Any Day Now (15 page)

“I will work harder,” she said. “You'll see. I promise.”

“You must, Aviva. If you don't, you put me in a very bad position.”

“I will, I will,” she said.

Through the open window she heard the buzz of insects. The fields, the sea, the desert, the mountains, everything was so close here.

“You are very beautiful,” he said, and she allowed herself the tiniest of caresses with her thumb. Ari! She'd never thought of Ari. He had a fiancée, she knew. A pretty girl who worked in the kitchen, Gutti. She drew a design on his shoulder.

“A butterfly,” she said. “See?”

“Do you know what Aviva means?” he asked, turning to look down at her, his face so earnest now it almost didn't look like him. “Did anyone tell you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I might be called up any day,” Ari said. “We live like this here.”

“Yes,” she said, and bending slowly because her head still hurt, began to work on his belt.

When she saw his sweaty, skittery face, she thought
hole.
She offered it coffee. Black, it said. And they were off and flailing, Sandy being light, normal, teacherly, him being a hole, as in vacuum. In his army surplus clothes and dark glasses, Foster reminded her a bit of Steve when he was young, but Steve without the charm. No
, this
intense kid was just a hurting unit of third-year, J-school brilliance and unmitigated — not even a “Hi, Sandy” after all these weeks — self-absorption. Hers to deal with. There was one every semester.

Taking your meds? she wanted to ask and didn't. “How's it going, Foster?”

“Good, good,” he said, scanning every surface in the could-be-anyone's office that part-time journalism faculty was encouraged to use for meetings like this. He added, “Well, you know.” She asked if he honestly thought he would be able to make up all the work to date: two profiles, a how-to, a review, a travel story, one long feature, two magazine analyses, one query letter — ten weeks of research and writing, reams of writing — before semester's end, two weeks from now.

“I'm good,” he said. “You know that.”

She didn't. She'd received one assignment to date, a one-page rant on how Ariel Sharon had been responsible for more deaths than Saddam Hussein. Attribution? she'd asked in the margin. Still, she'd written at the bottom, “It's good to see you're able to involve yourself in a story, the fearless ‘I.' Lots of journalists are afraid to do that.” Passion's good. Yeah. How often had she written that on students' stories, not knowing what else to say?

“My profile's going to be great. I've got this guy in Gaza I'm talking to. And for the long piece, I'm not sure what I'm going to write yet, but I've got contacts in Cuba and Vietnam. I've got contacts all over the free world.” Foster grinned at this.

He was a Marxist, a loud Marxist. (“Is there any other kind?” Rip had asked. Rip was her department head and part-time lover in the way she was part-time faculty: full-time in the head, part-time in payback.) And being a Marxist, this being 2003, meant Foster was pretty much out of step with everyone and everything, which only gave him more to rant against. A Web site for journalism students: right-wing propaganda.
Harper's
: white, elitist. Who's OK? she kept wanting to ask. Who passes in your world?

“We listen to you, Foster. So we would appreciate your listening to us,” one young woman had said in class a few weeks back and Sandy had felt awful. That should have been her line. Truth was, she didn't have many lines to counter this kid. She needed a different kind of script for him, and damn it, they weren't paying her enough to write a new one.

Foster's reaction to much of what Sandy said in class was to shake his head, smile knowingly and roll his eyes. Fool capitalist. Fool mainstream journalist. A sell-out, a centrist, a sheep. Well, he'd gotten that right. She was drifting perilously toward the centre of everything, not a radical idea left. Are Your Kids Into the New Drugs? — Ten Giveaways. She'd actually written a story on that for
Homemakers
last month. Her! Drugs!

I don't want this turning into
Oleanna
, she told herself, noting that Foster's glasses looked as if they had been left out in a sandstorm (Gaza?), then licked with saliva. She'd quite hated that Mamet play where a humourless female student exposes every little tear in an already-broken, anachronistic male teacher's psyche. Shreds. The two characters yelled a lot, she remembered.

“Let's talk due dates,” she said.

“Let's due that,” said Foster, jutting out his sweaty chin on “due,” grinning maybe at his word play. “I'm used to cranking out copy.”

“I don't want you to crank,” she said. “The point is to take your time. To craft.” Boring old talk — even the sane students did crazy polkas with the clock: three weeks lead time reduced to an hour of interviews (over the phone, or — slugs! — on the Net), then pound the keys between 5:00 and 7:00 a.m. and turn that thing in.
Voilà!
I'm
good
.

“Time is nature's way of not letting everything happen at once,” Sandy said and Foster looked at her. Who's in more trouble here? Was that what he was thinking?

“I see,” he said.

“Let's come up with a loose timetable,” she said. “I don't really care at this point what order you turn things in, just that you do.” The dance between compassion and vigilance against being manipulated — she had these teacher steps down
.

“I'm getting a vibe that you don't completely believe me,” said Foster, eyes darting. “What I told you.”

“Why would you be making any of this up?” she asked, thinking:
Are you crazy
? One of the sticking points of dealing with the mentally ill — “serious bipolar disorder,” Foster had written on his first e-mail a month ago — is that you had to catch yourself from using expressions like this.

I know about this condition, she'd e-mailed back. She had written “disease” first, then backspaced. So now he knew all about her ex-husband and her sister and her sister's son, Cody, her smart, beautiful fourteen-year-old nephew. And what? He didn't believe she believed him?

“Oh, Foster,” she said.

“Some profs,” he lowered his voice, “don't get it. Ted Manley kept me from graduating last year.
I should have graduated last year.
He's an asshole.”

Ted was, in fact, the crowning asshole of the department. Foster was seriously something or other, but he was smart and probably right about a few things. “I told you about my family, right?” she said. “I don't know what it's like to live inside this thing, but I do know what it's like to live beside it.” Sandy had composed this line before Foster's arrival, a good line to her ear.

“I'll crank,” he said. “I'm good. This thing makes one very creative. I don't want to change that.”

Sandy stood, because she'd had enough, and Foster pushed his chair back so hard it knocked into the bookshelf. A fat, generic, out-of-date journalism text hit the floor. Foster didn't stop to pick it up. Crash, bang, burn. He needed to be on something. (“I'm off my meds!!!” he'd e-mailed her a few days before. “I'm doing behaviour mod!! It's working!!!”) She knew a lot of the names: Zoloft, Paxil, Neurontin. Her sister, Liz, had been downing various highballs for the past many years. Sometimes Liz invented her own recipe — let's try forty parts lithium today — which usually landed her in the hallway of an emergency room for a couple of days. Sandy tossed Foster's empty Styrofoam cup (not even a bloody thank you) into the garbage.

“You survived.” Rip had crept to her doorway where he now lounged, sexy, terrible man that he was.

“He's a hole,” she said as Rip came in and closed the door, though he'd told her the week before they couldn't do this any more. The department had a new secretary and relations between Rip and the vice-dean — previously cozy — were cooling over capital expenditures.

“Closed doors, open legs,” she'd said. They'd had sex more than a few times in this room. After-hours, of course. Weekends, Rector's day, Easter Monday. Not the big family holidays, just the little administrative ones.

“Closed doors, open hearts,” he'd rallied, because it seemed he more than she needed this to be a matter of souls and minds.

Now he brought her close, deep-kissed her, rubbed his front against hers. “Hole, as in asshole.” He grabbed her right buttock.

“Not at all,” she said, stepping back, losing, she knew, precious petting time. But lately she'd been wanting to disagree with him. Not about them, but other stuff, perception stuff.

“He's the hole the wind blows through,” she said.

“Very pretty. Anyone ever tell you that you should write?” He tried to move in again, but she kept her hands down, attached to her sides, not to him, and this time he stepped back. It didn't take much to dissuade Rip, as if at any moment he would say, “You know, we really shouldn't be doing this.”

“Impossible kid. There was no talking to him. No reasoning.”

“He's a Marxist. He's built to withstand reason.” Rip went to the door, opened it slowly, looked in both directions, smiled back at her. “Quittin' time.”

“What should I do?”

“Let the other kids deal with him. Stay out of the way. Watch. I do that a lot. The kids are more ruthless than we are. Less, you know, hampered.”

Sandy didn't always like the way Rip talked about “the kids.” He called the girls Ms. Whatever to their face, very old world/new world. “It's respectful,” he insisted. “The girls appreciate it.” The guys he called chummy nicknames: Vince became Vinny, James, Jimbo. Rip was considered a cool prof, which meant he could get away with low-prep, low-effort teaching.

“Are you still working with that piece?” She'd been surprised when leafing through his course pack, a ring-bindered collection of magazine clips. It had been a good story: a profile of the Cusack acting family that had run big in
Vanity Fair
. It had been a good story five years before.

“It's strong,” Rip had answered.

“But so much great stuff has been written since. That's what you said you loved about magazine writing, what you said you miss when you do all those theory classes…press and the law, ethics. Getting to read stories right as they're happening.”

“I defy you to find me a better family profile,” said Rip.

“OK…” She had to think fast. Time with married men was always tight. “OK, that piece John Lahr did on Judi Dench and her family in
The New Yorker
last month. Now there's a merciless look at a theatrical family. He blasted through them like an icy, accurate wind.”

“Don't know it,” said Rip. “Hey, what about this one?” He flipped to another story and slipped a hand under her sweater. He had warm, accurate hands. But she'd begun to see something she hadn't really noticed as his former departmental buddy ol' pal, something she wished she didn't know because she knew it would be hard to forget and even harder to live with. He was forever right.

Now with Rip gone and the halls quiet, she settled down to her least favourite thing in the whole world, the thing she was paid to do: reading the kids' writing. She ate the package of Reeses' peanut butter cups, all three, she'd bought on her way in. Tuesdays, Rip always had to get home early to cook dinner for his four kids since Cookie — that was her name — played indoor soccer those nights.

“You're very different, yes,” Rip had conceded early on.

“I can't even throw a ball,” Sandy had told him, “let alone bounce one off my head.”

“One woman who can is enough,” Rip had said.

Tuesdays, Sandy's parents picked Danny up from school and kept him overnight, so she could presumably have some sort of life. When she and Rip had first hooked up, she'd tried to switch nights, but her parents in retirement were like her parents before retirement: go machines. Sign up for this, register for that — it was their way of coping with Liz's continuing mental health drama. Tuesday was their one free night.

And Rip couldn't very well ask Cookie to change her soccer night so he could regularly and deliriously break his marriage vows. So this was how it still stood: Tuesdays, bloody Tuesdays, which made her feel more alone and more divorced and more a single parent than all her toughest moments combined in thirteen years with Danny. Sometimes she could organize a dinner and movie out, but mostly, at least during the school year, Sandy spent it bent over paper, a headache coming on. Though this semester she
was
trying to head out at a reasonable hour, a safe hour.

In January, right after Christmas break, someone had left a single sheet of paper in all staff mailboxes, a photocopy of a news story on the murder-suicide that had rocked the university the year before. It had been an awful story, one that had administrators and staff wringing their hands with regret for months afterward: a professor with a known psychiatric history, a shady guy with too many conflicts of interest, too many grievances, and a vendetta against nearly everyone in the history department, a guy people ducked into empty or (surprise!) filled classrooms to avoid if they saw him bulldozing down the hall. It was in one of those classrooms that he'd had his final vent: one bullet each for his department head, the department head's secretary, two grad students and himself.

“Lest we forget,” had been block-printed across the photocopied news story. Rip had called other department heads. Was this a campus-wide leafletting? A blanket threat? Nope, just journalism. Rip advised his staff to keep a sharper lookout for strange people hanging around the department. “Other than yourselves,” he said at the next staff meeting. “Did you do this, Stan?” And Stan Birkenhaus, the department's techno whiz, gave him the finger. Rip liked running that kind of department.

“Probably just some crazy,” Rip had said. “Crazies love coming to university.”

“The Caribbean is one of the world's most exotic places…” Hadn't she lectured this group about the never-ever adjectives of travel writing? “Find a less clichéd, more descriptive...” Sandy was starting to write, but then she heard someone out in the hall and, in spite of being intent in the way only bad writing made her intent, in spite of the fact that it wasn't even 5:30, she jumped up, snagging her black leggings (Rip liked black) on the edge of the metal filing cabinet, and closed the door, pushing in the lock button.

“Thanks,” said someone from outside.

It was not some crazy, but Vonda Jaffe, the only woman in the department with tenure and the only one who could ruffle Dr. Rip. (Though Rip would say, “Now
there's
someone who's certifiable.”) Rip's and Vonda's mutual dislike was based on the sins of their ambitious youth: somebody getting funding for a project, somebody not, someone getting tenure first, the other second. Now that Rip and Vonda were mid-life and mid-career, and neither had landed way up nor way down, the venom had aged into swats and slights.