Page 85 of Katabasis
She knew how to walk the line. She liked dazzling them all at conferences with her professionalism and poise; her pencil skirts and clacking heels. She snickered wryly at the lewd jokes the old guard made, and shot down anyone who came on to her.
“Don’t try with Alice.” She once overheard Professor Grimes saying this to a younger man who had been smiling at her all night. “She cares too much about the work.”
She rejoiced privately over this compliment for days. He took her seriously. He thought she cared too much about her work!
She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second-wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women from the conference. Alice was different from them. They were wives in the making, and she was a magician.
Once at the office she was working late when Professor Grimes came in with a giggling, staggering blonde. It was the new department secretary. Alice had only met her once, earlier that week when she’d dropped off a stack of graded exams for the undergrad pidges. Her name was Charlotte, she came from Kensington, and she had the sort of quick, manicured personality that made you feel bad for taking up her time. She had shiny, butter-colored hair. She had the legs of a former dancer.
“Oh!” Charlotte gasped. “You stop that.”
“Make me,” said Professor Grimes, which was the least professorial thing Alice had ever heard him say.
“You bad—” Charlotte began, and giggled as Professor Grimes buried his face into her neck. “You big badwolf.”
Alice could not move.
She was allowed to be here—in fact, Professor Grimesknewshe’d be here, as he was the one who’d asked her to stay late in the first place. Likely he’d forgotten, but that didn’t mean she was doing anything wrong—even if the lights were off; even if to any reasonable person the office looked like it was abandoned. Still, she should have made her presence known; and since she hadn’t when they first entered the building, she couldn’t now without startling them.
She couldn’t get to the door without being seen. She didn’t want to crouch below her desk and hide, like some fool. To Alice’s panicked brain, the only option available seemed to be to stand in place, watching heart pounding and slack-jawed, as Professor Grimes twirled Charlotte around the lab.
Thankfully, Professor Grimes was headed to his office. If only they would get in there and close the door. Then she could make her escape unnoticed.
They didn’t make it. They began kissing against the chalkboard. Charlotte gasped. Professor Grimes lifted her up by the legs; rammed her back against the wall; did something with his hands that made Charlotte’s voice go up several octaves—a single moan, running up and down the scales.
Alice was frozen in place, entranced and horrified, wondering if this was a tableau she wanted to join. Charlotte moaned once more. Alice’s hand slipped, and knocked into a beaker. It did not shatter—it was too far from the edge—but it did clink against another beaker, and the sound pierced the room.
Professor Grimes looked up through hooded eyes that locked on to her own. He did not cease his ministrations.
Alice’s heart skipped.
She grabbed her badge and hustled out, then. She felt Professor Grimes’s eyes searing into her back the whole way out the building, and it was not until she burst out the front doors, into the night chill, that she took a breath.
She didn’t think Charlotte ever knew she’d been there. She wondered, sometimes, when she passed Charlotte in the hallway. In the next few weeks she watched Charlotte perking up when Professor Grimes passed her office; her shoulders slumping when he did not return her wave. She noticed little changes in Charlotte’s appearance—how she’d stopped wearing lipstick, how she no longer matched her blouses with her shoes, how more and more often her hair looked unwashed and uncombed. She noticed Charlotte glowering at the other women in the department, Belinda in particular; eyes narrowed, fingers twisting. She wondered sometimes when she gazed into Charlotte’s shadowed, haggard face if Charlotte might confide in her—but all she ever got in return was a polite, “Morning, Alice.”
She wondered sometimes if she’d made up or exaggerated the whole encounter; if her mind had wandered, as it always did during these late crunches.
But she couldn’t get it out of her head. Her memory, after all, was infallible.
She couldn’t look at Professor Grimes without thinking of Charlotte’s laughter, or of her bouncing thighs, or her delighted gasps. She couldn’t hear his voice without thinking of that low growl.
Make me.
And she began confusing those panicked flashbacks for her own desires—for it was her own fault if she kept bringing them up, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t have seen so much if she’d only made her presence known—if she hadn’t been sosick, so naughty, so eager to stay and watch.
She could not tell where Professor Grimes’s malfeasance ended and where her complicity began. She could not sort out what she’d done wrong.
So when it all became too much—when it started interfering with her studies, when she started feeling less like a proper scholar in his eyes and more a walking pair of legs—she had no one to blame but herself for acting like a lovelorn, empty-headed slut.
She should have known better from the beginning.
She was the lamb that had walked straight into the lion’s den, because she’d wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Deep down, a part of her wanted to be devoured. And she felt that Professor Grimes, surely, had seen that the instant he met her eyes that night. That perhaps Professor Grimes had known this about her all along.
It happened the night they returnedfrom the Leverhulme Prize dinner; dizzy, elated, both of them drunk on the attention they’d received all evening. They took the late train back from Liverpool Street station, and then a cab back to the department—the department, not their respective lodgings, because Professor Grimes had decided at the station that they firstmuststop by his office to pick up some papers and Alice, thrilled and exhausted, didn’t think to interrogate this threadbare excuse.
At the department they kept giggling, bumping into things. Professor Grimes lost his balance and smeared his hand through a set of algorithms Michele had been laboring through on the blackboard all week, a perfect five-fingered arc through the dense layers of chalk, and this struck them both as tremendously funny. In his office, Professor Grimes proposed they get a head start on the lessons plans for next term, which was a ridiculous pretext because neither of them were in any state to plan lessons for the term.
At his office they made a perfect diorama of fools; stumping into doors, dropping their things, fumbling with their keys. Alice, very drunk and very focused on that pretext, riffled through Professor Grimes’s desk in an attempt to find his lecture handouts. At that moment, it seemed the most important thing in the world that she find those handouts.
