Days before commencement, a well-liked member of the Jewish fraternity slipped and fell from his frat-house roof, nearly sinking all of Danforth into a state of public mourning. He thwarted death and sprained his wrist instead. His brothers and sisters in the Greek system wrote well-wishes and addressed them to the great hospital complex by the park where he was being fitted for a cast, before returning to their own concerns. When graduation came, they shivered out into the world on the backs of one detestable family friend or another. The future, it seemed, was closer than it had ever been.
The student newspaper, the Danforth Register, picked up the story of Arthur and the librarian. The headline ran in all-capped distinction: PROF ASSAULTS FINANCIAL AID STUDENT. To Arthur’s horror, the altercation had been labeled an “assault.” The tattooed librarian was now a “financial aid student”—as though economic class had anything to do with Arthur laying the kid out.
Before he could harangue the editor in chief of the D-Redge, as the paper was informally known, he received an email from an admin at Dean Gupta’s office. A reminder of their impending meeting. What day this week is best for you? Arthur slammed his keyboard, marched across the Main Campus quad, and barged into the dean’s office.
“Don’t tell me he’s suing.”
Gupta looked up from his desk. “Pardon?”
“The kid came away fine,” Arthur said. “Unscathed. Not a bruise on him.”
A young woman in a pencil skirt and heels followed him into the office, taking the longest strides her outfit would allow. “I’m sorry, Dean Gupta,” she said breathlessly, her breasts bouncing under her blouse as she halted in the doorway. “He walked right in—”
“It’s okay, Lola. Arthur, come sit.”
The woman glared at Arthur. She spun on her heels and exited the room. Christ, he thought, averting his gaze from the two half-moons under her skirt to the vaulted ceiling above, inadvertently taking in a whiff of the dean’s powerful cologne, his nostrils filling with cedar and cardamom. Lola.
Gupta hardly looked up, his arms tentacling around the surface of his paper-strewn desk. A pince-nez straddled the bridge of his nose.
“Did you know my book is missing? From the library?”
“Arthur, Arthur,” the dean said. “Sit down. Breathe.”
Arthur sat, trembling with righteous frustration. He watched Gupta, framed by the tall wooden bookshelves behind him, taking his time to organize the items laid in disarray before him. After forty infuriating seconds—Arthur counted—Gupta procured a manila folder from the mess and handed it to Arthur.
“What’s this?”
“Read it.”
Unease rippled through him. Arthur’s stomach seemed to know the contents of the folder before he did. He opened it slowly, squinting at the text so as not to take it in all at once, then pinched the folder shut.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I’ll teach anything. Any class. I’ll work for nothing. I won’t be a burden.”
“Arthur, please.”
“You can’t fire me. Not after all I’ve done for this place.”
“You’re not fired. We’re simply choosing not to renew your contract at this time,” the dean said dryly.
“Read the article, Sahil. ‘No visible scarring or bruising.’ The kid’s fine.”
“It’s not just that, Arthur. Although we do encourage faculty not to tackle members of the student body, when possible.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Arthur. You must have seen this coming. You were teaching, what, two courses this semester? For the same money we pay graduate students. Surely you didn’t think this could continue forever. Frankly, I’m surprised you hung in this long.”
“All these years . . .”
“Your position was never permanent.”
“All the time I invested.”
“I expected more from you. Time is one thing. You never published, Arthur. Not one paper in all the years you were here.”
“I was focused on teaching!”
“Your student evaluations were in the sewer. Truly, Arthur, I never saw so many one-star reviews.”
“I’m an acquired taste. And what’s with the star system, anyway? We’re entrusting eighteen-year-olds with people’s livelihoods? Reviewing human beings like they’re movies?”
“The students love the star system. We get many more evaluations this way.”
“Sahil. Listen to me. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
“I’m sorry, Arthur. There’s nothing I can do for you. And with this recent . . . incident . . .” The dean picked up a copy of the D-Redge from his desk and waved it in front of him. And then he slapped Arthur with the most terrible slur that can issue from the lips of a university administrator.
“Professor Alter,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ve become a liability.”
Arthur cursed his career. He cursed the politics of tenure, the years spent under the hanging sword. He cursed a thin-skinned and entitled student body, enabled by obscene tuition fees and the consumer mind-set they engendered to act out in whatever ways they pleased. He cursed Henrik Vergoosen, Nobel laureate in chemistry and tenured Danforth professor, who (it was well-known) had fucked five of his last six office assistants, consequence-free, students and townies both, whether he was in loco parentis or out. He cursed the sushi flown in for the dining halls and the Tempur-Pedic mattresses in the freshman dorms. He cursed the Board of Trustees, a conspiracy of coal and biotech billionaires who opposed a minimum wage of $15 per hour for the food service staff making hour-long commutes to campus from East St. Louis at dawn. He cursed the hypocrisy of a school that boasted female STEM recruitment on the one hand and bestowed an honorary degree upon Phyllis Schlafly with the other. He cursed the Chinese and Nigerian elite who bought their kids admission to a university hungry for multicultural brochure photos. He cursed an institution that killed a once-great sociology department because the instructors had a Marxist bent. He cursed the emergent “Campus Left” for their militant closed-mindedness and the administration’s utter cowardice in dealing with them, second only to their gutlessness in handling the scandal-prone fraternities. He cursed Danforth’s inflated sense of self, its obsession with public relations and image. He cursed and cursed until there was nothing left to condemn and he was dragged, raving, from the administrative offices and instructed not to return to campus again.
* * *
• • •
His dismissal from Danforth spelled the end of hope for Arthur. He resigned himself to his fate. He put the house on the market. Three weeks later, it sold. To Arthur’s surprise, the buyers—a handsome young couple with triplets—were not, as he’d expected, affiliated with the university.
“What do they do?” Arthur asked.
“They’re in the private sector,” the real estate agent explained. Like that was some kind of an answer.
Ethan and Maggie flew out once again to help with the arrangements and observe the anniversary of Francine’s death, which coincided with the sale of the house. Maggie said they were on hand to provide “moral support,” a phrase Arthur had always found objectionable. What he needed was actual, physical help. In times like these, there was no substitute for manual labor. The few colleagues with whom he was on speaking terms had gone silent after word spread about his outburst in Dean Gupta’s office. He didn’t receive a single message of condolence or an invitation to debrief over a beer, to say nothing of an offer to help pack up the house. One of the perils of moving, he thought, is finding out who your friends are.
He asked for manual labor and he got it. His children moved through the house with a cold professionalism that made Arthur uneasy, talking to him only about logistical matters. But whether they’d forgiven him or not, they had come back, and he supposed he should be grateful.
One afternoon, he ran out of ma
sking tape. He followed the muted sound of his children’s voices up the stairs and into Maggie’s bedroom. The room was empty, but the red-runged ladder cut diagonally from the ceiling to the shaggy rug. He could hear them in the attic above.
“I worry about him.” Ethan’s voice. “What’s he supposed to do now?”
“That’s his problem.”
“Maggie . . .”
“See, this is the thing. You always let him off the hook so easily. Like he’s a child who doesn’t know better. He’s a grown man, Ethan. More than that. He’s an anachronism.”
“I’ll grant you that he’s out of touch. But what’s he supposed to do with that? Don’t we have a responsibility to him? To see that he makes it out of this okay?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. We both do.”
Maggie scoffed. “Whatever.”
“You decided at some point that he was going to be your enemy. It’s pure ideology with you. Anything that doesn’t fit with your idea of him, you dismiss out of hand. But he’s more complicated than that. You know he is. And how do you think I feel? You’re the one he paid the most attention to.”
“Me? Are you kidding?”
“He fights with you because he respects you. You’re a worthy opponent. Whatever I am to him, I’m not worth taking seriously.”
“And you’re still defending him!”
“I’m not defending him. I’m asking you to look at everything he’s done for us. Not only the slights. The whole picture . . .”
Arthur stood in the doorway. He knew he should back away but he couldn’t. His heart leapt anxiously with every eavesdropped word. He stood there as the minutes piled up, listening, with defensiveness and hurt—and no small sense of self-importance—as his children debated his legacy.
The following day, Maggie brought Ethan to the Climatron to commemorate Francine’s yahrzeit. Together they walked through the international gardens, all of them in vigorous bloom. They strode solemnly beside dogwoods beneath the English garden’s canopy of oaks. They traced the dragon-rippled walls of the Nanjing Friendship Garden. They walked in silence, out of respect for the dead, though the piercing squeals of children and the red- and blue- and yellow-speckled greenery insisted that life was happening here.
St. Louis burns in May—absolutely roasts. Even in the gardens, where the seasonal fever was partially mitigated by tree cover, a gummy heat slid between skin and clothing, limb and torso, leaving a slug trail of dampness where it settled. Ethan’s arms shimmered with sweat as they passed the reflecting pool where Charlie had rubbed his earlobe and the geodesic dome came into view.
The automatic doors closed behind them, and all at once they found themselves transported to another world. Leaves spilled over one another in the dense accumulation of bushes that lined the footpath. Mist machines spritzed on a timer. Maggie led her brother through a thatched-roof hut near the entrance, past the pleated palm leaves of a coco-de-mer and an overgrowth of passiflora, sidestepping the buttress roots of a looming tree. She pulled off the path and pointed to where she’d poured the remains. “You dumped them in the water?” Ethan asked, with a note of concern. Maggie nodded. “I wanted her to circulate.” Ethan traced her gaze downstream to the edge of the dome, then looked up at the triangular panes and the aluminum network of pipes that supported them. “Okay,” he said. They kneeled by the stream and sat awhile in the spring-green grove, girded by ferns and boscage and the odd Chihuly, the sounds of prerecorded wildlife distilling into one prolonged caw, the two of them sheltered, for the time being, under the great glazed-glass enclosure.
* * *
• • •
The sale covered the mortgage balance and left Arthur with enough money to take a room at the Chase Park Plaza and buy himself that most valuable commodity, time. There was an unexpected satisfaction in unloading the house, a decompression of anxiety, as when a person dies after a prolonged struggle with illness. His satisfaction was doubled by the realization that he was now free of teaching duties, committee meetings, all the caprices of an academic institution.
His room at the Plaza was furnished, the minibar stocked, and each morning he took brunch in the Chase Club. The lobby was his living room, the swimming pool his bathtub. He had his hair cut at the barbershop in the basement of the hotel, where a woman in a crop top with an obscenely appealing navel draped a hot towel over his face and put a cold glass of whiskey in his hand. He enjoyed himself for four wonderful weeks before the monthly bill arrived and the stress returned. Men of Arthur’s age were pioneers, the first generation to consistently live into their eighties and nineties. There were many years ahead to account for.
The neighborhood had changed since he’d first moved to St. Louis. The new Central West End, with its vodka bars, all-night cookie delivery service, art galleries, and athleisure retailers, catered to the reprehensibly young. The undeservedly wealthy. He watched them from his window like a hunchback in a bell tower. College students and regionally attractive professionals. Buying things. Eating things. Surely, he thought, this cannot be what they do all day. Surely there is more to life than this. He shivered with loathing. On more charitable days, however, Arthur forgave them their consumer goods and blamed the systems that encouraged their behavior. On days like that he wondered what it must cost to be young and upwardly mobile in America.
* * *
• • •
Back in Ridgewood, Maggie continued her good work with the Nakahara boys, but summer found them restless. She kept them occupied as best she could. They ate pizza in a refurbished garage in Bushwick and wandered Mt. Hope Cemetery in Glendale. Twice, day-trips to Coney Island were foiled by the MTA. First, a sick passenger caused their train to be taken out of service. The following week there was a fire on the tracks.
When a long-stalled bill to legalize professional cage fighting in New York finally received the okay from Albany, Bruno begged her to take him to a fight.
“Come on, Maggie, please. This summer has been boring as fuck.”
“Language. Jar. Now.”
“He’s not wrong,” added Alex. “I, for one, have been feeling understimulated.”
In August, Maggie caved, repurposing the jar into a field trip fund. With Oksana’s permission (and a cryptic nod from her husband), Maggie brought the boys to the Barclays Center. It seemed like all of downtown Brooklyn was under construction that night. Huge swaths of pavement had been jackhammered into rubble. Unmanned tractors cast eerie shadows across vacant lots marked off with warning signs and tape. Cranes loomed above mid-rise condos, clawing at the blue-black sky. Coming out of the subway the boys walked with their jaws slack, awestruck, toward the arena and its huge glowing donut overhang.
Theirs were nosebleed seats, dizzyingly elevated and extremely far from the stage. Maggie surveyed the crowd. It was very . . . male. These were people, she thought, with riot thresholds of zero and one. The kind of people that made you wonder: What’s the difference between a skinhead and a regular bald guy with tattoos? She didn’t want to have to find out. She already knew this was too much testosterone for one room. This was a mob on the verge.
But Bruno and Alex were enjoying themselves, unfazed by their surroundings. Too far from the action to get a glimpse of anything happening in real time, they stared at the Jumbotron as the first fighter, a broad-shouldered white guy, made his way down an illuminated aisle, removed his shirt to much applause, and stepped into the chain-mesh enclosure. A kick drum thumped throughout the arena, anchoring the promethazine-and-Sprite-soaked voice of a rapper whose music Maggie recognized, finally, as the soundtrack to Emma’s birthday party months earlier. The second fighter was darker skinned and sported a beard. He entered from the opposite end of the arena, booed the whole way down. He stuck out his tongue and sneered at the audience, waving a big red flag in step with the remixed Berber drums now throbbing through the speakers.
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sp; The emcee had frosted tips and took his time introducing the fighters. Their win-loss records were read aloud, as were their respective weights and countries of origin. “A good lesson on ‘the other,’” Maggie whispered to the boys. “Or, I mean, a bad one.”
They didn’t hear her, lost as they were in the spectacle. She watched them shout and cheer, excited as she’d ever seen them, and all at once it dawned on her that they would soon be too old to need her. She dabbed at her eyes with her T-shirt.
Bruno elbowed her in the ribs. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She winced. “I’m fine.” She reclined in her chair, gradually lowering her shoulders and watching, with begrudging amusement, as the fighters waled on one another.
* * *
• • •
In September, Ezra Goldin celebrated his bar mitzvah. Three hundred friends and family members were invited. Arthur wasn’t one of them.
Maggie was not so confident in her brother’s attendance as to eliminate the need for a plus-one. Though Ethan had assured her he was coming, Maggie knew he still might bail, leaving her to navigate the Goldins’ minefield of conspicuous consumption and unsolicited career advice. In the end, she decided to bring Mikey. Not as her date—she was clear on that point—but as a friend. She figured she’d been hard on him these past few years. His politics weren’t ideal, but she could work on that. Lean on him a little. Besides, he cared about her. He was in her corner, and she was coming to feel that that was worth something.
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