Theim’s Wingéd Chariot

Just as Dafne finished her rousing—if she said so herself—lecture about the limited choices for women in nineteenth-century America, much less Britain, and had called on the dependable Serena for a response, the door to her classroom nudged open. And there, peering around the doorjamb, was Edward! Dafne’s heart lurched like an old car. The whole of Friday night tumbled at her, an Atlantic wave full of force and silt guaranteed to knock her over the fence and into the moon.

“Professor Hartman!” she said. That horrid betraying flush was, she knew, making her face look as if she’d been in a boiler room shoveling coal.

Edward nodded, pushed open the door the rest of the way, and tiptoed, elaborately, to the nearest available chair.

Serena, who was addressing the significance of Madame Merle’s comments regarding the lovely little cups on Gilbert Osmond’s mantelpiece, lost track of her point and drifted to a stop. They all watched Edward slide into a chair, one of those with a built-in desks that doesn’t allow anyone over 160 pounds within its wooden embrace. He looked, the only word for it was, dapper. More dressed up than he’d been for Friday’s dinner. Striped shirt. Blue tie. Beneath the hem of dark gray slacks the toes of dress shoes gleamed. As did the skin of his chin, as if he’d shaved just minutes before, and slapped on oil.

He gave a little wave. The students near him shifted, one even slid her desk a few inches away. In the humid silence they all gazed at him.

“Professor Hartman!” Dafne said again, copying the hearty way he often greeted her in the department hallway.

“Professor Theim!”

“To what do we owe the pleasure, Professor Hartman?”

He cocked his head to one side and there, suddenly, was his breath on her neck, his fingers splayed on her belly. With both hands she took hold of the lectern and stared down at her notes (Why no to Goodwood?). “We’re discussing Portrait of a Lady.” She looked up in time to see the students’ faces swivel back to her. She encouraged her students to pull the desks out of rows and into a circle and this arrangement allowed them to look from him, in his desk by the door, to her, at the front of the room. But now it was as if they were watching a tennis match, except that what she and Hartman were tossing back and forth across the net was something like a stuffed toy octopus, pink plush legs flopping.

The length of Edward’s torso rising above the desk emphasized the sense that the chair belonged in a dollhouse rather than a classroom. “Don’t let me interrupt,” he said, waving a hand. “Please, go on.”

She should never have told him he could visit her classroom. Anytime, she’d said! She blamed the Sangiovese. Or the piña colada, which she’d ordered before dinner to make her palms stop sweating.

But she must keep heading towards the climax that Edward had derailed, she must keep fanning the flame before it fell off the mountain, she was so close to convincing them why these novels are worth reading! Trying to get to the life raft that is Caspar Goodwood, come to save Isabel Archer from the fate she has shot herself straight towards, and why she will turn away from the promise of salvation he offers and thrash back towards thin, mean, ascetic Gilbert Osmond, not because she wants to be with him—so Dafne wanted the students to realize—but because Isabel won’t abandon Pansy, the stepdaughter issued forth from the improbable loins of Madame Merle.

Dafne had laid out the kindling, tucked in the twists of paper, flames were licking around the discussion; the students (most of them) were with her, they were about to discover the New World for themselves, have it be their own—now all this had to pause as Edward sat there, elbow on desk, chin in palm. Why had...