Higher Ed (6 page)

“My one bad habit,” he says.

She looks down to the book in her lap. “I was wondering if you would help me with something … part of my final year law project. I wanted to investigate paupers’ graves,” she says and looks up at him. Her brown eyes are slanted and he sees now that there might be Chinese as well as African and Caucasian blood in her. These eyes go into a squint as though she’s now embarrassed about what she’s just said.

“Oh yes,” he says and sits forward, wanting to show enthusiasm but not yet knowing where this is going. Parenting will be like teaching—he can do this.

“Not just about the people who can’t afford a burial, you know, but also about those who have no one,” she says. Her enthusiasm is undercut with anxiety.

“Yes, okay.”

“Well, whose responsibility is it?” Her eyes go wide with the question.

“I suppose the state’s—”

“I don’t mean for the burial, I mean to honour them,” she says.

“I don’t know. No one’s, I guess,” he says. His sadness meets hers and waltzes through the room. She shifts and begins to tap her foot. He finds himself wanting to tell her about his baby, about Katrin and his heart.

“My research isn’t about this, exactly,” she says.

“Oh?” He holds her gaze, not wanting to press her.

“But I was just wondering if in films, like, in film history, there is anything that deals with that, with how you can remember the dead, how they can be honoured.”

He leans back. He is trying to grasp her vision. As a father he will have to entertain ideas more oblique than this. In the Mexican Western,
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
, the quest is to
honour Melquiades, to find his home, to do right by him. But that is a stretch. Then there is that romantic comedy that rebranded British cinema, but that’s just—but still, yes, here is something to say.

“Well, poetry is one way it’s been done in film.…” he says, leaning forward. Her face lights up. “‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,’” he says, but sits back; in this territory he is merely an interloper, and Shakespeare is surely not what Olivia has in mind. But her question has him churning now. A song: everyone needs their own song. He is tempted to mention “Brokedown Palace,” his secret signature tune, the song he’d like played at his own funeral. Instead he says, “But my area is really film—I use philosophy to discuss images: movement and time. Sometimes that intersects with concepts from literature, with poetry, but … that’s not the same.”

She looks disappointed.

“What are you looking for, Olivia?” he says, thinking that this young woman holds truth as a cup holds water. He himself is a sieve.

“A link, I suppose,” she says, and her face looks encumbered in a way that has nothing to do with the law project. “I don’t know.…”

He allows a silence to fall.

“Yes, well. Maybe it’s something to keep thinking about. It sounds like you need more of a legal angle, for the dissertation,” he says, annoyed at himself for not showing her that he sees where she’s going with this. He is off his game. She looks disappointed again, but nods. She thanks him, and the curls at the back of her head jump as she walks to the door and leaves.

Deleuze: The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?

Lawrence’s tie has bold red stripes. Francine watches him walk through the cafeteria with their colleague, Simon, both of them holding lunch trays loaded with lasagne and bread pudding. But she smells oranges. And lavender. (
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens, for you and for me, from Chef Boyardee
 …) Across the table from her, Patricia is watching her watch them, waiting for the answer to her question. How the hell can you know why you obsess on one thing and not another? The mother of the motorcyclist keeps coming up, simple, but this has not been enough of an answer for Patricia, who is tracing the path of Francine’s eyes as they jump from Lawrence to the students in the queue who are doing the hokey-pokey on the spot, earphones in, all of them jangling inside themselves. Francine can almost hear the music, can almost feel the tremors in their legs. The orange smell is heightened, peeled—all of it, everything excoriated.

She looks again at Lawrence, who is not dancing inside or anywhere else. One day last week he wore a bright purple tie. Lawrence thinks he’s outrageous, but Francine can see through his tie to his shirt, through his shirt to his skin, through his skin to his heart to see that it’s big but broken. She knows that last
year his wife told him she was having trouble seeing how they could live together in the same house for the rest of their lives. Lawrence, who heads up Quality Assurance and Enhancement, used to talk to Francine on their lunch hours, on away days, when they’d break from the group and walk and he would smoke and she’d pretend she did too. At one point in the past few years Francine thought Lawrence was starting to see her as more than a sympathy buddy, and she even started to find his fat fingers sexy. The gossip is that Lawrence had an affair with a woman at his gym, his wife moved out, and even though he’s single he no longer misses her. But Francine sees through the red stripes, through all of it. Oh Larry. Lawrence is maybe like Mary Tyler Moore’s Mr. Grant (
Oh Mr. Graaaaaant
). She holds back her smile and turns her attention back to Patricia.

She answers finally: “Well, what would it be like to get that call from the cops—the English cops, while you’re in Italy and maybe planning to visit your son who moved to London for work?” The cafeteria hums. On his way past, Lawrence beams her a smile, which Francine returns.

“You’re romanticizing it,” Patricia says, and Francine sits back, wary that Patricia, who doesn’t seem at all like Dancefloor Patty here in the throbbing presence of all these young people, is turning her into one of her anthropological subjects, doing psychoanalysis on the fact that Francine has been constantly sick and disoriented since the sight of Dario’s bent, emptied legs.

“Explain,” she says, pushing the chicken thigh on her plate through the sauce.

“You like to think you had a connection to him, because you saw him die, but this is about you, not him,” Patricia says, and maybe this is a step too close to the truth or maybe it isn’t.
“Maybe it was yourself you saw lying face down on the road,” she says, and after a pause, “or maybe your son—a son.”

“What are you talking about?” Francine puts her fork down. The Atkins diet isn’t working for her and Patty should stick to the dance floor. She looks up again as Lawrence laughs with Simon. His gappy teeth look like a ten-year-old’s.

“I mean,” Patricia catches Francine’s eye. “I mean, you seem traumatized.”

Francine looks back down at her chicken. Maybe she should try the raw food diet. She could sprout her own sprouts. She won’t tell Patricia that she knows the name of the driver of the red sedan—Rajit Mahadeo—and that he is charged with dangerous driving causing death. Rajit Mahadeo is a name far removed from Francine Johnson. “And how have you been, Pat?” she says, trying out familiarity.

“Fine. Busy, but this term is lighter than last, so, fine.”

“Your book?”

“Mmmm. I might have lost the lust for it,” Patricia says softly, and Francine wonders how one has lust for a topic like the anthropology of water (“not water itself,” Patricia said when first explaining it, “the necessity of water”) in the first place. At least Patricia has the lust for something.

“Shame, sounded cool,” Francine says. Patricia would never say cool. Francine is merely trying to keep the kindness floating.

“I’d rather be in the garden, all year round if it weren’t for winter. I’m trying orchids this year. I’m not very good,” says Patricia.

This shared interest in plants is not something Francine is willing to acknowledge just yet; besides, lots of middle-aged women like to grow things. She used to grow vegetables when she lived with Auntie T, but hasn’t touched a garden in decades.
Dancefloor Patty lives her passions. But there’s also something delicate about her—in a horsey-woman blond-bun kind of way. Those white shirts. And blue … slacks … you’d have to call them. And Oxfords. She comes from academic stock, from a long line of philosophers and mathematicians, but she prefers people science. She writes about people as they walk towards water, as they tilt towards the sun, as they bend in fields. Francine looks at her hands now and sees that despite the desiccated skin, Patricia has girly fingers that played with dolls. Probably made them perform passion plays and tragedies. Patricia would have been a girl who put on shows, who could skip faster than all the other girls, who built ant farms.

“We’d make a good singing duo,” Francine tells her.

Patricia’s brow twitches, and a wrinkle at her mouth deepens.

“I mean the names—Patty and Francine—a bit fifties, don’t you think? Or an ice-cream franchise …” Francine laughs, and this makes Patricia’s face go Times Square bright. Francine looks away, looks around. Lawrence is talking with his mouth full (
Well, it’s you girl and you should know it
 …), the students across from them have plates loaded solely with chips, which she wishes she had instead of this chicken. (
Love is all around no need to fake it
 …).

“It could have been me,” Francine blurts out, turning back to Patricia.

“What?” Patricia asks in a way that sounds like she already knows.

“Not me, on the road, but me in the car. I could have been the one who hit him,” Francine says, but feels stupid so she also laughs and a small bit of snot runs from her nostril to her top lip. She wipes it off and holds Patricia’s gaze long enough to blush.

“I see,” Patricia says softly.

“People get hit, all the time, all the time, you know, by buses, scaffolding, by lightning. It’s all over the place, you know?” And Francine is surprising herself now (
You can have the town why don’t you take it …
). The hair on Patricia’s arm is like the peach-fuzzy down on Virginia Cooper’s top lip when they were ten years old. Virginia Cooper, veterinarian’s daughter, saver of fallen baby birds, who lived on her street in Philly.

“Have you spoken to your brother?” Patricia asks. Scott is the opposite of a motorcyclist—a rich, high-flying financial manager with his own driver, in NYC.

“Why would I?” Francine says, her lip starting to tremble.

Patricia doesn’t shake her head at her in that way that Aunt T would when met with the same tone of voice, time after time through Francine’s orphan adolescence. What was it her mother would say to her? What was it? That thing her mother said to the eleven-year-old Francine about love? That final speech she always tries to grasp the tiny thread of—to hold on to what her mother left her with. About how “love comes with …”? What was it that love came with? Patricia looks at her.

“My brother isn’t a phone guy,” Francine says.

“Do you ever wish he was?” Patricia says. Francine can’t stand the compassion, the wise tone of concern, and she puts her knife and fork together on her plate, scrunches up her napkin and places it on top.

“I’ve got tons of work,” she says before standing. “I really should get going.”

Her office smells of banana. She clears her desk and awakens her computer.

There’s a message about the restructuring plans: “Have your say” forums are to be held throughout the rest of the term. Please, God. The wide streets of Philly will feel too big, the Julys too dry and hot. Please, God. She really needs to keep this job.

She checks other mail, but can’t concentrate. She clicks on to Soulmates. There’s a message from bringmesunshine:

I like your profile and pic. Would love to know more about life stateside. If you’re interested, please e-mail me at [email protected]
.

She clicks on to bringmesunshine’s profile. Oh man. She tries to be gracious. Matt is fifty-nine, describes himself as a genuine kind of guy with a childish sense of humour. He would like to find an attractive, intelligent, and sophisticated woman “because underneath the quiet, unassuming exterior lies a wheelbarrow of surprises. (OK, I’ve nicked that line from AA Milne, but there is some substance to it.)”

Help.

She goes back to Dario Martinelli’s Facebook page. Someone has posted a YouTube video called “My friend Dario.” She plays it. A jumpsuited woman, backed by bikini-ed girls in American football helmets and silver high-heeled boots dance to “my friend Dario, drives, too fast, drives, too flash.… doesn’t care about to crash.” The video has been posted by Roberto Martinelli. Such ease that a brother has with crashing and dying?

She clicks off.

Good God.

Fog gone; air rusty; time tight.

Right.

She’s cold. The sheepskin bits of her jacket are tattered now, the hide ripped for shite. How to afford new clothes is anybody’s guess. Olivia pulls her collar up, grips her leather bag, lets her curls fall over her right eye in the very second that she spots a dark male across the square watching her walk towards the Templeton Building. Clenching her legs, she holds herself in at the place no one has entered yet—sure, yeah, the fingers of Mark from year 10, but nothing like what that bloke might have in mind. Can’t be Nasar. Nasar’s texts don’t make her feel like she has to fend off invaders. If Jasmine knew this is what happened to her when some peng bloke took a look at her, she’d send out the fam and make some kinda virgin intervention. Olivia speeds up and heads to the doors of the atrium but stops short of going inside, waits. For what?