Appropriate Sex

This was a Friday in April, one of the last days of the term, and the undergrads were all worked up. You could see it in the way they touched themselves, those lewd, innocent little caresses of the self, the way they lingered over their cigarettes out on the steps, a thousand bright sucking lips.

The dress code in my own class was terrifying. Cutoffs. Halter tops. Garments that managed to fuse the sartorial aspirations of sportswear and lingerie. Spring was finally here (finally! finally!) and there was no holding the young skin back.

We were critiquing a story called "Last Rites," in which a mother mourning the death of her daughter decides, rather impulsively, to pay a visit to the girl's prize Arabian stallion.

"What's the deal with the horse?" said Brendan Mahoney. "Is there something, like, going on with the horse?"

"What would be going on with the horse?" said Nicole Buswell.

Nicole--pale, chubby, ardently sexless--was our leader for the day. I myself didn't lead discussions. I felt this would inhibit the class, and my philosophy as a teacher back then was to disinhibit.

"I don't know," Brendan said. "I'm not saying anything, like, explicit, but---" He looked down at his (continued on page 136)Appropriate Sex(continued from page 86) copy of the story and squinted. "There's this line at the top of seven: 'she felt the heat of the animal against her body. The animal heat entering her.' What's that mean, 'The animal heat entering her'?"

"Oh, that's sick," said Emily Givens.

"She goes and leans against the horse," said Rob Tway. "It's a human thing. Like wanting, like, contact. She's just decided to take her daughter off life support."

"That's what makes the whole thing so weird!" Brendan said, as if Rob had helped him make his point. "I mean, if she's so upset about her daughter and all, what's she doing getting all sexualized over a horse?"

"Sexualized?" said Nicole. "Sexualized isn't even a word."

"Yes it is," said Pete Fayne.

"All that stuff about the thick neck and the satiny hair or whatever," Brendan said. "It's like she's gonna hump the horse or something."

"Sick," said Emily. "You are so sick."

I had the feeling, actually, that Emily knew a little something about sick. She was wearing a top that would have been illegal in some Southern states, a kind of cheesecloth camisole.

"You're really twisted," said Rob.

Brendan shook his head. He was the lowest common denominator, no doubt about that, a dim kid with the long, rutted cheeks of adolescence. But he was only following my lead. I was the one who had ordered them to root out the truth, to never avert their eyes. Self-deception, I'd told them in my profound, deeply feeling teacher voice, is the only worthy enemy.

"I'm just saying," Brendan said. "Like, look at it. 'she stroked the beast's hot, damp, thick, satiny neck. She smelled the musk of the animal enveloping her trembling body.' I didn't write that. Did I write that?"'

He looked at me.

"You did not write that," I said.

Nicole let out a puff of air, disgusted.

The author, Mandy Shaw, sat scribbling in her notebook. She was a sadistic little sex bomb with a tattoo on the small of her back of a fairy princess with blue hair and D-cups. Sometimes, during conferences, as she sat across from me fretting over syntax, I imagined her body rendered on black velvet. The faintest hint of her raspberry body spray was enough to ruin my day.

"Even the way the daughter is described. The way she rides the horse, like the way their bodies fit together. And the mom's watching, remembering how her daughter's face looked." Brendan started flipping through the story again.

"Let's move on," Nicole said.

"Hold on, hold on. Here it is. 'The look on Cassie's face was one of unbridled ecstasy, as if her body were rising on some large, warm happiness.' Am I crazy or does that sound kind of horny? Come on. Large. Warm." Brendan looked for support to Teddy Leaf, his fellow burnout. "I'm not saying the mom doesn't love Cassie or isn't heartbroken or whatever. It's just there's all this weird, like, energy with the horses. Like this sexy horse energy."

This drew a few laughs and Brendan began to nod. "We all know about those girls, those horsey girls, who are all obsessed with horses. Going out to the barn and brushing them down and washing their flanks and all that. Rubbing them down. Marie Antoinette, she had sex with horses."

"That was Catherine the Great, you idiot," said Rob.

"They had to use a crane to lower the animal down onto her," Pete added helpfully.

"Please don't call him an idiot," I said to Rob.

"Who did?" said Teddy.

"Her attendants," said Pete. "Those dudes who help out the queen."

Teddy ran a finger over the scab on his elbow. "That's, like, treason, dude. Watching the queen fuck a horse is definitely treason."

"Why are we talking about this?" Nicole said.

"Brendan's just making stuff up to get attention because his parents didn't give him enough when he was a child," said Emily.

"I didn't make that up," Brendan said. "It's history."

"Gross," Emily said. "You are made of gross."

"You'd know," said Teddy, and the class, the entire little circle of creative fuckups, let out a low-down murmur.

All except Ingrid Nunez. She was a strict Pentecostal who wrote stories about her love for the All-Knowing Creator of Man and, more recently, her devout hope that the undevout would burn in hell for the rest of time.

"I think we may be getting a little far afield," I said.

They'd stuffed us into the basement of Krass, in an airless little cell that smelled of the chicken nuggets Teddy brought to class each week, despite my repeated implorations. I gazed out the window at the parking lot with the Dumpsters. The nice classrooms, the ones with natural light and a view of the courtyard's lush flowerbeds, were reserved for the business school, where it was assumed the students might someday become prosperous alumni.

"Wait a second," Brendan said. "What's so gross? Why are you guys all, like, ganging up on me? I'm just talking about what Mandy wrote in her story. I'm not trying to offend her. Mandy, I'm not trying to offend you. I liked the story. I wrote, like, a whole critique."

Brendan was not a promising student. He was the sort of student whose intellect might have been titled Still Life With Bong. But now, on this gorgeous April day, the wick of insight had been lit within him, and he came at us with the force of a crusader. He knew he was right, that he'd latched on to a node of perversion below the story's maudlin surface, and he wasn't going to let it go.

"Sex and death are related," he explained. "The French, the French people, when they come, they call that dying. Sex dying."

"A little death," said Rob.

"Right," Brendan said. "The point being that both of those things, like, dying, like when you die, and when you have sex, they're like the same thing in a certain way."

"A dead fuck," Teddy said.

"So, like, this mom, when she goes out to visit the horse, she's trying to connect to her daughter, right? But when she thinks about her daughter, she thinks about how she used to ride the horse and how her daughter used to be, like, all excited to ride the horse. And as she's describing this, that's when she starts touching the horse, like, rubbing it all over and getting all this heat entering her body and so forth."

Nicole was glaring at me now, with her sharp white teeth, and Emily had bugged out her eyes and Rob said, "Why can't it just be a story about a mother finding an emotional link to her dead daughter through her horse?"

"Yeah," Nicole said. "You don't have any idea what Mandy had in her mind when she wrote the story--"

"Yeah, but you can write something and not even know what it's about until you, like, look at it later and figure it out. Isn't that right, Mr. Lowe? That's even got a name."

"Perversion in the service of the ego," Emily said.

"I'm not trying to be a pervert," Brendan said.

"You don't have to try," Emily said.

It occurred to me suddenly that these two had fucked and that it had ended badly, as it usually does at that age, and that this probably explained the erotic charge I'd sensed in class over the past few weeks.

There were other factors. I should mention, for instance, that all this took place during the Lewinsky scandal and as much as I hate to invoke that dark episode, it is relevant because everyone back then, including The New York Times and the United States Congress, was talking about blow jobs, was imagining President Clinton with his pants around his ankles and his presidential ass pressed against his presidential desk and his presidential face all cragged up in bliss and Monica on her knees wrapping her big red mouth around his pecker. The Altoids hummer. The Cohiba up her snatch. The money shot on the blue dress.

And what's more, it was everything we'd ever wished for, to see our big daddy prez getting down with some chubby hayseed in the Oral Office. It was what we deserved. Our popular culture had prepared us exquisitely for the whole shebang. Almost everywhere you turned, strangers were preparing to have sex, or talking about sex, advising us on how to lick a woman's private parts.

I was one of the only adults who was not having sex at that historic moment, because my wife had left me. Actually, we hadn't had sex for a year or so before that because I had lost my desire for her and could not maintain an erection, and while I had learned to compensate in various ways, my wife had put two and two together and decided I was having an affair with one of my students, which, oddly, I was not.

Brendan was still pleading his case. He had taken off his visor so he could wave it around a little, and this had exposed a vibrant white band of skull around his head. He looked, in his cargo pants and high-tops, like a vehement hip-hop mushroom.

"Terrific," I said. "You've made some cogent points, Brendan. Let's hear from someone who hasn't had a chance yet." My glance settled, unfortunately, onto Ingrid. She was biting her lower lip.

"What do you think, Ingrid?"

"Brendan is going to burn in hell for the rest of time," she said quietly.

"That seems a little severe," I said.

"What about Mandy?" Nicole said. "She's supposed to be able to ask questions at the end, Mr. Lowe."

"Of course," I said. "Any questions?"

Mandy was wearing the sort of lip gloss that made her look like she'd just gone 10 rounds with a stick of butter. She had settled on a conservative outfit for the day, which meant you had to imagine what her nipples looked like using only texture as a guide. She looked down at her notebook and back up at me and licked her lips and smiled and began to run her bracelets up and down her wrist. There was nothing I could do about any of this. They hadn't come up with those kinds of arrest warrants yet.

"Nope," she said. "None."

This meant it was time for class to be over, which meant, given I could no longer tolerate being on campus for more than one afternoon a week, that it was time for office hours.

No one ever came to office hours except Rob, who had always read something life altering and wanted to discuss it and other issues of craft, which I managed to avoid because I didn't really understand what craft was, frankly, and because I no longer read anything written after the Civil War. I endured these onslaughts only by reminding myself that someday Rob would commit suicide.

"What are we going to do about this Mahoney?" Rob said. "It's probably too late to put him on academic probation. But we could always ask him to withdraw." He took out a pack of sugarless gum and whacked it against the heel of his palm. "We've got till April 15."

"I was thinking maybe of just letting it slide. Chalking it all up to critical enthusiasm."

"That was harassment, Mr. Lowe."

Tway now launched into a discourse on Tristram Shandy, a book I might have actually read, except that I hadn't.

There was a knock on the door. This was a wondrous thing! A knock. On the door.

"I'll need to see who that is," I said.

Rob checked his watch and frowned.

I opened the door and there in front of me stood Mandy. She had changed into a tank top and red miniskirt, and her little scent cloud smelled of coconut and cigarettes.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"Are you, like, available?"

"Yes. Of course I am. Rob was just finishing up."

"No, I wasn't," he said.

"Yes, you were."

Mandy flounced into my office and suddenly I was mortified by the decor--the antidrug poster clipped from a newspaper and taped to the door, the erotic renderings of Plato and Socrates. These had been put up by my office-mate, a gentleman named Jeffrey Thist, whom I had never met and who was, apparently, a classicist in recovery.

I watched Mandy settle into her chair. "How do you think it went in there?"

"In where?"

"In class."

Mandy had bound her hair up with a chopstick and the loose strands kept brushing her cheeks. "How did it go?" she said uncertainly.

"The critique of your story."

"I haven't read them yet," she said. "They're in my backpack."

"Right. I meant the discussion."

"The discussion?"

"Of your story. The discussion of your story in class. I was concerned that some of the comments may have been a little upsetting."

"Which comments?"

"Well, for instance, the comments that Brendan was making."

"Brendan?"

"Brendan Mahoney." I paused. "The observations he made about the mother in your story, Susan." Mandy's legs were crossed and one of her flip-flops dangled off her toes, which were painted metallic blue. "I worried those might have upset you."

"In what way?"

"Just that Brendan was saying that Susan, the character Susan, when she thought about her daughter, how much her daughter loved her horse, there was an erotic element to her, the mother's, thinking."

"Uh-huh."

"Yes?"

"I'm not sure I'm following you," Mandy said.

"Right," I said. "OK. Remember in class we were talking about your story and Brendan read those lines about the mom and the horse? And he was suggesting that the mom might have had certain feelings toward her daughter's horse. Feelings of a sexual sort. That she might have had some sexual feelings for the horse. I was worried this might have upset you. Because sometimes, as I've said, we write things and people might take them differently from the way we intended. Brendan was not passing judgment on you, or suggesting that you think about horses in a sexual way."

"But I do," said Mandy.

She had the face of a doomed starlet--small, round features that expressed a kind of contemptuous yearning. Watching her apply lip gloss made you want to grab God by the lapels and shout, "Now, why did you have to go and arrange that?" My fantasies about her, conjured during failed efforts with the wife, were sad and prosaic. Mandy on a bearskin rug. Mandy with whipped cream. Mandy insisting that I take my lashes like a man.

"Oh my God, I used to think about horses all the time," she said. "They're so big and, like, strong, you know? I used to go out to the stables, like, this stable near my house, to wash my horse, Zeus. 'Cause when you ride, you know, you're supposed to take care of your animal. That's part of the whole responsibility aspect. So when you go out to the stable, I mean, you see certain things when you're in the stable."

I made a noise then, a thoughtful little "Sure, I understand" noise.

"I think it has something to do with my dad," Mandy said. "He was really well hung. That's what my mom used to always say. Hung like a horse. You know that expression?"

I started to wonder if this wasn't maybe a practical joke. Or, worse, if some undercover-video show might have recruited Mandy. This was an era in which hidden video had become the hot new medium. Citizens found the authenticity irresistible. Real people. Real shame.

"I think that's where I made the connection," Mandy said. "Like, I drew on those feelings I had as a girl. And then I thought, But what if I died? Like if I died in a terrible accident. What would my mom do? Because we're, like, super-close. Me and my mom."

I thought about Mandy's first story, Home at Last. It was about a shy girl from Stamford, Connecticut who arrives at college and feels lonely ("as lonely as a single pebble at the bottom of a vast blue sea") because her roommates decide, for no good reason, that she's a bitch and won't include her in any of their activities. The girl (whose name in the story is "the girl"--"that way she's more, like, universal") considers dropping out of school and returning to Stamford. But then she meets some really cool girls from another dorm and transfers there and finally decides that "home is wherever people are willing to get to know the true you." I looked at Mandy, who had just reached into her purse and would soon start applying lip gloss, and started to sort of miss Home at Last.

"I'm not interested in appropriate sex," Mandy said. "That's what the guy I was seeing said, the therapist. I always go for these older guys. I went for a couple of the teachers in high school. Well, one of them was a coach, I guess. It's pretty shocking how easy it is to get them. I guess some teachers are pretty desperate."

I did not say anything. I did not think about Mandy's tattoo or any other part of her. I did not watch her apply lip gloss. I remained still. I remained still and thought about the tapes of Clinton talking on the phone with one of his old flames. She asks him, "Do you like to eat pussy?" And he, the future president of the United States, answers: "You bet I do." The shock jocks had this snippet on a continuous loop. What a noble answer! A president who goes down! It was sad to watch those dopes in Congress mugging the guy, day after day. Thirty years ago, when Kennedy was getting head from whores in bathtubs, nobody made a peep.

"That's what I like about college," Mandy said. "The teachers are so much more, like, professional. And your class, especially. You give us a chance to express our feelings. Like how you talk about we shouldn't be writers. We should just tell the truth."

"Right," I said.

Mandy folded her arms across her chest. "Is it always so cold in here?"

"It's central air. Sorry."

"Yeah." She shivered. "I've got, like, goose bumps."

"About the story," I said. "I do think you've got something. Take a look at my comments--"

"Can I ask you something, Mr. Lowe?" Mandy said. "I mean, a more personal question."

"Sure," I said. "But you know what? Let me just check to make sure there's no one else waiting."

Mandy looked me dead in the eye and I looked back at her. A couple of seconds passed, a couple of very long seconds, like perhaps the longest seconds in my life, extremely complicated, morally uncharted seconds, white-toothed, lip-glistening seconds, abject, wave-goodbye-to-certain-sacred-principles-type seconds.

Mandy nodded slowly. "You should do that," she said. "You should check."

So I got up and walked over to the door, and as I stepped past her, Mandy grazed my thigh with her hand, swept her hand down the outside of my thigh, and a great current of hope passed through my body, followed by a frisson of dread, followed by more hope, such that I began to tremble, more than a little, and Mandy, sensing this physiological event, let her hand settle on my knee.

She began to gently massage the anterior regions, as if checking for ligament damage, while I looked down into her face and tried to decide what sort of witness she would make in a court of law.

"I can tell you like me," Mandy said. She smiled and blew a strand of hair off her cheek. "And you want to kiss me, but you're afraid I'll say something to one of my stupid roommates and ruin the whole thing. True?"

I dipped my chin in a manner that was both a nod and a plausibly deniable non-nod.

"But why would I do that to my favorite teacher in the whole world?"

Mandy closed her eyes and made her lips into a buttery little bow. She gave my trousers a prompting tug.

Well.

I suppose I bent to kiss her, just a glancing kiss, a swift brush of my mouth across hers, but Mandy needed more than that. She grasped my thigh and let out a stagy moan and shook loose the chopstick, so that her hair fell free. There was something in these gestures, a certain rehearsed quality, that made me sad. I felt suddenly, irretrievably sorry for both of us: for Mandy, who viewed her sexuality as a bright new user option only obscurely related to her heart, and for me, who was losing hair in clumps and couldn't even give my wife a decent poking anymore. I wanted to have a good cry right then, preferably with my head nuzzled somewhere warm.

But before I could do any such thing, there was a knock on the door. I leaped backward, smashing my tailbone against the edge of my desk. The door swung open a crack and I could see Brendan standing there with his visor in one hand and a cookie in the other. He reeked of pot.

I leaped toward him and flung open the door the rest of the way, so that he could see the entire office, Mandy seated across from my desk with all her clothes on and so forth.

"Hey," he said.

"Brendan!"

"I didn't realize that you were with someone."

"Just finishing!" I said.

"Hey, Mandy," he said, and waved his cookie.

Mandy was already rebinding her hair, gathering up her purse. She slipped past Brendan without looking at him.

Brendan remained in the hallway.

"Did you want to come in?" I said.

"Yeah. OK. Sure."

He stepped into the office and sat down.

"What's up," I said.

But Brendan had spotted the antidrug poster, which showed a kid lying on the ground facedown, with blood coming out of his head. The legend underneath read: Drugs Sure are Glamorous.

"That's not mine," I said.

"It isn't?"

"No, it's not. I don't believe drugs are that bad."

Brendan seemed to consider this. "Huh," he said finally. "Yeah. I guess I'm still sort of undecided on the issue."

"Tell me why you're here," I said.

There was a long lag on the answer. I wondered if Brendan might be under the influence of a more powerful sedative, such as Rohypnol, and where he might have gotten it and whether he had any in his pocket. He was now examining the naked Plato sketch.

"Is that you?" he said finally.

"Plato," I said.

"Right. Plato." He sat up in the chair and began to nod. Then he slumped down again, in the way characteristic of young men who haven't quite grown into their height.

"So," I said.

"Yeah. I guess I wanted to apologize. Like, for all that stuff in class today. Sometimes I kind of get going on an idea and just don't stop. Mandy was pretty pissed, I think."

"On the contrary," I said. "She appreciated how seriously you took her work."

"I know Emily was pissed."

There was another long pause. It occurred to me that I was getting something of a contact high. Everything had started moving more slowly, more interestingly. The events of the day were coming to seem somehow related. Brendan looked up at me with his sorry, bloodshot eyes.

"Me and her were involved, you know."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. We just broke up. A couple of weeks ago."

"That's rough," I said.

"It was weird, man. I mean, I don't know if I want to lay it all out."

"Your call," I said.

"I assume, like, whatever I say will stay between us. Like, on the DL. The down low. Anyway, she's a nice girl. I've got nothing against her. But she wanted to do weird stuff." Brendan sat there, fingering the top of his cookie. "She liked to touch my ass, man. Put stuff up there. Weird. She had these balls made out of, like, mercury or something. And a string of pearls. And all this lube. Man, she was the queen of lube. She was like, 'Come on. Be an adventurer.' I told her, 'Hey, unless you're my personal physician, you don't get to fifth base.' I dunno, man. I'm from New Hampshire. You know what I mean?"

I nodded.

"She was all, like, 'Are you afraid you're gay?' And I was like, 'No. I don't like stuff put up my ass. Does that make me gay?"'

It wasn't clear to me whether Brendan wanted this question answered.

"So anyway, that's part of the reason I might have gotten sort of crazy today. Because here she is coming off all, like, puritaniacal, like I'm so gross and I'm so sick, when the truth is she's the freak. Freaky-deaky." Brendan had halfway crushed his cookie and he stared at the pieces in his hand, then crammed them into his mouth. "I just wanted to say sorry. I guess there's no need to go into detail. You probably don't need to hear this stuff, seeing as you're married and everything."

"How do you know I'm married?"

"The ring, bro."

"Right."

"How's that working for you, the marriage?"

"Fine," I said. "Why do you ask?"

"I dunno. I just figure it'd be weird to be around all these hot young chicks all the time and have the ball and chain at home."

"You learn to live with it."

We were both silent for a while. Brendan had slumped down so low his head was resting on the back of the chair. He closed his eyes and said, "I'm pretty sure Mandy Shaw wants to fuck you, dude."

"You think?"

"Man, I'd like to fuck her."

I made my thoughtful professorial noise.

"What do you want to do long-term, Brendan?"

"Long-term?" he said. "Hmm. Probably brain surgeon."

"Don't you have to have pretty good grades for that?"

Brendan looked down at his hand and realized, with visible disappointment, that he'd already eaten his cookie. "Yeah, that's kind of the catch-22 of the situation."

"Can I ask you a question, Brendan? Are you stoned?"

"Not really anymore."

"Well, for what it's worth, I thought your comments today were especially insightful."

"You did?"

"Yep."

"You weren't pissed?"

"Not at all," I said. "A for the day."

Brendan gazed at me shyly, as I imagined a child might gaze at his father upon receiving a gift. "I still kind of miss her," he said.

My own wife had loved me once so fiercely that she shrieked through the night. In the moments after love, our skin had glowed and our lungs had wept with joy. It was her belief, though, that something had died within me, a certain capacity for tenderness. She had me convinced.

Brendan had gone a little misty on me now. "It sucks to be alone," he said. "It sucks shit."

I got up from behind my desk and looked down into his face, a smooth, open face, with so much woe still to come.

"What am I supposed to do?" he asked me. "At night, I mean."

I laid my hand on his shoulder. "Forgive her. Forgive yourself. There's no other way."

I know this sounds depressing, but it was a lovely little moment, the two of us sitting there in my office with tears pooled in our eyes. I felt, for the first time in months, the urge to hug another human being.

A number of unpleasant things happened later. Nicole Buswell filed a complaint with the dean of students, alleging that my class was overly sexualized. Rob Tway testified on my behalf. So did Mandy Shaw. But the whole thing put a cloud over me and I agreed to go on leave. My wife filed for divorce and took up with a Tae Bo instructor. The hard-on difficulty was diagnosed and required a costly and painful surgery.

But all that was still to come on the day I'm describing. On that day, Brendan and I rose from our chairs and strolled into the dusk. It was one of those warm spring jobs that coats everything in gold, and we floated through the courtyard, with its sleeping crocuses and luminous blades of grass. The cafeteria was pumping out the sweet, greasy smell of calico skillet, and the tall stone cathedral was dozing before us and all the students gathered in the shadows to hug struck me, just then, as beautiful creatures, freaks, all of them, with their frail bodies and fearless hearts. We could hear them kissing, wetly, to the point of collapse.

Brendan ducked into an alcove behind the rectory. He pulled a joint from his hip pocket, lit up and took a drag.

"You want a rip?" he said.

"Better not," I said, taking the joint.

The lovers were all around us, making their strange, gentle noises of mercy. I took my rip and Brendan nodded. "Nice," he said. "Nice form." He put his arm around me, as if we'd done something heroic together, as if the happiness within us were a puff of smoke we might hold on to forever, and he snorted like a horse, a young fearless stallion who'd just shaken his bridle and pawed the ground, and I snorted and pawed the ground, too, and both of us began to giggle, wildly, senselessly, and went galloping (us stallions!) off into the dusk.

The dress code in my own class was terrifying. Spring was finally here and there was no holding the young skin back.