had given up in frustration. They didn’t need to know that. Technically inclined he was not.
“Dion and I have come up with a solution to your dilemma.”
“A dilemma you’ve conveniently manufactured.”
“Her name is Hawty Latimer.” Una let the name sink in a few seconds and sipped her daiquiri–her first drink to the men’s fourth. “She’s a junior, with a double major, English and computer science.”
“I don’t like her already,” Nick said. “Computers?” He contorted his face into a grimace. “I hate computers.”
“A Blakean nightmare vision, eh, Nick?” Dion asked through a mouthful of pretzels. “Our invention has made us its slaves.”
“Be nice, now, Nick. Don’t be so quick to judge. She had a two-year scholarship, and now she’s exhausted her family’s ability to help her. What talent! Quite an overachiever.”
“Una’s right, Nick. Seriously, I’ve read her stuff. Her papers are so well reasoned and innovative she could replace any one of about half our staff. For instance, that incompetent philistine–”
“Dion, shhhhh! Someone could overhear,” Una cautioned.
Dion bit his lower lip in suppressed rage. “Yes, yes, I’ll muzzle myself. Anyway, Hawty’s poetry is damn good, too. She’s an exceptional lass…and, uh, spirited.”
“Spirited? What’s that supposed to mean?” Nick demanded, suddenly wary.
“Her true intellectual loves are literature and history,” Una said, avoiding his question. “Good fit for you, right? And I’m certain she has a vocation for teaching. This past semester she taught an introductory English course. The kids loved her. The faculty review group gave her high marks, too. She had some, oh, slight medical problem, and missed out for a summer course. Nick, I’m afraid that this time, if she goes home–a tiny town in north Louisiana–she won’t be able to return. We’ll lose a fine future teacher. What you’re doing will mesh very well with her developing abilities and interests; and she could really, really use whatever small salary you could pay. By the time fall gets here, I should have some funding lined up for her.” Una held up crossed fingers.
“Pay! You got to be kidding,” Nick protested with a laugh. “Most months I can’t handle my rent. Or as President Cleveland’s advisors would say, it’s about the economy, you well-intentioned dolts–mine!”
Smirking in disappointment, Una looked at Dion, as if to confirm their suspicion that Nick had turned into a hardhearted capitalist swine. They contemplated their drinks while Nick fidgeted, and the loud, eclectic, alternative-alternative music of the Folio swirled around them.
“Just think about it, okay?” Una urged before lapsing into a pout.
How could he refuse? Nick asked the dregs of his beer, as Dion launched into a particularly inspired diatribe against their perennial archfoe, Frederick “the Usurper” Tawpie, currently the assistant department head of the Freret University English department.
He owed these friends so much. And for a time twelve years before, he and Una had been much closer than friends–lovers, in fact.
She had just joined the department then, a rosy-faced, diminutively sexy, enthusiastic young professor, who frolicked like a nymph through the wordy marshes of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, and Trollope. There had been three, four years of passion and cozy togetherness, many late nights of nakedness and laughter and wine and both Brownings aloud by candlelight. A lifetime of love seemed the logical outcome–at least in her mind.
And Nick? Well, he merely let things go on their course, feeling cocky and smiled upon by the universe, feeling the very focus of creation in his unvanquished young man’s egoism.
But the happier he told himself he was, the more dissatisfied he became. He changed, became moody, solitary; life lost its savor. He turned into a cad, though his students continued to crowd into his classes. Everybody who cared said it was too much Shelley and Byron, the subjects of his graduate seminar that fateful semester. Just an affectation, a Romantic pose he would grow out of. Now, looking back, Nick supposed it was nothing more unusual than a normal professional burnout, which would have been temporary had malice not worsened his circumstances, had Tawpie and computers not given his wheel of fortune a gratuitous damaging turn.
He had enemies he never suspected, who resented his youth, his good looks, his popularity with the students, his relationship with Una–who knows what. Does jealousy really need a good reason? One thing he did know: jealousy takes more insidious form in the minds of highly educated people.
There was a charge of plagiarism. He wasn’t sure to this day who first made it; it permeated the department, as if someone had