The Seducer

4

Kansas City was where, and Cornelia York was who. Meeting Cornelia was not in any way essential to Brad’s main purpose in going to Kansas City, but was something incidental that he and Cornelia had worked out between them to add interest and a bit of excitement to what would otherwise have been, for him, a rather dull chore.

In the beginning, at least, it had added interest and excitement, not to say drama, but now unfortunately, again for him, it was becoming more of a bother and a complication than a pleasure.

As Peermont’s most glamorous mathematician, he had been selected to conduct a television class in college algebra. This was flattering to his physical presence, as well as to his professional skill, and he had accepted readily enough in the beginning. However, he had been chagrined to discover that the televised session was scheduled for seven o’clock on Saturday morning, which was a bad day and a worse hour.

In order to reach the studio on time, he was forced to arise at five-thirty at the latest, if he drove to KC the same morning of the telecast, and this was not nearly late enough, especially on Saturday, when he might have lain abed as long as he pleased.

He had mitigated this dreary disadvantage to some extent by driving to the city Friday evening and spending the night in a hotel near the studio, and that was why Cornelia had become incidentally involved. They had decided that it was really a waste of time and opportunity for him to spend the night alone, and so she had been driving in independently and spending it with him.

Cornelia had been first a challenge and later a most satisfactory conquest. A member of the Peermont faculty in the department of foreign languages, appropriately Romance, she was a tall woman who had reached an age somewhere between thirty and forty without appearing to have reached any specific age at all. That is to say, one could have accepted without much question either of alternate contentions that she was a remarkably preserved forty or a mature twenty-five.

Rather tall, she was somewhat too amply endowed to be called willowy, but she succeeded, nevertheless, by tricks of dress and locomotion, to appear to be what she was really not. She wore her black hair bound in braids around her head, sometimes for variety in a knot on her neck, and she affected an air of sophisticated reserve that contrived subtly to suggest banked fires.

It was this subtle paradox of cold and heat that had initially tickled Brad’s fancy. He was both intrigued and challenged. He met her occasionally at faculty functions and devised occasions to meet her casually elsewhere.

To his surprise, she did not seem to be impressed by him, or even to like him very much. This was, of course, intolerable, and he began to develop in connection with her an almost frantic sense of frustration.

He was not the man to bear this philosophically, and if it was far too late for Cornelia’s virginity to suffer assault, her chastity, such as it was, was definitely imperiled.

The peril, if she had known it, would not have disturbed her. She was willing to risk it, even to invite it. What did disturb her, on the contrary, was the oppressive feeling that Brad was, after all, a fraud who was never going to make the pass she had sensed and expected and wanted.

She spent quite a bit of time wondering in both French and English how she could incite him to action without appearing to do so. Finally, after an interval during which they both suffered needlessly, they discovered that they had a common enthusiasm which not only brought them together unexpectedly at a favorable time and place, but also made it possible for them to arrange naturally other times and places equally favorable.

The enthusiasm was for walking in the country — a simple kind of exercise which, when enjoyed together by a comparatible pair, affords all sorts of opportunities for supplementary exercises and enthusiasms. Brad did a great deal of walking because it helped to keep his belly flat and because it was one of the few forms of physical exertion that he honestly enjoyed.

For her part, Cornelia did a great deal because it was part of a picture she had of herself. Anyhow, it had happened one raw, wet Sunday afternoon in early March of this year that they had met beside a hedge of Osage Orange along a country road, and it would have been impossible to imagine a pair more surprised and delighted and covertly calculative of the other’s virtue.

“Why, Brad!” she said. “How delightful to meet you so unexpectedly!”

“How are you, Cornelia? You’re looking exceptionally fine.”

“So are you, for that matter. It must be the country air.”

“If so, I’d like to recommend it for all women. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you at the moment to be about eighteen.”

“How charming we are today, aren’t we? You ought to walk in the country more often, Brad.”

“But I’m forever tramping about the country. I’m positively addicted to it.”

“Really? So am I. How has it happened, I wonder, that we have never come across each other before?” There was a sparkle in her eyes and her voice.

“However it happened, it was damned bad luck. Now that we have met at last, however, I suggest that we set a better precedent for the future.”

“Agreed. Shall we begin by walking along together?”

He responded by offering his arm, which she accepted and held lightly and released after a minute or two because she wished to avoid the impression of clinging, which was in conflict with her assumed role of a woman sharing equally his masculine pleasure.

They walked briskly along the road in the shadow of the Osage Orange. After a while, at the end of the hedge, he crawled over a barbed wire fence and parted two strands with a foot and hands for her to follow, admiring as she did so the fine flowing swell of her flanks and behind as tweed tightened over them in her strained position.

He felt a powerful urge to pat the behind and get things begun or ended without further preliminaries, but experience in such matters qualified the urge, and they walked on together across a pasture toward a thin line of timber that grew along a creek on the other side.

The sod beneath their sturdy shoes was soft and springy after the March thaw. Overhead, the sky was low and gray, a lusterless course for blown clouds. The thin timber, when they reached it, was little or no shelter from the biting wind. She began to shiver a little when they stopped to catch breath, he filling his pipe from a leather pouch and she lighting a cigarette from the match he struck for the pipe.

“Are you cold?” he asked, his voice solicitous.

“A little, now that we’ve stopped. It’s all right, though. I refuse absolutely to be delicate. I love this time of year, don’t you? The short, sad time between seasons.”

“Yes, indeed. I’m always reminded of Swinburne’s lines: ‘When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.’ ”

“Why, Brad, you’re simply the most astonishing man. Who’d have dreamed that you could quote off-hand from Atlanta in Caly don?”

“Oh, please. I hope you don’t think I have nothing in my head but equations and formulas.” He smiled almost boyishly.

“Well, mathematicians are so forbidding, you know. One somehow never suspects them of being quite human.”

“You’ll find me human enough if you care to try me.”

“Perhaps I shall,” she answered archly.

“You already have, to be candid.”

“Oh? I wasn’t aware of it. How?”

“By crawling through a barbed wire fence. My thoughts, I assure you, were human enough to be censorable.”

“Truly? I’m thoroughly flattered and delighted.”

“I was tempted to pat your pretty bottom.”

“I’d surely have snagged my stocking if you had, but I shouldn’t have cared. You must promise to submit to temptation the very next time we come to a fence.”

“I promise with pleasure. Now you are cold, though. I see you shivering. We need more shelter from the wind than these trees afford.”

“There’s a little hay barn over there in the field beyond the creek. I’ve stopped there before when I’ve walked this way. We could go there and rest and get warm, if you like.”

“I’ve already confessed to being a licentious sort of fellow. Do you feel that you can trust me in a hay barn?”

“My dear Brad! Do you actually think I’m so dull?

Whoever would want to go into a hay barn with a man she could trust?”

“Excuse me. I see that I’ve done you an injustice. How do we get across this damned creek? ”

“There’s a log fallen across to the opposite bank downstream a bit. I’ll show you.”

She took him by the hand and led him, as if the way were obscure and endangered. There was a kind of childish innocence in this that seemed to him very appealing, although later her tendency to behave this way in moments of excitement was to strike him as incongruous and ridiculous, like a matron in a pinafore.

Downstream a few yards, they came to the fallen log, bridging the stream at what seemed to him a rather threatening angle, and she released his hand and scampered across with reckless bravado — another bit of retrogression.

He followed more cautiously but with a casual air that disguised successfully his genuine fear of falling and becoming in an instant a comic figure, which was something he could never bear to be, and they went on together from the opposite bank toward the small hay barn that was visible in the field beyond.

The raw, wet air was suddenly full of a drizzle of rain, and they ran, hand in hand, the last thirty yards, tumbling through the door and into the hay with shouts of breathless laughter and an irrational conviction of having become, in the thirty yards, at least half as many years younger.

Somehow they could not recover from this exhilarating delusion in time to develop a more sophisticated approach to what they both wanted and meant to have — insofar, that is, as sophistication can function in a hay barn. Accordingly they fell upon each other in a fierce and abandoned frolic.

Her big body was wild with wanton charity, throwing itself upon him and demanding reciprocity with shameless hands. He went under her skirt and beneath her blouse with the reckless compulsion of a novice, claiming almost brutally her ultimate intimacy, and she responded with hoarse sounds of incitement and a frantic and rhythmic thrusting of her pelvis. Soon there was a hysterical discarding of tweeds and then not a single sound except gutturals and aspirants and the threshing of hay and a strange word that Cornelia kept repeating wildly at the end, apparently French.

Afterward, Cornelia was palpably prepared to rest and repeat the performance, but Brad was cold and was suffering, besides goose pimples, the familiar stale redundancy of disappointment.

It required almost a quarter of an hour, in which the gray rain fell and tweedless Cornelia lay lush in the hay, to achieve a proper appreciation of his n^th triumph, which had been, after all, somewhat easier than conjugating a French verb or solving for x.

Oh, well. That had been in March, and it was now October, getting on toward November, and in a matter of hours in a KC bar he would again be meeting Cornelia, who was becoming something of a bore, a familiar formula. Meanwhile, he would have to go home and pack a bag and have dinner with his wife, who was also a bore and a problem besides.