by Nino Ricci
“Here he is, our novus homo,” he had greeted David, what the Romans had called those striving plebes who had managed to scrounge a place among the patricians.
That was how the evening unfolded, in these smiling assaults, Julia looking on the whole time like an amused spectator. Away from her father she was scathing about him, but up close David could feel the dark lines of force that bound them.
“You’ll get used to him,” she said afterwards. “He just needs to claim his territory.”
Julia, too, had been quick to claim her territory, right from the start giving up any pretense of hiding their relationship at work, lingering in his office, taking his arm in the halls, planting her stakes. The truth was it pleased him to be taken possession of like this. He could see they were the envy of the department, in the untouchable way of celebrities or royalty, as if there was the sort of rightness to their coming together that put aside the usual pettinesses and rancour. Then the more open they were, the sooner Julia would be free of any lingering residue of Dirksen. For his own part, Dirksen had taken the hint early on—there was no more mooning at her office door, no orbiting at a distance, just his nods and smiles and quick retreats as if he were trying to make himself invisible. David figured he had come around like everyone else had, was probably even happy for them. They were both his protégés, in a way, even David, whom Dirksen had pushed for when he’d been hired and had always shown a paternal protectiveness toward.
The television deal brought another wave of buzz around David’s book and another flurry of speaking invitations, some of them from big-name universities in the States. More than once he was asked, with the sort of discretion that suggested serious intent, whether he had any plans for a move. The idea grew more compelling the more he thought about it. Even the B university back home had approached him, with an offer of a tailor-made cross-appointment. Nothing like the money he might get south of the border, but with course relief and a decent research budget.
He made a point of following up on every query and of shaking the right hands whenever he was on the road, telling himself he was merely finding out what was out there even while a part of him was already living an imagined future of doubled earnings and halved teaching loads. He didn’t breathe a word of any of this in the department, not even to Julia: he had too much at stake to risk involving her at this stage, still more than two years short of tenure and with plenty of detractors who would be ready to force his hand if any rumour got out that he was thinking of jumping ship. What made sense was to wait until he had decided definitively before bringing the matter up. Maybe even to wait until he had an actual offer; it would be easy enough then to negotiate something for Julia as part of the deal. That was his secret vision, to come to her with an engagement ring in one hand and a fat offer from a prestigious American school in the other. This despite all the evidence he’d had by then of her attachment to the city, the friends she’d had since kindergarten, the old haunts she’d taken him to, her secret devotion to her insufferable father. Somehow he shut all that out, drunk with his own possibilities.
He was just on the verge of expressing interest to a couple of places when Dirksen waylaid him in the hall one day as he was coming back from class. By then Dirksen had drifted so much to the edge of David’s field of vision that he had to keep reminding himself to actually take notice of him.
“I’ve got a student of yours in my office who wanted to see you.” Smiling, a bit quizzically. “Just a small matter, I think.”
David didn’t think anything of it—it was just like Dirksen to take in wandering strays like that and make sure they were tended to. The student was a hulking plodder from David’s Late Republic seminar who never said boo in class, sitting hunched in Dirksen’s office next to a hippopotamus of a woman decked out in bangles and shawls as if she had just come from a Bedouin wedding.
“I think Maddy and his mother have a question for you about his final paper,” Dirksen said, and there it sat on his desk, a big B minus on its cover page that David had awarded it, as he recalled, only because he couldn’t be bothered with the work of justifying the lower grade it actually deserved.
The woman was rummaging in her purse as if searching for some round of cheese or bottle of wine she had brought to propitiate him.
“Professor, please.” She had pulled out a newspaper clipping, which she laid with great ceremony next to the essay. “I can show you.”
It took David an instant to recognize the clipping as one of his own articles, a review he’d done recently for a local paper of a book on the Roman dictator Sulla. A couple of lines near the end of it had been carefully underlined in pencil.
David felt a shiver at the back of his neck.
“My son, he says you are famous. That you are writing a famous book. I tell him, he is lucky to have good professor. For good professor, he can work harder. He can learn more.”
Already David was finding it difficult to follow her. What threw him off was this deference, which did not waver the whole time she was making her case.
“You see, you write, ‘Good work,’ only that, no mistakes. But only B minus! He is trying for lawyer, my son, on the test, is good, but here only B minus. Then I see in the newspaper, where you write, is like Maddy! If famous professor can write for the newspaper, why only B minus?”
David’s temperature was rising. He wished Dirksen had had the wherewithal to spare him this. He was sick of students assuming that anything in their papers that didn’t have a big red circle around it was essentially flawless. Of parents coming to beg higher grades for their unremarkable offspring in the hope of getting them into law or medicine or a Harvard MBA.
The woman was urging the newspaper clipping on him, but he wouldn’t take it. Dirksen was still sitting there like a lump, his vicar’s smile plastered on his face.
“I beg you, Professor. Maybe can be B plus or A. To help him for lawyer.”
“You can’t expect him to get a fucking A just because he copied something he probably heard me say in class!”
The woman started back as if David had made a swipe at her. In the corner of his eye, he saw Dirksen go white.
“No, Professor Pace.” It was Maddy. He was the only one who looked unfazed. “I remember, I came up with the idea myself. Not that I would have if I hadn’t been in your class. I mean, you’re the one who taught us to think like that.”
The room had started to warp and shift. He shouldn’t have said probably, shouldn’t have left room for doubt. He shouldn’t have said fucking. He shouldn’t have given shape to an accusation that hadn’t even been made yet.
Dirksen was finally stirring to action.
“I think we understand your point, Mrs. Hakimi.” In a soothing tone David was actually grateful for. “Why don’t you let us discuss this on our own and see if we can’t find a solution.”
“Yes, Professor, thank you, I thank you!”
All David could see by then was a great black maw opening up before him. The matter came down to a short passage at the end of his Sulla review comparing a recent corruption scandal in the city to one in Roman times. A throwaway, really, just David acting clever, but of strikingly similar gist to an idea Maddy had developed at some length in his paper. Even the wording had echoes, David saw them at once. There was no chance Maddy had lifted the point from the review, which had come out only days earlier, after the essay had been marked and returned. One of the few margin comments David had bothered to make on the paper had singled out exactly the passage in question. “Great analogy,” he’d written. “Good work.”
David sat staring at the evidence after the duo had gone, unable to take it in.
“There’s no way that kid came up with this on his own! I distinctly remember discussing it in class. Either that or in a private meeting with him.”
But already he was scrambling, contradicting himself, until he wasn’t even sure anymore what the truth was.
Dirksen, to his credit, hadn’t expressed the le
ast hint of judgment in any of this, not even over David’s outburst.
“Let’s not lose our heads.” David could feel himself clutching at Dirksen’s calm. “It sounds like all they’re looking for is a grade review. Why don’t you let me give the paper a read and we’ll see if we can’t find some way for everyone to come out happy.”
When Dirksen called him back into his office the next day, however, all his assurance was gone. One of the boy’s other professors, it turned out, a Renaissance witch David had never got along with, had got wind of the dispute and had pressed Dirksen for details.
Dirksen wouldn’t meet David’s eye.
“I held her off, of course, but you have to understand this complicates things a bit, there’ll have to be some sort of follow-up. The boy must have talked to her after he left here. I suppose if you’d given him a bit more hope.” All the judgment Dirksen had withheld the previous day seemed there now. “The important thing is just to put your case together so we can keep this out of your tenure file. To spare you any awkwardness down the road.”
David wanted to scream. He already knew by then that he had nothing to prove he was in the right, no class notes that might clear him, no record of a private meeting. Not even his own confidence: the truth was, he’d reread the paper and been surprised, stunned really, at how cogent it had suddenly sounded.
Over the smallest thing—a couple of lines, it could happen to anyone—he was looking at ruin. Word would get out, it always did, and all his options would vanish, and meanwhile the matter would sit in his file ready to bite him again when he came up for tenure. Maybe some zealot would have managed to dig up dirt on Masculine History by then and David would be confirmed as a serial plagiarist, lucky to land a sessional job in the back of beyond.
The worst of it would be the humiliation. The look on his colleagues’ faces. On Julia’s. The smirk on her father’s.
He was ready to beg, even to Dirksen.
“Ed, you know how it’ll look if something like this gets out. The kind of stain it can leave.”
Some shadow flitted across Dirksen’s face, of compassion maybe. For some reason David thought he was thinking of Julia, of his own transgression.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Forcing a smile. “I’m sure in a couple of weeks the whole matter will be behind you.”
David is falling, scrambling for handholds, hurtling toward solid ground or just the realization that there is no solid ground, only space without end. Then he opens his eyes with a jerk: he has nodded off. Five minutes? Twenty? He can’t say. When he drops out like this his head fills with such a rush of images he has the sense that months might be passing, whole lives. Another of his symptoms, that his dreams light up like the Milky Way the instant he closes his eyes as if all along they have been reeling there at the back of his thoughts, waiting for dark.
On the Doomsday Channel the countdown has reached number one: death by warm front. Animals changing their habitats; flowers blooming out of season. Hurricanes, forest fires, floods. Great sheets of ice fall into the sea while satellite maps show Florida, London, Bangladesh disappearing beneath the rising tides. The stuff of nightmare. Of history.
The irony of history: that in the long run, it hardly matters. Ice caps spread and recede, continents drift, tumours the size of the moon split away and it is all just the blink of an eye on the way to final extinction. There is something comforting in that, liberating. In their deepest selves, David suspects, apocalypse is what people long for, to be freed of all caring, all restraint.
What he’d felt when he’d left Dirksen’s office was something like that freedom, a rush like heroin going through him or poison, the sense of his ties to the world being cut. The worst would happen and all the disguises he had made for himself, the careful lies, would fall away. Even Julia: this wasn’t something she could forgive him for, not really, he had already convinced himself of that. She needed him to be the golden boy, the star, not this blemished thing.
Then the instant he’d accepted the worst, the way forward was suddenly clear. All he had to do was act, to stop his dithering and forge ahead with the plans he had already been setting in motion for months. Now, at a distance of years, he suspects he might have invented the entire crisis just to galvanize himself into action, imagining himself at a precipice when chances were that the whole matter would have blown over even if he had done nothing. In any event he had proved Dirksen right, in the space of a couple of weeks managing to put the whole fiasco behind him, on his own terms. By then he had proposed to Julia and had brought her around to the idea of a move; he had quit his job and landed a new one. With his resignation there was no real point to any sort of inquisition beyond the practical one of the boy’s grade, which, without the least qualm, he bumped up to the A his mother had asked for.
David had been proud then of how well he had arranged things, had thought himself bold, the master of his fate. He had managed to talk Julia into the move through a blend of seduction and coercion, taking her out to a resort in the Townships for a weekend getaway with a big diamond ring in tow and making her promises and telling her lies, framing the move as a matter of getting better terms for the both of them, of catching the tide. By then he already had a firm offer in hand from the university back home, the only place he had called, in fact, using the interest from the States as leverage but never really following up on any of it. This was his concession to Julia, was what he told himself, just as he told himself that his strongarming—that he hadn’t hesitated, for instance, to put her tryst with Dirksen into the mix, probably what had broken her in the end—was all to the greater good of their relationship. Now, though, he sees that he was just using Julia as a cover for his own fears. That what would truly have been bold back then would have been to be honest, to have shown her the whole of himself as he had wanted to from the start.
He still remembers the stupid pleasure he took announcing to Dirksen that he was leaving.
“You have a good job here, David. Don’t throw it away.”
Certain then that he was making the right choice, that he was averting exactly the sort of plodding mediocrity Dirksen himself embodied. Yet ever since the run-in with him the year before David has been haunted by the feeling there was something he’d missed. More than once he has dreamed of being with Dirksen in his office again, everything the same, the tidy desk, the ordered shelves, yet more fraught, as if layered over with all the things David never knew that he knew, the deception and self-deception, the animal reflex, unavailable to the conscious mind, that is ninety per cent of every act. Dirksen, too, is amorphous in this way, himself and not, some question hanging between them that is never spoken but is like the very air they breathe, ubiquitous, forgettable, life-and-death.
David doesn’t know what to make of these revisitings. Since the onset of his disorder his dreams have grown increasingly pressing and vivid, yet if there is some insight they are trying to impart, David has yet to piece it out. From the sleep literature he has gathered that the thinking on dreams is as all over the map as on sleep itself, that Freud was utterly mistaken in them or only slightly so, that they are merely the brain’s desperate attempts to make sense of its own chemical twitches during sleep or a kind of spawning ground for consciousness itself. That they have something to do with firming up memories though in a way that subtly changes them, adding neural links that shift their associative streams according to a logic beyond the conscious mind’s reach. All night long, perhaps, this secret reconstruction work is going on in David’s head, his nighttime selves rejigging the experiences that his daytime one regards as the very stuff of his life. To what end? To make better sense of them? Or simply to fit them to the lie of what he thinks of as himself?
David had never really suspected Dirksen’s motives back then, never wondered why he had called him into his own office rather than sending the boy to David’s, whether he was as much in the dark as David was about what was coming or already knew the noose the boy’s
mother would dangle and sat calmly waiting until David had put his neck in it. Even the story of the other professor who had come to him could have been pure invention. David had stolen his woman, after all, and knew things that could have destroyed him. Not that Dirksen was the type who could ever have schemed so brazenly, but then who knew what under-selves of his own he employed to hold intact the smiling innocent he no doubt believed himself.
David wonders now if he would ever have proposed to Julia at all if Dirksen hadn’t been a factor. When he did, actually getting down on one knee to give her the ring, Julia’s face cycled through a dozen different emotions in an instant.
“You’ve got to be kidding! Pace the player is proposing? Let me get my camera! Who would believe it?”
In the first years of their marriage Julia used to tell this story with that same mordant good humour, as if this enterprise they had embarked on had had exactly the sort of grand beginning that boded well. Eventually her version of things overwrote David’s own until his memories of the weekend faded to mere impression. All that sticks out for him now with any vividness is a single image, of some animal crashing through the winter deadwood behind them as they were walking through the woods and Julia half-turned with a look of dread that for a split second seemed directed at him.
The sound of footsteps.
“What kills me is that you thought I’d never notice. That you could just keep putting me off with the same stupid excuses.”
The doomsday show is winding down. Images of abandoned cities, of empty highways, of desert and waste. The earth without people.
“What kills me is that you’d lie about it as if it were some kind of threat to your precious manhood. That that’s more important to you than your own son.”
“If you’d noticed,” he says, “why didn’t you ever bring it up?”
