can’t refuse. And we’ve been taught all the legal stuff, and there’s no time to train new members. Besides, imagine the noise when it becomes public that a new hearing panel had to be appointed because half of the current members wanted nothing to do with it! Worse and worse. No, it’s all hush-hush, business as usual, normality at all times.”
“But why do people volunteer for these committees in the first place if they’re going to cave in the moment a really distasteful case has to be heard?”
“Oh, Anna! Such innocence!” Tim mocks me. “They’re afraid the evidence will mean they’ll have to fire Hornberger, and they want nothing to do with that!”
Innocence, indeed.
“In that case, shouldn’t they stay on the panel and see if they can bail him out? By hook or by crook?” The two men look at me blankly until I have caught up with them. “Oh, you mean, they know he’s a lost cause? Oy!”
“Oy is right. I don’t know how else to interpret this mass resignation. Presumably they know more than we do. He must be in it up to his neck.”
“But,” I say for the third time, “I just don’t see it! It’s evident and plainly obvious that he and Natalie were having an affair—who knows for how long? Maybe since her undergraduate days! But she was friendly with him in the Astrolabe, after the first faculty meeting. I saw them! I sussed them because they were so natural and familiar with each other!”
Tim stares at me and blinks.
“It totally kills me when you use British slang in that Noo Yoak voice of yours. I would so do you, Anna, if.” He looks at Giles for corroboration.
“And I will so gag you, Timmy-my-man, if you don’t watch your mouth,” Giles says.
Tim, three-quarters drunk at this point, seems offended at this unambiguous announcement, but Giles smiles at him in a way that shows how little amused he is.
And I am sick at heart.
Because the first thing that hit me when I walked up to the two men huddled around the small table underneath a poster of The Pogues was the lamentable but undisputable truth that I have fallen in love with a married man who is also a tenured colleague.
For the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart.
For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.
Chapter 18
SINCE MONDAY IS NOT A TEACHING DAY for me and I have no set appointments, I could stay at home, slip into a white sweater, white sweatpants, and woolly socks, abstain from food, drink, and sex (ha!), and have an informal, private Yom Kippur. Obeying the letter of the law would be easy this year. I’m too dejected to have appetites of any sort, and in a sullen way I would even enjoy the ordeal of enduring thirst. But in view of the past days’ events, it seems hypocritical to do teshuvah—pray to return to God and to a stricter observance of His laws—when I know that tomorrow I will still be sadly and stupidly infatuated with Giles Cleveland.
So I drive in. It is pouring down rain, and my butt is still a bit sore from my bike ride on Saturday. My plan is to sort out the mystery of the lock on my office door. I start with the department secretary.
“Lorraine, hello. Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have a key to my office? E-four twenty-nine.”
“Oh, sure, dear—forgot yours at home, did you?” She unlocks a cupboard in which there is a locked chest in which are stored all the keys of the department.
“No, I mean, a key to the new lock on my door. There’s a new lock on my office door, but I never got a key for it.”
“But that’s…not yet,” says Kathy, her assistant. “Remember Central Maintenance wrote an email saying some of the older locks will be changed?” She clicks open some emails, finds the one, and says triumphantly, “Yes, November, and it will affect offices with the numbers E-four-oh-six, E—well, anyway. But that’s next month.”
“Well, the lock on my office door was changed last Friday. Any idea how I might get hold of a key? Preferably today?”
“This is funny,” says Lorraine, rummaging in the key chest. “E-four-twenty-nine, you said? There’s no spare key here for E-four-twenty-nine.”
“I know, right?” Kathy pulls the metal box toward her. “It’s a mess in here. Professor Dancey was looking