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By Root 916 0

professor at Heiden College, in Hartford, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House as a present for his "lady friend," who was also a professor at the college. His name was Wesley Mincher and hers was Lees Ardor. The letter was extremely learned ― there were whoms and ones everywhere, and lots of complicated punctuation ― but it was difficult to tell why he wanted to give her this present. And why would she want it? Why not a necklace, a cruise, or a car? Mincher couldn't say, or at least I couldn't understand what he was saying: professorial hemming and hawing is much denser than a layperson's hemming and hawing, and I needed one of those big dictionaries that you can't read without a magnifying glass to help me get to the center of his meaning. At the end of the letter, though, he finally got to it himself: "In summary, then, I wish for you to burn down the Mark Twain House because Professor Ardor believes Mr. Twain to be something of a [and here you could sense the ashamed pause, lurking between the lines] female pudendum."

I had no idea whether the two professors were still together (the letter had been written eleven years ago) or if she still believed Twain was a female pudendum. I had a good idea what a female pudendum was, though, and I also had a good idea where I could find Professor Mincher: he'd included his office phone number on the letter. I called the number, but Mincher wasn't there, and I didn't leave a message. Instead I called the English Department number (Mincher had written his letter on English Department letterhead, as though his was a query letter and I were a journal). The woman who answered the phone said that Professor Mincher wouldn't be in; but then I asked about Professor Ardor, who, as it turned out, had office hours that very morning.

LEES ARDOR WAS AN associate professor of American literature ― it said so on the plaque on her office door ― but she didn't like literature, didn't believe in it. I found this out after I knocked on her door, she opened it, and I stood there for too many seconds, staring at her hair. It was long, red, and straight: it was the sort of hair that demanded to be brushed religiously, two hundred times a day. Her hair was as shiny as a newly waxed kitchen floor, as mesmerizing as a hypnotist's swinging gold watch, and it was the only physical characteristic of Lees Ardor's that stuck with me. I'm sure she had others -she had a body, for instance, and it was wearing clothes; she had a voice and it was somewhere in the range of normal human voices -but it was her hair I remembered. Lees Ardor's hair stood for the rest of her, the way Ahab's peg leg had stood for him.

Anyway, I must have been staring at her hair for too long, because Lees Ardor put her fingers right under my nose and snapped them twice. The snapping brought me out of my trance. I stuck out my hand and asked, double-checking the accuracy of the door plaque, "Professor Ardor?" Without sticking out her hand to meet mine, she asked back, "And what, exactly, am I supposed to profess?"

This threw me some, I'll admit, and because of that, I forgot to introduce myself and stammered for a moment or so before finally saying, "You profess literature," and then I pointed at the door plaque, where it said so.

"I don't believe in literature," she said. "I don't like literature, either."

"But you're a literature professor."

"That's correct."

"I don't understand," I said. I knew from experience that it is exactly this response teachers most desire, because it makes them feel necessary. While at Our Lady of the Lake, I had understood so few things that I became something of a teacher's pet.

"It makes perfect sense," she said. "Does it not?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned her back to me, walked around her desk, and sat in her chair, the comfortable rolling sort of desk chair that you can lean back in until you're nearly horizontal. The only other chair in the office was one of those ancient hard-backed wooden chairs that my stern Yankee ancestors probably made to be so uncomfortable that the