The Lecturer's Tale
The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes, published by Picador USA
Copyright © 2001 by James Hynes. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Chapter One
Crossing the Quad on a Halloween Friday, as the clock in the library tower tolled thirteen under a windy, dramatic sky, Nelson Humboldt lost his right index finger in a freak accident. Someone called his name three times out of the midday press of students, and as he turned to answer, Nelson stumbled over a young woman stooping to the pavement behind him. Falling backward, he threw his hand out to catch himself, and his finger was severed by the whirring spokes of a passing bicycle.
Only minutes before, in the shadowy office of Victoria Victorinix, the English Department's undergraduate chair, Nelson had lost his job as a visiting adjunct lecturer. He had sat on the far side of Professor Victorinix's severely rectilinear desk, his hands tightly clutching his knees, while she told him with a cool courtesy that the department was forced by budget necessities to terminate his appointment at the end of the semester, only six weeks away.
"You have our gratitude, of course," she said, folding her slim hands in the icy blue light of her desk lamp, "for all your efforts on behalf of the department."
Professor Victorinix was a small, slender, thin-lipped woman with cropped, silvery hair and a bloodless manner barely masked by a disinterested politesse. Even during the day she kept the blinds of her office drawn, and today she sat in the shadows just beyond the direct glare of the lamp. The reflected glow off her desktop emphasized the sharpness of her cheekbones, the deep groove between her eyebrows, the smooth skullcap curve of her forehead. She regarded Nelson with a gaze that seemed to him aristocratic, ancient, bored.
"Under the circumstances," she said, "I realize that our gratitude may not mean much to you."
Nelson swallowed hard and tried not to cry. His own gaze, in order to avoid meeting hers, darted all over the office. His blurry glance took in pale gray walls, rigorously ordered books in steel and glass shelves, a muted etching in a silver frame of the Countess Bathory in her bath. Nelson appreciated that Professor Victorinix looked at him as she fired him, but couldn't she turn away, just for a moment?
"I, I'm sorry." Nelson cleared his throat. "Don't worry about me."
"I'd be happy to write a letter for your dossier." Victorinix began needlessly to adjust her pens and rearrange the papers on her desk. "We'll do what we can for you, Nelson."
Even more than the other senior members of the department, Victoria Victorinix was immune to the self-pity of wounded young men. After twenty-five years of ostracism, and worse, because of her sexual preference, she had outlasted the genteel bigotry of deans, chairmen, and senior colleagues to end up as a tenured full professor at a prestigious research university. Even more remarkably, she had survived three or four paradigm shifts in literary theory. All her books were still in print, from Rhythm and Metonomy in Coleridg's "Christabel" to Daughters of the Night: Clitoral Hegemony in LeFanu's Carmilla. In the academic world, this approached immortality, and her pitiless gaze told Nelson that in all that time she had seen dozens if not hundreds of young men just like him come and go.
"I-I-I," stammered Nelson, "I'm just grateful you kept me on as long as you did."
Nelson was short of breath. He wished he could retreat to his office and break down in semiprivate. Perhaps Vita Deonne, his office mate and the only person in the department who still talked to him willingly, would turn her attention from her own real and imagined professional terrors and comfort him. But he had a class to teach in ten minutes. He would have to compose himself in public as he crossed the Quad.
"Don't worry about me," he said again. He stood. "Gosh."
Professor Victorinix stood also, and Nelson stooped to pick up his battered leatherette briefcase full of student papers. He straightened to find Professor Victorinix gliding smoothly around the desk, regarding him with her relentlessly indifferent gaze. He backed away, clutching the briefcase to his chest. Nelson was taller even than most of his students, and he towered above the undergraduate chair. But when Professor Victorinix offered him her hand, Nelson felt as if he came only to her knees, looking up at her like a defenseless child. Still, he met her cool, dry palm with his own. No pressure was applied by either party.
Nelson had learned long ago that the handshake of his Iowa upbringing—what his father had called a "manly grip"—was not appropriate in academia. This was a mere brushing of palms, free of any gender typing.
A moment later Professor Victorinix's door closed silently behind him, and Nelson stood in the hall, unable to remember coming out of her office. He felt drained, and he looked woefully down the corridor, wondering if he had the energy to make it to the elevator. This was the highest floor in Harbour Hall, the headquarters of the English Department, where the department's elite had their rooms with a view of the wooded hills surrounding Hamilton Groves, and of the antlike undergraduates on the Quad below. Once upon a time Nelson had aspired to an office on this brightly lit and expensively carpeted hallway. Back when he had been a visiting assistant professor, he had ascended briefly as high as the fifth floor, where he'd had a grand view of the Quad, the Gothic clock tower of Thornfield Library, and the wide, glassy V of the library's underground Annex. Back then, all the secretaries had known his name and had laughed at his mild, self-deprecating jokes. Back then he had traded invitations to lunch with his colleagues while waiting to use the photocopier. Back then Morton Weissmann, his erstwhile mentor, had greeted him every day with a two-fisted handshake and a hearty, "How go the wars this morning, Nelson?"
Now Nelson ascended to the eighth floor only to have another pint of his professional lifeblood drained off. Now the secretaries peered at him warily, watching for the homicidal rage of a disgruntled postal worker. Now the copy machine and its good fellowship were off-limits to him, and he carried his lunch in a paper sack and ate alone in his office. Now he floated above the deep carpeting like a ghost. Colleagues he used to call by their first names didn't even make the effort of averting their eyes. They simply looked right through him, repressing a shudder at the sepulchral chill of failure trailing after him, at the feeling that someone had just stepped on their professional graves.
Nelson swallowed and started down the deep carpet. It always took more effort to walk up here, as if he were treading sand at a very high altitude; the gleaming doors of the elevator seemed to recede the closer he came to them. He heard the whirr of the photocopier and a deep, avuncular laugh coming from the copy room halfway down the hall, some professor deigning to share a joke with a work/study student. Nelson's knees began to tremble, his cheeks began to burn, and he trudged toward the elevators as if ankle deep in the plush pile, ducking his head as he approached the door to the copy room.
With a theatrical gust of laughter, Morton Weissmann, almost an emeritus and the man who had brought Nelson to the university and then abandoned him, stepped into the hallway ahead. Weissmann was a large man, once strikingly handsome but possessed now of the sagging good looks of an aging movie star, his tailored suits hanging a little too loosely off his frame. Still smiling, he lifted his eyes from the sheaf of copies in his large, liver-spotted hand and met Nelson's darting gaze. Nelson, rabbit-scared, caught his breath and sank deeper into the carpet. But Weissmann, who had not so much as said good morning to Nelson in a year, gave him a rictus of a smile and a flip of the hand, like Gregory Peck diffidently acknowledging a fan. He shouldered past Nelson and headed down the hall toward his office.
Nelson, flushed and trembling, waded to the elevators, where he stood kneedeep in the carpet and pushed the button. He lifted his eyes desperately to the little red light climbing through the floors, and prayed that he might have the elevator to himself. But someone wafted alongside him and pushed the button again. The elevator climbed slowly, as if it were being hauled by hand, and Nelson was aware of someone scarlet and slender next to him, radiating like heat. Nelson smelled expensive perfume, but if his life had depended upon it, he couldn't have said what it was.
My Library
