The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  Well, no. No, goddamn it. I would not become that kind of man — the type who just let hurtful things slip out of him about the female sex because he felt trapped in a life he didn’t want. I would rather be alone than carry such antipathies toward an entire gender. And so, in my efforts not to become a misogynist, I grew deeply suspicious of women. I avoided them when I could; dated sporadically; turned away the affections of any young thing who challenged the trajectory I had laid out for myself. I thought: No, no. Study hard. Keep your eye on the goal. Don’t get distracted. Your destiny is not a domestic one. You are meant to live a life of the mind.

  It worked. I graduated high school in 1983 with a full scholarship to the University of Toronto. I would do my bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, and then move on to Oxford for a doctorate. Little Frankie was, of course, button-popping proud of me. I still remember how we hopped around the apartment like madmen when that first acceptance packet arrived in the spring of grade twelve. But then an abrupt realization hit my father — that me leaving PEI meant that I would leave PEI, and he was shocked at how hard the empty-nest syndrome hit him. During my U of T years, he would call me every Sunday, long-distance charges be damned, and listen in rapture as I described whatever academic discoveries I was making. But he grew morose if I dragged my feet about visiting home. Truth was, the Jugglers Arms was struggling and Little Frankie couldn’t afford to help much with my education, and thus I had neither the resources nor the inclination to make frequent trips back to PEI. One Christmas I stayed in Toronto to take a bookstore job, and the following spring I abruptly cancelled a trek home after landing a posh research post with the Philosophy department. Both decisions plunged Frankie into despair. “I need the money, Pop,” is what I told him. “My scholarship doesn’t cover everything, you know.” But the truth was, I was avoiding home. For all of Frankie’s fluster about missing my presence, I knew what really awaited me on even the shorter trips to PEI — a bar apron, Frankie’s griping, and the dreadful, dreadful men he served.

  I should point out that Frankie’s calls to me became daily for a while in 1988, when the PEI premier held an island-wide plebiscite on whether to build a bridge — a “fixed link” — to the mainland. The issue had divided Islanders for decades: you were either in favour of a bridge in the abstract or vehemently opposed on principle. My father fell into the latter camp, as his debacles in the wider world had turned him staunchly provincialistic upon settling home for good. “If they build a bridge, would we even be an island anymore?” he’d ask. “Maybe they’d have to change our name to Prince Edward on a Stick.” The fear was, naturally, that a closer connection to the mainland would ruin “the Island Way of Life” — whatever the fuck that meant. (I confess I’m not the best person to describe it, since I spent most of my childhood either working like a dog to help Frankie keep the Jugglers Arms afloat, or studying.) Anyway. At the time of the ’88 plebiscite, I was halfway through my M.A. coursework, and I remember reading about the vote results in the paper while lounging on a couch in my beloved Hart House at U of T. “You’ll have to get the pub sign fixed now,” I joked to Frankie that night on the phone. “You’ll be competing with a bunch of come-from-away bar owners who know how to use punctuation.”

  He didn’t find that funny.

  Indeed, throughout the four years of the fixed link’s construction (1993–1997), Little Frankie declared, repeatedly, “I will be in the cold fucking ground before I drive on that bridge.” This, sadly, proved to be true. My father died of lung cancer on March 2, 1997 — almost two months to the day before the bridge opened. He left the Jugglers Arms to his employees, and the pub limped along for another six or seven years, but then closed and was torn down. By then, PEI had changed — just as Little Frankie had warned. Lots of mom-and-pop places pulled up stakes, and Islanders shopped at the Walmart and the Home Depot and the Indigo that arrived in the post-bridge age, and didn’t think much of it. Perhaps people longed for a more sophisticated night on the town, and my father’s dive just couldn’t make a go of it anymore.

  During his final days, Frankie expressed a number of regrets to me over the phone — chief among them that he had obviously polluted my mind against marriage, since I was now in my early thirties and still not hitched. He blamed himself for surrounding me with men who clearly hated and resented women, and for saying so many horrible things about my nymphomaniac mother. “You know I was just messing around, right?” he told me. “Anyway, forget all that shit, Philly. Just meet somebody, eh. Build your life with them. Believe me, dying alone is no fun. It certainly ain’t for wimps like me.” But I didn’t listen. By then, I was back at U of T, now an assistant professor, and battling my guts out for publications and teaching experience in order to secure tenure. Sure, I was dating — I always dated, intermittently — but I had my head so far up my own arse that I couldn’t really heed Frankie’s advice. I certainly couldn’t fathom the likes of Grace Daly, whom I wouldn’t meet for another ten years yet. And yes, she and I butt heads about a lot of stuff, and doing so often conjures these awful reminiscences of mine. But still. I do wish that she and Frankie could have met. He’d have been insecure around Grace at first — her spooky good looks, her confidence that bordered on the sensual, her intelligence, her ability to be the most dominant voice in any room — but I like to imagine that he’d eventually grow to like her. And like who I was with her.

  Anyway. When Frankie was just about to cash his cheque, I flew home to be by his side. I made sure to throw him lots of reassuring blandishments about what a great dad he’d been. I mean, I’m not an ogre. But these words proved a poor balm to all the guilt and disappointment that came spewing out of him right at the end. After he took his last breath and everything was calm, I kissed him on the forehead and thought: Oh, Pop. Why were you so tough on yourself, there? You shouldn’t have been. Look, you worked hard your whole life. And you did the impossible: you raised me on your own, and you raised me right. You did. You helped me become the intellectual you always wanted to be but couldn’t, and you taught me the value of hard work. And sure my childhood was mostly miserable, but so what? I am by any measure a success now, and it’s mostly because you pushed me. So I hope you didn’t kick yourself too hard in the arse on your way out.

  Did he raise me right?

  Wednesday, November 4

  In the spew of rush-hour bodies, I came out of the St. George subway station to find a veteran selling poppies on the sidewalk near the bank machines. He stood dressed in the typical garb of our honoured war heroes: black beret sporting the Canadian Legion emblem atop his liverspotted skull, a navy blazer over grey slacks, a row of ancient medals across his left breast, and his own poppy perfectly pinned above them. At his sternum hung a tray on a chain around his neck, as if he were selling cigars at a prizefight.

  I got into the lineup in front of him even though I was nearly late. Somehow I had lost track of the morning despite my refusal to read the day’s papers, the Star and the Times and the Globe and the Post, after I brought them in from the porch. No doubt my slip had found its way to their various op-ed pages, and I couldn’t bear to see my unconscionable gaffe ridiculed in black and white. No doubt all the columnists were howling for my blood. Grace and I spoke scant words at the breakfast table as we got the kids ready for the day. I think she knew I needed to be at the top of my game for my meeting with the dean, and thus opted to say little to me lest we have a repeat of what happened on Monday. All she did say was, “So you are taking Simone to that dance recital tonight?” and I replied with a tetchy, “Yes, Grace. I said I would, and I will.”

  “Because she’d be really sad if you didn’t.”

  “No, I know. Look, I am absolutely taking her.”

  Now, in the precious minutes I had left, I stood in line waiting to replace the poppy I had lost. This veteran was chatty, asking people if they would like him to fasten it onto their lapels for them, and some said yes, and some said no than
ks, and the line moved slowly. C’mon, c’mon. When it was my turn, I dug a pinch’s worth of loonies out of my pocket and manoeuvred them into the vet’s little tin jar.

  “This is actually the second poppy I’ve bought this year,” I told him, trying to smile as he selected one from his tray. “The first fell off.”

  “Would you like me to pin it for you,” he asked, his voice frail. “It may stay on better.”

  “Well,” I said, and glanced at my watch.

  “Come on, it will only take a se —” But then he got a good look at me. At first his face registered embarrassment, as if I might be the son of one of his expired comrades and he should’ve recognized me off the bat. But then his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Aren’t you that bloke the papers are all talking about? The one who —”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I replied, plucking the poppy from his hand. “I’m nearly late.”

  I looked behind me as I hustled off, and sure enough, a few people in the line had suddenly ID’d me as well. I felt exposed, vulnerable, as if a greasy film coated my entire body. I worked like hell to get the poppy attached to my lapel as I shambled up the street, desperate to gain this one small shred of respectability. I finally got the thing poked through the fabric by the time I reached the corner of Bloor and St. George Streets, where the drowsy Philosophy department offices lay hidden in their big blanched tower.

  As I mentioned, this was the second time in my career that I had been beckoned to the dean’s office for a dressing down. As I sat in the reception area, waiting to be summoned by Tom Howardson (his churchy, chinless secretary giving me stink-eye glances over her computer screen), I thumbed the plastic fern sitting in its plastic pot near my chair and pondered how this drubbing would go compared to last time. Truth was, I didn’t hate Tom. He was from my own department, an epistemologist with a handful of decent publications under his belt and a similar teaching philosophy to mine. I could respect an epistemologist. But he’d only been in the role of dean a couple of years, and his predecessor was someone who despised me with every atom of her body. Dr. Sandra Birrell was a postcolonialfeministwhachamacallit from the English department and the ring leader of a clique of arts faculty colleagues I unaffectionately referred to as the Foucult: a band of French theory–inspired anarchists whose sole ambition was to take down Western civilization via tendentious scholarship. I drew their distain, nat­urally, and not just because I was an “Enlightenment groupie” who still taught Dead White Males at their face value. No, if there’s one thing sclerotic academics really hate, it’s when one of their own refuses to stay in his lane, an orgulous polymath publishing all kinds of crazy crap in the mainstream media. That described me to a T, especially after my second book, The Movable Apocalypse, became an unexpected bestseller. All of a sudden I was a regular on the talk-show circuit, discussing everything from American foreign policy to the latest Frida and Diego exhibit at the art gallery. My essays got published in real magazines, not unreadable academic journals. Globe Books might ask me to review the latest CanLit doorstopper (The Brewmaster’s Catamite, or whatever it was called) or hack out a thousand words on what best to read while lolling in a hammock. I even wrote, for a short time, a philosophy-based dating column called The Charming Ethicist for a free weekly in Hamilton, and was only canned after several readers complained about my advice’s overreliance on eighteenth-century courting rituals. All of this left a mildew of professional jealousy on Sandra and her cadre, and as dean she waited patiently for some pretense to arise where I could be frogmarched into an early retirement.

  Her best chance came seven years ago when I published Understanding Islam: An Atheist’s Perspective (Tuxedo House, 2008), a deeply controversial book and my first with our nation’s largest publisher. The press chores had been lengthy, and yes, I said some divisive things about the Quran, about suicide bombers, Sufism, and a woman’s “right” to wear the burqa in a voting booth. When I returned to campus, Sandra demanded a meeting. “There have been some complaints, I won’t lie to you, Philip,” she began before I’d even managed to sit down in her office. “About your book. And what you’ve been saying. In the media.” This is how she talked (and wrote): in choppy fragments, as if she opposed proper sentences on theoretical grounds.

  “From Muslim students?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer right away, and went on: “I’m all for academic freedom. Don’t get me wrong. I’m wholly committed. To academic freedom. But you can’t, Philip, just bring outside perspectives — especially one as Eurocentric as yours, okay? okay? — to such a sensitive topic beyond your specialty area.”

  “Actually, Sandra, I consider that to be the very definition of academic freedom.” I pressed her again about whether it had been Muslim students who had complained. Again, she didn’t answer.

  “Enrolment,” she said instead. “Enrolment is so crucial. To your department. I don’t have to tell you. We are, totally. Under the microscope. We are. And I can’t have some of the student body feeling alienated. Okay? By a high-profile professor. Especially one who carries as heavy a course load as you do. We need to keep our numbers up.”

  “Because the Philosophy department is a ‘business,’ right?” I asked, quoting a line she had let slip during a faculty meeting a month earlier. “You know, Sandra, I could’ve sworn you were a Marxist.” That got her blood up, and our argument went to a whole other place. She said Muslim students might well feel “threatened” taking a course from me now, thanks to what I had published. That incensed me. “I’m going to ask you one last time. Was it a Muslim student who complained?” I already knew the answer. It hadn’t been a Muslim. It had been a couple of grad students from the Cultural Studies department. I knew this because they had confronted me about it on Philosopher’s Walk, and turned me down when I invited them up to my office for a frank discussion about my book. “It wasn’t, was it?” I said to Sandra. “And how do I know this? Because Muslim students are lined up outside the registrar’s door to get in to my courses. They are lined up outside the fucking door. And believe me, it’s not because they’re dabbling with apostasy. They want to learn about Western thought — as Muslims. They’re curious and open-minded, and know that different perspectives will strengthen, not weaken their faith. And far from being the delicate flowers you think they are, they are tough, they are participatory, and they are very generous in sharing their culture and beliefs.” This last part was especially true. I had spent more than two years meeting with a rotating group of Muslim students as research for my book, and they graciously talked about their faith and family life, helped me through turgid translations of the Koran during my five complete readings of it, and even taught me the rudiments of Arabic grammar.

  At this point, Sandra misquoted Edward Said’s Orientalism at me, which evidently was the only book on the East she had read, and I discredited Said in about five seconds flat, and then cited four other prominent books on Islam that she hadn’t read. By now we were screaming at each other, and she got down to her real point: that if I wanted to be out gallivanting around talk shows and op-ed pages and getting paid to say provocative things about cultures that weren’t my own, maybe I should consider quitting the department and becoming a full-time journalist. And I said, Oh yes, because in 2008 that’s where the real money is — in publishing and in —

  The door to Tom Howardson’s office opened. “I’ll see you now, Philip,” he said, and disappeared back inside his cave.

  I stood quickly, nearly giving myself a head rush. His secretary frowned at me over her computer screen. “Your poppy’s about to fall off,” she said. I looked down and, sure enough, the thing was hanging onto my lapel by the last millimetre of its pin. I patted at my chest as I staggered into Tom’s office, hoping to press the blossom back into place before he reached out his hand to shake mine. But then he didn’t.

  “Close the door and have a seat, Philip,” he said instead, and I obey
ed. “I don’t know where to begin,” he began. “You’ve created an awful lot of work for this office in the last thirty-six hours.”

  “No doubt I have.” I must reiterate, I didn’t hate Tom, and certainly wasn’t intimidated by him. He wasn’t the sort who instilled fear in others. A goofy, gangly man at six-foot-six, he had a face that was pretty much all neck, with two googlie eyes and a tuft of hair geysering out of the top of his head. From a certain angle — i.e., this one — he looked like a tweedier version of Beaker from The Muppet Show. Being an epistemologist, he was one of the few profs in the department who didn’t hate me on principle, and I tried to stay on his good side during his reign as dean. Yet, in that moment, I was still seething in the memory of my confrontation with Sandra seven years ago, and maybe I projected some of that rage onto Tom before he even started.

  “I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’ve fielded about your comment on the CBC,” he went on. “Journalists. Students. Parents. Faculty members. Sandra Birrell, for one, is calling for your immediate termination.”

  “She would,” I said.

  “Look, Philip, I’m trying to strike a diplomatic stance here. I don’t know if you saw the quote from me in this morning’s Toronto Star.” He conveyed this query with a serif of satisfaction, since it was clearly the first time Tom Howardson had any reason to be quoted by the Star. “I tried to be as fair to you as I could.”

  “No, I didn’t see it,” I replied, brushing invisible lint off the thigh of my slacks. “I’ve been avoiding this ridiculous fervour as much as I can.”

  “Well, I’m baffled by that, Philip. I really am. Why you wouldn’t just come out and apologize for what you said — nip this whole thing in the bud — is beyond me.”

  “Because I think this ‘whole thing’ is blown out of proportion,” I found myself saying. Hearing this made Tom’s googlie eyes doubled in size, but I plugged forward. “No, I’m serious, Tom. Yes, I got mixed up on the air and said some things I shouldn’t have. But that wasn’t who I really am. And anyone who has read my work, or taken a course from me, or knows me personally, knows that.”