Mean Boy (18 page)

It strikes me that Jim is performing for everyone.

Schofield gains his footing, lets himself lean into Jim for a moment and get his back patted. He rests one of his swollen hands between Jim’s shoulder blades for a quick moment.

“It’s good to see you,” says Jim, now holding Schofield by the shoulders as if to keep him steady.

“It’s good to hear that,” mutters Schofield, reaching up to remove and clean his glasses. The gesture means Jim has to let him go.

Then the inevitable awkward silence, during which Jim takes the time to look around, focus in on me, and ask what everybody’s standing around in the hall for.

Maybe poetic friendships are the only true friendships, where each friend feels entitled to be as ruthlessly—even viciously—honest as necessary when it comes to discussion of the other’s work. After all, the work is what matters, the work must always come first. And poets know this implicitly, which is why they bear no grudges when they meet face to face, even after all the blood sport that has taken place on the page.

I wonder if Todd will grasp this when I tell him what I think of his Harvest Excursion poem.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Keats—Keats, who was said to have been killed by a bad review. I tend to trade off a lot on the Romantic poets. For a while, Byron was my man, and when I heard Byron was friends with Shelley, I got interested in Shelley, but Shelley never managed to grab me by the guts in the same sort of way. Then I read somewhere about how Byron was always making fun of Keats—whom Shelley considered the bee’s knees—so I turned to Keats, ready to mock him in kind, taking my cue from my man George Gordon. But I found I didn’t mind Keats. In fact, I liked Keats. He was sort of quiet and sly. And pretty soon I liked Keats better than Byron and Shelley put together. I began to be annoyed by the very romance that first attracted me to Byron, his courtly affairs, his flouncing, self-important sojourns to calculatedly exotic locales. After a while I even found his club foot an irritant—it struck me as a ploy for attention, a physical flaw contrived to give himself some kind of air of tragic predestination, like a mark of Cain. Around this time,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
—to which I was on the verge of building a shrine the year the Stepfords cornered me—started to get on my nerves. Oh boo hoo hoo, poor Childe Harold—this struck me as the overarching theme of the poem. Boo hoo hoo, look at me with my sullen tears.

And here is the line that outraged the Presbyterian island boy in me the most:

He almost longed for woe. Why? Because of all that pleasure. What with being a lord and sleeping with noblewomen and drinking wine out of a skull and such.

So this was what got me looking at Keats, checking out
the enemy camp. I found out that Keats was a commoner, and this was why Byron made fun of him all the time. After Keats’s death, Byron relented somewhat, said maybe Keats didn’t stink quite so bad after all. All that snottiness because Keats hadn’t been a lord, like Gord. Byron, for all his iconoclastic posturing, was a snob. He was an upper-class twit.

I’m thinking so hard, hoofing it across the quad through the storm, that by the time I get inside the building, I realize I didn’t even notice the snow and wind lashing against me. This happens to me sometimes. I start thinking about writers who make me excited or angry, begin ranting inwardly, then zone out. I heave myself up the two flights of stairs, trying not to be creeped by how dark and empty the stairwell is—the suddenness of the silence after being outside in the howl. Trying not to think about the girl who hung herself for Donne from the very railing my hand is on. I’ve been tasked to see if Mrs. Gaudet is still lingering about the department—a futile task, in my opinion, as it’s after seven o’clock on a stormy Friday night. But Jim seems to think she might still be working and, if so, can open another classroom for us. The squeak of my wet boots against the floor is amplified into ear-puncturing shrieks by the stairwell acoustics. I stick Jim’s key in the lock, groaning as I yank open the department door, and my groan echoes too.

Did
she
shriek?
my morbid imagination pipes up.
Did
she
groan? Dangling away in here? Waiting to be found?

The department is dark except for a light in the student lounge and one that pours into the hallway from beyond Mrs. Gaudet’s open office door. I squeak rapidly down the hall, relieved as much by the fact that there’s another living being in here as I am by the knowledge that Jim has guessed right, that the dogged Marjorie is working late. Solid, resolute Marjorie will save the day. It must be going on 7:30 by now.

Standing in Mrs. Gaudet’s dimly lit office, no Mrs. Gaudet in sight, no coat on the rack, her ashtray emptied, her typewriter covered and files put away, I am going to confess that I was relieved by a third thing a moment ago. I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to do what Jim instructed me to do if Mrs. Gaudet had gone home. Which is to go through her top drawer and fish out a key to the conference room downstairs. Her keys are in the top drawer, Jim said.

I find that I don’t want to. I thought I could. I nodded rapidly when he told me to, nerves jazzed on what I could see was Jim’s rising annoyance. When he heard what the interloper prof had told me, Jim flung open the classroom door himself and demanded to know what the hell was going on. The students all sat up straight and the prof did his blinkthing a few hundred times before reiterating that this was a
class
and he was
teaching
it. Jim claimed to have booked the classroom weeks in advance and the prof told him that simply wasn’t possible, he was there with his group every Friday night and in fact he had been teaching that same class in that same room for the past three years. Jim then demanded, for some reason, to know what the class was, and the prof told him—blink after perplexed blink—that it was a second-year Sociology seminar. Jim curled his lip as if to say that he had expected as much, snorted, and slammed the door.

“Well, fuck!” he spat at the bunch of us in the hallway. (Apologetic shrug again from Schofield—another signature gesture, along with the nodding and pursing.) Practically in the same heartbeat, spittle from the
fuck!
still glistening on his lips, Jim had his arm around me and pulled me aside. It sort of hurt, Jim’s hand on my shoulder. Then with a red, somewhat pulsing face he told me what to do. And I was ready to do it.

But now I don’t want to. Go digging through Mrs. Gaudet’s top drawer. It doesn’t seem right. It seems dirty,
almost, and I feel my bowels constrict in the same way they did when I was eight in Janet’s bedroom, witnessing the compromise of Barbie and Joe. The same mix of doom and excitement elbowing its way around my intestines.

Because it would be kind of interesting to go through Mrs. Gaudet’s drawer, when you think of it. A woman’s top drawer is a private thing, you would expect. There, Mrs. Gaudet would place the items she requires most, personal items, items she needs quick, effortless access to. Women’s things. Lipstick. A mirror, maybe. Earrings. An extra pair of pantyhose. And what about panties themselves? Women need backup, they can’t just leave the house in the hope that a single pair of panties is going to get them through the day. Women are organized like that, they’re obsessive about this kind of stuff. My mother practically packs a suitcase every time she goes out to buy mushroom manure.

Therefore, the overripe Mrs. Gaudet’s top drawer is trembling to burst with creamy silk underthings. Voluminous see-through bras, equatorial garter belts, maybe a whip somewhere near the bottom. And it’s up to the intrepid young Campbell to pry open her treasure box, stand for a brief, unsteady moment drinking in the sight of those lurid pinks and blushing peaches, before Lawrence—reckless, now, panting slightly—thrusts his sweaty-palmed hand down into the inviting, satiny folds within. To emerge with—the treasure. The grail. The key.

Our hero!

“Lawrence.”

For the second time this month I’m facing the head of the department of English with a bone in my pants.

“Hi!” I say.

Doctor Sparrow squints at me and smiles just a little through the wisps of his beard. “You spooked me,” he says after a moment. “I thought you were our ghost.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I scream.

“Not at all,” says Doctor Sparrow. I stare at him. On some level, I understand the expression
not at all
to mean
that’s all right
, or
don’t worry about it
. But at this particular high-strung moment, it strikes me as the strangest thing to say in the world.
I’m sorry. Not at all
. It’s like an attempt to negate the last thing I said. It feels almost belligerent.

“Is everything all right?” Doctor Sparrow wants to know.

Not at all! Not at all!

“Oh yes!” I assure him, my hand still poised on the handle of Mrs. Gaudet’s open top drawer. I’m reminded of this fact when Sparrow allows his gaze to flicker downward. It takes in the open drawer and then bounces right back up to meet my eye.

“Are you,” he asks, still smiling behind the wisps, “in need of something here?”

“In fact …,” I say, gulpingly. Sparrow arches his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“We’re having a bit of a problem.”

“We?”

“The reading tonight.”

“Reading?”

“Dermot Schofield.”

Sparrow remains blank. I clear my throat.

“The reading Professor Arsenault organized for tonight?”

“Ah.” Sparrow tilts his chin and shifts position slightly to indicate that now he remembers. But also, barely perceptible, the same slight wilt I witnessed when we spoke in his office. When I reminded him of the creative writing option.

“It’s a poetry reading?” questions Sparrow.

“Yes,” I say. “Dermot Schofield. We put up signs?”

“Ah, yes, I remember now, Lawrence, yes.”

“Well, it’s supposed to be going on right now,” I explain. “The reading.”

Sparrow frowns. Behind the wisps. “This is a strange time of year for a reading,” he says.

I can’t believe he didn’t see any of the signs. I put them everywhere.

“I know!” I exclaim. “It
is
, and with the
storm
and everything … But anyway, the problem is, we don’t have a room.”

“You don’t have a room for the reading?”

I shake my head. “It’s been double-booked.”

Sparrow keeps frowning. He blinks a few times as well, seeming to have trouble with the information. It seems to me that poets and writers and academics as a whole are not a breed of people meant to be faced with logistical problems. We all seem to go intellectually limp.

“What can I do to help?” asks Sparrow after a moment of this.

“Well, that’s why I’m here,” I explain, recovering, regaining the powers of explanation and coherent speech, “digging around in, in the drawer. Jim said Mrs. Gaudet had a key to the conference room in here … So I—” I end the sentence at that point, gesturing twitchily at the desk.

Sparrow comes over and starts poking around in the drawer himself. “Yes, yes,” he mutters, rifling through Marjorie’s pens and paper clips—not a garter belt in sight. “I believe she does … somewhere.”

“Um, maybe it’s one of these,” I say, holding out the key ring I’ve already uncovered. Sparrow peers at it.

“But Lawrence,” he says, “the conference room is no place for a poetry reading. Why not just have everybody come up here?”

“Up here?”

“To the lounge. There’s plenty of room—how many people do you suppose are in attendance?”

“Maybe around ten or fifteen?”

“Plenty of room,” repeats Sparrow. “You’re welcome to
bring up some extra chairs from the conference room, if necessary.”

It’s a perfect idea. The lounge, with all its Grayson antiques and the coffee machine and the fireplace. Classy. I envision Schofield resting one of his massive arms on the mantelpiece.

“Maybe we could light a fire!” I say.

“No, no,” smiles Sparrow, “that fireplace hasn’t been lit in decades—the place would go up like a pile of twigs.”

“Oh,” I say. “But still. It’s perfect!”

“Oh, good,” nods Sparrow, clasping his hands together. “Problem solved!”

“We really appreciate this, Doctor Sparrow,” I babble, not quite knowing on behalf of whom I’m speaking when I say
we
.

“Not at all,” Doctor Sparrow murmurs, pleased with himself behind his beard. “Happy to be of assistance.” He crinkles his eyes at me, sparkling like jolly old Saint Nick’s.

Next, I nearly kill myself. My boots are still wet. In response to my hurry and exhilaration, they let out a particularly anguished shriek halfway down the stairwell before somehow managing to manoeuvre themselves out from underneath my body, thrusting their way upward to look me momentarily in the face before all three of us come crashing down with a reverberating thud. No
smack
, or
crack
—my skull hasn’t bounced against the floor. But, ow. It’s the kind of shock to the body that makes you need to be still for a moment. Lie there getting yourself together. Listen to the walls and metal handrails continue to resonate with the thud and the loud
ooof!
you involuntarily made when your lungs hit the tile. Wonder if you would even know if you were injured right now—bleeding internally, a hairline fracture. What if you can’t get up? What if you’re here all night, just lying here, gazing up at the top-floor railing, from which the Donne-girl
hung herself? What if she eventually materializes above you—at midnight, maybe, blue face mooning down? And what if she fell? What if you had to watch her decomposed body hurtling straight at you as you lay powerless to move, here on the landing?

I’m down only for a second, but I imagine all these things. It’s like those stories you hear about dream research—how dream time works differently. People can dream entire operas in the space of a minute, apparently. I read about this one guy who had an endlessly elaborate dream about the French Revolution. He was an aristocrat, captured by the revolutionaries, imprisoned in the Bastille, tried by Robespierre, and finally brought to the guillotine. He awoke the moment the blade dropped, only to discover that the headboard of his bed had fallen onto his neck. It was surmised that the entire dream must have taken place in the split second the moment the headboard detached itself and fell.