Trajectory E-Book

Richard Russo

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 347

Beschreibung

RTE Guide's Book of the Year, 2018 Richard Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from many of his novels. In 'Horseman,' a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer. In 'Intervention,' a real estate agent facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward - or not. In 'Voice,' a semi-retired academic is conned by his estranged brother into joining a group tour of the Venice Biennale, fleeing a mortifying incident with a traumatised student back in Massachusetts but encountering further complications in the maze of Venice. And in 'Milton and Marcus,' a lapsed novelist tries to rekindle his screenwriting career, only to be stymied by the pratfalls of that trade when he's called to an aging, iconic star's mountaintop retreat in Wyoming. Each of these stories is shot through with the humour, wisdom and surprise for which Richard Russo has long been acclaimed as Trajectory continues to extend the breadth of his achievements.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR TRAJECTORY

‘Thoughtful, soulful . . . It will abruptly break your heart. That’s what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again.’ New York Times

‘Another of the author’s peerless depictions of small-town life.’ Wall Street Journal

‘[Trajectory is] so rich and flavoursome that the temptation is to devour it all at once. I can’t in good conscience advise otherwise.’ Boston Globe

‘Thoughtful and warmhearted, [Russo’s] fiction has the engaging quality of tales told by a friend, over drinks, about a person we know in common. And so we lean forward, eager to hear what happened next.’ New York Times Book Review

‘Russo’s [characters] are sharply in view, and like opera singers performing quintets or sestets, they are all vital contributors. Equally significantly, their problems spring from their personalities, and the resolutions are heart-warming because they do indeed feel like real possibilities…All four stories are challenging because they raise questions about why we live our lives the way we do, and if that’s all right.’ Washington Times

‘Russo has fashioned tales compact enough to make an immediate impression (and to read in a single sitting), but rich [in] believable characters, graceful plotting and pointed dialogue.’ Columbus Dispatch

‘Entertaining and compellingly provocative . . . vibrant narratives with distinctive characters.’ New York Journal of Books

ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO

Mohawk

The Risk Pool

Nobody’s Fool

Straight Man

Empire Falls

The Whore’s Child

Bridge of Sighs

That Old Cape Magic

Interventions

On Helwig Street

Everybody’s Fool

Trajectory

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Richard Russo, 2017

The moral right of Richard Russo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

‘Horseman’ originally appeared in Atlantic Monthly (2006); ‘Voice’ was originally published as a novella, Nate in Venice (Byliner, 2013); and Intervention originally appeared as a novella, in Intervention: A Novella & Three Stories (Down East Books, 2012).

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

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Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 76029 720 6

E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 650 4

Printed in Great Britain

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Steve Murtagh and Tom Butler

Contents

HORSEMAN

VOICE

INTERVENTION

MILTON AND MARCUS

Trajectory

Horseman

Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet,

A man goes riding by.

Though only four in the afternoon, it was already dusk outside and the wind was blowing hard enough to set the quad’s trees in motion, the nearest branches scratching insistently on the window of Janet Moore’s office. Was it the turbulence outside that had invited the horseman to gallop into her consciousness, or the silence of the sullen boy sitting across from her? The lines were from a children’s poem, the one Robbie read to Marcus, their son, every night before he went to sleep, and they haunted her with the force of a childhood memory, even though she’d never heard the poem until just over a decade ago, as a grad student. Now it kept her up long after Robbie had come in and fallen asleep beside her—All night long in the dark and wet— and sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night with the verses still echoing. Had they been some sort of dream, repeating on an endless loop? Lately, the horseman had appeared in her daylight thoughts as well. When jogging in the woods behind the college, she’d realize she was running to that unwelcome, unforgiving iambic cadence—Whenever the moon and stars are set—as if she were a horse herself. And then, when it suddenly seemed like she was clomping not through the woods but an endless cemetery, there came an even-more-familiar heartsickness.

A moment before, she had been feeling both angry and self-righteous—easy, unambiguous emotions that in these circumstances she was entitled to. It angered her, and rightly so, that students were more likely to cheat in her classes than in those of her male colleagues, or to be tardier, to openly question her authority, to give her mediocre evaluations at the end of the term. Worse still, that they held her to a higher standard was actually unwitting. Had anyone asked if they were prejudiced against female professors, not one would answer yes. Hook them up to a lie detector, and every last one would pass.

This probably included James Cox, seated before her now, sockless boat shoe balanced on khakied knee, still smug, even though the fact that she had him dead to rights was beginning to dawn on him. He was studying, or pretending to, the two typed pages she’d given him—one with his own name in the upper-right-hand corner, and another that had been handed in to her four years earlier—with feigned astonishment, as if the similarities between them were just the damnedest thing, amazing, really, like frogs, thousands of them, falling out of a cloudless sky.

Next door she heard Tony Hope, her best friend in the department, bang his office door shut behind him. Earlier, she’d told him about this plagiarism case she had to deal with, and he’d offered to loiter outside, just in case. These days, all teachers were vulnerable. Cornered, female students would sometimes accuse male professors of making sexual advances, while similarly cornered males could act belligerently with female teachers. But James Cox had arrived late, no surprise, and Tony had already agreed to meet a couple of his seniors at the Hub Pub. When he paused, eyebrows arched, in her half-open doorway, she gestured that everything was fine and it was okay for him to leave. Probably it was.

Tony shrugged and then, before she could look away, did the jockey thing that always gave her a shiver. At the beginning of the term she’d made the mistake of telling him about the horseman, how Marcus refused to go to sleep until Robbie had read him the poem, and that afterward Robbie, unaware how deeply those lines weirded her out, would appear in their bedroom looking forlorn and hoping for sex. At times he even pretended to be the horseman of the poem, straddling her on the bed, reciting melodramatically—Whenever the moon and stars are set. That was about as far as he’d get before she hissed, “Stop it!”—not wanting him to wake Marcus up, but also genuinely furious that he couldn’t see how creepy this scenario was as foreplay.

As good as it had felt to tell someone, Tony Hope had been the wrong person to confide in. She might have predicted he’d turn it into a joke, and the very next afternoon, emerging into the quad after class, she heard her name shouted, and there was Tony bestride the library steps in a jockey stance, bent knees together, hands out in front, gripping invisible reins, his butt lowering and rising rhythmically. Over the course of the semester, this act had become a flexible metaphor—that it was time to saddle up and teach another class, or to grab some lunch at the union, or, as it did now, to lock up and head on out, See ya in the mornin’, sweetheart.

When she heard the double doors at the end of the corridor clang shut, Janet turned back to her student, whose demeanor had changed dramatically. The feigned astonishment had evaporated. He slumped in his chair now, like a beaten fighter in the late rounds, with barely enough cognition left to recognize futility when he saw it up close. He met her eye for a split second, and if he’d held it a beat longer Janet herself would have been the one to turn away, but the branch rustling against the windowpane caught his attention and he stared outside at the tiny cyclones of the dead leaves whistling over the windy quad.

Had he cheated before? she wondered. Was cheating the habit of his short lifetime? Even if it wasn’t, that didn’t matter; he’d cheated now, in her class, and she’d caught him, only after ransacking four years’ worth of files to find the essay he’d stolen. That had taken hours, time she couldn’t afford to waste, not two days before Thanksgiving. Knowing what she was in for, she’d almost let it go. After all, she hadn’t been certain. Cox’s essay felt familiar, but it was possible she was just recalling one with a similar topic and thesis. And even if she was right, what would her reward be? Proof that she had a good memory for ideas? She already knew that. Justification for not liking this particular student? By now, she had plenty of reasons. Hadn’t he vacillated, all semester, between sullen inattention and stubborn obstruction in class, then, out in the hall, plied her with half apologies and assurances that he didn’t mean to be a pain in the ass? But you are a pain in the ass. This had been on the tip of her tongue since September. Tony Hope would’ve just gone ahead and said it.

Of course he would have handled the entire thing differently. When suspicious of academic dishonesty, Tony was fearless—even, in Janet’s opinion, foolhardy. She would never have dreamed of confronting a student without proof, whereas Tony—by his own admission too lazy to gather any evidence—simply put on his poker face and forged ahead as if he held the winning hand. He recommended asking the suspect two straightforward questions: Is this your own work? and Would you be able to reproduce this effort under my supervision? The second, he maintained, rarely needed to be asked because the offender usually folded his tent at the first. And to answer yes to the second required the kind of “brass balls” that most undergraduates lacked. Only the most hardened, adept cheaters slipped through his net. Tony was also different in that he never took dishonesty personally, which had aroused her own suspicions, so one day she’d asked on impulse if he himself had ever cheated.

“Mostly in high school,” he replied, with surprising candor. “A couple times in college. How about you?”

“No.” Not that Janet would have admitted it if she had.

“Never?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I do, actually.”

“You needn’t make it sound like a failure of imagination.”

“Quite the opposite, in fact. At least in my case. I couldn’t imagine ever succeeding if I didn’t cheat.”

“Do you feel guilty about it now?”

“Not particularly. Should I?”

“I don’t know. Should you?”

“A little judgment, just a tad, in that question, sweetie, but I forgive you. For the record, I don’t cheat anymore.”

“You don’t take tests anymore,” she pointed out.

“An altogether superior arrangement, don’t you think? To be the test giver as opposed to the taker?”

What she couldn’t reconcile herself to was that the few who escaped Tony’s net were the very ones she was most determined to snare—the habitual liars who could look you in the eye and tell a whopper, having coldly calculated the system and how much you could reasonably expect to exploit it, how the first suggestion of a lawsuit would spook you and your dean. Such students were cancers, and she figured James Cox might well be one of them, which was why she’d spent so much time making the case against him airtight.

But maybe she’d been wrong, because now that he realized he’d been busted, he dropped the customary bravado. In fact, he looked like someone who’d been waiting so long in the doctor’s office that when the feared diagnosis was finally delivered, it came as a relief. “So,” he said, handing the identical pages back to her.

She waited until it became clear he didn’t intend to elaborate. “Meaning what?”

“You got me, right?” He made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger, put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger, his head then jerking as if struck by an invisible bullet. Sure, the gesture was a cliché, but she was still startled by the boy’s willingness to metaphorically off himself.

Finally she said, “Do you want to tell me why?”

“It was easy. My fraternity keeps files.”

“So do professors.”

Again he made her wait for him to say, “So, what do you want?”

The question, so simple and direct, took her off guard. “What do I want?”

He shrugged. “Well, this is where I get what’s coming to me, no?”

“And what do you think that might be?”

“Not up to me, is it?” he said, getting to his feet.

How brash men are, she told herself. How controlled, even in defeat. “Whatever you decide.” At the door he paused, his back to her and his head tipped at an odd angle, as if he were listening for something. What he said then surprised her. “My advice? Don’t hold back.” Then he simply walked out.

Moving pretty well, she thought, for someone with massive head trauma. And in the ensuing silence:

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again.

What did he want of her, this horseman? That was the mystery. She knew, of course, and had known from the beginning, who he was.

________

A decade earlier, on the other the side of the country, the day of her first conference with the great Marcus Bellamy, Janet parked in the dusty, unpaved X-lot on the farthest reaches of the university, the only place graduate students could afford a permit, and trekked across campus in the sweltering desert heat to Modern and Romance Languages. The faculty lot, which cost more to park in than she made as a teaching assistant, was right across the street, and Bellamy was just then arriving in his vintage roadster, which he parked, and then strode off, leaving the convertible’s top down, a breathtakingly confident move. After checking to make sure no one was watching, she walked over for a closer look. Amazingly, the front passenger seat was littered with cassette tapes, mostly jazz, and the corner of a box that likely contained others was visible beneath the seat. Did he have some reason to believe his music wouldn’t be stolen? Everyone knew Marcus Bellamy, of course, the department’s one true academic superstar, so maybe he felt protected by his reputation. Or perhaps the F-lots were guarded by cameras. She’d never noticed any, though it was possible. But afternoon thunderstorms were in the forecast. Did Bellamy believe his privilege warded off both petty thieves and the elements themselves?

She had a full day before her, a comp class to teach, a Henry James seminar to attend and a stack of essays she’d have to get started on if the whole weekend wouldn’t be ruined, yet in truth she wasn’t able to think of anything besides the conference with Bellamy. At lunch Robbie remarked on how distracted she seemed, and as the afternoon wore on she felt increasingly light-headed, at times almost ill. Robbie was also meeting with him that afternoon, and Janet was glad the conferences weren’t back-to-back. No doubt Bellamy had already noticed they were a couple, but she preferred him to think of her simply as a young scholar. For their first session she saw no need for any context beyond the essay they would be discussing, she hoped, at length. She’d spent a long time on it, and there was a good deal to talk about. She’d signed up for the last slot of the afternoon so that, if needs be, they could run long.

Bellamy’s office was the largest on the corridor, its most ostentatious feature a large fireplace. Seeing it, Janet thought that if things went well this semester, maybe by the holidays she’d be invited in for what—brandy and eggnog in front of a roaring fire? Probably it would never get cold enough in the desert to justify that, but it was a pleasant fantasy. The rest of the office was crammed with books and periodicals on floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves. In the unlikely event she ever managed to snag an office like this herself, she thought, she’d stay put. What possessed a man with such a cushy life to pack up all those books and move every couple of years? Bellamy had no sooner arrived on campus than the speculation began about how long he’d stay, where he’d go next and what salary and perks would be required to lure him away. It was a bull market for brilliant black English professors, as Bellamy was well aware, and it was whispered he was already receiving and weighing offers for the year after next. That was why she’d wanted so desperately to study with him now, this term. His class in proletarian fiction was wildly oversubscribed, since even students in linguistics and creative writing wanted in. And thus far, the course had been electrifying.

Bellamy’s smile was warm when he greeted her at the door, but she’d barely sat down when he said, rather ominously, “Ms. Moore, in conference I always like to be forthright.”

To which she murmured something silly, pretty close to the exact opposite of the truth, like she assumed he would be, or hoped he would be or, worse still, that she was always grateful for honest, rigorous appraisal.

“Excellent,” he said, handing back her essay, “because though there’s much to recommend here, I have serious misgivings about your work.”

Apparently it was true, then. Yesterday she’d overheard a classmate claim that Bellamy was reading not only the papers they’d just turned in but also previous efforts from other courses, everything he could get his hands on. She hadn’t believed it—only a madman would take on so much extra work—but there it was on the desk between them, a big blue Graduate Office folder with her name on it that probably held a dozen essays from past semesters. These misgivings about her work—did he actually mean all of it? Work that had already established her as perhaps the most promising scholar in the program?

She examined the essay he’d just handed her. There was no letter grade on the cover page, and Janet had marked enough freshman compositions to know what this could portend. She herself always put a poor grade on the last page, along with her reasons for giving it, to keep that safe from prying eyes. Though it was probably the wrong thing to do, she quickly turned to the end of the essay to see if Bellamy graded in the same fashion, only to discover that page was blank as well. As were all the others. If there was “much to recommend,” weren’t those things worth mentioning?

“Misgivings?” she said finally, her voice sounding strange, distant, whiny and frightened.

Bellamy, who’d stood up and was scanning his bookshelves, didn’t answer immediately. Turning his back on her like this had the effect of compounding her fears. “I’ll try to explain, but it’s going to be easier to show you.”

“Actually, I thought this essay was good,” she ventured. “I spent a long time on it.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that. She was always telling her own students that this was completely immaterial.

“I’m sure you did, Janet. It’s meticulous. Flawless.” He stepped back for a better angle at the books and periodicals on the top shelf. “It’s just not really yours.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, swallowing hard. “Are you saying it’s plagiarized?”

“Good heavens, no. Relax.”

As if any such thing were possible.

“Actually,” he went on, still without turning around, “theft would’ve been more revealing. Then at least I’d have known what you admired, whereas in what you wrote I can’t locate you anywhere. It’s the same with your previous essays. It’s as if you don’t exist . . . ah, here we are!” He’d found the volume he was looking for on the top shelf. Bellamy was tall—a skilled basketball player, according to Robbie, who’d reported this fact almost apologetically, perhaps fearful of perpetuating a stereotype—but he still had to use a footstool to reach it. Stepping down again, he set the journal, a twenty-year-old issue of American Literature, on the desk between them, then sat back down.

“But . . . I do exist,” she offered, suddenly unsure if she was entitled to this opinion. Would he attempt to reason her out of it?

“Indeed,” he said, “here you are. In the flesh.”

The word flesh, spoken in such an intimate setting, in a room with a leather sofa in front of the fireplace, made her apprehensive. Earlier that morning, stepping out of the shower, she’d looked forward to this meeting with pleasure. Nothing sexual, of course, or even terribly intimate. Ignorant of the sofa and fireplace, she’d assumed their conversation, the first of many, would go well, that Bellamy would be as fond of her as she was of him. He’d certainly seemed so in class, though no fonder than he was of her classmates. He obviously knew better than to display overt signs of favoritism. It was in conference where you let your guard down a bit, showed your real enthusiasm for good work. She’d felt confident this was exactly what would happen today. Maybe after they were done talking he’d suggest a beer at the Salty Dog, where grad students hung out and Robbie’s band played on Saturday nights. Or perhaps he’d want to go someplace else, a bar that played jazz, not rock and roll, and wasn’t crawling with university types. Would that have been so wrong? Wasn’t it the equivalent of the intimate access to Bellamy that Robbie and the other guys had in their Sunday-afternoon basketball games?

“I thought,” she said carefully, rubbing her moist palms against the cushion of her chair, “that was the whole idea of literary criticism. Isn’t the I supposed to disappear? Isn’t the argument itself what matters?”

“That’s what we teach,” he conceded. He’d taken his glasses off and was cleaning them with a handkerchief, unnecessarily, it occurred to her, an affectation. “It’s what I was taught, and I used to believe it. Now I’m not so sure. The first-person pronoun can be dispensed with, it’s true. But not the writer behind the pronoun.”

“I guess I don’t know what you mean, then,” she said, aware this was the second time she’d made that observation. Also, she guessed she didn’t understand? If one of her freshmen had written that, she’d have scratched Can’t you be certain? in the margin.

“It’s true the writer shouldn’t intrude upon the argument,” Bellamy admitted, “but that’s not the same as saying he should disappear, is it?”

She caught herself, luckily. A third “guess” would’ve been disastrous. “Isn’t it?”

“Okay, let’s back up. Why did you write about Dos Passos?”

“Because I was interested in—”

“But why were you interested?”

Now she was squirming, angry. Because he hadn’t given her a chance to explain? Or was it the challenge implied in his question?

“Did you choose a topic you had a real connection to? Or just one you knew I was interested in?”

Well, sure, Bellamy’s admiration of Dos Passos had been the main reason, but she’d considered that a good starting point for their ongoing dialogue. Isn’t that what the study of literature was supposed to yield—a series of dialogues between writer and reader, reader and teacher? And why was he challenging a conversation so recently begun unless he’d already decided it wouldn’t lead anywhere? What evidence could there possibly be for such a conclusion? She tried to focus on what he was saying, to neither personalize nor be overwhelmed by disappointment, but with each new question (What are you risking in this essay? From what passion in your life does it derive? Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Did you attend private school or public?) she could feel herself flushing. What did her life have to do with anything? She’d come prepared to argue her essay’s nuances, to accept his suggestions for bolstering its thesis, even for him to question its validity, but instead it was as if what she’d produced didn’t matter. This was almost like asking her to take off her clothes.

“Look, Janet,” he said, perhaps intuiting her distress. “The truth is, I can teach you very little. You have a lively intellect and genuine curiosity, and you work hard. You read carefully, synthesize well and know how to marshal evidence. If a scholar’s life is what you want, you’re well on your way. That’s the good news. But there’s one last piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, it’s a big one, and for some people it can be elusive.”

A big existential something she hadn’t even noticed? She didn’t want to believe that. Her other professors all agreed she was probably ready to start submitting her work to academic periodicals. (Bellamy knew the editors of these journals personally, and a word from him . . .) And if what she’d overlooked was so big, how could it be elusive? That didn’t make sense at all.

Then again, what if what he was saying was true? Hadn’t she sometimes worried, in the aftermath of extravagant praise, that something was missing? Or had the distinct impression that what she’d really succeeded in doing was fooling her professors yet again? Is that what Bellamy was getting at? Had he seen something in her work, or just noted the absence of something? He was arguing for some kind of passionate, personal connection—she understood this much—but what if that connection wasn’t there? What if what she possessed—and what her other professors admired—was merely a facility? If she was just doing what she was good at, and it didn’t go any deeper than that?

“This elusive thing,” she heard herself saying, in a frightened, childlike voice, “I won’t succeed until I find it?”

“Oh, you’ll succeed just fine,” he told her, waving that concern aside. “You’ll just never be any good.”

________

But the circumstances were hardly analogous, she told herself as she emerged into the windy quad. James Cox, the little prick, was a cheat, a plagiarist. True, when Bellamy had said that the essay wasn’t really hers, she’d thought at first that was what he meant, but no. His “misgivings” about her work had been vague, abstract, spectral, whereas her own objections to Cox’s criminal essay were concrete and clear-cut. There was no parallel whatsoever, so forget it. Go home.

She was halfway to her car, passing the student union, when a Frisbee whistled so close overhead that she ducked. Normally, it would’ve run out of air and skimmed through the brown grass before coming to rest, but this Frisbee was riding a gust of wind that tunneled down the quad—Whenever the wind is high, the words were suddenly there—and it flew on and on, actually gaining altitude.

Her first thought was that it must have been thrown at her intentionally, perhaps by James Cox, but she turned around and saw that the Frisbee could have been tossed only by one of the students standing on the lighted library steps over a hundred yards up the hill. Apparently they’d found the thing there, and somebody was curious to see how far it would travel on such an impressive tailwind. “Whoa!” she heard him shout as the Frisbee flew on down the terraced lawn, all the way to the macadam road, where it struck a passing pickup truck right in the windshield with a loud whump. The truck immediately skidded to a halt, and the driver, either a townie or someone from Grounds and Maintenance, jumped out, glared at her and yelled, “Hey!”

“Yeah, right,” she called to him sarcastically, though she couldn’t really blame the guy for jumping to the wrong conclusion. Except for the kids on the library steps, an impossible distance away, she was the only person in the deserted quad.

“The hell’s wrong with you, anyway?” the man wanted to know, his voice all but lost in the wind.

“Search me,” she called back, and when he looked like he might want to make something of it she made a sharp right and headed down the steps of the union into the Hub Pub, which she normally avoided, having no desire to run into students or, worse yet, grousing department colleagues. So it was a relief to discover that late on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving the place was almost as deserted as the quad. A large circular table was occupied by a group of students involved in a drinking game that involved bouncing quarters off the tabletop. Tony Hope occupied a booth in the far corner, where his seniors were cramming papers into overstuffed backpacks, their meeting concluded.

“Remember,” he was telling them. “In effaced, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re dunna dit in, dit in. If you’re dunna dit out, dit out.”

The students, apparently understanding this advice, nodded their agreement, slid out of the booth and wished him a happy Thanksgiving.

Sliding into the booth, she said, “Well, that sounded truly bizarre. ‘Effaced’?”

Tony chuckled, clearly pleased by her mystification. Pushing what she hoped was an unused glass in her direction, he poured the last of the pitcher’s beer into it. “Effaced point of view,” he explained. “Sort of like a camera eye. The writer disappears, just reports what the characters do and say without revealing their thoughts and motivations. No judgments. Totally objective.”

“‘If you’re dunna dit in, dit in’?”

“My father had a speech impediment. When we went to the drive-in for burgers, all us kids would get out and run around, always slamming doors and making a ruckus. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d yell, ‘If you’re dunna dit in, dit in. If your dunna dit out, dit out. No more doddamn dittin’ din, dittin’ out.’”

“And your students understand such references?”

“They’ve heard the story, yeah.”

“Teaching creative writing really is a scam, isn’t it? How do I join that club?”

“Did your father have a speech impediment?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go. Sorry. Don’t you ever tell your students any stories about yourself?”

“No, I teach literature, remember? We have actual texts to occupy our attention. Things would have to go terribly, terribly wrong before I’d resort to personal anecdote.” Such reticence, she knew all too well, ran counter to the entire culture, but she hadn’t the slightest interest in the confessional mode, nor did she intend to reduce the study of literature to issues, or ratchet up the interest by means of irrelevant autobiography. Besides, what would she tell them? Did you know I have a damaged son? (I do!) Guess how long it’s been since my husband and I had sex? (Here’s a hint: a long time!)

“Yeah, but don’t you people believe everything’s a text these days?” Tony said. “Tolstoy? Us Weekly? A tattooed buttock?”

“Oh, stop.”

“And speaking of living texts, there’s one of your favorites.”

In the entryway, Tom Newhouse, professor emeritus, was just then hanging his tweed hat on a peg. Forced into retirement at seventy, Newhouse continued to teach his Joyce seminar, famous among students for his bonhomie and infamous among colleagues for his critical misreadings. Turning, he planted his feet wide apart and surveyed the disappointing scene before him, his white hair crazily wild.

“Looks like he’s got his usual load on,” Tony observed.

“Don’t,” she pleaded, when he started to wave. “Maybe he won’t notice us.”

“He’s just lonely, Janet,” Tony said.

“It’s not your ass he’ll grab when he comes over here,” she reminded him.

“There was nothing to that at all, in case you’re interested,” he replied. Earlier that semester a young woman accused Newhouse of so-called inappropriate touching. “Inappropriate,” Tony had remarked at the time. “Now, there’s a word I wouldn’t mind never hearing again.” The charge was dropped when the committee learned the victim had overheard a professor of women’s studies suggest that someone ought to put a stop to the old fool’s groping. “Besides,” Tony went on, “you’re sitting on your ass. Don’t stand up, and your dignity will remain intact.”

“That’s your solution?”

“No, it’s yours. I don’t require one myself.”

The bartender was drawing Newhouse a pitcher of beer. Not a good sign, though it was possible he intended to send it over to the coin-flipping students. His wife having died a decade earlier, his house and car paid off, Newhouse was also famous for his largesse, especially with his seniors, the only students on campus old enough to drink legally.

Janet leaned forward on her elbows, hoping that if Newhouse saw the two of them having a possibly intimate conversation he wouldn’t intrude. “Are you going anywhere over the break?”

Usually, Tony fled for New York or Boston after his last class. When they first met, Janet assumed he was gay, but evidently not. In fact, he’d dated most of the college’s eligible female faculty, as well as a few of the administrative staff, and recently she’d heard a rumor about a custodian. Which made Janet wonder why he’d never shown any interest in her. True, she was married, but he’d never even flirted with her, at least not seriously.

“No, I’m staying put,” Tony said, surprising her. “My brother and his wife are visiting from Utah, if you can believe it.”

Janet risked a glance and saw the bartender was now drawing a second pitcher. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“We don’t see that much of each other,” Tony said. “He and the little woman are both strict Mormons, which means I won’t even be able to anesthetize myself. They’re determined to experience a genuine New England Thanksgiving and don’t seem to understand that these celebrations can’t be done sober. What are you and yours up to?”

She’d been dreading the holiday all week, and it now occurred to her this probably accounted for her willingness to squander all those hours hunting evidence of Cox’s plagiarism. Anything was better than contemplating such an awful, endless day. Robbie would cook a huge meal for just the three of them. Two, really. Marcus would eat only what he did every day, a grilled cheese sandwich—and then only if Robbie cut off any cheese that had turned brown on the bottom of the pan. It was possible he’d eat nothing at all if he was out of sorts, which he was likely to be. When his regular TV programs weren’t on, he often became agitated, inconsolable. Last year, the balloons of the Macy’s parade had upset him terribly, and it had taken forever to calm him down. Then there was the matter of her own presence. Marcus did best when his routine wasn’t compromised, and her being home on a weekday—Thanksgiving or any other—could make him restless, as if he was waiting patiently for her to go away and for things to return to normal. Robbie claimed this wasn’t true and swore that Marcus loved her, but it certainly seemed true to Janet. The doctors had warned that it wasn’t unusual for children like Marcus to prefer one parent over the other. Usually the mother, though not in their case. It was nothing personal, they’d told her, but what could possibly be more personal?

“Moooooore!” Tom Newhouse bellowed as he approached, beer slopping over the lip of the pitcher he was holding, having dropped the other off at the undergraduate table. Now he slid gracefully into their booth, on Janet’s side, naturally. She’d have bet the farm on that one. She slid as far away from him as she could, until her right shoulder was flush against the brick wall.

“You know what I like about you, Moore?”

Newhouse called everyone, whether students or colleagues, by their last names only. His other irritating habit was dramatically emphasizing, at deafening volume, a single word in nearly every sentence, not always the one you might expect.

Yes, Janet thought, you like my boobs. At least they were what he was always ogling, as he appeared to be now.

“Do you know what I like about Moore?” he asked Tony, when she declined to speculate.

“Sure,” Tony said. “The same thing we all like.”

Newhouse blinked at him drunkenly, then fixed Janet with a rheumy gaze. “He has a dirty mind.”

“You arrived at that conclusion how?” Janet said, causing him to scroll back, then break into a big grin.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “It’s my mind that’s dirty, isn’t it?” He returned to Tony. “What I was going to say was, what I like about this lady is that she’s a good dancer.”

“It’s what we all like about her,” Tony repeated.

“You’ve never seen me dance, Professor Newhouse.” She was sure she hadn’t danced in public since joining the faculty here, seven years before. Longer, probably.

“I’ve heard stories,” he said, again presenting his argument to Tony. “Besides, you can tell by how a woman walks if she’s got the music in her. And this lady’s got the music.”

“Nice tits, too,” Tony added.

Newhouse absorbed this comment thoughtfully, then turned back to her. “Now that time it was him. You can’t blame me for that one.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Just this once, I’ll let you skate.”

He topped off their glasses. “Thank you,” he said, fixing Tony again. “That’s the problem these days. Nobody lets anybody skate on anything.” He still hadn’t forgiven Tony for serving on the committee that required him to take a sensitivity seminar as a condition of his inappropriate-touching acquittal.

“That’s one of the problems,” Tony agreed cheerfully.

“We have a student in common, you and I,” Newhouse said, leaning toward her as if about to impart a secret that must be kept from their companion at all costs, his elbow brushing against her left breast. Tony noticed and grinned, her predicament highly entertaining to his apparent way of thinking. “That one.” He was now offering his index finger for her to sight along, not that she needed to. Though his back was to them, she now recognized one of the students at the round table.

“Cox,” Newhouse thundered. “James Cox. Wrote the best paper on Dubliners I ever read.”

“Who do you think wrote it?” she said.

“He could publish the damn thing,” Newhouse went on, an alcoholic beat behind. Then, finally, “What do you mean who wrote it? Cox wrote it.”

“Well, okay, if you say so.”

Now it was Newhouse’s turn to lean away. “Why would you suspect Cox?”

“If you aren’t suspicious, fine,” she said, lowering her voice in the vain hope that he might as well.

“I’m not suspicious. Why would you be suspicious?”

“Do you get a lot of publishable work from undergraduates?” Tony, bless him, asked innocently.

“You,” Newhouse said. “You stay out of this. I want this lady to tell me why I should suspect Cox.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” she told him.

“You are wrong,” he said, pushing out of the booth and taking the mostly empty pitcher with him. His face had gone beet red. “You are wrong. You’re worse than wrong.” Then he turned to Tony. “And you.”

“Yes, Tom?”

“You aren’t even a good dancer. There’s no excuse for you.” And with that he pivoted and returned to the bar to drink alone.

“What’s ‘worse than wrong,’ do you suppose?” Janet said when he was out of earshot.

“Might it include being naïve? Intellectually lazy? Failing to comprehend that you’ve become a figure of fun?”

She was studying the students at the coin table, seemingly oblivious to what had just occurred across the room. All except James Cox, something about the cant of his head suggesting he’d heard Newhouse say his name. Had he noticed her come in?

“So, was he right?” Tony Hope wanted to know. “Are you a good dancer?”

________

By the time she emerged from Modern and Romance Languages, the sky had grown menacingly dark and a hot desert wind, full of electricity, was auguring rain. Good, Janet thought. In the air-conditioning of Bellamy’s office she hadn’t sensed the gathering storm, which probably meant that he hadn’t, either. Otherwise, he’d be headed for his top-down convertible at a dead run. By the time his office windows started rattling, it would be too late.

She was holding that old issue of American Literature, in which he’d turned down the opening pages of the articles he wanted her to read. One, he’d explained, was his first published essay, written when he was still a grad student, a careless effort containing, by his count, no fewer than six errors, all pointed out to him over the years by fastidious would-be fact-checkers who seemed to consider any mistakes, no matter how innocent or inconsequential, unforgivable. He hoped she’d see why, despite its flaws, this semi-embarrassing essay had been worth publishing. Though he hadn’t actually said so, her assignment was presumably to look for signs of the passion that led Bellamy inevitably to greatness, with the best office on campus and the vintage roadster right across the street. The other essay he recommended was by someone called Patricia Anastacio, suggesting—again, rather than stating—that its admirable if somewhat-minor and feminine virtues—industriousness, organizational skills, attention to