Little miss evil, p.7
Little Miss Evil, page 7
part #4 of Nick Hoffman Series
Iris and Carter exchanged confused, angry glances.
“But what SUM really needs is to go hip-hop,” I
continued. “Then we could get on MTV and really make a difference. I mean, who needs those dumb black robes at graduation? Gold chains, backward baseball caps, tattoos, ski parkas, and baggy pants—that’s the wave of the future. And we could get Puff Daddy as graduation speaker, or Lauryn Hill, or Snoop—” I filled their simmering silence with a quiet, “Just kidding.”
Iris and Carter turned from me to stare at Cypriani’s books with undisguised loathing, as if they’d completely missed my last remarks. I would not have been surprised if they’d started ripping them from the shelves, stomping on them, tearing them apart, and even pissing on them.
“You like her work?” Iris demanded of me. “You like her? You think she belongs here?” Iris’s elfin face was twisted with venom. “Anyone could write the bilge that Cypriani’s churned out for years. Even I could, if I hadn’t been stuck grading composition papers year after year after year, with no chance of getting a novel published.” Carter patted her meager shoulder sympathetically.
God, I thought, Iris wasn’t just a frustrated writer, she was the kind of amateur who stupidly thought that writing only took some free time.
“And she won a Pulitzer?” Iris sneered.
“Well, Pulitzers are notoriously political. Edith Wharton won hers because the committee didn’t want to give it to Sinclair Lewis that year.”
Carter and Iris seemed to enjoy that bit of news. They were even more mollified when I decided to answer Iris’s angry questions about how I felt about Cypriani and her work.
“I would never have agreed to bringing Cypriani to SUM.” That was more about Stefan than Cypriani, but Iris and Carter didn’t need an explanation. “Not that anyone in EAR or anywhere else in the university was consulted, as far as we know,” I added. “And now there are all these people who’d like to pull that endowed chair right out from under her,” I quipped, feeling nervous and guilty for being mildly dishonest with them—but what else could I do when these two individuals would be the ones making the decision about my tenure review?
Savery and Bell were quite pleased by my apparent solidarity, and they conspiratorially said they were counting on me, but left without saying what they meant by that or what they were planning. Great, I thought, Carter and Iris are plotting a revolution, and they probably expect me to do the academic equivalent of running a blockade. Couldn’t I just sit by the guillotine and knit?
But I didn’t panic; I was amused to see that Iris and Carter headed straight for Camille, out in the hallway. She smiled disdainfully at them in what appeared to be a suck-up session. Unbelievable! They had just been trashing her, and now they were buzzing around her only slightly less solicitously than Nina Bullerschmidt. Well, it was probably not a bad idea, since Camille was EAR’s new power center, and if they couldn’t somehow get rid of her or undermine her, they might as well score some points.
I settled into a comfortable club chair, content to sip champagne and let the party go on around me, musing on how even the evening Bullerschmidt chose for the reception was a sign of the dean’s typical bullishness: a Monday night.
This made it harder for people to deal with Tuesday classes, whether they’d be hung over or simply have stayed out too late, but obviously the dean didn’t care. He was a workaholic and totally unsympathetic to anyone whose standards he deemed lower.
Stefan mooched in, confessing that he had been avoiding Camille, and that he’d counted the bottles of champagne. “It’s Bollinger and Veuve Cliquot,” he griped. “Where’d all the money come from for this lousy party?”
“Stefan, administrators on campus can produce funds for anything they want whenever they want, you know that.
This bacchanal is chicken feed in their scheme of things.” I reminded him of the studies we’d read that showed SUM was not just top-heavy with administrators, but perhaps one of the worst offenders in this way in the Midwest. “That’s the way things are.”
But just as I was about to warn Stefan to get a grip on himself and stop complaining, Coral Greathouse strolled in, looking rather severe in low heels and one of her typical badly cut brownish ex-nun suits. She hadn’t changed her stony demeanor, drab style, or red Sally Jesse Raphael glasses since she’d become provost, but I felt a difference nonetheless. Her powerful position had made her even more reserved, more self-contained.
I was chilled when she said, “Nick, I wanted to tell you something.”
I waited anxiously.
“I do hope that you’ll keep out of trouble as your application for promotion and tenure moves forward. It’s important that people think well of you,” she said flatly. “It’s important that people speak well of you.”
Coral Greathouse was the one who made the final
decision after reviewing the tenure committee’s findings, and she could overrule whatever decision reached her from EAR, so I assumed she meant it was important that she thought well of me. I felt as if Coral had sought me out because she thought I was misbehaving somehow, and I had the absurd urge to yell like a little kid, “I wasn’t doing anything! Honest!”
Instead, I just thanked her for the advice, and she left us alone, without once having acknowledged Stefan’s presence in the room. It was as if she had come to deliver a message from the Mob, and nobody else’s presence mattered.
I’d broken out in a sweat and wiped my face with the cocktail napkin from my drink.
Stefan was shaking his head. “Coral can do whatever she wants to at SUM,” he marveled. “She controls everything.”
He sounded wistful, tired, and envious.
Juno suddenly whirled into the room, red-faced. “That bloody bitch! She deserves to die!”
6
I ALMOST spilled my champagne at the phrase, so close to what had been written on the flyer. Was the choice of words coincidental, or an unconscious slip? If not, then Juno was playing some sick game with me, teasing me, leading me on, and trashing me. Could she be a split personality? No, that was unlikely—Juno’s personality was so outrageous, there wasn’t any room left over in her for another.
Juno barreled on, cursing, stalking back and forth. If she’d had a cigarette in her hand, she would probably have set something on fire. Vibrant, incensed, self-dramatizing, she reminded me of Bette Davis in All About Eve when she discovers that Eve Harrington had been her secret understudy and had taken her place at a reading. But I did not think I should make the comparison for her. Boy, that movie was buzzing around in my head like the last song you hear on the radio in the morning.
“I tried chatting Camille up, but I might as well adopt a Tasmanian devil as a house pet! Talking to her is like pissing up a cliff! I told her about having lunch with Margaret Atwood last month and how Atwood remarked that she admired the ending of Camille’s last book. And do you know what that wench said?”
Stefan sat on the wide arm of my chair, and together we asked, “What?”
Juno stopped pacing and stood with her legs slightly spread as if she were a contralto bracing herself for an aria of malediction. “She said she didn’t read Atwood because she avoided provincial writers! That Canada was simply too young a country to have produced anything worth the name of literature! Can you believe her balls?”
Juno looked angry enough to ram one of Atwood’s or even one of her own books down Cypriani’s throat. Suddenly she grinned and, eyebrows waggling, crowed with delight, “Camille may think she’s a class act, but she doesn’t even know the right way to hold a champagne glass. She’s holding it by the bowl, not the stem!”
I tried lightening the mood further. “Martha Stewart would really approve of your attention to detail.” But Juno’s face darkened, and she stalked from the room with this comment: “I’d strangle that high and mighty bitch if she were worth the effort.”
Stefan and I looked at each other as if we’d been through a storm-caused power outage and the lights had just flickered back on. Grimly, he said, “We’re going to be having more encounters like that one to look forward to.”
“True. Camille’s making enemies faster than Judge Starr hands down indictments.”
Stefan took my glass and finished the champagne, setting it down on a nearby marble-topped table. Watching him, I felt embarrassed to be suddenly imagining Juno flushed and vocal in more intimate circumstances. And pouring champagne from a glass down her breasts and licking them dry.
Jeez, was I a closet heterosexual?
Before I could follow that thought, there was a sound of glasses crashing out in the hall, and we rushed out to find a waiter on the floor, apparently having collided with Byron Summerscale, who was squinting and apparently dead drunk.
People crowded close to see what was going on while Nina and the rest of the catering staff apologetically tried to clean up the mess with napkins and little brooms, but didn’t get very far because Byron lay there unmoving and unmovable.
I shuddered. The large, tangled crowd and the body on the floor reminded me of last spring’s horrible incident on the Administration Building bridge, and I suddenly felt dizzy.
Stefan picked up on it instantly and slid an arm around me to keep me steady. He squeezed me until I felt solid and then let me go, without saying anything. And this was the man I was betraying in my thoughts—a man who picked up what I was feeling and comforted me immediately? How could I be so ungrateful—and obsessed? Obsession was no hyperbole—I was thinking about Juno more than I’d ever thought of any woman before, and far more intimately.
President Littleterry stormed over to the recumbent Summerscale. Grizzled and weather-beaten, SUM’s ex-football coach and current president had spent decades shouting at players, referees, and judges during games, so his face was permanently fixed in an expression of fierce discontent. Now he looked especially disgusted, ready to chew Summerscale a new asshole.
“You’re drunk—you’re a disgrace—get the hell out of here,” the president began, but ursine Summerscale staggered heavily to his feet, towering over Littleterry. If he’d smashed his head in with one big paw, I don’t think any of us would have been surprised.
“I’m a disgrace? You’re the one turning this university into a sick joke!” He pointed a sausage-fat finger at him and thundered, “You’re a disgrace!” as if he were Satan himself carting Don Juan off to hell in Don Giovanni.
There were gasps from the crowd, but Summerscale
wasn’t done by any means. “You’re a thug—an assassin.
You’re killing everything good and true at this university—it’s all one big cash register to you, and public relations.”
Juno sidled over to me and murmured, “Isn’t this
marvelous, it’s like an opera,” and I wasn’t just hyperaware of her perfume and her body heat, but also of her being on the same wavelength as I was. In response to my deep and appreciative breathing, Juno identified what she was wearing as Eternity. Stefan was oblivious to this byplay, but I started to blush.
Littleterry balled his fists and pounded on his chest as if about to give a Tarzan yell. “You’re a goddamned drunk,” he shouted.
“And you’re an anti-intellectual moron.”
“Has-been limpdick.”
“Churl! Visigoth!”
This name-calling escalated (or degenerated, depending on your perspective) until Littleterry mocked Summerscale’s late department as “lousy with faggots and commies and wimps.” Summerscale upped the ante by deriding the president’s former coaching skills. This was too much for the president, whose face purpled: “You’re nuts!” he cried. “We went to the Rose Bowl!”
“It was just dumb luck—you sucked, only everyone else sucked worse that year. If Ohio State had a better offense, you’d have been dead.”
There were quiet nods of agreement among those in the crowd who followed the team.
Littleterry lunged at Summerscale, who stiff-armed him as if he were John Elway at the Super Bowl. People started laughing. Summerscale suddenly let go, and the president fell.
There was no laughter now. Bullerschmidt, Greathouse, and other administrators rushed to help the president to his feet, but he furiously waved them off, glaring at Summerscale, who started to make a moderately dignified exit.
It was a bizarre and exciting scene; here for the first time was someone publicly saying what many people at SUM
thought—and directly to those in power. So there was a vicarious thrill for most of us that night watching Littleterry get mau-maued. But it was also scary; even people in the room who would have liked to egg Summerscale on dreaded what might happen to him or anyone who challenged SUM
authority.
“If this were a bar,” Littleterry roared, “you’d be tossed out on your can.”
“It’s close,” Summerscale said as he slipped out the front door. “It’s a whorehouse.”
There was complete silence, and Stefan and I nervously drew closer together, as if we were about to witness Hamlet stab Polonius through the arras in his mother’s bedroom, but Littleterry didn’t react.
Nina Bullerschmidt tactfully announced dessert, and there was a general sugartropic move away from scandal toward the buffet table, now seductively laden with multitiered trays of sweets. We followed, and I was impressed by the trifle, tiramisù, Linzer tarts, brownies, Russian tea cakes, Pavlova, and macaroons. Stefan dolefully surveyed the caloric cornucopia while I distractedly wondered what it would be like to feed Juno a brownie or a macaroon, piece by piece….
I studied Bullerschmidt, who seemed upset about more than the gross breach of decorum and the assault on the president’s and SUM’s dignity. The dean’s face was creased with anxiety or doubt, and he was watching Nina
suspiciously. I whispered to Stefan, “What if that scene wasn’t really about the university—what if Summerscale’s having an affair with Littleterry’s wife, and that’s why she’s not here?”
“She’s not here because she’s dead. She’s been dead for years, remember? She got crushed by that Homecoming float.”
“Well, maybe Nina’s coked up, maybe that’s why she’s so uncharacteristically ebullient.”
“What?”
“Or maybe she’s a lesbian and infatuated with Cypriani.”
“You think everyone’s gay,” Stefan snapped, and then apologized for being so sour. “That’s not remotely true,” he added. “I don’t know why I even said it.”
Well, I did; Stefan was upset and had to lash out at somebody, but understanding that didn’t make it feel any better. Stung by Stefan’s moodiness, I ploughed somewhat too heartily into dessert, but couldn’t take much delight in what I was scarfing down.
Suddenly President Littleterry was clinking a glass in the dining room, showing no signs of outrage at the recent fracas.
He held his champagne glass—the “wrong way,” I noticed— and tapped it with a silver knife as if he were at a wedding, then handed the knife to a startled waiter.
“Gather round,” he called, and I winced at his corniness.
Littleterry smacked at and dug into his pockets with his free hand, apparently looking for a speech, but couldn’t find anything and probably decided to wing it. There was general nervousness in the room; our nitwit president was not known as being swift of tongue, even when well coached by his overpaid minions.
He began as sententiously as if he were commemorating some famous battle, or Eliza Doolittle making sure she got her vowels right: “We are here tonight to honor the seat that has been given to Camille Cypriani.”
I winced at his choice of words, and could feel part of my brain drifting off to sleep. Juno had moved over to my side, and she whispered mockingly: “Seat? She’s not a fucking senator.”
Littleterry went on to give a short speech that was equal parts incoherence and ignorance, and briefly I wondered if Summerscale might have swiped the president’s speech in their fracas. There were obligatory references to SUM as a great institution and Michigan as a great state, along with slams of the University of Michigan. Most people at SUM
could have easily spun those weak filaments together into a speech, but even this simple rhetorical embroidery was beyond Littleterry. He kept coughing, saying “uh—,” and glancing around the room as if expecting to be rescued. His face exhibited a Nixonian sheen.
“The man gives village idiots a bad name,” Juno
muttered.
It was apparent not only that the president was very uncomfortable speaking without a prepared text, but worse, that he had very little idea who exactly Cypriani was. He even mispronounced her first and second names more than once.
Littleterry also mentioned her books randomly, leaving out the Pulitzer winner, and he never even looked at her or gestured her way as you might expect him to do.
During the whole embarrassing scene, Juno kept up a consistent chorus of murmured ridicule, making me feel like I was sitting with the class clown in junior high and desperately trying not to crack up. Stefan didn’t seem to be tuned in to any of this, whether because he’d disappeared into his own psychic wormhole or because he’d had too much champagne, I didn’t know. But I was actually relieved that Stefan’s awareness of what was going on around him—at least right then—was so dim.
Littleterry suddenly, awkwardly shifted gears just at the point I expected him to introduce Cypriani to general applause.
He announced, “I now want to speak about presenting a Bold New Initiative that will take SUM into the Twentieth Century —and Beyond.”
“Twenty- first,” Bullerschmidt rumbled from across the room. “Twenty-first century.”
Littleterry beamed: “Exactly!” And he paused dramatically, holding up his empty champagne glass as if about to make a toast. He blathered about the millennium, progress, responsibility, great changes, and the like.
Camille Cypriani’s face had hardened. Not surprisingly, she was pissed off to no longer be the center of even muddled attention and to have been shunted aside by this mysterious news. Almost everyone else at the party looked puzzled or annoyed, and whispers flared up like fireplace flames licking the edge of a log. All that champagne followed by all that sugar had made people a bit woozy, but we were wary, too, given the president’s history.
