Leaving the World (22 page)

‘Are you saying that she lied about being harassed by Michaels?’ I asked, sounding angry.

Ted Stevens came in at this point: ‘All Coach Hollander is saying . . .’

‘. . . is that it’s his word against hers.’

‘And mine,’ Professor Sanders said. ‘Because Ms Quastoff came to the late Professor Holder last term and complained to her that Michaels and his cronies were teasing her – and Professor Holder, in turn, informed me of this.’

‘Did she write this down, file a report, anything like that?’ Alma Carew asked.

‘No,’ Professor Sanders said. ‘But, to repeat, she did tell me that Lorrie Quastoff was being bullied by Joseph Michaels. And if that little creep didn’t happen to be the captain of the hockey team, we wouldn’t be here now, trying to see if there’s a way out of suspending him.’

‘With respect, Professor,’ Alma Carew said, ‘the issue here is whether Michaels was provoked into saying what he said in Professor Howard’s class. We know already that she had issues with Michaels.’

‘
Issues
,’ I said, sounding outraged. ‘The creep was deliberately rude and obstreperous in my class two days ago and was put on report for that. I rescinded the report because I was told that if he missed the big championship game on Saturday night it would be disastrous. So I decided to give him a second chance. What does he do? He winks at me at the start of the lecture and then viciously mocks a student with developmental challenges—’

‘You didn’t mention the wink in your report,’ Alma Carew said.

‘I felt it was irrelevant.’

‘But it got you angry, didn’t it?’ Budd Hollander said. ‘So angry that you decided to call on Lorrie Quastoff in the hope that Joey Michaels would—’

‘I did nothing of the sort,’ I said, now sounding very angry, ‘and I find it extraordinary that you are turning this discussion into a cross-examination.’

‘This is not a trial, Professor,’ said Ted Stevens.

‘Well, it’s certainly starting to smell like one. I genuinely resent being made to feel as if I am at fault here. The fact is, this kid is a nasty piece of work and he does not play by the rules when it comes to his comportment, let alone showing decency to a young woman who has overcome so much to simply gain admission to this university.’

‘Do you truly understand what you’re perpetrating if you insist on keeping him on Dean’s Report?’ asked Budd Hollander. ‘This university hasn’t won a major national hockey tournament in over twenty years. The team is on the brink of doing this, going into the game against U. Mass heavily favored to win. But Joey Michaels is the lynchpin of the team. Without him . . . well, it will be something of an uphill struggle. He’s the highest-scoring forward in our division, the NHL are already scouting him—’

‘And having been let off the hook less than thirty-six hours ago, he then plays on his “above the law” perspective by belittling an autistic student. Sorry – but you can’t excuse that. His arrogance landed him in this situation.’

‘I don’t think he’s the only arrogant person in this situation,’ Alma Carew said.

‘For the life of me I don’t know why you’re defending this kid,’ I said to her. ‘I mean, if he had uttered a racial epithet against a person of color, would you still—’

‘That is so way out of line.’ Carew was suddenly furious.

‘Sounds like a perfectly reasonable question to me,’ Professor Sanders said.

‘And that is absolutely
enough
from all of you,’ answered Ted Stevens.

He let the silence that followed hang in the air for a good minute – no doubt a strategy he had learned from one of his management books about defusing verbal fisticuffs among his underlings.

Finally he said: ‘Could I have a word with Professor Howard in private? I’ll be in touch with all of you by the end of the day to inform you what course of action I plan to take next.’

They all stood up, Alma Carew and Budd Hollander saying nothing to me as they walked out the door. Professor Sanders raised his eyes slightly in my direction. Was he indicating that I should proceed with prudence or was he telling me he’d stand by me, whatever came out of this mess? Certainly the tone of his comments during this ‘discussion’ hinted that he was in my corner, but in the ever-shifty world of university politics there was no such thing as ongoing loyalty. The default position always was public support but private subversion.

So I was suddenly alone with Ted Stevens. Having been sitting with the four of us around a conference table in one corner of his capacious office, he now stood up and moved to the equally capacious desk that covered one substantial corner of the room. As he motioned me to sit down in the narrow straight-backed chair fronting his desk, I wondered if he had picked up this tactic from another of those management guides in a chapter titled ‘How to Intimidate’. But I had decided that I wouldn’t be intimidated – and in the back of my mind was the idea that if he fired me now, he’d be letting himself in for a very public fight. No doubt he’d already worked this one out, as his first comment to me was: ‘Do you realize what this university stands to gain if we win the ECAC championship on Saturday night? Ken Malamut . . . ever heard of him?’

‘The big hedge fund guy.’

‘I forgot that you did a brief stint in high finance,’ he said. ‘Very brief, in fact.’

‘I decided that I wanted to return to academic life.’

‘Of course you did,’ he said, tingeing the comment with just the slightest hint of sarcasm. ‘Which is why you left Freedom Mutual in such a hurry.’

I said nothing.

‘We actually thought you were quite a catch when you were recruited to fill Deborah Holder’s post. But given the eventful first week you’ve had here—’

‘Now you listen to me, sir,’ I said, cutting him off. ‘The only damn reason I’ve had an eventful first week here is because of the antics of your star hockey player. I refuse to be made the scapegoat for his obnoxious—’

He held up his hand like a traffic cop forcing a driver into an immediate stop.

‘Personally, I think Joseph Michaels is an odious little shit,’ he said, ‘and one with a vast entitlement complex. So yes, I am in full agreement with you and have no doubt that the little bastard did everything you say he did. And as for the deliberate disrespect underscoring his alleged apology to you—

‘But here’s the thing, Professor. I may concur with you, but I am, at heart, a manager, not an academic. I was brought in here to manage a third-tier university that is trying to become second-tier and simultaneously to up its national profile and its endowment base. So far, I’ve increased our overall endowment by twenty-seven million dollars in just under nineteen months. And here I have, in my sights, Ken Malamut: one of Wall Street’s major league players, a New England State alumnus and a genuine college hockey fanatic. And he has promised me –
us
– a one-off gift of ten million dollars – nothing to a guy who’s worth close to one billion dollars – but a definitive ten million dollars if we win that hockey trophy on Saturday night.’

‘So I’m going to cost New England State ten million dollars if I keep Michaels on Dean’s Report?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t put it so bluntly . . .’

‘Yes, you would.’

‘All right, straight talking, no BS – yes, you would do just that.’

I lowered my head. I tried to shift around in the narrow seat, but realized it was designed for making the occupant feel very restricted and cowed by the big man in the big chair behind the big desk. Maybe it was the realization that this ‘management tool’ chair was deliberately restricting me – and that Ted Stevens struck me as exactly the sort of smarmy executive type I so hated in American life – which made me look up at him and say: ‘I’m not rescinding the Dean’s Report.’

He flinched, then tried to hide the fact that he had flinched.

‘That’s a foolish decision, Professor,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but it’s also the decision I can live with.’

‘I want you to think very carefully about—’

I stood up.

‘Nice meeting you, sir,’ I said.

‘You think you’re clever, occupying the emotional high ground and all that. You also think that a guaranteed cause célèbre around Lorrie Quastoff will shield you from retaliatory action from the university. Perhaps it will . . . in the short term. And no, I’m not so stupid as to fire you on the spot. But your four-year contract with us . . . it may allegedly be “tenure track”. But know this: if you cost us this ten million dollars, I can unequivocally promise you that you will never,
ever
get tenure. I’ll see to that.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said, then headed to the door.

‘Professor –
Jane
– why make life difficult for yourself?’

I wanted to say: ‘
I hate all bullies, that’s why
’ and make certain he understood that, by implication, I was including him. But I stopped myself. All justifications are defensive – and this afternoon, I had decided not to be defensive, even though I knew it was going to cost me big time.

So my only response was a shrug and a polite reiteration of, ‘Very nice meeting you, sir,’ as I left the room.

The Dean’s Report on Joseph Michaels was therefore not rescinded and he was suspended for the rest of the term. When, two days later, I walked into my class on American Originals, I scanned the students and caught sight of Lorrie Quastoff. She looked away and wouldn’t make eye contact with me. That afternoon, I steeled myself for dirty looks from the Michaels clique in my Naturalism course. Like everyone else in the lecture theater, they hushed themselves as soon as I entered the hall and behaved immaculately throughout my one-hour lecture. Had I earned their respect? Had my refusal to give in to popular sentiment won me a certain hard-ass reputation? It was difficult to say – though I did make a point of knocking on Professor Sanders’s office door later that day to hear him say that Stevens would definitely make good on his threat to eventually deny me tenure.

‘Maybe that’s no bad thing from your standpoint, Jane. You know now things are finite here for you.’

‘Even though you think I’ve made a huge mistake.’

‘You decided to adhere to a point of principle – and that’s admirable. But do understand that no one is going to like you for it. We all need scapegoats. And when the team loses the Big Game, you are going to be cast in that role.’

As it happened, the Big Game turned out a little different than everyone expected. I went online at eleven on Saturday night, fully expecting to see that U. Mass had emerged victorious. But on the Boston.com website, there was a short item in the Breaking Sports News department, heralding the ‘
Sudden Death Goal
’ which won New England State its first ECAC Championship: ‘
a goal scored by a certain Pete O’Mara
[one of Michaels’s cohorts in my class]
at 3:37 in the second overtime period
’.

So there are such things as happy endings – though when I ran into Ted Stevens while crossing the main campus quadrangle on Monday and wished him a good morning, he simply smiled thinly at me. It was a smile which said:
You’re dead here
.

On the Monday afternoon after the Big Game, I received a phone call from Professor Sanders, asking me to drop by his office.

As I walked in, he asked: ‘Scotch?’ and poured it before settling into the chair opposite his desk.

‘Is the news that bad?’ I asked.

‘Nothing you don’t already know. My advice to you is: get that book of yours published, write as much as you can for as many journals and magazines as possible, and hopefully find a new teaching post by sheer force of your output and ambition. Because once your contract is up here you will be packing your bags.’

After this drink Professor Sanders began to distance himself from me. He was never arctic in public – he was too smart to play that game – and he did make a point of asking for my take on things in departmental meetings. But he always referred to me as ‘Professor Howard’ while calling all my other colleagues by their first names. The other members of the department noted this, just as they also noted the way he had dispatched me to his own genteel version of Coventry. Or as Marty Melcher put it: ‘Sanders is
subtextually
telling us you are one dangerous babe . . . And go on and report me for using the word “babe”.’

‘Now why would I do a thing like that, Professor?’ I asked.

‘So you’re not PC, a crypto-feminist or even an uberfeminist?’

‘
Über
with an umlaut?’ I asked.

‘Sanders said you’re fast. So fast that you refused to be threatened by Our Beloved Leader, President Stevens.’

‘Might I have a vodka, please?’ I asked. We were in a bar and Melcher’s smarmy banter now had me regretting the fact that I had accepted his offer of an after-work cocktail – especially as another departmental colleague, Stephanie Peltz, had warned me he was a lech (just as Marty had warned me that Stephanie was
the
departmental gossip. ‘And believe me, there’s quite a competition for the number one spot in that field’).

Marty Melcher. Fifty-something. Fleshy, messy, but with a full head of gray-black curly hair and a walrus moustache that made him look like an American Günter Grass (
with
the umlaut). A specialist in twentieth-century American fiction (‘Not those second-tier imitation Zolas you like, but the Big Guns: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner’). A man whose face could ostensibly have been described as ‘lived in’, though ‘lived through’ might be closer to the truth. Certainly, Melcher had lived through a considerable amount (according to Stephanie Peltz): three divorces, a lengthy battle with painkillers, and a near career-destroying affair with a senior colleague, Victoria Mattingly, which ended when she suffered a nervous breakdown and confessed all to her husband. He then hired two goons from Southie to kick the crap out of Melcher in the driveway of his house in Brookline.