Free The Professor and the Prostitute by Linda Wolfe

and held long dialogues with himself in which he consoled himself with the thought that surely one of these days she’d make up with him. Hadn’t she said once that she’d learned forgiveness in the bosom of her family? Hadn’t she told him all about how she’d had an uncle who’d stolen money from her parents and landed in jail but been forgiven by the family, who’d even gone to visit him? Anyway, Robin would no doubt make up with him someday because even when she’d been angriest, she’d never said, “I will never see you again.” It was one of the things he treasured most about her. And besides, there was something else that gave him hope. It was the way she liked money. He figured her passion for money was particularly related to her passion for cocaine. And if only he could get another job, if only he could offer her the money with which to indulge her habit, surely he’d be able to persuade her to see him again.
    His musings proved right. Several weeks later, the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, his old stamping ground, came through with a job offer. He’d sent out feelers to SUNY shortly after the Tufts investigation had begun and now, unaware of the scandal, they promised him a professorship, starting in September, and invited him to come to Plattsburgh immediately to codirect a week-long seminar in tissue culture. Taking heart, he called Robin and asked her to accompany him. And, his good fortune making him euphoric and expansive, he promised her that if she would come, he’d pay her $1,000 a day.
    Robin said yes. How could she, why would she, when by now she knew that Douglas was shadowing her, even if she didn’t know he was behind her arrests and the health club firing? The answer was in part Robin’s greed. Just as Douglas had suspected, when offered enough money, she could readily put anger aside. But apparently she also, like many beautiful women, believed that because an admirer said he loved her, he truly did, and that this meant he would never hurt her, that she would always be the person in control of the relationship. On February 17, the next to the last day of the seminar, she flew to Plattsburgh.
    Bill met her at the airport, and they spent the night together. The following morning she accompanied him to the last sessions of the seminar. He was overjoyed, his troubles forgotten, at least for the moment. He was back in the city in which he had gone to college, been a nobody, a shy youth with no prospects. Now he had just finished directing a highly esoteric conference on the subject of tissue culture. He was surrounded by the leading lights in his field, scholars who were exploring the very farthest edges of the mysteries of biology, creating life in glass dishes, playing God. And he was there with Robin, his Galatea. That morning, during a break in the formal part of the seminar, he introduced her to his colleagues. Completely immersed in fantasy, he pretended to his peers and perhaps even to himself that she was not the tawdry, drug-dependent hooker from the Combat Zone who went down on strangers in the back of their cars, but a classy, brilliant young scientist, the kind of girlfriend he had always longed for. He told his colleagues she was his graduate student, one of his brightest. That’s why he’d brought her.
    Several of his colleagues tried to make conversation with her that day. One probed her about her goals. What were her major interests? What kind of research was she pursuing? Robin mumbled a few words, then retreated.
    Eventually, Bill and Robin got into his car and started the drive back to Boston. He had promised to give her the thousand dollars once they arrived there.
    The drive home started off pleasantly enough. Robin wanted a new nightgown, and Douglas suggested they look for one at a large shopping center in Plattsburgh. He knew the place well. He’d worked right there, in the Grand Union, when