Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Any port is snug after a storm, and a familiar port was even better. Betty Boop came on
from out of the blue. Our psychic horizons melded in a Hawaii coffee shop for me, on a Texas
shrink's sofa for her.
She'd moved to Boston in '71 as a married grad student and got her master's degree in Eng-
lish literature. That degree and eight dollars could get her a cup of coffee in any of your better
resort hotels, but she did enjoy the intellectual discourse. Her new Ivy-League husband called
the marriage perfect, though perfection was relative to his campaign for the PhD. Betty was
an academic wife, which is similar to political wifery with equal measures of tedious small talk
and hopeless good cheer—and with limits on certain topics to keep the husband's profile per-
fect. As an up-and-comer on a fast track to tenure, the husband's instinct for literary meaning
and campus politics endeared him to senior faculty. His mentor, Professor Pontius Polyneseus
Pough, the Charles Grey Gildquist Chair for Elizabethan Prose, struck a pose of wisdom for
the ages. The grad students spoke of genetic descent from the masters, and though some took
the genetic reference as a joke, others did not.
Prof Pough would bang Betty twice on each visit after regular office hours on Tuesdays
and Thursdays for three months at her insistence. This from the Boop's mouth. She'd been
so alone, so beside herself with the new husband's preoccupation and total distraction from
everything but the PhD and academic potential with regard to agonizing analysis of the most
boring verse on Earth. She felt abandoned and stifled. Make no mistake: Betty was horny,
which was not a fault but a clear and present maintenance issue accruing to any husband with
a third-grade education or the equivalent in common sense thereof.
In time, on a carefully laid trail of slips, subtext and blatant clues, she felt sure hubby was
wise to the hanky-panky, as intended. He said nothing, leaving her no recourse but to keep
banging Pough, a chore in itself, she said, given his effusions of self-esteem and his tiresome
failure at getting it up. The latter problem sounded like an attempt to discount the exchange
as real sex, in which the hot and steamy is a function of mutually consenting adults. I would
not ask how she cured his equivocation. Didn't she say twice on each visit?
Finally, she left a note from Pough referencing romantic innuendo lying on the kitchen
table. Hubby found it and kept it. The note praised Betty's skills as equal in a global context to
Pough's own literary insights. Well, it was painful for hubby, she'd hoped. But she'd forced the
issue, demanding that he stand like a man to re-declare his love and challenge Pough to a duel
or a game of whist or something. He didn't. He began helping her cover her careless clues. He
remained true to academic potential. He seemed grateful for her support in the cause.
Betty finally told him point blank that she was banging the head prof twice on Tuesdays
and hursdays. Each.
How did hubby take the frontal verbal? He made a beeline to Professor Pough's office to
apologize for any misunderstanding.
