Well, I don’t know what then. Every autumn, presumably, the scarlet of the maples still thrills Congressman Tino Bellardinelli’s lonely spirit like a cry / Of bugles going by. When Agnes Betty Cotts’ summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm, she will receive it as a nun and president of a Catholic women’s college. I work here at the newspaper. Sooner or later, though, I guess I was bound to slip the surly bonds of earth / And dance the skies on the laughter-silvered winds of Six Two Uniform or Three Nine Tango.
“Take off everything except your slip,” the nurse said. “Doctor will be with you in a moment.” Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.
“Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop,” the moderator of the talk show said. They had been taping a panel. The Indo-Chinese lesbian restaurant owner, who was holding her fish-sauces cookbook, resumed a dignified, offended silence. The crisp, cold, bracing writer was drunk, and raving to the savage pundit. The French film-archivist was talking, with delight, to the Bulgarian movie personality from California, who was about to sell, in stores across the country, the product of her secret formula for face creams. “That,” said the French film-archivist, squinting through his smoke, and scattering more ashes onto his vest and trousers, “is a house of another color.”
“Horse,” the nine-year-old star of television commercials said.
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the lady critic, who had been trying to find her way into the conversation somehow. “Exactement what you mean, Emile,” she added, patting the Frenchman’s arm. The rock musician, however, spoke at the same moment. “Tu parles,” he said, amiably. It was his favorite (in fact, his only) French expression. For Italians, he had “Ecco” and “S’immagine”; for Germans, “Sowas” and “Unglaublich.” He had travelled widely. In this case, he said, “Tu parles, Monsieur Blin.”
“Stop,” the moderator said again. The nine-year-old sulked.
The gentleman critic was now in his cups and muttering. Seven years ago, an obscure Southern writer by the critic’s own name had been chosen for an international colloquium on modern humor, which was held in Seoul, Korea. It had not been widely covered in the press. Certainly there had been an error. Certainly the invitation had gone to the wrong — the obscure and unintended — Herbert Course. No publication, however, had called attention to the matter. In the critic’s mind, the outrage had assumed immense proportions, as a parable of the monstrous in contemporary life. His divorce, his conversion to the politics and the literature of alienation had been but one result.
“Of course, you have right,” said the Frenchman, in serene misunderstanding. “When I have eighteen, I go in Natalie.” He seemed to be speaking of a visit to Turkish relatives in Anatolia. “I have eat something. It give me a terrible pain. In my tripes.”
“Lord, yes,” said the quarterback, warmly. He was already a lay preacher. He had just made a large investment in organic dog foods. The lights dimmed. The tape and the cameras had been off for several minutes. “Exhausted?” the curator of the Sixties Art Collection was saying to a cameraman who stood there. “My dear, I was drained.”
I have been writing speeches for a politician. Jim, who is a lawyer from Atlanta, has been running the campaign. My normal job is reporting and reviewing at the paper. By mistake, these past few months, I also teach. Normally, left to myself, I am not inclined to work much. To the contrary. “To the contrary” is what the head of the mine workers’ union said when he was asked whether he had ordered the murder of a rival and his family. It is hard to know what to the contrary of ordering a murder might, exactly, mean. Jim thinks ordering a birth, perhaps, or else a resurrection. The man was convicted anyway. I have now written “fairly and expeditiously,” and “thoroughly and fairly,” and “judiciously and seriously,” and “care and thoroughness and honor,” and so on, so many times that it may have affected my mind. I eat breakfast fairly and expeditiously. Jim cuts his own hair thoroughly and fairly. It rains judiciously and seriously, with care, and honor, and dignity, in full awareness of the public trust. Our politician, anyway, is a good and careful man — who sounds always a little pained, as though someone were standing on his foot.
Edith, from Kiev, twice divorced, and in New York, in her own words, a “terrapist,” was stealing a bonbon from one of the trays on the Steinway grand. She went to the bookshelves, removed a fine old volume there, and tore the four-leaf clover pressed inside to bits. The party had not yet begun. “This Max,” Franz, her own analyst, said to her next day. “How he makes you regress.”
“Now here, where it says Name,” said Miss Fiotti, from Fringe Benefits, “you write your name. Good. Now where it says Date. Yes. That’s right. Now here, where it says Name again. Exactly. Now once more. And your signature. Wonderful. Thank you, Professor Ellis.”
Miss Fiotti is the only efficient person at our city university. She is employed by the union itself. The union helps us with our forms, our insurance and pension plans, tenure, strike threats, and salaries, of course. The fact that the university is unionized at all, from janitors to deans, means that we have in many ways the worst of the civil service and of academe: a vast paper-riffling ivory tower in a cast-iron union shop. We are, in fact, a scandal citywide. Our faculty, liberal on most issues far away, sleeps well on this. Politicians tend to say the issue “does not sing.” Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours By Appointment; that is, never. Young instructors, hoping for tenure here, are scheduled to teach days and nights. The idea is that as long as an instructor is required to be in a classroom every hour, he will not have the time to write or publish anything. Not having published, he will never earn his tenure. Under this system, instructors tend to get hepatitis and become demoralized, but, thanks to the union, they are highly paid. And so they stay.
I see Edith, Max, Franz, and Miss Fiotti every week or so. I’ve taught courses for two semesters here, as Ms. Associate Professor Fain. I thought I missed the academic world, the books, the hours. I took the job part-time. I noticed only gradually. One evening, in a seminar, a student spoke of the required course they had all taken with the Recording Secretary of Professor Klein. “The what?” I said. “The Recording Secretary,” the brightest student said again, “of Professor Klein.” Dalton Klein has been, for thirty years, a book reviewer and writer of unsuccessful musicals. I don’t know what recording secretaries are. I know professors earn our professorial thirty-eight thousand a year. “Has anyone,” I asked, “ever had a course with, um, with the, with Professor Klein himself?” Certainly not; even his Recording Secretary now is H.B.A. Two students within memory had, however, actually met Professor Klein; he had approved their Prior Life Experience credits — for a year they had spent raking famous people’s leaves.