From Brigitte’s white-washed neighborhood, it’s only twenty minutes, on a good day, to the state university in western Dade County where Alan’s night class begins at 7:15. He’s slept away the afternoon, waking in Brigitte’s bed, disoriented, bathed in sweat, eyes crusty, a headache worse than a tightened vise. She hadn’t napped with him, nor had she let him ease the hammering in his brain by pounding her loins, by taking a man’s best medicine, the sexual decongestant. They hadn’t fought, he hadn’t been cruel, but their talk did degenerate into vague and aimless bickering, and his unfortunate poodle-kicking incident hadn’t helped matters either—so she’s mad at him now, mostly because he never said he loved her, wouldn’t say it, that he was in love with her, when she’d asked him point-blank . . . why hadn’t he? As Alan drives north on the Turnpike, stuck again in another bottleneck log-jam, he considers this, recreating some of the dialogue, mouthing aloud a few of the words.
Brigitte, he recalls, had compared him to Ishmael in Moby Dick, which is perturbing in itself because Alan fancies himself more of an Ahab. “What you need,” she’d told him, “is more than a change of scenery or a serious vacation; you need an adventure. An adventure, Allie. It might heal you.” Really she hadn’t said “heal”—her word had been “help.” She then told Alan about another adjunct she knows, Doug Horger, who’d get this same way sometimes, all agitated, all out-of-tune, and so what Doug would do would be to go off somewhere for the summer and do something adventuresome: work on an offshore oil-rig, sail the Bering Sea on a floating fish-processing factory, try his hand as a Texas ranch-hand. Well, honey, thought Alan, I’ve heard worse advice. Yet he’d politely dismissed her suggestion as foolish, and in part out of jealousy—who is this Horger, and how well had she known him, and where is he now? She’d spoken of Horger so favorably, and Alan’s envy prickled and burned, like hives on the skin. Does jealousy denote love? Maybe . . . maybe not.
And so he’d reconsidered, and he’d asked her if she’d go adventuring with him, to Texas or to Alaska, anywhere far away, but she’d hesitated, and she protested that she was happy enough here, in Florida, contented, or untroubled, or something to that effect, and so he’d blurted out: “How? How can you be? Be honest with yourself, girl! You live hand-to-mouth, semester-to-semester, with no certainty, with no future, no guarantees, and for what? You eat their table-scraps and thank them for it, but how is it worth it to you? How? How do you do it?”
His tone, his indictment, had hurt her. “I don’t know, honey,” she’d answered. “I don’t know that being an adjunct is worth anything to me. It certainly doesn’t disturb me, the way it does you. Alan, I’m not ashamed of who I am and what I am, if that’s what you’re implying. To struggle, to live day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, isn’t this how most people the world over are compelled to live? Isn’t this how it’s meant to be? No, I could not, in good conscience, live any other way.”
Couldn’t you? Her point-of-view seemed to him less than an insight, little more than a grim justification for her allowing herself to be used. She couldn’t persuade him otherwise, not after he’d drunk three glass-fulls of her red wine, and he couldn’t persuade her to kiss-and-make-up when he saw that he’d upset her; no, not after three glass-fulls of wine. And so she got right to it, to the heart of it, the core of it, and she asked him: do you love me? Are you in love with me, or not? She needs to know. He needs to say. Why hasn’t he brought his things over to her house, his books, his clothes and toiletries, all packed up in liquor-store boxes? If you love me, why wouldn’t you want to be with me? What would money, and stability, and pride-in-one’s-work, what would they matter? We’ll pool our resources; you’ll save yourself some rent. We’ll make a home, you and I, and it’ll be good for you, healthy for you, a place where your kids can come see you, be with you, maybe even live with you. What’s to stop you, honey, if you love me?
“What’s to stop me?” Alan hears himself mutter, as he takes the Tamiami Trail exit. “What indeed? Well, at the moment, a night class. Another pointless, profitless, meaningless night class.”
And now it occurs to the adjunct: why should I even go there, to class? Or, since I’m practically there already, why should I even teach it? Why not cancel, and then go patch things up with Brigitte? Or, if not Brigitte, then Nicole Newman—maybe she’s still agreeable. Oh, yes, and what about Jeff’s Little League game? Alan had forgotten about it, forgotten that his son’s team has a rain-out make-up tonight. Damnit, I told Jefferson I’d take him to the batting cages after school today, make adjustments to his batting stance, to how high he’s been holding the bat. Fuck! It’s too late to call Jeff, from either a payphone or a campus phone; the game starts at 7:30, and players get there by 7:00—the boy will be on his way to the ballfields, in Leisel’s car. Fuck!
By the time Alan parks in the student lot closest to his classroom, he’s made up his mind: he’s canceling; he’ll put a note on the classroom door. No, no, no; I’m not skipping any ballgames, not when I’m the coach—it’s a question of priorities! No need for a ceremonial coin-toss, not between baseball and night class, nor between baseball and Brigitte. No. His love for his son is neither debatable nor negotiable, and he’ll not miss Jeff’s make-up game to teach a damned adjunct class, at adjunct pay. Priorities! So what if his students are submitting their big paper tonight, the research project which counts 30% of their grade . . . so what? Let them hold on to it another week, maybe even revise it, bring it with them to the Final. If they never get it back, graded, then “oh, well.” What do they freaking want from me?
The rains start suddenly, symbolically, just as Alan steps out of his clunky Geo. The adjunct has no umbrella. In Miami, there can be a downpour, bright sunshine, and a rainbow all in the same sky, and the effect of such a natural triumvirate is always quite astonishing, inspirational, almost like beholding a small miracle. Alan, though, isn’t uplifted. This is the same university where he was denied tenure, where essentially he was fired, and without (to him) just cause; just being on this campus, seeing the same trees, the same buildings, that same god-awful po-mo sculpture, it tightens his chest; it constricts his throat. Getting drenched while he quick-steps it to the Humanities Pavilion, well, this adds insult to festering injury. His gall rises.
The adjunct office is a converted storage closet beneath the stairs of the Little Theatre, windowless, claustrophobic, the ceiling descending in the outline of the above tiered seating. All Alan wants is some tape, a piece of paper and some Scotch tape, so he can write a message to his students and post it on the upstairs classroom door. But nighttime adjuncts don’t have access to the division’s supply cabinet, so he’ll have to use chewing gum as an adhesive. Oh, well. If he’s not smoking those cheap imported cigarettes (a habit he’d only picked up within the last few months), then he’s chewing on Doublemint or blowing Double-Bubbles, or gnawing off the tips of toothpicks; something has to be in his mouth, always, even when he teaches.
“HST 1101, No Class, 5/1,” he writes on the back of a goldenrod-yellow memo. “Research Essay due 5/8, Comprehensive Final 5/8, Study Guide available on my website.” True, the adjunct rarely updates his personal webpage, but if he gets the chance to upload an old exam from his files, he’ll do it.
Avoiding the elevators, Alan heads for the back staircase, the fire exit. On the way, he ducks into the men’s restroom, combs back his wet hair DeNiro-style, unzips, and urinates all over the wall. This is a regular ritual of his, the piss on painted cinder-block, although the only one to suffer his small revenge is most often the Guatemalan cleaning-lady.
He checks his five-dollar watch, 7:06. Damn. And the nasty weather will make the nasty traffic even worse. Better hurry.
But, as he hustles down the hallway, he stops abruptly, pauses before an office, his old office, which now houses a visiting Communications professor. Next office down, the lights are on, the door ajar, and Ed Scherer, no doubt, sits in there, probably reading a newspaper or surfing the net. Though the departmental tenure vote went against Alan Polk 3-2, the adjunct doesn’t view the three dissenters equally, with equal loathing; no, he blames Scherer more than the others, feels so much more betrayed by Ed Scherer, since Scherer was his mentor, his close friend, and, thus, his Robespierre. How had it happened? Well, there’s no simple answer, and a diversity of opinion endures on the subject, but Alan traces its origin to some ugly departmental politics, petty power plays between the liberals and the radicals, and he himself had refused to take sides, and so became an unintended enemy of all. Then came the vote . . . and if a determined trio of naysayers want to conspire and sabotage your tenure, they can, they will; it happens everyday, everywhere, and is perfectly acceptable. Admittedly, Dr. Polk’s teaching record was spotless (two awards, a competitive grant, a citation for excellence-in-the-classroom), and he did have both a book-in-print and a book-in-contract, but this wasn’t enough. In order for Saboteur Scherer to reject the tenure application and justify doing so in compliance with the university’s tenure-and-promotion policies, Scherer had to establish at the end of Dr. Polk’s seven-year probationary period that the junior professor lacked an acceptable publication record, that Polk was insufficient in research, and in order to do that, Scherer had to discount both of Polk’s books. In essence, Dr. Polk was adjudicated as if he’d written and published absolutely nothing. Two days after the Twin Towers collapse, those heartless bastards voted Alan out; two days afterwards. The terror hadn’t touched them at all.
Why are you here, asshole? It’s Monday night. Monday nights are mine! Since the adjunct frequented this building but once per week, and since he hadn’t seen or spoken to Ed Scherer in well over a year, Alan presumed his old friend was avoiding him, a wise thing. Professor Scherer, why’re you freaking here?
Resisting the urge to throw open Ed’s door, to fly at Ed’s throat, Alan merely stands outside, silent, positioning himself where his shadow crosses the portal, his silhouette darkening Ed’s wall above the computer screen. For sixty seconds, he’ll stand there, for precisely sixty seconds, and if Ed doesn’t come out or speak out, the adjunct will walk away, will go on down to his car and drive on off. He wants to go, needs to go . . . yet he’s compelled to count to sixty.
“Alan,” says Ed, amicably, having seen the shadow, wheeled in his chair, opened wide the door. “Alan?”
The adjunct says nothing, only grins . . . eyes twinkling, left eyelid twitching.
“Alan, how long have you been out there?”
“Two-and-a-half years, muthafucka.” His grin widening, the adjunct’s light laughter comes out more as a cough. “Been waiting on your ass two-and-a-half years, man. You oughta know that.”
Ed Scherer perceives the threat yet dares not flinch . . . still, seeing Alan Polk again, seeing him like this, grizzled, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, the man having aged ten years in two, God, it’s distressing, unsettling. To Alan, Ed hasn’t changed at all—those same kind eyes, those same laugh lines, the well-trimmed beard; no, Professor Scherer’s life is stable, comfortable. Vain of his intelligence, physically inadequate, Ed is as affable as a ferret.
“So, Edwin, you’re here on a Monday,” grins the adjunct. “Why? I thought the troll only comes out from under his bridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The ole two-day workweek, right?”
“So, Alan, how’ve you been—”
“Don’t speak!” snaps the adjunct, taking hold of the door with one hand. “So, you come here on a Monday night, knowing I’ll be here—right?—and you’re surprised that I don’t like it.” Alan blows a bubble, bursts it. “You’re a pernicious sniveler, Ed, a troll. A Tolkien orc. Your father, if you had one, was an orc. Was your momma an orc, too?” The adjunct scratches his forehead. “What I gotta do to pick a fight with you, man?”
“Alan, I’m closing the door, if you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind?” He keeps both hands on the door, however, and it moves not an inch. “I’m standing here, sir, and I’m calling you out, hoping to pick a fight . . . and you think you can close me out? Just can’t bring yourself to Burr/Hamilton it with me, can you? No pistols at dawn? No broken beer bottles in an alleyway? How ‘bout bare hands, right here and now? No?”
Ed gazes down at the adjuncts shoes, notices that one of Alan’s shoelaces is untied.
“My offer still stands, Professor Scherer. Anyplace, anytime. Your choice of weapons. I made it two-and-half-years-ago, and I stand by it today. Your manhood is challenged. Refuse me, and be a troll!” Alan says all this very calmly, quite pleasantly. “No? You’d rather close the door, lock it, and call security, eh? Fine. You’re not a man.”
“I am closing the door now. Have a nice night, okay?”
But the adjunct holds it fast, and with whitened knuckles.
“Alan, what’s the matter with you?”
“The matter?” He pauses. “Maybe the matter is that I didn’t shag my girlfriend today.”
“What?”
“You know, if you’d have let me hit you, man, hit you as hard as I could, just once, then I might’ve been satisfied. That would’ve been it. But men won’t behave like men anymore, will we?”
“Let go the door, and be careful how far you take this.”
Alan folds both arms and puts a foot inside the doorframe. “How far am I willing to go, Edwin? Well, now, it’s farther than you might think, since, obviously, I haven’t yet gone nearly far enough.”
“Oh, you’ve gone plenty far.”
“Not so. Not so. See, the problem now is that this thing has festered . . . it’s fermented and festered for far too long, and I can see now how much damage you’ve done, how much hurt you’ve caused . . . not to me, that doesn’t matter, what you’ve done to me, but you’ve hurt my kids. See, if it were just me you’d hurt, I’d let it go . . . but you’ve harmed my children, hurt ‘em badly.”
Again, Ed lets fall his chin, stares down at the untied shoe.
“Word up, Edwin. Lemme remind you of a basic lesson in life: there are consequences for every action. There are consequences. Why would you think there wouldn’t be repercussions?”
Ed doesn’t answer.
“If you’re gonna mess with people, man, if you’re gonna fuck up their lives, and fail students and cost ‘em their scholarships, and shoot down a man’s tenure and cost him his livelihood, his marriage, his children, there’s got to be a response, a reaction, doesn’t there? Don’t you understand that? You shouldn’t have fucked with my kids!” Alan never raises his voice, never lifts a belligerent finger. “Your actions, Professor Scherer, have had a direct and profound effect on my children. You’ve hurt them. And that, my friend, I cannot abide. Let me speak plainly: I mean to kill you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I know you to be a God-fearing atheist, and I swear to you, sir, I swear to Allah above that I will kill you. Not here, not now . . . maybe never. Here’s how it’ll be: If I ever see you off this campus, out there, out in the world, then you die. That’s fair, isn’t it? If our paths cross out there, I’ll take it as a sign from God, a sign that I should do this thing, that I should act, that I should squash you like a cockroach.”
“You’re such a bully, Alan.”
“So long as you’re here, protected up in your ivory tower, you’re completely safe from me. But if, by pure chance, by divine intervention, or by the trembling hand of fate, whatever, if I see you out there, out in the world, in a grocery store, at a concert, changing a flat tire by the side of the freaking road—and what are the odds of that, seeing that not once in my nine years here have our paths, yours and mine, intersected out in a public place?—but if our paths do cross, Professor Scherer, then you’re dead. I’ll chain you to a stake out in the Everglades, I’ll slit your belly open, and I’ll leave you to the alligators. Don’t think I won’t.”
Ed doesn’t wince, but there’s the whisper of a flinch. “What does this bullying accomplish? What do you hope to achieve?”
Alan pauses to deliberate this, his left eye twitching. “Well, the way I see it, since you won’t call my bluff, I’m wondering if God will.” This answer satisfies the adjunct, so he picks up his briefcase. “Well, you shouldn’t fret, Edwin. Why take me seriously? Maybe I’m just funning you, ole pal.”
“Some fun.”
“I think it is!” laughs the adjunct, and he heads for the stairwell, calling back over his shoulder. “You may close your door now, sir. Good night.”
Hurrying down the stairs, out the building, out into a thunderstorm, Alan Polk is strangely exhilarated. Inside his car, he pulls off his soaked seven-dollar grey polo, towels off, and puts on his red Phillies coaching shirt. To the south, the clouds don’t seem so dark, so maybe the rain-out make-up isn’t rained out itself. There’s the handle of the wooden bat, exposed, sticking out the baseball bag. He reaches again for it, grips it, looks up to the third floor of Scherer’s building, to the one office with a light on. The urge is enormous.
Back at his computer, Professor Scherer is already composing an email to the academic dean, even before the adjunct can put key in ignition: “My credible complaints to the chair continue to fall on deaf ears, so I again turn to you for assistance regarding Alan Polk, since new circumstances have now arisen which make Dr. Polk’s continued affiliation with this university all the more intolerable, all the more outrageous, and it’s high time you step in and get involved and act like a dean and do the right thing . . . .”
