hear?” Amanda asks the big white crystal on her desk when we have sat down.
“Not much. Almost nothing, in fact,” I say deliberately. “I am very hard of hearing…well, can be.”
It works in mobster movies. I wonder whether it also works in the office of an Associate Vice President of Finance and Administration. Apart from the heightened color in her cheeks, Amanda Cleveland, née Saunders, betrays no sign of agitation. My natural sense of tact made it difficult, at first, to look her in the face when she asked me to take a seat at her desk; she would join me in a couple of minutes. And she did. A couple of minutes later she entered her office from the hallway, and if I didn’t know that she was just involved in a shouting match with her soon-to-be ex-husband, I would never have guessed it. This is one cool chick.
Chic, too, in a tight-fitting, pale green skirt suit and a charcoal top underneath that shows off her cleavage. And she may actually be a real blonde, styled in that medium-long way that looks as if she was wearing spaghetti tongs on her head, its teeth framing her jaw and chin in a many-layered wave. Put together hits it precisely. She is very slim, very good-looking, well-groomed and self-assured: exactly the sort of girl I envied at school and college. Today, if I were a man, I wouldn’t even attempt to get close to her. No point, no joy.
And yet this is a woman who had quickies in her office—in her office!—with Nick Hornberger. I try to picture her, hot and tousled, her slim legs wrapped around Hornberger’s no doubt hairy football player’s torso. Or maybe he would hike up her skirt, bend her over her desk, and take her from behind? Did she actually enjoy having an affair with him? It seems so improbable. And what is it with that man, anyway? What kind of potion does he ply them with to make these females—babes, all—lift their skirts for him? I think I understand what draws a certain kind of student to a certain kind of philandering professor. But Amanda Cleveland is no attention-hungry co-ed who knows that she carries her best assets in her blouse. No, I don’t get it.
She is a professional. I show her the original letter stating salary and benefits, my reply bidding for a higher sum in view of my publications, a print-out of the email that agreed to this higher sum, my contract and my paycheck. She takes her time reading everything, and I wonder whether she is merely very thorough, buying time, or finding it hard to focus.
“This was signed by Greg Newburgh,” she informs me, and I shrug and nod, too preoccupied to talk.
Irene would slap me if she knew how little I am interested in the material issue here—my money!—because I can’t help wondering, is this what Giles fancies, or is this what Giles doesn’t fancy? Used to fancy, but not anymore? No matter, really, because I couldn’t be like her if I tried, and the hair and the cleavage are the least of it.
Ex , ex , ex!
The syllable had been drowned out by the shouting and the aggravation and the sudden flare of sexual energy and the necessity to concentrate on figures and contracts. But in the hush of rustling paper and the clicking of her keyboard as she opens my file, it is echoing in my head like an alphorn.
Giles Cleveland is getting a divorce.
“You’re right, Dr. Lieberman. There is a discrepancy here, and I am for the moment at a loss to account for it. I must ask you to give me some time to look into it.”
What a self-righteous cow I’ve been, taking sides where I had neither the right nor the necessary information to do so! Wife cheats on husband with senior colleague, colleague flutters on to graduate student in the manner of a testosterone-driven butterfly. Said student accuses him of sexual violence, husband is given the opportunity to be as unhelpful as a department chair can be in such a case. Husband refuses, preferring the opportunity to come clean about his wife’s fling to the college authorities.
WTF?
Giles must still be mightily pissed off about his wife’s infidelity to prefer humiliating her to settling his score with Hornberger. I think he overestimates his colleagues’ discretion. Someone always blabs. He will be known as a cuckold all over campus, cuckolded by the very man who is