Thirty-two eighth-graders baked in the stifling heat, as the mid-June-1978 late-morning sun streamed through the uncovered 10-foot-high East-facing windows of the third-floor classroom. The hungrier students sat thinking of food, the sleepier students dozed fitfully, and the hornier students, meaning most of the boys, stared intently at their barely-five-foot-tall music teacher as she walked back and forth talking passionately about opera. Although they did not fully comprehend a single word she said, they thoroughly enjoyed her vigorous hand gestures, her purposeful stride, the click of her high-heeled calf-high black-leather boots against the wooden floor, the swish of her mini-skirt, the bouncing of her strawberry blond curls against her shoulders, and the swaying of her dark-capped breasts beneath a formerly crisp white blouse rendered virtually invisible by sun and sweat.

The boys might not have understood opera, but they did understand the revolution that was beginning to institutionalize itself in their small college town, a revolution that was creating a delicious tension between their as-yet-unrealized desires and the orgiastic future already being experienced by their parents and teachers - a tension that hung in the classroom as thick and hot and heavy as the humid almost-summer air.

The end-of-period buzzer suddenly blasted the slumberers awake, diffusing the tension and ending the teacher's thought in mid-sentence. Those who had been dreaming of lunch dashed through the door toward the cafeteria. Those who had been dreaming of the teacher arose more slowly, trudging out with wistful glances. All but William. William had not yet moved. He wanted her worse than anything he had ever wanted, wanted to rip off her blouse and her skirt and ravish her on her desk, wanted to suck her breasts hard, wanted to spank her, wanted to control her, wanted to take her as his own. He knew that in these desires he was not alone. He saw the blank and staring expressions of fifteen other drooling boys. But he had a secret weapon the others lacked. He had opera. He got the little smiles when he answered her questions in class. He got little smiley faces drawn on his tests next to the A's and A+'s, and he knew, as only a boy his age could know, that she wanted him as much as wanted her, that the day would come when she would keep him late, lock the door of her classroom, pull down the shade and beckon him hither.

A hand touched William's arm. Startled, he stared at it. It was her hand. He looked up. She was standing there. The room was empty. The door was closed. The shade was down. "Will?" she asked. He thrilled to the sound of his name on her lips, to the question it seemed to pose. "Can I talk to you?" she asked, sitting beside him, leaning toward him, her eyes huge.

"Sure" he stammered, "what about?" hoping he already knew.

"How do you know so much about opera?"

He wanted to tell her he was brilliant, precocious, the next great composer, the next great conductor, the next great tenor all rolled into one. But the little voice of sanity warned him to tell the truth. "My father" he answered.

"What about him?" she asked.

What about his father? How could he even answer such a question? How could he explain his father and opera? How could he make this woman, this vision, understand him? He knew just as surely as he had known this moment would come, this moment alone, that if she knew him, she would want him, that if she wanted him, she would take him.

So he began.

They sat there in the middle of the empty classroom as the sun climbed out of the window to beat down on the roof, as the other students trudged down the stairs to the basement to eat. They sat. She listened. He talked, and said more than he should.

He told her that opera was his family's life, and that their lives were opera. He told of his father's sudden bursts of temper and bouts of depression, of faculty parties when his father was up, of cigarette smoke, of conversations in Italian, of flirtatious wives, of heavy drinking and his father's dancing, of doors slamming, of doors found locked, of insistent knocking and the shouts of enraged husbands, of the tension between his parents, his mother's strained disapproval, of a house filled for days after a party with the soaring voices, wounded violins, and crashing timpani of Verdi and Puccini as his father stood in the living room conducting wildly. He told her of his failed attempts to become Americanized, to separate himself from his ancestry, from his difference, from his father's music, and his father. He hesitated before going on, knowing he had told too much, afraid to say more, until he saw how utterly riveted she was, saw the sparkle in her eye, and the heave of those beautiful breasts so nearly naked. Taking a deep breath, he told her how he had almost succeeded, had almost learned to like the American music of his peers, to take his mother's side of life and join her in her strained disapproval. Until the new music teacher had clicked into the third-floor classroom, with her fair hair, fairer skin, very Italian name, an interest in opera that bordered on sexual, and a sexuality that bordered on operatic. He told her of his conversations with his father, of his desire to learn opera, how his father without asking had assumed there was a woman involved, and how William, without telling, had gained a new-found admiration for his father's success with women, and an overwhelming desire to be just as good.

Silence fell in the hot classroom. William started at his teacher, and she stared back. The dark caps of her breasts swayed, the nipples hard. Her breathing was shallow. Her eyes were glazed. "Will" she murmured.

"Yes?"

"I want..." she trailed off again.

He waited, picturing her pressed against the blackboard, her sweating body caked with chalk dust.

"I can't ask you this..."

"What?" he asked gently, as firmly as he could, trying to feel older, poised to kiss her.

She shook her head, as though trying to shake the question away. He wanted to grab her. "Could you?" she whispered.

"Could I what?"

"Could you introduce me to your father?"