laughter.
“What, that? Thanks, but I’m not having my guests dispose of other people’s disposed-of condoms.”
Our eyes meet only for a fraction of a second, but again I feel a seismic wave travel through the earth, up my legs and into my womb.
I am in a panic of indecision. I can’t orchestrate a reason for Giles to stay. Do I even want him to stay? If he really wanted to stay, he could cycle off with Tim, lose him at the next junction, and come back. I am too shy to even look at him again to see whether he would like to come back. No, we are both carefully looking past each other.
Just as well. Who would prefer sex to grading essays, anyway?
Chapter 22
ON MONDAY I CYCLE ACROSS the Observatory parking lot, across Library Square, past Harrison Lab, along the river promenade, across the stone arch bridge into Ardrossan. When I hand the manila envelope to the elderly woman behind the counter in the post office, she says, “To England? This one’s sealed with a kiss, am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right. Wait—” I take it from her again and quickly kiss it for luck. “Oh—have I smudged it now?”
“No, it’s fine, dear. If half the love letters in the world were mailed with half the dedication as these…” She weighs and franks it. “That’s three thirty-one, please.”
Every other year the English department hosts its own Homecoming reception—what Nick Hornberger called “the black lining on the cloud of Family Weekend.” For two hours on Friday afternoon we will be welcoming English Lit alums, and they are sure to be interested in one thing and one thing only: the sex scandal. Hornberger lui-même will be conspicuously absent from this occasion but not, more importantly, from the opening ceremony at the new Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology. Apparently there was a ruckus about this amongst the President, the Provost, and the Board of Trustees, but Hornberger insisted that he was innocent until proven guilty, and as such—that is, innocent—he had every right to celebrate the coming to fruition of a several-hundred-thousand-dollar project that he had been working on for over a year. Fair enough. Meanwhile the men who had to clean up the E-4 hallway on Family Weekend are now posted at strategic corners of the Observatory to prevent a repetition.
I shake a lot of hands that afternoon and smile so much that my cheek muscles begin to tremble. Dancey steers us through the official program with professional efficiency, but he cannot stem the flow of gossip afterward. I say gossip, but the term disparages the experiences and memories of these women—more than three-quarters of English Lit alumni are in fact alumnae—that span a period of more than forty years. Those who were here five or ten years ago confirm that Nick Hornberger was notorious in their days for his favoritism and his affairs.
“He was in charge of assistantships, scholarships, fellowships—tedious paperwork for his colleagues, so they were happy to leave all that to him,” Annie, class of nineteen ninety-six, remembers. “And boy, did he pick ’em! The fourth floor looked like the catwalk of a beauty pageant!”
“The one good thing you can say about him, he is color-blind.” This information comes from a very attractive African-American woman, who adds hurriedly that her then boyfriend, now husband, was a member of the basketball team, so Hornberger never hit on her. “But I know of several girls who—well, he was charming, so they were rarely offended. I never heard worse of him than that. Flirting, I mean.”
I catch Yvonne’s eyes and I can see what she is thinking, but we had better shut the fuck up.
A woman whose nametag says Elaine Shaw, ’77, Tulane has been standing in our circle without commenting, and her silence becomes so conspicuous that I apologize to her for talking about a person unknown to her.
“Oh, I know Nick,” she says grimly. “Except he wasn’t called Hornberger then. He took his wife’s name, didn’t you know? Ex-wife’s, now. He was born Nicholas Eagleson.”
This is news to everyone, and Janice, the black woman, wonders what on earth possessed him to change his name from Eagleson to Hornberger.
“You may well ask,” says Elaine.
After an awkward silence, I speak for all of us. “I think we are asking.”
“He raped a girl in my dorm. Nick was on a football scholarship, confident, popular, going places. Mary-Lou was biracial, not conventionally beautiful, but striking—tall, very beautiful hair, and…well, these days it’s called