“I’ll tell you what she’s going to do,” Janet said. First, she was going to make an appointment at the clinic and ask for a referral to an obstetrician. Second, she was going to find herself a campus therapist. Third, she was going to buy some maternity clothes and figure out what to say to her parents, whoever they were. And fourth, she was going to check in on a regular basis with someone she trusted. This person, oddly enough, appeared to be Fitger, whose new job it would be to listen carefully and empathetically, making sure that Angela found the courage to do all the previously mentioned things that she needed to do.
Beck brought their food. He set Janet’s plate gracefully in front of her; then, from a height of several inches, he dropped Fitger’s—a Caesar salad and a carpet of cheese covering some sort of pasta—onto the tablecloth with a thump. Fitger stared disconsolately at the salad, which Janet had apparently forgotten was not his favorite. Caesar, he thought, often smelled of seaweed left in the sun.
“Is there a boyfriend involved?” he asked. “That is, for Angela?”
Janet was carving up a forest of broccoli. “I’m not sure I’d give him that title, but it was consensual, she says. She met him at a Bible study group. She says they had sex only once; I don’t think she’s seen him much since then.”
“Once?” Fitger found that he disliked the idea of Angela having sex; she seemed too young even to know what it was. Without having given the matter much thought, he realized that he envisioned for her a bibliophilic future, as either a celibate librarian or (was she Catholic?) perhaps a scholarly nun.
“So. You’ll talk to her?” Janet asked.
“About what?”
“Whatever she wants to discuss.”
Fitger sighed and, reluctantly, agreed—but he wouldn’t talk about pregnancy unless Angela raised the subject. Discussing intimate personal or sexual issues with a student was an absolute minefield; one misstep and his name would be listed at the head of a column of erotopaths in the Campus Scribe.
They had reached a lull in the conversation. “I didn’t ask you how your break was,” Janet said.
Fitger put down his fork. He didn’t want to compare his holiday, playing nursemaid to a feculent colleague, with Janet’s halcyon vacation: seven days on a beach, in front of her a turquoise body of water and behind her a well-used set of sheets and a satisfied dean.
Beck reappeared beside their table. “Is everything delicious so far?” Janet had eaten two bites of her salmon, and Fitger’s plate was a rubbery island of cheese.
“Unparalleled,” Fitger said.
Beck walked away.
Feeling morose, Fitger dissected his salad, pushing the croutons aside. He always looked forward to their divorce anniversary (even though the first of these had ended with Janet dumping a bowl of minestrone soup in his lap), and now their hour together—much of it spent talking about a student—was almost done. If Janet had news related to her Kama Sutra–inspired vacation, she was probably saving it for the end of the meal, he thought, planning to drop it and leave, as she had with the soup. He chewed a few bitter leaves of lettuce. Time to get it over with. “How’s Phil?”
“Why are you asking?” Janet stiffened.
“Should I not ask? I’m curious. You’re going out with him; he’s the dean.”
“So you’re asking because he’s the dean, or because I’m going out with him?”
She was angry; that was interesting. Where was their conversation headed? Fitger had lost track.
“What about you?” Janet asked. “How’s your French friend?”
“My…what? No, she and I aren’t—”
“Never mind. It’s none of my business,” Janet said. “I don’t want to know.” She went off to the restroom, asking Beck for the tab on her way.
Fitger ate one more lethargic bite of his salad. He had pissed Janet off—easy enough to do, of course, but his tone, when he asked about Phil, was probably aggressive. He put down his fork. How, after all these years, had Janet forgotten about his disinclination for Caesar?
When she returned to the table, they split the check. “FYI, for whenever you talk to Angela,” Janet said. “She and this boy are thinking about getting married.”
“Married? Legally?” Fitger was adding up a (small) tip.
“I guess he’s religious,” Janet said. “You and I were in our twenties when we got married, and even that was too young.”
But we wouldn’t have married if we were older and wiser, Fitger thought; and he was glad to have made that mistake when he had the chance.
Outside, new snow had fallen across the sidewalk. Janet touched the fringe on Fitger’s scarf. “I remember this. Did I give it to you?”
“Probably. It’s definitely nicer than anything I would have bought for myself.”
She rubbed the dark fabric between her fingers, and he stood still and hoped to remain in the doorway for a very long time.
“Happy divorce anniversary,” she said. They engaged in a postmarital embrace, a thick buffer of winter clothes between them.
“Janet, I wish I had—”
“I’m glad you liked the food,” she said.
This was an unusual remark, as they had both left at least a third of their dinners on their plates and refused the offer of a doggie bag. Fitger turned toward the restaurant’s window, where the menu was posted. There were the misbegotten quotation marks on “special” pasta; worse, under Soups and Salads his vision was arrested by the word Ceasar, grossly misspelled.
Janet was walking through the snow toward her car.
“You did that on purpose!” He took off his scarf and waved it at her. Hope had lit a tentative candle within him. Janet remembered that he didn’t like Caesar salad. She knew him and knew how to torment him—and wasn’t such specific, intimate knowledge a form of love?
THIRTEEN
Fran enjoyed the average wedding about as much as a migraine, and the thought of Angela getting married left her depressed. In the English office, she and Fitger and Ashkir had all received invitations, Angela coming into the office to hand-deliver them, her stomach like half a basketball under her shirt.
PLEASE COME TO WITNESS THE MARRIAGE OF ANGELA BERNICE VACKREY TO TREVOR LOUIS THURLEY
Payne’s Campus Chapel
Wednesday, March 30
3:00 p.m.
Thank you.
The “thank you,” Fran thought, was a clear indication that Angela was handling the wedding details herself. Fran had looked Trevor Thurley up on P-Cal. Uh-huh: a skinny young fuck with an Adam’s apple like a burl in his throat.
Ashkir, pausing in the doorway of her office, saw her rereading the invitation. Would she be going to the ceremony? he asked.
Fran nodded. She had thought about trying to talk Angela out of the wedding but decided against it. Marriages weren’t forever these days; and maybe it was preferable, legally or for insurance reasons, for Thurley to own up to what he had done. Like everyone else in the world, Angela would learn, even if painfully, from her mistakes. Still: a wrong turn like that at such an early age and a person could end up on a decades-long detour, the map of life with its helpfully highlighted routes sliding straight to the ground. “I told her I would visit her this summer,” she said, “after the baby shows up. Maybe in August.”
She put the invitation back in her in-box and stretched, careful not to disturb Rogaine, who spent most of the day beneath her desk, at her feet. The university’s rules about dogs on campus being needlessly strict, she’d been forced to be furtive about bringing him with her to work. Rogaine was too big to be hidden or carried in a tote, so she made him a vest with a logo (she created the vest from an old Girl Scout sash and a collection of badges, including NEEDLECRAFT, HOSPITALITY, and VISUAL ARTS) so that he could pass for what in some sense he was (everyone knew that animals were very soothing)—a
therapy dog. A side benefit of the vest: Fran had sewn a Velcro loop on each side so that Rogaine could carry her travel mug of coffee and sometimes her purse. He was learning to behave himself around human beings, at least most of the time.
Fran’s ultimate object, of course, was to ready the dog for adoption. Because of his biting history, Rogaine was considered “hard to place”; he hadn’t bitten anyone in the office, though he’d snapped at Fitger once or twice—but only because Fitger had pushed him away from his office window, which was the dog’s favorite vantage point from which to observe the comings and goings of campus squirrels.
But she couldn’t think about adoption at the moment, because they had a boatload of things to take care of: graduation bureaucracy and next year’s teaching schedule and various undergraduate complaints/possible lawsuits—and another installment of mousetraps for Professor Hesseldine’s office. They were also required to follow additional security measures in the building because of Cassovan’s “break-in” (which Fran suspected was not the work of a mischief-maker or thief, but evidence of the custodian’s attempt, by standing on the flat of Cassovan’s desk, to repair a broken ceiling tile or replace a dead bulb). The end of spring semester was (thank god) now only seven weeks away.
The newest task on the English to-do list (unbelievable, Fran thought, that Fitger might pull it off) was a speaker’s visit, which Fitger had dropped onto her desk like a penny into a beggar’s cup the week before.
“This is a lecturer who will come to campus?” Ashkir asked.
“I’m not sure I would call him a lecturer,” Fran said.
“A writer, then.”
“Sort of.”
Ashkir stood ready with a pen and paper. “When will he visit?”
“We don’t have a firm date yet because the…visitor has to check his schedule. But we’re looking at the second week in April.”
“Ah. And the visitor’s name?”
Rogaine stirred, and Fran scratched his flank where the fur was beginning at last to come in. She took a deep breath. “Orest Weisel.”
Ashkir frowned. She wasn’t referring to the Orest Weisel who—
“Yes,” said Fran.
Not Orest Weisel, whose poetry was—
Yes.
“But—”
Fran poured some kibble into Rogaine’s collapsible bowl and explained that Orest Weisel was a friend of Professor Kentrell’s, and that Professor Fitger had green-lighted his visit without bothering to find out that his poems were directed at the K–5 crowd, or that his most recent collection (Weisel was regularly lampooned on late-night TV for his bouncy educational jingles about everything from the rings of Saturn to Sojourner Truth) was entitled Blue-Bellied Baboon. “He’s been invited, and he accepted. We can’t uninvite him.” (A few hours earlier, Fran had found Fitger in his office, studying Weisel’s oeuvre, which included a waterproof book about the ocean that could be read in the tub. She often wondered if he would make it to the end of the year.)
With Ashkir looking on over her shoulder, she clicked her way to Orest Weisel’s website. On his homepage the poet, holding an oversized umbrella, was dressed as a cloud. “I just work here,” she said. “I don’t make the decisions. We’ll need to get the word out to the local elementary schools.”
Ashkir picked up his pen and his pad of paper again. What sort of help did Fran need, he asked, with the upcoming event?
What did she need? Well, all campus events were a pain in the tail, requiring arrangements for venue, travel, hotel, per diem, microphone, bottled water, allergen checklist, advertising and media coverage, and notification of the campus police; and typically, they were planned at least six months ahead. Though Weisel was forgoing an honorarium (Fran was relieved to know that she would not be required to cut a bad check), there was almost no time to iron out all these details. She thought about the professionally designed posters all over campus, promoting the end-of-year announcement to be made by Econ, with Roland Gladwell’s pompous likeness on every one.
“The first problem,” she said, “is that we don’t have a venue. And Weisel has an enthusiastic kindergarten fan base, so we need something big—ideally the auditorium, but we don’t have the money to reserve it.”
“And you don’t have an exact date yet?” Ashkir asked.
Rogaine finished his kibble and crawled under the desk.
“No. Weisel is rearranging his schedule, and he asked us to keep the second week of April open. To be safe, we should reserve the auditorium every night for five days. We might as well book the Taj Mahal.”
Ashkir tented his fingers. Student activity groups were able—without cost—to reserve campus venues, he said. Each group was allotted one reservation per year.
“But the auditorium?” Fran asked.
Ashkir said he would look into it; he was an entrepreneurial studies major, after all.
* * *
—
As required by university policy, Dennis Cassovan had filed a report about his office break-in, which he assumed was related to the vandalism of his poster, despite Fran’s belief that the rearrangement of the objects on his desk had resulted from the campus custodian’s attempt to replace a faulty overhead bulb. This was possible, of course, but the bulb still didn’t work—it flickered—and in any case, Cassovan preferred his green-shaded banker’s lamp to the fluorescent glare from above. Furthermore, why would the custodian have positioned Cassovan’s letter opener blade up and protruding from the center drawer? Curricular issues aside, Cassovan doubted that anyone cared enough about him to harm him; still, twice during the past few weeks, he had suffered the impression that someone was following behind him. Once, walking alone after dark from the library to his office, he had headed, chagrined at the direction in which his feet were carrying him, toward the blue security beacon behind Willard Hall and rested his trembling hand on the button. Feeling like a child playing olly-olly-in-come-free, he had stood quietly, catching his breath. The fit is momentary, upon a thought he will again be well.
Perhaps he was unwell; he continued to have trouble sleeping. For years he had risen every day at 5:15 a.m., worked for two hours before breakfast, and arrived on campus to meet with students or deliver a lecture by 9:00. Now, even though he still got out of bed, from force of habit, at 5:15, it seemed to take him hours to get dressed and read the paper, and when the draft of his book was in front of him, he gazed at the pages without getting much done.
His conversation with Roland Gladwell (who had followed up with multiple e-mails) pricked and disquieted him. A required Shakespeare class divorced from English? It was a peculiar, incongruous thought. On the one hand, the idea of every undergraduate student at Payne taking a course on Shakespeare was extraordinary, almost enthralling; on the other hand, a universally enforced class might soon be considered, by the students, to be punitive and dull. Morever, who—other than Cassovan—would teach it? He had always enjoyed both the dedicated literature students as well as the skeptics who needed to be coaxed; but to teach several hundred students every semester…He would need teaching assistants for crowd control and for grading. It would be exhausting. He thought about Lincoln Young and about his students and their SOS buttons, and he felt very old.
He had been trying to reach Lincoln Young for the past few days in order to talk about the upcoming conference, but his RA, who was usually eager to fill up a time card, was uncharacteristically elusive. Discovering a flyer taped to his door that announced an SOS meeting in the student center with “Professor Young,” Cassovan decided to attend, to seek Lincoln out.
The meeting was in process when he arrived, so he took a seat on a bench in the hall. Though the door nearby was open, he could hear only part of what was said. The discussion seemed to have nothing to do with Shakespeare, the students (with Lincoln Young interceding now and then, and emceeing) expressing frustration not with lite
rary or curricular issues but with injustices, global and local, of all different stripes.
Meeting concluded, Cassovan waited for the group to disperse; then he flagged Lincoln down.
The younger man seemed surprised to see him. He had been busy. Professor Cassovan had sent him an e-mail? Yes, of course; he would respond tomorrow. He would have invited the professor to the meeting but he assumed…Had Professor Cassovan noticed how many of the students were wearing SOS buttons?
“Yes, the buttons,” Cassovan said. It was impossible not to notice them; one saw them everywhere now, around campus. He had discovered a button half-crushed in a parking lot only that morning, and had picked it up to find an image of Shakespeare snarling and lifting his middle finger. Other buttons, festooning the students’ outerwear and backpacks, made obscure references (one depicted President Hoffman astride an oversized feather pen) that Cassovan found unsavory as well as absurd. The buttons had begun—didn’t Lincoln agree?—to betray an indeterminacy of purpose.
No, not at all, Lincoln said; that was just the undergrads’ natural high spirits. The students were all about supporting Shakespeare. Had Professor Cassovan seen them taking photos of themselves in front of his office?
Yes, it was hard not to see them. This was one of the reasons he couldn’t work in his office anymore, and why he was falling further behind. Personally, he failed to see how posing for photographs in front of a blemished poster—
The Shakespeare Requirement Page 21
