Blue Angel (20 page)

Swenson does as he's told. He perches on the edge of the bed, then scoots his back against the wall with his feet sticking out before him. Angela's too busy to notice. She's hooking up power cords, finding parallel ports, shaking the toner cartridge, attaching the mouse, and massaging it around its brand-new pad.

The computer's behaving obediently. At each juncture Angela waits, tense. When the proper light blinks on or something begins to whir, she puts up her thumbs and says, “Yessss.”

How fond Swenson is of this gifted, awkward girl! It's not just that he covets her youth, her talent, her good teeth, whatever she has that he's lost. It's genuine affection. At the same time he's acutely aware that he's sitting on her bed. Once more a drowsiness overcomes him, as it did in the car outside. He looks longingly at Angela's pillow. Perhaps he could just nod off.

Angela says, “I can't believe how well this is going. Setting up my old computer was total hell. It's like you're…lucky for me.”

“I hope so,” Swenson says.

“Yessss!” hisses Angela. “Yes yes yes. I think we've got it up and running. Let me try printing that last chapter.”

Angela pops a disk into the floppy drive, skates the mouse, and clicks. The first five pages the printer spits out are bare but for a diagonal black stripe. Then the machines stops printing, and an error light flashes.

“Sonofabitch!” She flips the switch on and off. For a moment there's a hopeful whir, and then a daunting crunch sounds from deep inside the machine. The paper jam light blinks.

“I think the paper's stuck,” says Swenson.

“Duh,” says Angela, wheeling on him.

Wait a minute! Swenson's not her
friend,
not her father or stepfather or boyfriend, some random useless male she can talk to like that. He happens to be her teacher, her creative writing professor. He's doing her a favor way beyond his job description.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “Please don't be mad. This shit drives me so crazy. I so wanted to get you those pages so you could take them with you. It meant so much to me, and now.…”

“That's okay. Try it one more time.”

Angela shrugs and clicks on
PRINT
. The printer starts. The paper jams. She bursts into tears. Swenson gets up and crosses the room and puts his hand on her shoulder. Angela reaches back and covers his hand with hers. Swenson has an out-of-body moment, watching their fingers intertwine, as if his hand were an arachnid or sea creature with a life of its own.

It's not as if he doesn't know that one thing will lead to another, that his leaving his hand on her shoulder will lead to his sliding it up her neck to the base of her hair, to his running his hand through the soft down on the back of her neck. It's not as if he doesn't know that he is reaching down her T-shirt, down the smooth expanse of her back, and that, still sitting at her desk chair, she is arching her back against him. It's not as if he doesn't know that if he stays there and doesn't move away, Angela will stand and turn around and they'll be in each other's arms. He knows it, and he doesn't know it, just as he has and hasn't known all along that every word they spoke, every gesture they made was leading to this. Still, he manages to be surprised, and he watches, as if from a distance, as he kisses Angela Argo.

After a while, Angela pulls back. She says, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

He
is
sure, but only so long as he doesn't have to say so, which would mean it was really happening—with his full knowledge and participation. He could be one of those unfortunate girls who manage to get pregnant while convincing themselves they're not really having sex. Isn't
he
supposed to be the one asking Angela's permission? Swenson can't let himself think about that, he's got too much on his mind: for example, the challenge of moving, while still kissing Angela, across the room to her bed, navigating the obstacle course of discarded computer boxes.

Luckily, Angela's walking smoothly backward, guided by some sort of sonar. All he has to do is follow. How can this be the same person who's always tripping and flopping about, trying to get comfortable? She's in her element, Swenson thinks, a fish returned to water. She pulls him across the room, steers him round, pushes him down on the bed. There's no resisting, no evading her gaze. It's like being charmed by a snake, not a king cobra, obviously, but a tough little adder, weaving slightly, holding him in her unblinking stare. Isn't it the snake who gets charmed? Why can't Swenson think straight? Why? Because Angela seems to be taking off her clothes, crossing her arms before her and pulling her black T-shirt over her head. How budlike and perfect her breasts are. The nipples stand up from the chill.

She peels her miniskirt down over her boots and steps out of it, leaving it on the floor. She's wearing a lacy black thong. Is this what young women routinely wear to go shopping for a computer? Could Angela have planned this? She'd left off the lip rings and any of the facial jewelry that might have made kissing a problem. Well, it's not as if
he
didn't dress with special care this morning.

She's naked except for the leather boots. It's unbelievably sexy. And yet…how thin she is. Her body's so different from Sherrie's, about whom he should not be thinking as he sits here with an erection so big that Angela can see it through his jeans.

“Cool,” she says admiringly, and comes over and straddles his thighs, facing him. For an instant Swenson catches what looks like fear in her eyes. Then she refocuses on his belt buckle, by which she's stumped for a moment until she figures it out and unbuckles it with a dreamy, sly abstraction. Abruptly, she slides off him, then sits down next to him and, leaning forward, yanks off her boots. Swenson slides one hand along the delicate bumps of her spine while, with the other, he struggles with his jeans and shorts.

When Angela has her boots off, he reaches for her again, but she motions for him to lie back on the bed and fumbles in the nightstand, from which she produces a little foil packet. It's been so long since he's used one—Sherrie's had a diaphragm for years since she went off the pill—that for one confused instant he thinks it's a tea bag. Well, it's a condom, all right. That's sex in the nineties, and a good thing for them both that Angela's careful. Not that she has much to worry about from Swenson. But who knows what
she's
been up to? Who was that boy who answered the phone? Swenson's the one at risk. It's a sobering thought, but not grim enough to make him lose his hard-on, which seems to be responding positively to the intimidating fact of how nearby Angela keeps her condoms. Isn't this how girls used to feel when Swenson was in high school, and, in the midst of the spontaneous passionate necking, their boyfriend turned out to have brought along a coolly premeditated rubber?

Angela gives him the packet, which he unwraps, mildly worried lest condoms have changed. What if he no longer knows how to use one? His high school years come back to him. It's like riding a bicycle. He slips it on, leaving room, and rolls back the rest.

Once more he feels the way the woman's supposed to as Angela lowers herself onto him and he thinks, What about foreplay? But it's only for a split second, until the pleasure takes over, the warmth pulsing up from his groin. For once he isn't thinking as he turns her over, and her legs fall open. He braces himself on his arms, then lets his chest sink against hers, feeling his chest against her breasts, her thighs pushing to get closer. And now his face is against her face, his chin against her cheek….

There's an explosion inside his head. A crack, a crunch, and then a grinding, like stone turning to powder. It takes him a while to realize what's happened.

“What was
that
?” asks Angela. “I heard it through my skull.”

“Nothing,” says Swenson. “I broke a tooth.”

That molar that's been going for months has chosen this moment to self-destruct. He hadn't realized he was gritting his teeth. This is dreadful! Unfair! At the moment he's been longing for and denying he wanted, when at last he gets what he hasn't dared to dream, he cracks a tooth. How middle-aged, how pathetic to be unmasked as a geriatric case with emergency dental problems! Still connected to Angela, Swenson moves his tongue to the back of his mouth and probes the jagged ruin.

“I lost a filling,” he says.

“That's not all you lost,” says Angela.

His hard-on's gone. Gone for good. He rolls onto his side. He looks down at Angela as desire drains from her face, ironing flat her expression. She blinks, then smiles uncertainly.

“Bummer,” she says. “Does it hurt?”

“Only my vanity,” he says. “My vanity's mortally wounded.” It's important not to let her know how wretched he feels. And the fact that he can't tell her fills him with a loneliness so excruciating that tears pool in his eyes. He knows it's partly hormonal, the chemistry of frustration. Still, he's cogent enough to wonder what he's doing here naked with this child, this stranger. He should be with Sherrie, whom he knows like his own skin. What will he tell Sherrie about how he broke his tooth? Sherrie's sympathy will make his torment more exquisite—and more deserved. He wants to howl at his own stupidity, at this toxic cocktail of lust and self-deception that he's been consuming in sips so tiny that he could convince himself he wasn't drinking.

Meanwhile all he really wants is to stay pressed against Angela Argo. But now she's sitting cross-legged on the bed, against the wall. Swenson pulls his legs over to make room. In their neutral asexual ease, they could be two dorm pals gathered to do their nails and gossip. The fact that they're both naked makes surprisingly little difference. He looks disconsolately across the room, and his gaze is drawn to the mournful: Bert Lahr, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton. What's Chaplin got to look gloomy about? He slept with harems of women!

“I'm sorry about your tooth,” Angela says. “But you know it's no big deal about the sex. I mean lots of weird stuff goes on. You know what happened to me once? I had an epileptic fit right in the middle of sex. A lucky thing it's
petit mal
. The guy really would have been grossed out if I'd started twitching and foaming. But I just spaced out and, like, disappeared.”

How sweet of Angela to offer this confession of a sexual gaffe even worse than cracking a filling. On the other hand…what if Angela had had a fit while she was with
him
? Whom would he have notified? How would he have explained it?

“I didn't know you were epileptic,” he says.

“I'm on medication,” she says. “I'm fine.”

“Like Dostoyevsky. Except that he wasn't fine….” Swenson hears noises outside the door. He's naked in a girl's dorm room. He doesn't even know her. She could be a lunatic who's lured him here just to blow the whistle on him and make him lose his job.

“Does that door lock?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Angela. “I locked it. When we first walked in.”

So she engineered this. But what is Swenson turning into? Another Adam blaming Eve for making him eat the apple? He knew better. It was his idea, too. He's the adult, the teacher. It was his doing as much as hers. A fine time to develop a consciousness, or, for that matter, a conscience. After he's already tried—and failed—to sleep with his most vulnerable student. Or was it his doing, really? Swenson has to wonder. What does it mean that she's writing a book about a teacher-student affair? Is this research for the next scene?

She scrambles toward him, monkeylike, and tenderly—or is it pityingly?—ruffles his hair. Her nipples brush against his face. He takes one in his mouth, from which she gently extricates it with a gesture so instinctive, so sure, that Swenson thinks—God help him—of how Sherrie used to reclaim her breast after Ruby fell asleep nursing.

As he dresses, Angela, still naked, goes back to the computer. She says, “Let's try it again.” It takes him a moment to realize she means the printer, not sex. “Maybe we worked magic,” she says, and now she
does
mean sex.

He watches her lithe, agile body. Her unselfconscious beauty. She double-clicks the mouse. The printer purrs. One by one, three pages drift onto her desk.

“Bingo,” she says. “We shook it loose. We did do some kind of voodoo.” She waits until he's fully dressed, then hands the pages to him.

“End of chapter,” she says.

“Excellent,” Swenson says, uncertainly. “I'll read it as soon as I can.” The promise feels extracted—the price he's paid for sex. But wait! He
likes
Angela's novel. He wasn't faking enthusiasm just to trick Angela into bed. In fact it's quite the reverse. He began to like Angela
because
he liked her novel. And he should have kept it that way and not let himself blur the distinction between literary enthusiasm and sexual attraction. But it's not a catastrophe, only a misunderstanding…. He pauses, then can't keep from saying, “You know we can't tell anyone. It would be a giant scandal.” Well, it's certainly going to be a challenge to keep on conducting the workshop as if none of this had happened.

“Right,” says Angela. “Sure. I'm
really
going to tell everyone. I
really
want us both to get kicked out of Euston. Besides, I don't want my boyfriend to know.”

Right. The boyfriend. Chances are
his
teeth don't crack in the middle of sex.

“It never happened,” Angela says. “Later, you know…we could…”

“I'd like that,” says Swenson, though he's not quite sure what she means. This is no time to figure it out. It's time get out of her dorm before he ruins his life completely.

“I'll call you when I read these.” It's what he's always said. So maybe Angela's right, after all. They can go on the same as before.