materializes out of the undergrowth, casts me a pissy glance and strikes across the clearing. Once it has a small dark body in its mouth; its legs blur as it hurries past me for fear I’ll rob it of its prey. Once, in the week before Thanksgiving, its approach seems slower and more cumbersome. No wonder: it got hold of one of the Walshes’ chickens. The feathery white neck is dangling out of the cat’s mouth; there is no point in trying to chase after it.
“Oh, man!” I sigh. “Okay, I’m not going to turn you in, but don’t let me catch you doing it again!” That is a sentence I am saying far too often these days.
Chapter 25
“ABOUT TOMORROW—”
Giles Cleveland materializes by my elbow, watching Dancey and Dolph caught up in some conspiratorial exchange as our colleagues file out of the Sperm Room. It is so like Dancey to schedule a faculty meeting one day before we break up for Thanksgiving. Nobody is concentrating, everyone is mulling over holiday menus or travel arrangements, eager to get away.
“Tomorrow. You’re not—” Giles hesitates, and for a wild moment I expect him to announce that I cannot go because there will be a departmental putsch and we all have to be present. “Are you flying to South Bend or to Chicago?”
“South Bend. Why?”
An emotion flickers across his face, but I still think that it must be in reaction to the two men standing by the windows. Giles barely acknowledged me during the meeting; I assumed that is what happens when you kiss colleagues after drunken parties. In the cold light of day, they ignore you.
“I could take you to the airport, if you’re on the eight-twenty flight.” As if he was offering to lend me some books or get a marker for me from his office.
“Why?” I realize I am repeating myself, but in my confusion I value precision over variation.
“I’m going, too.”
“To the airport?”
“To Notre Dame.”
I cannot help myself.
“But why?”
“Er…” He avoids my eyes and makes a show of fumbling to come up with a good reason. “I gotta see a horse about a man.”
“Barton, Scherer and Nussbaum Legal Associates, Irene Roshner speaking.”
“Help, Irene! Help!”
“Banana! What’s the matter? Are you okay?”
“Yeah…no…can you call me back later tonight? I know you’re busy, but—can you?”
“Sure, but tell me now! I’m alone in the office. I can talk. Tell me—what’s—”
“He’s coming to the conference!” I wail into the receiver, crouching on the sofa in my woolen pants even though I know that will make them go baggy at the knees.
“Who? What conference? Anna, no one has died, right? No one is about to die?”
“No! Well, my career.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Irene is using her resolute voice with me, so I settle down, straighten my legs, and try to be coherent.
“Tomorrow I’m going to present at a conference at Notre Dame. I bought the plane tickets months ago when—”
“Hey, I thought you were coming home for Thanksgiving!”
“I am coming home for Thanksgiving! Except I’m coming via South Bend. Anyway, today after a faculty meeting Giles Cleveland wanders up to me and offers me a ride to the airport. Tomorrow. Because he’s coming to the conference. It’s on iconography in early modern Europe, for Chrissakes! He isn’t even interested in that!”
“Seems he has unfinished business to attend to.”
“Shut up!”
“Why? You know where your priorities lie! It’s okay to flirt a little. Might do some good, when you’re up for your review.”
“I don’t want to—flirt—with him! I want to suck his brains out! And not by the shortest way!”
Irene groans into the phone. “Are you sure no one can hear you? You’ll be fired for sexual harassment! You and Horny Horn!”
“I’m not calling from my office, you nebbish. And I am absolutely not planning on being part of Ardrossan’s next little sex scandal.”
“You only wanna suck the Englishman’s schlong.”
“I want to do everything with him.”
“Well, you can’t. Way too messy, an affair with a senior colleague while you’re on tenure track. Question is, how will he take a brush-off?”
I am trying to assess how Giles will react when I reject him, but my system jams at a point of grammar. If. How would Giles react if I rejected him?
“Much virtue in ‘if’…”
“Huh? Oh, you’re quoting again.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t go.”
“Of course you’re going! What’s he going to do, fling himself on you in a dark corner of a Catholic campus? If you don’t encourage him, he won’t try anything. He’d be mad to!”