Page 54 of Katabasis
Thankfully, Professor Grimes was headed to his office. If only they would get in there and close the door. Then she could make her escape unnoticed.
They didn’t make it. They began kissing against the chalkboard. Charlotte gasped. Professor Grimes lifted her up by the legs; rammed her back against the wall; did something with his hands that made Charlotte’s voice go up several octaves—a single moan, running up and down the scales.
Alice was frozen in place, entranced and horrified, wondering if this was a tableau she wanted to join.
Charlotte moaned once more. Alice’s hand slipped, and knocked into a beaker.
It did not shatter—it was too far from the edge—but it did clink against another beaker, and the sound pierced the room.
Professor Grimes looked up through hooded eyes that locked on to her own. He did not cease his ministrations.
Alice’s heart skipped.
She grabbed her badge and hustled out, then. She felt Professor Grimes’s eyes searing into her back the whole way out the building, and it was not until she burst out the front doors, into the night chill, that she took a breath.
She didn’t think Charlotte ever knew she’d been there.
She wondered, sometimes, when she passed Charlotte in the hallway.
In the next few weeks she watched Charlotte perking up when Professor Grimes passed her office; her shoulders slumping when he did not return her wave.
She noticed little changes in Charlotte’s appearance—how she’d stopped wearing lipstick, how she no longer matched her blouses with her shoes, how more and more often her hair looked unwashed and uncombed.
She noticed Charlotte glowering at the other women in the department, Belinda in particular; eyes narrowed, fingers twisting.
She wondered sometimes when she gazed into Charlotte’s shadowed, haggard face if Charlotte might confide in her—but all she ever got in return was a polite, “Morning, Alice.”
She wondered sometimes if she’d made up or exaggerated the whole encounter; if her mind had wandered, as it always did during these late crunches.
But she couldn’t get it out of her head. Her memory, after all, was infallible.
She couldn’t look at Professor Grimes without thinking of Charlotte’s laughter, or of her bouncing thighs, or her delighted gasps. She couldn’t hear his voice without thinking of that low growl.
Make me.
And she began confusing those panicked flashbacks for her own desires—for it was her own fault if she kept bringing them up, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t have seen so much if she’d only made her presence known—if she hadn’t been so sick , so naughty, so eager to stay and watch.
She could not tell where Professor Grimes’s malfeasance ended and where her complicity began. She could not sort out what she’d done wrong.
So when it all became too much—when it started interfering with her studies, when she started feeling less like a proper scholar in his eyes and more a walking pair of legs—she had no one to blame but herself for acting like a lovelorn, empty-headed slut.
She should have known better from the beginning.
She was the lamb that had walked straight into the lion’s den, because she’d wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
Deep down, a part of her wanted to be devoured.
And she felt that Professor Grimes, surely, had seen that the instant he met her eyes that night.
That perhaps Professor Grimes had known this about her all along.
It happened the night they returned from the Leverhulme Prize dinner; dizzy, elated, both of them drunk on the attention they’d received all evening.
They took the late train back from Liverpool Street station, and then a cab back to the department—the department, not their respective lodgings, because Professor Grimes had decided at the station that they first must stop by his office to pick up some papers and Alice, thrilled and exhausted, didn’t think to interrogate this threadbare excuse.
At the department they kept giggling, bumping into things.
Professor Grimes lost his balance and smeared his hand through a set of algorithms Michele had been laboring through on the blackboard all week, a perfect five-fingered arc through the dense layers of chalk, and this struck them both as tremendously funny.
In his office, Professor Grimes proposed they get a head start on the lessons plans for next term, which was a ridiculous pretext because neither of them were in any state to plan lessons for the term.
At his office they made a perfect diorama of fools; stumping into doors, dropping their things, fumbling with their keys.
Alice, very drunk and very focused on that pretext, riffled through Professor Grimes’s desk in an attempt to find his lecture handouts.
At that moment, it seemed the most important thing in the world that she find those handouts.
“They were just here,” she kept saying. “I had them printed yesterday, they were just here.”
“Alice,” said Professor Grimes.
She stood, turned around.
He crossed the room and took her face in his hands.
It could have been a romantic gesture, but all Alice registered then was how trapped she felt. Her cheeks squished in the man’s iron grip. Up close, his face was so large , unbearably large, as if inflated on a television screen.
The features she’d pined for all those nights—those thick, dark brows; that sharp-edged nose—inches away, they suddenly seemed grotesque.
Too human, too wanting . All the qualities she admired—genius, brilliance, a sharp and cruel intellect—inscribed after all in a crude and mortal body.
His breath was sharp, sour, and she suppressed a gag.
How quickly the buzz vanished. Her laughter died in her throat.
“I know.” He mistook her trembling for delight. “I’ve seen it in your eyes, Alice. I feel it too.”
“No,” she choked.
“It’s all right.” His hand caressed the back of her head. His eyes surveyed hers, and his lips split into a smile. She’d spent years admiring that smile; the warmth of his charisma. Now it horrified her. All manufactured charm, all caprice. My, how white his teeth were.
His other hand traced her waist. Moved lower.
“You fucking tease,” he said.
“God, your ribs,” he said.
Alice thought her heart might explode out her chest; she actually thought she might before things progressed further. Never in her life had she felt so like a trapped animal; weak, helpless, caught in a cage entirely of her own making.
What shamed her most about that night, the memory she could never drive out of her skull, was how close she’d come to saying yes to it all.
It would have made everything so easy, if she’d just given Professor Grimes what he wanted.
He’d have satisfied his urges. He’d have been sated, happy with her, and that might have given her some reprieve.
In the tired moments after she might have asked for some guidance on her research proposal.
She might have asked him to put in a good word for her when she applied for extra funding that summer.
She might even have gotten some pleasure out of it.
She was sure that, if she split her mind in two, if she ignored all the parts of her that were screaming, if she sank back into her tipsy stupid buzz, then she could turn it into a fun night that got a bit wild.
And it might continue, because if you said yes once it meant you said yes to all times in the future.
But then she only had three years to go.
In three years, she would graduate, collect her recommendation letters, and move on to some new institution where her work would be so dazzling that soon everyone would ignore the rumors that floated around her.
And perhaps before then, his eye would have landed on some other bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first-year, leaving Alice free to concentrate on her work.
One could tolerate anything for just three years.
She softened in his grip; felt her lips opening up for his. And she would have succumbed right there, if she hadn’t felt a sudden, overriding wave of disgust.
He wasn’t just any fellow in the department. This man was her advisor. The guardian of her mind. Her teacher .
“I don’t want this.” It took every ounce of strength she had to push those words past her throat. “Professor—”
His lips grazed her neck. “What’s that?”
“I don’t...”
To her horror, she saw movement over his shoulder.
There across the lab, in the faraway rectangle of light, stood Peter Murdoch. Books in hand, a pack of chalk stacked on the top, standing frozen in the doorway with one hand lifted as if he’d been about to knock.
Professor Grimes never saw Peter. But Alice watched Peter back slowly away from the door, his mouth slightly agape. Their eyes met just for an instant, just over Professor Grimes’s shoulder, before Peter turned and hurried away.
“Please.” At last she found the strength to break from his grip. He did not want to let her go—she had to wrench, really fight to break his grip, and the sudden violence seemed at last to convince him her protestations were not, in fact, flirtation. “I don’t — ”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“ No! ” she shrieked—the first real sound she’d made; at least, the first time he seemed to hear her. It worked. He started backward. She wriggled out of his grasp.
“Alice,” he called as she hurried down the hallway. Ever so calm. As if they’d done nothing but look at syllabi. His voice grew stern. “Alice, come here. You come back here.”
But she’d fled down the hallway, heart pounding against her ribs.
And though she knew he wouldn’t follow her, though she’d forgotten her coat, and though her heels wobbled perilously against the cobblestones, she did not stop running until she had gone down the street, up the bridge, all the way along the river, and back to her apartment.
After that night Professor Grimes turned so cold.