The Englishman (22 page)

“Anna, would you like to come to our house-warming party? Might be nice for you, get to know a few of the locals? Danny, hmm—what do you think? Or Jake?” She turns to Bernie and gives him a significant look.

“Listen, I thank you both, but I’m not actually…I’ve only been here for a few weeks, it’s a little early for a
shidduch
date!” I squirm.

“Anna’s right.” Bernie nods. “Anyway, a party isn’t really a good occasion to catch up. Should we take her to
Los Viejos Amigos
first, after Yom Kippur, for a quiet glass of wine? That’s our favorite Mexican place here in Shaftsboro,” he informs me, as if I didn’t know that already, and as if we hadn’t already agreed to meet there in two weeks’ time. Bernie, it seems, is a bit of a heel, still. But I don’t mind. I like him much better now than when we were fourteen, and I am looking forward to knowing him a little better, too.

Chapter 13

T
HE
V
ERY
N
EXT
M
ONDAY
M
ORNING
I bump up against the realities of what it means to have Matthew Dancey take over the department chair because
other people
are shirking their administrative duties. When I check whether I have any snail mail, I come across Tim, squatting on a big box of Xerox paper and apparently meditating into a letter.

“Hey! All right?” I have learned that Tim is liable to lash out when pressed, but I also want him to know that he can confide in me.

“It’s…nothing.” He shrugs. “They’ve re-shuffled my committee.”

“Your tenure committee?”

“Mmhm. Hornberger is out, obviously, but Dancey is in. That’s…not so good. The good news is, the first paychecks of the semester are here!”

“Oooh—yay!” I make a beeline for L in the wall of pigeonholes. “This, my friend, is a moment I’ve been waiting for since I started college and realized that I would rather be a professor than a rabbi!”

Tim stares at me with his mouth open like a cartoon character.

“A
rabbi?”
he echoes. “But, babycakes, you wouldn’t look at all hot in a whachamcallit—that prayer rug—what? Anna? What’s wrong?”

I should shut up, but I can’t.

“This is wrong,” I say, and my voice sounds odd in my own ears. “My monthly net salary should be more than this. Almost two hundred dollars more than this, actually.”

“Probably just a mistake,” he says, almost too calm to sound confident.

“Maybe I should…my contract is in my office; I’ll go and see whether Dancey is in.”

“Or wait till next month?” Tim cautions me. “See whether by then—”

Let us cast away the sin of vain ambition, which prompts us to strive for goals, which bring neither true fulfillment nor genuine contentment.

The verses from the
tashlikh
service linger in my mind, but I do not see how it is evidence of vain ambition to insist on the salary that I negotiated. Those extra two hundred may not bring me genuine contentment, but being cheated out of them would make me genuinely discontented.

“Professor Dancey? Sir? May I ask for a couple of minutes of your time?”

“Sure, Anna. Go through.” He points me to his open office door while he continues his exchange with Mrs. Forster in a low voice. I walk in and wait next to one of the two broad metal-and-leather chairs in front of his desk. He makes me wait for about five minutes before he comes in.

“You should have sat down, Anna! Or do you find us so very formal here at Ardrossan?”

Matthew Dancey. Always a master at the “Have you hit your child today?” sort of question. I smile politely and sit down.

“Thank you, sir. It’s kind of you to make time for me at such short notice. I’ll come right to the point: there’s been a hiccup about my salary—”

“Oh, while you’re here, Anna—sorry to interrupt you.” He looks at the collection of Post-it notes on the cupboard door and peels one off. “Anna’s shoes,” he reads.

“Pardon me?”

“An odd request, isn’t it?” He smiles. “Indulge me. Would you show me your shoes?”

Utterly baffled I stick out one foot from under the chair. I am wearing Victorian-style lace-up half-boots, what I think of as my Mary Poppins boots.

“Very nice.” Dancey nods, like a benevolent uncle. “But they are hard-soled, aren’t they? And so many floors of our building are stone-tiled—”

He seems to be saying that my heels are too noisy, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is what he is saying, because I have never heard anything so absurdly petty. So I shake my head to signal my puzzlement.

“I’m afraid to say, Anna, that I’ve had a complaint about the noise your heels make. It’s always a question of what our neighbors are willing to tolerate, isn’t it? When I was a graduate assistant at Princeton, there was a very senior professor who used to listen to Wagner in his office—drove us crazy! I’m sure you wouldn’t want any of your colleagues to feel that you disrespect their right to a quiet work environment.”

“Of course I wouldn’t, and I’m sorry to hear this, but—”

“I just felt I ought to give you a little hint, Anna. You will know best how to respond in this case. Now, you came to see me about…?”

Choose your battles.

“My paycheck, sir. It’s just a misunderstanding, I’m sure, a mistake, but I wanted to first consult with you how best to proceed to get it rectified. It doesn’t match my contract.”

Downplay your annoyance.

Appeal to wisdom of higher-ups in sorting out your life.

“Salary issues are always sensitive.”

“Well, simple, too, in this case, I hope.” I cast a beaming smile at him and extract the sheets from the folder I have brought. “The contract I signed in June specifies my salary and the major benefits…here. My check, however, doesn’t match. By a fairly substantial margin, in fact.”

Dancey eyes me with evident misgivings before he takes the documents that I’m offering him.

“I consider such a mistake highly unlikely.”

“Well, sir, if you’ll compare the two sums—”

He begins to suck in his lower lip and chew his beard even before he can have found the relevant passages in the two documents.

“Ah, well, this—” he waves my contract in the air “—was signed by Greg Newburgh. He was interim Provost, after Clement Hills died. Were you told about Clement? Such a tragic story. He was one of the best administrators I ever worked with. We were undergraduates at Princeton together. He dropped dead in the middle of a meeting. Cardiac arrest. Such a loss, that man.”

“Sudden deaths are always especially shocking.”

“So naturally everything was at sixes and sevens over at Rossan.” A row of teeth gleams inside the beard, although his eyes do not crease at all. “I’m afraid I cannot help you with this, Anna.” He hands me back the two sheets. “This is a good salary for someone in your position, a first-year assistant professor, so maybe you want to consider your next step carefully.”

“I do—that is why I came to see you first, to ask for your advice in this matter.”

“Well, you heard my advice. Salary re-negotiations are invariably time-consuming and generally frustrating for all involved.” He gets up to show me out. Throw me out.

“I see that, sir.” I have no choice, I must rise, too. “But I’m not looking to re-negotiate at all. I believe a mistake has been made, which can easily be corrected. Surely this is in the best interests of everyone involved.”

“And surely it will be, next month. I suggest you wait for the next check, instead of kicking up a great fuss now.”

“I’m not—”

“Anyway, given that in your opinion Ardrossan is not a top university, I wonder how you can expect a top salary.”

For a moment or two, all I can do is stare at him.

“Sir, I—what can you mean? Of course I consider Ardrossan to be a top university!”

“You do? I’m glad to hear it.” He registers my loss of composure with satisfaction. “Have you seen the article about you in the
The Folly
? A very nice photograph, if I may say so.”

“N-No, I haven’t. Thank you, sir.”

He pulls a copy out from under a pile of folders and leafs through it.

“They found the opportunity to speak to some students after your first classes…this bit was interesting: ‘Dr. Lieberman brings a kind of energy and intensity to the classroom that some Ardrossan students may need time to get used to. A taste of academic life in the Big Apple.’ Well—” he looks up at me “—I wouldn’t call that negative feedback, would you?”

“Certainly not, sir. Energy and intensity are good things, in my book.”

“Oh, talking of energy—Dolph has been talking to some people who will have the running of the ICSLP, and it seems that if you get a bid in quickly, you may well manage to be among the conferences sponsored next year. Next fall, probably. You two better stick your heads together and start writing a call!”

His voice is at its most sonorously patronizing, and I am painfully aware that I am in the hands of a master rhetorician who has outmaneuvered me.

“Yes, thank you, sir. Then I will next ask for an appointment at the Office for Faculty Affairs. May I refer to our talk today in my discussion with the Dean?” Mistake, mistake. And yet.

“Of course you may. But I doubt that Holly Ortega will have time to concern herself with such a trifle!” he says coldly. Now I have really annoyed him, but at least he has understood that I mean business. Irene is right; sometimes you have to piss people off if you want to stop them from messing with you. Sometimes the boomerang comes back, though, and hits you right in the teeth. We’ll see about this one.

“The wrong salary? But that sounds highly unlikely,” says a blithe female voice in the Dean’s office when I call them.

“Nonetheless, I was wondering whether the Dean has time to see me briefly this week or next week. That would be so very helpful!”

“This week is all full up, I’m afraid.”

“And next week? It needn’t take long. I’m sure it’s a simple mistake.”

“Hmmm…nothing again, I’m afraid. Dr. Ortega is busy right now, as you can imagine.”

“Well, then perhaps she isn’t the person I should see about this at all? Could you possibly advise me who the best person to contact would be? I’d be really grateful.”

“Oh, I couldn’t say,” she pipes back. “It’s not my job to know these things, you see.”

“Yes, I see. Well, since it’s a matter involving my contract, perhaps the legal department would be the best place to try? What do you think? One of the legal advisors in HR?”

There is a short silence in the line.

“Can you make Wednesday at eight fifteen?”

I assure her that I can and dash off into the west wing (
clackety-clack
go the Mary Poppins boots), where I’m about to miss the beginning of my Comedy class. A crowd of students is loitering in front of my classroom.

“It’s Dr. Bergstrom’s class,” Jocelyn says. “They haven’t finished yet.”