It Will Come to Me (26 page)

T
he proverbial blank white page, Ruth was thinking, could hardly be more daunting than an empty computer screen. You looked
at the
page but
into
the screen, that deep-blue domain with its illusion of gelatinous depth that made her think of the farthest reaches of deep space. Not the deep space of the mind but the deep space of space, where there was no oxygen and a dead astronaut who'd come untethered from a space station could go spinning head over heels for all eternity …

Just write.

She got up from her desk and gathered all the loose papers in her study and placed them in file folders and stood them in the file holder Ben had given her in one of his periodic attempts to help her get organized. Then she moved to the downstairs half bath where she scrubbed the sink with Ajax and French-braided portions of her hair. After that she spent some minutes in the kitchen stuffing handfuls of dry cereal into her mouth as she waited for water to heat up for Postum, a suitably pointless beverage to which she was reverting only because she'd drunk it during what had seemed at the time like a fruitful writing period several years ago.

Just write.

But not about the dead astronaut. That's the kind of thing a stoned sophomore up against a deadline would write. Do an exercise, one of those exercises she made her students do when she'd run out of ways to fill time in a workshop. Do the automatic-writing thing. Ten minutes of continuous action of the fingers on the keyboard. Doesn't matter what, she'd told them. Write the same word over and over if you must. Prime the pump. Send the bucket down, haul the bucket up.

She checked the clock. Ten twenty-seven, a discouragingly indefinite starting point. Better wait for the half hour. She took three minutes to check the headlines on the CNN Web site, half hoping to find that six bombs had gone off simultaneously in the holds of six planes flying over the Atlantic. Not that she required anything as calamitous as that—just some piece of breaking news lurid and large-scale enough to serve as an occasion for amazed procrastination. When the page opened she saw that the lead story was the approach of Hurricane Heather, just as it had been for the past three days. Her heart rose momentarily when she saw how much larger the whirling blender-blade had grown
and how much progress it had made across the Gulf of Mexico, but then she noticed that the wide pink wedge radiating out from it had shifted disappointingly to the east,
HEATHER HOPS?
was the headline. “According to Spangler meteorologist Roush Spanier, Spangler and the east Texas coast will likely be spared Heather's worst. ‘We can't be 100 percent sure, but this morning nearly all our models are telling us Heather will come right up to our front door and then do a dogleg and pay the folks in western Louisiana a visit.

Ten thirty. Back to the blue screen. Just write. Just write. Just write. About what? About what? About a man getting on a bus somewhere in the Midwest, a lean graying man in a cheap Wind-breaker who's been forced to leave the family farm to get a job in Omaha and as he settles into his seat he's thinking about his widowed mother, or maybe it's his wife, and the cows in the barn and the chickens in the—what do you call it? The henhouse.

The henhouse. Why was it that under the pressure of this exercise, which should have squeezed something authentic out of her, she'd come up with a subject she knew nothing about, an alien style that couldn't be further from her own—as if she were channeling some hack? And how was she to perform the required dredging of her memory and imagination? It wasn't as if she kept an actual tool in her mind she could use to do the job, and of course there was no excavation site in there either, only slimy furrowed tissue.

Glancing at the clock she saw that less than a minute had elapsed, and she'd spent thirty seconds of it with her fingers suspended over the keyboard. No, automatic writing wouldn't do. She got up, walked around the room twice, returned to her chair,
fell into it heavily. What to do? Where to find distraction? Google. She'd Google herself, a practice she found both tempting and dread-provoking and usually indulged in only when she'd had a number of drinks. But this morning despair had made her reckless and recklessness had numbed her: Why should she care how many hits she had? Her books, after all, had been published long before the advent of the Internet; that was always a face-saving thing to remember. Today the count was 1,052 for Ruth's name alone—most of these hits, of course, had reference to other Ruth Blaus, many of them highly accomplished—and 97 for her name paired with
Getting Good.
The last count, if she remembered correctly, and she did, had been 1,081 and 351, respectively, and the time before that the numbers had been higher still.

Her Google flame had been flickering for years and now it was sputtering. It was an oddly luxurious sensation, watching herself disappear. Even so, she scrolled down through the pages, looking for something new, some mention, perhaps, of her name in a retrospective consideration of academic comedies, something on the order of “And who could forget
Getting Good
, Ruth Blau's sparkling contribution to the genre?” Or even a citation in a doctoral dissertation: that would be better than nothing. But what she found—what she'd known all along she'd find—was only page after page of used-and rare-book listings and a few familiar gum wads of acknowledgment she'd already chewed flavorless.

Back to the blue screen. Back to the mug of luke-cool Postum. Just write, just write, just write, just write. “Just write,” Ruth said aloud, her own voice startling her.

O
nce again he was seated in the jungle bower, once again breathing the mist of four humidifiers, once again subject to the steady gaze of four golden canine eyes.

“It's probably just as well you kept your distance when Charles Johns was acting out,” Mitten-Kurz was saying. “Another chair might have seen a way to take charge, but all things considered it was the right decision. We can't have you jeopardizing your safety. As it happens, the SCAC inspector doesn't appear to have been seriously injured. We can be thankful for that. He does have some pain in his ribs. His neck is discolored. They e-mailed documentation this morning.” She produced a photograph from a manila folder on her chair-side table: the inspector's shirt had been unbuttoned, exposing his puny sternum and his radically craned neck, on which Ben could make out faint purple imprints of two of Charles's meaty fingers. “We're still not quite out of the woods,” Mitten-Kurz went on. “It's possible he may have internal injuries. He's scheduled for an MRI this afternoon.”

“Good,” said Ben. “I mean I hope he's OK.”

“As I say, we can't fault you for hanging back. What concerns us is that you put the university at risk for a lawsuit by letting him leave without medical attention.”

“I tried,” said Ben. “He refused.”

“And you further complicated the situation by allowing a student to make the cell-phone video we've woken up this morning to find all over the Internet. Dr. Dreddle's particularly concerned about it. It opens us up to media scrutiny.”

“I saw it,” he said. “Pretty funny, I thought.” He'd been staring down at his folded hands, but now he raised his eyes and gave Mitten-Kurz a look of bland defiance.

He'd broken the civility barrier, and the glint in her eye told
him she was ready for it. As if slapping a trump card down on the table, she arched her eyebrows and said, “We've also had a report that you touched a female student inappropriately.”

More than anything else he'd done yesterday, the possible repercussions of this act had worried him. It was also the only act he felt proud of (Dolores would have endorsed it, he felt sure, though she might have advised against it on prudential grounds). He was disappointed to hear that Rhoda had betrayed him; he'd thought she was more sensible than that. “I was trying to get her out of harm's way,” he said. “She complained?”

“Ah,” said Mitten-Kurz. “It wasn't a complaint, properly speaking. It was a report from someone on the scene.”

Oh. If that was all she had on him, he could get up and leave right now. “So,” he said, rising to his feet, “are we done? I have a lot to see to this morning.”

The dogs lifted their heads. “We're not done, Ben. There's more we need to discuss. Please sit down.” Ben remained standing, arms crossed over his chest.

Mitten-Kurz paused for a moment, a little rattled by this refusal, then gave a quick hard nod. “The last time we spoke I told you we'd been getting”—she paused to find the right phrase—”a slow drip of negative feedback about the department. Now, more recently, I'm afraid I have to tell you we've been getting multiple,
multiple
complaints. Are you aware that your graduate students have been without medical coverage for the past two weeks? The paperwork simply hasn't been filed. We have a prominent local lawyer telling us his daughter can't get help from your office. Dr. Dreddle has asked us to red-flag that one—he's very concerned. We have classrooms mismatched with student rosters. They're standing in the doorway, Ben. They're sitting on the floor. Why
hasn't your office gotten back to the registrar? We're getting calls from parents. They want to know what they're paying tuition for. Security is complaining about repeated parking violations—”

“Hayley—” Ben blurted out, instantly regretting it.

“Never mind Hayley. You're the one in charge. If Hayley's not doing her job, you need to get after her. You need to correct her.”

Advantage, Mitten-Kurz. That was just the word Dolores had used, though she could hardly have known it. He felt himself teetering slightly; it was as if the autonomic brain mechanism that normally held him upright had failed, and the only way to keep from falling down was to dispatch a continuous stream of conscious messages to the muscles of his thighs and calves. One of the dogs, he noticed, was going into “pointer” position—slowly rising on its haunches and crooking a paw, as if Ben were a buckshot-riddled pigeon plummeting from the sky.

He sat. Mitten-Kurz made a sound like air escaping from a sofa cushion and gave him a cajoling smile. “We're of an age, aren't we Ben?” she said. “We both remember ‘the buck stops here.’ “

The dog that had identified him as prey sank slowly to the floor. Mitten-Kurz redistributed her bulk in her chair, wincing a little as she did so. Just now Ben noticed that she wore a white sock and an open-toed canvas shoe on one foot, and kept it propped on a low footstool. Broken toe? Bunion surgery? Gout? It served to remind him that Mitten-Kurz was human, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. She had a life, an assiduously cultivated life. She had her devoted Bobby; they had their famous weekly bridge game with potluck hors d'oeuvres. If Ben leaned a little to one side he could see around the potted sago palm to
the cluster of silver-framed photographs on her desk: nieces and nephews (presumably), the young Bobby and Bertie on their wedding day She'd been slender and handsome then; Ben was almost touched to see that what was now a frizz of gray was once dark and straight and glossy. The dogs were shown posed in front of the tidy bungalow with elaborately landscaped grounds where the Mitten-Kurzes had lived since anyone could remember. And there was the present-day Mitten-Kurz at some kind of administrative reception, leaning into one side of Lee Wayne Dreddle as Marcy Bainbridge leaned into the other. Dreddle had draped his arms around the shoulders of both women. Marcy was smiling her blazing smile for the camera, but Mitten-Kurz had rotated her face to gaze up adoringly into Dreddle's; in the penumbra of his masculinity she was suddenly and poignantly feminine.

Yes, Ben and Mitten-Kurz were of an age, and for that reason alone he should try to remember their common humanity. She'd wanted what she'd gotten—her cozy domestic life and her small domain of petty power near the administrative heart of the university—with an intensity he could understand. He could understand how she guarded it and sought to enlarge it. He did the same every day when he closed the door of his study and banged away on whatever manuscript he had in progress. Perhaps her childlessness had been a grief to her, as his child had been to him. Perhaps the two of them both compensated for these disappointments by turning their attention to work. At any rate, they were old enough to feel their mortality, and her afflicted foot was a memento mori, a reminder of how short a time they both had to enjoy the estates they'd made in the world. For that alone he could summon, and briefly maintain, a large vague sensation of
fellow feeling. Or at least he could until he looked up again into her piggy little eyes.

“So,” she went on, waxing expansive, “the last time you sat in that chair we spoke about the Philosophy Department's attitude. I continue to see that as the real problem. It's not just you; it's a historical thing, an institutional thing. It's a
cultural
thing, really. As far back as I can remember, there's been a kind of arrogance in that department, a refusal to join in the common project of the university. I hardly need to bring up specific instances. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.”