"That Old CapeMagic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard)

2 Slippery Slope

By the time Griffin ’s parents got divorced, each claiming they should’ve cut the cord sooner, that they’d made each other miserable for too long, he was in film school out West, and he’d thought it was probably for the best. But neither had prospered in their second marriages, and their careers suffered, too. Together, or at least voting together, they’d been a force to reckon with in English department politics. Singly, often voting against each other, they could be safely ignored, and the worst of their enemies now sniped at both with impunity. Of the two, his mother seemed to fare better at first. Openly contemptuous of the young literary theorists and culture critics when she was married to Griffin ’s father, she’d reinvented herself as a gender-studies specialist and became for a time their darling. One of her old “guilty pleasures,” Patricia Highsmith, had become respectable, and his mother published several well-placed articles on her and two or three other gay/lesbian novelists. Panels on gender were suddenly all the rage, and she found herself chairing several of these at regional conferences, where she hinted to her large and largely lesbian audiences that she herself had always been open, in both theory and practice, as regards her own sexuality. And perhaps, he supposed, she was. Bartleby, who’d begun their marriage preferring not to argue and ended it preferring not to speak at all, remained philosophical when these innuendos were reported back to him. Griffin had assumed his mother was exaggerating his withdrawal from speech, but a few months before his unexpected death (going to the doctor was something else he preferred not to do), he’d paid them a quick visit and they’d all gone out to dinner and the man hadn’t spoken a word. He didn’t seem to be in a bad mood and would occasionally smile ruefully at something his wife or Griffin said, but the closest he came to utterance was when a piece of meat lodged in his windpipe, turning his face the color of a grape until a passing waiter saw his distress and Heimliched him on the spot.

But his mother’s self-reinvention, a bold and for a time successful stroke, had ultimately failed. When the university, mostly at her suggestion and direction, created the Gender Studies Program, she of course expected to be named as its chair, but instead they’d recruited a transgendered scholar from, of all places, Utah, and that had been the last straw. From then on she taught her classes but quit attending meetings or having anything to do with departmental politics. Unless Griffin was mistaken, her secret hope was that her colleagues, noticing her absence, would try to lure her back into full academic life, but that hadn’t happened. Even Bartleby’s passing had elicited little sympathy. While she continued to publish, run panels and apply for chairperson positions at various English departments, her file by this time contained several letters suggesting that while she was a good teacher and a distinguished scholar, she was also divisive and quarrelsome. A bitch, really.

Despite deep misgivings, Griffin had accepted the university’s invitation to attend his mother’s retirement dinner. (Joy had volunteered to go as well, but he insisted on sparing her.) There happened to be a bumper crop of retirees that year, and each was given the opportunity to reflect on his or her many years of service to the institution. He found it particularly disconcerting that his mother was the last speaker on the program. He supposed it was possible the planners were saving the best, most distinguished retirees for last, though more likely they shared his misgivings about what might transpire, and putting her last represented damage control. When it was finally her turn, his mother rose to a smattering of polite applause and went to the podium. That she was wearing an expensive, well-tailored suit only deepened apprehension. “Unlike my colleagues,” she said directly into the microphone, the only speaker of the evening to recognize that fundamental necessity, “I’ll be brief and honest. I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is a distinctly second-rate institution, as are the vast majority of our students, as are we.” Then she returned to her seat and patted Griffin ’s hand, as if to say, There, now; that wasn’t so bad, was it? What she actually said in the stunned silence was, “Here’s something strange. For the first time in over a decade, I wish your father were here. He’d have enjoyed that.”

His father had fared even worse after the divorce. He, too, had attempted reinvention by attaching himself to the new American Studies major. He’d always been at least as interested in politics and history as literature, and the university had been willing to lend half of him to American Studies provided his colleagues in English had no objections (they certainly didn’t). His new office was one floor down in the Modern and Classical Languages Building, and Claudia, a big strapping graduate student, had offered to help him move his seventy or so boxes of books and periodicals. A lot of bending over was required and she wasn’t wearing a bra. Though he hadn’t really noticed her before, he did now, and his colleagues noticed him notice, remarking that it was clear which half of him was moving down to American Studies and which was remaining behind in English. Griffin was pretty sure his father had little desire to remarry and probably wouldn’t have but for the university ban on faculty-student fraternizing. Which was absurd. It wasn’t like Claudia was an undergraduate. She was twenty-nine, a grown-up (even by American university standards) who didn’t need any institutional protection, though several of her male professors wanted to know who would protect them from her. What Claudia did need, according to many in the department, was help, a lot of it, in completing her degree. She’d narrowly passed her doctoral prelims on the second and final attempt, one of her examiners abstaining, after which it took her a full academic year to come up with an acceptable dissertation topic, and like a prize heifer at a county fair, she had to be led (by his father) every step of the way. To Griffin, she indeed had a bovine quality. A full head taller than his father, she had wide hips and full breasts that always seemed to be in motion beneath the loose blouses she favored.

And so it was that this distinguished senior professor woke up one morning to the realization that while his wife had retooled herself as an adventurous gender specialist, he’d reinvented himself as a fool. Naked Lunch, Griffin ’s mother remarked, had finally won the day, showing poor Jeeves the door. Which may have been why, when an old graduate-school friend, who was now a dean at the University of Massachusetts, called to ask if he’d consider a one-year appointment replacing a professor who’d fallen ill, he eagerly accepted. Griffin ’s mother, of course, had been apoplectic with fury when she heard. Amherst, after all, was-what-two hours from the Cape? He and the fat cow would be able to spend weekends there, or even on the Vineyard or Nantucket, while she was stuck in the Mid-fucking-west with a mute for company. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it, which she determined, according to Griffin ’s father, by trying really, really hard.

He and Claudia were gone a full year, returning to the university only at the last possible moment, on Labor Day weekend. Griffin, just then between scripts, had flown to Indiana for a couple days. He hadn’t seen his father once during his Amherst stint, and he looked as if he must’ve spent the whole time in a TB ward. He’d aged a good ten years. Always slender and concave chested, he was now rail thin, with shrunken cheeks, and his hair had receded. Apparently to compensate, he wore what strands remained long on the back and sides, making him look like a Dickensian gravedigger. By contrast, Claudia had become even more zaftig. During Griffin ’s brief visit, she found numerous opportunities to insinuate her lush body near his, pillowing her unfettered breast against his arm or, if he happened to be sitting, the back of his head, gestures his father appeared not to notice.

They’d returned with excellent news, his father said. Claudia had finished her dissertation, and to celebrate they’d gotten married. He smiled bravely in relating this, while Claudia’s bovine version was of a different sort altogether. Their marriage had to remain a secret for now, he explained, until she’d defended her dissertation and she had her degree in hand. Griffin wasn’t sure he followed the logic of all this, but it wasn’t any of his business, so he agreed not to breathe a word to anyone, especially his mother. Which was why he was surprised when he met her and Bart for lunch in the faculty dining room and the first words out of her mouth were: “So, did your father tell you he’s married?”

In fact, she was full of information. No, his father wasn’t ill, though she agreed he did look like death warmed over. What he was, she claimed, was exhausted, and why wouldn’t he be? During his year at UMass, he’d not only taught all his classes but also researched and-get this-actually written Claudia’s dissertation. When Griffin asked her how she could possibly know this, since neither his father nor Claudia was likely to have confided it to anyone, she just gave him a look. “And that’s not even the best part,” she continued. “She wasn’t even with your father.” When his mother dropped this bomb, Griffin glanced over at Bartleby Though he hadn’t yet gone completely mute, he shrugged, as if to say, Don’t look at me; I just live here.

Claudia, his mother went on, had gone with his father to Amherst, that much was true. But she hadn’t stayed long. The tiny house they’d rented was almost twenty miles from the university, and since they only had one car, Claudia either had to go in to campus or else be stranded there in the boonies until he got home. “Work on your dissertation,” his father had suggested. Indeed, he may have rented this particular house in order to give her little alternative but to buckle down. Her response, apparently, delivered in her thick-as-molasses, blasé fashion, was “All day long?”

In mid-October there’d been a cold snap, and after several days of frigid drizzle she’d announced to Griffin ’s father one morning that she meant to go to Atlanta to visit a friend for a while. Even her pussy was frostbit, she claimed, to which he replied he’d have no way of knowing. Why didn’t they discuss things later that evening when he returned? But by then she was gone.

His mother admitted to being a bit vague about exactly when he discovered this “friend” wasn’t in fact a woman and also that he (and now Claudia) wasn’t in Atlanta but in Charleston. Apparently she’d been trying to throw him off track-and here Griffin’s mother chortled-as if he came from a long line of tough cops and private eyes and was the sort of guy who’d give immediate chase and never give up, whereas in actuality what he’d done was sigh deeply and say to himself, So… she’s gone, then.

That Claudia planned to remain gone for a good long while was obvious since she’d taken all her clothes, not just enough for a short trip. She took everything, in fact, except the materials she’d assembled, with his help, for her dissertation. These she left stacked impressively in the center of the dining room table, along with a sparse outline he briefly studied before wadding it up. In another man this gesture might have suggested he was through with her, that he’d seen and understood both the muddled writing on the page and the clearer writing on the wall. Unfortunately, all Griffin’s father had seen was a more sensible approach to the research and writing of his fiancée’s dissertation, so he took out a legal pad and started sketching out how things would proceed if the project were his and not Claudia’s. That way, he reasoned, when she returned in a week or two (he still hadn’t drawn the necessary inference from the empty clothes closet), she’d find that instead of having fallen behind, she was actually ahead. The once murky, bloated purpose statement was now a detailed, workable template, thoughtfully divided into manageable segments and subdivided into bite-sized pieces that required only mastication, a series of cuds that even the bovine Claudia could chew. Granted, this was something she should’ve been able to do for herself, but so what? It could be their secret. She’d be so grateful her frozen pussy would thaw.

This, according to Griffin ’s mother, was how the whole nightmare had begun, as an intellectual exercise in avoidance. That first night, when he’d come home, found her gone and substituted his own outline for hers, he’d have been mortified if anyone had suggested he might actually write any part of his fiancée’s dissertation. But a week went by and she hadn’t returned, and then another, and the materials still sat there on the table (though he’d moved them to one side to make room for his take-out meals), and he just hated for her to fall further and further behind. Of course Claudia, again according to Griffin ’s mother, had predicted all of this. She might be dumb as a plastic Jesus, but she was shrewd. After all, how smart did a woman have to be to get the best of a man so ruled by his pecker? Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would have tossed her dissertation stuff right into the fireplace, or at least shoved it into a dark closet. Instead Griffin’s father had allowed it to sit there accusingly-yes, accusing him, not her-until one day, over mu shu pork eaten directly from the carton, a thought occurred to him, as of course it would: Maybe just a short intro. Where’s the harm?

Because he’d been complicit, if only subconsciously, from the start. Hadn’t he made sure that the subject of Claudia’s dissertation was one that also greatly interested him? Hadn’t he known all along that he’d have to hold her hand through every last page? How different was actually writing the thing? Wasn’t it really just a question of efficiency? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how your father’s mind works, how he rationalizes,” his mother warned when Griffin objected. She understood all too well. Once he’d started down that slippery slope, he was a lost man. Writing the intro, he reconnected to the source material, making long, excited notes on cards for the body of the essay, its principal thrust and supporting arguments, until sometime during the holidays he slipped a fresh piece of paper into his IBM Selectric and typed: Chapter One.

Then an interesting thing happened. Whereas before he’d been anxiously awaiting Claudia’s return, he now hoped she’d stay away. He’d always believed this would be-what?-a collaboration, in the best sense. She’d do the actual writing, of course, but he’d be right there to share notes and ideas, to make sure she didn’t lose her focus. And wasn’t that what all dissertations really were, collaborations? Otherwise, why have an adviser? But now he thought, Fuck it. He was making good progress, staying up late at night, neglecting, truth be told, his own teaching responsibilities. He’d hit his scholarly stride, and Claudia’s return would break it. Maybe he’d surprise her in Atlanta during spring break, he told himself. But when the break came he decided to work through it (just as well, Griffin’s mother said, since Claudia wasn’t in Atlanta anyway and never had been), figuring that if all went well, he’d have a draft before the end-of-semester crunch. She could help him revise it while familiarizing herself with his conclusions and methods, because of course she was the one who’d have to defend them (though he’d be there to throw her a rope if she needed one).

All might have been well, except in April he’d come down with a toxic dose of the flu. At one point he awakened shivering and curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor with no memory of how he’d gotten there, though the commode testified eloquently as to why he’d needed to. Was he hallucinating or had Claudia called the day before, wondering how the dissertation was coming along? Had she laughed at him when he reported it was almost done?

Eventually the flu ran its course, but he never fully recovered his strength or the weight he’d lost as a result of vomiting and skipping meals, but guess what? He’d finished, and wasn’t he proud? Only when Claudia actually returned in late August, just when he’d concluded she was gone for good, did the enormity of what he’d done come down on him like an anvil. Not so much the dishonesty of it, but rather that this could have been his book. It was quite possibly the best thing he’d ever written. Any good university press would be happy to have it, maybe even a mainstream trade publisher. It was possible that real money, as opposed to the bogus scrip universities routinely printed, redeemable only in the academic commissary, might change hands. But there was an obvious problem. How could he claim the work as his own when it was supposed to be Claudia’s? He could argue she hadn’t written any of it, and everyone who’d ever taught her would believe him, but that would mean he’d stolen her idea. He’d already signed off on the fact that it was her idea when he and two other colleagues approved the proposal.

“Mom,” Griffin had protested at this point, “you can’t know all this. And don’t tell me Dad confided it, either. They aren’t the kind of things he’d admit to anybody, especially not you.” After all, he’d just spent the last twenty-four hours with his father, who hadn’t dropped a single hint, even an oblique one, about any of this.

Another woman might have taken umbrage at his especially not you, but his mother didn’t even slow down. “Pipe down,” she said gleefully. “I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. Claudia was blackmailing him.

“Well, not in the conventional sense,” she conceded. “It’s more like emotional blackmail.” Since they’d returned from Amherst, Claudia had taken to wondering out loud what his colleagues would think if they knew what he’d done. Had he always been so dishonest, she wanted to know, or was this something new? Was what he’d done a firing offense? Would the scandal make the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education?

“But that’s an absurd threat,” Griffin felt compelled to inject. “She couldn’t expose him without exposing herself.”

“True,” she said, “but he’s terrified anyway.”

“He didn’t look scared to me.”

“Trust me.”

“But Mom, the story doesn’t track. Any undergraduate fiction workshop would tear it apart.” Well, okay, maybe not completely. It was more disjointed and inconsistent than unbelievable, and Griffin suspected he knew why. The academy was a small world, and his mother had friends, and friends of friends, everywhere. She’d no doubt been following her ex-husband’s year at UMass, or trying to, through half a dozen spies. She’d glean small bits of information from a wide variety of sources and stitch these into a single narrative as best she could, drawing inferences, pretending, as she always did, to be privy to everything.

Nor did she appreciate him suggesting she wasn’t. “Undergraduate workshop,” she snorted. “Right. Now there’s a test.”

“Okay,” Griffin conceded. “I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’re saying. I’m just-”

But she waved him off. “Do you want to hear the best part or not?”

“The blackmail wasn’t the best part? There’s more?”

She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Get this. The whole time he was in Amherst?”

He waited until it was clear she had no intention of going on without a specific invitation. He had to go on record as wanting to know what she had to tell him, which, unfortunately, he did.

“What, Mom? The whole time in Amherst what?”

“The whole time your father was in Amherst,” she said triumphantly, “he never even made it to the Cape. Not once.”

In retrospect, his mother had been right about at least one thing. She’d given his father’s marriage another year. Not a full year, either, she insisted, an academic year. And that’s exactly how long it had lasted. The following May, Claudia had departed for good, and shortly after that his father had left the university to take a position as acting department chair at a small branch of the state university of Illinois. “He’s in a downward spiral,” his mother had reported. “In fact he’s circling the drain.” From there he’d become the dean of faculty at a small Christian college in Oklahoma, where he served until failing health forced him to retire.

And now, Griffin thought ruefully, he was in the trunk of his car.