Beet (14 page)

“You know,” said Booth. “Most of the little male pigs will have to be castrated.”

“The students can do it!” said Heilbrun. And all except Peace agreed the students could castrate the pigs.

BUT TO RETURN TO FERRITT LAWRENCE: HE HAD BEEN HAVING
another bad day—the one-thousand-and-fourth such day in his career as a junior journalist. This one had preceded the Veterans Day/Parents Weekend holiday. Ferritt had been spending the afternoon in his room in Coldenham, preparing his answer to a take-home quiz, “Should the media police itself?” He was brooding and depressed that his chosen profession might have been misdirected, after all, and his parents may have been right when they tried to steer him toward a career in air conditioner repair. With the sky over Beet College going black and the clouds crushing the sun into a saffron line, his spirits had not sunk so low since last winter's German measles prevented him from attending an invitation-only dinner in the Communications Arts private dining room for columnist Bobo de Pleasure, “the conservative's liberal and the liberal's conservative.” De Pleasure was speaking about his new book,
How to Become a Columnist,
the sequel to his two very popular previous books,
Is There Anyone in America I Don't Agree With?
And
I Could Not Agree More!

Ferritt had been getting nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in his pursuit of the story of the closing of the college, the story of a lifetime. The CCR members with whom he continued to hold off-the-record
conversations were on their own kicks and were telling him that if he wanted a story “of lasting significance” he ought to write about
them
, their remarkable successes and their hidden gifts.

Professor Kettlegorf prodded him to detail her early potential as a ballerina, a prodigy if she said so herself, and how she had sacrificed certain stardom for the greater good of teaching “our nation's future.” She also mentioned her heartbreaking experience with the ship's captain in Kansas, but when pressed by Ferritt said she could not go on. She did start to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset,” but by that time Ferritt was out the door.

Professor Smythe was deep into his ninth year on his seminal, comprehensive, and definitive study of the difference between the concepts of the egotistical sublime and negative capability. When, in a rare burst of innocent curiosity, the boy asked the professor if those ideas weren't just elaborate terms for self-concern and self-lessness, Smythe chuckled bitterly and accused him of misprision, which silenced him for once.

Professor Booth tried to persuade the young reporter to do a six-part series entitled “Booth: A Life in Chemistry.” And Professor Kramer agreed it would be an excellent idea, or perhaps another idea would also be excellent.

Professor Heilbrun, who was wearing a Ruckley (navy single-breasted lounge suit), had meager experience with journalism or its standards and thought Ferritt might wish to write about his treatise on Charles Pisherwold, a dim-witted thirteenth-century serf who was born without the sense of taste and wrote passion plays to be performed by cows. When the reporter seemed uninterested, Heilbrun asked whether he wished to hear him sing the entire score from
Two By Two
. He believed he was the only man living, including the former Broadway cast, who could do that.

Since Professor Lipman was Ferritt's instructor in the
New York Times
course, he decided in the end to do her bidding, and had produced but one piece of writing in all those weeks, other than his piece attacking Professor Porterfield at the faculty meeting. It was Professor Lipman's own story, “To Publicize or Criticize: A Celebrity Editor's Dilemma.”

“The question is…,” said Lipman.

“Is what?” said Ferritt.

“No, that's what you write. The question is…”

“The question is?”

“Yes. When you've written the preliminary material and are about to state the problem, you write, ‘The question is…'”

“Do I always do that?”

“Yes. Or sometimes, if you are dealing with the past, you write, ‘The question was…' But here you write ‘The question is…'”

What was worse, his editor on the
Pig's Eye
, Jacob McMinus III, grandson of the notorious Drunk Thief of Wall Street, had taken to downing Ecstasy with Tab every morning. By late afternoon, when the paper was closing, he sat slumped over in his swivel chair, spinning himself faster and faster and muttering limericks about girls from Cape Cod.

Am I the only honest, responsible, sober professional in this outfit? Ferritt asked himself. The question was: Did every great journalist suffer this way?

And then, on the day of his deepest despair, he got lucky, because on that rock-bottom afternoon, he'd decided to do what all the great journalists had done before him, when they too questioned the validity of their calling: he determined to get shit-faced. And so he slipped into the safari jacket that had briefly belonged to Diane Sawyer (purchased on eBay for a song), climbed upon his mountain bike, rode to town, and parked himself in the darkest corner of the High on the Hog Lounge at the Pigs-in-Blankets Bed 'N Breakfast, not five minutes before Matha Polite and Joel Bollovate had sat down at the onset of their partnership.

Ferritt had been the figure barely visible to anyone, and quite invisible to Matha and Joel as they had moved closer together with each glass of wine. He'd watched them with dark and narrow eyes. “Knowledge is power,” he said to himself, and so he would not forget, he wrote it down.

From that day in the bar, during which he had taken care to remain undetected, to the present, this week before Thanksgiving,
Ferritt followed Matha wherever she went. He would have liked to follow Bollovate as well, but since the trustee's main mode of transportation was an Apache Longbow attack helicopter minus the missiles and customized for his private use, the reporter was discouraged. Matha would do as a quarry because she frequently led him to Bollovate anyway. The chairman would pick her up outside the college gates, and they'd drive off to their business conferences. What was the story in their trysts? Something connected with the fate of the college? If not, at least a scandal, which Ferritt hoped would be “juicy.”

So he followed the two of them to Sow's Motel, and he believed he was becoming a first-rate tracker, though he trailed the couple at such close range—his mountain bike grinding its gears behind Bollovate's black Escalade at a distance no greater than sixty feet—they could have spotted him every time. Fortunately for Ferritt, the pair were so absorbed, not in each other but rather in themselves individually, he could have lain in bed between them without being noticed. He didn't need to; he could listen in with his cassette recorder outside their window.

Their pillow talk—Joel's and Matha's—had lately shifted subjects from Matha's limitless future in Long Island real estate to Professor Porterfield's limited future at Beet. At least, limited was the way both of them wanted it. Matha was more forthcoming.

“I'm mystified, Mr. Bollovate,” she said one afternoon in their special Room 207. Supine in the king-size bed, they appeared a lower-case i beside a capital O. She sipped from a bottle of Johnny Walker from the mini-bar, he from a miniature Chivas Regal. “I know why I want to get rid of Professor Porterfield. He's too goody-goody and too smart, and he might actually save the college. But you, Mr. Bollovate. I don't get why you want the same thing.”

She continued to call him Mr. Bollovate in spite of their intimacies. The formal address seemed to heighten her excitement in bed, or rather the excitement she expressed, at the peak of which she would often cry out, “Oh! Mr. Bollovate!”

“I want him out because he's not doing his job.”

“But you can't dump him—can you?” asked Matha, craning
her neck back to behold the print of Don Quixote over the headboard. “He has tenure. He's protected. And he may not be doing his job, but no one could do better. If you get rid of Porterfield, you'll get rid of the college.”

“Tenure!” Bollovate sat up in the bed and swiped at the air. “How I hate that word! Tenure! Where else on Planet Earth is there a thing called tenure? In a dildo factory? Oh, yeah. A dildo maker is awarded a job for life because he's just so good at his work? Give me a break.”

Matha slid deeper under the bedcovers. She'd hit a nerve. Mr. Bollovate seemed to have so many nerves.

“And if the dildo maker begins to get sloppy? Goes berserk? Produces whoopee cushions instead of dildos? He's fired! That's what happens. But not a college professor. Once a college professor gets tenure, he can fuck up all he wants or go to sleep for the next twenty years. He's got fucking tenure!”

“So,” Matha asked in a soft and careful voice, “how could you get rid of Professor Porterfield?”

“Does he screw around?” asked Bollovate. “Nah. That wouldn't do it. All those professors screw around.” It came to him where he was.

“Actually,” said Matha, “he may be one of the few professors at Beet who doesn't screw around.”

That was so. Other than Professor Porterfield, Keelye Smythe was the lone member of the English Department who had never had an affair with an undergraduate—though not for lack of trying. Once, in pursuit of a plump exchange student named Lufthansa, he'd written her a love letter suggesting that the passion they could share would rank among those of the exalted lovers of history and mythology, like Troilus and Cressida, Hero and Leander, Daphnis and Chloe, Venus and Adonis, and Edward, Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. Smythe's twelve-page letter was a philosophical-cum-philological argument that included blank spaces in the text. When he gave it to Mrs. Whiting for typing, he put the spaces in brackets and instructed, “insert endearments here.” Mrs. Whiting handed back the untyped letter without comment.

“What about the antifeminist bullshit?” asked Bollovate. “I wonder if we could get him on that.”

Matha said nothing, but she knew the “antifeminist bullshit” was a more usable charge than murder if they wanted Porterfield out. She recalled a recent incident at Columbia. It involved a professor caught chewing his Salisbury steak too demonstratively in the faculty cafeteria. A young woman complained that the offender had behaved inappropriately, and he was brought up for “lewd chewing.” The fellow tried to explain that he was merely masticating, but that only made matters worse.

“We can get around tenure,” said Bollovate. “He could be thrown out for cause. He's supposed to be serving the college's needs, and he's fucking up.”

Matha regarded him sideways, like a puzzle that required a different approach if one were to solve it. “Well, I can't see why you're telling me all this. What could I possibly do to get rid of Professor Porterfield?”

Bollovate had thought of what. “For one thing, you and your band of misfits could storm the CCR meetings, make it impossible for them to meet.”

“What good would that do? They're not getting anywhere anyway.”

“I want a change in public opinion,” said Bollovate, who purchased that very thing often enough to know what he was talking about. “I want the students to think that Porterfield, by failing in his job, is doing them in.”

Matha understood what he meant, if not his motives. If the majority of students were opposed to Porterfield, the faculty would turn on him too, because there was nothing they valued more than the collective opinions of people in their late teens. Yet again she was torn. If keeping Porterfield resulted in rescuing the college, her own mission would be thwarted. But if dumping him had the same consequence, that is, if he were replaced by someone who could do what the trustees had asked, what difference did it make? On the other hand, she had begun to see her future lay in real estate more than in poetry. And she might very soon
overtake that bitch Kathy in her very own trade. Also, the disruption of the CCR would bring one more time-wasting annoyance to the college.

“The trouble is,” she said, “Professor Porterfield really
can
do the job. You'd be better off letting him alone.” She gave him the fish eye. “Unless, for some reason, you don't want him to succeed.”

“Save those smarts for when you're working for me,” said Bollovate. He pulled on his pants and left her in the motel room. “I go. You stay.” She would have to make her return trip to the college on her own, which annoyed her practically, not emotionally.

But who was this standing in the wavering light of the motel parking lot, notebook in hand, looking, he hoped, like Hemingway in riding boots astride a hill in war-torn Spain? Ferritt Lawrence greeted her cheerily to cover his guilt, stuffed some items into his backpack, and offered to leave his bike at the motel and pay for a taxi for them both.

“What do you think of Professor Porterfield?” she asked him on the way back to Beet. Few people ever asked Ferritt his opinion of anything, not even driving directions, so he responded at great length. Professor Porterfield was just the sort of faculty member he despised, he told Matha. “He keeps to himself. He teaches, talks to his students in office hours, and goes home. He doesn't gossip. He doesn't tell me a thing, you can bet on that. He ignores the press. Can you believe it? Treats me like a pest.”

“What if I told you the MacArthur Five was about to rise again? At least two more times,” said Matha.

“That would be a story,” said the aroused Ferritt.

“Well, very soon, and I'll tell you when, we're going to raid a CCR meeting, bring the committee to a halt.”

“A grinding halt?” Ferritt asked.

“And something a lot bigger,” said Matha, as Gregory gave their taxi the toreador defense at the gates. They rode past Bacon. “A takeover to end all takeovers. I'll let you know. You'll have an exclusive.”

Ferritt had not been this excited since he was given a one-day press pass to sit in on a session of the Council on Foreign Relations.
At last here was the payoff for all the fallow weeks, and for all the crafty maneuvers involved in following Matha and Bollovate. Then he blundered. “And what does Mr. Bollovate think of the committee?”