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woman outside his office Ralph said, "Dusty, please tell Rusty and Misty I'll be showing Dr. Gold to the elevator myself. Ask Christy to step inside my office. Tell her I'm horny."
"Sure, love. Bye, sweetheart."
"Who's Christy?" Gold asked.
"The nice-looking one. I don't think you ve seei^
"And what's all this Dr. Gold shit?" ^
Ralph lowered his voice. "It makes ajb$ftgr impres. sion. Everyone knows professoij^feirt make much money and doctors do. G05boops—there goes one. Did you see that beautiful ass? Bruce, give my love to Andrea. You might find her a trifle prudish, but she's really as good as gold. It wasn't easy being the only child of Pugh Biddle Conover with all those riches and horses. They ride them, you know." Ralph pronounced this last detail as though describing a tasteless and unhealthy practice. "And give my love to Belle too. How are the children?"
"Fine. One is still at home."
"That's too bad," said Ralph. "Let me give you some good advice, Bruce, from an unofficial opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was seven to one, with the other member abstaining because he was under heavy anesthesia. When you get your divorce, don't fight for custody of the children, or even visitation rights. Make them all ask to come to you. Otherwise they'll think they're doing you a favor by letting you spend time with them, which you will quickly discover they are not."
Nearing the elevators, Gold could contain his curiosity no longer. "Ralph," he said, his fingers clenching nervously, "what do you do here?"
"Work, Bruce. Why?"
"I need some assurance, Ralph, don't I? Before I start making changes, don't you think I ought to find out a few things?"
"I don't see why not."
"What kind of job do you have?"
"A good one, Bruce."
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"What do you do?" "What I'm supposed to." "Well, what's your position exactly?" "r**in *e mner circle, Bruce " Does that mean you can't talk about it?"
like^o Cw?"an tCl1 y°U eVeiythin^ What -ould you "Well, who do you work for?" ct. 4y superiors."
"DWS2L^ave any authority?"
-Oh,yes?Ag^laid^l.''
"Over who?" """"■■■•'^
"My subordinates. I can do whatever I want once I get permission from my superiors. I'm my own boss. After all, I'm not really my own boss."
"Well," said Gold, "what are my chances?"
"As good as they ought to be."
"No better?" Gold inquired facetiously.
"Not at this time."
"When should I get in touch with you?"
"When I call you," said Ralph. "Pugh Biddle Conover can help while he's alive," Ralph shouted into the elevator car as the doors were closing.
Gold's mind was shimmering with fantasies of approaching eminence as the car descended. Secretary of State? Head of the CIA? A voice inside cautioned, Zei nisht naarish. Where does someone like you come off being Secretary of State? What's so crazy? he answered it brashly. It's happened to bigger schmucks than me.
By the time he was outside, only one disquieting thought survived. He'd been fawning.
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'.
IJEVEN years back, when Gold had his fellowship at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation and she was a research assistant doing advanced work in home economics, Andrea Conover had been too old for him. Now, nearing thirty-five, she was just right. Gold was no longer attracted to very young girls. With everybody doing everything to each other now, Gold had only his middle age and his large reputation as a minor intellectual to recommend him as a lover. It was all he wanted. He had never really liked going down.
Andrea was taller than he remembered. Or he had grown shorter. She paid for the drinks and dinner with a credit card, shyly confiding she would charge the expense to the Oversight Committee on Government Expenditures. Gold wondered what in the world she saw in him. She was easily the most beautiful woman he had ever been with, the richest, his first society girl. Her hair was blond. She had blue eyes, a small, straight nose, a broad forehead. Her complexion was light, her skin unmarred. To Gold, who was still shepherding the
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write anything about me in an article again and it'll be your ass."
Gold had written the opening paragraph of his article on education on the plane ride back from Washington and had completed most of the first draft in his classroom that afternoon instead of teaching. He had stacks of student blue books that would eventually have to be read. Dyspeptic and much put upon is how Gold would have described himself to a biographer if ever one should appear. Arriving at the college from the airport by cab late that morning, he was exactly in that physical and mental state. Already his remembrance of having made love to Andrea appeared to belong to an unrecoverable past.
He was unshaven and unprepared. He threw nearly all of his mail away. He acknowledged with a surly nod the greetings of colleagues, who were astonished to see him.
Gold never spent more time on campus than he had to and never went to faculty meetings. He posted a liberal schedule of office hours but did not keep them. Student conferences were by appointment only, and he never made any. Gold's favorites were those who dropped his courses before the term started. He disliked most the ones whose attendance was regular and whose assignments were completed on time. He was no more interested in their schoolwork than in his own. He arrived in the classroom five minutes late and, to the consternation of all, distributed examination booklets.
"Today," he began right in, "we're going to have one of those surprise examinations I may have mentioned. Write an essay in answer to a question that would lead you to discuss the high points of the work we've covered so far."
"What's the question?" asked a girl in front.
"Make one up. You'll be judged on the merit of your question as well as the quality of your answer. Begin."
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Gold emptied his attach^ case. There, still in a rubber band, was a bundle of blue books from his other undergraduate class, essays, he remembered with a sinking heart, on the psychology of sociology in contemporary American literature and on the sociology of psychology in English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They had been written for a course devised by him with no better intent than to lure people into literature from psychology and sociology on the mistaken assumption they would be mastering all three disciplines simultaneously with no greater expenditure of labor or time. Soon, he perceived, he would have this new set of blue books to lug around like a millstone. Lacking anything better to do, he reread the opening paragraph he had written on a yellow pad on the airplane, was tickled by his felicity of thought and word, and took up a pen enthusiastically. His progress was rapid. He was about to move into the concluding section of his piece on education and truth when he was brought to a halt by the first of his students to finish, a pale, gangling young man wearing a woven skullcap of patterned circles.
"Mr. Epstein?" he called softly as the boy tiptoed past.
"Sir?"
"What high school did you go to?" They spoke in undertones.
"The Herzliah Yeshiva."
"Oh, yes. I know it well. That's in Brighton, isn't it?"
"No, sir. Borough Park."
"Have you ever heard of a holiday called Shmini Atzereth?"
"Yes, sir. It comes right after Yom Kippur."
Gold clicked his tongue in disappointment. "How about Shabbos Bereishes?"
"Last week. That's a calendar day, though, Professor Gold, rather than a holiday."
"Do something for me, Mr. Epstein. Give me a list of all the Jewish holidays and calendar days this year.
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And maybe in some way I'll be able to repay the favor soon."
"Yes, Professor Gold, I'll be glad to. I hope you won't mind if I tell you I'm very disappointed in the course."
Gold sighed sympathetically. "So am I. What's your complaint?"
"It's called 'Monarchy and Monotheism in Literature from the
Medieval to the Modern.'"
"Yes?"
"But it seems to be a course in Shakespeare's history plays," said Mr. Epstein.
"We'll be moving on to the major tragedies soon," Gold answered breezily. "All but Othello and the Roman plays. In Othello, unfortunately, there is no monarch, and the Romans were not monotheistic."
"The course description in the college catalogue isn't accurate," Epstein complained.
"I know," said Gold. "I wrote it."
"Was that fair?"
"No. But maybe it was intelligent. We feel that anyone interested in literature ought to study Shakespeare and we know that few students will do so unless we call it something else."
"But I'm not interested in literature. I'm interested in God. I became an English major because the English Department seems to be offering so many courses in theology and religious visionary experiences."
"You were misled," said Gold. "If I were your adviser I would have forewarned you."
"You are my adviser," said the boy, "and you're never in your office."
Gold averted his eyes. "I'm always in class, though. If you'd like, I'll allow you to drop the course."
"Should I switch to the Department of Religion?"
"No, don't go there. You'll be reading Milton and Homer. Try Psychology if you're interested in God. I believe they've latched on to religion now."
"Where are the psychology courses?"
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"In Anthropology. Soon everything is going to be in Urban Studies anyway, so you might as well major in that. But do it soon. Otherwise you might find me there in a year or two and have to read Shakespeare's history plays all over again."
Gold was praying hard that Epstein would drop his course before he had to read his essay.
Gold prayed also for an endowed chair in the Urban Studies Program that would double his salary while halving his course load. Gold had little doubt he would succeed in Washington if once given the chance, for he was a master at diplomacy and palace intrigue. He was the department's deadliest strategist in the conflict now raging to attract students to subjects in liberal arts from other divisions of the college and to subjects in English from other departments in liberal arts. Gold wrote the most enticing titles and descriptions for the college catalogue, and no one was more successful at originating popular new courses. Gold was the architect of an illicit and secret policy of detente that permitted members of the German Department to give courses in remedial English to Hispanic and Oriental students in exchange for votes on critical issues at faculty council meetings. Italy and Spain were reeling as a result, Classics was deserted, and France had been isolated. Russia was in decline, along with History, Economics, and Philosophy. China was reduced to a flash in the pan: only the courses in Chinese cooking enjoyed flourishing enrollments. In the most successful maneuver of all, Comparative Literature had been walled off from texts in translation, while Gold and his English Department were free to pillage the continent at will for such triumphant creations of his as "Dante, Hell, Fire, and Faulkner"; "Through Hell and High Water with Hemingway, Hesse, Hume, Hobbes, Hinduism and Others: A Shortcut to India"; "Blake, Spinoza, and Contemporary American Pornography in Film and Literature"; "Sex in World and American Literature"; and "The Role of Women, Blacks, and Drugs in Sex and Religion in World and American Film and Litera-
ls
tare." It was now possible, in fact, thanks to the enterprise of Gold, for a student to graduate as an English major after spending all four years of academic study watching foreign motion pictures in a darkened classroom without being exposed for even one moment to any other light but that of a movie projector. As a result of these progressive innovations, the English Department was one of the few on campus with swelling registrations and a demonstrable need for a larger faculty, a need filled in part by professors of German teaching remedial English to natives of Hong Kong and Puerto Rico. Gold had made peace with the Hun and enjoyed the high regard of his superiors.
Gold himself was saturnine and subdued in the misanthropic pleasure he obtained from these accomplishments. His job was secure. He was esteemed by his colleagues and did not like that. He soon would be given tenure and didn't want it. He would rather feel at liberty. Gold possessed an advantage at the college similar to one he enjoyed with his family; if he did not talk, his relatives assumed he was thinking; if he did not go to faculty meetings, it was taken for granted he was engaged in more important matters. Like a Paramecium feeding blindly and incessantly, the English Department, under Gold's initiative and supervision, had stealthily been subsuming more and more areas of the Urban Studies Program through a schedule of courses he'd invented called "Recent American Realistic Problem Literature,of the City."
Gold had no clear idea yet what Urban Studies was about. But he knew he could do that shit as well as anybody else.
Gold who adamantly repelled conversational overtures on planes from everybody but attractive women, had plunged into his New York Times that morning with hawklike predacity as soon as he was seated on the shuttle returning him to New York. He had called Andrea from the airport in Washington and knew he would phone again from LaGuardia to say he missed
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her still. He quickly found himself at one of the important sections of the newspaper that interested him the most, the social page. Life in the city had gone spinning on without him. He read:
"It's to diey" bubbled Jan Chipman jammed on a banquette with her sister Buffy Cafritz, the Carleton Varneys and the Harold Reeds. "I wouldn't believe that my husband would sit on a floor to watch a fashion show."
Gold could believe it. With fingernails curving like claws, he separated the paragraph from the page and placed the ragged clipping between the leaves of his memorandum pad as frugally as a European bus conductor making change. He would use it, perhaps in his book on Jews. A fragment of political news on the front page kicked over in his memory, and he turned back to read:
In Indianapolis this morning, the President defended himself against a charge that he was a weak President who allowed himself to be "pushed around." "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," he retorted at a news conference.
Gold tore it out. Undoubtedly his President needed him. Business conditions were the same, he saw in the financial section, the verities of the free marketplace eternally unchanged, although he had to read the key sentence a second time to be sure:
Now, however, some analysts believe that the Federal Reserve Bank has stiffened its credit posture because of the growing danger of an economic recovery.
In education, the paper recorded a 55 percent increase in crimes in schools:
The number of reported acts of crime and violence in the city's schools, including assaults on teachers, has
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risen sharply this fall. This improvement followed a sharp upward trend in crime during the school year ended last June.
Gold was filled with inspiration suddenly for a brilliant opening to his "Education and Truth or Truth in Education." He wrote:
Education is the third greatest cause of human misery in the world. The first, of course, is life.
Here he had to pause. He had no idea of the second. Death was tempting. Death after life was either very good or very bad. It was glib, and might be mistaken for wit. He decided to chance it. He was on his way with another telling piece that might bring him to the attention of an admiring multitude larger than he had yet enjoyed. He closed his eyes and smiled. Gold was never invited to fashion shows. Soon he would be. He wondered if Mr. Chipman had enjoyed sitting on the floor the evening earlier and if he was eager to do so again. He was saddened that any reply by Buffy Cafritz to her sister had gone unreported and was probably lost for all time. Gold was good at daydreaming and gave himself up to the contemplation of what it would be like to work with Ralph for the President, marry Andrea, share her apartment in Washington, fuck her richer and even more attractive friends, serve on a Presidential Commis
sion on education, and be an overpaid professor of Urban Studies. It was to die.
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V
Education and Truth or Truth in Education
44I>
JjRILLIANT!" was a word Andrea Biddle Con-over employed to praise Gold's "Education and Truth or Truth in Education." "Trenchant" was another, along with "pithy," and Gold rated her animated approval brilliant, trenchant, and pithy. It was not Gold's method to show new work to anyone but editors. Never, however, had he been so intimately involved with a woman of such stunning ways whose academic credentials surpassed even his own, an undergraduate degree at Smith, a master's at Yale, her doctorate from Harvard, and a lectureship in England for one year at Cambridge University in her field of home economics.
Gold discovered during his second tryst in Washington that Andrea Biddle Conover's white terry-cloth bathrobe was too voluminous for him. The large sleeves could be cuffed back over his spidery hands and forearms, but the abundant folds of the skirt were treacherously long and twirled and dragged behind him in a disorderly train. He saw also with disquietude that his present circumstances would not afford him the
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money and the time to return to Washington as frequently as he would like.
"If you never want to see me again," she volunteered, "I'll understand."
That insistent pledge was beginning to jangle. "I do want to see you again," he assured her with passion. "I would like to spend whole weekends with you. It's just that I'm in this awful limbo right now. Ralph doesn't want me to call him at the office, and he doesn't want me to call him at home. He tells me you won't let anyone get personal calls on government telephones."