“Shakespeare,” Cassovan said, “is not an interest.”
Stang said that at least one class in feminist literature, and one in theory—
Atherman said that if the Brontës were not included—
Brown-Wilson suggested that the first paragraph of the Statement of Vision be entirely scrapped; and in the second paragraph, the word requirement—
Franklin Kentrell posed the idea of eliminating the dashes in paragraph three. He didn’t care for the dash as a unit of punctuation. It was too breezy and too offhand. It was—
“We could recommend a semester of Shakespeare, instead of requiring it,” Lovejoy said.
“A recommendation is insufficient,” Cassovan said. “The English major—”
Kentrell explained that he was not alone in his aversion to the dash. He never permitted students to use it. He—
“The English major,” Cassovan said, “is not a—”
Beauchamp said they obviously needed to rewrite the SOV, but fall, for her, was not a very propitious time. West moaned; they had just rewritten it, he said. Hesseldine also insisted on a thorough revision, but refused to participate himself; furthermore, he vehemently opposed the idea of the task being handled by a cabal of traditionalists. “And by ‘traditionalists,’ ” he said, still grooming the underside of his beard, “I’m referring to people who haven’t read any of the theoretical or Marxist literature in the past fifty years.”
“Please don’t say ‘Marxist,’ ” Lovejoy said. The word was an open invitation to Albert Tyne’s favorite diatribe regarding the vacuity of cultural studies, identity politics, political correctness, and “psychoanalytic hocus-pocus masquerading as legitimate inquiry”; Stang, as always, rose to the bait, following up with a mini-lecture on the subject of phallocentric hegemony and the necessary demise of the Anthropocene.
Martin Glenk, who had spent the past twenty minutes doing a crossword, said that if the meeting was going to be hijacked and sent downstream on a homemade raft of hackneyed rhetoric, they would have to excuse him, as he had more pressing things to do.
Fitger attempted to call them to order. “Do we have a motion?”
Atherman, her glass eye rolling toward the ceiling, moved that they vote.
Tyne asked if he would be speaking out of turn if he were to question the reputability of a department chaired not by a scholar but a “creative writer,” a person whose publications consisted of B-grade coitive fantasies of various easily identifiable women on campus, including the author’s ex-wife.
“The sensitivity training is going well, I see, Albert,” Fitger said.
A student knocked and opened the door. He was sorry to interrupt, but he was part of a Bible as Literature study group whose members were meeting in room 102A. Would the professors be able, for the next fifteen minutes, to quiet down?
Brown-Wilson seconded the motion.
“Shakespeare,” Cassovan said, “must always be the core of a department of English. We cannot allow—”
Glenk distributed ballots and the vote was taken: three were for the SOV as it stood and four were against; there were five abstentions.
“Goddammit,” Fitger said. The room began to empty out. He stopped Dennis Cassovan at the door. “This is absurd,” he said. “You know we could have tweaked the requirements later—or made some kind of in-house amendment to the SOV.”
Cassovan had never liked Fitger—had never claimed to discern, as others had, a tenderhearted core within the churlish exterior. He was uninterested in “tweaking” or amendments, he said.
Fitger was tugging at a bandage on his hand. “We don’t have a budget, Dennis. You might not appreciate the fact that I’m fighting here for the department’s existence.”
“Perhaps you should also fight for its soul.”
“A noble sentiment,” Fitger muttered, making a personal pledge: he would retire before in need of industrial hearing aids or orthopedic shoes. The bandage had tightened around his fingers. He gripped it with his teeth and pulled, then abruptly folded himself in half like a wallet and spit what appeared to be the bulk of a bloody molar into his hand.
He and Cassovan both stared at the tooth.
“You know I’m not anti-Shakespeare,” Fitger said, a cascade of reddish saliva dribbling out of his mouth.
Cassovan pulled a linen handkerchief from his pocket; he gave it to Fitger, who was using the palm of his hand as a catchment for blood. “You should get that seen to,” he said.
FIVE
On the butcher block in her kitchen, Janet Matthias (formerly Matthias-Fitger) chopped two small tomatoes, two cloves of garlic, an ovoid eggplant, and a handful of basil leaves and poured herself a glass of wine. Phil Hinckler was attending the soccer match of one of his sons (he was permitted to observe but not to cheer), so she was cooking for herself, which was more rewarding than cooking for two; she could eat standing up at the counter while watching one of the police shows she taped and hoarded for moments like these when she found herself contentedly alone.
The message button on her answering machine was blinking. She tapped it with a garlic-scented finger and heard the voice of her ex-husband, who ever since their act of postmarital misjudgment in August seemed to confuse her voicemail with a trip to the shrink, filling her in on crucial matters of business: he’d been stung by an insect; Fran had hired a student worker who didn’t like books…Oh, the stressful existence of a tenured professor. And then of course there had been the call from the campus police, asking her to comment on the likelihood of one Jason T. Fitger wanting to burn down a building. She hit delete before he reached the end of his first sentence, and tossed the vegetables into a pan.
She drained the pasta and looked out the window over the sink. In the middle of the street, paying no attention whatsoever to oncoming cars, two little boys were jousting with hockey sticks while riding bicycles, their mother observing through a fog of cigarette smoke and a beer. Human beings, Janet thought, were a disappointment. She stirred the vegetables into the pasta and cued up an episode of Undercover Lives, which promised the usual addictive blend of mayhem, righteousness, corruption, and sin.
The phone rang. Janet checked the caller ID. Of course it was Fitger. She dropped the receiver back on its base. Her favorite detective, Lydia Burke, had entered a grim-looking apartment building alone. She’d requested backup but her partner was useless; Lydia often had to cover for his incompetence because of office politics and a lousy relationship with her misogynist boss. Janet speared a hunk of eggplant, watching Lydia Burke—still with no backup—chase a suspect onto a rusted fire escape, the camera zooming in on the sidewalk six floors below. The phone rang again. She glanced at the caller ID: MORADI DDS. Her dentist?
“Ms. Matthias? Hi, it’s Cheryl here, calling from Dr. Moradi’s office. I’m sorry to bother you at the dinner hour, but we have a bit of a situation.”
“Let me guess.” Janet put Lydia Burke on pause. “It has something to do with my ex-husband.”
Well, yes, in fact it did. He’d had some dental work done—his bicuspids, on the left side in particular, were not in good shape—and because of the anesthesia (which they’d had a tussle about, to be honest), the professor wasn’t in any condition to drive himself home. Would she mind coming to get him—and then picking up his pain prescription? They ordinarily closed the office at six, and he hadn’t given them the name of anyone else they could call…“Hello? Ms. Matthias? Are you still there?”
“Unfortunately, yes, I am,” Janet said. This was what she got for failing to move across state lines and adopt an unpronounceable alias, post-divorce. She should at least have found one of them a new dentist. Fitger had always been a coward about both medical and dental work, and during the years they were married she’d had to force him to get his flu shots and have his teeth cleaned. “Give me ten minutes,” she said. She put on h
er shoes, put Undercover Lives on hold for another day, and threw the rest of her dinner into the trash.
* * *
—
In the passenger seat of her car, Fitger leaned back, drooling into a cloth and whimpering about his session in the dentist’s chair. Dr. Moradi was ruthless, he said; his glabrous hands smelled of paint remover and his creepy eyepiece made him look like a moray eel. “They signed me up for four more appointments.” His head lolled against the headrest. Four more appointments might be the end of him, he said; he knew that Janet had a soft spot for Dr. Moradi, but given the peerless state of her own gleaming enamel, she couldn’t begin to imagine the torments that a— “Wait: Where are we going?”
“To the pharmacy,” she said. “So we can get you some drugs that will make you stop talking.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve been traumatized.” His voice was syrupy and slurred. “I had to pay extra for anesthesia. He wanted to drill below the gums without knocking me out; he likes seeing me suffer.”
“I doubt he’s the only one,” Janet said. She parked between two mud-spattered trucks in front of the pharmacy; when Fitger didn’t open his door, she got out and walked around to the passenger side.
“You didn’t answer the phone when I called,” he said.
“That’s right; I didn’t.” She grabbed his arm and hauled him up and they entered the pharmacy, walking down an aisle that began with baby toys and pacifiers and ended with adult incontinence aids—an eloquent lifeline, Janet thought. They waited in a lengthy queue at the pharmacy window, Fitger holding a soggy cloth to his chin.
Janet leafed through a magazine while he launched into a woeful jeremiad about the state of English and Willard Hall, including a semi-coherent account of a Tech-Help employee who had spent an hour squatting in front of a pile of computer boxes, the frayed elastic of his underpants on display.
“Janet, listen. I’m beginning to think there’s some sort of organized, you know…” He paused. “An organization working against me.”
“An organization. Are you referring to the Mafia? The Knights Templar?”
No, not the Knights Templar. But had Fitger told her that English had been barred from its own conference room? And that his class had been scheduled in a fallout shelter? With Fran as second-in-command it was almost impossible to—
“Stop. I don’t want to hear you try to pin your problems on Fran.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Fitger slurred. “I can’t fairly blame a person who isn’t tall enough to reach the doorknobs.”
Janet put the magazine away. “Wait here.” She walked to the next aisle and came back with a package of gauze. “We’ll pay for this later.” She tore the lid off the package, handed a few squares of the cotton to Fitger, and pointed to the trash can so he would throw his saliva-drenched bandage away.
They shuffled forward in line, Janet contemplating an array of nutritional supplements, which promised relief of everything from athlete’s foot to zinc deficiency.
“Speaking of Fran,” Fitger said. “She asked for two days off to attend a bird’s funeral. How can it take two days to bury a bird?”
“God forbid she should have hobbies or a personal life,” Janet said.
The woman in front of them in line was pushing a shopping cart full of wadded-up circulars and bottles of pills.
“You have to admit,” Fitger said. “Fran is…”
“What?” Janet knew Fran; they had once served on a committee together.
“Well, right now she’s not speaking to me. But the larger issue is that…I need better advice than she can give me. We’re losing real estate in the building due to our flesh-eating neighbors upstairs. And Dennis Cassovan is making a stink about Shakespeare and the SOV.”
“I thought you liked Dennis,” Janet said. “Relatively speaking.”
Fitger propped the sagging corner of his mouth with gauze. “I don’t dislike him. But he refuses to understand that every single humanities department at Payne is competing for students. They’ve all relaxed their requirements. Over in the Spanish Department all the undergrads need to do is say adiós and buenos días and then certify that they’ve had a burrito for lunch.” They muddled forward, only the shopping cart woman in front of them. “I thought Cassovan was retiring,” Fitger said. “I think he’s been teaching since the Paleolithic Era.”
Janet shrugged. Since the recession had cut their retirement accounts roughly in half, Payne was full of faculty like Dennis Cassovan who were well over seventy. During the summer, when the students were gone, she looked at the members of the professoriat muddling slowly across the quad and imagined she was working at a nursing home.
“It’s almost like old times,” Fitger said. “Talking about work together like this.”
Janet agreed. “The similarity is that you’re always talking.”
The shopping cart woman, now at the window, was arguing with the pharmacist. She appeared to want to return—for cash in hand—her cartful of drugs to the store.
“What do you have there, ma’am?” Fitger asked. “If you have any Vicodin, I’ll buy it from you.”
Finally, a manager was summoned; following a brief altercation, he agreed to accept and dispose of the pills and offer cash for a possibly unopened bottle of milk of magnesia.
Fitger handed his prescription slip through the window. He wondered whether Janet had told Phil Hinckler about their lovely little slipup in August. If she had, it would make his upcoming request to the dean—for an emergency interim budget—a bit problematic. But Fitger didn’t regret their liaison; it was the most pleasurable fifteen minutes he had spent in years. “You know what I mean about Fran,” he said. “She’s perfectly familiar with the ins and outs of the office. But I need someone who has a grasp of the larger picture. Someone with a more strategic attitude, and with tactical smarts.”
The pharmacist handed over the drugs, and Fitger paid and followed Janet back to the car. She put her key in the ignition and said, “You haven’t thanked me for picking you up.”
“I’m sure I thanked you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I must have. What were you doing when I called?”
“I was having dinner.”
“What were you eating?”
She sighed. “Eggplant. With tomatoes and garlic.”
“I remember your eggplant.” Fitger was struggling to open the safety cap on his bottle of pills. “I’m going to be living on pureed vegetables for a month.”
Janet opened the pills, then pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. For a multitude of reasons, including her own health, it was not a good idea for her to give her ex-husband advice (he was a fuckup of the first order, his praise of her “tactical smarts” a pandering ploy)—but she had been a literature student herself, and she hated to see English founder at Payne. “Since this is your first semester as chair, and you’re obviously lacking in common sense, I’m going to offer you some basic administrative suggestions.”
“An insult as well as an offer,” Fitger said. “I accept both.”
“First,” Janet said, “you need to apologize to Fran. If you can’t get along with your admin assistant, you’re totally sunk.”
“Noted. But I don’t think you—”
“Second: learn how to network. Did you go to the meeting of the assembly of chairs?”
“Yes: two hours of pointlessness,” Fitger said. The number of ceremonial bodies to which he was supposed to belong was obscene. He was going to buy a departmental amphora that he could shake at the start of proceedings, like a voodoo priest. “I don’t think anything ever happens at those assemblies.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot.” Janet stopped at a light. “Everything happens off the agenda. It’s all about private conversations.”
He tried to swallow
one of the pills but it bounced off his lip and rolled onto the floor.
“Third—and this is my last piece of advice for you—you need money.”
“Don’t we all. But, inconveniently, my budget is frozen. I may be drawing up a request for— Hang on a second.” He found the pill under his shoe and dropped it into his mouth and washed it down with some cold coffee from a travel mug plucked from the console.
“You’re not understanding me,” Janet said. “I’m not talking about your department budget, though I assume in that respect you’re appealing to Phil. I’m talking about raising money. You need to find donors—people outside the university. Do you know anyone in the development office? Maybe Perrin Wilcox?”
Fitger frowned. “The name is familiar.”
“Send her an e-mail. You need to prove to the administration that you know how to fund-raise. That’s part of your job.”
“I should think that would be Perrin Wilcox’s job, if she works in development.”
“Tell her I sent you,” Janet said. “She doesn’t like to meet face-to-face. She’s somewhat…eccentric.”
“Eccentric” within the context of Payne, Fitger thought, could mean “thoroughly unhinged” almost anywhere else.
Janet parked but left the car running. Fitger rented the right-hand side—both up- and downstairs—of a Victorian house, which the landlord had painted an unfortunate green, suggestive of bogs and algae and things of the swamp. Would she like to come in for a while and—
No, she would not. She watched him walk to the door, dropping his keys and then his pills on the sidewalk, and picking both of them up.
Walking into her own house ten minutes later, she heard the phone ring. Of course it was Fitger. She answered. “What?”
“I wanted to be sure you heard me thank you for the ride,” he said.
The Shakespeare Requirement Page 8
