had known that Yvonne would tell you, I wouldn’t have told her, because I really can’t afford to look like a dud…like a rookie…to half the faculty as well as to the students!”
When I dare look at him, my heart leaps at the expression on his face.
“First of all, I’m not half the faculty. Secondly, you are a rookie, and there’s no shame attached to that at all. You are right to discuss these incidents with your colleagues. Choose your confidantes carefully, by all means, but don’t feel you have to be able to wrestle with the slings and arrows of college teaching all by yourself, because that is the sure way to a burnout. Yvonne only told me because she was concerned, and she feels that as your mentor I should try to help. I’ve had my run-ins with Mr. Williams, if that’s any consolation.”
“You have?” I breathe with relief.
“He’s what at school we used to call a complete dickhead. Do you want me to have a word with him? Only—”
“No, that would—”
“—I don’t think that would increase your authority in the classroom.”
“—look as if I needed help from the big boys. Yes, that’s—I mean, no, thanks. I can deal with him, it’s only that today—”
For a second or two I am tempted to give it all up and tell him about my paycheck, but—no. Not important enough. Not important enough to risk Cleveland’s impatience.
“It doesn’t excuse his behavior,” he adds, “but Logan’s biography isn’t quite what you normally see in our students. He went to a community college after school and did exceptionally well there. Ardrossan has an agreement with the state to offer places to one or two of these students each year; that’s how Logan got in. Since then he’s floundered, and it’s hard to say whether he is intellectually intimidated or feels culturally displaced. The social and cultural diversity on which we pride ourselves so much is, after all, of a very…er, circumscribed nature. What does your father do for a living?”
I’m too wrapped up in what he has been telling me about Logan to stop and think whether I want to answer that question.
“He’s a cardiologist.”
“See? Logan’s father is in and out of prison. Forgery, embezzlement, stuff like that, nothing heavier. But I didn’t tell you this.”
“Oh, man.” I rest my elbows on my desk and rub my forehead with the balls of my hands. “Now I can’t even dislike him?”
Cleveland grins. “Yes, you can. Although I don’t know about you, but I am usually more lenient with kids whose lives have been so much less privileged than mine. That’s when my middle-class guilt sets in. It’s the snooty, entitled ones who set my back up.”
“But I had to wallop Logan today! He was asking for it!”
“As far as I can see, you did all the right things, only you shouldn’t let him provoke you. But that’s the high art of teaching, and for you it’s early days yet. Now, in time—” He pauses, then continues with a twitch of the muscles around his mouth. “‘When in eternal lines to time thou growest,’ these incidents will become less frequent. Even if you were plain, you’d still be young. So be patient. Grow middle-aged. Don’t dye your hair when it begins to go gray. Gain a couple of stone in weight. None of them messes with Elizabeth Mayfield, I can tell you that.”
“That is preposterous!”
“It may be preposterous, but it’s the best advice I have for you. Take it or leave it. The rest is an occupational hazard.” Again he sighs, but he doesn’t seem impatient with me anymore, lounging on his rickety little chair. “We are pissing into the wind. All of us who uphold the fiction—or maybe it’s a dream, or worse, a hubristic fantasy—that by acquainting young people with, well, as Matthew Arnold has it, ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ with art, which is always the fruit of intellectual subtlety and wit and compassion and tenderness, something that is bigger and better than us ordinary folk, so we have to expand our minds in order to grasp its brilliance and beauty—now I’ve lost the beginning of my sentence.”
The seawater eyes release me from their deadlock; he looks round my office, bewildered. So passionate, when he lets his guard down, and so vulnerable.
I’m so in love with him I can hardly breathe.
“I was pissing into the wind,” I remind him quietly. The eyebrows shoot up, but he