“He’s giving a report on the trustees meeting. About the new health sciences school.”
Hal Smith, a colleague from the department, had just started a new appointment as dean of Humanities. Hal imagined himself an iconoclast, a British Marxist still talking about May 1968 like he started it all. When the promotion came through, he jokingly called himself a sellout for joining the managerial class, but he adjusted quickly to his new status, swapping his leather jacket and jeans for a suit and tie. (His silver hair remained gelled into one sharp spike in front, a conspiratorial wink that said,I’m doing it all for the proletariat.) I’d run into Hal the week before. Since the promotion, he had started speaking from the point of view of “the College”—as in “the College expects this” or “of course the College supports tenure track faculty, but …” etc., etc. I joked about it to Safie and she diagnosed him withinstitutionalitis. “That’s when you lose the last of your soul and stop seeing yourself as separate from Sawyer,” she said. “It’s fatal.”
“What’s going on guys? Make some room.”
I looked up as Colin dragged his chair over to the other side of Safie. He wedged in and then managed, somehow, to expand—all shoulders and elbows and youthfully worked-out muscles just going soft. How do straight guys do that—rearrange space around themselves wherever they go? I didn’t dislike Colin, exactly. But if junior faculty got grades, he’d be a grade-grubber, volunteering for every task force and initiating service-learning trips. His team-player attitude made the rest of us look bad.
“We’re just waiting on Hal,” I said.
Colin glanced to the front of the room. “Susan looks pissed.” It was no secret Susan had been gunning for the dean position. Shehad spent two decades doing grunt work in the department, keeping things running, but, of course, in the end the promotion went to a man. “I heard she filed a formal complaint about the search passing her over.”
“Maybe that’s why Hal is taking his sweet time getting here,” said Safie.
“Or maybe,” said Colin, “it’s because of his impending divorce.”
“What’s that now?” Safie raised an interested brow. Colin’s grubbing ambitions meant he was well connected and thus a consistent source of gossip. I still found him annoying, but Safie shifted the blame to me. “Knowledge is power,” she said when I complained about him, “and you’re a dead end—you don’t talk to anybody.” I couldn’t argue with that.
“I heard Elizabeth has moved out,” Colin said, leaning in.
Safie made a sound likehmmph.“Good for her. I wonder if Hal is up to his old tricks—” but before she could continue, Hal blustered into the room, a flurry of apologies about running late. “You know how it is,” he announced to no one in particular, like we were all in on something. “But the College”—I smirked and beside me, Safie snickered—“is very eager to catch you up on our plans for the year.”
Susan, arms still crossed, stood and announced, “Well, I guess we can finally start.”
The meeting droned on around me. I never paid attention at these things. I figured if anything important came up, the news would find me. My thoughts drifted to the previous night. I was ticked off that Tyler had stood me up. After all that anxiety about falling behind, he didn’t even show? And when I checked my email there was nothing—no apology, no explanation. I still hadn’t gotten anynotification from the registrar’s office. Maybe I’d make him sweat it out a little, say it was too late to sign up, as punishment for wasting my night. But that was petty—he’s just a kid, and I was the one who offered to stay late. I wondered what it was like to be at Sawyer on financial aid, surrounded by so much wealth. It wasn’t all the students, of course, but I’d learned you couldn’t trust their accounts; the baseline was so high, kids whose families didn’t own multiple homes thought themselves poor.Ihad found it overwhelming. My first semester, when I griped about a student in my Comp course to Safie, she replied, “Oh, the Saudi prince?” I laughed. He was obviously wealthy, gaudily sporting an enormous wristwatch you could trade in for a car—a nice one, not like mine. But Safie wasn’t kidding; he was an actual prince. The student had done a miserable job with his final presentation. He argued that the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia was good for the economy, as everyone just hired a private chauffeur. “Everyone?” I asked. “Yes, of course. Every family has a driver.” He had no idea. When I later explained his low grade, he tried to bribe me to reconsider. He said I should let him know the next time I was in the Middle East—his family owned a chain of hotels and would set me up. It was weird enough having royalty in your classroom—I don’t know if I could have handled living with them in the dorms.
When I was applying to college, I’d heard of Sawyer, of course, but why anyone would go to college in Ohio was beyond me. From the limited vantage point of a state school in Florida, I couldn’t see how the world worked, the unmarked networks that run between places like this (Sawyer, Wesleyan, Brown, Smith) and funnel directly into New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. While in grad school at NYU, I became acquainted with the beneficiaries of these circuits for the first time, people in their mid-twenties alreadyadvancing in careers in arts administration and magazines and PR, worlds of work I had no clue how to enter. (That’s the thing about being naïve—you don’t know you are.)
I had gotten completely lost in these thoughts and was snapped out of it by an eruption of conversation and people standing to leave. The meeting had ended.
“Back with us?” Safie asked.
“What did I miss?”
“Honestly, not much.”
“I kind of like knowing what’s going on at my workplace,” Colin said.
“And that is just one of our many differences,” I said. “I want the minutiae of this job to occupy as little space in my brain as possible—I don’t have much to spare.”
On our way out of the room, I tried to dodge Hal, but he saw me and turned from his conversation, waving a hand for me to stop.
“Mark, you’ll get that email to me?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Sorry to be slow,” and then hurried us through the door before he could say more.
In the hallway, Safie faced me. “Are you secretly conspiring with Hal?”
“Yeah, what was that about?” Colin asked, trying and failing to sound casual.
“Nothing, really,” I said. “He invited me to do one of those talks. Sawyer Scholars or whatever.”
“Really?” Colin asked. “I didn’t realize they were working out the schedule already.” I could tell he felt slighted; I would gladly trade places.
“That’s great,” said Safie. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell us. But you’re doing it, right?”
“I mean, it’s not really an invitation you can refuse, is it?” It was part of Fall Fest, when alums and parents came for a weekend of showboating and fund-raising. Sawyer mainly treated junior faculty as undeserving of our jobs, so the talk was considered something of an honor. But I was left puzzling at the sequence of choices that led to a life in which I was meant to feel lucky to spend a Friday evening reading from a bunch of printed pages to a sparsely populated room of semi-interested people.
Colin offered some laudatory words and Safie repeated hers. And then Colin asked if we were going back to our offices.
