“No, I’m just wondering if Seven Storey Books will end up biting me on the keister.”
“I hope not,” he said, trying as best he could to match her rueful smile and to not look at the keister in question.
“Me too,” Theresa said, playfully. “Because if it does, mine will not be the only keister bit.”
That night, halfway through a bottle of chardonnay, he recalled her remark. Was he odd? If so, had he always been, or was it a recent development, the result of having lived alone for so long? Was this oddness obvious to everybody? If so, why was someone pointing it out only now?
Teddy also remembered that at the door to Theresa’s office, when they shook hands, hers had been warm. And when she turned around to go back to her desk, he’d noted there was nothing wrong with her keister. What was odder? he wondered. For him to have noticed these things? Or to have acknowledged, even in the moment, that he would not act on them?
He also wondered if she too was eating alone.
* * *
—
FOR AN ACADEMIC TITLE The God Project had done well, winning a small but significant award and bringing the college some welcome attention. Also, an onslaught of manuscript submissions. To Teddy, it seemed that almost as many people were writing books about faith as were reading them. Most of the submissions were dreck, but a few small gems were mixed in. No new Thomas Merton, of course, but then he hadn’t expected there would be. What flagged during those early years, even as the press’s reputation grew, was Teddy’s enthusiasm. Gradually, he came to understand that he was unlikely ever again to replicate the experience of The God Project. Most writers weren’t desperate enough to just hand over their book and let Teddy revise it, free of authorial griping and interference. Having written the damn thing, they tended to think of it as theirs. Moreover, the possibility that they themselves sucked, no matter how richly warranted, never seemed to occur to them, as it had to poor Everett. Indeed, many were arrogant dickweeds who refused to accept criticism, no matter how carefully and sympathetically couched. They openly flouted Teddy’s most reasonable suggestions, and a few even called him names for making them. Mostly, though, they were like the author of the book he was editing on the ferry, hopelessly trapped, without realizing it, in a contemporary idiom that was ill suited to their timeless subject matter. What this particular guy was writing about, whether he knew it or not, was sin and redemption, but those words had gone out of fashion, so he refused to use them. The books Teddy had been publishing for the last decade weren’t bad, but neither were they the kind of books Tom Ford would’ve approved of. They weren’t urgent or necessary. They flowed with the cultural current, never against it, because the men and women who wrote them weren’t on fire.
Anyway, this would probably be Seven Storey’s last year. After a decade as president of St. Joseph’s, Theresa, the press’s primary champion, had been offered the position of provost at a large Catholic university out West and was stepping down. When Teddy half-heartedly floated the idea of moving the press to her new school, she’d been less than enthusiastic, perhaps because it meant that he, and not just Seven Storey Books, would be following her there. It was hardly that they weren’t fond of each other, and over the years there’d been talk about them. They’d gone out a few times, to dinner or the occasional concert, and enjoyed each other’s company, but that had been it. Teddy didn’t doubt that Theresa was disappointed when their relationship hadn’t evolved into something more intimate, but he didn’t know this for a fact and couldn’t think how to ask. Before her arrival on campus, the conventional wisdom had been that he was gay. It was possible she’d heard that rumor and, when he didn’t try to get her in bed, concluded it must be true. It was also possible that their friendship had cost her politically. After all, she was the college president and he a lowly adjunct who’d been given a cushy position that many “regular” faculty were envious of. If they weren’t having sex and he wasn’t giving her free drugs, then what on earth did she want with him? Whatever her reasoning, she seemed to desire a clean break.