The Englishman

chapter 15

KAY CHANG WAS RIGHT to suspect that the students know far more about the affaire Hornberger than we do after the evasive briefing by our Dean and our new chair. There appears to be no other topic these days on the fourth floor of the Observatory than Greco vs. Hornberger, and the hub for all information is Natalie’s and Selena’s office. Natalie keeps coming to school with an air of wounded but stubborn pride that I secretly admire—no matter whether it is real or a show.

Unfortunately, as a junior professor I must not be seen to allow or encourage familiarity with students. All I can say after a few days of walking purposefully (and noisily! In-yer-face!) past their open door on my way toward the stairs is that there is word of at least half a dozen other students who have, over the years, enjoyed Hornberger’s attentions, that he got a kick out of seducing them in all sorts of places on campus including his office, the library, and the elevator at Rossan House (this I assign to the realm of the fantastic), and that nobody seems to be openly contesting Natalie’s version of events.

They—she and Nick—went to a conference together in Los Angeles shortly before the semester started; he lured her into his room, plied her with drink, and forced himself on her. This is more or less the story that I expected, and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought is that Natalie will find it difficult to explain away her friendliness toward Hornberger since then. It is easy to imagine how the same events are being related by Hornberger himself, probably with as much claim to subjective truth. This affair will occupy our thoughts and time for months to come, money and administrative resources will be wasted, and in the end nothing will emerge but the two irreconcilable narratives that we already know today. Just because an aging male professor can’t resist the opportunities that offer themselves to him in the nubile shapes of young women eager for approbation.

The sleazy talk is momentarily interrupted the following Wednesday when I turn up early on the fourth floor of the Observatory to prepare for my hard-won appointment with Dean Ortega.

The air at the top of the marble stairwell is unusually crisp, and I mentally congratulate the cleaning staff who must have left some windows open. But what Martha Borlind, Steve Howell, and a couple of students are examining seems to be the result of vandalism. Three window panes, each in a different dormer window, have been smashed.

“Could it have been birds?” Martha wonders.

“Then you’d have the shards inside, on the floor here!” Steve brushes her off. “But most of the glass is—” He cautiously opens one of the broken windows to peer down onto the inner yard. “Well, I can’t see anything; it’s bushes down there. But either the pieces were swept up already, or these were smashed from inside!”

I slowly walk along the corridor checking each hole, the last one in the window closest to the Dumpster that is still sitting under the stairs. Now and again people add some waste paper or some cookie wrappings to the pile of junk, and the other day I fished half a sandwich out of it—don’t want to encourage the rats, on top of everything else. What I find in there today is a blood-drenched ball of tissue paper. I nudge a pile of plastic folders over it and saunter back to the others.

“Has anyone called maintenance?”

Larry the janitor is, if possible, even more appalled than we are at this evidence of wanton violence. He calls his young man, and together they are taping plastic sheets over the holes in the window panes as I leave to make my way across campus to the Dean’s office at Rossan House.

“That’s funny,” Larry observes cryptically.

“What is?”

“All happens in front of your office, ma’am.”

“What does?”

“Mess. Junk. Now this—” He nods at the windows.

“But that has nothing to do with my office!”

He looks past me at the cart and scratches his grizzled head. I’m waiting for him to explain himself, but after staring and scratching for a while, he turns back to his work.

“Anyway, you promised two weeks ago that you’d have this…thing removed,” I add sharply. “You know better than I do that it’s a fire hazard!”

“Central maintenance’s job, ma’am.”

“Yes, but it’s your job to see to it that central maintenance do theirs! And I believe I’ve asked you not to call me ma’am, Larry!”

He glances over at me, and I could project any kind of disdain into his expression, but I don’t have time for this.





Holly Ortega is apparently starting what is going to be a very busy day—during the ten minutes that I am in her office, her secretary comes in to hand her a sheaf of faxes, but she is very focused and friendly as she listens to my plight. I was right to come and see her, she tells me, but unfortunately she can’t do more than make a phone call for me.

“Morning, Liz. Holly Ortega here. Listen, I have a young colleague here with some discrepancies in her paycheck. It’s one of the contracts Newburgh signed…that’s right. Can Amanda see her next week? Tuesday?” She looks at me. “Tuesday at ten thirty any good? Great, Liz, the name is Lieberman, Anna. Thanks very much. Bye!” She puts the phone down and smiles at me, her thoughts clearly already on her next task. “There you are, Anna—Amanda Cleveland will sort you out.”

Oh. My. God.

Yes, I’m sure Amanda Cleveland will sort me out good ’n’ proper. Especially if I tell her that I am lusting after her husband.

Well, all right. I admit it. I’m curious about the woman who is allowed, by some cosmic coincidence of time and temperament, to run her hand across those broad, boyish shoulders. Slip her fingers into his and draw him close. Undress him. I am still wondering why he was so dead set against becoming department chair. There is more to it than “Giles only cares about his own research.” Amanda knows. I shouldn’t even want to know.

When I return to the fourth floor of the Observatory, business seems to be going on as usual. The office doors are all open—we received a memo from Dancey reminding us to leave our doors open as much as possible and without fail when we are in our offices with a student—and the makeshift plastic window panes are softly flapping in the wind. How much more pleasant it is, despite the frustration, to wonder about Giles and Amanda Cleveland, if the depressing reality is a blood-drenched hanky in my Dumpster and the janitor’s muttered suspicion that the recent mishaps on E-4 have one common denominator: the location of my office.

That’s got to be nonsense.

As usual, my bunch of keys is hiding at the very bottom of my purse, and when I’ve found it and grab the door handle, my hand slips off and I smash bodily against the door.

“What the—”

The handle—and now also the palm of my hand—is covered in a thick, oily substance. Viscous, oily, and evil, smelling of rotten fruit and airports. Engine oil? Lamp oil? Maybe Larry did something to the door hinges while he was up here, and a little got spilled? But there is no oil on any of the metal parts of my door.

Slowly it drips onto the floor in front of my Mary Poppins boots.

No. I will not lower myself into the bog of paranoia.

It must be Corvin. I would totally believe that Corvin has complained to Dancey about the noise my heels make. But would a seventy-five-year-old emeritus professor, no matter how aggressively senile, smear lamp oil onto the handle of colleague’s office door? And what’s with the broken window panes?

There are two rivaling theories about the windows, Martha Borlind informs me when I invite her, a little disingenuously, for a coffee in the Eatery. One, favored by Martha herself, is that this was the act of vandals, the same individuals who last semester smashed some glass cases with libri rari in the library and sprayed graffiti on the front façade of Rossan House. The second—and Larry vowed to make enquiries—is that a party at Modern Languages yesterday evening got out of hand.

I don’t tell Martha about the oil on my door handle, or about the bloody Kleenex. When I come back from the restroom along the corridor into Modern Languages, it is still sitting there, underneath the plastic folders, possibly the corpus delicti in this case. Without really bothering to examine my motives, I slip it into a clean plastic bag and lock it into the drawer of my desk.





Thursday after class I do what I consider to be the main part of my job: I spend an hour in the library and then work at my desk till my eyes cross with exhaustion. I may not be able to sleep eight hours at a stretch, but I can and do fall asleep anywhere. My three chairs pushed alongside each other make an adequate cot, and I’m dead to the world seconds after lying down. When I wake up, with a crick in my back and swollen eyes, it is almost eleven o’clock. The view from my window is a panorama lit by moonlight, sparsely dotted with the light from other offices, other night owls, and I can see the straight line of Victorian-style street lamps that illuminate the river promenade. I’ve never been in the Observatory so late in the evening. The hallway looks picturesquely dark except for the dim light from the windows, and it is exciting to feel that I have the building to myself. A little eerie, too. When mid-term grading is upon us, I’ll be surprised if by midnight this place is empty. We will be keeping ourselves awake with green tea and gymnastics in the corridor. Two essays, one jog up and down the staircase, another two essays; that would be a good routine, guaranteed to—

Oh, snap! There is someone upstairs in the dome!

I’m as scared as I would be if I saw two thugs walking toward me in a deserted alleyway. This huge old building sitting on a hill, with its dome designed to look out into the night sky, empty except for some light and some voices at the very top, under the roof, one of the highest points on campus. The immediate associations from films we have seen are inevitable. A chair rocking gently, the creaky voice of an old woman talking to her son.

Every step I take will go clackety-clack on those stone tiles. I take my shoes off and creep up the first couple of steps of the spiral staircase, my shoes in one hand. A male voice and a female voice. It may simply be some students who’ve picked the lock and think it cool to have midnight sit-ins under the dome. Who else could it be, really?

The vandals!

In a flash I feel more protective of Ardrossan than ever before. My vigilante spirit awakes, and I have to hold on to the grubby metal handrail to stop myself from charging upstairs and demanding to know, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, whether the intruders have no wit, manners nor honesty, to gabble like tinkers at this time of night. My compromise is another two steps, but as I creep up, my heart stops—the female voice grows loud enough for me to distinguish words.

“But it’s wrong! I know it is! I shouldn’t be doing it!”

“Charity, Selena! You’re the only thing that keeps me going! Hey…hey, come here…”

The man, whose voice I can’t place, continues to murmur and hush the agitated young woman. I recognized her voice at once; there is a strained, mewling quality to it that is very distinctive. I rode up in the elevator with her the other day, and she forced herself to talk to me although I could see that she was both shy and preoccupied. What Selena O’Neal is doing in the dome of the Observatory late at night is anybody’s guess, but the one thing she is not doing is planning acts of wanton destruction. I would wager the missing sum on my paycheck that Giles Cleveland is wrong about Selena’s virginity.





Overcoming parentally-imposed obstacles in order to have a sex life may be a drag. Presenting one’s work-in-progress in the graduate seminar of one’s academic program may be daunting. But neither warrant the sort of spectacle that Selena makes of herself when next we gather for an EMS meeting. She sits at the front desk like an Allegory of Misery, her face a sickly green above her demure jonquil blouse, trying and failing to unscrew the top of a water bottle by wedging it between her arm and her body. I can see from where I’m sitting how cold and sweaty her fingers are.

“Here, Selena, let me help.”

She hardly looks at me, let alone thanks me, and I begin to wonder whether she is in too much of a state to do this.

“Selena…Selena?” I have to raise my voice to arouse her attention. “Are you all right? What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Oh!” She stares at me, then at the arm as if it didn’t belong to her. “I changed from touchpad to mouse. It’s just a little sore. The doctor says it’s like tennis elbow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Shouldn’t you be wearing a sling?”

“No! No, it’s not that bad, really. I’m fine!” The skin between her brows puckers. “Thank you, Dr. Lieberman.”

She is dutifully polite, her little silver cross dangling above the tiny triangle of skin visible at the neck of her blouse. I can’t help finding this one a little creepy. Having seen the mother, I see the same large chest, luscious hair and full mouth on the daughter. Selena would actually be a much better candidate for America’s Next Top Model than Natalie because she would give Tyra Banks the chance to do magic. Even a day’s shopping and grooming with Irene Roshner—heck, even with me!—would go a long way toward turning this pasty-looking duckling into something swan-like. But Selena doesn’t want to be a swan. Good for her, but I do wish she weren’t such a drippy duckling. She makes me want to shake her, pull back her drooping shoulders, and send her out on early morning runs. Or better still, a course in kick-boxing. I’m convinced she goes up to the old observatory to have sex, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to get her circulation going.

“She’s not fine, you know.” Tessa has shifted on her chair so that she seems to be commenting on the people filing into the room. “She’s sick almost every morning, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s flu or a bug. You don’t have a stomach bug for more than two weeks.”

“Not normally, no.”

“Well.” Tessa is still looking neither at me nor at Selena, and I’m actually not sure what she is driving at, or that I want to hear it. “Grad school isn’t for everyone, that’s all. It isn’t just about working hard. You gotta be able to stand the pressure, mentally. I’m not the toughest cookie myself—cried for two days when Beecher dissed me for my paper, although I knew he would; he always does. But next to Selena I’m hard as nails.”

I could say a thing or two about being hard as nails, or ever wanting to be hard as nails, but this isn’t about me.

“Do you know whether she has seen a doctor? Other than about her elbow, I mean.”

“Why would she? To be told it’s bad for her and she should stop doing it?”

It dawns on me that Tessa and I have been talking at cross-purposes. I was thinking about nervous stomachs; she was talking about bulimia.

As it happens, I have a nervous stomach. How acute of Giles Cleveland to call me a co-ed. That’s exactly what I feel like, a nineteen-year-old airhead fidgeting in her chair because her favorite professor is about to enter the room. So embarrassing. The other embarrassing thing is that I decided to go a little way toward heeding his advice about my clothes. The black turtleneck may conceal a lot of skin, but it is tight-fitting, as are my jeans. This is not one of my teaching days, so I thought I could risk jeans. And a tight sweater. And silver pendant earrings. Let’s just say that this ensemble has worked before, okay?

It is so easy for men. Charcoal jeans, a white dress shirt with very thin dark stripes, a tweed jacket—delicious. He takes off the jacket, and his shirt cuffs are undone, as usual, but he does not roll them up to expose his arms. The smooth cotton tightens across his shoulders as he welcomes us and introduces Selena, and I get sucked into a sexual fantasy in which I slip my hands underneath his shirt, run them up his chest and around those shoulders that look so severe and vulnerable at the same time. Push the shirt up over his head, ruffling his hair, his beautiful, soft, silvery hair, sink my teeth into the skin over his pectoral muscles.

I’d be so gentle with him. Use my teeth on him so gently, ever so gently, just hard enough to make him moan and close his eyes and roll his head back onto his shoulders.

Would he like that? Does he like being undressed? Or is he a control freak who must be in charge at all times? I wonder what Giles Cleveland is like as a lover. Whether I’d think he’s a good lover. Whether that shiksa of his thinks he’s a good lover. I know that this is a trick that Mother Nature has evolved in order to safeguard the procreation of the English—the sense that an Englishman’s reserve hides a volcano of passion. Not the case, in nine cases out of ten, but the poor deluded non-English female is hopelessly intrigued.

I rejoin Selena’s talk when she looks up from the sheets she has been reading, so much like a deer caught in headlights that I feel guilty for not having paid more attention. Her project—at once predicable and disturbing, coming from her—is a cultural history of Satan, from medieval grotesque to sophisticated player. It could be summarized, although she does not do so in so many words, as the question, Since When Has Evil Been Sexy? It is a catchy topic that might spark a lively discussion, but Selena is making a hash of it because she does not approach it with the playful yet sophisticated mind it requires. She is right to observe that this shift, which culminates in Milton’s grandiose rebel, happened during the early modern period. But exactly by what method she is going to combine the analysis of synchronic aspects like popular culture in conflict with scholarly teachings, and of diachronic aspects like developments in and of the various genres, from the dramatic to the theological, is unclear both to her and us.

“Yes, uh…Selena,” Beecher interrupts her, “we can see that you read a great many texts, which is, uh…commendable. But could you perhaps summarize for us your main conclusions so far?”

She explains, haltingly, that she has not reached any “conclusions,” but that her main observation is that the medieval devil is merely an instrument by which temptations are presented to the tempted, a go-between, while the seventeenth-century devil begins to embody temptation, as an object of sexual desire himself.

“There is no suggestion at all that Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus is himself tempting, he is merely a tempter; but Othello, for instance, is a figure of temptation in this double sense. Another example—”

“Now we’re back with examples. Does your, uh…hypothesis go further than postulating that devil figures, along with practically all fictional types that survived from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, were rendered more psychologically realistic? This would be true of kings and maidens as much as of the devil.”

“Well, I…I would try to show how this is done, sir, not just…postulate.” Selena reddens but soldiers on. “If I may…Othello, for example, accuses himself of loving his wife too much, and this is also what Milton’s Adam is guilty of, loving his wife more than he loves God. But in most other respects, Othello is characterized as a satanic figure—black, and so forth. In a recent study about racism in intertexts of Othello—” Now it is Cleveland who groans and fidgets. “Yes, I know, sir, you don’t like the author, but—”

“Whether I like her or not isn’t the point; the point is that her book about Othello is—” he seems to fumble for the right word “—utter tosh. You should only read it to disagree with it.”

“But Othello—”

“—has satanic features and is guilty of idolatry. You are perfectly right about that.” He nods. “Carry on.”

It is obvious to me that Selena would benefit much more from an hour or two of individual tuition with her advisor than from this plenary interrogation. Why Cleveland allowed her to hurl herself into a methodological and theoretical quagmire like this, I cannot understand.

Giles does not care.

Here we have it.

Making the best of a mess, I suggest to Selena that her analysis might become more dynamic if she distinguished different genres of devil narrative. “Your second type of devil, the sexy seducer—” Selena flinches a little, as if she had made a wrong movement with her elbow “—is a new figure on the Renaissance stage, but he does not immediately replace the older, medieval kind of devil, the malevolent but inept bungler who assumes the shape of a black dog and promises riches and revenge to guileless old women.”

I’m gratified to see that Selena is making some notes, though none of the professors acknowledge my comment in any way.

Jenna, the girl who had asked about my British degrees, raises her hand and waits for Cleveland to give her a nod. “I was wondering, does that mean that in stories with a sexy devil—” Again there are some giggles at the phrase, and Jenna blushes. “That these stories are always about a woman—an Eve—who has to choose between an Adam and a Satan? A lot of love stories are like that, right?”

“Yes, the theme…the theme is temptation. The satanic figures that I want to look at aren’t just…evil. They tempt. That’s their defining feature.” Distress is making Selena’s strained voice rise in pitch, and I suddenly remember what I overheard the other night.

It’s wrong!

It’s charity!

“Charity” is an odd word to use for a young man who wants to get a girl in the sack, unless he understands how she ticks and is using her Christian morality against her. Satanic indeed.

“What about Gone With the Wind, though?” Tessa speaks up. She is nervous, as students usually are in these seminars, and very earnest. “Within the framework of a formation novel, Ashley Wilkes is the immature…like, the idol of the adolescent girl, while Rhett Butler is the man, the real man, she must grow up to appreciate. But isn’t our theory that the satanic figure is the immature fantasy? That the heroine has to overcome the temptation posed by the devil in order to marry Adam Ordinary and be happy with him?”

“Selena, I think Tessa has outlined an interesting line of inquiry.” I turn to her with the most encouraging smile I can muster. But Selena has lost it. Instead of composing herself, she has been following our exchanges with apprehensive eyes, and she is not ready to respond. So I ad-lib to buy her time.

“Actually, I tend to think the opposite. Rhett Butler is the immature fantasy, not Ashley Wilkes, although the film would have you think otherwise, because it equates masculinity with the ability or willingness to dominate women, and other men. With Rhett you can be as irrational and high-maintenance as you want, and he’ll laugh at you, first, then bitch-slap you, then rape you. Which is all you wanted in the first place, of course, only you were too much of a princess to admit it.”

Cleveland is quietly chuckling in his seat, but I am warming to my topic.

“Ashley Wilkes, on the other hand, apart from being far more beautiful than Rhett Butler, in my humble opinion, has no time for bitches. The truth—” I wait for the commotion to die down. “The truth is that Ashley is bored by Scarlett on every level except the sexual, just as any other grown-up man would be bored by an adolescent girl on every level except the—well, anyway.”

I cut myself off when I see several alarmed faces staring at me and Cleveland hiding a grin behind his hand as he leans forward to cup his chin. I know him well enough by now to be able to tell that there are all sorts of inappropriate things he is not saying, and while I am struggling not to respond to something he has not actually said, I have a sudden vision of Cleveland in a gray Confederate uniform, or a brown cutaway, vest and white collar, or a blue flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to display his long, sinewy arms, his long, sinewy fingers…and that lean face, so sensitive, so intelligent that I am itching to grab him and f*ck him till he begs me to let him come.

Oh, I hate Englishmen.

This one in particular. After his customary flippancy early on, he does nothing to protect Selena from Beecher and his henchmen, who round on her till she caves in completely. That she does not burst into tears is about all, but her monosyllabic answers become so painful that I have to withdraw my mind from the situation and keep thinking shut the f*ck up to stop myself from intervening. It is like a deer being baited by blood-crazed hounds, with the rest of us standing by, careful to keep away from the fray.

When it is all over, we disperse quickly and quietly. I find myself walking back toward the Observatory with Cleveland, fuming.

“Why didn’t you say something?” I burst out.

“Sorry?”

He looks down at me as if he was only now realizing that I’m here.

“Back in the meeting! Why were these…historians allowed to annihilate Selena like that?”

The gray-dappled green eyes focus on me and narrow, with condescension or impatience, I can’t tell.

“Because no one stopped them,” he says.

“That’s what I mean! Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

I stare at him, confused. He’s evidently trying to provoke me, and I really don’t see why he should be doing that.

“I couldn’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m nobody! Because Beecher wouldn’t listen to me anyway! But if you had told him to belt up—”

“It was Selena’s job to do that.”

“Well, she tried—you could see that she was trying! It was our job to protect her! I have to shut up, but you could have shut him up!”

“Bring in the cavalry, you mean?”

We walk up the steps to the entrance and almost come to a halt. Is he going to open the door for me, or am I going to go first? Or have we decided to dispense with polite gestures altogether? My level of adrenaline is so high that I step forward and hold the door open for him; he walks in, and when he catches my eyes and cocks a sardonic eyebrow, my blood reaches boiling point.

“You were the only one there from whom Beecher would have taken it! Which means that you were the only one there who could have prevented the last ninety minutes from being a complete nightmare for one of our grad students, and a complete waste of time for everyone else!”

“You are making my knees buckle. Such a weight of responsibility.”

“Which you refuse to accept!”

“I do. Because I, unlike you, know how to choose my battles! Now listen! Listen, once and for all!”

The tone of his voice makes me turn round on the stairs, and my blood runs cold. Face to face with him, because he’s two steps lower down, I can see that I have managed to upset him. His lips are tight with anger and his eyes hard as green glass.

“I do not believe in letting graduate students paddle about the shallow end with water wings on! Sel—” He hushes himself, but that only seems to make him fiercer. “The student insisted that she was ready to present, and it was not for me to veto her! And before you point out that her paper was feeble, permit me to say that I knew that! I knew it, and I told her, but she would not listen! I have told her on two different occasions that she should not attempt a doctorate degree, but she would not listen!”

“But it was a shambles!”

“Yes, it was,” he agrees, breathing hard. “But so is the job-market situation in the Humanities. Even if she pulled through, she would never find an academic job out there that would suit her. She can’t teach, and she is neither mentally nor intellectually equipped to do top-notch research. That said, she is neither dumb nor lazy, and that was sufficient to secure her an excellent first degree. But she is simply not good enough to continue!”

“But how must she feel right now? It was irresponsible to let them trample her like that!”

“It’s equally irresponsible to allow someone unsuited to an academic career to waste her time in grad school. So she failed! She will go home, think it over, talk it over, and revise her dissertation! And if she doesn’t, she’ll fail again, and if she keeps failing, she’d better come up with Plan B, because she won’t make it in academia!” He pauses and looks at me, oddly. “What’s your Plan B?”

“Plan B?”

“What are you going to do if this doesn’t work out?”

“Are you talking about what if I don’t make associate?”

“Well, for the syntax of that sentence alone you should be blackballed.”

“No, but—but this isn’t about me! And it isn’t about this particular student’s potential as a young academic! This is about common decency!”

“Oh, bollocks!”

And he stomps past me, two steps at a time with his long legs, up the stairs and along the hallway to his office. Just leaves me standing there, swaying with adrenaline. A student comes down the stairs and avoids my eyes so clumsily that I know our fight was audible all through the staircase. I hurry up two flights of stairs to my office, hoping that I will make it into my little sanctuary before I burst into tears. I am in such a state, my hand is trembling so badly I can’t even fit the key into the lock.

What’s with this freakin’ door?

The key does not fit the lock. It isn’t my trembling fingers at all. The lock has been changed. I hadn’t noticed it right away, in my rush, but the handle is different, newer; the whole thing, lock, handle, and all, has been changed. Thirty-six hours after I scrubbed it to get the stench of motor oil off it. And no one told me.

If a last straw were needed, this would be it.

Up the stairs…up the spiral staircase. The door to the old observatory under the dome will be locked, too, bound to be; Selena and her demon lover won’t have left it open, but at least it’ll get me out of sight. I crouch at the top of the stairs by the heavy carven door that looks as if it had not been changed since the eighteen fifties. Lean against the wall among broken chairs and wooden casks, and slide down into a pathetic bundle.

It is pouring out of me. Floods of silent tears, when I hate crying, when I haven’t cried since my bubbe died last spring, and why the hell does Cleveland keep reminding me of my grandmother? When he looked at me back there on the stairs—What are you going to do if this doesn’t work out?—for a split second I saw my grandmother’s anxious face. But no one is going to look at me ever again with such affectionate concern and say “But are you happy, lemeleh?” It would be foolish, the supremest of all follies—to think that anyone will. Or would.

Or just did.

Tears of fury—God, yes! But not about Cleveland.

And I don’t even have a—I wipe my face and nose with the sleeve of my blouse, and detect, in the dusky light of the landing, a box of tissue paper wedged between two moving boxes. Chances are, there’s a rat living in there. Or a huge spider. Gingerly I push my fingers in and have to bite on a squeal; something hard touched my fingertips. A key. Not a flat key like the ones on my key ring; a metal skeleton key, like the key in a fairy story.

It does make me feel childishly implausible, but how can I indulge in a fit of Weltschmerz when I may be holding the key to the fabled Ardrossan observatory in my hand?

It is like stepping into the apse of a church. The dome is a ribbed vault divided into eight segments, each designed to be slid open by a long crank handle. The windows are as high as the ceiling—long, slim lancet windows all round, in keeping with the neo-gothic style of the building, the walls between covered by high bookcases. This is a marvelous space.

The bookcases are full of junk; there are piles of broken office chairs, a musty old sofa, and a few old tables. Wooden stepladders, half a dozen or more, to reach the telescopes and the higher shelves of the bookcases. I instinctively scan all visible surfaces for evidence of violence or debauchery; I don’t know what I thought I would find. In fact, there is nothing, nothing that I can see in the dusky light of early evening. Except—

I’ve still got the box of tissues in my hand, and what I thought was a white carton with little flowers on it is in fact a white carton with specks of dried blood on it.

Okay, so…what? All sorts of people with all sorts of clandestine or nefarious intentions are using the old observatory as their base? Whoever broke the windows on the fourth floor mopped up the blood from the gashes on his hand with tissue paper from this box, then hid the box on the top landing—why? Why not throw it into the Dumpster, too? Selena and her boyfriend have late-night tête-à-têtes up here, so it must have been they who hid the key in the box of tissues. Why not just take it away? The only reason for Selena and Mr. X not to pocket the key is that they know that other people are also using it and that these other people would become suspicious of them if the key went missing. At the same time—what if this third party suddenly happened upon them when they are in the middle of a tryst? Awkward. They hadn’t even closed the door behind them, yesterday evening, or I wouldn’t have seen the crack of light.

I don’t give a hoot. I couldn’t care less about who is doing it with whom in the various attics, basements, elevators, or broom cupboards on campus. Let them all go to hell. I want my bag and my coat, and then I want to go home.

Except I don’t know where that is.