“I’m in your class. Do you remember?”

I knew he knew very well, but he wasn’t saying a word, just staring at me in disbelief.

“May I have a minute with you?”

“My minutes, and hours are posted on my office door.”

“Yes, of course, why don’t I see you then?”

He picked up his garden shears and walked away.

“You don’t happen to know where the clubhouse is, do you??”

He pointed without looking back once, a nonchalant flick of his shears. Even if I did live there, he didn’t care! My face reddened, burnt. The ignominy! Curtailed hunger, unrequited appetite! I ran home, back to my own company, and cried until my make-up left a ghostly portrait of myself on my pillow. Then I ate everything sweet I could find, four cans of peaches, and a box of white sugar, cube by cube. When I was done, I was hungrier than ever.

CHAPTER 19

Professor Ranji returned to class with a limp not worthy of his yellow jogging attire. His face had a chalky complexion and underneath his eyes, were night blue semicircles. His eyes were covered with that glossy film that is often the result of medication or fever. As he spoke, he never allowed his eyes to focus quite on me, concentrating to look just inches in front of my forehead. I crossed my legs. Black stockings do not go nicely with red pumps, I thought to myself, pulling out the wrinkles around my ankles.

Professor Ranji’s hands trembled as he walked up and down the rows, holding up a wide-mouthed jar for us all to see. It contained a translucent, offensive smelling liquid and one hemisphere of the human brain, separated from its partner like a grapefruit slice.

When Professor Ranji pointed to the area of motor cortex which commanded the muscles of the lips, tongue and jaw, his eyes at last met mine; not to greet them, but to burn them with his hatred. I must say that if I understood correctly, we do not really taste with our tongues. Our tongues are but civil servants who carry taste up a well-defined path, to the viscous ruler above, the brain, which determines its pleasure or disdain.

It was a curious moment in my life. I felt as though something was shifting inside me, a tide reversing prematurely. I do believe, though it may sound queer at first, that it was responsibility shifting from the low rank organs of execution to my brain. Yes, how curious, the area I’d considered the most moral of myself all those years, in all its scruples and accusations, was the very source of pleasure all the while, a masochistic mass battling against itself.

I couldn’t wait for class to finish, and bobbed my knee up and down. As soon as Professor Ranji gave us leave, I rushed out of the Scott’s Science building; my heels sank into the grass, stabbing the earth again and again. If I ran fast enough, I could catch Dr. Timberland as he arrived on campus, brief-case swinging high, jacket flapping in the air.