“Not pretty, is it?” Yolanda let it sink in. “Harris, I think you were a victim of sexual assault. Actually, I know you were. You spent that night somewhere other than your room, you were disheveled and had clearly been drinking, and I don’t think you hit yourself in the face. We’ve spoken to members of your former club, and they confirmed you were at the Beta house the night before. One of those animals did this to you, and you need to help us by telling us who it was.”
“What Ms. Perez is trying to say is that we’d certainly appreciate your assistance with this,” said the dean. “The fraternities have been a troublesome aspect of our culture here at Devon for some time.”
“Isn’t this my business?” asked Lulu.
“If there’s a sexual predator—or predators—on this campus, it’s everyone’s business,” said the dean. “We’d like to identify who it is so appropriate measures can be taken.”
“This is all just a big misunderstanding. Really, it is.” Lulu looked out the window, wishing she were anywhere else. She should just get up and walk out right now.
“Like the scepter?” asked Yolanda. “You seem to be at the center of a lot of misunderstandings.”
Dean Choudhary jumped back in. “Ms. Harris—Lulu—we’re really just here to help. We—the university, that is—are willing to overlook the whole incident with the scepter if you could assist us in this matter. We need to identify the individual or individuals who did this to you. Under Title IX rules, you will not have to personally confront anyone. I think you will find the process … unobtrusive. Indeed, you might find it personally restorative to unburden yourself. It must be a terrible thing to carry around.”
Lulu thought about waking up next that hairy thing on the Beta couch. Ugh. She was pretty sure she had been a willing participant, but really, who was to say? She couldn’t remember a damn thing. Maybe the hairy man-boy roofied her. He probably did, the creep. But did she really need to go through any of this shit? It might be fun to get the man-boy in trouble, but if she fessed up, everyone would know she’d had sex with that ape, forced or not. Yuck!
She looked at Yolanda and the dean, who both leaned toward her. What was that look on their faces? It was … eagerness.
Yolanda jumped in. “We have a whole support network for you here, Lulu. There’s no shame in it. You are a survivor.” Yolanda was practically glowing as she said the word.
Survivor.
Through the hazy fog of her depression, Lulu remembered the article in Newsweek about Mattress Girl and how she became world-famous, fêted globally by the media and women’s organizations, even attending the State of the Union. She had 2 million followers on Twitter, even more than Cricket Hayes. Lulu’s mental gears, addled as they were, ground away as she weighed her options. Maybe there’s a way forward. Sitting there, with the eager faces of Yolanda Perez and Dean Choudhary boring in on her, it came together.
“All right, it’s true.”
“Could you be more specific, please?” asked Choudhary.
“There was drinking, then I was assaulted. There was no consent. That bastard did it.”
A look of triumph swept over Yolanda’s face.
Rusty’s Bar
THE INVITATION WAS unexpected. Eph received an email from Fred Hallowell with the subject line Drink?
Fred was very senior in the department, and they’d never had much interaction outside the occasional departmental cocktail party at Titus Cooley’s house. Hallowell was on the tenure committee, so this was an invitation Eph could scantly afford to pass up. Besides, he couldn’t help but be curious about why Fred was reaching out. Perhaps he would share some insight on how tenure conversations were going.
Hallowell suggested meeting at Rusty’s, a bar Eph had only been to once or twice back when he first arrived at Devon. It was about a ten-minute walk, and it was a pleasant evening for early March, so Eph decided to hoof it.
Things turned a bit gritty off the north side of campus, the neighborhood where Rusty’s had planted its flag back in the 1950s. Other than Devon and its orbit, Havenport had always been a working-class town, although much of its industry had long departed for other countries or cheaper states down South. In recent years, the university began incentivizing its employees to buy homes locally, so there had been some improvement. You could see the odd restored Victorian here and there right next to another that was falling apart. Crime, while down, was still a fact of life. One walked with awareness, at least at night.
Eph reached Rusty’s, which was marked by a blinking neon sign of a yellow-and-white beer mug. It was early, so things were quiet. A few middle-aged men were sitting at the bar, with no students in evidence. That would change later in the evening. The air was pungent with the unmistakable smell of stale beer and grease. The lighting was low, punctuated by neon beer signs and multicolored lights from a classic-era pinball machine. There was also a jukebox, one that still played 45s.
Eph ordered an IPA at the bar and claimed an empty booth. He had the notion that a little privacy was in order, even if he wasn’t sure why. He’d thought about bringing D’Arcy, but the setting implied this was to be men only. Women didn’t care much for Rusty’s. It was a place to drink, and drink hard; a blue-collar bar dressed up in the paraphernalia of collegium historiae. Long-forgotten lettermen posed in fading photographs above wooden booths carved with generations of initials.
Each evening, Havenport’s workingmen quietly drank Schlitz drafts and blackberry brandy shots at shift’s end, then gradually yielded to fist-bumping undergrads with fake IDs, who wouldn’t have noticed the postal workers and stevedores at any rate. If asked, most students would have expressed solidarity with the Workingman, and indeed, many had taken the time to “like” the cafeteria workers’ Facebook page during the recent dining-hall strike. But they were young—Devonites!—and the world lay bare at their feet. There were worlds to conquer and beers to drink. Their sweeping sense of propriety made them blind to certain things.
Fred Hallowell arrived, and Eph’s first impression was that he looked immensely tired. There were bags under his eyes and his hair looked noticeably grayer around the ears than Eph remembered, which was odd since Eph saw him all the time. Eph didn’t know how old Fred was, but guessed midfifties. Fred smiled in Eph’s direction and motioned that he would stop at the bar first. (There was no such thing as waitress service at Rusty’s.) He returned to the booth with a draft beer and two shots of whiskey. He pushed one toward Eph.
“Uh, it might be a little early for me,” Eph said.
“Fair enough.” Fred threw back both shots.
Hello.
“Are we celebrating something?”
Fred didn’t answer right away. He chased the shots with a deep slug of beer, about a third of it disappearing down his throat. He then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You know, I’ve always had a soft spot for this place. Used to come here when I was an undergrad. My initials are still in one of the booths, I think.”
“I didn’t realize you went here.”
“Class of ’84. Other than my Ph.D. stint at Chicago, been here ever since.”
“I imagine things were different back then.”
“You could say that.” Fred smiled slightly. “Somehow the place got by on a couple billion dollars.”
“Tough times,” Eph said with the appropriate smirk.
“Devon still looks more or less the same, but everything else about it is different.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying things have gone downhill?”
“Not entirely. All the money has its uses. Devon has opened up to a much-broader set of students, and that can only be a good thing.”
“But…”
Fred stared at his beer a bit. “The kids, for starters. They’ve changed. Sometimes I just want to wring them by the neck.”
“Why?”
“I first started noticing it about fifteen years ago, the sense of entitlement. And you know who feels the most entitled? T
he ones who come for free, the ones with no skin in the game. Go figure. No one will say it, but it’s true.”
“I think there’s plenty of entitlement to go around,” Eph said.
“You know, when I was a kid, we grew up without a lot of supervision. We were left to solve our own problems. If someone called you a pussy, you called them a pussy back. If they took a swing, you took a swing back. But then parents began to hover, became micromanagers, always there to intermediate, to make sure no one ever got hurt. The kids got it in their heads that someone else would always be there to solve their problems. At the same time, they were constantly told how special they were, even if they hadn’t done a goddamn thing to deserve it. So what do you know? Those kids started showing up at Devon a few years later. Buncha vapid infants who were—are—completely confident they possess the entirety of the world’s received wisdom. Why do we even need to teach them?”
Eph wondered why Fred was unburdening himself to him. They had rarely spoken beyond collegial pleasantries.
“And how, my friend,” Fred went on, “does our great university respond to this? By catering to their every whim, by continuing to award shiny trophies for showing up.”
“I’ve heard the word snowflakes thrown around. About the kids.”
“And don’t get me started on the Diversity Industrial Complex,” said Fred, apparently moving on to a new thread. “What do those people do all day? Seriously, when they get to their desks in the morning, and they sit down, what do they do?”
“I guess I know more about that than I’d like.”
“And no one seems to notice that the more diverse we become, the more fractured things get. Have you looked around a dining hall lately? Segregation is back, only now it’s self-imposed. If I hear the word diversity one more time, I might lose my shit because they’re all in little tribes now. And speech they don’t like is being shut down because diversity can’t thrive if students hear something that challenges their infantile view of the world. It’s a shame, really. And did you hear the black students want their own dorm? Their own goddamn dorm. Martin Luther King is rolling over in his grave.”
“I heard something about that. I agree with you on that one, it seems like a step back.” Eph took a sip of his beer. “Why does everyone seem so mad all the time?”
“Because outrage is now its own virtue, or hadn’t you noticed? They move like a pack from one grievance to the next, never stopping, even for a moment, to appreciate where they are or how far we’ve come.”
A Stones song came on the jukebox. This place was old-school before anyone used the term.
“I’m going to get another,” said Fred. “What will you have?”
Eph sensed he didn’t have a choice. “Another of these, thanks.” He pointed to his IPA. Fred rose and went to the bar, leaving Eph in the booth, still wondering why he was here. Not that he didn’t enjoy the chance to get to know one of his senior colleagues better, but he couldn’t help but think that something was yet to be said. Was he here to talk about tenure? Whatever the case, Fred was clearly in an impolitic mood, which made Eph uneasy.
Not knowing what else to do, Eph examined the carvings at his table, all preserved under multiple coats of shellac. It was mostly initials with graduation years, like EJM ’82. Another just said Mound, whatever that meant. It looked fresher than most. Someone, decades ago from the looks of it, had carved Suck my dick in deeply gouged, two-inch letters. Eph wondered how many hours it took to carve. The effort showed a real commitment to the message. But Suck my dick? That was what the table carver, so many years ago, needed to say?
Fred returned with the beers and set them down. A look of sadness crossed his face like a shadow. “I’m tired, Eph. Tired of all of it. I keep getting told what the ‘community’ wants, or what the ‘community’ thinks. How many times did we hear that word in the last staff meeting? Blue Feather and Smallwood can barely manage a sentence without saying it. Well, rest assured that every time you hear that word they are not talking about you or me.”
“I think the teachers here mean well, at least for the most part. Don’t you?”
“A knot of pit vipers, if you ask me, the biggest gossips I’ve ever met. And I swear, they are as self-entitled as the students. Maybe more.”
“I guess.” Eph feared the conversation was navigating toward dangerous waters.
“It just wears you down. Do you know I kept track of my time last year? There’s an app. Forty-seven percent of my time was spent responding to emails, attending departmental meetings, or dealing with HR.”
“Don’t you think that’s the case everywhere?”
Fred ignored him. “Most of us are just dialing it in, you know. One of the best-kept secrets in the world is how easy this job is, not to mention how overpaid we are to do it. I remember the first time I taught a class; it was a lot of work. You had to construct the course from scratch: figure out the syllabus, the assignments, the tests … I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But then the next year rolls around and there you are, teaching the same course. All the heavy lifting is done. Just repeat everything from the year before. Copy and paste. Sure, you tweak here and there, but after a couple of years you can do it in your sleep. That’s what it’s become, sleepwalking. Is it any wonder most of us drink way too much? Self included.” As if to underscore the point, Fred downed another slug of beer.
“I have to say, Fred, I really like teaching. I’m sorry you’ve grown bored with it, but for me it’s a calling. There’s nothing I’d rather do.”
Fred smiled. “It was like that for all of us at one time or another.”
“And also, I like it here. Devon is home to me.” Eph hoped he wasn’t being too confrontational, but the conversation was starting to annoy him.
“Hey, I get it. The bubble can be seductive. We float around this beautiful campus all day, maybe go see a famous guest lecturer or meet brilliant visiting fellows, do a little research. But it’s not real, none of it. Getting less so. Do you know what they charge for tuition these days?”
“Around seventy K, isn’t it?”
“Seventy-five. To live here and take eight or so classes over two semesters. Every year it goes up to pay for all the new deans who push paper around. But the bubble is so comfortable that no one wants to talk about how it’s going to pop. Eph, I tell you, there’s a tidal wave coming for higher ed, and it’s going to take out a lot of schools. Excuse the mixed metaphor.”
“But you don’t think that could happen here, do you?”
“Oh, Devon will survive. It has the brand. And the money. Devon will be here when the sun cools. But it will slowly lose relevance.”
“Okay, I get it now. You invited me here to give me a career pep talk. I have to tell you, Fred, you’re not very good at it.”
Fred leaned back. “I’m sorry. You’re nice to let me vent a little, or a lot, but it’s wrong of me. You’re idealistic and I admire that. Please accept my apologies.”
“Sure, it’s no problem. Really.”
Hallowell took a deep breath. “Listen, I’m aware of the elephant in the room. You should know I think you’re a good guy, a good teacher, and the best candidate.”
“I appreciate that.” Eph allowed himself to swell with optimism, but then he noticed Fred wasn’t exactly sharing in the moment of colleague-to-colleague bonhomie. Something was off, something Fred wasn’t saying.
“I’m afraid to ask … was there a but in there?”
Fred now looked, what, nervous? “There’s something you should know, Eph. Something I was informed of earlier today. It’s why I asked you here.” Fred took one more sip of beer.
“A student named Louise Harris has accused you of sexual assault.”
The Tarzan of Anderson House
HOLED UP IN her altogether pathetic room, it was not lost on Lulu what a shitstorm her accusation was about to unleash.
She was counting on it.
If she felt badly for what she was about to pu
t Ephraim Russell through, those thoughts were fleeting. Mostly, there was the despair at her new circumstances—her dénouement at the society and callous treatment at the hands of OTA. The weight of these things, the public embarrassment, required dispatching. Throwing in with the feminists didn’t exactly thrill her—they were so unattractive—but it was a necessary course correction.
But … she needed some time to think. This had to be played just right.
She needed a plan. Simply being another run-of-the-mill “survivor” would not suffice. That market was getting crowded. Some of the early girls got a lot of play, sure, but only Mattress Girl had transcended her own campus. The mattress angle was clever, but it had been done. Lulu needed a bigger play, something original.
She wasn’t sure why, but a story that Sheldon had once told her about his freshman year popped into her head. She did some googling to refresh herself on the details.
Late one night, all those years ago, someone had lowered a window on the fifth floor of Anderson House, a freshman dorm in East Quad right across from Duffy. Yelling into the darkness, he executed a perfect Tarzan call, right out of the back-lot jungles of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It went largely unnoticed, but then he did it again the next night. And the next, and the next after that, all at precisely the same time: 11:09.
After a week or so, a small crowd began to gather, eager for the nightly Tarzan call. That no one knew the would-be Tarzan’s identity added to the crowd’s general sense of ironic self-amusement. (No one liked arch, ironic humor more than Devonites.) It was always dark and Tarzan never stuck his head out far enough to be identified. No one in Anderson was talking, either. When the Daily wrote a piece about it, the crowds got larger, numbering in the hundreds each night, their excitement often fueled by alcohol. Tarzan developed a sense of drama, now delaying his nightly calls by a few minutes to build the anticipation. Other pseudo-Tarzans would call out from Pope and Kimball, but these pretenders were always roundly booed. Only the Anderson House Tarzan was worthy of the crowd’s adoration. They chanted, “Tar-zan, Tar-zan,” building in volume until, at last, he would come.
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