textfiles/sex/EROTICA/C/carillon.txt

The Carillon
By Anne Tourney

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.  The 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 glassy 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 a
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 rows gracefully up and down it--a swan
riding a bicycle.



Her name is Kim Lindley.  She is one of three Kims 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 is too well bred to say it.

"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.



"Kim was the name of a girl I was in love with," William tells
the girl, in his dreams.  "Kim McMurphy.  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."

Kim Lindley 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 Kim
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.  Kim Lindley 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 eyelids, 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.  Kim Lindley 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 remain stationary.

One afternoon in April, when he's walking from the auditorium to
the student union, he sees Kim Lindley crossing the campus alone.
He is only twenty-nine years old, he thinks.  Why shouldn't he
date a former student?  The likelihood of Kim Lindley 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.