Free Black Iris by Leah Raeder

themes of Frawley’s book—white middle-class academic suffers midlife crisis, has affairs with younger women (which Blythe would’ve undoubtedly called “Updike-wannabe sexist crap”)—then, occasionally, our own work. I was writing a novel called Black Iris , about a woman who kills herself and leaves a note for her teenage daughter, and how the daughter carries the note around without ever having read it.
    “Why doesn’t she read it?” Frawley had asked, intrigued.
    I could only shake my head.
    “Work on motivation,” he said. “Behavior is deterministic. There’s always a cause.”
    Prick, I’d thought. But he was right.
    Now Frawley leaned against his desk, his trim, svelte frame clad in an Italian suit. Early forties, married, but with a foxish Petyr Baelish smile that said he slept with his students, the younger the better.
    “I’ve got a plan,” he continued. “I’ve rented a room from a widow and her twelve-year-old daughter. The mother is interested in me, but it’s the girl I want. I live with them for months. I insinuate myself into their lives, earn their trust, their adoration. They both fall in love with me. But I’m only in love with one of them. When the opportunity arises, I remove the mother from the picture. Now it’s just me and the girl. What is age but a number? I take her on a road trip, a tour of the finest roadside diners and motels America has to offer. I buy her anything her heart desires. We make love. We’re crazy about each other, and it doesn’t matter that I’m three times her age. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
    The class watched him nervously, some of them evidently finding Lolita more true crime than fiction.
    “She initiated sex the first time. She wasn’t a virgin. She enjoys making love, though maybe not as much as comic books and candy. If I have to trade her toys for sex, well, it’s no different from most marriages.” Uneasy titters from the class. “And if she calls me a brute and an ape, well, I’m tall, dark, and handsome, though unfortunately rather hirsute. Sometimes she cries herself to sleep because she misses her dead mother. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll run away. Why would she run? We’re in love. It’s just that she’s a young girl, and young girls play games. She teases me and says she’ll tell the police what I’ve done, so I tease back and threaten to dump her in a home for wayward children. No more toys or candy. How wouldyou like that, Dolly? Isn’t it better to be with me, to see this beautiful country together? Why must we fight when we love each other so?”
    Frawley laced his hands behind his head, raising his eyebrows.
    “What do you think, class?” he said. “Are my young paramour and I in love?”
    An instant chorus of no, sicko, pedophile , etc. Frawley smiled, patronizing.
    “Yes, yes. Good. What else am I? Think about it in a literary context.”
    Villain, antihero, antagonist , etc.
    He kept smiling, waiting for the right answer. Grudgingly I raised my voice.
    “Unreliable narrator,” I said.
    Frawley smacked his hands together. “Bingo.”
    Everyone looked at me.
    “Very good, Ms. Keating.” The professor paced, his voice looping around me. “I haven’t told you the whole story. But you can tell from clues I’ve dropped that something isn’t right. I’m withholding information. I want you to believe a lie.”
    He stopped somewhere behind my desk. I didn’t turn.
    “A novel with an unreliable narrator is really two stories in one. There’s what the narrator tells us, and there’s the truth. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes one illuminates the other. Nabokov’s Lolita is the example par excellence: Humbert Humbert is so blind with lust and self-justification that he ignores his young victim’s suffering. Desire can be a powerful obfuscating force.
    “In the Romantic era, writers would often conflate desire with the concept of the muse. ‘Divine inspiration,’ in the form of a