Another You by Ann Beattie Read Free Book Online Page B

As he got older, the students got younger. Enrollment fell, and more local students began to enroll. Now he routinely taught a course in composition, as well as his poetry seminar and his survey course on modern American literature. He was considered stodgy, but admirable. The newer people taught Third World literature and women’s studies. McCallum taught a seminar on the unreliable narrator in twentieth-century fiction, as well as offering a course in popular fiction, informally known as “shit lit.” Well, he thought: as one studenthad recently written, “It’s a doggy dog world.” He was a mutt, and the purebreds were at Stanford or Columbia or Harvard. So, he wondered, who else would be at the sherry fest? Dr. Gerold Ziller was only on campus one day a week, on the orders of his proctologist. Susan Campbell-Magawa had probably already left for the City of Angels, to fly among her airheaded own. McCallum. Would they bring out that wild card? Or would it be other people in the department, or people from the administration? Someone from campus parking, perhaps, to explain why Mrs. Adam Barrows had had to park half a mile away, since the mudflat that was once visitor parking had been paved over to provide an area for safer Rollerblading?
    At exactly three-thirty, his hands empty of books, his head bare, Marshall walked into the Irving T. Peck Room. Barbara, the voice on the phone, was there, emptying ice cubes into an aluminum ice bucket beneath the portrait of Professor Emeritus Irving T. Peck. In the portrait, Peck’s long neck stretched high, like a chicken or turkey looking for a way out. The folds of skin, relentlessly detailed by the portrait painter, added to the impression of the man as a startled fowl. He had retired the year before Marshall came to Benson, though questions about his sexual preferences still remained, indelibly, in the men’s room.
    Barbara greeted him with delight. She was younger than he’d thought from her officious voice on the phone—young and, it turned out, quite pleasant. The President was showing Mrs. Barrows around the library, she told him. He wondered aloud whether Mrs. Barrows would be shown the easily jimmied-open window in the history stacks, through which books could easily be dropped from the second floor. Barbara blushed, as if she had personally arranged the book drop. She emptied the ice cubes into the bucket, shook the ice cube tray over the floor, and dropped the tray in her backpack. She set the sherry bottle in place—there was no red wine—and put out plastic glasses and paper napkins on the mahogany drop-leaf. Today, the table was protected by a series of place mats imprinted with pictures of wolves running along under grapevines or through snowy fields, or leaping in midair, about to pounce on a frightened rabbit. Barbara surveyed everything and announced that she would take her leave,lifting the backpack from the floor, shrugging her shoulders to center it on her back as she inserted her long, thin arms.
    “I won’t drink it all before they show up,” he said.
    “Oh. No,” she said, blushing again, as if she’d actually had such a concern.
    Then she was gone, relieved to be away from him, no doubt. He looked around. The barometer on the wall indicated rain or snow, the needle right on the line between the two. Outside, the sky was gray. It didn’t look like a snow sky. He sat in one of the brown leather chairs, thinking how inelegant all of this was. The room was a shabby, cheap imitation of an English library, with bookshelves that contained more magazines than books, and a rug that looked like Jackson Pollock had been recruited, in the last thirty seconds of the rug’s creation, to drizzle some color over its grayness.
    “Hello, hello,” President Llewellyn said, extending his hand. “It’s just terrific that you could make time in your schedule to see us. Marshall, may I introduce Mrs. Barrows. She’s the mother of Darcy Barrows, whom I know you