The Visiting Professor

  Like this was not the first joint he’d been offered, right? but he had up to then always found an excuse to say no, he was too tired, he was too busy following erotic bands of randomness to their psychotic origins, lah-di-dah, he had to be up and out to deliver a guest lecture on apple pie at the crack of eleven, whichever. But that night he seemed more … frustrated than usual, probably because of the altercation—hey, altercation has to be in the same league with averted and menstruate, right?

  Where was I? Altercation. I was saying as how L. Falk was pretty strung out from this fight he went and had with What’s-His-Face, the führer at the Chaos Institute. In my head I have this picture of L. Falk staring at the joint very intently, the way Eve might’ve eyeballed the first Golden Delicious, he wanted to try it but he was afraid there was a worm in it. He glanced over at me. I shrugged one of my curvaceous shoulders. He shrugged one of his heavy shoulders. He reached out and took the joint.

  “So what do I do?” he asked me.

  “Tell Lem what to do, babe,” Dwayne told Shirley.

  Shirley plunked herself down on the couch next to L. Falk, draped a leg over his thigh and an arm over his shoulders and gave him the beginner’s course in dope-smoking. “You insert A into B,” she said. “A is the joint. B is your mouth.”

  I got to admit we thought it was hype, Dwayne and Shirley and me, watching him inhale and hold the smoke in until his eyes watered. Even Mayday seemed to have a smile on her face. L. Falk batted the smoke away with the back of a hand and told us the dope wasn’t having any effect on him, he didn’t feel different, he suspected my world-famous Thai truffle might have come from someone’s backyard in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. Then he started in giggling. When I asked him what he was giggling at, he said something about how he was gonna take his sweet time before saying yes. Shirley pressed one of her tiny tits into his arm and asked him what he was saying yes to. Slurring his words, L. Falk explained he was saying yes to Yahweh-made randomness, which implied a not to man-made randomness. He started rambling on about how he could kick himself for not seeing it before, it was exactly the kind of information he needed rattling around in his brain.

  Shirley probably figured if she could keep him talking, she could keep him smoking. She passed the joint back to L. Falk and asked what information he had in mind. Still giggling, he informed us he had just about solved the serial murders. He said the lesson he had learned from the serial murders was applicable to randomness in general. He said the fact that you set out to manufacture randomness, I think I’m getting this right, right? means the randomness you manufacture has not been selected randomly. He got the hiccups, took another drag on the joint and held his breath until the hiccups went away. Giggling some more, he said what was missing from man-made randomness was randomness. Which was another way of saying, this is still L. Falk talking, not me, that randomness, like God, had to be discovered, as opposed to invented.

  Shirley was hanging on his every word and nodding as if he was supplying her with information she couldn’t live without. Dwayne caught my eye, nodded toward Shirley, then stuck his tongue out and wiggled it around suggestively.

  You didn’t need to be a shrink to see what was rattling around in Shirley’s brain.

  “Dwayne and me, we both saw Shirley had the hots for you,” I was explaining to L. Falk in the bathtub. I started running more hot water, I like to sweat when I soak, when I noticed L. Falk’s circumcised periscope peeking through the bubbles of the bubble bath.

  Just thinking about what he was thinking about had turned him into a Homo erectus.

  Watching my Homo turn erectus was turning me on. I stoked both our fires. “So you didn’t not like it, right?”

  L. Falk seemed to wrestle with the question, I could see the wheels turning in his head, I could see the smoke coming out of his ears.

  “Come clean,” I urged.

  “I can say you, at the time I did not not like it. Which I think means I liked it.”

  “So describe it.”

  “You want me to describe it? Out loud?”

  “Yo,” I said. “Everything,” I said. “From E to Z.”

  You would’ve thought I’d gone and ordered up periscope.

  L. Falk’s lids drifted over his eyes, which I took to mean he wasn’t only remembering, he was reliving. Go with the flow.

  “I was dreaming,” he said dreamily, “In my dream, I was hovering over Backwater like a cloud in trousers, that is a line from a Mayakovsky poem, blocking out the sunlight, when I felt something warm and moist close over my you-know-what.”

  “Hey, go ahead and say it.”

  He took a deep breath. “Penis.”

  I reached through the bubbles with my toes to fondle his periscope. His left foot floated toward me and docked against my butterfly tattoo. I gave a good imitation of a bitch in heat.

  “And then and then and then?”

  “And then Shirley came up for air, ‘I’m not very good at this,’ she told me. ‘My mouth’s too small.’ “

  “Shirley doing her fishing-for-compliments act. Rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “I tried to reassure her. I told her she was doing great. ‘I’m not as good as the Tender To,’ she said with a sigh. ‘The Tender To’s fantastic.’ I asked her how she knew how good you were. ‘From Dwayne. He says Rain gives incredible head. She has a big mouth.’ ‘They have made love together, Dwayne and Rain?’ I asked her. ‘Geez, I thought you knew or I wouldn’ta shot my mouth off. We all been into the occasional major merge. Dwayne and Rain. Me and Rain. Dwayne and Rain and me, à trois, as the French fries say. Haven’t you ever made it à trois?’ ”

  I slid the heel of my foot along L. Falk’s thigh. “Like have you?”

  “À deux already strains my capacities.”

  “You didn’t go and tell that to Shirley?”

  “I can say you I did. ‘You’ll love it, Lem,’ Shirley promised me. Three’s a trip you want to take. You get confused. After a while you lose track of who’s doing what to who. It gets very … busy, if you see what I mean.’ “

  “I told her I saw what she meant,” L. Falk remarked in the tub, “but I did not really see what she meant.”

  “Fast forward to the X-rated scenes,” I ordered impatiently.

  “We ran out of conversation and she went back to what she had been doing. After a while I asked her if she was trying to bring me off with her mouth. I heard the words ‘why’ and ‘not’ drift up through her naturally wavy hair.”

  “Fucking Shirley,” I said in admiration. In jealousy, too. I honestly didn’t mind her making it with my squeeze, I just didn’t feature her making it with him better than I make it with him. Besides which I happen to know, bear in mind I am a professional, her hair is not naturally wavy.

  “Afterward,” L. Falk went on, “I could not think of anything to say, so I said thank you. I told her I thought it was a very elegant gesture to take a friend’s …”

  “Hey?”

  “… penis into your mouth. Shirley curled up alongside me and slid a stick of gum between her teeth and told me it was no big deal, all she did was insert A into B, I should not give it a second thought, the pleasure was mostly hers, she liked sucking the occasional unfamiliar cock, what with variety being the spice and all. Of life. Or words to that effect.”

  This was definitely not the moment to educate L. Falk about dudes who thanked you afterwards, as if you were the Tender To who serviced their goddamn yacht. “You guys sure were courteous,” I said, my voice dripping sarcasm. “Maybe you should collaborate on a book of etiquette. You could call it The Greenhorn’s Guide to Polite Oral Sex.”

  L. Falk was so caught up in reliving the scene he missed the sarcasm, but he wasn’t about to let some new slang slip past his ear. “ ‘Greenhorn’ means what?”

  “A greenhorn is a new immigrant who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and thinks it’s physically possible to wear his heart on his sleeve. In other words, it’s someone who’s in
nocent about anatomy. Which is why he needs a guide to oral sex, forget polite.”

  L. Falk shoe horned greenhorn into his vocabulary with one of those slow, solemn, pursed-lip nods that professors own the patent to.

  “So where was I?” he asked himself. “Shirley said she really wanted to show me she could write her name backward. She made it sound important. She said the human race was divided into those who could write their name backward and those who could not. But by the time I came up with a pencil and some paper, she was snoring away. So I tiptoed into the living room.”

  I stepped up the antisubmarine patrol in the general vicinity of his periscope. “You’re only up to the M in your E to Z.”

  “Which is when I spotted the pile of clothes on the couch. The TV was on with the sound turned off, there was one of those late-night shows where some girls go off with some men and then they talk dirty about each other and try to guess who said what about who. I fingered the clothing—your miniskirt, your body-hugging ribbed sweater, your purple tights, your gray Calvin Klein underpants. I think my hearts, the one in my chest, the one on my sleeve, skipped several beats when I saw Dwayne’s pinstriped button-down shirt, his designer jeans, his silk boxer shorts.”

  “Ooooooooh.”

  “I started folding the clothing over the back of the couch, I live in a kind of permanent chaos, I go slumming in order when I can find any, when I heard sounds coming from the bathroom. I padded down the hallway to the door.”

  “Which is warped and never quite closes …”

  “Through the crack I could see the two of you in the tub. You were kneeling between his outstretched legs, which were pink and hairless. You were reaching over his shoulder to wash his back. Your nipples were centimeters from his granny glasses. His left hand was cupping your right knocker. His right hand was caressing your left hip.”

  “You definitely have an eye for detail. So did you get off on seeing me bare-assed with another dude?”

  “I could not believe it,” L. Falk murmured so softly I had to strain to catch his words. “It was extraordinarily beautiful … I felt as if I was watching you with me. … At the same time I had trouble breathing.”

  “I love it that you were looking,” I told him, and I meant every word. If you are what the French call a voyeur, you like to be, pardon the conjugation, voyied.

  “I went back to the bedroom and stretched out alongside Shirley. I lay there in the dark, contemplating the blackness of the night, squaring circles, following elusive threads of randomness to their chaotic origins … most of all listening. I heard Shirley exhale between snores, I heard the wind whistle past the window, I heard the wind harp hanging from a branch of the tree tinkle, I heard the church bell toll the half hour.” L. Falk cleared his throat. “I heard the floorboards squeak. I heard the couch in the next room open. I heard the soft gasps that escape from the back of your throat when you fuck. …”

  “I love it you were listening,” I whispered.

  “So now it is your turn to describe everything from E to Z.”

  It will go on the credit side of my ledger when I’m nominated for sainthood that I didn’t leap at the opportunity. I told L. Falk I wasn’t absolutely convinced he was ready to hear the dirty details; he might lose his cool, he might freak out. He smiled a razor-thin smile which came across as one-third uncertain, two-thirds curious.

  “I will freak out if you do not tell me the dirty details. Telling me everything from E to Z proves that the core conspiracy is with me.”

  Core conspiracy! Goddamn L. Falk! There were still parts of him I had not been to yet.

  So I thought, What the hell, you want someone to act like a consenting adult, treat him like a consenting adult. “I wanted to go back to the couch in the living room,” I began, monitoring his vital signs, so far so good, “but Dwayne was worried you’d come barging in. He wasn’t sure how you’d take it, seeing the two of us. In the act. So we went on into your office and pushed aside the Nordic skier and opened the couch—hey, we really have to oil the hinges on it one of these days. Then we sort of hugged awhile, me looking out the window at the light in the steeple of the Seventh-Day Baptist Church on North Main, him advertising his erection by pushing it into my butt. Then Dwayne said something like, ‘We might as well do this Hollywood-style, huh, babe?’ Dwayne has this Rudolph Valentino side to him. He lifted me up and carried me to the bed. Jesus, L. Falk, the goddamn bath’s getting cold. Anyhow, I don’t remember all the details.”

  “Add hot water. So were you wearing the T-shirt that does not cover your navel?”

  “Yo. I put it on after the bath like I always do. Somewhere along the way it must have disappeared, because I don’t remember taking it off, but I remember him kissing my nipples … Then he went down on me.”

  “… does Dwayne give good head?”

  “… yeah. As a matter of fact he does. Give good head. He makes you feel he’s doing it because he likes cunts, not because giving head happens to be next on the menu. He makes you feel like you don’t need to go and douche with yogurt.”

  “… was he wearing his granny glasses?”

  “Jesus, you ask a lot of questions. Dwayne always wears granny glasses.”

  “If he was wearing his granny glasses, it meant he could see the Siberian night moth in the sea of freckles under your knocker.”

  “Hey, Dwayne’s no greenhorn, he knows his way around the female body without granny glasses. Anyhow, after that I sucked his nipples, but you’ll be gratified to know they didn’t get erect like when I suck your nipples.”

  When I hesitated, L. Falk hit me with, “You are only up to the M in your E to Z.”

  “Right. M … So then I went and sucked him a bit.”

  “How long is a bit?”

  “Five minutes … eight on the outside.”

  “… did he do the dirty deed in your favorite position?”

  Looking back, I can see we should have stopped while we were ahead. He was pushing me past where it was safe to go. I don’t like to be pushed. Maybe that’s why I decided to get clinical, which was my way of pushing back. I suppose you could make a case that I wanted to hurt him.

  So much for my nomination for sainthood.

  “Okay, after you hear the answer, do me a personal favor and remember you asked, right? So where was I? When I finished sucking him, which might’ve lasted ten or twelve minutes now that I think of it, I rolled over onto my stomach so he could fuck me from behind. But he rolled me back onto my back and fucked me from in front. Very slowly. The way someone who’s sure his erection will last forever fucks. I folded my legs back and dug my heels into his butt.”

  “… did you come off?”

  “Sure I came off. The juices were really flowing.”

  “… did you like fucking Dwayne?”

  “I more than liked fucking Dwayne. I loved fucking Dwayne. It’s fly to fuck with a friend, especially if the friend in question happens to have a beautimous body. I don’t understand why more people don’t do it more often. I got this theory, I remember telling you about it the night of the Delta Delta Phi bash, you always love the person you’re fucking while you’re fucking. You lose yourself in the act, you stop growing old, you stop dying.”

  L. Falk let this pearl sink in. After a while he cleared his throat several times, which I interpreted to mean he was about to drop an economy-sized A-bomb.

  “So what ever happened to monogamy?” is what he muttered with his ventriloquist’s lips.

  So what ever happened to monogamy! What a chuckle, right? when you need to educate a consenting Homo chaoticus as to the facts of life. What is it with men, they have this incurable double standard? I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t into monogamy while Shirley was going down on him. So he hears me fucking with a friend, what could be more natural? and all of a sudden he’s pitching new, improved monogamy.

  I wasn’t looking for a fight, so I tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke. “I prefer knotted pine.”

/>   Dudes have gone and told me I don’t know how to deliver punch lines. L. Falk provided the living proof when he lobbed his next observation into the conversation. “Monogamy has nothing to do with mahogany,” is what he said. “What you need is a good dictionary,” is what he said.

  A good dictionary!

  Me.

  Go figure.

  So there we were, eyeing each other across a tub that suddenly felt as if it was filled with ice cubes, his periscope sunk below the surface of the ocean that had come between us, on the threshold of our second fight.

  “So don’t beat around the goddamn bush,” I remember telling him, “come right out and say it. You think I’m uneducated, right?”

  “I think you are educated … differently. You know how to fuck, but you do not know how to make love. I can say you it is possible to make love and still not miss the violence, the orgasm. I can also say you I think there is nothing wrong with you that cannot be corrected.”

  I vaulted out of the tub and shuddered like a dog to get the water off and wrapped the only body I’ll ever have in a beach towel. “What do you say we go directly to the heart of the heart of the goddamn problem,” I sneered, I must have raised my voice an octave or two because L. Falk’s eyes took on the startled gawk that made him look like a bird about to take to the wing. “Just because you get to fuck me doesn’t mean you get to fix me. I mean, I am not broken.” I tried to chill out, I half succeeded, which means I half didn’t. “Jesus, L. Falk, for a while back there I thought we had something going. …”

  He followed me out of the tub. “We had something going,” he said with maddening calmness, there’s nothing more infuriating than dudes who get cooler as you get hotter. He opened the medicine chest and took out the Swedish safety razor that bitch with the sagging tits gave him. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was going to goddamn shave. With her goddamn razor.