A Guide to Being Born: Stories (15 page)

FAUSTUS
MACELOVICH
from the English Department had to come to the lecture by the Nobel Laureate, just as everyone did. He needed to appear in the crowd and shake hands with the other professors. This was far beyond his normal cheese Danish and crumblingly old book at the dining room table routine, where his recently dead wife looked down on him from a giant painting, done by Faustus himself upon their return from her first bad-news doctor appointment. This was a special night, a night on which each professor hoped to shake the hand belonging to the body belonging to such an important mind. They all knew that as they fell asleep that night, they would dream of their acceptance speech for that same storied award, remembering to thank the secretaries and the deans and the chairs and the chancellors and vice chancellors and the provost and the vice provost and the president, and vowing to always show up to each and every lecture they were to give, early, not like this ungrateful person. These professors knew that if they were honored they would never, never forget where they came from. They would arrive everywhere bearing gifts for their hosts. Beautiful fruit baskets, chocolates imported from villages so small they didn’t even have names. What grateful, humble, well-deserved recipients they would be!

They now stood in the red-velvet-seated auditorium with many others from across the departments. The professors had all attended lectures here countless times: physicists, poets, ethnomusicologists, archivists. As usual, there were cookies and cheese and coffee urns and small paper cups. As usual, they cordialed and greeted and congratulated and acted nice whether or not it was sincere. Faustus endured the sympathy for his lost wife from some and appreciated it from others and was avoided by many who did not know what to say.

He had practiced for this, his reintroduction. He had read the sports page and was armed with knowledge of the baseball season and the basketball draft. He had prepared a list of conversation topics. “This new pitcher the Dodgers have, what a terrible choice,” he would say, “but I do think the center from Duke has incredible potential,” and even, “Won’t you join me in moving to Canada if the Republicans win next year?” He feared asking others about their spouses and children, because he did not want to have to speak about his own family.

It did not used to be hard, this place where his life-life and his work-life met up. Aside from committees and meetings and budgets taking up ever more time, he had always felt like one of the rare men to be completely fulfilled. He used to arrive on time to all the faculty parties and watch his wife across the room make intelligent, witty remarks to the delight of senior members of his department. Sometimes he thought Petra was as responsible for his making tenure as he himself was. Now that she was gone, he did not know how to stand in this room right. He looked around at the familiar faces, some people he had known for decades, and was filled with the sense of being incomplete—not enough of a person to do his job. He was paid for his mind, but at this moment he did not know how to find his mind within the shimmering sorrow of his heart. The questions he had spent his career considering seemed like kickable little stones compared to the topography of this loss.

He had counted on the cookies to be enough to get him through the milling period, but this was getting to be an unusually long one. In the lecture hall, the professors began to tire of milling. They wanted to sit down. They wanted at this hour to listen and, many of them, to doze. This was supposed to be the reward—a place where everyone believed as they did—after days spent laboring in classrooms, waving their arms, each wave a misunderstood expression of their love of the subject: a mathematical wave, a wave to the beauty of the Principles of Physics.
The slippery-eyed students in their straight rows, the visible boredom surrounding them in gray clouds, asked, “But, Professor,” adjusting their miniskirts or basketball shorts, “how many academic sources do we need?”

“We should really be getting started,” the professors began to say to one another. “Isn’t someone in charge here?” Except for a few wiry-haired ex-hippies, the professors tended to be watch-watching on-timers. Lateness was a sign of laziness and unwillingness to attend to The Way Things Must Go.

Faustus took his cookies to a corner seat, alone and with a bad view. “I am at school,” he whispered to himself. “This is fine.” He thought about the last day he taught a class and the doctor’s appointment following it. After, Petra and Faustus had parked their newish car on the street and walked into the house, whereupon Petra took a slow and silent lap, touching each item on each shelf. The Native American pots from trips to the Southwest. The pictures of their nieces and nephews. A hammer left on the mantel after hanging a picture. The sun was still strong and it broke into the house in tubes of light so that his wife, her fingers moving slowly over item after item, was bright white.

A woman sat down next to Faustus and introduced herself as Professor Claire Baker, Bio. They had little in common once they established that he was childless and hadn’t even passed his high school science classes. And in regard to reading, Professor Baker admitted to enjoying a
People
magazine on the beach but preferred no words to words. “Written words, that is. Talking I like, I can talk plenty of words!” She was visibly amused by her bad sentence, as if it was a shining testament to her identity as a Science Person. “See that?” she joked. Faustus saw that. “You? What’s your story?” she asked.

“My wife is dead and I’m taking the semester off,” he said, too tired to recall the manners he had promised himself to employ. “But I think the center from Duke has amazing potential.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” she began, but he interrupted her.

“What I would like to do?” he said. “Is for us both to pretend that I am invisible.”

At this point, an ambitious undergraduate—feeling the anxiety of this late start, the anxiety of the absence of the great speaker all the way from Oxford whom he knew all the professors had been waiting to meet, professors in whose minds he could picture perfect questions formulated over the last weeks—went to the podium and tapped the microphone. “Hello, everybody,” he said. He clapped his hands together dramatically and projected his voice much more than necessary, so that every time he said the letter
P
, a great explosion of sound went out through the seats.

“Please, please, settle down. Welcome to this evening’s program. I think we ought to get started, don’t you?” He swished his hand through his thick brown hair. “Um . . . Learning is important, I think we can all agree. So, I think that this university is a great institution. Actually all universities, but this one in particular.” The undergraduate was already running out of things to say and he hadn’t said anything yet. He had hoped that his presence at the podium would root out the Laureate, who might stand up graciously and wait to be introduced. No such graciousness occurred, so the undergraduate continued. “Uh, when I arrived here I didn’t care about the Spanish Civil War. Maybe other people always cared, but I didn’t. But now, because of Professor Paul Pretoria’s class this semester, I think it’s
awesome
. Oh!” he said, getting an idea, “please put your hands together for Professor Paul Pretoria.”

Professor Baker and Faustus both clapped, but they did not look at each other.

In order to come to the stage, Professor Pretoria had to squeeze past the knees of a half row of people. “What an unexpected honor,” he said when he finally arrived. “Thank you, Carlo. I haven’t prepared anything, but as long as I have you here I might like to say a few words about . . .” Whatever he actually said, what nearly all the other professors heard was “the capture of so and so which I will relate to the events of blah blah and to the unusual situation we find ourselves in concerning blank.”

The speech was certainly more than a few words. The many wrists were busy with watch viewings. “Have you seen the Nobel Laureate?” people asked. “Maybe he’s late? Maybe he’s stuck in traffic? Maybe he’s lost or dead or asleep? But what could be more important than this?” they asked. “His peers have gathered out of respect and admiration, and there is no better honor than that. Certainly, no personal problem could ever matter more.”

After points and counterpoints, evidence and notes on the evidence, Professor Pretoria, nervous and sweating with the excitement of his own argument, suddenly looked up and realized that no one was listening. The entire university faculty, gathered here, was bored by what he had imagined might be his own Nobel Prize–winning theory. He said quietly and with a heave of despair directed at a sleeping man in the second row, “This brings me to the next speaker this evening: the amazing, exceptional,
genius
Professor Zelk.” His voice was burned sugar.

Bill Zelk woke up to the sound of his own name ringing through the speakers. No notes of sarcasm sounded to him. What a wonderful way to wake up! He squirmed and adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses eight times on the way to the stage, making some who did not know him think he perhaps had some sort of disorder. The psychologists were certain. “I am involved in the study of mole rats,” he said. “We are looking at the act of fecal perfuming.” He looked out at the crowd. “There is an awful lot to say on the subject,” and he began to say it.

•   •   •

FOR
THE
FIRST
FULL
HOUR,
the professors, Faustus among them, sat up straight in the auditorium chairs, some with legs crossed at the knee, some at the ankle. They had listened vaguely to each introduction and clapped as the next bespectacled or mustachioed person took the stage. Occasionally some got up and had a bit of refreshment. The respectful professors remained quiet even while chewing their cheese.

By hour two they began to fidget. They continued to scan the room for unfamiliar faces—prize-winning faces, the face of the smartest breed. They pointed through the spaces between heads, hopeful that they had found the guest. Faustus had no intention of trying to pick the Laureate out, worried he might ask someone he should have recognized. Perhaps someone with whom he had had a nice conversation at last year’s Christmas Party about Yeats’s dog.

No one wanted to be the first to give up. They hoped that after such turmoil must come great treasure. Whatever sense it made or didn’t, the longer they stayed the more they felt they must continue to do so. They did take other liberties. Most of the French Department curled up on the floor under their seats and napped. They looked like a series of tortoises, their black sweaters hiding the pink of their skin. Others went back to earlier discussions with one another, always with one eye on the podium in case one of two things happened: they themselves were called up to speak, or the headliner finally arrived.

Words like “venerable” and “inimitable” and “indefatigable” were said so many times they began to sound made up. After an analysis of subjectivity and objectivity in Poe and Dickinson, Professor Sydney Mott looked out at the mess of a room and said, “I’ve been divorced recently, as some of you know. She took the cat and I took the fish.” He wondered out loud whether his teenage daughter was sleeping with her boyfriend and whether he ought to try to stop her if she was. “He isn’t even that cute, the boyfriend,” he explained. “He has a mustache. And my daughter is such a beauty, Botticelli-esque.” The professors itched at this microphoned admission. Things like this occurred in creative writing departments, maybe in art, certainly drama, but this was none of those. They did not know what to do.

In the back, the coffee ran out. The cookies were eaten, although a few were secreted away in the corduroy pockets of professors who thought ahead to future hunger. They fingered them in there, little disks of survival. In the back of the room was a cluster of historians and poets talking about what a nice round number one hundred was. Faustus stood behind them and listened.

“You know,” said the same undergraduate who had started things off, “Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had a hundred illegitimate children.” In this moment that was beautiful to the historians and to the poets.

“They should get them all together for a game sometime. They could sing the national anthem,” someone offered.

“They could file into the basketball court in a long line—just think how tall they would be—all of them wearing their father’s jersey.”

“And the announcer’s voice would echo through the building: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please rise for the singing of the national anthem by The Illegitimate Children of Wilt Chaimberlain.’”

“They could sing it in a round,” someone else added.

“And all their mothers, who number almost as many, could come out and harmonize.”

“That would be an historical event,” the historians agreed.

“That would be a poetic event,” the poets added.

Some of the members of the French Department touched each other’s black tights, both parties pretending not to be awake.

Claire Baker approached Faustus and took him by the arm. “If you would please come over here, please, I promise we won’t try to talk to you.” She sat him down in a circle of German Romanticists. An older woman, long established in the department, put the bottle of water she was holding down in the center of the circle. “Spin,” she said to Faustus. “As long as we’re here.”

“Is this what I think it is?” Faustus asked.

“We’re all waiting for something great to happen in here,” the woman answered. Faustus spun and the mouth of the bottle pointed directly back at him.