She shrugged. "Well, did y'all ask?"

"No."

"Then that pretty much explains it, would'n you say?"

When she had gone Corde bundled his cards together and tossed them into his briefcase. He noticed that the phone booth up the hall was free and he walked quickly to it. As he stood waiting for someone to answer his call, two young men walked past lost in loud debate. "You're not listening to me. I'm saying there's perception and there's reality. They're both valid. I'll prove it to you. Like, see that cop over there?…" But at that moment T.T. Ebbans said hello and Corde never heard the end of the discussion.

He lusted for her.

What a phenomenon! He was actually salivating, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell her and he wanted more than anything to pull open her white blouse and slip a high-rider breast into his mouth.

Brian Okun said to Victoria Feinstein, "I'm thinking of doing a seminar on gender identity in the Romantic era. Would you be interested in being on the panel?"

"Interesting idea," she said, and crossed legs encased in tight black jeans.

They were sitting in the Arts and Sciences cafeteria, coffee before them. Victoria was Okun's most brilliant student. She had stormed onto campus from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. He had read her first paper of the semester, "Gynocriticism and the Old New Left," and bolstered by her self-rising breasts and hard buttocks decided she was everything that Jennie Gebben was and considerably more.

Alas this proved too literally true however and he found with bitterness that certain aspects of her knowledge – semiotics, for instance, and South American writers (currently chic topics in the MLA) – vastly outweighed his, a discrepancy she gleefully flaunted. Okun's hampered hope vaporized one day when he saw Victoria Feinstein kiss a woman on the lips outside his classroom. Still Okun admired her immensely and spoke to her often.

It troubled him to use such a brilliant mind in this cheap way.

She said, "Why Romantic? Why not Classic?"

"Been done," he dismissed.

"Maybe," she pondered, "you could do it interstitially – the Augustan era interposed against the Romantic. You know Latin, don't you?"

"I do, mirabile dictu. But I've already outlined the program. I hope you'll think about it. I'd like the panel to be straight, gay, transvestite and transsexual."

Victoria said, "Ah, you want a cross-section?"

He laughed hard. Why oh why don't you want to sit on my cock and scrunch around?

She was courteous enough to ask the question before he had to steer her there. "Is this for Gilchrist's class?"

"Leon's? No, it's my own idea. He's out in San Francisco. Won't be back for a couple of days." Gilchrist had in fact called Okun the night before to tell him that he would be arriving in three days and had ordered Okun to prepare a draft of a final exam. Okun noted that the son of a bitch called at exactly the moment a substitute professor was delivering Gilchrist's lecture; he wanted to make certain that Okun hadn't been standing before his class.

"What's he doing out there?" she asked.

"Healing the wounds, I guess."

"How's that?" she asked.

"You know. The girl."

"The girl?"

He looked confused. "You told me, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"What was her name? The first one who was killed. Jennie something. I thought you told me. About the two of them?"

She asked in astonishment, "Gilchrist and Jennie Gebben, they were fucking?"

"It wasn't you who told me?"

"No."

"Who was it?" He looked at the ceiling. "Don't recall. Well, anyway, I heard they were a unit."

"Poor girl," Victoria said, frowning. "Gilchrist, huh? I wouldn't have guessed Jennie and him. I heard he was an S and M pup."

Okun nodded knowingly, quelling resentment that this was the second person who seemed to know for a fact something about his own professor that he had not been aware of.

She continued, "I'm surprised at the leather. My opinion was that Gilchrist would be more of your classic postwar British pederast. You know, I think they should castrate rapists."

Okun thought for a moment. That might make another seminar. "Mutilation and Castration as Metaphor in Western Literature."

Victoria's eyes brightened. "Now there's an idea for you."

She wasn't sure what the vibration was. Alignment maybe. Or a soft tire.

Driving home from Auden University, Diane Corde noticed that the steering wheel seemed to shake; her engagement ring hobbled noisily on tan GM Plastic. Then she realized the station wagon was fine; it was her hand that shook so fiercely – the first time in her life that a reference to money had made her fingers tremble.

Diane was returning from a meeting with the admissions director at the Auden lab school. The woman, who looked sharp and professional (no sultry pink, no clattering bracelets, no hussy makeup), had explained the procedures. Sarah's file, which Dr. Parker had already forwarded to the school, would be reviewed by the school's special education admissions board. They would make a recommendation about placing Sarah in one of the classes or arranging for private tutoring.

"I'm sure," the woman said, "your daughter will be accepted."

Diane was grateful to tears at this news.

Then the director had consulted a sheet of paper. "Let's see… Tuition for a special education class at Sarah's level is eight thousand four hundred. Now we -"

"A year?" Diane had interrupted breathlessly.

The woman had smiled. "Oh, don't worry. That's not per semester. That's for the entire year."

Oh don't worry.

Eight thousand four hundred.

Which exceeded Diane's annual salary when she'd been receptionist for Dr. Bullen, the oldest living gynecologist in New Lebanon. "Does insurance ever cover it?"

"Medical insurance? No."

"That's a little steep."

"Auden's lab school is one of the best in the country."

"We just bought a new Frigidaire."

"Well."

Diane broke the silence. "Dr. Parker mentioned a private tutor is an option. Three times a week, she said. How much would that be?"

The woman had cheerfully parried that the total fee for a tutor would be two hundred seventy dollars a week.

Oh don't worry.

Diane had smoothed her navy blue skirt and studied a cleft of wrinkle in the cloth. She felt totally numb; maybe bad news was an anesthetic.

"So you see," the admissions director had said, smiling, "the school is in fact the better bargain."

Well, Diane Corde didn't see that at all. Bargain? What she saw was everybody taking advantage of her little girl's problem – all of them, Dr. Parker the harlot and this pert L.A. Law admissions director and the prissy tutors who weren't going to do anything but get Sarah's brain back up to the level where God intended it to be all along.

"Well, I'll have to talk to my husband about it."

"Just let me say, Mrs. Corde, that I think we can be of real help to your daughter. Sarah has the sort of deficit that responds very well to our method of education."

Well, now, miss, hearing that makes me feel just jim-dandy.

"Shall I start Sarah's application? There's no fee to apply."

Oh, a freebie!

"Why not?" she had asked, wholly discouraged.

Pulling now into the driveway of her house Diane waved to Tom, standing scrubbed and ruddy beside his Harrison County Sheriffs Department cruiser. After the two threatening Polaroids and the second murder, he had taken to marching a regular line around the backyard at various times throughout the day. He was also armed with his wife's opera glasses, which, he explained, she bought for when they went to Plymouth Playhouse Dinner Theater. With these he'd often scan the forest for hostile eyes. He looked silly, a beefy red-cheeked young man holding the delicate plastic mother-of-pearl glasses, but Diane was grateful for the effort. There had been no more threats and the sense of violation had almost vanished.