25. When I went downstairs to check my box. . .
When I went downstairs to check my box, I spotted Julia in the teachers’ lounge, smoking one of her clove cigarettes. “Julia!” I said, going over to her. “Leonard Strange is looking for a research assistant for next semester.”
“Surely a fate worse than death,” she grunted. “Say, how was the Thanksgiving party at Adrian’s? I heard you blossomed like a zit.” Her gaze fell on my empurpled neck; she stared as if magnetized.
“Oh, you heard that, did you?” I glanced around. “My fame spreads. Maybe that explains why I’ve been making eye contact with people who haven’t looked at me all semester. Rapunzel from Leonard’s class actually smiled in my direction this morning. And she wasn’t even among the merry throng.”
“They’re probably just staring at your whiskers,” Julia said, grinning. “You look like someone who just stepped out of a boxcar, Jonas. You look like the sort of person who might steal a dog.”
“Thanks ever so much,” I said. “The party was all right. The food was great. I should know, I tasted it twice.”
“Eck,” Julia said, looking away. “L. D. wasn’t there, was she?”
“Nope,” I said. “How did you know?”
“She has a fine instinct for self-preservation,” Julia answered cryptically. “How was the rest of your vacation?”
“Oh,” I said, “you know, it wasn’t bad. I went up home for a couple of days. Did me good, I think.”
“To see your parents?”
“I saw my dad. My mother lives out in Washington.”
“I wish mine lived in the Yucatan,” she said. “Both of them. You want to know what’s the latest trip they’ve laid on me? They want me to see a gynecologist, I guess to find out why I’m still a virgin. They think I haven’t got the normal urges, or something.”
“That is quite weird,” I said. “So they want you to have an affair?”
“They want me to have babies,” she said, “and a husband, too, presumably. They mention my breasts: ‘What have you got those big things for?’ They invite middle-aged men for Shabbas. It’s a bombardment.”
“Sounds like my home town, in a way,” I said. “Not a lot of respect for your intellectual accomplishments.”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Some jerk comes to dinner who can recite a couple of poems, they trip over each other bringing him wine and chocolates. The schlockier the poetry, the better. My folks are big on Carl Sandburg for some reason. Maybe they think he’s a Jew.”
“The Allen Ginsberg of Chicago,” I said. “So how come they don’t think it’s great that you want to study literature?”
“Don’t be dense, Jonas,” she said. “Did you grow up in America, or what?”
“Ah,” I said. “We’re confronting a gender issue here.”
“Indeed.” She paused, and colored as she seemed to consider something. “Do you want to come home with me some weekend? Maybe if they thought I had a boy friend they’d get off my back. I can guarantee you’d sleep in a separate wing of the house.”
“Good God, Julia. They’d shit a ring around themselves.”
Julia laughed, a silvery guffaw that made heads turn in the hallway. “I’d love to see that. What about it, big fella?”
“I won’t be used for my shock value,” I said. “Not after all the showers I take so as not to offend.” I scratched at the hickeys under my budding beard. “Although I expect the grub is plentiful. You might try me closer to the end of the month.”
“Thanks, asshole,” she said bitterly. “I’d better come up with a body. If you know some wino who needs a meal, give him my phone number.”
Upstairs in my office, I rolled my chair across the room so I could lay my forehead against the window and gaze down on the quad. The sun shone warmly on my lap, and my eyes closed. I was thinking of my sweet Grace and getting a nice hard-on when the door rattled and my office-mate came in, an awkward little fellow under a load of books. I hardly noticed the chappie unless he lit his pipe. Then I’d open a window and let the wind blow papers off his desk. “Hey, Shemansky,” I said, wheeling myself backward and getting in his way. “Guess what! I was talking to Julia Stein in the teachers’ lounge, and she asked me all sorts of questions about you. She’s planning to invite you up to Omaha for the holidays; what do you think of that?” I knew perfectly well that offices with windows were for regular faculty, and if the two of us hadn’t had to share, we’d have been shoehorned into closet-sized boxes like the rest of the TAs. Still, I couldn’t resist bugging the little guy. “Julia. You know.” I shaped impossible boobs with my hands, while he goggled at me over his stack of books. “Long black hair. Too much perfume. Wears all those bracelets and shit.”
“But—” He looked around as if for assistance. “I live in Milwaukee.” He sidled past me and let the heavy books down onto his desk. “Milwaukee,” he repeated, like a hobbit with echolalia.
“This is Lincoln, Nebraska,” I said. “You see the Capitol Building out there? You’re a heck of a ways from Milwaukee.”
“I can’t go to Omaha,” he said, “because I’m going to Milwaukee. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell her it’s impossible.”
“Tell her yourself,” I said. “I’m not going to be the one to break her heart.”
“She’s too— Large,” he said finally, not wishing to put it rudely. It’s true she would’ve made two of him, with enough left over for a cocker spaniel.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Afraid she’ll roll over in the night and smother you between her tits? That’d be the way to go, if you ask me.” He frowned. “Hey, man,” I went on, “she’s got a waist. It’s all proportional, you know? You’d be a lucky fella. Everything there you’d ever need.”
“Ask her out yourself, then,” he said. “They wouldn’t like her in Milwaukee.”
“They,” I said. “Screw they.” I wondered briefly if he found me as obnoxious as I found him. “Maybe I will,” I said thoughtfully. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. All that bouncy womanhood, and her father is rich besides.”
“Rich?” He turned before settling into his chair. “You’re joking with me now, aren’t you?”
“Biggest plumbing supply business in the state,” I said. “You think all that Navajo silver costs nothing?” I cocked an eyebrow significantly. “And,” I said, leaning toward him and lowering my voice, “she can get you a terrific discount on a toilet fixture.”
Shemansky flushed. “I don’t happen to need a toilet fixture, thanks,” he said, and plunged his face to the ears in one of his books. I fought the urge to brain him with an ash tray.
“Don’t say I didn’t pass along the offer,” I said. “You’ll be sorry when she runs off with some jockey.”
“She needs a jockey,” he said. “She’s as big as a horse.”
I gathered my books and went off to George Kensington’s Chaucer class, with the image of Shemansky astride Julia’s hefty buns playing vividly in my imagination. Each of them would have a book propped open, I decided, though in Julia’s case it would be a sex manual. It was just the right frame of mind to approach Chaucer.
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