The desk, with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony, was school-of-Ruhlmann, and not by the great Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann himself; but it was very expensive, all the same, certainly to Lantier’s way of thinking. Likewise, the very expensive desk chair, with its tapered bands of ivory set into all four shin guards… All very expensive… but Lantier had still been in the giddy caution-to-the-winds euphoria of just having bought a house for madly more than he could afford. What was an insanely high price for his, the maître’s, own desk and chair, on top of that?
At this moment Ghislaine sat on that miserable chair with perfect posture… and yet she was relaxed. He looked at her as objectively as he could. He didn’t want to deceive himself. He didn’t want to expect the impossible from her… She had a nice slim shape and lovely legs. She must have figured that out for herself, because she rarely wore jeans or any other form of pants. She was wearing a tan skirt—he had no idea what material—short but not catastrophically short… a gorgeous long-sleeved silk blouse—or it looked like silk to him—unbuttoned partway, but not irredeemably far down… Ghislaine never used the word blouse, but that’s what it was to him. From out of the open collar rose her perfect slender neck.
And her face—here he found it hard to be objective. He wanted to see her as his daughter.
He himself—he couldn’t abide the jeans girls wore to class. They looked so common. He got the feeling half of them didn’t even own anything else to cover themselves up with from the waist down. So there wasn’t much he could do about the jeans. But those damned babyish baseball caps boys wore to class—with that infantile fashion he took action. One day, at the beginning of class, he said, “Mr. Ramirez, where do you have to go to find a cap like yours?—fits on sideways like that?… and Mr. Strudmire… yours goes straight down your neck and has that little cutout in front so we can see a little bit of your upper forehead. Do they make them like that, or do you have to get them custom-made?”
But all he got out of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Strudmire were begrudging half-chuckles, and from the rest of the class, even the girls, nothing at all. They were irony-proof. The next class they and many other boys still had these little-boy baseball caps on. So he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, from now on no caps or other headgear may be worn in this class unless it’s required by religious orthodoxy. Have I made myself clear? Anyone who insists on wearing a cap to class—I’ll have to take him to the principal’s office.” They didn’t get that, either. They just looked at one another… puzzled. To himself he said, The principal—get it? That’s what you have in high school, not in college, and this is college. You’re irony-proof, aren’t you. You’re children! What are you doing here? Look at you… it’s not just the baseball caps, it’s also the short pants and the flip-flops and the shirts hanging down below the waist, way down, in some cases. You’ve regressed! You’re ten years old again! Well, at least they didn’t wear baseball caps to class anymore. Maybe they thought there really was a principal at EGU… and I’m supposed to teach these borderline idiots…
No, he must not mention any of this to Ghislaine. She would be shocked. She wasn’t ready for… snobbery. She was at the age, twenty-one, when a girl’s heart is filled to the brim with charity and love for the little people. She was still too young and unsophisticated to be told that her South Beach Outreach pity for the poor was actually a luxury for someone like her. It meant that her family had enough money and standing to be able to afford Good Works. Not that he made much money as an associate professor of French at EGU, Everglades Global University. But he was an intellectual, a scholar… and a writer… or at least he had managed to publish twenty-four articles in academic journals and one book. The book and the articles gave him enough cachet at least to give Ghislaine a boost up to the level of South Beach Outreach… My