Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [78]
That was what I was thinking when the Internationally Famous Art Professor leaned over and put his tongue in my ear. This ear bath continued for so long that it seemed to require some kind of reaction. The only one I could find inside me was coiled like a snake and shaped like the words “Uh-oh.”
I knew I was supposed to find this pleasurable. Since I didn’t, I tried to turn up the corners of my mouth and arrange my face accordingly. The last thing I wanted to do was offend the Internationally Famous Art Professor.
By the end of the evening, when Mr. IFAP pulled his Volkswagen up to the curb in front of my apartment to drop me off, I was still flummoxed. “Thank you so much,” I stammered, my hand on the car door handle as I prepared to let myself out. He stared at me expectantly, waiting for me to speak.
“Would you like to come in for some tea?” I finally asked, not because I wanted to spend more time with him but because I couldn’t bring myself to be anything but gracious to Mr. IFAP. Anyway, how bad would it be to have him come in and see my studio?
And what timing! As of today, there was even a place to sit in my apartment: a rotting rattan love seat I had taken from the curb across the street before garbage pickup removed it forever. Now it faced into a room that was full of workbenches, and sawhorses topped by doors so they could also double as worktables. The floor of the room itself was covered with piles of sawdust, proudly unswept: proof that I didn’t just own power tools, I also knew how to use them.
“Come sit next to me,” he said, patting the seat beside him as I approached carrying tea, served in ceramic cups from my Boy Scout mug collection, each one emblazoned with an individual troop insignia. For Mr. IFAP, my favorite: Region Twelve, decorated with a decal of an angry black-and-red bull’s head in a yellow circle.
My short-range plan was to entertain Mr. IFAP with my enormous shoe box full of unintentionally funny postcards, which I had been collecting since high school. Ceremoniously, I removed the box from the cabinet and placed it on the rattan seat between us. Then I began to pull out a few of my favorites, many of which I had sorted by themes. I had at least ten different ones that featured a photo of a giant trout filling the bed of a pickup truck, though some were “strapped” to the side of an only slightly larger horse. They all said something like “Caught a FAIR-sized trout today.”
I was prepared to move from there to a second, equally amusing theme: postcards featuring lots of different photos of squirrels eating acorns, all of them captioned “Nutty About Nuts.” After that, I would break out the cards spotlighting enormous fruits and vegetables. But before I could locate the three different versions of giant cabbages loaded onto flatbed train cars, Mr. IFAP leaned in to kiss me.
My worst fears were confirmed.
I was so uninterested in kissing this blocky, bearded old guy that I had no idea what facial expression to plaster on this time. Kissing him was like making out with Santa.
In retrospect, I probably looked to him like a girl who had been around. Maybe my short skirt and my high boots and my foul mouth had him fooled. Or the way I had acted blasé when he talked about all the people he knew who had orgies and liked Victorian erotica. Maybe he assumed I liked that stuff, too. He almost certainly would have been surprised to learn that I knew a lot more about power tools and funny postcards than I did about human sexuality. So far, I had only slept with the Mechanical Man. And he had been such a puzzling first encounter that just a day or two before I had asked a friend, “What does it mean when a guy says, ‘Did you come?’ Come where?”
“I’m not sure,” she had replied. “I think it has something to do with having an orgasm.”
“Seriously?” I said.
Next thing I knew, the Internationally Famous Art Professor and I were on my Murphy bed having sex because it seemed rude to say no to him. He was my professor. He was a big