Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (3 page)

Like that. That's how I, Tracy Farber, am happy.

There's a knock on my office door. Four o'clock on the dot. Entering, Elizabeth practically genuflects. “Is this a good time?”

“Of course.” I wave her to a chair. “I was expecting you.”

Seated, Elizabeth rummages in her backpack for a notebook, which she opens primly on her lap. “Here's what I'm thinking of saying,” she begins in a wobbly voice.

I settle back in my seat. Elizabeth is in her mid-twenties, petite, Midwestern, with straight, dark hair pulled back in a loose knot and pale skin that only amplifies the darkness of her eyes—a doll's large black-button eyes. If this were the 1600s, someone would write a sonnet to her ebony gaze and high, flawless brow. Listening to her outline an analysis of Dickinson's romance motifs, I have little to say but
terrific observation
and
nice framing.
After a few minutes I interject: “Elizabeth, I just want to make certain that you're comfortable with December.”

Reluctantly she raises her eyes from her notes.

“We can always schedule a later date for your defense. There's no need for you to overextend yourself.”

“No, no, I'll be fine.”

She looks baffled by my smile—reminding me that graduate students never understand how invested their advisers are in their progress.

We in the English Department are odd birds. My colleagues stride the corridors chasing the flapping tail of the next thought, getting exercised about the misinterpretation of a chiasmus, pausing to scan conference flyers that woo participants by describing the host city's sky as “pellucid.” But Elizabeth's oddness is more
apparent than most. She treads the corridors like a prairie dog just popped up from a tunnel, blinking at the light. Unlike the average jaded graduate student, Elizabeth still treats faculty like demigods. Without my repeated invitation she wouldn't have presumed to schedule this meeting to discuss her introductory remarks for her dissertation committee. Though technically she ought to be dissatisfied—the unexpected retirement of our Dickinson specialist two years ago denied her the chance for a long-tenured, politically powerful adviser—she's embraced my predissertation background as a nineteenth-century specialist, never mind my subsequent switch to the twentieth century. And Elizabeth acting as though she's won the jackpot, adviser-wise, makes me forget that the time I sink into her thesis doesn't help a whit toward my tenure. I see it, instead, as a chance to watch a brilliant mind at work. When Elizabeth talks, it's as if literature is one of those antique glass clocks: all the minute, miraculous workings suddenly apparent. Muddy texts emerge from her hands clear and shedding light. Elizabeth is not only the youngest grad student in her cohort, but also, due to her habit of hatching an idea and drafting a searing chapter the same day, the closest to completion. The only drag on her dissertation process has been her tendency to indulge side projects, producing an impressive output of papers only peripherally related to her specialty. And even that idiosyncrasy, while it's slowed her otherwise lightning progress, will pay off prodigiously when she goes on the job market. She's already getting a reputation as one of the sharpest scholars in departmental memory. Rumor has it she started college at sixteen.

“I have a few questions.” Elizabeth opens her notebook to a finely printed list and concentrates for a moment. “Do you think I ought to shore up my analysis with more responses from British critics?”

Two years of Elizabeth's lists have taught me that my job as her adviser is to keep her from obsessing over minutiae. “If you find a useful reference,” I say, “it's worth anecdotal mention. Nothing more. Your argument is original, and it stands.”

She takes a moment to write this down—presumably verbatim. Even I don't think my every utterance worth immortalizing, but I've learned to hold my laughter. Teasing only embarrasses her. I wait
as she scribbles, fingers clamped around a visibly tooth-marked pen. I like Elizabeth. It's not only that she reminds me of my own grad school years (I, too, was the youngest student, and—while not so intellectually capricious as to be the subject of mythmaking by my fellow students—gave it my all, zipping through my dissertation in the time it took some of my fellow students to refine their topics). Elizabeth's off-kilter earnestness makes me feel hopeful, and more at ease in a not entirely hospitable department.

“Which poem do you plan to lead with?” Not that I need to know—I just enjoy Elizabeth's recitations, and she doesn't disappoint me.

“
This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me.
” Her voice is soft, her face rapt as a child's.

It takes twenty minutes to make our way through the rest of her questions. As soon as we're done she shuts her notebook, jimmies it into her crammed backpack, and makes the usual polite inquiry. “How is work going on your tenure packet?”

“Coming along.”

“That's good, good, I'm glad.” In her rush to clarify that she wasn't prying, Elizabeth dons her jacket and leaves without thanking me for my time. By day's end, I know, I will find in the dim cavity of my departmental mailbox an utterly unnecessary thank-you note.

In fact my tenure packet is coming together more easily than I'd expected. My
Literature of the American City
anthology will be published this month, and, together with my first book and other publications and record of university service, this ought to put me in good stead. Seated at my desk, I tinker with tomorrow's lecture, a consideration of American poetry's relationship to interwar social change. For an opener, I've chosen Edwin Arlington Robinson: dark, but reliable bait for the depressive elements among my sophomores. Once I've gotten the skeptics' attention, I can talk frankly about our contemporary indifference to poetry. Why else be a Ph.D., if not to stand as a lion at the gate of our cultural heritage? I'll remind my audience that the most well known four words by an American poet were penned by beatnik Lew Welch, who supported himself with a day job in advertising. “Raid Kills Bugs Dead.” This ought to worry all of us. Hence my admittedly
unfashionable course requirement. My undergraduates must memorize a poem, which they recite in the privacy of my office before the end of term. Their choice.
The Cat in the Hat
will do.

Jeff gives a lazy thump on my office door. Pushing it open with his foot, he indicates the clock without a word. Four-thirty: the Bitching Hour. I leave my desk and join him in the hall.

“How goes?”

He shrugs. “Another day dredging the sewers of Brit lit.” With his narrow face, blue eyes, black hair, and the long, square sideburns accentuating his pale skin, Jeff is at once handsome and stern. For such a rail-thin man, he has a startlingly deep, gravelly voice. It commands respect, both in the classroom and out. Jeff was hired as junior faculty the year before I finished my dissertation. Back then I helped him learn the ropes; he's been guiding me since. He's the closest thing I have to a friend in the department.

“Paper's going that well?” I say, locking my office door behind me.

He feels his shave. “It'll work out.”

Of course it will; Jeff's papers always land in top-notch publications.

We proceed in silence down the corridor, past colleagues' doors—mostly closed—featuring bulletins advertising favored campus groups; cartoons that make arcane literary references and cartoons that mock them; brief poems; and, on the doors of two Romanticism profs, gravestone etchings. The department, occupying the whole of the building's ninth floor, is laid out in a perfect square. Its circulatory system—this windowless hallway obviously designed for the comfort of submariners—holds the outside-facing offices of senior faculty and the inside offices of us junior folk, our walls brightened by posters. At one end of each corridor is a bulletin board crowded with undergraduate announcements and study-abroad notices—barely glanced at by the handful of students hunching through these halls, each in an apparent rush to get someplace else: a burly redhead whose wary expression implies the English Department is trying to kill him; a lank-haired junior (one of my brightest twentieth-century students—we exchange waves) with a grim set to her face and a fluorescent T-shirt she wears at least once a week:
STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
.
Near the end of the corridor we pass the chairman: round-faced, balding, smelling of tobacco. “Nice tie,” says Jeff solemnly.

Patting the green pinstriped bow tie at his throat, the chairman nods his thanks.

When we've rounded the corner, Jeff leans close. “Makes you feel sorry for the man.”

“Because?”

“Because anyone who wears a bow tie is confessing more than he ought. Neckties are just cloth arrows pointing to a man's prized possession.”

I match his conspiratorial murmur. “You think?”

“Come, girl. Don't be naive. Observe the cut of the cloth. Follow the arrow.” With a flourish he indicates his own tie, running down the navy plane of his shirt and terminating in a sharp V an inch above his belt. “Men who wear bow ties have, I'm sorry to say, no penis.”

“And guys who wear bolo ties?”

“Have hardly any penis at all.”

I indicate the subtle design on Jeff's tie. “Don't think I want to know what the pattern means.”

He smirks.

“Why so dressed up?”

With a look that says
I'll tell you inside,
Jeff reaches for the door of the faculty lounge. By now the lounge is empty and nearly clear of pipe smoke, the departmental aristocracy—two professors who drift, high-minded, above the fray—having retired from taking their tea. Neither of these gentlemen has published a paper in at least as long as I've been here; neither bothers to attend conferences; both have been known to nod off during colleagues' lectures.
Le premier état:
Professors Grub and Paleozoic.

Names have been changed.

Grub, our bow-tied, middle-aged chairman, always votes yes on tenure (all his faculty candidates are, naturally, above average), never asks questions at dissertation defenses, and promptly delegates all new initiatives to exploratory committees. His office door stays shut. I've seen the room's interior only once, when I was summoned for a brief hail-fellow chat shortly after my hiring. Grub cares about the department in the manner of a ship's captain secluded in his cabin, a military-style chart on the wall
marked with colored pins for the faculty's formidable list of publications and professional honors. The galley slaves row, the stewards shovel coal into the flames, and Grub emerges now and again to give a pep talk. He manages the department with a strategy I'm convinced he picked up from Dickens's Inspector Bucket, though I suspect the
Bleak House
character used it with more charm: when conflicts erupt or persuasion is necessary, Grub tells his faculty about themselves.

“You're the kind who stays on course,” he'll say to a disgruntled professor, buttonholing her in the corridor. “You're the sort who would never let a small matter derail her.”

People love to hear about themselves. They blush under the assault:
Is that how I come across? Un-derail-able?

I shouldn't criticize; the strategy seems to work. Faculty eat out of his hand.

Paleozoic, seventy-something and perpetually rumpled, was chairman for two decades before Grub and he's sticking around to make sure it all works out. Paleozoic sheds his outdoor shoes the moment he enters the department at eight
A.M
. and dons the felt slippers in which he pads about the department for the remainder of the day. You'd never know he was coming if not for the pipe smoke that permeates his clothing. He abstains from all departmental votes (reportedly he's leery of throwing around his chairman-emeritus weight, lest he unfairly influence the weak-minded). He is a decent man: decent in his 1950s sense of humor, his sexism, and his incomprehension of the new subspecialized courses (African American Lit, Homosexuality and Text, Women and the Novel); decent, too, in his disapproval of anything written after 1700 (which is, and I quote, “so much gah-gah”). These days he teaches only one seminar, thinly attended by undergraduates who emerge from the three-hour sessions glassy-eyed. Conversation with Paleozoic has a surreal quality. Learning I've just come from the library, he'll begin with a reference to the stacks, segue to Dante's circles of hell, and somehow, several minutes later, alight on Hemingway. Regarding Hemingway (good bloke, shame the way it ended), he will become animated. “Have you ever been to Morocco?” His shaggy eyebrows rise and stay aloft, awaiting my reply.

I have not.

The eyebrows drop. He struggles for another metaphor to illustrate his sentiment about Hemingway. “Have you ever been sailing?” Up with the brows. “On a blustery day?”

“Yes.”

A smile expands across his face. “Enough said.” Patting me on the shoulder, he departs with hushed tread.

At three
P.M
. our two senior gentlemen take their tea. Whichever is last to reach the faculty lounge discovers his waiting companion with a cry of “Aha!”; the one already seated in the lounge replies in kind, and once this attendance has been taken they settle down to business in earnest. In the sanctum of the lounge, beneath a large
NO SMOKING
sign (relic of the days before smoking was prohibited in all university buildings), Paleozoic strikes a match and lights his pipe, and the two commence a tranquil hour's throat clearing while the rest of us make ourselves scarce.

The Bitching Hour now convened, Jeff opens the lounge's single window. I flap a manila folder to clear the remaining smoke.

“Word is Dean Hopkins has a crush on Faulkner,” says Jeff. “He's hinting about pushing for a more contemporary curriculum, presumably expanding our twentieth-century offerings. Look who's going to win the tenure jackpot.”