The Englishman

chapter 13

THE VERY NEXT MONDAY MORNING I bump up against the realities of what it means to have Matthew Dancey take over the department chair because other people are shirking their administrative duties. When I check whether I have any snail mail, I come across Tim, squatting on a big box of Xerox paper and apparently meditating into a letter.

“Hey! All right?” I have learned that Tim is liable to lash out when pressed, but I also want him to know that he can confide in me.

“It’s…nothing.” He shrugs. “They’ve re-shuffled my committee.”

“Your tenure committee?”

“Mmhm. Hornberger is out, obviously, but Dancey is in. That’s…not so good. The good news is, the first paychecks of the semester are here!”

“Oooh—yay!” I make a beeline for L in the wall of pigeonholes. “This, my friend, is a moment I’ve been waiting for since I started college and realized that I would rather be a professor than a rabbi!”

Tim stares at me with his mouth open like a cartoon character.

“A rabbi?” he echoes. “But, babycakes, you wouldn’t look at all hot in a whachamcallit—that prayer rug—what? Anna? What’s wrong?”

I should shut up, but I can’t.

“This is wrong,” I say, and my voice sounds odd in my own ears. “My monthly net salary should be more than this. Almost two hundred dollars more than this, actually.”

“Probably just a mistake,” he says, almost too calm to sound confident.

“Maybe I should…my contract is in my office; I’ll go and see whether Dancey is in.”

“Or wait till next month?” Tim cautions me. “See whether by then—”

Let us cast away the sin of vain ambition, which prompts us to strive for goals, which bring neither true fulfillment nor genuine contentment.

The verses from the tashlikh service linger in my mind, but I do not see how it is evidence of vain ambition to insist on the salary that I negotiated. Those extra two hundred may not bring me genuine contentment, but being cheated out of them would make me genuinely discontented.





“Professor Dancey? Sir? May I ask for a couple of minutes of your time?”

“Sure, Anna. Go through.” He points me to his open office door while he continues his exchange with Mrs. Forster in a low voice. I walk in and wait next to one of the two broad metal-and-leather chairs in front of his desk. He makes me wait for about five minutes before he comes in.

“You should have sat down, Anna! Or do you find us so very formal here at Ardrossan?”

Matthew Dancey. Always a master at the “Have you hit your child today?” sort of question. I smile politely and sit down.

“Thank you, sir. It’s kind of you to make time for me at such short notice. I’ll come right to the point: there’s been a hiccup about my salary—”

“Oh, while you’re here, Anna—sorry to interrupt you.” He looks at the collection of Post-it notes on the cupboard door and peels one off. “Anna’s shoes,” he reads.

“Pardon me?”

“An odd request, isn’t it?” He smiles. “Indulge me. Would you show me your shoes?”

Utterly baffled I stick out one foot from under the chair. I am wearing Victorian-style lace-up half-boots, what I think of as my Mary Poppins boots.

“Very nice.” Dancey nods, like a benevolent uncle. “But they are hard-soled, aren’t they? And so many floors of our building are stone-tiled—”

He seems to be saying that my heels are too noisy, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is what he is saying, because I have never heard anything so absurdly petty. So I shake my head to signal my puzzlement.

“I’m afraid to say, Anna, that I’ve had a complaint about the noise your heels make. It’s always a question of what our neighbors are willing to tolerate, isn’t it? When I was a graduate assistant at Princeton, there was a very senior professor who used to listen to Wagner in his office—drove us crazy! I’m sure you wouldn’t want any of your colleagues to feel that you disrespect their right to a quiet work environment.”

“Of course I wouldn’t, and I’m sorry to hear this, but—”

“I just felt I ought to give you a little hint, Anna. You will know best how to respond in this case. Now, you came to see me about…?”

Choose your battles.

“My paycheck, sir. It’s just a misunderstanding, I’m sure, a mistake, but I wanted to first consult with you how best to proceed to get it rectified. It doesn’t match my contract.”

Downplay your annoyance.

Appeal to wisdom of higher-ups in sorting out your life.

“Salary issues are always sensitive.”

“Well, simple, too, in this case, I hope.” I cast a beaming smile at him and extract the sheets from the folder I have brought. “The contract I signed in June specifies my salary and the major benefits…here. My check, however, doesn’t match. By a fairly substantial margin, in fact.”

Dancey eyes me with evident misgivings before he takes the documents that I’m offering him.

“I consider such a mistake highly unlikely.”

“Well, sir, if you’ll compare the two sums—”

He begins to suck in his lower lip and chew his beard even before he can have found the relevant passages in the two documents.

“Ah, well, this—” he waves my contract in the air “—was signed by Greg Newburgh. He was interim Provost, after Clement Hills died. Were you told about Clement? Such a tragic story. He was one of the best administrators I ever worked with. We were undergraduates at Princeton together. He dropped dead in the middle of a meeting. Cardiac arrest. Such a loss, that man.”

“Sudden deaths are always especially shocking.”

“So naturally everything was at sixes and sevens over at Rossan.” A row of teeth gleams inside the beard, although his eyes do not crease at all. “I’m afraid I cannot help you with this, Anna.” He hands me back the two sheets. “This is a good salary for someone in your position, a first-year assistant professor, so maybe you want to consider your next step carefully.”

“I do—that is why I came to see you first, to ask for your advice in this matter.”

“Well, you heard my advice. Salary re-negotiations are invariably time-consuming and generally frustrating for all involved.” He gets up to show me out. Throw me out.

“I see that, sir.” I have no choice, I must rise, too. “But I’m not looking to re-negotiate at all. I believe a mistake has been made, which can easily be corrected. Surely this is in the best interests of everyone involved.”

“And surely it will be, next month. I suggest you wait for the next check, instead of kicking up a great fuss now.”

“I’m not—”

“Anyway, given that in your opinion Ardrossan is not a top university, I wonder how you can expect a top salary.”

For a moment or two, all I can do is stare at him.

“Sir, I—what can you mean? Of course I consider Ardrossan to be a top university!”

“You do? I’m glad to hear it.” He registers my loss of composure with satisfaction. “Have you seen the article about you in the The Folly? A very nice photograph, if I may say so.”

“N-No, I haven’t. Thank you, sir.”

He pulls a copy out from under a pile of folders and leafs through it.

“They found the opportunity to speak to some students after your first classes…this bit was interesting: ‘Dr. Lieberman brings a kind of energy and intensity to the classroom that some Ardrossan students may need time to get used to. A taste of academic life in the Big Apple.’ Well—” he looks up at me “—I wouldn’t call that negative feedback, would you?”

“Certainly not, sir. Energy and intensity are good things, in my book.”

“Oh, talking of energy—Dolph has been talking to some people who will have the running of the ICSLP, and it seems that if you get a bid in quickly, you may well manage to be among the conferences sponsored next year. Next fall, probably. You two better stick your heads together and start writing a call!”

His voice is at its most sonorously patronizing, and I am painfully aware that I am in the hands of a master rhetorician who has outmaneuvered me.

“Yes, thank you, sir. Then I will next ask for an appointment at the Office for Faculty Affairs. May I refer to our talk today in my discussion with the Dean?” Mistake, mistake. And yet.

“Of course you may. But I doubt that Holly Ortega will have time to concern herself with such a trifle!” he says coldly. Now I have really annoyed him, but at least he has understood that I mean business. Irene is right; sometimes you have to piss people off if you want to stop them from messing with you. Sometimes the boomerang comes back, though, and hits you right in the teeth. We’ll see about this one.





“The wrong salary? But that sounds highly unlikely,” says a blithe female voice in the Dean’s office when I call them.

“Nonetheless, I was wondering whether the Dean has time to see me briefly this week or next week. That would be so very helpful!”

“This week is all full up, I’m afraid.”

“And next week? It needn’t take long. I’m sure it’s a simple mistake.”

“Hmmm…nothing again, I’m afraid. Dr. Ortega is busy right now, as you can imagine.”

“Well, then perhaps she isn’t the person I should see about this at all? Could you possibly advise me who the best person to contact would be? I’d be really grateful.”

“Oh, I couldn’t say,” she pipes back. “It’s not my job to know these things, you see.”

“Yes, I see. Well, since it’s a matter involving my contract, perhaps the legal department would be the best place to try? What do you think? One of the legal advisors in HR?”

There is a short silence in the line.

“Can you make Wednesday at eight fifteen?”

I assure her that I can and dash off into the west wing (clackety-clack go the Mary Poppins boots), where I’m about to miss the beginning of my Comedy class. A crowd of students is loitering in front of my classroom.

“It’s Dr. Bergstrom’s class,” Jocelyn says. “They haven’t finished yet.”

“Oh, good, I thought I was late!”

“Well…” She checks her phone. “In fifty-seven,-six,-five,-four seconds, you would have been.”

At three minutes past the hour, Dolph has not looked left once, even though his students see me watching him through the glass pane in the door. I knock on the door. He turns his head, feigns surprise, raises his hand in a gesture that could mean anything or nothing, and goes on talking. At five minutes past my students have started giggling and joking that we should relocate to the Eatery, so I knock again and open the door.

“Apologies, Dr. Bergstrom, for interrupting what seems to be a spellbinding monologue, but might I ask you to wrap up now? We have a very full program, too.”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ll just finish this thought.”

Just finishing this thought takes him another three minutes at least, while his class, half packed, and my class, half unpacked, sit and stand in awkward disarray. I vaguely feel that I should assert myself against Dolph, but my anxious mind is worrying the exchange with Dancey like a cat worries a dead mouse. On the whole it is perhaps just as well that I am in no mood to go for Dolph, the chair’s pet.

“For the moment,” I announce when Dolph and his students have left and I have settled down my class, “I’m more interested in figuring out how metaphor works than in defining what it is. How far do you take a metaphor before it becomes too far-fetched? Let’s use Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’ as an example and be very simple and visual about it. Imagine all the features, all the characteristics of ‘deer’ as constituting one set…you know, like in third-grade math. Like this.” I draw a bubble on the board. “And imagine all the features of ‘lady’ in an overlapping set, like this—” I draw another bubble “then the question is, what’s in the intersection?”

“What? Reading, ’Riting, ’Rithmetic? And that’s what I got out of bed for?”

“Mr. Williams. Having made it so far, perhaps you can go one step further and sit down?”

Logan lingers in the doorway—scruffy, cocksure, his ginger mop standing on end—and scans the group before he sits down in the row behind the last occupied seat. Knowing full well that I want people to sit in the front rows.

“In structuralism,” I continue, “these bits of meaning are called sememes; from the Greek denoting meaning. Semantics. So in the cut set we collect all the sememes that the deer and the lady have in common.”

“Semen? Do we talk about sex again today?”

I would ignore Logan, but several of the other students start sniggering.

“Actually, yes, we do—if you recall, we found out in the very first session that comedy is about sexuality, and a love sonnet is a sort of mini-comedy in one voice. So brace yourselves. Wyatt obviously uses ‘deer’—and the integrated pun, ‘dear’—as a metaphor for his beloved lady. But what do animal and woman actually have in common? How does this metaphor work?”

“Both run away from the speaker.”

“They run away because they are shy and wild.”

“No, they run away because they are being hunted.”

“Both are objects of desire to others besides the speaker.”

I fill the intersection of the two bubbles on the whiteboard as the students name similarities between a hunted deer and a lady at the court of King Henry VIII.

“Right, these are some of the similarities that Wyatt is encouraging us to consider or, to avoid the intentional fallacy, this is the area of overlap between these two semantic fields. Now, in a second step—”

“Sorry, ma’am, how do you spell that? P-h-a-l-l-u-s-y?” Logan is looking at me with fake innocence.

“Pardon me?”

“Well, you said it was all about sex, so I thought, phallus—phallusy…”

A groan of comprehension fills the air, and before I can muster the energy to relax, I snap.

“You thought? All we’ve had from you so far is adolescent wise-cracks!”

The perpetual sneer on Logan’s lips wavers as the corners of his mouth tremble.

“And all we’ve had from you is ball-breaking—but I expected nothing less from a J.A.P.!”

“What did you call me?”

“What everyone calls you.” He grins, back in his comfort zone. “Haven’t you heard? Though it’s a shame not all high-powered Jewish princesses wear tight little skirts and low-cut blouses when they boss others around. I can see you in a little skirt, you know…”

There is an ugly expression in his eyes, and for a few seconds something happens that ought never to happen in a classroom: I am just a woman, he is a man, and he’s threatening me. That’s what it feels like. He’s hitting on me, with all the violence that expression implies.

“Dude, you’re rude!” Ross the football player cuts in, but affably.

“Shut up, Logan, and let’s get on with it!”

The support from the other students helps me calm myself, but inwardly I’m so furious I could slap his self-satisfied face.

“Mr. Williams, if you find us boring, I’m sure we’ll survive your absence.”

“Are you throwing me out?”

The room has gone very quiet.

“Well, you were tardy in the first place, so we can’t be all that high up on your list of priorities.”

“Okay, fine! I’ll be counting how many balls you break in your first year, princess! You know what you need, don’t you?” He glares at me, his cheeks flaming, grabs his rucksack and storms out.

In the corridor, on my way—flight!—back to my office after class, I run into Yvonne; and in a burst of confidence I blurt out what happened.

“Honey—calm down! Why do you let them upset you like this? They’re just kids!” Her good sense makes me feel that I’m totally overreacting, as of course I am. “What did he say, anyway?”

“He—ah, it’s too asinine! He called me a Jewish princess. A ball-breaker! Oh, and I’m to wear shorter skirts.”

Now I have impressed her.

“He said that? Anna, that’s sexual harassment. You have to—well, you have to—” She stares at me, thinking fast. “That’s sexual harassment and anti-Semitic stereotyping! You should talk to Elizabeth Mayfield about this!”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t start. It was sexist, yes, but not—look, I don’t want to make a big thing out of it. Sorry, Yvonne, I’m seeing a student at my office, uh, five minutes ago, so—but thanks!”

I talk the student waiting in front of my office through her essay; she’s from the graduate class, unrelated to the recent troubles. But I lost it with Logan Williams back in there, and the fear of retribution from my superiors is like a scorpion in my guts.

Before you get any salary at all at Ardrossan, Dr. Lieberman, you ought to consider a class in anger management!

Am I breaking down?

I cannot. I can’t break down.

There is a knock on the door.

“May I come in?”

Oh, no! I can’t face him now! Not now!

He opens the door a little wider and steps into the room. The sight of those lean, broad shoulders and that silver head of hair makes my chest expand with longing.

“By all means!” I jump up from my swivel chair and indicate one of the two other chairs in my dingy little office. “It’s not very—”

He doesn’t sit down. Leans against the bookshelf, one hand in the pocket of his pants. When I at last manage to look at his face, I realize that his awkwardness has nothing to do with having ventured upstairs into the servants’ quarters.

“A lot of essays, those.” He nods at my desk. “How are you getting on…with the students and all that?”

I sink back onto my chair, limp with defeat.

“Yvonne has been talking to you.”

“Not talking, no. We passed each other in the hall just now, and she said there had been an incident in your class. She said you seemed upset.”

“It’s Logan Williams,” I say, taking a deep breath. “He’s been trying to undermine me from the start. You know, butting in, making snide remarks under his breath, generally being a right PITA—even his posture, he slumps in his chair, sooooo bored, and he’s always a few minutes late, always! And of course I know I shouldn’t let him get to me, but…”

“Why did he, today?”

It is so hard to fight the impulse to trust him.

“Come on, Anna. Spill.”

Giles doesn’t care.

Erin’s verdict echoes in my mind, but he is here, and I must trust somebody. So I tell him everything; how I came across Logan and his girlfriend in the woods, about the “semen,” the “phallusy,” the reference to Jewish-American Princesses in tight little skirts, and even the suggestion that I’m a sexually frustrated ball-breaker. He is leaning against the shelf and listens impassively. When I’m done, he crosses his arms in front of his chest and sighs, I think in despair over my rashness and inexperience.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” I continue hotly, “but a student was disrespectful to me, in a blatantly sexist manner, and I’ll be damned if I’ll take that sort of provocation—”

“—lying down?” His lips twitch, then he shrugs his shoulder in apology. “Sorry.”

“Oh, that’s—you know what?” I hear my chair bump noisily against the wall as I jump up again. “Thanks very much for your ‘understanding’! If you’ve only come to—to be English about it, then this is a kind of mentoring I can do without!”

As I stand, quaking with rage and embarrassment, Cleveland moves over to a chair in front of my desk and sits down. His long legs crossed at the ankles, he pushes both hands into his pockets and frowns up at me.

“I haven’t come to be English about it. Logan Williams’ behavior is inexcusable, and we can think what to do about him later on. But more important is how you dealt with him. And how you will deal with him and his like in future, because I bet this sort of thing has happened before, and it will happen again.”

“I can assure you that I’ve never been addressed like that by a student, ever! Not at NYU, not when I first started teaching university students six years ago in London, and not when I taught Hebrew to twelve-year-olds!”

I know I’m shouting because the alternative is crying, and I would much rather Cleveland thought me aggressive than pitiful. My throat muscles hurt from suppressing the tears that keep shooting to my eyes, and I stare down at the papers on my desk, surfing the wave of my emotions. If I blink, the waters will rise over the banks of my lower lids and drop down onto the pile of essays in front of me.

Cleveland doesn’t move, and he doesn’t speak. Bless him.

“I’m sorry,” I finally manage to say. “I know the whole thing is absurd, but he really got to me. I mean, phallusy—that’s—it’s funny…” I giggle. Maybe I am sliding into hysteria after all. “I know I’m being defensive! I’ve never felt so defensive in my whole life, and—and I shouldn’t, I mustn’t! I know that I have to sort it out by myself, and I will, only I had to talk to someone about it, but…but if I had known that Yvonne would tell you, I wouldn’t have told her, because I really can’t afford to look like a dud…like a rookie…to half the faculty as well as to the students!”

When I dare look at him, my heart leaps at the expression on his face.

“First of all, I’m not half the faculty. Secondly, you are a rookie, and there’s no shame attached to that at all. You are right to discuss these incidents with your colleagues. Choose your confidantes carefully, by all means, but don’t feel you have to be able to wrestle with the slings and arrows of college teaching all by yourself, because that is the sure way to a burnout. Yvonne only told me because she was concerned, and she feels that as your mentor I should try to help. I’ve had my run-ins with Mr. Williams, if that’s any consolation.”

“You have?” I breathe with relief.

“He’s what at school we used to call a complete dickhead. Do you want me to have a word with him? Only—”

“No, that would—”

“—I don’t think that would increase your authority in the classroom.”

“—look as if I needed help from the big boys. Yes, that’s—I mean, no, thanks. I can deal with him, it’s only that today—”

For a second or two I am tempted to give it all up and tell him about my paycheck, but—no. Not important enough. Not important enough to risk Cleveland’s impatience.

“It doesn’t excuse his behavior,” he adds, “but Logan’s biography isn’t quite what you normally see in our students. He went to a community college after school and did exceptionally well there. Ardrossan has an agreement with the state to offer places to one or two of these students each year; that’s how Logan got in. Since then he’s floundered, and it’s hard to say whether he is intellectually intimidated or feels culturally displaced. The social and cultural diversity on which we pride ourselves so much is, after all, of a very…er, circumscribed nature. What does your father do for a living?”

I’m too wrapped up in what he has been telling me about Logan to stop and think whether I want to answer that question.

“He’s a cardiologist.”

“See? Logan’s father is in and out of prison. Forgery, embezzlement, stuff like that, nothing heavier. But I didn’t tell you this.”

“Oh, man.” I rest my elbows on my desk and rub my forehead with the balls of my hands. “Now I can’t even dislike him?”

Cleveland grins. “Yes, you can. Although I don’t know about you, but I am usually more lenient with kids whose lives have been so much less privileged than mine. That’s when my middle-class guilt sets in. It’s the snooty, entitled ones who set my back up.”

“But I had to wallop Logan today! He was asking for it!”

“As far as I can see, you did all the right things, only you shouldn’t let him provoke you. But that’s the high art of teaching, and for you it’s early days yet. Now, in time—” He pauses, then continues with a twitch of the muscles around his mouth. “‘When in eternal lines to time thou growest,’ these incidents will become less frequent. Even if you were plain, you’d still be young. So be patient. Grow middle-aged. Don’t dye your hair when it begins to go gray. Gain a couple of stone in weight. None of them messes with Elizabeth Mayfield, I can tell you that.”

“That is preposterous!”

“It may be preposterous, but it’s the best advice I have for you. Take it or leave it. The rest is an occupational hazard.” Again he sighs, but he doesn’t seem impatient with me anymore, lounging on his rickety little chair. “We are pissing into the wind. All of us who uphold the fiction—or maybe it’s a dream, or worse, a hubristic fantasy—that by acquainting young people with, well, as Matthew Arnold has it, ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ with art, which is always the fruit of intellectual subtlety and wit and compassion and tenderness, something that is bigger and better than us ordinary folk, so we have to expand our minds in order to grasp its brilliance and beauty—now I’ve lost the beginning of my sentence.”

The seawater eyes release me from their deadlock; he looks round my office, bewildered. So passionate, when he lets his guard down, and so vulnerable.

I’m so in love with him I can hardly breathe.

“I was pissing into the wind,” I remind him quietly. The eyebrows shoot up, but he doesn’t smile.

“So you were.” He seems to conclude our conversation by getting up from his chair. “There is nothing you can do to stop these young men from checking you out. And if they are the kind of male that bristles at women in authority, particularly in authority over them, they will seek relief from their discomfort by turning you into a sex object—a pretty little co-ed. If they become disrespectful, keep note of these incidents, mobilize witnesses, and report the offenders, but there’s never any point in throwing a temper tantrum. Send Elizabeth an email about Logan, and then drop it.”

All my tender feelings for him drown in the wave of blood that rushes to my head.

“Temper tantrum? That is so—patronizing! And where the hell do you get off calling me a co-ed?”

“I’m merely stating the obvious. You’re—what, five-three? Five-four? A half pint.” He appraises me dispassionately. “There are substantial benefits to be reaped by pretty, petite young women, as you no doubt know full well. But claiming authority over a gang of twenty-year-old males is harder for you than for some other types of woman. Boo-hoo and all that, but there it is.”

“Will you stop calling me pretty!” I mutter through clenched teeth.

Cleveland’s eyes glisten. He is hell-bent on provoking me, and I couldn’t bring myself to back off if my life depended on it. We are both standing now, on either side of my desk, and the space between us is filled with crackling ice, or crackling flames, I can’t tell the difference any more.

“When we’re alone…I’ll call you anything I like, and you’ll stick it.” He pauses for effect, and into the silence crowds a cornucopia of terms and phrases. “Not because I’m a male and more powerful than you—I’m not, by the way, more powerful than you—but because I’ll not call you anything that I don’t believe to be true. In company, rest assured it’ll be ‘Doctor Lieberman, my esteemed colleague.’”

I open my mouth to rake him down, but he cuts me off.

“And while we are having a heart-to-heart, I’ll just enrage you a little bit further and give you some entirely uninvited and no doubt undesired feedback on your, er, garb. You tend to look like lamb dressed as mutton.”

He pauses, as if he were waiting for me to lunge forward and slap his face. Since physical violence and stunned silence are my only options, I opt for silence.

“Of course I see that you dress conservatively to compensate for your youth,” he goes on. “But in my opinion that’s an error in judgment. It’s quite easy to impress these youngsters, and your Noo Yoak toak and your Columbia degree do impress them, even if they don’t admit it. Many of them are—well, maybe not scared of you, but a little in awe. The cool girl from the Big City. Make the stereotype work for you! You gotta slap them right if they don’t act right…bitch.”

His gaze holds me, and the word—its vulgarity, his low, gravelly voice—is as transgressive as his hand on my body would be. I can only gaze back, torn between fascination and fury, until I eventually manage to rally in my defense.

“Listen, don’t…don’t bitch me, buster. And maybe you can tell me why guys always think that women can be goaded out of the dumps? Because I got news for you: it’s a crap method of cheering us up! It never works, and it pisses me off!”

His face lights up in that way that fools a girl into thinking she is his only joy and delight, but his shoulders do not relax, and our eyes do not unlock; in a moment of panic I lose my bearings and almost my balance, because what I see in his eyes is that he is this close to striding over to kiss me.

My clash with Logan Williams in front of the whole class has me panicking about my end-of-term evaluations, about my prospects at Ardrossan, and about my aptitude as a lecturer. If Giles Cleveland were to come round that desk, grab me, and kiss me, every cell of my body would hurl itself toward him with all the kamikaze force of which I am capable. I would forget all the Logans and all the Madelines in the world. I would even forget about my paycheck.

It would be the end of life as I know it.