Problems with People (10 page)

She checked e-mail. DMW. For years they’d passed this code back and forth—she, Les Gross, Dane Snow, John Herringer, Gail North—and now Sarah Holger, new to the department: DMW, Department Meeting Wednesday, meaning drinks after work on short notice. Usually just a glass of wine somewhere, often in the living room of someone’s home, but sometimes in a restaurant or a wine bar. Every December, on the Wednesday before Winter Break, the Social Studies Department tippled together festively, and every June, on the last Wednesday of the school year, it celebrated with wine. Then there were the DMWs when, without an excuse, some of them drank too much, including her, because she didn’t
want to seem superior to her colleagues. For that reason, she sometimes drank three or four Wednesday glasses of wine, even though they gave her a headache.

Les Gross drove. They convened—a first—at Sarah Holger’s loft. She found out, there, that Sarah was twenty-seven. They met Sarah’s dog. They were offered a choice of playlists, which led to a discussion of iTunes Radio, and then a demonstration of iTunes Radio, everyone choosing, together—by consensus—urban humming stereo. Sarah served kale chips in an acacia-wood bowl and, because people were curious, Jell-O shots. They were undrinkable—again by consensus—but Sarah had wine on hand as well. Something in all of this made her decide to go for it. There were amalgamating factors: Sarah had a magnum left over from the holiday season that, once opened, needed to be emptied; Les Gross was driving; she’d taken a longer walk than usual the day before; for the moment—however ephemeral—she was less behind than she usually felt; and finally, she hadn’t yet shown the new kid—Sarah—this side of herself. “Sure,” she said, whenever Sarah poised the magnum. “Why not?”

Near-universal kudos for Sarah’s part of town—gentrified without losing all of its rough edges, fun without feeling like a theme park for whites—followed by Sarah’s mirthful scoffing about it: after all, every three minutes a lanky, lone white guy could be relied on to walk into Bakery X for a pastry and some face time with a hand-held device after having navigated, as if preoccupied, around an idealist with a clipboard. “It’s all good,” said Sarah—generalized mockery. She was dating a Sri Lankan woman who worked in the mayor’s office. There was
some actual business—curriculum-review scheduling—that was quickly dispatched before Department Meeting Wednesday ended with a flurry of sarcastic Mark Mitchell comments. That was their way. They meant nothing by it. Most of the time they were relatively serious. None of them, she believed, only went through the motions. Les, maybe, to some extent—Les struggled openly with burnout.

They were in the car again, she and Les, a block away, before, in her fog, she realized that, somehow, they’d forgotten about Hamish. “Hey!” she said. “We didn’t rag on Hamish!”

“We should make up for that,” Les advised. “Let’s check out whatchamacallit. ‘Feedback.’ ”

“God!” she answered. “Great idea!”

Their mirth endured. They only got control of it outside the Nash’s door. A hole in the wall, yes, but inside, it meandered. Around a first corner, still swimming, she felt quieted. They stood before a wall plaque, reading about Hamish:

They rounded a second corner. Now the photographs came into view, hung against desiccated if well-cleaned brick. Les went immediately to scrutinize one, while she stayed behind, reading about “Feedback”:

She looked for forty-five minutes. In each photograph, Hamish had turned his camera on a monitor, and then,
between them, interposed a human subject. Faces, eternally multiplied, became helical, or spiraled, or a hub for spokes that were also faces, or like the petals of a flower, but these visual complications only served to clarify expression—perturbation, depression, distress, rage, admonition, mockery. Hamish, whose daguerreotype days appeared to be over, shot in bald and garish light. His people were flagrant. You could see all their blemishes. He exposed them as assailed, as vulnerable.

She had the postmortem with Mark in the midst of her hangover. It was Thursday, a little warmer, and raining heavily. There would be no walking this afternoon. Behind Mark, on his credenza, a photograph of him and his wife looking like the Republicans they were on vacation in Mexico; another of the Mitchell family taken in a studio against a dark-blue backdrop. Mark handed her a copy of his evaluation, which she folded, unread, and slid into her bag. His actual subject: Clement Grimaldi’s tearful objections to the excising of Drawing III from the curriculum. Not a judgment, he added. Instead, by the numbers. No class in the building had lower enrollments. Clement could be emotional, he was emotional, he was recently divorced, he’d been ill with a MRSA infection, he took things personally, Clement was an artist. Mark clicked his pen a few times as he spoke. “What do you think?” he asked her. “You’ve been in this building for a long time.”

She knew what to say. She said, “I’m not sure what being an artist has to do with it. Clement is a friend of mine. I like and respect him, but he has a hard time with reality. I agree—he takes things personally.”

She thought of something. “Speaking of artists,” she said, “Les and I went to the Nash yesterday to see Hamish McAdam’s photographs. Remember Hamish? He’s teaching somewhere”—she had forgotten where—“I would guess low-residency.”

“Not low-residency. He’s at Grosvenor College.”

“I wonder how he got in front of students again.”

“Well, we certainly did what we could to help him. Oh,” said Mark, “that stuff. Yeah. It went nowhere, contrary to … hearsay.”

She didn’t answer. Mark took it as an invitation. “We even tried to bring him back,” he said. “Wouldn’t do it. Fortunately, he didn’t bring suit against the district. Not that he would have won, necessarily, but it could have been a much bigger hassle.”

“How so?” she asked.

“False allegations. Admitted to. In writing. By a girl I’m not going to name—she made an error. I thought faculty knew all about this,” said Mark. “I assumed you knew. Nothing,” he stressed. “Hamish never did a single thing wrong. Other than being a little … different.”

That night she told her husband about Hamish. They were in bed with books; he was about to pull the beaded chain on his lamp. He listened to her story without interruption, and then said that maybe she was obsessing about nothing and that probably, in the end, there’d been little or no harm. Why do you do this to yourself? he asked. Is it going to make the situation better? A situation—his real point—that wasn’t even a situation? The guy in the park had probably forgotten it—probably forgot it within a few minutes. It didn’t even exist, her husband suggested, except as thoughts in her head.

On Friday, she handed back the American civil rights movement quizzes and the set of Jim Crow era essays. The last bell of the week finally rang. She sat down and looked at the weekend weather, the starting times of movies, the hours the pool was open for lap swimming, restaurant dinner menus, and her retirement portfolio.
Should institutions of higher learning be allowed to use race as a factor in determining admissions?
Why or why not? She put those essays in her bag with dread about the work it would take to respond to them—to make comments, give feedback, give grades. Then she remembered that she’d forgotten about Hamish, had forgotten about him in the course of the day. Was that good or bad? She couldn’t say.

Eleven months out of twelve, the judge ignored being Jewish. Then Christmas slid into view, and for a while he was reminded of it. People who knew he was Jewish would say “Happy Hanukkah” in lieu of “Merry Christmas,” and though he wanted to retort, “You don’t understand; I’m an agnostic who has no more to do with Hanukkah than you do,” he never answered anything of the sort. But still, Christmas forced his hand to the extent that December was his default vacation window. He and his wife, yearly, went somewhere balmy to wait out the season. Each November, they called their grown children—who had children of their own, Christmas trees, and colored lights—to repeat that December was a low-fare month for flights to sunny climes, and that it conduced to the judge’s court schedule to mark off vacation time with annual consistency. Then, a few weeks later, away they went until just after New Year’s, by which time Seattle had returned to normal in the sense that a nominal Jew like the judge could go for weeks without thinking about his birth religion.

But this year was different. Instead of winging off to a tropical locale, they were driving to Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia, where Christmas was sure to be as omnipresent as it was at home, and—even more unusual—they had in tow the judge’s parents, who were too elderly to handle airplanes anymore but who were great at long-distance travel on interstates because, he thought, of the steady, unchanging rhythm. His father, who was spindly and had a dire need for legroom, rode beside the judge in the front seat, oblivious, as always, to fields, towns, and mountains—to everything in the landscape—while his mother, wedged into the back beside the judge’s wife, nattered on about herself: “I’m going with my quilt group on a quilting retreat during the third week of January, but I have to have a cyst removed from my neck the week before … walked downtown from his office and had lunch with … we went into the Old Navy store because of Dina’s niece’s daughter’s birthday … tell you what Roberta said about me last … reminded me of me because she’s so …” His father, the judge saw for the thousandth time in his life, hung on his wife’s every word and seethed. Behind the wheel of his Civic Hybrid, driving toward Canada through midmorning rain, the judge seethed about her, too, mostly while displaying a cheery face, though sometimes the best he could do was to feign impassivity or act as if immersion in driving prevented him from nodding in the rearview mirror to acknowledge his mother when she demanded it. She’d say, leaning forward, “Don’t you agree with me?” and he’d pretend, absorbed in interstate perils, that her question wasn’t aimed at him.

“Your sisters have abandoned me,” his mother insisted,
near Conway. “Don’t you agree? Don’t you think so, too?” And he checked a side mirror, purse-lipped but provoked, then changed lanes as if doing so was essential.

“Don’t you agree? Your sisters? Hello?”

At which point he looked in his rearview mirror and said, “I don’t know.”

“One is in South Africa and the other in Los Angeles,” said his mother. “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“So you agree with me.”

He didn’t answer. His mother said, “Well, that’s why your father and I had six kids. Oh boy, oh boy! We were sure busy, weren’t we, dear?”

“Yep,” said his father.

They approached the border. By the time the judge had answered the agent’s questions, zipped up his window, and rolled a little north, his mother had a fresh but familiar enthusiasm: “Handsome,” she said. “That fella in the booth? My God, he was so handsome!”

With a glance, the judge checked on his father, who said, “From this point, the border, it’s I think about an hour if—”

“You’re changing the subject,” his mother told him. “I want you to comment on that handsome border fella. Didn’t you think he was handsome?”

“Yes.”

“He could have been a model.”

“Yes,” his father repeated.

“A handsome, handsome man. Don’t you think?”

Once again the judge feigned interest in the road, as if rain
and traffic called for all of his attention. His father said, “I didn’t really look.”