Grace (5 page)

What roads does Sally want to travel? He thinks of her friend Anna Chang, a Chinese American with penetrating eyes and a placid smile that never fails to get under his skin. Anna works for his university system. She lives a few blocks from his apartment, but teaches at another college in Queens. Anna has her Ph.D., Anna is tenured, Anna is an assistant professor. Anna has no further ambitions. Tenure protects Anna, so Anna pursues
her hobby: gardening. She is a member of the horticultural club, she is a volunteer at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, she is an expert on eliminating the mealy bug from houseplants.

Anna is an English teacher. She teaches composition and literature at her college. Anna doesn’t think she needs to do research to teach composition and literature at a college where the majority of the freshmen read on a seventh-grade level and few can pass the university-wide placement exam. If Anna has any stirrings of conscience, this is the argument she presents to herself. The logic of it dissipates all doubt. Anna is happy with her life. Why not Sally?

He is on dangerous ground now for he does not approve of Anna’s choice. He is thinking only of how contented she seems, always pleasant, always smiling. Sally folded her tent when she became an anachronism. So she would have him believe. Is he to blame for that? Is he to blame for her surrender? She was teaching kindergarten when he met her. She was not a poet. Yes, she had written some poetry, but that did not make her a poet. A poet in his mind is someone actively writing poetry, someone struggling to find tangible expressions for the intangible, no matter what. Sally has chosen to struggle with the tangible: the children in her classroom. Giselle.

Perhaps Anna knew all along she did not have it in her to be a scholar. The Ph.D. was as far as she could go. At least she has come to terms with her limitations. He has come to terms with his, why not Sally? He teaches literature but he does not create it. He does not have the hubris of other literature professors to think he can.
Those who can, do. Those who cant, teach.
He is one
of those who can’t. Sally cannot think it is easy for him to accept this. She knows the long hours he used to spend hunched over his laptop, trying. Doesn’t every English teacher try at least once? Doesn’t every English teacher say, I can do this too?

Sally read his manuscript. More show, less tell, she would say over and over again. But he was in the business of telling. He was an academic, a teacher, a preacher, a lecturer, a hector, a cajoler.

The rejection letters piled up.
More show, less tell.
But he didn’t know how. In the end he and Sally made a party to celebrate his failure. He ripped, she cut in ribbons, and they put all five hundred pages of the manuscript that wasn’t a novel, that would never be a novel, in the garbage, opened a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and made love on the living-room floor.

Surely she knew it hurt. Surely she knew it was not easy to surrender, to admit he did not have the talent, would never have the talent.

He pulls into the parking lot at the college. It is Friday. Faculty do not teach on Fridays. Teaching on Fridays ruins the weekend. The lot, as he expects, is empty; the snow has been cleared. He can park where he chooses. He chooses a spot close to the sidewalk, near to the main door of the college, the provost’s spot.

Inside, some of the classroom doors are closed, but he is certain the teachers in these rooms are adjuncts, members of a cottage industry that has mushroomed in colleges across the country looking for ways to cut expenses on the rising cost of education in America. Adjuncts will teach a class for a fifth of the salary of a full-time faculty. They teach the same students,
but they are not expected to have the same credentials as the full-time faculty. Educators sermonize on the need to limit the number of classes they teach. They cite burnout and diminishing returns, but this argument applies to them, not to adjuncts. Adjuncts can teach as many classes as they want to, or need to. There are rules, of course. In his system, an adjunct is permitted to teach a maximum of three courses and not all three at the same college. But everyone knows that adjuncts cannot live on the paltry salaries they are paid, so no one checks. There are budgets that have to be cut. There are classes to be taught on Fridays. There are adjuncts who teach as many as six courses a semester in as many as three different colleges.

It is thoughts like these that get Justin riled up. There are no such reminders of these inequities in his den at home, another reason why he prefers to work there.

Sally says she is an anachronism, but it is he who is the anachronism, he thinks. He is out of step and out of time with the modern age, the age of political correctness and Afrocen-tricity. The age of technology and big bucks. He is a tenured full professor and yet he does research, he publishes articles, he presents papers. He believes his students deserve the respect of a professor who is continuing to learn as much as he can about the subjects he teaches. He thinks his students should learn not only about their world, their culture, their ancestry, but about the larger world, about other cultures. He thinks British and European literature is relevant to them. He thinks race is irrelevant. He thinks only their humanity is relevant.

But the doubters tell him that the books he teaches were
written by DWMs, Dead White Men, who have nothing to tell inner-city students dodging police who use them for target practice, then ship them upstate to concrete pens.

“And even if there is meaning for them in the books you teach,” a colleague once said to him, “they don’t have the frame of reference to get it.”

But Justin does not believe that. He is frustrated but he has not despaired. He, too, did not have a frame of reference when he was a boy growing up in Trinidad. There were no museums on his island where he could find artifacts from the eras he read about in books. No grand libraries where he could discover the works of great writers and philosophers barely mentioned in his textbooks; no theaters, no symphony halls, no art galleries, no monumental edifices boasting architectural designs that have lasted for centuries. Snow was something he had to imagine. Tulips that bloomed in the spring were a fantasy.

No, he believes the trick is finding a way to make the literature accessible to his students. He will teach DWMs and DBMs, Dead White Men and Dead Black Men, and living ones, too— and even women, the worthy ones.

He is reading an article about the convicted murderer Susan Smith when Mark Sandler knocks on his door. He lets him in. Mark is one of his best students. He is happy to see him. He needs a distraction from academic politics, and from the argument he had with Sally this morning, which continues to filter through his mind. It is thinking of Sally that set him on the road of defending himself as an anachronism. What does Sally want
from him? Is he to be responsible for helping her find herself?
Her space?

“Professor, what brings you out on this cold day?”

Justin shakes the last thoughts of Sally from his head and grasps Mark Sandler’s outstretched hand. “I could ask you the same.”

Under his black leather jacket, Mark Sandler’s shoulders seem excessively wide, but Justin knows it is not only the padding in the jacket that make them seem so. Mark works out in the same gym that he does. He has seen him bench press two hundred pounds. He isn’t tall but he gives the impression of height by the way he holds his head and back erect. His polished black skin reminds Justin of the La Brea Pitch Lake on a sunny day. He has dyed his hair blond. The incongruity of the color against his skin is not unattractive on him. He puts Justin in mind of one of those toga-clad young men one sees bringing wine to Caesar in Hollywood movies.

“Burrowing is for animals,” Mark shadowboxes with him, making a swing for his jaw. Justin ducks.

He likes Mark. Generally he calls his students by their last name—again the anachronism—but he makes an exception for Mark. Mark has taken Comp 1 and 2 with him and the Great Books course. Mark is smart. He is a good writer. Not an excellent writer or an average writer. A good writer, good being an adjective that Justin has observed has lost favor these days along with the respectability of the C grade. Everything is hyperbole. A student is either exceptional or he is a failure. Going
by some of the class rosters Justin sees posted on faculty doors, a third of the students in his college are exceptional, but so, he thinks sighing with resignation, are a third of all college students in America.

Mark wants to be a novelist and Justin has convinced him that first he has to become a reader. This is why Mark has signed up for independent study with him. They have agreed on a reading list, and he meets with Mark once a week to discuss an assigned book. Mark has to write a paper every three weeks based on one of these books. He is doing well, exceptionally well.

“So what’s up?”

“I saw the light in your office. You aren’t usually here on Fridays.”

“I forgot something in the office.” Justin makes a pretense of shuffling papers. His desk is cluttered. Papers stick out at all angles from untidy stacks of books. The only seemingly neat area, to the right of where he works, is the space he has cleared for two gold-framed pictures, one of Sally and the other of the three of them—he, Sally, and Giselle. A portrait of a happy family smiling.

His desk at home is not untidy. Sally makes sure of that. She has an uncanny sense of which books he has already thumbed through and which are important for the paper he is working on at the time. She stacks these books in separate piles and asks him later which she may return to his bookshelves. She puts his students’ papers in folders and labels them for him. She bags his garbage but does not remove it from the room until she has
asked for his permission. Sally is a good wife, a considerate wife, the right wife for a college professor.

“Is this what you were looking for?” Mark points to the article about Susan Smith. He is standing with his back to the door. Justin’s desk is in front of him. Behind it are posters, mainly of conferences Justin has attended, and a narrow long window that looks out to the street. Books tumble on top of each other on the shelves that line the walls.

“Yes,” Justin says. “I plan to use it in my class when we are finished with
Hamlet.”

“You think she lost it?”

“Who?”

“Susan Smith. You think she went temporarily insane?”

Justin returns the question to him. “What do you think?”

“I think you have to be insane to kill your children.”

Justin waits. He wants to see if Mark has made the connection. The story of Susan Smith, the young mother from South Carolina who released the emergency brakes on her car, stepped out of it, closed the door, and watched as the car slipped silently down the boat ramp into the lake carrying her two baby boys who were sleeping in the backseat, is part of his lesson plan for two of the books in his Great Books course.

“But then you’d have to say that Sethe was crazy, and Medea was crazy,” Mark adds.

Bingo! Vindication! He has proven his point. Just make the work accessible and they will get it. Give them a way in, and they will understand the rest. He will begin with Susan Smith. Bring in clippings from the tabloids if he must. Then it will be
smooth sailing to Euripedes’
Medea
and his students will have no trouble with Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
, though he knows many of them will still find Morrison’s work daunting.

“You should teach my class,” Justin says.

Mark grins but in a second, oddly, his face changes. “You can never tell what a woman can do,” he says. “I can’t imagine killing my children to get even with their mother.”

“And you think that is what Medea does? You think she kills her children to get even with her husband because he left her to marry another woman?”

Mark frowns. “I think men better straighten up and fly right,” he says. “Women are doing crazy things these days. I see a lot of them going the lesbian way when their men don’t treat them right. I mean beautiful, sexy women. Honeys.”

This detour puzzles Justin, but he responds. “A man can’t make a woman become a lesbian,” he says. “Either she is a lesbian or she isn’t. Either women turn her on or they don’t. A man has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I know a lot of men whose women are sleeping with women. And they weren’t that way before the men started treating them bad. If a man doesn’t treat a woman right,” he repeats, “she’ll fly the coop.”

Justin guesses that Mark is having problems with his girlfriend and he finds himself thinking again of Sally. Mark’s theories about lesbians do not bother him, but he wonders if he is forcing Sally to leave the coop. Does he need to straighten up and fly right? Yet he does not know what he has done to make
Sally so dissatisfied.
What more does she want?
Eight months ago her life with him could not have been more perfect. She said so herself. In spite of her denial, could there be another man?

“Yes, that is what a woman will do,” Mark says.

A friend would ask. A friend would say at this point: Did you and your girlfriend have a fight, Mark? But he is not Mark’s friend. He is Mark’s professor, so he takes the conversation back to the realm of professors, to the discussion of relationships that are fictitious, not to ones that are nonfictitious.

“Medea is aware of the consequences of killing the woman her husband is planning to marry,” he says with authority. “She has no doubt that her children will be brutally slaughtered in revenge. She prefers to kill them herself and spare them a worse death.” The newspapers reported that Susan Smith was going through a divorce. The week before, her new lover had rejected her. She was despondent. She did not want to live, one journalist wrote. She believed that if she killed her sons first and then committed suicide, her sons would suffer less, rather than if she committed suicide and left them on their own.

“No,” Mark says, “Medea knows that the worst pain her husband can suffer is the death of his children.” He wags his finger at Justin. “Beware of a woman scorned.”