Read Online Frog by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online Page A

not only want to see me again but want us to have sex together. From now on it has to be both. Not all the time, of course. But at least the next time if there’s nothing—you know—physically, like a bad cold, wrong with one of us. I hate making conditions—it can’t help the relationship—but feel I have to. If I saw you in one of our apartments alone again I think I’d tear your clothes off and jump on you no matter how hard and convincingly you said no. It’s awful, but there it is.” She says “Let me think about it. Either way, I’ll call.”
    She calls the next week and says “I think we better stop seeing each other. Even if I don’t believe you would, what you said about tearing off my clothes scared me.” “That’s not it,” he says. “I don’t know what it is, but that’s not it. OK. Goodbye.”
    He misses her, wants to call her, resume things on her terms, dials her number two nights in a row but both times hangs up after the first ring.
    He’s invited to give a lecture at a university out of town. His other duty that day is to read the manuscripts of ten students and see them in an office for fifteen minutes each to discuss their work. The man who invited him is a friend from years ago. He says “What’d you think of the papers I sent you? All pretty good, but one exceptional. Flora’s, right? She thinks and writes like someone who picked up a couple of postdoctorates in three years and then went on to five years of serious jounalism. Easy style, terrific insights, nothing left unturned, everything right and tight, sees things her teachers don’t and registers these ideas better than most of them. She intimidates half the department, I’m telling you. They’d rather not have her in their classes, except to look at her. That’s because she’s brilliant. I can actually say that about two of my students in fourteen years and the other’s now dean of a classy law school. But hear me, Howard. Keep your mitts off her. That doesn’t mean mine are on her or want to be. Oh, she’s a honey, all right, and I’ve fantasized about her for sure. But I don’t want anyone I’m inviting for good money messing with her and possibly messing up her head and the teaching career I’ve planned for her. Let some pimpleface do the messing; she’ll get over it sooner. I want her to get out of here with top grades and great GREs and without being screwed over and made crestfallen for the rest of the semester by some visiting horn. Any of the other girls you’ll be conferencing you can have and all at once if they so desire.” “Listen, they all have to be way too young for me and aren’t what I’ve been interested in for a long time, so stop fretting.”
    He sees two students. Flora’s next on the list. He opens the office door and says to some students sitting on the floor against the corridor wall “One of you Ms. Selenika?” She raises her hand, stands, was writing in a pad furiously, has glasses, gold ear studs, medium-length blond hair, quite frizzy, little backpack, clear frames, tall, rustically dressed, pens in both breast pockets, what seem like dancer’s legs, posture, neck. “Come in.” They shake hands, sit, he says “I guess we should get right to your paper. Of course, what else is there? I mean, I’m always interested in where students come from. Their native areas, countries, previous education, what they plan to do after graduation. You know, backgrounds and stuff; even what their parents do. That can be very interesting. One student’s father was police commissioner of New York. Probably the best one we had there in years. Another’s mother was Mildred Kraigman. A comedian, now she’s a character actress. Won an Academy Award? Well, she was once well known and you still see her name around, often for good