“Well, fuck.”
Yet, while the manager took this stern stance with his client, he privately felt rather encouraged by the end of the second “mountain year.” There was no income, true, but there was considerably less outgo. And if Ford would only stay put, maybe he’d even finish writing something new. “America’s National Treasure” (according to the Pulitzer committee) presumably hadn’t written a word for a solid year after (as far as Theo could reconstruct the sequence from Ford’s narration) the following had happened within a six-day period: he’d found his fourth wife embracing her personal trainer, and was knocked cold when he attacked this large, physically fit individual; his new play, Out of Bounds, opened, was panned by the Times, and closed; in Sardi’s, his younger son, Pawnee, publicly renounced him forever (his older son, Josh Jr., had done the same twenty years earlier); his fourth wife found him in the Jacuzzi with the show’s leading lady, and tried to electrocute them both; she then changed the locks on their penthouse, and boasted through the chain that, the night before, she’d tossed his computer containing his only copies of A Waste of Spirit (his play in progress) off the balcony into the traffic on Central Park West, twenty floors below; she then stabbed him when he shot the lock off the penthouse door in order to see if she’d really thrown out his computer (she had); he shot at his fourth wife; his lawyer kept him waiting in jail overnight; his psychiatrist tried to have him committed; and a parking garage accidentally gave his Ferrari to somebody else.
As, in a more peaceful mood, cuddled on the porch swing with Rhodora Potts, Rexford had summed it up for her and Theo, it had been, “Lord, boys and girls, just one of those real bad weeks.”
But by the end of mountain-year two, Bernie Bittermann had begun to hope that down there in that dry county, far from temptation, Ford Rexford could make a full moral, physical, artistic (and consequently, a full financial) comeback. For the physical regeneration, Bittermann counted on Rhodora Potts. For the artistic recovery, he counted on Theo Ryan.
Now, despite what Theo’s parents had said, it wasn’t true that he knew every word of Rexford’s work by heart, or that he “worshipped” the work. And he certainly didn’t worship the man—even before he’d met him. But it was true that Theo believed in his bones that Joshua “Ford” Rexford’s plays were as good, at times, as plays ever got. What became clear after he met the man was that Rexford didn’t know when those times were. Or at least he behaved as if he didn’t. He behaved as if he couldn’t read, much less write.
A scholar trained in current critical theories, Theo knew that any objectives of that human creature, the writer, were entirely beside the point, that the text’s intentions were irrelevant and the author was absolutely a goner—as dead to the modern world as God—with no more authority over creation than a rose has over its scent. Still, deep in Theo’s bones, tradition pulled; he hankered for meaning and purpose. He was troubled by Plato’s notion of the artist-as-divine-moron; he was annoyed by that recent play in which Mozart came across as a lewd, giggling, imbecilic conduit for the divine harmonies of the universe. Was it really plausible that Shakespeare could have been as dumb as Shaw thought him? Was it conceivable that Michelangelo didn’t have a clue as to what the David was going to end up looking like? Could anyone ever seriously believe that Jane Austen might be stupid?
But Ford Rexford, the man who’d written with such understanding and admiration about the Mexican family in The Valley of the Shadow, how could he possibly tell those sophomoric, racist jokes? How could the man who’d written Preacher’s Boy—a play that made fathers and sons all over the world weep to reconcile—have so irrevocably abandoned his own father and so alienated his own sons? How could the man who’d written Desert Slow Dance, that wonderful love song to women, have failed so miserably in four marriages? Surely Rexford was joking when he claimed that Bunches of Roses was “just about having some fun while the gettin’s good,” and that he couldn’t recall what The Long Way Home was about. It was almost enough to reconcile Theo to the worst excesses of modern criticism. Better that the poet have nothing to say about the poem, better that the plays be snatched by the critical midwife at the moment of delivery, than that fecund fools like Ford Rexford be allowed to bring them up.
That’s what Theo Ryan had thought when he’d first met the man whose biography he now appeared to know better than the subject himself. And that’s what he still thought two years later, when already in a bad mood on this sunny afternoon, late April in the Carolina mountains, he rode his bicycle wobbling up the gravel drive to his small house near the campus of Cavendish University.
For first he saw the battered, mud-splattered gold Lincoln by (or rather, on) his lawn, then he spotted Ford Rexford urinating off the side of his porch, just missing his careful beds of new blooming tulips and daffodils.
Chapter 4
Aside
If it must all come out, why let ’em know it; tis but the way of the world.
—Congreve, The Way of the World
Late that same afternoon, Dean Buddy Tupper Jr. stood in his luxurious suite of offices atop the Coolidge Building, from which, like Patton, he studied the field of battle below. He could see trouble coming like a swarm of Rommel’s tanks. Let it come, he growled. Tupper ran this university under the official title of provost. He continued to call himself “Dean Tupper” only because he liked a brisk title, rather like “Coach,” stuck in front of his name, and “Provost Tupper” didn’t, in his phrase, cut it. He was a bull-necked, big-thighed man who still had the flattop he’d worn when he’d played offensive line the year he’d slammed, bucked, and shoved Cavendish all the way to the Peach Bowl; when they’d named him Buddy the Bone-Cruncher Tupper. The smell of blood didn’t scare Tupper at all. He loved it.
Down below on campus, Herbert Crawford, star professor of History, and Maude Fletcher, acting Cavendish chaplain, were still stationed behind a microphone at the doors of Bleecker Dining Hall, where they’d been shouting at the cafeteria workers to unite because they had nothing to lose but their Tupper-forged chains. Above the doors flapped a big red banner that read, boycott bleecker. Crawford had been trying to stir things up from the inside for weeks. Now this. While at first the workers had clearly been put off by the British professor’s black leather outfit and his Ortega sunglasses; while many obviously hadn’t been able to follow his Cockney-accented call to arms; and while most had little idea what it meant to be a labor-intensive mode of capitalistic production; still, every one of them had quickly grasped the idea that an 8 percent raise for 8 percent fewer hours was something to think about. They didn’t need Herbie Crawford and the damn (temporary, thank God) chaplain, Maude Fletcher, out there distributing flyers urging them to strike for incredible wages in order to realize they were “slaving for slave pay.” Buddy Tupper had known it himself when he’d negotiated their contracts.
Worse, today Crawford and Co. had collected a squadron of followers among the young faculty and students, all of them dressed in black and wearing those damn red “8%!” buttons, who were out there with him now in the picket line, calling on the undergraduates to boycott the dining hall. Tupper could hear their ridiculous chant from his window right this minute.
Don’t eat Tupper’s supper! Don’t eat Tupper’s supper! Boycott Bleecker! Boycott Bleecker!
The provost butted his shoulder hard against the plate glass. Crawford, who only last month had announced that starting next year he’d be alternating his popular “Modern Capitalism: Origins to Collapse” with a new course, “Modern Communism: Origins to Collapse,” had pulled a fast one. The commie bastard really was a commie, despite the History Department’s fervent assurances that Professor Crawford’s ideology was all in his head and would stay there. Why, they’d claimed that Crawford hung around the cafeteria workers only to take notes on their dialects for an article on the ethno-semiotics of migrated blacks in rural Appalachia; they’d even shown him the article, and if it
was in English, you couldn’t prove it by Buddy Tupper, who held a Ph.D. himself (Cavendish, ’48, Social Sciences). Somebody ought to write an article on Commie Crawford’s negotiations for shameless salary supplements in nontaxable grants, noninterest mortgage loans, and incentive perks like lap pools unreported to the I.R.S.—in the haggling over which he’d displayed an entrepreneurial ruthlessness J.P. Morgan would have envied. Tupper had heard that Crawford had been pestering those cafeteria workers since they’d opened for breakfast. What was the man doing up at 6:30 anyhow?—after he’d refused to teach a single morning class. “Like Caruso, before noon, mate, I don’t even spit,” he’d told Tupper, laughing. And why didn’t he get his teeth fixed, now that he was in America! God knows he could afford to have every crooked one of them capped in pearl.
At 5:00 p.m. on this April afternoon, Herbie Crawford was not Tupper’s only problem. Tupper’s “major prob” was—as always—Claudia Pratt, the woman the trustees had put in over his objections as dean of the college, when, after twenty years at that post, he’d been promoted. This bleeding-heart, yellow-bellied woman, with no savvy about the real way of the world, had already been in here this morning jabbering junk about providing sympathetic arenas for discussion with the cafeteria workers. He’d had to pretend to take a call from the governor to get rid of her. (His secretary knew to buzz him with long-distance calls whenever Dean Pratt got going good.)
It was no slouch job running a university. Like all days, today had been long and hard. His secretary had left at noon just because she had a temperature of 102°. Her temporary replacement didn’t appear to know longhand, much less shorthand. The provost had had a phone call (collect from London) with the stage director Scottie Smith, who’d talked like a high-strung six-year-old, and who was asking for a salary that Vince Lombardi would have choked on. (Maybe they should have gone with Theo Ryan after all.) He’d had a telegram from Cavendish’s most famous law professor, off for some reason to Rio, demanding a raise that Tupper had initially assumed was a Western Union typing error.
He’d received a memo from the chairman of Romance Languages, advising him that in the heat of a tenure review, a senior member of the Spanish Department had, “regrettably rather seriously bitten through,” the forefinger of a senior member of the Italian Department. Tupper’s immediate phone call to demand why such news should be reported by (slow) campus post rather than the expensive system of computer-screen email with which they’d been provided elicited the update that Dr. Montemaggio’s finger had required twenty-two stitches, and that he was screaming about suing the university.
“Tell him to sue Dr. Torres!” the provost shouted. “What have we got to do with it?” He was told that Dr. Torres was still in the hospital with a burst blood vessel in his eye, and he too was considering bringing suit.
“Fire them both!” growled Tupper.
The chairman gasped. “Buddy, for heaven’s sake, they’re tenured.”
Damn tenure!, Tupper thought, and stopped himself from blurting out a witticism about the place of wops on the evolutionary scale—which would have doubtless left him vulnerable to another suit for racial discrimination from the chair of Romance Languages, whose name, he recalled just in time, was Sebastiani.
If there was one thing Tupper hated, it was the system called tenure. Thank God that so-called reverend, Maude Fletcher, didn’t have it yet. Tenure was a chokehold whereby the faculty who grabbed it were never to be shaken loose unless so senile they couldn’t locate their classrooms, or so depraved they debauched dogs in public. Short of those sins, the whole university had itself turned into one big sanctuary harboring the merely mad, the simply slothful, and the routinely immoral, ignorant, inept, obtuse, and inebriated. What C.E.O. of any other multimillion-dollar industry was so ridiculously hamstrung, so blocked from his goals, so unable to fire at will?
And if there was one thing Tupper hated more than tenured mediocrities, it was tenured celebrities like Crawford, it was that stable of pampered prize winners forced upon him by academia’s stampede to go Hollywood—and not even the good old Hollywood where as head of the studio he could have signed, traded, and indentured his stars in the imperious fashion of Louis B. Mayer; no, here he was in the new Hollywood, where the lunatics were running the asylum, where he had to put up with craziness like an economics professor who flew off to the White House every other week and actually had his own public relations man. Craziness like departments calling themselves “Cultural Studies,” and teaching comic books. Or calling themselves “Native American Studies,” and hiring boozed-out half-breeds from Boone (and what a laugh those old geezers were having on Cavendish) to hop up and down howling (so they claimed) authentic Algonquin into tape recorders. Or calling themselves “Women’s Studies,” and getting two hundred kids to enroll for something listed in the catalog as “The Power of Gender” or “The Gender of Power”—he couldn’t remember which. Craziness like Herbie Crawford.
Tupper’s meditations were interrupted by a late phone call from Norman Bridges saying Federal Express had just picked up a package from Jorvelle Wakefield addressed to Yale, which could very well mean Yale was making her an offer, so maybe Cavendish should be ready with a quick counteroffer. That wimp Norman Bridges would agree to a punt on second down if enough of the huddle asked him to! “Forget it!” Tupper barked. “Nobody with a new Saab is gonna park it in downtown New Haven.”
His mood burned hotter as the provost read the next item on his desk, a ten-page letter from the mother of a senior coed, one Cathy Bannister, in which Mrs. Bannister wondered why she and her overworked husband paid $29, 674.50 a year, as well as contributed heavily to the Alumni Fund Drive, so that their daughter could (A) write a honors thesis under the supervision of Jane Nash-Gantz entitled “Clitoral Imagery in Contemporary Lesbian Poetry,” (B) telephone her mother and tell her that on the basis of recent insights gleaned from her famous psychology professor, she felt fairly certain that her father had been sexually abused, (C) announce to her entire family after church on Easter Sunday (having attended those services in a black leather jacket) that modern capitalism had collapsed, that so had Christianity, and she herself had turned into a neo-Marxist. This was not the Cavendish the correspondent and her husband had attended twenty-five years ago, not “by a long shot,” and therefore the Bannisters were “compelled to wonder.”
Tupper telephoned immediately to Dr. Nash-Gantz, and was told by her secretary (she had her own secretary!) that Jane (her secretary called her Jane!) had flown that morning (why didn’t she stay home with her husband where she belonged?) to be a keynote speaker at an international women’s conference in Warsaw. Warsaw? By God, Nash-Gantz was a commie too! And to hell with this new notion that not even the communists were commies anymore. Tupper glanced quickly around his palatial office suite as if to plan the barricades behind which he could dig in to pepper these overpaid proletariats. He probably had more of them here on the Cavendish campus than were left in all of Eastern Europe!
Tupper’s roving glance caught sight of the stooped lean silhouette of his ostensible boss, President Irwin Kaney (Brigadier General, U.S. Army, Retired), a man of eighty who looked like a withered bald eagle, and behaved (in Tupper’s phrase) like a doddering dodo.
Now, many years back, Tupper himself had been a fervent advocate of Irwin Kaney’s appointment as Cavendish’s president. A bomber pilot hero of World War II, in his mid-sixties a field commander in Vietnam, General Kaney would be sure to have—or so Tupper had thought—the kind of no-nonsense military mentality this school could use. As it happened, the military mentality was there all right, but the search committee should have probed a little deeper into the no-nonsense. For the years had, in Tupper’s subsequent appraisal, dimmed out of the Old Man what had most likely been very low wattage to begin with.
The general now walked past the big desk on his way to Tupper’s private bathroom again; unable to recall that this was no longer h
is office, nor his toilet. The provost bellowed, “IRWIN!” at him. But in vain; the Old Man was deaf and doubtless legally blind as well. The bathroom door slammed shut. By the time Kaney came back out again, Tupper was in a worse mood, having finished an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with English Professor Jonas Marsh in which that (tenured) maniac denounced the university for everything from its South African stocks to its undergraduates’ IQs. “When will Cavendish stop admitting these shallow blonde streams of idiotic southern belles, these dumb sons of rich rednecks?” ran one boxed quote. “When will our cowardly faculty stop bestowing As on the mediocre and Bs on the mentally defective? Why, today, a C is cause for a faculty conference, and a D grounds for a legal suit!”
The bathroom door flew open. No toilet flush—as usual. President Kaney, immaculately dressed except that his pinstriped vest was on inside out, nodded pleasantly, but without a glimmer of recognition at Dean Tupper. “Irwin, your bathroom is down the hall in your office! Irwin! General Kaney!”
The general wheeled, saluted smartly, marched to the plate-glass window under the impression that it was an exit, and stopped. He stared down at the students picketing Bleecker Dining Hall. “Officer,” he said to his provost in his soft Mississippi slur, “that village down there is crawling with V.C. Radio fire base for some air support.” He shook his head sadly and ambled away.
Dean Claudia Pratt’s secretary came back in smirking with the bad news that his own temporary couldn’t figure out the telephone, and that his cousin Dina Sue Ludd was on line five wanting to know if it could possibly be true, as rumor had reached her—and as she had just chewed Norman Bridges out for babbling nonsense about academic freedom to excuse it—that one of her Ludd Chairs (Nantz-Gap, or whatever her name was) had used a Ludd Hall lecture room to accuse Emily Dickinson of unnatural desires? Was that why she was giving the English Department forty million dollars? And Norman Bridges was back on line three, calling from home, begging to be allowed to retire early. And a Channel 10 News van had just pulled up in front of Bleecker Hall; a woman with a TV camera was hopping out. And a (black) fast-food magnate with four children enrolled in Cavendish was waiting on line six to learn if indeed the richest university in the South paid its (mostly black) cafeteria workers slave wages. And a committee of undergraduates who wanted the land Cavendish sat on returned to the Cherokee Indians from whom it had been stolen by Andrew Jackson was outside waiting to see him.
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