One More Time (7 page)

Although Leslie agreed, she was cautious about voicing her thoughts. “Be serious.”

“I am.” Naomi gave her a wry look. “But what have you got to worry about? There can’t be that many brave enough to ask you for a referral.”

“Sixteen.”

“I’ve got forty.”

Leslie smiled despite herself. “They think you’re a soft touch. You’d better nip that in the bud, Naomi, because Dinkelmann will hear about it if some of them are disappointed. With that many, odds are that someone will be displeased.”

“How about yours? Are they all deserving?”

“Sadly, no.” Leslie shrugged. “But they don’t expect a glowing referral from me. If I say any one of them is acceptable or has potential, he or she will be over the moon.”

“What about the ones who aren’t? No one’s going to welcome the ‘keep this kid out of grad school at all costs’ letter.”

“Oh, there are ways to say things.”

“Aha, someone finally admits that there is a secret language of the referral letters!” Naomi rubbed her hands together in mock glee. “Do I get a decoder ring so I can play too?”

“Not until you get tenure. It’s like seeking the Holy Grail: you’ve got to earn your reward before you get it.”

“Now, wait a minute.” Naomi propped a hand on her hip, eyes sparkling. “Don’t you think it’s fundamentally wrong for a Roman scholar to be seeking a Holy Grail?”

“You were the one comparing yourself to a Christian martyr.” Leslie smiled as she stopped to unlock her office door.

“Touché.”

The stupid lock was jammed again, and Leslie wiggled the key in the push-pull-turn-wriggle combination that had worked the last time. To her amazement, it worked again.

Maybe her luck was changing.

As if. She could almost hear Annette’s snort.

Naomi lingered. Leslie hoped with every bit of hope left in her—which wasn’t much—that she didn’t want a favor. She didn’t want to turn Naomi down, but really, she was at hour thirty-six in the labor analogy and she was pretty sure she couldn’t take on anything more.

Giving away the fifteen percent participation mark to everybody. What was in Dinkelmann’s head?

Naomi shoved one hand in her pocket, looking suddenly young and uncertain. “Leslie, I’m concerned about this. You’re not really going to back Dinkelmann on this policy, are you?”

Leslie looked up and down the hall before she answered, and even then, she lowered her voice. “We’re talking about professional integrity. What choice do I have? The thing is that I doubt he’ll even notice. Just do yourself a favor: don’t challenge him in meetings and this whole thing will blow over.”

“You don’t think he’s going to go over your grades with a red pencil?”

“He wouldn’t. It would be wrong.” She shook her head, even as she wondered. Would he? “He’ll be on to the next reform tomorrow and by the time the marks come in, he’ll have so many changes to manage that he’ll forget to police this one.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t even sound plausible to Leslie.

“I don’t think so.” Naomi peered at her, suddenly sober. “I’ve heard about this edict being handed down in other departments, too. The university is serious about it—low grade averages are affecting their ability to draw new students.”

“So, it’s all about revenue.” Leslie spoke without thinking. “Like we’re selling a consumer product, not an education or a future.”

That was just the kind of reality check she needed.

Naomi added another. “Did you hear that Dias got tenure as part of the deal when they hired him?”

She stared at the younger teacher, aghast. “Tenure? That kid?” Naomi nodded. “But he’s coming here directly from Austin, he hasn’t even defended his thesis yet...”

“Dinkelmann thinks he’s a star. You should check out his website.” Naomi smiled wryly. “Dias thinks he’s a star, too, so they’re in agreement.”

“A website? Why does a scholar need a website?”

“Maybe he’s going to do an HBO deal on the side.”

“Since when was academic research about entertainment?” This was outrageous. “And besides,
you
don’t even have tenure yet!”

“Don’t remind me.” Naomi glanced at her watch. “Ah, the unwashed heathens await me, in all their splendid ignorance. Though my fate may be unpleasant, I cannot resist their siren call.” She bowed, then lifted her right hand high. “
Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutemus!
”

Leslie chuckled.
Hail, Caesar: we who are about to die salute you!
It was the traditional greeting given by gladiators to the emperor before facing battle and almost certain death in the arena.

“You’re not going to die, you fool, not even metaphorically unless you do something stupid.”

“Without tenure, I’ll starve in a gutter.” Naomi shrugged. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing that deal anytime soon, so I’ve pretty much got nothing to lose. I’ll go down defending the moral high road, if I’ve got a choice.” She gave Leslie a look. “It’d be nice to not be fighting the good fight alone.”

Leslie didn’t say anything and she noticed Naomi’s disappointment.

“
Ciao
, doc.”

Leslie watched her go, hating that Naomi’s achievements weren’t being appreciated by Dinkelmann. The new-hire Dias with tenure... and a website.

Could she defy Dinkelmann without him noticing?

On the other hand, how much further could she bend to accommodate his demands? Surely the rest of the department didn’t really dislike her for putting up and shutting up? She had to keep her job: didn’t they?

But at what cost? She would have given a paycheck just to talk to Matt again, to get his thoughts on what she should do. Maybe he was really just going to New Orleans to fetch Zach and she’d have that chance to talk to him.

As if.

A glance at the clock made Leslie jump. There were unwashed heathens awaiting her too, clamoring for higher grades for less work, and this despite their splendid ignorance. Duty called, putting Leslie in mind of Naomi’s earlier comment.

Because really, lecturing to a hall of university students
was
a lot like being tossed to the lions.

* * *

Matt marched through the terminal to the first bank of telephones he saw, then punched in the number he knew as well as his own name. The line had already connected before he checked his watch and realized Leslie would probably be giving a lecture.

The phone rang and rang, giving him plenty of time to curse the university and their failure to install voice mail. Or maybe they had it and Leslie the Luddite hadn’t read the instructions to install it on her phone.

Either way, the phone was clearly going to ring until Tuesday.

He looked at his watch and winced. He did have four hours to kill, and he did need to talk to her just one more time. He could punch Redial as well as anybody.

One more call; just one.

* * *

Leslie strode into her lecture hall, to the general disinterest of the students who had bothered to gather there. About half had showed up, which was pretty much an average measure of the burning desire to learn in a post-secondary institution in mid-January. Over the course of the term, their numbers would dwindle to a few hardy survivors, then she would be astonished by how many were present for the exam.

Sometimes the process seemed to have little point.

But then, Leslie had a feeling that if Matt was really gone, there was going to be a lot of her life that didn’t feel as if it was worth the trouble.

She put down her papers on the podium, glancing through them as if they contained her lecture when in fact they did not, and braced herself for one of the rituals of her job.

Leslie was a scholar of medieval history. The particular focus of her own research was social history in high medieval society, and she had studied, in sequence, table manners, rituals of courtship, and—her current mare’s nest of choice—the dances, songs and pageants of secular and/or seasonal festivals.

Everyone knows about May poles, of course, and Yuletide festivities, but there were lots of other ones. Often the customs were particular to a certain region or town; sometimes variations on the same theme occurred throughout an entire region. If the sources had been complete or even close to it, the topic would be a massive one. But these were primarily pagan celebrations—or the vestiges or them—and since most medieval source materials were recorded by churchmen, there was either no information or very biased information to be found.

Leslie had to look for snippets, dozens of them, hundreds of them, then try to fit all those jumbled bits together in a coherent way. It was like a puzzle, or solving a detective story, and she found it fascinating. She’d spent as much time as possible—which hadn’t been nearly enough—reading chronicles in the past three years, sifting through court records and reading the marginalia in vernacular stories. She didn’t have a whole lot to show for it as yet, at least not much that was new, except for some hauntingly weird and interesting vignettes.

This was one of those subjects that made her realize just how little we know about the great swath of a millennia of time and a continent of dirt blithely lumped together as ‘the Middle Ages’, never mind how poorly we understand the thinking and motivation of the people who lived then. Ferreting out details, finding the patterns and making cautious conclusions was the primary reason Leslie had become a scholar.

Teaching a second year medieval survey class to two hundred and seventy-five inattentive twenty-some-year-olds - most of whom had other majors and were looking for an easy breadth credit, preferably not below a B- was not.

This was a lecture she had given a thousand times, more or less: the emergence of centralized secular authority under the regimes of Henry II of England and Louis VII of France, compared and contrasted. It was chock-full of statistical figures that made students all scramble to take notes quickly enough, generated at least one essay question on the final exam, and took precisely fifty-three minutes to deliver.

Matt, who had endured numerous versions of it, invariably told Leslie that it was as dry as a popcorn fart. She had to admit that he was right. She had no real interest in political history, but when teaching a survey course, it was inescapable.

And it was part of her job to teach no less than three survey courses each year, as well as three or four seminars on more specialized topics. The seminars could be interesting, but it was hard to consider the survey classes, with their massive registration, to be more than a waste of everyone’s time.

She thought of popcorn farts, wondered how dry they really were, and smiled.

Then she thought of Matt—gone for good, never listening to another test-run of one of her lectures, making wry comments and making her laugh—and felt faint.

The gathered masses straightened at that, newly nervous. Crabcake Coxwell never smiled, unless she envisioned a particularly nasty future for you, and when she frowned right afterward, well, word was you’d better watch out.

That was the party line and they all knew it. Leslie wasn’t known for giving good lecture either. “Tough but fair marking, dry lectures” was inevitably what it said about her in the student calendar.

Nobody but Matt ever mentioned popcorn farts.

She spared a glance to the large wall clock—a purely theatrical move—cleared her throat—ditto—and commenced the lecture.

At least she would have commenced the lecture if she could have remembered it. Not one word came to Leslie’s lips.

Not one.

Leslie cleared her throat and tried again. No luck.

In fact, as she stared into that sea of expectant faces, she couldn’t even recall the title of the lecture.

Or what it was about.

This despite the bolstering effect of new La Perla lingerie.

What she thought about was Matt, the look on his face that morning, the angry glitter in his eyes, the taste of his kiss.

What she thought about was coming home to find the house empty.

What she thought about was coming home to find the house empty every day for the rest of her life.

And her mind stalled cold, refusing to process such a distinctly possible and horrific notion.

Such a thing had never happened to Leslie before. She’d never been uncomfortable at the front of a classroom, never been at a loss for words. She’d certainly never drawn a blank. She could never have anticipated that this lecture, of all lectures, would abandon her thoughts completely.

But she was a veritable
tabla rasa
, as well as left feeling as if someone had ripped out her heart and stomped that sucker flat. Leslie looked at her students—expectant, impatient, amused—and the words didn’t just leave her: they left town. They were crossing the border to Mexico, never to be seen in the contiguous forty-eight states again.

What the hell had happened to her?

Or more importantly: what was she going to do about it?

Leslie adjusted her glasses and gathered her papers, frowning in apparent concentration. She forced herself to breathe. In and out, in and out. The situation might be dire, but dying would only exacerbate matters.

And then these kids would know about her lingerie.

She had to grip the podium to steady herself at that prospect. Leslie tried a prayer, but still the lecture did not pop into her thoughts.

So much for divine intervention. She must have used up her allotment by finding the bra and panties on sale. Pick your divinity of choice: he, she or it clearly had better things to do in this moment of moments.

Leslie was on her own.

This called for showmanship of the highest order. Above all, Leslie had to get out of the lecture hall before her deodorant failure became apparent.

“There will be no lecture today,” she said as if this was no big deal. A ripple passed through the lecture hall, but Leslie lifted her chin. “This is due to circumstances beyond my control. I apologize for any inconvenience to you.”

And before they could ask about make-up classes, about getting their money’s worth, whether any of the material that should have been in the lecture would be on the exam, Leslie left.

No, that’s not quite true.