1992 ince arriving the previous week I''d kept hearing about a notorious person, and now as I entered the packed lecture hall my gaze caught on a highly conspicuous man. That''s him I declared inwardly, which of course was absurd. It was a vast university, of thousands of souls. There was no reason these two kinds of prominence--scandalous noteworthiness, and exceptional, even sinister, attractiveness--must be long to the same human being. Yet they had. The man was Nicholas Brodeur, though I knew it for sure only later. That first time seeing him, even before being sure who he was, it was already clear that his attractiveness was mixed up with a great deal of ridiculousness. He wore a long duster coat, in the heat of September.

His filthy blond hair stuck up and out in thatchy spikes from heavy use of some kind of pomade, as if it were 1982, not ''92, and he wore Lennon shades with completely black lenses, as if it were outdoors, not in, and overall, in his resemblance to a Joy Division poster, he comported himself as if twenty and not, as I''d come to find out, almost forty. Still he was the best-looking man, by a league, in the room and certainly the best-looking man I had seen in the flesh to that point in my life. I hadn''t yet lived in one of the world''s great cities, where such specimens congregate, but even now that I have, he still ranks. And he must have realized; there was in his posture a kind of inverse vanity, a suggestion that he engaged in his sartorial ridiculousness out of some impatience with the effects of his beauty. He stood alone at the back, his feet away from the wall and his shoulders slumped against it. An ambiguous expression that was not quite a smile slightly lifted the sides of his mouth. His hands remained stuffed in the duster''s deep pockets. The inappropriate hoodlum charade seemed to chide anybody who stared, as I did.

Casper was the only fellow student in my program I''d managed so far to befriend. When he arrived and dropped into the seat I had saved him, I directed his eyes to the man. "Oh my," Casper said. "Do I want to fuck him, or just be him?" Just being him did seem the lesser risk. I''d been inoculated against the villain Brodeur before I''d even enrolled. On my visit to campus the previous spring, my informational coffee with a second-year poetry student had been interrupted by a timorous and blushing undergraduate whom the second-year had caught in a fervent embrace, and then presented to me portentously as someone "any woman considering coming here needs to talk to." In the course of preparing her senior thesis under Brodeur''s direction, the undergraduate had been victimized by him, in what precise way it would victimize her further to ask her to relate. The result, thus far, had been a petition demanding his firing, but the second-year was confident that far more severe retribution would follow.

This was only the most recent petition, and the most recent of his sexual crimes. He was rumored to ask female students to read Donne to him while he lay on the floor of his office, in darkness, it was presumed masturbating himself. He was said to recite bawdy couplets referring to breasts while directing his gaze in the classroom at actual breasts. He''d attended, at the repertory cinema on campus, a screening of a late-career, poorly received film by Roman Polanski--the rapist--and unlike the rest of the solemn, censorious house, there to sharpen the critical blades, he''d apparently laughed so hard as to have literally fallen from his seat onto the floor. Amid all this baleful intelligence it came as a superfluous footnote that his relations with his wife, who was also a faculty member, were obscure and chaotic. I was as susceptible to this sort of gossip as anyone else--it impressed itself on me with more permanence than the titles of the texts I was required to read for my first set of graduate courses. And yet, as opposite as they would seem from each other in worth, the salacious gossip and the scholarly imperatives, they were equally thrilling to me, different-color threads of the same mantle: that of adulthood. Graduating from college, I''d suddenly found I''d Grown Up, and graduate school was my Eden, where I named and possessed all the precious, first things, even those with a taint, like the villain Brodeur.

Eagerly I absorbed Brodeur''s villainous status as I did the rest of the new esoterica. Rents were cheaper off the hill than on. The better grocery store was Friel''s, not Mighty Buy. Nicholas Brodeur was a predator--not to mention a sexist!--whose continuing presence on campus proved the sorry truth of everything we''d learned in women''s studies (and so was gratifying, though most of us wouldn''t admit it). But for all my initiate''s self-importance, about Nicholas Brodeur and the rest, I hadn''t been warned of his beauty, which for true initiates went without saying. Consciousness of his beauty, I understood now, thrilled beneath every condemnation. It was the shared secret that lent the condemning its eager subtext. The assembly of hundreds in the stifling hall was for a series of readings by the writing program faculty to fight world hunger.

How the funereal poems, or the confusing prose excerpts, each of which was prefaced by long explanations of context, might fight world hunger had not been made clear. Admission had been free, and no one was taking donations. Yet nonattendance at the reading seemed sufficiently aligned with indifference to world hunger that even acid-tongued Casper did not wax sarcastic, and despite the ravishingly gorgeous day outside, the hall was standing-room only, its atmosphere a strange combination of stultification and a showy self-regard for the good we were doing. I recognized just a scattering of students here and there, and not many more from the group of performers, who took the stage one by one with perhaps a hair too much affectation of reluctant humility, or loose-limbed unconcern, alternating these attitudes almost as consistently as they alternated genres: poet, fiction writer, poet, and so on, each, at the conclusion of his or her reading, giving introduction to the colleague who followed in a wry, collegial shorthand which sometimes provoked scattered outbursts of laughter from the knowing concealed in the crowd. Not a word that was read stayed with me. I could not even recall, once the readers were back in their seats, which had read poems versus prose. Affecting a pose of my own, of enchanted absorption, as if the powerful words drew my gaze far beyond the confines of the hall, I very slowly rotated my head toward the back, but the standing-room area now was so crowded I could no longer see him. Perhaps he had left.

When the reading was over it was a long time before we could even get out of our seats. "I''m very disappointed Byron and the Bunnymen didn''t share his work also," said Casper. "The man standing in back? But he isn''t a poet." "What else would he be?" "Something made me think he must be Nicholas Brodeur," I admitted, but Casper pooh-poohed. "Brodeur''s a Spenserian," Casper explained. "He''ll be tweedy. Even if he''s a rapist he''s going to be tweedy. You''re casting too much to type.

" Later that week, when I came up the steps at the end of my first day of classes, Dutra was already home, sprawled in the porch hammock with a half-empty bottle of beer. "What an insane day!" I complained and exulted. "You obviously need a drink," he said, swinging the bottle at me so I had to accept it. Dutra had a pouncing way of expressing himself, as if the subtext was always "I gotcha!" His voice was generally too loud for its setting, for the porch on this homely, leaf-drowned block of wood-frame houses on this somnolent, hot afternoon, for example, but the oversize voice was well matched with his face, long and lean and not the least softened up at its edges by his five-dollar barbershop buzz cut, its narrow span busily occupied by a large, slightly hooked Roman nose and large, hooded green eyes and a wide, mobile mouth and large out-sticking ears, all of which he tirelessly manipulated as a clown would, launching his eyebrows or stretching his grin from one lobe to the other. Yet in his rare moments of repose it was easy to imagine him leading the Argonauts and clanking his sword in the dust. It was my latest theory that the carelessness with which he carried himself--shambling with his shoulders hitched up, or tossing himself like so much useless scrap wood into a heap in the hammock--was meant to conceal this feline athleticism, to benefit him with a hidden advantage. He seemed to particularly relish being underestimated, a condition which formed the theme of the story he was now telling me, and which had surely played a role in our current relationship. I happened to be sleeping with Dutra.

Ten days before, the very night I''d moved in, he''d seduced me, with no more effort and no less presumption than he''d used handing over his beer. His story had to do with the boot-camp-style orientation he''d just undergone. He had begun his day dismissed as the skinny wise-ass, and wound up unanimously elected team leader: a typical triumph for him. "It was every kind of kill-the-individual, forge-the-collective, kick-your-ass, boot-camp-type thing they could think of," he went on, reaching over his head for the six-pack to fetch us new beers. "Climb walls, swing on ropes, fall blindfolded off high things into a net someone''s supposedly holding. Toward the end of the day, when we were doing that--put their blindfold on, help them up the ladder, talk them into jumping off with no idea is someone going to catch them or their neck''s getting broken--one of the residents said to me, ''You'.