“Are you going to bell curve the grades?” demanded one student who was familiar for consistently asking such questions.
“There is always the opportunity to improve your own grade and to receive an excellent mark on any assignment, Mr. Carmichael, but I will not be adjusting these grades. I do not believe in bell curves, as each class is unique. I do not mark to a quota: I give each paper the mark it deserves in my opinion, and if that meant every student got an A, I assure you that I would be delighted. Sadly, it usually means that the vast majority of students receive a C or an F.” She gave them a heartbeat to worry about that.
“But…”
“I am interested in the pursuit of academic excellence,” Leslie said, interrupting Mr. Carmichael crisply. “And the future of scholarship. It would be irresponsible on my part to mark over-generously. If none of you prepare an excellent essay or write an outstanding exam, it is my duty to give you a commensurate grade.”
“But…”
“I have tenure, Mr. Carmichael. They can only fire me for a few things, and telling the truth isn’t one of them.”
And Leslie could see, from one glance over the lecture hall, that she finally had their attention.
She hoped, a bit belatedly, that she was right about the tenure bit.
“Any questions? No? Fine, then I will leave your essays here for you to claim—surnames A through M in this pile, surnames N onward in this pile—and I look forward to our discussion on Tuesday. I remind you that the last date to drop any half course this semester without any mark of its presence remaining on your student record is tomorrow.”
Leslie left the lecture hall just as pandemonium erupted.
Wait until Dinkelmann heard about this.
The best part was that Leslie didn’t care. She had embarked on Naomi’s course of taking the high road and the only question she had was why she hadn’t done it sooner.
With those boxes gone, their burdens cast into the abyss to burn, she felt lighter on her feet. She felt like dancing, with a rose clenched in her teeth.
Maybe she should take tango lessons.
Except she’d want to take them with Matt and only with Matt, and that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. There was a thought to bring her back to earth.
Mercifully, there was one last Hershey’s in the vending machine below the history department offices.
* * *
The phone was ringing in Leslie’s office and she was pretty sure it was Dinkelmann, calling to chew her out for failing to play by the new rules of the game. The man had a sixth sense for knowing when things in his kingdom were diverging from his edict of the day. She bit off another piece of chocolate once she got the door unlocked, crossed the office in one step and picked up the phone.
“I don’t care what you think, Dr. Dinkelmann,” she said with defiance. “It was the right thing to do and I’m glad I did it. Go ahead. Do your worst.”
There was a beat of silence, then a different male voice echoed in her ear. “What did you do that Dinkelmann won’t like?” Matt asked, his tone wary.
Ooops.
Leslie sat down at her desk, reminding herself to breathe. The chocolate bar was less interesting than it had been.
For the moment at least.
“I didn’t expect you to call,” she said, instead of answering him. “Since you didn’t call last night.”
“I was too drunk to punch in the number,” he said with a rueful laugh. Leslie silently gave herself ten bonus points for not asking if he had been too drunk to do the horizontal boogie with Sharan.
There was an awkward pause, one that Leslie was reluctant to fill with chatter about Zach or even Sharan. She waited instead, not wanting to hang up the phone either.
What did she want? She wanted a sign from Matt—a portent, like the ones Gregory of Tours recorded so diligently—that he still cared, at least a little.
An eclipse or a shooting star would do. She checked out the window, only to find thin winter sunlight on dirty snow.
“You never answered my question,” Matt said irritably. “Why do you hate your job? You never said anything before.”
“You never said you were going to lose the court case.”
“I thought you knew.”
“Maybe I thought you knew about my job, or would guess.”
“I had no idea,” he confessed. “So, we have that in common. Is this new?”
Leslie straightened, not feeling inclined to bare her thoughts when she was so uncertain of his intentions. “I don’t think it really matters…”
“Well, I do.” Matt interrupted her, that new tinge of impatience in his tone. “The thing is that I expected everything to be right between us again once that case was over and it isn’t and I want to know why.”
Leslie liked the sound of his determination, but she wasn’t going to cave in too easily. “I thought you were leaving instead.”
“Well, maybe I am.”
“No maybe about it. You did.”
“All right, I did.” Matt exhaled and lowered his voice. “But you surprised me, Leslie. I was sure that you loved your job. Look, if I’d known otherwise, maybe I would have done something different in court.”
Leslie toyed with a paperclip, well aware that she was hearing what she most wanted to hear yet afraid to trust it. “It didn’t sound like compromising your principles was an option.”
“Is that it, then? Do you feel you’ve compromised yours?”
“Does it matter? We need my paycheck—or I guess now I should say that I need it.”
Matt ignored that opportunity to pledge his return. “Yet you did something today that you knew Dinkelmann wouldn’t approve of. It’s not like you to be inconsistent. What aren’t you telling me?”
What wasn’t she telling him?
Leslie thought of the Christmas letter from Sharan, that Sharan knew about his intent to lose the case and about his novel, neither of which Leslie had known. She recalled that he was at Sharan’s home, maybe sitting at her kitchen table, using her phone, which maybe had a smear of her lipstick on it (maybe there was a smear on him to match) and yet none of that seemed to be worthy of conversation.
What wasn’t she telling him?
She probably should have guessed that she’d lose it. “What aren’t I telling you? Hello, aren’t you my husband who is several thousand miles away, staying at the home of his former girlfriend, and noncommittal about returning to the family domicile here? I think you’ve got a few confessions of your own to make, Mr. Coxwell.”
He wasn’t daunted at all. In fact, he came back hard and fast, as if he was still in court facing his brother. “Fair enough. We haven’t talked enough lately. How does your not telling me that you hated your job fit into fixing that? How does refusing to discuss it now change anything?”
Leslie paused and swallowed, hearing the truth in his words. Every journey began with a small step, just one.
Maybe it was time she took that step.
Maybe she should take it first.
“Okay,” she agreed, twining the telephone coil around her fingers. “You’re right. I should have talked to you about it. But I haven’t felt as if I even knew you lately, Matt, and this whole situation isn’t helping.” She wished she could see his eyes, wished she had evidence beyond the tone of his voice to measure his sincerity.
New Orleans might as well have been the moon.
“Fair enough,” he said tightly. She heard a chair being dragged across the floor. “So, talk to me now, Leslie. Tell me what’s wrong with your job.”
“Why should I bother?”
“What have you got to lose? And I’m asking.”
She thought about that for three seconds, then straightened and pushed her door with her fingertips. The door didn’t quite close, so she lowered her voice, sure that no one was around anyway. “It’s Dinkelmann.”
“The department head?”
Leslie found herself nodding. “Yesterday, he insisted that we
have to give higher grades.”
“You’re whispering.”
“This isn’t the best place to express doubts about the emperor’s choice of wardrobe.”
Matt chuckled and Leslie was inordinately pleased that she had made him laugh, even a little. “I’ve missed your humor,” he said, his voice warm. “Why did you stop making jokes?”
Leslie felt herself blushing. “I don’t know.”
“When you became disenchanted with your job, I’ll bet,” he mused. “I’ve really got to become more observant.”
“I didn’t even notice,” Leslie admitted and there was a warm moment of understanding between them.
Matt cleared his throat. “So, presumably these higher grades are for the same work or lack thereof.” His disgust made Leslie feel better, as if she wasn’t fighting this battle alone.
She turned the paperclip over and over. “He wants me to just add the 15% participation grade to every student’s marks…”
“15% for free?” Matt was so incredulous that Leslie smiled. “Not even for showing up? The participation marks are already gimmes!”
“I know. And more students have to get A’s under the new policy. They’re going to calculate percentages.”
“I thought they did that already.”
“It was a request last time, not a formal policy.”
“So, why the change?”
“Apparently, the university is unable to compete for new students because of its reputation as a tough school. And people paying tuition want something great to show for it.”
“Straight A’s, regardless of what the kid has done. Welcome to the consumer society.”
“Exactly.”
“So, it’s all about money.”
“Yes! Money and marketing and bureaucracy and…”
“Bullshit.”
“Yes!”
“You know, there was a time when the antidote for low grades was more work on the part of the student.”
“Oh, but that’s not all. There’s more…”
“I get the Ginsu knife, too?”
Leslie chuckled. On some level, she was astonished by how easy this was. It was beginning to talk that was difficult, but once they were rolling, their old rhythms kicked right in. “This morning, I got a memo that Dinkelmann wants course offerings sexed up…”
“Sexed up? He actually used that word?”
“Um hmm. Listen, here’s his example.” Leslie retrieved the pink sheet from the trash and read to Matt. “‘A sample of a new course might well be Submissive Whores, Lusty Heiresses and Dominant Queens: The Unexpected Women of the Middle Ages.’” Leslie snorted, knowing she could express herself honestly to Matt. “What’s ‘unexpected’ is his suggested course title.”
“That’s incredible. Could such a course even be taught?
“Well, at some level. Maybe like a cable television script, not like a history course.” Leslie forced herself to consider the root of Dinkelmann’s suggestion. “Maybe he just wants to get away from political history, which I can understand. I would be the first person who would welcome a women’s studies course focused on the middle ages and the role of women in medieval society. It’s intriguing stuff and the origin of a lot of our notions of gender roles and courtship.”
“But…” Matt prompted, drawing her out.
“The problem is, as always, source material.” Leslie warmed to her theme. “How many churchmen wrote extensively about whores—or even about heiresses or queens? How many women were even taught to write, so they could write about themselves? How much raw stuff is available?”
“Not much,” Matt guessed. “Some, but not much.”
“Exactly. Is it reasonable to extrapolate from some bits and ends to half of the population of Europe?”
“Dangerous stuff, statistically speaking.”
“Exactly. Here’s a comparative for you. Could you take a case history of a hooker working in Manhattan and make conclusions about the role of women in general in twenty-first century western society?”
“No way.”
“Even the United States? Even Manhattan? It would be risky to even extrapolate to hookers working in Manhattan: one point does not make a line.”
“How much material is there on medieval women?”
“We have three well-documented examples and not much else. Three, for roughly a thousand years of history that encompasses all of Europe. It’s a pretty meager sample, but they are remarkable women. There’s Blanche of Castille, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegarde von Bingen: that gives us a queen regent who ruled with an iron fist, an assertive heiress who became queen twice by virtue of her inherited lands and sheer force of will, and an abbess who had remarkable dreams on theological themes.”
“But the million dollar question is how typical are they?”
“Right. Probably not any more typical than Ivana Trump or Princess Diana are of your mother or me.” Leslie heaved a sigh. “Maybe even less so. And none of them wrote without a scribe, none of them wrote themselves, so there’s always the chance that their words have been edited or revised.”
“Not very reliable stuff.”
“No. My own suspicion is that chroniclers who wrote about these women did so because they acted often in the ways men were expected to act, ways in which women were not supposed to act. They were considered abominations by clergy, and were newsworthy, so to speak.”
“Wasn’t Eleanor of Aquitaine the one someone called Queen of England ‘by the wrath of God’?”
“Yes! Giraldus Cambrensis called her that,” Leslie said, thrilled that he remembered some of this stuff. Her stuff. She balled up the pink sheet and tossed it back into the trash. “So, that’s why I hate my job. I can’t even pursue my own research, what with the number of classes and number of graduate students to advise…”
“But you like teaching, don’t you?”
“Not this way. Not when they’re going to dictate the resulting grades, independent of the work that gets done. And I don’t like having all these burdens piled on my back which keep me from doing my own research, then being told that I’m not publishing enough articles. There are only so many hours in a day!”
“And if you can’t keep up, Leslie, no one can. You’ve got to be the most organized person on the planet…”
“Could you stop saying that, please?” Her words were lightly spoken and she heard Matt chuckle. “I’d like to be given another adjective, even if it’s only for a while.” Leslie swung in her chair, surprised to find herself smiling. She felt better for venting, better for having Matt agree with her, better for tasting their old camaraderie again.
Reality, of course, was quick to intervene.
“But you see, they’re asking exactly the same thing of you that my father asked of me,” Matt said with a levity that the assertion certainly didn’t deserve. “You’re being asked to compromise your principles, your ideas of what makes good scholarship or even good teaching.”
Leslie froze, startled by the truth in this.
“It sounds as if you know exactly what I was facing, as if you understand now what you didn’t get the other day. You always were the moral lodestone, Leslie, so I know you’ll do the right thing.” He thought it was resolved, as easily as that. “Back to the topic at hand.”
Which was his leaving her. Leslie was in shock.
Matt apparently took her silence for assent. He cleared his throat, making her think he was uncomfortable with whatever he meant to say. Leslie had a heartbeat to marvel at that before he shocked her again.
“Look, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I lost my wallet last night.” His voice was strained, and Leslie intuitively knew that he was lying. “So, I’ll need to get the credit card numbers from you so I can cancel the cards.”
What had happened to his wallet? Or maybe it was just one item in that wallet, one credit card maybe, for which he needed the number. Matt never lost anything, so Leslie knew his story was exactly that.
&n
bsp; A story.
A lie.
Which made her angry all over again. How dare he challenge her for not telling him everything? How dare he spout about the value of honesty? She had just shared her concerns with him, only to have him lie to her in return.
Her silence clearly concerned him. “So, when do you think you could get me the numbers? A couple of those cards have a lot of open credit and I’m a bit worried.”
Leslie gritted her teeth and deliberately didn’t answer his question. “I don’t have the numbers here. Remarkably.”
“I wouldn’t expect even you to be that organized.” Matt laughed. When she didn’t laugh with him, he cleared his throat again. He was nervous. Because he was lying? Because he guessed that she knew it? Because the truth was something that would really infuriate her? “Well?”
“I think you have to report the loss within twenty-four hours,” Leslie said crisply. “So, tonight will probably be fine. If you call the house around dinner, I should have all of the statements collected by then.”
“Thanks.”
“Glad to be of assistance.” The words came out terse and hard.
“Leslie, don’t take this wrong. You know that there’s no one else I could ask about this…”
Being convenient was not what Leslie wanted to hear in this moment. Nor did she want to be told that she was organized, or useful, or any number of other safe wifely traits.
For once, Leslie wasn’t going to make nice and swallow her frustration. Matt wanted honesty? Well, he was going to get some. “Well, it’s terrific to find myself useful, especially when you’re lying through your teeth.”
“What do you mean?” He was hesitant, as if he knew that she was going to call him on something—and be right.
“You’ve never even lost a hair off your head, Matt. You never lose anything and no matter how drunk you might have been, you would never ever lose your wallet. You could at least tell me the truth, after I’ve shared my truth, Mr. Honesty-Is-Everything.”
He whistled low, but didn’t deny her accusation. “Cutting right to the chase, just like old times.” In fact, there was admiration in his voice. “I remember this Leslie. Where have you been?”
One More Time Page 14
