Campus Sexpot: A Memoir

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The following afternoon, when Linda stopped by his desk, Don said, “Can you baby sit for me again tonight?” Don adheres to the view once solemnly expressed to me by a college roommate: “Dave, never pass up a chance for a piece of ass.” What Linda doesn’t know is that Don, his wife still out of town, has deposited his two children at the home of a colleague for a few days. He has hatched a plan to get Linda alone again. He comes clean later, as they pull up in front of his house. “Linda, there’s something I should tell you.” It sounded stilted, because he was nervous, afraid of her reaction. “Susan and Betty aren’t here. I asked you to baby sit because I was reasonably sure that if I just asked you to come over, you’d refuse. If you want to go home, say so and I’ll take you. I want you to stay, though.” “I guess I should say I want to go home, but I really don’t,” she said, taking his face in her hands and kissing him. Good job, Don! I too was once guilty of a fraudulent invitation for purposes of seduction. I was in the fourth grade, and my class was taught by a woman who spent the entire school year pulling up her bra straps. 3 24 Mrs. Wilcox would be lecturing us, going on and on, and suddenly a flash of white would slip into view against the flesh of her upper arm. We’d get an eyeful before she shoved it back up. It was a nonstop Victorian peepshow. Sometimes a strap adjustment required major intervention, and Mrs. Wilcox would leave the classroom to grapple with her garments. That was when I would act. I was dreamily in love with Noel Swann. With my eyes fixed on her blonde head two seats in front of me, I would lean forward to the boy who sat at the desk between us and make this timeless request: “Ask Noel who she likes.” Then I would raise my desk lid, hinged at the front. I needed that wall of wood between me and the determination of my fate. I would rummage busily in my desk, to all appearances a lad of vast industry, until my go-between, updated, would slam the desk lid down on my head, making Noel giggle before she whipped her blonde hair around and faced the front. Then he would give me her ranked list—coldly, bluntly. I was always second, after Johnny Alvarado. This outcome was an early lesson for me in the attractiveness of bad boys to good girls. Johnny often rode the Bench—the wooden seat built into a corner of the central hall outside the principal’s office for boys caught misbehaving. (No girl ever sat there.) I remember once, as we were filing into our nearby classroom, hapless Peter Mehen gave a benched Johnny the “shame, shame” gesture with his index fingers. Johnny bolted from the Bench—a jailbreak of sorts—grabbed a fistful of Peter’s shirt, and said, “What did you just do? What did you just do?” Peter said, “Nothing! Nothing!” I watched, fascinated by the dynamics—a mere gesture could produce violence; a verbal negation of the gesture could be offered to restore equilibrium—but mostly thinking, I’m sure glad I’m not Peter Mehen right now. 25 Man has not pined for woman as I pined for Noel. On the playground , I performed the Indian rub burn on her fair arms. I gave her knickknacks that I won at the Mother Lode Fair—ashtrays, mainly. I held her wallet-size school photo up to mine and made them kiss, she in her Brownie outfit, I in my Cub Scout blues. One night I played the piano over the phone for her. She hung up in mid-recital, probably bored; when I called her again, she said that the operator had told her to get off the line. Twenty years later, it occurred to me that Noel had lied. But my mother was fooled. That night, when I told her what had happened, she said that it must be illegal to play a musical instrument over the phone and warned me not to do it again. On a Saturday morning around this time, I phoned a neighborhood boy...