Free Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend by Robert James Waller Page B

spaghetti and give him courage.
    A student staggered up, towing a platinum blonde wearing greased-on jeans and a black leather jacket. Ghastly beer breath
     washed Michael’s cheeks as the student shouted over the music, “Great class, Dr. Tillman, absolutely great. How’d I do?”
    Michael didn’t post grades, particularly in Beano’s. But what the hell, beer breath had done all right, and it was party time.
     He held up one of Beano’s custom napkins and pointed to the
B
on it, grinning.
    The student threw both arms over his head in joy and spun back onto the dance floor, where he went into a ponylike boogaloo,
     pawing the air. Five minutes later he sent the waitress over with two draws for Michael and Clarice. It was semester’s end,
     and they were all burying the dead and praising the living, so the atmosphere was celebrative, sort of like a New Orleans
     funeral at ten thousand watts. Doppler Don-ovan led the band into something called the “Drake Neighborhood Slide,” and Clarice
     pulled Michael out on the dance floor.
    The evening closed as he knew it would—warm, libidinous, and thoroughly satisfying. He and Clarice were good in bed together,
     and before it was over she was kneeling on the bed, palms and breasts and face pasted against the wall, with him behind her
     licking the perspiration off her shoulders and doing several other things that pleased her greatly, as she constantly and
     fervently emphasized while all of this was under way: “Yes, Michael…
goddamnit,
yes, yes,
yes!”

Seven
    J ellie from a distance. The ambiguity of those months she was in England was hard on him. His running shoes slushed along the
     streets of Cedar Bend, and ice clung to his hair where it stuck out beneath his blue stocking cap. The faculty and students
     were suspended in a climatic purgatory somewhere between the lights of Christmas and the warming of the earth in April. Gray
     muck draped like a shroud over Bingley Hall, ceiling lights bright and cold. Wind from the Canadian prairies smacked the building’s
     north side and howled through the corridors when an outside door was opened. Unlike wine, or the coed of legend who removed
     her duds in a Russian professor’s office, a midwestern winter does not improve with age.
    Thinking almost constantly about Jellie, Michael pushed the students hard and even held an extra three-hour class on a Sunday
     afternoon, promising them time off for good behavior later in the semester. He knew he’d begin to lose them and himself when
     the warm came again, so they were getting the hard stuff out of the way early. They hammered onward. By February’s close he
     was thinking of calling for mass, campuswide psychotherapy to counter the late winter blahs. But they hung on, as ancient
     sailors in pounding seas clung to the mainmast and with the same faith in better times to come.
    Then over the bare trees fluttered the first sign of hope in the form of colorful travel brochures pinned to hallway bulletin
     boards. The words and pictures promised sun and sand, tonic and tans, and, somewhat more slyly, fast times amid the palms
     of Florida or the south Texas coast. The classroom buzz as they waited for the bell ran to snow conditions in Colorado and
     who was driving which twelve people to South Padre Island in an old Dodge van.
    By that time Michael had frightened the lower 20 percent of the class into filing drop slips. Those remaining were a group
     of battle-scarred veterans, deserving of a short rest before he bullwhacked them up the slopes of learning toward victory,
     and maybe graduation. The inevitable questions came: “Professor Tillman, is it all right if I miss your Thursday class before
     spring break? A bunch of us are going to Day-tona Beach, and we want to leave Wednesday night.”
    He looked at the nice young woman who asked the question—it was a different one every spring, but they all ran together after
     a while—and said, “Why do you think I