“My parents listen to him. I don’t.”
“He’s spent most of his career criticizing America, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love this country. He’s an American icon. The power of dissent is a rich part of who we are. Robert, I respect your opinions, and I show that by critically examining your ideas. That’s what we’re here for. My job is to show you that ideas are meant to be broken apart and studied. If they’re not, they solidify into something nauseating and dangerous. If you remember nothing else from this class, I want you at least to remember how I’ve taught you to think. And hopefully I’ve created a classroom environment that allows you to critique my ideas as well. But just because you don’t like my ideas doesn’t mean you can get me fired.”
We sat there without saying anything for nearly half a minute. Robert shuffled in his seat. Sometimes in class, when I asked a question and no one answered, I would let the quiet build in the room. After enough discomfort, someone would eventually speak up. But Robert didn’t.
“I’m not sure there’s anything else for us to talk about,” I finally said.
“But there is.”
I waited.
“Just apologize for your derogatory comments about Christianity. You’re attacking us for our backgrounds, for being white and Christian. How is that any different than when people attack you for being Indian?”
“Robert, I think it’s time for you to leave.”
“Say it,” Robert said as he stood up. One last-ditch effort. “This could all be over.”
“You’re asking me for an apology, but giving you one would mean admitting I did something wrong. I have no problem with apologies. I make them all the time. But I’m not going to apologize for saying something I have every right to say.”
He walked out.
I waited for a minute and went down the hall to Cliff’s office. I closed the door behind me.
“How did it go?”
“Not very well. A little strange, actually.”
“He seemed like a normal enough kid.”
“He put on quite the act when you came into my office.”
“And what did he say after I left?”
“He admitted that he took the first video and complained to the dean’s office, but the second one is the work of our friends downstairs. I think it’s his relationship with them that’s got him mixed up. Mostly he seems like a loner, going through normal adolescent stuff. These other students are telling him that people like me are the reason his life isn’t what he wants it to be. Maybe he’s finally found a group that will take him in.”
“How did you leave it?”
“He said that I needed to apologize for what I said in class. I think he was hoping that I would apologize on the spot so that he could take a trophy back to his new friends.” Everyone was asking me for apologies, and yet they seemed to be more and more meaningless, a bandage that wasn’t up to the task of healing the serious wounds festering below. “Thank you for all your help with this, Cliff. I know it’s the last thing you want to be dealing with. You should be home writing.” I tapped on his desk. “I’m going to head home myself. Text me if anything else comes up.”
“Don’t go yet,” Cliff said. “Please sit.” He pointed to the empty chair. “I’m sorry all this is happening.”
He took out his can of tobacco and prepared a pipe. When he was finished, he placed it on his desk, opened a drawer, and took out a brand-new one. “Interested?”
“Sure,” I said, sitting down. He prepared mine, and we both lit up. The office filled with fabulous, fragrant smoke. I leaned back in the chair.
“Do you know how long I’ve been married?” Cliff asked.
“I don’t.”
“Fifty years. Does that seem like a long time to you?”
“It’s longer than I’ve been alive.”
Cliff nodded. “We have two wonderful children and seven grandchildren. My son and daughter-in-law just had their fourth. I don’t know how they get anything done. But they do it all.” He patiently blew out some smoke. “When I met my wife, I was with another woman, my high school sweetheart. We’d grown up together in a small town in Oregon. Our families knew each other really well. But the woman who would become my wife was from San Francisco and offered me a bigger world than I’d ever had access to before. I was scared of giving up the security of such a familiar life, but I worked up the courage to break up with my girlfriend. When I did, she told me that she was pregnant. It was so sudden, I thought she was saying it just to keep me, and I stormed off, but not before saying some pretty mean-spirited things that I didn’t think I had in me.” Cliff leaned toward me, even though his office door was closed. “It turns out that she was pregnant. She moved to Portland and went ahead and had the baby, but didn’t tell me. I had moved on to a new life. And then, right after my wife gave birth to our first child, my ex-girlfriend sent me a photo of our five-year-old daughter. She had named her Agnes. A perfect name. Her mother said that she simply wanted me to know about my daughter. She didn’t expect anything. To this day, Agnes doesn’t know who I am. I follow her life from afar and I still send her mother money. Agnes is an Episcopal priest. I suspect she got the priest’s demeanor from her mother.”
Cliff seemed almost serene as he told me this story. At the beginning of the week, just talking to him on the phone had felt too intimate. Now this.
“No one knows about this except her mother and me. You’re the first person I’ve ever told. My wife doesn’t know. My children don’t know. There are plenty of things husbands keep from their wives, parents from their children. But what kind of man keeps this kind of secret from his family? I’ve lied to them and I’ve been completely absent from my daughter’s life. Sometimes I think about sitting in on one of her services, but I’m not sure I ever could.”
I don’t know why I had assumed that all of the books he had written, and all the honorary degrees he had received, had made Cliff immune to secrets and tragedies. But sitting there, smoking our pipes, I felt really touched that Cliff trusted me enough to bring me into this corner of his private life, and as if he were trying to tell me something, that there was a lesson in all of this for me.
“Are you going to see her?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.” He relit his pipe.
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“I do,” Cliff said. With his layers of wrinkles and a beard on his face, I couldn’t tell what he was feeling.
“You should, then.”
He shook his head. “We’ve all found stability in our lives. She has, I have, my family has. This would wreck all of that. If they find out after I die, that’s fine. I guess I’m not who they think I am. I suppose we’re never the people our loved ones think we are.” He paused and smiled. “That’s a little dark, isn’t it?” He took another drag from the pipe, but he had smoked through the tobacco. “Why don’t you keep that pipe. It’s a nice one. Though I wouldn’t want to start you on a bad habit.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing up. “Among bad habits, this is a good one.”
“Raj,” he said as I got to the door. “I want you to know that I think you’re a core part of this department. You’ve had plenty of reason to be bitter and angry. And yet, you’ve shown up. I appreciate that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like teaching. And I like teaching here. I don’t want to stop. I can’t afford to stop. I’ll wait to hear from you.”
“Yes. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”
I walked out of the office but lingered in the hallway for a moment, his words echoing in my head.
I didn’t know Cliff that well, but he’d always been straightforward when he wanted to tell me something. Still, like so much of his writing, the implications of his words generally gained more meaning the further I got from them, illuminating some corner he’d not directly intended to illuminate. Perhaps he’d told me the story to make a connection, sensing that I needed a friend, signaling that I should feel safe in being ho
nest with him in return. But it also posed the idea of a double life. Who or what was my Agnes?
I went into my office, grabbed my new desk lamp, and with the pipe in my back pocket, took the elevator down. I tried to prepare myself to face the protesters. The doors opened, I took a deep inhale as if I were about to dive into a cold pool, and walked out. For several seconds, no one saw me.
Robert had rejoined the group of hunger strikers. Sitting there with the two couples, he was the fifth wheel. And about twenty feet to the right of them was a whole new group of students. I recognized some of them from my classes. David, the handsome Indian student who had come to see me in office hours earlier in the week, was among them. My heart sank. A brown Catholic kid who thinks I’m being insensitive to Christians? I was screwed.
The second group of students was gathered around a table filled with Styrofoam containers. While the hunger strikers sat nearby, this other group stood and piled plates with food. I noticed a platter of thick samosas.
A few of the students looked my way, and one of them tugged at David’s arm. David turned to me. “Professor Bhatt! Please come join us. We were hoping you were around today.”
I walked over to them cautiously. Together, this racially diverse group was perfect for a poster of a college that did not exist.
“The South Asian Student Association usually has a mixer once a term,” David said. “This time, we figured we’d do it here. We have some tasty food. Have you had lunch? Please eat with us.”
David smiled. It was hard to contain my own.
“We have plenty for everybody,” he said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear. “You don’t have to be a part of our association. We accept everyone.”
The protesting students just sat there, stone-faced.
The smell of the Indian food was overwhelming. Had I not eaten in more than twenty-four hours, I would certainly have broken down. But I think it’s safe to say that Robert, Alex, Holly, and the others didn’t have the same Proustian ties to samosas that I did.
One of the students handed me a plate with rice, palak paneer, and chicken tikka masala. Maybe I was hungry, or maybe the food was just great, or maybe it was the joy of eating among friendly faces. Whatever the reason, I finished half the plate at an unreasonable pace. The rest of the students eating lunch formed a little circle around me, taking turns telling me which class they’d taken with me and how much they’d enjoyed it.
“How’s the vest?” one of the students asked. “I miss it.”
One term, I had worn a slimming orange down vest nearly every day I taught. It became my security blanket.
“The zipper broke. I need to get it fixed. I love that thing.”
“Bring it in next time,” a young white hippie said to me. He wasn’t wearing shoes, but his feet were remarkably clean. “I know how to fix those things. And I still owe you for all those eggs.”
“Were you in that class?” I asked.
He put out his hand to shake. “Simon. Egg Man.”
Now I remembered. Simon was in a small seminar I had taught on literature and ethnography. The students were all very smart and engaged, and at some point, as we were talking about the use of point of view in ethnographic writing, the topic had turned from a figurative conversation on chickens and eggs to a more literal one. Our chickens at home were laying far too many eggs then, and so over the course of the term I would bring in a dozen or so to each session. The students who wanted them would take a few. Simon was always willing to take the extras. After a few weeks, we started referring to him affectionately as the Egg Man.
“Of course, Egg Man! How are you?”
I said this louder than I had intended. And as I did, self-conscious about my exuberance, I looked over at the other group. Robert was staring at me. He seemed hungry, tired, and haggard. “Please come and eat,” I said.
“Yes, please,” David added. “We have plenty.”
Without waiting for a response, David and the other students began putting together plates of food, as if they were a finely tuned assembly line at a food bank. They made five heaping plates, and with respect and solemnity they placed them on the floor in front of the students. I watched them. One group on one side, the other group on the other, with so much nourishing food in between. I watched Robert as he considered the plates of food. He had to be starving. He looked up and noticed me watching him. “Please eat,” I mouthed to him.
“Thank you,” Alex said. “But no thank you. We appreciate the thought.”
“We’ll leave it here in case you change your mind,” David said. I finished eating my food, mainly so as not to offend David and his group, but I had lost my appetite.
“Thank you all,” I said to David, Egg Man, and the others. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“See you in class on Monday,” David said.
I nodded and walked away, the lamp in my hand and my belly full.
* * *
When I got back to my car, I realized why my convenient parking spot had been available during prime time. My front windshield, along with some of the hood, was covered in white, wet bird shit. These weren’t the polite droppings of sweet birds; they were marking their territory, and clearly I was in the wrong place. The flock above squawked down at me.
“Please stop,” I pleaded, louder than I’d intended, looking up at the birds in the tree and the blue sky beyond.
Right then, a woman walked by on a nearby pathway.
“Raj?”
The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Nor did I immediately recognize her face, despite the fact that I had been staring at it for months.
“It’s Emily. Emily Baker.”
She walked up to me, looking like she had been on a decade-long yoga retreat. Her face was clear and lively, her body long and toned, and she was dressed in clothes that had probably come from some expensive little shop in SoHo. She gave me a big, genuine hug.
“In all this time, I never imagined someday I’d find you yelling at a tree.”
I pointed to the car.
“Ah. If one dropping is considered good luck, I would go get a lottery ticket.” She gave me a second hug, this time holding me tighter. “I’m so glad to see a familiar face. How did I know that you’d end up in a beautiful place like this? How are you?”
“I’m OK,” I said, wanting to sound upbeat and confident. “You know, a job, kids, a mortgage. The middle-aged holy trinity. You?”
“I’m fine. I’m here for this reading, and I just did a seminar with a group of faculty.”
“How was that?”
“Atrocious. I didn’t realize just how insane academics can sound when they’re trying to make sense of poetry. Some woman was going on and on about how I was writing in the tradition of Wallace Stevens. I fucking hate Wallace Stevens.”
Years ago, I had envied Emily’s Athenian opinions, the way they emerged from her head fully formed and well armored. But now I appreciated the clarity.
“Have you seen the campus?” I asked. “It would be fun to show you around.”
“I’d like nothing more.”
I put my lamp in the trunk and we walked out of the parking lot. As we did, she locked her arm in mine, the gesture a little more intimate than I had expected.
“The campus itself isn’t that collegiate, but there’s a great path leading to the ocean. Shall we do that?”
“That sounds perfect,” Emily said. “So I confess, I’d heard through the grapevine that you were teaching here. I was hoping to see you at the seminar.”
“They don’t invite lecturers to those things.”
“Ah,” Emily said, without sounding condescending. “I told the guy in the English department who invited me that we were in graduate school together. He asked if I meant the guy in the news. Are you in the news?”
I took my phone out of my pocket. The second video was already open. I’d watched it at least ten times. I handed it to her. She cupped the phone to shield
my screen from the sun. When she finished watching, she handed it back, a mischievous smile on her face.
“Bad evaluations?” she asked.
I chuckled. If only. “I lost my shit. I tore down the posters and screamed at the students, but the video is doctored.”
I went to the photos and showed her the one of the flyer. “They stapled these over posters for your reading,” I said, with some added needling enthusiasm. “For once, I had higher billing than you.”
Emily examined the photo closely. “This is really messed up. But you must have done something to warrant all this. Something smart, I’m sure.”
“I said something in class that some students took offense to. Now I’m having to defend myself for parroting Edward Said.”
“Last year I taught a seminar on African-American poetry and the students complained that the syllabus wasn’t diverse enough.”
“You should have added some Stevens.”
It was Emily’s turn to chuckle. “Being on a campus these days is depressing me,” she said, sounding resigned. “If given the opportunity, I’d quit teaching in a heartbeat. I’m so over it.”
“But you have a perfect job,” I said.
“Trust me, the only perfect job is no job at all.”
Our conversation was flowing, so I didn’t want to disagree. But there was a clear difference between her job and mine.
I looked ahead and saw Josh Morton about fifty yards farther down the path. I watched as he noticed me and started to turn away. But then he saw Emily and quickly straightened up. As we got closer, I said, “Let me introduce you to a grade-A jackass.”
“Raj,” Josh said, smiling. I don’t know why I’d not noticed before how straight and white his teeth were. His vanity was exhausting. “I’m glad we were able to meet this morning. I’m working closely with Cynthia to monitor the situation. All this is going to blow over in no time, don’t you worry.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said. I paused, drawing out the moment. I knew Josh wanted an introduction to Emily, and I loved not giving him what he wanted, if only for a few seconds. Finally: “Emily Baker, this is Josh Morton. Josh teaches here and is a bit of a campus celebrity. And Josh, this is my old friend Emily, who was always the smartest student when we were in graduate school together. I imagine she’s still the smartest person in any room she enters.”
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