by Kluge, P. F.
“Fine,” she says. “Just fine.” I’ve never felt more naked in my life, more vulnerable, but no complaints from me. I’m just taking orders, anything she says. She puts her hands on me and pulls me in for another kiss. “You’re a nice man, Billy.”
“Well, thanks.” It’s good, feeling my skin against her suede jacket, her jeans, my bare foot touching the tips of her leather boots. What the hell are you doing, Billy Hoover? I ask myself.
“You’ve got a clock by your bed,” she says. The digits turn just as I look over there. “It’s 11:10. I want you to undress me.”
“Yes...you bet...” I reach for the buttons on her suede jacket, buttons that are snap buttons, that would pop open in no time at all. She grabs my hands.
“I want you to take your time,” she says. “That’s the whole thing. I want you to finish at 11:15. I want you to take five minutes and not a second less.”
“Anything you want me to do? In particular?”
“Anything you want,” she says. “But slowly.”
Slowly. One thing at a time. One piece, one patch, one layer. The suede jacket is first to go, which draws me to the curve of her neck, the tips of her fingers, the backs of her ears. I take my time. I’ve been wrong all my life. It’s all a turn on, every curve, every inch, every opening. Even eyebrows. Then her boots, her socks come off. I discover her feet, the curve of her soles. She watches me take my time. A naked man, undressing her, slowly. It pleases her. What next? Her slacks, I decide. Slowly. Hung in the closet door, right next to mine. Before now, I thought I’d seen her. I could have given a description: brown hair, edging into reddish, pulled back into a bun, and an oval face. I’ve been around police identi-kits. Green eyes that drill right into you. But now I discover her legs, which are muscular legs, like you see on dancers. Time, I take my time. I take a minute on her legs. She watched me undress and now, the tables are turned but not so, because she was watching me undress her, discover her. Her shirt and bra are next. She’s built and that was no surprise, that was what she led with down behind the screen door, and I have no trouble loitering around there and then, all of a sudden she steps back and out of her underwear.
“You did that real well,” she says.
Lisa Garner made it all new. Her strategy, at the start, was to prolong everything, insisting, begging, commanding that I make the most of every step along the way before I moved on and then, when I was inside her, she fended me off again, she pleaded with me not to come, not to, not to, not to, like she wanted to take every second off the clock, hit the basket right at the buzzer and then, all of a sudden, it changed, a new command, the last and most important, Lisa to Billy, yes, yes, yes. Then, before I could reach for a cigarette and light hers, like they do in the movies, when they talk about the war, she had me up again and she was on me, all over me and this was a sprint, not a marathon, it was a dash, all out, all the way. Then, not a word more, she was ready to sleep. She fell asleep right off, no tossing and turning, no tarrying at all.
Now, I always have trouble sleeping in a strange place and to tell the truth, I have trouble sleeping with strangers. I even had trouble sleeping with my wife. And I’m wondering about the G-Man’s sister, how she got so good at what she did, how she stayed in practice, and what it meant to her, and what I meant to her, all those questions that the woman usually asks but now they came to me. It’s amazing how thoughtful you can get after it’s too late to make a difference. I stepped over to the window and checked outside. Sappho had started barking, up at the fence, barking at a truck, a truck with an unmistakable pinging valve that was moving slowly by. I should have known. It was Tom’s truck. He could tell I was home and I wasn’t alone. Lisa’s S.U.V. was right next to my truck. So he knew what I’d been doing. That was the bad news. The good news was, now I wouldn’t have to answer any questions. I looked down at Lisa Garner, naked and defenseless, breathing evenly and sleeping deep, here in a trailer with a guy who was twenty-four hours and two sex acts away from being a total stranger. Next thing, hours later it must have been, I sensed her stirring, sitting up at the edge of the bed. It was early yet, just getting light outside. When she started to get up, I reached out and held her.
“Don’t go,” I said.
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“What about breakfast?”
“Time’s up,” she answered. “I’ve got to get a move on. It’s eight o’clock.”
“Seven,” I said. You wake up often enough at the same place you can tell what time it is by looking at the strength and angle of the light. Eight it was. But this was the night that time changed. “Spring forward, fall back,” I said. “You’ve got an hour. A whole hour.”
“Oh hell, Billy,” she said, mussing my hair like a mother trying to make a hurt kid feel better. “Tell you what. I’ll split the difference. Half an hour?”
“Okay,” I said.
“To do as you like,” she said. Kittenish. “We can have breakfast, just like you said. We can sit in your backyard and throw the ball to your dog. That would be nice.” She gave me this sly smile, this challenge.
“I want you again,” I said. And that was that. I honestly tried to have it both ways, to talk with her while we were closing in on each other. “I want to keep seeing you.” She stands over me, naked, pulls off the sheets, all business. She sits, runs her hands down my belly, likes what she finds. “I want to know you. Where you work and who your friends are and all...” She likes this new game we’re playing. Talk...not dirty talk, anything but...and sex. “Nice morning,” she says. “I guess it’ll warm up later.”
Getting right on me, she leans forward, her breasts roving across my chest, her elbows at my sides, her eyes locked into mine. She’s like a kid reading a book, ready to discuss what she’s been reading, only this kid moves up and down and around on me, hovering, gliding, up and down, like she might break loose at any minute. And she talks. “So what’s on your mind, Billy Hoover?” Moving slow—rolling, rolling on the river. “Go on, Billy. Ask me anything. What’s on your mind, Billy?” She knows where my mind is. She looks down at me like a wrestler pinning an opponent, like a fisherman who hooks a worm, wriggling away. “I want more of you,” I say. “Not just this.” Moving. “But this,” she says, “is what you chose. We could have walked to the public library but oh no...” Just then, she tosses me a little move that about tears the top of my head off. “Yeah, I know but...” Hang on, Billy, I tell myself. I close my eyes, because if I look at her, I’ll be a goner, but I can still feel her, and a goner is what I am going to be. It won’t be long now: inside I’m screaming. “This isn’t about fucking,” I say. “Could have fooled me,” she says. “I don’t want to pry, honest,” I say. “I can feel you prying,” she counters. She leans forward. “Time’s up,” she said. She kisses me, stops my mouth with her tongue, so she’s in me like I’m in her and down south she turns a few spirals and circles, she’s a gyroscope, she loops the loop and now the whole thing gets out of control, out of her control too, we both make it happen or, put it another way, it happens to both of us. She’s been directing me, riding me, landing and taking off at will, teasing me trying to talk, but at the end she’s as lost as I am and, after the explosion, only for a moment, she rests upon me, like she belongs to me. And, of all the things I could ask, personal and professional, I just put my arms around her, I hug her, which she likes and say “I’ve got a farm here I’d like to show you some time.” And I hear a little gasp of surprise.
“You’re a sweet man,” she says.
“I’m trying.”
“Shitty cop, though.”
“Off duty...”
“What are you, Billy? I’m wondering...”
“What am I?”
“You have a farm, that you don’t live on. Or plow. You have a wife you’re not with anymore. You’re sort of a cop, but not really. And a little bit of a student, when you find the time.”
“Student...” I think about it. It’s something that hadn’t oc
curred to me. “Yeah, maybe that. I’m learning all the time.”
Like that the moment’s over, the evening, the morning after, the whole thing. As she slips out of bed and away from me, I wonder if we’d ever get this close again.
Another kiss, a quick touch of mouths and she’s out the door without looking back. I watch her back out and drive away. I toss Sappho the ball, walk her to the back of the trailer and thank God for the end of daylight savings.
Chapter VII
MARK MAY
It might have been the best day of the year, maples flaming red and yellow, oaks a stubborn brown, the lawns about finished growing but holding onto their darkest green. The college uses these magic times. This was Homecoming Weekend, graduates and current customers and prospectives gathering on this hill and Caroline and I out on the porch at the back of the house, setting up our Sunday breakfast, which is an eastern custom we’d continued in Ohio, even if the bagels were frozen and the paper’s the Columbus Dispatch. For the record, our Sunday breakfast followed our Sunday morning love-making, which was a habit we’d resumed. Caroline and I had been doing better lately, I thought. I’d bet even money we’d make it. Then, all of a sudden, the church bells were ringing, going on and on.
“What’s that about?” Caroline asked, coming out with a tray of orange juice and coffee.
“I don’t know,” I said. There was alarm in the bells; they were more like sirens or air-raid warnings. “I guess we’ll find out.”
It was a joke, how quickly news traveled in this town. You could start a rumor—a professor on the job market, devil-worshiping on a nearby farm, somebody’s house for sale—you could start it by pledging one person to secrecy and just wait for it to boomerang back to you. Just then, Caroline went into her office to take a phone call. She had a whole network of women friends who talked to each other about their careers. These calls never lasted less than an hour. I decided to try grading papers for my writing class:
“They’re coming this way”, Jessica said defensively, running a finger through her long blonde hair. “Yeah”. Megan sighed. Her conscience bothered her. After that night at the lodge. It had started the summer before with Josh.
Punctuation around quotes. Stop coaxing dialogue. Impose a moratorium on the use of flashbacks, until after graduation. I arranged the papers the way army medics sorted battlefield casualties. Triage. The lightly wounded, the serious but treatable, the lost causes (“sucking chest wounds,”) whom you sedated and set aside. This, from a paper entitled “The Last Kiss:” A golden, gibbous moon gilded her body, a wet lunar tongue licking into every curve and crevice, a last loving caress, so beautiful, so much more beautiful, she being dead and all.
It was like teaching song-writing to people who had never heard music. Sometimes, I cut through these papers like a hot knife through butter, sharp, perceptive, even helpful. Sometime I got impaled by the first paragraph. This was one of those. Words, words, words. We read them, we react to them, we spit them out into the air, we excrete them onto paper. But not this morning. Not with the bells still ringing. Maybe Caroline couldn’t hear them, busy on the phone, but they rang for me alright. I pushed the papers aside, stepped out the door and walked towards the village. Crossing in front of the dormitories and proceeding into town, past the bank, I could see the entrance to the main campus surrounded by yellow tape, a crime scene, a sheriff’s duty standing guard and—I saw as I came closer—a television reporter in front of the deputy, glancing over her notes while a cameraman scooted in front. One minute she was a harassed woman, checking what might have been a shopping list. When the camera was on, so was she, brightly lit performer.
“Traditional. Beautiful. Conservative. Selective. Expensive. These are words that commonly describe this liberal arts college. But today, new words apply. Murdered. Shocked. Frightened. The violent deaths of two students at the gates of the college...”
She gestured behind her and the camera followed along, through the gates, along the path, towards the bench and the grass beyond.
“Entering classes march—‘process’—down this mile-long path when college begins. Four years later, they take that walk again, at graduation. A lovely ritual at a proud school. But this year, Amy Plimpton and Jarrett Stark will not be among them...”
Plimpton and Stark! I stood there, dumbstruck, while the woman went on, tying these murders to the death of Professor Martha Yeats last August. Suddenly, the deaths were something that happened to me, in my life, in my neighborhood. I stood there, shuddering, on the edge of tears. I was a walk-on, a part-timer, a spousal hire, but I’d gone two-for-two on dead students. Both mine. I stood there, picturing people I would never see again. Kids. College students. Kids who couldn’t be counted on to deliver and...this was something I’d only just learned...also didn’t always disappoint. Just when you wrote them off, one at a time or a whole generation, they came through for you. And now, two of them were murdered. Both of them were mine. Mine. I claimed them now, now more than ever, and they claimed me. I remembered the way Amy Plimpton curled her finger in her hair, while I was lecturing, like she was turning a fork in a plate of spaghetti, I told her. An English major, a New Yorker with a patina of Manhattan sophistication, an air of grown-up familiarity and no particular aptitude for literary study, Amy acted as though college was something to get through as agreeably as possible. She appreciated good work when she saw it and—unlike some English majors—actually liked to read. It would be nice, she thought, to get A’s, if only it weren’t such work. Still, she dropped by my office regularly, not conniving for a paper extension or “kissing butt for a B.” It was because she thought of herself as an adult; she liked being around grown-ups.
“Hey, Professor May,” she’d say, leaning in my door, reluctant to put out a cigarette before coming inside. “How’s it?”
“Come on in, kiddo,” I’d say. It was a relief dealing with someone who didn’t want to go to graduate school or get published.
“You busy?”
“Molding young lives.”
“I bet you could use a break,” she’d say. She’d sit down and—have I made this clear yet?—on a campus where an unusual number of women were prematurely matronly, Amy was food for my paper-grading eyes. She was lean and willowy, a sports car on a parking lot filled with trucks and utility vehicles.
“So what’s it like being married to a provost?” she’d ask, with a directness that made me laugh. “Is it like Margaret Thatcher and...uh...Dennis?”
“Nope.”
“You show her your poetry?” She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of my book. “I’d ask you to sign it but it feels like brown-nosing. Maybe after graduation.”
“The rarer copies are the ones that are not signed,” I rejoindered.
“You put yourself down,” she said.
“Just beating the world to the punch,” I countered. “Have you read any of that stuff?”
“I’ve looked at them,” she said, leaving it at that. Amy Plimpton was one of those students who believed that it wasn’t necessary to read the poems, if you just could get to know the poet. English professors offer literature as a criticism of life. To Amy it was a poor substitute for it; literature was ribbons and wrapping paper around a present. “So answer me, Professor. You show your wife your poems?”
“I’m not sure the marriage could take it.”
“Oh...”
“You pictured me reading to her in bed?”
“You never tried it?”
“I didn’t say that,” I tried. I couldn’t resist adding a line. “I said, I never tried it with her.”
“Oh...” Every now and then it dawns upon our students: professors have lives. Have pasts. What we are now, we have not always been. How startled they are, when they see us at an airport—he travels! he flies! he leaves Ohio!
“So how’s class going?” I asked. “From where you sit?”
Amy always positioned herself in the front row. She played with me. Sometimes sh
e gazed out the window dreamily, at other times she stared at me, stared hard, undressing me with her eyes, whether to torture or caress, I couldn’t tell. She had long, tanned legs, toes equally long and graceful, that I couldn’t resist studying: she turned sandals into peek-a-boo wear. I pictured her toes in my mouth. Single toes, pairs of toes, whole clusters. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Amy had spent her last night in a student’s room at the south end of campus. She’d mentioned her love life, using “love” ironically, wriggling her fingers to make imaginary quotation marks. She disparaged college men: “macho, hormonal youths.” She spoke of adventures in Manhattan, limos and hotel rooms, an affair with a married man. She wanted me to know this. She was testing me, tempting me, in a good-natured sporting way. As if it were an abstract subject—black holes, tectonic plates—we discussed sex between professors and students. I had told her it was a bad idea. This was a small place and faculty had power over students. Any sex would be an exercise of power. “What if she’s not a student of yours?” Amy asked. And then she gamely added a line that won my heart forever. “I could always drop your class.” “No difference,” I said. Besides, I wanted her to stay. Amy nodded, smiled. “Never say never, Professor. Never say always.” I wondered where she got that. Students often surprise you with what they don’t know...and sometimes with what they do. “Never...here,” I said. I didn’t go further. I didn’t tell her that if I’d been a single professor—a wretched prospect in this sexual cul de sac—I’d have been waiting for Amy at the edge of the graduation stage, suitcase packed, tickets in my pocket. “Well, bummer, professor,” she’d said when I’d made my position clear.