he had shrugged into his jacket in a hurry—top shirt buttons undone, cuff buttons undone, the sleeves peeking out from under the sleeves of the jacket. As if someone had been in the process of undressing him when he remembered the faculty meeting and dashed off.
Now there’s a tantalizing thought.
Two young men take the seats further down from me, and I am glad I can turn to them.
“Hi, we haven’t met. I’m Anna Lieberman.”
“Mm.” While my neighbor—a beefy blond with a goatee—is finishing an email, his friend tips his chair backward.
“Hey. I’m Steve Howell. Settling in all right?” He is weedier than the blond, but good-looking in a nineteen fifties kind of way.
“Yes, thanks, I’m—”
“You’re in next to Corvin, aren’t you?” He pulls up one corner of his mouth in a smile that could be sympathetic or malicious. “That’s too bad.”
The hunk’s shoulders twitch.
I turn my body toward them to signal my readiness for confrontation, although my smile is sweet and harmless.
“You seem to know all about that. How come?”
“Well, we…saw you in there, that’s all.”
“The weakest link,” the hunk says, straightening up from his notebook. “Someone has to be in next to Corvin, and that’ll be the new hires who have no powerful friends in the place. Fuzzy end of the lollipop.”
“So it goes.” I shrug, pretending to be cool. “And you are—?” As if I didn’t know.
“Dolph Bergstrom.” He still can’t get himself to look straight at me.
I have never met anyone actually called that. Why would parents do such a thing to their child? A blond, blue-eyed boy, yet! Adolph. Seriously?
“Oh, man—hi! I thought we’d meet here today—look, what can I say? Bad luck, that’s all. I know you probably wish I’d go away and boil my head, and—well, I won’t, but maybe we can have lunch soon? I have a ton of questions I’d love to ask you!”
Dolph stares at me as if his pet rabbit had suddenly spoken to him. In Swahili.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he says.
For five mortifying seconds I am convinced I got it all wrong, but his rejection impulse is so strong he even inches his chair away from me with a nervous jolt.
“Head boiling seems a little excessive,” Steve jokes, but I notice that he quickly checks Dolph’s profile.
“Aren’t you worried you’re out of your depth here, with no experience of the American grad school system?” Dolph is irritated with me, as if I were the puny kid that wants to play on his team.
“Yeah, I’m sure that having been out of the country is going to be such a disadvantage.”
“Good idea, going abroad,” Steve murmurs, trying to sound like Tony Soprano.
“Around,” Dolph adds.
“What goes around…”
“…comes around,” Dolph completes Steve’s sentence. “You did your MA and your Ph.D in England?”
Shut the fuck up, Anna. Do yourself a favor.
“Yeah, England University. Big place.”
This makes him flinch, but he comes back straightaway.
“You won’t last long,” he tells me. “England can’t cut it, compared with a graduate degree from a top American university.”
“Actually, bub, neither of us has a graduate degree from a top American university.”
Part of me is mature enough to understand that he needs a mantra to deal with the shitty situation he finds himself in, but another part of me wants to go for his jugular. I don’t want to look at Cleveland, really, I don’t, but my eyes sort of brush past him all of their own accord, and he is looking over. Our eyes meet, and he shakes his head. Just a fraction, just barely enough for me to notice. Did he just tell me to back off? Does Cleveland think Dolph could harm me?
I am following the proceedings with one ear only, so I only half catch something about the Graduate Careers Fair which takes place at the beginning of each fall semester. But I am all eyes and ears when Cleveland mentions by the way that “Tim and Tessa” will be going it alone from the English Lit side of the Early Modern Studies program.
“But you have to be there,” Hornberger says tersely. “You’re program director.”
“Laurie Jacobs has agreed to stand in for me.”
“Laurie Jacobs has a sabbatical this semester. She’s in Florence, up to her elbows in headless torsos.”
Even Cleveland has to grin at the image conjured up by Hornberger.
“I know, but when we last spoke, she said she was leaving mid-September. I’ll be away over the weekend and back for my first class on Wednesday but not much before. Sorry.”