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By Anne Tourney (Address unknown)

The girl swings her heavy hair into William's arm, making his coffee slosh over the Styrofoam cup. She smiles but doesn't apologize; apparently he's supposed to take the physical contact as a recompense. Half the coffee has spilled. The clerk at the outdoor snack- stand notices him refilling his cup and demands an extra twenty-five cents. The girl is already gone, sitting on a bench under a eucalyptus tree. The December climate makes William irritable. Sunlight slams into his forehead, and the lush Santa Ynez mountains yawn at his foul spirits.
He carries his coffee to Van Orman Tower, where he will spend the next forty-five minutes playing Christmas carols on the carillon. Then he will go to the auditorium to administer the final exam for his music theory course. Finals week is ending; the campus is almost deserted.
Everywhere you can hear the gossip of palm and eucalyptus. When he gets to the top of the tower, he looks down and sees the woman with the heavy hair standing up, gathering her books. A wind off the Pacific comes billowing under her skirt, whisking it over her waist. fabric floats, as free as a torn scrap of parachute, over her buttocks. They are the color of iced tea. In his dreams that night, the girl's glossy hair lashes his body. Its strands are sharp and cold. She whips her head back and forth over his bare chest, inflicting a thousand microscopic scratches on his skin.
He laughs; the pain is exquisitely embarrassing. She is wearing the same light dress. The bodice is tight, but the skirt is full and sails upward whenever she moves. The dress is printed with tiny pink roses, a design that reminds him of the toaster-cover in his grandmother's kitchen. The girl clambers off him, leaving him sprawled out and blushing on his bed. "Why would I make you think about your grandmother's kitchen?" she laughs, reading his thoughts.
She's right. She would be alien to that Depression- era room. Her body is a product of light and abundance. People wouldn't think of covering their toasters in a world that generated such a luxury of muscles, skin and hair. That world is a careless theater of rare things, a world measured by twelve-hour airplane rides and the seasons of opera and ballet. She reaches for the ceiling, grabs the light fixture, and starts to swing. William jumps up, protesting, but she ignores him. The weight of her hips carries her like a sensuous pendulum from side to side. As he stands watching her, she suddenly swings backward and flies toward him, spreading her legs wide, then bringing them together and pointing her toes. "I love the carillon. Will you take me up there sometime?" He promises that he will. "I'll swing from the bell rope, like Quasimodo!" she cries.
And all at once her weight is on him, pushing him back on his bed. He kisses her before she can crawl off him again. She straddles his thigh and rubs gracefully up and down it--a swan riding a bicycle. Her name is Kristen. She is one of three Kristen's who registers for his Bach class, which can be plugged in to the liberal arts curriculum as four art appreciation units. "Excuse me," he addresses her one morning. She is talking to a friend while he lectures about the liturgical structure of the cantatas. He is describing the Church as a bride and Christ as a bridegroom, trying to convey the sacred eroticism of it. In the end he makes it sound as tantalizing as a sandwich of wheat toast and steel wool.
"Excuse me," he repeats. His voice comes out with more pedantic peevishness than he intended. She turns and looks at him over her shoulder. The rest of the class watches.
"I'd prefer you didn't talk while I'm lecturing," he says. I'd prefer you didn't lecture while I'm talking, he can hear her thinking, but she says nothing... "Sorry," she mutters, and rights herself in her seat so that she faces the blackboard.
William asks if anyone in the class listened to the cantatas he assigned. Someone raises his hand. William asks him to comment. The student remarks hopefully that he noticed a lot of counterpoint. "Excellent," William says wearily. "That's a brilliant observation."
Bach lived in Leipzig, William drones. He hardly ever left. The farmers who cultivated cabbage all week went to church on Sundays and got to hear Bach playing the organ, something William will never be able to do, though he knows more than enough about the lower middle class and its cabbage patches.
William plays the second movement of Cantata 140 on the Baldwin upright, to demonstrate its measured splendor for the class. It tinkles out in a bourgeois propriety that makes him wince. "Kristen was the name of a girl I was in love with," William tells the girl, in his dreams. "I loved her from third grade until I graduated from high school. If I hadn't gone East for college, I'd probably still be in love with her." The new Kristen cracks her blue gum, produces a bubble with a snide farting sound, and shrugs.
Her father owned a music store. 'McMurphy's Classical and Exotic Instruments.' It was the only place in Missouri you could get a cithara or a pan flute. Her mother taught piano at their house. I took lessons from her because I wanted to see where Kristen lived. In eight years of piano lessons, I saw her walk through the living room twenty-one times. I can describe to you every second of every one of those times: what she wore, whether she looked at me, how much of her thighs I could see." William is sitting at his harpsichord. Kristen sneaks up behind him and places her brown fingers over his. Her fingertips are bald and globular, like a child's. Only middle-class girls cultivate their fingernails. Dirt-poor girls and very rich girls keep them short. Like a pony, she fixes her mouth to his neck and sucks softly. Against his collarbone, her hair is icy cold. Her hands, as she slides them up his forearms, feel gritty and unwashed, and she smells of astringent sweat. "What have you been doing this afternoon?" he laughs. "Planting corn?"
Playing volleyball," she murmurs. "At the beach. You should have come to watch. I lost my bikini top." Suddenly she lifts her hands away, and he senses her fingers working behind his back. She is unbuttoning her white cotton shirt, the oversized shirt with the sleeves torn out. Through its long armholes her bra is visible, a sly, black flag; he looked away when he first saw it. Now he looks down at the keyboard and tries stupidly to play a scrap of a toccata, but he can't get away from the black and white; it's in front of him, on his instrument, and behind him, on the girl.
He turns around, his eyes closed. She unzips his fly, then slides on top of him, her nipples brushing his eye lids, then his lips. He nuzzles her breasts, grabs handfuls of her moist hips, but his radio alarm wakes him just as he's coming. He explodes to the hyperactive tinkle of a Scarlatti sonatina. Bach had his chance to see the rest of Europe. He spent time in Italy, then returned to Germany, where he continued writing and playing for cabbage-pickers. He wasn't the sociable globe-hopper that Handel would become. With Bach's death, the Baroque period ended, and so does William's course.
It's late March now. Kristen is going to Nice for spring break.
She's been chattering about it with her friends and discussing it in the notes she passes during class. "Should I go topless on the beach?" she asks in one of these notes, which William finds abandoned under a desk. The note feeds his fantasies for the next three weeks. He imagines the girl's waxy white breasts, exposed to the Mediterranean sun, the nipples stiffening as she wades in the sea. William has never been to a nude beach, in the United States or Europe. He did go to Europe once. To Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, and England, on a three-week tour with his sister. He hated it. He is one of those people who is born to re- main stationary. One afternoon in April, when he's walking from the auditorium to the student union, he sees Kristen crossing the campus alone. He is only twenty-nine years old, he thinks. Why shouldn't he date a former student? The likelihood of Kristen enrolling in another music class is remote--she earned a C- as a final grade in the Bach class. To his shock, she calls out to him. "Dr. Weber!" she cries. "I heard the most amazing joke! You'll love it!"He manages a crooked smile as she approaches. Over the break, her hair has lightened from honey blond to several gradations of silver and platinum. Her shoulders, under the thin straps of her white top, are the color of hammered copper. "Listen," she says. "Why did Bach have so many kids?"William waits. He's heard the joke before--he hears it from someone at least once every quarter--but he can't remember the punch line to save his life. "Because he couldn't pull the stops on his organ!" she shrieks. William laughs politely. The girl pats his arm, tells him to take care. They all say that, these pretty girls. Take care of what? If he understood their language, maybe he'd be able to win one of them for himself. But his mind is hopelessly baroque--convoluted dark, irregular--while their thoughts are streamlined and weightless, like kites. This quarter, he'll teach a course on the Classical Era.
Classical music is sexier than baroque, he reassures himself. By the time he gets to Mozart, he could very possibly have a chance of getting laid.