What Time Devours (16 page)

Alonso Petersohn’s argument wound its tortured way to the three-quarter-hour mark and stopped with an uneven patter of applause. Thomas was far from clear what had been said, though he had to concede that Petersohn’s rhetorical high-wire act had positively stunk of cleverness even though he had grasped little of it. Some of the old dears were clearly befuddled, but it was hard to get a sense of what people had thought, and Thomas had a glimpse of that Emperor’s New Clothes dynamic again, in which to point and scream with laughter would only demonstrate his status as impostor. That he could neither talk the talk or walk the walk.

Thomas scowled at himself. He remembered the Drake conference all too well. However much he’d like to think of his flight from graduate school and the ivory towers beyond as a principled reconnection with all he thought valuable about books and teaching, he knew that the real reason had at least as much to do with the fear that he couldn’t cut it as a scholar. Of course, any such sense of failure would vanish were he to emerge from this trip brandishing a long-lost Shakespeare play . . .

People were asking questions now, and Petersohn, smiling and nodding sagely, was fielding them as best he could. An older professor in horn-rims at the front had some grumpy quibbles, but all the rest who spoke up seemed to think that what Petersohn had said was insightful and dynamic, something they wanted to be seen to support. What it was they were supporting, Thomas had no idea. It came as something of a surprise even to himself, therefore, when he realized he had raised his left hand and that heads were turning toward him expectantly.

“Yes,” he said. “This is all fascinating. I was just wondering what difference it would make to your argument if the play’s sequel were available for study.”

“The play’s sequel?” said Petersohn, benign but bewildered.

“
Love’s Labour’s Won,
” said Thomas.

CHAPTER 29

Suddenly everyone in the room was smiling and shifting, some embarrassed, some enjoying what they took to be a joke.

“Is that likely?” said Petersohn, still smiling. “That
Love’s Labour’s Won
is going to be available for study?”

The audience relaxed, liking him more for his kindly treatment of the crank with his arm in a sling.

“Any day now,” said Thomas, with complete composure.

“Well,” said Petersohn, opting to spare Thomas the easy cruelty of ridicule, “won’t that be exciting?”

And then another hand was raised urgently in the front row: Chad—Julia’s eager and dour grad student—anxious to get back to serious matters. By the time Petersohn had fielded that one, it was time to break for tea.

“Like to make an entrance, don’t you?” said Julia McBride, appearing beside him and whispering with delight. “Did you see their faces? Like polite people farting in an elevator. Wonderful!”

Everyone else was filing out, avoiding his eyes. Only one paused to join them. He recognized her regal bearing before he saw her face.

“For a high school teacher, you do like your Shakespeare conferences,” said Katrina Barker, smiling.

“Just here to make trouble,” he said, feeling suddenly stupid again.

“I think academic gatherings need all the trouble they can get,” she said. And with another expansive smile she sailed off, parting the crowds before her.

“How on earth do you know Katy Barker?” said Julia. “She’s colossal.”

“Oh, we go way back,” said Thomas. “I have a long history of making dumb remarks in her presence.”

“Well, if it helps, she’s a
nice person
as well as a genius,” said Julia, “which really isn’t fair.”

“I thought genius meant you didn’t have to be nice.”

“She’s the exception that proves the rule, I guess.”

“Talking of genius,” said Thomas, as Alonso Petersohn walked past.

“You didn’t like his talk?”

“Did it make any sense to you?”

“Of course,” she said. “I have my disagreements, and he really needs to define his terms, but yes . . .”

“He barely mentioned the play,” said Thomas.

“What do you mean?”

“The quote in his title was about the only time he referred to the text at all!”

“This is the twenty-first century, Mr. Knight,” she said. “You can hardly expect him to start analyzing image clusters and figuring out the ways they could be ambiguous.”

“But I want to learn about the play, about what it means—or might mean—what makes it profound as literature, not about how it’s a matrix for social energies and discourses . . .”

“Oh!” she shouted, with the kind of delight someone might muster on spotting a chipmunk. “You’re a humanist!”

Thomas grimaced.

“You are!” she said, clapping her hands together.

“I’m a high school teacher who has to convince kids why these four-hundred-year-old plays are worth reading when they can be playing video games . . .”

“And joining street gangs,” she said, still grinning.

“Some of them do.”

“Well, I think it’s sweet,” she said. “Unfashionable and politically a bit suspect, but kind of sweet.”

“There’s nothing suspect about my politics,” Thomas muttered. “I just want a little more literature and a little less theory.”

“Aren’t you a little young for the fogey club?”

“I’m not a fogey,” said Thomas, offended.

“So there are things you stand for as well as things you stand against? Such as?”

“I love words,” said Thomas, jutting his chin out. “Expressive nuance. Precision. I like implications and—yes—image clusters, themes, and tropes.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, warming to his theme. “I like getting my students to read critically—and therefore think critically—by exploring complex and sophisticated literature. They live in a visual culture, but without words . . . Language is about who we are, how we reason, even how we feel. Words make experience.”

“Thank you, Wittgenstein,” she said.

“I happen to think that literature has something to teach us, something . . .”

“Universal?” she inserted, delighted.

“No,” said Thomas, avoiding what would damn him as a conservative. “Something that helps us reflect on who we are, on . . .”

“The human condition!” she giggled. She was enjoying his failure to dodge the mines of critical discourse far too much.

“I just don’t think the sole purpose of literature,” said Thomas, pushing through her amusement, “is to expose social hierarchy.”

“Neither does Petersohn,” she replied.

“Who the hell knows what he thinks?” said Thomas. “I didn’t understand a word of it.”

“So you’re mad,” she said. “That’s understandable. But this isn’t a talk at the local library for whoever happens to walk in. This is a seminar for professional Shakespeareans to talk to other professional Shakespeareans about the things that interest them in the terms they understand.”

“I’d just like to hear something about the
play
,” Thomas huffed. “I thought that was why we were here.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “This was exactly what you thought it would be and you came to complain as much as those kiddies in the front came to applaud. Which is fine. But let’s be honest about it, shall we?”

Thomas frowned. The room was now empty except for them.

“Tea?” she said, taking his left arm and propelling him out.

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t expect me to enjoy it.”

“Heaven forfend.”

As they stepped out into the hallway where the attendees were still chatting in huddles, Thomas caught two sets of eyes fixed on him, both cautious and attentive: thoughtful eyes, wary eyes. One set belonged to Alonso Petersohn, who was staring past the admiring graduate students clustered around him, fixing Thomas with a stare that was quite unlike the genial charm he had displayed in the lecture room. The other set of eyes belonged to Randall Dagenhart, Thomas’s former advisor, and though they shared Petersohn’s unnerving focus there was something else to them, something very like rage.

CHAPTER 30

“What are you doing here, Knight?” snapped Dagenhart.

He had waited only for McBride to take a step away from Thomas’s side before closing on him like a mastiff. His bloodhound face was flushed and his wet eyes were hard and bright.

“I’m a tourist,” said Thomas. “Just here to take in the sights . . .”

“You’re a liar,” said Dagenhart, his voice close to a snarl. “First Chicago, now here. Why? What are you up to, and what was all that nonsense about”—he lowered his voice—“
Love’s Labour’s Won
?”

“Just a bit of fun,” said Thomas. “Petersohn was annoying me so ...”

“You’re a damned liar,” said Dagenhart again. “And an amateur. Stay out of things you don’t understand, Knight. Go back to your
schoolroom
.”

He said it as one might say
gutter
, or
prison
.

“I’ll stay till I’m ready to leave,” said Thomas.

“You couldn’t cut it as a student, Thomas, remember?” said Dagenhart, pressing in so that their noses almost touched. Despite his age, he was a big, imposing presence. “You can pretend you opted out as some kind of protest,” he said, “but the truth is you just couldn’t do it. Now you are trying to prove that you are somehow better than the rest of us, better than the profession that rejected you. You can’t. You aren’t.”

Then he turned on his heel, his laptop bag swinging, and strode away, barging past an elderly woman who spilled her tea and peered after him with a wounded look. Thomas flushed with sudden anger and embarrassment, scanned the crowd quickly to see if anyone had seen, and as he did so, shrugged painfully out of the sling and looked for a trash can.

Over in the corner, still the center of attention, was Petersohn, whose eyes returned to the group as Thomas met them. And over by the door from the ladies’ room, moving slowly in his direction and looking more thoughtful and less amused than usual, was Julia McBride. Thomas wasn’t sure she’d seen, but she accelerated as she found his eyes on her, and her smile broadened.

“Having fun?” she said, pleased with herself.

“Not particularly.”

“At an academic conference?” she said with mock amazement. “Let me introduce you to another of my graduate students.”

She turned, beckoning, and a mousy-looking girl with wide, astonished brown eyes hustled over with quick, embarrassed steps.

“This is Angela Sorenson,” said Julia. “One of the best and brightest.”

“Hi,” said Angela, waving self-parodically. “Do you really think
Love’s Labour’s Won
will be found?”

“It’s at the Birthplace,” said Thomas, rallying but still red-faced. He had to tear his eyes away from the door where Dagenhart had stormed out. “Slipped down the back of the couch. You’d think someone would clean that place out once a century, wouldn’t you.”

Angela looked unsure.

“Mr. Knight is teasing,” said Julia, “which is very naughty of him.”

The graduate student smiled and nodded to show she got the joke.

“Still,” she said. “It would be exciting, wouldn’t it? To find a lost Shakespeare play, I mean.”

“Someone certainly thinks so,” said Thomas, considering the sling he had bunched up in his left hand.

As the girl’s face blanked again, Julia made a playful, dismissive noise and waved his comment away.

“What school are you at?” said Angela, filling the silence.

“Evanston Township,” he said, defiantly misunderstanding.

“Oh,” she said, uncertain. “I don’t know that one.”

He took a breath and relented.

“I’m afraid I never made it out of graduate school,” said Thomas. “Made a tactical withdrawal ABD. I teach high school now.”

“Right,” said the student, relieved. “That must be so rewarding.”

“Must it?” said Thomas. “Yes, I suppose it must. Sorry. Yes, it is. It dignifies being a failed academic.”

“Oh, come now, Thomas,” Julia inserted. “There are plenty of
failed
academics who are also quite
successful
academics, if you see what I mean. Depends what you mean by success. And I’m sure no one thinks that you couldn’t hack it.”

“Randall Dagenhart thinks exactly that,” said Thomas. “He just said so.”

“He’s just a grumpy old man who knows the profession is starting to pass him by.”

“Maybe, but he’s probably right about me. I quit because I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t believe that for a second . . . ,” she began.

“That’s because you don’t know anything about me,” Thomas returned, his irritation getting the better of him. “You’ve never seen my writing, heard me teach, and you sure as hell have no idea what I was going to write my doctoral dissertation on because I couldn’t figure that out myself. You don’t know me at all, Julia.”

Angela flushed and looked away.

“Well now,” said Julia, switching gears and smiling her feline smile, “
that
we can fix.”

“I think I’m going to go,” said Thomas.

She turned to look full at him then, and her face was unnervingly frank and appraising, as if she was deciding what to do or say next. Angela was forgotten. It was Thomas’s turn to look away.

“Okay,” said Julia. “You have a local phone number?”

He faltered.

“I’m just . . . I’m going to go,” he said again. “Thanks for getting me in. To the lecture, I mean.”

“Anytime,” she said. She smiled once, a tiny crinkling of one side of her mouth. “See you next time.”

Thomas made for the front door. He was almost out when a voice behind him called.

“Thomas?”

He turned. There was a man hovering a few yards away. He was pale and earnest looking, perhaps a few years Thomas’s junior. It took only a moment before full recognition dawned.

“Taylor?” said Thomas. “No way!”