Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  To say that Ned looked strained would be a gross understatement. Pale and skinny, with straight dun-colored hair flopping over his bulging forehead, Ned had grown weedy in the past year or so. His shoulders slumped, and a small pot belly had begun to emerge. He’d taken to wearing tweed jackets that bulged at the elbows and gray flannel pants that bulged at the rump. This was Ned’s first semester as department chair, a distinction he’d attained only once it became crystal clear that nobody else on the senior faculty would agree to do it. Ned, as far as I could tell, had lacked the courage to say no.

  So far, he’d approached the job with diffidence and hesitation. Because he could never bear to force his colleagues to come to the point, or to pressure us into a consensus, department meetings were endless. Plus he had an absolute phobia about possible lawsuits, the department being sued for some inadvertent breach of the Equal Employment Act or for violation of the College’s sexual harassment policies, or…you name it. It was as if some vindictive legal/political tribunal resided in his head, and all potential department decisions had to march past it in review. When Miles was chair, department meetings had been so boring I’d taken to bringing books of crossword puzzles, but with Ned in charge I’d advanced from Monday’s puzzles to Wednesday’s, and I was certain that by the end of the semester I’d be ready for Sunday’s.

  “Karen! Joseph! What’s the problem here?”

  “He—” I said

  “She—” he said.

  And then I remembered Ayesha. Where was she? I couldn’t see her among the cluster of colleagues now witnessing my humiliation. How embarrassing this must have been for her—two professors putting on such a juvenile display and using her as a pretext. I was beginning to realize that perhaps there might have been a more diplomatic way for me to handle the situation. I hadn’t been quite rational about my approach to Joe, had I? Now our spat was public spectacle. Oh, God. What had I done?

  And I couldn’t see Ayesha anywhere. I stood on my tiptoes and looked over Joe’s head. There she was down the dimly lit hall by the open office door with a tall, lean young man who looked familiar to me. Then a ray of late sun shone in through the glass of the door and lit up his matted blond hair.

  It was my other brilliant student, Hank Brody, and Ayesha seemed very comfortable in his arms.

  Chapter 5

  Monday evening

  “Oh, Charlie, I don’t know what to do. Ned scolded us as if we were naughty schoolchildren. I was so humiliated! And then I saw Ayesha in the arms of a boy, and the whole rationale for…chiding…Joe went right down the drain.”

  “Sounds like you did a lot more than ‘chide’ the man, Babe. Sounds like you just about skinned him alive. It’s not like you at all to lose your cool in front of colleagues. What was really going on?”

  I’d driven home on autopilot again, and the phone started ringing the minute I got in the house. When I heard Charlie’s voice, I flopped down on the old overstuffed couch and unburdened myself of the whole embarrassing scene. It had been three days since he’d been able to call, and I hadn’t wanted to get into my tenure dilemma by e-mail.

  Then he had to go and ask that question: “What was really going on?”

  What was really going on? “You just won’t believe it, Charlie. Miles Jewell came storming into my office—”

  “Jewell? That’s the old guy, right? The one who’s given you so much grief for being a mushy-eyed liberal?”

  Mushy-eyed? “Yes, but even he thinks what’s going on is an outrage.” I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my new silk blouse. Was I crying? No. Couldn’t be.

  “Calm down, Sweetie. Take a deep breath. Blow your nose. Good. Now tell me—what is going on?”

  And I told him all about it: the probability that, simply because he was Native, Joe Lone Wolf would take my place in the ranks of Enfield’s tenured faculty. “I don’t know if Ned’s support for Joe is because he’s terrified of an affirmative-action lawsuit, or if he truly believes I should be sacrificed to the gods of justice to make reparations for the whole sorry past of American history.”

  “Okay, sweetie. God, I wish I could be there with you! But, listen, I heard you use the word ‘probability.’ Don’t you think ‘possibility’ might be more like it? After all, not all your colleagues are idiots.”

  “When it comes to racial politics, nobody’s quite sane these days. I can’t be sure which way the department will jump.” The soft couch cushions were beginning to suffocate me. I pushed myself up and went to the window. Seven o’clock and dark already. Winter was coming, and I’d spend it alone. Charlie in Iraq. Amanda in Nepal. Me…

  “Babe, now remember, I’m an outsider. I’m not certain how this stuff works. After six years you apply for tenure, right?”

  “Right. You present your case, and the senior members of the department—those who already have tenure—vote yes or no.”

  “Does the department have the last word?”

  “Well, no. Their decision goes to the deans, and they look at it. If there’s even one or two negative votes, they sit up, take notice, and start asking questions.”

  “So, the deans have the last word?”

  “Well, no. Then it goes to the president.” The thought of Avery Mitchell casting the deciding vote made my stomach do flip flops. We had a history, Avery and I. Well, we had a tiny history—a one-kiss history. A long-ago-one-kiss history.

  “You’re in with him, right, Babe? You’ve done a lot for the school, and he seems like a reasonable guy.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Avery’s a reasonable guy.” That didn’t offer me any comfort. He was reasonable—but he was also the consummate political animal. Would he buck the tide if it went against me?

  On the phone I heard someone speaking to Charlie, but couldn’t make out the words. Then Charlie said, “Listen, Babe. I’m gonna have to get off the phone now. Word is we’re headed out into the provinces.” I wouldn’t say he sounded exactly thrilled, but there was an excited edge to his voice. Adventure. “That’s what I called to tell you. I may be out of touch for a few days.”

  “Oh, God. Listen to me kvetching when you’re the one who’s in danger.” It began to occur to me that maybe I was over-reacting to Miles’ news; Charlie’s safety mattered a hell of a lot more than my tenure.

  Someone in the background yelled, “Hey, Piotrowski. On the double!”

  “Listen, gotta go. One last thing. Put it all in proportion—what’s the worst that could possibly happen? You might lose your job. Happens to thousands of people every day. That’s just the way things work. So you’ll find another one.

  “And, anyhow, Babe,” his voice went husky, “if the worst should ever come about, believe me, I would never, ever, let you starve.”

  “Piotrowski!” the voice bawled.

  “Coming! Bye, Babe. I’ll call when I can.”

  ***

  I sat there with loneliness buzzing through the telephone’s receiver. I hated it, that abrupt severance: one second Charlie was there, the intelligence, the passion, the unique consciousness of him; the next, nothing but that meaningless electronic tone that spoke only of immutable distance and unwanted separation.

  My computer suddenly clicked out an e-mail from Amanda.

  From: APelletier@sbcglobal.net

  To: KPelletier@enfield.edu

  Subject: Don’t Worry!

  Can’t CALL YOU, Mom. Am out in the hills. One small Internet café in this town. Saw Buddhist funeral procession today winding up into the mountains—saffron and white against greenest green you could ever imagine. So beautiful here, and simple. People very friendly. Love, Amanda.

  I wrote back:

  Beautiful here, too, high autumn, but not simple. I miss you! Keep in touch!!!! Love, Mom.

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday 10/6

  “Joe Lone Wolf says you attacked him for no reason.” The expression on Ned Hilton’s narrow face was stern. “He called it an ambush.”

  Ned sat behind the cha
irman’s desk in a leather chair so large it threatened to engulf him. All three buttons on the beige polo shirt he wore beneath his brown tweed jacket were fastened. It was the next morning, Tuesday. At ten o’clock his east-facing office was flooded with light from the tall, recessed windows behind him, momentarily blinding me. Had he timed it that way?

  Ned had called me early—nine a.m. on the nose. He wanted, he said, in a voice so flat he might have gargled with liquid Xanax, to talk with me and “get to the bottom of that disgraceful scene yesterday afternoon between Professor Lone Wolf and yourself.”

  “When?” I asked. I didn’t know it was possible for me to sound so Minnie-mouse meek.

  “Now. My office.” He hung up. Masterful.

  Wearing black pants and my favorite denim jacket embroidered on the back with a peace symbol, my hair loosely plaited in a single braid, I sat in the hot seat and tried to defend myself. Motes of dust hung in the air, creating an aura of desiccated light around the chairman’s head and shoulders. “Ned, believe me, it wasn’t anything like an ambush or an attack. I simply informed Joe that I felt his behavior with a student was inappropriate.”

  “What behavior was that?” Ned was squeezing a hot-pink stress ball in his right hand.

  I felt like a fourth-grade tattle-tale. “He touched Ayesha Ahmed—twice.”

  “Where did he touch her?”

  “By the staircase.”

  “Karen…”

  “On the arm. Okay? He grabbed her by the arm, thus violating Islamic rules of gender separation and college sexual harassment policy—no touching, no hugging, etc. We get a memo about that every year, remember?”

  “Joe says he didn’t touch her—he simply gestured in her direction.”

  A brass letter opener in the shape of a dagger lay on the desk within easy reach. I folded my hands in my lap. “He touched her.”

  “So, it comes down to your word against his. Shall we call Ayesha in to settle this?”

  “No! We can’t put her through that.” As the catalyst for that ridiculous scene, the poor girl had had enough embarrassment.

  Ned leaned back in his chair and did something contemplative with his lips. It looked as if he had a bad toothache. “And, in any case, you overreacted, didn’t you? A simple touch on the arm?”

  “Perhaps.” It pained me to have to admit the possibility, but I was determined to continue in my policy of departmental congeniality, unaccustomed as I am to public meekness.

  “Perhaps?” The stress ball migrated to his left hand.

  I refused to respond to that hostile little nudge. A long, long, looong silence ensued. I sat it out, staring past Ned and through the window. A girl with a shaved head sped past on a bicycle—her clunky bike-lock chain hung around her neck. A guy with a blue backpack and a guitar case strolled by. A yellow Labrador retriever wearing a dark-blue bandana knotted around his collar jumped up and caught a high-flying Frisbee. Every campus has a yellow dog and a Frisbee.

  Finally Ned let out a sigh. “Karen, we both know what this is all about, don’t we?”

  “We do? What?”

  He leaned back in the chair and intertwined his fingers. “You are up for tenure—a stressful time for anyone, but you’re not handling it well. Making a scene in front of your colleagues. Tarnishing your chances.” He fiddled with his polo shirt’s top button until it suddenly popped off in his hand. He stared at it, bewildered, then opened his center desk drawer and placed it carefully in what I speculated must be a compartment designed especially for beige shirt buttons. Then he glanced back at me. “But this is a particularly sticky case, involving issues of social equity and racial equality. Some of us must make sacrifices in the name of reparative justice. You do understand, don’t you? Not everyone can be tenured everywhere, you know, Karen. Departments have their individual needs and obligations. I’m sure I don’t need to say anything more than that.”

  It’s a funny thing about unaccustomed meekness; sometimes it’s nothing but a ticking bomb. I stood up, very slowly, and walked around the desk behind which Ned had barricaded himself. “Professor Hilton,” I said. My voice was sculpted ice. “You may very well outrank me. You may very well hold the key to my future in your puny hands.…”

  The stress ball fell to the carpet. He skittered his ball-wheeled desk chair away from me and back toward the windows. I truly think he expected me to slug him.

  “…but,” I advanced on him, pushed the top of his chair with my finger, hard, and it tilted even further backward. “But, you may not patronize me, and you may not threaten me.”

  “That wasn’t a threat,” he squeaked, attempting to right himself.

  I stooped to pick up the hot-pink stress ball, gave it a squeeze, tossed it to him. He tried to catch it but missed, and it bounced onto the wide windowsill and came to rest in a terra cotta planter bristling with cacti.

  “Have a nice day, Professor Hilton.” I was dead, and I knew it. I might as well go straight home and write my letter of resignation.

  As I stalked out on Ned and entered the hallway, Joe Lone Wolf’s office door opened. I think I gained the sanctuary of the ladies’ room before Joe could see me. There I whipped out my cell phone, dialed Earlene, and got voice mail. “Call me as soon as you can,” I said to the electronic memory device I’d reached instead of my friend. I called Greg. Ditto. Sometimes modern life offers only cold electronic consolation. My heart was thudding and my face was hot. I stood at the old marble-top sink and splashed cold water on my face until I felt sufficiently recovered to face the world.

  When I left Dickinson Hall on my way to lunch, having finally made contact with my friends, I saw Joe Lone Wolf strutting across campus ahead of me. Elmore O’Hara, a black kid with shaved head and a little goatee, was walking toward us. Joe tilted his head at Elmore, as if questioning him. Elmore responded with two thumbs up. Not a word had passed, but something had been agreed upon.

  Tuesday Noon

  “You said that to him? You actually said ‘puny hands’?” Greg Samoorian’s expression was properly scandalized, but his brown eyes held an irrepressible glimmer of glee. He sat across the table from Earlene and me in the back booth at the Blue Dolphin diner drinking coffee from a ceramic mug. It was lunchtime and the aroma of hamburger and onion suffused the air.

  “I did. And now I’m dead meat. That’s why I called you guys.”

  “What on earth came over you?” Greg asked. He was studying the menu’s Specials of the Day.

  “Nobody, but nobody gets away with threatening me!” I had no appetite at all.

  Earlene set her coffee mug on the table. “Karen, as you know, I come from a background similar to yours, so I do understand the knee-jerk pride—”

  “Knee-jerk? He was abusing his power!” I couldn’t repress the tears that had been building since I’d left Ned’s office.

  “You think?” Earlene placed a hand on my arm. “Or was he simply being an insensitive jerk?” She handed me a paper napkin.

  I mopped my eyes and sighed. “Could be. My first year at Enfield, Ned was up for tenure himself, and his situation was iffy. I never saw anyone in such a state of despair. You’d think now he’d have empathy for someone in the same position.”

  The waitress showed up with a red plastic bread basket. She had brassy hair crimped into tousled ringlets and a wide streak of eyeliner above each eye. Her nameplate said SONIA. “Sorry to be so long,” she said. “It’s a madhouse. What can I get you?”

  My companions ordered the special, corn chowder and BLTs. Sonia wrote it on her little green pad, turned to me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Nothing.” The thought of food nauseated me.

  “She’ll have the same,” Greg said. “Cup of chowder. B.L.T.”

  Sonia changed the number 2 to 3. “Listen to your husband,” she said, as she walked off, “he knows what’s good.”

  “He’s not my—”

  Greg laughed and took my hand across the tabletop. “Yes, Doll-baby, li
sten up. Hubby knows best.”

  Earlene plucked a bread roll from the basket. “Ned is one of those people who latches onto a perfectly valid and well-meaning set of beliefs and then turns them into stone. It’s a kind of character flaw, the inability to live without absolutes.” She broke the roll and buttered it.

  “God help us,” Greg said, “when one of these secular fundamentalists is handed a little power—especially in the academy. Talk about rigid!”

  “You know, Karen,” Earlene went on, handing me half the buttered roll, “I continue to believe in the fairness of the tenure system here at Enfield. More rational minds than Ned’s will prevail. And, if they don’t, there’s always the appeal process. The college has no reason to want to lose you.”

  “I’d love to believe that’s true.”

  “But…but one thing I am concerned about…” She glanced over at Greg. He nodded.

  “What’s that?” I stopped the bread roll halfway to my mouth.

  Greg took over. “We’re afraid, the way you’re going, you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot.”

  When Greg gets serious, I sit up and listen. “Shoot myself—”

  Earlene broke in. “I wouldn’t put it quite that way, Karen, but I am concerned about the instability you’ve shown over the past couple of days—”

  “Instability! Me?”

  The waitress set a cup of soup in front of me. I pushed it away.

  “Maybe that’s too strong a word.” Earlene had her deanly manner on, which meant she was both sincere and worried. “But you’ve lost your temper twice now in an extremely impolitic manner. That’s not at all like you.”