The Englishman

chapter 8

“DEAD WOMAN WALKING!” Tim cries under his breath as he guides me along the hall into the classroom wing.

I’m too jittery to be distracted by his ribbing. It took me half an hour to get dressed this morning, only to end up with the same clothes I had put on first: a silk-and-cotton A-line skirt in a dark reddish-brown, a floral print blouse with three-quarter sleeves, and—the secret’s in the shoes—red leather strap sandals with heels. In New York, I would have made sure to wear at least one black item of clothing, not because black is the New York uniform but because black exudes authority and makes you look older. But for some reason this morning I felt that black wouldn’t be the right choice for my Ardrossan students. Now I wish I was dressed in the armor of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales.

“Hang on, this is me.” Tim compares the number on the classroom door with the note in his folder. “Good luck! Oh, and Anna? You have to be gentler with our freshpeeps than with the scholarship kids from Brooklyn.”

“Oh, c’mon, Tim! Give me a little credit here.”

Walking into my classroom is like walking into an oven. The room has big south-facing windows that we will be glad of during the winter months but today, the thermometer by the main entrance of the Observatory already showed eighty-one degrees Farenheit when I arrived two hours ago. It is one of Murphy’s laws that central A/C invariably breaks down in the first teaching week of the semester.

Thirty-three young people are lounging in their chairs, some openly curious, whispering with their neighbors as I arrange my pen, books, lists, and hand-outs on the desk, others pretending to ignore me. After the comforting routine of taking attendance I explain that I will hand out and discuss the syllabus at the end of the session.

“First I’m going to be boringly predictable for a moment. I’ll try to be excitingly wild and erratic later on.” This earns me my first titters of amusement. “Can someone define the term ‘comedy’ for us?”

One finger shoots up; it belongs to a ginger-haired boy in the last row.

“Yes—Logan, isn’t it?”

“That’s me, ma’am. Could we open the door, ma’am, to—” He waves his hand around to signify circulation. There are a few giggles, but they are nervous giggles. I have been challenged, and it takes me a second to overcome an instinctive reluctance to teach my first class for anyone to hear who walks along the hallway.

“Sure, be my guest.” In subtle retaliation I remain where I am and smile my permission at him to stand up and walk over to the door himself.

Several of my prospective English majors are of the eager beaver variety, girls who always do their homework and don’t let the teacher down. The eager beavers may not produce flights of fancy but they do keep a class afloat. We sort out that the everyday use of the term “comedy” has to be distinguished from its scholarly use and that a comedy is not necessarily belly-laugh funny.

“Isn’t the difference that at the end of a tragedy everyone is dead, and at the end of a comedy everyone is married?” says a girl wearing a bandana to keep her bright blond curls out of her face.

“That’s a little simplistic, but yes, let’s work with this definition. How would you categorize, say, Titanic? The event was, we all agree, tragic. The hubris of one man leads to the death of hundreds. But how would we categorize the genre of the movie? Kate Winslet doesn’t get to marry Leo di Caprio; that seems to rule out comedy. But do you remember the narrative frame of the movie?”

A low murmur arises as they begin to get involved in the debate, and I inwardly sigh with relief. I think I’ve got them. I make eye contact for a quick second with bandana girl and grin at her; she grins back.

“Now. If at the center of drama is the conflict between Life and Death, except that in comedy Life prevails while in tragedy Death prevails—” the class hurriedly starts scribbling notes “—then comedy and tragedy are basically about the same issues, but in different…flavors. Different modes. Now, I’d like to turn two more corners with you, and then we’ll probably just have time to look at a very short text. Can we think about the origins of drama for a moment? Because I believe that an anthropological perspective will allow us to see even more clearly how comedy and tragedy are flip sides of the same coin.”

This is either slightly over their heads, or not interesting enough after Leonardo di Caprio.

“Well, what cultural practices did people engage in that would, over time, develop into theatre?”

“Reality TV.” Logan, his long hair flopping over one eye, evidently aspires to the position of class clown.

“Well, obviously, reality TV,” I agree, poker-faced. “What else?”

They confer amongst themselves, and finally someone tentatively offers me “ritual.”

“Precisely, and the point of all these aboriginal rituals is the survival of the community, isn’t it? We dance, so that the gods may send rain or the return of sunlight. But if you’re making a deal with someone, you have to give something in return—sacrifice.”

“The Legend of the Five Suns,” says a slim boy who had not so far spoken up. I ask him to explain to the others, and he does, very articulately, but also a little diffidently. Note to self: remember to encourage the shy ones.

“What about religion?” asks one of the eager beavers.

“We’ve just been talking about religion,” Jocelyn with the bandana rebukes her.

“No! Proper religion! Christianity.”

“Sure, same thing.” Jocelyn is obviously willing to take control of the discussion, and I step back and watch my first class session crash and burn.

“Christianity isn’t one of those primitive, bloodthirsty rites!”

“It is so! You have a god, or the son of a god, and he is sacrificed to save mankind. It’s the same as in the Aztec legend, and there’re dozens of myths like this, all over the world! In fact—” Jocelyn leans forward, and I feel a shiver of fear “—Christians eat their god every Sunday, in little pieces!”

There is a beat, and then a storm of outrage breaks. About half of the students are engaged in heated debate, but the other half are sitting quietly, and two or three actually look distressed. They are freshmen, after all.

“All right, break it up, people! Break it up, come on!”

Some appear to be relieved that I am taking control again; others are reluctant.

“You see how charged with controversy our topic is, and it is brilliant that we have discovered it all by ourselves, without any help from theorists or critics.”

They have settled down again and are listening, and hardly any face shows the glassy lethargy that usually envelops a class two-thirds through.

“Okay.” The muscles in my stomach relax. Easy, now. “So, this semester we are going to look at comic versions of this tale of sacrifice and survival. The plays we will read together accentuate the aspect of revival, but I think we understand now that even the brightest, fluffiest comedy suppresses its tragic twin, a tale of loss and sacrifice. Over every comedy looms the danger that the sunlight will not break through the clouds, or that the rain might not come. Can you think of dangers to the survival of a community that have nothing to do with murder or other forms of violence?” This stumps them. “How do tribes and peoples die out?”

“Not enough babies.” This comes from Logan again, who is clearly hoping to throw me.

“And to produce babies, men and women have to have sex. That—and the ways in which these—um—negotiations can go wrong—is what early modern comedy is mainly about. Let’s have a look, if you will—” I get up from the desk on which I had been sitting to distribute the first batch of hand-outs “—at how Shakespeare addresses this issue in his first sonnet.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss this sort of thing in class.” A girl in a yellow silk blouse is holding the sheet of paper in her hand as if it were a soiled diaper. “In fact, I think it’s very inappropriate.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Sex and all that.”

“We’re not discussing sex,” I say calmly. “But thank you for raising that issue—Marleen, right? I’d like to make this unmistakably clear: we’re discussing a Shakespearean sonnet that happens to be about procreation. Okay, about sex. Our subject is the literary representation of the world, not the world itself. If you want that, stick to Political Science or Biology.”

“I’d like to,” she murmurs. “And my name is Madeline.”

I smile at her, and I think she knows perfectly well what I mean but am not saying: you have three weeks to drop out, baby, and welcome to!

We read the sonnet quatrain by quatrain, but the language is too involved for them to catch its drift right away. Slowly I take them through the nature metaphors.

“You promised us sex!” Logan, for one, is unable to distinguish the tale from the teller or, in this case, the topic from the teacher. My impulse is to step on him, but I am supposed to be gentle with them, so I ignore him and the guffaws he provokes.

“This is a lookist poem,” Jocelyn mutters. “Gorgeous people should have children so their gorgeousness lives on.”

“Aren’t the first sonnets addressed to a young man?” the shy boy, Lucas, cautiously offers. “And isn’t the young man gay?”

Madeline flings herself against the back of her chair in an outbreak of exasperation; there are some audible groans in the room, and not of the good variety.

“No, no, hang on—it’s not as bad as all that!” A sarcastic undertone creeps into my attempts to keep them calm. “You are right—Shakespeare played around with the traditional sonnet by replacing the poet-lover’s unattainable lady with an unattainable boy. But this boy, the implied reader of the poem, isn’t gay; that’s not the point. What is the point?”

“He’s a hoarder. He hoards food, the harvest produce, and other people starve.” This comes from one of Logan’s neighbors, a guy with shoulders like an action hero, who is evidently better at poetry than he looks.

“Excellent, now apply this metaphor to human beings.”

“He’s hoarding…no.” He blushes and shakes his head.

“Yes.” I grin at him. “Well, I’ve been suggesting to you that all this boy-meets-girl stuff in literature is, in essence, an enactment of ancient fertility rites. Renaissance England, being an agricultural society, was still closer to these realities than we are today, so we must expect Renaissance literature to be quite outspoken. The poet—in the persona of a fatherly friend or tutor—is encouraging the young man to settle down with a wife and procreate, to make sure that his beauty—Shakespeare might have said ‘genes,’ had he known about them—is passed on to new generations. But this isn’t just a procreation sonnet. Let’s be explicit about it: what is this ‘self-substantial fuel’ the young man is wasting?”

Jocelyn’s eyes grow wide with comprehension, and of course she is not slow to name the taboo.

“Are you saying it’s—he’s talking about—cum?”

“Let’s call it ‘semen,’ shall we? An Elizabethan word for it is ‘spirit.’ Yes, it’s an anti-masturbation sonnet. Hey!” The noise level has spiked. “Don’t blame me, blame Shakespeare!”

The noise is stifled by a movement that darkens the open door, first noticed by those in the last rows, then also by those who were watching my face.

“Oh—hey there, Professor Cleveland.”

I’m so high on adrenaline and so pleased to see him that I lock my eyes with his and smile at him in complete innocence. First I think the shock that runs through me is one of embarrassment, but it isn’t; it is an immediate, carnal thrill at the sight of that tall figure in dark jeans and shirt sleeves. “You’ll be delighted to hear, sir, that we are discussing questions of genre!”

The students cannot know that this is a jab meant to remind him of our first encounter, but the obvious disingenuousness of my assertion sets them off into a roar of laughter.

His eyebrows shoot halfway up his forehead, and I can see that he is struggling to keep a straight face.

“As you were.” A curt nod, and he is off.





One down, one to go. The challenges of a class full of English Lit graduates are very different from those of a general education class.

Surprise ’em. Stun ’em.

I hadn’t planned to do that, but when I walk into the room—by now it’s four o’clock in the afternoon, which seems to be a low point in almost everyone’s circadian rhythm—I am suddenly incredibly tired. High on adrenaline all day, and now I crash. I slump into the chair behind the desk, blow air like an exhausted whale, and serenely scan the faces that are already registering confusion about my behavior. Sixteen names are on my list, and I count fifteen, audibly but under my breath, then sigh again.

“The first week of the semester is murder, don’t you find? Man…I’m pooped.”

They are very, very quiet.

“What say we watch something, hmm? I mean, you must have had a long day, too, and I think we all deserve some R&R…” I rummage in my bag and produce a DVD that I insert into the player, switch on the projector and, while I’m waiting till it’s ready, I stretch out my legs under the desk, cross my ankles, and stifle a yawn. Good thing that at orientation they showed us how to work the classroom equipment.

“Right, here’s the deal,” I inform them. “I get to choose the video, and you get to watch it.” I’m riding the wave of my impromptu performance, not sure how long it will carry me. “Are you okay with basketball? I hear Ardrossan ain’t bad at basketball.”

Tessa Shephard in the second row is watching me with an expression of fascinated horror, Selena O’Neal next to her has a pained half-smile on her face, others have started to whisper and giggle. I ignore their consternation and languidly adjust the volume level as moving images of a gym are projected onto the wall.

“Hey! That’s Marv Albert!” one of the boys hisses.

“Who?”

“My dad says he was, like, the best basketball commentator ever!”

I settle in my chair and watch Marv announce, “Connie Hawkins, one-time Harlem Globetrotter, one of the most exciting players in the NBA, as a member of the Atlanta Hawks. And The Hawk will be opposed by Paul Simon.”

As the camera cuts from six foot eight inch Hawkins to five foot two inch Simon, some of the students are beginning to laugh.

“It’s Saturday Night Live!” someone whispers triumphantly.

“It’s what? Who’s the short guy?”

“Shhhh!”

Albert is asking Paul Simon about his uniform number, “decimal point zero two,” and Simon explains, perfectly deadpan, that this had been his number since junior high school, and since it wasn’t a number used by Hawkins, it would avoid confusion between the two of them. This has the students laugh out loud, and they relax into enjoying the sketch, reassured that their professor—although a little peculiar—isn’t certifiably mad.

“So.” I smile when I switch off the video machine. “What does all this have to do with parody and satire?”

The session goes like a dream. My unconventional opening gambit has jolted them into attention; they are lively and intelligent, and we have fun together.

Seems I owe Cleveland one.





On Thursday afternoon, as the two student journalists who interviewed me for the next issue of The Folly Chronicle have taken the inevitable photo of me and are just winding up, Tim sticks his head through my half-open office door.

“This is an intervention—oh, hi, Kirsty, Josh—oh, right—interview for The Folly! That’s great!”

He seems jumpy, even for him. I understand why when I show the students to the door, and Tim steps out of the way to reveal Giles Cleveland and Tessa Shephard among the junk in the hall.

“This is…quite a crowd,” I observe dryly, hoping to cover my confusion.

The students pick up the scent of a good story and are discreetly kicking their heels by the garbage container, but Cleveland makes short shrift of them.

“Off you pop, folks. Go on, on yer bikes.”

He doesn’t seem to see me. At least he sees no reason to acknowledge my presence in any formal way. Instead, he looks around my office, shaking his head.

“How long were you going to wait till something was done about this?”

“As long as I consider reasonable, in view of the fact that it is my office!” From the corner of my eye I see Tessa grimace at Tim as if to say, Told you this was a crap idea!

Cleveland seems unmoved by my belligerence. “And what kind of a cock-and-bull story do you tell the students to explain the state of this place?”

“Administrative miscommunication.” I know I’m blushing. The students are visibly shocked when they enter my office and as visibly reluctant to swallow my cover-up tale.

“You can say that again,” he mutters under his breath while staring at the pile of torn ring binders that sits crookedly on top of a crate with posters advertising a number of academic events that happened decades ago. “Well—out it all goes. Matter of minutes.”

“So Elizabeth Mayfield said we can chuck it?”

“Elizabeth?” This comes with a frown and eye contact, suddenly.

“Y-Yes, she promised me to do something about—this—when I spoke to her last Friday. I assumed—I assume you’re the relief force?”

Cleveland is gazing down at me, clearly at a loss, and I am so overwhelmed by his physical proximity in this cramped space that I feel my eyes flicker.

“Yes,” he says. “We’re the relief force.”

He takes off his jacket and flings it across my swivel chair, and my little office is filled with the glistening light of a white shirt in the sun. When he undoes his cuffs and starts to roll up his sleeves, I have to look away.

We set to work, and apart from a slapstick moment with a moldering box full of fanfold paper—its bottom drops out and so do lengths and lengths of yellowed paper, tripping up both Giles, who was carrying it, and Tessa behind him—there are no mishaps.

“When you come across any slates and chalk, don’t chuck them; the museum might want them,” Giles says. “And the hornbooks, and the rolls of vellum.”

“Actually, this is nothing,” Tessa gasps, steadying herself against my desk. “Mel and I once got a look into his office, Professor Corvin’s, I mean. Did you ever—? Well, it’s the messiest place you ever saw! Actually, no, not all that messy, not like this, just completely stuffed full of…stuff. All the walls up to the ceiling, including the window! And piles of boxes, one in front of the other. You can hardly get into the room, it’s like walking into a tiny closet full of clothes, only his is full of paper.”

“Does he have family?” I ask. “Someone to look after him? He looks the type who’ll lie dead in his apartment for weeks till the neighbors notice a smell.”

“He once told me of a daughter, but she was then living in Vermont.” Tim shrugs. “Keep your nose peeled, Anna.”

“Morbid much, Tim?”

“This looks official. Are you sure we can just—?” Tessa is holding up a plastic folder. “It says nineteen seventy-five to eighty-four, A through L on the back. There’s only the one, though, and the ink is—”

“I’ll take that.” Giles reaches over and, with a smile, wrests it from her hands. “If it’s anything eggy, it had better end up on my face, not yours.”

Half an hour later the container in the hall is spilling over, and my office is a dusty but empty room.

“Needs a good scrubbing,” Cleveland observes, hands propped up on his hip bones. “And the walls need painting.”

“I can do that tomorrow. Well, not the painting, but—thank you so much, this is—” I have to laugh out loud, I am so glad that he has bullied me into submission “—this is absolutely fabulous!”

“What it is—” he smiles “—now that it’s out of this office and in the hallway, is a fire hazard. If they don’t have it removed ASAP, they’ll get into trouble with the fire marshal. Does your phone take pictures?”

“Mine does,” Tessa offers when I hesitate.

“Mine does, too, but—”

“Tell maintenance to pick up the cart, and if they don’t, send a picture of it to Health and Safety, and to the Dean.”

“They’ll be here faster than you can say asbestos,” Tim adds.

“Whoa, hold your horses! I’m grateful for your help, sir, but I’m not going to bring out the big guns quite yet!”

“Why not?” Tim gingerly dusts off his pants. “I’m not coming up here every week to clean up after a crazy old man no one has the guts to fire, or after a newbie who hasn’t the guts to stand up to admin!”

“It isn’t a question of guts! But I don’t want to make a fuss, and—”

“You’re being too English about this.”

“W-What?”

Cleveland is gazing down at me with an expression on his face that under any other circumstance I would call—no. No, no.

“The waiting game might work with Brits; in fact, there it’s the done thing, and damnably inefficient it is, too. But it won’t wash here. If you allow them to walk roughshod over you now, they’ll never forget that you’re…a soft touch.”

“Well, I’m—I’m not,” I stutter, valiantly suppressing the fantasy contained in those two monosyllables.

“I know that.” He reaches across my desk for his tie and jacket, scooping up the old folder as if by the way. “But you have to make sure they know it, too.”

Stunned and mildly agoraphobic I sit in my empty office and try to decide whether to go downstairs to the car at once to fetch my cleaning utensils, or leave it till tomorrow. An almost inaudible knock on the door interrupts me—but it is only Tessa.

“Sorry, Dr. Lieberman—I just had to come and check that you’re all right.”

Her freckled face looks apprehensive, and I am flooded with a rush of affection for her.

“Only if you drop this Dr. Lieberman nonsense once and for all and call me Anna!”

She grins, pushes herself into the room and shuts the door behind herself.

“You’re not mad at Giles, are you?”

The tension drains out of my body, and I flop against the back of my chair, which gently rocks me on its springs.

“I was worried you’d think him a bully,” she rushes on. “Because he isn’t, really. That’s why I chose him as my advisor. Well, partly; it’s also that I wanted to work on Renaissance drama. I think he cares about you, that’s why—”

“He what?”

“No, I mean—” She blushes so fiercely that her freckles disappear. “He feels responsible, and he is right, you know. You could write emails till the cows come home, and Hornberger would make all sorts of promises if you approached him in person, but—it’s difficult, sorting out Professor Corvin, so he ignores it.”

“Cleveland might have asked first.”

“That’s what I thought. But he said you’d only…um…put us off.”

“What exactly did he say, Tessa?”

She grins. “He said, ‘She’ll only tell us to take a long jump off a short pier.’”

As Tessa and I are walking down the stairs, Madeline, the straight-laced girl from my Comedy class, approaches us from downstairs with two friends. The stairs aren’t broad enough for five, and we slow down to pass each other. She seems uncertain whether to acknowledge me or not, so I smile at her and say hi, when she suddenly glares at me, eyes narrow and nostrils wide.

“You are so in trouble!”

“Pardon me?”

“Wait for it!” she shouts down at me, halfway up to the second floor.

I am too stunned to react quickly, but when I recover, my first impulse is to run after her to confront her.

“No! Oh, sorry—” Tessa blushes furiously for having grabbed my sleeve to stop me.

“What? What is it?”

She points her thumb in the direction of the great hall, and we walk down. “That’s Madeline Harrison,” she whispers. “The Harrisons?”

“You say that like I would say the Corleones.”

“Well, not quite, but her uncle was governor a few years ago, and her father runs the family company, something biochemical, I don’t know exactly, but Harrison Lab, down the road—they donated that to the college, like, fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, no. Don’t tell me I’ve alienated the one frosh who can get me fired!”

“Well, have you?”

“Are they very conservative and very religious? Of course they are, what am I asking?” I close my eyes to recall my chaotic first session with the gen. ed. class. “Christianity as a primitive religion; comedy as a fertility rite; homosexuality, except that wasn’t my fault and we didn’t expand on that; and masturbation in Shakespeare sonnet number one. Nothing much to upset anyone. Right?”

Tessa stares at me like she did when I sat down to make them watch basketball instead of teaching them about early modern literature.

“Wow!” she breathes. “You are so in trouble!”

The weight of having committed two faux pas drops to the bottom of my stomach: one, I misjudged what my freshmen can take in their first session, and two, I told a grad student about it. But I will not be moved.

“Oh, come on—surely not. Remember, this is a coeducational, non-sectarian liberal arts college! You don’t get into trouble for talking about Shakespeare’s sonnets!”





“Hi, Mom.”

I wedge the receiver into the crook between neck and cheek as I lie on my sofa like a slug and stare catatonically up at the ceiling fan. Its swish-swish is the only noise in the room, punctuated by birds chirping. This is what I have been doing for the past half hour or so, ever since I came home, kicked off my high-heeled sandals, and grabbed a soda from the fridge.

“Listen, Anna, I only got a minute. I talked to Mrs. Krevitz at the grocer’s this morning, and guess what? Her nephew is a professor at Ardrossan, too! At the Psychology Department. He moved there last year, so he will be glad of some company, too. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you his number.”

“Whoa, Mom, not so fast. I only got here four weeks ago and already you’re trying to hook me up? And speak slowly, please. I can hardly move a brain cell, let alone a limb.”

“Sorry, darling.” She relents and dutifully asks, “Did you have an exhausting day? Teaching hasn’t started, has it?”

“Yes, this was the first week.” Silently I count to ten to overcome the temptation to unburden myself to my mother.

“Okay, shadchan,” I sigh. “Do your thing.”

“Well, like I said, he’s doing what you’re doing, only in psychology. Mrs. Krevitz says he had a girlfriend here, but they broke up a while ago, and—”

“Mom, if you think I’m going to call a guy who doesn’t know me from Adam—or Eve, for that matter—think again. I’m not that desperate. In fact, I’m not desperate at all.”

“Why, have you met someone?”

“Mom…”

“Anyway, what’s desperate? You’re new, he’s new, but maybe he already knows a few nice places to eat—what’s desperate about that? His name is Bernard Cogan. That’s C-O-G-A-N—”

“Bernie Cogan? Bernie Cogan who lived on Ingram Street? I went to school with Bernie, don’t you remember?”

“You did? Well, so much the better. You’ll have things to talk about!”

“Mom, that was more than fifteen years ago! Bernie used to bully me into giving him my homework to copy.”

He also taunted me about my short hair and my absence of cleavage and once gave me a Chinese burn that bruised my arm so badly I couldn’t wear a t-shirt for two weeks because I didn’t want to have to explain how I got it.

“You didn’t give Mrs. Krevitz my number, I hope.”

“Yes, I did. Now, don’t shout at me—there’s really no harm in it. There’s more harm in only ever seeing your own colleagues and talking about work all the time. Some change will do you good.”

No doubt about that. The idea of sitting in a quiet restaurant in the Real World and making Observatory-unrelated conversation has a definite appeal, but with Bernie the Bully?

“Yeah, maybe. All right, if he calls me, I’ll go, but I won’t call him first. I’m too old-fashioned for that kind of thing, Mom.”