The Englishman (9 page)

“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-fuck-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?”