I already wasn’t looking forward to next week; now I’m looking forward to it even less. I wish the males at Ardrossan were a little less…ardent in their attentions to the opposite sex.
Chapter 10
ON MONDAY MORNING I cycle to work expecting to find the Observatory shaken by a sex scandal as by a thunderbolt from a storm cloud. But the thunderbolt, insofar as there is one at all, strikes me. I guess it was naïve of me not to expect that there would be some fallout after Giles Cleveland’s intervention in my office situation. Except that the fallout is more in the nature of a hurl-out, this time not back into my office—I give thanks for small mercies—but onto the floor space between my office door and the foot of the spiral stairs that lead up to the old observatory in the dome.
I call the janitor, Larry, who insists it isn’t his job to clear out occupied offices. I explain that my office should have been cleared out in August, when it was still unoccupied, and that the content of the Dumpster, being mostly books and paper, poses a considerable fire hazard. In case he wonders why the contents of the cart are no longer in the cart, I refer him to Professor Andrew Corvin, room E-430. When I return from my library tour and a piece of carrot cake in the Eatery, the mess has disappeared off the floor, but the overflowing Dumpster is still sitting there. So be it. We have bigger problems now.
Upon reflection, I am not surprised that nobody talks to me about Hornberger. Although universities, like all close-knit communities, are rife with rumor, reliable facts are hard to come by at the best of times, and this threatens to be among the worst of times. If there are any fanciful stories at Ardrossan about professors guilty of, as Tim put it so crudely, boning student totty, they do not reach my ears. Tim does not inform me of what he, no doubt, finds out in the course of the week, and if Yvonne has been filled in by Sam Ruffin, she doesn’t let on. This is not a salacious tidbit like discovering two faculty members in the copy room during a Christmas booze-up. This is the violation of a taboo, and our instinctive reaction is to keep well away from it. A storm cloud has gathered above the Observatory, but we all pretend to each other that we haven’t seen it.
“Right. Research. Anything in the pipeline?” Giles Cleveland asks me, drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair.
Is this what the Faculty Mentoring Program calls “close and supportive mentoring of teaching and research activities?” I am the new girl in the Early Modern Studies graduate seminar, and we are assembled in a slightly ramshackle but cozy room across the road in the department of Art History. The floor is carpeted and sprinkled with chalk dust, the low chairs are upholstered and a little frayed. So is our host, Professor Harry Beecher, a potbellied figure in green corduroy and a blue tie, who handed round hot tea in college mugs and spilled sugar over the overhead projector. Eleven students have squeezed onto chairs, stools and boxes, and besides Beecher and Cleveland, there are five more professors from various neighboring departments. It was one of these, a guy with Franklin’s “Join, or die” cartoon on his t-shirt and a long ponytail, who asked Cleveland to introduce “your new colleague” to the group.
“Um, well, I have three publications forthcoming, one of them my book. We’re herding in the last contributions to a collection that I’m editing with a friend in England, and—”
“About?”
“Pregnancy.”
Cleveland freezes, and the laughs are on my side.
“I take it you are speaking metaphorically,” he says.
“You bet.” I smile, something I find confusing and difficult where Giles Cleveland is concerned. “Pregnancy as a stage image, or a narrative trope, or narrative structure, even. It’s a slightly off-the-wall theme, I admit, and we have some rather eccentric contributions, but—”
“The patriarchally circumscribed, ideologically enclosed female body-slash-narrative…” His face gives nothing away, but I know perfectly well that he is mocking me.
“Sometimes it works out like that, yes. But not as predictably as you might think. My main project at the moment is on illustrations in anatomy books, Vesalius and after, and how they adapt religious iconography, for instance that of the pregnant Mother of God, Maria gravida. I’m presenting that as