“You didn’t thank me.”
“Also, I remembered that you’ll be going to the reunion soon. And I wanted to tell you to have a good time.”
Janet scrutinized the bottle of wine by the sink. Had she opened it only that afternoon? She filled up a glass. “You aren’t…changing your mind about going?”
They’d both been invited to a retreat in Maine with half a dozen people with whom they had gone to graduate school, people who had known them when they were young and only mildly cynical, before they had made the mistake of getting married and intertwining their lives.
“No,” he said. He wouldn’t abuse her like that. He wanted her to let loose and have fun; perhaps his absence would persuade their former classmates that they had enjoyed his company, back in the day.
Janet wandered into her bedroom, massaging an oncoming headache at the base of her neck. She was relieved to know that Jay wasn’t going. Among their graduate school colleagues, it would be too easy to slip back into what their marriage therapist had termed their “symbiotic disputes”: Jay transgressed and Janet punished, each extracting psychic benefit from his or her role. During one of their final sessions, the therapist had asked Janet if the idea of getting divorced made her angry or sad. An easy question to answer: in the panoply of human emotions, Janet’s default was anger. She was better at anger. At a moment’s notice, she was primed and ready to be pissed off—that was how she was made.
She lay down on the bed and studied a network of cobwebs close to the ceiling. She remembered lying in bed with Jay two decades before, both of them reading the same book (an Irish novel; she didn’t remember the author), turning the pages at the same time in order to synchronize the experience, each of them listening for the intake of breath that signaled, in the other, trepidation or delight or surprise. It was probably her most erotic memory.
“I suppose I should tell you,” she said, opening the drawer in her bedside table to search for aspirin. “I’m going to be getting rid of the landline.”
“What? Your house phone?” Fitger asked. “This landline? Why?”
“Because I don’t need it anymore. I don’t want to pay for it. You can find me at work or on my cell. Not that I’m recommending you call. In fact, please don’t. You should give Dr. Moradi’s office—and the police and the fire department and the local prison—someone else’s number.”
“You can’t get rid of the landline,” Fitger said.
“Why not?”
Because, he explained, that was their number—the number he had memorized and had once helped to pay for. It was the phone they had shared, the one on which some people might still try to reach him.
Janet found the aspirin and spilled a pair of white pills into the palm of her hand. Was she going to swallow them with wine? Apparently so. “Jay,” she said. “No one has tried to reach you on this phone for years. You have a cell phone, don’t you?”
Well, yes, he had a cell phone; he’d been forced to buy one because some tribe of tech-loving barbarians was systematically uprooting all the pay phones from L.A. to New York.
Janet asked if he was making plans to update his inkwell and his feather pen.
“Amuse yourself at my expense if you want to,” he said, “but keep the landline. I’ll pay twenty percent of it.”
“You’re not going to pay any of it; I’m getting rid of it.” She noticed a size XL Payne T-shirt hanging on the bedpost. Though she had cleared out a drawer for him and made space in the closet, Phil Hinckler preferred to drape his semi-soiled clothes over the doorknobs and the backs of her chairs.
“Twenty-five percent, then,” Fitger said. “And I promise to call you only once a week. Don’t be hasty, Janet, because that’s probably going to be my final—”
She unplugged the phone.
SIX
Arms on her hips so that she resembled a fleshy teapot, Fran stood in the doorway of Fitger’s office. They had patched things up, to a certain extent, after he sent her a (belated) sympathy card on the death of Gloria. He had even copied out the poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” on a card with a picture of a robin eating a worm.
“I thought you were going to work on that Shakespeare business this week,” she said.
Fitger didn’t answer, but because he looked at her over the top of his reading glasses she knew he had heard her. This was the hallmark of their working relationship: she talked in his doorway while he ignored her; then he parked himself in her doorway while she did the same. This complementary pattern kept them from wearing on each other’s nerves.
“If you don’t submit a Statement of Vision, you won’t get a budget.”
Fitger thanked her for this nugget of wisdom, but explained that his efforts to convene a committee to revise the SOV had come to naught, because the faculty refused to approve of any subgroup that might take on the task. Therefore—no thanks to Dennis Cassovan, the old mossback—Fitger would have to rewrite this vaunted document himself. In preparation, he had decided to familiarize himself with previous SOVs and other absurd university protocol by studying the departmental records. This splendid set of documents consisted, in increasing order of volume, of files relating to:
website and PR (2 files)
technology (3 files)
events/lectures (8 files)
promotion and tenure (17 files)
committees/committee structure (21 files)
curriculum (26 files)
budget (32 files)
grievances (44 files)
misc/other (128 files)
A perusal of this final, intriguing category disclosed a thick wad of parking violations (unpaid—and belonging to the previous chair, Ted Boti); miscellaneous library fines; three police reports (one restraining order and two separate incidents of stalking—thankfully the faculty members in question had either died or moved on); some information regarding the care of a ficus; a petition requesting feminine hygiene product placement in the women’s restrooms; the cover of a comic book; and one fecal occult blood test result, which Fitger deposited, wishing he were wearing medical gloves, into the trash.
He would get to Shakespeare and the SOV soon enough, but these weren’t the only departmental priorities: he needed to argue for the reestablishment of the creative writing degree and for the literary magazine, The Pride of Payne, while making a case for two faculty hires.
“You might be too late on The Pride of Payne,” Fran said. “Or, at least, you’d have to find a different office.”
“What do you mean? What about that office in the basement?”
“There’s a new key-card lock on the door. I guess Econ is planning to use it for something.”
“Piracy,” Fitger said. “We turn our backs for a second and they capture our space. Soon they’ll hit us with a surcharge for using the stairs.”
“They have a budget,” Fran said. “Which reminds me. I had to cancel an order for paper clips this week, and I’m about to send an e-mail to the faculty, telling them they need to buy their own paper for the copy machine.”
Fitger stared at the mess of files spread across his desk. His stapler had a note taped to its spine: Property of Department of Physics—Do Not Remove. “There has to be a way of getting around these things. You keep telling me we don’t have money, but somehow you managed to hire Ashkir.”
Fran (re)explained that they were paying Ashkir with their maintenance funds, which included heat—so they would be hoping for a mild winter. “By the way, Althea Mulligan over in Accounting has called you three times to say that we’re operating in the red. You might want to avoid running into her in person; she said something about wanting to display your head on a spike outside her cubicle.”
Fitger suggested that Fran tell Althea Mulligan over in Accounting that he had just submitted
—to his ex-wife’s boyfriend, the dean—a request for an emergency provisional budget.
“Yeah.” Fran exhaled—a noisy whistle. “I saw what you submitted. That shit’s going to come right back with a long list of necessary supporting documents.”
Yes, of course it would, Fitger said. Every transaction at Payne required an abundance of supporting documents, the simplest procedures requiring truckloads of paperwork accompanied by blood samples, DNA test results, fingerprints, and FBI files.
“Let me ask you something,” he said, inserting a pencil into the electric sharpener, a growling receptacle that devoured all but about two inches of the tool in his hand. “Do you think it’s possible that there’s some sort of plot or plan at Payne whose object is to make our work life difficult, or at least pointlessly slow?”
“Are you asking me on or off the record?”
“There is no record. It’s just a question.”
“Then I’m not going to answer,” Fran said. She paused and looked up. Through the ceiling, they could hear the manly locomotion of Roland Gladwell’s rolling chair. “Will you be going to their party this afternoon?”
Fitger had no intention of going to the Econ celebration, the purpose of which was to extol the university’s most rapacious department.
Fran returned to her portion of the office and promptly sent him a dozen e-mails, which quickly slid down his endless queue. An hour later, she announced that the workweek was done; she was going home. “But if you’re planning to stick around for a while,” she said, “you might want to return that phone call about Albert Tyne. He’s refusing to finish his sensitivity training.”
Fitger shrugged. He had no sympathy for Tyne, who had been slapped with a six-week sentence for making a remark about a fellow faculty member’s vacation in “Sodomy Springs,” but he didn’t blame him for trying to avoid the training. The university’s sensitivity sessions resembled Maoist reeducation camps: one was expected to recant, to weep, to offer up several bones to be broken, and to emerge gleaming with a proselyte’s commitment to reform. There were other correctives for Tyne that Fitger would have prioritized and recommended, starting with a psychiatrist and a skilled barber.
Gingerly touching the left side of his face (just that morning he had endured another session of dental torment, the number of his natural teeth steadily dwindling), he wished Fran a good weekend.
“Your mouth is still bothering you?” she asked.
Fitger explained that his dentist was a tight-ass about pain pills, and had cut him off Vicodin in favor of Tylenol #3.
“I’ve got some Percocet if you need it,” she said. “I had a cyst dug out of my armpit a year ago.”
“Is Percocet similar to Vicodin?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” She dug through her canvas bag and came up with an unlabeled bottle. “I don’t think it’s as strong, though, as Vicodin,” she said. “So you should probably take two.”
Fitger rolled the pills around in his hand—they looked a bit worn, their edges chipped—and then tossed them into his mouth. After Fran left the office, he gave up on the department’s files and turned to his undergraduate students’ essays, at least half of which, contrary to explicit instructions, included floral or multicolored paper or typeface, plastic cover-sheets, emoticons, and links to YouTube videos. Most of the essays, on the basis of faulty grammar alone, would earn well-deserved Cs—with the exception of a pithy little manuscript submitted by a student who evinced a startling ability to think clearly, express original ideas, and write. Angela Vackrey. Hmm. He made a mental note to review his seating chart: was she the rustic, knee-socked creature in the left-hand row?
He glanced at his watch: 5:35, and he had graded only a few of the essays. The left side of his mouth—a fleshy battlefield—still throbbed as if to the beat of a drum. He was probably suffering from periodontal PTSD: when he’d arrived that morning for his appointment at the House of Moradi, the hygienist had led him by the hand to room 4, where she tenderly scolded him for drinking coffee, tea, club soda, orange juice, and red wine, and for eating anything more durable than toast. Tears flooded his eyes when she tied on his bib and tipped him back in the chair, placing a stress ball into the sweating palm of his hand.
He heard a knock at the outer door of the office, which he ignored. A moment later a woman in a trim black dress was standing in front of him, a bottle of wine tucked cozily under her arm.
“This does not look like a very interesting party,” she said.
Fitger stood up. Hello; was she looking for Econ? That department’s self-glorification ceremony had begun a short while ago, on the floor above.
The woman (she wore dark red polish on her nails; he could see her hip bones through the cloth of her dress) took in their surroundings: the matching fishbowl offices, the dust-colored carpet, the intermittent baseboard, and the tangle of extension cords that extended from Fitger’s office into the hall. “This is very, very ugly,” she said, her voice pitched low, with a polyglot European intonation. “It is much worse here than in my office. I am Marie Eland—languages. But you must have another place to do your work?”
“I used to,” Fitger said. “But when I became chair my faculty office was…usurped.” He mentioned Arnljot, the Norwegian, also in languages—perhaps she knew him? Arnljot kept a low profile, seeming to work ten-hour days without food or drink, and on the rare occasions when he did emerge from Fitger’s faculty office, he slouched down the hall with the posture of a half-parenthesis. He was as pallid as a garden grub beneath a rock.
“No. I do not know this person.” Marie Eland set her bottle of wine on Ashkir’s table. Was Fitger planning to go to the party? They would go there together, she said; but first, a little drink to prepare themselves.
Fitger told her he would be happy to have a drink but he wasn’t intending to go to the party. Having been forced to shelter-in-place during the yearlong construction project for the benefit of his colleagues upstairs, he was probably at risk for black lung, and didn’t harbor in his breast a love of Econ.
“You are not thinking about this correctly.” Marie Eland took a corkscrew from her purse. “This is not about pin-the-wheels and enjoyment. We are at work. We and the other department chairs will all be gathering information. Do you have wineglasses?”
He offered her a choice between coffee mugs and paper cups. “So,” he said. “You’re the chair of Foreign Languages?”
She held a Payne ID in front of him for inspection; beneath her name was a very long title. “We were once the Department of French and Italian. But now, because the president favors consolidation, I am the chair of French, Italian, Spanish, German, Ojibwe, Arabic, and Linguistics. But we will be getting rid of Arabic and Linguistics soon.” Expertly—“many years ago, I was a waitress in Paris”—she opened the wine and filled two paper cups.
Oh, the American university, she said. She was new to the campus. She had accepted the chairship and moved to Payne the year before in order to escape a previous position in Indiana—a reasonable school except that it was located in an impossible flat barren landscape devoid of literature, art, architecture, food, or music. In Indiana (perhaps Fitger understood this already), food was grown but could not—at least in restaurants—be eaten. But all over the American Midwest it was nearly the same: the diet was that of an alcoholic toddler, with beer and more beer and terrible yellow or bright orange cheese. “And your bookstores!” As if checking herself for fever, she put the back of her hand, theatrically, to her head.
Fitger lifted his cup and agreed. The campus bookstore at Payne was stocked primarily with electronics, novelties, lotion, jewelry, greeting cards, T-shirts (CAMPUS SADIST: I LOVE PAYNE), and a smattering of textbooks interspersed with the ghostwritten memoirs of celebrities and billionaires. Books, a colleague had once informed him during a meeting, were “hegemonic learning devices” that could alienate s
tudents. Fitger had responded with a proposal that the university do away with scholarship altogether, and design an experiential curriculum beginning with a marijuana smoke-off, mild hallucinogens being delivered to one and all.
“À la vôtre.” Marie Eland tapped her cup against his. “This is your first time being chair also, yes? Tell me how it is going.”
Fitger pondered and drank. At the start of each week he tried to give himself a pep talk: still acquainting himself with the job, he was doing his best to stay on top of the workload and to avoid further interactions with the campus police. But the arc of the workweek inevitably tended downward, the end of each unproductive day like the lid of a coffin creaking shut. Crossing the parking lot on Monday mornings, he imagined a BBC-inflected voice narrating his progress across the asphalt: There goes the chair of the department; step aside, here’s the chair of English. But by Friday afternoon the BBC anchor had been replaced by a scratchy Russian voice snarling in his ear: Go home, you prick. Even his teaching was enervating. In his Literature of Apocalypse class, moving from Saramago’s Blindness to McCarthy’s The Road, he’d begun to feel as if he were forcing a puppy’s nose into shit, leading a fresh-faced group of eighteen-year-olds on a tour of mayhem and hopelessness one hour at a time.
On the plus side, his gums—he had just noticed—weren’t throbbing as much. A comfortable buzzing began on the outskirts of his brain.
“You don’t care to answer. Yes, it makes sense to be discreet,” Marie Eland said. She rearranged the bowl of plastic fruit on Ashkir’s work surface, leaving a clump of lint-covered grapes on top. “I have probably spoken too much.”
“No, not at all,” Fitger said. “I was collecting my thoughts. What about you? Do you like being chair?”
“Do I like it? No. This is not about liking or not liking.” She touched his wrist. “It is about staying alive for the length of your term. Because this is a game for them—for the deans and the provost and the vice provosts: to cut us back and back and back and suppose what we will do. What do you name this? A blood sport. You will see when we go upstairs to the party: on the table with the food, they will give us spoons and forks, but no knives. This is so we do not slit each other’s throats.”
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