The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “You are asking me,” Lemuel repeats the question to be sure he has decoded it correctly, “if I want to … fuck?”

  Rain blows air through her lips in exasperation. “Like do you or don’t you? Will you or won’t you?”

  “Fuck is a … brutal way … of putting it.”

  “What would you say, ‘make love’?”

  “ ‘Make love,’ yes.”

  “ ‘Make love’ misses the point, L. Falk. It misses the violence. It misses the orgasm.”

  “I can understand how you would not want to miss the orgasm.”

  “Listen up, L. Falk: I steal sardines from the E-Z Mart, I steal money from church baskets, I cheat at strip poker and midterm exams and I don’t declare the tips I get cutting hair to the IRS. But I don’t cheat at words, right? I call things like fucking by their real name. And I never fake an orgasm.”

  At a loss for words, Lemuel pulls off a glove and, reaching out, touches the side of Rain’s face with the back of his callused fingers. “You are a young girl,” he says huskily. “Also a beautiful girl. Boys would kill to make love to you. Only smile to them, you can have all the lovers your heart desires. Only cross your legs wearing that short skirt, you will have to call in the police to keep order. You do not want to take an old man like me into your bed. If you please, take a good look at me. I am a doorknob, I am an earlobe, I am forty-six going on a hundred and six, my back aches when I walk uphill, my knees ache when I walk downhill. I am on the lam from terrestrial chaos, but I seem to take my chaos with me wherever I go.” Lemuel elevates his chin a notch. “I can honestly say you I am not a great lover. I can even say you I am not a good lover. After a certain age sex is spoiled for men by the worry over whether you will perform … each orgasm is a triumph. I am a run-down battery—you push the starter button, you hear a grinding noise, the motor turns over, you hold your breath hoping it will catch, praying even, then nothing.” He shrugs. “Nothing at all.”

  Rain struggles with a lump in her throat, a pain in her chest. “Hey, I could jump-start you,” she whispers, “like when you roll a car downhill and it picks up speed, right? and the motor cranks over even if the battery is low. And the next thing you know, whooooosh, you’re pushing the speed limit on the interstate.” She leans toward him and brushes her lips against his so lightly he catches his breath. “I’ve had it with the uphill crowd,” she says. “What I need is someone who’s downwardly mobile.” She angles her head, bats her eyelashes, stares at him with the seaweed green eyes that he is sure he has seen before. “Like what do you say we check out your battery, L. Falk? Yo?”

  Slipping into a delectable fiction, Lemuel imagines that what is happening to him is really happening to him. He watches her closely to see if she is suffering from second thoughts before he finally clears his throat.

  What he coughs up is a timid “Yo.”

  Once again Rain, unsmiling, holds out her hand. Once again Lemuel, unsmiling, takes it. They shake.

  Like I could see right off L. Falk was walking wounded, I’m talking sexually, not physically, right? My instincts told me he’d have trouble getting it out, forget up, so for once I decided it wouldn’t hurt to beat around the goddamn bush. I switched off the overhead and put on the projector with the piece of mauve silk over it, I poured him a shot of one-star cooking cognac, I burned some incense, I tried to make small talk. “So what is it you actually do for a living?”

  For furniture I have a low couch I once liberated from a Salvation Army truck and some folding kitchen chairs, some of which still fold, some of which don’t, time takes its toll on everything, right? The apartment was a riot; it was not that things were out of place, it was more a matter, I openly admit it, that nothing had a place. I stashed my French horn in the bathtub, kicked the dirty laundry under the dresser, collected the magazines scattered around into a pile, buried the loose Tampaxes under Mayday’s blanket and tugged the blanket, with Mayday clinging to it, into the spare bedroom. I didn’t want my arthritic rat of a dog spoiling the atmosphere with one of her silent farts. The vet attributes her farting to age: Mayday’s fifteen dog years and two dog months old—which, talk about coincidences, is the same as 106 human years. I kicked off my shoes and sprawled on the couch, my mini riding up my green tights, my arms back so that my nipples were pressing against the inside of my shirt. This last is a little trick I picked up when I was working summers as a parole officer in Atlantic City. (It’s a lousy lie that the paroler, yours truly, was fired for sleeping with the parolees; I was fired for pleading no contest to shoplifting a pair of seventy-nine-cent earrings from Woolworth’s.) I patted the couch next to me, but L. Falk pulled over a folding chair, turned it so the back was to the front and straddled it.

  “I dabble in chaos,” he said, as if what I was waiting for with bated breath was an answer to my question, “but my life’s passion is pure randomness, which probably does not exist.”

  “I like randomness, I like things that happen out of order,” I told him. “But I still don’t see how it’s possible to be passionate about something that doesn’t exist.”

  “I can say you it is not easy.”

  I told him to put on some music while I slipped into something less comfortable. I have this Arab-type robe, the good news is it plunges to my belly button, the bad news is it itches, but I figured I’d better pull out all the stops. I could see L. Falk’s nuts were going to be tough to crack.

  I was in the bedroom spritzing rose-scented toilet water on the sheets when some music I didn’t recognize came on. “Where’d you find that?” I called through the partly open door.

  “On the pile of records.”

  I remembered D.J. had converted the Rebbe to CDs, which is how come he gave me some of his old LPs the night he told me about the oral tradition in the O.T. and the birth-control pioneer named Onan. The Rebbe could have scored, too. I mean, he talked a nonviolent game and he was convincing enough for me to collaborate, except I was menstruating.

  Remember averted? Menstruating‘s in the same goddamn league.

  Where was I? When the Rebbe saw red, his eyes bulged more than usual, he mumbled something about me being impure and packed it in.

  Me.

  Impure.

  Go figure.

  I opened the door of the bedroom and positioned myself so I was in a frame. I picked this one up from a Lauren Bacall flick. When I spoke, I purred like a kitten. “So what’s the record you went and put on?”

  “It is a quintet …” He turned toward me, he took in the Arab-type robe, he followed the V down to my belly button, he swallowed hard.

  The secret to good sex can be summed up in one word, which is foreplay, right? though to be really effective, fore-play, contrary to the conventional wisdom, should take place after as well as before the dirty deed. Which is another way of saying that good sex should not start or stop, it should go on forever. Obviously different people mean different things by foreplay. My freshman year at Backwater I roomed with a girl from Corning who used a Water Pik as a vaginal spray—she described it as the longest ejaculation in the history of the universe. My roommate loaned me her Water Pik once, but it was too wet for my taste, so I stuck with my trusty Hitachi Magic Wand.

  I’m wandering. Foreplay.

  Like it was only natural, right? when I tried to jump-start L. Falk’s battery, for me to concentrate on foreplay. After what seemed like an eternity of small talk, I got him to stretch out on the bed, though his idea of making himself comfortable bore a curious resemblance to the fetal position. He wanted me to turn out the bed lamps, but we negotiated and compromised on turning one out and putting the other on the floor. I had a hell of a time untying his goddamn shoelaces, would you believe he had double-knotted them? and straightening out his legs.

  “Hey, relaaaax,” I said in my sexiest voice as I began to unbutton the buttons on his shirt. Sitting up, I reached for the hem of my Arab-type robe and pulled it over my head, I was still wearing my green tights, I leaned over
him, letting my tits graze his chest. Then I started sucking his nipples.

  Nipples, in my humble opinion, are the most neglected part of a man’s body, dudes tend to melt with gratitude when you pay the slightest attention to them. After a while L. Falk’s became erect, which I took as an auspicious, even positive, sign. I began to escalate. I undid his belt buckle and the top button of his trousers and slowly unzipped the zipper on his fly and snaked my hand down along his belly, which was surprisingly smooth, I had expected steel wool—to discover this soft, wilted Willie of a cock cringing in a tangle of underbrush.

  My Homo chaoticus had a long way to go to become a Homo erectus.

  L. Falk became very agitated, clutching his trousers, tugging at the zipper. “Oy … I said you I was a run-down battery.”

  I stretched out alongside him, one thigh draped over him, I kept my hand on his cock, nothing aggressive, just holding on to it the way you hang on to a strap in a subway, and I started whispering in his ear. “I don’t know how things are in Russia,” I remember saying something like this, “but you have an awful lot to learn about we Americans. There’s nothing that turns a girl on more than a dude who has trouble performing. We get fed up with all those hard-ons men get at the drop of a hat. Some stud asks you to dance and, whoops, he’s got to advertise his goddamn erection by pushing it into you. What we really like, what we lust after, is a dude whose sexuality is more subtle. You’ll get it up, L. Falk, and when you do it’ll be me who did it, it’ll be me who gets the credit.”

  The funny part was I had never thought these thoughts before, but when I heard myself say them, I knew I believed them. L. Falk must have believed I believed them too, because I could feel his body, which had been to say the least strung like a bow, relax under mine, I could feel his cock begin to stiffen in the palm of my hand.

  Weird how the body can grow soft while part of it grows hard.

  I won’t bore you with dirty details, I’ll only give you highlights. At one point, when we were kissing, I came up for air long enough to tell L. Falk, “Hey, I like your music.”

  Thinking I was talking about the Rebbe’s LP, he said breathlessly, “Schubert … it is his quintet … in C major.”

  “C major, wow! Rock ‘n’ roll. Like what can you do that I haven’t done before?”

  In the other room the phonograph needle began scratching around in the end grooves. “I can put the record on again,” he said.

  If I am ever nominated for sainthood, don’t smile, the idea may not be as far out as you think, if I’m nominated, for sainthood, right? it will go on the credit side of my ledger that I went to Mass every single Sunday I was in Italy and I was impatient with my Homo chaoticus, L. Falk, only once that night. “I don’t want to hear What’s-His-Face’s C major,” I coolly informed him. “I want to hear your C major.”

  It must have been about then he rolled over on top of me and began paying attention to my boobs, which is when he spotted the tattoo, which is located in a field of freckles under my right tit. I got the tattoo on sale in Atlantic City in a moment of madness. L. Falk must have been a butterfly in a previous incarnation, because the tattoo made a big impression on him. He reached for the lamp on the floor and held it up to get a better look.

  “A Siberian night moth!” he cried, touching it with his fingertips.

  “It’s a goddamn butterfly,” I corrected him, but I don’t think he heard me.

  “Imagine coming across a Siberian night moth in Backwater, America,” he whispered in surprise. Then he said some strange things I didn’t really understand, things about how turbulence is created when a moth’s wings flail the air, how the turbulence sets off ripples, how the ripples, I’m not sure I got this right, right? could paralyze the east coast of America the Beautiful. Something like that.

  You need to have a weird imagination to blame a butterfly for the weather.

  Like different folks have different strokes. So the sight of the tattoo really turned him on and the next thing you know we were doing it, the wild thang, the major merge. He was sweating and grunting and panting and looking down every now and then to make sure the butterfly hadn’t flown the coop, and then he seemed to freeze in midair, his bloodshot eyes wide open and unblinking and startled. And then he collapsed on me.

  No, I didn’t actually feel him come off, but I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking.

  I’ll answer the question before you ask it. How it was was … different. In ways I haven’t really figured out yet, how it was was … satisfying. His performance, also the time it lasted, also the actual size of his equipment, excuse me for putting it so crudely, left something to be desired. On the other hand I could feel that L. Falk …

  Just give me a sec. …

  I could feel that L. Falk wanted … me, which is an impression I must have had before, I just couldn’t remember when.

  Naturally L. Falk needed to know how he’d done, what is it with dudes that they always have to hear what fantastic lovers they are? I didn’t want to hit him with the truth—that for sheer physical sensation I couldn’t see there was much of a difference between safe sex and no sex. So I hit him with a joke. “Like I’ve always imagined what I call the phenomenal fuck—a fuck so totally awesome that it’s the mother of all fucks. In my imagination, it’s so out of sight that the two or three or four who participate decide to never fuck again. So the bad news is that screwing you wasn’t the phenomenal fuck. Which means the good news is we can fuck again.”

  I laughed. He smiled that razor-thin smile of his, which comes across as one-third faintly amused, two-thirds intensely thoughtful, as if he was trying to read between the lines.

  “Hey, you asked.”

  “And you answered.”

  Later on I let Mayday back into the living room and went and warmed up some frozen pizza in the clothes drier, my stove has no oven, pizza is one of the few things I can do in a kitchen besides sunny-side-ups. I had slipped back into my Arab-type robe, but L. Falk kept parting the V with a fingertip to get a look at the butterfly. We were sitting around the table staring at the dirty dishes when he spotted this piece of chalk hanging from a string next to the blackboard where I list what I need to buy or who I need to call or when I had my last period. Suddenly L. Falk lunged for the chalk, he was a man possessed, and scribbled like a madman on the blackboard, I never erased it, it’s still there if you want to check it out, y.y.a.y.t.f.h.r.m.c.o.m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m. Naturally I asked him what it meant, but all he said was it’d been written by L. Tolstoy, that every Russian schoolchild knew the story, that I needed to decode it for myself.

  Coming back to the table he sat down so hard the folding chair folded and L. Falk landed flat on the floor.

  Like I cracked up, right?

  So did L. Falk. We cracked up together. I don’t know why, I started laughing and he started smiling a smile that was two-thirds amused and pretty soon he was also laughing, and suddenly I was laughing so hard at him laughing I was crying. And then, I swear to Christ, he started crying too. You should have seen us, L. Falk on the floor, me kneeling next to him, doubled over with laughter, tears streaming down our faces. When we finally wiped away the tears we started in laughing all over again. Somewhere in all the laughing and crying and laughing he blurted out something else I couldn’t get a handle on—something about him understanding how it was possible to wear a heart on a sleeve.

  The next thing you know we were into the foreplay that comes after.

  L. Fucking Falk.

  Go figure.

  The morning after they have their first quarrel. On the surface, at least, it seems to be about nothing.

  Rain cracks two eggs into a frying pan. “Sunny-side-ups over easy, with a side order of recently swiped smoked clams, are a specialty of the house,” she boasts.

  “What does it mean, ‘over easy’?”

  “At the last second I flip the sunny-side-ups over and cook the yolk. That way the sun doesn’t run into the clams.”

  �
��If you please, skip the over easy. I prefer yolks that run.”

  “The specialty of the house isn’t sunny-side-ups,” Rain announces stiffly. “It’s sunny-side-downs.”

  Lemuel scrutinizes her. He is smiling the thin smile that is mostly thoughtful. “Who gets to decide which side is up?”

  “Like it’s my kitchen, right? It’s my eggs. It’s my frying pan. I get to decide.”

  “You do not give a centimeter.”

  Rain turns on him. “My dad, who was the hangar boss of a B-52 bomber ground crew, brought me up to defend my territory at the goddamn frontier. Sometimes it means making a big deal out of a small deal.”

  “We come at this dilemma from opposite ends of the spectrum,” Lemuel tells her. “My father raised me to give ground, to live and fight another day, to make my stand at major rivers or cities. The Russians who stopped Napoleon, who stopped the Fascists in the Great Patriotic War, followed this formula with some success.”

  “Hey, do I look like a fascist?” Mayday, curled up under the table, follows the argument with her eyes. “Does this look like a major river or city? Do me a personal favor, eat the eggs over easy.”

  Rain flips the eggs in the frying pan. Lemuel shrugs philosophically. “When we come to a major river, a city,” he says quietly, “you will discover another L. Falk.”

  Chapter Four

  Lemuel starts off the day with a brisk walk through the aisles of the E-Z Mart. On his way out he drops off a note in Dwayne’s in box pointing out which items are in dangerously short supply. “There were many more low-calorie yogurts yesterday than today,” he writes. “Ditto for the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, also Mrs. Foster’s crumble-proof chocolate-chipped cookies.”