The Emperor of Ocean Park (18 page)

“No,” he says, his voice much smaller.

I nod as though to say I knew it all along. Then I cross the line. As every mildly competent law professor knows, this is the point at which I should segue smoothly back into the discussion of the case, perhaps teasing Mr. Knowland a little by asking another student to act as his co-counsel, in order to help him out of the jam into which he has so foolishly talked himself. Instead, I give him my back and move two paces away from his seat, then whirl and point and ask him whether he often offers opinions that have no basis in fact. His eyes widen, in frustration and childlike hurt. He says nothing, opens his mouth, then shuts it again, because he is trapped: no answer that he can give will help him. He looks away again as his classmates try to decide whether they should laugh. (Some do, some do not.) My head pounds redly and I ask: “Is that what they taught you at—Princeton, wasn’t it?” This time, the students are too shocked to laugh. They do not really like the arrogant Mr. Avery Knowland, but now they like the arrogant Professor Talcott Garland even less. In the abrupt, nervous silence of the high-ceilinged classroom, it strikes me, far too late, that I, a tenured professor at one of the best law schools in the land, am in the process of humiliating a twenty-two-year-old who was, all of five years ago, in high school—the campus equivalent of a sixth-grade bully beating up a kindergartner. It does not matter if Avery Knowland is arrogant or ignorant or even if he is racist. My job is to teach him, not to embarrass him. I am not doing my job.

My rampant demons have chased me even into my classroom.

I soften once more. And try to clean up the mess. Of course, I continue, tweedily pacing the front of the room, lawyers are occasionally called upon to argue what they cannot prove. But—and here I spin and stiletto my finger again toward Mr. Knowland—
but,
when they offer these unsupported and unsupportable arguments, they must do so with verve. And they must have the confidence, when asked about the factual basis of their claims, to do the courtroom polka, which I demonstrate as I repeat the simple instructions: sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, stay on your toes, and never, ever face the music.

Relieved, jittery laughter from the students.

Except a glaring Avery Knowland.

I am able to finish the class, even to summon a bit of dignity, but I flee to my office the instant noon arrives, furious at myself for allowing my demons to drive me to embarrass a student in class. The incident
will reinforce my reputation around the law school—
not a nice person,
the students tell each other, and Dana Worth, the faculty’s foremost connoisseur of student gossip, cheerfully repeats it to me—and maybe the reputation is the reality.

(II)

M
Y OFFICE
is on the second floor of the main law school building, called Oldie by most of the faculty and all of the students, not because it is old, although it is, but because it was built with an endowment from and is named for the Oldham family. Merritt Oldham, who grew up with money—his grandfather invented some sort of firing pin during the Civil War and, according to legend, died when the faulty prototype of an improved version caused a gun to explode in his face—was graduated from the law school around the dawn of the twentieth century and went on to Wall Street glory as a founder of the law firm of Grace, Grand, Oldham & Fair. When I was a law student, Grace, Grand sat at the top of the New York heap, but it came down hard in the Drexel Burnham scandal in the eighties. Two of its hottest partners went to the penitentiary, three more were forced to resign, and the rest fell to squabbling over the corpse. The firm finally split in two. One half went under within a few years; the other, retaining the Oldham name, is still afloat, but barely, and our students, who memorize the relative rankings in prestige of every Manhattan law firm long before they master even the rudiments of tort law, would sooner go hungry than work there.

The firm may have collapsed, but our building is still Oldie—formally, the Veronica Oldham Law Center. Merritt adored his sainted mother, never married, never had children, and is claimed by our gay students as one of their own, probably with reason, if a fraction of the stories Theo Mountain tells are true. The Law Center sits on a grassy hill at the end of Town Street, looking down over the city. It comprises two square blocks, north and south of Eastern Avenue, joined by a pedestrian bridge. The southern block, with a view toward the main campus, is Oldie, a vaguely Gothic structure with three floors of offices on its east side and six floors of library on the west, joined by a row of classrooms to the south and a high stone wall to the north, all surrounding the lovely flagstone courtyard that is probably the school’s greatest aesthetic attraction. The northern block of the Center, added
twenty years ago on the site of an old Roman Catholic church that was devastated by fire and purchased by a clever dean, includes a large, rather spartan dormitory housing nearly half our students, and a low, ugly brick building (formerly the parish school) crammed with offices for all our student organizations except the most prestigious, the law review. This arrangement causes a bit of jealousy, but we have no choice: our alumni, like alumni everywhere, regard change as the enemy of memory, and would never allow us to evict the law review from its traditional warren of rooms on the first floor of the faculty wing.

To reach my office, one climbs the central marble staircase and, at the second floor, turns left, trudges to the end of the dreary corridor with its peeling linoleum floor, turns left again, and counts four doors down on the left. Immediately before my office is a large room housing four faculty secretaries, not including my own, who sits, thanks to some fascinating bit of administrative reasoning, on the third floor in another corner of the building. Beyond my office is the den of Amy Hefferman, the ageless Princess of Procedure, much beloved of the students, who talks every year or so of retirement, then relents when the graduating class votes her commencement speaker; directly across the hall is young Ethan Brinkley, who has the habit, without warning, of dropping by to share implausible stories of his three years as deputy counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; next to him, in a room little larger than Kimmer’s walk-in closet, sits the even younger Matthew Goffe, who teaches a course on corporations, a course on secured transactions, and a course on radical alternatives to the rule of law. Matt is one of our few untenured faculty members and, unless he discontinues his disconcerting habit of signing every student petition and joining every student boycott, is likely to remain in that category. Next along, in the northwest corner of the building, is the vast chamber occupied by Stuart Land, the former dean and, probably, the most widely respected intellect on the faculty, who teaches a little bit of everything, commands the services of two secretaries, and makes the reputation of the law school his special concern. Stuart, say the corridor gossips, has never quite recovered from the palace coup that led to his ouster and Dean Lynda’s elevation, a revolution more about politics than about policies—for Stuart’s unapologetic conservatism left him constantly at war with Theo Mountain and Marc Hadley and Tish Kirschbaum and many other powers on the faculty.

Or so it is rumored.

But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call
the school.
Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni—more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.

The hallways of Oldie are warm and familiar. I
like
it here.

Most of the time.

Today, however, when I turn the final corner toward my office after my unfortunate class, I encounter an agitated Dana Worth, rapping imperiously on my office door, as though irritated that I am not present to open it. She rattles the knob, pushes, then pulls. Cupping a hand above her eyes, she peers through the frosted glass, even though the darkness within is plainly visible.

I look on in amusement, then concern, for I have not seen Dana this upset since the day she told me she was leaving my friend Eddie . . . and then told me why.

Dana, who teaches contracts and intellectual property, is one of our stars, even though her diminutive stature invariably tempts a few unfortunate first-year students to think they can walk all over her. Dana comes from an old Virginia family that once had lots of money (read slaves) but lost it in what she laughingly calls “the late unpleasantness.” She lives delightfully, even charmingly, in a world centered on herself. (“Your sister died in a car wreck? You know, back at the University of Virginia, I used to
date
a man who died in a car wreck. He was a McMichael, of the Rappahannock County McMichaels.” Reminded that my father actually
knew
the senior McMichael, the Senator, knew him quite well once upon a time, Dana would be undeterred: “But not the way I knew his son, I’m willing to bet.”)

Dana, three years older than I am, has survived, even transcended, the minor scandal of the way her marriage broke up. Eddie, whose life around the university was lived largely in his wife’s shadow, left us last year to return to his native Texas, where, he insists, the kind of thing that happened to him in Elm Harbor would not be allowed. (He does not say who would stop it.) His departure reduced the law school’s black faculty by twenty-five percent. Dana left him for a woman named Alison Frye, a nervous, fleshy New Yorker, all carroty hair and burning
anger at the world. Alison is a novelist of slight accomplishment and runs a Web site full of airy but erudite social commentary, most with a “new economy” spin. Her courtship of Dana was a more or less public event, at least among the techie crowd. Three years ago, back when their affair was still secret, Alison posted on her site a composition entitled “Dear Dana Worth,” a love letter of sorts, which was downloaded and e-mailed all over the world, and, more important, all over the campus—Dana likes to say that Alison mortified her into falling in love. Many of us have adopted the essay’s title as a teasing nickname, although her husband understandably missed the humor. When Dana and Eddie were married, Kimmer and I hung around with them a lot, for Eddie and I played together as children. Eddie’s parents are old family friends, and he may even be a distant cousin on my mother’s side, although we never quite worked it out.

The end of the Dozier-Worth marriage two years ago soured my friendships with both partners. Eddie has become a stranger, his politics driven even further to the right. As for Dana, I truly like her, but she and I have serious differences on countless matters, the way she treated Eddie chief among them.
Misha, please, you have to try to look at it from my point of view,
she begged me in that last, hurtful argument before she left him.
No, I don’t,
I stormed back at her, unable to be charitable. Perhaps I feared I might be seeing in the disintegration of her marriage a prefiguring of the end of my own. Nowadays, Dana and I try to be friends, but, to quote Casey Stengel, sometimes it doesn’t always work.

Watching Dear Dana, I remember her tears at my father’s funeral. She admired the Judge, her onetime boss, perhaps loved him a little, even though he never quite made his peace with the gay rights movement. But, then, neither has Dana, who likes to insist, in her pedantic way, that she is far more interested in her freedom than in her rights. Dana opposes rules to tell property owners whom to rent to or businesses whom to hire, for she is a radical libertarian right down to her pedicured toes. Except on the question of abortion. After the Judge’s funeral, Dana joined the procession to the cemetery in her snazzy gold Lexus with its dual-meaning bumper sticker—ANOTHER LESBIAN FOR LIFE, it proclaims—which tends to confound people.

Dana likes to confound people.

“Dana,” I say softly as she continues banging on the door. “Dana!”

She turns in my direction, one tiny hand to her throat in the familiar
gesture of generations of wounded Southern ladies. Her short black hair glistens in the dim light of the hallway. But her face startles me. Dear Dana Worth is always pale, but today her whiteness is unusually . . . well, unusually white.

“Oh, Misha,” she moans, shaking her head. “Oh, Misha, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m betting this is more bad news,” I say slowly, my speech inhibited by the block of ice that has formed around my heart.

“You don’t know.” Dana is surprised. Panicky. For a moment, she seems to be at a loss, which hardly ever happens. Sufficiently gutsy is Dear Dana that she spends most Sunday mornings at a small, conservative Methodist church twenty road miles and a thousand cultural ones away from the campus.
I need to be there,
she tells the few colleagues who dare question her.

“What don’t I know?” I ask, a little panicky myself.

“Oh, Misha,” Dana whispers again. Then she gathers herself. She grips my arm as I unlock the door, and we enter my office together. She points to the small, sleek CD player on the shelf above my computer. Kimmer bought it for me on one of her trips. My wife hates to spend money, so, whenever she buys me an expensive gift, I think of it as a second-place trophy, Kimmer’s own version of guilt money. “Does that thing have a radio?” Dana asks.

“Well, yes. I don’t use it much.”

“Turn it on.”

“What?”

“Turn on the news.”

“Why can’t you just tell me . . .”

Dana’s gray eyes are troubled and sad. One of her great weaknesses has always been an inability to deal with the emotional pain of others. Which means that whatever she wants me to know is going to hurt. “Please. Just turn it on.”

I swallow a retort about how much I hate these games because I can see that she is genuinely upset. I walk over to the CD player, always tuned to our local National Public Radio affiliate, which, when I switch it on, is playing insipid classical music—the
Fanfare for the Common Man,
I believe. I change to the all-news station, which comes in as clearly in Elm Harbor as it does in New York City. The anchor is waxing mournfully self-righteous about the latest act of racist violence, a black preacher who was tortured to death. My insides churn: stories of
this kind are like a blow to my most sensitive parts. I always want to buy a couple of guns, grab my family, and run for the hills. And this time a preacher! I listen to sound clips, voices of national outrage: Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, the President of the United States. Two children discovered the body in the tall grass behind the swings in a playground earlier today.