It’s hot. The house has two window units that can’t keep up. In the evenings, after class, she sits on the microfiber couch as the unit blows without pause. The heat, though, doesn’t seem to leave her body; it’s as if she’s carrying it with her everywhere, an internal combustion engine, smoldering campfire, waiting for a cool wind or a chance to ignite.
The students are smart, some. They challenge her with their considered analysis, their insight. Others are less smart, and they hate her through their own stupidity. She can tell by the way they aren’t ashamed to look her dead-on when she poses a question they can’t answer. She hates them back for this. Why offer a kindness no one offered her?
The whole thing has the haze of a decades-old photo, a dreamy ’70s wash, but only because of the sweat in her eyes. She’s back reliving an old dream. When she wipes her face, everything is daylight-bright, harsh. The sun, hellbent on scorching the earth. The trees, gone.
◆
She walks the visiting male writers through the building to the classroom. The two talk to each other, casually.
“That was Tom’s office,” the famous one says.
“That was my office,” the other says.
“That is my office,” she tells them. She’s been here eight months, and Tom has been gone two decades.
They chuckle good naturedly, but don’t respond.
“Remember when that student bet Tom could ejaculate across the entire room,” the famous one says.
“I’ll never forget it,” the less famous one says.
She doesn’t speak, but sucks her teeth and leads them to the room where the eager, waiting students, some smart, some stupid, wait for the male writers to share their genius.
The students ask questions, and the famous writer expounds at length. He tells them that he writes for two hours every afternoon, that he asked a data scientist to run an analysis on his word choice, that he works in two documents simultaneously, choosing the best lines to go from the scratch document to the working one.
She listens, stays silent, doodles sharp, geometric shapes in her notebook. The less famous male writer interrupts his friend to clarify a point that he made. They dialogue. They hook in another male writer. He’s famous too, relatively. Of the three, she’s only read one man’s novel.
Her, she shades her triangles in gradients.
Afterwards, the students are dutifully impressed. They hang around and ask the famous writer questions. She goes to coffee with her colleagues. She tells them the ejaculation story. All the women roll their eyes.
Back at home the window unit hums its infernal, eternal blast. She puts pen to paper, but the only words that come out describe the ways her body betrays her. The kidney stone. The hip ache. She remembers when she was a student. When her male professor, a male writer, referred to her work as “clit lit.” She puts the pen down and stands in front of the AC.
◆
The reading is the main event. The famous male writer stands at the front of the small auditorium. He reads new work. He lets them know it is new work. It is funny, and the audience laughs at the appropriate moments. The characters live and breathe, fuck and fly.
He knows how to read, she thinks, then laughs at herself. He knows how to read to an audience, she corrects, for no one. He catches her eye and winks, mid-sentence. He thinks she’s laughed at his story.
The auditorium has the industrial air-conditioning of a university building. It makes her teeth hurt. Her sweat has dried, and she pulls a sweater from her bag. Shivers. It’s time for the Q&A. She wraps the sweater around her and sinks into the seat, resigned to the long haul.
One of her students asks about his research, the science of your work is all so natural. He talks at length about working at his famous university, about the genius of his colleagues, how he pesters them with questions and reads their important work. He launches into facts about space. She doesn’t catch their meaning: the effects of zero g, the age of the body, the litter of satellites…
“…the velocity of ejaculation.” He says to a full room of laughter.
Two of her colleagues whip their heads around to her. She stares a tight-lipped smile.
◆
After the reading, a party. The male writers arrive together. They stand in a circle with the other men but allow her and some students to join. The men chuckle together, speak in undertones together, jostle elbows together. They look over the women’s heads and recommend male authors so typical, it sounds like parody. She stands by two of her students, a girl and a boy. Woman and man, she corrects herself.
“I mean everything’s about sex, isn’t it?” the famous writer asks the circle.
I guess she thinks.
Her male student says, “that’s what I’m always saying.” He looks around at the other students. “I’m always telling you guys that.”
The female student turns up one corner of her mouth like she’s heard about smiles before but never actually tried one.
The female writer goes back into the house. Two more of her students cook in the kitchen. Oil glistens in a pan on the open flame burner. One student chops an onion and laughs as the other scoops the mince from the cutting board and throws it in a pan. They move like fluid around each other, easy. In that moment, she loves them limitlessly. The laughing one asks her to pull back her hair, her hands are covered in onion. The female writer winds it into a loose braid, ties it with an elastic off her own wrist.
“I could cry,” her student says. “Just being touched.”
She wants to hug her, but instead rests a hand on her shoulder. She could cry, too. Instead, she pulls a beer out of the fridge, puts the glass bottle to her forehead. The condensation, so cool.