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K R I S T E N' S C O L L E C T I O N
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WARNING!
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Archive name: William.txt
Authors name: Anne Tourney (Address unknown)
Story Title : William and the Carillion an A+ story
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This work is copyrighted to the author (c) 1997.
Please do not remove the author information or make
any changes to this story. You may post freely to non-
commercial "free" sites, or in the "free" area of
commercial sites. Thank you for your consideration.
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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 Decem-
ber 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 Christ-
mas 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 eu-
calyptus.
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.
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 glossy 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 the 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 bring-
ing them together and pointing her toes.
"I love the carillon. Will you take me up there some-
time?"
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 rubs grace-
fully up and down it--a swan riding a bicycle.
Her name is Kristen. She is one of three Kristen's
who registers for his Bach class, which can be plugged
in to the liberal arts curriculum as four art appreci-
ation units.
"Excuse me," he addresses her one morning. She is
talking to a friend while he lectures about the litur-
gical 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 says nothing...
"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 bril-
liant 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.
"Kristen was the name of a girl I was in love with,"
William tells the girl, in his dreams. "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."
The new Kristen cracks her blue gum, produces a bub-
ble 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 Mis-
souri 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 Kristen 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. Kristen 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 eye
lids, 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. Kristen 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, ex-
posed 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 re-
main stationary.
One afternoon in April, when he's walking from the
auditorium to the student union, he sees Kristen cros-
sing the campus alone. He is only twenty-nine years old,
he thinks. Why shouldn't he date a former student? The
likelihood of Kristen 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 shoul-
ders, 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.
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Kristen's collection - Directory 5