THEY WERE ACTUALLY still there waiting, most of them anyway, when I took the comer fast and walked in, totally unprepared. No notes, no books, just sweaty clothes and a worried smile on my face.
Felt just like my undergrad days at USNO, in fact.
It had suddenly come to me, on the streetcar back uptown, that this was Monday, and that Monday was a class day. I'd already missed all Wednesday's classes and half of today's. I asked the woman beside me, an older black woman sitting with knees far apart, stockings rolled to her ankles, what time it was.
One-forty. I could just about make it.
I just about did.
Two-ten on the classroom clock when I got there. Many hadn't unpacked books and papers. Some sat talking quietly. Kyle Skillman methodically moved potato chips from bag to mouth. Others scribbled in notebooks-homework, letters, shopping lists. Some were reading, a few of them even reading Beckett or Joyce. Sally Mara was reading, too, but not Molloy or Ulysses. She was reading The Old Man.
Somehow I got through the hour. Somehow, talking about Finnegans Wake, At Swim-Two-Birds and early Beckett, and with several tactical detours to nearby Queneau country, I managed to keep them mostly awake and myself, if not exactly on track, then always within view of it, at least.
Sally Mara was waiting for me outside the classroom.
"Have a few minutes?" she asked. When I said I did, she fell in beside me, round face turned up as we walked.
"You'd look great with a beard," she said. We pushed our way through sluggish doors and started down the first half-flight of stairs. "Don't you think?"
"I had one once. Woman I was living with kept trying to grab it to do dishes, thought it was a Brillo pad."
Her smile broadened.
"You didn't tell us you were a writer, Mr. Griffin."
"Lots of things I don't admit to, Mrs. Mara. But somehow these nasty little secrets have a way of getting out."
"But you're good."
We started down the second half-flight.
"Thank you. But that was a long time ago. A different world."
"What are you working on now?"
For a moment I almost said, I'm trying to find my son.
"Nothing," I said instead.
By then we were at the office door. I put in the key and felt the entire lock assembly rotate as I turned it. I pushed at the cylinder with my other hand to hold it in place.
"That's… awful," Mrs. Mara said.
Finally got the door open.
"Sad," Mrs. Mara added.
Each year I feel the gap between myself and these young people widen-cracks taking over a floor as boards wear away. We don't live in the same world, hardly speak the same language. It's possible we never did. Though every year or so a face will tilt up out of some new mass of them, Conversational French or The Contemporary European Novel, yet another redundant student assembly, a group walking together down Magazine or in Lakeside Mall, and for a moment, as a kind of electric arc passes between us, I'll recognize: here is another.
Something of that sense now with Sally Mara.
"Not really," I told her. "There are probably too many books in the world already. And certainly too many second-rate writers."
She stood with one hip raised, leaning against the wall. Still smiling.
"I don't believe you mean that."
I remembered Dr. Lola Park as I said, "I'm sure you don't want to."
Using her other hip, Sally Mara pushed away from the wall. She came closer to me, inches away, face turned up, eyes searching mine.
"Then I won't."
Again, that sudden smile. There'd been times in my life I could have lived on that smile for months.
"I just wanted to thank you, Mr. Griffin. That's all. The course's been fabulous, I mean. Butfinding your books…"
She ducked her head.
"That's all, I just wanted you to know that"
"Thank you."
At the door she turned and said, all in a rush, "I think they're great Mr. Griffin. Really great!"
Then she was gone.
But today my dance card was full.
Another form replaced hers in the doorway. Light from the office's narrow, high window silhouetted his hair, like some exotic plant, on the wall behind.
"I waited outside. Had no desire to interrupt. Or to impose. Hope you don't mind."
He came a tentative step or two into the office.
Much more than that, of course, and he'd fetch up against the far wall.
"Yourememberme? Keith LeRoy?"
"Sure I do."
Last name accented on the firstsyllable. The young man with Woody Woodpecker hair who'd run Tast-T Donut all but single-handedly for minimum wage. Who, when I spoke to him on the phone, with his beeper and E-mail address, had glided so naturally from street talk to standard English.
"This where you work, huh."
I nodded.
"What you do."
Nodded again, thenrealizedit was a question. I was nowhere near as sensitive as Keith LeRoy to inflection, to the subtle clues of class language. Though once I had been. So much gets lost along the way.
"I teach."
"Mmm-hmm," he said, looking around. "This all yours?"
"Pretty much."
"Good. That's good." Nodding. "What you teach."
"Literature. French."
"Parlez-vous and all that."
"Right."
"And literature."
"Novels. Stories. Essays. All the things people make up to try to understand and explain what we're doing here, what life's all about, why we choose the things we do."
"Mmm-hmm. You done this a long time."
"Keith, tell you the truth, it feels to me now like I've done everything a long time."
His topknot bobbed, directly before me and in silhouette on the wall behind, as he nodded.
"Know what you mean."
He looked about. At books and papers stacked on shelves behind my desk, at that nairow, high window, at the computer that worked when fate allowed, trays full of letters and interoffice memos.
"Always thought someday I might do this. Go thisroute. You know? Be a kick."
I don't think I even paused to consider his obvious intelligence, his easy, untutored shuttle among social stations. I simply said, "You decide to, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help you. Since I'm teaching here, I have some voice in who gets admitted, who gets financial aid, that sort of thing."
He stood watching me.
"Really, man? Why would you want to do that for me?"
Hell if I knew.
"Any reason I shouldn't?"
He shook his head.
"Thanks," he said after a moment.
Maybe because I hadn't tried to help LaVerne, hadn't been able to help Alouette or my own son?
"Thank me after you decide and something comes of it."
He nodded. Seemed quite settled in there. Neither of us spoke for a couple of minutes.
"So…" he said.
"So."
"Few days ago you were looking for Shon Delany. That still up?"
"Till I find him, yeah."
"Figured. Well…"
That well went on and on, stretching taut like a clothesline, looping back on itself, suggesting all sorts of things. LeRoy had this way of squeezing a single word, so, well, for all it was worth.
" 'Round seven this morning my beeper goes off, and when I haul the body out of bed to a phone it's Delany on the other end, wondering when he can pick up his final check.
"I'm half an inch from telling him we don't do finalchecks-out of sight, out of mind, right? Invisible and insane, like the old joke goes-when I remember how you came 'round asking. So who knows why, but I decide to hold off, stall him. Told him maybe tomorrow. You got a number, I can call you then. I'll call you, he says. Right…"
Another verbal net thrown out. Dragging towards the boat, wriggling, sliding over one another's smooth bodies, a hearty catch of suppositions, implicit gestures, possibilities.
"How bad you want to talk to this Shon Delany?"
"His family asked me to find him."
"Family."
"Brother, actually. He's the one that takes care of them all. Shon's mother, some smaller kids."
"I used to have a brother, couple of years younger than me. Really smart. We all thought, this kid can do anything he wants to, anything at all. One Saturday night they shot him down in the parking lot outside Wal-Mart. Took him for someone else, maybe-or just drove by and he was there. We never knew. He'd just turned fourteen."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah. Yeah, sure you are. Everyone is. Delany do something."
"I don't think so. Not yet."
"But you're thinking he hangs where he is, it's only a matter of time."
I nodded.
"Good kid."
"I know."
"But he has that hitch in his eye. Looking for something. Hungry."
I nodded again. Wondering if I had ever come across anyone, any age, who understood people the way Keith LeRoy did.
"Well. You are what you eat. Nothing larger than your own head, right?"
He smiled.
"Delany told me he had to have the money. Don't hold your breath, I said-anyway it's only a few dollars. He says, hole he's in, a few dollars could just make a difference."
LeRoy saw the question before I asked it. He shrugged.
"Who knows? That kind of need, it's got its own language."
"You think he'll call back?"
"I think he would of, yeah. But I told him I wouldn't be there-got my rounds to make, pickups and deliveries and the like. Be gone most of the day. Asked what part of town he was in, maybe we could meet up somewhere nearby later on. First he didn't answer. Then he said, 1 don't know…'"
Keith LeRoy grinned.
"You free 'round six o'clock, Mr. Griffin?"
"I could be."
"Good. Then you just might want to come along with me to the Funky Butt Bar, midcity. Have a sandwich, maybe a couple of beers, see what happens?"
Someone at the office door cleared his throat.
"I'll come by where you stay," Keith LeRoy said, "pick you up. That okay? 'Round five, five-thirty."
He nodded to me, then to my newest visitor, who stepped back out of the door to let him pass.
One last dance on my card, this time strictly %, a fox-trot, maybe.
Dean Treadwell wondered aloud just how serious was my dedication to teaching, to the university. He knew that I had a drinking problem, of course-and raised his hand when I started to protest. He understood, too, that my creative work, my own novels and stories, were of primary importance to me. He'd read and admired several of them himself, at his wife's urging. And devoted as it was to liberal arts, the university was happy to make certain concessions and accommodations. But.
Surely I understood that the university's obligation.
That the department must.
That I, as an untenured assistant professor, perhaps especially as an untenured assistant professor.
After all, we're all of us, students and faculty alike, on campus for.
Mind you, Treadwell's as fine a man as you're likely to pluck out from among these academic brambles and thickets. I'm sure he resented giving the lecture as much as I did receiving it.
So when he was done, I said "You're absolutely right" and handed over the office key. "You have to hold on to the lock, push in on it, to get it open. There's probably a trick to getting the computer to work too, but I haven't found it. The students pretty much take care of themselves."
"Mr. Griffin," he said. "Lewis. Please. Wait."
But I was in the doorway now, canceling out the rest of my dance card.
"I have been," I said. "Waiting. For far too long."