It Will Come to Me (27 page)

Ben did. He could match her example for example. There was the department's general refusal to cross-list courses with other departments, and the possibly impolitic use of the phrase “quality control” as justification on one occasion. He was proud of that. There was the business of the rejection of the sociology chair's proposal of a joint colloquium on Strategies for Implementing Social Change on the grounds that any philosophical contribution to such a discussion should enter in at a level more foundational than implementational. There was the department's infamous neglect of its collegial duties. Ben was not proud of that, but he couldn't help finding it amusing that the only member to serve on a university committee last year was Stuart Dilbert, who drove the Parking Committee wild with his insistent demands that the university produce a justification for charging any parking fees at all.

Yes, Mitten-Kurz was right, the Philosophy Department had a culture, a culture of fogginess and cerebral distance, of lofty, puzzled indifference to the bureaucratic intrigues and power machinations that convulsed the administration and many of the other departments. He and Bruce Federman were reasonably
alert and grounded, but most of the others were throwbacks to a time when the world viewed academia as a preserve for the gently befuddled.

Not that all philosophy departments were like his. He knew from the yearly meetings of the American Philosophical Association that these days most in his profession were indistinguishable from those in any other. They were accomplished networkers; they knew how to initiate, maintain, and break off conversations; how to order from a complex menu; how to send a fax or summon a cab. Thirty years ago the attendees were an unhygienic herd of tweedy bumblers; swollen gums were in evidence then, and dandruff. Riding an elevator with a crowd of philosophers was an experience that engaged all the senses. These days many were as kempt and suave and “professional” as their counterparts at the MLA, and the ones who weren't seemed to have made a conscious decision not to be. They had what their predecessors lacked, a sense of themselves as seen from the outside.

Mitten-Kurz was winding up for the pitch. “In most ways you've been a fairly competent chair, Ben. In spite of the recent difficulties I'm not particularly concerned about the day-to-day workings of the department. It's the larger thing that has me troubled, the vision thing, if you will …” She shifted her weight in the chair, wincing again. “I've shared my concerns with President Dreddle,” she went on. “I was in his office for most of the morning yesterday discussing some of the more problematic departments, and I have to say philosophy was at the top of our agenda. Dr. Dreddle agrees that we need to come to a new understanding. Our charge to you, Ben, is to change the culture of the Philosophy Department.”

Ben paused for a moment to consider his response. “I don't see
my job as changing the culture of the Philosophy Department. The culture's just fine. We teach and we write and we think, and that's what we ought to be doing.”

Mitten-Kurz threw out a jiggling arm. “We all share that view, Ben. Philosophy doesn't have a monopoly on those values. It's just that we have to find ways to foster them, to bring them into the world. The university isn't the cloistered place it was when we were young. It's part of the world now, like it or not, and the way it presents itself to the community and the wider world matters. It's not as if the university is a collection of individuals sitting in their offices dreaming of spires or whatever. It's an organism, a complex organism whose parts are interconnected and when one part isn't functioning the others are affected all the way down the line. And that's not all. The university is connected to the larger organism of the world. What happens outside is felt inside and what happens inside is felt outside. Think of what happened yesterday afternoon.”

What? Was she saying that this was the way the university
should
be, or only that this was what it was becoming? If the former, why? What was so inspiring about this notion of the university as a buzzing, clanking, whirring Rube Goldberg contraption contained by and subordinate to a still larger Rube Goldberg machine? And what could it mean to bring philosophy (or the humanities generally) into the world? If the humanities become part of the world, they become useless to the world. But there was no point in discussing any of this with Mitten-Kurz. She had all the advantages: an indifference to reason, a copious supply of administrative jargon, a facility for fogging up the room with demagogic nonsense. Better to bring this interchange back to earth.

“So we teach and write and think,” he said. “We can agree about that.”

A little nonplussed, she nodded.

“My question is: How can we do those things when we're constantly distracted by task forces and study groups and useless committees and endless memos? How do we find time to discover what's true when—”

“Ah well,
truth”
said Mitten-Kurz, tossing her chin. She was too sophisticated, she'd have him know, not to ironize
that
word.

“And how can we get anything at all done with a secretary—”

“Oh no no no, Ben,” she cut in, as if remonstrating with a madman who would revert to the same delusion over and over if not sternly checked. “I already told you that's entirely outside our considerations here …”

But now one of the dogs was whimpering, trotting distractedly back and forth in front of the door. “Oh dear, Big has to go again,” said Mitten-Kurz. “It's the medication,” she confided in a stage whisper. Picking up the phone, she summoned Marcy. “Big needs the facilities. Right away, please.” Instantly, Marcy padded in on the balls of her feet. The dog pranced and capered, and as Marcy squatted to attach a leash to its collar, Mitten-Kurz contracted her brows, compressed her lips into a tender moue, and let loose a barrage of animal baby talk. Ben stiffened and stared down at his knees. He was humming inwardly, doing his best not to hear, the theory being that what he didn't hear he wouldn't remember. Nevertheless, the endearments reached him in blips: “Her is such a sad sad girl … her has got side effects …” When he looked up, the dog was dragging Marcy out the door, but even
so she managed to fling her head back flamenco-dancer style and shoot him a significant look. It was a gesture of solidarity, and it gave him the courage to remember how purely and devotedly he hated Mitten-Kurz.

The door closed. For a moment they sat in silence. Soon Mitten-Kurz had begun to speak again in her fluty contralto, but Ben was no longer listening. Instead, he was looking out the window. Marcy and the dog had taken only twenty seconds or so to get down the stairs and around the corner to a patch of yellowed grass immediately beneath the rain gutter on the east end of the Business School building. The dog really must have been in some distress, because its haunches were already quivering and its back had assumed the shape of a C. Marcy was holding the leash slackly and staring off into the distance. Even from this distance he could see that for the moment she felt free. Not joyfully free, just free to drop the valiant perkiness and return to the brooding self she left at home when she went to work every day in the dean's office. A long, loosely spiraling tube—not a good color, too pale—was extruding itself from the dog's hindquarters. Ben got to his feet.

R
uth lay sprawled in front of the TV, contemplating a restaurant scene from a forties black-and-white movie with the sound turned off. A ferret-faced man in evening clothes had barged past the maitre d’ and was menacing a table of champagne drinkers. A rangy young woman in a long sequined gown rose and strode away, tossing a disgusted look over her shoulder. An older woman spoke reprovingly to an older man, who followed
the young woman out to the balcony, where they exchanged what looked like heated words.

Enough of that. She switched to the shopping channel and turned up the volume. All the charcoal-gray ones had gone in the first five minutes, one woman was saying to another, and the navy had nearly sold out. These red ones are really great, said the second woman, shrugging on a jacket and executing a twirl to display its front and sides and back while the first woman stood a little distance away, her hands thrown up in admiration. Who knew red denim could have so much impact? And yet it's really very neutral. You could throw it on over anything and you'd be all set for the mall, the post office, the grocery store. It's just great basic gear for the way we live now.

I want that, Ruth thought. No, she corrected herself, I don't, really. I want to be the kind of woman who requires gear. She switched back to the forties movie, where the angular young woman in the sequined dress was standing under a streetlamp, her face tipped up into the gaze of a man who was neither the ferret-faced intruder nor the avuncular defender. She switched the channel again, this time to another shopping channel where another pair of women were selling jewelry. The pearl earrings were gone and the square-cut zirconium rings were going fast and the diamond watch …

The watch. Of course. The olive-green enamel watch, the tiny, essential focal point of Ricia's memoir. Now what object from her own childhood might represent the equivalent, for Ruth, of the olive-green enamel watch? Could it be the embroidered black satin shawl she'd kept in the dress-up box, the one her grandmother had bequeathed to her? No. She'd always found
it alien, with its patchy crusts of seed pearls. Could it be the pink net crinoline petticoat of uncertain provenance that one day had appeared, bunched up, in the back of her closet? No. She'd used it as a cage to trap a chronically runaway parakeet, and that had spoiled any iconic glamour it might otherwise have held for her.

Could it be the ceramic Staffordshire dog? She'd owned it ever since she could remember; it was the only surviving relic of her childhood. She kept it right over there, on a low brick-and-board bookshelf where she also stored twelve remaindered copies of
Getting Good.
She got up from the chaise, picked up the ceramic dog, sat down, examined it. She hadn't held it in her hands for years, but she'd have recognized it by feel even if she'd lost her sight. The ceramicist had given more attention to the ridges and runnels that suggested the dog's coat than to the actual shape of the thing. She turned it over, noting its remarkable crudeness. The front legs were fused into a thick column with a fluted base, ticked with black paint on the front-facing side to indicate claws. The hindquarters were only hinted at, though the head and the drapery of the ears were articulated a little more carefully than the rest.

She'd always assumed that the dog was meant to represent some English variety of spaniel. Its ears and nose and eyes had been rendered in black paint with a certain primitive verve, as had the splotches on its chest and legs. Or at least it had splotches in front; the maker had left it blankly white in back. As a child, Ruth had found this incompleteness a little shocking. Now, of course, she understood that its charm, and whatever small monetary value it carried, resided in its imperfections. The dog's un-decorated rear aspect could even be seen as a calculated part of its appeal. I'm all for you, the maker might have meant it to say
to anyone who bothered to pick it up and look into its eternally worried face. The part of me you can't see doesn't matter.

Its left ear had been chipped when four-year-old Isaac flung it against a wall, but otherwise the dog had remained intact for, what—a hundred years? Two? Longer? Ruth knew it was an antique of sorts, but she'd never thought to look into its pedigree. For a hollow statuette it was remarkably durable. It had been with her all her life, over here on a shelf, over there on a mantel under a mirror. Through all the wind and rain and sun and darkness transpiring outside the windows of all the rooms where it had been kept, through all the noise and silence of the life lived within them, the dog had sat, disregarded and unchanging. Its constancy was almost comic. Ruth turned it over again in her hands. The blankness of its back-facing side had begun to strike her as ominous, like the dark side of the moon.

It was hard not to imagine the ceramic dog as a silent witness, but that, of course, would be a mistake. It was an object meant to be sentimentalized, but it drew its totemic power from its inanimateness. It was like a boulder jutting out of a rushing stream, a marker by which Ruth could sense, for a moment, the continuity of time's passage. Even so, it seemed to her that while she'd been examining and contemplating the dog, its expression had changed from mute appeal to mute reproach. Its constancy was almost tragic. She thought of a line from an Auden poem: “Time will say only that I told you so.”

She carried the dog back into her study, logged on to the Internet and consulted the Google oracle, which reported that it knew nothing of this line. She tried again, changing the search terms to “W. H. Auden” and “time.” Now she was led to the poem, which was entitled “If I Could Tell You,” and to the line,
which she had slightly misremembered. It was the second stanza she'd been thinking of:

She found a place for the dog on her desk, between a photograph of Isaac at age nine and the small pottery bowl where she kept paper clips and rubber bands. Then she leaned back in her chair and returned to the contemplation of the empty screen.

T
he decision had made itself in his muscles, not his mind. He'd simply risen from his chair in Mitten-Kurz's office and announced it and walked out the door and down the hall, where he was intercepted by Marcy and Big, just emerging from the stairwell. Dangling from her pursed fingertips was a knotted-off plastic bag containing the product of their excursion. “What happened?” she whispered. “I quit,” he answered.

“You
quit?”

“I did.”

“Just now? In there?”

“Just now in there.”

A look of doubt came into Marcy's shining eyes. “You quit your
job?”