Office Hours--On Hearing Henry's Voice

October 05, 2003 7:29 p.m.

He closed the door behind me as I came in. I sat demurely, pulling my gray wool skirt down over my knees, covering the little thin-line scab where I had cut myself shaving. I reached for my notebook, to ask about the affect of the Alexandrian invasion on Indian art. I knew, as I usually do, that when I leaned over, he watched the slide of my flesh, the black hyphen on my bra inside the green silk blouse, the rise of my breasts against his eyes.

I spoke quickly, aware that he was not really listening. The closed door began to burn a rectangular stigmata into my back. He began to answer me, bored with the march of the Hellenes through the Indus valley, reciting textual support as though it were a grocery list. Milk, tea, carrot cake, detergent, and don�t-forget-the-boullion-for-Sunday-soup. I was startled to find his office-voice so different than his lecture-voice. Intimate, soft as shoe leather, clipped and cultured but with an edge of cajoling suggestion. His voice was a hand sliding up my thigh, trying to slip inside me without being noticed. In lecture it was all bombast, pounding on blackboards and sending up mushroom clouds of chalk. Here it was the thin hiss of sweat separating hand from haunch.

He came around the edge of his paper-strewn desk and I thought ridiculously of his brown loafers, scuffed beige and at least ten years old, frayed laces brushing against my smooth, black, sensible-woman high-but-not-too-high heels. His hand fell onto my knee with the weight of clich�, and from a distance of India to Egypt I heard him say something about how bright a student I was, and how I brought so much to his classes. His hand moved up under my skirt with a pleading slowness, and he knelt in front of me, Alexander and the oracle, begging for my mouth, for a cascade of words that would end with us grinding on his desk between term papers and research for the summer�s conference on Hellenistic expansion.

I was surprised to discover I wanted him--but only a little. It was the pleasure of an old coat still wearable--that this sort of thing still happens in the world, that professors still want to stutter and grope and shove themselves inside their students--and better it be the bright ones, better it be the ones hungry for books and ink. Then the invasion is so much more, it is epic, it is Gaugamela, it is Salamis. I am Persia, come inside me and burn my womb like a sacked palace. I am India, lie over me and cut me into ragged slices. I am Egypt, grip me by the hair and flood my mouth full of the salty Nile.

Except that I was not. I was China, the last, beyond the territory Alexander was allowed to conquer. I was silk and incense he would never press to his face. I was inviolate, absolute, the end of the world. Beyond me, all men drop into an ocean that has no end. Beyond me lie only serpents and monsters--I am the gasping civilized, I am the breath of palace-builders. And not for him.

I put my black shoe against his chest and pushed him back against the edge of the desk, smiling with the inscrutable pleasure of Eastern statues, that cruel upturn of the lips that bodhisattvas cultivate. Slowly, I bent towards him, stretching the muscles of my pale thigh against his hands which hand not dared to move, and kissed him, gently pushing my tongue into his mouth and bending his head back beneath me. I bit his lower lip until a tiny bead of salted blood rose up, and then licked it away, my trophy and my war-prize.

I removed my foot, straightened my skirt, and closed the door behind me as I left.

--Anais