Envy by Kathryn Harrison Page B

barren?”
    She pulls her purse up, hugging it to her stomach. It’s one of the few times her handling it doesn’t strike him as premeditated. “I think”—she takes a deep breath, starts over. “I think maybe I want you to see me with my boyfriend so I can prove to you that I don’t have any . . . any of those feelings for you.”
    Can it be true that all of Will’s patients are consumed by the topic of sex? Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex. Has he done this to them? Communicated his disease?
    The last appointment of the day is an intake, a tall young woman, leggy like a teenager and decorated with what he’s come to regard as the usual assortment of tattoos. She sits sideways in the armchair, her back against one padded arm, her legs over the other. Two stainless steel studs connected by a post sit on either side of the pinch of flesh just above the bridge of her nose. Placed where they are, the little orbs disturb him as might a smaller, brighter pair of eyes between her own pale blue ones, themselves offset by owlishly smudged eyeliner and mascara. She’s attractive in a sulky, ill-kempt way, her hair falling unevenly around her face, appearing to have been hacked rather than styled. More likely, styled expensively to look as though hacked. As she talks she chews one of her nails, all of which are bitten to the quick, and armored with silver rings.
    â€œSo,” she says, “that’s it, I guess.”
    â€œWhere do you meet these men?”
    â€œBars mostly. Except the one I’m going to do next will be an art-history professor. So I’ll pick him up at the faculty house.”
    â€œThe faculty house?”
    â€œUh-huh. It’s my work-study gig. I waitress there.”
    Will tries to picture the young woman in a waitress outfit along with the studs, tattoos, and smudged mascara. She doesn’t present herself as a person who would take orders politely. “That’s unusual financial aid, isn’t it?” he asks her.
    â€œIt would be, yeah. But it’s not financial aid, per se. See, there’s hardly any teaching slots in classics; there’s maybe five TA’s in the whole department, so if you’re a doctoral student, eventually you end up with these funky jobs. Quasi-official. The department secretary will hunt something down for you if you’re willing to, like, grovel and curry favor. Which is the definition of higher education, basically, at least as far as I can figure. I’ll maybe go into teaching if I ever get out of there. I wouldn’t need an education degree to get hired by a private school.” Speaking about her future, she looks earnest and sober, not the disaffected slacker who threw herself into the chair but a scholarly disciple whose postmodern finery might peel right off, like a Halloween costume, and reveal one of those laurel-wreathed heads from a Roman coin. “It’s not as impractical as it seems,” she adds. “Classics are cool again. They’re making a comeback.”
    Will nods. “I guess that’s what makes them classics.”
    She raises her eyebrows, and the two studs ascend slightly as well. “Precisely,” she says. Her expression suggests that she’s taken his comment to have been sarcastic, which it was not.
    â€œLatin?” he asks. “Greek?”
    â€œLatin and Greek. Latin all the way back to junior high. Greek I began as a freshman.”
    Will leans back in his chair, hands behind his head, fingers laced. It’s a pose, at once relaxed and challenging. “Well,” he says. “What would you want from this process? From what you’ve told me, I assume