She, young and attractive and deucedly alone: trying to get tenure at a big research one. He, middle-aged, tall and slender: tenured years ago, perhaps before she made it to high school. He could have passed for 45 if you didn’t look too closely. She was my neighbor, though we hardly spoke. Her curtains were often open of an evening, and when I was bored with my work–often enough–I went to my window, looked across the yard, and watched them together: grading papers at the dining room table, having a drink, mingling with friends. I spied her picking her nose for what seemed an eternity.
Once, when she was looking over his shoulder, he reached up and casually massaged her breast. He never looked at her. I guessed that the paper he was reading was far too engrossing, probably something out of the lusty Derrida or sexy Foucault. She hung about for a moment, and then disappeared to another part of the house. He, however, never moved.
I used to see him in town occasionally–at a restaurant or bar. I never saw them together in public. One afternoon in the back of a record shop I watched as he ran his hands up and down the back of a forward-thinking grad student, one I had seen in the halls. It wasn’t my neighbor. He moved behind and pressed himself, slowly, against her bottom.
And even while I wondered about my neighbor–whether she knew or cared that he was dogging her–I had to admire him. For he stood tall in defense of an old school approach to being a professor.
