The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [25]
“I can feel the whole experience withering around me.”
“Perfect! You understand me perfectly. Do you remember the dead skins of the Pulitzer Prize winner? Right. His books—dead skins! How could he say that? Do you think he was being stupidly provocative or simply imitating a colossal human anus?”
“He treated me okay, Tiberius. But I wasn’t chasing his girlfriend around the living room.”
“Oh, my friends and foes! That night! Later! You have no idea how violently I masturbated!”
Let that be the last word of any description of the conversations among our Department members.
But no, I couldn’t let it. A few minutes later I trailed Clara Frenow into the hallway and called her name as she struggled with her office door.
“I’m surprised I even feel irritated with you,” I told her.
She looked surprised herself, then unsurprised, then incapable of surprise. “You want to come in?” she said.
It was visible and plain, the oppressiveness stealing back over her life. And all she had was her blue beret. She looked prehistoric. I could see her in the rags of animals, lifting up a small harpoon against the storm.
“Nah,” I said, “forget it, no.”
Tiberius hadn’t had his last word, either. He turned up beside me now and put both hands on my arm: “Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life. Nothing matters but that we get out of here.”
He walked away toward the hallway’s end. He hadn’t even glanced at Clara. In the stairwell he became a swaying silhouette and disappeared six inches at a time, descending.
“Clara, I thought we had an understanding.” But I might as well have been saying, I understood we had a thought.
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Then I guess we didn’t. It’s probably silly of me to be talking about it. Anyway—come on. What happened?”
“The position’s gone tenure track. It was kind of sudden, Mike.”
We both knew I’d done nothing to build a case for getting tenure.
“We assumed it was coming, but it came without warning,” she explained. “The fact is Marty blessed us suddenly with the tenured slot when Tiberius got all that publicity. Look, we’ve got to move Tiberius over to a tenure track. In fact we’d better give him tenure right away or we’re going to lose him.”
“If you haven’t already.”
“He’s not as around-the-bend as he acts. He’s just lighting a fire under us. And having fun at it, too, I might add.”
Marty Peele was the Dean of Liberal Arts (and the man at whose house Tiberius had been so pleased to meet Kelly Stein). The History Department was barely on Marty’s radar, but apparently he’d been galvanized by a series of interviews Tiberius had done with somebody on PBS. Soames had been brilliant. That which excellent teaching couldn’t do for him, the impression that he’d become famous had managed to do. And good for him.
“Good for him. And, really: good for the Department. And good for the whole institution. It just comes kind of abruptly—as you say.”
“I would have shuffled you over to Tibby’s position for a year, but the truth is, we had to restructure the budget, too. In effect his line isn’t there, not for a year or two anyway.”
“You mean it isn’t there at all?”
“Well, it’s sort of there. There just isn’t much money for it.” Tiberius had probably gotten a whopping raise, in other words.
“I could maybe do with that. Just for the one year.”
“Well, of course, Mike. If you want the position—uh.” She finished off by saying, nearly wailing, “Oh, Mike!”
“Oh, Clara!” It was impossible. I’d been wrong to ask. “All right. I feel like a fool. I know you’ve done whatever you could. I’m out of line. I owe you thanks, and that’s all.”
“You’ve been wonderful here,” she said.
“It’s been good for me.” I was sincere in saying it.
I took the stairs to the parking-lot entrance. When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.
Not a lot happened. The following day I carried a cardboard box to the office and emptied my