Fran shouldered past him and lifted the receiver; she heard a mechanical voice requesting that she enter a code. “You just have to clear the old voicemail and set up a password.”
Fitger explained that he had attempted to do just that; but lacking high-level security clearance and a degree in cryptology, he had failed to penetrate beyond the insistent request for a code. “Which is why I am asking you, as my assistant, a person employed by this university to aid and support me in the operation of this office, for your invaluable help.”
A Frisbee slammed—again—against his window, dislodging the rusted screen, which tumbled out of its casement. The screen was accompanied on its earthward voyage by the rolls of toilet paper that had helped to prop the window open; thankfully, the dictionary remained firmly in place, as did the fan. There was a shout from below.
Fran started toward the open window but reversed course when a column of insects drifted balletically in on the breeze. “Whoops,” she said. “Looks like you’ve got wasps.”
* * *
—
Precisely above Fitger’s office, on the second floor of Willard Hall, where the temperature was a calming seventy-one degrees, Professor Roland Gladwell made an editorial note in the left-hand margin of the Campus Scribe and buzzed his assistant, the rigorously lovely Marilyn Hoopes, who immediately knocked twice—tap tap!—and then opened the door.
“Econ,” Roland said, pointing with his Montblanc to the Scribe’s opening paragraph. “The Scribe has referred to us as ‘Econ.’ We are the Department of Economics.”
“I’ll call it in,” Marilyn said. “Do you want a printed correction?”
“No.” Roland held up the meaty, pawlike palm of his hand. He was feeling generous. The architectural renovation of Willard Hall’s second floor was…not perfect, but close. It had taken three years to overcome the university’s quibbling legalities and regulations, but finally even that stick-in-the-mud President Hoffman couldn’t deny the largesse of the corporate sponsors who—so what?—had some opinions about hiring and curricular issues and would soon see their names prominently displayed on a plaque in the hall. A certain tenacity, Roland had found, was essential to getting things accomplished at Payne.
He opened the skylight over his desk. Like it or not, education had changed. Gone was the era of young men in neckties reading Catullus; students today, justifiably anxious about rising tuition, needed to be prepared for a dynamic workplace, and universities had to adapt. Ergo, business and professional schools were on the rise, as were the hard sciences, whereas some of the “softer” departments—the language units, art, music (piano and dance lessons, Roland thought, were best left as hobbies for the weekend)—would inevitably shrink. It was a simple and necessary formula: supply and demand and competition. The university had no choice but to become more fiscally responsible and more efficient, which meant eliminating redundant or unprofitable programs. As for the thin-skinned faculty and students whose tender feelings might be hurt by a lack of inclusiveness: let them beat their drums and sing their victims’ songs. Roland had no patience for those who would defend incompetence or champion all-but-moribund areas of study. As per the dean’s recent memo, “The Road to Ecexellence,” the future of Payne was quality: only the worthiest departments would be granted resources and, at least in their current incarnations, be allowed to survive.
A gentle ping! from Roland’s electronic calendar, P-Cal: it was time to check the placement of the donor plaque. Roland had, of course, overseen its design. He had supervised every aspect of the Willard Hall renovation, from the square footage in each of the faculty offices to the selection of window shades and the color of carpet and tile. Roland understood what most academics did not: money attracts money; like attracts like. Additional, future donors—skillfully identified by Marilyn Hoopes—would, at the celebration in October, soon be anxious to see their names among the illustrious contributors on the plaque.
Roland adjusted a cuff link—unlike faculty in some of the grimier departments, he was conscientious about his appearance—and strode out through the anteroom, where Marilyn and the other staff members were working. Marilyn followed him into the hall. The plaque was eight feet wide and four feet high, a few inches shy of ostentatious. Roland had wanted it large enough so that the names attached to the various levels of giving could be easily read. A trio of workmen in overalls and hard-toed shoes held the plaque in place. Marilyn had triple-checked the spellings. Yes, Roland thought, it struck just the right tone, the typeface dignified and substantial. He turned toward her. “At the reception, we need to make sure that each of the contributors—”
To Marilyn’s left, a troll-like woman stood with her hands on her hips, contemplating the plaque. She was stolid; her gray dress resembled a cement drainage pipe. “Can we help you with something?” Roland asked.
She raised an eyebrow. Most people were intimidated by Roland, if not by his intelligence or the rolling timbre of his voice then by his size, particularly the savanna of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders. But the drainpipe woman seemed…unimpressed. “Just looking.” She walked slowly away, a pair of rubber flip-flops clapping against her heels.
Marilyn Hoopes lowered her voice. “That’s Frances Ignatieff,” she said. “She’s the administrative assistant for English. I believe they’re coming upstairs to use our rest rooms.”
“English,” Roland said. He hated English. He hated its sloppy, undisciplined students; he hated its lawlessly oblique course offerings; he hated its faculty, probably half of whom were insane; and he especially hated Fitger, its chair. Fitger had spent the previous year publicly pissing and moaning about the Willard Hall renovations, making a stink about the dust and the corporate funds, and now he was sending his employees up here to pee. A parasitic discipline by definition, English was a feeble, fast-declining department. If it had ever had a heyday, that day was done. Fitger and his ragtag colleagues had no business in Willard; Roland wanted to crush and humiliate them—failing that, he wanted them out.
“Would you like me to speak to them?” Marilyn asked.
Roland watched Fran amble down the corridor—a snail could have defeated her in a footrace—her sandals still slapping against her feet. She pushed through the door to the women’s room, whistling: Was that “Three Blind Mice”?
“No,” he said. “Not yet.” He needed to caution himself. Patience. The only way to climb the rungs of the Payneful ladder (within ten years, Roland would either become provost or leave this cut-rate institution behind) was to sheathe his iron fist in a velvet glove and seize the opportune moments when they arrived.
“Ready to go, sir?” one of the workmen asked.
Roland nodded. He turned to Marilyn Hoopes. “Put Fitger and his staff on the invitation list for the celebration,” he said.
Marilyn—she was superb; he would have to see about another raise—assured him she would.
* * *
—
Power walking across campus during her twenty-two-minute lunch hour, Janet Matthias (she still occasionally signed her name—bad habits being the hardest to break—as Matthias-Fitger) paused at the side door of Willard Hall. Typically, starting out from the law school, where she served as senior administrator, she preferred the paths on the north end of campus, shaded by oaks; but the north end was jammed with freshmen and their hand-wringing parents, everyone sweating and pushing Payne-issued bins full of electronics (most students needing at a moment’s notice to exchange erotic or animal videos with every other resident of the globe) from the upper parking lot toward the dorms.
She took her pulse: a bit fast but not bad. The daily walk was supposed to reduce her stress and bring her pulse and her blood pressure down. But, pausing on the steps of Willard—she had just cut through the building in order to deposit into Jay Fitger’s campus mailbox a current issue of the Campus Scribe—she felt her pulse quicken
. Impossible to resist bringing to her ex’s attention those few short paragraphs (Janet had circled them in red) about Econ—a delicious thorn to be inserted into his side. But now—stretching her calves on the cement steps—she thought about returning to the mailroom to take the student paper back again. Fitger had a tendency to overinterpret and, given their error in judgment back in August (force of habit: one minute they were arguing about nothing; the next, their clothes lay tangled on the floor), he might read something into her gesture that she didn’t intend. Already, he had implied that Janet was partly to blame for his status as chair—which was absurd: she had simply confronted him with a series of truths, i.e., the previous academic year, culminating in the death of a favorite student, had hit him hard; his writing had stalled (the market perhaps saturated at last with egotistical male writers); and there were worse sorts of tonics for the academic soul than a three-year stint in administration. Gazing down into a planter filled with the butts of cigarettes, she felt startled, anew, that he had listened, that he had run for office and won.
A shirtless Frisbee-playing student sprinted in front of her across the sidewalk, sporting the shoulder-length hairstyle of a wannabe Jesus. She noted the nipple ring and the macramé bracelets. (Now in her fifties, Janet found herself—with no desire to fight the tendency—becoming a crank.) Fitger-as-department-chair did present problems: namely, he had no tact and no discretion, and his immediate superior was Janet’s significant other, Phil Hinckler, dean of Humanities and Arts. Phil was in almost every way unlike her ex. Amiable, guileless, and even-tempered, Phil was ill-suited to academic intrigue, and was repeatedly dumbstruck by attacks from other administrators and (especially) from the faculty. He had been called (he told Janet) a traitorous popinjay; a Scaramouch; a bovine sycophant (these were PhD holders, after all); and a clueless astigmatic stooge. Still, like an oversized Labrador retriever, he walked into a room in the hope that he would be liked. Only a few days before, he had slung a beefy arm across her freckled sternum and mourned the loss of his humbler, less well-paid position in the Department of Music. Then he rolled out of bed, a soggy condom forlorn on the sheet at her side.
Janet shaded her eyes and looked up at the first-floor corner office of Willard Hall, where a rusted screen appeared to be barely affixed to its frame. When people on campus found out she’d been married to Fitger—and not as a youthful, passing mistake but for almost twelve years—she could see the astonishment blooming to life on their faces: Jason Fitger? In English? Really? Why?
Well, it was hard to explain, but once upon a time when they were in grad school, they both had wanted the same things—to write, to publish (Janet had long ago consigned her work to a dark shelf in the closet)—and that had seemed like enough: to be two striving artists hammering away at the door of the world. Jay had succeeded, at least for a while: he had published his novel and climbed the tenure ladder at Payne, while Janet labored on and collected rejections, her failure a wellspring of embarrassment to them both. Jay offered occasional bon mots of encouragement, which made her detest him. And then one day, when she was in her late thirties, opening a rejection letter in the bathroom where Jay wouldn’t witness her humiliation, she had looked up at the tarnished mirror over the sink and seen her mother’s face taking shape within her own. Her mother had been dead for three years, but there in the mirror were the doleful, yellowing half-circles under her mother’s eyes, and the two horizontal lines that had segmented her mother’s neck like a thorax. Janet had torn up the rejection letter (given the volume of submissions, we regret to inform you…) and decided to free herself from the tyranny and the failure of writing. She quit her freelance editing job and accepted an administrative post at the law school, for which Jay pitied her. Let him, she thought; her salary now exceeded his. Giving up on the writing and, a few years later, her marriage (the final straw being the publication of Jay’s novel Transfer of Affection, which contained a very thinly disguised account of his affair with another woman on campus) had been a relief. But judging from their entanglement in August (about which Janet had no compunctions—these things happened sometimes, and she had made no assurances to Phil), she wasn’t sure whether Jay felt the same.
The yellow Frisbee boomeranged onto the grass and came to rest at her feet. Janet picked it up and found herself face-to-face with the wannabe Jesus. One look at his unwashed hair and unfocused eyes and she understood why his aim was inaccurate.
“Sorry, lady,” he slurred.
“That’s all right,” she said. “Here’s your toy.” Every now and then she needed that little electric jolt that came from dispensing small verbal cruelties.
She looked up once more at the corner office before deciding to leave the Scribe in her ex-husband’s box. There was no escaping one’s past within the circumscribed world that was Payne.
* * *
—
Sitting on the newly made bed in her dorm room, Angela Vackrey looked out her window at the perfect green rectangle of grass on the quad. Her mother had just left, having stained most of Angela’s clothes with her tears, even sobbing aloud (Angela hoped none of the other girls in her dorm overheard) while stacking a new pink diary (a graduation gift from Angela’s grandma), a dictionary, and a Bible on the pockmarked shelf by the bed. Her mother had wanted her to live at home and go to the community college seven miles from their house in Vellmar; but Angela, who had been homeschooled since the fourth grade, had needed a change. She wasn’t sure yet what kind of change, but the world was surely bigger than the pile of paperbound workbooks (Broad Horizon: A Christian’s Historical Perspective) next to the chicken-and-egg-shaped salt and pepper shakers on the maple table where she had completed her schoolwork at home. Angela felt guilty whenever the thought slid into her mind, but she wanted to be different from her mother. She wanted to be smarter, more interesting. Which was cruel and unfair: her mother, a single parent (Angela remembered her father as a large, inebriated shadow; he drank himself to death when she was four), had sacrificed so much to raise her. They had only twice left the state for a vacation, her mother working overtime for months to pay for a trip to Florida, where the three of them—Angela and her mother and grandma—had huddled together under an umbrella in the rain. So when people in Vellmar had stopped Angela on the sidewalk or in the hobby store where she worked, and asked, Are you really planning to go away to college and leave us?, she could scarcely bring herself to reply. Together, she and her mother and her grandma had prayed for guidance on the issue, which eventually arrived in the form of a full-tuition scholarship to Payne.
Angela contemplated the denim skirt she was wearing—her knees prickled with hairs—and wondered whether she ought to be wearing shorts. Her roommate (because of the silver ring through her nose and the heavy dark makeup, Angela had decided it best not to show her mother Paxia’s photo) was currently hitchhiking across the country and would not be attending orientation. Angela had also kept from her mother the e-mail in which Paxia had used the word fuck three times and identified herself as bi/questioning/queer. For the next few days, Angela would have their modest cinder-block room to herself.
Though she had already memorized its contents, Angela opened her blue-and-white Welcome to Payne folder and read through it again, laying everything neatly across the bed. There was her orientation schedule; her campus map; a list of her fall course assignments (calculus, chemistry, English, physics, French—What do you need French for? her mother had asked); a copy of the student paper, the Campus Scribe; and the name of her faculty adviser: Professor Jason T. Fitger, Department of English, Willard Hall. Coincidentally, this was the same professor who was teaching the Literature of Apocalypse class (her mother thought it was about the Book of Revelation) in which she was enrolled. As instructed, Angela had requested an appointment with her adviser on P-Cal, the university scheduling system, but had not heard back. Which was a relief, because what on earth would she have talked about at a me
eting with a professor? She wouldn’t be able to think up any smart questions, and would have been throwing away a valuable opportunity to ask for advice.
She straightened her Bible and her dictionary and tucked her diary (nothing was written in it yet) into the bottom of her underwear drawer. She put her dorm key on its lanyard around her neck, included her weeping mother, her grandma, her hitchhiking roommate, and Professor Fitger in a brief, cheerful prayer, and went out for a walk. At the edge of the parking lot, she helped a tall, dark-haired girl whose rolling bin of belongings—suitcases, computer, lava lamp, near-life-sized stuffed moose, microwave, ironing board, and beanbag chair—had a misaligned wheel. The girl said “Thanks” but didn’t stop to introduce herself or ask Angela’s name. But that was okay: making friends would take time, and Angela would have to learn to be more outgoing and not behave like a “daydreaming mouse,” as her grandmother said. Away from home, from her room with the faded blue flowered wallpaper and the smell of the Limreys’ strawberry farm drifting through the curtains in front of her window, she felt untethered, as if she’d been freed from the laws of gravity. It was dizzying. Because no one knew her here at Payne, she could be anyone, whoever or whatever she wanted. She had the sense of being on the threshold of something—as if her life hadn’t yet started, but she was standing in front of it, heart thumping, her trembling hands pressed against the door.
A woman wearing a dress and running shoes walked quickly past. At a university of this size, you couldn’t acknowledge or say hello to everyone you met on the sidewalk. That would be too many people. Angela took a deep breath. There was the university library, with tendrils of ivy creeping like witches’ fingers up the brick facade, and there were the classroom buildings—Angela probably wasn’t allowed to go into them yet—including Willard Hall, where Professor Fitger had his office. The Welcome to Payne folder said that freshmen should feel free to consult their advisers with any questions about their academic goals or their future. But did that include questions about being different from her mother and other people in Vellmar? Questions about becoming a person whose life could be different from the way she’d grown up, a person, for example, who—
The Shakespeare Requirement Page 2
