I hung my jacket and straightened myself up, looking in a mirror someone had kindly glued to the back of our office door. It didn’t do much for morale if you showed up in class with parsley between your teeth or bird poop on your shoulder. I pushed stray hair out of my face and pasted on a trial smile. I would do.
This year’s schedule was better than last year’s, where I had taught 8 a.m. and evening classes, picking up the timetable dregs no one else wanted, but it was still taking a while to get back into the groove. I longed for the sort of panache with which Valerie Bock strode through the halls, her laptop ready to connect to the AV in any room, offering her notes and slides for every lecture.
She was really the model of the job I had envisioned for myself, back when I’d been lured by Margaret Ahlers’ first book into doing my MA. I saw myself teaching freshman English, turning reluctant students into lifelong readers and making critical thinking and the formulation of elegant arguments the accepted mode of discourse. That, of course, hadn’t been the path.
I wondered what would have happened if I’d published my understanding of the Ahlers/Quinn hoax. Would that have secured me the sort of academic career I’d been seeking? I stood in the middle of the office, and then shook myself. That sort of “what if” thinking was the route to madness. Every choice had been the right one at the time, and there was little except the lack of security that I would trade about my life as it was. Even that was becoming less of an issue, with the way the governments were playing with old-age pensions. More people than just I were finding they would have to start considering working till they died as a retirement option. My grasshopper lifestyle wasn’t looking quite so headstrong and silly anymore.
I gathered my books: the class anthology, a file of notes, the plastic folder containing the class information, and my coffee, and made my way back down the stairs to a classroom on the main floor. The tiers of tables with their locked in place seats were half-filled as I got there, and students streamed in while I busied myself getting ready for the class.
We were supposed to be discussing The Yellow Wallpaper, the most consistently anthologized story I’d ever known. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author, was lauded as an early feminist, and her story of a postpartum depressed young woman being misdiagnosed and driven mad by the choices of her physician husband was both accessible and tantalizing for students to play with. I liked, as well, to point out the ways that fiction was developing in terms of the reader being able to suspend disbelief. The story was written in journal or diary style, which was an accepted form of writing. Although fictionalized, one could believe in the possibility of finding a person’s diary and reading it, making it easier for a reader to buy into the reality of the fictional world. For a long time, when published, the story had people shocked by Gilman’s seeming candour of her own bouts of madness.
I spoke to the class of the anecdotal accounts of people overseas worrying about a serial killer in Vancouver when the book Headhunter came out in the early ’80s.
“Since the Canadian fiction market was mostly high culture and mainstream fiction, people ascribed a true-crime sensibility to the novel, and Vancouverites formerly from England with relatives back home were getting letters worried about them, with that madman running about.”
Some students laughed, but others looked a little bemused. They had probably never thought of books having an impact on real life. This was my cause, on the whole—to make them understand the value of fiction, poetry, and essays in the world they inhabited. If I managed, over the course of the next few months, to get them to see how the publication of a controversial piece of writing could change the course of how people behaved, I would have achieved my goals. Being able to construct a solid three-point essay was bonus.
The class went well, and those who had bothered to read the story engaged in a good discussion over whether she was mad to begin with, or made mad by the confinement in the room. Several people made mention of the ways in which the room sounded like a torture chamber rather than a former nursery, which gave me hope for more close reading in the weeks to come. I reminded them about the upcoming essay and my office hours before dismissing them, and turned to erase the white board.
Two or three students stuck around to talk to me outside in the hall, one of them still stuck on his interpretation of the story and the other two wondering whether citations in MLA were all that different from APA. By the time I shook them off to their satisfaction, it was 12:15 and my stomach was grumbling audibly. I took my notes to my office, checked my email, listened to two phone messages from students who were too ill to come to class, and then grabbed my coat and left campus.
There was no way I was going to make it all the way home without expiring of hunger, or at least that was how I was feeling. I checked my phone to discover a message from Denise. She was downtown, having had a dentist appointment, and was I interested in meeting for lunch? I texted back immediately, and we agreed to meet for what Denise and I referred to as “crack chicken,” because it was so amazingly good.
Chicken for Lunch, a mainstay of downtown lunchtime dining, was located in a basement food court of Scotia Place, one of the shinier office buildings in the city core. Run by Amy Quon, whose family had owned the fancy Lingnan Restaurant for as long as I could recall, it was testament to both her personality and her cooking that lineups often wound round the entire food court to get a Styrofoam box of rice, vegetables, three types of chicken, and a spring roll on top.
Denise was three-quarters of the way down the line when I got there. Like the rest of the business-suit-clad crew, we visited in line.
“I wonder how these other food kiosk people feel, getting one or two people while this line taunts them every day?” Denise mused.
“Right. How do you compete with this sort of success?”
“They must make enough from people who just can’t take the time for the line, I guess. But on the whole, it moves quickly enough.”
“Quickly enough for what you’re going to get,” I agreed.
We were settled soon enough with our steaming hot chicken, chopsticks and cans of Fresca. I had chosen curried chicken, hot and dry chicken, and chicken with mushrooms, my very favourite. Denise stuck to the ginger chicken and hot and dry, which she said was the only food she actually dreamed about.
“Did you have a toothache?” I asked.
“No, it was the annual checkup and cleaning,” Denise said, dabbing her lips with her folded paper napkin as if it was thick damask. “My mother would be so proud of me. I’ve gone three years without a single cavity, and the hygienist was impressed with my flossing technique.”
I smiled. Of course, Denise would ace a dental checkup. Denise aced all her tests.
We chatted about our class compositions, and schedules. Denise had a Shakespeare, a grad seminar in Elizabethan women writers, and one freshman class. Normally she taught two classes per term, but was aiming for a half-year sabbatical, so had frontloaded her academic year to make it feasible.
“I really haven’t taught first-year students in about six years, and it’s amazing how different they seem than kids that have been around campus for two or three or more years.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I’m so used to third- and fourth-year students, most of whom have self-selected an English degree, right? So few people take Shakespeare for an elective, although I find the ones who do rather refreshing. But anyhow, the students seem to have created their own personae by the time they get to senior-level courses. What I guess I mean to say is, I can tell them apart.”
I laughed. “I know exactly what you mean. I had three girls with long blond hair who sat in the back row of one of my classes last year, and I couldn’t ever get their names straight. They were sort of interchangeable in my mind, because they all had the same coat, and wore the same look.”
“Right! They haven’t moved out of the high school herd mentality yet.”
“Is that what it is? Oh go
od. I thought it was me getting too old to absorb that many new names in one go.”
“Nope. It’s never our fault, Randy. There is always a sociological explanation for problems that beset us. That is the great joy of the rational world: rationalization.” Denise laughed, and I swear seven men in business suits turned as if a mermaid was singing.
“So,” she segued abruptly, “how are things with you and Guy going to work?”
“I don’t really know,” I confessed. It had been eating away at me, and it was sort of a relief to confront it and discuss it in the middle of a busy food court. “I am not sure how I am going to react when I see him, or what I should do.”
Denise wrinkled her brow, he mouth set in a grimace. “You should be reporting him to the authorities.”
“What authorities? The graduate student association? The provost? Who handles plagiarism and theft of intellectual property at that level? And besides that, even if I found the right window to complain to, what sort of argument do I have, being ignorant of the theft for so many years? It speaks to my intellectual rigour, or lack thereof, that he has stolen my thesis out from under my nose.”
“There have been cases of work from another language being stolen. I’ve heard of a dissertation being translated into German and passed off as one’s own, and the reverse from Norwegian to English,” Denise nodded, “but I hear you. To have someone you know take your material and publish in the same language on the same continent does raise the question of how much you were keeping up with your topic.”
I bristled in spite of knowing I’d opened the door to this discussion. Who was Denise, in her tenured position, to lecture me on keeping up with my academic stakehold? I’d been spending the last dozen years doing anything and everything to keep kale on the table, without the luxury of time to read every literary journal and attend conferences. Guy could have published the complete works of Lucy Maud Montgomery under his own name, and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Speaking of Lucy Maud, I wondered if Guy would use the Colleen McCullough argument if I confronted him with his transgressions. He might say that having spent time with me in his grad school days, he’d inadvertently absorbed the arguments of my thesis without recalling having read them in his youth. That, as I recalled, was her argument for recreating a Montgomery story as her Ladies of Missalonghi. It was a similar argument to George Harrison’s apologia for “My Sweet Lord,” the inadvertent remake of “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons.
And speaking of Guy, I wondered when he was going to be showing up in town. Actual Alumni Weekend events didn’t begin till the Thursday of the third week after classes began, and since they’d started late this year, that would be the last full week of September. If Guy were teaching, he’d be needing to watch his timing rather carefully, one would think. Of course, he might be on sabbatical, or taking course relief to do research, or wherever he was teaching might be on the tutorial concept, where he could slate his students for fortnightly sessions and be relatively free every second week.
I didn’t want him sneaking up on me. If there was going to be one good thing about helping out with the organizing of this clambake, it should be having an inside eye on everyone else’s timetables.
Denise had popped on the LRT from campus to come downtown, so I agreed to travel back with her. We were lucky to find seats on the train heading toward Century Park, which was the direction for the university. Once term began again, the entire city seemed to teem with students, especially on transportation corridors. School zones made traffic denser, and backpacks doubled the size of passengers headed for the university, NAIT, Grant MacEwan and several high schools to be found near the tracks. There was a lot to be said for living close enough to walk to most of the places I frequented.
Denise and I calved off at the HUB egress from the LRT. She headed north to the Humanities Building where her office was, and I wandered past the Fine Arts building and turned east to head through the residence buildings on 88th Avenue, then down the back alley toward my apartment. It was a warm autumn sun on my back, and even the skiff of early leaves in the lane didn’t bother me. If we could make it through September without me digging out my plush-lined tights and boots, I was considering it a victory.
I turned on my laptop on my way to put on the kettle. From the kitchen I heard the pinging of email announcements, which startled me into splashing water on myself as I swished out my teapot. I popped a couple of peppermint teabags in the pot, and went to check my mail.
There were two emails from Leo, the first thanking me profusely in his Leo-nine way for the offer of my sleeping bag and air mattress, and the second reminding me that he was lactose-intolerant, and could I see my way to having some specially formulated skim milk on hand? Another email had come from Sherry Brownlee letting me know that as we now had sixty-five registrants identifying themselves as English Grads Twenty, the name Denise and she had concocted for our subset, we were entitled to an hour of specialty time in the quad Homecoming tent.
There was also a promotion from the Bay, four Groupon offers, a letter from my Aunt Muriel, and a Call Me from Steve, one of his subject-line-only messages.
I could hear the kettle singing from the kitchen. I headed for it, wondering briefly whether that noise pissed off my upstairs neighbour as much as her aerobicizing on Saturday mornings annoyed me. I was extra careful with the boiling water, and soon had settled myself into my small sofa in the living room to read the email from my aunt. Her chatty letter calmed me down for the moment, but I was going to have to do something about my nerves over this whole reunion and plagiarizing situation.
I had to admit, I was worried about receiving more messages from Guy. I had no idea how I was going to react to seeing him again. It bothered me that he might even know my email address. The invites had gone out with the alumni association address, not mine, but still. Had he been keeping tabs on me? And if so, for how long? Till he stole my thesis and then there was no need? And moreover, why the hell was he coming back to this shindig? What did he have to do with the new Margaret Ahlers novel? And would his hair be grey, or would he still have any hair? Would he still be good-looking?
That thought made me feel uncomfortably disloyal to Steve. Thinking of Steve reminded me I was supposed to call him. He had likely tried to reach me on my cellphone, too. I scrabbled for it in my purse, which was near the foot of the loveseat, where I’d dumped it when I came in. I really had to stop putting my ringer on silent all the time. Maybe I could find a ringtone that approximated noises people didn’t associate with the rudeness of a cellphone, like a whiny child or a yapping dog, and not be constantly worried I was infringing on other people’s noise barriers.
I called into my voice mail to hear Steve’s message. It was always easier for him to leave a voice message than type in a text, because he was usually on the road or in transit somehow.
“Hey Randy,” his voice sounded warm in my ear, “I wanted to know if you’re okay for eggs. Robin’s sister-in-law brought in some farm eggs before heading to her stall at Mother’s Market, and there are a dozen going begging here. I could bring them over after my shift—around 5:30? Let me know.”
The voice-mail voice told me the message had been left about an hour earlier, when I had been on my way home. I quickly texted him to say I would love the eggs and to see him, and could have some supper ready for us both, if he liked.
I got back a smiley face, which I took to mean he would be at my door in about another hour.
The apartment was in pretty good condition, considering I hadn’t been in all day, or perhaps because of that. I put away the dishes in the draining rack, set the kettle on, and cleared off the unnecessary mail on the kitchen table.
Steve was true to his timing and emoticon. He looked very happy to see me, and maybe my guilt at receiving a message from an old boyfriend made me a bit more effusive in my kiss at the door. He broke away, still hugging me, and cocked his head for a moment, and then came back in for another kiss
.
“I like it,” he announced, as I pulled back from our embrace. “That is the kiss a true hunter receives.”
“A hunter? What have you been hunting? And what have you caught?”
“You would be amazed.”
“Would I?” I had no idea what Steve was talking about, but he was in such a good mood, it didn’t bother me. “These must be some great eggs.”
He laughed, and handed me a cardboard container. I peeked in at beautifully brown eggs, a couple of which had chicken dung still clinging to the side. Farm fresh came with its own issues.
“I didn’t mean the eggs, but yeah, they’re pretty wonderful.” He followed me into the kitchen, where I put the eggs in the fridge. “What would you give, though, to have a look at this which I am holding in my hand?”
I turned to see him waving a file folder at me. He must have pulled it out of his satchel. It was faded and official-looking with large numbers across the tab and a large stamp on the front that reminded me of an old library stamp sheet, probably because I could see signatures and dates written into the boxes on the stamp.
Steve looked at me trying to process it, and grinned.
“Oh, it’s official all right. This is Hilary Quinn’s incident and autopsy file. I figured it might be of interest.”
35.
He figured correctly.
We sat side-by-side at the kitchen table as he walked me through the notes and forms in the twenty-odd-year-old file. When the kettle sang, he got up to fill the teapot as I worked my way through the scribbled notes in the margins of poorly typed statements.
I found my statement in the bunch, as well. It looked as if they had interviewed everyone she had been teaching, as well as the professors who had offices along the same hallway and two of the secretaries. There was one name missing from the interviews, though. Guy Larmour had no statement recorded. I wondered if it was missing, after all these years, or an oversight of the original officers. Surely someone would have told them he had a key to her office.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 19
