Pleased to Please You

The fizz of champagne is a curious thing. It seems to have the overwhelming power to make the thin glass enclosing it shatter into a million pieces.

The boy carrying the tray did not seem to harbour this same apprehension because he was carrying the flutes pretty confidently for someone who was doing it for the first time.

“You know how I know that he hasn’t done this before?” a man in his early thirties told an older woman standing in his vicinity. The man was dressed as all men are at gatherings such as these. It could be described in detail but that would add nothing to the general perception of him. He had been to too many of these parties to care about standing out and especially to know that standing out at these parties was not necessarily a good thing. You got invited to more parties if you ended up being a charming guest.

“Oh Professor, how?” the woman gasped. The professor did not miss the exaggeration of her reaction. He did not miss most things and this was just routine cocktail party behaviour. People continued to clutch at their pearls long after they were gone.

“Egan. You know you can call me by my name, right?”, the Professor sighed,  “Especially since this is an academic meet? Egan.”

The woman blushed with her entire body. It is unusual to see someone do that outside, in the real world. People were too tired out there to perform inane actions like blushing.

“How then did you know, Profes… Egan?”  she asked.

“Professor Egan is just fine,” Professor Egan smiled. It wasn’t an encouraging smile. She was coming on to him, he knew that. Most middle aged women did in parties such as these. His lips barely twitched at all. “I know he has never done this before because he is not terrified of what he is holding in his hands.”

The woman, who, like all others at this party, was also a professor, furrowed her eyebrows a bit. People could understand that she was thinking, “What he is holding in his hands, huh? Intoxication? He is holding delirium! That’s it.”

Her eyes managed to light up even though most people could not notice such a thing in a room with such glaring lights and such a redundant abundance of candles.

“No,” Professor Egan had started wondering roughly three minutes ago why he had started this conversation in the first place, “He is holding very fragile glasses.”

The woman had to laugh away the sheer mediocrity of this sentiment. Whenever professedly smart professors tend to say something so insensitively mundane, it has to be taken as a very smart joke that’s coming from a profound place you know nothing about.

“Excuse me, sir?”

A surprisingly steady voice startled Professor Egan out of his thoughts. A know-it-all leech of a post-grad was the last thing he wanted right now. But once he raised his eyes towards the speaker, he realised that it was not a student at all. It was the boy with the fragile glasses.

Again, it is possible to describe what the boy looked like but it would be a futile exercise. This boy stood out in this crowd and he would never be invited back to these gatherings again. Because:

A.      He had not been invited to this party in the first place.

B.      He was probably an idiot.

It is needless to say that these things pleased Professor Egan plenty. He would have followed the boy to the end of the world right now even if he had not looked the way he did. But fortunately for Professor Egan he did look the way he did.  

“Sir, there’s a gentleman in the portico who wishes to speak to you. Would you please…”

There was no one in the portico. But the professor had known this all along. It was dark and empty. Those who had wanted to be let in had already been let in and none of those people would want to be let out any time soon.

Now the intricate dance could begin.

It was easy to fall back into stereotypes. Erastes- eromenos. Different names in different centuries, it was all the same dance.

Did Professor Egan enjoy this dance? It is impossible to ascertain that for sure. One can question why he would have participated in this ancient ritual had he despised this? One would be correct, but not completely. On the other hand, saying that that claim is wrong would be to ignore the practicalities of this situation. No one was forcing him to do this. He could take a backseat and be dominated by this youth. But that would be falling back into a modification of the same stereotype- the blue-blooded soft gentleman being manhandled by the callused hands of a brutish working man. It’s theory once again. What wouldn’t the Professor give to be able to stop theorising!

“Bren.”

The boy’s voice brought the professor out of his trance again.

“You don’t have to tell me your name.”

The boy sat down on the marble staircase and lit a cigarette. “I know. But we are going to talk. I don’t like talking in abstractions.”

A familiar feeling of dread came over the professor.

“So you’re a student,” his displeasure was obvious, “What is this? A part time job? Here for the whole proletariat experience? You know I am not going to take you under my wing and whisper Socratic truths to you in bed, right?”

Bren laughed and patted the spot beside him, “Sit down, Egan. I’m not going to go to bed with you.”

How did the dance usually go after this, the professor wondered. Was he supposed to pursue the boy? He had never ended up here.  He felt like a buffoon with who had been dipped by his waist in a dance and not been pulled back up immediately.

“So… why did you call me out here?”

“Oh because there was a gentleman who actually wanted to meet you. I wasn’t lying about that. He must have left by the time we got here. He must have left a calling card at the front desk. You should check it out when you go back inside.”

“Of course,” the professor rolled his eyes, “that’s likely. Why don’t you just tell me why we’re here? You’re not a minor and I am not your supervisor so you cannot really blackmail me with this, so you must have wanted me out here for a reason. How are you so sure that you are not going to go to bed with me?”

It sounded strange in his head when he said it but he had a firm belief that this was all a part of the dance. Perhaps an extended circumlocution. But ultimately it would all end up where it is meant to end up.

“I am not going to go to bed with you,” said the boy with elaborate pauses between each word as if he was speaking to a particularly slow toddler, “because I don’t want to.”

The Professor felt his face heat up. It was a familiar feeling that he had not experienced in many years. Shame. He had miscalculated. And even though he did not understand how he had done so, he felt like a fool. He needed to leave. Especially because he had not foreseen the other more unpredictable outcome of feeling like a fool- he wanted to stay.

“Sit down, Egan.”

This time he did.

“Do you know about Thyestes?” he asked after a while. He felt like he needed some time to steady his voice.

“Perhaps,” the unnervingly confident voice answered back and the professor did not know what to think anymore.

Perhaps this was the mastermind of a generation that he was meant to mentor. Perhaps this was a brute that he was meant to be held down by. Perhaps this boy was perceptive enough to have read every single one of the professor’s thoughts. Perhaps he was a messiah who had been sent down from the heavens to stop him from dancing the same old dance of theory in bed. Oh, to be an absolute idiot if only for a day!

Or perhaps there really was a calling card at the front desk that said

“Doctor Egan, really wanted to meet you but had to rush.

–Regards, Professor H.

P.S.- The boy that I sent after you is really slow.”

Egan never checked.