Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  Elizabeth’s face, normally inscrutable, seemed to shift between real sympathy for Bonnie and glee because, in the race to get ahead, she’d just pulled a couple of lengths ahead of her. “Right. No problem. I’ll tell Dr. Carillo—maybe next spring?”

  “Absolutely.” Bonnie nodded vigorously, sidling toward the door. “Next spring, great, I’ll start planning over the summer. Sounds like fun. Thanks, Elizabeth, I really appreciate it.” She really did. Well, better to be naive than cynical and paranoid like everyone else. Hold on to it as long as you can, that was Andrew’s advice.

  “All right. Last on the agenda, this year’s outstanding student. You were to give me your nominees, and I believe I’ve got everyone’s but Bonnie’s. Oh, and yours, Dominic. Would that be for the usual reason? No one worthy enough to warrant consideration?”

  Brodsky grunted, not bothering to look up from the brutal manicure he was giving himself with a penknife. He and Richard didn’t get along, but Brodsky’s temperament with everybody was almost as bearish as his hairy, hulking body. But he was a brilliant scholar. Andrew rather liked him, even though their teaching philosophies were poles apart. At least you never had to wonder where you stood with Dominic, who was happy to call you an ass to your face if he thought you were being one.

  “Let me guess,” he said in his deep-chested rumble. “O’Neal’s list is all women. Right?”

  Elizabeth only blinked at him with slow disdain.

  “Flynn’s is the longest, because he thinks that’ll give him a better chance to ‘win.’” He made quote marks in the air. “Bateman’s…” He shot Andrew a look of exaggerated contempt. “Bateman’s is the most sincere.”

  Andrew clasped his hands together. “I do, I do hope so,” he said sincerely.

  “And Richard’s.” Dominic made a fake-earnest face and pitched his voice high and precise, like Richard’s. “Richard’s has a black, an Asian, and a female. Oh, if only there were a black Asian female. If only she were gay.”

  Peter Flynn laughed, flashing his white teeth. The sound wasn’t quite real, though. The hollowness of it made Andrew glance at him, and he caught, quick as fingers snapping, a flash of hate in Flynn’s face, before he bent his head and went back to sketching Xs on a legal pad. Hate. No other word for it.

  Andrew had to rub his eyes. He felt disoriented, practically dizzy. Peter and Dominic—weren’t they allies? Prickly ones, perhaps, but didn’t they vote together, eat together, mock their colleagues together? If not…Gradually a likelier possibility came into focus. It made sense, and it answered a question that had been at the back of Andrew’s mind for weeks: Why would Peter, notoriously stingy, offer to help him over the “last hurdle” to the chairmanship, as Richard put it, by inviting him to write a chapter in his book?

  One reason: to keep Dominic, the only other eligible candidate interested in the department chairmanship, from getting it.

  Could it be? Was Flynn really so blinded by paranoia that he thought Richard and the dean would agree on Brodsky—who’d be a disaster as chair, a human wrecking ball. He alienated everyone he came in contact with, plus Richard couldn’t stand him.

  Of course Flynn was that delusional, and absolutely he would try to sabotage his imaginary rival’s imaginary chances. Minutes before this meeting, he’d buttonholed Andrew in the hall and made his chapter pitch again. “I could really use your voice,” he’d said, jingling change in the pockets of his trousers. He favored turtleneck sweaters year-round, going for that author-photo look; all he needed was a dog and a fireplace.

  “What voice is that?” Andrew had asked. Notwithstanding what anyone else (Dash) might think, his reasons for disliking Flynn were completely professional, not personal. He couldn’t teach, he didn’t have the decency or the common sense to try to hide the nakedness of his ambition, and, worst, he had no loyalty to the college.

  “Oh, you know. Older—and wiser, of course.” He’d laughed indulgently. “The conservative voice. Don’t you think? Nothing wrong with a conservative voice.”

  “The foil, you mean.”

  “No, no. The foil?”

  “The antagonist. Jefferson’s racist defender, there to be set up and knocked down. No, thanks. Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.”

  “No, hey, you’ve got it wrong. Balance, that’s what you’d bring to the argument. No one’s setting anyone up. Richard thinks this is all you’d need, Andrew, this little boost up to full professor. After that, the sky’s the limit. Talking chairmanship, talking respect. For all your hard work. Everyone thinks you deserve it—I know I do. And if I can help, why, that makes it even better.”

  Andrew had almost bought it. He’d said no again, but more civilly than the first time, and for a moment he’d wondered if he might’ve misjudged Flynn.

  And it turned out all he wanted to do was thwart Dominic, his so-called friend. It ought to be funny. The hypocrisy by itself might be funny. Or the petty treachery, or the cynicism. All three together, though, sucked the humor right out of Andrew.

  “All right, we’re done, I guess. If no one has anything else, thank—” The rest of Richard’s benediction was drowned out by the scraping of chairs.

  “I’ve got a question.” Dominic Brodsky folded his forearms on the table and hunched forward, wild eyebrows meeting above his globular nose. Andrew thought of Olive Oyl’s bullying boyfriend—what was his name?

  “Yes, Dominic?” Richard held up a hand to halt the exodus.

  “Yeah, Richard. Some of us are wondering. How’s the job search going?”

  Bluto. That was Olive Oyl’s boyfriend.

  All movement stopped. The only sound was the faint scratch of Dominic’s penknife under his thumbnail. His gall was impressive, considering everyone knew that he was the only interested party left, since Andrew had dropped out, in the search for Richard’s replacement. And Richard loathed him.

  “Ah, the job search.” Richard yanked on his goatee, buying time. “Well, you know, that’s a deliberate process. Can’t be rushed. Naturally the dean wants just the right person, believes the department deserves the best. As do I.” He looked down, patting his fingers on top of the table at random, as if playing a child’s tune on a piano. He lifted his head, looked directly at Dominic. “As the time nears to step down, though, it’s funny, I find myself feeling more reluctant than I thought I would. Matter of fact, I’ve been toying with the idea of staying on for another term or two.”

  Disbelieving faces locked gazes and glanced away. Dominic stopped cleaning his nails.

  “Or we might seek an interim chair before we settle on just the right person.” Enjoying himself now, Richard clasped his hands behind his head, ostentatiously stretching his shoulders. “Or”—he took a deep breath, held it, and said on the gusty exhale—“it’s possible the dean may want to go outside the department for a new chair.”

  Brodsky looked ill. But he only had himself to blame. Politically, he was tone-deaf. You didn’t broadcast your ambitions or go around lobbying other faculty for support; not visibly, anyway. You dropped a word in the chair’s ear, or at most the dean’s—but preferably vice versa—and let events take their course. Otherwise, look what happened. Public embarrassment, general awkwardness, unnecessary humiliation.

  Obliquely, Andrew felt responsible. If he’d said yes to Richard’s offer, repeated to him as recently as last week, none of this would be happening. But he had his reasons for declining, simple and complicated ones, obvious ones, ones he didn’t quite understand himself.

  One thing he was sure of, though: Spiting Dash couldn’t possibly be among them.

  He peered in the side-view mirror of Elizabeth O’Neal’s speeding black Volvo, but a huge SUV, not Tim’s little green compact, had run the light behind the Volvo at Georgia Avenue and Van Buren, and now who knew where Tim was.

  “He’ll catch up,” Elizabeth said between puffs on a cigarette she kept in her mouth while she drove. She needed both hands, one to steer, one to shift and downshift the Vol
vo at noisy RPMs that threw Andrew forward and back in his leather seat but mysteriously didn’t move her at all. She leaned over the wheel like a hawk, saying little as they turned west on Military Road and entered the gloomy, wind-whipped park. Going out for a drink after the meeting had been her idea, but she looked as if she regretted it.

  “Mind if I tag along?” Tim had asked, overhearing the invitation in the faculty parking lot.

  “Sure, no, of course not,” Andrew had responded after a peculiar pause in which he’d feared Elizabeth might actually say yes, she minded.

  “Great. Where to?” Tim had rubbed his hands together amiably. “Slidell’s? The Cozy?” He named a couple of other Takoma Park bars. Students drank in Silver Spring; faculty drove a little farther to avoid them.

  Elizabeth had made a face of disgust. “Follow me,” she commanded, pressing a remote control to unlock the Volvo.

  Andrew had hesitated. “Three cars?”

  “No, Tim, follow me. He can drive you back.”

  Made sense; Tim lived a mile east, in Takoma Park.

  Stopped at a light, Elizabeth tapped her fingertips on the steering wheel in a tight, impatient rhythm. Andrew noticed she bit her nails down to the quick. “Smells new,” he mentioned for something to say. “The car.”

  She turned on the windshield wipers. Above the black boots, her black-stockinged thighs flashed dark and aggressive in the garish light of streetlamps. “Yeah, it’s new.” She flicked on the radio, and then there was no more conversation apart from her sneering asides or random curses at the woman reading the evening news.

  They turned left on Connecticut, then right a few blocks later. She pointed across Andrew’s lap. “That’s where I live.”

  He saw an enormous three-story colonial, stone, with solid old trees flanking the walk. “By yourself?”

  “Usually.”

  On Wisconsin, they turned into a small parking lot, full, beside a low brick building with a sign on the awning that said JERZY. Elizabeth drove around to the back. “They know me,” she said as she backed into a tight spot beside a PRIVATE–NO PARKING sign.

  “I think we’ve lost Tim.”

  “Have we?” She smiled.

  “I’ll call, tell him where—” But as he was reaching for his cell, Tim’s car nosed around the corner and skidded to a stop just past Elizabeth’s bumper. He took his hands off the wheel and lifted his shoulders; his face repeated the message: “What the hell?” Andrew sent back an innocent wave, trying to convey “Don’t look at me.” No place for Tim to park—insult to injury. Shaking his head, he drove out of the lot and into the crowded alley.

  Tim had joked once, Andrew forgot in what context, about Elizabeth hanging out with vampires—so he was half expecting Jerzy to be a creepy, lightless bar full of pale, leather-garbed young people dancing maniacally or spouting angry poetry from a brick-backed stage. Happily, it was none of those, merely an upscale neighborhood restaurant-tavern decorated with a lot of mirrors and pale wood, a zinc-topped horseshoe bar, and taupe-colored upholstered furniture arranged in intimate, living room–style groupings. No television.

  Happy hour was in full swing, but Elizabeth signaled with three fingers to a waiter with a shaved head, who smiled a greeting and led her and Andrew to a trio of low chairs and a table in a dim corner. “What can I bring you?” he asked Andrew but not Elizabeth, and a moment later he returned with a glass of wine and a gin martini.

  “Well,” Andrew said, lifting his wineglass. He tried to think of a toast.

  “Cheers,” Elizabeth said, and drank.

  Tim showed up a few minutes later, wet, disgruntled, carrying the remains of his umbrella. “Look what the wind did. It’s ruined.” Definitely; the umbrella was inside out. Tim had difficulty fitting its carcass between his chair and the customer’s at the next table. “What a lousy night.” His lowering glance at Andrew and Elizabeth said he considered them part of it. “I practically had to park in Wheaton. Guinness,” he told the waiter, then sat back and took a deep breath. “Well, anyway. Here we are.”

  Here they were. Andrew suspected Tim, no particular fan of Elizabeth’s, had come along to protect him from her wiles. He watched them exchange stiff chitchat, Tim trying to fix his gaze on her gaze, not her chest; she’d unbuttoned her long black cardigan to reveal another sweater under it, also black but tight and plunging. She wore a single crystal on a silver chain, the crystal settling in the cleft between her breasts. It drew the eye like the only light in a dark room.

  Tim’s beer came. “Well, here’s to another year of Richard Weldon.” He wiped foam from his mustache. “How about that?”

  “I know,” Andrew said. “I thought Brodsky was going to take it.”

  “Me, too,” said Tim.

  “Never. Not while Richard is breathing.” Elizabeth still had half a drink, but she stirred her finger in the air at the waiter, and presently another round appeared. “Richard would keep his job for the rest of his life before he’d give it up to Dom.”

  “He can’t stand him,” Tim agreed. “Never understood why, except for the obvious—Dominic’s a son of a bitch.”

  Elizabeth extended her neck at him. “Are you serious? You don’t know why Richard hates Dom?”

  Tim shook his head. She looked at Andrew—he shook his head, too. Respectively, they were twenty and twenty-five years older than Elizabeth, and yet so often she made them feel like teenage boys with impure thoughts and no social skills.

  “Because he fucked Allison.”

  “Who did?”

  “Dom, who do you think.”

  Tim set his glass down. “Richard’s wife? And Dominic? They had an affair?”

  “Not technically. It was before Richard married her.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Interesting,” Andrew said, thinking this was a bit of gossip he might actually remember. Dash said he was worthless as a source of departmental intel, which was true, and that no one ever told him anything, which wasn’t true. People confided in him all the time. It went in one ear and out the other. This was juicy stuff, though. Allison and Brodsky. What an unsavory image. And what a cesspool of vice and perfidy the history department was, too—because if what the gossips said was true, Elizabeth, who’d delivered the Brodsky-Allison news with such relish, was having an affair with Richard right now.

  “You know what I figured out today?” Andrew reached for his drink and saw that he’d finished it. “I had a Eureka moment.” Elizabeth and Tim leaned toward him expectantly, and he paused to heighten the suspense. “In actuality, Peter is no friend of Dominic.” How gratifying to have an actual scoop.

  “No?”

  He told them his theory of Flynn’s true motive for offering him a chapter in The Great Cover-up. Gossip wasn’t always a bad thing, he realized; it brought people together. It created community.

  “Huh,” Tim said. “Well, it wouldn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t put anything past Sink-or-Swim. Yeah, no, now that you—”

  Elizabeth cut him off. “So why don’t you want to be the chair?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Isn’t it just your kind of thing?”

  “Em, how do you mean?”

  “Responsible. A sacrifice. Idealistic.” Her lips curled.

  Tim said, “You think that’s why Brodsky wants it?”

  “Oh, please. For him it’s a stepping-stone. He’d serve a few years, put it on his CV, and move on to better things. But you.” She turned back to Andrew. “For you it would be a duty. A good deed. So. Why are you shirking your duty?”

  If she’d asked him the question in a quiet place, his office, over the phone, in a car, he’d have had to answer. Here it was all right to sit back and look philosophical, move his cocktail napkin around, gaze over Tim’s head at the backlit pyramid of liquor bottles behind the bar. The music was lively but low; he could hardly hear it above the chatter. There were no awkward pauses in a bar after the first or second drink, because there was no such thing as si
lence.

  Elizabeth got tired of waiting. “Going for a smoke.” She stood up and walked away.

  Tim had his hands folded over his belly, a mellow look on his round Irish face. If his chair went back he’d have it on two legs, and if Jerzy were a little less upscale he’d have his big feet on the table. Andrew smiled at him, deep fondness coming over him like a blush. His friend, the hairy leprechaun. His boon companion. We should go camping together, he thought. Or gambling. We should take a trip out West.

  “So why don’t you take the job?”

  Andrew’s spreading smile reversed itself. He said the first thing that came into his head—“Dash wants me to”—but then he didn’t know if it was the answer or a non sequitur. He excused himself to go to the men’s room.

  Washing his hands, he made faces at himself in the mirror, a sure sign of the edge his body had come to, the point at which his mind always said, Right then, that’s it, and he put down the glass or shook his head at the bartender. A cheap drunk, Dash called him, but he didn’t like to go past the feeling of weakness in his biceps or the urge to stare stupidly into space, the sensation that his cheek muscles had atrophied. Or else he talked too much, said things he hadn’t thought out beforehand, and soon the intense conviction would overtake him that his ideas were not only profound and unique, but that he’d never had them before.

  Back at the table, though, a fresh round of drinks had just arrived. He sipped from his without hesitating, and the thought process that led to the decision was as complicated as Oh, what the hell. A feeling of spectacular rightness lifted him, shone inside like a light. He was exactly where he wanted to be, with the very people he wanted to be with. He’d been so down, and now he was so happy. Euphoria, he thought. I feel euphoric.

  Tim and Elizabeth were having an argument about art. No, about government. Or government control of art. Their intensity was a match, but she cared more and she was ruthless, so Tim didn’t have a chance. Andrew listened, calm and judicial, the moderate one between two extremists. Tim said let the government fund the arts all it wanted, and if that meant fewer crucifixes in bottles of urine, fine with him. No, Elizabeth countered, that was state-sponsored censorship, the conservatives would finally strangle creativity altogether, only the most vapid, bourgeois, timid clones of art would be encouraged. How nice to see them engaging each other, even if it was in a fight. It made Andrew smile.