Their pillow talk—Joel’s and Matha’s—had lately shifted subjects from Matha’s limitless future in Long Island real estate to Professor Porterfield’s limited future at Beet. At least, limited was the way both of them wanted it. Matha was more forthcoming.
“I’m mystified, Mr. Bollovate,” she said one afternoon in their special Room 207. Supine in the king-size bed, they appeared a lower-case i beside a capital O. She sipped from a bottle of Johnny Walker from the mini-bar, he from a miniature Chivas Regal. “I know why I want to get rid of Professor Porterfield. He’s too goody-goody and too smart, and he might actually save the college. But you, Mr. Bollovate. I don’t get why you want the same thing.”
She continued to call him Mr. Bollovate in spite of their intimacies. The formal address seemed to heighten her excitement in bed, or rather the excitement she expressed, at the peak of which she would often cry out, “Oh! Mr. Bollovate!”
“I want him out because he’s not doing his job.”
“But you can’t dump him—can you?” asked Matha, craning her neck back to behold the print of Don Quixote over the headboard. “He has tenure. He’s protected. And he may not be doing his job, but no one could do better. If you get rid of Porterfield, you’ll get rid of the college.”
“Tenure!” Bollovate sat up in the bed and swiped at the air. “How I hate that word! Tenure! Where else on Planet Earth is there a thing called tenure? In a dildo factory? Oh, yeah. A dildo maker is awarded a job for life because he’s just so good at his work? Give me a break.”
Matha slid deeper under the bedcovers. She’d hit a nerve. Mr. Bollovate seemed to have so many nerves.
“And if the dildo maker begins to get sloppy? Goes berserk? Produces whoopee cushions instead of dildos? He’s fired! That’s what happens. But not a college professor. Once a college professor gets tenure, he can fuck up all he wants or go to sleep for the next twenty years. He’s got fucking tenure!”
“So,” Matha asked in a soft and careful voice, “how could you get rid of Professor Porterfield?”
“Does he screw around?” asked Bollovate. “Nah. That wouldn’t do it. All those professors screw around.” It came to him where he was.
“Actually,” said Matha, “he may be one of the few professors at Beet who doesn’t screw around.”
That was so. Other than Professor Porterfield, Keelye Smythe was the lone member of the English Department who had never had an affair with an undergraduate—though not for lack of trying. Once, in pursuit of a plump exchange student named Lufthansa, he’d written her a love letter suggesting that the passion they could share would rank among those of the exalted lovers of history and mythology, like Troilus and Cressida, Hero and Leander, Daphnis and Chloe, Venus and Adonis, and Edward, Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. Smythe’s twelve-page letter was a philosophical-cum-philological argument that included blank spaces in the text. When he gave it to Mrs. Whiting for typing, he put the spaces in brackets and instructed, “insert endearments here.” Mrs. Whiting handed back the untyped letter without comment.
“What about the antifeminist bullshit?” asked Bollovate. “I wonder if we could get him on that.”
Matha said nothing, but she knew the “antifeminist bullshit” was a more usable charge than murder if they wanted Porterfield out. She recalled a recent incident at Columbia. It involved a professor caught chewing his Salisbury steak too demonstratively in the faculty cafeteria. A young woman complained that the offender had behaved inappropriately, and he was brought up for “lewd chewing.” The fellow tried to explain that he was merely masticating, but that only made matters worse.
“We can get around tenure,” said Bollovate. “He could be thrown out for cause. He’s supposed to be serving the college’s needs, and he’s fucking up.”
Matha regarded him sideways, like a puzzle that required a different approach if one were to solve it. “Well, I can’t see why you’re telling me all this. What could I possibly do to get rid of Professor Porterfield?”
Bollovate had thought of what. “For one thing, you and your band of misfits could storm the CCR meetings, make it impossible for them to meet.”
“What good would that do? They’re not getting anywhere anyway.”
“I want a change in public opinion,” said Bollovate, who purchased that very thing often enough to know what he was talking about. “I want the students to think that Porterfield, by failing in his job, is doing them in.”
Matha understood what he meant, if not his motives. If the majority of students were opposed to Porterfield, the faculty would turn on him too, because there was nothing they valued more than the collective opinions of people in their late teens. Yet again she was torn. If keeping Porterfield resulted in rescuing the college, her own mission would be thwarted. But if dumping him had the same consequence, that is, if he were replaced by someone who could do what the trustees had asked, what difference did it make? On the other hand, she had begun to see her future lay in real estate more than in poetry. And she might very soon overtake that bitch Kathy in her very own trade. Also, the disruption of the CCR would bring one more time-wasting annoyance to the college.
“The trouble is,” she said, “Professor Porterfield really can do the job. You’d be better off letting him alone.” She gave him the fish eye. “Unless, for some reason, you don’t want him to succeed.”
“Save those smarts for when you’re working for me,” said Bollovate. He pulled on his pants and left her in the motel room. “I go. You stay.” She would have to make her return trip to the college on her own, which annoyed her practically, not emotionally.
But who was this standing in the wavering light of the motel parking lot, notebook in hand, looking, he hoped, like Hemingway in riding boots astride a hill in war-torn Spain? Ferritt Lawrence greeted her cheerily to cover his guilt, stuffed some items into his backpack, and offered to leave his bike at the motel and pay for a taxi for them both.
“What do you think of Professor Porterfield?” she asked him on the way back to Beet. Few people ever asked Ferritt his opinion of anything, not even driving directions, so he responded at great length. Professor Porterfield was just the sort of faculty member he despised, he told Matha. “He keeps to himself. He teaches, talks to his students in office hours, and goes home. He doesn’t gossip. He doesn’t tell me a thing, you can bet on that. He ignores the press. Can you believe it? Treats me like a pest.”
“What if I told you the MacArthur Five was about to rise again? At least two more times,” said Matha.
“That would be a story,” said the aroused Ferritt.
“Well, very soon, and I’ll tell you when, we’re going to raid a CCR meeting, bring the committee to a halt.”
“A grinding halt?” Ferritt asked.
“And something a lot bigger,” said Matha, as Gregory gave their taxi the toreador defense at the gates. They rode past Bacon. “A takeover to end all takeovers. I’ll let you know. You’ll have an exclusive.”
Ferritt had not been this excited since he was given a one-day press pass to sit in on a session of the Council on Foreign Relations. At last here was the payoff for all the fallow weeks, and for all the crafty maneuvers involved in following Matha and Bollovate. Then he blundered. “And what does Mr. Bollovate think of the committee?”
“How would I know what Mr. Bollovate is thinking of anything?” she asked, her voice a block of ice.
“Oh,” said Ferritt in an awkward attempt to sound casual, “I happened to see Mr. Bollovate leave the motel shortly before you did. I thought perhaps you had run into him.”
Matha spoke ruminatively. “Of course, I could always phone all the local papers too. Maybe stories as big as the ones I’m contemplating should not be restricted to one news outlet. A college paper at that. Maybe it isn’t fair.”
“I don’t know a thing,” said Ferritt at once.
“See that you keep it that way.” But she did not trust him and vowed to screw him, figuratively, at the fir
st opportunity. In his own preprofessional way, he made the same vow, and wondered if there were anything else Matha Polite had to hide.
Deposited at Chillingworth, she left him without a thanks or good-bye and climbed the stairs to her room to summon her Gang of Four. Ferritt remained in the taxi, reviewing the pictures he had taken with his cell phone. He also played his cassette recorder, whose reception was muffled and staticky. Still, he could make out much of the conversation, and the words “Oh! Mr. Bollovate!” came through loud and clear, which gave him hope of getting his story after all.
In fact, the day concluded with several of the principals more hopeful than they’d had when it started—making it an unusual day in New England. Bollovate, still smarting from his face-off with Peace outside the classroom, was hopeful that he’d engineered the professor’s eventual dismissal for incompetence or neglect of duty. While it was unlikely that charges would ever become formal, the mere accusation might be sufficiently discomfiting to force Porterfield to quit. Even so, students would have to turn against him as well as the faculty and administration, a circumstance that seemed unlikely, but—given Bollovate’s determination and Matha’s new assignment—not out of the question. If that should happen, Porterfield would feel as though he had let down the people he had been charged to help, and he’d walk.
So that was Bollovate’s hope. And consequently it became President Huey’s hope, and it was Matha’s hope, and Ferritt Lawrence’s. It was also the hope of Peace’s fellow committee members. And, had he been in on any of the multiple schemes aborning, it would have been Akim Ben Laden’s too (though he liked Professor Porterfield and felt he owed him his life for the incident with Latin the Pig), since the failure of the CCR would mean the destruction of the Satan college.
But these days Akim harbored other hopes, such as that the Homeland Security Department might disappear, but not before it appeared. The permutations for the codes had reached the high millions. It was near Thanksgiving. Would the search ever yield an answer?
And Akim held a more immediate hope. He had just emerged from the bathroom on the top floor of Fordyce, and he very much hoped that on the long walk back to his cave he would not drop the soup bowl he had just filled with his first batch of TATP.
CHAPTER 14
DID PEACE HAVE FRIENDS OTHER THAN DEREK MANNING? HE had a few from prep school, and a few more from college with whom he communicated episodically, in the way that most men prefer 161 to maintain their friendships. And he corresponded with some of the kids he’d taught in Sunset Park. With five or six faculty colleagues, too, he had cordial relationships if not full-blown friendships, marked by the occasional drinks or the occasional lunch, or the very occasional dinner party. Peace and Livi abhorred dinner parties, particularly faculty dinner parties, and they often said they produced Beth and Robert as excuses to decline invitations. In their four years at Beet they had thrown only one obligatory dinner party for the English and American Literature Department, at the end of which Livi had asked her husband if buying a flame thrower required a waiting period.
As it was, though, Manning constituted most of Peace’s social life. And much of that occurred on the gym floor. In previous years, before the Day of the Bollovate, the two men had met twice a week for one-on-one basketball games, which they played to the death. Now, in late November, they were going at each other in their first game of the term.
It was the Monday before Thanksgiving. Peace had invited Manning to play in part to work up a real sweat, as compared to the purposeless games of the CCR, and to spill his many woes to his friend.
“You know what’s wrong with you,” said Manning, after listening to the litany. Peace had kept it short, his sentences fragmented, and he was so uncomfortable in talking about himself, much less his difficulties, that anyone other than Manning might have thought he was recounting a lucky streak. Manning, who had legs like pilings and a vertical leap of three feet, sailed over his taller opponent and slammed the ball down with a whoosh. “What’s wrong with you is that you’re not PC. You’re not P, and you have no sense of C.”
“And you do?”
“I don’t need to be PC. I’m Jewish.” They were playing losers-outs. “And that’s a perfect example,” Manning said. “If you had an ounce of common sense, or a sense of self-preservation, you’d hang with black guys on the faculty, or Chinese guys, or gays in wheelchairs. But no. You hang with a Jew! So wrong, my friend. So yesterday.”
“How do you do that?” asked Peace as his opponent again drifted over him and stuffed the ball in the basket, this time double-handed.
“Jewish legs,” said Manning. He stole the ball off Peace’s dribble. “Are you going to play, by the way, or bellyache?”
“Bellyache,” said Peace. The ball echoed in the empty gym, the late autumn light streaming through the wire mesh on the high windows and making whorly patterns on the court. Manning knew not to pick up on the subject of Livi and the children going to New York. That was too raw. So he pretended the most important thing was how to devise a curriculum that would save the college, rid Peace of the sight of Bollovate, and set him free of his dreadful committee. As a government professor he fancied his lot superior to the English professor’s, but he was experienced enough to recognize that a committee made up of his own types would have behaved no better, only with fewer verbal flourishes.
“That’s why you’ll never find me on a committee, unless it’s to write obits for the faculty meeting. I like doing that.”
“Thanks for your help,” said Peace, as he stood flat-footed and watched his friend nail a long jumper. “You’ve been practicing.”
“For you?” Manning smiled.
“Okay. No more Mr. Nice Guy.” Peace took the ball. “Let’s change to winners-outs.” He hit seven straight shots from all over the court, and “Game.” Manning took it as well as could be expected. They sat side by side with their knees up and their backs to the wall, like two kids on a playground in summer.
“Are you asking me something or just venting?” said Manning.
“Here’s my problem. I mean, apart from figuring out how to have a family life without a family.” He stared briefly at the floor. “We’re up against it. We have to produce something. If I make up a plan on my own, I don’t think I’ll have trouble selling it to the rest of the group. They really aren’t as foolish as they’ve been acting.”
“And Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds,” said Manning. “Or did Twain say that?”
“But when they hear something that works, they’ll know it and jump aboard, I’m fairly sure, if I can come up with a decent idea.”
“If you do,” said Manning, “you’ll be doing everyone a service way beyond bringing dollars into the college. Nobody knows what to do with higher education these days. There’s so much horseshit in the curriculum as it is.”
“Between deadheaded tradition and the current nonsense,” said Peace, “there has to be a clean, clear education designed to help young people find useful lives, to help them live in the world. I mean, that’s it, isn’t it? To learn how to live in the world? And you know, Derek, no matter how much they mess up, I believe most of the faculty believes that too.”
“And I believe that deep down, Miss Frank, everyone is good. Why don’t you seek help in Bliss House?”
“No, I mean it.”
“I know you do. And in my happier moments, all three of them, I see it your way. A hundred forty-one overeducated people can’t be wrong all the time. But the kind of curriculum you’re suggesting would be hard enough to put in place in a matter of years, much less weeks. You’re talking about a reeducation of the educators. I think the trustees snookered you.”
“Not if I do what they asked.”
“You want to know the trouble with this place—fundamentally, I mean?”
“I do,” said Peace. “But no bottom-line lectures.”
“It’s a different bottom line. Our colleagues are lazy, morally and intellectually l
azy. Nobody cares about the students these days—a fact I find grimly hilarious because that’s all anyone claims to care about. They spend so much time and energy trying to come up with what they think the students want. But our colleagues are gutless, because rather than concentrating on difficult, complicated material, and teaching that—worthwhile material that, by the way, they perfectly well know and were taught themselves—they offer pap. Instead of playing offense, they are always backing up the way we play D on the court here, countermoving according to the moves of people barely out of childhood. The joke is, nobody is on offense but them. The faculty is playing against themselves and getting creamed. What the students want, what they crave, is inequality. They want to rely on people who know more than they do, and they want to come out of Beet College a little smarter than when they went in.
“And you think the kids don’t know what’s going on? They go through the motions of sitting in classes they laugh at—Native American Crafts and Casino Studies?—and spend half their time partying, out of boredom, and the other half in a stupor, dreaming about becoming The Donald’s latest apprentice or the next American Idol. This is what popular culture hath wrought. Have I not seen the best minds of their generation competing to be on Survivor? They dream the big preposterous dreams because they don’t want to earn the small ones. And that’s because we so-called teachers don’t give them the small dreams anymore. No wonder Ms. Polite and the Four Stooges want to close the place down. The college has become a Green Room—without a show to go with it.”
“You’re saying it’s attitude more than substance?”
“One drives the other.” Manning thought about it. “You know, you might not be talking about new courses as much as a new way to see the array of courses we have. Maybe you could trick our colleagues into taking an interest in what they teach, make them good students again by coming up with something they want to learn. Between you and me, I think most of the race and gender stuff is bunk, and you know what I think of the professors of newspapers. But even with those folks, it’s the way they see things, not the material itself, that sinks them, the dumbass idea that the purpose of education is to make people proud of who they are instead of what they might become.
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