Book Four: The Goon
24. I gave Marilyn Keogh a hug. . .
I gave Marilyn Keogh a hug, which she returned and which return I found I needed. Then I went home and read all afternoon, and went out for a drink in the evening. The following day I had Sunday dinner with my dad, a plate of chicken at the Milestone, and turned down his offer of a rig of my own if I’d come and work for him. I made the long drive back to Lincoln Sunday afternoon. Somewhere east of Riley a fast mouse-colored cloud spit snow across the road, the first of winter.
On Monday, as soon as I got my Comp class over with, I went to see Dr. Strange in his office. I intended only to make an appointment, but he made me come in, saying he’d been hoping to catch me. “I feel I should apologize to you,” he said when I’d seated myself across from him, his desk mounded with paper like the back of a beluga surfacing between us. “I feel you’re not having a successful experience, and that I am in some way responsible for your disappointment with the class.” I was not taken in by his mild language; his small black eyes glittered with resentment.
“You don’t owe me any apology,” I replied. “It’s true that my expectations were different, but yours is my first seminar. Maybe I should’ve waited until I got my feet on the ground. As for my having a successful experience—” I licked my lips nervously. “I understand that my oral presentation will account for a good share of my grade.”
“That and the accompanying paper,” he said. “Do you want to talk about your oral presentation?” In chess (I found out later from Grace) there’s a name for this: Fool’s Mate.
“As a matter of fact I do,” I said with as much feigned eagerness as I could muster on the first day after vacation. “I have a new idea—”
He leaned slightly forward to interrupt me. “What was your original idea?” he asked. “I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me, as I don’t seem to have any notes on the subject.”
“Oh, that?” I bought myself a little time by looking dumfounded; we’d been expected to notify him of our topics by the first of November, and I hoped he would think that I’d forgotten I had not done this. “I was going to write on David Jones,” I said. “The Welsh poet. A contemporary of Eliot’s. But when I went to the library, I couldn’t find enough sources for a paper.” The words came down to me from heaven.
“Odd,” he said, “I’ve been successful at finding a number of books on Jones.” ‘Successful’ is right, you old bastard, I wanted to reply, you’ve found all of them. “Well, that’s too bad. I’d have liked to hear your reaction to David Jones. It was his father, you know, who was Welsh. You were going to talk on In Parenthesis, I presume? Or did you plan to tackle The Anathemata?”
I searched his lips for a hint of a smirk, but the man was deadpan. “In Parenthesis,” I said, hoping that was the title of the poem whose excerpt I’d read. “It strikes me as sort of, well, relevant.” An effective word, ‘relevant’; I’d picked it up from my own star pupils. As used—usuallly in the form of a question: But is it relevant?—it meant Fuck this, man; my altered, all-seeing consciousness finds you boring.
Dark circles magically appeared under Dr. Strange’s eyes. “I grant that a need exists to expose the cruel aspects of modern, technology-based warfare,” he said. “In Parenthesis certainly does that. But a man’s relations with the Deity are always ‘relevant’, don’t you think?”
Having had no relations with the Deity, I could not answer. “In any case,” I said, hoping to change the subject, “what I want to do now is something exploring the connection between Eliot’s rhythm patterns—”
“Prosody,” Leonard corrected. “You mean his prosody.”
“—Right, the connection between his prosody patterns, in ‘The Waste Land’ for instance, and the jazz that was being recorded at the time it was published.” I licked my lips and swallowed hard; even at nine in the morning, his arctic unvarying dryness made me want a drink.
He tipped back his chair and gave me an anthracite look. “What will be your sources for this comparison?” he asked.
“Sources?” I swallowed another ball of sticky phlegm.
“Sources,” he said. “You can’t expect to pull information out of the blue.”
I shifted my expression in the direction of earnestness. “Actually, I came to see if you could maybe help me with that,” I said, “you being a well-known expert on T. S. Eliot and all.” He waited for me to go on. “I’ll have to get hold of some 1920s records, and—”
“The history of recorded music is a legitimate field of inquiry, I suppose,” he interrupted again, “but if you intend to use recordings as references for your paper, they would have to be transcribed, and I can tell you that assigning customary prosodic notation to musical phrases is notoriously difficult.”
“What I thought I might do,” I went on doggedly, “is play some of the music and then read some lines of the poem, sort of hoping to show how one might relate to the other.”
The circles under his eyes got a little darker. “That approach,” Leonard sniffed, “is not scholarly.”
“Well,” I sulked, “I have to do something.”
“Research,” Leonard said crossly. “Research, Mr. Smith, not ‘something’.” He closed his eyes. “There is no possibility, I take it, that you’ll have the In Parenthesis paper done on time? What day did you sign up for, by the way?”
“December 18th,” I said. “That’s two weeks from this Thursday. I’d say there’s very little possibility.”
“Then what makes you think you can choose a different subject at this late date and still finish?” He opened his eyes and leaned forward in his chair. “This new subject you’re taking on isn’t child’s play, you know.”
“I can have a talk ready, at least,” I said. “With the other, I couldn’t even do that.”
He sighed, a long exhalation through his fine Asiatic nose. “Very well,” he said. “Prepare your talk. After that, if necessary, we can discuss your taking an Incomplete.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, and rose. “Anything else?”
“I understand you’re teaching only one class?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“There may be a research assistantship available during the spring semester,” he said. “I’ll be needing some help with a small project I’m working on. It has to do with David Jones, as a matter of fact; an interesting coincidence, now that I think of it. Anyway, you might give the matter some thought. It would be an opportunity to learn the ropes of the ship of knowledge, you might say.” He slicked back his Vaselined hair and smiled woodenly, one canine showing against his liverish lip.
“What would I be doing?” I asked, suppressing a shudder.
“Oh, you know, couple of hours here and there. You’d get acquainted with the stacks; it’d make things easier for you, in the long run. I did the same thing myself once, for Professor Bligh at Cornell. Made me an efficient researcher, if I may say so.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll type up a proposal for my talk and get it to you tomorrow.”
“No need to be terribly specific,” he said. “So long as we understand one another. Two typed pages should be sufficient, I should think. Tomorrow would be excellent, since you’re already a month late.”
I left his office growling. Two typed pages, just for a forty-minute presentation? If I’d been better at kissing his butt, I would’ve gotten by with a paragraph. Well, the tyrant would have his two pages; if it’d help me get where he had gotten, I’d cut it up into perforated strips and put in on a roller for him, too.
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