Girls (19 page)

The dispatcher said a professor needed assistance with a vehicle at the social sciences lot. I said I’d answer. Maybe I’d just break the arm on this one and let it go at that. But it turned out to be Professor Piri, and I seemed to have a hard time with her. She had that wide grin. It made her look young, like a high school girl. And there was something maybe mischievous in her face. It said we were both misbehaving a little.

She stood outside her runty, beat-up car, moving her feet and swinging her arms. “Thank you,” she said, smiling the smile.

“I didn’t help you yet,” I said.

“You will. It doesn’t start. It won’t talk to me.”

“Car won’t talk to you. Does it say anything at all?”

“Nothing.”

I did the usual with the jumper cables, but she was right. This was a dead car. She was sitting in my Jeep with the heater on high, and I had to open her door and reach across her for the radio. I was very careful not to touch her legs, which were in red tights. She watched my arm move in front of her. I told the dispatcher we needed a car towed. Professor Piri told me which of the two garages nearby she liked to use. I told the dispatcher to have them take it there. After I got her briefcase for her, I started driving toward her house.

I asked if we weren’t supposed to be meeting soon about the threat to the Vice President.

“They’re talking about putting Irene Horstmuller in jail.”

“The library head?”

“She’s a right-on woman. She’ll go, I know she will. She’ll be right to.”

“What if somebody shoots the Vice President or something?”

“We’re talking right to
privacy.
We’re talking Constitution. This isn’t just about library rules or niceties or even ethics.”

“Constitution,” I said.

“Why does that make you smile?”

“No,” I said, “I was talking to somebody in connection with my, I
don’t—well, with my duties. Earlier today. He talks about the Constitution. He also sells drugs.”

“That’s right. I hear you. One of them sells drugs. The other threatens Presidents.”

“Vice Presidents.”

“Yes. And the outlaws are ahead, two to one, and you don’t like it.” She said, “Cops.”

“Whoa.”

“Well, I
know
this argument. I’ve heard it half my life from my father.”

“Professor Piri, I am not making an argument. I’m not arguing. All I did was, I smiled.”

We were on the street, and she was pointing to houses. She had me go up the driveway that curled around in the back of where she lived.

“It was a fine smile,” she said.

“Same to you,” I said.

Here we were. I thought we were coming to it, but we were here already. I noticed I had shut the engine off.

“Let me make you some coffee,” she said.

“Please.”

“Then you have to go back, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“My first name is Rosalie. Did I tell you that?”

“I remember your name.”

“You could call me that.”

“Rosalie,” I said.

She said, “Jack.”

“I have to get back on patrol,” I said.

“But first the coffee.”

“Thank you.”

“Rosalie.”

“Thank you, Rosalie.”

Her kitchen was small and not terribly clean. She said, “Oh! The damned garbage.”

I smelled it, too, a kind of mild decay I always associated with
winter and too much snow to want to go out in. She hung her coat over a chair, and I kept mine on. She moved behind me twice while making the coffee, and I felt the hairs on my neck respond. It was a boyish feeling, and that as much as she herself was exciting.

She told me about her father, the policeman. She talked about her mother, who was a nutritionist in the public schools. She told me about Smith College and Princeton University. She talked about the politics of untenured professors.

“Tenure always struck me as a kind of baby thing. You know, do your job well and stay, do it badly and we can you.” I was looking for any sort of fight, I realized. I didn’t want to relax any more in this room. She sat on the counter across from me, swinging her legs in their red tights under her short black jumper.

“Say I’m a lesbian,” she said.

“You’re a lesbian.”

“Is that a question?”

“Just saying it.”

“I’m not,” she said. “
Say
I am. Say my department head’s a woman who wants to get me in the sack. Say she’s a he who thinks a dyke is a very expendable item.”

“I’ll say the one where she wants you in the sack.”

She almost smiled the smile, but she kept talking. She moved her hands a lot as she talked, and she swung her legs back and forth.

She said, “Say she wants me so much, and I say no, and she punishes me by seeing I don’t get a new contract.”

“Can that happen?”

“Not as easily as I made it sound, but yes.”

“Okay. That wouldn’t be fair. But wouldn’t that happen in the rest of the world? Another job? Where they don’t do tenure?”

“You’re cute,” she said. “
Here
it is. I’m teaching from lesbian theory, say.”

“There’s lesbian
theory
?”

“There’s every theory. That’s what drives a lot of work these days: theory. I’m doing a good deal of the new historicism myself.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry. Never mind that. But all it is—think of context. Anyway. Say I’m teaching a kind of theory my department head doesn’t like. Say the kids complain. Say
she
complains. Say she disapproves because of how I think.”

“And she gets you canned for how you think. I hear that. Okay. That’s bad. But people get fired for how they think. Why should you guys get protected when the rest of us don’t? Except you’re better-educated and smarter and you—would you mind getting down off of the counter?”

She jumped down at once. She said, “Why?”

“You have to know why.”

She did smile the wicked smile then. When she walked over to me, she leaned against the back of the chair I was sitting sideways in, and some of her touched me up and down.

She said, “I’m not a cop groupie. I know about them.”

“I never met one.”

“Then maybe I should be one. You could find out. They’re pretty basic, I think.”

“Groupy theory,” I said.

I smelled her lipstick and her perfume and her skin. All of them were new to me. They overwhelmed the smell of the kitchen, which had bothered me. She put her hand on my shoulder so her fingers touched my neck. I shivered.

“I’m not careless with my personhood,” she said.

I wanted to ask her what personhood was, but I didn’t think she was conducting a conversation. She was delivering a message, maybe to herself and maybe to me, and I wanted to listen.

Her hand moved, but not away from me. I saw that her eyes were closed. I knew the water she was heating for instant coffee in a blackened aluminum pot was going to bubble and boil, and she would have to change her position. I found that I was moving. I was leaning up and moving my left hand. I stood, reached under her arm and pulled her against me, set my legs, leaned down, to find her looking up, and I shut my eyes and kissed her.

It seemed to me to be a lot more than teeth and lips and her
small, cool tongue. It seemed to me, or maybe I was just hoping a lot, that I was going to end up with Rosalie Piri on her kitchen floor and me in big trouble. I stepped back, but slowly. Her eyes had closed again, and she kept them shut when I stepped farther back, toward the door. I heard the chug of boiling water against the side of the pot.

“Are you gone yet?” she asked.

“Here I go.”

“I can’t look,” she said. “Can you go now?”

Her face was crimson. She looked like a child in a terrible moment who was making it go away by closing her eyes.

“Here I go,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

I said, “Then open your eyes.”

She stood in her kitchen, slight and red. She opened her eyes, she looked at me, and she put her hands to her face and then covered her eyes with them. She laughed a grown-up’s laugh. She said, “I can’t, Jack. Can I—why don’t I—why don’t we call each other up or something?”

I did walk back across her little kitchen and kiss her lightly on the mouth and then the nose before I left. I did have to do that. I was making it a morning of doing all I could to be wrong.

When I saw Archie Halpern on campus late that afternoon, I asked him about people who might want to talk to one Roger Gambrelle about his rap music, his racism or his reverse racism or his racism inside out. Archie wore a Russian fur cap about two feet tall. His old-fashioned plaid mackinaw was the blue of a bathrobe I had worn as a child in 1950 something. His round face was red from the cold and his five o’clock shadow had set in. He looked like leftovers.

His little eyes were full of pleasure when he said, “I just might pay cash money to eavesdrop on you, telling this boy to lay off the famous Niva.”

“She’s famous?”

“Half the males in the senior class report to the infirmary with knotted testes on account of her. She’s the Catch. She’s smart, capable, tough, exotic as hell around here, in white-bread country, and the daughter of the president of the Denver Chamber of Commerce. Somebody said she sends for her underwear to Victoria’s Secret, and guys started camping near the mailroom. No, don’t go after Gambrelle. God, I can see it. The kid limps into class with a sling on his ass and two black eyes—”

“Hey, Archie, what’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“It’s a joke, Jack. What’d you think it’s supposed to mean? You’re a little sensitive.”

“You’re right. I apologize.”

“You don’t need to apologize to me. I was just pointing something out to you.”

“You always point something out to me. You’re usually right.”

“So how come, if I’m so smart, we don’t declare the campus a neurosis-free zone? You shithead. Relax. I’ll whisper a word to Gambrelle in the laid-back, subtle way I’m famous for. You know: Gambrelle, stay the fuck away from Niva.”

I loved it when he laughed. His laughter reminded me of feeling only good. Archie moved on, and I walked back to the truck, checked in on the radio, and continued to circle the campus slowly, top to bottom, side to side, selecting buildings randomly just to walk through. Students didn’t see me because I was a support service. They were accustomed to acknowledging one another and their teachers, not the vomit-moppers or thermostat repairmen, and surely not the campus cops. Janice Tanner’s face flapped in the wind outside, stirred in the hallways whenever a door was opened, and stared out of car windows over and over in the parking lots.

It was time to get to the library. I’d been summoned for three, and I showed up a few minutes early. There were two FBI agents and the Secret Service men, and Anthony Berberich had showed up as instructed by me. Our job was to keep people assembled in the big anteroom near the circulation desk while the president and the dean, who looked like men who didn’t have a choice, went through the
reference section toward Irene Horstmuller’s office, a few feet behind the four federal agents. It looked as though they were trying to get ahead of the agents, but the agents closed up tight and edged the administrators back. Some faculty and students and library staff were behind me as I watched.

I said, turning, “We’re required to stay back here, folks.”

“Fuckin’ fascists,” a student said. He was about five feet tall and maybe Korean, with a sweet, open face. As I looked him over, he checked me out. “Cop motherfucker,” he said.

I said, “What’s your name?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Chang,” he said.

I stuck my hand out. “Hi, Chang. I’m Jack.”

He let me shake his hand. He stared at me a few seconds more, and then his mouth collapsed into a smile.

One of the women at the checkout desk said, “You think they’ll put her in handcuffs?”

“I think they have to,” I said. “They’ll serve the subpoena.”

“She’ll tell ’em to stick it in the great anal darkness,” Chang said.

“Then they can arrest her,” I said. “And take the files.”

The woman at the desk, who had a round, impressively hairy face, smiled larger than Chang. “We don’t have any,” she said.

I said, “You shredded them?”

“No,” the woman said, “they were in the mainframe. Irene accessed them yesterday.”

“And had an accident,” I said.

She said, “Whoops.”

“Darn,” Chang said.

The Secret Service men came first, the crease of their dark gray trousers cutting the air. They were followed by Irene Horstmuller, in coat and hat and gloves, looking a little tense at the mouth. Then came the FBI. When she saw us, Horstmuller’s face began to collapse. She fought the tears. She raised her hands and, as the sleeves of the coat slid down, the handcuffs were exposed.

“Fascist cocksucker motherfuckers,” Chang said.

As they passed and the little patter of applause died, I said to Chang, “I bet you there’s a backup.”

“I bet you she found it.”

“That’d be good,” I said. “Unless, of course, the Vice President gets damaged.”

Chang said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, baby.”

I asked him, “Is that one of those Harry Truman sayings?”