Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

thousand classes I would take everyone. I would major in Professor Eva. She rocks my world!!!!
    Right now, Eva was at work on her laptop preparing a class. For the past few hours she had been playing and replaying two performances of Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song” that she had tracked down on YouTube, one by Klaus Nomi, theother by Sting. They would be the departure point for a class discussion on representations of masculinities. The Nomi version showed Klaus arrayed in what looked to be transparent rain gear designed for the consumer determined to get wet and stay wet. From the shoulders of the cape-like garment a fan-shaped contraption rose to a towering height, a backdrop for Klaus’s chalk-white face, his lips gleaming with a shockingly intense scarlet lipstick. Nomi’s singing was an unearthly, piercing castrato-warble.
    In contrast, a deeper-voiced, bearded Sting sang lounging on a stool in a tweedy sports coat, a long scarf of the kind worn by British football fans draped casually around his neck. The chorus of attractive women who accompanied Sting periodically panted a refrain that was either meant to illustrate the effect of frigid weather on the respiratory system or to demonstrate what effect such close proximity to Sting had on the female libido.
    Hearing Klaus and Sting trill the same song for the seventh or eighth time, coupled with the incessant pounding in his hands, was slowly driving Brewster out of his mind, but he knew better than to ask Eva to desist or even to turn down the volume, especially when she was so completely absorbed in frantically scribbling notes about the meaning these enactments of masculinities indicated.
    Eva no longer needed to ponder or make notes on the sort of masculinity Charley Brewster enacted. It hadn’t taken her long to conclude that he was a poster boy for the bad hegemonic variety since he was white, heterosexual, and a member of a privileged profession. Once that was settled, her homophobia and misogyny sensors had gone on full alert.They beeped a lot in his company. No matter how he combed his conscience, Brewster couldn’t help feeling her sensors were prone to giving a lot of false readings.
    Three weeks ago, in the middle of one of their increasingly frequent and rancorous spats, Eva had said, “You know what, Charley? Whenever any of your assumptions are questioned, you start talking like a thug, acting like a thug.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Every second word is a curse word. It’s the way people with no ideas try to intimidate others.”
    “My father was a working man. It’s the way he talked when something pissed him off. The gosling walks in the gander’s footsteps. I got imprinted. If it walks like a goose, talks like a goose, I guess it’s a goose. Don’t blame me, I’m a social construct.”
    “I suppose
social construct
is a dig at my work. Don’t belittle me because I’m passionate about what I do. Unlike you, your department’s sleepwalker.”
    “Not passionate about what I do? I’ll have you know I ferret out comma splices with great fervour.”
    Coming in the door tonight Eva had taken one look at him and said, “So what’s wrong in Brewster’s Horizonless World now?”
    “I feel like shit. I’ve got these terrible pains in my hands.”
    “Pains from what?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe arthritis. The doctor wasn’t sure.”
    “Did you take something?”
    “I’ve been taking something all day. The something doesn’t do squat.”
    “I guess that means you didn’t make dinner.”
    “I thought maybe we could order some Chinese.”
    “No thanks. I’ll pass on the monosodium glutamate. But please yourself. I’ve got work to do.”
    Sitting slumped on the sofa, Brewster was struck by the appropriateness of the music, how well Purcell’s “Cold Song” suited the frosty atmosphere reigning in his apartment. Of course, the ice jam could be broken, the relationship ended with a single stroke. All he needed to