Selling Out Read Online Free

noiselessly pacing the room in bare feet, or simply sitting in the old easy chair in the corner, smoking his pipe and staring.
    â€œNothing,” he answered quietly, or “I don’t know.”
    He came and kissed her gently on the forehead, wondering himself what it was that distracted him during the day, acting like a subtle itch on his concentration. His senses had never seemed so acute, yet when classes began in September he found himself losing thoughts in midsentence, suddenly standing and staring at the students’ familiar faces and wondering who they were and how they got there.
    All the girls seemed to be named Michelle now. When he started teaching they were mostly Mary Lou and Cindy and now they were Michelle and Dawn. Of course they weren’t girls any more, they were women. It was difficult for Perry to look at the latest crop of rosy-cheeked, milky-skinned, lithe young damsels, some of them teenagers fresh from pubescence, and call them women, just as it was incongruous for him to think of their giggling, pimply male counterparts as men. It was all right to slip now and then and refer to the male species as boys (the football coach called them his kids), but calling the females girls was a real cultural-political gaffe, practically reportable as an incident of sexual harassment.
    There was a gorgeous Michelle who sat in the front row of Perry’s “Art of the Novel” class who he privately felt was sexually harassing him , and certainly contributing to his already acute condition of mental disorientation, by every ten minutes or so tossing back her head in such a way that her long mane of glossy hair swung like a golden curtain across her face and spread itself on her other shoulder. The execution of the movement involved an arching of the neck and back that thrust forward her high, ample breasts, which of course were not confined by the unnatural constriction of a bra, so that, under the low-cut T-shirt-type garment she wore above her skintight jeans, the breasts seemed to be shoved toward Perry like a kind of erotic taunt as he paced in front of the class. He wondered if alleging that this Michelle’s breasts were invading his space would be an acceptably current kind of complaint.
    As the swing of Michelle’s golden mane one morning totally swept from Perry’s mind an intricate formulation he was about to present in regard to Henry James’s style in The Golden Bowl , he stopped and asked, “Excuse me, but do you have some kind of itch that makes you have to throw back your head like that?”
    â€œNo,” Michelle said with eye-blinking innocence, “I don’t have any kind of itch at all.”
    There were giggles beginning now.
    â€œThen why do you do it so often?”
    â€œTo develop my breasts,” she explained brightly.
    The room cracked up, as Perry felt his face become a beet.
    â€œClass dismissed,” he said.
    It was one of those days. He happened to be wearing his treasured old faded Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt, which usually made him feel mellow, if not still youthful. He often wore to class instead of the standard tweed jacket with suede elbow patches one of his colorful collection of sweatshirts emblazoned with images and names of sixties music groups, or offbeat places or events he had been to, like the Fifth Annual Joy Street Block Party held on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and the World Blueberry Capital, which was Union, Maine. Wearing one of those with one of his colorful hats (the brief-billed Chinese worker’s cap, the Parisian beret were among his favorites), plus a pair of bright red or green corduroys with hiking boots, made Perry feel happily more like a crazy creative sort than a stodgy professor. It was not only tolerated, he felt it was rather expected of him, part of the fulfillment of his role as the English department’s “real writer.”
    It of course was on that day, the day of Michelle’s