Beowulf for Cretins

by Ann McMan

  Unless . . . She could always ask Rizzo about Abbie?

  No. If Abbie had wanted to stay in touch, she’d have said so. They would have exchanged names and phone numbers. They’d have talked about finding ways to try and meet again in one place or the other.

  But Abbie had said nothing, so Grace said nothing.

  Fuck it. Grow up. You knew what you were doing. Don’t weep about it now. There are no victims in this little drama.

  She sighed, walked to the bed, and flopped down on it. She had six hours to kill until her flight left. Might as well try to get a little sleep, since she hadn’t gotten any last night.

  She closed her eyes, but all she could see were visions of Abbie.

  Jeez. The woman sure made up for lost time. They both had. It was fantastic. Incredible. Without a doubt, it was the most erotic and exciting thing she’d ever done. What Abbie seemed to lack in experience, she made up for in enthusiasm—and determination. And she hadn’t been kidding. She was one hell of a fast learner. In fact, Grace had felt like the novice. What a great problem to have.

  She rolled over and stared at the bedside clock.

  This was a colossal waste of time. She was too keyed-up to sleep. Only one thing could help her now.

  She got up to head for the bathroom and a cold shower.

  Chapter Two

  Back at St. Albans, things soon settled into a normal routine.

  Memories of her “overnight rental” didn’t exactly fade, but they gradually became easier to think about without an accompanying attack of angst. Or regret. She resolved to chalk the entire experience up to a growth spurt—an exponential leap forward in her recovery from the Disaster-That-Was-Denise.

  Classes were spiraling toward the long, Labor Day weekend. All four sections of her English Lit survey had papers due. She’d be up to her ass in reams of bad prose by Wednesday afternoon. She knew better than to waste her time holding classes on Thursday. The students would all have decamped for exotic end-of-summer destinations long before then.

  Fall break would roll around next, followed shortly by mid-terms. Then finals. It was hard to believe how fast the semester was advancing. At least the long Christmas break would give her a chance to work on her book. That was how she filled up the empty spaces in her life right now—by continuing her halting attempts at writing the next Great American Novel.

  She called it her GAN.

  In fact, her GAN wasn’t really living up to the G part of its acronym. At least, not yet. But hammering away on The Disappearance of Ochre kept her busy through the succession of dull and interminable nights that kicked in after Denise moved out.

  Grace had been an undergraduate at Haverford when she first heard about how the famous “Woman-Ochre” painting by Willem de Kooning had been slashed from its frame and stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985. Two unassuming, albeit oddly dressed, patrons had walked in at 9 a.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, tarried in the gallery for about ten minutes, then departed in a hurry with the de Kooning rolled up and hidden beneath an overcoat. They were never identified or caught and more than three decades later, the painting’s whereabouts remained a mystery.

  It wasn’t until graduate school at Vanderbilt—and a fiction writing seminar with novelist Ann Patchett—that Grace cobbled together her fledgling idea for a fictionalized story about the subject of the painting, an artist’s model she called “Ochre.” She was writing the novel as a series of short stories, each detailing Ochre’s first-person accounts of her sojourns with quirky and wildly divergent sets of captors. Part of the appeal of this narrative approach was that it allowed her to work in shorter, more episodic bursts.

  She liked to think of this enterprise as a homage to her literary idol, Italo Calvino.

  At least, that was the idea.

  When she wasn’t working on her GAN, she filled her lonely days by making protracted progress on an endless series of renovations to her small, Craftsman-style bungalow.

  Grace had purchased the place six years ago when she first started teaching at St. Albans. It was a small, unremarkable house in a line of other small, unremarkable houses that occupied a block several streets back from the main quad. That appealed to her. The campus, with its ivy-covered Georgian halls and manicured grounds, had a storybook kind of beauty—but she liked not having to stare at the bleakest aspects of its classroom buildings when she looked out her windows at home.

  Of course, these days, that wasn’t much of an issue. Most of the front windows on her house were obscured by heavy plastic sheathing while the asbestos shingles were being removed. She and Denise had shared grand prospects for restoring the vintage house to its original glory. It was only after their renovations commenced that they uncovered a sequence of numbers stamped at regular intervals on exposed joists and rafters that identified their bungalow as a bona fide, circa 1936 Sears “Vallonia”—one of the 370 varieties of kit homes that people of modest means could order up right out of the same fat catalog that brought overcoats, rubber galoshes, longline corsets, Bakelite toasters and Hercules boilers right to their doorsteps.

  The lion’s share of the renovation work was being carried out on weekends by Grace’s brother, Dean, who ran his own business restoring historic homes—and operating a hugely successful regional chain of home improvement stores.

  He was the rock star of the Warner family.

  Unfortunately, Denise had decided to decamp long before the restorations were completed, and Grace now lived with the consequences. Every room of the house was in some state of disrepair. It didn’t escape her notice that the level of disruption in her home paralleled the mess of her interior life. It was like an object lesson writ large. When she stopped to think about it—which seemed to be more often lately—she understood the irony that restoring order to the disarray of her fractured soul probably proceeded along the same timetable as setting the house to rights.

  She sat down in front of her office computer to check her email one last time before packing up and heading for home.

  There were several messages from students offering creative excuses for why their papers would be late. She archived those for later. There were also two messages marked “high priority” from the Presidential Search Committee. One suggested that an announcement from the Trustees would be forthcoming soon.

  Grace rolled her eyes.

  Yeah, that one promised to be a real nail-biter—not. They were all persuaded that the board would make a “traditional” choice—which meant another musty, dried-up non-academic with an indifferent resume, deep ties to the Catholic church, and even deeper pockets.

  It was a small college no-brainer.

  Especially for a place like St. Albans.

  Pre-Law, Pre-Med and Pre-Menstrual. That’s how Grace characterized most of her students.

  St. Allie’s, as they called it, was sixty-three percent female. And it showed. Even though the admission staff worked hard to level the playing field and recruit more males, the balance stayed the same. Or rather, the imbalance stayed the same. The lopsided enrollment both helped and hurt the small, northern Vermont college. Grace found that classes more heavily weighted toward females tended to have more—gravitas. She supposed that was because a classroom full of girls was more inclined to focus on the content of the course, and less inclined to primp and preen for any males plopped in their midst.

  Well. With certain exceptions . . .

  St. Allie’s was gaining a reputation for that characteristic, too. Numerous dour and tight-lipped trustees would scowl and cluck their tongues when the annual U.S. News & World Report Guide to America’s Best Colleges awarded St. Allie’s a consistent top-ten ranking for “Most Lesbian Friendly” small college.

  Yeah. Great for academics and field hockey—not so great for growing the endowment. Or so they said. For her part, Grace thought the tiny place should embrace and capitalize on its burgeoning mark of distinction rather than work so hard to paper it over and will it
to fade into obscurity.

  She recalled her own tenure as a plaid-skirted coed at Bishop Hoban High School in Wilkes-Barre. In “health class”—a benign euphemism for the dark and murky netherland that encompassed anything related to female sexuality—Sister Mary Lawrence (they all called her Sister Merry Larry) instructed the pockmarked, ragtag group of alternately amused or embarrassed teens about what to do if a boy became “overexcited” on a date.

  In Nun-Speak™, “overexcited” meant “erect.”

  Sister Merry Larry lowered her alto voice to a near whisper. “You slap it hard to make it go down.”

  Slap it? Hard?

  Grace found that to be a curiously . . . intimate . . . response to an uninvited consequence. More than once, she wondered about Sister Merry Larry’s familiarity with the predicament. Unlike the other nuns at Bishop Hoban, Sister Merry Larry was more . . . clued-in. For one thing, she was younger by decades than most of the other Sisters. And she had come to Wilkes-Barre from a more progressive order in Philadelphia where the nuns lived in off-campus apartments, versus the crumbling convents that typically sagged off the back walls of parochial school gymnasiums. She also wore a short habit and black Reeboks. That distinction alone gave her street cred.

  Still, Sister Merry Larry’s visceral advice about how to respond to presumed unwanted outcomes was, in Grace’s view, a decidedly Catholic innovation.

  Create the world. Invite the people in. And don’t hesitate to slap them down—hard—if they get overexcited.

  Grace felt fortunate that she never had to test that last part of the dating equation. None of her half-hearted fumbles in the back seat of Jamie Zook’s ’69 Maverick ever escalated to the “slap down” stage. That was probably because Jamie was a lot more interested in Grace’s brother, Dean, who smoked hard-pack Camels and rode a Kawasaki KZ1000. That was okay with Grace because she was more interested in Jamie’s sister, Amy. Amy didn’t smoke or ride anything—not unless you believed those stories about Sister Merry Larry catching the head cheerleader behind the bleachers, occupying a compromising position atop the Argents’ quarterback, Nick Szeptak.

  Those rumors didn’t hurt Amy’s reputation a bit.

  And they didn’t diminish Grace’s appreciation for the popular blonde’s . . . charms.

  But that was all ancient history. Grace scrolled past a newer slew of mea culpa emails from her missing-in-action students to read a message from the board chair—inviting the entire community to an all-campus meeting at two o’clock that afternoon.

  She looked at her watch.

  There was a follow-up email from her department chair that required all members of the English faculty who were still on campus to attend the announcement.

  Not that she would want to miss it. An event like this one was a big deal in the life of a small college. The last two presidents of St. Allie’s had been pulled from business backgrounds. This time, the faculty dared to hope they’d at least get a real academic at the helm—someone who would take a greater interest in curricular development and scholarship, rather than shaking the money tree.

  She sighed. Fat chance. It was all about raising money these days. Still . . . it would be interesting to see which one of their dried-up old clones the big boys flushed out this go-round.

  She shut down her computer and picked up her messenger bag. She’d have just enough time to run home and grab a sandwich before the meeting. She got outside and saw, with a sinking feeling, that it had started to rain. Great. She had plans to spend the weekend out on Butler Island and had been hoping the calls for rain would all be wrong—the way they usually were.

  One thing you could always count on in Vermont was how the weather forecasts were moving targets. If what was predicted wasn’t to your liking, you didn’t have to worry much or wait very long for it to change.

  But this wasn’t looking like the kind of rain that was just passing through on its way to greener pastures in New Hampshire. This was the slow, lazy, I’m-gonna-hang-out-on-your-porch-and-drink-up-all-your-beer-before-moving-on kind of rain.

  She looked up at the sky. It was the color of dull pewter. Crap.

  A boat ride in the rain was sure to be a real blast.

  # # #

  The auditorium was packed.

  And things were definitely looking up. Grace exchanged surprised glances with Grady Shepard as Mitchell Ware, the board chair, finished talking about the methodology used by the search committee and finally shared details from the Chosen One’s curriculum vitae.

  It slowly became clear that, this time, the committee had apparently listened to the faculty. The new president was an academic with a solid background in research and scholarly publication—a teacher and a thinker with stellar credentials, including a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton. The winning candidate had authored a list of books and articles a half-mile long, and had spent eight years teaching literature and philology at Princeton, before taking the helm as director of the prestigious Duke Endowment—one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the country.

  It was a slam dunk, and the board chair knew it. The normally unimpressed members of the St. Allie’s faculty were literally sitting on the edges of their seats, waiting for the big reveal. You could’ve heard a pin drop in that joint.

  He made them wait.

  “When she joins our community, we will begin a new chapter in the life of this exceptional institution of higher learning,” he said.

  Grady and Grace looked at each other in shock. She?

  A titter of conversation spread throughout the hall.

  The board chair smiled. “No, that wasn’t a mistake. I said ‘she.’”

  The hall erupted in applause. People got to their feet.

  The chair shouted over the din, “It gives me great pleasure to introduce the fifteenth President of St. Albans College, Élisabeth Abbot Williams.”

  The applause in the hall was deafening. People were whooping and cheering. Grace got to her feet and strained to see around the bobbing rows of heads in front of her.

  The cheers and the applause went on and on. This was a seminal event in the life of the college—the first female president in its one-hundred-and-sixty-five-year history.

  Grace finally took a step out into the aisle so she could get a glimpse of their new leader, who had taken the stage and now stood towering over the board chair, smiling and waving at the audience. Grace stared, stunned, and dropped back into her seat.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  Her hands were shaking. She felt light-headed and feared she might pass out. She knew that Grady was looking at her strangely.

  This was not happening.

  It was Abbie.

  # # #

  Grace’s mother had been pissed when Grace called her to say she’d decided to spend the long holiday weekend on Butler Island instead of making the trek to Wilkes-Barre.

  “I’ll try coming down over fall break,” she said. But she knew she probably wouldn’t. Not now. Not after seeing Abbie.

  Correction. Not after seeing the new president of St. Albans . . . her boss.

  God.

  This mess was like the plot of a twisted Eugene O’Neill play. A ludicrous joke—and she was the punchline. These things didn’t happen in real life. These things only happened in literature to characters like Oedipus—or in movies that starred Deborah Kerr.

  What the hell was she supposed to do now? Pack up and move to Idaho?

  She scoffed and took another big swig from the Grey Goose bottle. It had been part of a thank-you goodie basket sent to her from members of the curriculum committee she’d chaired last semester.

  Pear-flavored vodka. How . . . inventive. It was only a pint bottle, but right now, it was getting the job done just fine.

  She was sitting on the back steps of her small house. The rain was still coming down. Big, fat drops that exploded on every surface—including her. She knew that her jacket and her hair were
soaked, but she didn’t really care. Maybe if she sat here long enough, she’d melt right into the landscape, and never have to worry about how Abbie would react when she finally realized Grace was one of her newest . . . employees.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” Grady Shepard had asked earlier, when he caught up with her outside the auditorium after the announcement. “And why are you walking so goddamn fast?”

  Grace just shook him off. “I don’t feel so well. I think it must’ve been those hot dogs I ate at the Commons.”

  He looked skeptical. “You ate hot dogs at the St. Allie’s cafeteria? Is this some new self-flagellation technique?”

  “Could be.” She didn’t want to prolong the conversation. “Look, Grady, I really feel sick.” It wasn’t far from the truth.

  “Oh, man.” He ran a hand through his short Afro. “I really wanted to talk about this. Call me later?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I hope we’re still on for the island this weekend.”

  Grace had been headed for the solitude of her office—until she saw her love-struck student stalker, Brittney McDaniel, making a beeline toward Ames Hall. It never failed. Brittney seemed to have a homing beacon where Grace was concerned.

  She nodded at Grady and abruptly veered off on a brick sidewalk that led away from the building that housed the English department offices. “Talk to you later, okay?”

  He continued to stand there as she walked away. “Hey, Grace?”

  She stopped and turned around.

  “She’s pretty hot, isn’t she?” He grinned at her. “Just your type, too.”

  Grace hadn’t eaten any hot dogs that day, but right then, she really did feel like throwing up.

  “Yeah,” she said, turning away. Rain was pelting her in the face. “She’s just my type.”

  God. She took another drink. Once the vodka was gone she knew she’d start feeling how fucking soaked she was.

  The Nine O’Clock Dog was barking.