Olephant had never spoken this openly with Sor before. He must be very upset about something, Sor thought. He looked around the room anxiously. He was concerned that students at neighboring tables might hear what Olephant was saying. But their table was wedged into a corner against the window, away from the others, and Olephant spoke in a lowered voice.
“Now it’s pay-back time, I guess,” he went on. “Ethel’s trying to grind me into the ground. She wants to make sure there’s no equanimity in my life, no joy. She thinks I’m made of money. She wants and wants and wants. Of course, it’s always for the kids, my children. I have no problem with that. They’re my responsibility. I know that. But don’t use them as pawns to get more money from me. I’m a teacher. I don’t make much money. I’m not a Wall Street wheeler-dealer. The children need this. They need that. That’s all I hear. But it’s all in the name of revenge, Sor. She has to get even. She has to beat me down until I am no longer a man, until I become an insect—like Kafka’s cockroach man in The Metamorphosis—a nothing. And you know why, Sor? She hears about my exploits with other women. She has a friend on the campus—I won’t divulge her name. This friend tells her whom I’m seeing on the campus and ergo, whom I’m sleeping with. She takes it out on me through the kids. But I know she sleeps with other men. Do I care? So why should she think I should put my organ in cold storage and become celibate?”
A student laughed out loud at one of the tables behind them. Maybe something another student said. Maybe something they heard or saw on one of the televisions.
“Her confidant on campus told her about my latest affair,” Olephant continued. “I was seeing a young woman—she teaches a course on global communications. I no longer see her. Anyway, as soon as I started seeing her, Ethel heard about it. She promptly calls me up. I know it was because I was seeing the Global woman. She demanded more money for the kids. There’s no end to it, Sor. Why does she behave like this? Why does she have to become so spiteful?”
“What did you expect, Dick?” Sor said, almost apologetically, not wanting to hurt Olephant’s feelings. “Look at it from Ethel’s point of view. You married her. She bore your children. You left her for another woman. In her mind, you are free, carrying on with other women, younger and prettier, while her life is choked up, put on hold, while she raises your children. Child support and alimony do not heal her wound or ease the pain she attributes to you. She has to be recompensed in some way. Why should you have the easy life? She hurts, Dick. She wants revenge. Her fangs come out. We, too, would become vindictive and angry if we were in her shoes. The male sex has not been particularly kind to women. Even when we thought we were being chivalrous in the past, that we were their protectors, we were merely keeping them locked up, second-class citizens incapable of realizing their potential. You are the history professor, Dick. You should know that.”
“Whose side are you on?” Olephant said, tapping loudly on the table with his fingers. “But you’re right. Still, you’d have to be in my shoes to fully comprehend what I’m talking about. Ethel has become spiteful and mean. Her whole agenda is to crush me into the ground, and always, always using the children to make me feel guilty, and put the pressure on. I hope you never have to experience it.”
Both men fell quiet in the noisy café. Olephant cleared his throat. “I hope I didn’t upset you by speaking about my children. I forgot about the little boy you and Jasmine…” His voice trailed off.
It would be four years next month that they had lost him. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t upset when you spoke about your two boys,” Sor said, almost inaudibly, a painful expression on his face. He cut violently into his cake. Olephant had reopened the wound.
At that moment Sor saw Julian Plum walking by outside with a student. Plum was gesticulating wildly as he spoke, probably about some arcane literary term, or some new critical insight he had come up with on a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy work. Sor used the opportunity to turn Olephant’s attention away from his son.
“Look who’s going by!” Sor said, pointing out the window.
“Oh, Julian,” Olephant said, turning around in his chair to study their mutual friend. “Now, there’s a creative man who doesn’t drink coffee. He drinks tea. I have to serve him tea when he visits me in my office. Something must be the matter with him. One of these days I’ll have to instruct him on the merits of the coffee bean.”
They both watched Plum, his long, skinny hands flailing in the air, the student saying nothing, listening intently as if under a spell, as if intoxicated by the maestro’s learned explanation of whatever they were discussing.
“A bright man, Julian Plum,” Olephant said. “But I can’t figure him out. He doesn’t seem to have a life outside academia. He has never mentioned dating a woman. He seems to have no sexual inclinations of any kind. He’s like a monk. I did, though, see him last week in the dining hall having lunch with Marguerite Spares, an adjunct art teacher. I don’t think you know her. I met her briefly once. They seemed close. They laughed a lot. They even touched hands. I joked about it with him afterwards. I asked him if she was his girlfriend. He said she was just an old friend and that she was married. Apparently they went to college together.”
Sor was surprised to hear Marguerite’s name coming from Olephant’s lips. Had Olephant made a pass at her? But he didn’t tell Olephant that he knew her. Or what happened between them at Plum’s birthday dinner. Or that he had just run into her. And how he felt about her.
“By the way, how is your famous humanities class?” Sor asked, remembering that this was the semester Olephant taught it.
“It’s going great. Just great,” said Olephant. “I think it’s because the majority of the students who sign up for that class have a genuine interest in it. They want to be there. Maybe it’s because of me, too. I am more passionate about teaching it than any of my other classes. Of course, every time I teach it, I’m reminded how fragile civilizations are. No matter how solid they appear, how indestructible, they can crumble so easily, fall into a condition of anarchy, be eaten away from the inside, and poof, they’re no more. Civilizations are like some individuals, Sor. One day they are on top of the world, happy, secure, things are good, they have money, they are blessed with good health, loving, caring spouses, and suddenly, some unexpected intrusion, some poor choice on their part, bad investments, terminal illness, and everything falls apart, and one’s life is not what it used to be.”
“That’s a very grim perspective for you,” Sor said, “but there’s truth in what you say. However, I still think the individual, if he makes the right decisions, barring any of life’s little surprises, and if he doesn’t allow his life to become so complicated it becomes unmanageable, can withstand most existential setbacks and live a good, stable life.”
Behind them, a student’s phone rang. Its ring was the opening note from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Both men, surprised, turned around. The owner of the phone had a violin case next to her chair. She must be one of the conservatory students, Sor thought.
“Beethoven… a little surprise to brighten the day, eh, Sor?” Olephant said. “But who listens to Beethoven anymore? A few conservatory students and over-the-hill guys like us.”
“I want to believe there is going to be a time when we return to the profound artistic statements of the past,” said Sor. “The great painters, composers, poets, writers, philosophers—they cannot have existed to be forgotten and ignored like this. Plato was once lost, and Aristotle, and they came back. They became the backbone of western civilization more than a thousand years later. Maybe, sometime in the future, a fledgling culture will use Heidegger and Nietzsche and Sartre, and the other great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the artists and painters and composers, to build a robust and meaningful civilization.”
Another outburst of laughter came from a nearby table. Some students were sharing a whispered joke as they got up to leave.
It’s then that both men noticed that most of the tables were empty. While they were talking students were leaving for their classes.
“Have we been speaking this long?” Sor said, hurriedly bringing the last piece of cake to his mouth. “I guess we should be going too.”
“I suppose we should,” Olephant said. “We have hungry minds to feed.”
They left Zanzibar, walking off in different directions, both men promising to see each other more frequently.
“Don’t be a stranger, Sor,” Olephant said in parting. “I’ll make you a fine cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain on your next visit.”
FOUR
“The characters we encountered in the novels we have read thus far this semester,” Sor began his lecture to the class, “are very much like us. They wrestle with emotional crisis, anxiety, relationship problems, guilt, self-identity, and the discomfort they sometimes experience in their daily interaction with others, which can be so trying at times. They, too, must face the huge task of confronting and coming to terms with their personal demons—whatever it is that prevents them from developing into more dynamic, emotionally whole individuals. If they don’t, they’ll remain stagnant, locked up in their unhappy lives. Like us, it sometimes takes life-shaking experiences, jarring but hopefully enlightening epiphanies, pretty rough stuff, to wake them up, make them see themselves and reevaluate and modify their lives, and…”
A low-flying plane, probably making its final descent to land at the Fort Lauderdale airport, interrupted Sor’s talk. He stopped talking to let it pass, and didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He walked back and forth in front of his desk, not looking at the students. He wanted to give them time to think about what he had said before resuming his talk. He hoped someone would question what he said. Come up with an insightful rebuttal. He sometimes wished one of them would let his or her true feelings spill out and tell him that what he was talking about was a lot of nonsense—like the fellow in one of his classes the previous semester, who told him that the novel was an antiquated art form, and that you can’t compare living beings with fictional characters, and that literature would be of no importance in his life. But no one spoke.
“Isn’t it ironic,” he said, when he resumed, “isn’t it perversely ironic that we can understand and interpret these imagined, fictional beings, but cannot understand and know our own selves, the person closest to us, whose clothes we wear, whose skin we wear, whose thoughts run amok in our heads, whose dreams we dream, whose breath we breathe. We fall through our fingers like sand in an hourglass. Our lives unwind like a film we are watching for the first time. We don’t know what is going to happen next. We cannot predict the next words that will fall from our lips, whom we will meet and love, or hate, and who will take our lives in a direction we did not intend it to go.”
Sor filled the whiteboard with notes pertaining to the novel: how to evaluate and interpret characters in a work of fiction, the dynamics behind a character’s growth. He wrote swiftly, sometimes talking as he wrote, the felt-tipped pen traversing quietly over the surface of the whiteboard. Sor preferred the old blackboard. He missed the crisp, grating sound of the chalk when he wrote his notes. It had presence. He could hear himself writing on the old board. The chalk left particles of itself on his fingers. With the chalk, he knew he was writing, he knew he was putting down his ideas. With the new whiteboard, the whole process of writing his notes had become muted. It changed his relationship with the board and the ideas he transcribed onto its surface. Some faculty didn’t even use the boards anymore. Even though they were new they were already obsolete, the way books were becoming obsolete. Everything was changing, Sor thought. The new technologies were not only changing the way we lived, but how we thought. Students no longer depended on the sound of turning pages for an education.
While the students took down his notes, Sor walked over to the window and opened the warped and yellowing Venetian blinds. A group of students was gathered around the fountain that stood between his classroom and the gym. They all had their notebooks out, going over their class notes. They were probably doing last-minute cramming for an exam, he thought.
When the class ended and the students began leaving the room, Sor erased his notes from the board, put his books and notes into his briefcase, and walked back to the window. The students around the fountain had all left for their classes, except for one student with a yellow skateboard who was talking on his phone, talking hard and fast, kicking the side of the fountain with his sneaker-encased foot as he spoke. Sor couldn’t hear him but surmised he was trying to convince some girl that he was worthy of her love. At his age, it was probably just sex. Not love. Just sex.
Caught up in his reverie, Sor didn’t realize there was someone in the room with him until he heard a familiar voice calling his name. It was Adolfo Salvio, one of his favorite students, the young man from Argentina, the student in the wheelchair.
“Oh… it’s you, Adolfo. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were here. I thought everyone had left. What can I do for you?”
“It’s about your response to my last paper, Professor Avraham. Based on my grade, you didn’t seem to like it.”
Sor remembered Adolfo’s last paper. He had written a page-and-a-half response, typed, not handwritten as he normally did when he critiqued students’ papers. Adolfo was special. He was bright and intellectually combative, and initiated many lively discussions in the classroom. He wrote extraordinarily well for his age.
“It was a very good paper, Adolfo,” Sor said. “I’m sorry for the confusion. I always expect more from brighter students like you. It was a particularly good paper, one of your best. But you should know me by now. I like to push bright students. I think you can still do better.”
Adolfo had been in a car accident when he was fifteen. Since then he had lived mostly in America, undergoing various surgeries and therapies. He attended elite private schools in Boston, where he had learned to speak and write English proficiently, before coming to the university. He wrote and spoke English better than he did Spanish, his native language. The doctors’ prognosis of his condition was good. They believed that with one more operation and rigorous therapy, he could be out of his wheelchair and back on his feet within a year after the surgery. Sor hoped, for Adolfo’s sake, their prognosis was correct.
“I know you expect a lot from me, Professor Avraham,” he said, “but I put a lot into that paper. I was expecting a better grade than you gave me. You gave me a B. I was expecting an A.”
“Grades! Don’t be concerned about grades, Adolfo. It’s my agenda to make you into a fine writer, to get the most out of you. As for your grade, I’m sure your final grade will meet your expectation.”
“Thank you, Professor Avraham,” Adolfo said, a smile of satisfaction on his face. “You are a good man, a bit eccentric at times, but a good teacher. We all like you.”
“Thank you Adolfo, I hope I’m liked for the right reasons. I would not appreciate being liked because I am thought soft or that I am an easy grader.”
“No one thinks you are an easy grader. It is very difficult to get an A in your class. You also have us do a lot more work than the other teachers. I have heard some of the students complaining about it. But you make up for it by being an interesting and exciting teacher. And you care about your students.”
Adolfo looked at his watch, turned his wheelchair around and was about to leave when Sor thought of something and stopped him. He remembered Adolfo telling him about an art appreciation class he had taken with Marguerite from the previous semester. What did Adolfo think of Marguerite? How did the students see her? Sor had to be careful, though. He didn’t want Adolfo to become suspicious and assume he was interested in Marguerite.
“Oh, by the way, Adolfo,” Sor said offhandedly, his hand on the door knob, “if I am not mistaken, I remember your telling me that you had taken an art appr
eciation class last semester. I forgot to ask you about it. How did it go?”
“Oh, it went well. I was not at all disappointed.”
“Who was your teacher?”
“Professor Spares. She is a good teacher. I found her very interesting. I think it’s because she paints. For her, art is not just theory. It is what she loves, what she does. She is going to have an exhibit soon. She invited the class. It’s going to be at a gallery in Miami.”
“That’s good of her to invite you. You should go. I hope you earned a good grade.”
“I got a very good grade. I wish, though, that I were able to meet more often with her in her office. Some of the students found it to be problematic; they couldn’t see her as often as they would like. She has two boys and is very committed to them. She was always in a rush to go home to be with them and hardly had time for individual conferences with the students. Why do you ask about her, Professor Avraham?”
“Oh… nothing,” Sor said. “I wasn’t asking about her, just about your class with her. I like to know how you are doing in your other classes.”
Adolfo looked again at his watch. “I must go, Professor Avraham,” he said. “I have my afternoon therapy in ten minutes. My physical therapist is probably waiting. He is always on time.”
Sor took the elevator with Adolfo to the first floor of the building. He watched him slowly make his way toward his dormitory in his motorized wheelchair. He wondered if his questions about Marguerite, though he had tried to be as nonchalant and discreet as possible, had made Adolfo suspicious. “God speed, Adolfo,” he said to himself, and turned and walked toward his office.
FIVE
When Sor got to his office, he immediately checked his phone messages and e-mails. He answered two e-mails that were flagged as important and spoke to one of the administrators in the registrar’s office about a student’s grade that needed adjusting. After that he proceeded to read and grade the remainder of the essay papers for one of his classes. It was a habit of his to promptly mark his students’ papers.
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