“Do you know whether she has seen a doctor? Other than about her elbow, I mean.”
“Why would she? To be told it’s bad for her and she should stop doing it?”
It dawns on me that Tessa and I have been talking at cross-purposes. I was thinking about nervous stomachs; she was talking about bulimia.
As it happens, I have a nervous stomach. How acute of Giles Cleveland to call me a co-ed. That’s exactly what I feel like, a nineteen-year-old airhead fidgeting in her chair because her favorite professor is about to enter the room. So embarrassing. The other embarrassing thing is that I decided to go a little way toward heeding his advice about my clothes. The black turtleneck may conceal a lot of skin, but it is tight-fitting, as are my jeans. This is not one of my teaching days, so I thought I could risk jeans. And a tight sweater. And silver pendant earrings. Let’s just say that this ensemble has worked before, okay?
It is so easy for men. Charcoal jeans, a white dress shirt with very thin dark stripes, a tweed jacket—delicious. He takes off the jacket, and his shirt cuffs are undone, as usual, but he does not roll them up to expose his arms. The smooth cotton tightens across his shoulders as he welcomes us and introduces Selena, and I get sucked into a sexual fantasy in which I slip my hands underneath his shirt, run them up his chest and around those shoulders that look so severe and vulnerable at the same time. Push the shirt up over his head, ruffling his hair, his beautiful, soft, silvery hair, sink my teeth into the skin over his pectoral muscles.
I’d be so gentle with him. Use my teeth on him so gently, ever so gently, just hard enough to make him moan and close his eyes and roll his head back onto his shoulders.
Would he like that? Does he like being undressed? Or is he a control freak who must be in charge at all times? I wonder what Giles Cleveland is like as a lover. Whether I’d think he’s a good lover. Whether that shiksa of his thinks he’s a good lover. I know that this is a trick that Mother Nature has evolved in order to safeguard the procreation of the English—the sense that an Englishman’s reserve hides a volcano of passion. Not the case, in nine cases out of ten, but the poor deluded non-English female is hopelessly intrigued.
I rejoin Selena’s talk when she looks up from the sheets she has been reading, so much like a deer caught in headlights that I feel guilty for not having paid more attention. Her project—at once predicable and disturbing, coming from her—is a cultural history of Satan, from medieval grotesque to sophisticated player. It could be summarized, although she does not do so in so many words, as the question, Since When Has Evil Been Sexy? It is a catchy topic that might spark a lively discussion, but Selena is making a hash of it because she does not approach it with the playful yet sophisticated mind it requires. She is right to observe that this shift, which culminates in Milton’s grandiose rebel, happened during the early modern period. But exactly by what method she is going to combine the analysis of synchronic aspects like popular culture in conflict with scholarly teachings, and of diachronic aspects like developments in and of the various genres, from the dramatic to the theological, is unclear both to her and us.
“Yes, uh…Selena,” Beecher interrupts her, “we can see that you read a great many texts, which is, uh…commendable. But could you perhaps summarize for us your main conclusions so far?”
She explains, haltingly, that she has not reached any “conclusions,” but that her main observation is that the medieval devil is merely an instrument by which temptations are presented to the tempted, a go-between, while the seventeenth-century devil begins to embody temptation, as an object of sexual desire himself.
“There is no suggestion at all that Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus is himself tempting, he is merely a tempter; but Othello, for instance, is a figure of temptation in this double sense. Another example—”
“Now we’re back with examples. Does your, uh…hypothesis go further than postulating that devil figures, along with practically all fictional types that survived from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, were rendered more psychologically realistic? This would be true of kings and maidens as much