Chapter 17

BEDFORD UNIVERSITY
MOUNT CLEMMONS, NORTH CAROLINA

nnie had been stalking Professor Ballard for several weeks, although if he was aware of it, he gave no sign. He was, after all, accustomed to the attentions of his female students. Annie, waiting outside his office, had on numerous occasions witnessed a young woman exiting from behind the dark oak-paneled door, her eyes bright and her face flushed with color. Annie made up one fraudulent excuse after another to see him. She had several times shown up for office hours only to find him gone and a note taped to his door that read Come on in. Back in a minute. Rather than discouraging her, she found these moments alone in a room where he spent so much of his time exhilarating. She was like a pilgrim on a visit to a holy shrine. The room smelled of mildew, old books, cigarette smoke, and something indistinct but undeniably male. Sex, she supposed. (Although Professor Ballard was careful never to copulate with his students in his office—he was far too cautious for that, as she would eventually learn.)

She had taken his class her senior year because she was three English credits short and she had thought the class, entitled Romantic Literature: Invention and Transformation of Genres from the French Revolution to the Ascension of Queen Victoria, sounded easy. She wasn’t particularly fond of English lit, although she liked grammar well enough. The diagramming of sentences had always been rather fun for her, as rational and deliberate as the lines of an algebraic equation. She had come to that first lecture class prepared to find nothing more than boredom, so she had been unprepared when the small, ordinary-looking professor broke into the opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” He had a loud theatrical voice, deep and rather pleasant to the ear, and when he read, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?” there were very few in the crowded lecture hall who didn’t sit up and take notice.

Annie sat there stunned and open-eyed while the beautiful words fell around her like fairy dust. By the time he started in on “I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child,” she was leaning forward in her seat, her eyes fixed on the professor as he strode back and forth across the lecture stage like a magician. He was a small, only moderately attractive man, but when he stood in front of them and read “and there I shut her wild wild eyes so kiss’d to sleep,” what did it matter? The girls sighed and rested their cheeks against their hands. Byron had been born with a clubfoot and Keats had suffered from tuberculosis but what female heart could resist a poet?

She went home and practiced reading Keats’s beautiful lines aloud in her room but there was something flat and uninspired about her delivery. There was something in Professor Ballard’s delivery that made the lines exciting, passionate, and Annie could hardly wait for the next class.

When Sara saw her reading Songs of Innocence and Experience she asked, “What class are you taking?”

“Romantic Lit with Professor Ballard.”

“That old letch. Make sure you don’t go into his office without taking a friend along. At the very least, keep the door open.”

Annie ignored the rumors about him because she didn’t believe they were true and, later, because she didn’t want to believe they were true. By then it was too late anyway.

Losing her virginity to Mitchell Stites at homecoming of her sophomore year turned out to be, in hindsight, a disaster. Whereas he’d been rather tentative at first, by Thanksgiving break he’d become a bit more enthusiastic, and by Christmas break he was like a ten-year-old with a brand new minibike. By the time she came home for summer vacation she could hardly get him to do anything else. Once he realized Annie was on the Pill and there’d be no repercussions, no squalling babies or homicidal parents to contend with, Mitchell took to sex like flies to roadkill. His words. There was nothing of the romantic poet about Mitchell Stites.

She hadn’t realized what a problem the sex thing was until the first semester of her senior year, when she’d begun to moon over Professor Ballard. Having become accustomed to regular sexcapades over the summer, Mitchell saw no reason that he should have to go without once Annie returned to school. So he planned a visit to Bedford every other weekend, a schedule that left Annie exhausted. It wasn’t the act itself that tired her out but the masquerade of pretending that she enjoyed it. Which she did, in a way. It was very sweet the way Mitchell was always coming up with ways to keep her interested. “Hey, honey, let’s try this one,” he’d say, pointing to a well-worn copy of the Kama Sutra he’d picked up in a Memphis porn shop. “It’s called the Congress of a Cow.”

Despite Mitchell’s best efforts, Annie was finding it harder and harder to maintain any enthusiasm for his weekend visits. She began to make excuses for why he shouldn’t come: I’ve got a big test next week or I’ve got a paper due or, when all else failed, I’ve got my period. Having become obsessed with Professor Ballard, she couldn’t think of Mitchell the same way and she definitely couldn’t think of sex the same way. She couldn’t think of having it with Mitchell although she had no trouble imagining it with Professor Ballard. The positions of the Kama Sutra, which Mitchell had unsuccessfully tried to introduce her to, filled her imagination as she and Professor Ballard moved through the intricate postures like well-trained acrobats. During class, while studying at the library, when walking across campus, it was all she could think of. Sometimes at night the images drove her from her bed and she would wander the dark house like a ghost, looking for something to clean.

Once during class he said something funny and she laughed loudly, too loudly, drawing his attention. His eyes, dark and liquid, fell on her for a moment, seeking her in the crowd. Returning his gaze, she felt lightheaded and slightly nauseous. After that she began to dress for him (she was pretty and had a small, trim figure) and she would feel his eyes upon her as she entered the lecture hall each Tuesday and Thursday morning. By the first week in October he had learned her name and called upon her often in class, by Halloween he had touched her arm furtively in his office, and by Thanksgiving they were having lunch in some out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant in town and plotting their first rendezvous. It happened so quickly and so effortlessly, Annie was amazed. One minute she was sitting in Professor Ballard’s office blushing furiously as his fingers brushed her arm, and the next they were sitting in a public restaurant discussing their attraction for each other as casually as if they were discussing whether to order the El Cid chili or the fiesta tamale pie. A girl more experienced than Annie might have taken his obvious ease at seduction as a warning sign but all she could think about was the way his dark eyes had flashed when he read “Ozymandias” in class.

He had her get a room in some shabby, out-of-the way place called the Cherokee Chief Motor Lodge. She paid cash and called him with the room number. When he came in forty minutes later smelling of aftershave and cigarettes, she was suddenly as shy as a virgin bride. He sat on the foot of the bed and pulled her to him, and she allowed him to undress her like a limp marionette. Now that the moment was here, she was uncertain exactly what she should do. All she ever had to do with Mitchell was lie there.

But Professor Ballard had a few tricks up his sleeve. First he gave her a massage to relax her, and then he kissed her in places that made her blush to think about, and then he did something with his tongue that she had heard about but never actually thought possible (it was). By now she was feeling a whole lot more relaxed and was even beginning to enjoy herself When he came up for air she bit him lightly on the shoulder and moaned.

“Oh, Professor Ballard,” she said.

He slid his hand up between her legs. “I think you better call me Paul,” he said.