The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  All over the country people were being dislocated, heading off to places they didn’t belong, hoping to somehow find themselves another home. Some of them, like Andrew Saucer, probably couldn’t fit in anywhere. Cal was beginning to suspect he was yet another, that there was nothing left for him, that one wrong turn he’d taken a long time ago had landed him right here, trying to remember the stranger next door.

  “Speaking of a good meal,” Vico was saying, “I believe you could use one. You’ve ingested a lot of lighter fluid over the last couple of weeks. My pals and I lost interest in the Series when the Yankees dropped the pennant and denied us the chance to root against ’em, but the Pats play the Vikings on Sunday, which means Randy Moss is back and we’ve got him to hate. How about it? Want to come over? Game starts around four. We’ll drink all the way through it and chow down when it ends.”

  Over many years of playing fiddle tunes on guitar and mandolin, Cal had learned to prize those fleeting instants when his wrists loosened up and his hands were moving at just the right speed: not picking so hard that he had to smear notes, instead allowing each one to exist as its own separate creation, according it the dignity it deserved. When this happened, the most wonderful sensation came over him, as if at least for a while everything was as it should be, the tune he was playing and the instrument he was playing it on both belonging to him and, even more important, he to them. It couldn’t last forever, but that’s exactly how he felt now.

  “Sure, Vico,” he said, “I’d like that.”

  donna taff would’ve preferred to go through life thinking others wished her well, but she’d noticed that this notion often led people to become prey, losing their savings to Bernie Madoff or their cell phones to some young hoodlum because they’d stupidly pulled them out on the subway as the train neared their stop. Whereas if you were like her and regarded those around you with keen-eyed suspicion, you wouldn’t easily get fooled.

  So she was suspicious of her husband, Charlie, who kept hatching schemes to improve their financial situation. A few years ago, after his best friend drowned in the Starbound disaster, he’d sold his trawler, taken out a second mortgage on their Gloucester home and opened a bar called the Screeching Gull. His reasoning went something like this: new groundfishing regulations, combined with reduced limits on a number of species, made it unlikely he’d see any growth in catch levels over the next decade or so, too many of his friends had died at sea anyway and he didn’t want to leave her a widow. Furthermore, the film version of The Perfect Storm had just been released about eighteen months earlier, and people were flocking to town wanting to see where the crew of the Andrea Gail had lived, worked and hung out. Since a great many of the scenes in the movie were set in a Gloucester bar called the Crow’s Nest, he was convinced that simply opening a pub named after a bird would draw tourists by the score.

  The tourists never came. The pub was only a block off Main, but it was a block that few outsiders ever ventured into. While over time it developed its own clientele, primarily old friends from the fishing industry who’d tired of all the thrill seekers continually crowding the Crow’s Nest, business had been slack now for at least a couple of years and even showed signs of getting worse. If she hadn’t been one of only three administrative assistants at North Shore State to receive a raise last year, she and Charlie might have shown up in the foreclosure stats.

  She was suspicious of Finn and Cara Martone, who worked at the Screeching Gull and told too many stories that didn’t add up. They’d met in Kansas, Finn said when the two couples were sitting at a table after the bar closed, finishing off a keg. Yet another time, Donna overheard Cara tell a customer that she’d first laid eyes on her husband on a beach in Orange County, California. Surrounded by all that tan SoCal perfection, she proudly remarked, he’d still stood out. How could he not? Even in dank and foggy Gloucester his skin remained as bronze as a penny, his stomach was flat, and his biceps rippled when he reached for the tap to draw a pint. He’d earned a degree in PE, he said, and coached football for a couple of years at a Michigan high school. But Charlie, who seemed enamored with both of them, once noted that when he and Finn watched a Pats game together, his younger friend seemed stumped by pretty basic terminology like “cover two” and “skinny post.”

  Her suspicion also extended to her boss. At first, it was rooted in her fear that a woman as well educated as Kristin Stevens, with her background at a top research university, would look down her nose at her from the moment she walked in. Happily, that hadn’t been the case. Grudgingly—because it was not Donna’s habit to give things away—Kristin earned her trust. She was kind. And you could sense she’d known her share of hardship.

  As the semester moved into the middle of November and a number of nettlesome issues loomed, her boss looked far less stressed out than she had when she began work back in August. Rather than appearing each morning with her hair askew and bags under her eyes, she now came in with every strand in place, her makeup carefully applied, her face relaxed. Some mornings she brought Donna delicacies she’d picked up at the bakery across the street from the Bradbury bus station: vanilla-custard babas, lemon anginetti. One day she even invited her to lunch at a small place called Café Polonia, which served three different kinds of pierogi and a tangy hunter’s stew.

  Her current suspicion of Kristin was rooted in the belief that when a fifty-year-old woman stops looking miserable and harried and seems relaxed and happy, it’s usually for one reason only. If they’d ever had occasion to go out after work for a few drinks, she eventually might’ve looked her boss in the eye and said, “Whatever it is you’ve found for yourself, you better not let it come to light.”

  What comes to light when you launch an investigation of academic misconduct is seldom surprising. People pad their CVs, listing as “publications” articles that are simply under review. They reward themselves with consultantships at companies in foreign countries. They claim membership in Phi Beta Kappa. They name themselves to leadership positions in professional organizations that, at best, they’re only members of. They list “presentations” at conferences they didn’t attend. Back when student evaluations were turned in on paper, they delivered forgeries; now that the process has gone online, those with the technical know-how hack into the system and replace poor evaluations with good ones, taking care to make at least a few of their students sound representatively inarticulate.

  When Kristin was a professor, she hadn’t expected to qualify for tenure. Her teaching evaluations were spotty, and the book based on her dissertation had been turned down by several presses. Shortly before she would’ve had to stand for tenure, she’d been asked to join the administration on an interim basis. She accepted, since that would stop her tenure clock. If she’d gone through the process, though, she wouldn’t have lied about her lack of accomplishment, so she’d never felt any sympathy for those who did. If they lied and she discovered it, they’d get what they deserved.

  After John Bell delivered evidence damning Robert Dilson-Alvarez and Gwendolyn Conley, she went over it carefully, then pulled the professors’ personnel files and reviewed their CVs.

  Dilson-Alvarez listed an undergraduate degree from Heidelberg, and a master’s and doctorate from McGill. Prior to his arrival at North Shore State, he’d held visiting professorships at SUNY Binghamton and Colgate, followed by a lectureship at Appalachian State. One could argue that his career had spiraled steadily downward. But so had Kristin’s.

  According to Gwendolyn Conley’s vitae, she’d taken her B.A. at Cal State, Fullerton, then earned an M.A. at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. There was a gap of six years before she’d enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Nevada, Reno. During this period she’d taught for three years at a community college in Porterville, California.

  Conley had the kind of background you expected to encounter at North Shore State: degrees from second- or even third-tier public schools, a spotty teaching résumé, minimal publications. Dilson-A
lvarez didn’t. He’d started off hot, attending prestigious universities and publishing a book a decade ago with a press in Great Britain. She flipped back to his résumé and saw that “To Shoot Down a European”: Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Therapeutic Violence had been issued in the fall of 2000 by Caylor and Hill, International Academic Publishers. She hadn’t heard of the press, so she opened her browser and typed the name in on Google.

  The company had gone out of business in 2003. She found a couple of articles in British trade journals detailing its various financial problems, and one of them reported that the press had specialized in titles that dealt with liberation movements. A couple had been fairly successful, with a paperback edition of one having been brought out in the United States by Picador.

  Oddly, the only mention she could find of Dilson-Alvarez’s book was on the North Shore State website. It wasn’t listed on Amazon UK, and no reviews came up anywhere, even in JSTOR. The only pertinent reference was a quote from the preface Jean-Paul Sartre had written for Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.… For in the first days of the revolt you must kill; to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”

  Dilson-Alvarez’s tenure documents would have reached the dean’s office by now, and the file should have included all relevant publications. But given what Bell had told her of Provost Bedard’s coziness with this professor, she decided not to call her just yet.

  Instead, she phoned the chair. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Okay. Can you hold on for a moment? My office door’s open.”

  While waiting, she saw the red light blink on her BlackBerry. A new text message from Matt: Making a foot-long tuna melt and thinking of you. He sent them to her off and on all day, and she frequently reread them. In each instance she felt augmented, as if digesting the words for the tenth or twelfth time added yet another layer to the entity the rest of the world knew as Kristin Stevens. The messages might not keep coming forever. She was fifty years old, her hair beginning to turn gray, her body losing its tone. But something surprising had happened just when she thought nothing ever could.

  “All right,” Bell said, “I’m back.”

  “When Dilson-Alvarez submitted his tenure documents,” she asked, “did he include his book?”

  “No. He wasn’t required to. He published it before we hired him. All he had to submit in the tenure file was the work that’s been accepted or come out since he got here.”

  “Have you actually seen the book?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When we interviewed him. I was on the hiring committee. He submitted it as his writing sample.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “Some of it.”

  “What did you think?”

  He sighed. “I was an assistant professor at the time—actually up for tenure myself. Some people on the committee were very taken by it. I mean, it was a book. Nobody else in the department had ever published one.”

  “In other words, you weren’t impressed?”

  “Since you’re asking me questions,” he said, “might I risk one myself?”

  “I suppose the least I can do is say yes, right?”

  “You could say no, but I suspect you’re too nice a person.”

  “Okay. Fire away.”

  “What made you quit being a literary critic?”

  Still holding the phone, she pushed her chair back from her desk and looked through the window at the quad. The morning couldn’t have been more beautiful. The sun was out, and a brisk breeze sent leaves swirling through the air as students strolled between classes. It was the kind of day that made you happy to be here, even if it wasn’t where you thought you belonged. “I despised all the jargon,” she said. “I blamed it for destroying my love of literature. In retrospect, this was unfair. That didn’t have to happen.”

  “Granted,” he said. “Better things can always happen. But academic discourse, especially in fields like yours and mine, has become a long, tiresome exercise in obfuscation. That’s what’s in. What I love is decidedly out.”

  “What do you love?”

  “I’m an old-fashioned proponent of event-based history who clings to the simple-minded notion that what’s most interesting is a well-told story. The writers I go back to again and again are people like Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin. And they’re anathema to academic historians. Robert’s book’s okay for what it is, I guess. But I only made it through about five or ten pages. Why do you ask?”

  She told him she couldn’t find any mention of the title online. The publisher was defunct, and the book had apparently never been reviewed anywhere, which she found unusual.

  “So given the plagiarized passages in his article,” Bell said, “you’re wondering whether or not the book exists. I can relieve your mind on that score. Seven years ago, I held it in my hands.”

  “For all of ten or twelve minutes.”

  Bell burst out laughing, and it sounded as if this was the first release of tension he’d experienced in days, if not weeks. “Kristin,” he said, “the most amazing thing has occurred.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve become fond of an administrator.”

  That night, as she lay on her back in Penelope Hill’s bed, staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see, in a house she had no right to be in, she told Matt about her two plagiarists and said she was in a quandary about what to do next.

  “Just get rid of them,” he said.

  “It’s not quite that simple.”

  “It was pretty simple when my boss caught me.”

  Both of them smelled of sex, brandy and Szechuan beef. After making love, they’d eaten Chinese takeout in the glow of a lithium flashlight he’d bought at Paul Nowicki’s hardware. He no longer felt any inclination to avoid the place, he’d told her. The other day his ex waited on him, and they’d chatted like old friends.

  “You worked at a bookstore,” she said. “My plagiarists are employed by a university. A shitty one, but still a sort of institution with all the usual rules.”

  “Breaking the law’s generally accepted as wrong. I fail to see the difference.”

  On this sagging mattress that hadn’t been slept on in decades, she’d done and said things that she could neither condone nor disown. Soon she’d go home and face her husband, and when he asked how she’d spent her day and evening she would look him in the eye and lie, and his willingness to believe her would diminish him a bit further. He was six foot four but shrinking daily, a decent man with huge hands that became delicate only when he laid them on a mandolin.

  “We’re breaking the law by being here,” she said.

  “Well, that is different. In our case, hearts are involved.”

  He rolled toward her and rested his head on her breast. She loved it when he did that. Though it shamed her to acknowledge this even to herself, it made her wish, as she used to, that she could have a child. Phil always maintained they should wait until they both got tenure, but once he did he left. She was in her midthirties when she met Cal. When he broached the subject she told him it was too late, that her job wouldn’t allow for child rearing. The truth was she didn’t want to have a baby with him, though she knew that unlike Phil he would’ve made a good father. How irrational her choices had been, none more so than being where she was right now. “I actually have a feeling hearts may be involved in my plagiarism case, too,” she said. “Gwendolyn Conley’s heart, anyway.”

  She told him that the first time she’d seen the two of them together, she suspected they were lovers. From John Bell she’d learned that Conley was divorced, with two young children, and that Dilson-Alvarez was married, though no one in the department, as far as the chair knew, had ever met his wife. It was said she came from someplace in Eastern Europe. Slovenia, he thought, or maybe
Slovakia.

  “So what does being lovers,” Matt asked, “have to do with being plagiarists?” It accrued to his credit that he took her concerns seriously. Try though Cal might—and he sometimes did—he’d never been able to conceal his belief that about 90 percent of what transpired at universities was bogus. He once remarked that the only people he respected at her previous school were those in the Department of Viticulture and Enology. When she wondered why, he said, “At least they admit they’re producing an intoxicant.”

  “I don’t know,” she told Matt. “But I have a feeling that somehow Dilson-Alvarez has entrapped her.”

  “Well, if she let him talk her into plagiarizing, she’ll pay with her job.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Are you serious? Your provost might be an idiot, but I doubt she’s suicidal. Once you’ve shown her the evidence you just described to me, she can’t afford to ignore it. That’d make her guilty of misconduct herself. I read a book about plagiarism—Stolen Words, I believe it was called. It’s pretty cut and dried in academia. You should know that.”

  “You’ve read a book about everything,” she said, then told him she still needed to confer with the editors of the journals in which the disputed articles had appeared, to alert them of her discovery and take their statements. She also hoped to contact the editor in chief of the British house that published Dilson-Alvarez’s book; she’d seen his name in one of the online articles, so unless he’d died in the meantime, she ought to be able to track him down. She couldn’t help but wonder why the book had never been reviewed anywhere.

  “Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “I’d also call the National Student Clearinghouse and ask them to check their degrees, since official transcripts can be faked. But that’s tricky, because the clearinghouse requires written permission from the individuals whose records you’ve requested. Normally, you get that before hiring anybody, but North Shore didn’t have the foresight and asking for it now would tip my hand. This is just a horrible mess, and I can’t tell you how badly I wish it hadn’t come up. If I could ignore it, I would.”