The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  “Oh, Rani, don’t say that.”

  “Why? It’s true. They’re savages, Sharpe. You know that as well as I do.”

  “I think you should go home,” I said. “Try and get some sleep.”

  She took a long breath. “Yeah, I know. We’re just waiting for a couple more items to come in off the wire and then they’re gonna send us home.” She sniffed again. “Home — to my empty flat. God. It’s the last place I want to be right now.” Then, apropos of this, she said, “Listen, I know it’s been a while but I would really like to see you, Sharpe. When are you coming to the U.K. next?”

  “Um, well. I’m giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh in April.”

  “April,” she said. “Maybe I could come up on the train and see you. Just like old times.”

  Just then, Simone came bursting out of my bathroom and ran over to where I stood with the phone. She hugged my legs just above the knees, then leaned back and opened her mouth as wide as wide can be, to show me the fantastic job she did brushing her teeth.

  “Rani, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said, tousling Simone’s hair.

  “Oh,” she replied. “Oh, okay.”

  “Look, I have some company here so I should probably let you go.”

  “Oh, sorry, Sharpe.” And she chuckled sarcastically. “I didn’t realize you were — entertaining.”

  I chuckled back, and then grew serious. “Listen, Rani, everything is going to be okay. Okay?”

  “Nope,” she replied. “Nope, I don’t think it is. But I appreciate you saying so. Anyway. Enjoy your ‘company,’ Sharpe.” And then she added, perhaps as an olive branch, “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Rani.”

  And then we hung up.

  From behind the closed bathroom door, the toilet flushed, and then Grace came out. “Hey,” she said, coming over. “Who was on the phone?”

  “A friend of mine at the BBC in London,” I replied. “She’s pretty upset.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  I sighed deeply. “Benazir Bhutto was assassinated yesterday.”

  Grace tilted her head. “Who?”

  I just looked at her. “It — you know what, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Hey, Philip,” Simone called as she climbed onto my couch. I went over and sat next to her. “Where am I sleeping tonight?” she asked.

  “Why, you’re going to sleep right here,” I said, patting the couch cushion. “We’re going to get you a pillow and blankets and everything.”

  She furrowed her little brow. “But where is Mommy gonna sleep?”

  Grace and I looked at each other, smiled.

  “Oh, I know,” Simone said. “She’s gonna sleep in your room.”

  Grace and I burst out laughing. We couldn’t help it. Then Simone joined in, too, hooting along maniacally, though she had no idea over what.

  And just like that, we became a family. L’Avenir dure longtemps.

  By the following May, Grace and I were engaged, and we set a date for the summer of 2009. We went about the work of amalgamating our lives, which meant — God help me — shopping for a house. The experience proved just as soul-destroying as I always imagined it would be. We looked at everything from overpriced dumps on the Danforth to prefabricated cubes in the soulless suburbs of Markham. Grace, to my alarm, spoke to our real estate agent with well-honed authority. Her four years in a Parkdale shoebox notwithstanding, she knew exactly what she wanted in a proper home — based mostly on the North Toronto house she grew up in. Her must-have list was quite extensive. We saw a few places that I thought were passable, but she’d grow glum when they weren’t “quite there.” (That’s the phrase she used with each: Nah, it’s not quite there.)

  And then, on a wintry day about six months before our wedding, we stumbled upon 4 Metcalfe Street — that three-storey, red-brick palace right in the heart of tony Cabbagetown. We’d been looking at something much cheaper in neighbouring St. James Town, but when it didn’t suit, our real estate agent led us like pigeons a few blocks southeast to our future home’s open house. As soon as Grace saw it, her eyes welled with tears. “That’s my house,” she said before we even stepped inside. “Oh my God, that’s my house.” The tour confirmed it. The place had everything that we — she — wanted (save a finished basement), and at the end of our supervised wander through its chambers and cubbies and alcoves, Grace spun around to face me with a grin that said, My life begins the minute we move in here. But I was already in a paroxysm of sticker shock, which I did a good job of concealing from Grace. I didn’t even want to think about how old I would be when we — I — paid off the mortgage. This house was far too expensive for a philosopher, even one with tenure, and book deals, and speaking engagements. It didn’t help matters that the economy had all but collapsed the previous September, and Grace’s freelance work was rapidly drying up. But what can you say to the woman you love — a woman who has brought such incomparable joy, such vigour and vitality to your hitherto frumpy, lonely life — when she arrives at the threshold of a dream you’re pretty sure you can’t afford to give her? What do you say when this is the only woman who has shown any interest in building a life with you, after meeting her at the graceless age of forty-two? Well, I was no longer Grace-less, and I was determined to make it work. I would’ve given Grace anything.

  Still. I fell into a pit of despair when that first massive mortgage payment came out of my bank account. Don’t laugh at me. When you grow up poor, you always worry about money, no matter how much you have as an adult. This, too, I hid from Grace. It was an aspect of my personality I feared she wouldn’t understand, or would perhaps judge. Summer 2009 came and we enjoyed our elaborate Toronto wedding; we even made the society pages in the Toronto Times. By that fall, I decided to buck up and get over myself: I’d just publish more, do more speaking engagements. I lived to work, after all; I was hard-wired for prolificacy. Grace and I developed our “arrangement,” some of it spoken and much of it unspoken. If I was going to be the primary breadwinner, there were certain tra­jec­tor­ies to my behaviour that would need to go unobstructed: the long hours at the writing desk, the swaths of afternoons lost in the library; the full teaching loads and constant public appearances; and, most important, a steady diet of Bloody Josephs to provide me with the creative nourishment I needed to keep up my polymathic output.

  Grace had no qualms. Within the first year of our marriage, her life achieved a kind of nirvanic self-affirmation: she had finally squared the circle of her feminism, trading in financial independence for the adoption of motherhood as her full and all-consuming vocation. She built strong networks among other stay-at-home mommy feminists — many of them in person and many in the online agora of Facebook and Twitter. These women supported and encouraged and nurtured each other, seemingly hourly. But Facebook and Twitter had a dark side, and so did Grace. She soon encountered other feminists who flat-out argued that, by God, a woman couldn’t stay home and be a feminist, what kind of hypocrite were you, and her flame wars with these women made Grace tetchy and caused dishes to go unwashed. She never took her own version of feminism for granted, and was constantly re-justifying it to herself and others — especially when a nemesis made some passive-aggressive remark about Grace’s “dependence on a man.” And what sort of man? My own public persona, decidedly centrist, made regular appearances in these online spaces. If someone on the Left, for example, lobbed the occasional charge of misogyny at me — the receiving of which was just part of my job description as a high-minded humanist, as far as I was concerned — Grace would make a few desultory manoeuvres to defend me. If, on the other hand, an article of mine skewered some dirtbag on the Right, she praised me to the rafters and shared it online as widely as she could — partly because she loved me and partly because it signalled to her rivals that her spousal choice had, in fact, been sound.

  While a
ll this was a fair if precarious balance, there was still the issue of money. Gawd. Why do I keep harping on it? In 2010, after little Simone had been in elementary school a couple of years, I began a subtle, delicate lobbying to convince Grace to take at least some part-time work. But then she finished another children’s book (Dana Plays Hockey; need I describe the plot?), which Tuxedo Kids rejected, and another, smaller press accepted on the proviso of heavy revision. These rewrites were, apparently, so involved and taxing that they precluded Grace from going out and getting a real job. Meanwhile, our basement stayed unfinished, our bathroom faucets began their shenanigans, and a mid-winter replacement of both roof and furnace bled me dry. Even when Grace landed her Motherlode column in a national women’s magazine and began bringing in some money (750 words x $1/word x 10 issues a year = diddly-squat), I remained silently unimpressed. When Dana Plays Hockey was finally published and then promptly slipped beneath the waves, unsold and unread, I thought: NOW will you please just fucking help me?

  But then, in 2011, Grace fell pregnant with Naomi. She lit­erally spun around in euphoria at the news, her arms airplaned out. I was happy, too, don’t get me wrong, but my stress and resentment also grew. Maybe I had adopted some of Grace’s now haywire hormones through transference. Or maybe I’m just an awful fucking human being. But sometimes I would look at her during the height of this prenatal jubilation and think: Oh my God, you’re never going to work again, are you?

  Of course, dear reader, you don’t say that to your pregnant wife. You don’t.

  You just gotta bottle that shit up.

  Friday, November 6

  Did I forget to mention that I’m also teaching a graduate seminar this term?

  It’s not surprising it slipped my mind. Unlike undergrad courses, with their propaedeutic expansiveness, a graduate seminar is focused, concentrated, and brutal — like a punch to the kidneys. On the one hand, they are less work for me than an undergrad class: only twelve students, we sit around at desks in a circle, and I lecture for a bit, and then they take a turn each week delivering a paper and leading a discussion. It’s not really a class at all, but more like an intellectual seance. On the other hand, these three-hour gatherings cripple me with an inanition that requires a spirited Friday lunch to recover from. I don’t mean to make sweeping generalizations, but I can say with certitude that philosophy graduate students are the most exhausting people in the world. Sebastian’s company excluded, of course. He and I, at least until yesterday, would have been friends regardless. Grad school has not managed to beat the natural curiosity and open-mindedness out of the boy.

  But what of the rest of them? I can barely stand to be in their presence under official circumstances; I can’t even imagine trying to socialize with them. Do they even socialize? These M.A. and Ph.D. candidates arrive in my seminar room an inevitably grim and humourless lot, year after year. What annoys me about them? It’s not just the long, dull, tendentious, and grammatically suspect essays they write for my class, the sentences that loop and baffle with cataphoric and anaphoric bungling. It’s not just the odium theologicum I see settling into their DNA: the intense sanctimony over their chosen theoretical framework, the eagerness to denounce not only anyone who disagrees with them but anyone who chooses to talk about something else. They will take these biases and calcified beliefs, what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences, into other Philosophy departments upon graduation — or at least they would, if there were any jobs out there for them — and the ecosystem of academic backbiting will continue. No, it’s not just that. It’s really the theses and dissertations they will go on to write that bother me most. This is especially true of those Ph.D. candidates who take seven, or eight, or even ten years to finish their projects. Watching them lose themselves in the convoluted corridors of a dissertation topic is rather like watching our family cat, Constance, play with the laser pointer. The cat is certain that there is something there, certain that the red dot exists, and thinks that it will take just one more leap, one last frantic flail of its paws to subdue that crimson circle. Well, grad students do enough of their own leaping and flailing when it comes to their torturously long-winded projects. As their thesis advisor, I’m the one who holds the laser pointer, and am not above teasing them with it. I send the more obnoxious students on various wild goose chases, partly in the hopes that they’ll have an unexpected breakthrough, but mostly in the hopes that they will arrive, through sheer frustration, at a revelatory moment about their life decisions. These students eventually graduate — or don’t — and then disappear. What happens to them? In this economy, most drift into the semi-employment of sessional teaching.

  Anyway. I host my graduate seminar every Friday morning from nine until noon. The ungodly start time helps to weed out the uncommitted. What course am I teaching this term? You won’t believe, dear reader, the coincidence of it. I mean, I can’t make this shit up. It’s called “Rousseau’s Social Contract and Its Impact on Modern Justice.” After Monday’s catastrophic slip with Cheryl Sneed on Power Today, I had of course lost all credibility in this subject area. So I was not surprised when I arrived a few minutes before class to find the seminar room empty. (Usually there was at least a keener or two in there, reading studiously at their desks.) I came in and sat, arranged my lecture notes in front of me, then stared up at the clock on the wall. The top of the hour came, but no students did. I harrumphed. Nine ten came, and still no students. I harrumphed again. By 9:20, it was clear that there had been a mass boycott of the seminar, and yet like a sap I continued sitting there, with November’s grey light coming through the window, for another ten minutes. At 9:30, I stood and gathered my notes, then sulked out the door like a beaten dog.

  I crossed the campus to University College. Huffing and burping up the college’s ornate staircase, I arrived at my office door and was not shocked to find a note taped to it. How old school. It dangled just above my SAPERE AUDE driftwood plank. I tore the note down and opened it.

  Dr. Sharpe,

  As you have no doubt deduced by now, we are sta­ging a collective boycott of your graduate seminar. We will not return to class until you have publicly condemned the remarks you made this week.

  Sincerely,

  The students of PHL1814F

  I crumpled the note with one hand and unlocked my office door with the other. Stepping inside, I tossed the paper into the trash bin, then went over and flopped into the chair at my desk. Looking up, I could see the red message light on my phone was flashing once more. I picked up the receiver and dialled into the voicemail. The first message was, quite evidently, from an undergrad student whom I’d never met. Oddly enough, this young woman left her full name and student ID number, and then proceeded to term me a balding cocksucker. I hung up without listening to the rest.

  I checked email. Seventeen new notifications from Facebook. I batch-deleted them, then leaned back and sighed. How is this even happening? I thought. It was as if a schism, a tear in the space-time continuum of my philosophical life, my self-image, had opened up. I was not in denial, dear reader. I realized how poisonous my statements were about ODS’s executives, how completely unforgivable. But the public reaction, this stake-burning, seemed so out of proportion. I guess I could understand it among the PHL1814 group: we had been grappling with these very ideas all term, the notions of justice, of equality for all before the law, and how Rousseau’s seminal work informed these ideas. I could see how my remarks on television had more or less undermined everything I had postulated this term. But what of everyone else? How could flippant comments about a bunch of corporate assholes draw such rage out of the populace? It didn’t make sense — especially considering that I and my ideals, I readily admit, seemed quaint in 2015. The Enlightenment was out of vogue. Humanism was out of vogue. Hell, the privileging of reason over emotion was out of vogue. On my best day I was, like the note taped to my door, so old school as to be subversive. So when I betrayed my values in a mome
nt of weakness, when I did let emotion trump reason, why didn’t the unwashed masses stand up and cheer? Yes — Sharpe’s right! Throw the greedy bastards in jail! We’ll figure out their crime later!

  I would need to do something about this. And like Grace said, it would have to be huge.

  In the meantime, with class cancelled, I had an unexpected surfeit of free time. My usual Friday routine was to teach the graduate seminar from nine till noon, then grab a streetcar and slip back to Cabbagetown, to my local, Stout Irish Pub, for a hearty Friday lunch. The daytime barman there, whose name was also Phillip (though spelt with two l’s) could set his watch by my Friday ritual: I came in promptly at 12:30 and climbed enthusiastically onto a bar stool, ready to order pints and food. Today, thanks to grad student rebelliousness, I could arrive a full hour early — i.e., right when the pub opened. This would put me ahead of schedule going out to Raj’s place on the Danforth, as I had promised. I certainly didn’t want to use this extra time to go back to 4 Metcalfe Street, as I was now a persona non grata in my own house. So instead, I decided to get a bit of work done there in my office — catching up on some reading, prepping for an upcoming thesis defence, gawd — and then I left campus. I walked south to College Street, grabbed the Carlton streetcar, and rode it to Parliament, where it deposited me at Stout’s door.

  I came in and climbed the stairs to the upper level. “Hello, Phillip!” I called out as I approached the bar.

  “Hello, Philip,” he said back, somewhat more flatly, through the peacefulness of the empty, just-opened pub. “You’re early today.”