The Lesson of Her Death

lace tulle on the cuff of her dress. “Well, you know ’bout Jennie’s affair with that girl, don’tcha?”
    After a pause he wrote “Bisexual?” in precise boxy letters and asked her to continue.
    The girl touched her round pink lip with her tongue and made a circuit of Corde’s face. “Just rumors. Y’all know how it is.” The plump mouth closed.
    “Please.”
    Finally she said, “One time, the story goes, some girls were in a dorm across campus and saw Jennie in bed with another girl.”
    The flesh was no longer pale but glowed with fire.
    “Who was this other girl?”
    “I was led to believe their … position in bed made it a little difficult to see her. If you understand what I’m saying.”
    “Who were these girls who saw it?”
    “I don’t know. I assumed you knew all about this.”The frown produced not a single wrinkle in her perfect skin. “You know of course about the fight she had?”
    “Tell me.”
    “The Sunday before she died. Jennie was on the phone for a long time. It was late and she was whispering a lot but I got the impression she was talking to somebody she’d dumped. You know that tone? Like where you have to get meaner than you want to because they’re not taking no for an answer. They all were carrying on and my room is right near the phone and I was going to go out and tell her to hush when I heard her say, ‘Well, I love her and I don’t love you and that’s all there is to it.’ Then crash bang she hung up.”
    “Loved ‘her’?”
    “Right. I’m sure about that.”
    “The call, did she make it or receive it?”
    “She received it.”
    No way to trace
. “Man or woman?”
    “She sounded like she was talking to a man but maybe I’m projecting my own values. With her, I guess it could’ve been either. That’s all I know.”
    “Nobody else has said anything about it.”
    She shrugged. “Well, did y’all ask?”
    “No.”
    “Then that pretty much explains it, would’n you say?”
    When she had gone Corde bundled his cards together and tossed them into his briefcase. He noticed that the phone booth up the hall was free and he walked quickly to it. As he stood waiting for someone to answer his call, two young men walked past lost in loud debate. “You’re not listening to me. I’m saying there’s perception and there’s reality. They’re
both
valid. I’ll prove it to you. Like, see that cop over there? …” But at that moment T.T. Ebbans said hello and Corde never heard the end of the discussion.

    He lusted for her.
    What a phenomenon! He was actually salivating, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell her and he wanted more than anything to pull open her white blouse and slip a high-rider breast into his mouth.
    Brian Okun said to Victoria Feinstein, “I’m thinking of doing a seminar on gender identity in the Romantic era. Would you be interested in being on the panel?”
    “Interesting idea,” she said, and crossed legs encased in tight black jeans.
    They were sitting in the Arts and Sciences cafeteria, coffee before them. Victoria was Okun’s most brilliant student. She had stormed onto campus from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. He had read her first paper of the semester, “Gynocriticism and the Old New Left,” and bolstered by her self-rising breasts and hard buttocks decided she was everything that Jennie Gebben was and considerably more.
    Alas this proved too literally true however and he found with bitterness that certain aspects of her knowledge—semiotics, for instance, and South American writers (currently chic topics in the MLA)—vastly outweighed his, a discrepancy she gleefully flaunted. Okun’s hampered hope vaporized one day when he saw Victoria Feinstein kiss a woman on the lips outside his classroom. Still Okun admired her immensely and spoke to her often.
    It troubled him to use such a brilliant mind in this cheap way.
    She said, “Why Romantic? Why not Classic?”
    “Been done,” he dismissed.
    “Maybe,” she pondered, “you could do it interstitially—the Augustan era interposed against the Romantic. You know Latin, don’t you?”
    “I do,
mirabile dictu
. But I’ve already outlined the program. I hope you’ll think about it. I’d like the panel to be straight, gay, transvestite and transsexual.”
    Victoria said, “Ah, you want a cross-section?”
    He laughed hard.
Why oh why don’t you want to sit on my cock and scrunch around?
    She was courteous enough to ask the question before