Heads of the Colored People(7)

“I’ll get on that.” Randolph fake smiled.

“Great. Hi, Isabela,” Carol said before she left. “How’re you liking the office?”

“It is very nice with the lights on,” she said, looking at Randolph.

Carol paused, and glancing at Randolph said, “I suppose it would be.”

Randolph didn’t know what to make of Isabela’s comment at the time, so he focused on Carol’s. He’d avoided his mentoring meetings because DIY struck him as another nut among many in the school’s canister. Though he was six feet three, he felt something shrink in her presence.

? ? ?

A few days after the first time she requested more light, on a day that Randolph did not recall as particularly overcast, Isabela beat him into the office, and when he arrived all the lights were on. He sat down at his desk and considered how he should approach the situation. Perhaps she didn’t understand the severity of his medical problems. He could call her over to his desk and pull up a Wikipedia page about migraines. He could say, in Spanish, that he really preferred natural light to all this fake stuff, which changes the rhythm of the brain and disrupts work. He could tell her that he’d been generous by using headphones, instead of speakers, to listen to music, so the least she could do was let him leave the lights off.

He said, pantomiming an expansive space, “The windows are very big, bright, don’t you think?”

She said, “Yes, but an office without lights? It is very strange. It doesn’t look nice.”

“What about a desk lamp?”

“Desk lamp.” She spit the words out like they were made of metal.

“It’s a little light that sits on your side of the office, for overcast days.”

“I know what it is. I will think about it,” she said, turning back to her computer. She did not offer to turn off the lights. “It is cold in here,” she said, pulling her sweater around her chest.

? ? ?

When Reggie called Randolph that afternoon to check on him, Randolph tried to describe the environment accurately, starting with DIY. “She’s at least seventy and limps along the hallways with a cane, flashing warnings at visible and invisible offenses. She’s not the department chair, but you’d think so,” he said.

“Sounds like Black Crazy personified,” Reggie said, though he said that about nearly anyone he saw as overworked, and about most female academics who happened to be black. Reggie had served as Randolph’s assigned faculty mentor at Preston through the Minority Mentoring Program. He was about ten years older than Randolph, and had written a book called Black Crazy: Tipping Points in Black Literature, 1874–1974. He took Randolph to lunch once a month, observed his classes a few times, and wrote a recommendation letter that would sit in his Interfolio queue should Randolph choose “not to fool around after this little experiment is over and get a real job at a research university.”

“She’s Black Crazy all right. I’ll tell you about her later. But look, Reg, I want to pick your brain about my new office mate.”

He described Isabela as “a wall with a nose,” hoping to avoid a lecture.

“Good. I’ve told you before—”

Reggie repeated his stock advice, the same advice Randolph’s parents and all his other mentors, formal and informal, repeated: “Don’t screw it up. Err on the side of passivity. Don’t date anyone in the humanities departments. Don’t even look at those women’s legs when they pull out their short skirts in the spring or when they prance up the stairs in those leggings.” Lost in his lecture, Reggie failed to give Randolph any useful suggestions about the light situation.

Randolph assured him that there was no chance of him dating Isabela and said goodbye. Before he hung up, he heard an incredulous “Mhhhm,” though Randolph supposed he could see why Reggie wouldn’t believe him. At Preston, Randolph had broken two of Reggie’s rules at once by dating Crystal—both colleague and white woman—and a third when he told him he wanted to take a break from the research setting and get a teaching job at a liberal arts school for a couple of years. “You’re on your way to Black Crazy,” Reggie said with a shrug. “If your students don’t kill you, the four-four load will.”

The teaching load was heavier than Randolph expected, even after hearing Reggie’s stories of lost colleagues and “scholars who showed so much promise early on,” but the environment bothered Randolph the most, the cramped classrooms, the oldness of the place, its sharp luminance. In meetings, Randolph pouted while DIY sat on her elevated chair whispering, the women leaning in, straining to hear her. That’s how they all were, Randolph concluded, making you lean into them and accommodate their every whim, their eccentricities. Randolph had begun to hate the whole lot of them.

? ? ?

When he returned to his office—their office—after class the next day, the door was open and the lights were on. Randolph thwacked his folder and a stack of papers on his desk without looking at Isabela.

“You can turn the lights off,” she said without looking up. She was wearing one of those sweaters with a low-cut oval neck that usually look good on really skinny girls, yet somehow it did not, Randolph insisted, look good on Isabela.

“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“No, I did not know if you were gone for the day or for a class. It’s okay.” She frowned, nodding toward the light switch.