Chosen Prey

art talk led to coffee, to a suggestion that she might pose for him.
    Oh, no, she’d said, I wouldn’t pose nude. That wouldn’t be necessary, he said. He was an art professor, he just wanted some facial studies that he could print digitally. She agreed, and had, eventually, even taken off a few of her clothes: her back turned to him, sitting on a stool, her glorious back tapering down to a sheet crinkled beneath her little round butt. The studies had been all right, but it was at home, with the computer, that he’d done the real drawings.
    He had drawn her, wined her, dined her, and finally, on this bleak winter afternoon, fucked her and nearly killed her because she had not lived up to her images he had created from her photographs. . . .
     
    T HE DAY AFTER the assignation with Barstad, the low stacked-heels of Charlotte Neumann, an ordained Episcopalian priest, author of New Art Modalities: Woman/Sin, Sin/Woman, S/in/ister, which, the week before, had broken through the top-10,000 barrier of the Barnes & Noble on-line bestseller list, and who was, not incidentally, the department chairperson, echoed down the hallway and stopped at his door. A tall ever-angry woman with a prominent nose and a single, dark, four-inch-long eyebrow, Neumann walked in without knocking and said, “I need your student budget line. This afternoon.”
    “I thought we had until next Wednesday?” He posed with a cup of coffee held delicately in both hands, his eyebrows arched. He’d left the steel-blue Hermes silk scarf looped around his neck when he’d taken off his coat, and with the books behind him, the china cup, and the scarf framing his face, he must’ve been a striking portrait, he thought. But it was wasted on Neumann, he thought; she was a natural Puritan.
    “I’ve decided that we could avoid the confusion of last year by having them in my office a week early, which will give me time to eliminate any error,” she said, leaving no doubt that she used the term “error” as might a papal inquisitor: “Last year” Qatar had been two weeks late with the budget.
    “Well, that’s simply impossible,” Qatar said. “If you’d given me any notice at all . . .”
    “You apparently didn’t read last week’s departmental bulletin,” she snarled. There was a light in her eye. She’d caught him out, she thought, and he’d soon get a corrective memo with a copy for his personnel file.
    “Nobody read last week’s departmental bulletin, Charlotte,” Qatar snarled back. He’d been widely published and was permitted a snarl. “Nobody ever reads the departmental bulletin because the departmental bulletin, is, in the words of the sainted Sartre, shit. Besides, I was on periodic retreat on Thursday and Friday, as you should have known if you’d read the memo I sent you. I never got the bulletin.”
    “I’m sure it was placed in your mailbox.”
    “Elene couldn’t find her own butt, much less my mailbox. She can’t even deliver my paycheck,” Qatar said. Elene was the departmental secretary.
    “All right,” Neuman said. “Then by tomorrow. By noon.” She took one step backward, into the hallway, and slammed the door.
    The impact ejected Qatar from his office chair, sloshing coffee out of his cup, across his fingers, and onto the old carpet. He took a turn around the office, blinded by a red rage that left him shaking. He’d chosen the life of a teacher because it was a high calling, much higher than commerce. If he’d gone for commerce, he’d undoubtedly be rich now; but then, he’d be a merchant, with dirty hands. But sometimes, like this, the idea of possessing an executive power—the power to destroy the Charlotte Neumanns of the world—was very attractive.
    He paced the office for five minutes, imaging scenarios of her destruction, muttering through them, reciting the lines. The visions were so clear that he could walk through them.
    When the rage subsided, he felt cleaner. Purified. He poured another cup of coffee and picked it up with a steady hand. Took a sip, and sighed.
    He would have taken pleasure in throttling the life out of Charlotte Neumann, though not because she appealed to his particular brand of insanity. He thought he might enjoy it the way anyone would whose nominal supervisor enjoyed small tyrannies as Neumann did.
    So he would get angry, he would fantasize, but he would do nothing but snipe and backbite, like any other associate professor.
    She did not engage him—did not