“Oh, talking of energy—Dolph has been talking to some people who will have the running of the ICSLP, and it seems that if you get a bid in quickly, you may well manage to be among the conferences sponsored next year. Next fall, probably. You two better stick your heads together and start writing a call!”
His voice is at its most sonorously patronizing, and I am painfully aware that I am in the hands of a master rhetorician who has outmaneuvered me.
“Yes, thank you, sir. Then I will next ask for an appointment at the Office for Faculty Affairs. May I refer to our talk today in my discussion with the Dean?” Mistake, mistake. And yet.
“Of course you may. But I doubt that Holly Ortega will have time to concern herself with such a trifle!” he says coldly. Now I have really annoyed him, but at least he has understood that I mean business. Irene is right; sometimes you have to piss people off if you want to stop them from messing with you. Sometimes the boomerang comes back, though, and hits you right in the teeth. We’ll see about this one.
“The wrong salary? But that sounds highly unlikely,” says a blithe female voice in the Dean’s office when I call them.
“Nonetheless, I was wondering whether the Dean has time to see me briefly this week or next week. That would be so very helpful!”
“This week is all full up, I’m afraid.”
“And next week? It needn’t take long. I’m sure it’s a simple mistake.”
“Hmmm…nothing again, I’m afraid. Dr. Ortega is busy right now, as you can imagine.”
“Well, then perhaps she isn’t the person I should see about this at all? Could you possibly advise me who the best person to contact would be? I’d be really grateful.”
“Oh, I couldn’t say,” she pipes back. “It’s not my job to know these things, you see.”
“Yes, I see. Well, since it’s a matter involving my contract, perhaps the legal department would be the best place to try? What do you think? One of the legal advisors in HR?”
There is a short silence in the line.
“Can you make Wednesday at eight fifteen?”
I assure her that I can and dash off into the west wing (clackety-clack go the Mary Poppins boots), where I’m about to miss the beginning of my Comedy class. A crowd of students is loitering in front of my classroom.
“It’s Dr. Bergstrom’s class,” Jocelyn says. “They haven’t finished yet.”
“Oh, good, I thought I was late!”
“Well…” She checks her phone. “In fifty-seven,-six,-five,-four seconds, you would have been.”
At three minutes past the hour, Dolph has not looked left once, even though his students see me watching him through the glass pane in the door. I knock on the door. He turns his head, feigns surprise, raises his hand in a gesture that could mean anything or nothing, and goes on talking. At five minutes past my students have started giggling and joking that we should relocate to the Eatery, so I knock again and open the door.
“Apologies, Dr. Bergstrom, for interrupting what seems to be a spellbinding monologue, but might I ask you to wrap up now? We have a very full program, too.”
“Yeah, sorry, I’ll just finish this thought.”
Just finishing this thought takes him another three minutes at least, while his class, half packed, and my class, half unpacked, sit and stand in awkward disarray. I vaguely feel that I should assert myself against Dolph, but my anxious mind is worrying the exchange with Dancey like a cat worries a dead mouse. On the whole it is perhaps just as well that I am in no mood to go for Dolph, the chair’s pet.
“For the moment,” I announce when Dolph and his students have left and I have settled down my class, “I’m more interested in figuring out how metaphor works than in defining what it is. How far do you take a metaphor before it becomes too far-fetched? Let’s use Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’ as an example and be very simple and visual about it. Imagine all the features, all the characteristics of ‘deer’ as constituting one set…you know, like in third-grade math. Like this.” I draw a bubble on the board. “And imagine all the features of ‘lady’ in an overlapping set, like this—” I draw another bubble “then the question is, what’s in the intersection?”
“What? Reading, ’Riting, ’Rithmetic? And that’s what I got out of bed for?”