currently suspected of having raped a student. How is that better than chairing the department and washing his hands of Hornberger once the case is dealt with in a court of law, as it surely will be? He must be driven by revenge. No other motive makes any sense at all.
Why won’t you take the department chair?
I can’t tell you that.
What he also didn’t tell me is that he is divorced. About to be divorced. Separated from his wife, a free man! And indeed, why would a man who doesn’t even change out of his dog-walking pants before he meets a woman in a bar tell that woman that he is as good as single? No wonder he looked so disconcerted just now when I gave him my best come-hither look! Whoever he is dating now that he is rid of Amanda Saunders, she is sure to be cool and blond and enormously stacked. And who was that big-mouthed yuchna who told him that she saw the hole while he saw the bagel? Well, the hole in this bagel is that he did not invite me into his home for tea! Whatever it was that sparked the impulse, he regretted it almost instantly. He did not want me to know that he is divorced.
O soul, be changed into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!
I cannot remember when I was last so comprehensively, so painfully ashamed.
The last thing I need right now is another clash with Dolph Bergstrom. He overruns his sessions most weeks, but usually he just runs into the transition time, not into my class period. Today my class is once more still loitering in the hallway when I turn up. The light of a beamer is flickering in the darkened classroom; I recognize Peter Fonda in his psychedelic shirt pressing his face against the stone statue in the cemetery. I mentally re-run the film and calculate it is at least another five minutes until Wyatt’s bike is blown up. Five more minutes of film, wrapping up, packing up—what the heck does Dolph think he is doing?
Whatever I do, I must do it with conviction.
“All right, people—we can’t barge in on the ending of Easy Rider. Wouldn’t be cool. I’ll start the session in ten minutes sharp. See you back here in seven.”
Seven minutes to hide in the toilets, my fists pressed into my eyes. When I return, I can tell by their silence and their faces that my apparent sangfroid has created a certain sense of expectation, gleeful in some cases, apprehensive in others. For a moment I feel like the narrator in George Orwell’s story about a police officer in Burma who is goaded by a crowd of natives into shooting an elephant. But my job is to teach them Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, not to mud-fight a colleague.
A “colleague” who, five-and-a half-minutes into my class period, is still holding forth about the contradictions of avant-garde film-making in late nineteen-sixties Hollywood.
“Excuse me, Dr. Bergstrom—so sorry to interrupt. You’ll have noticed it’s way past the end of your class period.”
Without waiting for his reply, I usher my lot in but almost lose my cool when he says that he has been showing a film and needs another couple of minutes. My students, with the deference to authority that doesn’t cease to amaze me, stop in their tracks and look at me for their cue.
There is never any point in throwing a temper tantrum.
“But a couple more minutes won’t do justice to Easy Rider, now, will they? Maybe leave it till Thursday and discuss it properly?”
Dolph is in my face as if I had interrupted him at a particularly tricky bit of brain surgery.
“Now you’re telling me how to teach? Listen, if I want your advice, I’ll ask you!”
My instinct is to go for him, but my bad angel has been doused so effectively by the icy water of eavesdropping that it lacks the élan to egg me on to a foolhardy confrontation.
“I wouldn’t dare. But this isn’t your time and place to teach, I’m afraid, Dolph, but mine, and I’d be glad if you gave me the chance to do so.”
A good speech, if I say so myself. It makes Dolph close his laptop with an angry klop and his class sigh with relief. My New York students would by now have formed a ring around us, chanting for their champions—well, metaphorically speaking, anyway. Ardrossan students are made uncomfortable by clashes between