Untrue Love Read online

Beth laughed again and shook her head. “What, are you worried about cockroaches? No, you don’t need to worry about that. The roaches would never make it past the rats.”

  “Rats?” Ellie asked anxiously, but Beth had moved on down the sidewalk.

  “Now, I want you to meet the other members of the department as soon as possible. A couple of them are still out of town, but I’m thinking of calling a department meeting for next Monday or Tuesday. Usually you’d have met them during the interview process, but of course that’s not the way it happened this time. Let me tell you, Tony spoke very highly of you!”

  “Tony?” Ellie asked, not thinking.

  “Tony Bradford, of course!” Beth answered, shooting her a quizzical look. “You remember, the man who recommended you for the job here?”

  “Right, of course. Tony. I’ve always thought of him as an Anthony.”

  “Well, we call him Tony here, and as I was saying he sang your praises non-stop until we just couldn’t say no anymore! But I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. We are very excited to have you with us. It can be a little sleepy out here in the middle of cow country, and I think someone like you is just what we need to wake us up and bring us into the 21st century!”

  Ellie smiled wanly. She had to agree—someone needed to take this school and give it a good, hard shake.

  “Now,” Beth pronounced, “let’s go take a look at your new office! I’m pretty sure they’ve fixed that broken window by now.”

  7

  THE SUN WAS down but the humidity was not, and Ellie sat in her dark apartment and listened to the shrill singing of the crickets outside her window. She’d learned that the ceiling fan did a serviceable job of making the hot, wet air seem a little less oppressive, and for the last thirty minutes she’d been watching it spin around while she toyed with the idea of running away and joining the circus.

  Her phone buzzed. She answered it without looking to see who it was.

  “Yes?” she asked weakly.

  “My God. It sounds like you’re on death’s door. Should I hang up and dial 911?”

  “Hi, Jackson,” she said, closing her eyes and letting her head loll back.

  “Did you have a bad day?”

  “A bad day, in the middle of a bad week that’s finishing a bad month that’s part of the worst year of my life.”

  “So the answer is yes. I’m sorry, sweetie. Tell me about it.”

  She sighed and looked for where she might begin. “I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I know that. I helped you find it on the map, remember?”

  “It didn’t seem so bad then.”

  “We were drunk, as I remember, but you’re right. It seemed like it would be a fun adventure. Not so much?”

  “There are no stores in this town. There’s not even a downtown. It’s just a collection of streets. What the hell was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking that they offered you tenure, sight-unseen, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. I still don’t know how you did it.”

  Ellie sighed and stood up, walking with the phone to the window where she could look out on the silent streets. “I know how men think, and that means I know how to get them to do nice things for me. I’ve always known how to do that.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Jackson said. “What does that say about our life together? Have I just been a puppet on your strings?”

  “I don’t use my powers on you. Puppets aren’t sexy, and your job is to be the sexiest of men.”

  “I do what I can.”

  “I know you do,” Ellie said in a voice barely above a whisper. Hearing Jackson’s voice was better than the silence had been, but it was making her miss him so much that her entire body ached. “I don’t know if it was a good idea coming here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t see us living here. The whole idea is we were supposed to find a place where we can both teach, and this doesn’t look like that place. It’s like something out of an old TV show, Jackson. I didn’t know real towns were like this.”

  “Well crap,” he muttered. “Are you sure? Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

  “It could be not as bad as I think and still be really bad.”

  “Maybe it will be better when classes start. When you’re busy grading papers and working on your own thing, you might not notice it so much.”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t feel very much cheered up, but she also didn’t see an alternative. “Have you heard of any openings?” she asked hopefully.

  “No. Not yet. It’s a bad time of year for it. In a few months things might start opening up, but right now everyone’s just finishing off the summer and getting ready for the new term.”

  “I know. I was just hoping.”

  “It’s more than hope, baby. We’ll make it work. Sooner or later we’ll be together again, and then this will just be a funny story that we’ll tell our grandchildren.”

  Ellie smiled in spite of herself. “Grandchildren? Who said anything about grandchildren?”

  “My work is not done until I see how good you look in maternity clothes.”

  “Maybe you can see about visiting me sometime and knocking me up. Sometime soon?”

  The pause on the other end was long enough to become uncomfortable. “Thanksgiving, maybe?” he said at last. “I don’t know. I’ll have to see how the term shakes out. It looks like they’re giving me Johnson’s course load.”

  “Why isn’t he teaching his own classes?”

  “He needs surgery on his hip. If you ask me, what he needs to do is look in the mirror and realize he’s an old man who should have retired years ago. But now, at the last moment, I suddenly have two more classes than I thought I did. I’m going to turn them into seminars so there won’t be much to do outside of leading the class discussions, but there will be papers to grade…I don’t know, Ellie. I’ll do what I can.”

  “It’s OK,” she lied. “I want you to come as soon as you can, but I understand you need to take care of business, too.”

  “I miss you,” he said.

  Ellie closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window pane. “I miss you too.”

  “We’re going to win. This game we’re playing? We’re going to win.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  With a murmured goodnight, he was gone and the phone line was dead. Ellie stayed at the window for several minutes more, looking out into the night at a bunch of somethings that she really didn’t want to see.

  8

  “OK, EVERYONE, LET’S go around the table and introduce ourselves. Ellie and I have already had a chance to get acquainted, so why don’t we start with you, John?”

  Ellie scanned the faces of the others who were seated at the conference table. Beth, as perky as ever, was at the head of the table, and the three other chairs were occupied by her fellow faculty in the Department of English Literature.

  An older man with gray hair and square-framed glasses cleared his throat and gave Ellie an awkward smile. “I’m John Sullivan,” he began. “I’ve been here for, how long now? I guess it’s been nearly 30 years. Which is a long time to stay in one place, but I guess it suits me well enough. I teach modern English literature, mostly, though every year I lead a seminar on the origins of the novel and that’s always a lot of fun. And that’s about all you need to know about me.”

  Beth smiled at him fondly. “John has been a mentor for me and many of the other faculty who have come through here. He’s kind of a legend in these parts. When he finally retires—which I hope is no time soon!—we won’t know what to do with ourselves.”

  John chuckled happily. Ellie was getting the sense that he was a surrogate grandfather for anyone who was looking for that sort of thing. She thought that he had a kind face and enough intelligence behind his eyeglasses that she would take him seriously in an argument.


  “I guess it’s my turn,” muttered the woman sitting just across the table from Ellie. She had curly black hair and a blunt, challenging expression that immediately put Ellie on the defensive. “I’m Karen Jefferson. I teach poetry. I’ve been here a long time, too.”

  Beth and the others waited for her to add something more, but there was nothing. Finally a familiar, smiling face broke the awkward silence. “And you know me, of course,” beamed Tony Bradford. He was both balder and more squinty than Ellie remembered, but she also remembered how much she owed the man, so she made a point of returning his smile with one of her own. “As you know I like to take a culture studies approach to various topics, including music videos and other pop culture ephemera, but I’m also the resident creative writing teacher.”

  Ellie was not blind to the fact that Karen Jefferson rolled her eyes at Tony’s use of the term “ephemera.” She revised the mental dossier she was assembling on the woman to include: “Sarcastic and disrespectful.”

  “Thank you, everyone,” she said to the room, “and thank you in particular for welcoming me into your community here. This is an exciting new start for me, and I can’t wait to get started.”

  “Well, we’re all as pleased as can be that you chose to join us,” Beth enthused. “We have trouble attracting top-flight candidates, particularly the ones who are used to living in more urban and sophisticated areas, so it was a very pleasant surprise to hear about your interest.”

  “Yes, very surprising,” Karen added, fixing Ellie with a look that hovered somewhere between suspicion and amusement. “Please, if you would, tell us what about this school attracted your interest?”

  “What attracted me to the position?” Ellie asked, her mind actively scrambling for an answer more compelling than: “Because it was available.”

  “Yes. You were in a large department at a prominent university in one of the most vibrant, exciting cities in the world. You wouldn’t just dump all of that and come here unless you had a very good reason. I’d like to hear it.”

  “Karen, I don’t think Ellie needs to explain herself to us,” Tony tried to interject, but she cut him off.

  “I just find it so flattering that she would choose to join us,” she purred unconvincingly, “and I’d like to indulge myself by basking in that flattery for a moment or two. So Ellie, if you would, please share what you were thinking. Because I called around and discovered that they were very close to reaching a decision on your tenure. It’s very dramatic, isn’t it, making such a big change at such a climactic moment. I’d love to hear the story of how you got from there to here.”

  Ellie’s blood turned to ice as she realized what her new colleague was doing. Clearly Karen had found someone who told her about the tenure decision, and now she wanted to see whether Ellie would reveal the true reason she had accepted their offer. Of course, telling the truth might irreparably harm Ellie’s reputation among her new colleagues; they might even withdraw their offer if they thought it had been extended under false pretenses. Luckily for her, she was practiced in the art of the incomplete truth.

  “It’s true, I was up for tenure,” she began. “And for a long time that was all I wanted. I loved the school, and I loved the city, and I could see making my home there.”

  She paused and scanned the other eyes in the room. Beth was smiling warmly in anticipation of a good story, while Tony and John seemed no more than curious at what she might say. Karen, though, had a hungry look in her eyes, as if she was wondering whether Ellie would be so bold and foolish as to tell the unvarnished truth. She had sat up in her chair and was leaning forward slightly, hanging on every word.

  “What I forgot, though—or what I hadn’t learned yet—is there’s a lot more to making something work than just wanting it so. And the great challenge of being on a tenure track is there’s so much on your plate. There’s teaching, of course, and you need to learn to be a great lecturer and good with students. There writing, so you’re also working your ass off to do the research, publish your work, and become a better writer all the time. I focused really hard on those things, and I did them extremely well. I thought that was it. I thought, after that, my job was done.”

  She paused and scanned their eyes a second time, and was satisfied at what she saw there. She had captured their attention utterly, and they were all waiting for the second shoe to drop in the story she was telling.

  “But I wasn’t done,” she said, and infused the words with all the disappointment she could remember feeling on that terrible day. “As important as those other things are, it’s even more important to invest in relationships, particularly with the members of your department. They’re your colleagues, they’re your coworkers, and they should be your friends. That was where I made a huge mistake. I had an opportunity to connect meaningfully and powerfully with the people around me, but I didn’t.”

  She paused a third time to take a deep breath and look down at the surface of the conference table, as if in penitence. “The thing about friendship is it’s a window that only stays open for a period of time. When it closes, you’ve lost the opportunity and it doesn’t come back around. So one day I woke up and found myself working in a department full of people to whom I was not close and never would be. It was a terrible thing to realize, especially since I knew I would never be able to fix it. So that’s when I started to think about making a fresh start. I would come to a new university, and this time I would take the time to get to know and value the people around me. I’m here today in the hope that each and every one of you will be a close colleague and also a good friend.”

  Ellie peeked out at her audience and found them smiling warmly back at her. She had guessed correctly that the friendship card was the right one to play in a small department within a small school that was founded inside a small town. She had played the game well and won three of her new colleagues over to her side.

  The fourth was Karen, and she wore the look of someone who had lost the battle but still expected to win the war. Ellie smiled cheerfully at her and thought, If you mess with the tiger, honey, you’re going to get the claws.

  9

  “GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE. My name is Ellie Stanton, and I’ll be your professor for this course.”

  The room was smaller than she was used to, with twelve students distributed among the chairs facing the front of the room. It was the first day of school, so none of them looked completely bored quite yet, but Ellie could already pick out the ones who would be attentive and eager to learn, and the ones who were there merely in the hopes that it would be an easy route to an A or a B.

  “The title of this class is ‘Introduction to the Great Books.’ This is the sort of class that everyone takes sooner or later, and—if you haven’t already—at some point in your life someone will tell you that the whole notion of a ‘Great Book’ is a sexist, classist, ethnocentric, and paternalistic wart on the face of world literature.” Ellie had been expecting some sort of reaction to her joke, if nothing more than a polite chuckle from students who were hoping to get on her good side, but no reaction at all emerged from the wall of blank faces. She sighed; this wasn’t going to be as easy as she had hoped.

  “Personally I’ve never had much time for either side of the argument. I don’t believe that there is a list of books that are objectively greater than anything else that’s been written before or since, but neither do I think that there is a vast conspiracy of dead white men attempting to shove their worldview down everybody else’s throats. Instead, what we have is a long and intricate history of men and women writing something very personal and very true to who they were and what they knew at the time of writing. Any book is great if you can understand that dimension of the work, but no book can remain great if its author’s point of view has become so remote from current experience that we can no longer relate to what he or she did on the page.”

  She picked up a dry-erase pen and walked to the whiteboard at the front of the room, where she had written “Great Bo
oks” when she first entered the room. Now she slowly added a big question mark next to the word “Great.”

  “What we are going to do in this class is ask the question of everything we read: is it great? What makes a work great, and how can we tell whether a work qualifies? Does greatness imply that a work is great for everyone, or is it possible for a book to be great for me but not for you?”

  Again she scanned the sea of faces, and for the first time began to see a few, faint signs of interest.

  “There is one thing that everyone should learn in college, no matter what your major is and what you intend to do with yourself after graduation. That thing is: ask intelligent questions. So we are going to be doing three things in this class: read books, ask intelligent questions about those books, and respond intelligently to the questions of others. Everyone but me will be doing a fourth thing as well: by the end of the class you will write an essay arguing that one of the books we read in this class either is or is not great. That’s it. I don’t care how long the paper is, just so long as it’s the right length for making a good argument.”

  She went to the whiteboard again and wrote three letters on the board: A, B, and F.

  “I tend to give three grades in my classes,” she said, turning back to the students who were now giving her their undivided attention. Ellie had learned years before that the two ways to get her students’ full and complete attention were to bring food or talk about their grades. “If you do all four things I require of you, I will give you a B. If you fail to do any of them—skip one of the books, skip class, attend class but sit in silence during the discussion, or blow off the term paper—I will give you a failing grade. I don’t really see the point of C’s and D’s. Either you gave a good effort or you didn’t, and if you didn’t that’s an F.”

  “Umm, Professor Stanton?” asked one student, a girl who looked impossibly young to be in college.

  “Yes?” Ellie asked, already knowing what the question was.

  “How do you get an A?” asked the girl, speaking for the other students in the room who were all wondering the same thing.