Carlinda sat up, then sighed. She leaned over and kissed John’s forehead.
“Because I need a man,” she said. “A man that needs me.”
“Doesn’t Arnold need you?”
“You remember his name.”
“You talk, I listen.”
Carlinda leaned back on her elbows. “Arnold wants me. He wants me all the time. He wants my company, my ass, my attention. He was my boyfriend in high school in Trenton, and then when I applied to U Pitt he did too. I didn’t like Pittsburgh, transferred to NYU and he followed.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not really. He always asked if he could come. He’s very sweet and I love him.”
“But you don’t need him because he doesn’t see you.”
“You’re very smart, Professor. You say things I know but can’t say.”
“That doesn’t explain why you think I need you.”
“I’m not talking about you. I’m in love with Arnold.”
“But you need me because, you say, I need you.”
“Yes.” She strummed his penis and he was immediately erect. “And what is it that I need?”
“Not this,” she said. “You don’t think about my body except when we’re having sex.”
“Making love?”
“Whatever. You give me physical love but then let it go. I like that very much.”
“You’re mature for a second-year student.”
“I have two younger sisters, one younger brother, an older brother who’s a loser, a father gone away somewhere forever, and a mother who has serious prescription drug issues. I don’t remember ever being a kid.”
“And what about me?” John asked. “How do I fit in all that?”
“Kerry Brightknowles,” she said to the ceiling.
“What about her?”
“She’s my dorm advisor.”
“And she told you about the meeting today?”
“What meeting?”
“In the history department.”
“Uh-uh. I haven’t talked to her since the night after orientation.”
“Then what could she have said that makes you think I need you?” John’s professional interest was now aroused also.
“Administrators and professors that have admin positions come to work two weeks before the semester begins,” she said. “Kerry had to be there because they needed someone to print their reports and get them coffee. She heard Annette Eubanks and Ira Carmody talking about how they were going to get you fired.”
“When did she tell you this?”
“Really she was telling my roommate Tamala Marman and I was there.”
“But you didn’t know me.”
“Not until class. I really was worried about that personal history paper but I could see how great you were and I just got mad about them trying to fire you. Then, when you wiped the sweat from my lip I knew we had to be... not in love but lovers.”
“It doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” John said.
“I need you. Does that make sense?”
“But I could never have you.”
Carlinda smiled and he was aroused again.
At four in the morning they were both wide awake and sated.
“What do I need you for?” John asked.
“What?”
“Yes... what.”
The young woman twisted her skinny, naked body and groaned, stretching like a satisfied house cat. She sat up in half-lotus and gave her professor a meaningful look.
“Natasha Bien.”
“Who?”
“My best friend in high school. Her boyfriend, this mechanic called Stitch, was banging her mother when Tasha was at school. One day she came home early and saw them on her father’s workshop cot out back. She saw ’em through a window. They were going at it like porn stars.”
“And?”
“She was crazy mad yelling about Stitch and then her mom betraying both her and her dad. She wanted to hurt them but didn’t know how.
“I told her that we could ditch school and sneak around to the window again and record them on my phone. After that all we had to do was release it on the school website.”
“You did that?” John asked.
“It took us a couple of weeks to catch ’em again. But when we did, it really fucked up Tasha’s mom and the asshole Stitch. Both of them left town.”
“Together?”
“Uh-uh. Stitch joined the Marines and her mom went to live with her sister. So I thought I could do the same thing for you — instead of my personal history paper.”
“You’re saying that I need you to do homework?”
“You need me to stop them from getting rid of you.”
“Even President Luckfeld can’t stop them from refusing me tenure,” John said. “What can you do?”
“What I did to Tasha’s mom. Me and Tamala and maybe Kerry could find out things about Eubanks and Carmody and then put it out around the school. They’d be too upset to mess with you and then I could jump the fence whenever I needed somebody to be with without them being in love.”
“Without you being in love.”
“You too,” Carlinda chided. “You don’t love me either.”
John experienced an unfamiliar urge.
“What?” she asked in response to his blank stare.
I murdered a man and put him in the wall of a silent cinema, that’s what he wanted to say, to break the silence he’d held since childhood. But swallowing the truth had become second nature; he couldn’t admit guilt even though he wanted to.
“What?” Carlinda asked again.
Cornelius was thinking about his days at Yale as the newly minted John Woman. That was when he started seeing prostitutes. They didn’t care about a name or the history attached to that name. He had very few school acquaintances and not one of them knew one true thing about him.
“John.”
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
“That I like your proposal to do a personal history outing of my enemies.”
“Enemies?”
“Yes. But I don’t want you to do it. I don’t want you fighting my battle for me.”
“Okay,” she said reluctantly.
“But if you were to take on such a project, and I definitely don’t want you to, but if you took on this project you couldn’t just target Annette and Ira,” John said. “That would be too obvious.”
“What then?”
“You’d do six or seven professors in various departments. Find their hidden truths and then attribute them to another person. For instance if professor number one was a convicted sex offender and professor six was an embezzler then you would switch their crimes giving just enough information that the real malefactor would recognize him or herself.”
“It’d be so close; like a tooth feeling the sing of pain waiting for the full-on toothache,” Carlinda said. “That’s really devious. And, and, and Eubanks and Carmody would just be another two.”
“But I don’t want you to do it.”
“Of course not. I was just saying it because I want you to know that I really like you even if I don’t, you know, love you.”
“It would be fun though,” John admitted. “They’d be too afraid to blame me for putting out the information even though it’d be obvious.”
“I think that I need some more ass-fucking, Professor Woman.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Don’t worry, you can’t.”
10
Later that morning John awoke, alone as usual. It was Saturday. John’s custom on Saturdays was to walk around the campus, especially near the dorms and through Deck Rec, to be among the students observing how they interacted. He liked to note their clothes and slight changes in language.
But that Saturday he was inclined to go into the little town annexed to the university — Parsonsville.