GIRL IN BLACK
39
claimed to be bogged down). "I am an odd case, hard to cate–
gorize,"-he told himself, a little pleased.
Nonetheless, he had enjoyed the casual pre-seduction, nearly
three months of it, in which they had begun pretending to talk
about sex; but which had really been a jockeying to see who would
conquer whom. It was typical of Professor Willowaw that he talked
of "conquests" rather than "lays," as he gathered it was now con–
sidered fashionable--even delicate-to do. He did not, in fact,
care who was whose conquest; but he suspected that
it
might matter
very much to a young lady of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three.
The last time she had come to his office for a "conference"
(she was auditing his course in Catullus), he had slipped a hand
into the V of her raincoat and had fondled a moderately convincing
breast- though to be sure, one tautly contained in a brassiere he
had been surprised to discover she wore. He had always thought
of her epicene shape as needing no support, had relished the way
in which it merely suggested not asserted her femaleness under the,
after all, rather ambiguous raincoat. And this time, he told him–
self, slipping the coat first down to her waist, then all the way to the
floor, he must-if he would avoid discourtesy-come to the climax.
Scarcely noticing what he did, he turned her away from
him,
to
unbuckle her
soutiengorge
(he began always at this point to de–
scribe his actions to himself in French ) and to salute, chastely, her
cul.
But when he turned her to face him once more he was mildly
disconcerted to discover her after all a male, in an indifferent stage
of excitement. For an instant, he considered the effect of a dra–
matic outcry; then dismissed it as unworthy of his level of civiliza–
tion; and murmuring,
"Tant pis!"
knelt before the now discovered
boy as if in prayer.
IV
For Mike Manger the supreme indignity of
his
life in the
University was the location of his office (Humanities 104) at the
end of a long corridor filled with men who called themselves
"Doctor" or "Professor." That he was a writer three published
novels attested; and he had long since got past the snobbish point
(after, he guessed, the appearance of his first book) when he in-
