In the doorway to the reception room, wearing the dark blue suit she had persuaded him to purchase (after forbidding him, in future, from wearing khaki), was Hinckler, the dean. He didn’t want to intrude, he said, but if Janet needed any assistance…
“Thanks. I’m taking care of it,” she said.
Fitger noted her use of the word “it.” She freed her wrist from his fingers.
“Let me go over a few things,” she said. “You and I are divorced.”
Fitger nodded. Yes, understood. He had been meaning to schedule an appointment with Hinckler to discuss emergency provisional funds for English, but that struck him as problematic, now.
“And I don’t work for you,” Janet said. “Or with you.”
True, but—
“I gave you some advice a while back—a mistake on my part—which I assume you ignored. Now I’m telling you to take your job seriously, for god’s sake, and sober up.”
“I’m not drunk,” Fitger said, “I—”
She walked away, then turned and pointed an accusing finger. “And do not get behind the wheel of a car.”
He tried to adopt an abstemious expression. Not knowing how long it would take for Fran’s pills to wear off, he considered asking for a ride, but this brought to mind an unfortunate image—of Janet and Phil in the front of Phil’s minivan, with Fitger, like an irresponsible teen, throwing up across the seats in the rear.
He watched Janet walk toward the stairwell, arm in arm with the dean. And the thought occurred to him: she had made a comment, somewhat cutting, about Marie Eland. That was intriguing; he tucked that observation away for another time.
* * *
—
Ten minutes later, Fitger was rinsing his head in the men’s room sink. His thoughts proceeded in cyclical fashion: to defend his department against Econ and other incursions, aka QUAP, he needed a budget; to get a budget (without assistance from Hinckler) he needed a Statement of Vision; to gain faculty approval of a Statement of Vision (via a three-quarters majority vote) he needed his faculty to decide whether a full semester of Shakespeare—he silently cursed Dennis Cassovan—would or would not be required.
The water cascaded around the nape of his neck. He tried to remember the last time he had been this high. It might have been just before his divorce: a regrettable evening culminating in Janet nearly killing him in a FreshWay store by knocking him into a frozen food case with a grocery cart.
Turning the water off at last—he felt like his brain had been replaced with foam insulation—he raised his head. The restroom, unlike its counterpart on the English floor, was stocked with functional soap dispensers and a wicker basket full of fluffy white towels. It appeared not to be a breeding ground for hepatitis A or E. coli, and was free of X-rated graffiti. Roland was probably planning a steam-room addition, he thought, with a pedicure station and a eucalyptus-wielding masseur.
To his left, he heard the cheery, functional flush of a urinal. He shut his eyes, dispatching a quick secular prayer: Don’t let it be an economist. Please, at least don’t let it be—
“Jason Fitger. You seem to have found the evening enjoyable.”
Fitger opened his eyes, gazing deeply into the drain of the sink. There was no mistaking the rumbling bass of Roland Gladwell, the self-satisfied growl of a papa bear in its den. Fitger groped for a towel and found one pressed into his outstretched hand.
“I think it went well,” Roland said. “An excellent turnout. Some of our philanthropic heavy hitters were there. They like to meet faculty—to see exactly where their hard-earned dollars are going. To know who they can trust.”
“Whom,” Fitger said, mopping his head with the towel.
“Most of our donors”—Roland washed his hands at a neighboring sink, pretending not to have heard—“are interested in only one thing. Quality. That’s their only criterion, and it makes my job very simple.” He dried his hands and then buffed his nails with a cloth. “Some people imagine that running a department or a university is hard. But I tell them it’s not.”
Fitger tried to avoid the sight of his own waterlogged face in the mirror. “You aren’t running a university.”
“Quality,” Roland went on, “is such a basic concept, and yet many people—including some here at Payne—have no idea how to achieve it. On every level, the object should be to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Tossing his towel into a bin, Fitger noted Roland’s habit of speaking to a vacant spot in the distance, as if—even within the confines of the men’s room—he were addressing an eagle in flight. He suggested that Roland’s sifting of wheat versus chaff would be opposed by anyone deemed to be chaff. And if all his chitchat about quality was a not-so-subtle reference to QUAP, that committee—like most—would be pointless: Payne’s forests of red tape would bring any new initiative to a terminal halt.
Roland chuckled, then rested his arm, as heavy as the limb of a sequoia, across Fitger’s shoulders. He certainly shared Fitger’s frustration with some of Payne’s administrative machinery. But QUAP (of which—had he heard?—Roland had recently been appointed chair) was going to be different. The committee would be small, and it wouldn’t concern itself with documents and charters. Which was all to the good. As a fellow head-of-department, Fitger surely agreed that, during a time of scarce resources, there was no room for underperforming academic units. No one wanted to pay for mediocrity when there were methods of ensuring excellence instead.
“Methods,” Fitger repeated.
Roland nodded. Yes, the one common denominator across the span of the university had to be quality, and the QUAP committee would study each academic discipline with that goal in mind. The logical place to begin, of course, was with an examination of the Statements of Vision. Roland had a bit of an inside track and was already beginning to review them, but he found it startling that some departments had incomplete or missing Statements. Did Fitger know of any such departments? If so, Roland would be happy to lend him an ear.
About twenty years earlier, in Venice, Fitger had spent several long moments contemplating a slot into which seventeenth-century accusers could anonymously slip the names of heretics and dissenters, who would soon enjoy a visit from a robed employee of the Inquisition; that memory returned to him now.
He lifted the sequoia arm from his shoulders. The Statements of Vision were token documents, he said; no one cared about them or read them.
Roland begged to differ. An academic unit that had no vision and no coherence would surely lack…quality—and would therefore be reviewed with particular care. And—one additional administrative detail, in case it was relevant: departments submitting after the due date, which of course was long past, would from now on be required to submit their SOVs with evidence of faculty consensus: that is, unanimous approval of the Statement rather than majority vote.
“Unanimous?” Fitger had started for the door but turned around. Unanimity in English—it was akin to a rainbow over a field of unicorns.
Would that be a problem? Roland asked. Perhaps there were schisms or difficulties within his unit that—
No. Definitely not, Fitger said. In English, all was happiness, harmony, and intellectual light.
SEVEN
Halfway through her first semester at Payne, Angela Vackrey was trying to look at the bright side of being at college and away from home. She liked her classes, which weren’t—as she had feared they might be—too hard; she had found a Bible study group (though she had skipped its last two devotions); and she had already learned, although alone in her room, the words to Payne’s official song. (She had never sung “Payne, Our Payne” with other students. She knew it was sung at football games, which she had thought would be free but, when she was turned away at the gate, had learned they were not. To charge admission to students seemed strange: the stadium was huge and at least half empty and, according to t
he Campus Scribe, the team hadn’t won a game all year.)
On the not-so-bright side, there were things about her first semester of college that she wished she could change. She wished she had a roommate, even though a couple of the girls on her hall repeatedly told her how lucky she was to have a room of her own. Paxia had sent another postcard in mid-September (with a picture of an erotic statue in a museum; finding it in her mailbox, Angela had blushed), saying she was still coming, so Angela had reserved half the room, untouched, for her. But by October (“Having too much fun out here in the fucking real world”), Paxia had changed her mind. For a while, Angela had done her homework with her door open as a gesture of friendliness, in case any of her dorm-mates wanted to wander in. Soon, though, she felt awkward and wondered if they were pitying her or even averting their eyes so as not to see her sitting alone at her desk, so she had begun to shut the door.
Now, with only ten days left until Thanksgiving break, Angela was almost dreading the trip back to Vellmar, because she would have to lie to her mother about how happy she was at Payne. If she wasn’t happy, her mother would want her to move back home—which Angela sometimes wanted to do as well, especially at night, and especially when she thought about the Bible study group (one of the girls in the group had stopped Angela in the mailroom and asked her why she’d missed the most recent devotion), and also during dinner in the dining hall. Angela particularly dreaded the moment when, sliding her tray along the silver track, she would be funneled as if via the mouth of a river into the ocean of the cafeteria, her hands sweating, her eyes often blurring as she scanned the chaos of the room for an empty seat at a table, a place where—even if she was reading while she ate—she would not appear to be conspicuously alone.
Oh, what was wrong with her, that she had come to a place with thousands of people her own age and not made any friends? The resident adviser in her dorm—a rugby player named Brandi who was fond of nicknames and asked that everyone call her “Shazam”—had stopped in her doorway one morning and suggested that Angela not spend so much time in her room. The change was painful at first: she forced herself to take long walks every day around campus, stopping in at department offices and reading their informational pamphlets (Study in Bulgaria!); and then, if anyone noticed her, consulting her watch to give the impression that she was urgently needed somewhere else.
But then, in the English Department office, she had met Fran. Fran had seen her reading the Discover English pamphlet—for the third or fourth time—and caught on. “First semester?” she’d asked. “It can definitely be a tough adjustment.”
Angela had glanced at her watch, then realized she’d forgotten to wear it. Fran asked her where she was from (Fran had never been to Vellmar but she knew where it was) and soon Angela was helping to peel the labels from a stack of old files. Fran had told her to come back whenever she liked, and Angela did. She helped Fran tidy the supply closet and she met Ashkir (which made her nervous at first, because she had never met a Muslim), and later she met Ashkir’s two older sisters, who came by to visit him sometimes, in their dark cloaks and hijabs. They argued and fussed over Ashkir; their bodies swayed like cloth bells.
On his way into or out of the office, Professor Fitger occasionally nodded in her direction. She was in his apocalypse class, wasn’t she? Was she waiting to see him?
Angela felt her face flush. Yes, she was in his class, but no, she wasn’t waiting to see him; she was fine.
Fran and Ashkir had gently scolded her about this later. She should make time to talk to her professors, who were regular flesh-and-blood people, even if some of them, despite their PhDs, Fran said, were not very bright. Professor Fitger was her adviser, for heaven’s sake! But Angela wasn’t sure what sort of advice she needed; she could see how busy he was, and she didn’t want to take up his time.
But now, only ten days before Thanksgiving, Professor Fitger and Fran were arguing about her. Professor Fitger seemed to be angry about Angela cleaning and refilling the coffee pot. (Fran always told her to refill it in the nicer bathroom, upstairs.) Angela wanted to run out of the office and never return—she wanted to die—but Fran had pointed to Ashkir’s chair and told her to wait in that spot and don’t move. Angela put on her jacket and took it off and thought about going home for Thanksgiving (her mother’s green beans with onions, the breast of turkey, her grandmother’s tablecloth and napkins, ironed with starch) and having to tell her mother that she’d been expelled. Impossible. She couldn’t do it. She would have to lie. She would tell her mother that Paxia’s family had invited her to stay with them for the holiday, and then she could hide for the weekend in the dorm.
“Ahem.” Professor Fitger was standing in front of her. “Fran and I are finished with our little chat,” he said. “Thank you for waiting.”
Angela stood up. Professor Fitger was not as tall as he seemed in class.
He said that Fran had explained that Angela enjoyed lending a hand in the department, but her generosity, however laudable, would unfortunately have to be declined. “We’re discouraged from the active exploitation of students,” he said. “Askhir, as far as I know—but Fran will correct me if I’m wrong—is being paid.”
Fran muttered something about professors not having much of a talent for humor.
“Have you looked for work-study jobs on campus? Or paid internships?”
Angela shook her head.
“You might want to do that. It’s often a way to make money and friends at the same time.” He paused; perhaps he was waiting for her to say something. “There are no hard feelings, I hope. It was kind of you to assist Fran, but we can’t allow rampant volunteerism or unpaid labor here in the office.”
He steered her to the door. They shook hands. She was halfway to the stairs when he shouted after her. “Ms. Vackrey!”
She turned around.
“I meant to tell you in person: your essays are very impressive. You write very well. Exceptionally well, for a first-year student.”
Angela repeated those words—exceptionally well; exceptionally—all the way across campus to her physics class in Glasgow Hall.
* * *
—
Dennis Cassovan had spent the long Thanksgiving weekend at home, tinkering (again) with his opening chapter. The desire to rewrite and rewrite the first twenty pages, removing a paragraph here and inserting it there, was not, in his experience, a very good sign. It indicated a logical misstep that was probably lurking under the surface; but no matter how many times he combed through the prose—sometimes awakening in the middle of the night, pencil in hand—he could not find it out.
He wasn’t sleeping well, and his thinking felt muddled. Twice during the break he had experienced the odd sensation of someone standing just out of his line of sight. Both times he had turned and seen no one. A premonition? A ghost? This bodes some strange eruption to our state…Perhaps he was coming down with something, or was simply unsettled by the department’s shortsighted stupidity regarding the Shakespeare requirement. Fitger had circulated several inadequate suggestions (perhaps half a semester of Shakespeare?) and dusted off a few punctuation marks in the Statement of Vision; but each of these feeble efforts, Cassovan was gratified to see, had been quickly shot down.
On Monday after the break he had been invited to guest-lecture (“On Structure and Staging in King Lear”) at a small private college two hours away. So it wasn’t until Tuesday that he returned to the Payne campus, still discouraged and not feeling well rested. In the mailroom he picked up the handful of irrelevant notices and flyers that constituted his campus correspondence, dropped them into the recycling bin, and then headed down the hall to his office. The building was quiet. (Many of the faculty, he had noticed, avoided their offices, asking students to “meet” them via e-mail or Skype, but Cassovan understood that regular and reliable habits were the underpinnings of a productive academic career.) He paused outsid
e the conference room—which, given the ladder and the cans of paint in the entry, seemed to be undergoing some sort of renovation—and noted the faint strip of light under the visiting Norwegian’s door.
For a few hours he wrestled, still dissatisfied, with his chapter, occasionally distracted by the sound of footsteps and conversation outside his office. After lunch, his research assistant knocked and came in, his threadbare scalp gleaming under the lights. How was Professor Cassovan’s holiday? Relaxing? Lincoln Young had only briefly left town, he’d had papers to grade and of course the work that Professor Cassovan had assigned him, but because of the travel and the time off, he was slightly behind.
Cassovan wondered whether he would be better off with a different RA; but hiring someone else would involve a search and an interview, and Lincoln Young, judging from his appearance, would find it a hardship not to be rehired.
Lincoln sat down and patted his hair. He wanted Professor Cassovan to know that the students—both graduates and undergrads—were following the Shakespeare issue closely via social media. “We made a Facebook page,” he said. “Campus opinion is definitely going to be in your favor.”
“Campus opinion?”
Lincoln nodded and perused the books and journals—neatly alphabetized by author—on the shelves. On more than one occasion Cassovan had bequeathed to his RA duplicate or review copies of books he no longer needed, which was probably a mistake: Lincoln was examining the shelves with the covetous air of a legatee. “Payne has a code of ethics about this kind of thing,” Lincoln said. “It’s harassment, you know—the creation of a hostile work environment.”
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