by Ava Paris
“Okay. That sounds fair.” I said, knowing I was parroting what he had just said before and smiling to myself for how silly it must sound.
“Don’t students get paid to go to university in Sweden?” I asked.
At my question, William nodded. “Yes, they do.”
“That must be good for them. Not having to worry about how to pay for their books, or having any loans to pay back when they are done.” I told him. “They wouldn’t be starting behind the eight ball.”
“Behind the eight ball?” He asked me.
I laughed at how silly it was, that I had gotten so relaxed with the easy conversation that I didn’t remember William wasn’t a native English speaker and wouldn’t understand every idiom a native speaker is used to hearing and using on a daily basis. We were climbing stairs though so I had an excuse to not speak for a moment. When we reached the top of the stairs and I turned left, leading the way, William trailed behind me and I told him that, “behind the eight ball is an expression. It is an idiom taken from the game pool. If you are behind the eight ball, it is impossible to make a move in the game without hitting the eight ball. If you hit the eight ball it means your opponent gets penalty shots, so no matter what you do, you are starting behind where you should be, and don’t really have any opportunities to improve your position with the shot you’re taking, also, you have given your opponent two opportunities to your none. It is a way of expressing inequity and injustice. But, maybe not the best way to express this. Anyway, here is my office.” I said, reaching for my keys. We had climbed a few sets of stairs as we were talking and I felt a little out of breath, but I didn’t want to show it.
I slipped the key in the door and turned it in the lock. In opening the door I exposed not only my messy office space, but the messy office space of half the faculty who also shared the office with myself. Oops. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to see this. But, what did I know? No-one had properly communicated with me about what he was here for, or for how long. I had received one email about him then he had been in my lecture hall waiting for me this morning. Perhaps if I had answered my phone this morning I would have discovered that the call was actually about him. But, I would never know because I didn’t answer that call this morning and I did run off to work to arrive late instead.
It was so good I lived near campus I thought as I collected a few bits and pieces from my desk.
“The class is downstairs in this building.” I told William. “This is actually supposed to be the natural sciences building, which is why the interior decorators used so much green. It is nice that we got our own building and the building was built to be energy efficient, too. Adding to the green-ness I guess.” I told him as I rifled through papers on my desk. The building really was an architectural marvel and had won awards which the university - along with the architect - were incredibly proud of, but when you worked in it every day you hardly cared after a while.
“I like green buildings.” William told me. “They make a lot of sense, with the climate.”
“Yes, it is the way of the future. But like all of these things, a little slow perhaps.” I told him.
“Oh?” He asked.
I shook my head a little without looking at him as I pulled out the last of my things and put everything in a clear plastic crate I often took to class. It was easier to carry down all the stairs than anything else I had.
“Is this everything?” William asked. I nodded and told him yes and he picked up the crate, headed for the door.
I was pretty shocked by what I was seeing. He had picked up the crate which I knew was incredibly heavy with just one hand as he opened the door for me with the other. He didn’t even show the slightest sign of strain on his face as he did so either.
I was surprised, but didn’t want to show it. I didn’t think that would portray that professional appearance I was trying to keep up. The professional appearance I had been trying to keep up since walking into my own lecture late and finding this gorgeous man playing hanged man with my class, relaxed and care free as if he had always been in charge of minding my class for me.
I looked at him and he at me, me trying so hard to keep my eyes off his defined muscles and on his face. I failed. Oh dear, this was going to be a long day indeed. Perhaps I should have just stayed in bed.
Chapter Four
For the rest of the day, William was at my side. He took on the role of an assistant, albeit a very well-educated assistant who knew just as much as any professor would, so, nothing like the honors and PhD students professors like myself often had helping with classes in exchange for credits or cash. He helped me set up experiments for the students, answered a lot of the questions that they should have known the answer to to begin with, was polite and kind to each and every one of them while still maintaining that natural authority he had. Also, I was sure the female students who kept asking him questions they should already know the answer to were just enjoying his attention. If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t blame them.
He either didn’t notice this or didn’t care. He seemed to be utterly focused on doing the work and in making my life easier. Something that I did really appreciate.
After all my classes were done for the day - I only had three classes on this particular day, two lectures and a lab - I asked William if he wanted to come with me to help the honors students with their work in the wetlands. I figured he was there anyway, an extra set of hands - and eyes - couldn’t hurt.
“What are they studying there?” He asked me.
I made a face and told him honestly, “I don’t think they know.”
“What do you mean?” He asked.
“Well, I don’t think they know what they are studying because it keeps changing. At first they wanted to study the bugs and how they indicated water quality and overall environmental health. Then they changed their mind when there was an algal bloom and they realized the wetlands were not as healthy as they had originally thought. Then they wanted to study the algae, but they didn’t get enough samples…”
I trailed away, feeling like perhaps I shouldn’t tell him this. Perhaps it was my failing as a professor that my students really didn’t know what they were studying. Perhaps they - like myself - should always know what they’re doing or at least appear to know what they’re doing in an effort to be seen as professional and successful, regardless of whether they felt professional and successful in their day to day grind or not. I knew deep down that this wasn’t the case, because honors and PhD students changed their focus almost as much - if not more - than undergraduate students did, but that didn’t really matter. I still felt like a bit of a failure.
I tried to push those feelings aside as I smiled and asked William if he would like to come again, to see the students doing their work and potentially to help them if he felt up to it. As a visiting professor, he didn’t have to help them. I was supposed to be there to help them, but I knew they could use all the extra help they could get.
“What are they looking at today?” He asked me.
“Birds.” I said with a smile, it was a little ridiculous when it wasn’t mortifying and a sign of my failure as a professor. I saw the irony in my students not really knowing what they were doing and that birds and bugs, even though they were both important creatures when it came to wetlands, were not the same. Not by a long shot.
“I would be interested in coming to see the birds.” He told me. “If I could ask you questions as we go?”
“Sure.” I agreed, quickly reflecting that he really hadn’t interviewed me about my work all day, despite that apparently being what he was here for as a visiting professor. Mostly we had made small talk, and when we had approached work, we hadn’t really spoken about work in the same way I knew somehow that we should be discussing my work. Otherwise, there would be no point to him tailing me at all.
Even though I knew he was basically a free resource for the university, I didn’t really have any problems in my work that I felt he could help me with right at this
moment, and I was too polite to just turn him away. I was too polite to tell him that nope, I didn’t need his help. Could he go and look devastatingly sexy in someone else's classroom? Could he distract another professor as well as all the girls and gays in her class?
I pushed that thought out of my head as soon as it came to me, no. He wasn’t devastatingly sexy. He was my colleague. It was not professional for me to look at him that way. It wasn’t professional for me to even notice what my students were doing, unless I had planned to do something about it. I had to stop.
That feeling, that thought, begged the question though.
“How long will you be shadowing me and my work?” I asked him.
“Oh, a few weeks maybe.” He told me casually.
“Weeks?” I asked, far too startled. Was he serious? Most of these visiting professorships didn’t last that long, not at all.
“Yes. A few weeks. Is that okay?” He asked.
I caught myself. “Yes, that should be fine. I am happy to help out another professional where I can.” I said, feeling the smile on my own face was a bit forced.
Chapter Five
One morning a week into our professional acquaintance, William came into my office to find me slumped over my computer looking at some data sets. To most people’s eye, it would appear that I was just looking at a bunch of numbers. The truth was though that I was looking at the water temperatures in a lake near Sydney’s northern beaches region. The data had been collected by a PhD student and I was using it in one of my own experiments as a way to compare and contrast what I was looking at, but the anomalies were pretty intense, so I was looking at them in the data and if they needed to be taken out as they could be errors created by otherwise normally functioning equipment when William appeared behind me.
“Hey!” He said, and I jumped.
“Oh, hi.” I said, startled, my eyes wide.
“I got you a coffee.” He said, putting down a coffee in a reusable takeaway cup beside me. I looked down at the cup and saw that it was mine. But I had already had my morning coffee from that same cup this morning. I stared at it for a long time. Hadn’t I just put it down after drinking the last drop of my morning coffee less than five minutes ago? How did he suddenly appear with the same cup full of coffee? Even if he had of slinked in and taken the cup without my noticing, how would he have managed to have the cup filled with fresh coffee again by a barista before bringing it back to me?
Before I could say anything about the oddness of all of this, William was looking at my data, seeing the same anomalies as me when he told me, “I think this is important data.”
“Do you?” I asked, skeptical that he even knew what the data was considering the data wasn’t labeled anywhere with the lakes name, or even that it was the data of water temperature in a lake.
“Yes, I do.” He told me.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“I think that because if you can show an upwards trend in the temperature in the water in such a short span of time, you can show an upwards trend in the temperature of the planet is much quicker than we think, right?” He asked.
“Plenty of scientists have already shown that the climate is changing.” I told him. That wasn’t the point I wanted to make with my data. Either in my own experiment where I was making a comparison or in the PhD candidates research. We were looking for something else and using this data to back up our claims. I know that the data is what it is and we have to accept findings no matter what, but these findings were not for testing overall climate.
“I agree, they have.” He told me. “There are other things here.”
“Oh?” I asked.
He pointed to the anomalies in the data, days where the lake was too hot or too cold, and it was much more extreme than the air temperature data taken on that day. Where the data in the lake didn’t tally up with the data from the days surrounding it or even from historical weather data, something must be wrong with the data we have, or so was my thinking.
“Yes, these days were bigger shifts for the climate.” He told me confidently.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Yes, the climate is changing faster than people think and you can see it in the water.” He said.
I stared at him for a long moment. He sounded like a first year student trying to make a prediction about something after someone else in class explained the most rudimentary concepts to him. He sounded like he was trying to make some sort of prediction without having all the data in front of him, and as a scientist, that made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I was made even more uncomfortable by the fact that he was also a well-respected scientist.
“No, it’s just.” He began, then reached for my coffee, “Do you want to start again?”
“Start what again?” I asked.
William looked forlorn and breathed a heavy sigh before he said almost to himself, “It’s been too many times.”
“Too many times?” I asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. When is your next class?” He asked.
“At twelve. But I -” I caught sight of the time on my computer, it was a quarter to twelve. I swore I had just sat down and looked at this data. Where had all the time gone? Disappearing time filled my mind as I looked at the my phone’s screen to confirm that yes it really was a quarter to twelve. The time really was gone, although I wasn’t sure where it had gone.
“That’s crazy.” I said so quietly I was almost breathing the words.
“Ya, sometimes when I am looking at statistics and data, sometimes I lose track of the time too.” He told me in his accent which sounded thicker today than usual somehow.
I looked up at him. I never lost track of the time like this. This was one of the few days where I could work uninterrupted from the moment I got into the office in the morning until midday when I would need to teach a class. I needed this time to get my best work done.
Publish or perish, as it is in academia, isn’t a joke. It is the life we have to live to get our best work done.
Frustrated, I reached for the save button to save my work and grabbed a muesli bar from a box I kept on my desk. It would have to be this until after I got out of the lecture this afternoon and could eat something a little more substantial.
I had only just opened the muesli bar when William was reaching for my big plastic crate. I looked up at him, thankful that he would carry things for me, even though his criticisms of my work didn’t make as much sense as I felt they should. I would have to ask him what he meant later though I thought as my mind turned from something he had done moments ago to the upcoming class which would be here quicker than I had expected.
We walked along the corridor and down the stairs in silence. The lecture was in a different building so I bit down on my teeth as we walked out into the windy and rainy Melbourne day. We made our way quickly into the other building together then continued talking. I quickly forgot about his criticisms as we slipped into our easy way of talking that was becoming normal for the two of us.
“I like this class.” He told me. “I wish we had it when I was studying for my undergraduate degree.”
I smiled. “I agree. Students don’t know how good they have it now. When I was studying, we didn’t do nearly as much field work.” I told him.
“In Sweden, we didn’t do as much either.” He agreed with me.
“Oh, plenty of universities here don’t do this much field work.” I told him, “This university is known for it. That’s why so many students choose to come here.”
There was a moment as we got into a lift and I reached over him for the button as he didn’t remember which floor we were going to when I brushed against him, and I was back in that same place I had been on day one. Those same heady teenaged girl feelings were taking me over.
No. It wasn’t professional to think about your colleagues this way. No, I was not going to be a professor who people gossiped about behind her back, I had worked so hard to
get here and to be seen with the level of professional respect I was seen with. No, I was not going to be someone who others laughed at. I had not worked this hard to be the butt of jokes, especially considering most of my colleagues were male and would joke about this either without understanding how damaging it is for a professional woman or wouldn’t care. That and once you show yourself to be a sexual being at work, sometimes a line forms behind your guy, which is creepy, but something I know happens. Nope, not today gorgeous man.
It didn’t matter how gorgeous and clever he was. It didn’t matter how exotic. I wasn’t going to go for it. Despite what every part of my body was telling me. I wouldn’t be that reckless.
No. No I wouldn’t I told myself. I would be good. I clenched my teeth as if against the cold again.
Then, for a moment as our eyes met, I felt like I had to physically remove myself from the situation, but there was nowhere to go, we were stuck in a tiny elevator.
Then the doors opened and the breath I hadn’t been aware I had been holding was released as I rushed out onto our floor.
Thank god. Crisis averted.
Or at least that’s what I had to tell myself as I fiercely fought against every fiber in my being that was crying out for me to go for it. Every fiber in my being that were all screaming at once for me to just touch him, that reaching out a hand and just touching him would stop the ache.
Not today though. Today I averted crisis. Today I swallowed the ache and went on to be my professional self.
Chapter Six
It is tough working in a male dominated field, even in twenty-first century Australia. There has been plenty of research into these things from all over the world, but when you’re at cocktail hour with the girls, sometimes the research doesn’t matter. Sometimes you let slip just how you really feel, and that is far more important than any research when it comes to your life at work.
This cocktail hour was an impromptu thing between four girlfriends who hardly saw one another with all the work we had to do. It was a cocktail hour where we would have an opportunity to talk among ourselves in a way we couldn’t in every part of our lives outside of this.
