for a couple of keys last week, and they were missing, too.”
Dancey was looking for other people’s office keys?
Lorraine tells me that Dancey teaches on Monday afternoons but usually comes in just before his class starts, so it would be better if I spoke to him afterward. But my patience has run out.
“Professor Dancey? I know you’re teaching now, sir, but I spent the better part of the morning trying to get into my office. A new lock was fitted on Friday afternoon, but I never received notice of this, nor a key. So I’d be extremely grateful if—”
“Oh, then this must be it!” Dancey, who had been hanging up his coat and cleaning his black woolen sweater with an adhesive roll, reaches across his desk to where a padded envelope is sitting on top of a pile of books. He picks it up and rattles it. “This arrived on Friday afternoon when Lorraine had already gone.”
The envelope, baggy and dog-eared like all recycled office material, has Central Maintenance and Urgent written on it. Not urgent enough to inform me, apparently.
These are my plans for getting my ass fired from my tenure-track position at a national research university. Plan A: alienate the big-donor, conservative Christian clientele. Working on that. Plan B: start an affair with a married and tenured colleague who is also my academic mentor. Unlikely to be realized, as said colleague does not progress beyond very mild flirtation and comes to Sunday night drinking spree in his dog-walking gear. Plan C: drive into town, find a locksmith, and have the ancient key to the old observatory copied behind admin’s back. Check. I don’t even know why I want a duplicate of the key to the dome. Ineffectual spite, I guess. Why am I so determined to piss off my employer? Well, Your Honor, they started it! Armed, at last, with the key I fingered out of the (sealed and re-sealed?) envelope on Dancey’s desk, I enter my office with as much suspicion as the weakest link in the tenure chain may allow herself. What does it matter if anyone’s been in my office while I was locked out? It isn’t my private home, and if I keep anything private in my workplace, it is at my own risk.
Except that someone has been in my office. As far as I can tell, nothing has been taken, but why would someone lift up and turn over the library books on my desk? Someone picked up all the items on my desk and did not realize that my system of working through library books is that I put the ones I’m done with face down. I know for a fact that there was a face-down pile of four; the pile is still there, but it is facing up. Knowing that Crazy Corvin had a key to my office made me uncomfortable, but this is a brand-new lock. It wasn’t Corvin who snooped around in here.
Wonderful. So now I have a choice of at least four stomach-churning scenarios to worry over: my paycheck disaster, the intrusions into my office, the fact that I have not added a single sentence to my Notre Dame paper since Rosh Hashanah, and my imminent encounter with the woman I envy more than anyone else in the whole wide world.
“Ms. Cleveland is upstairs, but she knows she’s seeing you at half past.”
Liz, her administrative assistant, opens a door from the landing area into a waiting room with a suite of slim beige armchairs and a sofa. The office itself can be partitioned off by a sliding door, which is already half open. There is another sliding door, currently shut, on the opposite wall—evidently the other legal counselor’s office. It’s like being at an expensive dentist’s, including the Picasso prints on the walls and the potted ficus by the window. Actually, some root-canal work doesn’t sound so bad. I hear the door open and close in the adjoining room, and my stomach turns.
“Look, you can’t simply walk in here and assume that I’m going to make time for you! I’d like to see your face if I barged in on one of your lectures!”
“Would you prefer me to ring up your secretary and make an appointment? I can do that, if that’s what you want!”
Oh, please, God—don’t make me witness a fight between Giles Cleveland and his wife!
“Anyway,” he says, “this is urgent. Holly Ortega and the department want me to take over the chair from Nick.”