Teacher's Threat

by Diane Vallere

  “I’m a decorator.”

  He leaned forward, picked up his pen, and resumed whatever task he’d been working on. It was as if I weren’t there. He glanced up at me and pointed at the door. “You can go now. Radical Business Strategy isn’t for you.”

  His dismissal wasn’t my first, but it was my most recent. Piled on top of the recent bank rejections, and I’d had just about enough of men in authority telling me what was right for me. I stood and moved my backpack to the chair and then put my palms on the edge of the professor’s desk and leaned toward him.

  “For the past decade, I’ve owned a decorating firm. I specialize in mid-century modern design, which I learned from studying Doris Day movies. I have acquired inventory at a fraction of its price by reading the obituaries, identifying women of a certain age, and contacting their next of kin. You would be surprised how many people my age lack nostalgia when money is involved.”

  He set down his pen and leaned back again. “Who taught you to do that?”

  “Aside from the experience I picked up working for a decorator in Pennsylvania over a decade ago, I taught myself everything I know. I’ve made contacts with funeral homes, powder coaters, and trash men. My business has posted double- and triple-digit increases since I opened. I’ve had an offer from one of the most successful architects in Dallas that I turned down because I liked working for myself.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You sound like you have a good thing going, but you’re here at a college, well past an age when most people attend.” He held up his hand. “No offense, but you’re not exactly a schoolgirl.”

  This was what I thought of as a Doris Day moment. How often did people think they knew who, or what, she was? How many times did people write her off as fluff and then learn she was smart, talented, funny, and sexy? How much time would she have wasted if she got angry every time they did?

  I forced a smile and softened my voice. “Professor Gallagher. I believe I can learn something new from your course, and I believe my experience might inspire your students. Starting my company wasn’t easy, but I persisted, and I’m prepared to do that again.” I pulled the paperwork out of my backpack, unfolded the documents, and set them in front of him. I picked up his pen and turned it around and extended it. “If you want me to go away, all you have to do is sign. Let me decide if Radical Business Strategy is right for me.”

  For longer than felt comfortable, we remained in that position: me extending his pen, him sitting back with his hands folded across his midsection. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw the rise and fall of my chest with each breath. My palms dampened with sweat and my pulse thudded in my neck. The hint of a cramp announced itself behind my right shoulder blade.

  “That was a pop quiz. You passed.” He took the pen. He signed the paperwork. He set the pen down and handed me the pages. “Be in class tomorrow morning at eight,” he said. “Room 102. I can’t say you’ll survive, but it will be fun watching you try.”

  2

  I left the office on unstable legs. I’d expected a professorial type: tweed suit, studious attitude. An interest in finding a student who had an almost passionate desire to learn. I’d expected him to hear my request, ask a few polite questions, ignore my age, and sign my paperwork.

  But Professor Gallagher was like an attack dog protecting his curriculum. He dismissed me before asking about my motivation. Perhaps that was lesson number one: don’t wait to be asked what you want. Class didn’t start until tomorrow, but I’d consider it a freebie.

  The next morning, I dressed in a green Banlon top with white flowers appliqued to the hem and a coordinating white skirt with green flowers. I attached a white metal daisy pin close to my collar and slipped on a pair of green and pink flowered canvas Keds. Too much. I swapped the sneakers out for white and tied a Vera scarf around the handle of my backpack.

  I drove to the campus, parked in Lot B, and made it to room 102 of the Canfield Building in seven minutes. The door was open, and students milled around inside, chatting amongst themselves in clusters around the room. I stood by the chalkboard. RISK was scrolled in large letters across the surface.

  “You should have told me you’re the new teaching assistant,” said a man next to me. “I could have warned you.”

  I turned to face the young man I’d seen behind the admissions desk yesterday. Today his bowtie was navy with pink and white stripes. “Warned me about what?” I asked.

  “Gallagher’s no picnic. You’ll see.” The man scanned the room and then returned his attention to me. “If you do what he asks and knock ten”—he stepped back and assessed me from head to toe—“maybe twenty years off your age, you’ll be fine. The last TA was fired after meeting with students behind his back. They said they were afraid to approach him. Gallagher said if students are scared of him, they’d never make it in business.” He walked away.

  The tall blonde who had directed me to Gallagher’s office made her way toward me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Faye. I heard you tell Eric you were the new TA.”

  “I’m Madison,” I said. “But I think there’s been some mistake. I’m not—”

  She grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You have no idea how happy I am to meet you.”

  Before I could correct her misassumption, we were interrupted by a door slamming shut. Everyone in the class got quiet, and Professor Gallagher walked to the front of the room. When he reached the desk, he sat on the corner and made a show of looking at each individual face. I hadn’t chosen a seat yet, and from my standing vantage point, I could easily see which students were comfortable and which ones wanted to hide.

  Gallagher’s sight eventually rested on me. I smiled and held my backpack with both hands. “Please, Ms. Night, don’t stand on my account. Take a seat. Any seat. I suppose you can’t take any seat because you let the others take theirs first.” He shook his head at my lack of initiative. “It seems you’ve got a choice between the one directly in front of me, which somehow is always vacant, and the one closest to the door, which incidentally is also always vacant. Which will it be?”

  There was no mistaking the taunt in his voice. Getting him to sign my papers wasn’t an accomplishment. It was bait. I had no idea what went into Radical Business Strategy, but public humiliation appeared to be part of it.

  I passed the vacant seat by the door and walked to the front of the room. I stopped and smiled at the professor and then lowered myself into the seat directly in front of him. I pulled a notebook and pen out of my backpack and slid the pack under my chair.

  He nodded his head at me. “Let’s start with a case study,” he said to the class. “A moderately successful decorator loses her business after being sued for fraud. She loses her inventory, her client list, and her line of credit with the bank. In a week, she’s paying rent on an empty storefront. Banks turn down her loan applications, but she’s too proud to solicit money from a personal source. Where does she go from here?”

  My face flushed with heat. That case study wasn’t just awkwardly familiar—it was my life. In the twenty-four hours since asking Gallagher to sign off on my request to join his class, He must have read every piece of information he could find on me. I came here to learn, not be mocked. If I hadn’t chosen the desk directly in front of the professor, I would have left.

  “Eric, go,” Gallagher said.

  Eric, I discovered, was the student in the bowtie. “The decorator should apply for work with a larger firm. She has skills, but the backing of a reputable company will help offset the bad publicity.”

  “Who thinks that’s the way to go?” the professor asked. A few hands went up. “Faye, you had your hand up. What do you think she should do?”

  “She needs to get out of her lease so she’s not throwing away money. Find a cheaper location. Solicit business from clients. Maybe do a big public job in exchange for free publicity.”

  “Who likes that idea?” he asked. Fewer hands went up this tim
e. “Anybody else?”

  A series of suggestions were called out: “Get over herself and ask friends for money,” “get a co-signer,” “find a new business,” and “take on a partner.” While I didn’t love the suggestions, I appreciated that not one of them said the decorator in question should give up.

  “Madison, you’ve been quiet,” the professor said to me. “What do you think the decorator should do?”

  He already knew I didn’t know the answer. If I did, I wouldn’t be in his class. But something about Professor Gallagher got my goat. Admitting I didn’t have the answer felt like giving in, and giving in felt like giving up. Mad for Mod defined me. It didn’t matter how many decorating firms existed in Dallas or how niche the mid-century modern market was. I was the best at it, and giving it up wasn’t an option.

  “She should expand,” I said coolly. The professor raised his eyebrows. “She did remarkably well for several years, and that was on instinct. First she needs to shore up her business plan so the banks know she’s a good risk. That might require some outside education. She needs to go big with a loan so she can invest in inventory, advertising, and client outreach all at once. Keep the current office but look for additional property. A satellite office. Double down on what she does best and be ruthless with jobs that don’t fit her specialty.”

  “Are you nuts?” Eric called out. “Who’s going to hire a decorator that steals ideas?”

  I turned toward him. “There were extenuating circumstances,” I said. “People will understand.” I hadn’t expected to respond out loud, and as I heard what I said replayed in my head, I added, “Probably.”

  Professor Gallagher continued. “Good points. Anybody who followed the news knows she was found guilty, which will make potential clients think twice about engaging her services. Is Madison’s point germane? Does it matter why she did it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s an explanation. People like human interest stories, and hers is unique.”

  “How would you know?” Eric asked.

  I turned to face Gallagher. “Tell him,” he instructed.

  I turned back to Eric and the other students. “I know because I’m the decorator.”

  A ripple ran through the other students. It sounded like locusts. My cheeks flushed again. Eric glowered at me. I turned my back on the rest of my class and stared straight ahead, focusing on a piece of chalk that rested in the tray below the chalk board.

  Gallagher saw an opening for theatrics. “Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Madison Night,” he said, gesturing to me. “She’s the owner of Mad for Mod, a boutique decorating firm on Greenville Avenue, and she’s your newest classmate. Yesterday, Madison told me she posted double- and triple-digit increases since opening, won a county-wide decorating competition that expanded her client base overnight, and has turned down offers to buy her business. She did not tell me she operated with zero debt on her balance sheet.” He shifted his attention from the rest of the class to me. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “It didn’t seem relevant,” I said.

  “It’s very relevant,” he said.

  The professor turned his back on the class and went to the chalkboard. He underlined RISK. “If you want to succeed, you have to get comfortable with risk. You have to learn to think you know nothing. Less than nothing. You have to do the opposite of every instinct you have.” He looked at me. “Madison’s answer was filled with risk. She lost her business, but think about the words she used: expand. Go big. Double down. Invest.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Those are power words. They’re the concepts we need to use every day.” He looked at the class. “If I didn’t believe her answer was fueled by anger at me, I’d say she did a very good job.”

  The class rippled again. Laughing locusts.

  The next hour was filled with heated discussions about my situation. Had I left, I would have missed out on one of the most productive brainstorming sessions of my life. I might not have liked how Professor Gallagher initiated the subject, but I couldn’t deny the results.

  When class ended, a rush of students approached the professor. “Faye, stay after class,” he said. “Everybody else, office hours are at four-six.”

  I led the group out of the classroom. A few people welcomed me to the shark tank. No one asked me to join them for lunch in the quad, but it still felt like a victory.

  Three classes into my schedule, it was obvious Radical Business Strategy would be the highlight of my semester. Accounting and Operations Process were easy; I’d been doing my accounting from the beginning, and as a sole proprietor, I wrote the operations manual. My one part-time employee was a business school student herself, but her contribution to the Mad for Mod Operations had been a cloud-based system to track my inventory, which had simply streamlined the process of producing an itemized list after the lawsuit went south. She also introduced me to hug therapy, which (so far) I hadn’t seen mentioned on the Van Doren curriculum.

  At six forty-five, after a full day of classes, I returned to the admissions desk. Eric was behind the desk like he’d been that morning. He scowled when he saw me. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “Gallagher won’t change the way he treats you in class. He’s like that with everybody.”

  “That’s good. I don’t want him to change his style of teaching on my account.”

  “You don’t care that he made a fool of you in class?”

  Was that how it looked? I reflected on the moment. Yes, I’d felt embarrassed at first. I’d wanted to crawl into my vintage white backpack and hide. The mistake I’d made had cost me more than I thought I could lose, and the professor had pulled at that thread like he was deconstructing a vintage needlepoint.

  “Sure, it was humiliating at first, but that was because I tried to keep my failure a secret and he confronted it straightaway. Once it was out in the open and the class brainstormed solutions, I got over my embarrassment and started thinking about where to go next.”

  “It’s like I said in class,” Eric said. “If you want to rebound, you should take a job at a big company. That’s the real way forward.” He slammed a book and put it on a shelf. “Or keep plugging away in the land of small potatoes. That’s where small minds are most comfortable.”

  What a jerk.

  I shook my head and walked down the hall to Professor Gallagher’s office. Voices poured from inside. Angry voices.

  I waited in the hallway for him to finish with whoever was with him. As I got closer, the voices subsided. I hesitated, waiting for the door to open and a student to exit.

  Instead, I heard a gunshot.

  3

  A moment after the shot, a door slammed. I turned the doorknob and the door swung inward. I braced myself for what I might find: body, blood, weapon. I found option D: none of the above.

  “Hello,” said a man behind the desk. He reached forward and clicked Pause on the remote. From the frozen image, I recognized Samuel Jackson and John Travolta from Pulp Fiction. This wasn’t the scene in which they discussed the Royale with Cheese.

  The man held a pipe in one hand and a dingy, rag in the other. When I entered, he set both down. He held one hand up with his index finger extended and wiggled it in my direction. “Let me guess. You’re not one of the parents. . . maybe a new professor? No. Drama coach.” His eyes moved from my face to my outfit. “Wardrobe? Yes. They did say they were bringing in an outside party, though I hardly expected you to come see me before rehearsal.” He stood. “Ansel Benedict,” he said. “Or should I say Henry Higgins? I’ve just been cast as the lead in the North Dallas production of My Fair Lady.”

  He bowed, less at-your-service and more encore-encore.

  “Did I hear a gun?” I asked.

  Ansel reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a pistol with black electrical tape wound around the handle. I stepped back and held my hands up. He laughed.

  “Starter’s pistol,” he said. He opened the pistol and emptied out the blanks. He closed it and set in his open pal
m and served it to me as if it were a tray of appetizers. As he moved it around, I could tell the handle under the tape was bright orange. I looked back at Ansel.

  “I took a bit of a liberty today. Pulp Fiction always gets my blood going. You understand, I’m sure.”

  I didn’t. “I’m looking for Professor Gallagher,” I said. “Isn’t this his office?”

  “Yes and no. This is his office, but you won’t find him here. My office is in the Dramatic Arts building. A pipe burst, and until the work is complete, Gallagher and I are temporary roommates. I’m sure you can understand how difficult it is to concentrate with business majors running around all the time.” He waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. He paused to consider something, and his thick eyebrows pulled together like a bold black underline below his forehead. “Has the college given you an office? I don’t suppose they would, you being temporary. I’d say you can borrow mine from time to time, but as I’ve said, it’s unavailable.”

  “I think you misunderstand who I am.” I held out a hand. “Madison Night.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for Ansel’s eyebrows to get any closer, but at the mention of my name, they appeared to overlap. He seemed put off by both my name and my outstretched hand. To his credit, he did stand and take my fingertips in his, though it could hardly count as a handshake. He dropped my hand and fished a handkerchief out of his pants pocket to wipe off my cooties (I surmised).

  He lowered himself back into Professor Gallagher’s chair. “I don’t suppose you are the costumer for My Fair Lady, are you?”

  “No. I’m an MBA candidate.”

  “Well, then our business here is done.”

  “Mine isn’t. I have outstanding questions about this morning’s lecture.”

  “And this is my problem how?”

  “It’s not your problem, it’s mine. It’s why I’m here for Professor Gallagher’s office hours.”