Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(21)
In another email, he complained about his reputation. “My problem is I succeeded too well with my goal of bridging the gap between serious and commercial fiction. I made the plots too strong. The books have sold too many copies. So now according to the Washington Post I’m a ‘veteran mystery writer.’ And not one of my books is a true mystery.”
In another: “Did you notice that every fucking review so far has started off by announcing that I got a 200k advance for Summer? Is that how everybody judges a book these days, Harry?”
DeMarco sipped his whiskey. “So he does have a few bugs up his ass,” he said. “Not a happy camper at all.”
But Huston wore a different face in the emails to his students. Most were filled with encouragement and practical advice: “Don’t even worry about publication for now. You’re a strong writer, Nicole, and will get even stronger. So concentrate on that. Publication will come when you’re ready for it.”
“It’s all in the execution, Ben. Learn when to dramatize and when to summarize. You do too much of the latter and not enough of the former.”
All told, there were emails to or from nineteen different students. Huston signed all of his emails TH. In all of his remarks there was a kind but insistent honesty that DeMarco had to admire. “Not a man for blowing smoke up your ass,” DeMarco said.
Most students had received only one or two emails from Huston, but a student named Nathan Briessen had rated at least one each week for the past five weeks. All were responses to messages sent by Briessen with questions about structure, first-or third-person voice, amount of backstory to include. What struck DeMarco as interesting, though, was that three of Huston’s responses, though each started out with practical advice and encouragement, ended with some small variation on the same statement and question: Research this week. Care to join me? Even more intriguing was the most recent message, eight days old: I need to talk to Annabel again. Want to come along?
“Annabel?” DeMarco said. “Who the fuck is Annabel?”
He wrote Nathan Briessen on the tablet beside the keyboard, and beneath that name he wrote Annabel?
Two files contained correspondence between Huston and the dean of humanities, Huston, and the provost. Congratulations from the administrators, invitations to lunch, effusive glad-handing and backslapping, polite thank-yous from Huston. The only interesting message from the inbox had come from the dean, who wrote, Just wanted you to know that I’ve received a cc of Professor Conescu’s diatribe. Be assured that my response to it will be the usual one. Still, we must tread lightly here. Litigation can be messy, whether justified or not.
“Hmmm,” said DeMarco, tilting up his glass, which was empty. He considered refilling it but was too eager to open the file labeled Conescu. The first message was a two-page, single-spaced, and sometimes barely comprehensible denunciation of Huston. Its salutation was ominous. Sieg Heil, mein Chairman! The letter then went on to blame Huston and some other individual—“you and your sycophant henchman both”—for the department’s recent decision to deny Conescu’s application for tenure. Conescu promised a lawsuit charging “ethnic discrimination.” The letter was punctuated with pejoratives, most of them in all caps or bold type: villainous, despicable, contemptible, sadistic. He called Huston a “yuppie neo-Nazi,” a panderer, a harlot, an asswipe. He wished him “a cancerous life full of pustules and misery.”
DeMarco wrote Conescu on the tablet.
Seriously pissed.
Huston’s response to the message was more measured:
I understand your anger, Valya, but I am only one of nine colleagues who voted against tenure. And I assure you that I have nothing against you personally and not a single negative feeling toward Romanians in general. You know my concerns; I’ve made them very clear in the department meetings. As the chair of the tenure committee, it is my responsibility to do so, and I take that responsibility seriously. But, for the record, here they are again: I consider it improper that you charge your students $60 each for a textbook you wrote and paid to have published. Had the book been brought out by a reputable trade publisher, it would have been better edited. As you will recall, I made a photocopy of the first two pages for you and marked 19 spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors in those pages alone. And this is a composition text for beginning writers. How can we justify its use as such? It is one thing to self-publish for your own pleasure but another thing to force your students to purchase a book that is otherwise unmarketable and, unfortunately, riddled with the kind of errors we hope to teach these students to avoid. I consider it an abuse of our academic freedom that the administration has allowed this practice to continue for the past three years. That is why I cast my vote against awarding you tenure.
DeMarco reached for his tablet. He put an exclamation point after Conescu’s name.
The remaining file also contained three messages, two from Huston’s colleague, the poet Robert Denton, and the other from Huston to Denton. In the first, Denton stated that he too had been cc’d a copy of Conescu’s angry letter, and added:
I want to see that slimy, slinking bastard’s balls cut off and nailed to the wall. But chickenshit you know who is quaking in his Guccis over the possibility of a lawsuit.
Huston, in his response, cautioned restraint.
The vote was 9–3 against him. Is he going to sue all of us? It’s all bluff, you know that. He blows off steam in these letters, then he sits in the department meetings and never makes a peep.