The Englishman (17 page)

Why do I have to think of Alex now?

I rang him up when I went to live in London four years later. His phone number was not difficult to find, and I could hear that his first reaction was one of pleasure. But when I suggested a meeting, he backed off. Said it wouldn’t be wise, what with my work and all. A week later he turned up, unannounced. We spent the weekend in bed, and I don’t believe I have it in me to be happier than during those few days, even though at the end of them he told me that he was getting married again.

That evening I wrote him a letter. What I needed to say was that I loved him and wanted him to marry me. For the first and only time in my life I laid claim to another person, a man. Nothing by return of post; nothing within the week. Then, a small parcel and inside it a small box and inside the box a gray pebble, the size of a child’s fist. No note, nothing. His answer to my question was engraved in the pebble: “&”.

I have never seen Alex again or spoken to him. There is nothing left to say. I understood what he tried to say, and the pebble is among my most treasured possessions. I broke my heart over him and went back to having sex instead of making love, this time with Ciaran, a man whose wife and child were not dead. For a while I smoked a lot of dope and got little writing done, then I had a sort of breakdown and got no writing done at all. Dark days.

So lost am I in memories that when I hear faint grunts and moans echoing between the trees, I at first think I am hallucinating. That, in turn, worries me enough to make me tread more carefully and to survey the gray-green stillness around me. I have only taken one more turning of the way when off to the left, behind a huge uprooted tree, there is movement. The rhythmic movement and sound of hips smacking against each other.

One of the many things my dope-hazy affair with Ciaran taught me is a certain sang-froid in relation to casual sex. If you start sleeping with the owner of the house in which you share the top-floor apartment with a fellow student, and in which he lives with his wife and new baby on the second floor and runs a second-hand record store on the first floor, and if his wife not only knows about your affair but even claims to condone it, and if you spend an increasing number of evenings in their sitting room, smoking weed, eating Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, and making out with your landlord, occasionally his friend and, on one best-forgotten occasion, even his younger brother, you do not flinch when you come across a copulating couple in the woods. I try not to step onto any dry twigs and make myself scarce.

“
What the hell!”

Like birds flushed from a thicket, two bodies rush out of the undergrowth in front of me, limbs flailing, giggling, out of breath. They are as startled by my sudden appearance on the scene as I am by theirs, and it would be hard to tell which of us is more mortified when Logan Williams, the aggravating redhead from my Comedy class, and I recognize each other.

“Oh, shit!” He bites his lip, but the cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone in his blood spurs him on. “Dr. L.! What the fuck are
you
doing here?”

His companion, a blond hippy in a corduroy mini skirt and a grass-stained t-shirt, giggles and pulls him along, but as in class, Logan wants to see how I react to his provocation. I give him a sour smile and nonchalantly lean against the tree to my left.

“Not what
you’re
doing here, fucking. Run along now. I hope you’re using condoms!” I shout after them as they scurry off, giggling again.

What point is there in trying to teach this swaggering bundle of muscles and spermatic cords the subtleties of Renaissance poetry? He embodies the force of nature that comedy seeks to represent and tame, and while he is driven by the sexual energy of youth, he is not at all interested in its representation. And why should he be? Except that someone is forking out thirty thousand dollars a year to keep this kid in school.

I already wasn’t looking forward to next week; now I’m looking forward to it even less. I wish the males at Ardrossan were a little less…ardent in their attentions to the opposite sex.

Chapter 10

O
N
M
ONDAY
M
ORNING
I cycle to work expecting to find the Observatory shaken by a sex scandal as by a thunderbolt from a storm cloud. But the thunderbolt, insofar as there is one at all, strikes me. I guess it was naïve of me not to expect that there would be some fallout after Giles Cleveland’s intervention in my office situation. Except that the fallout is more in the nature of a hurl-out, this time not back into my office—I give thanks for small mercies—but onto the floor space between my office door and the foot of the spiral stairs that lead up to the old observatory in the dome.

I call the janitor, Larry, who insists it isn’t his job to clear out occupied offices. I explain that my office should have been cleared out in August, when it was still unoccupied, and that the content of the Dumpster, being mostly books and paper, poses a considerable fire hazard. In case he wonders why the contents of the cart are no longer
in
the cart, I refer him to Professor Andrew Corvin, room E-430. When I return from my library tour and a piece of carrot cake in the Eatery, the mess has disappeared off the floor, but the overflowing Dumpster is still sitting there. So be it. We have bigger problems now.

Upon reflection, I am not surprised that nobody talks to me about Hornberger. Although universities, like all close-knit communities, are rife with rumor, reliable facts are hard to come by at the best of times, and this threatens to be among the worst of times. If there are any fanciful stories at Ardrossan about professors guilty of, as Tim put it so crudely, boning student totty, they do not reach my ears. Tim does not inform me of what he, no doubt, finds out in the course of the week, and if Yvonne has been filled in by Sam Ruffin, she doesn’t let on. This is not a salacious tidbit like discovering two faculty members in the copy room during a Christmas booze-up. This is the violation of a taboo, and our instinctive reaction is to keep well away from it. A storm cloud has gathered above the Observatory, but we all pretend to each other that we haven’t seen it.

“Right. Research. Anything in the pipeline?” Giles Cleveland asks me, drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair.

Is this what the Faculty Mentoring Program calls “close and supportive mentoring of teaching and research activities?” I am the new girl in the Early Modern Studies graduate seminar, and we are assembled in a slightly ramshackle but cozy room across the road in the department of Art History. The floor is carpeted and sprinkled with chalk dust, the low chairs are upholstered and a little frayed. So is our host, Professor Harry Beecher, a potbellied figure in green corduroy and a blue tie, who handed round hot tea in college mugs and spilled sugar over the overhead projector. Eleven students have squeezed onto chairs, stools and boxes, and besides Beecher and Cleveland, there are five more professors from various neighboring departments. It was one of these, a guy with Franklin’s “Join, or die” cartoon on his t-shirt and a long ponytail, who asked Cleveland to introduce “your new colleague” to the group.

“Um, well, I have three publications forthcoming, one of them my book. We’re herding in the last contributions to a collection that I’m editing with a friend in England, and—”

“About?”

“Pregnancy.”

Cleveland freezes, and the laughs are on my side.

“I take it you are speaking metaphorically,” he says.

“You bet.” I smile, something I find confusing and difficult where Giles Cleveland is concerned. “Pregnancy as a stage image, or a narrative trope, or narrative structure, even. It’s a slightly off-the-wall theme, I admit, and we have some rather eccentric contributions, but—”

“The patriarchally circumscribed, ideologically enclosed female body-slash-narrative…” His face gives nothing away, but I know perfectly well that he is mocking me.

“Sometimes it works out like that, yes. But not as predictably as you might think. My main project at the moment is on illustrations in anatomy books, Vesalius and after, and how they adapt religious iconography, for instance that of the pregnant Mother of God,
Maria gravida
. I’m presenting that as work-in-progress at Notre Dame in November, and it—”

“Travel grant,” he interrupts me. “Apply, ASAP. Ask Tim how—or Tessa, you could—”

“I can show you the forms, Dr. Lieberman. It’s all online,” Selena O’Neal offers, her cheeks bright red. She looks feverish, flushed, and pale at the same time, and once I see Tessa surreptitiously reach across and rub her shoulder in a way that strikes me as both comforting and concerned.

“I will, thanks. Listen, I don’t know what the local customs are, but—” Just in time I manage to suppress the fatal phrase “
at NYU we used to”
and turn to Cleveland. “Would first name terms be appropriate?”

“Sure.” He nods. “I’m Giles.”

This time it takes about half a minute for the laughter to die down, and I realize that Cleveland’s buffoonery is his way of providing a channel for the tension that thickens the atmosphere. Grad school is an anxious place.

“Hi, everyone, I’m Anna. Anyway, that’s the article I’m mainly working on at the moment, the anatomies—”

“But that’s out of your field, isn’t it?” Professor Beecher interrupts me. He is turning the pages of a stapled document that, absurdly, seems to contain my CV and list of publications. “Your book is on Anglo-American Jewish writing. In fact, I fail to see how you qualify at all for a position in—”

“Dr. Lieberman’s dissertation is on performances of civic culture in early modern English towns.” Cleveland crosses his legs and shifts in his chair so that his long right leg is like a barrier to the room. “It’ll be out early next year, with CUP.
That
one—” he nods at the sheets in Beecher’s hand “—she wrote just for fun.”

The students murmur amongst themselves, and I recognize the expressions of astonishment and worry on their faces. It is always worrying to hear what people a few years older than you have already achieved. Grad school is also a neurotic place.

For
fun
. Assclown.

Beecher appears to have sorted out my CV, but he is still skeptical. While Cleveland is lounging in his chair and, I suspect, watching me squirm like a boy watches a worm that is pecked at by a bird, Beecher continues to peck.

“But there is no link between either of these topics and the history of medicine. Is that going to be your third field of expertise? Because Jonathan Sawday dealt extensively with those images in the mid-nineties.”

“In
The Body Emblazoned
, yes, I know. I wouldn’t call it ‘field of expertise,’ precisely. It’s an interest that grew out of my preoccupation with religious iconography. There is a…well, I’m going to
argue
there is an undercurrent of Protestant propaganda, or at least a Protestant impetus in these medical textbooks, particularly in the illustrations, and even more particularly in illustrations of the pregnant female body.” I notice that in my eagerness to demonstrate that I am open to questions, I begin to sound as if I needed to justify my research. So I shut up.

“That sounds really interesting. Are you going to give a talk about that here?” Selena asks nervously.

“I don’t know.” I turn to Cleveland for guidance. “Am I? Would that be—”

“I think it would be extremely advisable to try that out on us before you ram it down the throat of a Catholic audience at Notre Dame.”

“I’m not planning to ram anything down anyone’s throat, thanks very much!”

Cleveland’s lips twitch, and he looks down at his notepad as if he had to remind himself of the next step.

“Right, do you have any questions for Dr. Lieb—for Anna?”

“I do.” The girl sitting next to Cleveland raises her hand. “Didn’t you find it difficult to get a good job over here? With a British MA and Ph.D?”

“Yes, I did. I’m not going to lie to you. But—”

“And staying in England wasn’t an option? Sorry, is it okay if I ask you that?”

“Oh, sure, it’s—”

“Well, didn’t you want to?”

“Well, I—I couldn’t.”