Visiting Professor by Robert Littell Read Free Book Online Page B

was born. My full name, it’s written in on my birth certificate, is Occasional
     Rain, but I only use the Occasional occasionally. I have a kid sister named Partly Cloudy. Hippie parents. Go figure.”
    “And what is the significance of ‘Tender To’?”
    Rain gazes at the

    painted on the window. “I sublet from the Village Store. Tender To’ came with the lease. The way I see it, ‘tender to’ is
     how women see themselves—we’re tender to men, in the sense that we are gentle and loving and sympathetic to them. But men
     have a tendency to see us as
the
tender to—the small boat that services a big yacht.” Rain shrugs. “I try not to let men depress me. I don’t always succeed.”
    Her legs spread wide, her knees flexed, Rain circumnavigates Lemuel’s scalp, chattering away as she shears his hair. “Dudes
     who don’t know each other usually start off talking horoscope. You’ve heard of the zodiac in Russia, haven’t you? Personally
     speaking, I don’t believe in all that Capricorn crap. It’s all right for ice-breaking, but after that what are you left with?
     Ascending this, descending that. I’m a practicing Catholic, though what I practice is not Catholicism. The last time I attended
     Mass it was because I was hitchhiking through Italy and needed to steal money from the collection basket to eat. I also scored
     candles and sold them on streetcorners.”
    “If you do not practice Catholicism, what do you practice?”
    “I practice hairstyling, but only part-time—I cut hair to work my way through college. I practice the French horn in the Backwater
     Marching Band even though I can’t march and I can’t read music, I play by ear. I practice safe sex, which I also play by ear,
     though these days safe sex more often than not means no sex. I practice homeeconomics, which is my major, and motion-picture history, which is my minor. I practice …”
    Gradually Lemuel finds himself tuning out. He hears her voice droning on, but no longer makes out what she is saying. It is
     like watching a film without a sound track. From time to time he mutters “Uh-huh,” which is an American expression he has
     never been able to locate in a dictionary, but everyone seems to understand. It occurs to him that having your hair cut by
     a lady, and an attractive one at that, is a curiously intimate business. He has not been this close physically to a woman
     he does not know since the KGB handcuffed him to the lady movie reviewer after his arrest for signing a petition. When Rain
     leans diagonally across his chest to trim the hair falling over his eyes, he feels the air stir, he gets a whiff of female
     flesh, of rose-scented toilet water that has almost but not quite worn off. Out of the corner of his eye he inspects her narrow
     hips, the line of her thigh, her wrists, the shape of her fingernails, the rings she wears on almost every finger, no two
     are alike. When she turns away to reach for a comb, he takes a long look at her ass, which strikes him as nothing less than
     glorious, encased as it is in washed-out, skin-tight jeans. At moments her breasts are level with his eyes, and only centimeters
     away. With his peripheral vision he sees the buttons straining at her shirt, catches the barest glimpse of flesh, the faintest
     swell of breast between the buttons. She is obviously not wearing a brassiere, something unheard of in the workers’ paradise
     he fled. Once the soft tip of her breast grazes his ear—or is he merely slipping into an agreeable fiction?
    Oy.
Ta’amu ure’u
.
    If only he could.
    And then she is snipping away at the hair jutting from his nostrils and loosening the sheet and brushing talc on the back
     of his neck and pulling the sheet free. Lemuel climbs stiffly to his feet, fixes his glasses over his eyes and studies himself
     in the mirror.
    “So?”
    “I feel … couth.”
    “Couth is the opposite of uncouth, right? So it must be a goddamn compliment.”
    Lemuel threads his