Tenure Track by Victoria Bradley Read Free Book Online

handful of younger female faculty tended to dress more professionally than their male counterparts, with power pantsuits common. On the day of the mixer, Jane herself was adorned in a chic Liz Claiborne dress, her long brown hair pulled into a stylish updo with trendy flipped-back bangs.
    Before Jane ever had the opportunity to seek out her female peers, she was accosted by Henry Gould, who had not yet earned his notorious nickname. Slender, with thick wavy hair and a clean-shaven face, Henry was slightly better looking and much neater than he would become in his later years, when his unkempt attire often rendered him indistinguishable from the homeless who milled about on the campus periphery. Back then, Jane could have understood his physical appeal to some female students, were it not for his unchanged arrogance and misogyny. Within moments of introducing himself, the already tipsy Henry bragged that he had just earned tenure and that he hoped this Women’s Studies “experiment” would not “wind up sullying the university by attracting a bunch of ugly bra-burners and Nazi dykes.”
    Jane pretended he was joking. She laughed loudly, both to make it clear that she wasn’t one of those “overly sensitive” females, and also to prevent her one hand not holding a drink from slapping his smug, sexist face.
    Henry was at the mixer with his first wife, a mousy little woman whom he proudly introduced to Jane as his college sweetheart. Perhaps thinking the women would want to share girl talk, or just looking for a way to ditch the wife, Henry quickly abandoned the two of them to get another drink. Jane awkwardly tried to make small talk, but it was soon clear that she had little in common with the shy housewife who used the social hour as a rare chance to leave her two small children with a neighbor and visit with adults. Jane never forgot the puzzled look in the eyes of Mrs. Gould the First, like a zoo-raised animal suddenly released back into the wild.
    Ironically, it was while trying to find a graceful way to extricate herself from Mrs. Gould the First that Jane spotted her own future husband. Mark was hard to miss, looking like a stale leftover from the Chicago Seven: frizzy black hair down to his shoulders, John Lennon glasses and a Fu Manchu mustache with about a day’s growth of beard over the rest of his face. He wore bell-bottom blue jeans and a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt—a style at least a decade out of date. When Jane first saw this spectacle from across the room, she thought it looked very unprofessional. Even accounting for modern fashion, most professors still expected to be able to distinguish faculty from students.
    She was a bit taken aback when Mark caught her staring at his attire. As his kind eyes met hers from across the room, his face broke into a wide grin. She tried to look away, but he soon sauntered by with an unknown drink in hand. “Hi,” he said, extending his free palm to Mrs. Gould the First as if genuinely glad to meet her. “Mark Straussman, Math Department.” Whether from shyness or fear of talking to a man other than her husband, Mrs. Gould bashfully excused herself to find Henry.
    “ So . . . You one of the new profs?” Mark chirped to Jane, rocking back and forth on workman’s boots.
    “ Yes,” she responded, trying to look uninterested.
    “ New Yorker?” he shouted gleefully upon hearing her accent, as if discovering a long-lost cousin. “Me too! Brooklyn born and bred!” She could have guessed his origins just by the thick accent and loud voice that reflected every negative stereotype the upstate Episcopalian held of Brooklyn Jews.
    Despite her own biases, she was not quite sure what to make of the gangly mathematician. Even beneath all that hair, she could tell that Mark was not particularly handsome. He had slightly bucked teeth, severely pockmarked skin, a very bent nose caused by a freak shot putt accident and a thin, wiry frame from years of running. He described