‘Have you read your assignment?’ Walt snapped.
Even with the remnants of his grey hair standing on end Walt looked old-school, one of those profs who knows everything and enjoys the fact that the rest of us don’t.
Buddy’s grin told me he hadn’t. I guessed him to be a poet. Those of a certain age all have the same air about them. They will never be rich and are therefore convinced they will never compromise themselves. They are penniless and proud, rebels lingering under the mothering wings of the university. This one wrote the book on it. Or so I thought. It was only the first of several miscalculations I was to make about Mr Elder.
‘Buddy’s a novelist!’ Walt told me. ‘Right? You’ve got a novel you’re working on?’
A pump of the head, a wry grin that didn’t exactly spell big money but could if his genius got recognized by the right folks. I knew the feeling. I’d written the book on that one.‘
‘The Great American Novel and pulling an A in Chaucer!’
Buddy Elder gave the woman with him a look I had no trouble reading. ‘Maybe an A,’ he said good-naturedly, ‘and maybe my prof turns into a hard ass.’
I looked at the woman steadily now. There was a bit of duty behind her flat brown eyes, and I decided Buddy Elder’s appearance at Caleb’s was not entirely an accident. A fleeting thought really, nothing more, but I was fairly sure of myself. Buddy was having a little trouble with the Middle English. Who didn’t? He could work at it or he could take care of it. Having an agreeable girlfriend sure beat cramming for a final exam, and after all what’s a free lap dance or two among friends?
Of course Walt Beery was a professor of the highest integrity when he thought about it. Trouble was Walt hadn’t thought about it in years. Payoff? Not as such.
Walt would have been outraged at such a suggestion.
No, he had just been to see the woman dance and took the gratis without thinking about it. And today drinks and some artless innuendo. But no bargains made, no exchange of favours. Any hint of quid pro quo would have killed the deal for Walt. No, this would play out with nothing more than a good ol’ boy’s wink.
As I was making these calculations, Walt pointed at me. ‘David is the guy you want to talk to!’ His wet lunch taking hold, Walt was talking about me as if I sat across the room.
Buddy Elder gave me a speculative glance, the first since he had sat down, and I realized he had mistaken me for a towny. ‘Why is that? You know Chaucer?’
This came with a smirk. I was definitely working-class, or maybe a grad who hadn’t left town. Failure to launch, as they called it. Certainly nobody worth taking seriously, at any rate.
‘Intimately,’ I lied.
‘David doesn’t know Jack about Chaucer!’ Walt shouted affectionately. Walt knew his Chaucer. It was life after 1400 that left him mystified. ‘He’s a novelist!’
Cautiously, the way of a dog meeting another at the junkyard social, ‘A novelist?’
‘Prof,’ I said. ‘Writing’s an avocation.’
Like the holy of holies, Walt added, ‘Published.’
A prof with a published novel that Buddy Elder didn’t know? He couldn’t imagine it. I could see the calculations sparking in his bloodshot eyes. Maybe I was something from Mathematics or one of the hard sciences writing sci-fi with my left hand or a guy from the school of business taking a turn as Sam Spade.
Probably getting rich to boot. People in English hate writers who make money.
‘What department are you in?’
‘English,’ I answered.
‘Here?’ He was baffled, certain I was lying. I actually lie quite a bit, if only to keep my hand in, but as it happened this was one of those rare moments when truth was exquisitely more rewarding.
I nodded and got a don’t-mess-with-me look with just a bit of a grin to cut the edge. Buddy Elder was in English. He had been in English since August. What was I trying to pull? He knew all the writers in the English department. He gave a quick glance in Walt Beery’s direction, still green enough to be uncertain of his ground.
‘I’m David Albo,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on leave this year.’
Buddy Elder threw his head back like a man laughing, but all he did was smile. ‘I’ve got you for Advanced Fiction Writing next fall,’ he said.
‘Can’t wait,’ I said with an icy smile I’m sure he had no trouble reading.
I left shortly after that. I even got a sweet smile from the dancer with no name. Now that I held Buddy’s fate in my hands, I was worth that much.
Come autumn I expected I might even get offered a lap dance or two, if she was still in play.
I bought them a round as I was heading out. It is the only way to leave folks without getting the worst of your stories told right off. Outside, the daylight was something of a surprise, as was my sobriety. A good feeling, I decided. Clean. Like being fully alive for the first time in years.
I was not to see either Walt Beery or Buddy Elder again for several months. I did hear a few stories about Walt though. I had my sources. Seems he had begun telling some tasteless homosexual monkey jokes at the faculty club. There was talk of it being the last straw, but talk was all it would ever be. Walt Beery had a good lawyer and pockets deep enough to pay the fees.
I don’t recall so much as a fleeting thought about Buddy Elder or his girlfriend. Buddy belonged to that other world I had inhabited in that other lifetime.
While my sabbatical continued I wrote each morning and spent my afternoons at Molly’s side turning the last rooms of an early nineteenth century plantation-style mansion into a showpiece. I fed and groomed my stepdaughter’s two racehorses. I baled hay twice and once a week or so mucked stalls solo like an old hand. I mowed the pasture a few times with a new John Deere tractor. I indulged in a midnight swim with Molly on one occasion with nothing but a full moon covering us, and even told a ghost story to Lucy and a gaggle of her girlfriends who were ‘camping out’ on our third floor one night in July. Well advanced into adolescence, they had imagined they were far too grown-up to get spooked by anything short of Stephen King, but I told the story as true with the indifference of a man relating an article from the newspaper. In the dark, far from the sounds they knew, I rose up devils those girls had never quite dreamed of. All in good fun, of course.
Lucy told me later they said I was cool, for an old man. I turned thirty-seven that summer, older than Dante when he toured Hell, but only by a couple of years.
Chapter 2
When I was still a young man an old dog in the academy, dead now, told me the secret to life.
No one, he said, forgets caviar. Rise early, work hard, speak no evil, use tax shelters: everyone’s got an angle.
But caviar made an impression on me. Maybe it’s because professors are so long on dignity and so damn short on cash, but serving caviar at parties is worth at least a dozen publications on one’s curriculum vitae.
That fall I was eligible for promotion. The last hurdle of an academic’s career: full professor. I was eight years in the business. Young for the honour, to be sure, but I had been quietly ambitious for a while and had lately come to be well-positioned to get the faculty’s nod.
Not that the vote was a sure thing. Not for anyone, really. Especially not for one of the younger associates. As a matter of policy, my department rather enjoyed turning people down. The last seven who asked, to be precise. I had tenure of course and was settled comfortably into the broad sea of middle management, which at a university is the rank of associate professor.
There were a couple of magazine hits I could drop into a conversation when it was necessary to impress the occasional visiting dignitary in the arts and now a novel. Born in the cold of winter and praised by friends coast-to- coast, Jinx wasn’t climbing the charts, but it was exactly what I needed for the vote of my peers.
Assuming they didn’t forget me.
Molly and I set the party for the first weekend before classes began that fall. I kept the list diverse enough that it didn’t look like a departmental meeting of the Olympians, but I made sure everyone with the power of a vote got a written and personal invitation. No talk, either, of my promotion. I hadn’t even applied for it, had carefully avoided even the most casual discussion of my prospects. That would come later, a few weeks before the actual
