The sleazy talk is momentarily interrupted the following Wednesday when I turn up early on the fourth floor of the Observatory to prepare for my hard-won appointment with Dean Ortega.
The air at the top of the marble stairwell is unusually crisp, and I mentally congratulate the cleaning staff who must have left some windows open. But what Martha Borlind, Steve Howell, and a couple of students are examining seems to be the result of vandalism. Three window panes, each in a different dormer window, have been smashed.
“Could it have been birds?” Martha wonders.
“Then you’d have the shards inside, on the floor here!” Steve brushes her off. “But most of the glass is—” He cautiously opens one of the broken windows to peer down onto the inner yard. “Well, I can’t see anything; it’s bushes down there. But either the pieces were swept up already, or these were smashed from inside!”
I slowly walk along the corridor checking each hole, the last one in the window closest to the Dumpster that is still sitting under the stairs. Now and again people add some waste paper or some cookie wrappings to the pile of junk, and the other day I fished half a sandwich out of it—don’t want to encourage the rats, on top of everything else. What I find in there today is a blood-drenched ball of tissue paper. I nudge a pile of plastic folders over it and saunter back to the others.
“Has anyone called maintenance?”
Larry the janitor is, if possible, even more appalled than we are at this evidence of wanton violence. He calls his young man, and together they are taping plastic sheets over the holes in the window panes as I leave to make my way across campus to the Dean’s office at Rossan House.
“That’s funny,” Larry observes cryptically.
“What is?”
“All happens in front of your office, ma’am.”
“What does?”
“Mess. Junk. Now this—” He nods at the windows.
“But that has nothing to do with my office!”
He looks past me at the cart and scratches his grizzled head. I’m waiting for him to explain himself, but after staring and scratching for a while, he turns back to his work.
“Anyway, you promised two weeks ago that you’d have this…thing removed,” I add sharply. “You know better than I do that it’s a fire hazard!”
“Central maintenance’s job, ma’am.”
“Yes, but it’s your job to see to it that central maintenance do theirs! And I believe I’ve asked you not to call me ma’am, Larry!”
He glances over at me, and I could project any kind of disdain into his expression, but I don’t have time for this.
Holly Ortega is apparently starting what is going to be a very busy day—during the ten minutes that I am in her office, her secretary comes in to hand her a sheaf of faxes, but she is very focused and friendly as she listens to my plight. I was right to come and see her, she tells me, but unfortunately she can’t do more than make a phone call for me.
“Morning, Liz. Holly Ortega here. Listen, I have a young colleague here with some discrepancies in her paycheck. It’s one of the contracts Newburgh signed…that’s right. Can Amanda see her next week? Tuesday?” She looks at me. “Tuesday at ten thirty any good? Great, Liz, the name is Lieberman, Anna. Thanks very much. Bye!” She puts the phone down and smiles at me, her thoughts clearly already on her next task. “There you are, Anna—Amanda Cleveland will sort you out.”
Oh. My. God.
Yes, I’m sure Amanda Cleveland will sort me out good ’n’ proper. Especially if I tell her that I am lusting after her husband.
Well, all right. I admit it. I’m curious about the woman who is allowed, by some cosmic coincidence of time and temperament, to run her hand across those broad, boyish shoulders. Slip her fingers into his and draw him close. Undress him. I am still wondering why he was so dead set against becoming department chair. There is more to it than “Giles only cares about his own research.” Amanda knows. I shouldn’t even want to know.
When I return to the fourth floor of the Observatory, business seems to be going on as usual. The office doors are all open—we received a memo from Dancey reminding us to leave our doors open as much as possible and without fail when we are in our offices with a student—and the makeshift plastic window panes are softly flapping in the wind.