by Mark Sampson
“Well, first of all, that’s not true. Since you published that book of yours, The Marxist’s Palinode — what was it, three years ago now? — people around here think you’ve taken a steep turn to the Right —”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Oh my God, Tom —”
“And second of all, what you said on the CBC was beyond the pale. It was, Philip, beyond the pale.”
Wow. He did look like Beaker. Especially with his eyes bulging like that. I couldn’t stand that I was being chastised by a puppet. “I’m not apologizing,” I told him. “The Internet trolls and the Toronto Star can have their fun, but it’s been two days. People just need to fuck off.”
He sat all the way back in his chair then. “I’m sorry to hear you say that. I truly am.” He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a piece of paper. “The VP of strategic communications has penned this press release about your gaffe. She asked for my feedback on it, and I advised that we hold off on putting it out until I talked to you first, to see if I could get you to apologize on your own. But since you’re digging in your heels, I have no choice. I’m recommending,” and he flapped the paper, “that she release this to the media later this morning. It condemns, in no uncertain terms, what you said on Monday. I think you should read it.”
I stretched across his desk so that he could pass the page to me. I settled back in my chair, my eyes about to glide over the words. But then I changed my mind. Slid the printout back at him. “I’m not reading that,” I said. “You do what you feel you need to, Tom.”
Somehow his eyes bulged even more, and he began to tremble. Now he really resembled Beaker. “You need to listen to me, Philip. You need to listen well.”
And I would have, too, except I noticed that, as a result of my reaching across his desk, my poppy had once again fallen off. It lay on the floor, at the tip of my right Payless. I stooped to pick it up, but my foot shot out as I did, kicking the poppy under his desk. It came to rest next to the far right leg. Beaker was talking, but I wasn’t listening — captivated, I was, by that scarlet bloom mocking me from a distance that was so near and yet so very far away.
“MEEP MEEP MEEP,” Tom was saying. “MEEPMEEP disrespectful. MEEP MEEP MEEPMEEPMEEP wildly inappropriate. MEEP MEEP.”
I nodded without looking at him, hypnotized now by the poppy. I slid down in my chair as discreetly as I could, and stretched a clandestine leg under Tom’s desk. Frantic now to snag the poppy under my Payless and drag it home — and do so without accidentally playing footsie with my boss.
“MEEPMEEPMEEP,” he went on. “MEEP MEEP Ms. Sneed MEEP MEEPMEEP MEEP. MEEPMEEPMEEP tenure, Philip, but that doesn’t mean you can just MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEPMEEPMEEP.”
I was so close. Another inch and a half would do it. I wanted that poppy. I wasn’t giving any more of my pocket change to those goddamn veterans. I’d now gotten as far down in my chair as I could without being completely horizontal in it, my outstretched toe tapping at the floor like a ballerina’s. The poppy was right there — it was right there! — but just out of my reach. I couldn’t get it. I just couldn’t.
“MEEPMEEP MEEP your reputation?” Tom asked. “MEEP MEEP MEEEPMEEPMEEP MEEP press release?”
“Well, let me ask you a question,” I said, sitting up and zoning back in. “Where were your press releases when I published The Marxist’s Palinode? Where were this university’s press releases when Why the West Still Matters won a Stowaway Award in 2000?”
“Philip —”
“No, Tom. The truth is, you people are incredibly ungrateful. No, you are. I make one slip-up on TV and you’re all over me. But you’ve never once acknowledged that my work brings more attention to the Philosophy department than all the other professors’ combined.”
“Okay, you better just watch yourself,” he said. “Tenure isn’t what it used to be, you know.”
“Well, perhaps we could have a discussion about that with my Faculty Association. They may be very curious to hear your take on my freedom of expression.” I sneered at him. “You know, Tom, there was a time when the academy was about more than just overpaid administrators putting out sub-literate press releases. There was a time when an outspoken professor was treated like more than just a PR problem.”
“Okay, we’re done. I’m sorry. We’re done. This press release is going out, Philip. You will have to deal with the fallout as you will.”
I stood up to leave. “Unbelievable,” I muttered, and thought about climbing under his desk to nab the poppy. “Fucking unbelievable.”
“Philip, look,” he said, his tone softening somewhat. “I’ll be honest with you. I often think that you don’t really need this university. You’re such a big deal now — and I don’t say that facetiously. You could’ve become a full-time writer years ago, if you wanted. I think this job may be more hassle to you than it’s worth.”
I looked at him in bafflement. What are you talking about, Tom? I thought. I overpaid for a huge house in Cabbagetown six years ago. I’m supporting two kids, one of which isn’t even mine. And I have a wife who doesn’t work. Of course I need this job.
Back in my book-cluttered office at University College, I checked email. Seven new notifications from Facebook. Good. Things were starting to die down. Above them I could see that a second email had just come in from Rani in London. The subject line, far more sedate than her first, read simply:
Okay …
I opened it.
Hiya,
All right, I just re-watched the full clip of you on CBC. I mean, what you said was still AWFUL, but you did look a bit painted into a corner. Were you distracted by something? You didn’t seem like your usual sharp self, Sharpe. Trouble in paradise, perhaps?
Look, a lot of people are ragging on you right now, but I know you didn’t mean to say what you said to that woman. Anyway, if you want to talk about all this, give a ring on my mobile: 07870 663 926. I’m here if you need me. For anything. ;)
Love and rockets,
Rani
Oh God, why didn’t she just tear me to shreds like everybody else? It would’ve been easier to read than — than that. I hovered over the REPLY button for a second, but then backed off. No, I thought. Don’t do it. Don’t.
I returned to my inbox, to the list of Facebook notifications. It was then that I realized that all seven were identical: they were for an event invitation, each one forwarded to me by one of my forty-six friends. The subject line read: EVENING OF PROTEST: SOLIDARITY IN DEMANDING PHILIP SHARPE’S RESIGNATION: Hosted by U of T Women’s Studies Dept.
The Women’s Studies department? Why were those people getting mixed up in all this? They didn’t strike me as a group particularly interested in judicial process — especially when it came to marauding capitalists. Why would they care about what I said on the CBC? I returned to my inbox and found a message from Sebastian. He had forwarded the exact same Facebook invitation to me, and included a note:
Sir,
I really think you should come to this. Everybody is going, and it would be a good chance for you to clear the air. Yes, it’ll be a hostile environment, but I and your other supporters will be right there. You won’t be alone. Think about it.
Sebastian
The boy was right. I should go. I should go to my protest. It would be a ballsy move. An opportunity to speak my mind, hear what others had to say, and find a resolution to this absurd “scandal.” Yes, I should just gird myself and show up to my own effigy burning. Face the outrage head on and clear the air with everyone.
I clicked through to the invitation. Wow. There were 517 people listed as “Interested” in going. One of them, I could see, was Roberta Rosenbaum, the reporter from the Globe whom I used to date. That cinched it. She’d give me a fair hearing, for sure. I looked over at the event’s date and time.
Shit. Shit! It was for tonight. What the hell? I stared at the date to make sure I wasn�
�t hallucinating, and then my stomach sank to the floor.
I went to Google then to look up a number, and picked up my phone when I found it. (The red message light was blinking again — more journalists, no doubt, looking for a statement from me.) I dialled.
“Toronto Dance Studio.”
“Hi, yes. I’m calling to confirm that you still have a recital happening there tonight.”
“Yep. It’s still on.”
“It hasn’t been cancelled by any chance?”
“Why would it be cancelled?”
“Ah, no reason. Thank you for that.”
“Thank you.”
I hung up. Sat in silence for a long time. Grace’s words rang in my mind like a bell: … she’s convinced you’re going to renege on taking her … you don’t really seem all that plugged in to what’s happening in your own house … But then I was lured away from these thoughts by the Facebook invitation, still on my screen. Its gravitational force.
Okay, Sharpe, I thought. This is one of those life decisions. This is where the good men are separated from the louts. Sapere aude.
Actually, it wasn’t a hard decision. I knew what I had to do.
Higher Learning
But first, a few words about Rani Sumita.
I’m not one to gambol through the false paradise of nostalgia but when you’ve been to Oxford you can’t help but self-mythologize, at least a little. I arrived at Balliol College to begin my doctorate in the fall of 1989, during what I can only describe as the backwash of Thatcherism. I had high hopes that there was no better place than here — here being England, with all its class obsessions and new-found bootstrapism — to be a young philosopher looking to excoriate the rising tide of neo-liberal thought. And I was young: twenty-four years old, imagine, and still sporting a full head of my tomato-coloured hair and a well-trimmed goatee as precursor to the greying red mass that inhabits my face now. I felt buoyant as I came to Balliol on my Commonwealth scholarship, certain I would break new ground by braiding Kantian thought to trendy economic theories. I was not interested in the ternary structure of a North American Ph.D. (coursework-comps-dissertation, blah) and wanted something more for myself. Yet Oxford took mere weeks to prove less an institution of higher learning and more a Gothic theme park, one that both was itself and performed itself relentlessly. I lasted four months in Holywell Manor, the grad student residence for Balliol, and by January of 1990 I had taken a room on Walton Street in nearby Jericho.
How to describe the ensuing year, before Rani sashayed into my life? I don’t think I was prepared to have my bubble burst so spectacularly about what jolly old England had become under Thatcher. How could a country that had provided us Shakespeare and Purcell now provide so little to so many of its own? I remember hordes of homeless people gathered in front of the co-op on Iffley Road, vaguely threatening to me and my presumed “Yankee” accent. Class resentment seemed to be in the drinking water. The town of Oxford itself displayed lots of public wealth and hid lots of private poverty. If you were a gownie, you remained insulated from the latter as long as you stayed inside the castellated walls of your college. But if you were a townie, then despair was like a spastic tic you couldn’t shake; despair had become your way of life. This, mind you, in no way diminished the jingoistic roaring that shook the pubs of Oxford in the summer of 1990 during the World Cup. England did very well and then it didn’t, getting eliminated by the host country, Italy, in the third-place match. I feared for my life while riding the bus or walking home from the Bodleian Library during those summer weeks as townies worked themselves into a lather of nationalism. I thought: Are you all insane? Have you forgotten just how much the country you’re rooting for has screwed you over?
Well. Thatcher got hers that November, I need not remind you — the knives of her own party turning on her after so many years of mindless loyalty. But the damage had been done, and I knew even then that the legacy of Thatcherism had put something permanent and heinous into the world economy, a near-religious fanaticism of market thinking that would supply my academic work with decades of fodder.
For my first fifteen months at Oxford, I carried on pretty much as I had at U of T for my first two degrees. Everyone attending Oxford was, by default, brilliant — as if intellectualism was a hobby you’d had since you were five — and I accepted my moira of solitary bookishness and deep immersion into the Enlightenment’s lasting influence on current affairs. But I did socialize. Here, look at me go — taking the bus across town to go on dates with chatty café waitresses or fellow students at Balliol. I was a regular at all the well-known pubs of Oxford — Turf Tavern, the Bear, the Mitre, and of course the Lindsay Bar at Balliol. Yes, I avoided the Canadian Club, but who didn’t! I even joined the Oxford Union, that famed and notoriously Tory debating society. Why? Mostly for the cheap photocopying in its library — and the polemics! Yes, yes. Despite the union’s Anglo-Saxon stuffiness, its overt conservatism, its stature as mere training ground for Britain’s future political elite, I really loved attending the society’s parliamentary-style debates on Thursday nights. From the packed gallery above the debating floor, I would watch each combatant take his or her place at the despatch box and, surrounded by frosty portraits of notable past union members, deliver a fierce, argumentative speech. It was here that I learned how arguing could be an art form, and I found myself glowing at every incisive joust, even if it scored a point I fervidly disagreed with.
Then, one chilly evening in January of 1991, I attended a debate entitled “The Rushdie Fatwa and the Limitations of Free Speech.” The discussion started out surprisingly limp: there were predictable plaudits about the importance of novelists in society; there were politically correct assertions about respecting the sensitivity of other cultures; one bloke, clearly a Thatcherite, argued that Rushdie’s free speech wasn’t “free” at all, considering how much his now round-the-clock security was costing the state. It was all a bit ho-hum. It was all a bit too obvious.
But then, from the front row of the gallery, I watched as a young woman wrapped in a red-and-orange sari appeared from behind her team’s bench and took her place at the despatch box directly below me. Her sari was trimmed in gold that matched the large, feathery earrings that dangled from her ears. Her forearms were adorned with intricately wrought bracelets, her fingers covered in rings. Her hair was pulled back into a long, thick braid that reached beyond her shoulder blades, and her two eyebrows were really just one, meeting above a stare of deep, penetrating brown. When this young woman spoke, her accent was an alluring mix of East Indian and East London, a cockney twang curling around an enunciation that conjured distant oceans. I don’t want to say it, and you, dear reader, don’t want to hear it, because it’s a terrible cliché, but she was the most beautiful, poised, and powerful woman I’d ever seen.
She stunned us all with what she said. The Rushdie fatwa, she said, was merely the thin edge of the wedge. Anyone who was paying attention could see that larger forces were gathering, that soon extremists from every corner of the Muslim faith would place Rushdie’s death sentence on all of Western civilization. She drew a succinct line between the Six-Day War in Israel, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan (pronounced with a sexy, defiantly non-English v in the middle — Afvhanistan), and, now, America’s intervention in the Persian Gulf, and how these events would conspire to put a bull’s eye on the institutions and values that we held dear. If we wanted to confront this inevitable threat, she went on, the first step was to stop seeing it as a clash between two cultures, because it wasn’t. It was a clash between one culture and a group of violent nihilists who renounced the very notion of culture. Rushdie was living this reality now, and soon we all would be.
Perhaps I’m overplaying the impact of her speech in my memory, its prescience. But I do recall rushing down the winding stairwell from the gallery after the vote and having to wait a long fucking time in a lineup to meet her during the milli
ng that followed. An entire conclave of grey-haired Oxfordian men had descended upon this young sari’d woman to congratulate her on her speech, and I hovered impatiently to have a turn. The last of the fogies took forever to wrap up, asking if she had read his own scholarship on Iranian foreign policy, and then described it to her in bone-numbing detail before she could answer. She actually spotted my face, youthful and anxious, and flashed me a gently mocking two-step of her unibrow. Finally, the old fart moved on and I sidled up to her.
“Great speech,” I said. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I thought your points were bang on.”
“Wow,” she smiled, “where is your accent from?”
I laughed a little and looked at the floor. “Canada.” Gawd. Even the name sounded bland. Then I added: “Prince Edward Island.”
“Anne of Green Gables!” she beamed. “Ah, I loved that book as a kid.”
“Uh, yeah,” I sighed.
“Well look at that,” she said, and gave me a cheeky up-and-down. “Another redhead from Prince Edward Island.”
We talked, all friendly like, for a few minutes, and I learned some things: how to properly pronounce her name, that she was twenty-four, originally from Goa, moved at puberty to England with her family, and was now in the middle of a master’s degree in international studies at Merton College. When I asked how she had come to join the Oxford Union (hers the only brown visage in this evening’s taiga of puckered pink faces), Rani told me it was because her hero, the already-iconic Benazir Bhutto, had been a member as a student fifteen years earlier. Actually, our chat was more than a bit friendly — full of flirts and bon mots — and maybe the expectation was that I would ask her out at the end of it. Maybe. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, dear reader, but I can be pretty oblivious from time to time. Truth be told, all those rings on her fingers ran interference on my intentions. I thought: Don’t people, even if they’re from India, leave a particular digit empty to indicate singledom?