The Realm of Last Chances (22 page)

Conley had the kind of background you expected to encounter at North Shore State: degrees from second- or even third-tier public schools, a spotty teaching résumé, minimal publications. Dilson-Alvarez didn’t. He’d started off hot, attending prestigious universities and publishing a book a decade ago with a press in Great Britain. She flipped back to his résumé and saw that
“To Shoot Down a European”: Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Therapeutic Violence
had been issued in the fall of 2000 by Caylor and Hill, International Academic Publishers. She hadn’t heard of the press, so she opened her browser and typed the name in on Google.

The company had gone out of business in 2003. She found a couple of articles in British trade journals detailing its various financial problems, and one of them reported that the press had specialized in titles that dealt with liberation movements. A couple had been fairly successful, with a paperback
edition of one having been brought out in the United States by Picador.

Oddly, the only mention she could find of Dilson-Alvarez’s book was on the North Shore State website. It wasn’t listed on Amazon UK, and no reviews came up anywhere, even in JSTOR. The only pertinent reference was a quote from the preface Jean-Paul Sartre had written for Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth:
“The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.… For in the first days of the revolt you must kill; to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”

Dilson-Alvarez’s tenure documents would have reached the dean’s office by now, and the file should have included all relevant publications. But given what Bell had told her of Provost Bedard’s coziness with this professor, she decided not to call her just yet.

Instead, she phoned the chair. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve got a question for you.”

“Okay. Can you hold on for a moment? My office door’s open.”

While waiting, she saw the red light blink on her BlackBerry. A new text message from Matt:
Making a foot-long tuna melt and thinking of you
. He sent them to her off and on all day, and she frequently reread them. In each instance she felt augmented, as if digesting the words for the tenth or twelfth time added yet another layer to the entity the rest of the world knew as Kristin Stevens. The messages might not keep coming forever. She was fifty years old, her hair beginning to turn gray, her body losing its tone. But something surprising had happened just when she thought nothing ever could.

“All right,” Bell said, “I’m back.”

“When Dilson-Alvarez submitted his tenure documents,” she asked, “did he include his book?”

“No. He wasn’t required to. He published it before we hired
him. All he had to submit in the tenure file was the work that’s been accepted or come out since he got here.”

“Have you actually seen the book?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When we interviewed him. I was on the hiring committee. He submitted it as his writing sample.”

“Did you read it?”

“Some of it.”

“What did you think?”

He sighed. “I was an assistant professor at the time—actually up for tenure myself. Some people on the committee were very taken by it. I mean, it was a
book
. Nobody else in the department had ever published one.”

“In other words, you weren’t impressed?”

“Since you’re asking me questions,” he said, “might I risk one myself?”

“I suppose the least I can do is say yes, right?”

“You could say no, but I suspect you’re too nice a person.”

“Okay. Fire away.”

“What made you quit being a literary critic?”

Still holding the phone, she pushed her chair back from her desk and looked through the window at the quad. The morning couldn’t have been more beautiful. The sun was out, and a brisk breeze sent leaves swirling through the air as students strolled between classes. It was the kind of day that made you happy to be here, even if it wasn’t where you thought you belonged. “I despised all the jargon,” she said. “I blamed it for destroying my love of literature. In retrospect, this was unfair. That didn’t have to happen.”

“Granted,” he said. “Better things can always happen. But academic discourse, especially in fields like yours and mine, has become a long, tiresome exercise in obfuscation. That’s what’s in. What I love is decidedly out.”

“What do you love?”

“I’m an old-fashioned proponent of event-based history who clings to the simple-minded notion that what’s most interesting is a well-told story. The writers I go back to again and again are people like Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin. And they’re anathema to academic historians. Robert’s book’s okay for what it is, I guess. But I only made it through about five or ten pages. Why do you ask?”

She told him she couldn’t find any mention of the title online. The publisher was defunct, and the book had apparently never been reviewed anywhere, which she found unusual.

“So given the plagiarized passages in his article,” Bell said, “you’re wondering whether or not the book exists. I can relieve your mind on that score. Seven years ago, I held it in my hands.”

“For all of ten or twelve minutes.”

Bell burst out laughing, and it sounded as if this was the first release of tension he’d experienced in days, if not weeks. “Kristin,” he said, “the most amazing thing has occurred.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve become fond of an administrator.”

That night, as she lay on her back in Penelope Hill’s bed, staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see, in a house she had no right to be in, she told Matt about her two plagiarists and said she was in a quandary about what to do next.

“Just get rid of them,” he said.

“It’s not quite that simple.”

“It was pretty simple when my boss caught me.”

Both of them smelled of sex, brandy and Szechuan beef. After making love, they’d eaten Chinese takeout in the glow of a lithium flashlight he’d bought at Paul Nowicki’s hardware. He no longer felt any inclination to avoid the place, he’d told
her. The other day his ex waited on him, and they’d chatted like old friends.

“You worked at a bookstore,” she said. “My plagiarists are employed by a university. A shitty one, but still a sort of institution with all the usual rules.”

“Breaking the law’s generally accepted as wrong. I fail to see the difference.”

On this sagging mattress that hadn’t been slept on in decades, she’d done and said things that she could neither condone nor disown. Soon she’d go home and face her husband, and when he asked how she’d spent her day and evening she would look him in the eye and lie, and his willingness to believe her would diminish him a bit further. He was six foot four but shrinking daily, a decent man with huge hands that became delicate only when he laid them on a mandolin.

“We’re breaking the law by being here,” she said.

“Well, that
is
different. In our case, hearts are involved.”

He rolled toward her and rested his head on her breast. She loved it when he did that. Though it shamed her to acknowledge this even to herself, it made her wish, as she used to, that she could have a child. Phil always maintained they should wait until they both got tenure, but once he did he left. She was in her midthirties when she met Cal. When he broached the subject she told him it was too late, that her job wouldn’t allow for child rearing. The truth was she didn’t want to have a baby with him, though she knew that unlike Phil he would’ve made a good father. How irrational her choices had been, none more so than being where she was right now. “I actually have a feeling hearts may be involved in my plagiarism case, too,” she said. “Gwendolyn Conley’s heart, anyway.”

She told him that the first time she’d seen the two of them together, she suspected they were lovers. From John Bell she’d learned that Conley was divorced, with two young children,
and that Dilson-Alvarez was married, though no one in the department, as far as the chair knew, had ever met his wife. It was said she came from someplace in Eastern Europe. Slovenia, he thought, or maybe Slovakia.

“So what does being lovers,” Matt asked, “have to do with being plagiarists?” It accrued to his credit that he took her concerns seriously. Try though Cal might—and he sometimes did—he’d never been able to conceal his belief that about 90 percent of what transpired at universities was bogus. He once remarked that the only people he respected at her previous school were those in the Department of Viticulture and Enology. When she wondered why, he said, “At least they admit they’re producing an intoxicant.”

“I don’t know,” she told Matt. “But I have a feeling that somehow Dilson-Alvarez has entrapped her.”

“Well, if she let him talk her into plagiarizing, she’ll pay with her job.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Are you serious? Your provost might be an idiot, but I doubt she’s suicidal. Once you’ve shown her the evidence you just described to me, she can’t afford to ignore it. That’d make her guilty of misconduct herself. I read a book about plagiarism—
Stolen Words
, I believe it was called. It’s pretty cut and dried in academia. You should know that.”

“You’ve read a book about everything,” she said, then told him she still needed to confer with the editors of the journals in which the disputed articles had appeared, to alert them of her discovery and take their statements. She also hoped to contact the editor in chief of the British house that published Dilson-Alvarez’s book; she’d seen his name in one of the online articles, so unless he’d died in the meantime, she ought to be able to track him down. She couldn’t help but wonder why the book had never been reviewed anywhere.

“Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “I’d also call the
National Student Clearinghouse and ask them to check their degrees, since official transcripts can be faked. But that’s tricky, because the clearinghouse requires written permission from the individuals whose records you’ve requested. Normally, you get that before hiring anybody, but North Shore didn’t have the foresight and asking for it now would tip my hand. This is just a horrible mess, and I can’t tell you how badly I wish it hadn’t come up. If I could ignore it, I would.”

He lifted his head, then sat up in bed. She’d been surprised when she first saw him with his shirt off. His torso looked frail, the bones of his ribs visible through his skin. He didn’t have much chest hair either, just a faint downy fuzz. There was something so boyish about him, a vulnerability that made her feel many things, one of which was a desire to protect him, even from herself.

Though no musician, he wasn’t tone-deaf. “You’re not thinking of letting it go, are you?”

She’d once overheard a friend of her mother’s pose the same question, with exactly the same inflection. As if an affirmative answer would cast doubt on her mother’s sanity.

The occasion was a visit home from Chapel Hill, on the Thanksgiving of her first fall in grad school. She’d gone because her mother practically begged her to come. By then she and Phil were spending all their nights together, drinking his generic beer and talking books, making love and talking books some more. He wanted to accompany her to Pennsylvania but couldn’t; his grandmother was seriously ill in Mississippi, and he hoped to see her once more before she died. “Just keep your chin up,” he advised. “Your mom needs you. Otherwise she wouldn’t ask.”

The friend who’d asked her mother the question wasn’t aware that Kristin was within earshot. The house she’d grown up in had become a place in which one lurked, stopping and listening
before moving from one room to the next. Her mother often sat alone in dark corners, talking on the phone with the lights turned off and the drapes drawn tightly so she couldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of the property next door. Her father was renting a room in one of the row houses at the end of South Market. She’d never known anybody who lived there, but evidently he did. Who could say who he did or didn’t know or how long he might’ve known them?

“You’re not thinking of letting it go, are you?” her mother’s friend said. “You’d let him move back
in
?”

“I didn’t say that,” her mother said. Her voice no longer sounded as if her mouth were full of peanut butter. She’d quit taking whatever the doctor had been giving her but was on the mend, though no one understood that then, least of all Kristin. “I said I’m considering picking up the pieces and moving on.”

“With him?”

“Possibly. Next semester, when I go back to work, I’ll see him at school every day. If I see him there, I might as well see him here.”

“But what about her? She’s right next door.”

Her mother sighed. “She won’t be a problem.”

“She sure was before.”

“She won’t be anymore.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because she told me she wouldn’t.”

“And you trust her?”

“I always have.”

“And look where that led.”

Where it had led was to the bedroom or, more precisely, as Kristin’s friend said the day she called her in Cleveland, to Patty’s own bed. That was where Patty’s father had found them. He’d entered the house around four in the afternoon and slipped upstairs, knowing what he would discover before he ever saw the proof. He’d spared Patty most of the details, she said, but implication is the most potent of all poisons: when
she began to cry at the notion that they’d made love in her bed, her dad said,
No, honey, it wasn’t like that, they weren’t in the bed, exactly
. So Patty then imagined her mother bent over, clutching the foot rail while Kristin’s father slammed into her. She wouldn’t have been on her knees, since the room had no carpet.
You know what she said to my dad?
Patty sobbed.
When he asked her if she loved your father? She said not only didn’t she love him, she didn’t even like him very much
.

“Sooner or later,” her mother told her friend, “trust always leads to disappointment. You think you’ll wake up tomorrow, because you always have. But one day you won’t. Sarah’s already disappointed me, but she hasn’t got it in her to do it again. She didn’t really have it in her the first time. She just ended up living on the wrong man’s street.”