During her first semester at Columbia, Abbey Shaine loses all interest in Epicurus and Epictetus and instead falls for her professor, Dmitri Green. Young-ish, brilliant, and constantly in a state of self-propelled enthusiasm, Dmitri is exciting. Sleeping with a professor, and falling in love with one, has a craven velocity to it that makes her feel like life has become bigger, super sized.

How did they meet? He’s teaching a seminar on architecture and philosophy at Columbia. He arrives to class looking disheveled and put-upon, like it’s his cross to bear to be a brilliant, dynamic thinker. The philosophical wars he must wage in the basement of Avery library between the pages of post-structuralist theory! And this works on Abbey Shaine.

After the first seminar she approaches him, “I think I should drop this class,” She looks into his dark eyes, thinks these are the pathways to knowledge and wisdom, “You see, I’m a freshman and this class will likely be too advanced. I have no foundation…” Those are the words she speaks, but her mind silently articulates, “I should not be falling so easily in love with a middle aged man, two inches shorter than myself, with narrow shoulders. And I should drop this class now to save us the trouble.” He says, “Don’t be ridiculous. You asked the most intelligent question of the day.” He silently registers her no bra and clingy white sweater and wondered if she has an ass.

As a lecturer he’s unintelligible. But Abbey Shaine’s hooked on his style: a performative, intellectual wrestler of sorts. Dmitri seems to be searching for the theorem which, Deleuze-like, could bleed from one discrete arena of inquiry to the next, melding all things into one cohesive, complex web of meaning. He constructs worlds of thought which, in content resembled the love child of the Book of Genesis and MIT’s Zone Books series. The product is a panacea to existential, professorial angst; bathing the road to tenure and publication in a light of ineffable glory! Abbey Shaine cannot eat, she cannot sleep, she becomes very thin and feels eminently fuckable.

So, on instinct, one Tuesday evening, after seminar, Abbey Shaine follows Dmitri Green to the 1 train going south. She rides next to him, talks nervously about an installation art practice that exists no more than her reason for going downtown–she lives on campus and presumes this is un-sexy to a professor. He asks where she lives. “Brooklyn,” Abbey Shaine says. A lie she says it without hesitation, thus securing a ride downtown with him every Tuesday and Thursday evening for the next four months.

For an entire semester she sits next to Dmitri on the subway listening to his long-winded responses to her carefully crafted questions. It’s like handing a flight path to a pilot and forty-five minutes later they’d arrive at her supposed destination, Borough Hall. She says goodnight, gets off, watches the train depart and then crosses to the other platform to wait for the Harlem bound train to arrive.

For the final class, Abbey Shaine has a plan. She rents his favorite movie, Contempt, from Kim’s and has it in her bag. She’ll let him know that she possesses this thing they mutually enjoy and if nothing transpires then she will lure him to a “friend’s” dorm where Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, a book he’d lent her, was waiting to be retrieved by him. Should she say Le Mepris or Contempt? She struggles.

As they walked to the subway, performing the bi-weekly ritual, he inquireds about her evening plans. She pulls out the DVD, hands shaking with desire.
“A bottle of wine and Contempt.”

They’re walking west across the main red-brick walkway. It has rained. It’s a very fine New York winter evening. One of those nights that are clear and windless. The stars are out. The twinkling holiday lights decorating the cherry trees provide an atmosphere of romantic perfection that verges on the ironic. Abbey Shaine’s heart races, and she swears her genitals ache. Will he take the bait?

“You fucking bitch.” He says eyeing her suspiciously.
That was not the response she expects.
“What? You wanna watch?”
“Yes.”

That’s it. They ride the subway to his Brooklyn home. They enter. He opens a bottle of wine. Not one glass in, Dmitri Green stands up and says the sexiest line to ever incorporate itself into Abbey Shaine’s log of human interaction: “Now I’m going to turn off the light and hit on you and if you don’t like it, you can slap me.”

Abbey Shaine doesn’t know what “hit on” means, but she wants it. They never make it to the movie, ever.

A few days later, they’re in bed. Dmitri’s holding her and, apropos of nothing, he says, “You know, after Picasso finished Demoiselles he stashed it in the closet. He was embarrassed.” She doesn’t know what Dmitri means, but loves the idea that she’s expected to have opinions about Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Dmitri talks about Picasso and De Kooning the way normal people talk about their co-workers, and this makes her feel like she has been initiated into some other, better world.