HER BELLYBOY

Diana set down her empty wine glass and slid trimly off the broad metal desk that served as her chair while she directed us in the basement theater. She walked toward me.

Here, she forbid us to call her "Professor Morgenstern;" it had to be "Diana."

"I need more from you," she said. She carried the script in her right hand. Her hips swayed in her long, low gypsy skirt. Stylish leather boots ticked her footsteps on the floorboards.

The humidity was insufferable in the college studio theater that summer. The administrators conveniently forgot that summer theater productions would  rehearse here, so they didn't pay to keep the AC running.

Diana had pulled up her long white T-shirt and knotted it firmly between her breasts. Her bare belly-button whispered kisses as she moved toward me. Her hair, wild with gray ripples and streaks, looked like she had never touched it, as natural as wildflower meadows. Her eyeglasses were prim and purely functional.

To a young man in my condition she was the perfect poison: a doctorate in literature wrapped around a confident, exuberant female eroticism. I felt it just in passing her on campus. And of course I'd heard the gossip.

I really didn't need the grade credit. I had taken her summer theater course expressly for the chance to work closely — intimately, even — with Professor Morgenstern. The course consisted entirely of us 5 students staging a one-act play, written by her, under her direction.

I visited her during office hours at the first opportunity, and by skimming her bookshelf discovered we shared a love of belly-dancing: she as a performer and instructor, me as a respectful and studied admirer of the artistry and athleticism of the women who dance — that's how I unfolded my connoisseurship it to her. The truth is I have a deep and incurable erotic fetish for female belly-buttons and shapely, well-hipped woman-bellies. Pure aesthetic fetish. My mask was no doubt transparent. I probably didn't really care.

She regaled me with tales of the classes she had taken with this or that legend of belly-dancing. But she was glad of an appreciative listener, I believe. "Legend of Belly-Dancing" is a title that doesn't carry very far; most people can't name you one besides "Little Egypt."

And in me she had at least an audience of one who could understand what a thrill it must have been to dance on stage with Ansuya or to have taken a class in arms with Rachel B. herself. No need to tell her that I knew this out of a perverted lust to kneel and kiss their belly-buttons and worship them erotically.

She also shared with me some of her own writings on belly-dance, which had sometimes been published in belly-dance publications. I copied down part of one poem that struck me:

Voluptuous undulations of lovely
belly; I know men's softnesses
know what melts him within.
My wrists twine like the vines in Eden.
hips rise in tides,
and bare belly blossoms, all
unfurled in dark erotic ecstasy

I should have paid more attention to other passages. The truth of her was more cruel, bellyslamming, and lusty than my dreamy romantic fantasies of women could have anticipated.

When the casting of the play was announced, I got an e-mail simply listing my part: "unnamed male, Act IV, scene 5." I had expected her to give me something more central. I thought we were friends. There was one romantic role — not the lead male, but a guy who made love to his wife, a very hot role — that I thought was just right for me. She gave it to another guy in the class.

She sent me a follow-up, personally, asking me how I liked my role. I feigned a little enthusiasm, and also made what was supposed to sound like a light-hearted "boo-hoo" over the other boy getting the part I coveted. But she wrote back and replied, simply, "wait and see."

Turns out "unnamed male character" had rather a lot to do. Professor Morgenstern's play was an extended metaphor, based on the interaction of a coarse, violent young married couple (I wrote a paper about it later, got an A, then reworked it into a masters' thesis). On the stage they bicker, tossing lines to each other. At the same time, incongruously, they are acting out their various ways of cheating on one another, onstage.

They deny the very things we see them do. You see him flirting with showgirls. You see her seducing the husband of a friend. You see him sneaking through her drawers, looking for evidence of infidelity. You see her do the same to him.

And at one high point — my big scene — you see him beat up a guy for having an affair with his wife. Except it's the wrong guy. It's not the guy you saw his wife actually fooling around with — because she's still fooling around with him, hot and heavy, while this beating is going on across the stage.

And the couple, in their dialogue, divorced from the action, are throwing their biggest verbal jabs now, shouting with their rages and passion. It's as intense as the balcony scene in "Streetcar." And their actions on stage are ramped up to match the fury of the words.

She is really in the throes of passion with this adulterous man, and he is really pouring the punches into the belly of this hapless victim.

Who happened to be me. By Professor Mor- by "Diana's" choice and election.

Obviously, it was a very physical play to stage. Most of the play was rehearsed without me, because I wasn't in it. But Diana set aside a special hour each day to work on just this scene. Which was a lot of focus, in proportion to the length of it. But she said it was the most important scene in her play, and the one she was most interested in getting right.

They rehearsed my part separately at first from the action on the other side of the stage, where the wife and her lover were getting it on. But as the wife's lines were part of the husband's dialogue, Diana made the actress who played her attend these beating rehearsals, and stand there and deliver her lines, in character, facing us.

And the husband responded to them, while enforcing his point with punches into me. The timing of the beating had to be woven into the rhythm of the dialogue, as Diana explained it. That's why she was taking such care with the details of this beating. "When he MEANS what he SAYS, he literally drives home the point with the hammer-blow of a FIST," she told the other actor, all the while pressing with her own fist on my belly.

Diana also explained that the space constraints of small stages effectively limited the kind of action you could stage on them. So she had written this explicitly as a belly-punch beating, which can be staged pretty much in one spot. And if this play was going to get on stage anywhere, it was going to be a small stage.

So that was what I did with my summer vacation: Sweated and lusted after a professor and let another man beat up my belly for hours for free.

We were in the third of our four rehearsals before the staging of the play. In the first, Diana taught us the intertwined dual rhythm of the punches and the dialogue. And she drilled us in each line and each punch till we all three had the scene by heart. (When it got to the stage, the wife actress would have to perform with her back to this beating, so it was important that she memorize it, both visually and by the dialogue).

She made them say the lines over and over, to one another, while he slugged me in the belly, till they had the timing by rote. And my reactions were part of it, too, so she coaxed me in how to take it — how to take it — how to show the whole house that I'd just been gutted in the stomach by his fist, in spite of the pulled stunt-punch he had actually given me. The vocalics of my reactions to being bellypunched were essential to the scene, she explained.

We did that, over and over all one hot afternoon, taking it from the top when any of us flubbed. The wife actress was a self-absorbed junior who frequently lost track of her lines.

I had to convincingly take not just one punch in the belly, but a whole beatdown-ful of them. In between I had to spend long periods of being doubled over, breathless, winded. All as determined by the pacing of the lines in Diana's script, and the need, as determined by her, of the husband actor to emphasize his words by an emphatic punch in my belly.

That microscopic moment out of reality became the essence of who I was, during that time. For I deeply longed to impress her as a serious talent, and she knew that. She had me in her office for coffee and to talk about it. It was the first time in my life I'd ever had espresso. She described my part to me again and told me, "you aren't just a guy who takes a punch. You are the punch, the impact of the punch, in the form of a man on stage. That's all you represent; that is the only reason you are even here."

The title of my thesis was "Existentialism as Stage Combat."

Diana said "action," and I became "punched belly," until the scene ended or she said "cut." I became completely, body, voice, and mind, the platonic ideal of "belly punch" that existed in the minds of enough people out there that you could count on it being recognized by most of them. I was "the guy who can't take it in the belly."

You'd seen him somewhere: old Westerns, pro wrestling, interrogation scenes in gangster novels. Those years, with tiny television screens and big, dim arenas and gyms, the wrestlers and the stuntmen — who were purveyors of the only violence we were allowed to see — over-sold every act and move. The key to a stunt bellypunch, of course, is the "take." Even the lamest attempt to throw a punch can look like Rocky if the taker receives it with body blown back from the center, air rushing out of lungs, face contorted with bellyache suffering, arms flailing helplessly.

And now the authoress herself stood there in front of me, speaking the lines she had written for the wife to speak as she watched me get my belly beat up. Diana held the script in her hand but never glanced at it. She spoke them from heart. And her eyes riveted me.

That's how she had instructed Emma, the junior-class actress, to look at me for this rehearsal of the scene. But Diana moved so differently from Emma. She moved as she spoke, took a step this way and that, put her hands on her hips, and when she moved her hips slid this way, then that, and my eyes couldn't help but follow them.

During a break I asked her why she did it like that, when it wasn't part of the play.

"I'm directing you," she replied. I must have frowned.

"Because I know you understand belly-dance so deeply," she smiled as she stroked back her hair. "I'm watching a man doubled up and suffering from a punch in his belly. And I'm flaunting my bare belly-button at you, taunting you with my bare belly, even as you burn in shame because this lovely woman is absorbing the sight of you as a pathetic humiliated wimp who can't take a punch in the belly. My belly-button is mocking you, isn't it? She's laughing silently at your suffering."

When we went back to work Diana turned her attention to the hero. Sternly, coyly, she got him worked up for his role, let him see how much she depended on him to make her theatrical climax succeed.

Then we found our marks on the stage, and Diana plunged right into the scene and commanded the other actor to belly-whomp me right there and drop me to my knees. "Hit him like you mean it."

He does, and I performed the drop to my knees very well, I thought, very realistic.  And as he rants his lines, periodically, he hauls me up off the floor and beats my belly some more for emphasis. I'm nothing more than visual flourishes for his egotistical rant. But those flourishes cost me a belly-punch humiliation. And I put my whole self into them.

We finished, and took our places to do it over again. But now Diana walked between us, peering over her eye-glasses at me, circling her hips, flaunting bare belly, and saying,

"It's got to have more."

And she was talking to him but her eyes stayed on me. She explained how this was such a key scene, and we all were wonderful but it still did not match the vision in her mind. And that this sometimes happened in theaters. And there was a way professionals handled it. And she knew we, all of us here, were professionals. She was watching my eyes watching her. She was reading me like a secret.

And she was right in front of me now, and she leaned forward and stood tiptoe, and I felt her belly, her bare belly, pressed damp and firm against me. Her bellybutton laid a deep, long, deceitful kiss on mine.

"From now on, when you beat him," she said, "I want you to give it to him. Really slam your fist into him. Right in his belly." And finally, to me, almost a coo: "You're a big boy. You can take it."