The Englishman

chapter 6

AFTER ABOUT A TRILLION SESSIONS of new faculty orientation, and cocktails with the Provost, and lunchtime finger food and jazz with the Dean and her staff—none of which addressed my most pressing problem, of course—we assemble for the first faculty meeting at the English department. I still have no idea what to do about Crazy Corvin and the mountain of his trash in my office, but I do know that my part as the new kid on the block is to be seen, not heard. I would get off to a very bad start indeed with my new colleagues if the first thing they heard from me was a complaint. My best course of action is to be as quiet as a mouse: watch, listen, and learn.

Our venue is the conference room at the Observatory. It is dominated by a table that is at once decorative and emblematic, an almost round oval at one end, it narrows down at the other end and connects, with a couple of tapering pieces in-between, with as many rectangular tables as are needed.

“What’s with the tear-shaped table?” I whisper to Tim as we enter the room.

“Tear? We call it the Sperm Room, for all the whacking off that goes on in here.”

“Okay, you sit at the window, I sit here. Go, reprobate. Shoo.”

The full professors and highest-ranking associates sit at the head of the table, while the rest of us huddle round the, um, tail. Andrew Corvin, in the same suit he wore before, comes in and obliges half a dozen people to move down because he insists on sitting next to Matthew Dancey. I’m a somewhere-in-the-middle-of-the-tail assistant professor, and I think—although I can’t be sure because I don’t want to be caught looking at him—that when Giles Cleveland enters, he scans the room, sees me among the infantry and checks that box. I was right; he doesn’t wear jeans and rugby shirts when he is on duty. But even in a light gray summer suit and a white dress shirt there is a disheveled look about him, as if he had shrugged into his jacket in a hurry—top shirt buttons undone, cuff buttons undone, the sleeves peeking out from under the sleeves of the jacket. As if someone had been in the process of undressing him when he remembered the faculty meeting and dashed off.

Now there’s a tantalizing thought.

Two young men take the seats further down from me, and I am glad I can turn to them.

“Hi, we haven’t met. I’m Anna Lieberman.”

“Mm.” While my neighbor—a beefy blond with a goatee—is finishing an email, his friend tips his chair backward.

“Hey. I’m Steve Howell. Settling in all right?” He is weedier than the blond, but good-looking in a nineteen fifties kind of way.

“Yes, thanks, I’m—”

“You’re in next to Corvin, aren’t you?” He pulls up one corner of his mouth in a smile that could be sympathetic or malicious. “That’s too bad.”

The hunk’s shoulders twitch.

I turn my body toward them to signal my readiness for confrontation, although my smile is sweet and harmless.

“You seem to know all about that. How come?”

“Well, we…saw you in there, that’s all.”

“The weakest link,” the hunk says, straightening up from his notebook. “Someone has to be in next to Corvin, and that’ll be the new hires who have no powerful friends in the place. Fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

“So it goes.” I shrug, pretending to be cool. “And you are—?” As if I didn’t know.

“Dolph Bergstrom.” He still can’t get himself to look straight at me.

I have never met anyone actually called that. Why would parents do such a thing to their child? A blond, blue-eyed boy, yet! Adolph. Seriously?

“Oh, man—hi! I thought we’d meet here today—look, what can I say? Bad luck, that’s all. I know you probably wish I’d go away and boil my head, and—well, I won’t, but maybe we can have lunch soon? I have a ton of questions I’d love to ask you!”

Dolph stares at me as if his pet rabbit had suddenly spoken to him. In Swahili.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he says.

For five mortifying seconds I am convinced I got it all wrong, but his rejection impulse is so strong he even inches his chair away from me with a nervous jolt.

“Head boiling seems a little excessive,” Steve jokes, but I notice that he quickly checks Dolph’s profile.

“Aren’t you worried you’re out of your depth here, with no experience of the American grad school system?” Dolph is irritated with me, as if I were the puny kid that wants to play on his team.

“Yeah, I’m sure that having been out of the country is going to be such a disadvantage.”

“Good idea, going abroad,” Steve murmurs, trying to sound like Tony Soprano.

“Around,” Dolph adds.

“What goes around…”

“…comes around,” Dolph completes Steve’s sentence. “You did your MA and your Ph.D in England?”

Shut the f*ck up, Anna. Do yourself a favor.

“Yeah, England University. Big place.”

This makes him flinch, but he comes back straightaway.

“You won’t last long,” he tells me. “England can’t cut it, compared with a graduate degree from a top American university.”

“Actually, bub, neither of us has a graduate degree from a top American university.”

Part of me is mature enough to understand that he needs a mantra to deal with the shitty situation he finds himself in, but another part of me wants to go for his jugular. I don’t want to look at Cleveland, really, I don’t, but my eyes sort of brush past him all of their own accord, and he is looking over. Our eyes meet, and he shakes his head. Just a fraction, just barely enough for me to notice. Did he just tell me to back off? Does Cleveland think Dolph could harm me?

I am following the proceedings with one ear only, so I only half catch something about the Graduate Careers Fair which takes place at the beginning of each fall semester. But I am all eyes and ears when Cleveland mentions by the way that “Tim and Tessa” will be going it alone from the English Lit side of the Early Modern Studies program.

“But you have to be there,” Hornberger says tersely. “You’re program director.”

“Laurie Jacobs has agreed to stand in for me.”

“Laurie Jacobs has a sabbatical this semester. She’s in Florence, up to her elbows in headless torsos.”

Even Cleveland has to grin at the image conjured up by Hornberger.

“I know, but when we last spoke, she said she was leaving mid-September. I’ll be away over the weekend and back for my first class on Wednesday but not much before. Sorry.”

“Giles cleared that with the Dean a while ago, Nick,” Elizabeth steps in.

“If Giles thinks it is wise, we shouldn’t interfere,” Matthew Dancey addresses his colleagues, doing precisely that. “All other graduate programs are represented by their directors; if he thinks that an assistant professor and a graduate student will do justice to our contribution to Medieval and Renaissance Studies—fine. The phasing out of Medieval Studies will have an inevitable effect on Early Modern Studies anyway.”

A low groan indicates that I am not alone in being taken aback by this bitch-slapping behavior.

“You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, I think, Matthew,” Elizabeth Mayfield says with awe-inspiring coolness, but Dancey ignores her.

“Maybe we shouldn’t stray from the agenda. I’m sure we all have things left to prepare for next week.” Hornberger doesn’t look at Elizabeth either, and she doesn’t pursue the issue, but Cleveland, for the first time since the meeting started, had an arrested look on his face when Dancey dropped that little bomb. I know that the ailing Robert Morgan is a medievalist, but one sick professor is hardly a reason to shut down a whole subfield.

On an unrelated note, I wonder why Cleveland does not come clean and announce that he has to be in Edinburgh, Scotland, for an award ceremony in which he might win a very prestigious prize. He is provoking Nick Hornberger for no other reason than that he can.

I look up and catch Tim looking at me. The question mark on his face is unmistakable, and it dawns on me that he wants to recruit me. I give him a mouth-shrug and a tiny nod.

“We could take Anna.” Tim interrupts the awkward silence as if he was talking about a trip to the mall.

“Which one is Anna?” Professor Westley, an aging hippy in a crocheted beanie, puts on his red-rimmed glasses and leans forward to scan the lower end of the room. He came late and missed our introduction, and since neither Hornberger nor any of the others can be bothered to fill him in, I half-raise one hand and wave at him, which makes Steve Howell and Dolph Bergstrom double up over their notebooks.

Spotlight on Anna.

“Hi, Anna!” Westley grins and winks at me. “I thought you were a new grad student!”

“No offense, Anna—Dr. Lieberman—but she knows nothing yet about the program, how could she represent it?” This is a token objection; Hornberger himself is not convinced by it, so to clinch the matter I ignore my thumping heart and speak up.

“I could do my shtick on why Renaissance Studies is a great subject. That’s the main point of the exercise, isn’t it? And I do know a little about job-hunting in English Lit.”

I haven’t looked at Cleveland at all during this little intermezzo, and I won’t.

Hornberger, looming handsomely but uncomfortably at the head of the table, makes a bid for control as a low hubbub wells up in the room. “Dr. Lieberman—Anna—would show a great deal of collegiality if she agreed to take over a composition section. I know it’s short notice, but we’re in a tight corner, so—”

“Nick, why are we in a tight corner?” Elizabeth interrupts him. “The teaching schedules were drawn up last spring. We had everything sorted out.”

Hornberger pokes his keyboard as if it was a pile of dog poop. “One of the comp sections is without an instructor,” he declares almost triumphantly, reading from his screen.

Dancey launches a smooth attack on me. “Anna, we’d be eternally grateful to you if you would help us out of this predicament.”

I hadn’t expected the policy of shut-the-f*ck-up to become so hard to stick to so early in the game. Teaching composition is the equivalent of army boot camp, except you’re both the drill sergeant and the recruit. It is a crazy amount of work—I know this from experience, and I really, really do not have time to repeat it.

The problem is, I really, really have no choice.

“Well, sir, I was hop—”

“I’ve asked Dr. Lieberman to make up for Bob’s class in the graduate program. She has kindly agreed to do so, and I think you’ll find, Matthew, that the change has already been entered in the course schedule. Asking her to agree to yet another change would really be playing fast and loose with a rookie, and I don’t think we ought do that. Wouldn’t be ethical.”

Not a single glance at me during this little pièce de résistance. I hate that Cleveland makes me feel like a high-school freshman who needs protecting from the bullies. The miserable truth, however, is that I am, and I do.

“When did you arrange that?” Dancey snaps at him.

“Friday afternoon.” Cleveland folds his arms again and scoots down in his chair so that only the protuberance of his tailbone is stopping his descent.

“On whose authority?” Hornberger apparently feels he has to assert himself as chair. “If we all went round changing the teaching arrangements, this place would descend into chaos! We’re not a co-op, you know!”

This evokes subdued chuckles from some, and twisted grins from others. Cleveland is gazing at Hornberger with an odd, private little smile on his face, as if he was pleased that Hornberger had said something stupid.

“Communism, I thought, Nick. What’s mine is yours…and so forth.”

“This will have to be corrected,” Dancey decides, still white around the mouth. “How can Anna take over Bob’s class? She’s not a medievalist.”

“Matthew, who among our many medievalists were you going to suggest might take over Bob’s classes?” Cleveland sits up and leans forward on his elbows as if he were interested in the answer. He doesn’t get one, because the round table is now arguing among themselves in increasingly loud voices.

There is more to this than meets the eye—has to be, because the issue itself is so minor—but I take very great care not to seem overly curious. I keep my head down and draw a lacy border on my sheet of notepaper, and when Dolph Bergstrom murmurs, “Well, that’s all going very nicely, isn’t it?” I stupidly think at first that he is referring to my doodling.

“Oh, come on!” I groan when I realize what he means. “Could you please not be quite so blatantly hostile?”

I had been given conflicting advice on how to deal with Dolph. Irene advocated flattery, while Debbie felt I should give him some time to lick his wounds. Neither of them had recommended a cat fight.

“I would take on another comp section, sir,” pipes a female voice lower down the table from me, below the salt, where the graduate assistants and the exploited adjuncts have to sit.

“Danielle! Would you? That’s fantastic!” Hornberger leaps at her offer like a trout leaps at a mosquito. “Right, then, moving along to Family Weekend, and the black lining on that cloud, Homecoming. Any suggestions? Bright ideas?”

It is half past seven when we finally pile out of the stuffy room into the hallway, grateful for our escape. It is an eternal mystery why, if everybody hates them, faculty meetings are so endless. Ordinarily, I would dash back to my office, grab my stuff and head home, but these people are my new colleagues, and if there is any socializing to follow, I must not miss it.

“There.” Tim comes over to me and whispers next to my ear. “Your baptism of fire is over. Let’s see your burns.”

“Anna!” Rich Westley appears from the direction of the men’s room. “So great to see you back on campus! Sorry about earlier—that was meant to be a joke, about you being a new grad student. Not so funny, I know.” He takes off his eyeglasses and peers at me.

“Thank you, sir—”

“Rich.”

“Rich, it’s wonderful to be back.”

“Found your way to the Astrolabe yet? That’s our watering-hole. Across the parking lot, and so considered to be off campus. We always adjourn there to moisten our throats after meetings. I’ll take you, if you like.”

“Sorry, Rich—Anna wanted me to show her my first editions.” Tim tugs at my elbow. “We’ll come later.”

“Show her your—what?” Westley grins. “I’ve never heard it called that before!”

“Associating with you will soil my reputation,” I say darkly when Tim’s office door has closed behind us.

“Nonsense. I want to bitch to you about Dancey and Hornberger.”

Tim’s office is as functional as his suits and ties, very neat and tidy, no personal touch at all, except for a model of the Louvre glass pyramid on his desk and a steel-framed print of Jackson Pollock’s Convergence on the wall. There is a knock on the door, and he narrows his baby blues in a grimace of ultimate vexation.

“Come in!”

“Listen, Tim, can you make sure that—oh. Sorry.” Cleveland looks up from the sheaf of paper in his hand, sees me, and a deep crease appears between his eyebrows.

“I was just about to give Anna a few glosses on the meeting.” Tim waves him in, but Cleveland remains rooted to the threshold.

“Right, I’ll get back to you later. You should go and drink with the others.” This is Giles Cleveland doing some mentoring. Go and drink with the others.

“Cleve, wait—is that the latest version of the application files? I want those.”

Cleveland takes one step further into the room but doesn’t even close the door behind him. While he and Tim are scanning the print-outs, I debate whether I should thank him for saving me from a fate worse than death, or slap him upside the head for making me the center of a faculty quarrel. He turns over the pages and pins a second folder behind the first, lifting his arm so that his jacket hitches up and his shirt tautens across his left flank and lower ribcage.

“So,” he suddenly addresses me, “you’re all right.” That’s a statement, not a question, and since I was lost in very inappropriate thought and no response seems required, I am tempted to shrug and say nothing. But I don’t want to seem peevish, so I rally for an enthusiastic reply and force myself to look up into his eyes. The second I do so, he looks away.

“Yes, I am, thank you. I was grateful for your intervention.”

“Well, it’s closed season yet for rookie-hunting.”

“I wish you’d told me about Adolph, though.”

“I thought you knew. It’s in all the history books.”

“This Adolph! The guy whose job I got, and who is still here as an adjunct! How awkward is that!”

Cleveland hesitates, and I know that I am destroying all the benefits of having shut up so valiantly during the meeting.

“I didn’t think you should worry…” He either falters, or he makes an ironic show of faltering. I don’t know him well enough yet to tell the difference. “You shouldn’t worry your—”

Pretty little head about that? Say it, Cleveland, and I’ll bite your balls off!

“—yourself about Dolph. Ignore him, is my advice. Well, then—” He inhales and straightens his shoulders. “I’ll see y’all next week, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!”

“I hope you’ll be an also-ran!” I fling at him.

He understands at once what I am referring to, but either I’ve stumped him or I’m not worthy of a riposte.

“What do you mean ‘also ran’? Cleve, where’re you off to, anyway?” Tim, at first vaguely interested, notices our silent glaring and becomes attentive. “Oh, secrets,” he says archly.

“Evidently not.” The light in Cleveland’s face dies down, and he rushes off in one of his abrupt exits.

“What’s with you?” Tim splutters into the silence after the door snaps shut. “Sweet and polite, I said! Not snide and pissy!”

I throw myself into one of the steel-and-leather armchairs, feeling like a petulant teenager. “He started it.”

“He has tenure! And he saved your ass in there! You’d be drowning in essays this semester if it wasn’t for Giles!”

“I said I was grateful!”

A knock on the door saves me, but as the electricity tingles in my nerve endings, I have to confess to myself that I’m hoping Cleveland is back. I pissed him off, and I can’t wait to see him again. Something’s wrong there.

“Aren’t you coming to the Astrolabe?” Erin Gallagher has her bag under one arm and a box of diapers under the other; above her shoulder Eugenia Russell’s avid face appears. “We saw you dive in here, so we thought something was up.”

“Follow-up meeting for Anna.”

“Gosh, yes, you almost got Dancey’s blade right between the third and fourth ribs there, Anna!” Eugenia leans against the sideboard, making the wood creak and Tim cringe, but he keeps his mouth shut.

“Giles bailed her out.”

“Well, he didn’t want to let Dancey and Hornberger get away with their little scheme. How did he know, though?”

“You don’t exactly have to be clairvoyant to know that Dancey would get Nick to play gofer for him,” Tim said. “And if you ask me, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Erin contemplates me from the depth of the second armchair. “What you don’t know, Anna, is that Dolph Bergstrom should have gotten your job.”

“Erin! Don’t tell her that!” Eugenia frowns at her. “What’s she to do with that? Don’t worry about it, Anna. Department politics, keep out of them.”

“Well, I’d like to,” I say.

“No, Ginny, Anna needs to know, because I what I think is that Dancey and Hornberger have it in for her,” Erin insists. “Doofus doesn’t have to teach comp, so why should you? Because teaching comp means one fewer article on your list of publications at the end of the semester, that’s why!”

“Doofus?”

“Dolph. He’s an Ardrossan seedling, bedded by—”

“Hush, now!” Tim flutters his eyelids in the manner of a scandalized aunt.

“—bedded by William DeGroot, our erstwhile Commonwealth Foundation professor, and currently cultivated by Matthew Dancey. So you may be sure that the burden of teaching comp was going to be lifted from his tender shoulders at the first opportunity.”

“Dancey got Dolph shortlisted for your job,” Tim says, taking over, “although there are unwritten rules against having in-house candidates for tenure-track positions. The third candidate was another woman from up north. Dartmouth, or Cornell, I forget. But we didn’t like her, did we? Brusque, harsh.”

“Jessica-Ann Wright,” I say, because I don’t want to appear like a totally lame dweeb. Tim, Erin and Eugenia beam at me like teachers at the dumb kid who unexpectedly produces a nugget of knowledge.

“I would have preferred her to Doofus, though, if she had been the only alternative. Luckily, as it turned out—” Erin stretches out her arms toward me like a compere to an award winner.

When the four of us enter the Astrolabe—Erin still with her thirty-six-pack of diapers, which adds a bizarre touch to the pseudo-fin-de-siècle décor of the bar—the first thing I see is Nick Hornberger handing drinks to a gaggle of female students. This is his comfort zone. Chairing a college department is a thankless task, but if the whip is passed to you, you must use it. I’m guessing that Nick Hornberger is neither willing nor equipped to rule as master and commander of this navis academicum, to ration bread and water if need be, and perhaps even subject slackers to the cat o’ nine tails. He wants to be popular, and that is a dangerous motivation.

“Ah, Anna! Welcome to our haunt! What’re you having?”

“I’m driving, thanks—soda, please, sir.”

“None of that formal sir! Call me Nick! Or have you spent so long among the English that you’ve adopted their stick-in-the-mud arrogance?”

My field of vision is completely filled by a big chest in a golf shirt as he puts one arm around my shoulders and draws me against himself. A receding hairline is the fate of many a younger man, but the sagging jowls and the tell-tale thickness around the waist and chest must give him a pang when he looks in the mirror.

“Ted? Ted?” he calls over to the barkeeper. “Ted, this is Anna, and she will have—” He scans my face as if the answer lay there. “A white wine spritzer. You can drive after a wine spritzer!”

“Well, sir—Nick—if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather—”

“To celebrate your appointment, Anna!” Hornberger insists as if he were a Sherpa tribesman obliged by custom to force food and drink onto a guest protesting his fullness.

The only person standing near Hornberger who comes up to his earlobe is a stunning brunette in a white pants suit and a figure-hugging top who has been watching our exchange very narrowly.

“Hello, Professor Lieberman! Welcome to Ardrossan!” She beams down at me with all the self-confidence of the spoiled and beautiful. “We’re all so curious to meet you—may we introduce ourselves? We’re all in offices next to yours. Only not so far down the hallway.”

Bite me, Versace Girl.

My advice to a graduate student at a top-tier research university would always be to strive to be remembered for her work, not for her looks, but Irene calls this the German Protestant infiltration of my cultural heritage.

I hope and trust the Almighty is not among the aging males dazzled by visions of female fabulousness, but Nick Hornberger evidently is. There is a subtle but distinct difference in the way Hornberger bear-hugged me and the way he reaches past America’s Next Top Model to take some glasses from Ted the barman. Not sure if I can put my finger on it. Familiarity coupled with a sense of reverence.

“This is Tessa Shephard,” Versace Girl says, inviting a copiously freckled girl with dark red locks into our small circle. “Tessa’s in her third year of grad school, so—”

“So if there’s anything you need, ma’am, don’t hesitate to ask,” says Tessa, not visibly galled by her colleague’s patronizing manner. She gives me a broad smile. “I’m in your class on parody, and Professor Cleveland said you’ll be coming to the Early Modern Studies graduate seminar, so we’ll meet there, too.”

“And this is my friend Selena O’Neal.” Versace Girl steps aside and pushes a third girl toward me. Selena is tall and very well-endowed, too, but two thick mouse-colored braids hang on either side of her pale face down to her waist, her face has a pasty sheen, and she manages to look almost dowdy in a pleated skirt and a white blouse. If it was Hornberger who recommended these girls as graduate assistants to the Academic Affairs Office, he is only partially guilty of selecting them with his loins. Maybe he makes deals with the AAO: one stunner for one nerd.

“Hello, Dr. Lieberman.” Selena has a soft, strained voice, and I have to read her lips to hear her above the music. “I was sorry to see that your class on Paradise Lost was canceled. I was…I was looking forward to that.”

“Oh, thanks! How nice of you to say that, Selena. Yes, I was sorry, too, but curriculum requirements made the change necessary. Maybe next semester!”

She smiles and bobs her head in a manner reminiscent of the late Princess Diana.

“That would be wonderful, because I’m actually working on—”

“Yeah, leave that for the grad sem, Selena,” her frenemy butts in. “I’m Natalie Greco, Professor Lieberman. I’m in my first year of grad school and it’s my first year as a grad assistant, so you can imagine how excited I am! Welcome to Ardrossan University, again, ma’am, and to The Old Dominion!”

I’m the new girl in class, and the popular girls are noticing me. That is definitely a new experience, only it comes fifteen years too late to be anything but awkward.

“Tessa, Selena and Natalie—thanks for coming to say hello.” I give them my best teacher’s smile. “I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other, if we’re…on the same floor.”

In the same dorm, I almost said. Knee-jerk reflex.

Hornberger hands me my wine, and my eyes focus on the glittering drops of water that are running down the outside of the glass, gather at the bottom, fall onto his wrist and run down the underside of his arm. This is what stimulus overload does to me; I latch on to a tiny detail and close in on it. Then the still life of the drops of water on Nick Hornberger’s hairy footballer’s arm turns dramatic. Natalie Greco reaches out, and with the backs of her four fingers, slightly bent, she brushes the drops away. She is talking to him about something college-related—I catch the words “scanning” and “PDF”—but her eyes find the detail that mine had also found, and she lifts her hand and brushes the water away. Neither of them comments on her action or stops the conversation, and it is this that tells me that they are sleeping together.

I look up and around to see whether anyone else has seen what I just saw, and I catch Yvonne Roberts’s pleading stare, urging me over to join her and Elizabeth Mayfield. It turns out that Elizabeth will not, after her stint as chair, go back to full-time teaching but proceed up the administrative ladder to the position of Dean of Studies. She graciously accepts our congratulations and encourages us to approach her, notwithstanding her principal duties, should we need her help or advice. There is not a single glance over at Hornberger and his circle of giggling admirers to indicate that she does, in fact, doubt the new chair’s ability or willingness to look after us.

I decide to take Elizabeth at her word. She seems genuinely upset when she hears about the mess in my office; apparently it was reported clean and empty months ago. Neither of us mentions Andrew Corvin’s name, and I am as certain as I can be that she appreciates my discretion. Relief at her promise to look into it gives me a second wind of sociability, and when Dancey beckons me over, I bound up to him like a trusting puppy.

Matthew Dancey, I decide after five minutes in which he scolds me with paternal sternness for volunteering to do service that isn’t expected of me and stresses that cooperativeness is of course the first virtue of a valued team member, is a politician. Physically, he is nondescript: below medium height, nearly bald, very thin, a little ill-looking. The only attractive thing about him is his smooth, sonorous voice, but as he speaks I sink into an aural hallucination of this voice as it affably dissects a poor junior professor’s failings and informs her that her three-year tenure review was unsuccessful. This man surely can smile and smile and be a villain. I am too exhausted and too pleased with the prospect of an uncluttered office to worry about the mixed messages that he is sending me. He is very upfront about the awkwardness of Dolph and me working together in the same subfield and suggests we might consider a project that would benefit us both. I can see that Dolphie, standing next to Dancey like a bodyguard with his biceps stretching the short sleeves of his shirt, hates the idea as much as I do, but with the non-tenured obsequiousness that unites us, we both nod and assure Dancey that this is a great idea.

“Anna, you have heard about the new jewel in our crown, haven’t you?” Dancey continues. “The new Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology? Nick Hornberger was instrumental in acquiring the necessary funds—well, he and the task force delegated to undertake this project. It would make an excellent impression if the English department were among the first to convene a conference there—perhaps about Renaissance art and neuroesthetics? That’s Dolph’s field, of course, but you have worked on iconography, too, so you wouldn’t find yourself too much out of your depth!”

I just want to get out of this overheated bar and head back to my quiet little haven on the tomato farm, but I have to be polite. “You wrote your dissertation about neuroesthetics?”

“Visual art and visual images in Shakespeare, yes,” Dolph speaks up for the first time. “That’s how I cover the early modern requirement and bring cutting-edge theory to the table. I guess you see why it irks me that I lost out to two MILFs who sailed in here on a diversity ticket.”

I can only stare at him, the last sip of wine unswallowed in my mouth.

“All search committees have to balance academic excellence and fit with political considerations.” Dancey nods as if he hadn’t heard. “These days, white, middle-class men sometimes get rough deals. That’s only fair, of course, seen in a historical perspective. And Anna, you’d not be doing yourself a favor at all if you allowed this to reflect on your standing at Ardrossan. We are very happy to have you!”





“He said what to you?” Irene screeches into the phone.

“I know.” Generally, I enjoy entertaining Irene with Tidbits from Academia, but I’m not enjoying this.

“He called you a MILF?”

“Not directly, but—yeah, he did. And if you love me, don’t—!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say, I told you so!”

“Well…”

“Reenie, I don’t know how to play this.” On my back porch, with another glass of wine, I don’t feel as low as I did when I drove home, but I’m still depressed enough to send a little cri de coeur to Manhattan. “They’re nice to me, don’t get me wrong. But boy—these small departments are cans of slithery, scholarly worms!”

“So what’s new?”

“That I’m in the thick of it. Well, not the thick of it, I’m not that important, but…involved. I didn’t used to be. That’s what was so great about England. I used to be just the li’l Yank and no one paid any attention to me. I preferred that.”

“But, Anna, Anna Banana, you can’t always be the promising grad student. Now it’s time to be the badass prof. You gotta toughen up! What were you wearing?”

“Polka-dotted hammer pants and flip-flops. There is nothing badass about these petty power games and these malicious Machiavellian machinations!”

“Come on, Anna, you know that this is what college is like! What’s the big surprise?”

I pull my knees close to my chest in a gesture that reminds me of Jules Walsh.

“I want to be Anshel, the Yeshiva boy.”

“Like there ain’t no power play at a shul!”

“But I hate it so! I want to concentrate on my work, not on playing games!”

“Power games are part of your work. That’s the crucial thing you don’t understand. Start shmoozing, girl! You still believe that all you have to do is work hard and be nice and you’ll get the job, but eighty percent of it is connections!”

“I got this job.”

“Yes, and why? Because you shmoozed that guy Schermerhorn. Matterhorn. Horny Horn.”

“Hornberger.”

“Hornberger!” Irene squeals. “Dude! Work him—you said he liked you, and you need allies.”

“I do need allies, but he isn’t one of them. Two reasons: a) I think Horny Horn is having an affair with one of the teaching assistants, and b) the people I like here don’t like him. On the other hand, he is chair at the moment. And he’s the golden boy because he nabbed a huge sponsorship deal.”

“Your chair is a dirty old man who f*cks grad students?” Once again, even pragmatic Irene is shocked.

“Oh, no, no, no, you have the wrong idea. He’s not young anymore, maybe fifty, but big, and he looks good, or looked, if you like that sort of thing. Bronzed, brawny, but evidently with some brains, or he wouldn’t be here. The worst I can say about Hornberger is that I think he’ll be inefficient. No, it’s that he’s under Dancey’s thumb.”

“Not that he has sex with students?”

“As long as that doesn’t make him corrupt, I couldn’t care less. Nobody cared that Clinton was having sex with his intern, did they? Until she blabbed and he committed perjury. But if I have Dancey against me, who is one of the most influential people in the place, and his buddy, the department chair—maybe I should start polishing my CV right away.”

“Don’t panic. Create your own alliances. Bert Scherer can’t stand me, but because I have the other senior partners on my side, I’m safe. Oh, I haven’t told you. They’re going to ask me to take over the Whettering case when Louise has her baby. Ed Barton told me yesterday.”

“Whoa—hey! Props to Irene! Congratulations!”

“It would be a nice feather in my cap if I brought that one home. And I will.” The tone of her voice leaves no doubt that she will. Irene usually gets what she wants.

“What does Jacques say? On boit du champagne?”

“He says if I win that one, he’ll take me to Per Se for dinner.”

Perhaps this is where Irene and I most differ. I would prefer a boyfriend who takes me to a romantic restaurant when I get the case, not if I win it. There is a reason why Jacques and I never warmed to each other, even though he has been a fixture since he and Irene met in law school.

“So, who do you like?” she asks. “Among your colleagues. Who could be an ally?”

“Dunno.”

“C’mon, Anna, you gotta do better than that!”

“Tim Blundell—he does Brit Lit, too, he’s half English and—”

“English, huh? Does that set your little heart a-flutter?”

“Well, no, in view of the fact that he is as gay as Christmas, it doesn’t.”

“He is? Down there? Yikes. Won’t he get, like, fifty lashes and two years of hard labor if he’s caught in flagrante?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I decide not to mention Tim’s closet. “Anyway, I like Tim, and he introduces me to people I like, on the whole. But he does shoot his mouth off about our colleagues, and although he makes me laugh, I’m worried that I’m getting in with the worst set of the school.”

“You want to be careful with that,” Irene agrees. “Stay out of trouble, find a powerful prof who’ll protect you, and a few people to hang out with. That’s all you need right now. Are you getting enough exercise?”

“Mm…”

“Well, do, Anna! Because the only thing I’m worried about is that you’ll work too hard and worry too much, panic, like you do, and then start an affair with, I dunno, a student, or the prez, or someone else totally inappropriate. Like you do!”

“You make me sound like a Pavlovian bitch.”

“Just sayin’, babycakes. Take that bitch out for long runs, and she won’t show that stress-induced random mating behavior!”

“Irene, I wish you were here. So I could slap you!”