Read Cold Rain for Free Online Page B

sloppily.
    Nothing unusual in this, nor in the fact that a student wanted to connect with me. It was a large class, and older students sometimes needed to feel as though they had some kind of feel for the prof’s humanity, such as it was.
    ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
    I had no idea what she was talking about and told her as much.
    ‘We met at Caleb’s last spring.’
    The moment she said this, I locked in on the brown eyes. Buddy Elder’s pale, plain stripper girlfriend who had not said a word. ‘You’re Buddy Elder’s friend,’ I said.
    ‘You won’t hold that against me, will you?’ It was a quick, sweet remark, and I laughed. She did as well, and as she did, I decided I liked her. At least she didn’t seem like the anaemic little dolt I had imagined. With a smile, she was actually a good deal prettier than The Slipper’s usual offerings. At just this point Norma Olson and Marlene Moss came walking toward us. Norma and Marlene were both graduate students. Both of them had been out to the farm for the party. I greeted them casually and noticed them checking out Denise.
    ‘Usually, when men don’t recognize me it’s because I have my clothes on.’
    Not wanting to touch this one, I said, ‘You’ve changed your hair, haven’t you?’
    She was in fact a peroxide blonde. ‘You know what they say. Blondes have more fun. What do you think?
    Do you like it?’
    ‘It looks good.’
    ‘Buddy says it makes me look like a total prostitute.’ I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment in the lexicon of Buddy Elder or not, so I let that go and just looked at her for a moment. ‘My tips are up forty percent since I did my hair. Can you believe it?’
    ‘You’re still working at The Slipper?’
    ‘I have to pay rent.’ I had nothing to say to this.
    ‘I’m dreading the day someone from school walks in.’
    ‘You mean besides Walt?’
    She smiled as if I had mentioned somebody’s old sheepdog. ‘I don’t really think of Walty as university .
    He’s one of my regulars. With you it would be different.
    I think if you came in to watch me I’d be embarrassed.
    You’re my professor!’
    ‘I expect we’d both be embarrassed.’
    ‘We’re not total nude, but there’s not much left to the imagination.’
    I started to ruminate on the imagination and decided that wasn’t a good idea, so I nodded thoughtfully, praying we got off the subject of nude dancing, or semi-nude dancing, as soon as possible.
    In my office, Denise got right down to business. She was having a problem with the sexuality in the material. Since we were reading Oedipus the King , I was a bit confused. In fact, I had a difficult time not laughing. ‘Sexuality?’
    ‘The incest. I just want to throw up when I think about him married to his mother. Like, they had sex, didn’t they? And kids?’ I had had complaints before about the Oedipus , but never expressed with such conviction. My only answer was to say we were almost done with it.
    ‘But I have to write about it on the test, and I don’t think I can. Is there something else I can study?’
    I decided not to try selling Oedipus to her. The standard line would be to tell her it wasn’t really about incest. It was about ignorance, all the things we think we know about our lives but actually just take on faith. I decided instead to extricate myself from the problem with humour. The exam would be fairly general and cover a great deal of material. If the subject of incest bothered her for some reason, she could always choose to write about adultery and murder.
    Denise locked on the word adultery. ‘I don’t need to read some story about adultery! I get that every night at work. Most all of the guys who come into The Slipper are married.’
    I wasn’t quite sure what I should say, so I tried to relate the material to something in her own experience. I said any number of movies dealt with the same themes. ‘You go to movies, don’t you?’ Sometimes, she said, when she had