The Englishman

chapter 29

SINCE IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that I will be shot down, my only consolation is that it is Ma Mayfield rather than Matthew Dancey who is wielding the gun. Giles and I are waiting in front of the Dean of Studies’ office, and it’s a toss-up whether I am more afraid of Giles or of Ma Mayfield.

“Giles, I’m sorry. Could we not—”

“Don’t worry about me,” he cuts in, his face like a stone. “I can be professional about this. You do the talking. Ignore me. After all…” He shrugs sardonically.

“Look, I’m truly sorry, but don’t you—”

But we are called in, and he doesn’t want to hear anyway.

“Now, Anna, I regret that your first semester at Ardossan has been somewhat fraught with…difficulties.” Elizabeth seems calm and collected, as usual. “So I would not lay too much stress on this, but I have received written complaints from six students in your general education class.” Elizabeth fans out half a dozen email print-outs on her desk, and I can see that none consists of fewer than two paragraphs of text. “Four of them suggest that your behavior in class could be regarded as sexual harassment.”

At this, my jaw drops. Literally. I lose control over my facial muscles and my mouth falls open.

“Now, look here, Elizabeth.” Three minutes into the meeting, Giles is already riding to the rescue. “You know perfectly well that these accusations are preposterous! I don’t know why these students have it in for Anna, but it’s not because she acknowledges the sexually charged language of Elizabethan sonnets!”

Elizabeth puts on her glasses and picks up one of the emails.

“‘She intimidated me and others with expression like, “Baby, you make my pips squeak!” and “Get outta here!” (said with a broad New York accent that gave it a Mafia quality). When she wanted to interrupt students who were conferring with each other about points made in class, she would signal this by “slicing her throat” with her flat hand.’ Here is another one. ‘Professor Lieberman chose to focus on the sexual content of the plays under discussion. Her jokes often had a sexual coloring, too. This created an uncomfortable learning atmosphere for those of us who do not come from families that talk about such things at the dinner table.’ One more? ‘Professor Lieberman is obsessed with sex. Not a single class session went by without mentioning sex or things related to sex. She made me dread coming to classes.’”

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!”

I couldn’t suppress the long, low moan if my life depended on it, and I arch myself toward his mouth for more. He grips me harder and leaves a trail of heat along my throat, to the top of my breast, the nipples as hard as marbles in anticipation of his mouth.

“Giles, please…”

He nestles his face against the side of mine, into my hair. Very still.

“Say that again.”

I shrug my arms out of the blouse sleeves and wrap them around his neck.

“Giles,” I whisper against his ear, because I know that he isn’t demanding my submission, he’s asking for my tenderness. “Giles, please…”

Without further ado he cups my left breast, fastens his hard, tender mouth on the tip and suckles it; his other hand is splayed across my right breast, its tip between its fingers, circling it with its thumb. His bright, silver-streaked head is in my arms, so close to my heart, and I know that I have never in my life been so comprehensively, so painfully aroused as by this man.

With one impatient movement he pulls me against himself, my thighs on either side of him. He is holding me by the waist and his fingers dig into the muscles running along my spine, but if I want more of him, I’ll have to get it myself.

“Kiss me,” I whisper.

“No.”

For the first time since he has come in, he looks at me, and in the dim light of the sky above our heads, he is beautiful. But he is not enjoying this in the same way he enjoyed sleeping with me at Notre Dame. He isn’t happy. He was so radiant with pleasure then, so frank and unguarded in his delight that I would open my legs for him and welcome his touch. What I see gleaming at the back of his deep-set eyes now is a tense wariness, coupled with a determination I can’t identify.

“It’s such a loving thing, isn’t it? A kiss. I don’t feel particularly loving toward you these days.”

“Then let me go!”

“You don’t want me to touch you?”

“No!”

To my surprise he appears to accept this. He bows his head in apparent resignation, only to reach behind me and clasp my wrists again, bend my elbows so that my lower arms are parallel with each other and he can pin them together with one hand, none too gently.

“I’ll just test that, if I may,” he murmurs, his voice hot in my ear. The fingers of his free hand find my breast, thumb pushes hard nipple into soft flesh, again none too gently. Then he bites into the side of my neck.

I shudder and cry out. But no amount of outrage can curb the blatant, voluptuous need that wells up in me like a spring tide. He is biting hard enough to startle me, his mouth slowly descends to my shoulder, leaving tingling seals of his possession, but not hard enough to frighten me. In my struggle to free my hands, I shrug my shoulders and bruise his mouth. He swallows a curse and rears up; we are both panting, both torn between lust and rage. The gray specks in his eyes glitter like polar ice, and I have to fight down an impulse to apologize, to shy away.

Well, f*ck that!

A smile creeps into my eyes, I can feel it, and I know it looks like satisfaction.

“Serves you right.” My voice is hoarse, but well audible.

He doesn’t even reply. His fingers tighten around my wrists and his mouth seizes mine. Our tongues clash; he is kissing me. He said he wouldn’t, but he’s kissing me and I’m responding blindly, ravenously. His mouth, however angry he is with me, is a wonderfully sensuous mouth, demanding yet tender when he kisses me, surprisingly malicious when it returns to my shoulder. He has released my wrists, and after shrugging out of my bra, I sling my aching arms around his neck, leaving space enough between our bodies only for his hands on my breasts, and with them he is as rough as I need him to be now. He pulls me close; the wool of his jacket is rough against my hyper-sensitive skin, his stomach hard against my writhing crotch, and I try to stifle my moans in the warm, fragrant nook of his throat, in his hair, my burning face against his.

“Say that you want me!”

His voice rattles in my ear, and I can only whimper in response; my bones and my flesh are melting down into a heaving mass of sensation, melting against his fully dressed body, when I’m so naked. I know what he wants. He wants me to bare my soul to him. He wants to see me naked and defenseless, while he is safe in his tweed armor. I lean away from him so that I can reach down between us. The fabric of his jeans is stretched so tight by his erection I have difficulties even opening the top button, but feeling it, just feeling it through his pants, makes me nosedive for disaster.

I jump down from the table to pull down my underwear, but my boots take forever to unlace. Giles laughs and curses with frustration as he watches, then—“Oh, damn it all!”—he lifts me up onto the table top, crouches down and pushes himself up between my legs, as if he were the thread and my legs, held together by the pantyhose, were the eyelet.

“Very sexy, these boots, but not very—” he brushes against me, misses me “—not very practical!”

We laugh, and then we moan, because there is nothing under the sun and the moon like this fusion and this friction. No wonder the Ancients thought that the universe was made by gods and goddesses f*cking.

Held fast between my legs, he doesn’t have a lot of room to maneuver, so he plunges deep into me, moves with deep, short thrusts, pulling me hard against his stomach.

“Look at me.” His voice is like the low rumble of thunder at the end of a scorching summer day.

I peel my cheek from the damp tweed of his shoulder and try to focus on his eyes. They are flickering, like those of a man determined to maintain consciousness under the influence of an overpowering drug. Even now, with my arms and legs clutching him to my body, my pubic bone grinding into his stomach, and his cock wreaking havoc inside me, the sight of his face gives me a jolt. He’s so beautiful, I want to die for him, and I’m going to die, here, right here on his cock, if he keeps on doing what he is doing.

He stops.

“Look at me!”

“I c-can’t!”

I can hardly breathe, let alone speak, and as for looking at him while he is doing this to me—he must be joking. I try to ride him, to tear my pleasure from him on my own terms, but he holds me fast by the waist, neither pressing me down nor lifting me off, he just holds me still, and I want to howl with frustration.

“Anna.”

It crunches my heart into a tight, frightened ball, he says the word so quietly, so tenderly.

“Please,” I whine. “Just f*ck me! Just f*ck me, please…”

“Anna. I want you to look at me.”

I do, like a girl awaiting a particularly insidious kind of punishment.

“I will f*ck you. I am f*cking you. But I want you to look at me while I’m doing it.”

And he rocks against me, slowly, so deeply, and when I whimper, he leans forward and kisses me as slowly, as deeply and as thoroughly as he is f*cking me. It’s not enough for him to make me drown in my desire for him, the sheer, voluptuous pleasure of feeling him with every square inch of my body, inside as well as outside. He wants to make me drown in him.

“Come for me, Anna.”

I’m close, so close, my feet are halfway over the ledge of the cliff, but I’m afraid to jump, frightened of the fall, frightened that he won’t catch me.

I feel him hunch his shoulders, then he pushes his hand down the front of our bodies, the large palm of his hand lies flat against my hot, sweaty stomach, then his fingers reach my *oris and press it, just press against it, his mouth is on my breast, and he sucks me into an orgasm as keen and hard-edged as a swig of whisky straight from the bottle—sharp, almost painful. My cry of release echoes in the firmament like a cry of pain, and I claw at his shoulders, at his back, to pull him still deeper into me. The still center of the turning world.

I clench my pelvic muscles around him, deliberately now, and we both catch our breaths.

“You’re still h-hard!” I gasp, and if I weren’t still so far gone, this statement of the obvious would make me laugh.

He leans back a little, in the circles of my arms and legs, to see my face. The angry light at the back of his eyes has gone, but he is still fierce with unspent sexual energy.

“Say that you want me!”

I pull myself against him and tilt my hips up against his stomach so that the tip of his cock slides firmly along the sheath of muscle that holds it.

“I want you,” I whisper into his ear as if it were a secret.

He grabs my butt and lifts me off the tabletop—a welcome move, because the hardwood edge is beginning to bruise my flesh—and turns to look for a surface more conducive to physical pleasure. I look for the sofa and scream.

“What?” Giles cries, alarmed at my shocked reaction.

The dome is dusky now, and full of shades and half-light, but it is light enough to see that there is someone sitting on the sofa. A bulky figure, his legs crossed, watching.

Nick Hornberger is watching us as we stagger and yelp in our entanglement of limbs and clothes, a beast with two backs. Giles stumbles against the pedestal of one of the smaller telescopes, and in our career across the room he slips out of me. He can’t free himself of me, caught as he is between my legs, and I guess I understand why Hornberger is laughing out loud. That doesn’t make me less protective of my man, though.

“Listen, a*shole!” I steady myself against Giles’s body as he leans against one of the bookshelves, heaving. “You have been extremely voluble about your right to f*ck who you want whenever you want and where you want! So why don’t you grant the same privilege to other people, and f*ck off out of here!”

“My word, this one has spunk!” Hornberger pretends to be impressed. “A feisty little bitch, but I see she’s more game than that frigid wife of yours, Cleveland.”

I look at Giles, and now I am really scared. His face is a sneer of humiliation, and I truly think that if he had his arms and legs free, he would fling himself on Hornberger and start a brawl. But we are not in a saloon in Ardrossan Gulch, and Giles has his arms full of naked woman. How am I going to restore the dignity of a man with his pants around his knees and pantyhose around his back?

“Giles?” I don’t think he can hear me. He is heaving with emotion, and his seething panic makes me panic, too. If I let go of him now, he will fall into an abyss of shame and self-loathing, screaming, his arms and legs flapping ineffectually. With my arms and legs I draw him harder against me.

“Giles!”

He inhales, and his face relaxes. He even looks at me.

“He isn’t important,” I say with as much conviction as I can. “I am.”

He gazes into my eyes, and I see his pupils flicker, perhaps in recognition; he blinks. Slowly his eyes narrow in a smile, and he pulls me closer so as to cover my nakedness from view.

“You heard what the lady said, Hornberger. F*ck off, do.”

Hornberger rises from the sofa, and I feel another lurch of fear. We are very naked, Giles and I.

“Do you think I will? Just like that? I hear things aren’t going so well for you, Anna. I heard about the stench bomb on Family Weekend. And your students drop out like flies because your class discussions are too prurient? What will the Provost think when he hears about your trysts with a tenured colleague on college premises?”

“All right.” Giles grabs me and walks back to the big table. “Hold on!” He ducks and slips out from between my legs, pulls up his pants and takes off his jacket. “Cover up.”

I draw my knees up to my chest and huddle under the warm tweed without pushing my arms into the sleeves.

“Now. You will not drag Anna’s name through the mud, nor mine. And I’ll tell you why. It all hangs on a slim file that I have in my possession, and have had, for weeks.”

“You have it!” Hornberger’s shoulders stiffen, then he deflates like a brawny balloon. “How did you get it off him? And—when?”

“Found it in Anna’s office when we cleared out Corvin’s hoard. Call it chance. Call it fate. That was in the first week of the semester, actually, so you could have saved yourself the bother of prowling around in people’s offices and just molested a few more of our students in the meantime.”

Hornberger is making a good show of keeping his countenance, but he is completely bowled over. “Can we talk about this? Perhaps we can—”

“Oh, shut up, Nick!”

“What will you do with it? Hand it over to the papers so they can run another article about me?”

“You are paying rather dearly for free sex with young women.” Giles hesitates. “Was it worth it?”

“Depends on the finale of this little farce,” Hornberger jeers, showing his teeth. “F*cking a woman like you just f*cked that one makes you feel like a god, doesn’t it? That’s got to be worth some risk.”

Giles gazes at him.

“Yeah,” he says after a long pause.

Hornberger returns to the subject closer to his heart than student totty. “What are you going to do with the file?”

“If you refrain from bandying a lady’s name about the place, I will make sure it does not reach the hands of university admin, nor of the police. I would ask you for your word, if I thought it was worth anything.”

Hornberger shifts his weight to one foot and seems to consider the deal offered to him. I am considering it, too.