No one understood more than I did the loneliness and frustration of such work, I said, the feelings of doubt, the disappointment of rejection, even if it was only the failure to connect with a single reader! I wasn’t making progress. Roger had seen through me. I was lying. I hadn’t read his novel. I was pulling a con, and he was not going to forgive me. I still didn’t back down. I had noticed a misspelled word on 1,243, if he called me a liar, but I didn’t have to get petty.
He drifted, I lectured.
Finally we got completely off the subject of writing.
I asked about his mother, how she was handling the separation with his dad. Roger told me she was doing fine. He couldn’t answer any specific questions, and I managed to rattle off a couple of platitudes about relationships before noticing my watch. The time had gotten away from me, I said. I had to get back to my office.
I still had a class to teach that afternoon.
‘I haven’t even read the assignment yet, I’ve been so busy!’
We shook hands and parted like friends, but I left the meeting with that sick feeling one gets when one’s lies are not properly and politely swallowed. This would get back to his mother. Instead of feeling guilty, I was irritated at myself. I should have told Walt upfront I couldn’t do what he asked. Failing that, I should have given the manuscript a couple of hours and then told Roger that was what I had done, two hours, and this is what I think.
Did I regret my failure to act properly? Well, not really. Like most people, my only regret was getting caught.
Denise waited for me after class that afternoon.
I was not in a particularly good mood, and the sight of Buddy’s girlfriend with that we-need-to-talk look on her pale, lonesome face put me on the defensive.
‘Is this about Buddy?’
Denise shook her head morosely.
I relaxed but only slightly. ‘You don’t like Medea?’
She stared at me as if I had written the thing for Euripides. ‘I hate it! I hate the Greeks!’
‘Let me guess. She killed her own kids.’
‘It’s sick!’
‘You need to speak up in class, Denise. That’s the best place to talk about something you don’t like.
You’d be surprised how many people will back you up if you speak your mind.’
‘What’s the Aeneid about?’
I smiled. ‘We’re just reading a single passage, the love story between Aeneas and Dido. Not even adultery if you can believe it. Exactly your kind of story.
Except… well, she kills herself.’
‘Why?’
‘Why else? Aeneas leaves her.’
‘Men are pigs.’
‘All men or just the ones you sleep with?’
Denise looked like I had slapped her, and I apologized. I said I was out-of-line. I didn’t mean it. Bad day. She smiled, but it wasn’t as forgiving as I would have liked.
Following that abysmal day of quarrels and miscues, I managed to bury myself in my work. I expected Buddy to drop my class. I even thought Denise Conway might.
To my surprise, Buddy returned to class the following week with a good attitude. He was not especially attentive to me, but he did his work. His comments about the writings of others were competent, even insightful.
In fact, he was pretty good at finding both the positive and negative with the occasional plot twist that even left the prof nodding with approval. I had seen this kind of thing before, a student with modest abilities as a writer suddenly emerging as a potentially outstanding teacher of writing.
In my worst fears I was that guy. Under different circumstances I probably would have approached Buddy to let him know I was impressed with his involvement. Even though it was the right thing to do, I just couldn’t manage it. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like the way he treated Walt or for that matter Denise.
And Denise had become important to me in her own right. To my surprise, she took my advice about speaking up in class. She actually began raising her hand on a regular basis. She was blunt, sometimes funny, sometimes the star of the discussion. An issues-kind-of-student, Denise could complain about Dido’s lack of professionalism with a straight face. She had a country to run. Sure, she had feelings, but she had responsibilities too! Didn’t she think about that? ‘I mean the world isn’t all guys! There’s other things important too!’
Othello got no sympathy. What a dumbass! Hamlet needed to get laid. And what was with Ophelia? What was the real message here? Girls are nothing without guys?
If a teacher is lucky, there’s always one student who can jumpstart a flagging discussion or, in my case, a flagging semester. That was Denise Conway for me, and in various ways I let her know I was proud of her.
Whether in response to my encouragement or because of her own unexpected excitement for all things literary Denise liked to drop by my office two or three times a week. She had an idea for one of the required papers and we talked through that. Another time, she wanted to talk about changing jobs. Did I have any ideas? Jobs? As in no more dancing? She was, she said, starting to feel like a piece of meat. I talked about student worker programs. One day, she came in looking exhausted. There had been trouble at the club the night before. The police had come. One of the patrons had gone to the hospital, one to jail. Walt was there. Walt had crawled under his table. I told her Walt wasn’t the man for a crisis. No argument there, but the student worker thing was looking better and better. I made a call across campus and got her set up to meet someone.
The next day Denise dropped in to tell me Buddy didn’t want her to quit her job at The Slipper. Could I believe that?
I made a point of asking her some hard questions about the relationship and what she thought the future might hold.
‘You know,’ I said finally, ‘when you’re into something like you are, a business like that, it feels like you don’t have options. People make you believe you can’t do something else. But you can do what you decide you want to do, Denise. It might cost. It might even bruise you, but you alone have the power to change your own life, if that’s what you want.’
Denise missed the next class. The day following that, I got a call from Leslie Blackwell in Affirmative Action.
Could I come across campus and talk to her?
We made an appointment for the following morning.
Chapter 6
As a rule I didn’t talk much with Molly about what went on at school. It was my way of separating my realities, and she was okay with that. She knew Buddy Elder was taking my class, but not that he and I had squared off in my office. I told her Buddy’s stripper girlfriend was taking my Intro to Literature class but that was the extent of it. I certainly didn’t tell her I had been summoned to appear at the office of Affirmative Action. It was simply not Molly’s world.
She had no interest in it.
Affirmative Action operated under the control of the university president as an investigatory agency.
Through its work, the president’s office monitored every aspect of the university’s compliance to federal law regarding civil rights, including sexual discrimination.
Are departments hiring a racially and culturally diverse faculty? Are women treated without bias, provided with the same opportunities, paid according to the same scale as men? Affirmative Action’s mandate was to investigate, and naturally the office intruded into business that various professors and departments considered their own.
