Professorial Fantasies

I kept telling myself to focus on her exam paper alone, but something inside me was compelling me to take short glances of her. I had snapshots of her: her wandering eyes with long lashes and thick eyeliners, the sweaty flesh between her nose and upper lip, the strands of dark hair curling around her neck, the shiny pendant that fell right between her full breasts. “Why are you so nervous?” I asked, biting my lower lip; it was more for me than her. She shrugged. I wondered if she knew then what it was going to be about. I had been planning it for so long that I had grown too afraid of the possibility that something might go wrong. I wasn’t really used to plans failing. If she knew it already, would she still do it? “I asked you to be here in my office, Ms. de los Santos, because you aced my exam,” I said, taking care not to sound too professional, making sure it was casual, cool, something like that. She smiled. “Kudos to you, yes. I was wondering, however, if you did it honestly.” It disgusted her. I looked up and saw her looking away, which gave me a chance to stare at the pendant again. My pants bulged. She turned her head and stared back at me. I wondered if she knew about it, this urge, and for how long she had known if she did.

“Do you seriously think I cheated?” Yes, in fact. See, she seemed like the dumb broad in my philosophy class, whose sole purpose in this world was to be blessed with suffocating breasts that were meant for obsessive staring. And, well, I was this pervert professor who gave unreasonably difficult exams in informal logic. Not even divine intervention could make me believe she didn’t cheat.

I wanted to say something but I had lost my poise; I couldn’t stop looking at the pendant, how it shone between those two things. She repeated the question and demanded I look at her, eye to eye, and I did. But her eyes were more overwhelming than her breasts; I saw the intelligence, the potential, in them that I used to neglect. I saw how she saw through me; I felt like a book being examined, a page of me turned after each careful scanning. I was the inferior one then; she had me by her gaze.

Yet I challenged this quasi-superiority. “Do you believe, Angela, that creatures are attracted to creatures manifesting brilliance in their endowments?” It shook her.

“Sorry?” She pulled herself away slowly.

“Endowments, such as hunting in lions, shrewdness in foxes, and, well, intellect in humans.” She laughed, giggled, even. She was probably more relieved about the absence of innuendo in the term than excited by what I had actually meant. Nonetheless, she said yes. “This might come as surprising to you, but I find your acing my exam very attractive.” I paused for a few seconds, waited for a response that did not come. “I haven’t met any student whose physicality is as stimulating as her cognitive skill,” I lied. “You astound me, Angela. Them boys are probably always after you.” She sensed my superiority in the moment then and looked down. She was, suddenly, the book. That, I did not enjoy. I wanted to do it with her consent, so I waited, until the office was filled with nothing but noise from the air conditioner. “There is a theory about copulation, that it’s not just physical but intellectual connection. If that were true, then every teacher must be, at least partly, copulating with his students,” I said, finally. “What do you think?”

She looked up then, at me, and then frowned. “Personally,” she said, “I think you’re a pervert.” It was just how I wanted. We were fixed on each other’s eyes, equal by virtue of debate.

“Ah, but I ask,” I said, playing with my beard and smiling smugly, “what do you mean by ‘pervert’?” I had her then, her pages in my hands. “Let this serve as a post-test examination.”

“A pervert is someone who manifests sexual malice with someone else.”

I smiled. “Then that must necessarily include couples! Would you call them perverts as well?”

“No,” she said. A pregnant pause. She was thinking; it was so, well, sexy. “This someone else needs to be someone who is not related intimately with the pervert, who coerces this someone else into sexual acts by means of, say, blackmail.” It did not impress me, really. “And you’re blackmailing me, sir, by first claiming that you don’t trust that I did well in your exam honestly and then suggesting certain acts, which, being in a lesser position, I am disposed to believe as alternatives to vindicate myself against your accusation.”

“Ah, blackmail is a funny term,” I said.

She was aggravated. She looked sideways, probably trying to conjure some thoughts. “Blackmailing,” she said, finally, still looking away, “is when someone pressures someone else into doing something.”

“Then you’re blackmailing me too, Ms. de los Santos,” I said, smiling calmly. “You’re pressuring me too into entering this ‘sexual act’. This isn’t entirely my fault; you gave me no choice!”

“What!” she yelled. Then she began sobbing, crying for some salvation from this situation and from the irrationality of my arguments. “Not entirely your fault! You’ve been suggesting things and harassing me since I got here! You’ve been staring at my chest the entire time!” She stood up then and prepared to leave, tears trickling into her mouth. I held her arm tight and asked her to stop and sit down. She didn’t.

“You don’t understand, Ms. de los Santos,” I said. I maintained composure. “You’ve been pressuring me since the start of this semester and now I can’t help it. You’ve been blackmailing me with your beauty and intellect, your love for my course, your brilliance with your endowment. I had no choice but to be attracted to someone like you!”

She stopped crying all of a sudden and began undressing and offering herself to me, to my superior intelligence, to my rhetoric, to the power of my thoughts. Then we did it on my desk; she straddled me like a psycho and I kept yanking her hair, throwing expletives as I did.

Not really. She left then, crying her way out of the office. A day later I received a memo from the Anti-Sexual Harassment Office and thereafter got fired. It was alright, though. After all, I had succeeded in my attempts with other students far too often in the forty years I had been teaching. Perhaps it was time to finally retire.

~ by dyeisi on March 25, 2009.