Free Visiting Professor by Robert Littell Page B

around in time to the music.
    “Hey, in Russia they must dance, right?” Rain tells Lemuel. He feels her breath warm his ear. “Let’s you and me …” Her forefinger
     describes a circle.
    “I do not know if I know—” Lemuel starts to protest, but Rain, polishing off the wine, dangling the empty glass by its stem,
     pulls him into the other room and melts into his arms. He feels the wineglass against the back of his neck, he feels her breasts
     against his chest, he feels her thighs against his legs, he smells her lipstick. He hears the Rebbe’s “Oy” seep between his
     lips.
    Rain presses her mouth against his ear. When she speaks, her words actually tickle. “The business with the two signatures—when
     did that happen?”
    “Eight years ago.”
    “I remember something that happened twenty-three years ago,” she says lazily. “I remember my birth.”
    “You are inventing this up? I do not even remember my childhood, mainly because I never had one.”
    “Honest to Christ, I’m not inventing. I was very young at birth, who isn’t? but I remember every detail. I remember the dampness
     and the darkness and then the coldness and the blinding light. I remember being held upside down and whacked. You want me
     to give you the dirty details?”
    “Another time maybe.”
    They shuffle around the floor in silence. After a while Rain’s voice tickles his ear again. “So are you married?”
    “I was married. I am divorced.”
    “How many times in your life have you been in love?”
    Lemuel tries to shrug, but finds it difficult because Rain is hanging on his shoulders. “Perhaps once. Once, perhaps. Yes,
     once.”
    “You don’t sound sure.”
    “I am sure. I was in love once.”
    “With your wife?”
    “I showed up in the Leningrad Palace of Marriage to sign the book under the photograph of Lenin because my wife’s father was
     the rector at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where I would have given my right arm to work. Also his daughter
     had a sixty-square-meter apartment all to herself.”
    “So who were you in love with if it wasn’t your wife?”
    “A girl … I never knew her name, I never spoke with her.”
    “You fucked with her, right?”
    Lemuel tosses his head in embarrassment.
    “I don’t get it. If you never talked to her, if you never fucked with her, then even if she existed it’s the same as if she
     didn’t exist. She was a figment of your imagination.”
    “She was real,” Lemuel insists, but Rain is following her own thoughts.
    “I don’t see how it’s possible to be passionate about someone who doesn’t exist?”
    Lemuel tries to change the subject. “I suppose you have been in love many times.”
    Rain laughs. “More than many. I have been briefly in love dozens of times. Hundreds even.”
    “What does it mean, briefly in love?”
    “Thirty seconds. Two minutes. Ten.”
    “How much time must pass before your love affairs become serious?”
    Rain is insulted. “For the thirty seconds or two minutes or ten, they are very serious. While I am making love, I am in love.”
     She crushes her miniskirt into Lemuel’s crotch. “And when I am in love, I am usually making love.”
    “What about a love affair which lasts for a month or a year? What about marriage?”
    “Tried marriage,” Rain smugly informs him. “Didn’t like it. Tried divorce.”
    “You were married how long?”
    “It seemed like an ice age, but it was only two months.”
    “What was it about marriage you did not like?”
    “My ex was good in bed, but not with me.”
    “He was unfaithful?”
    “He was fucking his friends, if that’s what you mean. So was I. Fucking my friends. But that wasn’t why I quit him.” She tells
     Lemuel the story of how her ex supplied rice instead of birdseed at her wedding. “I ought to have seen the handwriting on
     the wall,” she adds. “I ought to have left him then and there.”
    “You did not divorce because of the rice,” Lemuel