I first met Lise back in the U. You chose your major the way you chose toppings. You paid your money, you got your degree. My main interests were earning money and having a girlfriend. At the Pizza U Business School, in addition to girls hundreds of them, tweezering their legs in the lecture hall, squeezing their books against their chests: never had learning been so exciting! This had the effect of making me look good: a guy who knew what he was about.
Promising, as the letters of recommendation like to say. Lise had studied political science at the most elite graduate school in Paris.
Now she was in the U. How she ended up at Pizza U was a mystery to me: some kind of administrative shipwreck, I suppose. We met at a Halloween party, and instantly I was attracted. Not because she was foreign and sophisticated and from a tony school. I knew none of that, then. I was looking at her, not simply ogling but also wondering what her costume was supposed to be. There was something about the way she carried herself, excessively formal for a Halloween Party.
I almost told her this but kept my mouth shut. What she saw in me is harder to say. Lise was out of her element, that was for sure, and in such circumstances, people can get lonely and behave differently than they might otherwise.
Seductions can happen, like falling downstairs. Not long after that first party this sounds silly, but the truth often is , Lise dressed me up with a hat and jeans and a little leather vest and then surveyed the result, which seemed to affect her strongly: she kept touching me and laughing. This was a new experience. She would touch my shoulders, tug my belt, then laugh some more. It made me laugh with her. Then she kissed me on the mouth.
