Untrue Love Page 15

  He chuckled affectionately. “That sounds more like my girl. Go get ‘em.”

  Her coffee had gone cold. Ellie stood and tossed the bitter remnants into the sink. She still felt terrible, filled with a cold sadness and weariness that threatened even now to pull her down into a dark and silent place. But now she also felt that there was something else pulling her forward and keeping her moving. She’d heard that sharks suffocate unless they keep constantly moving forward. She could see now that sharks had something to teach her.

  Her mind turned to Philip Baptiste, and she went looking for her phone. The thought of Jackson and what he might think was no longer holding her back. She could be as powerful now as she needed to be.

  52

  ELLIE WAS SITTING in her office chair and thinking of nothing when there was a loud knock on the door. Without waiting for a response, Donna opened the door and slipped through, an excited smile on her face.

  “I have news,” she said without preamble.

  Ellie looked at her without enthusiasm. Despite her best intentions, she had been locked in a desperate struggle with depression ever since she received that horrible email. She had scheduled a meeting with Philip, and she was moving forward with her other plans for the conference. As long as she was active and absorbed with the work at hand she did well, but whenever her life slowed down even for a moment, the darkness started to slip in again from the margins. She felt run-down and sleepy most of the time, no matter how much coffee she drank, and this morning she hadn’t even heard the alarm. By the time she woke it was already thirty minutes past the time when she was supposed to be on campus.

  “I’m sorry about missing class this morning,” she said. “I don’t know what happened, but I overslept. We’ll need to reschedule that session.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Donna responded chirpily. “Professor Jefferson filled in for you.”

  It took a moment for Ellie’s sluggish mind to recognize the name. “Karen? What? How did that happen?”

  Donna shrugged. “It was kind of on the spur of the moment. When you weren’t there at quarter after the hour, I went to ask the department secretary if you had called to say you were sick or something. She hadn’t heard from you, but Professor Jefferson was there to pick up her mail, and she volunteered to fill in for you. So we just spent the rest of the period discussing the reading.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Oh, fine. The usual suspects spoke too much, but Professor Jefferson is really good in front of a class. She got everyone involved and we ended up having a really good discussion about whether the whale in Moby Dick is just a whale or also a symbol within Melville’s philosophy. It went well.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, simply astonished. She was having a hard time reconciling this story of Karen Jefferson being a kind and generous colleague with her first-hand experience of the woman, but she was starting to realize how little she knew or understood her her taciturn fellow professor. “OK, then. You said that you have news?”

  “Yes!” Donna’s eyes widened in enthusiasm, and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial half-whisper. “I have a date!”

  “A date?”

  “Yes! On Saturday!”

  “This is the boy we were talking about before?”

  Donna nodded enthusiastically. “We ran into each other in the library. In the library, isn’t that funny? It was so much like the scene you had me visualize, I had to fight to keep from laughing. So we were talking, and I was doing some of the flirting things you told me to do.”

  “You flirted with him?” Ellie asked, amused. Despite the black cloud that continued to hang over her head, the younger woman’s enthusiasm was starting to pull her out of it. “How did that go?”

  “Oh,” Donna said, rolling her eyes, “there were some issues. Like I was trying to think of something to say about the way he looked, and so while he was talking I wasn’t really paying attention because I was thinking to myself, should I mention his muscles, or the color of his eyes, or maybe I should say something about his smile, except that sounded more romantic than flirty and I still don’t really know what flirting is, and then I noticed that he was waiting for something and it turned out that he’d asked me a question and I didn’t even hear it.”

  “Oh no!”

  “It was OK, though, because he was cool about it and just repeated the question, which it turns out was about the author of the book I was reading, which was great because I actually have a lot to say about him. So we were talking about writers and books we liked and then he asked me out and I said yes!”

  Ellie smiled, honestly happy for her teaching assistant. “That’s so great.”

  “And I have you to thank for it,” Donna said. “If you hadn’t taken the time to help me, I would have found some way to screw this up, and I would have spent the next three years kicking myself for it. I can’t tell you how thankful I am.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Ellie said, more pleased than she would have expected. “Please. You’re an intelligent, beautiful, powerful woman who realized none of those things about herself. That was a crime, and it was my duty as a citizen to do something about it. I hope you have a wonderful time on Saturday.”

  “I will,” Donna beamed before bounding out of the office.

  Ellie sighed. She felt good for her young protege, but she also felt a little jealous. She could hardly remember what it was like to be right on the cusp of something new, when life is so full of excitement and possibility and two people could just be happy in knowing that they like each other. It had been a very long time since Ellie felt like that, and it seemed longer still before she would have the chance to feel that way again.

  Still, she thought, it was good to know that there was still love in the world, even if it was reserved for other people. That was something less than she wanted, but it was also more than she feared.

  53

  ELLIE SCANNED THE circle of faces before her and silently sent a “thank you” in the direction of Bruce Springsteen. Years before she’d heard an interview in which “the Boss” said he never got nervous—he only got excited. Ever since she had taken that as a mantra, and made a point of reminding herself that the tight sensation that felt like a coiled spring in her stomach was not nervousness, it was merely excitement.

  She was seated in a room dominated by a large oaken table ringed by ten men and women who, as far as Ellie was concerned, held the power of life and death in their hands. The assembled trustees of the university looked her up and down, and Ellie could see the gears inside their brains turning as they examined her and reached their various first impressions. Ellie knew that you do not become a university trustee by being a pushover; these men and women had climbed the corporate ladder quite successfully, and she had little doubt that they had left a number of crushed and bleeding rivals in their wake. Now she sat before them and prepared to ask for a favor.

  Her stomach gave a little lurch, in a way that might feel like nervousness if she didn’t know better. I’m not nervous, she thought to herself. Not nervous at all, but I am getting really, really excited.

  The trustees had been talking for some time now, finishing off the last bits of conversation concerning whatever order of business they had dealt with before Ellie had been invited into the room. Involuntarily her eyes flicked to where Paul sat, leaning back in his chair where he radiated a characteristic combination of rumpled boredom and sexiness that she was beginning to recognize as his signature move. Ever since she had entered the room, his eyes had been rooted to a stack of papers in front of him, but Ellie could see that those gray eyes were not moving back and forth across the lines on the page. He was not reading, then; was he trying to avoid looking at her?

  Her mind flicked away from the disquiet that grew within that thought and she looked over at Philip. He, at least, was smiling at her, and when their eyes met his smile grew even wider. She could not help smiling back at him, and inwardly she felt a bloom of gratitude. At least she had
one friend in the room.

  She cleared her throat. “Thank you for considering my proposal. The full details are on the sheet before you. The high-level summary is that I propose we host a conference of the most prominent writers and lecturers in English literature this spring. My stance is that this is the best way to raise the profile of my department and attract a higher quality of students and faculty applicants to this institution.”

  She paused to sweep the room with her eyes and take a reading of how the trustees were reacting to her proposal, but what she saw there proved difficult to read. Aside from Philip, who was still smiling and who gave her an encouraging nod when she met his eyes, the other trustees met her gaze with flat, noncommittal looks of their own.

  “It’s true that this sort of thing is not cheap. I won’t pretend that we can do it well for less than a significant cost. However, an institution on the rise is the sort of thing that will get alumni and boosters excited. If we do this well—and we will do it well—it could translate almost immediately into increased donations to the school’s endowment.”

  She paused. The part of her speech that she had memorized was now complete, and she searched for the words that would truly capture what she was feeling in that moment. “I hope—no, I trust that you will join me in seeing the opportunity here. Across the country there are hundreds of places just like this one: little schools that try to do a little job well. There is no shame in that. Not every school has to be a Harvard, or a Yale. But that being said, I believe we fail ourselves a little bit if we don’t reach out to see what might be possible. I look around me here and see an institution that could be something more, and I feel this is the time to reach out. Let’s see what we can do together.”

  She stopped, her heart pounding a little bit. She had injected more emotion into that pitch than she intended. “I’m happy to take your questions,” she said.

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” said a familiar face, and Ellie’s eyes swiveled to Philip. His blue eyes twinkled within a tanned face, and not for the first time she wondered whether he was spending his time in a tanning salon or on a beach somewhere. “It is bold, certainly. The timetable is aggressive. But I’ve never been one to wait when I see an opportunity, and I agree with Professor Stanton that this is an excellent opportunity.”

  “No one is arguing that the school should embrace mediocrity,” said an elderly woman in a gray business suit seated on the other side of the room from Philip. “And certainly I would be the last one to counsel needless delay. However, there is a reason that we have a process for setting the budget within an academic year, and the process is set up in part to keep us from making impetuous, impulsive decisions. So I would like Professor Stanton to explain to us, if she would, why it is so important that this happen in the current calendar, and not next year?”

  Ellie took a deep breath while she gathered her thoughts. She had no intention of telling the full truth of the matter. The full, embarrassing truth was that she originally wanted to hold the conference as soon as possible because waiting a year would have meant a too-long wait for Jackson to join her. Now that her love life was a smoking wreck by the side of the road, there was no longer a compelling reason to stick to the original schedule other than the fact that the thought of spending a year without doing something bold and exciting filled her with a depression so dark that it might swallow her whole. She needed this conference the way a drowning woman needed a life jacket. It gave her something to look forward to.

  Nevertheless, she knew a losing argument when she heard one, and she had no intention of sharing it. Fortunately she had anticipated the question and was ready with a response. “In the field of modern English literature, three names stand above the others: Steven James at Yale, Edward Carnegie at Berkeley, and Ernest Morrison at Duke. If you see a book on literature on the New York Times best-sellers list, it’s a good bet that it was written by one of these three, edited by a second, and has a cover with a pull-quote from the third. Our conference will go nowhere unless we have two of these men in attendance, and ideally all three. It’s well-known that Carnegie intends to go on sabbatical next year, while Morrison is thinking of retiring. This year we can get them, but next year could be too late.”

  She watched her words land on her audience, and Philip gave her a little nod that said: “Nicely done.” Ellie smiled inwardly but kept her face outwardly impassive.

  “We can be sure they’ll come?”

  Ellie’s moment of triumph was broken by the words, and her eyes swiveled to Paul, who was finally looking at her with an expression that was conspicuous for its lack of warmth.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “We can be sure that these three men will come if we invite them?”

  “Well, I—“ she began.

  “Because it occurs to me,” he said, speaking over the top of her response, “that you might be exposing this institution to considerable risk. What assurance do we have that we will not disburse the funds, only to see the conference come and go without these members of the academic royalty in attendance? If so, all the benefits that you promised us will evaporate. In fact, we might even come off looking like fools. We built it, but they did not come.”

  Ellie was momentarily thrown off her guard. “I…well, of course I’ll do everything I can to get them to attend,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that she had made a mistake.

  “So you are not certain,” he said, pouncing on the opening she had left him. “You ask us to commit significant funds, in exchange for which you will do…your…best.”

  Ellie felt as if she had been slapped. There could not have been more condescension in his tone. All the words that she might have offered in her defense were lost in the torrent of rage that surged through her. She had actually let this son of a bitch kiss her!

  “You’re taking her words out of context,” offered Philip, jumping in to salvage something of the situation. “Of course all Professor Stanton can do is extend an invitation. And I’m sure that she’s not expecting us to disburse funds until she has some reasonable assurances that the men in question will be able to attend. Isn’t that right, Professor Stanton?”

  “Yes, of course,” Ellie said, fighting to regain her composure. “I thought it was understood,” she lied, “but perhaps I should have made myself more clear. Once we agree in principle that we should hold a conference this spring, I will start lining up speakers and attendees. As soon as we know that the conference will be the success we’re all anticipating, then I will come back for the funds. Not before then.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Philip said, then turned to the other trustees. “So let’s put it to a vote: If Professor Stanton can line up commitments from two of the men she named—”

  “All three,” Paul broke in. “Things come up, and plans change. If we have a verbal commitment from all three, then one of them could cancel and we’d still have a chance at success. With only two committed, we would have a much smaller margin of error.”

  Philip gave him a dark look, but he nodded in acquiescence. “If Professor Stanton can get commitments from all three of the men she named, then we will guarantee the funds she needs to hold her conference. All in favor?”

  By a show of hands, Ellie saw that the motion had carried by a 6-3 majority. Her black mood was made even darker by the fact that Paul had chosen to abstain.

  She gave the room a professional smile and then beat a hasty retreat before they could see how she actually felt. She would have time to deal with Paul later. In the meantime she had a lot of work to do.

  54

  THE CROWD OUTSIDE the theater was beginning to disperse. Donna and Glenn stood on the dark sidewalk and made awkward conversation.

  It had all started so well. They were going to spend the whole day together, at a Harry Potter movie marathon. Donna had been terrified to suggest such a nerdy occasion to him, but then it turned out he was just as big a fan as she was. Glenn had shown up wearing a blac
k overcoat that clinked suspiciously if he moved too quickly. In a series of interior pockets he had stashed away their lunch: two plastic-wrapped sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, and two specialty sodas in glass bottles. The movies themselves, meanwhile, had been about as good as she’d remembered them, although the experience of watching them back-to-back certainly had her shifting uncomfortably in her seat before even the third movie was done.

  It had all gone quite well. The only serious problem was sitting next to her.

  She had been fighting all day long against the thoughts that would not stop filling her head. He’s not as tall as Evan. The way he does his hair looks dorky. Evan would never wear his hair like that. He doesn’t dress very well. Evan really has a sense of style. Evan doesn’t laugh so loudly.

  The litany of faults she was finding with Glenn was endless. It was like an avalanche of ill will that buried all of her good intentions. More than once she offered a furious inward retort: Evan isn’t here. Glenn is. It wasn’t enough. She stood on the sidewalk in the dark and looked for a way to escape.

  “Do you want to get coffee?” he asked her.

  “Oh, no. I can’t sit down again, not after all the time we just spent in those theater seats. My butt can’t take the strain.”

  “OK, that’s cool. I’m tired, too. I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I want to do that.”

  “No, really. Thanks, but I need to pick up a few things on the way home.” She felt terrible about offering such obvious lies. “I won’t bore you with that stuff.”

  He gave her a long, silent look, then finally relented. “OK. I guess this is ‘good night,’ then.”

  “Good night,” she said and raised her hand in a wave, hoping that she would be able to make a clean getaway.

  Abruptly he stepped forward and gathered her into a hug. “Good night,” he said again, his mouth against her ear, and then he stepped away. He gave her a slightly sad smile, turned, and started walking away.