The Englishman (51 page)

Giles cuts in acidly. “These class sessions have filthy minds, mentioning sex all the time instead of studying grammar and syntax.”

“Mockery of grammar is no rebuttal of content, Giles. Anna?”

“I—I don’t know what to say.” And that is about all there is to it. But it is expected of me that I go on. “I am truly sorry. But I would ask you to take the whole class’s end-of-term evaluations into account before you declare me guilty of…sexual harassment.”

“Or an obsession with sex,” Giles adds.
Bastard!

“Nick Hornberger has made sure that no one seems to be talking about anything but sexual harassment these days,” Elizabeth says caustically. “Unfortunately there are other issues. Anna, I understand you failed students for handing in their work late?”

“Not…as such. It says in the syllabus that I will take off a certain number of points for tardiness—just as I do for mild instances of plagiarism. We are talking about Madeline Harrison, aren’t we?”

“Amongst others.” Elizabeth nods. “Carolyn Turner complains that you advised her strongly against going for Honors in her English Lit Major.”

“Carolyn Turner is just about now realizing that off-the-cuff recall may have got her through high school, but it won’t get her through college, at least not this one. I predict that she won’t last out her third year. And with her grades, she shouldn’t even go for a Major in English Lit, let alone an Honors Major.”

Ma Mayfield leafs through the girls’ files.

“They both seem to maintain their Bs; Madeline less solidly than Carolyn, but nonetheless. They aren’t exactly failing, Anna.”

“If students’ grades even out as Bs,” Giles says, once more throwing himself into the fray, “it just goes to show, first of all, that everyone knows who the generous graders are, and secondly that we have a grade inflation going on. And a solid B is no recommendation for an Honors Major! In two years’ time she’ll be trying to get into grad school!”

“
Ceterum censeo
…”

“Yes, I know I keep harping on it, but I wouldn’t, if I saw a spark of acknowledgement in your eyes, Elizabeth!”

Giles is sitting on the edge of his seat, one hand flat on the surface of Elizabeth’s desk, and he is using it to underline his points in a manner very different from the laid-back professor lolling in his office chair. It makes me uncomfortable that he is once again fighting my battle for me, but it seems to have been his war before it ever became my battle.

“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Elizabeth says placidly. “All I’m saying is you cannot fight the system.”

“I’m not interested in the system. I’m interested in maintaining a bit of common sense, that’s all.”

“
Your
common sense.”

“Oh, please! How does it involve my class, race, or gender if I point out that allowing our students to tyrannize over us with their willful, rancorous evaluations will lead to the decay of our academic standards?”

“It doesn’t. But it involves our budget.” Elizabeth isn’t cowed by Giles’s intensity at all. My feeling that this is an old struggle between the two of them is confirmed when he throws himself back in his chair.

“Of course,” he says sarcastically with a nod. “Frank Harrison is a wealthy alumnus who gave generously to the university when his son studied here a few years ago, as had his father before him and his father before him.”

“Precisely.”

Giles knuckles his eyes in defeat and runs his fingers through his hair, like a cat worsted in an encounter with the neighbor’s dog.

“Apologize, Anna. Apologize and change Madeline Harrison’s grade. Behave like the submissive young professor they expect you to be. A few words and ten seconds of paperwork may earn us thousands of dollars.”

“I wouldn’t want any of my actions to harm the department,” I say cautiously. “And—”

“And you’d be a fool to harm yourself.” His eyes glance past mine as he says this, and the sentence reverberates between us. “You can’t afford to refuse this…request by your Dean.”

“No, I can’t.” I look at Elizabeth to signal my acquiescence with the powers that be, and she shrugs, not unsympathetically.

“No, you can’t.”

“Right. Well, ladies, I’ll leave you to it.” Giles gets up, still angry, but he replaces the chair he had taken from the large table in Elizabeth’s office, and he does so quietly, and quietly he shuts the door behind himself.

Elizabeth unfolds her hands and makes a few pencil notes in the student files.

“I value Giles greatly,” she says finally, and I can tell that she, too, is upset; otherwise she would not speak to me about a tenured colleague. “But this puritan streak of his is a nuisance! Well. I’m sorry, Anna, that you had to bump up against the realities of private education so early in your term here. But don’t worry, I have to make a note of it, of course, but nobody will care about it when you’re up for your three-year review.”

“Unless it happens more often.” I feel defeated rather than obstinate.

“Well, I see no reason to start a debate about principles at this point, Anna. I share Giles’s view that a teacher who is popular with everyone must be doing something wrong.” She relaxes her manner a little. “How was Notre Dame?”

Oh, my God.

“Fine, thank you.”

She smiles at my hollow tone. “Don’t look so dismayed. Richard Prewitt is an old friend of mine. He wrote to me especially to congratulate me on our choice of junior faculty, and I can assure you his praise is not easily earned.”

I recall the elderly professor who was extremely complimentary about my paper, both in the discussion and over coffee afterward.

“Oh! Yes, he was very kind.”

“So, keep up the good work, Anna, but try to pull the New York brusqueness a little. Will you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Friday afternoon, reading week. The place is deserted. I need to regroup. Get my act together. Think.
Sexual harassment.
Will I ever live that down?

This might still work out. A slap on the wrist, yes, but in the balance also a commendation by a valued friend of the Dean of Studies. It seems all is not lost yet.

I have not been upstairs in the dome since I took Irene there on Family Weekend. Why I have the strong urge to go now, I am not sure. Maybe because I feel unfairly treated and so, to even the scales, I will do something forbidden. I will use my secret key. The box of tissues has long gone; maybe Selena and her seducer have found a new
locus amoris
.

This is not a space in which one would ever want to switch on artificial light. Candles, perhaps, but electric light would hurt the eyes. I walk across to the long, partitioned windows and ease one of the crank handles out of its holder. Amazingly, it turns, and inch by groaning inch one of the roof segments lifts and slides above its neighbor, revealing a slice of gray December sky. The wind blows surprisingly hard into the room, and the dome starts singing; the door slips off the latch and creaks.

I understand why Selena and her young man sometimes stay the night up here. It must be wonderful to hide out among the stars. It is overcast today, but on a clear day, or during a clear night, this must be a wonderful place to make love. Cautiously I climb the wooden steps to the biggest telescope that is mounted on a high oak table. I peek through it, but the lens is so grimy I can’t see a thing. My back will probably be covered in dust, but I stretch out on the table top, next to the thick round pedestal of the telescope. If the stars were out, I could see them all. Dizzy. Frightening, as if the firmament would fall and bury me. Me, tiny, tiny me; a speck, and yet, with the man inside me, his rod of life glowing, igniting me, we would be the center of the turning world.

I understand Selena.

Selene.

Σελήνη

Goddess of the moon.

The whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.

“What are you doing?”

I shriek and snap upright like a switchblade.

But it’s no rapist on the rampage. It’s worse.

“Nothing,” I say, in the same rough tone of voice. He pushes the door firmly into its frame. The noise seems deafening, as do his footsteps on the floor, because there is no other sound, except the singing of the wind in the hemisphere of the dome. And my hammering heart.

“Giles, it was Selena who did the graffiti! That must mean she’s—”

“Not interested.” He comes very close, till his flanks touch my knees where I’m sitting on the table top.

Incredibly, his fingers fasten on the top button of my blouse and undo it. There is no hesitation in his movement, although his male fingers are a little clumsy with the tiny plastic discs. Awkward, but not at all rough. Or hurried. I’m watching, going to pieces while I’m watching, as he undoes button after button, methodically and without haste or hesitation.

I stare down at his hands hovering over the open shirtfront, and although he has barely touched me, all the parts of my body capable of swelling are doing so. This is how the seamen on the Titanic must have felt, watching helplessly as bulkhead after bulkhead was inexorably flooded. Flooded, and going down fast.

But it’s no iceberg bringing me down. A slight tremor in his fingers betrays him, and it may be a sudden flagging of courage or a calculated move to pluck at the sinews of my restraint, but instead of sliding beneath the cotton fabric to touch bare skin, his hands slowly cup my breasts still hidden inside the blouse and bra. Miraculously, I manage to stay silent as a bolt of lust sizzles along the nerve strands connecting my breasts and my womb, only my breathing becomes faster as I watch his hands, slow and warm and firm, and my whole body relaxes against them.

I hear him sigh, his mouth very close to my ear. He seems to have been waiting for my body’s response, because now he parts the front halves of my blouse, pushes them apart with his fingertips almost negligently, and the tickling sensation is a delicious promise against my skin. I want to close my eyes and drift off in this wonderful erotic memory that I’m having, this memory of having sex with Giles Cleveland, but at the same time I’m mesmerized by the sight of his fingers gently squeezing my flesh. Up on my perch I am a little taller even than he; our foreheads are close enough to touch as we are looking down at his hands on my breasts, as if we were both spectators at an event that is happening without our volition.

Still I haven’t reached out for him. I need my hands to steady myself on my less than secure seat, and when he hooks his thumbs under the flimsy fabric and pushes it over my shoulders, gathers it behind my back in one large fist, my elbows are pinned to my side not only by my blouse but also by my astonishment. For a moment he holds me like this, a pinioned bundle of assistant professorship, my breasts pushed against his chest, which is of course securely encased in cotton and tweed, and I can tell the sight pleases him. He has not looked me in the eye once since he has entered the room.

So infinitely gentle before, then suddenly this force, and I hope and trust that we are only playing, because for a few breathless moments I cannot move a limb. If he is lowering his head to my neck to sink his teeth into my flesh till they draw blood, there is nothing I can do. The atavistic fear of the male flares up in me, instinctive and fierce, then his mouth touches the tender skin below my ear, and the sensation is so intense that I gasp with the shock of it, oblivious to whether it’s pain or pleasure he is giving me.

“That’s right,” he whispers, but I don’t know whether he’s enjoying my pleasure or my apprehension. With his mouth he explores the sensitive skin that covers the big artery in my throat, stops for a moment above the wildly pulsing area of flesh, and I tremble with sensation, I grope blindly for his hands, his wrists, to steady myself, my fingers inch into the sleeves of his jacket but I can’t feel much of his skin, he’s protected by his clothes, while every nerve end in my body overloads as my blood pounds against the soft pressure of his lips. Never have I felt so keenly the dangerous, voluptuous pleasure of surrender. I’m baring my throat to him like a bitch to the alpha wolf. And he knows.

“God, woman! You’re like an animal in heat!”