The Lecturer's Tale
The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes, published by Picador USA
(Page 2 of 3)
Don't look, he told himself, don't meet her eye; but without lowering his chin, he slid his eyes to one side and glimpsed Miranda DeLaTour, one of the star performers of the department. She was poised and strikingly featured—cheekbones, chin—with an artfully unruly mane of black hair and a red silk suit that showed off her legs and her narrow waist. She ignored Nelson without any effort at all, as if he simply weren't there. She was rumored to be the lover of the department's chair, the flamboyant and forceful Anthony Pescecane; but Nelson, even in his distress, forced himself to remember that rumors of that sort trailed every attractive woman in the academy. She lifted her hand to her hair, brushed a silken strand off her padded shoulder, and sighed. Nelson held his breath.
The bell dinged, number eight burned red, the elevator doors slithered open. Professor DeLaTour stepped into the car, her sharp heels clicking against the floor. Blinking at Nelson without a trace of recognition, she pressed the button for her floor without waiting for him to get on, and the doors slid shut on Miranda DeLaTour regarding her reflection in the elevator's control panel. Nelson breathed out at last and turned to the stairwell.
The stairs at least gave him a few moments' respite from further embarrassment. He descended with heavy, echoing footfalls, drawing in shallow breaths of dead, stairwell air. In eight years at the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota, Nelson had fallen from a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship, at the rank of assistant professor, to teaching three sections of composition and one of study skills as a visiting adjunct lecturer on a semester-to-semester contract. Now he was about to become a former visiting adjunct lecturer, on his way to failed academic. At times like this, when he was in need of a spiritual buttress, some inspirational line or scene from English literature often came to him unbidden; an unusually thorough memory of the canon was Nelson's chief attribute as a teacher and a scholar. But today the canon let him down, and all he heard in the leaden reverberation of his descending footsteps was "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow."
At the foot of the stairs he paused among the dust balls and crumpled candy wrappers. He squeezed the dampness out of the corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger, lifted his gaze to the concrete ceiling, and sighed once, twice, three times. Losing his position meant that his income would stop on the last day of the year, just after Christmas. His health insurance for himself, his wife, and their two young daughters would be cut off, along with their eligibility to live in university married housing. All this would happen a short six weeks from now. Nelson had no savings and no prospects, and now he was about to have no job, no insurance, and no home. The loss of his finger in a few moments would merely add injury to insult.
He squared his shoulders, adjusted his grip on the briefcase, and thought of having to face his tough-minded wife with the news.
"Screw your courage to the sticking-place," he murmured, and he pushed hard at the battered metal door of the stairwell, swinging it wide into the lobby. It promptly swung back and slammed in his face. As Nelson jumped back, he saw through the square little window the furious, bug-eyed glare of Lionel Grossmaul, the chairperson's administrative assistant. Nelson had swung the door open in Lionel's path.
"I, I'm sorry!" Nelson shouted through the smudged glass. His voice reverberated up the empty stairwell, as high-pitched as a girl's.
But Grossmaul swung the murderous beam of his black-rimmed glasses away from Nelson, and beyond him Nelson saw the leonine head of Anthony Pescecane as he swept by. Grossmaul followed, passing out of sight of the window, and Nelson gingerly pushed the door open and peeked out. Chairperson Pescecane swung into the elevator, shooting his expensive cuffs and clasping his powerful hands before his tailored suit coat, his dark gaze fixed in the middle distance. Nelson stepped into the lobby, his arms wrapped around his briefcase.
"I didn't see you," he said.
But Grossmaul moved between Nelson and Pescecane. Lionel Grossmaul was a pear-shaped little man in discount store khakis and a too-tight polyester shirt, and he stepped backward into the car and viciously punched the button. Lionel was Pescecane's sidekick, bitterly loyal, following in Pescecane's train while the more successful man ascended from department to department. In Nelson's few encounters with Grossmaul, the chairperson's assistant had never yielded a kind answer to Nelson. As the elevator doors clapped shut, Grossmaul glared at Nelson with the open contempt he reserved for his institutional inferiors.
Unnerved, Nelson hurried across the lobby, and the outside door was wrenched out of his grasp by a cold wind blowing out of the north. Nelson was fairly sucked out of the building into the chill, and he staggered to a stop. Ominous, ragged blocks of cloud ground together low over the Quad, trailing windblown shreds of gray. The narrow, redbrick clock tower on Thornfield Library, erected not very symmetrically at one corner of the square old building, seemed to glide against the moving clouds, the glaring white face of the clock set against the wind, the ornate black hands pinching together toward twelve. Today was the last day of October, and just as Nelson looked up the clock began to toll noon.
One, tolled the clock, in a long, resonant stroke of the bell, and Nelson was caught in a little dust devil of dry, crackling leaves. The bony fingers of leafless maples were black against the overcast sky, crones swaying to the slow rhythm of the bell all around the Quad.
Two. Nelson put his head down and closed his eyes and clutched his briefcase as the freakish little wind beat around him.
"Professor Humboldt!" someone called.
What an odd thing for someone to call me, Nelson thought. Under the circumstances.
Three. The dust devil pulled at him like a pair of cold, insistent hands. Nelson planted his feet and opened his eyes to see a young man in a hooded black cape just turning away from him in the stream of students moving toward the Quad. Nelson opened his mouth to call after the boy, but he didn't know who it was, and anyway, the kid was walking away, his cape billowing after him. Urged on by the wind, Nelson headed toward his twelve o'clock composition class in the Chemistry Building on the far side of the Quad.
Four, tolled the clock. The tower seemed to sway vertiginously against the rushing clouds, so Nelson kept his eyes down and matched his pace to the rhythm of the bell.
Five. This was the busiest class change of the day, as students entered the Quad from all four corners at once in a slow maelstrom of complex currents and eddies. Out of the eddies little knots formed, students meeting friends or roommates or lovers, talking loudly in the brisk wind, book packs slung over their shoulders. Today a good many of them were in costume.
Six. In spite of his troubles, Nelson loved this scene. It reminded him that he was looking forward to taking his daughters, Clara and little Abigail, trick-or-treating at dusk tonight, through the cul-de-sacs of married housing. Even in his distress, the gentle riot of students across the Quad seemed to Nelson the epitome of what life at university ought to be: bright, good-humored, energetic young people in a hurry to be somewhere else, chattering happily about their classes, their lives, their loves.
Seven. And on Halloween they were parading their secret faces across the Quad. Some were costumed traditionally, as ghosts, vampires, witches. Some were ironic representations of the working people these students of a prestige university would almost certainly never be: nurses, firemen, cops, carpenters. Some were recognizable to Nelson as movie stars or pop singers; some were made up in abstract masks of red and yellow and green. The Bride of Frankenstein walked beside Marge Simpson, their columns of hair bobbing in counterpoint.
Eight. This was more restorative to Nelson than sobbing in his office. Unlike many of his colleagues—unlike most of them, truth to tell—Nelson liked his students. He believed himself to be a fundamentally cheerful man. He counted another stroke of the great bell—nine—and it seemed to him that all of life should have such heedless momentum; all of life should be so full of hope.
"Professor Humboldt!" someone shouted again, a little louder, a little more eagerly. Nelson twisted to see the boy in black, cape flying, beckoning to Nelson from a corner of the Quad between the steps of Thornfield Library and the narrow, glassed-in gully of the library's underground Annex. Or was it a boy? Nelson had already drifted through the densest part of the Quad into a lane of traffic where kids on bicycles, skateboards, and roller blades darted through the fringes of class change; and at this distance, over the heads of the shifting crowd, the caped figure looked like a young woman, with a bosom and hips and shoulder-length hair. The sky was churning overhead; the blocks of cloud were clashing together, drops of cold rain spitting into Nelson's face. As the girl in black turned away, Nelson glimpsed a red, grinning mask with horns, and he was reminded of the undergraduate tradition that the old library was haunted by the ghost of a suicide, if memory served. Ten. Nelson lifted a hand and waved to the figure-boy? girl?—in the cape.
My Library
