The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  “Couldn’t? Or didn’t want to?”

  “Didn’t know how to,” he said. He set the mug on the counter, and a little coffee sloshed out that he didn’t bother to wipe up. “She was just a small-town girl from Chouteau, Oklahoma, who moved to California with an asshole. Then the asshole got rich. And that was the end of her.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I’d like to think she’s in heaven, since she spent her earthly life in hell. But she’s actually in a hole in the ground.”

  “A real hole?” she asked. “Or one you’ve made up?”

  “This hole’s as real as any hole’s ever been. I’ll take you there to see it if you’d like.”

  She rose, carried her bowl to the sink and ran it full of warm water. Then she pulled a paper towel off the rack and wiped up the coffee. “Is there anything else I don’t know?” she asked. While she waited for an answer, they heard a tremendous crash, and she looked up to see the glass vibrating in the sliding door that led to the patio.

  She ran over and shoved it open and saw an oriole lying on the ground beside her lilac bush, and the poor thing wasn’t even moving. “Cal?” she called.

  He was already there. He bent over and lifted it up—something she’d never been able to bring herself to do, because birds were so different—and gently stroked its feathers before resting a forefinger on its breast. He closed his eyes like he always did when playing a solo on the mandolin or guitar. Then he opened them again and set the bird on the picnic table. “Its heart’s still beating,” he said, his voice tinged with doubt, as though a beating heart, in and of itself, provided evidence of nothing at all.

  Is there anything else I don’t know?

  On the day Kristin reported for work at her new job, he again considered the question that the unfortunate oriole had saved him from having to answer. Wasn’t there always something else you didn’t know, even about the one you knew best? To think otherwise was either downright stupid or willfully naïve, and his wife was neither. If she’d never posed the question again, it was by design. Her willingness to drop the topic, to accept the fact that her husband of three years wasn’t who she thought he was, came back to him from time to time like one of those pop-up ads for malware removal, assuring him he ought to be worried. And from time to time he did worry.

  In the two weeks they’d lived in the house on Essex Street, he hadn’t been inside by himself for more than two or three hours. They’d spent their days moving methodically from the first floor to the second and then to the third, putting their household items in order, hanging pictures on the walls, positioning the Bose close by so he could listen to music. Always, though, there had been the sound of her voice, as soothing now as it had occasionally been annoying back in California. The notes not played, he’d always believed, were at least as important as the ones you did play, and the same was true with words: some things didn’t need to be said, but sometimes she couldn’t stop saying them. He never felt an urge to know what she’d done at work on any given day, which dean or vice president she’d had lunch with, which faculty member she’d had to call into her office because she’d been caught falsifying student evaluations. He hated everything he knew about colleges and universities, how they packed too many people into too small a space and called on them at any moment to ask for the answer to a question that didn’t interest anybody. He distrusted the notion that there was a finite body of knowledge worth communicating to others. Professors, he thought, were mostly con artists who’d been captured and confined to campus, where they could inflict the least damage, since almost no one paid them any attention. As for administrators, they were glorified jailors with a string of initials after their names: Ed.D., Ph.D., SOB—what did it matter? Yet he listened to everything she said. That was what he did best, since listening was the best thing you could do for someone you loved.

  This morning, he’d waved good-bye to her when she set off on foot for the train station, and once he turned back into the house and pulled the door shut behind him, black silence descended. Alone like that, he could easily have stretched out on the couch and given in to the sinking sensation, but he knew that if he did he wouldn’t get up all day. She’d find him right there when she came home. So he went down into the basement and opened the drawer in the workbench where he’d left his pills. He took a double dose of the sertraline that he’d stocked up on last spring in Mexicali, then forced himself to tromp the stairs to the third-floor room where he planned to keep his instruments as soon as they arrived. He stared at the worn Berber carpet, which in addition to being ugly as sin would soak up too much sound.

  He hunkered down in one corner and used a utility knife to loosen the fabric, pulled the edge up and peeled it back two or three feet. A tag on the underside of the carpet, right where he’d grabbed it, informed him that it had been installed by the Lechmere Rug Company, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 23, 1977. He pinned it with his knee and leaned over to get a better look at the flooring.

  It was in poor condition with lots of gaps that needed to be filled, a tricky task in a climate where you’d have to allow for expansion and shrinkage. He put his hand in his pocket, took out a quarter and scratched it against one of the boards. The finish flecked off easily, so it was either varnish or shellac, which meant it would require a full sanding. Though the floor had probably once been beautiful, it must have already been in terrible shape when somebody—the owner of this house in 1977—decided to cover it up, thinking the times called for something better. Whoever it was couldn’t have foreseen that thirty-three years later, his specially installed carpet would be peeled up and disposed of, once again revealing what was underneath. You couldn’t hide anything forever.

  the school that became North Shore State College had begun its existence in the middle of the nineteenth century. Known at the outset as Bradbury Normal School, after the town in which it stood, it welcomed its inaugural class in September 1854, admitting some sixty-six young women hoping for careers in the teaching profession. The student body grew steadily in subsequent decades and exploded in the years following the close of the Second World War, as returning soldiers took advantage of the GI Bill and programs in the liberal arts, nursing and business administration were added to the curriculum.

  The enrollment was now around ten thousand, including students from twenty-eight states and more than thirty foreign countries. “We’ve got a brand-new ice-hockey arena,” the president proudly informed Kristin during a walk around campus when she visited for her interview, “as well as a new eighty-seat black-box-style theater. Due to budget constraints, the library renovations had to be pushed back, but they should still be completed in the next few years. And as of this past fall, all of the residence halls are green and sustainable.”

  In a purely academic sense—and almost every other sense as well—NSSC was undistinguished, its deficiencies rendered all the more glaring by its close proximity to Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Brandeis, even UMass Lowell. It was just a third-rate state school, where the students often worked full-time and took seven or eight years to graduate, but this was where she’d ended up. The day President Randall finally called to offer her the job, he said, “We think you can help us make the big leap,” and for an instant she saw herself dressed in a bulky suit, complete with boots and a helmet and an oxygen tank, a female Neil Armstrong bounding across the moon like some lost kangaroo.

  Her assistant, Donna, was on the phone when she arrived. In her late fifties or early sixties, she kept her mouth permanently pursed, as if she’d assessed the world in all its particulars and found it disagreeable. She must have recognized Kristin—they’d met during her interview—but did nothing to acknowledge her presence, just let her stand there with her bag in hand while she listened impassively to the person on the other end. Finally, after what felt like five minutes but was probably less, she said, “Okay, that’s enough. I’ll have to call you back. Someone’s here.”

  She laid the receiver down and
observed Kristin for a few seconds before rising to offer her hand. “So you made it,” she said, then glanced at the wall clock.

  It was a quarter past ten. When they spoke the previous Friday, Kristin had told her she’d be in by nine thirty. “I know I’m late,” she said, shaking hands, “but I took the wrong bus in Andover.”

  “Andover? What in the world were you doing there?”

  “I live close to the Haverhill Line, and they said I could ride it north to Andover and then grab a bus. Somehow I ended up on one to Lynn.”

  “Lynn? It’s a wonder you made it out alive. For God’s sake, don’t you own a car?”

  She’d had two assistants in California, and neither of them would have talked to her that way. “I own one,” Kristin said, “but I’m not the best driver, and I’m not sure yet about some of the local traffic laws.”

  “If you’re a bad driver, you’ll fit right in. The main traffic law you need to know is never to use your turn signals.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not.” A smile flickered across her face, then fled. “Why share information with the enemy?”

  Kristin spent the remainder of the morning running from one office to another, having her ID made, picking up keys, filling out payroll forms. In so doing, she learned a lot more about the school than she had on her previous visit. Most of the offices she stepped into had decrepit Dell computers, frayed carpeting and furniture that looked like it came from a Reagan-era flood sale. She heard one payroll assistant complaining about a paper shortage, while another said paper wouldn’t do them any good since the copiers were out of toner. At the parking office, where she went to pick up a permit she wasn’t sure she’d ever use, she saw a fuming young woman write a check to cover fines. “They’re just issuing tickets to raise revenue,” she said, ripping the check out and shoving it at the cashier. “Tell the fucking football team to buy their own jocks.”

  At one o’clock, she attended a luncheon in the faculty dining hall with the president, the provost and the four academic deans. They’d absorbed an 8 percent cut this year, she learned, and while so far they’d avoided layoffs of tenure-track faculty, between seventy and eighty adjuncts had not been rehired. In addition, fifty-five staff positions had been cut by HR, with Mail Services and Purchasing taking the hardest hits. Furthermore, the formerly freestanding Schools of Education, Nursing and Social Work had been turned into “divisions” and rolled into a single School of Human Services. No one alluded to it, but she knew this had sent two former deans back to the classroom. Unlike her, they’d been wise enough to secure a fallback position.

  When the conversation flagged, the provost, a heavyset woman named Joanne Bedard, who had an Iowa State doctorate in family and consumer services, looked across the table at Kristin. “You and I,” she said, “will earn our salaries this year.”

  “Oh, now,” said Norm Vance, the dean of liberal arts, whose bushy black mustache called G. Gordon Liddy to mind, “must we drop the t word here in the middle of August?”

  “The t word?” Kristin said.

  “Tenure, dear,” Bedard replied.

  At her interview, Kristin had understood, as one sometimes grasps certain things without being told, that the provost opposed her candidacy. She didn’t know why that was, but she’d decided not to let it hurt her feelings. She used to conduct orientation sessions for new faculty, and she always urged them not to take peer reviews and student evaluations personally—or tenure decisions, either—to remember that people were judging their performance, not their worth as individuals. “The fact that you might not be a perfect fit here,” she’d say, “doesn’t mean you won’t be exactly that somewhere else.” It was good advice, and she’d tried her best to follow it when told she was losing her job. She hadn’t cried or thrown a tantrum or filed a lawsuit. She’d brushed off her résumé, reactivated her placement file and put her house on the market.

  “Are there some dubious cases coming up?” she asked her new colleagues.

  Everybody except President Randall laughed.

  “Aren’t there always?” said the provost. “The stakes are just unusually high now. In times like these, with budgets crumbling everywhere, you get the heave-ho at a place like this, what’s next? A job teaching ESL at the University of Bangladesh?”

  As if suddenly realizing that Kristin herself had just been canned, everyone grew quiet. The same thing could happen to any one of them, the president included, and all of them must have known it. This was the new reality in higher education, which was sinking lower day by day.

  Norm Vance said, “Hey, at least it’s not as rough as it is in California, right? That state’s in deep trouble.”

  Kristin swallowed one last bite of overbaked seafood quiche before agreeing that no, nothing could be as rough as that.

  Her office adjoined Donna’s, so no one could get to her without first passing scrutiny. “Your predecessor,” her assistant told her later that afternoon when she started unpacking the cardboard boxes she’d shipped ahead from California, “was pretty grateful for this arrangement the day Stuart Simms came after him with a rolling pin.”

  Kristin slit the tape on the first box. She was eager to reclaim her possessions and make the office her own. It would just take time, she told herself, but it would surely happen. It had to. “Who was Stuart Simms?” she asked.

  “An English professor that got fired. I keep my cell phone set to speed-dial the campus police. The whole time I was arguing with him, telling him Dr. Reichardt was busy, that he couldn’t just barge in on a vice president whenever he felt like it, I had it in my hand, and the dispatcher could hear me. A couple of cops rushed in and put him in a headlock.”

  “A rolling pin was his weapon of choice?”

  “Apparently he did a lot of baking, and that was the most lethal thing he owned.”

  “Why did he get fired?”

  “He wasn’t who he said he was.”

  Few sentences could make her heart race like that one. Were any of us who we said we were? Was she who she used to be? For most of her life she’d thought her identity was stable and fixed, but she wasn’t so sure anymore. “In what sense?” she asked.

  “By claiming he had a Ph.D. when he didn’t.”

  “He faked his doctoral degree?”

  “Sure did. The B.A., too. But the M.A.—now, that was bona fide.” Donna walked over to the window and looked out onto the quad, where two bare-chested male students were tossing a Frisbee. “If you could earn one real degree, why not three? That’s what gets me. But maybe some people enjoy gaming the system. If they weren’t doing that, they might be dropping a pile of money at the casinos.”

  Kristin opened the box she’d just slit the tape on and pulled out several photos: her and her dissertation director years ago in Chapel Hill; Cal sitting on a rustic bench, eyes clamped shut while he picked the mandolin; Suzy at poolside, basking in the sunlight. She scanned the walls for hooks but didn’t see any; tomorrow she’d bring a hammer and some nails.

  “There’s no reason for anybody with a bogus degree to get hired here,” she told Donna. “From now on, we’ll make candidates submit to a complete background check before offering them a campus interview. Sometimes it’s surprising what turns up.”

  “I guess there’s not much of anything that you can’t find out anymore, is there?”

  “Not if you really want to.”

  Donna turned away from the window, then looked directly at her. Off and on all day, Kristin had been trying to determine precisely what it was about her assistant that made her uncomfortable. Now she believed she knew: her gaze was too openly analytic, as if she were gauging how any stimulus, small or large, affected Kristin.

  “We’re on summer hours until next week,” the older woman said, “so I’m going home. See you later.”

  After she left, Kristin opened another carton, and there was her teapot. Her father had given it to her the day she left for college. She’d probably owned it longer t
han anything else and always placed it on a windowsill, first in her dorm room at Case Western and then in various offices, even though she’d long ago quit drinking tea in favor of coffee. To have kept it all these years suddenly seemed odd to her, as if it were an attempt to hold on to some part of herself that, in the natural course of things, should have been left behind. Tucking it under her arm, she walked through the outer office, then opened the door and stepped outside.

  Down the long hallway, past the provost’s office and a conference room, stood a large green trash can with the school logo on the side. She pushed the slot open and dropped the teapot in. The receptacle must have been empty, because her father’s gift hit the bottom and smashed to pieces.

  in the afternoon, when Matt got off work, he was often at loose ends. Before his mother died, he usually headed home and spent time with her; she was always good company, liked to have a glass of wine and talk books or listen to classical music, recalling when she and his father heard Charles Munch or Seiji Ozawa conduct a particular piece at the BSO. But once she was gone he hated returning to the big, empty house. Though he’d never been athletic, he decided to join a gym.

  He chose a new LA Fitness right off Main Street in Montvale. What he liked about it was that he almost never saw anyone he knew. Montvalians, as you could tell by the sight of them strolling the aisles at Shaw’s or Stop & Shop, filling their carts with Ruffles and Chips Ahoy, were not especially health conscious, and the few who did belong to a gym tended to prefer the Cedar Park YMCA, which had occupied the same spot for fifty years. At LA Fitness you saw people from Winchester, Woburn, Reading, Wakefield, even Burlington, all of them strangers, just as he preferred it. A year ago, when he first started, it was almost empty at four thirty, but a series of membership drives had attracted more and more people, and now he sometimes had trouble finding a locker.