by Alison Lurie
Jane isn’t bored, Alan thought. She still cares, she wants to help. But there had been something strange in the way she had looked at him this morning out in the driveway, just for a second, almost as if she didn’t recognize him. And again later, when she brought him the icepacks, the same sort of look. As if she were seeing him from a great distance, and maybe not liking what she saw.
Only eleven in the morning, and he was exhausted. If he could read, it might distract him, but the Times had somehow fallen to the floor in disarray. He felt about with his hand, but could reach only the business section, which reminded him of the declining economy and the many medical bills he continued to receive for amounts not covered by his insurance. Meanwhile, he realized that the blue icepacks Jane had brought had softened and turned lukewarm and useless. Alan pulled them out from behind him with an impatient, agonizing wrench, and threw them on the floor. Then he lay heavily back, trying to decide if it was worth it to get up, carry the icepacks into the kitchen, put them into the freezer, remove the inferior white icepack, return to the sofa, and lie down again. All these actions would hurt, possibly more than the ice would help.
Maybe in a few minutes he would have the energy. Or maybe Jane would come in and he could ask her to do it. Meanwhile, he lay there, and the lizard continued to chew on his back.
THREE
On a hot late August afternoon at the Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities, things were not going well. Five professors were scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow ; but that morning a large piece of ceiling had fallen in the kitchen, filling much of the ground floor with dust and debris.
Jane had not been very surprised by this event. One of the things she knew by now was that for anyone in an administrative position, probably right up to the dean of the Arts College and the provost and president of the University, the question is always, “What is going to go wrong today, and how will I deal with it?” As her husband Alan had said of his own department chairmanship, “You take the job because you have ideas about how things could be better, and then you spend most of your time keeping them from getting worse.” Over the past few years she had learned to anticipate and even in a way to appreciate problems and their repair.
Jane usually got to the Center just after lunch. During the morning she was at her other job on campus, where she was the administrative secretary of the Humanities Council. There, in Knight Hall, she collected and issued announcements of lectures and conferences and prizes, scheduled campus events and conferences, interviewed students for work-study jobs, and sent out bulletins and e-mails. There were problems at Knight Hall too, but they tended to be smaller. Files were lost, mistakes were made in memos and bulletins, students did not go to their assigned jobs, and computers broke down.
But at the Center there was almost always, or seemed to be, a major crisis. For one thing, her assistant there, a young skim-milk blonde called Susie Burdett, was the sort of person to whom problems naturally seem to come, eager to cause alarm and worry. Susie almost appeared to enjoy reporting to Jane, for instance, that the copier had broken down again. When Jane asked if she had called Technical Services, the answer was always no. “I thought you might want to look at it first,” Susie would say, clasping her plump pink hands, whose nails were painted a different color every day.
Today Susie’s nails were a shimmery yellow-green, coordinating peculiarly well with her long blond hair, which always had a slightly greenish tinge from the chlorine in the college pool. Now her green nails held a wad of pink tissues to Susie’s nose, which quivered with a series of sneezes. The dust from the accident, she explained, had brought on an allergic reaction.
Jane followed her to the kitchen, where they contemplated a gaping hole in the ceiling near the sink that exposed broken plaster, wires, and pipes, and a corresponding heap of debris on the floor below. “It was a couple of hours ago,” Susie explained, sneezing again. “I was in the office and I heard this awful noise, sort of like thunder, only indoors. The cleaners heard it too, so we all rushed in.”
“I see. You didn’t ask them to sweep up while they were here?”
“Uh-uh.” Susie sneezed again. “They wanted to, but I was scared. I thought, maybe there’s asbestos in that stuff. And maybe more of the ceiling is going to come down anytime. Like even now.” She gave Jane a panicky Chicken Little look and backed toward the door.
“I suppose it could,” Jane said. “Well, Buildings and Grounds should be able to tell us that. Let’s get out of here for now.” She shut the kitchen door firmly.
Sneezing violently, Susie followed her through the dining room into the wide, oak-paneled central hall. “I think maybe I ought to leave before my allergy gets worse,” she said when she could speak again.
“Yes, maybe that’s a good idea. It’s nearly four anyhow,” Jane told her. “I’ll call B and G, unless you did that already.”
Susie, sneezing more quietly and pathetically now, shook her head.
“Really,” Jane said, and might have said more, except that she had heard in her own voice a new, unpleasant tone that she recognized. Though she was still managing, just barely, to be patient and kind with Alan, she had ceased to be an automatically nice person. Often now it was as if all her suppressed impatient unkindness was in danger of slopping over into the rest of her life, onto innocent people like Susie.
She returned to the office and made the call, stressing the word “asbestos.” The B and G people usually went home at four o’clock, but the voice on the other end promised to try and send somebody over that afternoon to inspect the damage.
“Better not go in there again,” the voice ordered Jane, who, once she had hung up, immediately disobeyed. The consequences of the accident were beginning to appear in her mind, and she needed a cup of tea.
Jane was not sorry to have gotten rid of Susie, who would certainly have gone on sneezing, and also been made anxious by this disobedience. She only wished that she could get rid of Susie permanently. Though she liked her assistant personally, she deeply regretted having assigned her this job. She had been misled by Susie’s many good qualities: she was cheerful, accurate, and reliable; she was also quite pretty, something the Humanities Council had felt desirable in someone who would sit at the desk in the front hall of the Center and meet the public. When Susie had worked in the big Arts and Sciences office in Knight Hall it had not been apparent that she attracted problems, or that she was fearful of taking any initiative in solving them. She had been sociable and outgoing, and had many friends. But that had turned out to be a problem in itself. Susie had been happy in Knight Hall with her friends; the promotion in rank and raise in pay had not made their loss up to her, and she was lonely and unhappy at the Center. Moreover, recently she had quarreled with her boyfriend and become allergic to a wide range of substances. Jane had promised her a transfer back to Knight Hall as soon as a suitable job turned up, but so far there had been nothing that paid as well as this.
Carrying her tea in a mug with the Corinth crest on it, Jane returned to the Center office, a small sunny room with a white marble fireplace and blue Morris wallpaper, formerly the back parlor of the mansion. Built in the 1890s, this was a substantial brick house picturesquely covered in Virginia creeper, with an imposing entrance, bulging bay windows, and heavy dark Victorian furniture. Its large downstairs rooms were elaborately decorated and in continual demand for official lunches, dinners, receptions, and lectures. Permission to use these rooms was nominally in the gift of the Humanities Council; essentially Jane made the decisions, which added considerably to the respect she received from the various departments in the Arts College.
The standard procedure of the Matthew Unger Humanities Center was to invite a diverse group of Fellows, from different universities and fields, and to unite them by designating a yearly theme, thus encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue. This year the theme was “Structures of Faith,” and, as usual, there were three outside Fellows: a sociologist from India and Yale, an econom
ist from Bosnia and the University of Ohio, and the famous writer Delia Delaney, the author of Womenfaith (spiritual essays), Dreamworks (poetry), and Moon Tales (modern fairy stories). There were also two Faculty Fellows: Jane’s husband Alan and a young literary theorist from Comparative Literature called Selma Schmidt. All of their projects had some relationship to the economic, social, or artistic aspects of religion.
Jane had already assigned the Fellows offices according to rank and reputation: Matthew Unger’s very large former bedroom had gone to Delia Delaney; and his wife’s only slightly smaller bedroom across the hall to Alan. The sociologist and the economist would occupy the other big rooms on the second floor, while Selma Schmidt would have to make do with a former sewing room next to the supply cupboard.
According to one of the senior administrators in Knight Hall, five Fellows automatically meant trouble, since about one professor out of five was always a real kook or a bastard or both. To Jane these statistics seemed exaggerated. The Fellows were usually very agreeable and accomplished people, well liked by their colleagues. Once in a while, of course, one of them was a disagreeable person whose colleagues wanted him or her out of the way for a while, so they could have a holiday from this person’s obnoxious behavior. It was true that each year at the Center somebody became a problem, but this was not always their own fault. Last winter, for instance, a well-known naturalist called Wilkie Walker, whom everybody liked, had slipped on the front steps one icy day and broken his leg.
Jane finished her tea and sat waiting for the man from Buildings and Grounds. Susie’s anxiety about future falls of plaster, she had realized, would probably be shared by B and G, which like all administrative offices was ever mindful of possible legal liability. It was very probable that once they saw the kitchen they would want to close it until a full structural inspection could be made. That could take a week or two, and meanwhile the room couldn’t be used, which meant that any University event involving more than minimal refreshments would have to be moved or rescheduled, including the Labor Day reception for incoming Fellows. For a moment Jane contemplated trying to convince them simply to cover the hole with a piece of drywall until it could be repaired; but a picture immediately came into her mind of heavy chunks of plaster and dust and drywall falling upon a group of catering students from the Hotel School, some of whom might be seriously injured or turn out to be the offspring of lawyers. Sighing, she took out the schedule for September and began to make a list of the people in various University departments whom she would have to phone on Monday, causing them irritation and inconvenience.
It was hot and stuffy in the Matthew Unger Center, which, unlike Knight Hall, was not air-conditioned. As time passed, Jane remembered that she had promised to stop at the drugstore on her way home and pick up a prescription and some grapefruit juice for Alan. She became more and more impatient to leave, and doubtful that anyone from Buildings and Grounds would appear. But shortly before five she heard the front door open, and a strong-looking man in his fifties, in jeans and a blue denim work shirt, carrying a clipboard, came in. He had curly dark hair and a friendly smile.
“Mrs. Mackenzie?” he said. “I’m Henry Hull.”
“Oh, good.” She smiled back “You’ve come about the ceiling.”
“The ceiling?” He gazed vaguely upward.
“Not here, in the kitchen. Come on, I’ll show you.” She headed for the back hall, thinking that as a rule the guys from B and G were much better looking than the average professor. “There.”
“Wow. It looks like a big piece of plaster has come down,” he said.
“Yes.” Clearly, though attractive, he was a little slow on the uptake. “So what do you think?”
“It doesn’t seem too bad. I guess you should call Buildings and Grounds, or whatever.”
“But you are Buildings and Grounds,” Jane said, her voice fading from irritation to uncertainty.
“No. I’m Henry Hull,” he repeated. This time, a vague feeling of having heard the name somewhere came over Jane.
“Delia Delaney’s husband.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t remember.”
“That’s all right. Nobody does.” He smiled very slightly.
I suppose not, Jane thought, and for the first time she considered that it might not always be wonderful to be married to a famous person. She tried to remember what she knew about Delia Delaney’s husband—not much compared to the masses of information the Center had received on his wife. All she could recall was that he was an editor at a small publishing company, but worked mostly at home.
“Well, how do you do?” Embarrassed, but determined to be polite, she held out her hand. After a second of hesitation, Henry took it; his grip was warm and hard, like that of the Buildings and Grounds employee she had believed him to be. “So how is everything going? Are you comfortable in the Vogelmans’ house?” One of Jane’s regular jobs at the Center was to find sabbatical rentals for the Visiting Fellows.
“Oh, very. Nothing but comfortable.” Henry Hull smiled ambiguously. “You’ve seen it?”
“Oh yes.” The Vogelmans’ house was one of the largest on the hill; it was totally modern, with four bedrooms, three baths, a two-car garage, a large deck, and central air-conditioning. Since Henry did not comment further but only smiled, she added, “Is something wrong?”
“Not essentially. But it’s a bit disconcerting, don’t you think, all those dead gray and brown birds?”
It was true, Jane remembered, that in the dining room and study of the house there were a number of cases containing stuffed birds. “Professor Vogelman and his wife are ornithologists,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I think they’ve actually discovered a new species, or maybe it’s what’s called a variant.”
“But they look so unhappy—the birds, I mean. They sit in their glass cases, on their brown and gray twigs, and look at you while you eat dinner. Some seem angry, but most are just miserable.”
In spite of herself, Jane giggled. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I wouldn’t really want them in my house. But maybe you could move the cases,” she said.
“Not a hope. They’re built into the walls. I looked.”
“Or put something over them?”
“But we’d know the birds were still there, underneath.”
“You’d forget after a while.”
“Maybe.” He looked grave: for a moment she wondered if perhaps the whole thing wasn’t a joke. “I’d forget, but Delia wouldn’t. No, the only solution is never to use the dining room.”
“Or the study.”
“That’s all right. I’ll be working in the study: I can get along with the birds.”
Jane returned his smile. Her wish to leave for home had wholly vanished. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No thanks. I’ve really just come to look at the office for Delia.”
Jane, who knew that the upstairs wouldn’t be cleaned until tomorrow, would normally have said that the Center wasn’t open yet. But now she hesitated, not wanting to seem rude or unfriendly. “Couldn’t she come herself?”
“No, she has a migraine. Is the office upstairs?”
Already he was moving toward the hall. Jane reluctantly followed.
“This won’t take much time,” Henry assured her, beginning to ascend the wide red-carpeted staircase two steps at a time. Though his build was solid, he seemed agile.
“If you’ll show me. . . . This one?” He walked into the former master bedroom, which had a bay window with views to the south and west. “It’s a good big space,” he said thoughtfully “She’ll like that.”
“I hope so.” Jane spoke with confidence: all the past Fellows to whom she had assigned this office had been appreciative and grateful.
“It’s very bright,” he added after a moment.
“Yes, you get wonderful light here. Even in the winter.” She paused, registering something negative in his intonation. “You mean it’s
too bright for you?”
“Not for me, but maybe for Delia.” He smiled almost conspiratorially, and Jane smiled back. “Bright light sometimes brings on one of her attacks.”
“There are blinds,” Jane said. “And drapes she can pull.” Going to one of the west-facing windows, through which the August sun poured like thick, hot honey, she demonstrated.
“Yes, that might help.” Henry made a note on his clipboard; then he began to circle the room, opening the drawers of the big leather-topped oak desk, trying out the desk chair and the easy chair by the bay window, lifting the phone, and turning the desk lamp off and on. “There’s a connection to the University computer system?”
“Oh yes, right here.”
He leaned and peered behind the desk, as if he did not quite believe her.
“That’s good. And do you have a surge protector?”
“She won’t need one. We’re already wired for power outages, it was in the brochure we sent you,” Jane said, beginning to feel impatient.
“Great.” Henry smiled at Jane again, but this time with less effect. “I think we may have to move the desk,” he said. “Delia works best when she has a view.”
You may have to move the desk, not me, Jane thought but did not say.
“Well, it’s a pretty good space,” he said. “I think she could be happy here. But she’ll need a sofa.”
“A sofa?” Jane said, not encouragingly.
“Yeah, you see, when a migraine’s coming on Delia mostly gets an aura. Then if she can take her pill and lie down in a darkened room, sometimes that will head it off.”
“Does she get migraines often?” As far as Jane could recall, nothing in any of Delia Delaney’s glowing, even fulsome letters of recommendation had mentioned this.
“It varies,” Henry said vaguely. He ran a hand along the pink marble mantel, over which hung a large antique sepia photograph of the University quadrangle, glanced at the dust that had collected on his fingers because the rooms hadn’t been cleaned for a month, but made no comment.
