am reeling under the sudden conviction that all this talk—all these words between Professor Cleveland and myself, cagey and aloof on both sides—is completely beside the point, because what we really should be doing is—unthinkable. Except I am thinking it.
I look up quietly, my mind in a whirl, and I say nothing. I don’t know what to say, and Cleveland almost apologizes. His eyes flicker and the groove between his eyes deepens—the pained look of a man about to apologize.
Of course he doesn’t.
“What’s—” He clears his throat. “What’s your take on Renaissance drama, Dr. Lieberman? I suppose you are a feminist new historicist?”
“Of course I am. Isn’t everybody, these days?” I can be blasé, too, if sufficiently provoked.
He is still staring at me, and I could swear that there is a grin lurking in the light eyes, and my chest expands in anticipation. But then he hides his face behind his mug, and I feel as if he had pushed me away.
“Only I’d like to coordinate my course requirements with my colleagues, particularly with Tim Blundell, who will be teaching English Comedy II next semester. I’ve no mind to become the Nasty Newbie by making them read or write more than they have to in other first-year classes, or—”
“Didn’t Hornberger take it upon himself to instruct you in this matter?”
“No, why—” I am saying the wrong thing here, aren’t I? “—why should he?”
“Well, you would naturally turn to him, seeing as he’s our new chair.”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Christ, woman, will you stop calling me sir!”
Driven by my particular demon, I grin manically and do my Marcie-and-Peppermint-Patty impersonation.
“Yes, sir.”
He stares at me, still caught up in his irritation, and inwardly I quail at my audacity. Play with me! I’m nice! Come out of there and play with me!
His gaze begins to waver and that impossibly attractive smile flits across his face.
“All right. What are you going to do in the other one?”
“Third- and fourth-year concentration, Paradise Lost.” My voice is squeaky, for a number of reasons.
He is scribbling away on a clipboard that he rests against his hunched-up knee. I don’t even know whether his notes have anything to do with me, or whether this interview is conducted on the side of more important matters.
“No, I think not…”
“But I’ve taught Milton before, I’m perfectly capable of—”
“Dr. Lieberman, I don’t doubt that you are…perfectly capable.” He is still scribbling, unaware that I am becoming increasingly capable of hitting him where it really hurts. “Save it, you can do Milton next year. Don’t you have something a little more sweet ’n’ fun? Something you can pull out of your hat?”
I push my hands under my thighs in a gesture that must seem childish to him, but I desperately need to steady myself. “Parody and satire? I taught that last winter at NYU.”
“We won’t hold that against you. And?”
“I—I concentrated on the motifs and discourses of courtly love and how they were subverted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In carnival, for instance, or in the sonnet. The process of a genre’s exhaustion, and how parody can infuse new life into it.”
“Subversion, no end of subversion, but not for us,” he quotes. And that is not a smile. That is a sneer.
I can feel a damp patch forming between my shoulder blades.
“The subversive thrust of parody may be out of our reach, I agree, but we can analyze the inversion, and the…well, as Bakhtin says, the processes by which high and noble ideas were degraded to the level of the body, to the digestive and reproductive systems.”
“Food and sex, you mean.” He is looking straight at me for a change, but I can’t tell whether he is deliberately provoking me or merely impatient with my display of theory.
“Food and sex…yes, that—yes.”
“Do one on parody, then, and Paradise Lost next year. What is your…thing on?”
I am so bewildered by his interruptions and his oscillations between humor and hauteur that it takes me a couple of seconds to latch on.
“My what? Oh, my dissertation! Early modern civic culture. Urban processions, drama, ritual…that sort of thing.”
“See that you finish it within the next couple of years.”
“I have finished it. The ‘thing.’ If that’s what you mean.”
“No, that’s not what I mean! Even Hornberger wouldn’t hire someone who hadn’t finished her dissertation! I meant publish it.”
“I have published it. As good as. It’s been with the readers at Cambridge University Press for about a month, and of course I don’t know how long their list of queries will