index


Message-ID: <62203asstr$1339596601@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: Uther Pendragon <nogardneprethu@gmail.com>
Subject: {ASSM} "Portrait - F" -- Uther -- nosex
Lines: 272
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 10:10:01 -0400
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
Approved: <assm@asstr-mirror.org>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d


If you are under the age of 18, or otherwise forbidden by law to read
electronically transmitted erotic material, please go do something else.

This material is copyright, 2011, Uther Pendragon. All rights reserved. I
specifically grant the right of downloading and keeping one electronic copy
for your personal reading so long as this notice is included. Reposting
requires previous permission.

If you have any comments or requests, please e-mail them to me at
nogardneprethu@gmail.com.

All persons here depicted, except public figures depicted as public figures
in the background, are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to
persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.


Portrait - F
by Uther Pendragon
nogardneprethu@gmail.com

nosex


It was really past time she should make the call, Carolyn Pierce thought,
but the twins had been going through successive growth spurts. Being a new
mother was more than a full-time job; being a student on top of that had
been too much to ask. But, if she wanted her degree in '74, she would have
to act soon.

Prof. Kindle answered his phone. She still knew when his office hours were.

"Professor? This is Carolyn Pierce."

"Yes, Mrs. Pierce. I was afraid that you had forgotten us." Forgotten him?
She'd sent him a draft of her dissertation two weeks before going into the
hospital.

"I hadn't forgotten you. I just couldn't cope with anything but the babies
for the past month. Anyway, did you get my draft?" Bill had delivered it
personally, but it was better to ask.

"Yes, and I had some suggestions." Of course, he had suggestions. The soup
always tasted better to the advisor after he'd pissed in it. "Do you want
to make an appointment to discuss it?"

"That's the thing. If you could come here for dinner Saturday, Bill, my
husband, will be able to manage the boys. If that's not acceptable, I'll
get a sitter for the time you want." Though sitters while high-school
classes were in session were scarce as rubies, and twice as expensive.

"Are you inviting me to dinner? That is quite kind of you. What time?"

"Would six-thirty be convenient? We're used to eating around then, but
that's merely a habit on Saturdays." Actually, the boys were used to eating
before then, which made his coming then remarkably convenient.

"Six-thirty this Saturday. I'd be delighted."

She figured that Kindle deserved lamb chops. Bill drove her to the
butcher's shop -- she wasn't going to depend on a butcher's department in a
supermarket when her dissertation's acceptance might hang on the taste of
the meal -- on Friday. He did what he could to give her time in the kitchen
to do the cooking. Bill was being very cooperative.

The same couldn't have been said of his sons. They got their schedules off,
and -- try as she might -- kept them off. She was nursing Paul when the
bell rang. Bill answered it carrying John. He was hungry, too, and telling
the world. Bill left Kindle in the living room to trade babies and burp and
change Paul. Then he went back. She changed John -- for guys whose only
talents were sleeping, eating, and eliminating, they sure could multitask
-- before coming out to greet Kindle.

Wonder of wonders, the professor was human. He had Paul on his arm, quite
safely, too. The head was tucked into the inside of his elbow as if he'd
done this before. He was talking baby-talk. Paul had someone new to hold
him and looked like he was listening. He'd look the same way if Kindle had
delivered an economics lecture. She suspected that the gold-rimmed
eyeglasses were Paul's real interest. She handed John to Bill and went to
wash her hands.

When the kids were in their cradles with mobiles to amuse them, the adults
sat down to dinner. Kindle asked about the children before discussing the
dissertation. If he noticed the meal she'd taken such pains to prepare, he
gave no indication. On the other hand, he sure had noticed the boys, and
she'd taken even more pains with them -- and received much more pain from
them.

"The details may seem niggling," Kindle said. "They are, in fact, niggling,
but the audience for that dissertation, tiny as it is, will be very
important to your future, and they will frown at any imprecision. The
difference between absolute clarity, clarity for your professional peers,
not for the general reader, who won't ever take the opportunity -- will
never have the opportunity -- to read it, and enough clarity for them to
understand  what you meant even if you didn't quite say it, is the
difference between their occasionally citing you when they need a
particular fact and their referring to you as an exemplar of how the facts
should be gathered and presented." German students were reported to applaud
when one of their professors kept a single sentence going for more than a
minute. Kindle was definitely teaching in the wrong country.

"You think these last changes will make it acceptable?"

"My dear, it's acceptable now. These last changes will make it exemplary."
In the event, that she went through two more drafts before she presented
it. It did, however, sail through the dissertation committee. All of the
others were Kindle's juniors in the department. She got her degree in June.
Bill got the day off; she expressed two bottles; her men sat in the
audience and watched the -- interminably dull, when you think about it --
ceremony. Well, Bill watched when the boys weren't distracting him. They
couldn't focus beyond a yard yet.

Bill had bought a camera before the birth. He already had enough snaps to
fill an album. He insisted of taking a picture of her in her robe holding
the twins. That was fine. She only insisted that the pictures of her
breastfeeding were kept out of the album. He wanted to go further, though.

"You can keep the robe another few days, can't you?"

"Bachelor's robes are rented. I purchased the doctoral robe. We wear them
again. Didn't you see all the faculty in the parade?"

"Great! Now, what I want to do is to get a real portrait-style photo of you
in the robe with the twins. We can go to a studio where the guy will do it
right."

"Why?"

"Because my snapshots are just that. We want a professional job."

"Why? I mean, not why the professional will do a better job than the
amateur," -- although it would be convenient if he accepted that in
economics, instead of thinking that his MBA training trumped her years of
specialization -- "but why do *you* want the picture at all?" Where did he
get that 'we' wanted it?

"Because it puts together your successes of this year. You know, you
academics think of the doctor's degree as one rung on the ladder. Doctor
Smith is inferior to Assistant Professor Jones. But we think of it as a
high point. Even if not, and I want the picture for my friends not for your
fellow faculty, you aren't going to have a baby -- let alone twins -- the
year you make full professor." She wasn't going to have a baby, let alone
twins, ever again. But it was too early to discuss that. Anyway, you had to
give Bill points for wanting a family portrait which didn't include him and
focused on her accomplishments. Was a baby an accomplishment? Twin babies
were more like a disaster. Well, getting a doctorate while bearing twins
*was* an accomplishment.

They got the portrait done. Bill got a print for his office wall, and a
larger print which he had framed and hung in their dining room.

Kindle invited himself over once more, this time in the middle of the
afternoon. It really was more convenient than getting a sitter and going to
his office, but you don't ask to come to someone else's house. Men, in
particular, don't ask to visit married women when their husbands aren't
home. On the other hand, Kindle might not have noticed that she was a
woman. When he got there, he paid attention to both babies before getting
down to business.

"Are you applying for a teaching job for this next year?"

"Definitely, but only in the Chicago area." She'd mailed applications to
all the colleges -- even junior colleges -- within an hour's commute. Hell,
she'd included the U of Chicago, and they might have turned up their noses
at Kindle; they certainly weren't going to consider her.

"Including the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois?" Kindle was
the only person who called Circle by its formal name except officials
making official announcements. She nodded. "Because they are thinking of
adding a regional-economics position. They wrote me for recommendations."
That was, really, the way academic appointments worked. You applied all
over, and the ones who weren't interested threw them away -- or filed them
away, the effective difference was only the number of file cabinets that
were required. The ones who *were* interested filed them away just as
quickly and asked the network for names.

"Really, it is a matter of whether you're interested. They are only
offering an instructor's appointment, but they will expect that instructor
to teach one graduate class. That isn't fair. You, on the other hand, are
the best regional-economics student to graduate this year -- these last two
years -- from the department."

"Well, Professor, I don't really think I have the choice between being an
assistant professor teaching graduate students or being an instructor
teaching graduate students. Do you?" He shook his head. If someone else was
looking for a new Ph. D. to teach regional economics, Kindle would know.
"And I'd rather be an instructor teaching graduate students than an
instructor teaching only undergraduates. When you were a new Ph. D.,
wouldn't you have preferred that?"

"Oh, yes."

"So, if you would recommend me, I would be quite grateful." They left it at
that, and Kindle admired the sleeping babies again before taking his leave.
She admired them, too. Asleep was definitely the twins' best state.

Circle responded to her application with a request for an interview. She
engaged a babysitter and expressed two bottles; Bill left her the car. If
she didn't knock their socks off in the interview, their impression was
favorable enough to get her an offer. It was an offer she gladly accepted.
She would teach one graduate course in regional economics and the rest
undergraduate courses like the other instructors. She got the impression
that this would be mostly, maybe all, freshman courses her first year. The
regional economics would merely be another sort of introduction. They
weren't interested in supporting a concentration, merely in that some of
their students would have seen a course in regional economics before they
walked out the door.

While that would make her lonely in one way, it might be a good career move
in another way. She wouldn't have any colleagues to discuss her interests
with. *If* she could keep publishing research, on the other hand, and *if*
Circle decided to teach a concentration in regional economics later (and
*enough* later), then *maybe* she would become the senior teacher in what
was a sub-department. There was a narrow, highly problematic, path to
becoming the Kindle of another university in a few more decades. Well, the
part she could control was to keep researching.

The job, at least, had good health benefits. She would be working for the
state, legally. Ironically, if she'd taken this job before they'd started
the babies, she would have probably qualified for maternity leave fairly
soon. She didn't ask. The only maternity leave she was interested in was a
leave from being a mother, and that wouldn't come for another two decades.

Over the rest of the summer, she got the intro book she would be teaching,
*Bach*, which she'd never read, and looked it over. (The department was
perfectly happy to take her recommendation of Hoover*, which she'd studied
at Northwestern, for regional economics.) She found a woman to take care of
the twins when she'd be gone. She bought a car. She weaned the boys, who
were not happy about the process. They managed to add to her own
unhappiness about the process. On the first day of class, she found herself
in front of a roomful of strangers at 10:00 a.m.

"Good morning. I'm Doctor Pierce. I'm an instructor, and you don't call me
'professor.' This is Introduction to Economics. If you haven't signed up
for that course, you're in the wrong room. It's a discussion section, and
the lectures are later in the day. So, we're mostly going to deal with
mechanics today. I'm going to call the roll slowly. When I call your name,
please speak and raise your hand. If I mispronounce your name, it's polite
to correct me. It's not polite to make comments. Now..."

The end
Portrait - F
by Uther Pendragon
nogardneprethu@gmail.com
2012/06/11

These same events from Bill's perspective:
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Uther_Pendragon/www/Gjt/pie_16m.htm
Bill's experience

The first adventures of Carolyn with Bill:
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Uther_Pendragon/www/Gjt/pie_01f.htm
"Get a Room - F"

Another story about another woman trying to balance a marriage with a
career:
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Uther_Pendragon/www/Gjt/bla_04f.htm
"Morning Has Broken"


The index to almost all my stories:
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Uther_Pendragon/www/index.htm
<1st attachment begin>

<HTML removed pursuant to http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/erotica/assm/faq.html#policy>
<1st attachment end>

----- ASSM Moderation System Notice------
Notice: This post has been modified from its original
format.  The post was sent as an email attachment and
has been converted by ASSTR ASSM moderation software.
----- ASSM Moderation System Notice------

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| alt.sex.stories.moderated ------ send stories to: <ckought69@hotmail.com>|
| FAQ: <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/faq.html> Moderators: <story-ckought69@hotmail.com> |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|ASSM Archive at <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org>   Hosted by <http://www.asstr-mirror.org> |
|Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d; look for subject {ASSD}|
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+