40
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
sisted on his embarrassed students calling him "Mike." "Mr. Manger"
said it with a kind of austerity he now preferred to the studied
roughness he had once affected under the influence of the Cult of
Experience. He still wore a beard, to be sure, but a quietly aca–
demic one, he liked to think; not a black bush of masculine protest,
nor a straggly ensign of conventional non-conformity. He no longer
needed to screw his female student writers, either, possessing now
not only a wife but also a mistress by whom he was almost equally
bored; and having, too, a three-year-old daughter with whom he
flirted atrociously to the horror of that wife, and, he hoped, the
mistress as well.
That his female students (a) loved him, (b) wanted to sleep
with an established writer to see if the charisma would wear off
and (c) longed to be tickled just falling asleep or waking by a beard
he assumed to be true; and brushed off their efforts to prove it to
him.
It
would have pleased him to bug the Terrible Trio, Old Wil–
lowaw, Frost and Snow (he was a little older than Frost but kept
young thinking of him in this way) with the sounds of sexual
pleasure coming out of his office over the tick of their typewriters
and the scratching of their pens; but it was hard to get hold of a
girl anymore who asserted her satisfaction loud and clear, the way
the survivors of the thirties, who had broken him in as a mere kid,
had once done. The last couple of girls he had tried had, as a
matter of fact, approached their climaxes (if any) so silently, so
secretly that for a little while he had even thought of himself as
slipping.
The girl in the black raincoat was another matter, however:
so always belted up; so flat in the belly and behind, despite the
heavy cloth of her coat; so cool of eye and tight of mouth, with no
hint of sexual swagger or naive teen-age allure, that he had thought:
"For Christ sake, she's like me. Sure enough of what she is to play
it cool. Nothing to prove." And he had found himself moist in the
mouth and weak in the hams thinking it. But this was the way each
of
his
books had begun, he remembered, as he could only remember
when a new one was about to begin: always with a new girl; but
she had to be really
new.
And this one
was,
he could see, unbuckling and uncloaking
her as she lay spread-eagled on the untidy heap of papers on
his
