I remember the first day of class very well, because every class thereafter was almost exactly the same. We students arrived early, freshly showered and perfumed, already having read every book in the syllabus. We sat down in our chairs, the kind with a half desk attached, and the chairs were arranged in a U-shape around his empty wooden desk. We chattered nervously among ourselves. We crossed and uncrossed our legs. I wore a peasant shirt and a denim skirt made from a pair of jeans, the fashion of the time, sure to drive men crazy.

Precisely when it was time for class, which I seem to remember was 2 o’clock, he entered the room. He’s a very tall, lanky guy, and he walked in a stooped way, his face appearing through the doorway before the rest of him lurched in, leading with his head like a well-read giraffe. He wore a lightly starched oxford shirt of small blue-and-white checks, pressed khaki pants with a brown leather belt, and brown wingtips, an outfit he would wear to almost every class. He barely looked at us or made eye contact, but murmured a hello, then sat down in his chair, crossed one long leg over the other, and slowly unbuckled his watch.

That’s as sexy as it got.

His watch had a leather strap, and he took it off and set it face up on his desk. He asked us to call him Mr. Roth, though the other seminar professors had us call them by their first name, in those let-it-all-hang-out days. Then he began to talk about the novel assigned for that week, taking us through its pages and pointing out its various themes, details or particularly terrific sentences. He never consulted his notes, which were handwritten and kept in a slim black binder, but he spoke extemporaneously, point after point, insight after insight, as if he apprehended the entire novel, all of a piece.

Imagine taking physics from Einstein. But you want to be Mrs. Einstein.

We explored love, romance and sex in the novels of Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Musil, Milan Kundera, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, but the class was anything but explicitly erotic. The passages on which he lavished attention were never the juicy parts, but rather the subtler passages. I remember he loved this particular line from “Madame Bovary”: “She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her teeth.”

We spent a lot of time on that sentence, and the more I read it, the sexier it got.

Try that yourself. At home.