by Zadie Smith
Zora laughed. ‘You should hear my dad’s freshmen. I was like,’ she said, pitching her voice high and across the country to the opposite coast, ‘and then she was like, and then he was like, and I was like, oh, my God. Repeat ad infinitum.’
Carl looked puzzled. ‘Your pops, the professor . . .’ he said slowly. ‘He white, right?’
‘Howard. He’s English.’
‘English!’ said Carl, revealing the chalky sclera of his eyes, and then a moment later, seeming to have taken the concept fully on board, ‘I ain’t never been to England, man. I’ve never been out of the States. So . . .’ He was doing a strange rhythmic clicking into his palm. ‘He be like a math professor or whatever.’
‘My dad? No. Art History.’
‘You get on with him, with your pops?’
Again Carl’s eyes wandered around the place. Again Zora’s paranoia got the better of her. She imagined for a moment that all these questions were a kind of verbal grooming that would later lead – by routes she didn’t pause to imagine – to her family home and her mother’s jewellery and the safe in the basement. She began to speak rather manically, as was her way when trying to disguise the fact that her mind was elsewhere.
‘Howard – he’s great. I mean’s he’s my dad, so sometimes, you know . . . but he’s cool – I mean, he just had this affair – yeah, I know, it all came out, it was with this other professor – so everything’s pretty fucked up at home right now. My mom’s freaking out. But I’m really like, hello, what kind of a sophisticated guy in his fifties doesn’t have an affair? It’s basically mandatory. Intellectual men are attracted to intellectual women – big fucking surprise. Plus my mom doesn’t do herself any favours – she’s like three hundred pounds or something . . .’
Carl looked down, apparently embarrassed for Zora. Zora blushed and pressed her stubby nails deep into the meat of her palms.
‘Fat ladies need love too,’ said Carl philosophically, and took a cigarette from inside his hoodie, where it had been tucked behind his ear. ‘You best be going, huh,’ he said and lit up. He seemed bored with her now. Zora was filled with the sad sense that something precious had escaped. Somehow with her blethering she had made Mozart vanish and his pal Sussawhatsit too.
‘People to see, places to go, sho’ nuff,’ he said.
‘Oh, no . . . I mean, I’ve just got a meeting. It’s not really –’
‘Important meeting,’ said Carl ruminatively, taking a moment to envision it.
‘Not really . . . more like a meeting about the future, I guess.’
Zora was on her way to Dean French’s office to empty her hypothetical future into his lap. She was particularly concerned about her failure to get into Claire Malcolm’s poetry class last semester. She hadn’t yet seen the boards, but if it happened again then that could have a very adverse affect on her future, which needed to be discussed, along with many other troubling aspects of her future in all its futurity. This was the first of seven meetings that she had taken it upon herself to schedule for the initial week of the semester. Zora was extremely fond of scheduling meetings about her future with important people for whom her future was not really a top priority. The more people were informed of her plans the more real they became to her.
‘The future’s another country, man,’ said Carl mournfully, and then the punchline seemed to come to him; his face surrendered to a smile. ‘And I still ain’t got a passport.’
‘That’s . . . is that from your lyrics?’
‘Might be, might be.’ He shrugged, rubbed his hands together, although it wasn’t cold, not yet. With deep insincerity he said, ‘It was nice talking to you, Zora. It was educational.’
He seemed angry again. Zora looked away and fiddled with the zip of her tote. She had an unfamiliar urge to help him. ‘Hardly – I didn’t say a word, practically.’
‘Yeah, but you listen well. That’s the same thing.’
Zora looked up at him again, startled. She couldn’t remember ever being told that she listened well.
‘You’re very talented, aren’t you?’ murmured Zora without thinking about what in God’s name she meant. She was lucky – the words slipped under a passing delivery truck.
‘Well, Zora –’ He clapped his hands; was she ridiculous to him? ‘You keep studyin’.’
‘Carl. It was nice to meet you again.’
‘Tell that brother of yours to call me. I’m doing another show at the Bus Stop – you know, it’s down Kennedy, on Tuesday.’
‘Don’t you live in Boston?’
‘Yeah, and? It ain’t far – we’re allowed to come into Wellington, you know. Don’t need a pass. Man. Wellington’s OK – that part of it is, Kennedy Square. It ain’t all students – there’s brothers too. Anyway . . . Just tell your bro if he wants to hear some rhymes he should come. It might not be poetry poetry,’ said Carl, walking away before Zora had a chance to answer, ‘but it’s what I do.’
2
Up on the seventh floor of the Stegner Memorial Building, in an insufficiently heated room, Howard had just finished unpacking a projector. He’d slipped his hands on each side of its bulk, kept the armature steady under his chin and eased the whole ugly contraption out of its box. He always requested this projector for his first presentation of the year, when his class was ‘shopped’; it was as much of a ritual as unpacking the Christmas lights. As homely, as dispiriting. In what new way, this year, would it fail to light up? Howard carefully opened the lid of the light-box and placed the too familiar title page (he had been delivering this lecture series for six years), CONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN: 1600–1700, face down on the glass. He picked the page up again, wiped away the accumulated dust and placed it back down. The projector was grey and orange – the colours of the future thirty years ago – and, like all obsolete technology, elicited an involuntary sympathy from Howard. He was not modern any more either.
‘Pah-point,’ said Smith J. Miller, who was standing in the doorway, both hands wrapped around his coffee mug for warmth, eagerly keeping a lookout for the students. Howard knew that this morning would bring more students than the room could handle – unlike Smith, he understood that this didn’t mean anything. They’d have students sitting on the long corporate meeting table and the grim floor, students on the window ledge with their student heels tucked under their student backsides, students lined up against the wall like prisoners waiting to be shot. They’d all take notes like crazed stenographers, they’d be so involved in the movements of Howard’s mouth he would have to convince himself that this was not a deaf school and these not lip-readers; they would all, every single one – in all sincerity – write down their names and e-mails, no matter how many times Dr Belsey repeated, ‘Please only – only – put your names down if you’re seriously intending to take this class.’ And then next Tuesday there would be twenty kids. And the Tuesday after that, nine.
‘It’s a heck of a lot easier, pah-point. Ah could show you.’
Howard raised his eyes from his poor machine. He felt obscurely cheered by Smith’s neat tartan bow-tie, his baby face spattered with light freckles, the thin ripple of ash-blond hair. You couldn’t ask for a better helpmeet than Smith J. Miller. But he was an eternal optimist. He didn’t get how this system worked. He didn’t know, as Howard did, that by next Tuesday these kids would have already sifted through the academic wares on display in the form of courses across the Humanities Faculty, and performed a comparative assessment in their own minds, drawing on multiple variables including the relative academic fame of the professor; his previous publications up to that point; his intellectual kudos; the uses of his class; whether his class really meant anything to their permanent records or their personal futures or their grad school potential; the likelihood of the professor in question having any real-world power that might translate into an actual capacity to write that letter which would effectively place them – three years from now – on an internship at the New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton’s Harlem of
fices or at French Vogue – and that all this private research, all this Googling, would lead them rightly to conclude that taking a class on ‘Constructions of the Human’, which did not come under their core requirements for the semester, which was taught by a human being himself over the hill, in a bad jacket, with eighties hair, who was under-published, politically marginal and badly situated at the top of a building without proper heating and no elevator, was not in their best interests. There’s a reason it’s called shopping.
‘See, now, with pah-point,’ persisted Smith, ‘the whole class can see what’s going on. It’s pretty damn sharp, the image you git.’
Howard smiled gratefully but shook his head. He was beyond the point of learning new tricks. He got on his knees and plugged the projector’s cord into the wall; a snag of blue light leaped from the socket. He pressed the button on the back of the projector. He twiddled the connected cable. He pressed hard on the light box, hoping to engage some loose connection.
‘Ah’ll do that,’ said Smith. He drew the projector away from Howard, sliding it along the table. Howard stood where he was for a minute, in exactly the same pose as if the projector were still before him.
‘Maybe you should close those blinds,’ suggested Smith gently. Like most people in the Wellington loop, Smith was fully apprised of Howard’s situation. And, personally, he was sorry for Howard’s trouble, and had told him so two days earlier when they met to go over which worksheets needed photocopying. I’m sorry for your trouble. As if someone Howard loved had died.
‘You want some coffee, Howard, some tea? Doughnut?’
With one hand absently holding on to the blinds’ strings, Howard looked out of the window on to Wellington’s yard. Here was the white church and the grey library, antagonizing each other on opposite sides of the square. A pot-pourri of orange, red, yellow and purple leaves carpeted the ground. It was still warm enough, but only just, for kids to sit on the steps of the Greenman, reclining on their own knapsacks, wasting time. Howard scanned the scene for Warren or Claire. The news was that they were still together. This from Erskine, who got it from his wife Caroline, who was on the board of trustees at the Wellington Institute of Molecular Research where Warren spent his days. It was Kiki who had told Warren; the explosion had happened – but no one had died. It was just walking wounded as far as the eye could see. No packed bags, no final door slams, no relocation to different colleges, different towns. They were all going to stay put and suffer. It would be played out very slowly over years. The thought was debilitating. Everybody knew about it. Howard expected that the shorthand, water-cooler version, currently circulating the college would be ‘Warren’s forgiven her’ said with pity mixed with a little contempt – as if that covered it, the feeling. People said ‘She’s forgiven him’ about Kiki, and only now was Howard learning of the levels of purgatory forgiveness involves. People don’t know what they’re talking about. At the water cooler Howard was just another middle-aged professor suffering the expected mid-life crisis. And then there was the other reality, the one he had to live. Last night, very late, he had peeled himself off the crushing, too short divan in his study and gone into the bedroom. He lay down in his clothes, above the quilt, next to Kiki, a woman he had loved and lived with his entire adult life. On her bedside table he could not avoid seeing the packet of anti-depressants, sitting alongside a few coins, some earplugs, a teaspoon, all crushed in a small wooden Indian box with elephants carved upon its sides. He waited almost twenty minutes, never sure if she was awake or not. Then he put his hand, above the quilt, very softly, somewhere on her thigh. She began to cry.
‘Ah got a good feelin’ about this semester,’ said Smith, and whistled and released his sprightly Southern chuckle. ‘Expectin’ standing room only.’
On to the blackboard Smith was poster-gumming a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Dr Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm, 1632, that clarion call of an Enlightenment not yet arrived, with its rational apostles gathered around a dead man, their faces uncannily lit by the holy light of science. The left hand of the doctor, raised in explicit imitation (or so Howard would argue to his students) of the benefactions of Christ; the gentleman at the back staring out at us, requesting admiration for the fearless humanity of the project, the rigorous scientific pursuance of the dictum Nosce te ipsium, ‘Know thyself’ – Howard had a long shtick about this painting that never failed to captivate his army of shopping-day students, their new eyes boring holes into the old photocopy. Howard had seen it so many times he could no longer see it at all. He spoke with his back to it, pointing to what he needed to with the pencil in his left hand. But today Howard felt himself caught in the painting’s orbit. He could see himself laid out on that very table, his skin white and finished with the world, his arm cut open for students to examine. He turned back to the window. Suddenly he spotted the small but unmistakable figure of his daughter, clomping a speedy diagonal towards the English Department.
‘My daughter,’ said Howard, without meaning to.
‘Zora? She coming today?’
‘Oh, yes – yes, I believe so.’
‘She’s such a satisfying student, rilly she is.’
‘She works terribly hard,’ agreed Howard. He saw Zora stop by the corner of the Greenman to speak with another girl. Even from here Howard could see she was standing much too close to this other person, closing in on her personal space in a way Americans do not enjoy. Why was she wearing his old hat?
‘Oh, ah know it. Ah was supervising her Joyce class and her Eliot class last semester. Compared to the other freshmen, she was lahk a text-eating machine – ah mean, she strips the area of sentiment and goes to work. Ah’m dealing with these kids who are still saying Ah really like the part when and Ah love the way – you know, that’s their high-school-analysis level. But Zora . . .’ Smith whistled again. ‘She’s awl business. Whatever she gits in front of her she rips apart to see how it works. She’s gonna go a long way.’
Howard thumped the window lightly and then a little harder. He was having an odd parental rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently hunting through Howard’s expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don’t walk in front of cars take care and be good and don’t hurt or be hurt and don’t live in a way that makes you feel dead and don’t betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don’t and please remember and make sure
‘Hey, Howard? Those windows open only at the very top. Student precaution, ah guess. Suicide proof.’
‘Basically, I’m concerned that I’m being unfairly prevented from taking this class due to circumstances beyond my control,’ said Zora firmly, to which Dean French could offer no more than the merest preamble to a murmur, ‘namely, the fact of my father’s relationship with Professor Malcolm.’
Jack French clutched the sides of his chair and leaned back into it. This was not the way things went in his office. In a semicircle on the wall behind him portraits of great men hung, men who were careful with their words, who weighed them cautiously and considered their consequences, men whom Jack French admired and had learned from: Joseph Addison, Bertrand Russell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Carlyle and Henry Watson Fowler, the author of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, on whom French had written a colossal, almost painfully detailed biography. But nothing in French’s armoury of baroque sentences seemed sufficient for dealing with a girl who used language like an automatic weapon.
‘Zora, If I understand you correctly. . .’ began Jack, moving donnishly forward across the desk to speak – not quickly enough.
‘Dean French, I just don’t see why my opportunity for advancement in the creative fields should be stymied’ – French raised his eyebrows at ‘stymied’ – ‘by a vendetta that a professor appears to have against me for reasons that are outside the proper context of academic assessment.’ She paused. She sat very straight in her chair. ‘I think it’s inappropriate,’ she said
.
They had been skirting around this for ten minutes. Now the word had been used.
‘Inappropriate,’ repeated French. All he could do at this point was to aim for damage limitation. The word had been used. ‘You are referring,’ he said, hopelessly, ‘to the relationship to which you referred, which was, indeed, inappropriate. But what I do not as yet see is how the relationship to which you referred –’
‘No, you misunderstand me. What happened between Professor Malcolm and my father doesn’t interest me,’ Zora cut in. ‘What interests me is my academic career in this institution.’
‘Well, naturally, that would be uppermost in all of –’
‘And as for the situation between Professor Malcolm and my father . . .’
Jack wished very much she would stop using that violent phrase. It was drilling into his brain: Professor Malcolm and my father, Professor Malcolm and my father. The very thing that was not to be spoken of this fall semester, in order to protect both the participants and the families of the participants, was now being batted around his office like a pigskin filled with blood . . . ‘as the situation is no longer a situation and has not been for some time, I don’t see why Professor Malcolm should be allowed to continue to discriminate against me in this blatantly personal fashion.’
Jack gazed tragically over her head to the clock on the far wall. There was a pecan muffin with his name on it in the cafeteria, but it would be too late for all that by the time he was through here.
‘And you feel certain, do you, that this is, as you say, a personal discrimination?’
‘I really don’t know what else it can be, Dean French, I don’t know what else to call it. I am in the top three percentile of this college, my academic record is pretty spotless – I think we can both agree on that.’
‘Ah!’ said French, grabbing at a thin rod of light in this murky discussion. ‘But we must also consider, Zora, that this class is a creative-writing class. It is not purely, therefore, an academic question, and when we approach questions of the creative, we must, to a certain extent, adapt our –’
