way. Here are my papers.” She held up her hotel confirmation for the blond man to see. He didn’t turn around.
As she looked back in the direction of downtown New Orleans, through the heavily tinted rear window, she understood that there was indeed a mistake, a terrible one. And she had made it.
Elzbieta frantically yanked the door handles. Both doors were locked solid from the front.
Praying to the Holy Family and John Paul II, she cried quietly.
.
3
“Nick,” Una said, after one of those long, observant, nearly telepathic lulls in the conversation that characterize the meetings of longtime friends. They were sitting around a shellacked salvaged cable reel that served as a table at the Folio, a favorite hangout of diverse groups from the adjacent Freret University campus.
At the Folio there was a boozy truce between highbrow and lowbrow, professors and students, art and science, social dissidents and frat members, aesthetes and athletes.
Nick’s earlier plan to jog had lost out to an invitation from Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus to meet here.
“Dion and I have a proposition for you,” Una said and waited. She adjusted her glasses, leaning forward on the table in earnestness, her blue eyes daring him to take the challenge.
Nick raised an eyebrow in suspicion. He put down his beer mug with a thud. “Hey, I was just sitting here, tending my own psychic garden, enjoying the music, and the whole time you two have been laying a trap for me…oh yeah, I definitely smell a conspiracy. What is it this time? An office job in the geology department? Somebody at the library on maternity leave? Assisting a Ph.D. candidate in his research? Hey, friends, please: you don’t have to throw me scraps anymore. In fact, I like my work. I haven’t been able to say that in a long, long time, have I?”
They nodded in unison.
“Look, I know it must be unnerving for pampered, tenured, grant-rich scholars like you to acknowledge that; it does violence to your self-image; but I am actual proof that there is life outside the shaded groves of academe.”
Always focused on the higher motivations, like one of her long-suffering Victorian literary heroines, Una ignored his self-defensive outburst: “We’ve noticed that you’re overworked. The rat race doesn’t agree with you. You’re too thin…those circles under your eyes.”
“Just allergies, that’s all,” Nick replied.
“For a minute there, when I came in, I thought Una was sitting with Keith Richards,” Dion Rambus said. “He’s coming to town for a performance, as the posters stuck all over campus proclaim.”
“Ouch! That hurt,” said Nick, wincing in feigned discomfort.
“‘O how full of briers is this working-day world!’” Dion continued.
“As You Like It, act 1, scene three,” Nick said between sips.
“Very good. Listen to Una, Nick. You need our help. I remember the days when you would outpace me, in spite of my longer legs, on our brisk walks across campus. And outtalk me! Now, you’re stooped and brooding like a medieval monk in a scriptorium. What a horrible yoke it must be to have to work twelve months a year.” Dion shook his head and tsk-tsked.
“I remember a time when I thought you were somewhat handsome, in a tragic-hero way,” Una said.
“‘Somewhat’!?” Nick echoed as if hurt to his core.
“You miss appointments, you don’t even answer the phone most of the time.”
“It’s positively infuriating that you refuse to hook up that answering machine we bought you for Christmas,” Dion complained.
“I mean, really, Nick,” Una said, “you’re living in the past, yours and mankind’s. It’s 1993, not 1893 or 1793. It’s a new world out there, full of possibility, and you’re stagnating, cutting yourself off! You need an infusion of fresh ideas.”
“Hamlet asked Horatio to absent himself from felicity,” said Dion, “but only for a while. Haven’t you done enough penance?”
Una continued the verbal assault: “You probably aren’t even aware we have a dynamic new president–”
“You mean that guy”–Nick snapped his fingers–“what’s his name…Grover Cleveland?” Una was an earnest liberal, like most of his other former colleagues; he couldn’t resist teasing her for what he now saw as good-hearted naivety. He’d come to believe that we were all “useful idiots” to self-dealing narcissists in power, on either side of the left-right line.
“That’s rich!” Dion shouted through the music. “But your cynicism has proved our point precisely. You’ve become a card-carrying member of the Party of Yourself–apologies to Walt Whitman.”
“Okay, okay, I give in. What’s going on?” Nick asked. He had in fact tried to hook up the answering machine but