The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [24]
And weren’t we all just as sad? These little gatherings where you can smell the sugar, the small cakes. Ours were come-as-you-are, but you couldn’t make these occasions any more bearable by wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Stainless steel urns on brown institutional tables hidden under white paper lace. Professor Frenow in her pitifully jaunty headgear, Tiberius Soames with his fingertips at a floating braille, looking as if the air hurt his skin. He stayed near me but was silent. He smiled a wide terrified distracted smile. I couldn’t tell if he was pained for me or for himself.
The History Department was thriving, thanks entirely to Soames. As a young diplomat in the Haitian government, I believe an assistant to the President’s Chargé d’Affaires, he’d been implicated in a coup conspiracy, quite accurately, he said, and I didn’t doubt him. He escaped to France and received political refugee status, which protected him from extradition. He claimed to have been spirited to Paris by the British MI-6. When he talked of his past he had a habit of stating somewhere invariably in the tale, “All the boys in MI-6 went to the same school and shared a horrible adolescence.” This information meant something to him. He was always turning it over in his mind, apparently, but as far as I know he never got its significance across to any of the rest of us. The kids adored his personal reminiscences, stories that sometimes hijacked whole lecture periods but which he tied to the study of history in a way that illuminated it as the very medium of our lives. Here, after all, stood a man who lived under sentence of death in the land of his fathers. History had done that. He would never return. He’d written half a dozen books, contributed frequently to Foreign Affairs, and had a good exile. Still, it was exile.
Clara rang her spoon against her cup and delivered a toast. A toast to me. The purpose of today’s gathering was to celebrate me. Because I was leaving. Everyone applauded politely.
Apparently they weren’t going to renew my contract. This was news. I’d expected one more appointment, and then the gate. Clara and I had chatted at the end of the previous year and left the subject open; somehow it had closed all by itself. Here I’d been wondering what would happen to me year after next, and it was happening now.
I wondered if, in the shuffle of medicines and sorrows through her recent life, Clara had simply forgotten to discuss this with me. As I tumbled it all over in my mind, smiling and faking my thanks, bitter and relieved, I considered she’d probably at first simply hoped, and finally just presumed, that no discussion was necessary. Out of sheer personal cowardice she may have decided to let that one conversation serve as the final and necessary acknowledgement that, as far as History was concerned, I was history. But that was the style in our Department, and, as far as I knew, in all the other Departments. We conducted our business with a nonconfrontational vagueness which, in the world I’d been formerly a part of, the political realm, had been saved for communication with the voters (the Senator had called them “the votes”). To constituents we equivocated, but behind closed doors nobody minced words.
I heard a female campaign manager say to an aide once, “Do you want to know how a loser stinks? Put your nose in your armpit. Then empty your desk.” Maybe in the academy a distaste for causing pain kept us from shafting one another quite so mercilessly, but I don’t think Clara’s way of firing someone was very much more adroit, and I doubt the young aide clearing out his desk drawers had felt any more astonished and red-faced that day than I did at the moment.
Suddenly Soames was lucid: “Are you secretly ready to get out