The Englishman

chapter 3

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT IS HOUSED in the old Observatory, a huge red-and-black building dominated by an octagonal tower with a decrepit-looking dome. The observatory for which the building was named was housed up there, but nobody goes up there now, I was informed on my campus tour. The tower contains the elevator and, snaking round the elevator shaft, the main staircase, a grand stone-tiled construction that gives access to administration and offices on the eastern side, classrooms on the western side, and the department library, an auditorium, and a cafeteria to the south. Fantastically different from University Place, New York City. Prettier, of course, no competition, but I hope it isn’t going to make me feel claustrophobic.

Lorraine Forster, the department’s administrative assistant, asks whether I’d like a glass of tea and points out firmly that she is “Mrs.” not “Ms.” Forster. They make a remarkable pair, Mrs. Forster and Professor Mayfield. Both are, in their different ways, well-coiffed, well-preserved brunettes, but while Lorraine seems to live on carrots and coffee, Elizabeth Mayfield is an imposing woman in layered silk with the bosom and the girth of an opera singer. The voice, too.

“Anna—good to see you again. Welcome to Ardrossan.”

If I have half this woman’s poise and authority by the time I turn fifty, I will consider myself extremely lucky.

“Hello, Professor Mayfield. Thanks—I’m still a little stunned. This place is so beautiful it’s unreal!”

She smiles like someone who hears this all the time about her workplace, but I know it’s still expected that I say it.

“Yes, we are fortunate. Now, I’m guessing you’re impatient to see your new office—” My beaming smile elicits a chuckle of mild amusement. “Well, I’ll have to keep you a little with some administrative business. I’m handing over the chair at the end of the month, but because I chaired your search committee, I agreed to oversee your initiation at Ardrossan.”

“No hot radiators or bottles of Jack Daniel’s, I hope.”

“I beg your pardon?” She looks up from my file, as if she thought she had misheard me.

“Nothing, sorry. Who will take over from you?”

“Nick Hornberger.” She focuses her attention back on my file, and I wonder whether her terseness is significant. Hornberger was on my search committee, too, and he baffled me. With his close-cropped hair and the physique of an aging linebacker, he looks nothing like a paper-shuffling administrator, let alone the reconstructed male I had assumed him to be after surveying his list of publications. His most recent book is called Rakes, Rogues and Renegades, an unpardonable title for anything but a paperback with two pairs of nipples and swathes of red silk on the cover. In fact, it purports to be a study of masculinity—or, as the subtitle puts it more correctly, masculinities—in the Old South.

Perhaps it is his understanding of antebellum gentlemanliness that made him touch my arm or my back every time we passed through a door on my campus tour. I don’t think there is any harm in Hornberger; he is just a middle-aged macho who needs to flirt with younger women. But I am thankful that it is Elizabeth Mayfield who seems to be taking me under her wing.

“I think Giles Cleveland would be the right person to take you under his wing,” she says in her placid alto voice.

“Oh—uh—that’s—great.”

“Do you know Giles?”

“N-No. Well, I know of him, of course, and I heard him at a conference once, but I haven’t met him.”

Giles Cleveland, associate professor of Renaissance Literature and director of the Early Modern Studies program, has, in the last few years, turned into a force to be reckoned with among scholars of the English Renaissance. A good choice as a mentor, as regards his scholarship. But he is also a bit of an oddball. An Englishman born and raised, he came to Harvard as a postdoc and never went back home. I heard a rumor that he would go to Stanford, but apparently he is still here. Now in his early forties, he is reputed to be charming but difficult, an interesting and entertaining speaker at conferences, but I have heard people say about him that he is an embodiment of English arrogance, bringing civilization to the colonials. He is definitely not popular with everyone. Elizabeth seems to think she is doing me a favor. I jolly well hope she is right.

“We had most of the little offices on the fourth floor painted during the vacations.” She looks up and smiles. “But your humble abode might benefit from a quick sweep and wipe. You could ask the cleaning staff to put you on their list, but frankly, I wouldn’t advise it. Everyone is coming back right now and finding that their offices need cleaning, and—well, you know what it’s like. They’d probably make it up there in December.”





The next day I put my home improvement on hold, chuck rubber gloves, dustpan, liquid soap, and rags into a plastic bucket, put on jeans and t-shirt again, and go on another nesting mission. Appropriate to their insignificance in the larger scheme of things, assistant professors are located on the top floor, like a mixture between children and servants in the upper-class Victorian household. I am comfortable with that. I reckon it will be much cozier up here, with the other assistant profs, the adjuncts and the graduate assistants, than downstairs with the—um—grown-up folk.

My office is small—a third the size of the study at the cottage—but it has a proper desk, a filing cabinet, and floor-to-ceiling shelves that need scrubbing, and—oh, glory!—leaded windows. The only flaw in the set-up is that the whole room is clogged up with dozens of plastic bags, boxes, folders, hardcover volumes of journals I’ve never heard of, stacks of what seem to be old student essays—Katie Clough, 1/8/1985, I read on one—and piles of overhead transparencies.

“You must be joking. This?” I ask the janitor who unlocks the room for me and is making me sign for the key.

He checks the small print on the sheet.

“’Fraid so. Lieberman, E-four-twenty-nine. This is it, ma’am. You can phone for garbage disposal, extension thirty-three twenty-two. But they won’t go on and empty the room for you, they’ll just leave a big trash can.” He shrugs and leaves me to my own devices.

I blow the dust off the grubby phone on the desk and call admin. “Mrs. Forster? Anna Lieberman here. Oh, you’re the intern…Katie, right. Not Katie Clough, by any chance? No, of course not. Sorry. The thing is, Katie, I’m upstairs in my office, but it’s full of books and paper, and some of it seems to be old essays. I need to know what to do with them.”

Katie promises to ask Mrs. Forster to call me back, which she does forty minutes later.

“Your office is full of paper, dear? But that can’t be—oh. You’re in four twenty-nine? That’s—wait a moment—” She covers the mouthpiece with her hand and goes on speaking; then she is back, a little rushed. “Actually, Dr. Lieberman, Professor Mayfield was wondering whether you could spare her a few minutes.”

“Now? I’m in the middle of cleaning out my office, only I don’t know what to do with—”

“Anna.” Professor Mayfield takes over the phone. “I saw you drive in earlier. I don’t mean to inconvenience you, but if you have a moment, this would be a good time to meet Giles.”

Oy gevalt!

“Gosh! Thanks, Elizabeth.” I was given to understand that I might address Professor Mayfield by her first name but to play it by ear with the other senior professors. “That’s very kind of you, but I just came in to bring some books and clean the place. I’m not—dressed.”

But Elizabeth has no time for time-wasters. When I arrive at her office two minutes later, a short, sharp double-take indicates that I have committed my first faux pas. I bite on an impulse to protest—after all, she told me to scrub my office, and now she slaps me for not doing it in silk and cashmere? Vowing never again to assume that I am off-duty when I am on campus, I slink along the hall in Elizabeth’s wake.

Giles Cleveland, of all people. I had planned to be introduced to Giles Cleveland when I was at my most professionally professorial, cool and well-groomed. I would have my contacts in and not have my hair in an untidy ponytail and most probably dirt under my fingernails, wearing jeans, a little t-shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. But unless I want to risk alienating Elizabeth Mayfield, I cannot dive into an unlocked office or the ladies’ restroom and pretend I was swept up by Martians. It takes us about three minutes to reach the garden end of the hallway where Cleveland has his office.

God give I don’t have sweat marks under my armpits.

“Giles would have been on your search committee, of course, but he’s just back from a sabbatical.”

Oh, great. The man is probably peeved as hell that he didn’t get to select the newbie in his subfield!

“Actually, Elizabeth, before we go in—I have a question about my off—”

“You know he’s English, don’t you?” she says before she knocks once on the half-open door and pushes me in.

Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?

I wonder whether in a decade or two my sparsely-furnished little office will also look more like a living room than a workplace. Cleveland has a shabby but comfortable-looking leather sofa in his, a big rug on the floor and lots of picture frames on the walls. I am too nervous to take them in properly, but there is a beautiful set of medieval illuminations. And nature—water, mountains, trees. Perhaps Scotland, or Canada.

“Giles, I’ve brought our new assistant professor to meet you. Anna Lieberman.”

“Professor Cleveland…”

In a split second I debate with myself whether to extend my hand or not, and decide on a gut feeling that I will not. Reserve seems a better strategy here than familiarity. He sits at his desk—not a particularly tidy desk—and looks reluctant even to rise from his chair, let alone to shake my hand. Eventually he does get up, and my heart beats faster, nervousness becoming tinged with alarm. Tall I knew him to be, but up close his six-foot-something towers above my five-foot-four like Gandalf over a Hobbit. A Celt, with light eyes and dark hair gone prematurely gray. There is nothing remarkable about his appearance, except that a tall man, halfway between gangly and gaunt, will always look good in light brown cotton pants and a blue shirt, open at the neck and rolled up at the sleeves. Next to him I look like a complete klutz. I am furious that I have allowed Elizabeth Mayfield to put me at such a disadvantage.

I nerve myself to smile up into his face. His features are lean and regular but not wildly handsome, and there is nothing charming about him at all when he looks down at me—on me, too—with that particularly English brand of polite dislike and says, “Dr. Lieberman. How do you do. I was…told of your appointment.”

The sound of that well-educated, faintly nasal English voice hits me in the middle of my body and contracts the muscles of my womb in a spasm of response.

I feel a spate of explanations and justifications rushing to my tongue. I want him to know that although I have been foisted on him I am sure that we will get along well, that I will do my best to honor the confidence the college has shown in me. But I say none of these things. Could not, because my tongue is in knots, and do not want to, either, suddenly, because he is so pompous and unwelcoming to a junior colleague who really cannot help the situation at all.

“How do you do, sir.”

He blinks, as if taken aback. “I assume you’ve been well looked after?”

“Yes, sir, thank you.”

“Right. Well, then…” Get the hell outta here, bitch. He does not say it out loud, but I can see the words forming behind his forehead. Evidently Cleveland hasn’t been told yet that he is to play Mother Goose to this gosling.

“Can you spare a few minutes, Giles? The least we can do is make sure Anna has a smooth start, and I was hoping you’d show her the ropes.” There is an edge in Elizabeth’s voice now, a note of admonishment, which he hears and, to my surprise, heeds. He comes down from his high horse and suddenly looks very much younger. He looks at a loss, almost vulnerable, with his soft gray hair curling in wisps behind his ears, and his broad, lean, boyish shoulders.

“By all means. Dr. Lieberman, won’t you sit down?”

It is all I can do not to clutch Elizabeth’s skirt to beg her not to leave me alone with him, but she closes the door behind herself and we are alone. In very non-companionable silence. He points toward the sofa, which has clearly been chosen to make people feel small. Its seat is very deep, so I can either perch on the edge, looking nervous, or sit back, in which case my feet will hardly touch the floor and I will look like a five-year-old. I choose a mid-position, put my bunch of keys on the low table in front of me and hope Cleveland will not see my hairy little Hobbit-feet.

He stands over me, reluctant, a very remote fortress, like Isengard.

“Would you care for a cup of tea? Hot tea, I should say.”

Actually, I want to get this over with as quickly as possible. But you only have one chance to make a first impression, and when a senior colleague offers you a drink, you accept. Besides, I have to acknowledge the gesture of an Englishman making an effort.

The water in the kettle on the sideboard apparently just boiled, so he is busy about the cups and teabags for no more than half a minute. Half a minute during which I can surreptitiously observe him. His hands and feet—his feet naked in leather boat shoes—are a fraction too large for his body. He must have been one of those loosely-knit youths who are a little embarrassed about shooting up to their full height. Middle age has tightened his frame, but I can still see the awkward boy in his hands and shoulders.

“Do you take sugar? I don’t have any artificial sweetener, I’m afraid.” He still has his back turned to me, but I am sure that this is a jab.

“No, just milk, thank you. I suppose you’ve got milk?”

At this, he casts me a quick, suspicious glance, and I can’t suppress a smile and a shrug. Can’t live in England for years without picking up some habits.

“Sure, I’ve got milk,” he says and surprises me by answering my smile. It is a smile of extraordinary attractiveness—bright, young and full of humor.

Just as well, perhaps, that it doesn’t last.

He sets down our two mugs—I get a fine bone china one, with a William Morris motif and a chipped rim—and swivels his chair by a hundred and eighty degrees so that he faces away from his desk and toward the sofa.

“Are they making you go to those torturous New Faculty Orientation events?”

One ankle on the opposite thigh, he balances his mug somewhat precariously on the inside of his knee.

“Yes, that’s next week, spread over two days.” “Torturous” is probably the correct word, but it wouldn’t do for me to agree with him on this.

“Well, if there’s anything of that nature—where to find things and how to work things—ask the other people on tenure track, or the TAs.”

And don’t come bothering me!

“I hear ya.”

“Do come to me,” he goes on, glaring at me with those light eyes, “if you ever run into trouble with senior colleagues or admin.”

“Well, sir, funny you should mention th—”

“You have settled your teaching, haven’t you? Be an unfortunate omission if not, seeing as term starts in a week’s time.”

“I was asked to teach the first-year course on English Comedy this semester, and—”

“Have you made any changes to the syllabus?”

No idea whether yes or no would be the right answer, so I answer truthfully.

“Just a few.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I prefer The Rivals to The School for Scandal, but—”

“What about She Stoops to Conquer?”

“I’d rather not.” Too late I notice my blunder.

“Oh, I think stooping is all right,” he says dryly. “As long as you don’t bend over backward.”

The shock of hearing him play on my inadvertent reply sends a hot flash through my body; it might have been a joke, even an inept attempt at flirting. But his voice is cold with hostility, and the image so violent; he isn’t inviting me to laugh with him at all. In one fell swoop he has put his sharp pencil right on the sore spot of every young, tolerably attractive female academic—in fact, every young, tolerably attractive female professional: the implication that we achieve success by way of the casting couch. And the really devious thing about it is that it is usually no more than an insinuation, which you can’t defend yourself against without coming across like a defensive, neurotic cow.

So I keep my mouth shut and try to weather the insult like a flower weathers a storm: hunch up and wait till it’s over. And then a really strange thing happens: While I am pretending that I am merely an uninvolved bystander, my eyes stray over the objects cluttering the table in front of me: a pile of unopened letters, a pile of new books (probably review copies sent to him by hapless postdocs), my bunch of keys with its Royal Shakespeare Company dangly, my half-empty mug, his mug, with his hand…with his fingers…with his long, hard fingers wrapped round it. He grips it more tightly and the bones ripple across the back of his hand, the muscles in it flex, and so do the muscles deep in my belly, the muscles that sooner or later atrophy in any academic environment. I stare at his hand, and my body seems to anticipate its touch, and to anticipate it with keen impatience. Like a bolt of lightning that hits me in the solar plexus, I suddenly feel those hands on my skin, clasping my waist much more tightly than the tea mug, bending me over backward on this shabby leather sofa…

I am reeling under the sudden conviction that all this talk—all these words between Professor Cleveland and myself, cagey and aloof on both sides—is completely beside the point, because what we really should be doing is—unthinkable. Except I am thinking it.

I look up quietly, my mind in a whirl, and I say nothing. I don’t know what to say, and Cleveland almost apologizes. His eyes flicker and the groove between his eyes deepens—the pained look of a man about to apologize.

Of course he doesn’t.

“What’s—” He clears his throat. “What’s your take on Renaissance drama, Dr. Lieberman? I suppose you are a feminist new historicist?”

“Of course I am. Isn’t everybody, these days?” I can be blasé, too, if sufficiently provoked.

He is still staring at me, and I could swear that there is a grin lurking in the light eyes, and my chest expands in anticipation. But then he hides his face behind his mug, and I feel as if he had pushed me away.

“Only I’d like to coordinate my course requirements with my colleagues, particularly with Tim Blundell, who will be teaching English Comedy II next semester. I’ve no mind to become the Nasty Newbie by making them read or write more than they have to in other first-year classes, or—”

“Didn’t Hornberger take it upon himself to instruct you in this matter?”

“No, why—” I am saying the wrong thing here, aren’t I? “—why should he?”

“Well, you would naturally turn to him, seeing as he’s our new chair.”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Christ, woman, will you stop calling me sir!”

Driven by my particular demon, I grin manically and do my Marcie-and-Peppermint-Patty impersonation.

“Yes, sir.”

He stares at me, still caught up in his irritation, and inwardly I quail at my audacity. Play with me! I’m nice! Come out of there and play with me!

His gaze begins to waver and that impossibly attractive smile flits across his face.

“All right. What are you going to do in the other one?”

“Third- and fourth-year concentration, Paradise Lost.” My voice is squeaky, for a number of reasons.

He is scribbling away on a clipboard that he rests against his hunched-up knee. I don’t even know whether his notes have anything to do with me, or whether this interview is conducted on the side of more important matters.

“No, I think not…”

“But I’ve taught Milton before, I’m perfectly capable of—”

“Dr. Lieberman, I don’t doubt that you are…perfectly capable.” He is still scribbling, unaware that I am becoming increasingly capable of hitting him where it really hurts. “Save it, you can do Milton next year. Don’t you have something a little more sweet ’n’ fun? Something you can pull out of your hat?”

I push my hands under my thighs in a gesture that must seem childish to him, but I desperately need to steady myself. “Parody and satire? I taught that last winter at NYU.”

“We won’t hold that against you. And?”

“I—I concentrated on the motifs and discourses of courtly love and how they were subverted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In carnival, for instance, or in the sonnet. The process of a genre’s exhaustion, and how parody can infuse new life into it.”

“Subversion, no end of subversion, but not for us,” he quotes. And that is not a smile. That is a sneer.

I can feel a damp patch forming between my shoulder blades.

“The subversive thrust of parody may be out of our reach, I agree, but we can analyze the inversion, and the…well, as Bakhtin says, the processes by which high and noble ideas were degraded to the level of the body, to the digestive and reproductive systems.”

“Food and sex, you mean.” He is looking straight at me for a change, but I can’t tell whether he is deliberately provoking me or merely impatient with my display of theory.

“Food and sex…yes, that—yes.”

“Do one on parody, then, and Paradise Lost next year. What is your…thing on?”

I am so bewildered by his interruptions and his oscillations between humor and hauteur that it takes me a couple of seconds to latch on.

“My what? Oh, my dissertation! Early modern civic culture. Urban processions, drama, ritual…that sort of thing.”

“See that you finish it within the next couple of years.”

“I have finished it. The ‘thing.’ If that’s what you mean.”

“No, that’s not what I mean! Even Hornberger wouldn’t hire someone who hadn’t finished her dissertation! I meant publish it.”

“I have published it. As good as. It’s been with the readers at Cambridge University Press for about a month, and of course I don’t know how long their list of queries will be, but for now it’s out of my hands.”

The feeling of being unjustly treated gives me the courage to look him straight in the eyes. They aren’t blue at all but green, like seawater, with a thin scar running from the corner of the left eye across his temple to his ear. He seems even more Celtic to me, with those light eyes gleaming like the holy wells on Avalon. He has a mercurial energy, a kind of quicksilvery passion that makes him very attractive—exciting, even—but boy, do I see where he gets his reputation for being difficult!

Satisfied, I want to lean back but remember just in time that if I recline on this sofa, I will be practically horizontal. So I smirk sitting up and wait for him to come back.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the rush?”

Funny. That is what my grandmother, my darling bubbe, also asked when I told her that I was planning to hand in my book within the next six months. She was dying then, and one of her most urgent concerns was to leave knowing that my life was working out. “Will that make you happy?” she asked, anxiously. And I laughed and said, “Yes, of course it will! It’s what I want!”

It is what I want.

“I don’t see anything rushed about wanting to have a book publication to my name by the time I turn thirty! How else was I to stand a chance in the scramble for a tenure-track position? I’m relatively old as it is!” I have to attack him, or the wet film on my eyes will not go away.

“Two book publications.” Well, whaddayaknow. He has looked at my CV. “You’re a workaholic!”

Words fail me. Given that I have spent half my life working toward a job at a good university at a time of economic recession and in a discipline that is notoriously overrun, this is a ludicrous observation.

“Well…duh!” is all I can manage by way of a response.

“So instead of using this summer to recharge your batteries in order to be fit for a new job, you slaved away at your desk to get a book out that could easily have waited another year or two. I don’t see the sense in that.” He shifts in his chair, his long legs twitch, but it isn’t embarrassment at his own audacity to judge what is really no concern of his at all, it is anger. Impossible. He can’t be angry with me.

“I just…wanted it out of the way,” I stutter. “It’s a load off. And I think that’ll make it easier for me, here. Start a new phase.”

“But don’t you see, you—” He cuts himself off in exasperation. “You were sittin’ pretty without this stunt! You have to learn to pace yourself, or you’ll be burnt out by the time you’re thirty!”

Something is very wrong here. This is the second time Cleveland is about to make me cry. And this apart from the fact that he is making me want to climb onto his lap and—do something. I don’t exactly know what. Touch him?

“I’ll be thirty in three months. Thanks for the warning, but I think I’ll be okay. Sir.”

“You should get David Bergeron to have a look at your book.” Scribbling on his sheet of paper again.

“David has offered to review it for the Shakespeare Quarterly.”

“Has he.” Same tone of voice. Scribbling. “And what does David think of it?”

“He thinks it’s crap.” The word and my frosty voice make him look up again, startled. The blood rushes to my head, but I am in a panic of self-defense, too upset to care. “Yeah, he’s going to waste four hundred words panning the book of a total nobody. As one does. You know.”

The seawater eyes, deep-set under their grizzled brows, are glistening with icy resentment.

“Does one? Well, Professor Lieberman, I think we’ve settled the most pressing matters—don’t let me keep you. I’m sure you must be very…busy.”

Well, fine. Not only will there be a snake in the grass in my new-found academic Eden, it has already reared its ugly head. Except—not all that ugly. Squatting on the floor of my li’l office a few minutes later, I wait as the muscles in my body unclench, slowly. I can’t remember when I last received such a pasting. My job interviews, by comparison, were walks in the park. But then if a search committee turns out to be a bunch of jerks, you shrug and delete that place from your list of desirable prospects. This is different; I really wanted Giles Cleveland to like me. I still do, except it is all a lot more confusing than it was an hour ago.

When I reach for the bottle of water in my rucksack, my fingers are trembling. Okay, so Cleveland won’t be a friend; that is a pity but no big deal. It would have been nice to network with him, but it is not as if I need him to get tenure.

Keep your head down, smile, publish, and everything will be all right.

“What are you doing here?”

I am getting ready to leave when my open door is darkened by an elderly man in a baggy suit and a purple bow-tie. His face is an unhealthy shade of purple, too.

“Pardon me?”

“Up here it’s offices only!” He stares at me with pale blue eyes from under a pair of very impressive bushy eyebrows; in fact, all of his hair seems bushy, including that protruding from his nostrils. I jump up from the floor and wipe my hands on the seat of my jeans, but as I advance toward him to shake hands, he backs off into the hallway.

“All this—” he waves his arms toward the right “—is English literature, and all this—” he turns round and waves into the opposite direction “—is Modern Languages! Classrooms are in the other wing!”

“Um…thank you, sir, I know that. I work here.”

“You do?” The bushy eyebrows wriggle like distressed caterpillars. “You are not cleaning staff—you’re not wearing a uniform!”

“No, sir, that’s right—I’m faculty.”

“Faculty? Nonsense! Which professor do you work for?”

“Professor Lieberman.” Well, it’s worth a try. The sound of that little phrase still makes my heart skip. I wish they would screw that name tag to my office door.

The caterpillars, too, perform a little skip ’n’ dance routine.

“Lieberman? You must be on the wrong floor. Or the wrong building. This is English, up to here—” he actually scrapes his shoe across the floor tiles “—and over there it’s Modern Languages!”

At this point it dawns on me that I am dealing with something more disturbing than professorial eccentricity. A bunch of keys is dangling from the door to the office next to mine; his demonstration of inter-departmental boundaries shows that his office is the last English Lit post on the frontier. There is a big black bag on its threshold, and three open boxes with books and papers are stacked up next to it.

“Yes, sir, I know.” I smile in a way that I hope will calm him down. “We haven’t been introduced. Anna Lieberman. This is my first semester here. Assistant Professor, British Literature.”

He comes forward to shake my hand, but then changes his mind and withdraws toward his office door like a flustered, angry old dog.

“You’re a professor? You don’t look like a professor!”

“Um…”

“Lieberman?”

“Yes.”

“You’re Jewish!”

“That is correct.”

“I knew nothing of this!”

“I’m sorry that I’m coming as a surprise to you, Professor—?”

“No, no—this is wrong! Nick has not spoken to me about you!”

“Well, sir, if you care to mention my name to Professor Hornberger, I am sure he will be happy to verify my appointment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m actually rather—uh—busy.”