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think we’re getting a little far afield,” I said.
    They’d stuffed us in the basement of Krass, in an airless little cell that smelled of chicken nuggets, which Teddy Leaf brought to class each week, despite my repeated implorations. I gazed out the window, at the parking lot with the Dumpsters. The nice classrooms, the ones with natural light and a view of the courtyard’s lush flower beds, were reserved for the business school, where it was assumed the students might someday become prosperous.
    â€œWait a second,” Brendan said. “What’s so gross? Why are you guys all, like, ganging up on me? I’m just talking about what Mandy wrote in her story. I’m not trying tooffend her. Mandy, I’m not trying to offend you. I liked the story. I wrote, like, a whole critique.”
    Brendan Mahoney was not a promising student. He was the sort of student whose intellectual life might have been titled
Still Life with Bong
. But now, on this gorgeous April day, the wick of insight had been lit within him and he came at us with the force of a crusader. He knew he was right, that he’d latched onto a little node of perversion below the story’s maudlin surface, and he wasn’t going to let it go.
    â€œSex and death are related,” he explained. “The French, the French people, when they come, they call that dying. Sex dying.”
    â€œA little death,” said Rob Tway.
    â€œRight,” Brendan said. “The point being that both of those things, like, dying, like when you die, and when you have sex, they’re like the same thing in a certain way.”
    â€œA dead fuck,” Teddy Leaf said.
    â€œSo like this mom, when she goes out to visit the horse, she’s trying to connect to her daughter, right? But when she thinks about her daughter she thinks about how she used to ride the horse and how her daughter used to be, like, all
excited
to ride the horse. And as she’s describing this, that’s when she starts touching the horse, like rubbing it all over and getting all this heat entering her body and so forth.”
    Nicole Buswell was glaring at me now, with her sharpwhite teeth, and Emily Givens had bugged out her eyes. Rob Tway said, “You don’t have any idea what Mandy had in her mind when she wrote the story—”
    â€œYeah, but you can write something and not even know what it’s about until you, like, look at it later and figure it out. Isn’t that right, Mr. Lowe? That’s even got a name.”
    â€œPerversion in the service of the ego,” Emily Givens said.
    â€œI’m not trying to be a pervert,” Brendan said.
    â€œYou don’t
have
to try,” Emily said.
    It occurred to me suddenly that these two had fucked and that it had ended badly, as it usually does at that age, and that this probably explained the extra erotic charge I’d sensed in class over the past few weeks.
    There were other factors. I should mention, for instance, that all this took place during the Lewinsky scandal, and as much as I hate to invoke that dark episode, it is relevant, because everyone back then, including the
New York Times
and the United States Congress was talking about blow jobs, was imagining President Clinton with his pants around his ankles and his naked Presidential ass pressed against his Presidential desk and his Presidential face all cragged up in bliss and Monica on her knees wrapping her big red mouth around his pecker. The Altoids hummer. The Cohiba up her snatch. The money shot onto the blue dress. This was our political discourse.
    And what’s more, it was everything we’d ever wished for,to see our big daddy Prez getting down with some chubby hayseed in the Oral Office. It was what we deserved. Our popular culture had prepared us exquisitely for the whole shebang. Practically everywhere you turned, strangers were preparing to have sex, or talking about sex, advising us on how to lick a