Frederick Busch - Girls

The dispatcher said a professor needed assistance with a vehicle at the social sciences lot. I said I’d answer. Maybe I’d just break the arm on this one and let it go at that. But it turned out to be Professor Piri, and I seemed to have a hard time with her. She had that wide grin. It made her look young, like a high school girl. And there was something maybe mischievous in her face. It said we were both misbehaving a little.

She stood outside her runty, beat-up car, moving her feet and swinging her arms. “Thank you,” she said, smiling the smile.

“I didn’t help you yet,” I said.

“You will. It doesn’t start. It won’t talk to me.”

“Car won’t talk to you. Does it say anything at all?”

“Nothing.”

I did the usual with the jumper cables, but she was right. This was a dead car. She was sitting in my Jeep with the heater on high, and I had to open her door and reach across her for the radio. I was very careful not to touch her legs, which were in red tights. She watched my arm move in front of her. I told the dispatcher we needed a car towed. Professor Piri told me which of the two garages nearby she liked to use. I told the dispatcher to have them take it there. After I got her briefcase for her, I started driving toward her house.

I asked if we weren’t supposed to be meeting soon about the threat to the Vice President.

“They’re talking about putting Irene Horstmuller in jail.”

“The library head?”

“She’s a right-on woman. She’ll go, I know she will. She’ll be right to.”

“What if somebody shoots the Vice President or something?”

“We’re talking right to privacy. We’re talking Constitution. This isn’t just about library rules or niceties or even ethics.”

“Constitution,” I said.

“Why does that make you smile?”

“No,” I said, “I was talking to somebody in connection with my, I don’t — well, with my duties. Earlier today. He talks about the Constitution. He also sells drugs.”

“That’s right. I hear you. One of them sells drugs. The other threatens Presidents.”

“Vice Presidents.”

“Yes. And the outlaws are ahead, two to one, and you don’t like it.” She said, “Cops.”

“Whoa.”

“Well, I know this argument. I’ve heard it half my life from my father.”

“Professor Piri, I am not making an argument. I’m not arguing. All I did was, I smiled.”

We were on the street, and she was pointing to houses. She had me go up the driveway that curled around in the back of where she lived.

“It was a fine smile,” she said.

“Same to you,” I said.

Here we were. I thought we were coming to it, but we were here already. I noticed I had shut the engine off.

“Let me make you some coffee,” she said.

“Please.”

“Then you have to go back, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“My first name is Rosalie. Did I tell you that?”

“I remember your name.”

“You could call me that.”

“Rosalie,” I said.

She said, “Jack.”

“I have to get back on patrol,” I said.

“But first the coffee.”

“Thank you.”

“Rosalie.”

“Thank you, Rosalie.”

Her kitchen was small and not terribly clean. She said, “Oh! The damned garbage.”

I smelled it, too, a kind of mild decay I always associated with winter and too much snow to want to go out in. She hung her coat over a chair, and I kept mine on. She moved behind me twice while making the coffee, and I felt the hairs on my neck respond. It was a boyish feeling, and that as much as she herself was exciting.

She told me about her father, the policeman. She talked about her mother, who was a nutritionist in the public schools. She told me about Smith College and Princeton University. She talked about the politics of untenured professors.

“Tenure always struck me as a kind of baby thing. You know, do your job well and stay, do it badly and we can you.” I was looking for any sort of fight, I realized. I didn’t want to relax any more in this room. She sat on the counter across from me, swinging her legs in their red tights under her short black jumper.

“Say I’m a lesbian,” she said.

“You’re a lesbian.”

“Is that a question?”

“Just saying it.”

“I’m not,” she said. “ Say I am. Say my department head’s a woman who wants to get me in the sack. Say she’s a he who thinks a dyke is a very expendable item.”

“I’ll say the one where she wants you in the sack.”

She almost smiled the smile, but she kept talking. She moved her hands a lot as she talked, and she swung her legs back and forth.

She said, “Say she wants me so much, and I say no, and she punishes me by seeing I don’t get a new contract.”

“Can that happen?”

“Not as easily as I made it sound, but yes.”

“Okay. That wouldn’t be fair. But wouldn’t that happen in the rest of the world? Another job? Where they don’t do tenure?”

“You’re cute,” she said. “ Here it is. I’m teaching from lesbian theory, say.”

“There’s lesbian theory ?”

“There’s every theory. That’s what drives a lot of work these days: theory. I’m doing a good deal of the new historicism myself.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry. Never mind that. But all it is — think of context. Anyway. Say I’m teaching a kind of theory my department head doesn’t like. Say the kids complain. Say she complains. Say she disapproves because of how I think.”

“And she gets you canned for how you think. I hear that. Okay. That’s bad. But people get fired for how they think. Why should you guys get protected when the rest of us don’t? Except you’re better-educated and smarter and you — would you mind getting down off of the counter?”

She jumped down at once. She said, “Why?”

“You have to know why.”

She did smile the wicked smile then. When she walked over to me, she leaned against the back of the chair I was sitting sideways in, and some of her touched me up and down.

She said, “I’m not a cop groupie. I know about them.”

“I never met one.”

“Then maybe I should be one. You could find out. They’re pretty basic, I think.”

“Groupy theory,” I said.

I smelled her lipstick and her perfume and her skin. All of them were new to me. They overwhelmed the smell of the kitchen, which had bothered me. She put her hand on my shoulder so her fingers touched my neck. I shivered.

“I’m not careless with my personhood,” she said.

I wanted to ask her what personhood was, but I didn’t think she was conducting a conversation. She was delivering a message, maybe to herself and maybe to me, and I wanted to listen.

Her hand moved, but not away from me. I saw that her eyes were closed. I knew the water she was heating for instant coffee in a blackened aluminum pot was going to bubble and boil, and she would have to change her position. I found that I was moving. I was leaning up and moving my left hand. I stood, reached under her arm and pulled her against me, set my legs, leaned down, to find her looking up, and I shut my eyes and kissed her.

It seemed to me to be a lot more than teeth and lips and her small, cool tongue. It seemed to me, or maybe I was just hoping a lot, that I was going to end up with Rosalie Piri on her kitchen floor and me in big trouble. I stepped back, but slowly. Her eyes had closed again, and she kept them shut when I stepped farther back, toward the door. I heard the chug of boiling water against the side of the pot.

“Are you gone yet?” she asked.

“Here I go.”

“I can’t look,” she said. “Can you go now?”