One Coffee With (2 page)

A fellow worker from Buildings and Grounds blocked the workman’s furious lunge toward Riley Quinn, and the red-haired girl rushed for the guy rope before the steel dot could do further damage.

“I’ll have you fired!” Professor Quinn promised, almost purple now with answering rage. ‘‘I’ve endured all the threats and insults from you that I intend to take!”

Laughter, catcalls and applause from the surrounding windows followed the deputy chairman’s stormy withdrawal from the field of battle.

Thus the arrival of the first piece of artwork for the Art Department’s spring faculty exhibition.

At that point, Wednesday morning stopped being normal at Vanderlyn College. Especially for the Art Department.

C
HAPTER
3

In a department rampant with egoists, eccentrics and aesthetes, the chairman’s secretary, Sandy Keppler, was sensible, efficient and decorative, with long blond hair, fair skin and a smile that began in blue eyes and ended in
devastating dimples. But even her considerable tact and charm were taxed by the effort of soothing Professor Quinn’s ruffled feathers when he came storming into the Art Department offices on the seventh floor of Van Hoeen Hall shortly after eight-thirty.

Sandy listened to him rage and then put through his telephone call to the office of Buildings and Grounds. Before long Quinn’s voice could be heard repeating stridently, “S-z-a-b-o. Szabo! Mike Szabo. The man’s a lunatic! Every time I turn around, there he is, accusing me of the most incredible actions. I want him fired. Yes, I’m aware that Unions—yes, I know about due process—damn it, I do have sufficient grounds! Haven’t you been listening?”

The official in Buildings and Grounds might have been inattentive, but those members of the department who had come to work early were all ears, drifting in and out of Sandy’s office on flimsy pretexts. Quinn was usually such an imperturbable bastard. A born critic and as such, little loved, he was sharp-tongued and thick-skinned; very seldom could anyone slip a needle under that armor. How a clumsy workman with broken English could make him fall apart was a question that puzzled almost everyone, especially the junior members who didn’t know Mike Szabo’s history.

It did not puzzle Piers Leyden, however. Not only did Leyden (Assistant Professor, Life Painting) know why Quinn was irritated by the very sight of Mike Szabo, it was Leyden who had spoken to a crony over at Buildings and Grounds and caused Szabo to be hired. He had done it deliberately and with malice aforethought, and now he stood in Sandy’s office enjoying the fruits of his labors.

Quinn caught sight of Leyden’s grinning face through the open office door and with a visible effort drew himself together.

“An interesting phenomenon, laughter,” he observed coldly. “I shall certainly have to incorporate more of it myself in my new book.”

Quinn’s comment was a pointed reminder of the power he, as a critic, had to make or break artistic careers.

It was Leyden’s turn to glower.

Sandy managed to prevent open warfare by reminding Quinn of his nine-o’clock class, but when he popped back in at nine-fifty for the slides he needed for his ten-o’clock lecture, he was still in such waspish temper that he insulted two more of his colleagues and sent a graduate assistant home in tears.

By ten-twenty-five, though, the floor was quiet, things seemed almost normal, and Sandy felt she could safely start on her usual trip to the cafeteria for coffee. Although she was really secretary only to the chairman, Oscar Nauman, Sandy considered the whole department her responsibility. She sheltered its people from Administration’s hectoring; she typed their essays for scholarly art journals and their subsequent angry rebuttals to the editors of those same journals; she listened with amusement to their jokes and with sympathy to their diatribes; and—as with her intercession between Leyden and Quinn earlier—she trod a fine impartial line between the studio artists and the art historians.

In that uneasy coexistence Sandy Keppler’s artful curves were one subject both factions could usually agree on, although Piers Leyden, a neo-realist, thought she could have modeled for Fragonard, while Dumont, a baroque specialist, argued for Tiepolo. It was a spirited battle, but since Sandy’s heart belonged to David Wade, one of the young untenured lecturers, discussion of her body remained purely academic.

To add to her charms, she did as favors tasks that others might have considered demeaning. She wanted a midmorning cup of coffee, and she wanted to drink it in her big, shabby office amid rowdy, disputatious staff and students, so why should she be selfish about it? As long as it was her choice and not something demanded, Sandy was quite willing to fetch refreshments for anyone else.

As she skimmed down the hall to the elevator, she was intercepted by Associate Professor Albert Simpson (Classical Art History) and Lemuel Vance (Associate Professor, Printmaking), who both fumbled in their pockets for change. Vance wanted hot chocolate.

“Tea for you, Professor?” asked Sandy.

“No, I think I’ll have coffee today,” said Professor Simpson. “Black with one sugar, please.”

Lemuel Vance couldn’t resist the gleam of Sandy’s long bare legs beneath a spring green cotton skirt.

“Summer must be ‘icumen in,’” he grinned. “Those are the first female legs I’ve seen since last fall.”

Vance knew all about the practical aspects of pants—their comfort, their convenience, their warmth in cold weather—and one always ran the risk of being called a chauvinist if one expressed a simple admiration of female anatomy, but how lovely were young girls in spring dresses! The pale green and gold of her reminded him of Botticelli’s Venus, and he was unwisely tempted into a classical allusion. “You look as fresh as Aphrodite when she was first fashioned from sea spray!”

Professor Simpson could never let a classical misapprehension go uncorrected. “Actually she wasn’t formed from sea spray, you know,” he told Vance kindly. “If you’ll recall, Cronus mutilated his father, Uranus, and flung the—”

Belatedly the elderly historian remembered that Sandy was a living, breathing girl, not a mythological abstraction. Unwilling to elaborate further on Cronus’s unfilial behavior, he broke off in old-fashioned reticence.

Vance waited questioningly. “Flung what where?” he prompted.

“I’ll lend you a book,” Simpson said austerely and moved away.

Sandy slipped into the elevator, choking back laughter at Lemuel Vance’s blank look. She knew exactly what part of Uranus’s anatomy Cronus had thrown into the sea. David had explained the birth of Aphrodite very graphically once. Still, it was sweet of Professor Simpson to be too embarrassed to recount the three-thousand-year-old tale in mixed company.

On the first floor she picked up the department’s morning mail, then walked downstairs to a snack bar adjoining the main cafeteria. There was the usual assortment of students: some munched corn muffins and worked crossword puzzles with buttery fingers; others sipped weak tea and idled away the time in conversation till their next classes; still another, a determinedly solitary girl, hunched over a chart of French conjugations with the desperate and fatalistic air of one who had flunked too many pop quizzes.

At the rear of the deep room three smaller tables had been pushed into a single long one, and there a number of the clerical-administrative staff sat together with their backs against the wall, openly dissecting everyone who passed. Middle-aged women all, most were plump, beringed and elaborately coiffed and made-up. They delighted in red tape, deadlines and all regulations pertaining to IBM grade cards, and their exasperated sighs when asked to perform any service out of the routine could chill newly appointed faculty members. Only half in jest they agreed that Vanderlyn would be an ideal place to work if one could dispense with the teachers and students.

Unlike them, Sandy liked most of the students and considered her own charges on Art’s faculty rather fun. Still, she was savvy enough to realize how difficult those career secretaries could make her job if they chose not to cooperate with her in interdepartmental business, so she was careful not to appear rude even when avoiding them. She waggled her fingers in friendly greeting as she passed but continued on to the service counter, aware of their neutral eyes on her progress.

The line at the counter was short; and as the five cups of hot beverages were placed on her tray, Sandy scrawled an abbreviated note of each cup’s contents across its plastic snap-on lid with a felttipped pen: coffee with sugar—C/W/SUG; hot chocolate—CHOC; coffee black—BLK. Heading back toward the door, she spotted a familiar profile and detoured to the table.

“Hi, Andrea.
You’re in early today.”

Andrea Ross (Assistant Professor, Medieval Art History) looked up from her sketchy breakfast and smiled at the girl, ruefully aware of her own passing youth. Not yet thirty, she was only now acquiring chic; never again would her thin face hold the spring-fresh appeal of Sandy’s open prettiness. Still her career offered compensations. Or it had until recently, she thought with another flare of wellconcealed anger.

“I’ve got to pull slides for my eleven o’clock, but if you want company, I’ll wait,” Andrea offered.

“No, I’m going back, too,” said Sandy, wistfully eyeing Andrea’s cheese Danish.

Professor Ross knew Sandy’s weakness for pastries. “They’re fresh for a change,” she said. “Why don’t you put that tray down and go get one?”

“I really shouldn’t,” Sandy murmured, unconsciously smoothing a hip line that seemed to stay perfectly trim no matter what she ate. But she parked her tray on the older woman’s table and hurried back over to the service counter.

When she returned, she perched on the edge of a chair while Andrea finished the last few bites and regaled her with a brief synopsis of Sam Jordan’s sculpture and Professor Quinn’s angry encounter with Mike Szabo.

“Do you think Professor Quinn is a thief?” she finished.

Andrea shrugged, not wanting to ruin her digestion with speculations on Riley Quinn’s character, and changed the subject. “Who’re the extra two cups for?” she asked, gesturing toward the tray.

“Lem and Professor Simpson.
Your ‘friend’ Jake Saxer was around somewhere,” she added meaningfully, “but I certainly didn’t go looking for him.”

She hesitated briefly, as though debating something in her mind, then leaned forward and blurted out, “Look, Andrea, why
don’t you
let me talk to Professor Nauman for you about this Jake SaxerProfessor Quinn business?”

“Absolutely not!”

“But you know how out of it Professor Nauman can be sometimes. He probably hasn’t noticed how high-handed Quinn’s getting. I know he’d stop it if he realized how unfair it is.”

“I mean it, Sandy. I’ll fight my own battles with that damn Riley Quinn. You don’t have to get involved. Besides,” she added as they rose and walked toward the elevator, “you’ve got enough to worry about. How are David’s job prospects looking these days?”

Sandy shook her head, her bright face momentarily dimmed. “He’s still just getting the usual form letters: ‘We regret to inform you that we anticipate no academic openings in the foreseeable future; however, we will keep your letter on file and should circumstances alter. . . .’”

“Sounds as though you have the whole routine memorized,” Andrea said. She pushed the button to signal the self-service elevator.

“I ought to. I mail out enough of the same sort of letters every week.” She tilted her head toward the stack of mail on the tray she carried. “I’ll bet at least five of these are job applications. Everyone wants to teach in New York.”

“Something’s bound to turn up for David,” Andrea encouraged.

“Oh, well, if worse comes to worst, I can keep working here after we’re married. We could get by on my salary while David finishes his doctorate.”

The elevator door
opened,
and everyone inside exited except a brown-coveralled figure

“Miss Sandy!” the workman beamed. “Only now I am coming to see you. That chair you want me to fix.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mike,” Sandy said hastily. “It can wait till next week sometime.”

“No, no. I get it today.” Armed with the assurance of one who knows himself firmly in the right, Mike Szabo had no hesitation about entering his enemy’s domain. He was a stocky man in his late thirties, with dark hair beginning to show gray around the edges of a broad East European face. He took the tray of cups from Sandy’s hands with a determined air of rough courtesy.

The elevator stopped for more passengers at each floor until everyone was jammed together, and Sandy, standing in front of Szabo, felt the tray he was holding cut into the back of her thin dress. She hoped all the lids were on tight; she’d hate to walk around all day with a coffee stain across her back.

“Where’s Quinn right now?” whispered Andrea in her ear.

“In class for
another ten or fifteen minutes
if I’m lucky,” Sandy whispered back.

It was, in fact, ten-thirty-eight when they parted in the hall: Andrea Ross to pull slides for her eleven-o’clock class on Gothic architecture; Sandy to distribute the hot drinks and ease Mike Szabo out of the area before Quinn came back from his lecture at ten-fifty.

Although the number of staff and students in the Art Department had doubled since open enrollment several years earlier, its original office space atop Van Hoeen Hall had not. Partitioned and repartitioned, that wing of the seventh floor had become a maze of overcrowded, interconnected offices, each shared by at least two (though usually more) staff members. An elevator and stairwell were at the top of the hall opposite a set of rest rooms. The first office on the right was occupied by several art historians, including Andrea Ross; the second was mostly art-studio personnel; and at the end of the hall a third door opened into two small offices and the slide library, a tiny room lined with banks of file drawers sized to hold the two-inch-square glassmounted slides that were used to illustrate the survey courses.