curse and went for the always-courteous abrupt hang-up. I smoothed down my sleeveless garnet blouse and ran out of the office, skidding down two flights of stairs until I reached of the office Dr. Etheridge—“little Napoleon” as I liked to refer to him—where my illustrious humanities and social sciences colleagues were gathered. I ran past Fran, Etheridge’s secretary, who shot me a death look, and ran into the room. With the plethora of pocket protectors jammed into short-sleeved dress shirts and knee-hi panty hose peeking out from beneath peasant skirts, it resembled a meeting of the local chapter of Star Trek conventioneers. In my garnet blouse, black printed skirt, and high-heeled pumps, I looked, frankly, like a hooker compared to this crew.
“Sorry I’m late,” I mumbled and slid into the only empty chair in the room, the one right beside Little Napoleon at the conference table. Sister Mary glared at me from across the table and I looked down at my hands.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Bergeron,” Etheridge said. “Now that you’re here, perhaps we should have a moment of silence for our departed colleague, Dr. Stark. And perhaps a word from Dr. Bergeron?”
I looked around the room and all eyes were on me. Why me? I had only been married to the guy for seven years; some of these clowns had worked with him for far longer. Silence, the man said. Surely I couldn’t be expected to say something about Ray?
“Alison? Would you like to say something?” Etheridge asked.
Oh, I’ve got a lot to say, I thought, but I shook my head instead.
“It really would be nice if you could share something about Ray,” he persisted.
Share something? How about how he made me pay off the credit cards after we divorced, and then bought a fifty-thousand-dollar car? Or how I’d learned he was catting around mere hours after we returned from our honeymoon? Or how he had managed to produce the most boring sex tape known to the world of amateur porn? I clasped my hands together and cast my eyes downward. “Dear Lord, watch over Ray as he makes his way from purgatory to heaven.” That was the best I could do.
I looked up and all eyes were still on me, except this time, instead of pity, the eyes were filled with wonder. At my prayer. Sister Mary put her hand over mine and patted it gently. “Do you really think that Ray is in purgatory, Alison?”
No, I think he’s in hell. My marriage was purgatory. “I don’t know, Sister. But let’s hope he makes it upstairs to the big guy as soon as possible.”
If I had any doubts that Etheridge thought I was a giant buffoon, I was fairly confident at that moment that that was the case. He stared at me from behind his glasses and considered what I had said. Finally, he broke the silence and returned to the matter at hand: why we were all in the conference room together. “We were just discussing the potentially changing demographic landscape for…”
Blah, blah, blah, I thought, as I chewed on “potentially changing demographic landscape.” There was so much wrong with that phrase that I couldn’t even begin to focus on what he was saying. I watched his mouth move and thought about my raging headache when in my half slumber I heard him ask, “And what do you think?”
I sat up a little straighter. “Sounds good.”
David Morlock, the history chair, caught my eye and gave his head a little shake to warn me.
“Sounds good?” Etheridge asked. “So, you’re proposing that we reverse our policy?”
Whoops. The blood in my veins turned to ice as I considered my options. I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the answer right—or wrong for that matter—so I stalled by putting my finger to my nose in a gesture of contemplation. “Hmmm…” I said. “Interesting dilemma.” I looked around the table and saw that all of my colleagues were staring at me. After a few seconds of silence, David spoke up.
“I think what Alison means is that there are two schools of thought on the issue of gay rights and that allowing a queer studies program into a Catholic school has both pros and cons,” he said. He continued talking, and after a few tense seconds, all eyes were off me and onto him, an eloquent orator and all-around good guy.
I almost fell in love with him at that moment, but being as he is sixty-seven, has terrible halitosis, and lives