The Pavilion of Former Wives by Jonathan Baumbach

Author:Jonathan Baumbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Pavilion of Former Wives
ISBN: 9780982631898
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2016-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

OFFICE HOURS

I usually keep my door locked during office hours, not wanting to give the random eager student the wrong impression. I’m opposed to conferences, though I make myself available as required—I hang out at my desk one hour a week for just that purpose—but I see no point in unfelt encouragement. You have to knock at least three times to get me to open the door. So only the persistent, who usually visit with an agenda of complaint, get in to see me, and it is the persistent who are generally the most tiresome. So much of college teaching, so much of life, is wasting time in the disguise of conversation. Whatever small wisdom I have to impart has already been imparted in lectures or in the margins of papers I’ve graded. So, as the more perceptive of my students note, the way to gain my respect is to stay away.

The above is all prelude, of course, to my describing an experience in 180-degree opposition to my hard-earned expectations. And it happens with someone—a woman, a graduate student—who had come in on the wrong day to see the person who uses my office on the days I’m not there. This is what she said to me when, against better judgment, I opened the door to let her in on her fifth barely audible knock. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and said accusingly, “You’re not Professor Haggert.”

“Haggert is in on Mondays and Wednesdays,” I said.

Nevertheless she walked by me and sat down in the chair next to my desk. “What day is today?” she asked, as if she had caught me in some kind of self-contradiction.

My first impression was that she had been crying or had spent a sleepless night or both. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, though she was clearly not at her best, whatever that might have been.

“Today was Tuesday when I woke up this morning,” I said.

“Are you positive?” she said. “When I woke up it was Wednesday.”

So here was this woman I’d never met—I did have the sense that I’d seen her before somewhere or other but still—storming into my office to argue about what day it was. “If it was Wednesday,” I said, “Haggert would have been here instead of me.”

“And we both would have been happier,” she said. “Or maybe not.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Would you give Professor Haggert a message?”

“The thing is, Ms….I never see Haggert. We’re not here on the same days. You could leave him a note.”

“No,” she said. “I could but I can’t. A note has too much permanence.”

I laughed, assuming she had made a joke, but in the next moment I realized that had not been her intent. She was tearing up, foraging in her purse for something with which to wipe her eyes or blow her nose. Nothing emerged and she used the back of her hand to blot her eyes.

“Are you all right?” I said, not knowing what else to say, embarrassed at the poverty of my sympathy.

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