by Smiley, Jane
The letter was a personal one, on bond stationery, a call for papers to be delivered at the Foundation for Black Endeavor Conference at the Stouffer Orlando Resort in March. Her airfare would be paid by the foundation, as would her room expense. Right at the top of the board of directors column was Thomas Sowell. After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares—Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark about Toni Morrison, whom Margaret considered a goddess. Her eye caught the words “per diem,” then the words “I am familiar with all your work, and feel, along with the board, that your contribution would make this year’s conference a particularly special event, a marvelous way to inaugurate the activities of our organization.” Though she was immune to it, of course, the flattery combined with the bribery did make her just a bit angry. “Please do let me know that you will consider giving a paper.” Margaret spoke aloud, a withering “Ha!” “I heard your paper on intersecting political and literary continuums in minority literatures at MLA last December and was enormously impressed.” Here Margaret got up from her desk chair and walked across her office and back.
She could feel herself soften, O death! soften because she had loved that paper herself, had felt that idea ripen so sweetly, been so proud of it, her first MLA paper, and felt so overlooked after she gave it, because of course it turned out that there were too many papers on too many topics at too many conflicting times by too many self-absorbed English professors. She had been reduced to doing what she had vowed never to do, count the number of questions asked (four) and use that as some index of the interest she had aroused.
“I have read both your books, the second one twice. Do come. We need people like you to give this conference the edge we are looking for.”
Margaret licked her lips.
Florida. In March. The Stouffer Orlando Resort. She picked up her phone and dialed an outside line, then used her credit card to call the Stouffer Orlando Resort. A voice answered that was accustomed to curry favor. Room rates? High season? Why, of course. Double rooms, $425 per night; suites, $595. Will that be all? Margaret put on her Negro-est, most Arkansas voice and asked whether rooms were available in March, the second week. The young man didn’t miss a beat. “Certainly, ma’am. May I make you a reservation? Yes, please do call back. We look forward to welcoming you. No, thank you for calling.”
Clearly the color line at the Stouffer Orlando Resort was green rather than black.
Margaret read her letter again.
Margaret was not fond of recent fashions in literary theory, fashions that delighted in finding formal or(and) stylistic contradictions in a piece of writing (text), and used them to prove that the text had no meaning. The idea that because words in a language developed meaning only in relationship to one another, therefore the meaning of all aspects of the piece of writing (text) existed only in relationship to each other, sounded a lot to Margaret like equally specious proofs-by-analogy that she had grown up with: God the “Father,” black men as “boys,” the man as the “head” of the house. She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of reading and thinking was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.
A book, she had emphasized in her paper, was a negotiable commodity. Above a certain level of obscurity, the public paid for it in either money or praise, rarely both. All American writers of books (makers of films) considered themselves artists, because they defined artistry as the creative manipulation of materials. Through accidents of heritage, upbringing, psychological profile, and temperament, every artist found her(him)self more or less in conflict with the prevailing cultural norms and forms. Choice on this score would be as impossible as choosing one’s own fingerprints. Artists from the mainstream of the culture would locate themselves on a single continuum, and if they were in agreement with cultural norms and forms, their reward would be money and no praise (Danielle Steel), and if they were in conflict with cultural norms and forms, their reward would be praise and no money (Ishmael Reed). The restlessness of American cultural norms and forms was well known, however, and any but the most hermetically sealed writer could hope(fear) that the ever-darting spotlight would one day focus on her (him).
The minority complication of this model, Margaret had said, was that the writer sat on at least two continuums in relationship to the mainstream culture, and these two (or more) were already at odds. Every book (cultural and commercial act) affected the writer’s position on both continuums, and as the writer became less and less generally obscure, the information communicated to her(him) by the only two cultural means of money and praise became more intense and more contradictory.
Margaret had not portrayed this effect as a conspiracy of the culture against minority writers, but as an inevitable result where one culture was dominant and many others were semi-incorporated into it and partly in conflict with it.
Three of the four questions asked after her paper had been hostile ones, and had implied that she took a destructively benign view of the culture in power.
Her advisor from Harvard had advised her to receive this hostility as praise rather than money, and later, over dinner, remarked that the Midwest seemed to have “smoothed” her.
She had not known he had considered her “rough.”
Now she was sought as a speaker for a manifestly conservative group.
She looked out the window of her office, feeling that she had passed through a doorway that she had never realized was there. Or that the very thing her model predicted, that in its restless flitting and focusing, a cultural spotlight (one of the very smallest and dimmest, to be sure) had landed on her.
She sighed. Of course, it was always one thing to know something, and quite another to act upon that knowledge, and refuse an all-expenses-paid trip to a resort in Orlando.
Across the campus, in a building Margaret could see but could not have identified, Dr. John Cates, professor of chemistry, a man who had never read any literary theory, was also looking out his window, but he was talking on the phone. He was saying, “Yes. Yes, of course. I have a very interesting paper almost ready. Oh, and my wife and son will be accompanying me to Orlando. Your offer of airfare extends to them, I’m sure. And we would prefer a suite. Terrific. Thank you. And if you would have their tickets to Disney World at the desk on our arrival—great. The three-day package should be enough for even him.” Cates laughed cheerfully. “Well, in fact, there is another conference right then, of the Societa Italiana di Fisica. In Rome. Yes. Oh, yes, all expenses paid. I had intended to give my paper there, but I hadn’t gotten around to sending off my confirmation. Good. I knew you’d understand. This would be a relief, actually. I do hate that jet-lagged feeling, but—” He spun his chair once around, once back, listening, then smiled and said, “We’re all set, then. Good-bye. Oh, oh. One last thing. Sea World. Three one-day passes to Sea World. Perfect. Thank you, you’ve been very cooperative.”
28
Networking
OVER THE YEARS, Mrs. Loraine Walker’s vision of the campus had changed. The collection of stone buildings had evolved, in her mind, into a web of offices, where secretaries sat under bright lights and near them, much more dimly, sat administrators whose grasp on things was tenuous at best. Once the filaments connecting the secretaries had been phone lines, and making connections had taken that minimal effort of picking up the phone and dialing the extension and moving the mouth through greetings, well-wishings, and idle chatter to the gist of the call. No longer. The only people who talked on the phone anymore were the administrators, whose whole lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nit-picking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance. The secretaries were connected by compu
ter. Mrs. Walker and her colleagues inhabited a universe of information as pervasive as air, and Mrs. Walker was careful to keep abreast of the weather systems moving through that atmosphere. The stony walls and concrete paths, the closed windows and doors, the trees and shrubs, all the elements of the campus that seemed to separate people, had become permeable membranes undetectable in the wafting currents of information.
Now it came to her from several directions that Arlen Martin and the TransNationalAmerica Corporation were, or would soon be, present on the campus after all. She saw that she had misjudged the purpose of his meeting with Ivar. Optimistically, she had assumed that Martin had been seeking Ivar’s cooperation because it was necessary. She saw now that it had only been desirable, perhaps even less than that, a matter of form, or simply a signal. The fact was that no faculty member needed Ivar’s permission to seek or accept a grant. The provost’s office maintained the university guidelines on intellectual property and ethical research standards, and if there were a scandal, the provost’s office would have to take the lead in handling it, but faculty members were officially assumed to be knowledgeable and responsible in these areas, and, Mrs. Walker had to admit, Ivar was well enough disposed toward the world to believe the official assumption. He was also a strong believer in academic freedom, which, in Mrs. Walker’s view, was rather like accepting the precepts of supply-side economics and industrial self-regulation.
Over Mrs. Loraine Walker’s eyes the wool could not so easily be pulled. Her own guidelines on intellectual property and ethical research standards were rather strict and geared toward preserving her office from crises that could result from incompetence, negligence, or venality on the part of a professorial population that was, in general, insulated from the consequences of most of its own actions by tenure, mandated salary raises, and other perks of university life.
In these days of fiscal crisis, it was also true that Ivar was far too relieved by any good news on the financial front and far too panicky in his focus on the actions of the board of governors and the state legislature. His thinking was clouded by both fear and desire. However, as a state civil service employee of long standing, an official in AFSCME, a fully vested member of her pension plan, and an owner of a six-unit apartment building near the campus that was entirely paid for and always rented, Mrs. Loraine Walker could afford to eschew both fear and desire in favor of propriety, moral standards, and long-term damage control.
It was also true that she resented the way Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek had sought Ivar’s compliance, then ignored him when she didn’t get it, and, in addition to that, the way she had circumvented Mrs. Walker’s authority. Elaine was a royal bitch to her own secretary, who was witless enough to be intimidated even though she held Elaine’s entire information system, the font of any administrator’s power, in the palm of her hand. Were Elaine to successfully bring in many millions in grant money, her manners, thought Mrs. Walker, would certainly deteriorate even further. Mrs. Walker did not think that she would like to see that.
It was clear that, as she did so often, Mrs. Walker would have to act on her own and in some secrecy. There were many areas, all of them located in the principle of academic freedom, where the provost’s office could not be perceived to be treading, even lightly.
As she said to Martha, “You wonder what there is about the place that is even worth saving. You wonder, why not just let them stumble around the way they seem intent upon doing. But it offends me. It’s too disorderly. And in the end, all that disorder would land right in my lap. That, I am too old for now.”
While it was too soon to act, Mrs. Walker did suggest to Ivar that he hadn’t staved off the Arlen Martin threat. Ivar said, “Well, he has a lot of money.”
“Do you mean that he carries a big stick, or that he carries a big carrot?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, none, I suppose, since they both make me angry.”
“We’ll see.”
“We’ll see?” She expressed pointed disbelief.
“I’ll talk to some people.”
“That will be an interesting first step.”
“There’s not a lot we can do.”
“Academic freedom?”
“Well, of course.”
She could see that he was defeated already. She said, “I thought you should know.”
“Thank you.”
She turned briskly and strode out of the office, clearly communicating disagreement. As soon as she sat down at her desk, though, her phone rang. It was Ivar. He said, “Mrs. Walker, I know you’ll be careful in all matters.”
She said, “Well, of course.”
And she was.
All she did, when she had time to do it, was access the Poultry Science files for recent outgoing communications having to do with unorthodox (what, anymore, though, could be unorthodox?) poultry feeding systems. Or poultry breeding systems. Or chicken processing systems. There was nothing. You could say, she thought, that the files were clean as a whistle, or you could say that poultry processing had devolved as far as technologically and humanly possible, and therefore no longer interested Arlen Martin. Mrs. Walker herself always bought local free-range chickens from a farmwife co-op in the next county, so when she accessed some data about potential links between growth hormones in factory chickens and the early onset of menarche in selected populations of American girls, her interest was fairly abstract.
Anyway, chickens were the leading edge of the past. She had accessed chickens mostly for tidiness’ sake, so that she couldn’t accuse herself of overlooking the obvious. But there was no activity in poultry.
Under her own version of Ivar’s signature, Mrs. Walker had, over the years, authorized the library to buy as many available databases as they could. She had actually transferred funds out of the athletic budget into the library budget from time to time, possibly her most dangerous covert action. The result was, though, that she could now, bit by bit, during breaks and minutes of free time, track Arlen Martin and the TransNationalAmerica Corporation through the Wall Street Journal index, Facts on File, Commercial and Industrial blah-blah, Acquisitions and Mergers International, etc. There were plenty of articles about Martin. He had allowed himself to be interviewed by everyone from USAir’s in-flight magazine to Life magazine to Business Week to a weekly newspaper from the suburbs of Amarillo, Texas, to Der Spiegel and British Vogue. At the same time, his holdings were a secretive and complex web of interlocking companies, some apparently just names and boards of directors, others actual businesses. Tracing his ownership and influence amounted, at first, to recognizing recurrent names, then intuiting relationships and duties from the positions and companies attached to them. After a while, she could track his restless interests. One of them, and an odd one compared to the others, she thought, was mining. Around Christmas, the TransNationalAmerica Corporation, through two intermediaries, had acquired the Seven Stones Mining Corporation, home office, Denver, Colorado. And Martin had paid a lot for it. She turned back to the Wall Street Journal index, and found an article headlined “Once Powerful Enough to Topple Governments: Mineral Industry Now in Doldrums.” She transferred herself to university E-mail, and left a note for Library Media: “Please send a copy of the following article to provost’s office.” She cited the article. Her instincts, which were not only naturally good, but muscular from use, told her that, speaking of mining, she had found a very productive seam. She logged off and stood up. Out in the living room, the clock read 1:24 and Martha had fallen asleep on the couch. Loraine stood her up and guided her into the bedroom.
29
Midterm Review
THE THING that Keri had noticed over the last seven weeks in Dr. Lionel Gift’s beginning economics lecture class was how happy he seemed. He bounced around the podium, full of high spirits; his smile beamed everywhere in the large room, as if his teeth were strangely iridescent. He made lots of jokes, most of them not that funny, but he was in such a good mood that the students laugh
ed along with him anyway. The students were mostly boys, and they seemed to enjoy classes very much. Keri felt more at a remove. She felt, in fact, as if Dr. Gift were telling rollicking tales about an entirely alien planet, the Bizarro Planet, home of Bizarro Superman. She also felt that today, with “Midterm Review” on the syllabus, was her last chance to assimilate Bizarro World and thereby pass her midterm. She came into the hall and set out her pens and pencils, her notebook. She WOULD write everything down, and if she couldn’t understand it, she would memorize it.
The usual glances from the mostly male lecture audience followed her entrance. In fact, it was she who put most of them into a receptive frame of mind. Gift presented the task, but Keri, the life-size Barbie with a voice like the reassuring low hum of insects on a summer night, represented the reward. Sometimes, one or the other of them offered to help her with her homework, but she shook her head. Reassuringly like every dream-girl, she acted self-contained and remote, bestowing smiles and friendly nods out of a sort of impersonal good cheer, clearly signalling that she had no preferences of her own—the best candidate would win the prize, and his very accomplishment would be enough for her. In the words of Dr. Gift, “pure competition would lead to an optimal allocation of resources.” The boys, who in economics classes tended to be self-confident and to look forward to lives of wealth and power, licked their lips at the thought. It all agreed reassuringly with every myth and fairy tale. Reality-girls might have preferences—that was a result of their fallen natures, as represented by their imperfect looks and unpredictable demands. But if you could get beyond THEM to THIS one, well, every vibration of every boy’s desiring soul promised him a paradise of total love, respect, and acceptance.
