While she shrugged off her vest, she watched the professor scribbling on the board. In an attempt to blend in with their students, some instructors wore jeans and T-shirts or the occasional flannel shirt with the requisite frayed collar and cuffs. Some had beards or other facial hair, and a few of the arty ones had long hair. This guy looked the way college professors were portrayed in movies: Dress slacks. Dress shirt. Necktie. Blazer. Loafers or wing tips. His belt always matched his shoes, a miracle for a single man who wasn’t gay. Clean-shaven face. Short blond hair with a bit of curl on top and a smudge of gray on the sideburns.
When the school year started, he’d had a sunburned face and a tan on the back of his neck. During a hot spell that early September, he’d removed his blazer and rolled up his sleeves, revealing tanned, muscled arms covered with blond hair. She bet most of the girls in her class and a couple of the guys suffered a drop in grades that week.
Not surprisingly, his classes were popular with female students. His looks and the subject matter were both big draws, but they weren’t the only ones. The professor listened to women when they spoke. It was a precious and rare commodity, a man who listened to the female voice instead of tuning it out.
Before opening her notebook, she reached around to the back cover and ran her index finger over the outline of the octagon. She’d seen the stickers before at student health fairs and the like but had been too self-conscious to pick one up. On the first day of class, the prof had distributed them to his students. Most of the kids waited until they were in the hallway and then tossed theirs in the trash can. A couple had made derisive remarks. She’d kept hers, plastering it to the back cover of the notebook. Just in case.
She opened the notebook to a clean page, clicked her pen, and emptied the last inch of Slim-Fast into her mouth.
The prof spun around and spotted her sitting in the back row, chewing. “Glad you could join us, Ms. Klein.”
He called all the students by their names. Without assigning seats or checking a cheat sheet, he’d learned the first and last names of all twenty of them by the third day of class. Most of the students still didn’t know one another’s names. He went around the Formica-topped table that served as his desk and leaned his butt against it. She was glad she wasn’t sitting in the front row; she’d be staring where she ought not. “Kyra, swallow your breakfast and read us anything by Dorothy Parker.”
Kyra Klein cracked open The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker, ran her tongue across her top front teeth to make sure she didn’t have a nut wedged between them, and opened her mouth to launch into the poem.
“Wait,” the professor said, holding up his palm like a traffic cop.
Klein glanced up from her book.
“Read us anything by Dorothy Parker as long as it isn’t ‘Résumé.’”
She looked back down and turned the page.
“Kyra. Don’t tell me.”
Grinning, she looked up. “It’s my favorite.”
“Fine,” he said. “Torture me if you must. I’ve only heard the damn thing a million times.”
She continued her page flipping. “I can find something else.”
“While you’re doing that, tell us why you picked Dorothy Parker for your paper in the first place.”
She looked up from her book. “Actually, my first choice was Sylvia Plath, but you told us we couldn’t do her.”
He stood straight and ran his eyes around the room. “How many of you wanted Sylvia Plath?”
Nearly everyone raised his or her hand.
“Good God, people. Sylvia Plath?”
“What’s wrong with Sylvia Plath?” asked a girl sitting to Klein’s right.
“Cliché city,” squeaked Jess, who always sat in the front row, smack-dab in the middle. Jess had a shaved head and was either a puffy guy with a Truman Capote voice or a puffy woman with the downy beginnings of an Ernest Hemingway beard. Out of sensitivity and without prior planning or discussion, the entire class avoided the minefield of transgender issues in literature while Jess was in their midst.
“I could fill the Metrodome with undergraduate papers on Sylvia Plath, and to a one, they would be wretched,” said the professor. He went back to the board, scribbled madly, and stepped to one side. He’d scrawled Sylvia Plath, drew a bell shape around the name, and then slashed a diagonal bar across it.
A young woman two seats in front of Klein raised her hand. “How can we take a class like this without Sylvia Plath?”
“I didn’t say we’d do without her, Alisha.” He went back around the Formica table and poked an index finger in his chest. “I shall discuss Sylvia Plath, and you shall listen.”
He walked between the rows of desks, heading for Klein. Clasping his hands behind his back, he came up next to her. “Now tell us about number two on your hit parade.”
He was wearing cologne. Did he have a date tonight? There were rumors he went out with students. Distracted by his closeness, she dropped her lashes and fumbled with the small volume under her hands. “Well … she … she had a hard life. Both her parents died. She lived in a boardinghouse for a while and played the piano to make money. She wrote fashion ads for Vogue.”
“‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie,’” he said.
She looked up with wide eyes. “What?”
He turned around and marched back to the front of the room. “That was one of her clever captions.”
“She had a successful writing career. Poetry and short stories and scripts for Hollywood. But she wasn’t always happy.”
The professor leaned one hand against the table. “She tried to kill herself. More than once.”
Klein nodded slowly.
“And that’s what this class is all about, isn’t it?” Returning to the board, he wrote something in large letters, underlined it three times, and stepped away so the class could read it. Enough Rope. “Who can explain what that means?”
A boy in a middle row raised his hand.
The professor pointed at him. “Jason?”
“It’s part of an expression. Enough rope to hang yourself. It’s like—I don’t know … you do it to yourself.”
Klein raised her hand.
“You’d better get this right, Kyra,” the professor said.
“It’s the title of one of Dorothy Parker’s best-selling collections of poetry,” she said.
“Excellent.” He tipped his head toward her. “From that collection, please read the selection that you think best illuminates the creative and personal struggles of Mrs. Parker.” He paused. “And, Kyra, if you really think your first selection does the job, then by all means, go right ahead.”
Klein turned back to “Résumé,” the oft-quoted poem about suicide, and began reading. “‘Razors pain you …’”
AFTER CLASS let out, she hung back while the other students surrounded him to ask questions about their papers and a quiz set for Friday. She’d wait and get him alone. While she leaned against the edge of a desk, she looked at her watch. Screw her doctor’s appointment. Let him wait on her for a change.
After the room emptied of the other students, Klein approached him while he erased the board. There was that cologne again. “Professor, I’m having second thoughts about Mrs. Parker. I’m thinking I might do Anne Sexton instead.”
He moved to the end of the board listing students’ names alongside the writers they were set to profile. Before he erased “Dorothy Parker,” he turned and asked Klein, “Why the change of heart?”
“It’s—she … her life was a little too much like mine.”
He looked at the clock on the wall. “There isn’t another class in here for forty-five minutes. Let’s sit.”
She took a seat in the front row, he turned a desk around so it faced her, and they sat across from each other. While she talked, he listened and nodded and interrupted only to ask an occasional question. She was going to be really late for her appointment, and she didn’t give a damn. This was better therapy.