point? I’m tenure-track. I’ll shut the fuck up and wait till one of the higher-ups deigns to favor me with his attention. I tried to speak with Corvin, but when I met him this morning, he glared at me and ducked into his office like a toad into a hole. C’mon, huddle up—” I pull up the second chair and switch on my PC.
“You have to tell Giles.”
“You say that as if Giles Cleveland were God. Or Darth Vader. Do you think he’s going to choke Corvin? Using the Force?”
“For sure.” Tim grins. “Your lack of faith is disturbing!”
“See, here. I get to this page, but when I try to select my courses—”
“Giles is your mentor,” he insists. “It’s his job to sort out problems like this!”
“I won’t go running to Daddy the moment things don’t go smoothly!”
“Don’t you like Giles?” The baby blues are round as saucers.
“He calls me doctor.”
Tim stares at me with glassy incomprehension.
“Who calls you what?”
“Cleveland. He calls me Dr. Lieberman! Not in front of the students. To my face.”
“Seriously?”
“Tim! Cleveland can’t stand me!” I say, as if he were the dumb boy who gets it last.
“I don’t believe that. Maybe he’s teasing you. He only does that when he likes someone. He’s flirting with you!”
“I know how Englishmen flirt. He isn’t flirting with me. He hasn’t suggested I call him Giles, either, though he expressly told me not to call him sir.”
“You called him sir?”
“Considering my options, sir seemed very restrained!”
“Ouch, he did rub you the wrong way!” Tim can’t resist milking my indignation, but he clearly has no explanation for Cleveland’s behavior. It would have been a relief to hear that he—Cleveland—was notorious throughout the department for his rudeness, but apparently not so. On the contrary, Tim seems to hero-worship him, which I find absolutely laughable.
“Whatever. I won’t ask Cleveland for help, that’s all.”
I’m tempted to ask Tim about Dolph Bergstrom and the search committee, but something stops me. Tim is such a gossip; if he hasn’t told me yet, there is a reason. Perhaps I should keep this tidbit under my cap for a little. The more I hear about Dolph beforehand, the more awkward I will feel when I meet him. At the end of the day all we can do is try and be grown-up about it. I got the job, and Dolph will just have to suck it up. Now I want my office.
Chapter 6
AFTER ABOUT A TRILLION SESSIONS of new faculty orientation, and cocktails with the Provost, and lunchtime finger food and jazz with the Dean and her staff—none of which addressed my most pressing problem, of course—we assemble for the first faculty meeting at the English department. I still have no idea what to do about Crazy Corvin and the mountain of his trash in my office, but I do know that my part as the new kid on the block is to be seen, not heard. I would get off to a very bad start indeed with my new colleagues if the first thing they heard from me was a complaint. My best course of action is to be as quiet as a mouse: watch, listen, and learn.
Our venue is the conference room at the Observatory. It is dominated by a table that is at once decorative and emblematic, an almost round oval at one end, it narrows down at the other end and connects, with a couple of tapering pieces in-between, with as many rectangular tables as are needed.
“What’s with the tear-shaped table?” I whisper to Tim as we enter the room.
“Tear? We call it the Sperm Room, for all the whacking off that goes on in here.”
“Okay, you sit at the window, I sit here. Go, reprobate. Shoo.”
The full professors and highest-ranking associates sit at the head of the table, while the rest of us huddle round the, um, tail. Andrew Corvin, in the same suit he wore before, comes in and obliges half a dozen people to move down because he insists on sitting next to Matthew Dancey. I’m a somewhere-in-the-middle-of-the-tail assistant professor, and I think—although I can’t be sure because I don’t want to be caught looking at him—that when Giles Cleveland enters, he scans the room, sees me among the infantry and checks that box. I was right; he doesn’t wear jeans and rugby shirts when he is on duty. But even in a light gray summer suit and a white dress shirt there is a disheveled look about him, as if