Home Run

by Paul Kropp

  I followed her through a mouse-maze of cubicles, wondering if an electric shock or a little piece of grain was waiting for me at the end. Instead, I found myself in a tiny half-office that had three chairs, a computer, and a bookshelf.

  “What can we do for you, Alan?” she asked, flashing that genuine smile one more time.

  “Well, I’m having a little trouble in Pysch,” I said. “So I was wondering if I could drop the course and maybe pick up something a little more in line with, uh…” My words dropped off, as they sometimes do when my thoughts run a little ahead of them. My thoughts, at that moment, were engaged in some interesting speculation on just how attractive Dean Thayer happened to be, and how much more attractive she might be with a little less clothing. It took some willpower to snap my mind back to reality.

  “Drop and add,” she said, looking at the computer screen. “Looks like Psychology 101 isn’t for you.”

  “It’s not that I haven’t been trying,” I began. “And I’m sure the course will get more interesting later on, but, frankly, I’m not doing that well with this behaviourist stuff.”

  Her brown eyes looked at the screen, then back at me. “A thirty-two on the first quiz.”

  I smiled, a fairly genuine smile, right back to her. “Aren’t computers wonderful?”

  “Your other marks are quite good, Alan,” she said. “You’re getting an A in Poetry and Short Fiction, and your Humanities mark is good.”

  “Thank you, Dean Thayer.”

  “Gloria,” she said, smiling again. “I’m not a dean, just an admin. assistant. We help out during drop-and-add week.”

  “Aha,” I said. “I had a hunch you were too good-looking to be a dean.”

  She groaned. “Let’s get down to business, Alan. What course were you thinking of adding?”

  “I was wondering about Women in Modern Society,” I said. “The course description looked kind of interesting.”

  “Looking to meet some girls, eh?” she asked wryly.

  I kept my mouth shut. Of course I was out to meet some girls. Why else would I sign up for a course in the women’s studies department? But there was no way I could respond to her question with a truthful answer.

  “Let me see,” Ms. Thayer said, typing something into the computer. “There’s room. Is that the course you really want?” Her middle finger hovered over the enter key, waiting for me to say something.

  “Well, I suppose,” I said.

  Her finger dropped. “Done.” She looked up. “Anything else you’d like?”

  Now that question sent my mind leaping. Ms. Call-me-Gloria Thayer seemed even more attractive because she was so matter-of-fact. There was something about her no-nonsense attitude that was getting me positively excited, but I pushed that thought aside and wiggled in the chair.

  “No, not really, but I was just wondering,” I said, “if anyone ever told you how much you look like Ashley Judd.”

  She shot me a look that did not come with a smile. “Just my ex-husband,” she said. “And he was a jerk.”

  And that, as they say, was that.

  Walking back to the dorm, I spent the next eleven minutes wondering if I, too, might be a jerk. I wondered if my shallowness and my lack of direction might make me a jerk, or my lack of sensitivity, or my general cloddishness. I wondered if I might have gotten laid by now if I were not a jerk, or at least managed to hide my jerkishness.

  All those questions were spinning through my mind when I got back to our dorm room. Kirk was reading a book, something serious and unjerkish, and looked up.

  “Am I a jerk?” I asked him.

  He gave me a look. “Somebody suggest that?” he asked. “Kind of, and I’ve been wondering.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, like a doctor considering a patient. “Let me just check.” He grabbed a dictionary from his bookshelf. “Webster’s says that a jerk is ‘a stupid, dull, and fatuous person.’” I don’t think you fit the bill. You’re definitely not stupid, since your marks are mostly okay, and at least a few people think you’re interesting.”

  “What about fatuous?”

  “Got to look that one up,” he said. “Hmmm, it means ‘silly and pointless.’” He gave me a searching look. “I have known you to be silly, and maybe lacking direction.”

  “So I am fatuous,” I sighed.

  “But not a jerk.”

  These are the kind of intellectual discussions that we’re supposed to have at university, discussions that suggest the great traditions of thought and philosophy which lie at the basis of our culture. I’m sure that my parents, had they heard this learned back-and-forth, would have felt reassured that their tuition money was being well spent. I’m sure that Maggie, even in her Ivy League school, would have had to acknowledge that there was some intellectual depth out here at BU. If my attention span could actually extend beyond eleven minutes, we might have delved further into some serious self-examination.

  As it was, the eleven minutes was up. “Let’s go eat,” I said.

  Kirk had become my best friend at school despite the enormous differences in our interests and backgrounds. He was cleaner, neater, and more conscientious than I was. On the other hand, I brought a certain amount of disorder and zaniness to his otherwise serious life, a je ne sais quoi, you might say. While Kirk would neatly press his own shirts (and mine, if I asked him), I would be the one to show him that boxer shorts actually exist and that a guy could wear a shirt without an undershirt beneath it. One day, I even showed Kirk that the Internet was not a den of sin and iniquity, that websites like the fan site for the Thinkertoys did not have pictures of nude women. Another day we went over to Fuji’s room and I showed him that not all video games were filled with violence, blood, and gore.

  We balanced each other, Kirk and I. We even had a few courses in common—Humanities 101 and Poetry and Short Fiction 105 among them. Kirk was better in Humanities with his knowledge of the Bible and his feel for Greek philosophy. I was stronger in English, always my best subject, though I was having some trouble when we got to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and we just couldn’t agree on whether Satan or God was the more interesting character. Still, our discussions were invigorating, perhaps more so because we had such different ideas.

  It’s possible that our debates were having some effect on me. At least Maggie thought so.

  To: amacklin@​BU.​edu

  From: maggiemac@​sl.​edu

  Your last email sounded almost intellectual. When did this nasty trend get started? I expect you to stay the same adorable idiot you’ve always been, and suddenly you’re writing about Satan and original sin. I think this Christian roommate is starting to get to you. Next thing you know, they’ll start dunking you in water and declaring you born again. Wasn’t being born once trouble enough?

  Actually, I don’t think Kirk was getting to me as much as the entire place. Somebody wrote in our school paper that going off to university had much in common with going to jail. We’re cut off from our friends and families, put in an overcrowded environment, consistently belittled by our guards/professors, and forced to rethink all our ideas and values. In a prison, the inmates suck up to guards for a few smokes; here we suck up to professors for an extra three marks on an assignment.

  I thought that article was a little over the top, since our suffering and overcrowding here at BU were hardly on the level of Kingston Pen, but the attitude change was scarily real. In this tiny, cloistered (another good word!) environment, nothing outside of the campus seems very important.

  So I was saying to Kirk. We sat eating lunch at the sundial one day near the end of October. It was a glorious day: the sun shining brightly in a crisp blue sky, a few fallen leaves blowing gently across the crowd, and everyone enjoying the warmth enough to strip off coats and heavy sweaters.

  “A day like this is a gift, Al,” Kirk said, leaning back on the concrete. “A gift from—”

  “God,” I said, filling in. I was watching the various coeds and secretaries parade across
campus and, frankly, God was the last thing on my mind.

  “Ah, you’re finally figuring it out.”

  “I just know how you think.”

  “And I know what you’re thinking about,” he replied. “Either the blonde over there by the fence, or the girl with short hair and the big, uh, you know.”

  “Did you actually suggest what I thought you did?”

  Kirk refused to comment. Of course, he was right. I was looking at the blonde by the fence and the dark-haired girl with big boobs. I was admiring the dark-haired girl, especially, when I realized that I had met her before.

  “Where are you going?” Kirk asked.

  “Got to talk to an old friend,” I told him.

  8

  Gloriana

  IT HAD BEEN ALMOST a month since the fiasco with Shauna. I had decided, after her, to give up on women and concentrate on my studies. This resolve was made more more difficult by the hundreds of attractive women in my various courses. My new women’s studies course, for instance, was a virtual gold mine of glittering girls. I could, I suppose, have asked any of them to go out for coffee, or go to a club, or join me at Slavin Hall for lunch. But I didn’t. I was studying. Perhaps I was in a fallow period, just waiting for the moment to begin again.

  But when I saw Gloria Thayer eating her lunch by the concrete railing outside Randolf Hall, I was reminded just how attractive she was.

  I walked up beside her and propped my arms on the railing.

  “Ms. Thayer, I was wrong,” I began. “You do not look like Ashley Judd. You look better than that. I’d say you look remarkably like yourself.”

  She turned and looked at me. Her face was quite perfect without any makeup at all. Just like her: no nonsense. The expression on that face was somewhere between neutral and moderately annoyed.

  “It’s Al Macklin,” I said, continuing. “The jerk?”

  “Oh, I remember,” she said, blushing a little. “You were changing a course.”

  “Psychology to…remember?”

  She studied my face for a second. “Women’s studies, right?”

  “Absolutely right. Your advice to go into that course was, well, genius. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  I could see her wondering whether she had actually given me that advice, but I decided not to give her too long to reflect. When chatting up a girl, it’s important to keep the patter going.

  “I can see now that my Ashley Judd comment was totally inappropriate. That kind of comparison is demeaning because of its emphasis on the physical. See, that’s just one of the things I’ve learned in that new course. Women have been objectified for centuries by a male-dominated culture, so really, it’s no wonder you thought I was a jerk.”

  “I didn’t call you a jerk, did I?” she asked.

  “No, no,” I said. “You’d never do something like that. It was just an offhand comparison with your ex-husband.” “Oh, that jerk.”

  “That fool is what I would say,” I went on. “To lose a woman like you, a man would have to be an idiot.” What a line, I said to myself. How do I come up with these things? And why can’t I find words like that when I really need them?

  “Come on, you don’t even know me.” She turned away and took a bite out of her sandwich.

  “But I’d like to,” I replied.

  She turned back to me, trying to look miffed, but there was a smile underneath the annoyance. “Alan, I’m old enough to be, well, almost your mother.”

  “Not so,” I told her. “I’m twenty,” I said, exaggerating by a year or so, “and I suspect you’re about thirty, so that’s only ten years between us. Now there have been a couple recorded cases of ten year olds giving birth, but that’s pretty rare.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” she said.

  “Still pretty rare,” I came back. “What if I told you that I’m very mature for a twenty year old, that I’m really twenty going on thirty. Besides, what’s a decade between friends?”

  “I can’t believe this. Are you actually coming on to me?”

  I gave her my best Hugh Grant look. “Actually, yes. I am.”

  We had reached a pretty tense moment, a moment of decision. Gloria could, for instance, take her sandwich and smoosh it into my face, then go stomping off to her office. She could, on the other hand, continue the dalliance by asking me just what I had in mind. Dalliance, isn’t that a great word? These days we have too much hooking up and not enough dalliance.

  I could see on her face the various thoughts that must have been going through her mind. I was a kid, that was true, but not that much of a kid. She was older, that was true, but not that much older. Did she have a boyfriend? Was she still carrying a thing for “the jerk” ex-husband? Was there some university policy against admin. assistants going out with students? Lots of thoughts to consider in perhaps five seconds. It gave a person some respect for the human brain.

  “This is crazy,” she said. But I caught the smile.

  “Sensible is overrated,” I replied. “How about we have lunch tomorrow?”

  Gloria gave me an appraising look. Would I just go away if she told me to? Did she really want me to go away? There was another five seconds to consider things.

  “Coffee,” she said at last. “But not on campus. There’s a Starbucks on Nanaimo Street. I’ll meet you there for a few minutes after work, tomorrow about five.”

  I smiled and agreed, then she packed up her sandwich and headed back to the Dean’s Office.

  I stayed put until Kirk came up beside me. I tried to keep a poker face rather than asking immediately for a high-five. Then again, I’m not sure Kirk knew how to do a high-five.

  “So how’d you do?” he asked.

  “Coffee date, tomorrow,” I said, breaking into a wide grin.

  “Pretty smooth, Al. Remind me to take lessons from you if I ever have to look for a girl.”

  “From what I can tell,” I replied, “you need lessons in how to fight them off.”

  I admit I was a bit nervous about meeting Gloria for coffee. I have done a few coffee dates over the last couple of years, but this was my first experience ever with an “older woman.” In my film course, the “older woman” was a stock character in the old Hollywood movies. Actresses like Jane Wyman created such roles. Anne Bancroft seduced a very young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, a movie that was popular about twenty years before I was born. But these older women really were older, like in their forties, while Gloria was only somewhat older. Still, she was definitely more experienced than me—she’d been married, she might even have kids! For a few minutes, while I sat in the Film 101 lab watching Gone with the Wind clips, I felt positively terrified. It was only a couple years ago that I started going out with sixteen year olds; now I was doubling the age factor.

  As the question goes, what was I thinking?

  Nonetheless, it was too late to back down. Given my luck over the past little while, it would probably all come to nothing. So after class I headed over to the Starbucks on Nanaimo Street. It was a rainy afternoon, and the general gloom meshed with my hopeless mood. I was early, of course, so I got my grande latte, and sat on one of two stools at a small table, and waited. And waited. And waited. I checked my watch every five minutes, then began to wonder if I had the wrong date or the wrong Starbucks. I eventually asked the counter guy if there was another Starbucks on Nanaimo, but he said I was at the one and only. By five-thirty, my latte was cold and I had decided that Gloria had simply changed her mind. Part of me was disappointed, but part of me was exhaling sighs of relief. What had I been thinking?

  I was at the door, heading out, when Gloria came rushing in.

  “Sorry,” she said, closing her umbrella. “I got held up.”

  “No problem,” I lied.

  “Let me buy you something,” she offered, by way of apology.

  So I asked for an espresso, since that seemed a bit more mature than the latte I had just finished, and Gloria got a straight black coffee. We settled back at the smal
l table I had just abandoned and talked small: weather, lateness, apologies.

  “I can’t believe I agreed to meet you here,” Gloria said. “The administration frowns on this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Staff and students, seeing each other,” she said. “You could haul me up on harassment charges.”

  “But I haven’t been harassed.”

  “So far I’ve managed to control myself.” She laughed.

  I liked the sound of that remark. Gloria was looking quite, well, glorious that afternoon, even after a long day at the Dean’s Office. Her hair shone under the lights, her smile flashed, her eyes sparkled. I would not have minded her harassing me at all, but that seemed a pretty remote possibility.

  We had only twenty minutes to talk that afternoon. I found out that there were children, ages three and seven, waiting at home with a babysitter. I found out that Gloria had graduated from BU ten years ago, gotten married, then taken a part-time job at the Dean’s Office that had turned into a full-time job after her divorce. “Happens,” she said with a shrug.

  I’m not sure what Gloria found out about me. She had already seen my class schedule, and talking about my classes to someone ten years beyond all that seemed a bit juvenile. So I talked about my home town, about movies, about my roommate Kirk, and about poetry. I tried not to sound like a kid. Be mature, I told myself. Pretend you’re mature.

  Then we reached that awkward moment when Gloria had to go—was this going forward or coming to a quick end? Usually, a guy gets a sense of his prospects long before the coffees are finished, but I really didn’t have a clue. There were no signs, no quick touches of hands, or smiles, or shared laughter. Maybe older women are like that, a little more secretive. I had to ask.

  “Can I see you again?”

  She gave me a serious look. “So you’re not scared off? An older woman with kids and emotional baggage from a lousy marriage, and you still want to go out?”