“That’s not that embarrassing. What’s wrong with that?”
“Clearly there is something very wrong with that,” he says. “A twenty-one-year-old boy in his dorm reading Confessions of a Victorian Virgin?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve always been weirdly impressed by people who read four hundred pages just to have a single orgasm. That’s a lot of work. Watching a video would have been astronomically easier.”
“Thanks for the support, but I have a feeling my time might have been better spent actually finishing Moby-Dick or something.”
“Moby-Dick is porn, too,” she says.
“Moby-Dick is not porn.”
“It’s ship porn!” she says. “The total fantasy of being a man on a ship, having a wild adventure. But instead of it ending with a woman having a triple orgasm, it ends with a…”
“Hey, no spoilers!”
“Giant whale…”
“Having a triple orgasm?”
“Exactly. Then it smashes into the ship and basically everyone dies.”
“Ugh, I knew it,” he says, and they laugh. She spreads her arms out and trails her fingers along the warm water, looks up at the moon. Life is unbelievable, she thinks. Last night, she was about to die alone in her hotel room and now she is here, in a hot tub, flirting with a man she would have deemed “too attractive” before. She would have seen him out at a bar and dismissed him because he was beautiful. And how ridiculous is that? That she made rules about not being attracted to people who were too attractive for the same reason her husband refused to hire a philosopher with an agent. “I mean, we have to ask ourselves, Is someone that famous going to want to teach our Intro to Ethics course?” he asked her. “I think not.” And she agreed, because this is often what she wondered when she met men. Is someone that handsome going to want to wipe up the spills on the counter? Hold our daughter’s hair when she vomits with the flu? Listen to me talk at length about the ideological underpinnings of the Victorian beard trend?
No. She couldn’t imagine it. She could only imagine beautiful people doing beautiful things. But right now, she feels equally beautiful. More beautiful. She is alive. Enchanted. I have fingers, she thinks, and brings them to the surface of the water. Look at these magical fucking fingers.
“So what’s your specialty, Professor?” he says. “Your field? Not sure how you say it.”
“My field is Victorian literature,” she says. “Novels, mostly. The marriage plots. The Jane Eyres.”
“The book about the orphan girl?” he asks. “Or am I thinking of Annie?”
“They’re both orphans.”
“So your field is … orphans?”
“Yes,” she jokes. “I specialize in … orphans.”
She tells him she was always drawn to their stories.
“Were you … an orphan?” he asks.
“No. But I always wanted to be one.”
“Who doesn’t?” he says. “Orphans, they’re living the life.”
“I mean, my mother died when I was born.”
“Okay. So you were halfway to the dream.”
“But my father raised me.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, a real tragedy.” She laughs. “No. He was a good man. I loved him. But he also was so depressed about my mother being dead that much of the time it was like he was hardly there at all. So I think I convinced myself that I functionally had no parents, yet was still bound by the rules of my father.”
“An orphan without all the perks.”
“Lonely with no street cred.”
“Strange the things we convince ourselves as kids,” he says. “I always wanted to get the shit kicked out of me when I was younger.”
“Why?”
“Boys were always getting the shit kicked out of them in movies, and it just seemed like a rite of passage. Like I couldn’t grow up and be a real man until someone deviated the hell out of my septum or something.”
“That’s what all the real men say.”
“Unfortunately, it never happened,” he says. “A notorious people pleaser.”
He grows quiet. He leans back.
“Did you just get tired of talking?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “I just got actually tired. This doesn’t really feel like talking.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Just feels like being here,” he says. “It’s relaxing.”
