Academic Affairs or Beneath the Gown

'SLAVE MARKETING'

October 12, 1967

Professor Richard Melton
Chairman
English Department
Chicago Urban University
Chicago, Illinois

Dear Professor Melton:

I am seeking a position for the academic year of 1968-69 in which I would be assigned classes in the training of English teachers and in American literature. I plan to obtain my Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and have taught at both high school and college levels. My credentials are on file at the University of Rochester Placement Office, 116 Benton Hall.

I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours truly,

Herbert Ballard
Herbert Ballard For the two hundred and tenth time Herbert Ballard typed this letter, grabbed it from his Underwood portable, folded it, and stacked it in a pile of waiting envelopes. Enough was too much. In an age of computers and data banks, he wondered, why can't applicants and jobs be united by the touch of a switch and a tiny pulse, was it, of electromagnetic energy?

His tongue flattened-even began to feel decayed-at the prospect of another twenty stamps to lick. Why not peppermint glue, or even hashish flavored stickum, so licking would be a pleasure? Or maybe pretend each stamp was a swollen, flaring, humid clitoris awaiting the final flick of tongue that sent it jerkingly and slitheringly away amid the shrieks, protests, and grunted sobs of its undefined possessor. That might take too much psychic energy, and besides, the stamps were implacably male: virtuous Presidents, impassive in their White Housed dignity. Lincoln was supposed to have loved dirty stories, but with a wife like Mary Todd-late photos had shown her to be a swollen Queen Victoria-his sex life had probably been listless.

'Are you dreaming again? Get going on those stamps and maybe we can make the afternoon mail. Christmas is only two months from now, and we need interviews.'

'I know, I know,' Herbert replied to his wife's reprimand, dragging his mind from Lincoln's rumpled sheets. Sue Ballard had been his wife for four years now. They had first met at a Halloween costume party, to which Herbert went as a ghost-perhaps echoing his own sense of insubstantiality in the half-world of a Rochester University graduate student. Sue had gone as Alice in Wonderland, playing on the innocence that pulsed from her somewhat flawed face. As a child, she had picked at the scabs from chicken pox, leaving her cheeks slightly pitted. Only visible from close up, they gave a character, a reality to an otherwise too innocent face. Sue's eyes were gray, her lips thin, intense. On their first meeting, Herbert had wondered automatically what she would be like in bed. She had been alone, and he went up to her, asking, 'Who are you?', ambiguously referring both to her real name and to the character she portrayed. It had been a big year for ambiguity, he remembered-both in the critical papers he had been told to write and in his conversation.

These opening conversation ploys had always bothered him, since they usually petered out in both senses after the initial question. 'Are you from New Jersey?' 'Nice night out, isn't it?' were answered 'No' or 'Yes.' Girls usually averted their eyes, and no more questions welled up from Herbert's impeded mind. The thing he would have liked to do would have been simply to say: 'Do you want to fuck now, or do we have to wait three months?' Indeed, he had heard of one heroic male who had approached twenty-five women that way one evening-and who had been turned down twenty-five times.

But at that dance, Sue had answered nicely enough: 'I'm Alice here, but my real name is Sue.' He asked her out for a drive the next day. She accepted and he had begun his slow slide into marriage. Sue had just been getting over an earlier affair, and welcomed all Herbert's attentions. Two days after, in the isolation of the dorm sitting room-for the graduate student 'housemother' was a disguised agent of free love who entertained her lover behind locked doors, creating thereby a mood of musky carnality throughout the female dormitory-Herbert made a lustful lunge for Sue. To his surprise, she wilted, becoming wholly passive as his fingers roved her back, gently and momentarily sliding into the curving dip of her buttocks, the cleft yielding through her red cotton dress.

'God damn it! You're dreaming again. Stop making me play Mrs. Mitty and get those envelopes licked.'

'Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right away.'

So much for the remembrance of feels past. Now, secretarial work.