He repeated the speech he had delivered to Stang and Brown-Wilson: Now near the end of his first semester as chair, he wanted to check in with the faculty on a one-to-one basis, finding out what particular concerns they might have and discussing the ways in which—despite a nonexistent budget and no real power or leverage of any kind—he might be able to ease their respective burdens so that they, in turn, might become more flexible in outlook regarding the Shakespeare requirement and the SOV. “It looks like you could use some additional bookshelves.” He gestured toward a precarious tower of books on the floor.
Lovejoy—her name grimly incongruous, Fitger reflected—didn’t respond.
“And maybe some paint on that wall behind you; it looks like it’s peeling.” He tried to envision himself, later, explaining to Fran that, in addition to foraging through other departments’ closets for office supplies, she would need to be on the lookout for drop cloths, brushes, paint, and a set of old clothes.
Lovejoy set her pen down. “My wall isn’t peeling,” she said. “That’s mold—from water leaking through the ceiling from the bathroom upstairs.” She grabbed a wooden ruler and, leaning back, used it to scrape a crooked six-inch scar in the plaster. She set the ruler—now tipped with a fringe of black fungus—close to Fitger, at the edge of the desk. “I don’t seem to be allergic to it, at least not yet. If I get a fatal lung disease from inhaling the spores later on, I figure I can sue, and leave some money behind for my kids.”
Fitger studied the tip of the ruler, trying to ascertain whether the fungus was moving or breathing; it looked almost alive. “Good lord, that’s appalling,” he said. “Have you complained to—”
“Buildings and grounds? Yes. They brought me some poster board to cover the worst of it, under the window, but my son needed poster board for a school assignment so I brought it home.”
There was a knock at the door. Lovejoy leaned forward and shouted, it seemed, directly into Fitger’s ear. “Come in!”
It was an undergrad. “Professor Lovejoy? Um, hi. On my last assignment you said that I should try to—”
“We’re in the middle of a conversation here.” Fitger held his hand up in front of the student. “Give us ten minutes.”
“Five minutes,” Lovejoy said, head bent over the essays again. The undergrad left.
“Listen, Donna.” Fitger couldn’t keep his eyes away from the mold on the ruler. The stuff of nightmares, it might or might not have been exuding a faint treacly smell. “You probably know why I’m here. If there’s anything reasonable I can offer that might—”
“I don’t care about bookshelves and I don’t want my office painted,” Lovejoy said. “Well, I do want it painted, but if you’re trying to buy my vote on the SOV or on a Shakespeare plan, that won’t be enough.” She started massaging the palm of her hand.
Fitger noted the callus on her middle finger, from gripping the pen. He wasn’t talking about buying or selling votes, he said—what a silly idea—but if she wanted to talk to him about—
“I have a problem student,” she said.
“Oh?” Fitger sat back, relieved. Students he could handle. He jerked his thumb toward the hall. “Is it that one?”
“No. Other than a lack of organizational skills, he’s fine. The student I’m talking about is a—” She shook her head. “I would have let it go at this point, with only a few classes left, but I’m teaching the yearlong survey, and he’s enrolled in the second half of it, in the spring. I can’t deal with this for another fifteen weeks. It’s just…I’m not—”
“Jesus,” Fitger said. “What the hell is he doing?” Lovejoy was no stranger to confrontation. Like most of the English faculty, she had dealt with suicidal and homicidal students, students with eating disorders who fainted in class, students with depression, cancer, learning disabilities, dead or dying parents, autism, schizophrenia, gender identity issues, romantic heartbreak, and various syndromes involving the inability to sit quietly and read. She usually seemed to be in desperate need of sleep, but he had never seen her visibly perturbed. “Can you tell me if the student is—”
Another knock at the door.
“Come in!” Lovejoy roared.
The first undergraduate had been joined by two others; they had formed a small posse. One of them spoke up. “Professor Lovejoy, I have band practice at four-thirty, and Brian says that on our last paper you wanted us to—”
“Five minutes,” said Fitger.
“Two minutes,” said Lovejoy. She had already picked up her pen and gone back to her grading.
Probably what Lovejoy needed most, Fitger thought, was two weeks with her hand in a splint and a prescription for sleeping pills. Taking his periodontal notebook from his pants pocket, he inadvertently brushed against the moldy ruler. Should he wipe the poisonous spores on his jacket or—
“Here.” Lovejoy reached behind her for an economy-sized container of hand sanitizer, which she set on the desk in front of him with a plop. She nudged the ruler into the trash. “I have a masturbator,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Fitger pumped a liberal quantity of the gel-like substance into his hand. “Are you saying that—”
“I didn’t notice it until a week or two ago,” Lovejoy said. “I think it started during our discussion of Samuel Pepys. I was telling them about Cromwell and the Anglo-Dutch war and at the end of the class one of the other students brought it to my attention. She’d taken pictures on her phone. I suppose it might have violated a privacy clause, but I looked them over.”
“I’m not sure I fully understand,” Fitger said, availing himself of another squirt from the dispenser. “You’re saying that during class, while you were lecturing—”
“Professor Lovejoy?” The students in the hall were knocking again. Fitger pushed the door shut with his shoe and then locked it.
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Lovejoy said. “I’ve seen it myself. Each…iteration is more overt. Other than that, I’m not going into any detail.” She wrote down the student’s name and ID number and passed them on a slip of paper to Fitger.
“So…you want me to talk to him?” he asked.
“I don’t care what you do.” Lovejoy stood up to unlock her door. “I want him out of my class, and I don’t want to see him next semester. He apparently needs the survey to graduate, but I’m done, I won’t teach him.” She put her hand on the doorknob and got ready to let the undergrads in. “You’re the chair,” she told Fitger. “I want him gone.”
* * *
—
In the basement men’s room, nose-to-knees on the toilet in the leftmost stall, Franklin Kentrell was suffering from what, in his own mind and prior to his diagnosis, he preferred to call “the old trouble.” How old was old? Professor Franklin Kentrell was fifty-six, and he had endured a smorgasbord of gastrointestinal maladies since the seventh grade. For days or even weeks at a time, he would dose himself with Pepto-Bismol, his pants pocket a mini-storehouse of the chalky pink pills; then, abruptly, his symptoms would shift, and he would replace the antidiarrheals with a roundhouse of laxatives, his symptoms reeling, pendulum-like, between the two extremes.
Kentrell heard the creak of the bathroom door. To announce his presence and his location, he harrumphed and rattled the pages of the student paper. He had already skimmed its few articles (a mysterious virus had prevented the chess club from competition; Kottuolo and his elongated chin had won a philosophy award) and was wishing he had brought something longer to read. A spasm shook him. The pain was hideously familiar: first the lightning-bolt cramps, as if he had swallowed a rotating spear, and then the brutal, convulsive pressure. Shifting his feet to keep the cuffs of his pants off the floor, he began his usual recitation of the things he would no longer consume: ice cream and Indian food and cheese and beans and chocolate and tomatoes and spices of any kind, along with coffee and alcohol and citrus, thoug
h he did love his orange juice first thing in the morning. He would make obeisance to the digestive gods and subsist for the remainder of his life on white rice and vegetable broth if only the old trouble—evident now from a splatter of blood in the bowl—would leave him alone.
“Franklin?”
Kentrell froze. “Yes?”
“Your office door across the hall was open. I was hoping we might have a talk.”
“Now?” Kentrell asked. The rotating spear began its torturous work again, carving a propeller-like path through his entrails. His gastroenterologist, Dr. Syme, had insisted on surgery after the most recent round of tests: Crohn’s and diverticulitis, with a chaser of irritable bowel. They were going to remove a foot or two of his small intestine, which Dr. Syme claimed, with a cheerfulness Kentrell found unbecoming, he would never miss.
“I thought we could chat about your request for a medical leave,” Fitger said. His shoes were just visible beneath the stall door. “You said you need six to eight weeks?”
Kentrell batted weakly at the toilet paper dispenser. To have to plead his case with Fitger! Unfair. Life was unfair. Kentrell had taught the American Literature Survey for twenty-two years, and what sort of recognition had he been afforded? He hadn’t once won an award or a fellowship, even the consolation prizes of academe passing him by. Fitger, meanwhile, had been elected chair—though he had a lousy master’s degree instead of a doctorate, having spent two years airing unfounded opinions around a seminar table. Kentrell had read one of his novels, Stain, but didn’t think much of it. Any idiot could write a novel. Kentrell had written part of one once.
What was particularly galling: a few years before, someone had gotten hold of, and systematically distributed, a confidential spreadsheet showing the salaries of every faculty member in English, and Kentrell had found his name near the bottom. He hadn’t expected to find himself on top—Hesseldine regularly pimped himself out at international conferences, and Beauchamp seemed to publish a newly unreadable book every year—but he had been hired prior to both of them. Even worse: Fitger’s annual salary was higher than his. Not by much (seven hundred and fifty-three dollars and twenty-six cents, to be exact) but the discrepancy irked.
“I don’t want to pry,” Fitger said. (The sick-leave documentation Kentrell had submitted was heavily redacted; Fitger had been tempted to send it back with a FOIA request.) “But you know that, technically, you can only have two weeks of paid leave.”
Kentrell’s bony thighs shivered. He had lost weight: he had to cinch his corduroy pants at the waist with his belt. But had anyone asked how he was feeling? “I’ve been told I’ll need at least six,” he said.
“But you applied for a leave over the winter break. You don’t need to count that part,” Fitger said.
Kentrell reached behind him and flushed in order to mask an unpleasant noise.
“What I’m proposing”—Kentrell could hear Fitger opening the window—“is that we change the request so that your leave doesn’t begin until the first teaching day of the second semester. Then you’ll be asking for only three weeks—with two of them paid.”
Kentrell leaned his head against the wall, the vulgar graffiti scrawled across it as familiar now as his own last name.
“Franklin? We’ll still need to find someone to sub for your classes.”
The hinge on the restroom door announced the entry of another visitor. If Franklin wanted to talk more later, Fitger said—about his request, or about the need for faculty consensus on the SOV—he could find Fitger in his office, upstairs.
* * *
—
When he wasn’t knocking on doors like Little Red Riding Hood with his basket of unfulfillable promises, Fitger was responding to endless requests for credentials, affidavits, and documentation. (Explain why the writing classes listed below fulfill the university’s writing requirement. “Because they are writing classes,” he wrote; the form was returned to him. You must fill out and complete the answers in full.) He also tinkered, almost daily, with the Statement of Vision. He had written one version of the document that was twelve pages long; others were as short as a single paragraph. He was tempted to pen an SOV haiku:
English at Payne is
About reading and writing
And things in between.
During lulls he graded, taught, answered e-mail (Fran sent him, he estimated, fifty e-mails a day), and made multiple efforts to appeal to the provost. But he had found that an appointment with Rutledge was as easily obtained as an audience with the Wizard of Oz. Each time he penetrated the inner sanctum of Lefferts Hall, he was told that Rutledge’s office hours had just ended, or had not yet begun, or had been canceled altogether due to urgent, unspecified matters out of town.
Finally, with only one week left until the winter break, to which he was looking forward with something akin to desperation, Fitger set out early and full of purpose, a satchel of student essays in hand. Crossing the ice sheets that passed as sidewalks at Payne in December, he considered the anomalous appearance of the university’s administration building: on a campus dominated by colorless squat rectangular structures, Lefferts was a strangely rounded edifice resembling a reddish, ominous planet—a place from which, through one of the numerous darkly tinted windows, the rest of campus could be covertly observed.
He arrived at Rutledge’s office at 9:30 a.m., eschewing coffee and other liquids in case a twenty-two-second visit to the restroom should result in missing the provost’s sole appearance of the day. As usual, Rutledge’s door was tightly closed; but in the anteroom, Harvey Wu, provostial assistant, was racketing away on the keyboard attached to three different screens. He barely glanced in Fitger’s direction. “He isn’t in right now,” he said.
Fitger said he would wait.
“I wouldn’t advise that.”
“It’s fine. I brought work with me.” Indicating his briefcase, he sat down.
Wu’s typing slowed briefly. “You might as well have brought a sleeping bag. He’ll be out all day.”
“It’s the final week of the semester. I’ve been trying to meet him since October,” Fitger said. “Will he be in tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Later this week, before the break?”
Wu sighed and appeared to summon a calendar on one of his screens. “Late January, I’d say, is probably soonest. February would be safer.”
“Jesus,” Fitger said. “Can I reach him by phone?”
Wu stopped typing entirely, closing his eyes. “The provost is in Suriname,” he said.
“Suriname.” Fitger paused. “Would that be on…business?”
“Partly. He’s following the business portion of the trip with two weeks of vacation, followed by several weeks of discretionary leave.”
“All of that in Suriname.”
“Yes. He’s pursuing a hobby there. An interest.”
“And the hobby or interest,” Fitger said, wondering if they were playing Twenty Questions. “May I ask…”
“The provost collects tarantulas,” Wu said. “He’s a member of the American Tarantula Society. Theraphosa blondi. In fact, he’s an officer.”
“An officer in the tarantula society.” Fitger immediately envisioned Rutledge wearing a fuzzy gray tunic and an eight-legged cap.
“He brings the tarantulas back to the U.S. in Styrofoam coolers,” Wu said. “He’s had some difficulty in the past, getting through customs.”
“How surprising,” Fitger said. He had been interrogated for nearly an hour once, at customs, for an unlabeled bottle of shampoo. “The tarantulas don’t attempt to escape?”
“No.” Wu explained that the giant spiders—their legs, the provost had once explained, could overhang the edges of a dinner plate—would be carefully enclosed in individual Tupperware containers; otherwise, they would devour one another in transit.
<
br /> The conversation seemed to have come to an end. Fitger stood and buttoned his coat, then asked if, between daily forays to collect his woolly specimens, Rutledge might, for example via e-mail, entertain a few brief but important requests regarding—
“All e-mail and other correspondence is being held here.” Wu returned to his screens. “Try again in February,” he said. “He should be in then.”
* * *
—
“That looks like a scorecard.” Fran had stationed herself, once again, in the open doorway of Fitger’s office.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said. On his desk on a piece of cardboard, he had written the word “Shakespeare” and, beneath it, on the left in a column, the names of the faculty. On the right, he had left space for yeses, nos, bargaining chips, opinions, incentives, bribes.
Fran studied the cardboard. “It looks like you’re at only about fifty percent—and you’ve done the easier ones first. I thought you were going to talk to every member of the department before winter break.”
“I’ve been busy.” Fitger gestured toward the mayhem that was his desk. “I spent nearly two days chasing Donna Lovejoy’s wanker. If someone had told me that being chair was going to involve the apprehending of onanists…”
“Privilege of the office. What did you do with him?”
“I arranged to have him finish the term as well as his next semester’s credits via independent study—with me. We’ll meet in my office once a week. I’ll have to stipulate that his hands remain in view at all times.”
“Good idea.” Fran rubbed her own hands together. She was wearing fingerless gloves because of the plummeting temperature in the office. “By the way,” she said. “Your student Angela came by to tell you that she got an internship at the law school—which is pretty unusual for a first-year student. She brought you a gift to show her appreciation.” She ambled around the divider between their two offices and came back with a tissue-wrapped package.
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