The gesture seemed lecherous. Sharon sensed it too. She looked away from him and said, “That’s all, Walter.”

“Tsk, tsk,” said Julian, raising a professorial pipe. “Let’s operationalize. Does she suck him? Or does he suck her? Or have they advanced to mutual sucking, the old six-nine pretzel?”

Sharon’s hands flew to her face. She coughed to keep from crying.

“Camille,” said Maddy. “What bullshit.”

“Enough,” I barked.

Maddy’s face darkened. “Another authoritarian father figure heard from.”

“Easy,” said someone. “Everyone mellow out.”

Sharon got to her feet, scooping up her books, struggling with them, all white legs and rustling nylon. “I’m sorry, please excuse me.” She made a grab for the door-knob, twisted it and ran out.

Walter said, “Catharsis. Could be a breakthrough.”

I looked at him, at all of them. Saw vulture smiles, smugness. And something else- a flicker of fear.

“Class dismissed,” I said.

I caught up with her just as she reached the sidewalk.

“Sharon?”

She kept running.

“Wait a second. Please.”

She stopped, kept her back to me. I stepped in front of her. She stared down at the pavement, then up at the sky. The night was starless. Her hair merged with it so that only her face was visible. A pale, floating mask.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, it was my fault. I acted like a baby, totally inappropriate.”

“There’s nothing inappropriate about not wanting to be bludgeoned. They’re some bunch. I should have kept a tighter rein on things, should have seen what was happening.”

She finally made eye contact. Smiled. “That’s all right. No one could have seen.”

“Is it like that all the time?”

“Sometimes.”

“Dr. Kruse approves?”

“Dr. Kruse says we have to confront our own defense systems before being able to help others.” Small laugh. “I guess I have a ways to go.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said. “In the long run, this kind of stuff’s irrelevant.”

“That’s nice of you to say, Dr. Delaware.”

“Alex.”

The smile widened. “Thanks for checking on me, Alex. I guess you’d better be heading back to class.”

“Class is over. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” She shifted her weight from one hip to the other, trying to get a firmer grip on the books.

“Here, let me help you with those.” Something in her was bringing out the Lancelot in me.

She said, “No, no, that’s okay,” but didn’t stop me from taking the books.

“Where’s your car?”

“I’m walking. I live in the dorms. Curtis Hall.”

“I can drive you to Curtis.”

“It’s really not necessary.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Well, then,” she said, “I’d like that.”

I dropped her off at the dorm, made a date for the following Saturday.

She was waiting at the curb when I came to pick her up, wearing a yellow cashmere sweater, black-and-yellow tartan skirt, black knee socks, and loafers. She let me open the car door for her. The second my hand touched the steering wheel, hers was upon it, warm and firm.

We had dinner at one of the smoky, noisy, beer-and-pizza joints that cling to every college campus- the best I could afford. Staking out a corner table, we watched Road Runner cartoons, ate and drank, smiled at each other.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, wanted to know more about her, to forge an impossible, instant intimacy. She fed me nibbles of information about herself: She was twenty-one, had grown up on the East Coast, graduated from a small women’s college, come west for graduate school. Then she steered the conversation to grad school. Academic issues.

Remembering the insinuations of the other students, I asked about her association with Kruse. She said he was her faculty adviser, made it sound unimportant. When I asked what he was like, she said he was dynamic and creative, then changed the subject, again.

I dropped it but remained curious. After that ugly session, I’d asked around about Kruse, had learned he was one of the clinical associates, a new arrival who’d already earned a reputation as a skirt-chaser and an attention-grabber.

Not the kind of mentor I would have thought right for someone like Sharon. Then again, what did I really know about Sharon? About what was right for her?

I tried to learn more. She danced nimbly away from my questions, kept shifting the focus to me.

I experienced some frustration, understood for an instant the anger of the other students. Then I reminded myself we’d just met; I was being pushy, expecting too much too soon. Her demeanor suggested old money, a conservative, sheltered background. Precisely the kind of upbringing that would stress the dangers of instant intimacy.

Yet there was the matter of her hand stroking mine, the open affection of her smile. Not playing hard-to-get at all.

We talked psychology. She knew her stuff but kept deferring to my superior knowledge. I sensed real depth beneath the Suzy Creamcheese exterior. And something else: agreeableness. A ladylike niceness that caught me by pleasant surprise in that age of four-letter female anger masquerading as liberation.

My diploma said I was a doctor of the mind, a sage at twenty-four, grand arbiter of relationships. But relationships still scared me. Women still scared me. Since adolescence I’d indentured myself to a regimen of study, work, more study, struggling to pull myself up out of blue-collar purgatory and expecting the human factor to fall into place along with my career goals. But new goals kept popping up and at twenty-four I was still pulling, my social life limited to casual encounters, mandatory, calisthenic sex.

My last date had been more than two months ago- a brief misadventure with a pretty blond neonatology intern from Kansas who asked me out as we stood in the cafeteria line at the hospital. She suggested the restaurant, paid for her own meal, invited herself to my apartment, immediately sprawled on the couch, popped a Quaalude, and got peevish when I refused to take one. A moment later the peevishness was forgotten and she was buck-naked, grinning and pointing to her crotch: “This is L.A., Buster. Eat pussy.”

Two months.

Now here I was, sitting opposite a demure beauty who made me feel like Einstein and wiped her mouth even when it was clean. I drank her in. In the candle-in-chianti-bottle light of that pizza joint, everything she did seemed special: spurning beer for 7-Up, laughing like a kid at the misfortunes of Wile E. Coyote, twirling strands of hot cheese around her finger before taking them between perfect white teeth.

A flash of pink tongue.

I constructed a past for her, one that reeked of high WASP sensibilities: summer homes, cotillions, deb balls, the hunt. Scores of suitors…

The scientist in me snipped my fantasies midframe: total conjecture, hotshot. She’s left you empty spaces- you’re filling them in with blind guesses.

I made another stab at finding out who she was. She answered me without telling me a thing, got me talking about myself again.

I surrendered to the cheap thrills of autobiography. She made it easy. She was a first-rate listener, propping her chin on her knuckles, staring up at me with those huge blue eyes, making it clear that every word I uttered was monumentally important. Playing with my fingers, laughing at my jokes, tossing her hair so that the light caught her earrings.

At that point in time I was God’s gift to Sharon Ransom. It felt better than anything else I could recall.

Without all that, her looks might have snagged me. Even in that raucous place teeming with lush young bodies and heartbreaking faces, her beauty was a magnet. It seemed obvious that every passing man was stopping and caressing her visually, the women appraising her with fierce acuity. She was unaware of it, remained zeroed in on me.