One Coffee With (3 page)

There were more than fifty thousand slides in the collection, yet the historians were always grumbling about the need for more.
“More French impressionists, African primitives, German cubists!
And okay, so we have all of Picasso’s blue period,” they might concede, “but what about his rose period?
Practically zilch!”

Only two doors opened on the left side of the hall. A person could enter the first and turn left again into the nursery—so called because eight of the most junior staff members shared the six desks shoehorned into that narrow office—or veer right into Sandy’s office. A two-sided mail rack with pigeonholes for each departmental member jutted out into her office. Beyond the mail rack, doors led into two smaller offices, and a third door gave onto the hall again.

The decor was late government surplus: nothing matched. Tables, chairs, desks, file cabinets—almost everything had been scrounged over the years. Whenever a more favored department got new furnishings, Piers Leyden’s friends in Buildings and Grounds would let someone from Art salvage such desirable objects as desks with unbroken drawers, chairs that still swiveled or better desk lamps. Other offices had carpets and matching
draperies. Art’s floor and windows were bare, and the chairman’s telephone was a simple black extension of Sandy’s—there was no way to put someone on hold, no push buttons to route in extra calls.

All this was not a deliberate shortchanging on Administration’s part. Not entirely. By a sort of unspoken agreement Art balanced its unyielding attitude toward Administration’s officiousness by not clamoring for more amenities. Most members of the department were happy to relinquish bigger offices and fancier furnishings in return for their relative independence.

With Mike Szabo trailing her like a shaggy brown dog, Sandy entered this shabby warren of offices by the first door, lifted a cup from the tray he still carried and stepped aside to let the Hungarian pass through to the main office.

“You can just set the tray on the bookcase,” she called after him. “The broken chair’s that one on the other side of the encyclopedias.”

“Hokay,” replied Szabo, who’d given Professor Simpson a cheerful salute in passing.

Sandy smiled at the gray-haired professor also and set the cup marked C/W/SUG on his desk in the front corner of the nursery.

Juniors were usually stuck with the early morning or late-afternoon schedules; they rarely got the desirable midday classes, so the room was empty now except for Professor Simpson. He looked up from a thick tome as Sandy placed his coffee on a desk cluttered by student themes, IBM grade cards, folders, and stacks of books with scrap paper markers fringing their ends.

Albert Simpson had once carried much weight on a large frame. The weight was gone now, and his boniness made him look older, as if he’d shrunk into himself. He seemed to embody the idea of the absentminded professor whose suits were always untidy, whose socks might not match, and who forgot contemporary dates, but who could make dead eras come alive with thousands of intimate details. The elderly classicist had been working on his book about Roman art for almost thirty years, yet it had never progressed beyond the research stage. He kept wandering down too many fascinating side paths ever to organize his mass of findings into a publishable manuscript; but he was David Wade’s graduate advisor, and Sandy was fond of him, so she defended him whenever Professor Quinn or Piers Leyden made caustic remarks about eggs that never hatched.

“Is David in this morning?” Simpson asked now, peering over his glasses at an outdated schedule taped to the wall above his desk. “I’ve just come across another passage in Maiuri that supports his thesis.”

“No, he’s taking in that exhibition at the Metropolitan,” Sandy said. She made a mental note to replace the three-year-old schedule with a new one, and this time she’d tape it up herself instead of just handing it to him to get lost on his desk again. “He should be in around noon, though.”

“Good, good,” murmured the old scholar, already reabsorbed in his text. He probably wouldn’t think of the coffee again until it was stone-cold, Sandy thought.

She turned and almost collided with Mike Szabo, who now carried a battered wooden armchair over his head. One of the legs had come unglued and was hanging by its stretchers, the result of some too strenuous roughhousing among the teaching fellows and graduate assistants.

“I have it fixed good for this afternoon,” Szabo promised, and Sandy smiled her thanks.

Leaving the nursery, she skirted the mail rack and paused by a long, waist-high bookcase beside the chairman’s door. It was another castoff—battered looking but sturdy and capacious enough to hold the department’s Britannicas, an unabridged dictionary, several art encyclopedias and a dozen or so other reference works. Szabo had left the tray on the end nearer the door to Professor Nauman’s office, and Sandy picked up Vance’s CHOC and continued on around the corner with it.

Lemuel Vance was a vigorous fifty, with thick black hair only lightly sprinkled with gray. He was more of a technician than an intellectual, but he knew as much as any man living about how to achieve every subtle effect possible in the realm of graphics. He raged, bellowed, cursed, had even been known to deliver a stinging smack to the backsides of his most talented students when they slacked their standards; but he was an effective, respected teacher, and he got results. Over the years many of his former students had carved out quite respectable niches in the art world.

Sandy found the barrel-shaped printer lusting over a glossy catalog of heavy equipment and preparing his annual raid on the department’s budget.

“You could type up the requisition order, slip it in with some other stuff, and Oscar’d never notice he’d signed it,” Vance said, continuing an earlier argument.

“I still don’t see what’s wrong with the printing press you have,” Sandy smiled.

“Are you kidding? Eighteen inches—that’s the biggest plate that antediluvian junk heap can take. Now this beauty,” he crooned, touching a picture in the catalog with inkstained fingers, “can take plates twice that big.”

Sandy studied the description. Most of the technical terms were beyond her. The astronomical price she could understand, though, as well as the machine’s gross shipping weight. “Could the floor support that much extra weight?”

“So they have to put jacks under it, so what?” Vance said impatiently, dismissing what would certainly be screams of outrage from Modern Languages directly beneath the printmaking workshop. “Come on,
Sandy,
help me talk Oscar into it. How can I teach etching without a decent press?”

“Professor Nauman isn’t a dictator, Lem. Something this expensive he’d want the whole department to vote on. Anyhow, you know Professor Quinn doesn’t feel the historians have been getting their fair share of the budget. Haven’t you heard him? He thinks the slide collection should be doubled, and that’ll mean new file cabinets and probably remodeling, and there goes this year’s budget.”

“Those parasites!
Without artists where would those damn historians be?” he asked darkly. “Riley Quinn won’t be happy till he’s bought a slide of every piece of art that’s ever been photographed. To hell with buying necessities to teach new artists! You think he cares that I’ve got kids waiting in line half the period to use a press?”

Vance was still griping at 10:43 when Sandy slipped down the hall to wash her hands. Considering the lavatory’s location and clientele, the caricatures and graffiti decorating its walls weren’t too pornographic. Figure classes increased one’s draftsmanship but took a lot of fun and spice out of anatomical nudes. Of course, someone had rather wittily combined Piers Leyden’s reputation for romantic dalliance with a well-known Pompeian wall painting of Priapus; and some else’s despairing scrawl “I hate periods!” had been answered by a brisk “Then try semicolons—they’re more artistic.”

With her mind elsewhere Sandy barely noticed the decorations. She dried her hands and hurried back down the hallway. Professor Simpson didn’t look up from his books as she passed him, and his unopened coffee was still sitting exactly where she had placed it.

Inside her own office she took the cup marked BLK from the tray and set it and the cheese Danish on her desk. The last two cups—both labeled C/W/SUG—she left on the bookcase for Professors Nauman and Quinn, chairman and deputy chairman, who shared the inner office, a preference for sugared coffee and very little else.

As she distributed mail among the pigeonholes of the large rack at the front of the office, a noise drew her attention to a weak-mouthed young man who had appeared behind her by the closed door to the inner office.

“Oh, Harley,” she said. “I tried to call you before.”

“What about?” the graduate student asked
suspiciously.
Harley Harris was shorter than she, with petulant eyes and beardless baby-smooth cheeks. He had tried to coax his lank brown hair into an Afro, but it was uncooperative and merely looked messy.

“I called your house three times,” Sandy said, “but no one answered. That meeting you wanted with Professor Nauman at eleven—he’s scheduled to see the dean of faculties at 11:15 so you’ll have to wait till two to meet with him. I’m sorry, Harley.”

“Puke on the dean! Let him wait! Or is Nauman afraid to see me? Afraid I’ll raise a stink?” His voice rose in a whine. “Listen, Sandy, they’re wrecking me. If I don’t get that degree, I can’t teach; and if I don’t teach, when’ll I have time to paint?”

Sandy gave an inaudible groan. If Harley Harris were lazy or less dedicated, she thought, echoing departmental sentiment, he could have been deflected from the Master of Fine Arts program long ago; but what could be done with an energetic grind whose mawkish, ill-proportioned, beetle-busy landscapes weren’t even good kitsch?

It was Piers Leyden, with his perverted sense of humor and disdain for degrees, who had conned the department into letting Harris into the program; who had insisted Harris had the makings of a primitive artist—another Rousseau or Bombois. Unfortunately Harley Harris wasn’t even another Grandma Moses.

The joke had stopped being funny. A graduate, after all, reflects the quality of the institution awarding the degree, and the other faculty members were determined that Harley Harris was not going to reflect on them. He had been informed that he would not be receiving an M.F.A. degree next month.

“If I can’t teach, I’ll have to take a job with my old man,” Harley complained.

“Oh, stop whining!” said Sandy, stuffing pigeonholes angrily. “You’re lucky to have your father to fall back on.”

The senior Mr. Harris owned a thriving window-dressing business in Brooklyn. He had loved the way Harley could write
SPRING FASHION SALE
in bluebirds and daisies when the lad was only sixteen, and he didn’t think six years of college had improved his son’s technique. Most of Vanderlyn’s Art Department agreed with him.

“You don’t have the foggiest idea of how tight the job market is right now,” she added impatiently. “Do you know how many people in this country can’t find a job? Not just the job they want, any job! And if you think an M.F.A.’s a sure ticket to college teaching, forget it! Look at David—for the last three months we’ve papered the whole country with his curriculum vitae, and he still hasn’t found an opening!”

The murmur of changing classes signaled the end of the third lecture period.
Ten-fifty.
Sandy turned and saw Harley Harris now leaning over the bookcase to glare at a jewel-toned abstract on the wall above.

“Nauman says my work’s fuzzy and tasteless—what the hell does he call this muck?”

Since examples of Oscar Nauman’s “muck” hung in major museums all over the world, Sandy overlooked his peevish insult.

Suddenly the door of the inner office opened, and a thin blond man emerged. “Phone calls,” he announced blandly, and Sandy wondered how much he had heard of her outburst. Jake Saxer was by no means one of her favorites.

Everything about him was just a little too crisp and hard-edged. Even his straw-colored beard was precisely clipped to a Vandyke point. Andrea Ross called him a Plexiglas construction straight out of minimal art, and he did have the brittle two-dimensional intensity of a man who expects to make it before forty. At twenty-seven Saxer already had his Ph.D. and an assistant professorship. Upon his arrival at Vanderlyn College two years ago, he’d analyzed his opportunities like a hard-nosed curator assessing the authenticity of a dubious Etruscan warrior and then deliberately ingratiated himself with Professor Quinn. Quinn had just begun another definitive book on postwar trends in modern art, and Saxer was knowledgeable about sources, references and illustrations. He had made himself so indispensable that Quinn had used his authority as deputy chairman to cut Saxer’s teaching load to one survey course this semester—ostensibly so that Saxer could sort and catalog the department’s chaotic slide library but in reality to give him more free time for Quinn’s research chores.

The office continued to fill up as people drifted in from classes to check their mail or just shoot the breeze. Piers Leyden and Andrea Ross were followed by Vance, who came in sipping his hot chocolate.
Graduate students and lecturers, holding coffee and cigarettes, elbowed for space at the corner table, gossiping about the morning fiasco in hoots of laughter, which moderated slightly when Riley Quinn returned from his ten-o’clock lecture, “Conceptual Divergence in Modern Art.”