After she’d taken her temperature, she made her lie down on the couch under a blanket while she phoned the school and asked for her mother. With her good ear, Kristin heard her speaking calmly. “Yes, it’s awful high, and her ear’s red and hot to the touch.… No, I don’t think you need to do that. I’ll just call them myself and take her right in.… Yes, of course, I’ll let you know the minute we get back.… It’s no bother, I love her too.”
It turned out she had a bacterial infection. They told her to lie on her side while they put some drops in her ear. Then they prescribed an oral antibiotic, gave her an extra-strength pain reliever and let her go.
It was snowing hard when they left the doctor’s office. She sat in the car with the heater on while Mrs. Connulty used an ice scraper to clear the windshield, and looking through it Kristin could see the tears in her eyes. She didn’t think they were caused by the cold. She believed they’d been brought on by her fear of exposure.
That episode was on her mind the morning after the foiled robbery, as she waited for Donna to show the chair of the history department into her office. She had a public e-mail address, and lacking any other means of contacting her than walking up and knocking on her front door, Matt Drinnan had chosen to use it. Around three a.m. he’d written to say he was in love with her—It seems impossible, but it’s happened—and her inclination, after reading the lengthy message, was to delete it immediately, because messages sent to a university address were never private, especially if you were a personnel officer. In California, hers had been subpoenaed so often it seemed like the techies were rummaging through her inbox at least once a week. On the other hand, deleting it wouldn’t accomplish anything. It was still on the server. And it was still in Matt’s heart.
Donna ushered the chair in, then stepped out and closed the door. Kristin rose and offered him her hand. They’d met at a couple monthly sessions held by Academic Affairs, but had never really talked. Around forty, trim and fit, with a receding hairline, John Bell had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. Like a number of other chairs around the university, he was a tenured associate professor. This was by design, since an associate was more likely than a full professor to do whatever the administration asked, even at the risk of annoying senior colleagues. If the department denied him promotion, the administration would overturn it—assuming he’d done its bidding. That’s how things worked both here and at any number of other schools.
“I saw the Globe article this morning about the attempted robbery in Cedar Park,” Bell said. “That was your husband who broke it up, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“He must have real cojones.”
The academic cop in her noted his willingness to use that particular word in the presence of a female administrator. “That’s one way of putting it,” she said. “The other is to say it was foolish as hell. The guy pointed a gun at him and was obviously prepared to use it.”
“Is he all right?”
Wanting to get the meeting over with so she could decide what to do about Matt, she gestured at the seat opposite her desk. “He’s got bandages all over his arm. He won’t play the guitar for a while, which is a problem for him.”
Bell sat down. “He’s a musician?”
“Among other things.”
“I play a little guitar, though I’m not very good.”
She made a point of glancing at the wall clock. He hadn’t come to discuss musicology, and she had more momentous things on her mind.
Bell finally cleared his throat. “I don’t know you well,” he said, “but I’ve got a problem on my hands and don’t know where else to turn.”
“What kind of problem?”
“It concerns a couple of my faculty members, and it’s related to academic integrity.”
“Well, normally that would come under the purview of the dean and the provost. And if Joanne thought I needed to become involved, she’d tell me.”
“Yes, I know that,” he said, and even though the morning was cool and the heat in the office had yet to trip on, his cheeks were beginning to glisten. “The thing is … Well, Dr. Stevens …”
“Kristin.”
“Kristin,” he said, “the thing is, Joanne Bedard is a good friend of one of these people. He’s spent six years cultivating her, and she’s susceptible to flattery. If I went to her with this problem, I’m afraid she’d take a chunk out of my rear the size of a Big Mac.”
Kristin didn’t want to have this conversation any more than Bell did, but they clearly were going to, so she might as well try to ease his discomfort. She stood, walked over to the window and cracked it open. When she sat down again, she said, “Whatever you’re about to say to me is confidential. I won’t discuss it with anyone else without first asking your permission. Does that help?”
“Yes,” he said, “it does. My wife just lost her job, we’ve got two kids, and I was hoping to go up for promotion next year. I’d rather not be here this morning. But if I didn’t address this situation, that would be negligence. There’s only so far you can go in protecting your self-interest. That’s what I said to my wife, anyway, and she agrees.”
Last week, Bell told her, the department had met to vote on tenure and promotion for Robert Dilson-Alvarez and Gwen Conley. They’d satisfied all the requirements, and though neither was particularly well liked they’d gotten positive recommendations, in both cases on a seven-to-two vote. Then, a couple days ago, he’d found a large manila envelope in his departmental mailbox, with his name typed on a label. It had neither stamps nor a postmark. Inside were two photocopied articles, each of which had several additional pages paper-clipped to it. The first article was a piece by Dilson-Alvarez titled “Neocolonialism and the Media in the West Indies Federation: 1958–1962.” It had appeared three years ago in a Canadian journal. Someone had used a yellow marker to highlight various passages—some as short as two or three sentences, others as long as a few paragraphs. The attached pages were taken from three other articles, each by a different author, all published prior to Dilson-Alvarez’s piece, and each attached page had highlighted passages identical to those in his article.
“Identical?” she asked.
“Word for word.”
“And he didn’t identify the passages as direct quotations?”
“No.”
“What was the second article?”
“One of Gwen Conley’s. Same thing. A number of passages highlighted in yellow—some short, some long—and each of them appeared verbatim in the attached pages from previously published work by other authors.”
“Did either Dilson-Alvarez or Conley cite the other works in their bibliographies?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“So we’re not dealing with simple sloppiness.”
“No.”
“You didn’t bring the pages with you?” Bell hadn’t been carrying a briefcase when he entered her office.
“No.” He looked sick, his face taking on a hue that wasn’t green, exactly, though it was pretty close. “I actually thought … No, that’s the wrong word. I’m afraid I hoped you’d tell me to forget it.”
“What in the world made you think I might do that?”
Bell laid both hands on his knees and leaned forward. “Kristin,” he said, “do you fully understand where we are? The provost at this university was twice turned down for tenure before she came here and worked her way into the administration. She has no standards whatsoever but can run rings around the president, and she’s surrounded herself with sycophants.”
“So you assumed I was one too?”
“Well, let’s just say many of us were stunned when you got hired. People don’t come here from the UC—Bedard doesn’t want them. She wants people from places like Black Hills State.”
“Is there really such a school?”
“That’s where our dean worked previously. Bedard and Norm Vance have been friends for about forty years. She’s the one who hired him.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because we have signed ballots, and I’m the one who counts them and records the results.”
“Was it the same two people both times?”
Bell nodded.
“Where are the ballots now?”
“The provost has them.”
“What?”
“We’re required to turn them in to her office immediately following the vote.”
“According to the faculty handbook, Joanne’s not supposed to have anything to do with the tenure and promotion process until she receives the recommendations of Dean Vance and the school committee in January.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. We’re supposed to follow the handbook, but we don’t. The provost already knows who voted against her pet.”
“Is the faculty aware that the ballots have gone to her?”
“I doubt it. They probably think I have them.”
“As department chair, you don’t vote, right?”
“No. But I have to submit an independent recommendation next week. And that’s why I’ve swallowed about half a bottle of Xanax since I got that envelope. Somebody on my faculty knows I have this information. If I give Robert and Gwen positive recommendations after seeing evidence of academic misconduct, I’m open to serious charges myself. But if I give them a negative, Bedard’s going to—”
She laid her pen down and held up her hand. “Let’s back up,” she said. The handbook, she reminded him, stated that evaluations could be based only on the materials in the file submitted by the candidate. Since the pages in that manila envelope weren’t part of anyone’s file, he couldn’t consider them even if he wanted to. There was a mechanism for adding material after the departmental vote, but it involved notifying the candidate of what you planned to do, and whoever delivered this information certainly hadn’t.
“In other words,” he said, “you are telling me to ignore it?”
“Absolutely not. In fact, I’m instructing you to bring me the contents of that envelope.”
“So you can do what with them?”
“So I can begin an investigation into possible academic misconduct.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime,” she said, rising, “it’s strictly my problem.”
He stood up too. “Well, given the size of it, I hope it’s the only one you’ve got.”
“It’s not,” she said.
Something in her voice must have revealed more than she intended. Instead of leaving, he continued to stand there. Then he stepped around the desk and hugged her. “I’m glad you’re here,” Bell said.
• • •
Once he left she opened a Word file and wrote a one-page account of their meeting, leaving out the hug. Then she popped in her USB stick and saved the file there. As soon as she received the material Bell had been given, she’d start investigating every aspect of Conley’s and Dilson-Alvarez’s careers. She felt certain that nothing she discovered could possibly faze her.
Her more immediate concern was Matt’s message, which she went to her inbox and reread. In it, he absolved her of all responsibility for his feelings, asserting that he knew she never intended to lead him on, that she hadn’t been sending false signals, that from the moment he reached out and touched her hand at the ridiculously named bar in North Reading he’d understood she wanted only to be his friend. The blame, if it had to be assigned, should all accrue to him. He was in love with her, but that was his problem, not hers.
He said it had come to him lately that he must once have taken joy in something as simple as the sight of a familiar face hovering over his crib when he opened his eyes in the morning, the creaking of a particular floorboard as he stepped through the front door after a long, boring day in first grade, his friend Frankie’s voice on the phone when they were eight or nine or ten: “Hey, Drinnan, you wanna go see the Sox on Sunday with me and Pop?” The process by which small pleasures had lost their power to deliver happiness was as mysterious to him as ever—maybe even more mysterious, since their value now seemed so essential that only a fool could fail to grasp it.
He’d seen the news report about her husband last night, and he knew they’d been together a long time, and he was not out to disrupt their marriage. But couldn’t they keep meeting for drinks? he asked. If not every day, then whenever she had time? She’d helped him become engaged in life again, he said. He’d recently given his car a good cleaning. The house too. He was going to repair everything that had fallen apart there, and he was beginning to think about the future and had even registered to vote. He didn’t have any money, but if he ever got his hands on some he’d do something smart with it. Around the corner, for all he knew, lay stocks and bonds, mutual funds.
She read the message four or five times. At some point, she propped her elbows on the desk and put her head in her hands. When she shut her eyes, she could see him sitting there in the house down the street from hers, alone in the middle of the night, telling a woman he’d only known for a couple months that all his thoughts now revolved around her. Even if he was asking for more than he acknowledged, he was offering more than he asked and at no small risk to himself. He couldn’t know that last night, when she’d made love to her husband, it was his hand rather than Cal’s that she’d felt on her breast, or that afterward she’d lain on her side with her back to the man she’d lived with all this time so she could imagine what it might feel like if it were Matt she was in bed with.
For fifteen years, up until she lost her job, her life had been without significant complication. She’d risen each morning, made herself breakfast, glanced at the local paper, then showered and dressed. She’d walked into the garage, pressed the door opener, climbed into her car and driven to work. At the university, she’d attended innumerable meetings, mostly with people like her, who’d started out as biologists, literary critics, painters or chemical engineers and ended up in administration. They talked now about budget shortfalls, mission statements, outcome assessments, five-year plans. All of them earned corporate salaries. For the most part, they were bright people, and generally speaking they liked one another.
Cal didn’t say much about music, but when he did it was usually because he’d heard another musician whose playing excited him. “That guy’s really tasteful,” he might remark. “He never plays too many notes, and his improvisations are fresh and unpredictable. He delivers lots of color.” Every now and then, usually when she was driving home in the evening, often after going to dinner with a couple other administrators, a job candidate or some wealthy alumnus being courted by the development office, she would think about Cal’s comments and assess things accordingly: she was living her life tastefully—she never played too many notes—but it lacked color. And she never departed from the melody. Improvisation was for others.
She had no idea how much time had passed before she reached for her mouse and clicked Reply. She wrote only a few lines.
Forgive me, Matt, for not contacting you yesterday. As I’m sure you understand, what happened to my husband was disturbing, and I rushed to the hospital once I found out. I could have left a message on your home phone to explain, and I should have.
And forgive me for what I am about to say now, because we will surely both come to regret it, probably quite soon: I’m afraid I might be in love with you too.
when matt was seventeen, he read a short novel by Richard Yates called A Good School and was so moved by the struggles of the book’s adolescent characters that he’d scoured the Montvale and Cedar Park libraries for all the author’s work, blazing through one title after another. Shortly afterward, an article in the Globe reported that the semifamous writer lived in Boston and often ate dinner at the Newbury Steakhouse, which Matt recalled having seen on his numerous trips to Fenway with Frankie. So one late-summer evening he rode
the Orange Line into the city and hung around the corner of Mass Ave and Newbury, where the restaurant was located, hoping the novelist might happen along. He’d justified the endeavor by telling himself he simply wanted the author to know how much he loved his work.
He was about to give up when a man resembling Yates walked around the corner. Matt wasn’t sure it was him: he looked both older and taller than expected. But he had the right face—gray beard, sad lines—so before he could enter the restaurant, Matt stepped up and said, “Mr. Yates?”
The man paused, glanced at him, then dropped his gaze as if he needed to consider the question. In the ensuing silence, Matt noted that his slumped shoulders made him look like a hunchback. Finally, he said, “Yeah?”
Matt’s heart began to race. He felt as if he were offering testimony and that if he hit on the right words he’d walk away with tangible gain. He didn’t know why he thought so, just as he wouldn’t know fifteen years later, when he sat down to dinner with Jonathan Franzen or Ian McEwan or any of the other writers with whom his job allowed him to rub shoulders. “Mr. Yates,” he stammered, “I just wanted to tell you how much I love your books. I’ve read them all. Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, The Easter Parade, Cold Spring Harbor, Disturbing the Peace … every single one of them. My favorite’s probably A Good School.”
Again the author dropped his gaze. Later, whenever Matt related the story of the encounter to other novelists, they invariably asked if Yates had been drunk. He didn’t know for sure, but he didn’t think so, and that was what he told them.
“A Good School’s an étude,” Yates finally said. “Revolutionary Road’s a symphony. The closest I ever came to writing one, anyway.”
Matt just stood there awkwardly after hearing that, and once the novelist realized his young fan had run out of words, he stuck his hand out. Matt shook it—it felt dry and chilly—and then Yates disappeared into the steak house.
Lately, he’d been thinking a lot about that experience. He’d heard a man with five or six more years to live speaking of himself and all his efforts almost in the past tense. It was like he already knew he’d never produce another book. And unlike many of the writers Matt had met at the Emporium, he didn’t insist that his most recent novel was his masterpiece. Instead, he thought his first one was, or that it had at least come close, and Matt believed this was something Yates had known for a long time, that even when writing it he might’ve suspected it represented the best he had in him. Though he used to think his hero was disparaging A Good School by calling it an étude, he now saw things differently. No one could write a symphony every day, and no one could live one either.
The Realm of Last Chances Page 14