Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 9

I did see two weeks later when I surprised Ginger enjoying the assistant to the Dean of Continuous Learning, on his desk. There had been a little get-together in the Continuous Learning division to introduce that session’s new faculty, and Ginger, whose workload included tutoring extramural students who needed help in writing essays, had there met the assistant to the dean and carted her off to his lair.

When I told Carole she laughed. “I wondered who he would pick first,” she said. Her remark told me once again that I know nothing important about the people I know. And then, two weeks later, I went down to the office one Sunday afternoon to pick up some grade sheets and I found him with a woman who teaches “Movement” in the Theatre department, on the floor this time.

I couldn’t leave it there. The next morning I asked him, “If the assistant to the dean finds out about the Movement teacher, isn’t life going to be difficult?”

“For her, you mean?”

“For you, for Christ’s sake.”

“Why? I’m not planning to marry either of them. If one of them does find out, she can tell me to fook off, if she wants. Look, let’s go down to the canteen at twelve and compare sexual etiquette in Scarborough and Scunthorpe; until then, I’ve got to get this bloody essay marked.”

“One last thing. Don’t you have a home? I mean, this isn’t anyone’s idea of a bower of bliss, is it?” I waved a hand around the shabby office, which isn’t even carpeted. His duffel coat had been used to protect the Movement teacher from splinters.

He wrote something on the essay he was reading, put down his pen, and crossed his hands on top of his head. “I live in a residence for postulants for the Catholic Church, a seminary, like, because it’s very cheap. Actually I get my board and room free in exchange for light janitorial duties, like cleaning the toilets and shovelling snow. I’m trying to make ends meet on the pittance they are paying me around here. In answer to your question, it’s a very liberal house, this residence; there’s only one rule—no women allowed past the front door. Now, will you shut up for ten minutes?” He picked up his pen, blew a piece of fluff from the point, and went back to work.

So now, whenever I use the office after hours, I spend a lot of time fumbling with the door key. But I’ve never found Ginger at home and busy since that day.

I don’t think he will be here very long. His other characteristic, related, surely, to his libido, is that he gets into fights. Twice so far, he’s appeared on a Monday with a cut lip and a bruised face which, he says, happened in a pickup rugby game he gets involved in on Sundays in High Park, but privately he confessed to me that they were both caused by someone in a bar, “taking the piss”.

Ginger doesn’t fit the academic mould, even the Hambleton approximation, and yet he’s much more of a scholar than I am: he’s been seen coming out of the Rare Books room of Robarts Library. He just doesn’t look like one.

When I arrived the next morning, Ginger was waiting with a surprise for me. Our furniture—my desk and the old trestle table they had found for Ginger, and our joint filing cabinet—had been rearranged to make room for another table and chair. Ginger pointed to the door. A third name had been added to ours, printed in large, word processed letters and cello-taped to the door. “M. KINOSHITA”. We had a new roommate.

This was no surprise. As part-timers we were constantly kept aware of our lack of status. They wouldn’t have simply moved another person into the office of a tenured faculty member, but those rules—of courtesy, respect, etc.—don’t apply to us.

“Japanese?” I asked Ginger, as I stood there with my back to the doorway.

Ginger nodded. A small smile.

“Met him yet?”

Ginger nodded.

“What’s the ’M’ stand for?”

Now Ginger was grinning out loud, as it were. “Masaka” he said.

I said, “That’s Greek. Not a common combination,” risking the charge of racism that is invoked whenever any comment of any kind is made about ethnicity.

“Not Moussaka—Masaka,” a voice behind me said. “M-A-S-A-K-A.” A female voice, quiet, clear, poised, toneless. “Masaka Kinoshita.” The “k”s sounded like tiny nuts being cracked.

I turned. A small person stood in the corridor, not smiling but not unsmiling. A black cap of hair with points curling under her ears, unoccidental eyes, ivory-coloured skin, grey schoolgirl tunic over a white shirt, black shoes. She was loaded down with copy paper.

“Masaka?” I repeated, but without her nutcracker clarity.

“Kinoshita,” she repeated, twitching her nose, showing she was human, distantly related to creatures like me and Ginger, then smiling properly, confirming the twitch came from amusement.

This time, I promised myself, I would get the name straight before sunset, not stumble around with it for two weeks. Masaka Kinoshita. Ma-sa-ka Ki-no-shi-ta. Already in my head, the nuts were starting to crack. “Joe,” I said stepping backwards into the table she was heading for, banging my spine against the edge. I grinned and nodded, holding out my hand.

She walked by me, put down the stack of paper, then turned and offered me a tiny ivory paw.

“You’re the new sessional,” I said.

She smiled again and moved around behind the table, sat down, and drew the stack of paper towards her. It was some kind of questionnaire.

“Masaka’s replacing Wanamaker for a few weeks,” Ginger said.

Lester Wanamaker was a part-timer who lasted for only three weeks until so many students had come to the department offices to look for him that the chairman decided to make enquiries and learned that Wanamaker had actually only lasted a week before disappearing westwards, back to Saskatchewan, leaving no forwarding address.

We concluded that he had become paralysed with doubt—he had never taught before—because his colleagues, putting together their recollections, found the common thread of his talk had been his worry about where and how to begin, not with the literary material on the course, but with the actual occasion. Should you keep the students waiting so that you could stride in, making an entrance? What should the opening remark be on the first day? Should you stand behind the lectern all the time, or walk about? Should you permit talking in class? And so on.

In any event, according to his students, he had simply walked in with his head down and started to read from the text, “sort of shouting” as one student put it. Sometimes he read a short story, sometimes two. He never looked at them. Towards the end of the week one student asked him what he was doing and he said he was acquainting them with the text.

It was a breakdown, of course; we’ve seen them before and we should have realised it, so we felt a bit guilty about him.

When he disappeared, some of us did penance by offering to teach a bit of his course, including our chairman, who stays out of the classroom if he can. Now, finally, we had a replacement.

“Have you met a class yet?” I asked Masaka, as I already thought of her, without losing the feeling of weird-ness at finding myself the colleague and roommate of Madame Butterfly and realizing why Pinkerton got hooked.

“This will be my first one.” She looked at her watch. “At ten,” she said.

“What do you plan to do?” I asked.

She took her time, knitting her brows at me slightly, then gave a small shrug. “Teach them,” she said, and picked up her stack of paper and left.