by Cynthia Kuhn
“What is it, my love?” my mother asked, gently touching Damon on the arm. “An upsetting text?”
He looked up, then put his cell on the table. “No. I was just thinking about you, gadding about, talking about your art rather than doing it. What a waste of time.”
“Damon!” My mother swatted at him playfully, then turned to me. “He’s joking. He likes to tease me.”
“No, actually Vi, I’m not. It’s absurd how willing you are to squander your gift.” He finished his whiskey in one action and slammed it on the table.
My mother stared him down, though she remained composed. “What are you doing, my love? My daughter is here with us. It’s not the time for this.”
Damon bellowed, “You could be making art. Instead, you are simply talking.” He leaned over and enunciated the next few words in an unpleasant blast of his whiskey-scented breath. “Talk, talk, talk. It’s a waste of your talent.” He paused, then added in a nasty tone, “My love.”
She spoke calmly to me. “Lila, would you please excuse us for a few minutes?”
“I should probably go, actually. The dissertation is calling.” Which was true, but also I knew my mother could protect herself—in fact, she adored a good row—and I didn’t want her to have to hold back with Damon because I was sitting there. On the way out, I hugged my mother slightly harder than usual and wished her good luck at the conference, hoping that would be the last time I ever saw Damon and his facial hair.
That turned out not to be the case. Sadly.
After I finished my cocoa, I dialed my mother’s number.
She answered on the first ring, her voice cheery as usual.
“Lila, I’m so glad to hear your voice. I was going to give you a call later this evening to see how the new semester is going.”
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “How are you?”
She gave me the rundown on her latest project, along with some anecdotes about her best frenemy Daphne Duvall—who had apparently gotten a face lift but told everyone her glow came from a trip to Belize and now everyone was laughing up their sleeves at her. “But enough about me. How are things in Stonedale?”
“Well,” I said, “we have a problem.”
My mother caught her breath. “Not more dead bodies?”
“No, no.”
“Thank God.” I allowed her a few minutes of parental fussing rights, then explained that I needed to ask her a favor.
“Of course.”
I told her about Damon’s disappearance from the reading and our inability to confirm our event. “I hope he’s safe,” I said. “Have you spoken to him lately?”
“No. We haven’t talked at all since our breakup. What does Tally say?” My mother was fond of Damon’s agent; they’d bonded instantly last spring.
“She doesn’t know where he is, or at least that’s what she’s telling us.”
“That might be true, or she might just be protecting him. You know, doing her job. She gets paid to be a pit bull.”
“I understand. And if Damon is truly in trouble, none of this matters. But...” I almost couldn’t go on. It seemed heartless to be asking about business when Damon could be tied up in an abandoned warehouse or something right now. Or worse.
“Go on, darling,” my mother urged. “What do you need?”
“Well, his cancellation leaves the university in a tight spot, and I’ve been asked to request that you call Damon on the school’s behalf. People are hoping, if it’s simply a question of not wanting to attend, that you could persuade him to reconsider. Oh, and the chancellor would like you to mention—again, only if Damon is okay to begin with—that the speaker fee has been doubled.”
“Doubled? How generous.”
“They’re quite serious about getting Damon to Stonedale,” I said. “They’ve been advertising him all over the place.”
“I see.”
“Not sure why the planning committee wants you to be the one to call him, aside from the fact that you have his direct phone number, but—”
“Oh, I do,” said my mother, laughing lightly. “It’s because he’s a cantankerous buzzard. Everyone else is afraid of him.”
“He is intimidating,” I agreed.
“Also, he has a terrible habit of not responding when people contact him. I can’t tell you how many times I had to apologize for him when we were together. It’s a question of manners, really.”
“I’m sorry to have to ask. I know you haven’t been in touch since you broke up.”
“No worries, darling. I’ll call him for you. And if I can’t get in touch with him, I’ll see if I can get Tally to budge.”
“Great. It’s more important that he’s safe—”
“Goes without saying. He probably is...the man does whatever he wants, regardless of how it affects other people. He’s probably not even aware that everyone is worrying about him. Or if he is, he doesn’t care. Send along the info. And if he won’t be your speaker, I certainly would do it.”
“Now there’s a brilliant plan,” I said. “I’ll suggest it to the committee if he refuses. Thanks again, Mom. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Whew. I could cross that off my list. I probably shouldn’t have agreed to be on the committee in the first place, which added far more pressure than I needed, but it was too late to back out.
And now, there were quizzes to be graded.
Chapter 4
“Professors don’t always want to do the assigned readings either,” I said to the members of my Literary Modernism class—most of whom were slumped in the wooden desks before me. The room was unbearably warm, as if someone had decided that the best way to counter our early February snowstorm was to crank up the heat and melt everything from inside the building. If I weren’t standing up to teach, I’d be slumping too.
A few blinks. Some yawns. Effort to connect: denied.
The quizzes I’d graded last night had indicated that a friendly reminder of classroom expectations was warranted, so I lifted the thick anthology from the desk and gave it a shake. “But I promise I will come prepared, and if you do the same, we will have a great deal to talk about.”
The students appeared to be waiting for me to say something interesting. I didn’t blame them. I shifted gears.
“You know how when you read something, you can get lost in the story so completely that you lose track of time? You pause and it takes a minute to readjust to the real world?”
Some nods.
“Well, a number of these texts won’t allow us to relax into the reading. Part of the objective is to keep us aware of what we are doing as we are doing it.” I could feel the tension in the room increase, which was the opposite of what I’d intended. I hurried ahead. “Working through the avant-garde movements can be difficult in general, and there may be moments when you feel lost or confused even if you read a particular piece over and over.”
I noted a few stricken looks around the classroom. One woman in a red knit cap looked up from her cell phone and narrowed her eyes. Oops. Stonedale University was a small private school—not Ivy League but prestigious nonetheless—full of students who were accustomed to sailing blithely through their assignments on the S.S. Academic Success. Here I was suggesting that there were choppy waters ahead, and they did not like it one bit. But persevering without certainty was an important aspect of Modernism—and life, for that matter.
“Whenever it gets tough, just keep going. We’ll sort it out together, and it will be worth it.” I smiled. Reassuringly, I hoped. “So. Let’s talk about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’”
I loved T.S. Eliot’s poem for many reasons, and I always looked forward to going beyond the surface of the poem’s myriad of complexities into the heart of the matter, which was, in fact, the heart. Or longing, to be more precise.
After a long and l
ively discussion despite the smothering heat, I reminded them of the short paper due next week and ended the class. As the class was engaged in packing up their backpacks and heading off to the rest of their day, Keandra Lawrence approached my desk, buttoning up a thick coat. It was our first class together, but I was already impressed by her insightful contributions. Her black dreadlocks, which usually fell forward around her face, were pulled back and secured with a red ribbon featuring tiny gothic skulls, which were, I had noticed, all the rage lately.
“Professor? I heard Damon Von Tussel is coming to campus soon and you might need some students to escort him. Do you know who’s in charge of that?”
“I’m on the committee, so I can find out for you,” I said, realizing it might actually be me. No one had said, exactly, who was in charge. I didn’t want to mention that Damon was missing if she hadn’t heard about it yet. No need to spread rumors. We’d all know soon enough what was going on.
“Do you like his work?”
Her face lit up. “I love it. My dad is a veteran, and he read The Medusa Variation out loud at the dinner table when I was growing up.”
I smiled at her. “Nice.”
She wrapped a thick scarf around her neck, pausing to carefully extricate her braids. “How about if I email you?”
“Please. I’ll email you back as soon as I find out the scoop.”
Now I had to figure out how to ask who was doing the organizing without inadvertently getting assigned the task myself. Not that I didn’t want to pull my weight in terms of service. I’d be happy to do future tasks. I just wanted to stay as far away from Damon Von Tussel as possible. If he showed up.
After class, I stopped by Norton’s office. He was peering through his reading glasses at the computer screen, his head tilted back at an unnatural angle. When he saw me out of the corner of his eye, he ripped the glasses off and tossed them onto his desk next to his pipe.
“Can’t see with these things, can’t see without them. Absurd.” He gestured toward an empty chair. “Sit, sit.”
“Thank you, but I just have a quick question.”
“Please,” he said, his arm still pointing toward the chair. “I want to talk to you.”
I sank into the chair, though I didn’t remove my coat. After our encounters last semester, all negative, I tried to keep a healthy distance. He was an esteemed Chaucer scholar with a wicked wit and keen mind, judging from the articles I’d read, but I was wary of him.
“You first,” he said magnanimously.
“Do you know who is organizing the students for Damon’s visit? If he visits...” I held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t say it was me.
“Not sure,” he said. “What did you think of the meeting, by the way?” As he waited for me to respond, he smoothed the horizontal row of spindly hairs he’d arranged carefully across his skull.
“It was…productive,” I said, trying not to stare at his comb-over. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this line of questioning.
“Do you think a panel is a good idea?”
Oh. Francisco’s panel. “It could be interesting,” I said noncommittally.
He studied me, his dark brown eyes unreadable. “Fair enough,” he said finally.
As I stood to leave, he added, “By the way, if you are at all interested in tenure, you might want to get started on the Isabella Dare book you mentioned in your interviews.”
I whirled back around. “At all interested” in tenure? It was all I was interested in, and he knew it. “Pardon?”
“Well, the tenure committee met yesterday to discuss some business, and we also made a calendar listing who would be coming up for tenure and when. It made me think about publications. And how important it is to have them.”
My mouth went dry.
“You don’t have any yet, right?”
I shook my head. “Just conference presentations.”
He gave me a tight smile, patting his pipe, which he was not allowed to smoke inside the building, absently. “Well, then…”
The implication of my impending failure filled the room, making it harder to breathe. I thanked him and raced back toward my office, barreling into Nate just outside my door.
“Whoa,” he said. “Who’s chasing you?”
I put my finger to my lips, shushing him. He instantly looked both concerned and puzzled.
Managing to fit my shaking key into the lock, I pulled him inside the office and shut the door.
“Norton just completely freaked me out,” I said, recounting the conversation for him. “Here I was trying to do like you said and push tenure out of my mind. And now it’s right back in my face again.” My eyes filled with tears, which happened sometimes when I was especially frustrated, much to my dismay. “Are they going to be reminding us about it constantly? I don’t think I can handle that.”
He perched on the edge of my desk, smelling pleasantly of soap, as he always did. “Lila, it’s okay. You have years until you have to apply for tenure.”
“So why did he mention it to me today?”
Nate grabbed a tissue from the box on my bookshelf and handed it to me. I dabbed at my eyes.
“Who knows?” he said. “He may want you to have as much time as possible to work on a project, so he’s mentioning it now. He may genuinely want you to succeed.”
“Or he may be trying to discourage me by implying that the tenure committee is worried because I haven’t published anything yet. And preparing me for the worst.”
“That’s not likely,” he said. “It’s only your first year.”
“I’ve only been here one semester,” I protested. “I didn’t get much research done because I was trying not to get killed!”
He patted my arm. “I know. Look, no one expected you to publish something immediately. And honestly, whatever Norton did mean by it doesn’t matter. Look at it this way: he could tell you right now you weren’t getting tenure—”
I gasped. “Don’t say that out loud!”
“—but it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s not up to him alone.”
“True,” I said, calming down.
“There is a lot of time between now and then.” He smiled at me. “You’ll publish when you’re ready. Don’t stress.”
“Easy for you to say,” I sniffled. “You already published a ton of articles and you’re almost done with your book.”
“One measly article. And maybe no one will want to publish my book. I’m only a year ahead of you, Lila.”
I resolved right then and there to finish the book proposal I’d started last fall and worked on over break. It was time to send it into the world. One thing my dissertation director Avery had insisted upon was that I kept publication after graduation in mind as I wrote the project. And thank goodness I had. Now if I could just find a publisher who was interested, which seemed like an impossible dream. But clearly I had to behave as though it wasn’t.
After some deep breathing exercises, I was composed enough to tackle some work. I had fallen more than the usual amount behind already.
As soon as I’d settled down at my desk and turned on my laptop, a text arrived from my mother: Damon said yes.
My whole body relaxed. That meant that he was alive and well, which was most important. And now we didn’t have to scramble for a replacement. I dashed off an email to the planning committee, imagining collective sighs of relief all around. I couldn’t wait to hear how my mother’s conversation with Damon had gone.
I wasn’t surprised she had managed to locate the man the rest of the world was looking for; she was a very determined woman who typically got what she wanted when she put her mind to it.
I’d bet if she were in my shoes, she’d already have managed to get tenure somehow.
As the wise Cervantes said, comparisons are odious.
Returning to the computer, I made
my way down the list of emails from students and colleagues. The last one had a name and email address I didn’t recognize, but the subject line read “Arts Week.” Planning committee member names and emails were on the university web page as contacts, and I’d received quite a few queries asking about various particulars. I clicked on it, ready to dispense whatever information was required and move on to grading.
The email was short but not so sweet: Cancel Damon Von Tussel or else.
Seriously? We’d just managed to wrangle the author back onto the schedule and now someone wanted us to cancel?
I checked the email header again. Nothing about the person’s name or email service was familiar.
Leaning back in my chair, I stared at the screen. I wasn’t sure if this was the kind of thing better filed in the “crank” or “concern” category, so I printed it out and headed toward Spencer’s office.
As I passed the faculty mailboxes brimming with flyers and student papers, I greeted Mei Tan, a student who worked part-time in the office. After reading “Two Kinds” in American Lit last term, we’d bonded over our shared admiration of Amy Tan—“No relation,” Mei had said to the class, “though I sure hope an agent thinks so when I send out my novel.” She was leaning against the wall typing away on her cell phone, her long dark hair shining prettily in the glare of the overhead lights.
I complimented the large rainbow-colored peace sign on her phone case, and she looked up.
“Oh, hey Dr. Maclean. Sorry—I didn’t hear you. I’m in the writing zone. Do you need something copied? This is going to take a little while,” she said apologetically, indicating the rumbling machine next to her, which was spewing out collated packets of something.
