Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  No, I can’t, because I’ll see him at the Christmas party. I’ll see him in the department. I’ll see him everywhere. In my dreams, when I go to sleep.

  I call Sherrie. Her letter is identical except for the name in the salutation.

  The next person I call is the departmental secretary, Mrs. Marjorie Gaudet. The trick to handling fear is to get it over with as soon as possible. It’s like jumping into a freezing cold stream which may or may not contain piranhas. You don’t know until you take the plunge. The important thing is, it’s over and you don’t have to stand on the shore shivering in your trunks, peering into the depths anymore. Dermot Schofield arrives early next week. My first exam is on the Thursday after that—Dekker’s Shakespeare, which shouldn’t be too bad. I just need to get this out of my head in order to function. It’s like being called to the principal’s office. Except I have never been called to the principal’s office.

  On top of it all, I’m supposed to write ten new poems, and how exactly am I supposed to pull off such a thing under this kind of pressure? I read something by someone—I think it was Wordsworth—something like, poetry is intensity recalled in times of tranquility. Not intensity recalled in times of even more intensity, no, that’s not how the great man put it. So where’s my tranquility? This could be a good argument against the study of creative writing in a university setting, come to think of it. But that’s not an argument I would ever make.

  Ring, ring.

  “Hello, this is Doctor Sparrow’s office.”

  “I’d like to make an appointment to see Doctor Sparrow, please?”

  “Mm hmm?” says Marjorie Gaudet. “Your name, please?”

  “Lawrence Campbell.”

  Scribble, scribble, she is writing my name into a book.

  “And to what does this pertain, Mr. Campbell?”

  Doctor Sparrow’s secretary uses impeccable grammar. I don’t know if I can do this.

  “It pertains to …” I say, deepening into my classroom-speaking voice. “Uh, it pertains to … Professor Arsenault?”—and up it goes, right on cue, spiralling into its old, reliable question mark.

  There is another quick scribble-sound. And then, “Oh!” says Mrs. Gaudet. To my surprise, her tone has faltered as well—I detect the exclamation point in her voice.

  “Is this about the petition?” she wants to know, voice hushed with a conspicuously unprofessional interest. In me. The guy on the phone.

  And now I know we’ve really done something.

  Ring, ring.

  It’s my phone. Someone is calling me. Therefore, it must be my parents. Certainly it wouldn’t be Marjorie Gaudet, calling me back, to let me know Doctor Sparrow doesn’t need to see me after all, that he’s decided on summary expulsion.

  “Hello?”

  “Larry!”

  It’s Jim. Balm. I molest the receiver.

  “Hi, Jim!”

  “Howya doing, kiddo?”

  “Well—actually I’m a bit crazed.”

  “Oh, Christ, Larry, you’re not worried about exams, are you?”

  “Among other things …”

  “Listen, Larry,” he says before I can beg for reassurance about Doctor Sparrow. “I’ve just been going over this grant application stuff for Schofield’s reading—”

  Who? What?

  “—I just realized we’re supposed to be promoting the fucking thing all week long.”

  “Promoting?”

  “Schofield gets an evaluation sheet after the reading, where he basically gets to report on us.”

  “That’s outrageous!” I declare, rallying.

  “So if he doesn’t think we did a good enough job, the cocksucker could get our funding cut off for next time.”

  I am comprehending approximately none of this.

  “He’d do that?”

  “Yes, he’d do that. He’ll just be looking for an excuse to screw us over, particularly after my review. That’s exactly the kind of asshole Schofield is.”

  “Jim,” I say, “I’m sorry, I’m feeling kind of scattered today. How could Schofield get our funding cut off …?”

  I hear a staticky sigh on the other end of the line. “All right, Larry, listen carefully this time. Basically, we have to kiss Schofield’s ass the whole time he’s here. We gotta put posters up all over town so that he sees we made an effort, and we gotta get people out to the reading.”

  I’m stupefied. I had assumed it was understood by all concerned that the only people coming to Schofield’s reading at Christmas-exam time would be the students in Jim’s poetry seminar. All eight of us.

  “How many?” I say. “How many people?”

  “We should try and shoot for twenty.”

  “Twenty?” There won’t be twenty people left on campus.

  “So I need you,” concludes Jim, “to get to work on that.”

  “Okay,” I answer faintly. I drag the phone to the cupboard and, balancing receiver under chin, use my free hand to reach for my colossal blue teapot. “Listen,” I say, struggling with the logistics of this. “Jim?”

  “Yeah, kid?” I can hear him putting down his papers and smacking his lips.

  “I got a letter from Doctor Sparrow—”

  Jim tells me he knows. Todd has told him about the letter from Doctor Sparrow. Todd is certainly fast-acting. Like a laxative. I eventually found out that the reason he was invited to the dinner at Jim’s house last month was because, indeed, Todd had called him up and explained to him in intricate detail his role in getting the petition started.

  Jim is talking a mile a minute. Loudly. He is calling Doctor Sparrow the same sort of names he has just used with regard to Dermot Schofield. Only with greater volume and relish. He says not to let that bastard intimidate us. He advises that we refuse to see him individually, that we “stick to our guns” and “not take any shit.” He suggests we threaten to “hold a fucking sit-in” like the students at Berkeley, barricade ourselves in his office, rifle through his files. Get blankets and pillows and sleep there throughout the holidays. Get the entire campus up in arms, alert the media, march through town, wave placards, break windows.

  “You gotta show these shitheads you won’t be pushed around,” Jim is saying. “That their time has come and gone, the wheels are in motion and the goddamn revolution is at hand!”

  I return to the couch with Big Blue on my lap, listening. In the kitchen is the comfortable sound of my kettle gasping with heat. In my ear, the less comfortable sound of Jim. I’m thinking about the Christmas ferry to PEI all of a sudden. Cape Tormentine to Borden. Ferrying across the Christmastime sea, homeward bound.

  9.

  IT SMELLS LIKE BOOKS and antiques. Oak and dust. Velvet and leather and panicking students. The ghosts of undergraduates past.

  I am alarmed by my reaction to Marjorie Gaudet today. She’s a type like Brenda L., only older, even older than Brenda L. Jim has another word for women like this: blowsy. Overripe is forgivable if slightly lamentable in his poems, but blowsy is pushing the limits of acceptable female physicality. I looked it up, after reading it in Blinding White, and found that the basic meaning appears to be bloated.

  I know it doesn’t mean the same thing, but I always imagine blowsy has something to do with women’s blouses.

  The problem is her breasts. They’re big, because Mrs. Gaudet is a big woman overall. She has children, I assume. Maybe dozens of them—she looks like the type who could handle it. But today in particular, her breasts strike me as big. Too big, uncomfortably big, exploding from beneath her unbuttoned brown cardigan, shoving it rudely aside. So blowsy is Mrs. Gaudet, so overripe her breasts, I keep imagining that every once in a while she has to lean forward, when no one is around to see, and rest them on her desk.

  It’s this image that gives me the hard-on. Plus she’s so nice. She smiles at me when I arrive, calls me Mr. Campbell, and confides that she was much impressed by our initiative in getting the petition together. She asks if I’d like a cup of coffee while
I wait for Doctor Sparrow to “finish up.” I try to imagine what he could be finishing up. I picture him wiping blood from his fingertips—the corners of his mouth—with a silken handkerchief. Humming to himself. “Greensleeves,” maybe.

  I ask for water. Mrs. Gaudet heaves to her feet to get it for me. She thuds off down the hall, creaking in a pair of solid high heels—as sensible a pair as high-heeled shoes can be. I wonder where she’s going to get the water. Will she just fill it up from the tap in the women’s washroom? I picture it and, moronically, get harder.

  Doctor Sparrow’s door opens. I shuttle to my feet. He looks around, frowns in my direction, then slumps against the doorframe, taking in the fact of Mrs. Gaudet’s empty desk.

  “Oh dear,” says Doctor Sparrow. “Now where has Marjorie gone?” I don’t answer, because I don’t get the sense that he’s addressing me. But after a click or two of silence, he looks directly into my eyes, with the blank aspect of a robot needing input. Or else the single-minded yet somehow mindless expression of Jim’s dog Panda, willing me to throw the ball.

  “She just went down the hall for a moment,” I smile, folding my hands in front of my pants.

  “I’m right here!” Marjorie calls, emerging from the washroom somewhere down the hall. The echoes in this place—she can hear our conversation like we’re beside her. The thudity-thud of her sturdy secretarial heels can be heard gaining urgency. “I’ll be right there!” she yells. “Do you need anything?”

  “I can’t recall what I’m doing next!” calls Sparrow, even though he could mutter it and she’d probably hear.

  “You’re seeing Lawrence Campbell next!”

  “Who?”

  I smile harder, making my lips tight and thin and bloodless. But he’s not looking at me. He has that off-in-the-distance look people get when addressing the unseen.

  “Lawrence Campbell!” Marjorie yells, and I can feel my name bouncing off every single surface in the department. “He’s right there in front of you.”

  Doctor Sparrow straightens in the doorframe, swivels his head around. I imagine I hear a creak.

  “Ah,” he says, adjusting his glasses.

  “The petition,“ elucidates Marjorie.

  My hands drop to my sides.

  Doctor Sparrow is a put-upon sort. The first five minutes of our conversation entail him sighing vague endearments and non-blasphemous oaths.

  “Oh my,” he murmurs windily, shifting a stack of papers from the centre of his desk to a nearby table. “Oh dear,” cleaning his glasses. “Oh goodness me. Lawrence Campbell. Just allow me to get my bearings. It’s a busy time of year, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  After a few more sighs and whispered groans, he settles into his chair. It doesn’t creak like Dekker’s. He’s a trim, grey-haired man. The only non-neat thing about him is a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. It’s wispy, made up out of patches. The pink of his chin peeks through here and there. It bothers me.

  Finally Sparrow heaves a bigger, more cleansing sigh than the previous one and places his hands on his desk. We face each other.

  “So how are you?” he beams.

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “Well done,” he replies. “You were all most upset over Professor Arsenault, I suppose.”

  I’m impressed at how quickly he has gotten down to it. “Yes—”

  “Of course. He’s an inspiring teacher, no doubt.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We get such wonderful reports of him.”

  “You do?” I don’t mean to say this pointedly, but, because of my surprise, it comes out that way. Sparrow nods and leans back as if I have made some kind of pithy, sagacious retort that he now must pause to consider.

  “Well, this,” he remarks following the pause, “is the difficulty with dynamic personalities such as Professor Arsenault, wouldn’t you say? At their best, they are unsurpassed—extraordinary, uncompromising in both art and craft.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “It’s an admirable trait in an artist.”

  “It is,” I say.

  “Yet the craft of teaching, Lawrence. Is something else entirely.”

  “He’s an inspiring teacher,” I remind.

  Sparrow nods furiously, apologetically, waving his hands a little as if to clear away smoke. “You’re an aspiring poet yourself, yes? I understand you’ve won several competitions back in Newfoundland.”

  “Prince Edward Island.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s not the same place at all, is it?” He rests a hand on his chest, abashed.

  “No,” I laugh, to put him at ease.

  “Well, bravo, Lawrence. And a scholarship no less. You’re a superlative student.”

  I sit and smile.

  “Have you thought of graduate work?”

  “Um,” I say, getting ready to deepen my voice. I’ve gotten to the point in my self-training where, whenever I hear myself say um, my voice deepens instinctively. But the question mark. Watch the question mark. Do not succumb to the question mark.

  “Well, I’d like to try my hand at getting published,” I state, voice level with conviction.

  Sparrow’s salty eyebrows almost fly off his head. “Of course!” he exclaims, startling me. “But that goes without saying! You’re already well on your way!”

  “Well,” I say, treading carefully to keep from sounding ridiculous, “I hope to have a—maybe a chapbook ready by the time I graduate.” And still no question mark. Sparrow is bobbing his beard at me again, eyes wide with affirmation. And I want it edited by Jim. I want it supervised by Jim. I came here for the Jim Arsenault Midas touch and I won’t let you take it away from me. It’s a perfect opportunity to say all and any of these things, but I don’t. I’m too busy blushing at having articulated my fondest wish to this English guy.

  “That’s wonderful, Lawrence,” says Sparrow with strength and conviction. I gaze out the window. Sparrow’s office overlooks the entire marsh and the fields of salt hay beyond. I can see a weather system approaching in the distance—wild, blowsy, multi-hued clouds piled up on the horizon as if some crazed god has bulldozed a snow-covered mountain range and is slouching with his load toward Timperly.

  “But Lawrence,” calls Sparrow, “looking at your transcripts, I see your course load has been somewhat eclectic for an English student.”

  “Well, the requirements are a bit different for the creative writing option,” I remind Doctor Sparrow.

  He wilts a little. “Yes, the creative writing option. I confess, I keep forgetting about it, which is an appalling thing for a department head to admit, I suppose, but there you go. It’s been underway for such a short time. But Lawrence,” he adds, perkening, “I hope you were planning to take my Elizabethan poets course next year?”

  Because Doctor Sparrow appears to hope this very much, I don’t contradict him.

  “It’s just that,” I explain, “I’m very interested in, and—you know—very excited by—modern poetry—”

  More furious, commiserating nodding from Sparrow.

  “—and what’s being done in this country. I find it very … exciting.”

  “Of course you do!”

  “In fact, I was very much looking forward to taking Jim—Professor Arsenault’s—Canadian poetry seminar next year. I was very excited to see it offered in the calendar.”

  Stop saying very excited. Stop saying very exciting. Stop saying very. Stop it.

  “Lawrence,” Sparrow interrupts. “Yes. Absolutely. A young man—a Canadian boy like yourself would of course be interested in the poetry of his time and place. It’s laudable. But, I wonder, have you ever heard the expression, one must know the rules before one can break them?”

  “It’s not that I, that I, um, disdain literary history!” I explain in a high-voiced panic set off by the awfulness of the words Canadian boy.

  Sparrow looks away, clears more smoke, embarrassed for us both. “No, no, no, no, of course not.”

&nb
sp; “It’s just that I’ve already read—like—everything.”

  And this wins me my first look of reproach from Doctor Sparrow.

  “Now, Lawrence,” he admonishes, mouth disappearing behind his beard. “Everything?”

  At this juncture, I opt to sit back and shut up.

  “Marvell? Spenser? My goodness, but there’s so much, Lawrence. Aside from the poets themselves, so many great thinkers who’ve informed the tradition. Virgilius Ferm?”

  Virgilius Ferm?

  “Coleridge? Johnson? Milton?”

  “I’ve read some Milton.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. But English literature, Lawrence, is a vast canopy, stretching back over centuries. To aspire to contribute to it without attempting even a rudimentary grasp of what’s come before you is to—well, is to insult that tradition, I’m afraid.”

  There is something about the British manner of phrasing that fascinates me. The effect seems to be to terrify and soothe you all at once.

  “Doctor Sparrow,” I speak, deeply, “I love English literature. Probably more than anyone in this department. I would be the last person in the world to insult it, let me assure you.”

  I think it is the first time I’ve ever used the expression let me assure you, and I’m pleased with the way it turns out, like one of my mother’s Duncan Hines cakes, gold and quivering with perfection. Didn’t stick to the pan, as it were. The fact is, I’m falling into the rhythms of Sparrow’s own rarified speech as I sit here. Sparrow is looking at me. He is looking at me with approval, I would venture to say. If I were feeling bold, I might even identify his gaze as one of admiration.

  “I,” says Doctor Sparrow, once we’ve passed a couple of cozy, appraising moments, “could tell that just from looking at you, my boy.” He smiles, places his hands on his desk, and stands as if about to hug me.