The Old Professor

NOTE: This does have some pee in it, but its more about sweat, semen, sloppiness and … 1964.
He was a math professor at the nearby college. A soft spoken, grey haired man who walked to the campus mornings looking at the flowers, the birds in the trees, and saying hello to a friendly, older woman who gardened and paused in her sweaty endeavors to say hello to the friendly old guy who wore tweed jackets with patched elbows, who incongruously chose to live upstairs in the four apartment building at the end of a disheveled street where the kudzu threatened to take over again and turn everything back to the swamp it had once been.
Sometimes, he rode a bicycle. A large, black one with fat tires and a large, comfy seat with big springs and three big baskets, so he could put groceries in front of the handlebars and on either side of the back wheel when he went by the A&P. It took strength to make the heavy, old bike go down the street like that, but he looked like he hid some gnarly old muscles under his worn, baggy pants, and he hardly sweated more than the green, humid air made the friendly old lady who stopped her gardening to wipe her brow and stand and call his name and wave as he rolled past.
It started raining one Saturday afternoon, shortly after he arrived with his groceries, and he had to rush the bicycle up the stairs and hurry inside with his victuals to avoid a thorough soaking. He stripped off his shirt and stood there, breathing hard and looking out the window at the rain, which had graduated quickly from a sprinkle to a shower to sheets of drenching rain that fell straight down, the natural progression of the late summer humidity that had been building since morning.
He turned from the window and went to put up his groceries when he heard a loud crash, a thump that shook the wall. He jumped, and he felt his heart race, the effect flushing his body in a shock. He shook his head. A new student must be living next door, he reasoned. The fall semester had begun. He put away his milk, and was reaching for the ice cream, when a bloodcurdling scream came from next door. Shocked again, he raced next door and pounded on the greened, half rotted frame.
A young woman opened the door. She was sweaty, red–faced, breathing hard, and had a heavily damaged Calculus book in her hand. “I’m sick and tired of math!” she screamed at him, “I could just scream!”
“You have, you have!” Exclaimed the old man, and his statement of the facts made her even more red–faced. In fact, it subdued her.
“You don’t understand,” she said, looking at his chest, “I’ve been doing this all my life because I don’t want to disappoint my father, but it’s boring, and sometimes, I have trouble with it! I’m not a genius! I don’t do anything but study! I have no life! I’m tired of it!”
“What year are you?” he inquired absently, bewildered.
“I’m only a freshman,” she said to his navel, then, “but I’ve been making straight A’s since kindergarten. I’ve never been away from home before, and I’d like to, well, I’d like to take the afternoon off and appreciate being by myself … I’d like to fall asleep with the rain, but I have advanced classes, and I have so much homework!” All this was said to his middle, through tears, her with the calculus in her hand, he staring into space and leaning on her doorframe. He stood back and brushed the flakes of paint from her doorframe off his arm. “You scared me,” he said absently.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll be real quiet, I don’t play my records loud, I don’t have any visitors,” she said, like the rest of what she’d said, all in one, breathless sentence.
“Just try to let me know in advance when you’re going to scream,” he said, and turned away.
“I’m probably going to fail calculus,” she said. “I don’t understand differential substitution.”
He turned back and looked at her. She wore jeans cut off just above the knee and an oversize, purple and gold college sweatshirt. A hefty young heifer. She wore horn rim glasses with thick lenses and her long, brown hair hung limply past her shoulders in the humid air. She wore no makeup, but her deep, blue eyes were surrounded by naturally long lashes that made patterns in the grease on the insides of her glasses. “Oh … sorry, Beth Duncan,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m a math teacher,” he said after telling her his name.
Their first tutoring session went well. So well, in fact, that she employed her limited cooking skills and made him supper, when he wouldn’t take any money from her. In his turn, he enjoyed their almost literal putting together of heads over the small table they studied at, and he had to make her leave when the hour got late and his waning attention span made him useless. But he tossed and turned in his bed, and he heard noises through the wall, the sound of a loose bedframe and headboard as someone else had trouble with sleep.
In the days that followed, he saw her in the hallways of the math building, sometimes elsewhere on campus, and he helped her more on two evenings of the following week, the two of them hunched over the small table in the alcove where he usually graded papers and took care of his few, simple financial needs, writing a check or two, then balancing his checkbook.
She was not pretty, and she wore no makeup, no perfume. He smelled only the shampoo she used in her hair. She smelled innocent and young. He told her parents pushed her too much, and she agreed. She was tired of it.
One Saturday, when she had finished her studies, she stayed and let her eyes read from whatever was on the shelves or tables of his apartment, a place littered with books and more books. So it was that she was deep in a book by Masters and Johnson when he emerged from the kitchen with coffee and sandwiches, something he thought would bring a cozy mood in an afternoon when rain was again dominating the forecast, and he had no other plans, and she had no other plans.
“It’s all right,” he said, when he saw her embarrassment, “You can take it home with you if you like,” he added, “I think I know all I want to know about that subject, and I’m not scheduled to take any exams on that this semester,” he improvised, smiling.
“Thank you,” she said awkwardly, looking at the floor.
“So have it,” he said, equally awkward, “and I hope you find a handsome young man when you’re ready,” he added, a slight downward turn to his voice, a catch. There was another moment of awkward silence.
“What does semen look like?” she asked quietly, looking at the floor.
“Milky,” said the old man, confused between suddenly disturbed feelings he thought he had let go of many years ago, and concern not to embarrass the young woman whom he had been sharing some afternoons with for several weeks now. With a flash of realization, he knew the noises and the flurry when he emerged from the bathroom or the kitchen meant that she had been reading Masters and Johnson every time he had stepped out of the room for more than a moment. “Have you dated much?” he asked.
“Never,” she said, and then she added, “My father and mother won’t let me date.”
“Mmmmmmm,” he said, shaking his head sadly and staring at his copy of M.C.Escher on the coffee table, “I see.”
“And they’ve always insisted I get A’s and take the most advanced classes I could get, in math, physics … “
“You’d like to have a life other than academic, yes,” he said. This was hard. he could feel the pain she must be feeling when she saw the young men of the campus going about with the pretty young things that hung out looking for an M.R.S. degree, the lettermen and the cheerleaders, the fashion conscious, as she pulled on coveralls over her raw boned frame, her thick legs, her fat bottom, her small breasts. He wanted to tell her all he had seen in his years of teaching, of the beautiful, college women who married the young knights who graduated with wimpy BA’s in business, who fooled around with their secretaries, while the women were stuck raising the kids, until they themselves started fiddling about on the side with the gardener, the postman, while the long–disinterested husbands were romancing their secretaries, until the divorce. No, Beth, don’t envy them, their time will come, most of them. He suddenly wanted to tell her of his long marriage, parted only by a heart attack, but what could he say to give the perspective of his years? He’d gone completely off track, but she brought him back.
“I’ve been told that before.”
“What?”
“That it’s milky.”
“Oh, yes! Yes, sperm. It’s milky. Who told you?”
“A girlfriend. I knew a girl who …” and he thought of a movie he’d seen once, more naughty than dirty, called ‘Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.’ She was still talking about her naughty friend when he said, “I have an idea,” and he went into his bedroom, his closet, and rummaged in a cardboard box he took from the back of the closet.
When he returned, he went into the kitchen, and she followed, a puzzled look on her face, and a slight hurt look, too, for his attention had obviously drifted while she was telling him about her parochial school friend who had sex in a store–room of the gymnasium with the coach’s assistant.
The professor was mixing powdered, laboratory agar and water in a teacup in the sink. He let it get to the right consistency and added some milk to it. He dipped a tablespoon in it at held it out to her.
“It looks about like that,” he said.
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much,” he mumbled, staring at a floor tile.
“How’s it… smell?”
“Well, there’s an odor … I’ve heard it described as smelling like seashells … some people like it, some don’t … but that’s what it looks like, and that’s about how much there is, too …” He ran down into mumbling at the end.
Beth took the spoon from his hand, and he felt her hand tremble as she took it. Her eyes were large, black marbles behind her thick glasses. She moved her lips, then asked falteringly, “when this stuff, when this is, when its inside, does it come back out?”
“Yes.”
“Hah! What a mess!” she said, and she laughed nervously, fumbled the spoon and spilled the contents of the spoon onto the tile floor, for which she apologized profusely and tried to get down and wipe it up with the towel on the handle of the fridge, but he touched her elbows, pulled her back up and refused to let her.
“It’s not much of a mess,” he said, and he took the dishtowel and put it over the plastic dish rack next to the sink so it covered it up.
“Lets say this is your underwear,” he said, a slight tremor in his voice, and he took a spoonful from the teacup and turned it over in the middle of the towel, “If you look underneath, you see it just makes a wet spot.” Beth obediently bent over, pulling her brown, flaxen hair back from her ears with a hand at each side of her head, and she looked under the towel.
“It looks wet,” she said.
“It’s only damp,” he said with faltering offhandedness, “you probably sweat more than that, if you walk to school like I do.”
Beth stood up and took her glasses off. Her hands shook as she put her glasses on the kitchen counter. “I’d like it very much if you would make love to me,” she announced in a breathless rush. The old man smiled, looked down, looked at her spotless, white Keds, her soft, white legs, her shorts, this time flower–patterned cotton, not jeans, and looked at her oversize white top with the sleeves torn off, her soft, white arms, her uncertain face, her myopic gaze. He smiled and reached his arms around her and hugged her, intending to reassure her before telling her to find a boyfriend out of the many, lonely young men on campus.
But she hugged him back, holding him with her soft arms, pushing herself against him, grinding herself on him, and he was erect, and she felt it, and she rubbed up and down on him.
He made her sit on the bed and he undressed in front of her, slowly, and she watched, her legs together, the heels of her hands pushing into the mattress on either side of her thighs.
He asked her to shut her eyes, then he lifted her sweatshirt over her head, revealing her soft, white body and her small, white bra. He undid the clasp and lifted it reverently from her breasts, then he kissed and licked and sucked on each of them momentarily. Her hands came from the bed and she held his head.
He unzipped her shorts with his teeth after laying a pillow behind her and telling her to lay back. He pulled them off her and gently laid his tongue flat against the crotch of her white, cotton panties and pressed against her before removing them, pulling them off her slowly, in the quiet of the little bedroom, their breathing the only sound, her eyes large as she looked at his erection.
When he laid on top of her and put himself up against her, he felt the obstruction, and he moved up and down her lips, feeling her get wetter, more slippery, her body pulling up, spasms, her breathing become harder, catching. When he pressed, felt the resistance momentarily, then burst through and went in, she made an involuntary noise, and he was instantly there, kissing, pressing, and he was surrounded by her, hot, pulsing, irregular, to his unexpected short thrusts and pressure.
When his warm sunshine flew into her, she made a loud sound in his ear, which was next to her mouth, and she wrapped her heavy legs around him and pushed on him, pushing up, and he delighted in the feeling, the little squeeze she gave him, that told him she got there her very first time.
She stroked his grey head as he nuzzled her neck, and she stared at the ceiling, the books, a picture of a field of flowers that jostled with some clothbound tomes. Eventually, they fell asleep to the sound of the rain.
**********
Beth had a straight–A semester in the making, and the old math professor ate more hot suppers in a row than he had since being a much younger, married man. The rhythm of their studies, their evenings, revolved around her finishing her homework, by his insistence, then finishing each other, by mutual agreement.
One morning, she woke up late in their near–perpetually–unmade bed with the odors of their sex in her nose and knew she was late to school. She threw on her clothes and hurried around while he watched from the bed. When she was dressed and about to leave, he followed her to the door, he in his boxers, her in a white, pleated skirt, white tee, sandals, he wrapped his arms about her waist and pulled her to him.
“I’m late for school!” she said.
“You sure are!” he said, and he reached under her skirt and pulled her cotton britches to her knees. She lost her balance, dropped her books, fell on the couch.
She was amazed at how quickly he was in her, filling her, and she thought she barely got there before he did, then she saw his smile, his hands and mouth all over her, through her shirt, the pain of his bite on her shoulder mixed with the warmth, the pleasure, the rush of his final presence, far up inside her.
She smiled, kissed him, grabbed her britches and pulled them up from her ankles in one motion, then grabbed her books and ran. He watched her behind bounce and make the pleats of her skirt move most adorably as her fat, young legs propelled her up the street at a trot. He called the math department and had the receptionist pass a note to a grad student to teach his class – he was going bird watching this morning.
**********
“Don’t do that to me again!”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t try to seduce me on the way out the door!”
“You loved it!”
“I wet my skirt! I had to go in the bathroom before class, it was running down my legs in gobs!”
“I’m sorry,” he replied, with a look all over his face that said he was not.
“Damn you!” she shouted, fat fists at her sides, her body jumping, lovely, he reflected that she was lovely when angry, but, “All you had to do was put a hankie…” he said mildly, pointing vaguely at his own crotch.
“All you had to do was wait until a better time.”
“Why not wait until we have our first, lovers’ quarrel,” he said, again quietly. This brought her up short. “Why not wait,” he said, “until we have our first quarrel about money, then we can start having sex once a week, on Saturday night, in bed, and we can never be spontaneous, then you can wonder if I look too much at other women … you know, some questions have only to be asked for the answer to be … unless you like to fool yourself.”
“Oh.” she said, and sat down. It was a final thing, her ‘oh,’ and he moved to her, encircled her waist with his arms, put his chin on her soft, white shoulder.
“There wasn’t much,” she mumbled, “maybe nobody noticed.”
“You give people too much credit,” he said, “especially first thing in the morning. Of course nobody noticed.”
“I sat through English wetting myself,” she said.
“Who noticed?”
“No one …”
“People aren’t that observant,” he said.
“No one would say anything, I meant to say,” she finished, and she pushed herself away from him, a look of hurt, of betrayal in her eyes. He didn’t do that again.
**********
Beth’s semester fell apart. Peculiarly, she was still doing all right in math, but her English, a subject she had no trouble with as far back as elementary school, was a decided failure by midterms. She stayed at school and talked long with her counselor, who sent a note to her father and mother of her own accord, and her father called the Saturday after midterms to confront her.
Beth cried on the couch as she told her neighbor and lover what had happened, that her scholarship was in doubt, that her father and mother were aware that she’d lost English 111, the advanced freshman course, versus English 101, the usual requirement.
The old math professor listened with a stone face. She eventually looked up at him and ceased tracing the patterns on the sofa cushions with her fat, index finger.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she said. When the old man continued to look at her, stone faced, she said it again. “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Have you … I don’t know how to say this except to say this … have you slept with anyone else?” He was quiet, grave.
“NO! How could you say such a thing!?”
“I’ve had a vasectomy, and I’ve been sterile for many years. I’ll go to the doctor and see if it has mysteriously reversed itself, but I suspect not. If it has, I’ll marry you.”
This caused her to look at him while a series of emotions played on her face, but the main one was horror. When she got up to leave, the old man stayed on the couch and watched her go. He sat and traced patterns on the pillows himself for a few minutes before he got up and put away the dish, knife, fork and glass he had left from his meal in the dish rack. He opened the fridge and got a beer. He sat back on the couch and began reading some math papers he had to grade. He made himself do them all before breaking down and crying his heart out.
**********
Beth’s period arrived the very next day. He had already gone to the doctor, just to make sure he was still sterile, and he received her news with a sigh. She went to school early in the mornings, to avoid seeing him, and he left late, to avoid seeing her. He walked down the street feeling every rock through his sloppy old shoes, and he failed to notice the lady calling him from her garden as he shambled past.
**********
Beth’s father arrived with the movers at the end of the semester, just before Christmas. There was a loud pounding on the math prof’s humble, rotted door, and he opened it to see a very angry man of forty or so, with Beth, crying, behind him. The man immediately asked him his name. He told him. The man’s fist caught the old academic square on the jaw, and he fell backwards. Beth’s father stepped quickly into the apartment, Beth, wailing, came forward too – she had seen her first lover fall, arms straight out, as though the punch had crucified him.
The old man slapped the floor, let the momentum carry his feet up, over, and he was on his feet in a ready stance at the back of his livingroom. Beth’s father advanced through the dim livingroom and was much surprised when a bare foot doing considerable speed broke some ribs and flung him past his daughter and into the loose railings in the hallway, which blonged and sponked as he fell over. His daughter, crying from the moment he arrived, knelt next to him and cried some more.
The police arrived and looked at the old man in his shirt sleeves, bloody faced, standing in the middle of his livingroom, and the husky, much younger man in a sport coat hugging his sides and left after a brief talk with them. One of the cops shook his head after comparing the combatants, then winked at the old math prof. The old prof winked grimly back. When everyone had gone away, and the empty apartment next door ceased its echoes and was silent, he popped open a can of Dixie Beer and went in the bathroom to look at his face. In the middle of washing up, he laughed out loud. When he looked at his swollen nose and split lip and bruised chin the next morning, just before he left for school, he laughed again.
**********
“Hey, are you deaf?”
“No, why?” The old man replied in genuine concern, and he stopped on the sidewalk and leaned over the fence where the woman stood, dirty, in her garden.
“You’ve ignored me and – my God, what happened to your face!?”
“Shouldn’t challenge young punks any more at my age,” he said, and she put black muck on his cheeks with her hands, then apologized profusely, so naturally, she opened the gate and led him through her lovely home to the kitch to clean him up, and she asked him about the fight, and he said evasive things, and he regarded her soft contours, her sweat, her soft face and lovely brown eyes, and asked her if he could take her out to dinner sometime, seeing that she lived alone, the framed pictures on the doilies on the end tables telling a mute story of a family past. She said yes to dinner at seven.
**********
His doorbell rang at six thirty. He was still in his undershirt, in the bathroom, and he’d just dragged the razor for the second time that day and he didn’t have time to wipe the remainders of the cream when the doorbell rang a second time.
He was surprised to see the lady gardener in a tight, dark, jade skirt and a lovely, light green sleeveless blouse. She had lovely, shapely legs and wore matching, jade pumps. Her hair was back in a bun and she looked soft, full, very comely to him. He stared a long moment up, and down, up and down.
“You’re not ready.”
“Very observant,” he replied.
“Should I come back?”
“No, you should come in.” She came in and put her purse, incongruously large, down on the table next to his phone. She stepped up and kissed him, and he responded by kissing her cheek. “Just continue on, like I’m not here, and I’ll keep watching you, like I’m not here,” she smiled. He smiled and did continue, selecting a shirt from the closet, wiping his face, using aftershave upon which she offered her opinion in one word, (“Nice!”) and looking for a tie and socks that matched.
**********
They left their favorite restaurant, the one they went to late six weeks ago on their first date, an older couple, walking slowly.
“I’m glad we didn’t drive,” she said. I need to walk off some of this food … I’m afraid I made a pig of myself!”
“I’m glad, I’m a little tipsy!” he said, and they continued towards the campus comparing notes on the food.
At an alley between two old, ornate brick buildings, part of the quaintness of the district just next to the campus, she grabbed his elbow.
“Come here to me!” she intoned, and she led him up the alley.
She removed her panties and put them in her purse. He watched, looking at her legs, her lovely ass and her full bush. She smiled and came over to him. She wrapped her arms and one leg around him.
They did it against the wall, in the alley, her soft moans encouraging him as he pushed her soft body until he carried her over with the hot torrent of his arrival, then he was surprised at all the warmth he felt down there, suddenly.
He looked down. She’d peed! In the aftermath of her climax, she’d relaxed so much she’d let her water go. He looked up to see a horrified look on her face.
“It’s OK!” He said, and he wrapped his arms around her more, to discourage her turning away.
“Oh, My God, I’m so sorry! I came so much, I’m sorry! I almost passed out, I guess I lost control …”
“It’s OK, I like it!” said the old prof, to which she stopped speaking, looking at him in amazement. “Do you do that often?”
“Only when I’m swooning with pleasure,” she said, sadly trailing off.
“Well then, love, you’re going to be doing it a lot more if I have my way with you!” He replied, to which she greeted his pronouncement with eyes like saucers.
They arrived on the sidewalk, he tucking in his shirt and checking his zipper, her pulling her skirt down, him noticing that her skirt was twisted so the zipper was over her left cheek instead of in the middle and deciding not to say a word, he loved seeing her in disarray so much, just as a trio of students came down the sidewalk towards them.
“Hey,” said the tallest one to the other two, “It’s my math teacher!” and to him, “Hey, teach, this your wife? She’s pretty good lookin’!”
“She’s my date,” he replied. She self consciously straightened her skirt and blouse some more, ineffectually trying to look neat and put together, and stood as tall as she could.
“Man, I didn’t know guys your age even had dates! Uh, hey, congratulations!” The other two looked at him, arching their bodies away from him, as if to say, “We hardly know this jerk!” But they laughed at his recovery, then he spoke again. “I hope you won’t hold that against me when you grade my stuff, eh, teach?”
“No, I’m just as glad I have a date,” said the old prof, wrinkling his nose some and smiling. The woman under his arm was smiling at the ground, now. Her unaccustomed, tall stance in high heels had him unbalanced, his arm around her shoulders at above–ear height. He dropped it to her waist.
“Do you feel old?” She asked him, concerned, when they had parted with the students after a few more artless words.
“No! Be quiet! Listen!” he said.
“Hope I can get a woman that goodalookin’ when I’m a wrinkled up old fart,” said the heaviest of the retreating students, a short, rotund, greasy kid with severe acne. His wish sounded ernest.
“Shut up, he can hear that,” said the tall one with the sarcasm and the math class. His carelessness was now up to causing him some cares.
“Probably can’t get it up anyway,” offered the third student.
“I said shut up!” said tall boy.
“What a waste,” said the third.
“Hey, I didn’t know you liked old bags,” said Hefty.
“SHUT UP,” grated beanpole. They were far away, now, and hardly audible.
“Is he one of your good students?” the woman said.
“Hopeless,” said the prof, “Probably get drafted even if I give him a gift and give him a C in math.”
About then, they became aware of the sounds of the band in the bar they’d walked up to. The piano was accompanied by a good, acoustic bass, brushes, and it switched to a background, ronking accompaniment to someone doing it superbly on an alto sax. He stopped, and, because he had his arm around her slender waist, she stopped too. He let his hand slip down the blossoming planes of her skirt and patted her ample bottom, absently running his fingers over the misplaced zipper. He moved for the door.
“If I go in there and sit down … I don’t think your stuff will dry clean out of this skirt,” she said ruefully.
“Mmmm, I don’t think the wall was too good for it, either,” he mused, looking at the abrasions on the back of it. He held the door for her and bowed slightly at the waist. She stepped in ahead of him.
**************
“Damn!” said the tall young man at the corner. It was the one who had the math class with the same professor who now had a lady in one hand and a drink in the other at a table for two in a bar where someone’s salute to Dave Brubeck was still just loud enough to hear from the bus stop.
His pals were alternating between two arguments: whether the last bus had come (it had) or if Jeff’s blue Ford Falcon was running (it wasn’t). His pronouncement was misinterpreted, and they gave up. Another Friday night stuck at the dorm – once they got back to the dorm.
Penniless, they walked down the street, the failing math student listening to his friends discussing life, politics, girlfriends, and sticking their thumbs out every time a car passed. Eventually, the hefty one noticed his silence.
“Hey, if the old fart gets laid, he may give you a reprieve!” said he. His tall audience didn’t laugh, so he gave his attention back to his former audience, who held that Goldwater was right, and that he intended to ask Beth, who was in his English class, for a date when he got the money his mother said she mailed last week.
“The hell you will,” riposted hefty, “you don’t have a car, so forget it, and besides, she’s fatter’n me this year, you should see her.”
“She is!?”
“Hey, last year, I’ll admit, she was ‘pleasingly plump,’ I mean, if you like that sort of thing, but this year, well, she should’ve trapped some poor slob into marrying her before doing that. She’ll probably like stay a virgin now forever.”
“Hey, that’s not nice!” The tall one was back in the conversation.
“Well, pal, look at her!”
“That’s cold, man,” he replied, but he found himself chuckling the answer, giving approval despite his criticism. So hefty continued.
“Hey, that’s life, pal. You don’t have dough, you date Beth, then when you’re old, like your professor, who’s probably gonna nail your coffin shut, get you drafted in the Army! (the other student laughed) you date some old bag with small boobs and a big ass. And I’m gonna get a petroleum engineering degree and make money and have one beautiful babe after another, and y’all need to change your majors. Period. End of sentence, end of paragraph, end–ola.”
Erich Too