The Englishman (43 page)

A long kiss into the hollow of his right hand, and I sit up. Shaky.

“Go now. Go quickly.”

I don’t know whether that was addressed to me or to himself, because he isn’t looking at me anymore. He has withdrawn from me. And although that makes me want to climb onto his lap and kiss the desire back into his eyes, I am sober enough to understand that I have to let him be.

Chapter 24

K
ISSING
G
ILES
W
AS
T
HE
B
IZARRE
, D
REAMLIKE
C
ULMINATION
of a sequence of bizarre, dreamlike events as the second half of the semester claims us. The second graffiti was painted over even more swiftly than the first, and since it didn’t seem to contain a threat, it is regarded more in the nature of an eccentricity than anything else. “Seen any graffiti lately?” becomes the jokey greeting in the Eatery at lunchtime.

Now that I know what Hornberger was looking for in my office, I am more reluctant than ever to get involved. STFU. Giles never told me what he intends to do with the file. Hornberger’s first hearing is over, and the second one has been scheduled for the week before Thanksgiving; the first meeting of Tim’s tenure review committee has been shifted to the week after Thanksgiving. Now all the balls are rolling, and we will see where they land. I am a mere bystander.

In a strange kind of way I am glad that it was Hornberger who broke into my office, because—though turpid—I can understand his motivation; he’s trying to save his neck. Corvin is a crazy old man who uses disgusting fluids to express his antagonism toward a new colleague. That is a lot more disturbing. I have not seen Corvin since the extraordinary faculty meeting after the rape bomb exploded. The image of this vindictive emeritus moray eel sitting in his burrow and waiting to dart out again to bite me when next he feels provoked is one that I push away.

Not that I have much time to brood. Mindful of Selena O’Neal’s academic predicament, I am very conscientious and very candid when it comes to advising undergraduates which major to go for, whether to go for honors in the major, and in a couple of cases whether graduate school might be a good idea. This leads to hours of fruitless and draining argument with young people who have always been extolled for their academic abilities and are now bumping up against real resistance and their own unexplored limits. I am not impatient, though. This is very much the routine work of a college lecturer, and after all the hindrances of recent weeks, it is soothing and strangely validating to simply be doing my job.

The few hours I snatch to finish my anatomy paper for the Notre Dame conference are precious and stimulating. I saw Giles once in the past two weeks, and that was across the library reading room. Once I had a quick coffee with Tim. Yvonne and I supported each other in our first round of Ardrossan essays—she had more plagiarism than usual, too—but that was not exactly fun and games.

I have taken up my early morning walks again, which means I am out with my thermos between six and seven o’clock. At first I thought it must have been a Walsh or a forest warden who scratched the bark on several trees. But one morning, the gold-brown shape ahead of me turns its head, and the early morning sun is reflected in its eyes as by two small torches. A bobcat. This is why I came to live on a Piedmont fruit farm after living in New York City.

I am surprised the cat does not change its itinerary when I start waiting at the same crossroads in the wood each morning. I sit there; it materializes out of the undergrowth, casts me a pissy glance and strikes across the clearing. Once it has a small dark body in its mouth; its legs blur as it hurries past me for fear I’ll rob it of its prey. Once, in the week before Thanksgiving, its approach seems slower and more cumbersome. No wonder: it got hold of one of the Walshes’ chickens. The feathery white neck is dangling out of the cat’s mouth; there is no point in trying to chase after it.

“Oh, man!” I sigh. “Okay, I’m not going to turn you in, but don’t let me catch you doing it again!” That is a sentence I am saying far too often these days.

Chapter 25

“A
BOUT
T
OMORROW
—”

Giles Cleveland materializes by my elbow, watching Dancey and Dolph caught up in some conspiratorial exchange as our colleagues file out of the Sperm Room. It is so like Dancey to schedule a faculty meeting one day before we break up for Thanksgiving. Nobody is concentrating, everyone is mulling over holiday menus or travel arrangements, eager to get away.

“Tomorrow. You’re not—” Giles hesitates, and for a wild moment I expect him to announce that I cannot go because there will be a departmental putsch and we all have to be present. “Are you flying to South Bend or to Chicago?”

“South Bend. Why?”

An emotion flickers across his face, but I still think that it must be in reaction to the two men standing by the windows. Giles barely acknowledged me during the meeting; I assumed that is what happens when you kiss colleagues after drunken parties. In the cold light of day, they ignore you.

“I could take you to the airport, if you’re on the eight-twenty flight.” As if he was offering to lend me some books or get a marker for me from his office.

“Why?” I realize I am repeating myself, but in my confusion I value precision over variation.

“I’m going, too.”

“To the airport?”

“To Notre Dame.”

I cannot help myself.

“But
why?”

“Er…” He avoids my eyes and makes a show of fumbling to come up with a good reason. “I gotta see a horse about a man.”

“Barton, Scherer and Nussbaum Legal Associates, Irene Roshner speaking.”

“Help, Irene!
Help!”

“Banana! What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“Yeah…no…can you call me back later tonight? I know you’re busy, but—can you?”

“Sure, but tell me now! I’m alone in the office. I can talk. Tell me—what’s—”

“He’s coming to the conference!” I wail into the receiver, crouching on the sofa in my woolen pants even though I know that will make them go baggy at the knees.

“Who? What conference? Anna, no one has died, right? No one is about to die?”

“No! Well, my career.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Irene is using her resolute voice with me, so I settle down, straighten my legs, and try to be coherent.

“Tomorrow I’m going to present at a conference at Notre Dame. I bought the plane tickets months ago when—”

“Hey, I thought you were coming home for Thanksgiving!”

“I am coming home for Thanksgiving! Except I’m coming via South Bend. Anyway, today after a faculty meeting Giles Cleveland wanders up to me and offers me a ride to the airport. Tomorrow. Because he’s coming to the conference. It’s on iconography in early modern Europe, for Chrissakes! He isn’t even interested in that!”

“Seems he has unfinished business to attend to.”

“
Shut up!”

“Why? You know where your priorities lie! It’s okay to flirt a little. Might do some good, when you’re up for your review.”

“I don’t want to—
flirt
—with him! I want to suck his brains out! And not by the shortest way!”

Irene groans into the phone. “Are you sure no one can hear you? You’ll be fired for sexual harassment! You
and
Horny Horn!”

“I’m not calling from my office, you
nebbish
. And I am absolutely not planning on being part of Ardrossan’s next little sex scandal.”

“You only wanna suck the Englishman’s
schlong.”

“I want to do everything with him.”

“Well, you can’t. Way too messy, an affair with a senior colleague while you’re on tenure track. Question is, how will he take a brush-off?”

I am trying to assess how Giles will react when I reject him, but my system jams at a point of grammar.
If
. How would Giles react
if
I rejected him?

“
Much virtue in ‘if’…
”

“Huh? Oh, you’re quoting again.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

“Of course you’re going! What’s he going to do, fling himself on you in a dark corner of a Catholic campus? If you don’t encourage him, he won’t try anything. He’d be mad to!”

“Well, in view of the fact that I kissed him…”

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.

“Reenie?”

“Yes, hello. Could I speak to Anna Lieberman, please?”

“It was after a party, and—”

“That kiss—what are we talking about here, anyway? When you say ‘kiss,’ do I hear ‘blow job’?”

“No!”

“That kiss may have cost you and your parents tens of thousands of dollars. You realize that, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Because a fling with a member of your tenure-and-promotion committee will cost you exactly that: tenure and promotion. And if you think word won’t get round why that promising young scholar didn’t get tenure at Ardrossan, you know a lot less about academia than I do! If all you wanted was a teaching job at a third-rate school somewhere in flyover country, why bother with an Ivy League education?”

This is the heavy artillery. I am impressed that Irene would get genuinely upset with me. Irene Roshner. The arch-player.

“Anna, I gotta go. Ed Barton is giving me the evil eye. But one more thing. I’ve known you practically forever, and I’m going to tell you this truth about yourself: you could not handle an affair with Cleveland. I’m not saying that because I don’t want you to have great sex again—I do. But Cleveland’s not the one. You’re hardly tough enough for academia as it is. You’re way not tough enough to brazen out an affair with one of the shooting stars in your field. You said he is going to be big.”

“For sure he is.”

“Then picture it. All you’ll ever be is the little girl Cleveland fucked when she was new on tenure track at Ardrossan. There are bitches who could handle shit like this, but you’re not one of them!”

“Thanks, Reenie. You’re making your point very clear.”

“Love you, too. Bye!”

In a depressing kind of way I was more at peace when I still thought that Giles was married and that he disliked me. I bore the deep, blind yearning of my body for his like I bore Andrew Corvin’s garbage in my office. A time of tribulation that I will always connect with my first months at Ardrossan. Eventually the situation would have resolved itself and become a hazy, even amusing memory: the crush I had on Giles Cleveland during my first semester. It is much, much harder to muster stoic self-denial now that I know what his lips feel like on mine. Now that I have heard him admit that in another world he would come to my bed. Does Indiana count as “another world?”

He won’t try to seduce me. He could have had me on a platter the other night, and he refused. Politely, regretfully, but he refused, and he was right.