The Three-Day Affair by Michael Kardos Page B

the only thing keeping Jeffrey in school was that modern European authors class. He’d already read “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice,” which had been assigned, as well as all the other stories in Mann’s collection, which hadn’t. Twice a week, our professor spoke in his resonant baritone to several hundred of us with great urgency from behind the podium in the McCosh lecture hall, removing and replacing a pair of glasses every few minutes from the bridge of his distinguished, birdlike nose. Apparently Professor Rinehart was quite famous, and we freshmen were lucky to be taught by him prior to his retirement at the end of the year. He’d begin to speak the moment the bell rang and seemed to have his lectures perfectly timed so that they ended just as the bell rang again fifty minutes later. I loved the music of his voice, the rhythm of his extemporaneous phrases, but I never knew what to write in my notebook or what to think about as I read for class.
    Jeffrey told me that I should be reading for the beauty of Mann’s language and the depth of his sympathy for outsiders and misfits. Hearing this, I felt guilty and sophomoric for my own lack of sympathy in my earlier attempts to read the work. I vowed to give it another try when I returned to my room.
    “That’s Mann in a nutshell,” he said. “Read for that and you’ll be fine. You might even come to like it.”
    Jeffrey was right. I did come to like it. Or at least I convinced myself that I did.
    But Jeffrey’s own interest in the modern European authors class, I learned soon enough, had less to do with modern European authors and more to do with the striking young woman who sat in the front row of the lecture hall. I’d noticed her, too, since early in the semester. She was curvy and blonde. She wore heart-stopping skirts and scuffed cowboy boots. Jeffrey and I began to refer to her as Dallas, since in our eyes she could pass for a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader a whole lot easier than a Princeton University freshman. And yet she seemed almost possessed in class, writing nonstop in her notebook, as if her method was to transcribe the professor’s entire lecture and then sort it out later.
    One day, Dallas raised her hand during class. This simply wasn’t done. Professor Rinehart would talk for fifty minutes and then the class would applaud. (This always amused me. I suppose that the professor gave good lectures, but also Princeton students liked knowing that they attended a college where the professors’ lectures received applause.)
    The day that Dallas raised her hand, Professor Rinehart had been talking to us about Sartre’s play
No Exit
. Her hand went up with just a few minutes remaining in the class. At first he ignored her. Then he stopped speaking and asked, “Is there a problem?”
    “Not a problem, Professor. Just a question.”
    The accent was all Texas drawl, and Jeffrey punched my leg and whispered, “
See?
”
    Students sat up straighter. A few nervous titters. We were all waiting. We were five weeks into the semester, long enough to crave something unusual.
    “And what question is that, Ms….?”
    “Paige.”
    Rinehart nodded. “A literary name.”
    Jeffrey and I had started sitting to the side of the lecture hall so that we could steal looks at Dallas. Her face lit up. Even her teeth were pretty. “Well, I guess I never thought of it that way.”
    Some more laughter, lots of glancing around.
    “Now, what is your question, Ms. Paige?”
    “Well,” she said. Two syllables. “You’ve been telling us about Sartre, how he believed in people’s ability”—here she checked her notes—“‘to choose their own essence.’ But I was wondering …” She glanced around, aware now of the crowd watching her, the gaze of six hundred eyes in the faces of three hundred honor students and valedictorians, each with an exceptional talent that had led them to this university, this classroom. “I was wondering if you, you know, think