by Lev Raphael
“It is a little gloomy,” I said, as if commenting merely on the wattage of the light bulbs. I was trying to be careful. I didn’t want any casual bon mot of mine to waft through the department and make its way to Broadshaw.
“Gloomy?” she chortled. “It fits our department to a ‘t.’ Anne Rice could move her vampire novels here. She’d love the way we eat each other alive.”
I decided to change the subject because I didn’t know her well at all, and I wasn’t prepared to dish our host, our chair, who could make my life unpleasant for me if he wanted. It could be things like assigning me to more committee work than I could reasonably do, ensuring I had an inconvenient schedule, or something worse, guaranteeing that I never taught a graduate class.
“It’s always been bad around here, but ever since Rhetoric was demolished as a department and they dumped all of us into English and American Studies—” She shuddered. “More than a decade later, they still treat us like they’re Pat Buchanan and we’re illegal aliens!”
“Well, what exactly happened?”
Serena bit her lips. “Budget cutting in the early eighties swept through this school like a firestorm. It was devastating.”
That was true, and I lived with the aftereffects, even though I had entered the department well after this shotgun wedding. At department meetings, the animosity was always just about to break, and made me feel like I was watching one of Eugene O’Neill’s less peppy plays.
I hadn’t heard Serena complain about all this before, and I wanted to hear more. “So how’s it difficult for you and the Rhetoric faculty?” I asked.
“We get consistently bad schedules, we have small and crowded offices, and they’ll do anything to make us feel insignificant. It’s true that some of the former Rhetoric faculty can be a mite prickly at times, but what about the spirit of collegiality?”
I didn’t respond to that because at SUM, the Rhetoric Department was widely known as a collection of whining misfits and nowadays had the smothered mournful hysteria of an ancient country that had seen the eclipse of its glory and was now a mere province in some larger empire. Most of them had only Master’s degrees, were unenthusiastic about teaching writing and did it poorly, and made no effort to do research that might lead to improving their own skills, or to publishing.
“It’s not easy being despised,” Serena said darkly.
I wondered if that was really true for her, as the former chair of Rhetoric, or whether she was just feeling especially bitter because of Perry Cross getting the Canadian Studies position. Serena was Canadian-born and had published well-received books on Timothy Findley and Mavis Gallant. Though there was sometimes prejudice against hiring an “internal” candidate, she really was qualified and the position should have been hers. And the fact that she was a talented woman in a department overloaded with not so talented men should have enhanced her qualifications.
“How are your classes?” I asked.
“Wonderful!” she sighed. “I have so much energy this semester.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, I’m just so inspired by the rich new talent we’re bringing into this department.”
Now I laughed at her obvious slam on Perry Cross.
“Though I’m sure,” she went on, “that Perry Cross will be raided by some finer school very soon because he’s so amazingly qualified.” She grinned.
EAR had no more nationally known scholars left; they’d been lured away by Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Duke, Brown, given endowed chairs when SUM couldn’t scrape together enough cash to endow a footstool.
I confess I liked inciting Serena. I said softly, “I heard Perry’s good in class.”
“No you haven’t,” she snapped. “You couldn’t have. His students despise him.”
“Already? How do you know?”
“They talk. They talk to each other, they talk to me.” I recalled hearing that Serena was one of the few faculty members who enjoyed advising students. Serena nodded. “He’s arrogant, he talks down to his students—one of them left his office crying!”
I was appalled. I had known a few teachers like that in my lifetime; their whole manner could feel like a cross-examination and you’d end up convicted, hopeless, lost.
Serena lifted her chin regally. “Now I admit I sometimes despair of students who haven’t read the syllabus and ask unnecessary questions, or who waste my time trying to be friendly for a better grade, but I do try always to at least be patient and polite.”
I’d heard from many sources that Serena was more than just polite; she was thorough, professional, helpful, adept. And in all of those ways, she was resolutely unlike the Rhetoric faculty she’d once headed. Their reputation for temperament and academic shoddiness still hung in the air, like the dust from a volcanic eruption changing the weather thousands of miles away.
“Perry Cross won’t last,” Serena added, as if dismissing some tacky fad, like those ’70s platform shoes with live goldfish in their plastic heels.
“But how did he get hired if he hasn’t published that much?” I was looking for real dirt, for the double-dealing that must have taken place in the search and hiring committees, and beyond.
Serena grinned. “I did wonder at first if some rich relative of Perry Cross’s had made a secret large donation to the university. Then I thought, why SUM and not a more prestigious school? Or was that the point? Would a better school have scorned such a deal, no matter how private? Now I think I know the answer.”
“And?”
Eyelids lowered as if she were Mata Hari, Serena drawled, “Blow jobs, lots of blow jobs.”
I laughed so hard I started coughing and almost spilled my drink.
People turned around, smiling, enjoying my hilarity—or maybe not. Maybe they were enjoying my discomfort—because I sensed that lots of the faculty thought I had gotten the job only because I was Stefan’s partner. Despite my publications, my conference papers, terrific student evaluations, despite everything that made my own academic career substantial, I still felt somewhat unwelcome in the department after a year. And then I also wondered how much of it was my being openly gay and proudly Jewish, too, in a department with few Jewish professors and some apparent closet queens.
“Blow jobs,” I said. “So that’s his secret.”
Serena downed her drink. “He won’t last,” she said again.
“You should have gotten his position.”
“You mean, being on my knees? Or his job?”
I gulped. I was not used to Serena talking like this. I looked closely at her, and realized that she was standing up very straight, as if trying not to sway. I had never seen her this close to being drunk.
“His job,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be in the same department with someone who was far less qualified than you, far younger, far less experienced, who had bested you as Perry Cross somehow had done.
Serena looked at me as if I were a freshman making the most obvious grammatical error, raising her heavily plucked and redrawn eyebrows.
“What makes you think I won’t have Perry Cross’s position?” She headed away for another drink.
3
WATCHING SERENA FISCH SASHAY OFF, I leaned back against a nearby bookcase, thinking’ about how much unhappiness and dissension there was in the department. Look at Priscilla Davidoff and her animus toward Stefan. It wasn’t just obvious in her attitude that she was furious about Stefan winding up as writer-in-residence, she’d even said that to me. We were in the middle of a neutral few lines of conversation at the department mailboxes and she popped out with: “He doesn’t deserve it.” I was appalled by her rudeness, and wanted to be just as rude and snap, “You’re not good enough to be writer-in-residence of an outhouse.”
What if Priscilla Davidoff was as determined to get rid of Stefan as Serena was intent on sinking Perry Cross? Was there anything either one of them could do?
I scanned the room looking for Priscilla and spotted her off near the
kitchen. She was staring at Stefan and Perry, who were now seated halfway up the broad uncarpeted stairs. Stefan seemed unusually attentive, when he wasn’t talking.
Priscilla’s eyes were nakedly full of hatred. It scared me.
The way Priscilla presented herself to the world was so discordant. She was so hard and angry, but her smiles, her voice, her perfume, and even her clothes were usually very soft. She was quite tall, striking—almost a blond Geena Davis—and given to long velvet dresses with padded shoulders and lacy necklines. She had flowing pre-Raphaelite hair, creamy skin, large brown eyes, long dark lips, and appropriately gentle but dramatic gestures. Tonight at Broadshaw’s party, I wanted to convince her that Stefan really was the right person for writer-in-residence.
I shook my head and moved off to get myself some more wine, some stuffed grape leaves, and torta rustica. And just as I started munching away, I was cornered by Chuck Bayer, the department’s chain-smoking, nail-biting fake.
“Nick! Nicky, I want to talk to you! Wait here, I want to get a refill, okay?”
I watched Chuck lope off He was excruciatingly tall—like Ichabod Crane, with a weird kind of good looks that were highlighted by his shabby-looking blue suits, scuffed oxfords, and bland ties.
I suppose every department like ours has one of these intellectual lounge lizards—oddly magnetic, driven, shallow. They don’t do really valuable academic work, but tend to churn out shoddy introductions to insignificant collections or anthologies. Despite the pitiful levels of achievement, they act as if they know everybody in academic publishing and they sprinkle conversations with gossip, talk of contracts, advances, and proposals. They generally don’t get tenure, at good schools anyway, because no one’s really fooled into taking them seriously.
I did not like it that Chuck kept calling me Nicky, as if we were Hollywood types bantering at poolside. I had tried subtle approaches, and then finally came right out and said, “Nobody calls me Nicky.” Chuck had simply nodded, as if remarking on a natural phenomenon he had no control over. I admit that I was jealous that he had done his doctorate at Yale, while I had only gotten into NYU.
Back with his drink, Chuck said, “How about doing a bibliography of Joan Didion with me?”
I knew at once that meant I’d do it and we’d share the authorship. He sounded desperate, and was probably racing a publisher’s deadline because he’d talked someone into giving him a contract. “We can do it easy,” he kept saying, like a drunk repeating, “I’m all right, I’m all right.” And I stared into his slightly cross-eyed, pockmarked, ineffectual face.
As Chuck went on trying to convince me, I knew for sure then that he and reality were not good friends. My Wharton bibliography took me five years of tracking down and reading every single book, article, and review about Wharton and her novels, short stories, poems, and articles in English, French, German, Japanese, Italian from 1897 to the present. Everything had to be located, read, sometimes translated, and described in objective tight prose. For those years, Stefan and I lived in a maze of overflowing file cabinets, the stench of Xeroxes, and the nagging fear that something major would get missed or lost or end up incorrect in the finished book, which contained thousands upon thousands of numbers and dates. It’s said that Henry James once remarked about someone “with profound stupefaction” that the man was “interested in indexes.” By the time I was done with my bibliography, I was stupefied. Even Stefan was exhausted, and he said he would never read a word by or about Wharton for the rest of his life.
I had tuned out a little, thinking about Wharton. But Chuck Bayer was still talking about the Didion bibliography as if it were a trip to the mall.
“I don’t like Joan Didion,” I finally told Chuck. “She’s too thin.”
“Her prose or her body?”
“Take your pick. Besides, I prefer dead authors—live ones can be so slippery.”
“Are you sure you’re not interested?”
I nodded.
“I really need your help,” he said, his voice lowered, his face—for him—suddenly more open and honest. I could see he was about to reach for my arm, but then he looked a bit frightened and scuttled off. And when I turned, I had no idea who had scared him; there were dozens of faculty members and their spouses in view.
I was startled when I turned back to see Priscilla Davidoff advancing on me, smiling.
“Did Chuck try to get you involved in the Didion bibliography?”
I admit I was surprised. “You, too?”
“What a twerp,” she spat. “I don’t get him at all. What’s the big deal about that Edith Wharton postcard he found? I don’t see how that would make anybody’s scholarly reputation.”
“Postcard! It was a letter.” I took a deep breath. “Wharton scholars always call it ‘The Letter.’ ”
Priscilla rolled her eyes.
“No, this was big stuff. You have to remember that until all those love letters Wharton wrote to Morton Fullerton showed up in Paris, people thought of Wharton as stiff and cold. A grande dame out of touch with life. You do remember reading about those letters, don’t you?”
“How could I forget?”
Priscilla was sarcastic, but I forged ahead. I was a little drunk, and I proceeded to lecture her about Wharton’s love letters, how they had revealed her as a passionate, imperiously demanding, yearning, heartbroken woman—in other words, as a more complete human being. “So it doesn’t matter how you see the affair, whether it was a trap or a miracle. It’s still powerful stuff—the letters make her come alive in a new way. And they proved that a really intimate diary Wharton kept was actually written about Fullerton, and not Walter Berry. He was a lifelong friend and literary adviser.”
“So where does Chuck’s letter fit in?”
I almost hugged myself in excitement. “When Walter Berry died, Wharton went to his apartment in Paris and burned all her letters to him. So Chuck found the only one that survived! Berry must have slipped it in a copy of one of her novels, The Touchstone, and when his mammoth library got broken up after he died, the book kicked around Paris and ended up in a used bookstore on the Left Bank.”
Priscilla frowned. “But why the fuss? What’s in the letter?”
Here I hesitated. “Well, actually it’s kind of ambiguous. Just a few sentences in French.” Whether the letter proved Wharton and Berry were lovers, no one could say for sure—but it was still juicy and exciting.
“That’s all? And Chucky-lucky found it? How?”
“He was a graduate student on vacation in Paris. He just bought the book and there it was.” It pained me to have to tell this part of the story, since I envied the find so deeply. “He wrote an article about it, and he got famous. Among Wharton scholars, anyway.”
“How do you know the letter’s real? Maybe he forged it!”
I was horrified. “No, it’s been authenticated.” But then I smiled. “That’s the last time Chuck had any success; since then, he’s been coasting.”
“A lucky break,” she said grimly. “Like lots of people in this department.” She shook her head. “Like that damned Perry Cross. Can you believe they hired him at fifty thousand dollars?”
“What! I never heard that.”
“Sure—nobody’s bragging, but that’s what he’s getting.”
“But he’s just an assistant professor. Full professors get that much.”
Priscilla snorted. “If they don’t get shafted first.” She walked off.
Amazed that Perry was making so much more than I was, I headed for the nearest bathroom, which was down a long, narrow, badly lit hallway. This guest bathroom was pretentious and large, all black and white and chrome—with a tiny stereo system, VCR, and small television. Perhaps the hallway was kept dark so that the gleam and glare of this room would be more surprising and impressive.
On the way out, I passed a bedroom full of light jackets and sweaters. The door was half open and I heard an anguished woman’s voice: “You told him? I can’t believe you told
him! Are you crazy?” And then a quiet reply: “I couldn’t help it.”
I lingered, pretending to puzzle out the Latin inscription at the bottom of an architectural print of some Roman ruin that was the only thing hung in the dim hallway. But there was silence—perhaps they could sense my presence—and I moved on. As I headed back to the party, I thought someone might have been at the far end of the hallway, beyond the bathroom, because I heard a different door close.
I had recognized the voices: Betty and Bill Malatesta, the Whiz Kids. The two brightest and friendliest graduate students in the department. Both were publishing, going to conferences, smart, likable—a darling couple. Almost too darling. Sometimes meeting them in the department office I expected them to burst into song or announce, “Hey everybody, let’s dance!” Betty was slim and sexy, very blond and elegant, given to wearing only black. And Bill was also blond, but more robust—broad-shouldered, over six feet tall.
We often ran into each other at the mailboxes or getting coffee. In the EAR Department, there was an informality between graduate students and professors that had at first seemed warm and relaxing to me, but was actually rigid and ceremonial. As if we were all courtiers vividly aware of varying ranks, but absolutely committed to pretending that the hierarchy didn’t exist. It was odd. I had known departments that were honestly unfriendly, and honestly relaxed; this was an uncomfortable mix, in which you could never tell what was real. I sensed that my new colleagues didn’t like my spending time talking to graduate students like the Malatestas, but maybe it wasn’t so much the time as that I genuinely liked them, or at least didn’t think of them as less than human.
I was looking around for Stefan when Bill Malatesta came up to me, a little flushed, to tell me about some article he’d read in The New Yorker. Bill had the stance and style of a kickboxer—light on his feet, maybe, but powerful. While he spoke, I wondered if he’d seen it was me outside the bedroom door eavesdropping, and if he were trying to figure out how much I’d heard.
“How many graduate assistants does it take to change a light bulb?” he suddenly asked me.