The Englishman (5 page)

His gaze begins to waver and that impossibly attractive smile flits across his face.

“All right. What are you going to do in the other one?”

“Third- and fourth-year concentration,
Paradise Lost
.” My voice is squeaky, for a number of reasons.

He is scribbling away on a clipboard that he rests against his hunched-up knee. I don’t even know whether his notes have anything to do with me, or whether this interview is conducted on the side of more important matters.

“No, I think not…”

“But I’ve taught Milton before, I’m perfectly capable of—”

“Dr. Lieberman, I don’t doubt that you are…perfectly capable.” He is still scribbling, unaware that I am becoming increasingly capable of hitting him where it really hurts. “Save it, you can do Milton next year. Don’t you have something a little more sweet ’n’ fun? Something you can pull out of your hat?”

I push my hands under my thighs in a gesture that must seem childish to him, but I desperately need to steady myself. “Parody and satire? I taught that last winter at NYU.”

“We won’t hold that against you. And?”

“I—I concentrated on the motifs and discourses of courtly love and how they were subverted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In carnival, for instance, or in the sonnet. The process of a genre’s exhaustion, and how parody can infuse new life into it.”

“
Subversion, no end of subversion, but not for us
,” he quotes. And that is not a smile. That is a sneer.

I can feel a damp patch forming between my shoulder blades.

“The subversive thrust of parody may be out of our reach, I agree, but we can analyze the
inversion
, and the…well, as Bakhtin says, the processes by which high and noble ideas were degraded to the level of the body, to the digestive and reproductive systems.”

“Food and sex, you mean.” He is looking straight at me for a change, but I can’t tell whether he is deliberately provoking me or merely impatient with my display of theory.

“Food and sex…yes, that—yes.”

“Do one on parody, then, and
Paradise Lost
next year. What is your…thing on?”

I am so bewildered by his interruptions and his oscillations between humor and hauteur that it takes me a couple of seconds to latch on.

“My what? Oh, my dissertation! Early modern civic culture. Urban processions, drama, ritual…that sort of thing.”

“See that you finish it within the next couple of years.”

“I have finished it. The ‘thing.’ If that’s what you mean.”

“No, that’s not what I mean! Even Hornberger wouldn’t hire someone who hadn’t finished her dissertation! I meant publish it.”

“I
have
published it. As good as. It’s been with the readers at Cambridge University Press for about a month, and of course I don’t know how long their list of queries will be, but for now it’s out of my hands.”

The feeling of being unjustly treated gives me the courage to look him straight in the eyes. They aren’t blue at all but green, like seawater, with a thin scar running from the corner of the left eye across his temple to his ear. He seems even more Celtic to me, with those light eyes gleaming like the holy wells on Avalon. He has a mercurial energy, a kind of quicksilvery passion that makes him very attractive—exciting, even—but boy, do I see where he gets his reputation for being difficult!

Satisfied, I want to lean back but remember just in time that if I recline on this sofa, I will be practically horizontal. So I smirk sitting up and wait for him to come back.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the rush?”

Funny. That is what my grandmother, my darling
bubbe
, also asked when I told her that I was planning to hand in my book within the next six months. She was dying then, and one of her most urgent concerns was to leave knowing that my life was working out. “Will that make you happy?” she asked, anxiously. And I laughed and said, “Yes, of course it will! It’s what I want!”

It
is
what I want.

“I don’t see anything rushed about wanting to have a book publication to my name by the time I turn thirty! How else was I to stand a chance in the scramble for a tenure-track position? I’m relatively old as it is!” I have to attack him, or the wet film on my eyes will not go away.

“Two book publications.” Well, whaddayaknow. He has looked at my CV. “You’re a workaholic!”

Words fail me. Given that I have spent half my life working toward a job at a good university at a time of economic recession and in a discipline that is notoriously overrun, this is a ludicrous observation.

“Well…
duh!”
is all I can manage by way of a response.

“So instead of using this summer to recharge your batteries in order to be fit for a new job, you slaved away at your desk to get a book out that could easily have waited another year or two. I don’t see the sense in that.” He shifts in his chair, his long legs twitch, but it isn’t embarrassment at his own audacity to judge what is really no concern of his at all, it is anger. Impossible. He can’t be angry with me.

“I just…wanted it out of the way,” I stutter. “It’s a load off. And I think that’ll make it easier for me, here. Start a new phase.”

“But don’t you see, you—” He cuts himself off in exasperation. “You were sittin’ pretty without this stunt! You have to learn to pace yourself, or you’ll be burnt out by the time you’re thirty!”

Something is very wrong here. This is the second time Cleveland is about to make me cry. And this apart from the fact that he is making me want to climb onto his lap and—do something. I don’t exactly know what. Touch him?

“I’ll be thirty in three months. Thanks for the warning, but I think I’ll be okay. Sir.”

“You should get David Bergeron to have a look at your book.” Scribbling on his sheet of paper again.

“David has offered to review it for the
Shakespeare Quarterly
.”

“Has he.” Same tone of voice. Scribbling. “And what does David think of it?”

“He thinks it’s crap.” The word and my frosty voice make him look up again, startled. The blood rushes to my head, but I am in a panic of self-defense, too upset to care. “Yeah, he’s going to waste four hundred words panning the book of a total nobody. As one does. You know.”

The seawater eyes, deep-set under their grizzled brows, are glistening with icy resentment.

“Does one? Well, Professor Lieberman, I think we’ve settled the most pressing matters—don’t let me keep you. I’m sure you must be very…busy.”

Well, fine. Not only will there be a snake in the grass in my new-found academic Eden, it has already reared its ugly head. Except—not all that ugly. Squatting on the floor of my li’l office a few minutes later, I wait as the muscles in my body unclench, slowly. I can’t remember when I last received such a pasting. My job interviews, by comparison, were walks in the park. But then if a search committee turns out to be a bunch of jerks, you shrug and delete that place from your list of desirable prospects. This is different; I really wanted Giles Cleveland to like me. I still do, except it is all a lot more confusing than it was an hour ago.

When I reach for the bottle of water in my rucksack, my fingers are trembling. Okay, so Cleveland won’t be a friend; that is a pity but no big deal. It would have been nice to network with him, but it is not as if I need him to get tenure.

Keep your head down, smile, publish, and everything will be all right.

“What are you doing here?”

I am getting ready to leave when my open door is darkened by an elderly man in a baggy suit and a purple bow-tie. His face is an unhealthy shade of purple, too.

“Pardon me?”

“Up here it’s offices only!” He stares at me with pale blue eyes from under a pair of very impressive bushy eyebrows; in fact, all of his hair seems bushy, including that protruding from his nostrils. I jump up from the floor and wipe my hands on the seat of my jeans, but as I advance toward him to shake hands, he backs off into the hallway.

“All this—” he waves his arms toward the right “—is English literature, and all this—” he turns round and waves into the opposite direction “—is Modern Languages! Classrooms are in the other wing!”

“Um…thank you, sir, I know that. I work here.”

“You do?” The bushy eyebrows wriggle like distressed caterpillars. “You are not cleaning staff—you’re not wearing a uniform!”

“No, sir, that’s right—I’m faculty.”

“Faculty? Nonsense! Which professor do you work for?”

“Professor Lieberman.” Well, it’s worth a try. The sound of that little phrase still makes my heart skip. I wish they would screw that name tag to my office door.

The caterpillars, too, perform a little skip ’n’ dance routine.

“Lieberman? You must be on the wrong floor. Or the wrong building. This is English, up to here—” he actually scrapes his shoe across the floor tiles “—and over there it’s Modern Languages!”

At this point it dawns on me that I am dealing with something more disturbing than professorial eccentricity. A bunch of keys is dangling from the door to the office next to mine; his demonstration of inter-departmental boundaries shows that his office is the last English Lit post on the frontier. There is a big black bag on its threshold, and three open boxes with books and papers are stacked up next to it.

“Yes, sir, I know.” I smile in a way that I hope will calm him down. “We haven’t been introduced. Anna Lieberman. This is my first semester here. Assistant Professor, British Literature.”

He comes forward to shake my hand, but then changes his mind and withdraws toward his office door like a flustered, angry old dog.

“You’re a professor? You don’t look like a professor!”

“Um…”

“Lieberman?”

“Yes.”

“You’re Jewish!”

“That is correct.”

“I knew nothing of this!”

“I’m sorry that I’m coming as a surprise to you, Professor—?”

“No, no—this is wrong! Nick has not spoken to me about you!”

“Well, sir, if you care to mention my name to Professor Hornberger, I am sure he will be happy to verify my appointment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m actually rather—uh—busy.”

Chapter 4

W
HEN
I R
EACH
T
HE
C
OTTAGE
after my encounters with Giles Cleveland and the crazy old man in the next-door office, I feel tense enough to scream. I was determined not to go back to writing again until I had my house in some sort of order, but Cleveland’s interrogation has pushed me over the brink into a state of acute withdrawal. I must work. Work, write, publish—the only thing to calm me down. There are the essays of the collection that I’m co-editing and its introduction; there are two conference paper proposals and one review to be written; there is an essay on Ralph Glasser and the Whitechapel Boys to revise for submission to a journal; there is the paper to be presented in November at Notre Dame University. Oh, and there is the class on parody and satire to prep, foisted on me at the eleventh hour by my mentor, who doesn’t think I’m up to teaching Milton. Cleveland is such a
jerk!

My early morning walks are during the only cool hours of the day. Now the air is full of the sweet, sticky smells and the insects of a hot summer evening. It’s still a relief to escape across the brook, on the four stepping stones that must have been put there by a Walsh last year or thirty years ago, and into the green world. The characters in Shakespeare’s comedies escape from civilization into the green world of the Athenian forest, or the Forest of Arden, or the Welsh mountains. The forest is a place for metamorphoses, for playing out the impulses of the subconscious. If I could metamorphose, what would I choose to be?

I float on my blanket next to the big patch of blue-violet flowers I have discovered for this purpose (
must pick one and ask a Walsh what they are
) and squint up against the glistening emerald ceiling overhead.

I am a squirrel. Dashing around with inexhaustible energy, gathering a fat hoard of publications. Books like brazil nuts, articles like hazelnuts, reviews like sunflower seeds. A nice, nourishing portfolio to keep me alive.

Or maybe I should be a bird. One that builds its nest out of the twigs and grass it collects all day long. I’m trying to build my nest, aren’t I?

A bed of moss. Dark green, heavy moss. Soft, for something warm and furry to lie on. Rest on. Sleep.

A plot of land. Just…a measure of earth. Heavy. Just heavy and still. And little gray-furred creatures would burrow into me and I would hold them safe, and we would sleep.

I should go to bed without checking my email again, but of course I can’t. There is an email from Debbie Crocker, my friend and co-editor in England, and because I feel guilty, I decide to call her. Debbie’s day is structured by the feat of combining a full-time job in the English department at Bristol University, marriage and motherhood, and since it is now late afternoon in England, she is probably at home.