“Still married, I hope. How’s your wife?” He points at me. “Claire, right?”
“Yes. She’s well, thank you.”
“I heard you were expecting a child — a while ago, I suppose?”
“Yes, Cecil, he’s six now.”
“Well, a belated congratulations to you. What are his interests?”
“He loves soccer and is beginning to like baseball. He’s quite a painter.”
“Really, any visual artists in the line?”
“Yes, his maternal grandfather was.”
“Well, a real art pedigree. Where do you have him enrolled?”
“Saint George’s.”
“Well, that’s a trick. Quite a school. I read about it — dragon-slaying artists. Are they teaching him draftsmanship — how to really draw — or do they let them muck about abstractly?”
“Both. He has a good line.”
“Excellent.” He checks his mustache. “Well, what else have you been doing for nigh a decade?”
“I have two other children — another son, three and a half, and a daughter who’s eighteen months.”
“Well,” he sits upright. “You have been busy. I never thought of that strategy — overrun the planet with your progeny.” He lets out a low chuckle and smoothes the sides of his hair this time. He folds his hands, puts them in his lap. “But, what else, what else?” He unfolds his hands, puts his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands, and leans in.
“I’ve been working.”
“Working on what?”
“Just working.”
He smiles softly — unexpectedly — and almost whispers, “How’s the writing? What are you working on?”
I feel a sudden jump of dull heat inside, as if someone tried to light a wet match in my throat. “I’ve been working, Doctor Pincus. I’ve been trying to stay afloat.”
He loses his smile. “I don’t want to sound coarse, but — why are you here?”
“I need a letter, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
His eyes widen. “A letter? No trouble, none at all.” He looks around the stacks on his desk as if one was already there. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll make some calls. Are you planning on coming back here? I can certainly squeeze you in, but the funding. .”
“No, sir.”
He stops searching. He seems a little hurt and tries to hide it. “No, somewhere else.” He nods. Points. “That makes sense.” He cocks his head and drops his voice. “Ivy?”
“I need proof of employment. I’m sorry I have to ask.”
Now he looks confused. “You need a job,” he says unsurely. Then he brightens. “Did you finish your doctorate somewhere else and not tell me? I won’t have you be an adjunct any longer.”
“No, sir, just the letter.”
His face turns, and he leans back in his chair like someone slowly realizing he’s been insulted. He covers his mouth with his hand and looks away from me, out the window, down Lexington.
He speaks through his fingers. “You know, since you left here, I’ve been keeping an eye and ear open for your name. Silly, I suppose, but I thought by now that I’d have seen you in print, or that you would come out of that elevator,” he gestures at the suit. “And you would be well.”
“I am well.”
He nods, unconvinced. He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “You know, after the break-in, I wracked my brain trying to understand why they chose to take what they took: the computer, the printer, a radio — I think I got it after you left; it was a good one — some other things, which strangely enough, I don’t recall ever having here, ever owning. So I know it was, and forgive me for saying this, someone I know. And I’m no amateur sleuth. I’ve never found that world intriguing. But I can’t help but think that whoever it was took all of the other things to get that picture. Every other item had value out there.” He points at the window, then waves at it. He covers his face, rubs his eyes, pushes away from the desk, and then resumes his watch over the avenue.
“When I signed on to do what I was going to do, it was during a dark time. There existed in this country’s dominant class a horrifying mix of paranoia, cynicism, ignorance, amnesia, sadism, and base desire, and it was wrapped in a synthetic cloak of privilege and entitlement. Forgive me — I’m mixing metaphors, I know — but that collective was like a seed, and things grew from it: the white American middle class, the immigrant middle class. And like thorny, dense hedgerows grew barriers between the classes, barriers between the races, and barriers between the people and their government — between the people and themselves. Strange times. We were kids then, so we didn’t know, but we felt it. Well, I’ve lost my place — let me make it brief. I knew back then, we knew, that it was just a big lie — that it was all corrupt. From the military industrial complex to every untried lynching, our country had gone to shit — perhaps always had been shit since its inception.”
He clears his throat with a sharp bark, focuses on my tie, and then goes back to the window. “I thought it could be, should be, had to be—different. So I tried, in my own way, to make it different.” He points at me but doesn’t look. “You were just a baby when we marched on Cicero. We thought every loud noise was a gunshot. Cicero, hah—an American town named Cicero, I never thought about it before. And that town — how rich.
“I wasn’t in Memphis. I was here. I was ill with an extraordinary fever, so I remember it strangely. Bobby Kennedy told me, via the television, of course. I’m sure you’ve seen that footage. I thought I was going to die. I’d never been so scared in my life — not in Cicero, or anyplace else where they brought the guns and the gas and the dogs. Each time I exhaled I thought I’d never take another breath. I just lay there on the couch—that room was dark, man. And when I recovered and was up and about, I forgot all about my bout, until, of course, they killed Bobby. The same thing happened. I forgot, not the act, but that despair. I suppose that’s the mind coping.
“But I’m older now, less prone to emotional swoons. Now I remember. I say it again, dark days are here, my boy. There’s hardly any—discrimination. True, no one’s getting their brains blown out—’round these parts, at least, but I see the darkness in the possibility that there aren’t any brains left to be splattered. Or perhaps I was wrong — perhaps we all were: black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, oppression and freedom. Did you know that I was the first black student to receive a doctorate in philosophy from my alma mater?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Ah, well, taking a dialectic approach to your potential and probable murderer. Synthesis during crisis — what would that look like? A man in the middle of a riot scratching his chin. At least, back then, only part of the world was mad. Nonetheless, someone’s got to know right from wrong, son. Someone has to weigh in.”
He pushes a stack of papers to one side of his desk. “In my advancing years I’ve been known to prattle on to my semicaptive audience. Forgive me.” He sucks his teeth and focuses on a point just above my head. He grins broadly, inhales sharply, gestures grandly a few times in the air and makes his voice loud and bright.
“Still the aesthete? Or have we dirtied our hands yet?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”