38
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
until it is engaged at point B, then.
..."
He could not really make out
the rest, for the print seemed idiotically to grow smaller; while
vanity had kept him from fitting himself out with bifocals (at only
thirty-five!) and besides, he had never been able to assemble any–
thing, not even his first Erector Set, before which he had sat in
stupid joylessness until his father had left the house enraged (on
Christmas!) ; and his mother, sobbing, had taken him into her arms.
Nonetheless, this time he meant to try; and he flung the girl
to the floor, pressing his black-rimmed glasses up close against the
flapping tag and manipulating the bolts and levers of the Chastity
Belt with trembling fingers. He did not pause, even to wipe
his
dripping brow, until the bell rang for his twelve o'clock class (he
preferred teaching to eating with the students in the loud and seedy
commons), and picking up his books, he moved deliberately out
into the corridor.
It was not until his students whooped in helpless laughter,
nudging each other and pointing at
his
middle, that he realized
his fly was still open.
III
Dr. Willowaw had never enjoyed entering Humanities 103;
on the other hand, leaving it was always a pleasure, for it seemed
to
him
a prison cell, a hospital room, a tomb; and leaving it, he
felt himself simultaneously pardoned, healed and resurrected.
It
was
not the place, indeed, which he would have picked himself for
what he was still old-fashioned enough to think of as a "tryst" with
the girl in the black raincoat; it was her idea and, he supposed, part
of the pattern of subduing an environment she hated, triumphing
over the academy. She had seduced, he assumed, a large number
of her professors before him; and would doubtless seduce many
more after
him.
He wondered only, and that vaguely, whether she
were working an ascending series in age and rank-having begun
with the twenty-year old assistants--or a descending one, having
started with certain venerable deans whom he named to himself
with some amusement. He himself was fifty-three but still an
As–
sistant Professor (he had never even imagined the book which his
colleagues at least pretended to be about to start or in which they
