Never was a man dressed as a woman more full of joie de vivre than Finny off his meds. “We have to let out the dragon,” he insisted to one and all. “Just let him out! Let him fly off and lay waste to other kingdoms. Let him be gone!” he thundered, from atop his unsteady high heels, his rapture bringing tears to his eyes and causing his mascara to run. “If you don’t get out of my office,” Paul Rourke told him, “I’m going to rip your nylons off and strangle you with them.” June Barnes merely counseled him against pearls before five. Only Billy Quigley, who normally had no use for Finny, seemed glad to see him. He offered Finny a seat and a generous belt from his flask. “I’ve drunk with uglier broads than you,” he informed his colleague, adding, “Not much uglier though.”
But Finny’s freedom and happiness were short-lived. By the time the last marine was choppered off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, his soon-to-be ex-wife had Finny hospitalized and drugged back into disheartened heterosexuality and male attire. After a month-long convalescence he returned to the classroom in Modern Languages with half a dozen new exercises illustrating the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, and since then he’s caused no problems, unless you considered his arrogant incompetence and brain-scalding classroom tedium problematic.
I stop outside Finny’s classroom and peer in through the small window in the door. Finny’s soft monotone makes it impossible to hear what he’s saying. His students have the grim look of death camp dwellers, and in a sixty-second timed test, six of the eleven consult their watches. Four yawn. One starts violently awake. And they’re only fifteen minutes into class. By the time I’ve completed the timed test, one or two students have noticed my face framed in the small window. Pretty soon, everybody but Finny is aware of me. A couple of these students are also taking a class with me, and these roll their eyes, as if to say, “Can you believe this? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Why don’t you do something?” I roll my eyes back at them. Because.
I make what I think is a clean getaway, but then I hear the classroom door open behind me and feel pursuit. “This,” Finny hisses at my retreating form, “is harassment.”
I turn to face him. Finny is resplendent, as always these days, in a white suit, pink tie, white shoes. “Finny,” I say. “Qué pasa?”
His rich tan deepens. “And so is that,” he points out, quite rightly. Within the last year Finny, an ABD from Penn, has become the proud recipient of a Ph.D. from American Sonora University, an institution that exists, so far as we’ve been able to determine, only on letterhead and in the form of a post office box in Del Rio, Texas, the onetime home, if I am not mistaken, of Wolfman Jack.
In truth I shouldn’t goad him. I know this. It was my malicious goading of Gracie in yesterday’s personnel committee meeting that resulted in my mutilated nose, which is at this very moment throbbing like a guilty conscience.
“I know you don’t respect me, or anybody else in the department,” he tells me. “But that doesn’t mean you get to ridicule me in front of my students.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Finny—”
“Stay away from my classroom, or I’ll file a grievance,” he warns me. “I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.”
“I teach in that room too,” I point out, since it’s true. “I don’t think I can be restrained from a room I teach in.”
This stops him momentarily.
“When I’m in it,” he explains seriously.
“Oh. Well. That. Sure,” I agree, as if I couldn’t be more delighted to have the whole misunderstanding cleared up. “Just one question.”
He pauses at his classroom door, hand on the knob. “What?”
“How did you get the bloodstains out of that?”
“The suit you’re referring to is at the dry cleaner’s, thanks to you.”
Thanks to me? “You have two identical white linen suits?”
“Is there any law against that?”
“Well, there’s natural law, of course.”
“It’s only fair to warn you,” he warns me, “that I spent part of last night on the phone. There’s considerable sentiment among our colleagues for a recall of the chair.”
I can’t help but chuckle at this. “Name one time in the last twenty years when that wasn’t true.”
Rachel, our department secretary, is at her computer terminal when I enter. Like Finny, she dresses up for work. Unlike him, she doesn’t wear cologne. Rachel is one of the half dozen women on campus with whom I have to work at not falling in love. The majority of these women are in their midthirties to midforties and married to men who don’t deserve them. (I regard these men the way Teddy regards me.) Rachel’s husband, from whom she is recently separated, is an enormously self-satisfied local man who is frequently employed by Conrail (and just as frequently laid off), a man whose inner emotional equilibrium is not easily tilted. Only a wife with aspirations of her own could manage it, but unfortunately that’s what he had in Rachel, who, in addition to serving as department secretary and raising their son, Jory, has been, for the last ten years of their depressing marriage, quietly writing short stories and working up the courage to show them to me. This year I’ve been helping her rewrite them, teaching her the little tricks of the craft she needs to know. That’s about all I have to teach her, since the requisite heart, voice, vision, and sense of narrative are already there, learned intuitively.
Last fall, buoyed and excited by my enthusiastic response to a new story, she made the mistake of sharing my comments with her husband and inviting him to read one of her stories. It took him most of the evening, she said, sitting there in his armchair, laboring over her sentences, his brow darkening, phrase by phrase, pausing every so often to glance at her. When he finished, he got up, scratched himself thoughtfully, and said I must be trying to get her in the sack. Where literary criticism is concerned, he’s a minimalist.
Rachel is surprised to see me so early. It’s only eight-twenty, and I’m not due for another two hours by conservative estimate. Rachel’s hours are seven-thirty to three-thirty, so she can pick up her son at the elementary school. I had no idea she actually came in so early, but here she is, so she must. When she gets a gander at my nose, which is even uglier this morning than last night, Rachel starts visibly, and the look on her face remains frightened, as if she fears the explanation will only intensify my injury’s horrific aspect. “Rachel,” I say, pouring myself a cup of coffee, “you’re on the job.”
She is speechless, looking at me, and her reaction, I realize, is what I’d secretly been hoping for from Lily, who over the years has learned to take me in stride. There’s no reason a wife shouldn’t take her husband in stride, of course, yet it’s disappointing to be so taken, especially for a man like me, so intent on breaking people’s gait.
“I stayed up reading a good book last night,” I tell her.
“Really?” she says. I can tell she’d like to think I’m alluding to her revised story collection, given to me a couple weeks ago, but she’s afraid to presume. The hope in her voice is excruciating.
“Let’s have lunch,” I suggest. “I’ll tell you all about it.” I’m not trying to get Rachel in the sack, as her husband, the minimalist, fears, but I did spend the evening with her, in a manner of speaking, so I consider lunch with Rachel a platonic reward.
“You’re having lunch with the dean?” she says, holding up a pink message slip. Most of Rachel’s statements sound like questions. Her inability to let her voice fall is related to her own terrible insecurity and lack of self-esteem. She’s been working in the department for nearly five years now, and it’s only recently that she’s stopped excusing herself to go to the women’s room to vomit when someone is cross with her. According to Rachel, only Paul Rourke causes her gag reflex to kick in anymore, and I assure her that this is perfectly normal.
I take the memo, glance at its scant information. The time noted in the upper-left-hand corner is seven-thirty.
“Wh
at’s Jacob doing in so early?” I wonder out loud. An academic dean in his office before midmorning cannot be good news. Jacob and I are friends, and I know he never buys lunch except to mitigate bad news. “Anything else?”
Rachel reluctantly hands me two more messages, as if she would have spared me if she could. I take them into my office, close the door. The first memo is from Gracie, who would like me to set aside some time this afternoon to meet with her. Her message contains neither apology nor suggestion of regret at having mutilated her chairman. The second is from the faculty union representative, Herbert Schonberg, who has been begging an audience for weeks, probably in order to discuss my continuing misconduct as interim chair, a position I’ve been elected to precisely because my lack of administrative skill is legend.
No one for an instant considered the possibility that I would do anything. No one imagined I could locate the necessary forms to do anything. I am regarded throughout the university as a militant procedural incompetent. This is partly due to the fact that I have maintained loudly, publicly, for twenty years that not policy but rather epic failures of imagination and goodwill are the reason for our collective woes. My lack of political acumen, coupled with my perverse inclination to side occasionally with my enemies (much to Teddy’s dismay when he was chair, since mine was often a deciding vote), my inattention to the details of political machination, and my failures of short-term memory made me, my colleagues thought, the perfect compromise candidate for the temporary chair of our hopelessly divided department. How much harm could I do in a year?
A good deal, as it’s turned out, thanks to Rachel. Nobody imagined what might happen if ever I were aided and abetted by a competent secretary, someone who knew where the forms were and how to fill them out and who to send them to and when. Teddy’s fall from grace after six years as chair was occasioned by what was generally and correctly seen to be his abuse of power, this despite his constant and cloying diplomacy. The rules set forth explicitly in the department’s operating paper, if taken literally, are egalitarian in nature, and render the chair an impotent facilitator, should he or she be foolish enough to obey them. Teddy hadn’t the slightest intention of obeying them, of course, only of appearing to, and the fact that it took six years for this to become manifest was ample testimony to his administrative expertise, as well as to the fact that he desperately wanted to keep the job and its reduced teaching load.
Not wanting the job, on the other hand, has freed me to dispense entirely with subterfuge. Whereas the conventional wisdom had been that a year would be too little time for me to wreak much havoc, I have demonstrated that a great deal of havoc can be wrought in two semesters by anyone so inclined, at least if that person is sufficiently insensitive to ridicule, personal invective, and threat. Who could have guessed that I’d take it upon myself to undermine seriously the very principles of egalitarian democracy that have kept us all in a state of suspended animation for over a decade?
Well, anyone who knew me might have guessed, but no one did, and now, nearly a full academic year after having taken up the reins of abusive power, I am still at large, the subject of vitriolic letters to the dean, the campus executive officer, and the school newspaper, as well as anonymous memos distributed late at night in department mailboxes and the regular appearance of official documents arriving via registered mail, many of which threaten litigation if I do not immediately and with all haste cease and desist. Taken all around, as Huck Finn was fond of saying, it’s been fun.
When I hear the phone ring in the outer office, I tell Rachel over the intercom that I have just stepped out, and, to keep her from becoming a liar at my behest, I do just that. There’s nobody I want to talk to this early.
That includes Billy Quigley, who finds me in the corridor trying to locate the right key to lock the private door to my office. He’s on his way to his office prior to his nine o’clock class. He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it. “Are you coming or going?” he inquires.
“I never know anymore,” I tell him. “Come join me for a cup of coffee in the student center.”
He makes a face. Apparently the idea of coffee offends him. “Am I getting my extra section next fall or what?”
“I’m having lunch with the dean today,” I tell him. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a budget.”
“Screw the budget,” Billy says, genuinely pissed off that I’d use such a cheap ploy to avoid the issue. “We’re talking a crummy three grand, not thirty. Don’t give me budget.”
I’m on his side, of course. This budgetary danse macabre, a semester-by-semester ritual, is ridiculous. There’s no valid reason why we can’t be told the semester before if the soft money to cover all necessary sections of freshman composition will in fact be made available. To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
“Like I told you last night,” I explain, “I’ll do what I can.”
“What do you mean, ‘last night’?”
Billy Quigley often doesn’t remember that he’s called me, and I can tell by the puzzled, belligerent look on his swollen face that he has no recollection of our conversation, or of the fact that we concluded it amicably, indeed sentimentally.
“Billy,” I say. “You have a nice day.”
“Hank,” Billy Quigley says. “You have a rotten one.”
CHAPTER
6
The student center is normally a short walk, now a somewhat longer one, thanks to the massive excavation out of which will grow, this summer, the new College of Technical Careers building. Ground-breaking ceremonies were scheduled earlier in the month until one of the dignitaries, our local congressman, waving enthusiastically to imaginary constituents for the benefit of TV cameras, missed the first step getting off his charter plane and broke his ankle on the second, making it necessary to conduct the ground-breaking ceremonies later this afternoon, after the excavation has been dug. They’ll have to find a camera angle for that first symbolic shovelful of earth that does not include the enormous pit.
In truth, this hole fills me with misgivings, and not because a Pennsylvania congressman has fallen in the line of duty trying to dedicate it. Perhaps, I tell myself, it’s that a surprise—a replica of my own house—grew out of the last such excavation I inspected. Seeing this new hole suggests that more surprises may be in store for me. On the other hand, all logic dictates that I should be reassured by this hole in the ground. It was competed for by the other campuses in the university system and awarded to ours, a sign of favor in these straitened academic times. Soon concrete footers will be poured and walls will climb out of the hole, and the summer air will be full of the sound of jackhammers and drills, the raised voices of men with real, urgent information to communicate (“Watch your fucking head there!”) as steel girders swing through the dusty air.
All of this will proceed quite naturally from this still undedicated but undeniable hole in the ground, and what it all suggests is that these rumors about an impending purge of our professorial ranks simply cannot be true. Even university administrators are not foolish enough to spend millions on a new facility in the same year they intend to fire tenured faculty and claim financial hardship as justification. Unless they have no intention of building anything here. Unless the faculty are going to be invited to drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid after the donkey basketball game and then buried in a mass grave. This scenario also accounts for the facts as we know them, and although I can hear William of Occam snickering across the centuries, the sound does not dispel my misgivings. Right this instant, the hole does more closely resemble a mass grave site for dull-witted faculty than a new, state-of-the-art, technical careers center, and I can’t help offering up a nervous smile at the idea that the administration might put the lot of us so beyond further grievance with one deft, efficient stroke.
Huddled on the far side of the campus pond, where the tall trees offer better protection from the wind, are thirty or forty duc
ks and geese. There was a time when these birds migrated, but anymore they’re year-round residents, tenured and content, squatting motionless on the bank, like abandoned decoys, subsisting on popcorn and other student junk food, too fat to fly and, as the saying goes, too ugly to love.
They are easily faked out, too, as if they’ve been too long separated from their better instincts, too often seduced by baser ones. Their heads rotate on their otherwise motionless bodies, and when I take my hands out of my pockets and make a flicking motion, tossing imaginary popcorn along the bank, the birds start toward me, trailing V’s on the placid surface of the pond. I’d like to think they know better, that they are capable of perceiving from across the pond that I have nothing for them. I’ve been told by hunters that ducks are smart, that they have remarkable vision, that from high in the sky they can detect subtle movements on the ground, see the whites of hunters’ eyes.
If true, these particular ducks are the village idiots of their species, waddling up out of the water and quacking around on the brown grass in search of what I’ve pretended to throw them. They can see it isn’t there, but they search for it anyway. Their protests reach a remarkable crescendo. Among the mallards are three tough-looking white geese, and the tallest and most elegant of these comes over and hisses at me, its bill wide open, its dark, toothless maw surprisingly menacing. Its white breast is dappled with smatterings of rust color, which remind me of the blood I sneezed the length of the seminar table yesterday afternoon. “Finny,” I say to the angry goose. “Qué pasa?”
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