The Englishman

chapter 18

SINCE MONDAY IS NOT A TEACHING DAY for me and I have no set appointments, I could stay at home, slip into a white sweater, white sweatpants, and woolly socks, abstain from food, drink, and sex (ha!), and have an informal, private Yom Kippur. Obeying the letter of the law would be easy this year. I’m too dejected to have appetites of any sort, and in a sullen way I would even enjoy the ordeal of enduring thirst. But in view of the past days’ events, it seems hypocritical to do teshuvah—pray to return to God and to a stricter observance of His laws—when I know that tomorrow I will still be sadly and stupidly infatuated with Giles Cleveland.

So I drive in. It is pouring down rain, and my butt is still a bit sore from my bike ride on Saturday. My plan is to sort out the mystery of the lock on my office door. I start with the department secretary.

“Lorraine, hello. Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have a key to my office? E-four twenty-nine.”

“Oh, sure, dear—forgot yours at home, did you?” She unlocks a cupboard in which there is a locked chest in which are stored all the keys of the department.

“No, I mean, a key to the new lock on my door. There’s a new lock on my office door, but I never got a key for it.”

“But that’s…not yet,” says Kathy, her assistant. “Remember Central Maintenance wrote an email saying some of the older locks will be changed?” She clicks open some emails, finds the one, and says triumphantly, “Yes, November, and it will affect offices with the numbers E-four-oh-six, E—well, anyway. But that’s next month.”

“Well, the lock on my office door was changed last Friday. Any idea how I might get hold of a key? Preferably today?”

“This is funny,” says Lorraine, rummaging in the key chest. “E-four-twenty-nine, you said? There’s no spare key here for E-four-twenty-nine.”

“I know, right?” Kathy pulls the metal box toward her. “It’s a mess in here. Professor Dancey was looking for a couple of keys last week, and they were missing, too.”

Dancey was looking for other people’s office keys?

Lorraine tells me that Dancey teaches on Monday afternoons but usually comes in just before his class starts, so it would be better if I spoke to him afterward. But my patience has run out.

“Professor Dancey? I know you’re teaching now, sir, but I spent the better part of the morning trying to get into my office. A new lock was fitted on Friday afternoon, but I never received notice of this, nor a key. So I’d be extremely grateful if—”

“Oh, then this must be it!” Dancey, who had been hanging up his coat and cleaning his black woolen sweater with an adhesive roll, reaches across his desk to where a padded envelope is sitting on top of a pile of books. He picks it up and rattles it. “This arrived on Friday afternoon when Lorraine had already gone.”

The envelope, baggy and dog-eared like all recycled office material, has Central Maintenance and Urgent written on it. Not urgent enough to inform me, apparently.

These are my plans for getting my ass fired from my tenure-track position at a national research university. Plan A: alienate the big-donor, conservative Christian clientele. Working on that. Plan B: start an affair with a married and tenured colleague who is also my academic mentor. Unlikely to be realized, as said colleague does not progress beyond very mild flirtation and comes to Sunday night drinking spree in his dog-walking gear. Plan C: drive into town, find a locksmith, and have the ancient key to the old observatory copied behind admin’s back. Check. I don’t even know why I want a duplicate of the key to the dome. Ineffectual spite, I guess. Why am I so determined to piss off my employer? Well, Your Honor, they started it! Armed, at last, with the key I fingered out of the (sealed and re-sealed?) envelope on Dancey’s desk, I enter my office with as much suspicion as the weakest link in the tenure chain may allow herself. What does it matter if anyone’s been in my office while I was locked out? It isn’t my private home, and if I keep anything private in my workplace, it is at my own risk.

Except that someone has been in my office. As far as I can tell, nothing has been taken, but why would someone lift up and turn over the library books on my desk? Someone picked up all the items on my desk and did not realize that my system of working through library books is that I put the ones I’m done with face down. I know for a fact that there was a face-down pile of four; the pile is still there, but it is facing up. Knowing that Crazy Corvin had a key to my office made me uncomfortable, but this is a brand-new lock. It wasn’t Corvin who snooped around in here.

Wonderful. So now I have a choice of at least four stomach-churning scenarios to worry over: my paycheck disaster, the intrusions into my office, the fact that I have not added a single sentence to my Notre Dame paper since Rosh Hashanah, and my imminent encounter with the woman I envy more than anyone else in the whole wide world.





“Ms. Cleveland is upstairs, but she knows she’s seeing you at half past.”

Liz, her administrative assistant, opens a door from the landing area into a waiting room with a suite of slim beige armchairs and a sofa. The office itself can be partitioned off by a sliding door, which is already half open. There is another sliding door, currently shut, on the opposite wall—evidently the other legal counselor’s office. It’s like being at an expensive dentist’s, including the Picasso prints on the walls and the potted ficus by the window. Actually, some root-canal work doesn’t sound so bad. I hear the door open and close in the adjoining room, and my stomach turns.

“Look, you can’t simply walk in here and assume that I’m going to make time for you! I’d like to see your face if I barged in on one of your lectures!”

“Would you prefer me to ring up your secretary and make an appointment? I can do that, if that’s what you want!”

Oh, please, God—don’t make me witness a fight between Giles Cleveland and his wife!

“Anyway,” he says, “this is urgent. Holly Ortega and the department want me to take over the chair from Nick.”

I should leave. I should wait for Liz to return and inform her that Ms. Cleveland is seeing someone else first, and discretion dictates that I wait out of earshot.

Do it. Get up. Leave the room.

“But you haven’t made full professor,” Amanda Cleveland says. She sounds defensive now, less exasperated than she did at first.

“Well, I sort of have, as both Holly and Elizabeth hastened to point out. I got the salary boost before I went to England. They’re promising me the full package now, if I hand in my stuff by Christmas.”

“Why can’t someone else do it?”

“Any suggestions?” he asks sardonically. “The only one who wants to do it is Matthew Dancey, which would be a disaster, particularly for MedRen Studies. I think he’s planning a putsch of some sort.”

“Then do it.” I don’t have to see her face to know that there is no conviction in this counsel.

“To clean up after yet another one of Nick’s messes? Like hell I will. And no, I do not relish the idea of revenge, gratifying as it was for about fifteen seconds.”

Revenge?

“I do not see why revenge needs to come into it.”

“Oh, it’s just a thought. Many a man would feel tempted to kick his wife’s lover in the balls if he gets the chance.”

Jumping cats!

Right, that’s it. If they find out I’ve been sitting next door and soaking up every word like a shamefaced sponge, Cleveland will get me fired before I can say “tenure review.” He will get me fired, and my body will be found years from now in the river, a bloated, water-logged corpse with a couple of volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary tied to its feet. Folio edition.

“So don’t take the chair. Giles, I am really busy. I’m supposed to be seeing someone right now. She’s probably—”

“I’m going to explain to Holly Ortega why I won’t do it.”

Another pause. I can only guess that Amanda is speechless with horror. I certainly am. Speechless and rooted to the spot.

“You can’t do that,” she says flatly.

“Yes, I can. To Holly, and to as many of my colleagues as necessary, because they are all convinced I’m merely shirking a tedious job.”

“You know as well as I do that Nick didn’t force himself on that girl! She’s just a hysterical little attention-seeker!”

“On the contrary, it would amaze me to hear that Nick has evolved enough to adhere to something as sophisticated as a sexual code of honor. But of course you have more insight into the matter than I have.”

“Giles…”

“No, forget it. I’ve been as civilized about the whole thing as I can—maybe too civilized. But this is where I draw the line!”

“You were glad I gave you an excuse to leave me!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“You weren’t even angry!”

“Then I wasn’t! I was too busy feeling like a complete failure because my wife cheated on me with the biggest wanker on campus!”

He’s sure as hell angry now.

“I didn’t think…about how much it would embarrass you, Giles,” she says in a very level voice. “And I never thought it would go on. I certainly never thought we’d be caught.”

“One never does, I suppose.” Giles, too, is calmer again, though still sardonic. The steam seems to have gone out of him a little. My stomach muscles unclench.

“If you’d taken the job at Stanford, none of this would ever have turned into a problem!” Amanda is audibly nettled by his acquiescence.

“I can’t believe you are seriously suggesting that it would have saved our marriage if I’d gone to California! It would have turned it into even more of a travesty! For f*ck’s sake, Mandy!”

“Look, Giles, I know you’re riled, but this is my office and I won’t have you using that kind of language!”

“I’ll swear as much as I like, thank you very much. And to make this as petty as possible, I was here first. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have got the job on your own merits, but the fact remains, you were a spousal hire! I made way for you and Nick by going to Stanford and by shifting my sabbatical forward, but enough is enough. I will not chair the English department while Nick is accused of raping one of our students! And I want my name back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My name. I want you to use your maiden name again.”

“Why? This is pure malice!”

“Not a bit of it. You’re not my wife anymore—well, as of any day now you won’t be my wife anymore, and you didn’t want to be my wife anymore. We’re done, and I think I may ask you to give up the use of my name without being accused of gratuitous cruelty.”

“But why do you have to advertise it all over campus?” She sounds more annoyed with him about this than about anything else so far. Frankly, I can see her point.

“What, our divorce or your adultery?”

“Oh, stop wallowing in self-pity just because you’re the wronged party in this, Giles!”

“I am not wallowing! I just want to be free of it!” he says stubbornly. “The whole bloody thing! And I don’t want people to think I’m married.”

“People? You mean students! So now you are going to—”

“F*ck,” he says. “Go on. Am I now going to f*ck our attention-seeking little snowflakes? No, I’m not. But anyone who looks up Cleveland and Ardrossan on the Internet will find us both and assume we’re married, and that irks me. So if you wouldn’t mind, I want to see Amanda Saunders on that door next time I look.”

“Giles, what is wrong with you?” Her voice, remarkably calm so far, rises in pitch. “You wouldn’t just be harming me but also yourself! Everyone would know!”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he says, ignoring her tone. “The last thing Holly and Elizabeth want is to besmirch Nick’s fair name any further. They wouldn’t blab. Nor Dancey, if he must know. Dancey least of all, no matter how much he’d like to drop me in it. They’ve been amazingly generous about my leaves of absence, so I need them to understand why I’m not going to help extinguish this fire.”

“Give me time to think. I need to—to talk to Daddy about this.”

“There is nothing for you to think about, and I don’t care what Robert says. I am merely here to give you warning that I am going to do this. Complain to Nick about it, not to me. This isn’t about revenge. I don’t give a flying toss about the whole thing anymore.”

“The breakup was your fault! I never wanted a divorce! If my parents hadn’t made me—”

“My fault?” There is a loud thump; I think it was his fist on a table top. “You suck the campus dick in your office, and I’m supposed to take that on the chin and shut up about it, just to save appearances? You always did take me for a blundering idiot, didn’t you? Is that why you married me, Amanda?”

Instinctively I check Liz’s silhouette through the glass pane in the door. She can’t not have heard Cleveland’s flare-up. Her head turns, she peers through the glass, sees me sitting on the sofa where she left me. For one tense second we stare at each other, and with all my might I will her to sit down again. No such luck.

“What’s going on here? Where’s Ms. Cleveland?”

“Ms. Saunders,” I correct her weakly. I’m toast anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Hurried murmurs from the next room, the sound of a chair scraping along the floor.

Giles stops in his tracks as if he had collided with an invisible barrier.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

The mysteries of sexual attraction. How—how on earth—could any woman even contemplate sex with Nick Hornberger when she can have this man? It’s clearly not true that he doesn’t care anymore. His blood is up, and it is shocking to me how intensely I respond to that. I expected to be mortified with embarrassment, and I am. Embarrassed, a little afraid, and mightily turned on. Giles Cleveland has come out of his shell.

“Don’t let ’em screw you!” He darts his finger at me as if he wanted to recruit me for military service.

I nod obediently at this harsh order and—while I am still looking up at him, half startled, half playing at being startled—the air congeals between us.

Will you?

No, I didn’t say it out loud. But I might as well, because he heard it, and it flusters him terribly. His chest is heaving with emotion, and he is staring at me as if panicked by what he read in my face.

This time I am sure. I am calm. Not physically—my hands are cold with sweat, my chest hurts with excitement—but in my mind I am calm. I mean it.

If you want, I will make you forget your humiliation at the hands of a silly woman and a man who thinks with his cock. Oblivion may only last for a few minutes, but I promise you it will be sweet and intense.

Screw me, Cleveland.





“How much of that did you hear?” Amanda asks the big white crystal on her desk when we have sat down.

“Not much. Almost nothing, in fact,” I say deliberately. “I am very hard of hearing…well, can be.”

It works in mobster movies. I wonder whether it also works in the office of an Associate Vice President of Finance and Administration. Apart from the heightened color in her cheeks, Amanda Cleveland, née Saunders, betrays no sign of agitation. My natural sense of tact made it difficult, at first, to look her in the face when she asked me to take a seat at her desk; she would join me in a couple of minutes. And she did. A couple of minutes later she entered her office from the hallway, and if I didn’t know that she was just involved in a shouting match with her soon-to-be ex-husband, I would never have guessed it. This is one cool chick.

Chic, too, in a tight-fitting, pale green skirt suit and a charcoal top underneath that shows off her cleavage. And she may actually be a real blonde, styled in that medium-long way that looks as if she was wearing spaghetti tongs on her head, its teeth framing her jaw and chin in a many-layered wave. Put together hits it precisely. She is very slim, very good-looking, well-groomed and self-assured: exactly the sort of girl I envied at school and college. Today, if I were a man, I wouldn’t even attempt to get close to her. No point, no joy.

And yet this is a woman who had quickies in her office—in her office!—with Nick Hornberger. I try to picture her, hot and tousled, her slim legs wrapped around Hornberger’s no doubt hairy football player’s torso. Or maybe he would hike up her skirt, bend her over her desk, and take her from behind? Did she actually enjoy having an affair with him? It seems so improbable. And what is it with that man, anyway? What kind of potion does he ply them with to make these females—babes, all—lift their skirts for him? I think I understand what draws a certain kind of student to a certain kind of philandering professor. But Amanda Cleveland is no attention-hungry co-ed who knows that she carries her best assets in her blouse. No, I don’t get it.

She is a professional. I show her the original letter stating salary and benefits, my reply bidding for a higher sum in view of my publications, a print-out of the email that agreed to this higher sum, my contract and my paycheck. She takes her time reading everything, and I wonder whether she is merely very thorough, buying time, or finding it hard to focus.

“This was signed by Greg Newburgh,” she informs me, and I shrug and nod, too preoccupied to talk.

Irene would slap me if she knew how little I am interested in the material issue here—my money!—because I can’t help wondering, is this what Giles fancies, or is this what Giles doesn’t fancy? Used to fancy, but not anymore? No matter, really, because I couldn’t be like her if I tried, and the hair and the cleavage are the least of it.

Ex , ex , ex!

The syllable had been drowned out by the shouting and the aggravation and the sudden flare of sexual energy and the necessity to concentrate on figures and contracts. But in the hush of rustling paper and the clicking of her keyboard as she opens my file, it is echoing in my head like an alphorn.

Giles Cleveland is getting a divorce.

“You’re right, Dr. Lieberman. There is a discrepancy here, and I am for the moment at a loss to account for it. I must ask you to give me some time to look into it.”

What a self-righteous cow I’ve been, taking sides where I had neither the right nor the necessary information to do so! Wife cheats on husband with senior colleague, colleague flutters on to graduate student in the manner of a testosterone-driven butterfly. Said student accuses him of sexual violence, husband is given the opportunity to be as unhelpful as a department chair can be in such a case. Husband refuses, preferring the opportunity to come clean about his wife’s fling to the college authorities.

WTF?

Giles must still be mightily pissed off about his wife’s infidelity to prefer humiliating her to settling his score with Hornberger. I think he overestimates his colleagues’ discretion. Someone always blabs. He will be known as a cuckold all over campus, cuckolded by the very man who is currently suspected of having raped a student. How is that better than chairing the department and washing his hands of Hornberger once the case is dealt with in a court of law, as it surely will be? He must be driven by revenge. No other motive makes any sense at all.

Why won’t you take the department chair?

I can’t tell you that.

What he also didn’t tell me is that he is divorced. About to be divorced. Separated from his wife, a free man! And indeed, why would a man who doesn’t even change out of his dog-walking pants before he meets a woman in a bar tell that woman that he is as good as single? No wonder he looked so disconcerted just now when I gave him my best come-hither look! Whoever he is dating now that he is rid of Amanda Saunders, she is sure to be cool and blond and enormously stacked. And who was that big-mouthed yuchna who told him that she saw the hole while he saw the bagel? Well, the hole in this bagel is that he did not invite me into his home for tea! Whatever it was that sparked the impulse, he regretted it almost instantly. He did not want me to know that he is divorced.

O soul, be changed into small water-drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!

I cannot remember when I was last so comprehensively, so painfully ashamed.





The last thing I need right now is another clash with Dolph Bergstrom. He overruns his sessions most weeks, but usually he just runs into the transition time, not into my class period. Today my class is once more still loitering in the hallway when I turn up. The light of a beamer is flickering in the darkened classroom; I recognize Peter Fonda in his psychedelic shirt pressing his face against the stone statue in the cemetery. I mentally re-run the film and calculate it is at least another five minutes until Wyatt’s bike is blown up. Five more minutes of film, wrapping up, packing up—what the heck does Dolph think he is doing?

Whatever I do, I must do it with conviction.

“All right, people—we can’t barge in on the ending of Easy Rider. Wouldn’t be cool. I’ll start the session in ten minutes sharp. See you back here in seven.”

Seven minutes to hide in the toilets, my fists pressed into my eyes. When I return, I can tell by their silence and their faces that my apparent sangfroid has created a certain sense of expectation, gleeful in some cases, apprehensive in others. For a moment I feel like the narrator in George Orwell’s story about a police officer in Burma who is goaded by a crowd of natives into shooting an elephant. But my job is to teach them Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, not to mud-fight a colleague.

A “colleague” who, five-and-a half-minutes into my class period, is still holding forth about the contradictions of avant-garde film-making in late nineteen-sixties Hollywood.

“Excuse me, Dr. Bergstrom—so sorry to interrupt. You’ll have noticed it’s way past the end of your class period.”

Without waiting for his reply, I usher my lot in but almost lose my cool when he says that he has been showing a film and needs another couple of minutes. My students, with the deference to authority that doesn’t cease to amaze me, stop in their tracks and look at me for their cue.

There is never any point in throwing a temper tantrum.

“But a couple more minutes won’t do justice to Easy Rider, now, will they? Maybe leave it till Thursday and discuss it properly?”

Dolph is in my face as if I had interrupted him at a particularly tricky bit of brain surgery.

“Now you’re telling me how to teach? Listen, if I want your advice, I’ll ask you!”

My instinct is to go for him, but my bad angel has been doused so effectively by the icy water of eavesdropping that it lacks the élan to egg me on to a foolhardy confrontation.

“I wouldn’t dare. But this isn’t your time and place to teach, I’m afraid, Dolph, but mine, and I’d be glad if you gave me the chance to do so.”

A good speech, if I say so myself. It makes Dolph close his laptop with an angry klop and his class sigh with relief. My New York students would by now have formed a ring around us, chanting for their champions—well, metaphorically speaking, anyway. Ardrossan students are made uncomfortable by clashes between their authority figures. Ignoring me completely, Dolph packs up the projector and turns around to wipe the board as if he was alone in the room and had all the time in the world. Then he picks up the board markers, one by one, and sticks them into his back pocket. It doesn’t help that bubbling up through my stupor I feel the urge to laugh about his absurdly territorial behavior.

“Wait.” I hold him back very affably when he finally collects his papers and books and shoves them into his bag. “You forgot to pee on the desk. Go on. You know you want to.”

This provokes a double-take as he stares at me, thunderstruck. Then he grabs his belongings, storms out and—get this!—slams the door behind himself. His last remaining students rush out meekly, and Logan, of all people, gives me a cheer of triumph that makes me bite on a smile.

A*shole.





I drive home at a snail’s pace. My brain has slowed down, my whole body has slowed down in the attempt to come to grips with what I learned today. Not that I have fallen in love with Giles Cleveland—I knew that already. But that there is no limit to how wrong I can still be about a man, at the great old age of twenty-nine years and three hundred and forty days. How selectively blind to his signals. This is a man enjoying his new-won liberty! Yes, he made that little joke to the barman about me being his wife. Yes, he enjoyed, for a moment or two, the idea of picking up a young woman in front of his cabin at the lake. But that whole conversation at the lake, which made me feel so warm and happy—which for the first time made me feel as if he actually liked me—is now overshadowed by the glaring absence of one simple sentence.

My wife and I are getting a divorce.

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting in my car in front of the farm’s gate when my phone bleeps.

Call me! Great news! Deb.

Oh, God, no. Not another pregnant woman! Debbie has been joking that if editing the pregnancy essays isn’t going to make her conceive, she will go for IVF. I would be very happy for her if she could save herself that whole ordeal, but this is not the best moment for me to rejoice with her. But I owe Debbie. So I go inside, get a glass of wine, and call England.

“Queen Mary College is going to advertise a full-time position for someone who does Ren. Lit. as well as something modern to do with Anglophone literature! I spoke to Ewan Buchanan; he says Anglo-Jewish definitely qualifies, and he says hi, and you would be a fool if you didn’t apply!”

Debbie is a little breathless after this outpouring. As am I.

“Woah, hold your horses, Crocker. Did you tell Ewan that I have a tenure-track position at Ardrossan?”

“Yes, I did. He said, Where?”

“God, you Brits are so arrogant.”

Debbie chortles into the phone but says nothing.

“’Kay.”

“What?”

“I’ll apply.”

“Seriously?”

“No, I’m kidding. Yeah, seriously!”

“Anna, is something wrong?”

“Yeah.” I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to sit on the couch in Debbie’s and Dave’s living room with a mug of milky tea and a biscuit, or stand and shuckel with the half-asleep Jonah against my shoulder. “D’you think I’m pretty?”

“Oh, Anna,” she sighs. Then we both burst into laughter.

I give her a sixty-second version of events, and Debbie points out that Cleveland has evidently turned out to be the jerk I took him for at our first meeting.

“No, see—he isn’t. Me refusing to read the message he was sending doesn’t make him a jerk. Not fancying me doesn’t make him a jerk.”

“Yes, it does!”

“Bless you, but no, it doesn’t. He’s probably seeing someone else, that’s all. Spoiled for choice, that one, for sure.”

“So what was your plan before you found out he didn’t tell you he is divorced but seeing someone else? Start sleeping with a senior colleague? If that was the idea, I suggest you find yourself a Southern pothead and do a repeat performance of Ciaran, because—”

“Please, don’t. Look, I’ll apply for that job at Queen Mary and meanwhile I’ll lust after my mentor a little, okay? No harm done, either way. End of debate.”