Chapter 1
Quite by accident, Professor Horatio Wedge found out that Professor Lucretia Slade very much wanted tenure in the English Department.
It was a mild surprise.
He was crouched amidst the roses in the Botanical Garden when he heard her say it. Wedge was an impatient man and did not normally walk anywhere, but this particular day was a warm one, one of the first days of an early California spring, it was a Saturday and he didn't really want to go to his office, so, on his way from the faculty parking lot to Hurlburd Hall he had decided to take a stroll through the Botanical Garden. The roses, when he came to them, he thought were beautiful-just coming out-and on impulse he decided to pick one, which was forbidden. He walked back to the third row of bushes to break off a burgundy cherry colored one. He started back to the path and then heard female voices approaching, two of them. Not wanting to be caught red-handed with the purloined rose and therefore face censure from one of his colleagues' wives or worse, a student, he ducked. That is how he came to be crouched amidst the roses when he overheard that Lucy Slade so very much wanted tenure.
Most young professors want tenure, sometime, somewhere; and at thirty-two Wedge himself had only had it three years. And a young professor even works for it, churning out reams of academic trivia those first few years, but most men resign themselves to not getting it. After all, if one school doesn't keep you permanently, you simply go someplace else to teach. Miss Slade was only twenty-seven and had been in the department just two years, although she'd come to her present job from Yale and had taught there a year.
Of course, Wedge could not have been expected to recognize her from his quick glimpse through the bushes, and he didn't know who it was until the other voice said:
"Well, I'll tell you one thing. If they don't give you tenure, the Women's Caucus will tear the English Department apart. Tooth and nail."
"Do you think the threat of that will be enough to make those male chauvinist pigs give in?"
"I would think so."
"Let's sit here. The grass looks nice."
Ahah, Wedge thought, putting "English Department" together with the voices, Lucy Slade and her lover, whatshername, Samantha. That's odd, she was wearing her hair down. He peered, frowning, able to view them as they sat on the slope. Lucy stretched out, leaning back on an elbow and shaking her head, her hair flowing, golden brown, with a sheen in the sunlight. He had no idea she had such nice hair. She had always worn it pinned up, wound tightly around her head and pulled back at the sides, giving her face a severe mien.
Wedge began to look around for an exit. To the right the path curved around the roses; they would undoubtedly hear and see him. If he turned to the left he would have to walk uphill through an open space before he reached cover again. Behind him was an embankment and a brook-the bank was just steep and muddy enough to sap any enthusiasm he might have had for walking down it.
"How can you say that?" Samantha shrieked. Wedge looked back out through the bushes at an expanse of Samantha's back, her vertebrae clearly segmented between her halter top and the crease in her buttocks where, as she sat leaning forward, she spilled out of her hip-huggers. Flat on her back, Lucy slightly raised one knee, her legs longer, her flesh softer than Wedge had imagined, having never given her much thought, actually.
"Good God, Sam. It's nothing that extreme!"
"It's a step backwards from liberation."
"No, I see it as a means of using what we've learned."
"It's enough to make you vomit."
"It's not as if we've never had men before, either of us."
"But to say ... to sit there and tell me that you wouldn't mind making it with a man again? I've never heard anything so scandalous!"
"No, Sam . . ."
"Do you think a man, any man, could make love to you like I have."
"Of course not."
"Putting out for some sexist pig? After all our . . . Christ, it seems the whole movement is bogged down, spinning its wheels."
"Pussy, Pussy, calm down," Lucy purred and the sweet timbre in her voice sent chills up Wedge's spine, "that's not what I have in mind at all. All I said was that the idea of taking a young lover was beginning to have some appeal for me. Now, that's not putting out for some dirty old man. That's making some young innocent put out for you."
"I fail to see the distinction."
"When a man gets to be twenty-five or thirty, he can get pretty hard to manage. But when he's just eighteen or so, he's quite malleable. When they have their first big thing with a woman they generally get ... oh, what's the word? Pussy-whipped! That's it. Now when you're eighteen yourself, it can be a pretty heavy number, pretty dreadful, but if you know the ropes, well, they can be easy to dominate."
"It still sounds dreadful."
"I don't know. I just thought it might be amusing, that's all."
"Whom do you have in mind?"
"Oh, no one in particular. There's a lot of attractive fresh-faced kids around."
"Crap!" Samantha said sulking for a moment before saying, "Well, don't act too hastily."
"Don't worry, Sam," she said, reaching out to take her friend's hand in her own.
They held hands quietly for a minute before Samantha rolled over and kissed Lucy full on the lips. Wedge strained to see. He couldn't believe his eyes-he knew things like this happened, he knew what they did together but he still could not quite take in stride this display of exclusively feminine passion, and when Samantha idly began to fondle the end of Lucy's breast Wedge felt far less casual about it than she did. He huffed on his glasses and scrubbed them with his shirttail.
"No! Not here!" Lucy said, breaking the kiss.
But Samantha ran her hand up Lucretia's skirt--Wedge was again amazed by the naturalness and simplicity of the act as Samantha lifted the skirt and touched home. "No!" Lucy said, clamping her thighs together.
Samantha held her hand in place, however, and the professor would have given a month's salary just then, being a rash man, to view the scene from the opposite direction. "I just want you to admit that I can juice you up more quickly than any man," she said.
"Oh, Sam," Lucy said, obviously touched and for the moment gripping her friend's probing hand with both of hers, "of course you can!"
Lucy tugged the intruding hand away and sat up, looking around in all directions. Wedge drew back where the roses were thickest and when Lucy looked behind herself, her eyes rested a moment on the farthermost roses, the burgundy-colored ones just above the professor's head.
"I've always wanted to make love out on the lawn," Samantha said.
"Me too," Lucy said, "and we will. When I've got tenure we'll even do it in public-but for now we have to cool it."
Having heard enough if he hadn't seen enough, Wedge held his rose by its stem with his teeth as he backed down the embankment on all fours, his imagination so inflamed that he didn't realize he was getting his trouser legs muddy until he stood up next to the creek bed. Clutching his rose, he picked his way along the edge of the stream and out of the garden, brow knitted lost in thought.
Everyone knew that the two were lovers. It was a widely held presumption. Lucretia Slade had been hired as a result of activities of the Women's Caucus, a group of graduate females who had taken it on themselves to oversee the department's treatment of women and criticize hiring practices. Most of them were naturally involved in Women's Lib. Lucy had been a token thrown into their gaping maws to shut them up. It had only partly worked: they had immediately screamed "Tokenism!" But their screams were less shrill, which was perhaps the most the faculty could hope for. Lucy had arrived, man-less. She had not gone on record as having evinced interest in a man in a year and a half, a period during which she was seen in the constant company of several graduates and movement women, and for three or four months now she had been exclusively with Samantha. Everyone assumed the obvious.
"Oh, Wedge!"
As he left the creek-bed and returned to the walk, the professor heard his name called. He started, and then, twiddling his rose, checked his reverie as the two lesbians approached from the Botanical Garden. From the bounce with each step, from the freedom of her jiggle, Wedge discerned that Lucy was naked beneath her turquoise t-shirt. It had lately gotten so he could tell at a glance if his students or his colleagues' wives were wearing bras.
"I see you've been in the garden today, too," Lucy said, eyeing his rose.
"Nice day for it," he said.
"You must have discovered a new path," she said with an obvious look at his muddy pants, smiling amusedly. Samantha looked off, face impassive.
"I slipped and fell," he said, lamely, his eyes dropping from her visibly pointing nipples to his rose before darting up to her eyes.
"I saw those particular roses, too," she said. "But I resisted the temptation."
"I can't resist temptation," he said.
"I guess we'll have to keep you out of the garden, then, won't we?"
"For you," he said. "I'd be pleased if you'd take it."
"I couldn't," she said. "You apparently went to great trouble to get it."
"You look very nice today," he said. "Ravishing. I wish you'd take it."
Samantha snorted silently; she couldn't snort too obviously, Wedge being Eighteenth Century, her own specialty.
"I can't really refuse, if you put it like that," she said. "Thank you." Looking closely at the color of it, she frowned slightly.
"Bye-bye."
"Take care, stumbling around in the garden."
As they walked off, Wedge glanced down at himself with a grimace, then stared after them, chuckling fitfully, rubbing his hands together.