Campus confidential, p.23
Campus Confidential, page 23
“Is that what you’d do?”
“Me?” He flashed me a grin, his teeth white against the darkness into which his stubbly face was disappearing. “I’d probably take the Provost’s offer, and I’m betting you will, too. And you want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because Madison needs you to, doesn’t she? Right now I bet you’re thinking, ‘But if I walk away from her, who will help Madison? What will happen to her if I walk away from her?’ Admit it. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“More than maybe. And you know what? You’re probably right. Somebody should take care of that girl, and it damn sure isn’t going to be her parents. Her dad’s too busy bucking for university president and that two million dollar salary, and her mom’s too busy fucking the ski instructor or whoever it was she ran off with. And like I said before, money don’t buy you love, which is what that girl needs.”
“So you think I should do it?”
“I think you should think about it,” he said soberly. “I think you should think about it, and then you should demand a job title that will look good on your CV, and a contract that specifies time for research, and you should only sleep with him if you really want to.”
“Um,” I said. “Thanks for your advice.”
“Anytime,” he said. “So, you want me to be around when you meet with him next week?”
“Around?”
“You know, as a kind of invisible wingman? Just in case you need, like, someone to step in if things start getting weird.”
“I doubt things would get weird with Madison there,” I said.
“Tell you what: when’s this meeting?”
“6:00pm, next Friday.”
“Great. I’ll be grading, or packing up my stuff, or whatever, then anyway, just as a way to avoid going home. So I’ll walk you over to the meeting, and meet you afterwards, and walk you back to your car unless you tell me otherwise, okay?”
“Um...if it’s no trouble?”
“Might as well put that Safe Walk training I did as a cadet to work,” he said. “You know, escorting students around campus at night in matched male-female pairs of cadets? It seemed like complete shit to me at the time, but now I think it might have been the most useful thing I did, my entire time in the Navy. And it’ll take me back to my idealistic youth to recreate that experience.”
“Okay. If you don’t mind.”
“I more than don’t mind. I insist.”
“Okay. Thanks, Alex. I really appreciate it. I wish I could do the same for you when you go to Beirut.”
“Oh Jesus.” He groaned. “Don’t remind me! But I’m afraid even a badass wingwoman like you can’t protect me from what awaits me there. The humiliation will be mine alone to bear. Is this your car? You okay to get home from here?”
“Yeah, no problem. Where are you?”
“That piece of shit three cars down. You have an exam on Monday, right?”
“Right,” I said. “8:00am Monday, Russian 101.”
“Yeah, of course. See you Monday, then.” He made an indecisive motion, like he was about to kiss my cheek, and then turned it into a squeeze of my arm before turning and going to his car. I waited until he had opened the door, swearing and kicking it to make it pop open, and gotten in, and then we drove out together in convoy, as if that would keep us safe from the intangible dangers that threatened us.
40
Nothing miraculous happened over the weekend to save me from whatever was awaiting me the following week. I spent some of my time working on another round of edits for the already-accepted article, which was slated to come out next summer if I could get the edits done in time. I wondered what Tsvetaeva would say to all of this. Probably insist proudly that she, as a true poet, was above all such nonsense, and hang herself rather than submit to the humiliation of living under a repressive regime. That option was looking more and more correct.
I also discovered by reading The Wiki that two more jobs and a postdoc I’d very laboriously applied for had all sent out their invitations to interview, and I hadn’t gotten one. The Wiki entry for the postdoc was now a multi-page collection of wailing and lamentation, with applicants discussing everything from mailing the committee boxes of worn-out dirty socks (it would be cheaper, more satisfying, and remove old socks from the apartment, claimed the poster) to dropping out of academia and spending the rest of their lives gathering coconuts on a deserted island.
More realistically, many people were planning to go see if their local supermarket was looking for part-time baggers, and if they could move into their parents’ basements, since whatever job they got, all their earnings were going to go to paying off their student loans. Probably to those on the outside it seemed somewhere between funny and pathetic. To those of us on the inside, it was very much a banality-of-evil experience.
To take my mind off my troubles I ran down to True Grit on Sunday morning and spent two dollars I shouldn’t have spent on some coffee and conversation with Mike and Jimmy, where I couldn’t help but feel them out about how they’d gotten their jobs collecting garbage. I’d never wanted to be a garbage collector before, but right now it didn’t sound so bad. There was always a demand, and I could ride around holding onto the outside of one of those trucks, which might be fun, and end the day with the satisfaction of a job well done. And a long hot shower, providing I could afford to keep my water and electricity on, but at least it would be physical dirt, not an indelible moral stain. Easy to think when it’s not your hands getting dirty. I wondered if white women with PhDs who looked vaguely like Elizabeth Taylor but with a yoga body could get jobs as sanitation workers. Almost certainly not, no matter how desperate we were. Back to high-class hustling and hooking, then, as my back-up plan.
No one in my 101 class was happy about the 8:00am final on Monday, and there was a lot of whining from some, a certain amount of falling asleep from others, and Vitya and Danila showed up half an hour late, smelling of cigarette smoke.
“For Christ’s sake, you could have taken the test first and gone on your smoke break afterwards,” I told them. “It won’t take you more than half an hour anyway.” Vitya and Danila were far from the best students in the class, at least when it came to the written work, but they never wasted much time agonizing over whether their answers were correct or not, which was normally the right choice on language tests. Vitya and Danila dashed off their test answers at stream-of-consciousness speed, and achieved results comparable to Ira, who carefully worked through every question—and then ended up writing something laughably illiterate anyway. Much to the heritage speakers’ chagrin, learning to write in Russian involved learning all the spelling rules and endings, when it all sounded like a sort of “ee” sound to them. Instead of breezing through the course, they were having to work twice as hard as the non-heritage speakers in order to overcome their instincts, and were consequently doing poorly.
“Sorry, Prof,” said Danila, not sounding very sorry. His steady string of B-minuses and Cs, not to mention my frequent expressions of displeasure at his behavior, rolled right off his back without effect, while Ira was in a state of angry despair over her B average, and jumped to find insult in my every word of praise.
“Yeah, sorry, Prof,” echoed Vitya. “Can we have the listening comp questions?”
For a second I considered becoming one of those professors I despised and lecturing them on the sovereign importance of showing up to exams on time, and how they’d forfeited the chance to hear the listening comprehension questions by arriving at their final half an hour late, especially since they’d obviously been using the time to smoke, how my patience had limits, they had to learn to be more responsible, actions had consequences, blah blah blah.
“Sure, no problem,” I said, swallowing down my worst impulses. Being a jerk to Danila and Vitya would only piss them off, hamper whatever acquisition of Russian they might have made otherwise, and generally turn me into a bully and a petty tyrant. “Why don’t you go sit in the back corner, so it doesn’t bother the others.”
“Thanks, Prof; you’re the best.” Both boys gave me grateful smiles.
“No, I just enjoy drawing out your torment,” I told them, which made them laugh.
Monday was the 15th, the last day of my contract. I had assumed that I would remain in the system long enough to enter my final grades, but when I went to enter them for 101 into The Den on Wednesday morning, I was locked out and had to make a trip to The Bear Cave to beg for help, which at first they wouldn’t give me because I was technically no longer an employee at TLASC. The fact that for once the TLASC administration was working efficiently, just when they needed it to work inefficiently in order to wring the last drops of work out of me, was one of those funny little ironies in life.
The 201 final was at 2:00pm on Friday, in the very last slot of exam week. Lucky me to get the first and last exam times. After the grading fiasco of Wednesday, I was afraid that I would be locked out of the classroom, but TLASC’s old-fashioned lock-and-key system instead of card readers meant that I was able to let us all into our tiny little room.
If anything, the students were even more surly than they had been in 101. It was a cold miserable day, with a kind of a slushy wet snow/sleet coming down, which had revealed all the leaks in my boots and rendered ballet flats entirely out of the question, forcing me to wear my sneakers. If anyone thought anything of the fact that I was wearing electric blue running shoes to a final, they kept it to themselves. Probably they were too busy thinking about how they wanted to get this over with and go home. I had offered those who lived far away the opportunity to take the exam during the 101 exam time so that they could go home early, but strangely enough, no one had taken me up on that offer. Now, on this cold, dark Friday afternoon one week before Christmas, they were regretting that choice.
Afterwards Riva came up to me to give me a fistful of chocolate Hanukkah gelt and tell me how sad it was that I was leaving and would I be anywhere nearby next semester and what should she do if she needed a letter of recommendation? I gave her my non-TLASC email address—my TLASC email address was still working, but I was already getting threatening messages about how it would expire in 30 days—and told her I’d be happy to provide her with a recommendation whenever she needed it.
“Don’t worry,” I heard Adam tell her as they exited together. “Professor Cahill’s really cool too.” Which was nice but also sad.
Madison was the last to finish, and came dancing up to me with her completed exam, high, as far as I could tell, on natural exuberance rather than cocaine, although with her the two tended to run together.
“We’ll be seeing each other again in just a little bit, won’t we, Professor!” she said, shoving the completed exam into my hands.
“In just”—I checked my phone—“about two hours.”
“Oh. Yeah. So, what are you going to do between now and then?”
“Probably get some grading done,” I said, trying to sound more enthusiastic about it than I was.
“Oh, yeah, I guess so. Can I come with you?”
“To do what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t have anywhere else to go. I mean, other than my dad’s office, but I can’t go there. It, like, sucks.”
“My office is a lot less nice,” I told her.
“Yeah, but it’s gotta be better than there!”
“Can’t you, I don’t know, go to the library or something?”
She looked so disappointed at my words that I backtracked and said, “It’s just that there isn’t a lot of space in the office. But you’re welcome to come and hang out if you want to and you can avoid bothering anyone who’s grading.”
“Thanks, Professor H!”
But when I had walked and she had skipped along behind me across the leaking skywalk to the adjunct office, we found Alex, Emma, and Kate all there and all bent over piles of exams, looking harried. Madison took them in at a glance and said, without prompting, “Maybe I should go hang out with my dad, Professor.”
“Probably a good idea,” I agreed. “And I’ll see you at six, okay?”
“Sure thing, Professor! See you then!” She skipped off like it was a beautiful morning in May, not a sleety December evening.
41
“Was that a student?” asked Emma, looking up from her frightening pile of exams covered in what appeared to be beginner attempts at Chinese characters. I wondered what would be worse: deciphering first-year Cyrillic or first-year Chinese. I looked over at Alex’s pile of papers. Maybe Arabic beat us both out. “Why was she so cheerful?”
“She’s just a cheerful girl,” I said.
“Was that Madison?” asked Alex.
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’re still going to meet with her at 6:00?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re meeting with a student at 6:00pm on the last day of finals?” asked Emma. “What for?”
“She asked me to,” I said.
Emma made a face. Alex refrained from saying anything about how it was really her father, the Provost, who had asked, but I could see him thinking it. Instead he stood up and offered me his seat.
“No, that’s fine. I can”—I cast around for a place to work—“sit on the floor. You were here first.”
“Nah, I need a break. I’ve been here for two hours and I can’t handle another minute of it. And I have also agreed to meet with a student on the Friday afternoon of exam week. Justin,” he added, looking at me significantly. “We’re going to meet in the library in a few minutes. So I’ll just go on over right now, but I’ll be back in a bit.”
“That’s nice of you,” said Kate, while Emma pursed her lips at both of us as if our zeal personally offended her. Which it probably did.
“Yeah,” said Alex. “Okay, I’m off. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Text me if something changes, Rowena.” He slung a bag over each shoulder and left.
As soon as he was gone, Kate and Emma both turned to me. “Is there something going on between you two?” Kate asked, looking hopeful. An office romance would certainly brighten up everyone’s shitty semester.
“Not like what you’re thinking,” I said. “He’s going to walk me back to my car after my meeting. You know, like a campus Safe Walk thing.”
“That’s so gallant,” said Kate, a misty look in her eye. “I know we’re supposed to be feminists and everything, but I wish a man would offer to walk me to my car sometimes when it’s dark out.”
“Using the buddy system to walk around dangerous places in the dark isn’t anti-feminist, it’s smart,” I said.
“Yeah...it’s different if it’s a man, though,” said Kate, still with a misty look in her eyes. “Not that I would know. I’ve been walked home maybe once in my life, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Emma sullenly.
They both turned to me expectantly.
“It’s a common thing in Russia,” I said.
“Really?” said Kate. “You don’t think of Russian men as being, well, gallant.”
“Either they’re super-gallant, or they’re predators,” I said. “Sometimes both. Either way they’re probably going to insist on walking you home. And rightly so, although most of the streets of Moscow are probably safer than the streets of New Brunswick.”
“Oh.” Kate looked taken aback. “Well. That sounds...I don’t know...”
“It makes you tough,” I said. “Do you have a lot of grading left?”
We segued into complaints about grading, which ended with both Emma and Kate calling it a day, but with Kate making me promise to meet up with her for coffee at some as-yet-undefined time over the weekend, and Emma giving me a half-hearted “Keep in touch” as she went out the door.
At 5:30, when I had graded enough exams that I was starting to think about giving up and moseying very slowly over to Angelo as a way to kill the time, I heard people coming down the hall, talking.
I poked my head out the door, expecting to see Alex and Justin. Instead I saw Alex and John Greene.
“I really don’t think it’s appropriate...” John Greene was saying. I pulled my head back into the office, hoping they hadn’t noticed me eavesdropping, but I could still hear them. Both men were speaking loudly, almost shouting, obviously well into what was turning into an argument.
“I have to be able to meet with my students somewhere,” Alex said. “I don’t have a private office. And you could say that the coffee shop is more appropriate than the office anyway. It’s public. It’s impossible for anything inappropriate to happen there by definition.”
“But it looks like...socializing! It looks like it could be a, a...a date!”
“I hope I can tell the difference between a date and a meeting with a student. For starters, because in my case the first would take place with someone within ten years of my own age and of the opposite sex, whom I found attractive. None of the three applied in this case.”
“Yes, but, you have to admit, it looks...it could be construed...”
“What could be construed? What are we going to do? Do we need to perform thorough examinations of our students’ sexual preferences, as well as our own, before admitting them into our classes, to make sure that our male instructors never have contact with any gay men? Or with, because this is a much more serious issue, female students of any sort? That doesn’t strike you as a little intrusive? For crying out loud, John, I was in the Navy! I know all about these kinds of baseless rumors! And about the real abuses that go on behind them! But what are you going to do? If you’re so worried about the possibility of a hint of impropriety from an instructor meeting with a student in Starbucks, and you for some reason think that private offices would be better—which they won’t, because they’re private—then you damn well need to start providing your faculty with private offices! Otherwise we’re just going to have to keep meeting with our students in coffee shops, if not our cars!”
