Look Closer(41)

“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. I don’t need cheering up.”

“Well, I do,” he says. “I want people who deserve the job. I don’t like people clouting their way into a professorship because of their donor father. This school has enough money already. So help me drown my sorrows, okay?”

How can I say no to that?

“Only if you let me buy,” I say.

“Even better.”

? ? ?

The place is just a walk down from the law school, a block south and near Michigan Avenue, a French place that, according to Anshu, has the best monkfish in the world. I’ve never eaten monkfish and probably won’t start today. I’m looking forward more to the well-stocked bar area after lunch.

“Bindra, party of two,” says Anshu, when we walk in. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

I glance around the room. It doesn’t take me long.

Dean Comstock and his new protégé, Associate Professor Reid Southern, soon to be full professor, sitting in one of the booths, a bottle of champagne on ice by the table.

You have seriously got to be kidding me. They’re celebrating his ascension to full professor, and I have to be in the same fucking room with them? I mean, why doesn’t someone come over and waterboard me while we’re at it?

“We can go somewhere else,” Anshu whispers. “I really don’t care where—”

“Not at all,” I say, patting his arm. “I’m dying to try that monkfish.”

“Simon, really.”

“They already saw us,” I say. “If I walk out now, I look like an asshole.”

It’s true. They’ve seen us. And now the dean and Reid are whispering something to each other and putting on their good-sportsmanship-pity faces.

“Are we all set, gentlemen?” the woman at the reception podium asks us.

All set! Just don’t seat us next to them, or near them, and maybe I can get through this.

“Professors!” Dean Comstock calls out, Mr. Orange Bow Tie today, his silver cuff link gleaming as he extends a hand to us. I was kind of hoping handshakes would go the way of the dodo bird after COVID-19, but the dean’s an old-school kind of guy, so I shake his hand.

“Good to see you, Reid,” I say, though I’d rather have my fingernails removed with pliers.

As Anshu has pointed out several times, Reid indeed looks the part of a law professor with his sport coat, circular eyeglasses, salt-and-pepper goatee, and general air of smugness.

“No class today?” Reid asks me, sizing up my usual attire, a button-down shirt and jeans.

Well, that was a little below the belt, wasn’t it, Reid? I mean, you know how I dress, and you know that your buddy Dean Cumstain just bulldozed the field so you could glide into the full-professor spot untouched. You could at least show some semblance of grace, but you can’t help yourself, you have to take me down a peg, anyway?

You do know how this all played out, don’t you, Reid? I’d imagine the dean didn’t spell out every detail for you, but I have no doubt that he let you, and your big-bucks daddy, know that he was responsible for “talking some sense” into me or “helping” me “understand” the situation. He “took care of it,” I’m sure he told you, in his faux-diplomatic way.

Yeah, you know that. You’re smiling at me with that patronizing, blue-blood smirk, that aura of cutthroat privilege. You don’t mind that the hierarchical levers were pulled on your behalf. Hell, you’re proud of it, and you’re happy to let me know it. Sure, I didn’t submit my materials, so ultimately I was a good little boy, but how dare I even think of applying for that seat when you applied on the first day and let the world know that REID SOUTHERN wanted that position. How dare I even consider challenging your ascension to the throne. Really, who do I think I am, contemplating that I am even remotely on your level?

Right, Reid?

“Congratulations,” Anshu says to Reid. “I look forward to your joining us.”

“That’s good of you to say, Professor,” Reid replies. “By the way, Simon, I read your blog the other day,” he adds, calling me by name after referring to Anshu by his title. Yeah, I notice things like that. “Something about the Eleventh Circuit and the third-party doctrine?”

“Right.”

“It was a fun piece,” he says.

A fun piece? I dissected that court opinion and exposed it for the circular reasoning that it was.

A fun piece. Our courts are lying down and allowing the government to expand its reach beyond anything anyone would ever have envisioned, and it’s a fun piece?

I smile at him.

Easy now, Simon.

I pat my pocket, pull out my phone like I just got a text. “Will you guys excuse me one minute?”

I step away while they chit-chat. I take a breath.

Easy now. Good, clean thoughts. Calming exercises, go.

“Tear” and “tier” are pronounced the same but “tear” and “tear” are not.

“Fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing.

I dig into my email. Not the In-Box or the Sent but the Drafts folder.

“Arkansas” and “Kansas” are pronounced differently.

We drive on a parkway but park in a driveway.