The Nix(13)

SLIPPERY SLOPE


“I’m just saying,” continues Laura, “that if you fail me you’ll have to fail everyone. Because everyone’s doing it. And then you won’t have no one left to teach.”

“Anyone,” he says.

“What?”

“You won’t have anyone left to teach. Not no one.”

Laura looks at him with an expression she might also give someone who’s speaking to her in Latin.

“It’s a double negative,” he says. “Won’t and no one.”

“Whatever.”

He knows it is a graceless and condescending thing to do, correcting someone’s spoken grammar. Like being at a party and criticizing someone for not being well-read enough, which in fact had happened to Samuel his first week on the job, at a faculty get-to-know-you dinner at the home of his boss, the dean of the college, a woman who had been a member of the English Department before bolting for her current administrative gig. She had built her academic career the typical way: by knowing everything there was to know about an extraordinarily small field (her specific niche was literature written during the plague, about the plague). At dinner, she had asked his opinion on a certain section of The Canterbury Tales, and, when he demurred, said, a little too loudly, “You haven’t read it? Oh, well, goodness.”





NON SEQUITUR


“Also?” Laura says. “I thought it was really unfair that you gave a quiz.”

“What quiz?”

“The quiz you gave? Yesterday? On Hamlet? I asked you if there was going to be a quiz and you said no. Then you gave a quiz anyway.”

“That’s my prerogative.”

“You lied to me,” she says, affecting this injured and aggrieved tone that sounds inherited from thousands of television family dramas.

“I didn’t lie,” he says. “I changed my mind.”

“You didn’t tell me the truth.”

“You shouldn’t have skipped class.”

What was it exactly about Larry Broxton that enraged him so much? Why the actual physical revulsion when he saw them sitting together and laughing together and walking home together? Part of it was that he found the boy worthless—his manner of dress, his casual ignorance, his prognathic face, his total wall of silence during classroom discussions, sitting there motionless, a lump of organic matter contributing nothing to the class or the world. Yes, these things angered him, and that anger was magnified at the knowledge that Laura would let this boy do things to her. Would let him touch her, would actually nuzzle up willingly to his tuberish skin, let his crusty lips press against hers, allow herself to be felt by him, his hands, his raggedly chewed fingernails that held little purplish globs of goo. That she might willingly remove his oversize basketball shorts back at his squalid dorm room that surely smelled of sweat and old pizza and body crust and urine, that she would allow all these things willingly and not suffer for them made Samuel suffer for her.





POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC


“Just because I skipped class,” says Laura, “doesn’t mean I should fail. That’s really unfair.”

“That’s not why you’re failing.”

“I mean, it’s just one class. You don’t have to go so, like, nuclear about it?”

What made Samuel suffer even more was the thought that what brought Laura and Larry together was likely a mutual dislike of him. That Samuel was the glue between them. That they both found him boring and tedious, and this was enough to make small talk on, enough to fill in the gaps between the heavy petting. It was, in a way, his fault. Samuel felt responsible for the sexual catastrophe that was ongoing in his class, back row, left side.





FALSE COMPROMISE


“I’ll tell you what,” says Laura, sitting up straight now and leaning toward him. “I can admit I was wrong about copying the paper, if you can admit you were wrong about giving the quiz.”

“Okay.”

“So as a compromise, I’ll rewrite the paper, and you’ll give me a makeup quiz. Everybody’s happy.” She lifts her hands, palms up, and smiles. “Voilà,” she says.

“How is that a compromise?”

“I think we need to get beyond the conversation of ‘did Laura cheat’ and toward the conversation of ‘how do we move forward.’?”

“It’s not a compromise if you get everything you want.”

“But you get what you want too. I’ll take full responsibility for my actions.”

“How?”

“By saying it. Saying that”—and here she puts her fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks—“I take full responsibility for my actions”—end air quotes.

“You take responsibility for your actions by facing the consequences for them.”

“You mean failing.”

“I mean, yes, failing.”

“That’s so not fair! I shouldn’t have to fail the class and take full responsibility for my actions. It should be one or the other. That’s how it works. And you know what else?”





RED HERRING


“I don’t even need this class. I shouldn’t even be in this class. When am I ever going to need this in real life? When is anyone ever going to ask if I know Hamlet? When is that going to be essential information? Can you tell me that? Huh? Tell me, when am I ever going to need to know this?”