Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [79]
“Natty says I was an Oedipal surrogate, and he’s probably right.”
Marcus preempts this joke, too. He strenuously ignores his resilient erection by working his armpits into a lather.
Greta taught ANT201 Introduction to Anthropology. Such entry-level classes are often the purgatorial bane of the untenured assistant professor’s existence, even at a prestigious school like Princeton. But Greta liked the assignment, liked “getting them early,” as she would explain to Marcus later, because she truly believed that the right teacher could turn curious interest into a lifetime calling. Her own husband had done that for her when she was eighteen, she said. The ex’s influence on her intellectual life had—with the obvious exception of the genetic contribution to the creation of her twenty-three-year-old son—long outlasted his influence on her emotional life.
Marcus had enjoyed the class about as much as he enjoyed most of his classes, which was to say a lot. As his professor, Greta hadn’t treated him differently from anyone else, hadn’t acted inappropriately toward him in any way. He showed up every Monday and Wednesday at 10 A.M. and did the readings, took the exams, wrote the papers, learned more about anthropology than he had known before. He got an A and considered taking another, higher-level anthropology class—Human Adaptation, perhaps?—the following semester, that is, if he could find room in his schedule. There were so many classes to take and so little time. Of course, knowing what he knows now, he wishes he had taken another class instead of taking Greta up on her offer to go back to her apartment and see a certain self-portrait of a nineteenth-century painter whom she claimed he resembled in both appearance and raison d’être.
“Natty says he’s surprised she didn’t offer to show me her etchings.”
Another joke remembered and rejected. Marcus swivels this way and that, his hard-on cutting like a rudder through the arctic water. It’s like my cock’s been winterized, Marcus thinks. He nudges the nozzle toward H.
All the years in academia had turned Greta into a relentless questioner. Even the simplest answers were too straightforward for Greta to blindly accept without a debate. Her inquisitiveness and refusal to accept face-value truths were the qualities that first attracted Marcus to Greta; at least, that was what he told her when she asked. (Of course, this response just begged for obvious follow-up questions, to which Marcus replied “Your breasts” and “You don’t need a lift” and finally “Greta, you’ve got better breasts than any eighteen-year-old on campus, now come over here and let me show you how much I enjoy them.”) These are also traits he appreciated—still appreciates—about Jessica. Greta appealed to Marcus not only for the challenging similarities she shared with the woman he had wanted to marry, but because those qualities contributed to making Greta the very opposite of the simple, unchallenging girl (emphasis on “girl”) Jessica had assumed Marcus would fuck in the effort to get over her. Marcus was Greta’s subordinate. Both knew it and preferred it that way. Their relationship, such as it was, depended on that imbalance of power.
He squirts liquid soap into one hand and takes a firm grasp of his hard-on with the other, pulling back at the base, near his balls.
In all those years with Jessica Darling, she never pressed him to try to explain what had drawn him to her. He never offered such an explanation, not even in the form of cryptic postcards or elliptical lyrics, always believing that such analysis was needy, unnecessary, and impossible. He loved her because she was Jessica Darling, that’s why What better explanation could there be? And he would hope that if asked why she stayed with him as long as she did—had she been asked in the years since the breakup?—she would respond in kind: because he was Marcus Flutie, that’s why.
He closes his eyes, taking slow, soapy-smooth strokes up and down and up and down and up and down …
Not that he would have, but Marcus never had