124
PARTISAN REVIEW
prolong our foreplay. She sat eagerly between her parents, hot little eyes
exploring my every crevice.
What any normal person saw, choosing to look at me, was a man in
pain, in owlish horn rims, baggy flannel pants, a Brooks Brothers (346
Shop) tweed jacket, and my best pale blue
J.
Press shirt. My boss outfit
for crucial moments. Shoes scuffed and wet from snow. I tracked a bit of
mud into the office, just as I had tracked some mud into the lives of
these Southhampton parents.
The
girl,
the girl, that ribald coed. She was plump. She wore a blue
cashmere sweater to match her eyes and the silver fillings of her teeth. She
was stacked. A fraternity pin bobbled at the slightly pointed end of one
of the stacks. She was pledged. "Hi, Doctor," she said.
The face looked familiar. She was registered in a European Novel
lecture course along with about two hundred others. Wernet in a large
room of Goldwyn Smith Hall - a medieval surgery filled with bloody
insights - where I rambled through the semester from the
Story oj
the
Rose
to
Alina Karel/il1a
and
Madame BOilary
and
Ulysses
and up through
time, reverently, to my predecessor's
La La Lolita.
He had been known at
Cornell as a good writer but a tough grader.
The girl was lobbing cheerful lovelooks at me across the carpeted
office. (Administrators have carpets; Nabokov lent me his rug, but rolled
it up when he finally left town; profs normally prowl on naked floors.)
Enthusiasm and perkiness flowed in little invisible wavelets from the
young woman to me. I thought only I could feel the vibration. Her fa–
ther's elbow jabbed her suddenly, just below the stack with the pin, and
she stopped jiggling.
What followed was no inquisition, there was no rack or water tor–
ture, no fire on feet or singed fingernails, but I'm here to say it felt rot–
ten. The accused was assumed to be guilty, due to passionate evidence.
Penelope said she had been doing all those dirty things with me. Her
sorority mates had heard her telephone me, although they couldn't cer–
tifY the other end of the line . Her parents were armed by single-minded
intensity; they cherished their now-dishonored child in a ceremony of
revenge. They wanted my head; so did
I.
Did I suffer memory gaps?
Other complicated fellows had performed awful crimes - why not me? I
tried to adjust to being a monster, the amnesiac fiend of the Ithaca Hills.
I still felt rotten. This was not a literary crime. Punishment was more
than a bad review. There would be letters on file, and no more job,
farewell to chalk and term papers, and what about my bills? the respect
The accused began to feel guilty. This is a familiar phenomenon.
Surely I had dreamed of nubile and submissive students. I struggled to
remember the fiery pleasures of Penelope. Was I the sort of criminal who
