Читать книгу Flam Grub - Dan Dowhal - Страница 15

Chapter 11

The class that night started punctually at 6:30 p.m., making Flam glad the insider knowledge of the building’s geography from his fulltime student days had allowed him to find the room without trouble, and arrive in time to grab a good seat. He looked around the room, evaluating the dozen-or-so fellow students who had chosen to give up their summer’s Wednesday nights in order to take a Comparative Religion class.

There was one other student around his own age, but overall it was a much older group. It included one shriveled-up and hunched-over, white-bearded gnome of a man in the back. Maybe religion is something most people don’t start paying serious attention to until they’re nearing the end, Flam thought, causing him to reflect on why he then had ended up there.

The instructor, a gangly and grim-looking man in his fifties, introduced himself as Professor Abbott. His gaze seemed permanently fixed on a spot high on the back wall, and he stood virtually motionless as he talked, with his hands pressed in front as if he were praying. Flam thought at first this was a contrived theatrical device, given the course’s subject matter, but eventually came to the conclusion this was an unconscious habit of the teacher’s.

“The objective of this course is to assist you in developing an informed appreciation for the spiritual traditions of humankind as manifested in the most influential and widely recognized religions of the world,” Professor Abbott began, giving Flam the distinct impression his new teacher was reciting well-worn words from rote, as if talking in his sleep. This impression was strengthened by the professor’s naturally uninterested and droopy-eyed look.

As Flam looked around for something else in the class that might be worthy of his attention, his gaze was captured by a woman a few seats over. She was furiously making notes, even though the professor was simply regurgitating the course syllabus, a copy of which he had already handed out to the class.

The woman had a high-cheeked, angular face, and a close-cut crop of snow-white hair sticking off the top of her head in a riot of pronounced spikes. Despite the white hair colour, however, she appeared to be only in her thirties. She wore mauve lip-gloss, which highlighted full, pouty lips, but her large, hazel-coloured eyes, liberally accented with eyeliner and mascara, were the most noticeable feature.

Her appearance was made even more striking by the fact she was also dressed completely in white, including the pantyhose under her flowing floor-length skirt. They were visible only because she had hoisted her legs up onto the seat, and was sitting cross-legged, while she continued to rapidly jot things down in a large, ornate, hard-covered notebook, also white.

Despite her unorthodox appearance, Flam decided the woman was quite attractive. As he studied her, she suddenly looked up, as if she knew she was being watched, catching Flam in the act. Before he had a chance to look away, she suddenly smiled at him with the sort of sweet, familiar grin lovers might share upon seeing one another across a crowded room. The woman added a little wink before resuming her enthusiastic notetaking.

Flam realized he was blushing and forced his attention back to the deadpan Professor Abbott. The teacher was still standing in the same stiff pose, staring off into space with hands pressed in front of his chest like a carved graveyard angel, droning on in an emotionless monotone.

“I must emphasize,” Abbott was saying, without any emphasis whatsoever, “this course is not intended to try to convert you to any one religion. Nor will I endeavour in any way to convince you to reject any particular religion, or for that matter to discard all religion in general. Now, I will hand out the reading list, which includes the required course texts plus a number of optional books I strongly urge you to read.” Despite the admonition, there was nothing strong or urging in Abbott’s oratory.

Flam chanced another glance at the woman, but as soon as he started his observation she again caught his gaze and smiled, as if some secret sense had alerted her to Flam’s attentions. Her smile was so friendly, and her look so inviting, that this time, despite his natural bashfulness and the frenzied drumbeat of his heart, Flam offered a slight smile of his own and maintained eye contact for several seconds until the circulating handouts reached him and demanded his attention. When he looked back, the woman had returned to her fervid scribbling, even though Professor Abbott was standing silently, waiting for the papers’ distribution to be completed.

Flam found the rest of the introductory lecture disappointing. Whether it was because of Professor Abbott’s expressionless demeanour and uninspired presentation, or the distraction of the woman in white, at whom Flam kept peeking in hopes of once again exchanging even a fleeting glance, the class totally lacked the spiritual stimulation and revelatory quality he had hoped to find.

Give it a chance, give it a chance, he kept telling himself, it’s only the first lecture. But within a half-hour, after establishing the woman was not going to smile or even look at him again, Flam found himself all but tuning out the lacklustre teacher, and instead toying with a limerick, which started: “A glum-faced professor called Abbott.” After an hour had painfully dragged out, Flam was contemplating dropping the course and getting a refund, and wondering how he’d conceal that fact from his mother without lying.

When Professor Abbott mercifully announced their mid-lecture break, the woman in white sprung from her seat and made a beeline straight for Flam. Her long white skirt billowed around her and made her resemble some Christmas pageant angel, lacking only cardboard wings and an aluminum foil halo to complete the effect.

“Hi, I’m Angel,” she announced, the synchronicity of her name with his thoughts making him smile. She casually reached out to squeeze his arm, and then plunged onward before Flam could utter a word in response. “I saw you looking over earlier and I’m convinced we’re connected on the spiritual plane . . . it really feels like our souls are drawn to each other. I have to be honest—and I bet you hear this all the time—but I am totally blown away by the size of your . . ..”

She stopped abruptly at this point, and held up her finger in a just-a-minute gesture, leaving Flam hanging in suspense and completely confused. Angel suddenly squeezed her eyes tight and let go a girlish sneeze. Still keeping her eyes closed, she raised her hands up to shoulder height, rotated the palms outward, and chanted a handful of strange words under her breath that were totally foreign to Flam. Finally, she reopened her eyes, smiled innocently, and resumed talking, her words flowing and tumbling from her non-stop, like spring water down a brook.

“. . . the size of your aura, omigosh it’s huge and, wow, it has such really cool colours too. I’ve never seen one like it. I can just tell that you’re the most amazing guy. So, what do you think of the course so far? Abbott is so interesting, don’t you think?”

Angel kept right on talking incessantly while Flam just stood, mouth agape, unable to respond or slip in a word, even though every second sentence was posed to him as a question. In fact, he was relieved that her unending stream of words allowed him to avoid having to reveal his name.

As she continued to merrily babble, Flam studied Angel more intensely. She was shorter than she’d appeared in her seat, barely coming up to his chin, and had an ample bosom, which sloped down to an enticingly slim waist. He saw from her eyebrows, despite the fact they’d seemingly been dyed at one point as well, that she was naturally a brunette, making him wonder why she had opted for pure white as a hair colour.

All of her fingers and both thumbs were covered in an eclectic collection of hand-crafted rings, some quite large, all of fine silver and worked intricately into exotic flowing shapes and runes. A few of the symbols Flam recognized from his readings, but most were totally unfamiliar. Each wrist was likewise adorned with several silver bracelets. When she lifted her hand and sent the jewellery sliding down her arm with a soft, musical tinkling, it revealed, coiled completely around her right wrist, a tattooed ouroboros, with the juncture where the artfully inked serpent’s mouth swallowed its own tail appearing on the soft inside of her wrist.

She had a constant, childlike smile, and a persistent habit of familiarly stroking his arm as she spoke. This, plus an intoxicating scent—not really a perfume but some unusual yet pleasant organic soap or lotion—all combined to create an instant aphrodisiacal effect on Flam. This effect was made stronger still since, as Flam had quickly noticed, the buxom Angel was not wearing a bra. He had to work hard to keep from gawking at the protuberance of her nipples that was easily visible through the taut fabric of her satiny white blouse.

He was standing there mesmerized by her charms when she grabbed his arm and shook him from his reverie. “Hey, look at the time! We should grab a coffee or something before class starts again,” she suddenly suggested, abruptly changing the course of her monologue yet again. But now she began to look around, as if searching for someone, and Flam’s heart dropped instantly when he heard her say, “Where’s Joe? We should ask him along too . . . he’s such a sweetie. Oh, there he is.”

Flam was unexpectedly stabbed by jealousy and glanced over to see who she was looking at. He naturally expected the worst, and immediately hated himself for naively believing again that an attractive female’s attentions were anything more than casual friendliness. His fears seemed to be confirmed when he saw a tall, good-looking, fair-haired man in his thirties presiding over a clique of their classmates, and looking over with obvious interest when Angel floated towards that group. To Flam’s delight, Angel did not so much as glance in the blond man’s direction. Joe proved instead to be the wizened, hunched-over old-timer Flam had noticed earlier. Angel quickly wrapped her arm around the little fellow’s shoulders, and guided him back to where Flam was standing.

As he loomed over the small old man, Flam noticed for the first time that Joe, in addition to his beard, wore a yarmulke nestled onto the back of his head, and found it commendable that a devout Jew of the old school had the curiosity to take a Comparative Religion class. But there was no time for Flam to comment on this as Angel neither offered nor allowed introductions, and instead, casually slipped in between the pair of oddly-matched males and, taking her newly acquired escorts arm in arm, proceeded to guide them without resistance towards the coffee kiosk. She babbled merrily the whole way about how she’d once been an Elizabethan midwife and nurse in a past life, and felt certain the three of them had known each other intimately in that period.

There was something alluring and stimulating, yet at the same time relaxing, about Angel’s presence. Flam was content to be passively carried along by the spirit and energy of her inexorable mile-a-minute personality. So it also seemed was Joe, because a wide, amused smile never left his extraordinarily wrinkled face. As he shuffled along at a surprisingly lively pace, he continued to beam up at the girl, for despite her short stature, no more than 5-foot-2, Flam reckoned, Angel was still an inch or so taller than the elfin Joe.

Flam tried on a couple of occasions to answer one of Angel’s constant rhetorical questions, or make a contribution to one of her trains of thought. So did Joe, but both soon found it was pointless and gave up trying. Instead, the two men found themselves making eye contact and smiling knowingly at one another over Angel’s amusing oral meanderings.

By the time they returned to the classroom, the pointedly punctual Professor Abbott had already resumed the lecture, and the trio quietly slunk back into their respective seats. By now, Flam had decided against dropping the course, and began taking some half-hearted notes. He had to force himself to focus on the course content, which was now dealing with the widespread influences of Zoroastrianism. Although Flam would have been loath to admit it to himself, this resurrected academic interest had little to do with the lecture’s content, and could be attributed directly to the influence of the exotic Angel.

Meanwhile, the newfound object of his desire had no sooner settled into her seat than she started again busily writing in her large white notebook with a fervour and concentration that bunched up her pretty brow. Something in the professor’s pedantry must have hit home for her, for when Joe and Flam instinctively gravitated back to her side after the class had ended, she seemed deep in thought, almost troubled. As she gathered up her belongings, she was now apparently in no mood for chit chat.

An awkward silence fell on the trio. Flam was about to seize the opportunity to impress his newfound acquaintances with an erudite comment on some of the more obvious omissions in the lecture about the evolution of Heaven and Hell, for the book-loving Flam had encountered Zarathustra often during his earlier, single-minded research into funerary rites. Angel suddenly broke the quiet with a soft, “Sorry, boys, I have to go,” and promptly dashed off. As she hurried away in her oddly agitated state, instantly causing Flam’s heart to sink in her wake, she turned and flashed a sparkling smile back at the bemused pair. “We should all go out for coffee together after class next week,” she offered. Then, like some ghostly white apparition, she disappeared out the classroom door.