‘About fifteen minutes later they all came back laughing. Everybody loved Larry. Tubs told me to manage the deal because they were going to buy, and he was right. The thing went perfectly. Larry shut up like he was trained to do. I got their signature. The easiest sale I ever made. They loved the car. They loved us. Everything was perfect. Then right at the end, the family all tucked away in their brand new two-year-old Buick LeSabre, Larry leaned into the car and said in his squeaky little Southern drawl, ‘Oh! And I forgot to tell y’all! When y’all bring this in for service, we got a limousine out back with a driver that wears white gloves, and he’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’
Walt laughed. ‘White gloves?’
‘That’s exactly what he said. The lady goes, “Hey, that’s wonderful, Larry! Why don’t the other dealerships do that?” And Larry goes, “I told you, darling, we’re special!”’
‘The minute they drove off, I asked Larry why he had to go and tell a lie when it didn’t even matter! I said it was just asking for trouble down the line. You know what he said? He said, “A little lie just makes ’em feel good, Davey. That’s all!”’
Walt considered this for a moment. ‘That’s why you lied to Buddy? To make him feel good?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I lied because I don’t like the son of a bitch.’
Sometime the following week one of my students in Introduction to Literature came up to me after class. She said she wanted to make an appointment to talk with me. I was heading back to my office just then and said I could talk to her right away, if that was good for her. That would be okay, she said.
Did she want to walk along with me or meet over there? She said we might as well walk together.
At that point, I had already asked her name. Denise Conway. So as we started across campus I inquired about where she came from. Different places. Was she a freshman? Did it show? She looked like a senior, I said, but most of the advisers encouraged their people to get the one-hundred level courses out of the way early. That seemed to satisfy her and we walked in a comfortable silence for a while. She was a nice enough young woman, I thought, lacking confidence maybe, and, except for a trim, perky build, not especially interested in her appearance. To be fair, a lot of the kids dressed down for class: raggedy sweatshirts, loose jeans, no makeup, hair unwashed and pulled back sloppily.
Nothing unusual in this, nor in the fact that a student wanted to connect with me. It was a large class, and older students sometimes needed to feel as though they had some kind of feel for the prof’s humanity, such as it was.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
I had no idea what she was talking about and told her as much.
‘We met at Caleb’s last spring.’
The moment she said this, I locked in on the brown eyes. Buddy Elder’s pale, plain stripper girlfriend who had not said a word. ‘You’re Buddy Elder’s friend,’ I said.
‘You won’t hold that against me, will you?’ It was a quick, sweet remark, and I laughed. She did as well, and as she did, I decided I liked her. At least she didn’t seem like the anaemic little dolt I had imagined. With a smile, she was actually a good deal prettier than The Slipper’s usual offerings. At just this point Norma Olson and Marlene Moss came walking toward us. Norma and Marlene were both graduate students. Both of them had been out to the farm for the party. I greeted them casually and noticed them checking out Denise.
‘Usually, when men don’t recognize me it’s because I have my clothes on.’
Not wanting to touch this one, I said, ‘You’ve changed your hair, haven’t you?’
She was in fact a peroxide blonde. ‘You know what they say. Blondes have more fun. What do you think?
Do you like it?’
‘It looks good.’
‘Buddy says it makes me look like a total prostitute.’ I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment in the lexicon of Buddy Elder or not, so I let that go and just looked at her for a moment. ‘My tips are up forty percent since I did my hair. Can you believe it?’
‘You’re still working at The Slipper?’
‘I have to pay rent.’ I had nothing to say to this.
‘I’m dreading the day someone from school walks in.’
‘You mean besides Walt?’
She smiled as if I had mentioned somebody’s old sheepdog. ‘I don’t really think of Walty as university.
He’s one of my regulars. With you it would be different.
I think if you came in to watch me I’d be embarrassed.
You’re my professor!’
‘I expect we’d both be embarrassed.’
‘We’re not total nude, but there’s not much left to the imagination.’
I started to ruminate on the imagination and decided that wasn’t a good idea, so I nodded thoughtfully, praying we got off the subject of nude dancing, or semi-nude dancing, as soon as possible.
In my office, Denise got right down to business. She was having a problem with the sexuality in the material. Since we were reading Oedipus the King, I was a bit confused. In fact, I had a difficult time not laughing. ‘Sexuality?’
‘The incest. I just want to throw up when I think about him married to his mother. Like, they had sex, didn’t they? And kids?’ I had had complaints before about the Oedipus, but never expressed with such conviction. My only answer was to say we were almost done with it.
‘But I have to write about it on the test, and I don’t think I can. Is there something else I can study?’
I decided not to try selling Oedipus to her. The standard line would be to tell her it wasn’t really about incest. It was about ignorance, all the things we think we know about our lives but actually just take on faith. I decided instead to extricate myself from the problem with humour. The exam would be fairly general and cover a great deal of material. If the subject of incest bothered her for some reason, she could always choose to write about adultery and murder.
Denise locked on the word adultery. ‘I don’t need to read some story about adultery! I get that every night at work. Most all of the guys who come into The Slipper are married.’
I wasn’t quite sure what I should say, so I tried to relate the material to something in her own experience. I said any number of movies dealt with the same themes. ‘You go to movies, don’t you?’ Sometimes, she said, when she had time. ‘But I don’t like violent movies.’
‘What do you like to see?’
‘Love stories.’
‘That’s it?’
She thought about it. Pretty much.
I made a pitch for a diversity of experience. Besides, it was possible to dislike something and still understand it. She didn’t have to like everything she read.
Denise left my office that day promising she would try to be more open-minded. It was a fine moment for me, I decided, teaching open-mindedness to an employee of the sex industry.
Chapter 5
I told Molly I was having trouble getting back into the routine. I had been away from it too long, I said. Molly hadn’t much sympathy. She wanted to know how many other professions offered a nine-hour work-week, counting an hour as fifty minutes and a year as nine months. Put that way, the whole thing seemed less awful, and I reconciled myself to my fate.
It was not a bad fate actually. I was working on some new short stories, rising before dawn to write for an hour or so. Around six-thirty I would usually feed the dogs and horses, then let them out before I drove to town. In my office by nine o’clock most mornings, I had an enviable schedule, flexible in the extreme.
I usually finished up around three o’clock, though on Wednesday nights I regularly taught a night class.
That fall there were no emergencies at school, no grants to write, not even an excessive number of
