‘It’s just a small question,’ said Victoria, shrinking a little from all the student eyes upon her. ‘I was just –’
‘No, go on, go on,’ said Howard, over her attempts to speak.
‘Just . . . what time is the class?’
Howard sensed the relief in the room. At least she hadn’t asked anything clever. He could tell that the class as a whole could not abide prettiness and cleverness. But she had not tried to be clever. And now they approved of her practicality. Every pen was poised. This was all they really wanted to know, after all. The facts, the time, the place. Vee too had her pen on the page and her head low, and now she flicked her eyes up to meet Howard’s, a glance somewhere between flirtation and expectancy. Lucky for Jerome, thought Howard, that he had finally agreed to go back to Brown. This girl was a dangerous commodity. And now Howard realized that he’d been looking at her so absorbedly he’d neglected to answer her question.
‘It’s three o’clock, Tuesday, in this room,’ said Smith from behind Howard. ‘The reading list is on the website, or you can find a copy of it in the cubbyhole outside Dr Belsey’s office. Anybody needs their study cards signed, bring ’em to me and ah’ll sign ’em. Thank you for coming, people.’
‘Please,’ said Howard above the noise of scraping chairs and the packing of bags, ‘please only – only – put your names down if you’re seriously intending to take this class.’
‘Jack, darling,’ said Claire, shaking her head, ‘you send these websites your shopping lists and they put them up. They’ll take anything.’
Jack retrieved the printouts from Claire and slipped them back into his drawer. He had tried reason and plea and rhetoric, and now he must introduce reality into the conversation. It was time, once again, to walk round the desk, perch on the end and cross one leg over the other.
‘Claire . . .’
‘My God, what a piece of work that girl is!’
‘Claire, I really can’t have you making those kind of . . .’
‘Well, she is.’
‘That’s as may be, but . . .’
‘Jack, are you telling me I have to have her in my class?’
‘Claire, Zora Belsey is a very good student. She’s an exceptional student, in fact. Now, she may not be Emily Dickinson . . .’
Claire laughed. ‘Jack, Zora Belsey couldn’t write a poem if Emily Dickinson herself rolled out of her grave, put a gun to the girl’s head and demanded one. She’s simply untalented in this area. She refuses to read poetry – and all I get from her are pages from her journal aligned down the left-hand margin. I’ve got a hundred and twenty talented students applying for eighteen places.’
‘She is in the top three percentile of this college.’
‘Oh, I really couldn’t give a crap. My class rewards talent. I’m not teaching molecular biology, Jack. I’m trying to refine and polish a . . . a sensibility. I’m telling you: she doesn’t have one. She has arguments. That’s not the same thing.’
‘She believes,’ said Jack, using his deepest, most presidential, commencement day timbre, ‘that she is being kept from this class for . . . personal reasons that are outside the proper context of academic or creative assessment.’
‘What? What are you talking about, Jack? You’re talking to me like a management manual? This is insane.’
‘I’m afraid she went as far to intimate that she believed this was a “vendetta”. An inappropriate vendetta.’
Claire was quiet for a minute. She too had spent much time in universities. She understood the power of the inappropriate.
‘She said that? Are you serious? Oh, no, this is such a crock, Jack. Do I have a vendetta against the other hundred kids who didn’t get in the class this semester? Is this serious?’
‘She seems willing to take the matter on to the advisory board. As a case of personal prejudice, if I understand her correctly. She would be referring, of course, to your relations . . .’ said Jack, and allowed his ellipsis to do the rest.
‘What a piece of work!’
‘I think this is serious, Claire. I wouldn’t bring it to your attention if I thought otherwise.’
‘But Jack . . . the class has already been posted. What’s it going to look like when Zora Belsey’s name is added at the last minute?’
‘I think a minor embarrassment now is worth a far larger, possibly costly embarrassment further down the line before the advisory board – or even in court.’
Every now and then Jack French could be admirably succinct. Claire stood up. She was so tiny that even standing she was only just the equal to Jack’s reclining pose. But her small proportions bore no relation to the force of Claire Malcolm’s personality, as Jack well knew. He drew his head back a little in preparation for the assault.
‘What happened to supporting the faculty, Jack? What happened to privileging the decision of a respected faculty member over the demands of a student with a pretty glaring chip on their shoulder? Is that our policy now? Every time they cry wolf we run screaming?’
‘Please, Claire . . . I need you to appreciate that I have been placed in an extremely invidious situation in which –’
‘You’re in a situation – what about the situation you’re putting me in?’
‘Claire, Claire – sit down for a moment, will you? I haven’t explained myself well, I see that. Sit down for one moment.’
Claire lowered herself slowly into her chair, tucking one leg nimbly underneath her bottom like a teenager. She blinked at him warily.
‘I looked at the boards today. Three of the names in your class I did not recognize.’
Claire Malcolm did a double-take at Jack French. Then she lifted her hands and brought them down hard on the arms of the chair. ‘And? What are you saying?’
‘Who, for example,’ said Jack, glancing at a sheet of paper on his desk, ‘is Chantelle Williams?’
‘She’s a receptionist, Jack. For an optician, I believe. I don’t know which optician. What’s your point?’
‘A receptionist . . .’
‘She also happens to be one of the most exciting young female talents I’ve come across in years,’ announced Claire.
‘Claire, it still remains that she is not a student registered at this institution,’ said Jack quietly, neatly meeting hyperbole with sobriety. ‘And therefore not strictly speaking eligible for –’
‘Jack, I can’t believe we’re doing this . . . it was agreed three years ago that if I wanted to take on extra students, above and beyond my requirements, then that was under my discretion. There are a lot of talented kids in this town who don’t have the advantages of Zora Belsey – who can’t afford college, who can’t afford our summer school, who are looking at the army as their next best possibility, Jack, an army that’s presently fighting a war – kids who don’t –’
‘I am well aware,’ said Jack, a little tired of being lectured by highly strung women this morning, ‘of the educational situation for economically disadvantaged young people in New England – and you know I have always supported your sterling attempts . . .’
‘Jack –’
‘. . . to offer your impressive abilities . . .’
‘Jack, what are you saying?’
‘. . . to young people who would not otherwise have these opportunities . . . but the bottom line here is that people are asking questions about the fairness of classes being open to non-Wellington – ’
‘Who’s asking? English Department people?’
Jack sighed. ‘Quite a few people, Claire. And I redirect those questions. Have done for a while. But if Zora Belsey is successful in bringing a lot of unwelcome attention to your, shall we say, selective admissions process – then I don’t know if I will still be able to continue redirecting those questions.’
‘Is it Monty Kipps? I heard he “objected”,’ said Claire bitterly, and made her fingers quote, unnecessarily, Jack felt, ‘to Belsey’s Affirmative Action Committee working on campus. God, he hasn’t even been here a month! I
s he the new authority around here now or something?’
Jack blushed. He could blackmail with the best of them, but he could not involve himself very deeply in personal conflict. He also had a profound respect for public power, that compelling quality that Monty Kipps had in spades. If only, as a young man, Jack’s way of expressing himself had been a tad sprightlier, a shade more people-friendly (if one could have imagined, even abstractly, the possibility of having a beer with him), he too might have been a public person in the manner of Monty Kipps, or like Jack’s own late father, a senator for Massachusetts, or like his brother, a judge. But Jack was a university man from the cradle. And when he met people like Kipps, a man who straddled both worlds, Jack always deferred to them.
‘I cannot have you talking about a colleague of ours in that way, Claire, I just can’t. And you know that I can’t name names. I am trying to save you a lot of pointless pain here.’
‘I see.’
Claire looked down at her small brown hands. They were quivering. The dome of her speckled grey-and-white head faced Jack, downy, he thought, like the feathers in a bird’s nest.
‘In a university . . .’ began Jack, preparing his best impression of a parson, but Claire stood up.
‘I know what happens in universities, Jack,’ she said sourly. ‘You can tell Zora congratulations. She made the class.’
4
‘I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie,’ explained Kiki, leaning over the counter. ‘You know – tasty-looking.’
Kiki’s little laminated name tag tapped on the plastic sneeze-guard protecting the merchandise. This was her lunch hour.
‘It’s for my friend,’ she said bashfully, incorrectly. She hadn’t seen Carlene Kipps since that strange afternoon three weeks ago. ‘She’s not too well. I need a down home pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing French or . . . frilly.’
Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their speciality goods and smiled abstractly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren’t certain of the cause.
‘See that?’ said Kiki emphatically, pressing her index finger on the plastic, directly above an open-faced pie. The surrounding pastry was golden and in the centre sat a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’
A few minutes later Kiki was striding up the hill with her pie in its recycled cardboard box, tied with a green velvet ribbon. She was taking business into her own hands. For there had been a misunderstanding between Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps. Two days after their meeting, somebody had hand-delivered an extremely old-fashioned, unironic and frankly unAmerican visiting card to 83 Langham:
Dear Kiki,
Thank you so much for your kind visit. I should like to repay the call. Please let me know of a time that would be convenient to you,
Yours truly
Mrs C. Kipps
In normal circumstances, of course, this card would have served as an ideal object of ridicule over a Belsey breakfast table. But, as it happened, the card arrived two days after the Belsey world fell apart. Pleasure was no longer on the menu. Ditto communal breakfasts. Kiki had taken to eating on the bus to work – a bagel and a coffee from the Irish store on the corner – and putting up with those disapproving looks that other women give big women when they’re eating in public. Two weeks later, upon rediscovering the card tucked in the kitchen magazine rack, Kiki felt somewhat guilty; silly as it was, she had meant to reply. But there was never a good time to broach the subject with Jerome. The important thing at the time had been to keep her son’s spirits up, to keep the waters as calm as possible so that he might get in the boat his mother had spent so long carefully constructing and sail off to college. Two days before registration Kiki passed Jerome’s bedroom and witnessed him gathering his clothes into a ritualistic-looking mound in the middle of the floor – the traditional prelude to packing his bags. So now everyone was back in school. Everyone was enjoying the sense of new beginnings and fresh pastures that school cycles offer their participants. They were starting again. She envied them that.
Four days ago, Kiki found the visiting card once again, in the bottom of her Alice Walker Barnes and Noble tote bag. Sitting in the bus with the card on her lap, she parsed it into its constitutive parts, examining first the handwriting, then the Anglicized phrasing, then the idea of the maid or cleaner or whoever she was being sent round with it; the thick English notepaper with something about Bond Street stamped in the corner, the royal blue ink of the italics. It was too ridiculous, really. And yet when she looked out of the back window of the bus, seeking any happy memories of the long, distressing summer, moments when the weight of what had happened to her marriage was not crushing her ability to breathe and walk down the street and have breakfast with her family, for some reason, that afternoon on the porch with Carlene Kipps kept rising up.
She tried ringing. Three times. She sent Levi over with a note. The note received no reply. And on the phone it was always him, the husband, with his excuses. Carlene wasn’t feeling well, then she was asleep, and then yesterday: ‘My wife is not quite up to visitors just now.’
‘Could I maybe talk to her?’
‘I think it would be preferable if you left a message.’
Kiki’s imagination went to work. It was, after all, a good deal easier on her own conscience to envisage a Mrs Kipps kept from the world by dark, marital forces than to acknowledge a Mrs Kipps offended by Kiki’s own rudeness. So she had booked a two-hour lunch break today with the purpose of going over to Redwood and seeing about liberating Carlene Kipps from Montague Kipps. She would bring a pie. Everybody loves pie. Now she took out her cell and with a dextrous thumb scrolled down to JAY–DORM and pressed ‘Call’.
‘Hey . . . Hi, Mom . . . wait a minute . . . getting my glasses.’
Kiki heard a thump and then the sound of water spilling.
‘Oh, man . . . Mom, wait up.’
Kiki tensed her jaw. She could hear the tobacco in his voice. But it was no good attacking on that front, seeing as how she’d started up smoking again herself. Instead she attacked obliquely. ‘Every time I call you, Jerome, every time you always just getting out of bed. It’s amazing, really. Don’t matter what time I call, you still in bed.’
‘Mom . . . please . . . less of the Mamma Simmonds . . . I’m in pain here.’
‘Baby, we all in pain . . . now, look, Jay,’ said Kiki seriously, abandoning her own mother’s Southern stylings as too unwieldy for the delicate task at hand, ‘quickly – when you were in London . . . Mrs Kipps, her relationship with her husband, with Monty – they were, you know, cool with each other?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Jerome. Kiki could feel a little of the jittery anxiety of last year coming through the phone. ‘Mom, what’s going on?’
‘Nothing, nothing . . . Nothing about that . . . It’s just every time I try to call her, Mrs Kipps – you know, I just want to see how she is – she is my neighbour –’
‘Give me some gossip, I am your neighbour!’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Nothing. It’s a song,’ said Jerome and chuckled gently to himself. ‘Sorry – go on, Mom. Neighbourly concern, etcetera . . .’
‘Right. And I just want to say hello, and every time I call it’s like he won’t let me speak to her . . . like he’s got her locked away or . . . I don’t know, it’s strange. First I thought she was offended – you know how easy folk like that get offended, they’re worse than white folk that way – but now . . . I don’t know. I think it’s more than that. And I was just wondering if you knew anything.’
Kiki heard her son sigh into the phone. ‘Mom, I don’t think it’s time for an intervention. Just because she can’t come to the phone doesn’t mean the evil Republican is beating her. Mom . . . I really don’t want to come home at Christmas and find Victoria drinking eggnog in my kitchen . . . Could we just . . . like, could we cool it on the “being neighbourly” vibe? Th
ey’re pretty private people.’
‘Who’s bothering them!’ cried Kiki.
‘OK, then!’ echoed Jerome, imitating her.
‘Nobody’s bothering anybody,’ muttered Kiki irritably. She stepped aside to allow a woman with a double stroller to get by. ‘I just like her. The woman lives near by, and she’s obviously not well, and I’d like to see how she’s doing. Is that allowed?’
It was the first time she had articulated these motives, even to herself. Hearing them now, she recognized how approximate and shoddy they were when placed alongside the strong, irrational desire she had to be in that woman’s presence again.
‘OK . . . I just – I guess I don’t see why we have to be friends with them.’
‘You have friends, Jerome. And Zora has friends, and Levi practically lives with his friends – and’ – Kiki followed the thought to the edge of the cliff and beyond – ‘well, we sure as hell know now how close your father is to his friends – and what? I can’t make friends? Y’all have your life and I have no life?’
‘No, Mom . . . come on, that’s not fair . . . I just . . . I mean, I wouldn’t have thought she was your type of person . . . Makes it a little awkward for me, that’s all. Anyway, whatever. You know . . . you do what you want.’
A mutual bad temper stretched its black wings over the conversation.
‘Mom . . .’ mumbled Jerome contritely, ‘look, I’m glad you rang. How are you? Are you OK?’