Interview with the Professor

Returning to my task, I asked, "Have there been any attempts to cure Tami's allergy?"

Rod Sykes paused so as to give me a thoughtful answer. "Early on, but each attempt seemed to make it worse. Then a few years ago, we heard about Henry Ross."

"Oh, yes. I was told about him."

"Yes . . . Well as you recall, he was reported captured by terrorist rebels in Burma who thought he was a spy. Of course he wasn't, no matter what the media said, he was just smuggling. They tortured him and killed him. Then the details of the torture came out. It was exactly what Tami had sometimes fantasized about as the proper punishment for him, when she would get drunk."

"Right," I remembered. "They put his testicles in a vise and kept squeezing until they popped." He lived for a week afterward, until finally they disemboweled him. It made all the news shows, and led to calls for an invasion. But there weren't enough troops available, even with the draft we have now.

"Yes," he said, shifting uneasly in his chair, as I suppose any man would. "So that did a real guilt trip on Tami. She's hated Ross but would never really wish that on anyone. Her allergy suddenly got worse. She went into anaphylactic shock and they had to rush her into a freezer. By the time I got there she was standing on a block of ice, and they were pressing more blocks of ice against her, front and rear. That's when I had to think fast and set up the climate control."

"But what happened to Ross wasn't her fault."

"Yes, but . . . I blame it on her Catholic upbringing. Guilt, original sin. If something bad happens, it's always your fault somehow."

"I thought her family was supportive."

"Oh of course. Her dad was in a way the rock of her life, until he died. Her brother thinks of her as a hero, even though he's the one who's been in three wars. And her mother . . . " Suddenly and surprisingly his eyes got wet. "You should have seen how proud she was when she finally got her college degree. She had always wanted to go to college, but couldn't afford it until Tami and I paid her way through. It was a beautiful day, and they were able to get Tami's booth out there, even though it was hard for Tami to see because of all the frost in the booth. Martha went over with her diploma and they touched hands through the glass as everyone cheered.

"Sorry for getting emotional", he said, smiling. With his dark skin, in the dim light of the bar his white teeth were almost the only part of him I could see.

After a moment I said, "How is your business going?"

"Pretty well, considering. I'm lucky to get some Canadian clients recently."

"I heard your specialty is refrigeration."

"Well, it's *become* my specialty. Air conditioning too. Designing climate environments that take minimal energy. Not too many people do that. Business is O.K., considering the sorry shape our country's in. And I like being my own boss."

I felt like there was not much more for me to ask. I reflected on what we'd talked about. "Tami is very brave and yet very modest," I observed.

"As she sees it, she's lucky. She thinks of all the people who get killed in wars. And the arm that I lost. Or others with disabilities. Her friend Marisol, for example. A college friend of hers. For years she's badly needed a breast reduction but she can't because she's hemophilic and can't undergo surgery. The last time we visited her, down in the Bronx, she was almost disabled by back pain."

"That's a shame."

"Yes . . . so I suppose in the big scheme of things Tami's right. There are people worse off."

"And a lot of people love her."

"Yes . . . She's surrounded by freezing air, but also by love."

"And she has lots of orgasms."

"She counts every one in her head. Did you know that?"

No, I hadn't been told. "Seems impossible."

"She's always been good with numbers. She aced her major, math, when she was an undergrad." Then he paused and said, "There are some things about her orgasms that are curious. I'm sure you've heard that she can't bring herself off, with her own hand."

No, I hadn't heard that. More and more I was beginning to think my briefing had been incomplete.

"Also . . . you know about theta waves?"

"Aren't those . . . brain waves?"

"Yes. A couple of years ago there was some research in Germany where they compared theta waves of men and women during repeated orgasm. The men's were all the same. That wasn't surprising to me. For men, multiple orgasms are a learned response and theoretically, at least, any man can experience them. But women seem to fall into two classes, according to their theta waves. Some are naturally multiorgasmic, and others are once-and-it's over."

Like me, I thought. Though I wasn't comfortable disclosing anything so personal about myself. Not to a man. "It's obvious what class Tami falls into."

"Actually no. Tami volunteered to get hooked up to the machine. According to her theta waves, she is a one-orgasm woman."

"How can that be?"

"During those experiments at Chalfont, when she was strapped into those machines, she was forced to have further orgasms even after every fiber of her being wanted to be left alone after the first one. And she was forced to respond over and over and over again, session after session, all semester. So with her, multiple orgasms are unnatural. But she ended up needing them and finally craving them. And I think she sees Chalfont and Ross in her mind every time she comes. That probably goes a long way to describing her allergy. Though what goes on inside her mind, not even she probably knows. She's a very, very complicated person."

I already suspected there was a lot going on in that pretty, goose-bumped, shaved head . . . We sat and finished our drinks. Then Rod said, "Let me at least get the tip. I have a few." Euros, that is. He got up. "It's almost six o'clock. Time to collect her."

"How do you manage that?"

"Our jeep has a glass box in the passenger seat. One thing she misses is being able to drive. And work on cars. That was a big thing with her."

"Can I come with you? I want to see this jeep."

"O.K. . . ." As we emerged into sunlight, shielding our eyes, he said, "At least the price of gas went down."

"Yes. . . Finally! Back to twenty bucks a gallon."

"It's about time."

Part 3

I shouldn't have been surprised by his businesslike manner; after all, Prof. Harald Warmspring was the Dean. But I didn't expect the head of this fashion institute to be built like a linebacker. His biceps seemed to bulge out of his shirtsleeves. None of the swishiness I saw in some of the other faculty teaching their respective classes up and down the hall. When he got done with his New Synthetics class, he whisked me briskly down the hall, turning down the opposite hall from Tami's office, and sat me down with a decaf that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

"Thanks for taking the time," I said. "You must be busy."

"Yes. So many things to attend to in this job," he said, referring apparently to some irritation.

"How long have you been Dean?"

"A year. The job is a hot potato. Tami's next and she knows it."

"I wonder if her -- disability would keep her from handling that hot potato."

He smiled at this little joke. "Of course not. Tami can do anything."

"How does it affect publicity? Recruitment? To have a nude fashion technology professor?"

He got out the latest catalog. Sure enough, Tami's picture was alongside the others on the "Meet Our Faculty" page. Like the others, her picture was cropped at the neck. Still she was notable for her shaved head and the hint of bare shoulders. With the cropping, one could plausibly guess she was wearing a strapless dress. And that playful, crinkly smile, her "eyebrows" making her bald scalp move a little forward.

"The topic of her allergy must come up."

"She's 'Tami Beethoven'," Dean Warmspring said with a shrug. "Her nudity is part of her creative process. It isn't hard to figure that out. Well known in the industry, though she is not one to beat her own drum. She's amazingly modest for someone in this field, which tends to be filled with egomaniacs." Again, reflecting irritation, perhaps hinting at egomaniacs he had to deal with on the faculty.

I paused. "It's so poignant. Her creativity must be an expression of her desire for covering, don't you think?"

He looked up at the clock and then lapsed into silence for a while. Perhaps he realized he had more time to spend with me than he thought. "If it is, it's something she would never admit to. No one ever asks her. It would be too personal."

"Do you think she even remembers what clothes feel like?"

He thought for a second. "Probably not. Not after thirteen years of forced nudity. Practially half her life, she's been the only naked person in a world of clothed people. The memory of clothing is probably gone. By now all she has is a memory of having a memory." He pulled out a loose leaf of laminated designs and gave it to me. "Like Beethoven after years of deafness, her imagination is operating on some different plane. Like an alien from outer space, looking down at us Earthlings and noticing this peculiar device called clothes, recognizing their utility for socialization and warmth, and creating accordingly." From his florid language I could tell that he'd been thinking about it for a long time.

"Warmth . . . She still must know what warmth feels like."

"Oh of course. She sees it all around her, especially now when the weather's getting hot. People dressing less, lying out there in the sun with their eyes closed, enjoying the rays. She can't enjoy ambient warmth herself, and she's restricted to cold food, but she feels warmth when exercising. And during sex."

"It must give her something to look forward too, when she's shivering in that booth."

"Yes. We can't be thankful enough, of course. The name of the School of Design attaches to every achievement of hers, beginning of course with the armed services contract."

"How do people feel about that? Being in bed, so to speak, with the military?"

"In the fashion world I think everyone's resigned to it. This is a more militarized country than it was twenty years ago, and the private contractor sector is huge, at least the part of it that isn't being outsourced to Dubai. See her portfolio?" he said, leaning his considerable bulk over the desk toward me. "It begins with 'Cherish', then goes on to her military work and then some of her interesting commercial designs. One problem with her is labeling. Her designs tend to fall outside the normal categories of 'shirts', 'dresses', and so on."

He watched with me as I slowly leafed through. These were indeed strange designs, half-shirt, half-skirt, or half-gloves, half-sweater, and half-hat, half-I-don't-know-what. There were very few skimpy designs. Almost all seemed to afford full coverage and warmth. Warmth seemed like the main emphasis. Maybe it was due to Tami Smithers's influence that women, especially, had been covering up more in recent years.

As I got to page 37, near the end, he said, "Footwear has always been a problem with her. For some reason she has difficulty conceptualizing it, in that metallic, clothesless, shoeless universe her mind works in. But see how she's solved it?"

I recognized the red boots the squeaky-voiced girl was showing off to the professor -- I mean Tami -- after my classroom visit. But it turned out they weren't just boots, they continued on with a kind of loop that went up around the knees.

"The material used is very soft and pliable, ordinarily not stiff enough to serve as footwear, but Tami solved that problem with the extension around the knees. She uses math, hyperbolic functions, I don't understand it completely, to balance the forces so that support is transferred from the knee."

"Wow."

"As a result the boots are uniquely warm and comforting. They've been described as 'like wearing earmuffs on your feet'. Of course the model is unisex. Most of us intend to be wearing them when next winter comes." He turned from me and said, "Want to try some on? What are you, a size eight?"

Funny how he knew that. Of course, he was an expert in fashion design and very observant. I was going to say no but I have the usual feminine preoccupation with shoes. And I couldn't refuse the floppy red items that draped sensuously across my hands. So I slipped off my Oscar de la Renta heels, not very comfortable but stylish, and pulled on the boots. "Oooohh!" I couldn't control my reaction. It was like my feet were in a warm bubble bath. I'd never felt boots so soft and warm. Better yet, I could wiggle my toes in them freely. I stood up and walked there and back a few steps. "This is magic!" I laughed at my voice, which had an enthusiastic girlish squeak just like that student's.

Dean Warmspring laughed. "That's everyone's reaction. You should see how men react. We were in a circle around Tami's booth telling her how they felt. She always likes to hear that, about her designs. My own words were downright flowery."

Jokingly I pointed the boots to and fro, like a model showing them off on a runway. Then I exhaled, as if afraid I was going to have an exotic kind of foot orgasm, and sat down. Still wiggling my toes in them, I picked up the portfolio again.

"What a tragedy," I said, "that Tami can never enjoy what she creates. And now her allergy's getting worse."

"Yes I heard. It should only help her output. It's a sad fact, that the colder Tami gets, the more violently she shivers, the more brilliantly imaginative her designs."

I shook my head. "That is just downright cruel."

"Look at the last page."

It was a very shaky drawing, of a full-body suit with seams in unusual places. "What is this?"

"A drawing Tami made in her booth a few days ago. It's hard for her to draw when shivering so much, but it looks like a kind of mechanic's overalls shirred so that every movement rubs fabric against those muscles that are being used. Kind of like a self-massager."

"Wow." It seemed like the tenth time I'd said that.

"It will be constructed and tested in front of her, as always. And biometric results reported to her. Of course that will not be her final design. She always fiddles with them about twenty times before submitting them for patent. She lets the models keep the prototypes. In fact she clothes a good part of the faculty and students here. This," he said, touching the jacket he had hung up next to him, "is the penultimate prototype of the blazer on page 25."

"It still seems cruel, everyone wearing these warm clothes she designs, considering how she herself is always naked and freezing."

"It's what she does, Stephanie," he said, calling me by name for the first time. "We thought her urge to design, and to teach design, might be a kind of self-punishment, for example for what happened to that creep Henry Ross. By the way, I'm one of the few left who opposes capital punishment, but with that guy, I would have had very few scruples pulling the switch on him. . . Or we thought that designing might be exacerbating her allergy somehow. So three years ago we made her take a sabbatical. She did math work for the Military Physics Department over at Brown. But she wasn't happy and she came back with a batch of new designs under her arm. 'It's what I do, Harald,' she told me. Then she said the closest thing to self-analysis I've ever heard from her. She said, 'My being naked, cold and naked, has a purpose. Its purpose is to make me design good clothes.'

"So there you have it. If she didn't design clothes, Tami's shivering would have no purpose."

What a ghastly assessment. He was trying to put a positive spin on it but it was like talking about a terminally ill person. Rodney Sykes had been bleak too. Everyone, it seemed, was sad about Tami's predicament except Tami herself. I remembered her bubbling laugh as to my question about faking orgasms, at the same time she was having one.

I shook my head again. "What a bleak, horrible suffering."

He waited for me to finish shaking my head. Then he said, "She has all the love anyone can have. And sexual pleasure past what you or I could imagine. . . I tell you what. You don't have a full picture of her life. Let me invite you to the next Faculty Steering Committee meeting. It's down at her house."

"Wow, you go all the way down there? What about gas?"

"We car pool. We'll pick you up too. Be here tomorrow night at six thirty."

I looked down at my red booted feet, wiggling my toes in them, feeling the sensuous warmth. Then both of us looked up as we heard the whirring sound of Tami's booth approaching.

She was in the doorway now, her beautiful naked hairless body stretched out, her arms pushing up on the overhead support bars. Her breath came out in thick clouds. Evidently she had been in the booth for some time. Frost encrusted the corners of the glass, and I could swear I saw a rime of frost on her "eyebrows". With her arms up, her big firm breasts almost stuck in our faces, the huge dark areolas, and her nipples, big and long and permanently erect in the subfreezing cold. I looked further down, past her concave tummy, the strong lithe legs. Then her purplish bare feet, the toes spread as they gripped the raised holes of the metal ramp. I could see Homer had addressed her concerns as to the metal points. They were sharper and higher now, digging into her tough soles in a way that would be very painful to an ordinary person's feet.

I looked at my booted feet, snug and warm in the soft sensuous boots, then at her freezing bare feet, purplish and impaled on the cold metal points. My toes stopped wiggling.

"S - sorry," she shivered. "I d - didn't know you were m -meeting."

"It's O.K.," Harald Warmspring said. "We were about done anyway." He looked at me and I nodded. "Tami, do you mind if she attends tomorrow's meeting?"

"G - good God." Her blue lips smiled along with her eyebrowless green eyes. "You'd b - b - be b - b - bored to death."

"I'd still like to go," I said. I couldn't help but look down again at my feet and then hers.

"F - fine." There was no reason to keep her hands up on those bars, giving us a full frontal view of her stretched-out nudity, but she kept them up there. "Stay f - for the l - little p -party afterwards. My f - friends will be therrre."

"Thanks. . . I have to go now."

"G - g - good to see you again." Now she let her arms down and, to my surprise, brought her shivering arms down to her pussy lips. Her fingers shook but after two attempts she spread her lower lips wide open. In a little babyish voice she said, "B - b - bye - b - bye!" as her clitoris, wet and erect in the cold of the booth, jumped up at me twice. Apparently a special salutation for friends. Along with Dean Warmspring I couldn't help but smile.

So help me, I couldn't make the rendesvous with Dean Warmspring. I had to call him and apologize. He and his two car pool mates would have to spend a little more for that long ride to Westerly.

Long! It's only 25 miles. But in Rhode Island your sense of distance gets foreshortened. Like my trip to Tami's home neighborhood, to see the house she grew up in. It was like a different part of the planet, on the other side of town, but in fact it was only a mile as the crow flies. I could have walked instead of driven. Here and there an invasion of yuppies, the occasional newly and sometimes garishly painted house, but traditionally a working-class, if not actually depressed, area. I had access to Sarah Wickland's slide show of 2001 and visited those places, Ezek Hopkins Square, the run-down church. But the church seemed to be undergoing an expansion. A young dark-skinned family with kids strolled by, Spanish phrases in the air, merengue on the radio from an open window, and my perspective subtly changed. Tami's old neighborhood was being taken over by Hispanic immigrants. Then I saw that what looked like run-down stores were actually active restaurants and bodegas, people going in and out. No bright lights, no redone storefronts, but the neighborhood wasn't depressed. It was vibrant. As for the old house itself, it seemed to have been (no doubt illegally) subdivided, judging from the three mailboxes next to the door. Two happy little kids ran around the mostly grassless front yard.