The Professor and the Prostitute Read Online Free PDF Page B

Barry Manilow and the urgent ones of Michael Jackson. She learned to drive, and her father taught her to crawl under the old Pinto to change the oil and keep the car in shape.
    To look at photographs of Robin in those days is to see Everygirl: in a bouffant, off-the-shoulder dress for her Junior Prom; in a slinky, black spaghetti-strap number for the Senior Prom; playing the flute in the high school talent show; working on the yearbook with a camera slung around her neck.
    But she must have found life dull. I was struck, as I wandered around Methuen inquiring into Robin’s adolescence, by how little the town has to stimulate teenagers or to satisfy their longing for excitement and glamour. The main street is shabby. There are no lively gathering places. Teenage lovers drive to the Methuen Water Tower, a historic structure high on a hill, and stare at the view, daydreaming of places beyond Methuen. Or they neck in the one really private part of town, the Bellevue Cemetery. No wonder that in high school, Robin eventually began hanging out with a crowd of Hispanic teenagers from her school who knew where to find whatever action there was in the area. They would drive to discos in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Salisbury, Massachusetts, and Robin, who was light on her feet, would frequently win disco dance competitions. She also had her first sexual experiences. And, at around the time she was seventeen, an abortion.
    One of Robin’s high school boyfriends, a young man who eventually became an auto mechanic, remembered her from those days as “strong and smart,” the kind of girl who was beautiful and knew it—and who knew as well that she wanted something more for herself than the life of a Methuen housewife.
    One night during her senior year, Robin glimpsed a way to get the kind of life she daydreamed about. She had gone with a high school beau to attend a promotional football game that pitted the New England Patriots against the faculty of the Voke. After the game, there was a celebratory dinner, and Robin and her boyfriend got to talking with Ray Costic, a linebacker with the Patriots. Costic, a black from Mississippi, had been feeling out of place with many of the people he’d been meeting in New England, but he took a liking to Robin and her crowd and decided to join the group after dinner. They went to a disco and danced and drank, and Costic entertained the students with tales of his famous team, the places he’d been, the games he’d won. Robin found Costic, tall and muscular and far more worldly than the high school boys she was accustomed to dating, fascinating.
    That summer, after graduation, she took a job at a small graphic arts company and, although her parents had made it clear that they didn’t want her dating black men, set her sights for Costic. He’d said he was lonely, so she invited him home. Her parents were football fans and, unaware of her romantic interest in the athlete, entertained him and politely asked him to come again. He did and brought several of his teammates. Soon he was going to the Benedicts’ regularly, enjoying Sunday dinners with them, getting them tickets to his games, driving them home afterward. But he made no move toward Robin. He knew that her father disapproved of him, and besides, he had a girlfriend back home in Mississippi, a woman who had borne him a child. But Robin didn’t care about either of these facts, and one lazy summer afternoon, while Ray was at one of her parents’ backyard barbecues, she cornered him in a foyer, declared her admiration, and kissed him ardently. Her passion overrode his reluctance, and not long afterward he invited her to live with him in his expensive and fashionably furnished apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts.
    Robin was “good in bed,” Ray told reporters. But he liked her for her artistic abilities, too. Having decided to become an illustrator, she was taking some art courses at the