Prairie Symposium

Harvey Friedman wants to know who you are,” Mary Guthrie said.

Harvey Friedman was the Dean of Liberal Arts. He was well-off, well-spoken, well-dressed. Some said dashing. Some said he had a real eye for beauty (or at least for good-looking coeds). Mary had been having an affair with him since she moved to Iowa City in the fall of 1976 to take a degree in art history and became his teaching assistant. Not quite two years later, she was still trying to break it off, with only sporadic success. Both she and Bobby Duncan hoped she had managed finally to do it, if maybe for different reasons.

“How interesting,” Bobby said.

Mary frowned. She swore she had not slept with Friedman since she started sleeping with Bobby, but he took it for granted she was lying. We all have our little fictions, he believed, and the story she tried to peddle was that Friedman had been after her to tell him what was wrong. He even promised again to leave his entrenched trophy wife, Mary claimed. But the money belonged to Mrs. Friedman, and when Mary laughed out loud at him, the dean demanded to know the name of the other guy.

Bobby told her to tell him. He told her that to reach the end of an affair, you had to create the sense of an ending. He didn’t really know what the hell he was talking about, but it sounded good (he had once used the line in a paper he’d written about Graham Greene). In the past, whenever Bobby (who had recently separated from his wife) wanted to finish off one of his little flings, he simply stopped talking altogether to the lover in question and walked away. Clean, done, and out—brutal maybe, but over. Mary didn’t know about that, though, and she listened to him, and she told Harvey Friedman his name. So now the good dean was attempting to pry information out of her about Bobby. He wanted to make sure Bobby was not simply using her, she said he said. He wanted to make sure Bobby was worthy of her.

“Right,” said Bobby Duncan.

“He sounds like your father,” Bobby said. “He’s old enough to be.”

She rolled away from him under baby blue sheets. Bobby clicked on the lamp by the bed and looked at her.

“Part of it, he wants to see how you measure up,” she said. “He wants to know if there’s a chance you’re like the others.”

“Oh,” Bobby said blankly. “The others . . .”

She looked at him, mugged disgust, and went on to make her point.

“But I think it’s more than that, Bobby. He’s not a bad man. Sometimes he is fatherly. He wants me to be okay. To do well.”

“Oh, you do fine,” Bobby said.

She moved over to Bobby’s side of the bed and peeled the sheets back clear off their bodies. She let her hand glide by its nails across his belly to the inside of his thigh, while she softly kissed his neck and the lobe of his ear. She placed an arm out on either side of him and lifted herself up over his chest, turning down her head and allowing her long auburn hair to brush the length of his belly. She slipped her pale, full lips over the tip of his erection, and rolled her head round, playing with her kiss along the ridge, and when she tilted her face, she looked at him with her nearly colorless green eyes, eyes that held the hint of her slightly crooked smile.

They had begun to know each other’s bodies, timing the sex better these days. As she lay at an angle from him, her breasts sloping back against her frame, one knee placed against his side and one of her long legs stretched out away from them, Bobby touched her and made her lift her body in waves, and she grew damp, waiting for him. She swung around on top and took her time, moving slowly...