The Englishman (8 page)

“Sure.” I shrug. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to have time to twiddle my thumbs during my first semester here.”

“No, that wouldn’t do at all. Thumb twiddling is frowned on at all times.”

It isn’t that he doesn’t hear my sarcasm, it’s just that he chooses to deflect it with a deadpan irony that I would relish if he gave me any indication that he wants me to share it.

“May I ask to you send me an email about this? Where and when, and so forth?” This way, if anyone else tries to lumber me with more service or advisement, I can document that Cleveland got to me first.

“No problem.”

He is enjoying my claims to independence, my pretense that we are negotiating, when in fact we both know that I am receiving orders. And then he bolts. I am struggling to muster the courage to tell him about Corvin when he gives me a quick nod and strides off toward the hallway behind the staircase. Doesn’t even say good-bye, let alone thank you, or how are you getting on. Runs off, a gangly athlete, lurching a little because he hasn’t fully realized he isn’t an overgrown, diffident sixteen-year-old anymore.

“Hey, Anna. What’s wrong?”

Tim overtakes me as I sleepwalk toward the elevator, his head cocked to one side, searching my face for clues.

“Nothing. Only that—no, nothing. Listen, do you have a couple of minutes to come up to my office? Could you show me the way around the online blackboards? I’m finally logged in, but the template still defeats me!”

He checks his phone. “I haven’t got long, though. We should get together one evening and have a good natter about the place.”

We reach the elevator, and he falls back a step to let me enter first.

“Thank you.” I smile.

“
Manners Maketh Man
,” he murmurs, waiting till I’ve stepped out into the fourth-floor hallway, which is crowded with adjuncts and teaching assistants running into and out of their own and each other’s offices.

“Are you…an Old Wykehamist?” I ask, curious about his background.

“W-What?”

“Sorry, just—a wild stab in the dark.”

“But you’re a clueless colonial! You’re not meant to understand these things! Because I quoted—go, go!” Exasperated, he pushes me toward my office. “Nauseating anglophile!”

“You quoted the school motto, yeah. Winchester College. You said you grew up in England and went to a posh boarding school, so—what? Were you really at Winchester? Gosh, we
are
posh, aren’t we?”

“Shut up and get on with it.”

“Hey!” I protest. “You’re lucky I allow all my gay friends to boss me around, or I’d slap you for that! Stop pushing me!”

“
Shshshut up!”
he hisses under his breath, his manner switching from petulant diva to alarmed professional.

Equally alarmed about the flash of anger in his baby-blues, I rummage in my bag for the key. There was never any doubt in my mind that Tim is gay, and I was convinced that he let me know as much when we first met. Leaves only one explanation.

“You don’t mean to tell me there’s a closet in this place, do you?”

“Of course there is.” He flicks his finger at the Post-it that is standing in for the nameplate I still don’t have.

“I’m sorry.” I inhale deeply. “I—I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

“Can’t blame you for not expecting that. We’ll talk about it some other time, if you want. If you must.”

“Don’t be mad at me, Tim.”

“Oh, stop being such a girl!” he snaps, back for a moment in bitch-mode. “
Jesus F. Christ!”

“Welcome to Corvin’s other office.”

“Yes, but—this—” He slowly rotates around his own axis, which is about the only movement possible. “You can’t work like this!”

“I know. The guy who came to set up my computer was laughing his head off. And most of this was in the Dumpster when I left the place on Friday evening. Today it’s back in here. Mrs. Forster only says she’ll put me on Hornberger’s list—big joke, as if a department chair had nothing better to do at the beginning of the semester than to sort out piles of junk. I’ve written to Hornberger’s personal email account, too, but—nothing.”

“You must be furious.” Gingerly he touches a couple of bags with the tip of his Kenneth Cole loafers. One of the bags falls open and reveals another bunch of photocopied articles.

“What’s the point? I’m tenure-track. I’ll shut the fuck up and wait till one of the higher-ups deigns to favor me with his attention. I tried to speak with Corvin, but when I met him this morning, he glared at me and ducked into his office like a toad into a hole. C’mon, huddle up—” I pull up the second chair and switch on my PC.

“You have to tell Giles.”

“You say that as if Giles Cleveland were God. Or Darth Vader. Do you think he’s going to choke Corvin? Using the Force?”

“For sure.” Tim grins. “
Your lack of faith is disturbing!”

“See, here. I get to this page, but when I try to select my courses—”

“Giles is your mentor,” he insists. “It’s his job to sort out problems like this!”

“I won’t go running to Daddy the moment things don’t go smoothly!”

“Don’t you like Giles?” The baby blues are round as saucers.

“He calls me
doctor
.”

Tim stares at me with glassy incomprehension.

“Who calls you what?”

“Cleveland. He calls me Dr. Lieberman! Not in front of the students. To my face.”

“Seriously?”

“Tim! Cleveland can’t stand me!” I say, as if he were the dumb boy who gets it last.

“I don’t believe that. Maybe he’s teasing you. He only does that when he likes someone. He’s flirting with you!”

“I know how Englishmen flirt. He isn’t flirting with me. He hasn’t suggested I call him Giles, either, though he expressly told me not to call him sir.”

“You called him sir?”

“Considering my options, sir seemed very restrained!”

“Ouch, he did rub you the wrong way!” Tim can’t resist milking my indignation, but he clearly has no explanation for Cleveland’s behavior. It would have been a relief to hear that he—Cleveland—was notorious throughout the department for his rudeness, but apparently not so. On the contrary, Tim seems to hero-worship him, which I find absolutely laughable.

“Whatever. I won’t ask Cleveland for help, that’s all.”

I’m tempted to ask Tim about Dolph Bergstrom and the search committee, but something stops me. Tim is such a gossip; if he hasn’t told me yet, there is a reason. Perhaps I should keep this tidbit under my cap for a little. The more I hear about Dolph beforehand, the more awkward I will feel when I meet him. At the end of the day all we can do is try and be grown-up about it. I got the job, and Dolph will just have to suck it up. Now I want my office.

Chapter 6

A
FTER
A
BOUT
A T
RILLION
S
ESSIONS
of new faculty orientation, and cocktails with the Provost, and lunchtime finger food and jazz with the Dean and her staff—none of which addressed
my
most pressing problem, of course—we assemble for the first faculty meeting at the English department. I still have no idea what to do about Crazy Corvin and the mountain of his trash in my office, but I do know that my part as the new kid on the block is to be seen, not heard. I would get off to a very bad start indeed with my new colleagues if the first thing they heard from me was a complaint. My best course of action is to be as quiet as a mouse: watch, listen, and learn.

Our venue is the conference room at the Observatory. It is dominated by a table that is at once decorative and emblematic, an almost round oval at one end, it narrows down at the other end and connects, with a couple of tapering pieces in-between, with as many rectangular tables as are needed.

“What’s with the tear-shaped table?” I whisper to Tim as we enter the room.

“Tear? We call it the Sperm Room, for all the whacking off that goes on in here.”

“Okay, you sit at the window, I sit here. Go, reprobate. Shoo.”

The full professors and highest-ranking associates sit at the head of the table, while the rest of us huddle round the, um, tail. Andrew Corvin, in the same suit he wore before, comes in and obliges half a dozen people to move down because he insists on sitting next to Matthew Dancey. I’m a somewhere-in-the-middle-of-the-tail assistant professor, and I think—although I can’t be sure because I don’t want to be caught looking at him—that when Giles Cleveland enters, he scans the room, sees me among the infantry and checks that box. I was right; he doesn’t wear jeans and rugby shirts when he is on duty. But even in a light gray summer suit and a white dress shirt there is a disheveled look about him, as if he had shrugged into his jacket in a hurry—top shirt buttons undone, cuff buttons undone, the sleeves peeking out from under the sleeves of the jacket. As if someone had been in the process of undressing him when he remembered the faculty meeting and dashed off.

Now
there’s
a tantalizing thought.

Two young men take the seats further down from me, and I am glad I can turn to them.

“Hi, we haven’t met. I’m Anna Lieberman.”

“Mm.” While my neighbor—a beefy blond with a goatee—is finishing an email, his friend tips his chair backward.

“Hey. I’m Steve Howell. Settling in all right?” He is weedier than the blond, but good-looking in a nineteen fifties kind of way.

“Yes, thanks, I’m—”

“You’re in next to Corvin, aren’t you?” He pulls up one corner of his mouth in a smile that could be sympathetic or malicious. “That’s too bad.”

The hunk’s shoulders twitch.

I turn my body toward them to signal my readiness for confrontation, although my smile is sweet and harmless.

“You seem to know all about that. How come?”

“Well, we…saw you in there, that’s all.”

“The weakest link,” the hunk says, straightening up from his notebook. “Someone has to be in next to Corvin, and that’ll be the new hires who have no powerful friends in the place. Fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

“So it goes.” I shrug, pretending to be cool. “And you are—?” As if I didn’t know.

“Dolph Bergstrom.” He still can’t get himself to look straight at me.

I have never met anyone actually called that. Why would parents
do
such a thing to their child? A blond, blue-eyed boy, yet!
Adolph
. Seriously?

“Oh, man—hi! I thought we’d meet here today—look, what can I say? Bad luck, that’s all. I know you probably wish I’d go away and boil my head, and—well, I won’t, but maybe we can have lunch soon? I have a ton of questions I’d love to ask you!”

Dolph stares at me as if his pet rabbit had suddenly spoken to him. In Swahili.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he says.

For five mortifying seconds I am convinced I got it all wrong, but his rejection impulse is so strong he even inches his chair away from me with a nervous jolt.

“Head boiling seems a little excessive,” Steve jokes, but I notice that he quickly checks Dolph’s profile.

“Aren’t you worried you’re out of your depth here, with no experience of the American grad school system?” Dolph is irritated with me, as if I were the puny kid that wants to play on his team.

“Yeah, I’m sure that having been out of the country is going to be
such
a disadvantage.”

“Good idea, going abroad,” Steve murmurs, trying to sound like Tony Soprano.

“Around,” Dolph adds.

“What goes around…”

“…comes around,” Dolph completes Steve’s sentence. “You did your MA and your Ph.D in England?”

Shut the fuck up, Anna. Do yourself a favor.

“Yeah, England University. Big place.”

This makes him flinch, but he comes back straightaway.

“You won’t last long,” he tells me. “England can’t cut it, compared with a graduate degree from a top American university.”

“Actually, bub, neither of us has a graduate degree from a top American university.”

Part of me is mature enough to understand that he needs a mantra to deal with the shitty situation he finds himself in, but another part of me wants to go for his jugular. I don’t want to look at Cleveland, really, I don’t, but my eyes sort of brush past him all of their own accord, and he is looking over. Our eyes meet, and he shakes his head. Just a fraction, just barely enough for me to notice. Did he just tell me to back off? Does Cleveland think Dolph could harm me?

I am following the proceedings with one ear only, so I only half catch something about the Graduate Careers Fair which takes place at the beginning of each fall semester. But I am all eyes and ears when Cleveland mentions by the way that “Tim and Tessa” will be going it alone from the English Lit side of the Early Modern Studies program.