One Coffee With Read online

  “Tea for you, Professor?” asked Sandy.

  “No, I think I’ll have coffee today,” said Professor Simpson. “Black with one sugar, please.”

  Lemuel Vance couldn’t resist the gleam of Sandy’s long bare legs beneath a spring green cotton skirt.

  “Summer must be ‘icumen in,’” he grinned. “Those are the first female legs I’ve seen since last fall.”

  Vance knew all about the practical aspects of pants—their comfort, their convenience, their warmth in cold weather—and one always ran the risk of being called a chauvinist if one expressed a simple admiration of female anatomy, but how lovely were young girls in spring dresses! The pale green and gold of her reminded him of Botticelli’s Venus, and he was unwisely tempted into a classical allusion. “You look as fresh as Aphrodite when she was first fashioned from sea spray!”

  Professor Simpson could never let a classical misapprehension go uncorrected. “Actually she wasn’t formed from sea spray, you know,” he told Vance kindly. “If you’ll recall, Cronus mutilated his father, Uranus, and flung the—”

  Belatedly the elderly historian remembered that Sandy was a living, breathing girl, not a mythological abstraction. Unwilling to elaborate further on Cronus’s unfilial behavior, he broke off in old-fashioned reticence.

  Vance waited questioningly. “Flung what where?” he prompted.

  “I’ll lend you a book,” Simpson said austerely and moved away.

  Sandy slipped into the elevator, choking back laughter at Lemuel Vance’s blank look. She knew exactly what part of Uranus’s anatomy Cronus had thrown into the sea. David had explained the birth of Aphrodite very graphically once. Still, it was sweet of Professor Simpson to be too embarrassed to recount the three-thousand-year-old tale in mixed company.

  On the first floor she picked up the department’s morning mail, then walked downstairs to a snack bar adjoining the main cafeteria. There was the usual assortment of students: some munched corn muffins and worked crossword puzzles with buttery fingers; others sipped weak tea and idled away the time in conversation till their next classes; still another, a determinedly solitary girl, hunched over a chart of French conjugations with the desperate and fatalistic air of one who had flunked too many pop quizzes.

  At the rear of the deep room three smaller tables had been pushed into a single long one, and there a number of the clerical-administrative staff sat together with their backs against the wall, openly dissecting everyone who passed. Middle-aged women all, most were plump, beringed and elaborately coiffed and made-up. They delighted in red tape, deadlines and all regulations pertaining to IBM grade cards, and their exasperated sighs when asked to perform any service out of the routine could chill newly appointed faculty members. Only half in jest they agreed that Vanderlyn would be an ideal place to work if one could dispense with the teachers and students.

  Unlike them, Sandy liked most of the students and considered her own charges on Art’s faculty rather fun. Still, she was savvy enough to realize how difficult those career secretaries could make her job if they chose not to cooperate with her in interdepartmental business, so she was careful not to appear rude even when avoiding them. She waggled her fingers in friendly greeting as she passed but continued on to the service counter, aware of their neutral eyes on her progress.

  The line at the counter was short; and as the five cups of hot beverages were placed on her tray, Sandy scrawled an abbreviated note of each cup’s contents across its plastic snap-on lid with a felttipped pen: coffee with sugar—C/W/SUG; hot chocolate—CHOC; coffee black—BLK. Heading back toward the door, she spotted a familiar profile and detoured to the table.

  “Hi, Andrea. You’re in early today.”

  Andrea Ross (Assistant Professor, Medieval Art History) looked up from her sketchy breakfast and smiled at the girl, ruefully aware of her own passing youth. Not yet thirty, she was only now acquiring chic; never again would her thin face hold the spring-fresh appeal of Sandy’s open prettiness. Still her career offered compensations. Or it had until recently, she thought with another flare of wellconcealed anger.

  “I’ve got to pull slides for my eleven o’clock, but if you want company, I’ll wait,” Andrea offered.

  “No, I’m going back, too,” said Sandy, wistfully eyeing Andrea’s cheese Danish.

  Professor Ross knew Sandy’s weakness for pastries. “They’re fresh for a change,” she said. “Why don’t you put that tray down and go get one?”

  “I really shouldn’t,” Sandy murmured, unconsciously smoothing a hip line that seemed to stay perfectly trim no matter what she ate. But she parked her tray on the older woman’s table and hurried back over to the service counter.

  When she returned, she perched on the edge of a chair while Andrea finished the last few bites and regaled her with a brief synopsis of Sam Jordan’s sculpture and Professor Quinn’s angry encounter with Mike Szabo.

  “Do you think Professor Quinn is a thief?” she finished.

  Andrea shrugged, not wanting to ruin her digestion with speculations on Riley Quinn’s character, and changed the subject. “Who’re the extra two cups for?” she asked, gesturing toward the tray.

  “Lem and Professor Simpson. Your ‘friend’ Jake Saxer was around somewhere,” she added meaningfully, “but I certainly didn’t go looking for him.”

  She hesitated briefly, as though debating something in her mind, then leaned forward and blurted out, “Look, Andrea, why don’t you let me talk to Professor Nauman for you about this Jake SaxerProfessor Quinn business?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “But you know how out of it Professor Nauman can be sometimes. He probably hasn’t noticed how high-handed Quinn’s getting. I know he’d stop it if he realized how unfair it is.”

  “I mean it, Sandy. I’ll fight my own battles with that damn Riley Quinn. You don’t have to get involved. Besides,” she added as they rose and walked toward the elevator, “you’ve got enough to worry about. How are David’s job prospects looking these days?”

  Sandy shook her head, her bright face momentarily dimmed. “He’s still just getting the usual form letters: ‘We regret to inform you that we anticipate no academic openings in the foreseeable future; however, we will keep your letter on file and should circumstances alter. . . .’”

  “Sounds as though you have the whole routine memorized,” Andrea said. She pushed the button to signal the self-service elevator.

  “I ought to. I mail out enough of the same sort of letters every week.” She tilted her head toward the stack of mail on the tray she carried. “I’ll bet at least five of these are job applications. Everyone wants to teach in New York.”

  “Something’s bound to turn up for David,” Andrea encouraged.

  “Oh, well, if worse comes to worst, I can keep working here after we’re married. We could get by on my salary while David finishes his doctorate.”

  The elevator door opened, and everyone inside exited except a brown-coveralled figure

  “Miss Sandy!” the workman beamed. “Only now I am coming to see you. That chair you want me to fix.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Mike,” Sandy said hastily. “It can wait till next week sometime.”

  “No, no. I get it today.” Armed with the assurance of one who knows himself firmly in the right, Mike Szabo had no hesitation about entering his enemy’s domain. He was a stocky man in his late thirties, with dark hair beginning to show gray around the edges of a broad East European face. He took the tray of cups from Sandy’s hands with a determined air of rough courtesy.

  The elevator stopped for more passengers at each floor until everyone was jammed together, and Sandy, standing in front of Szabo, felt the tray he was holding cut into the back of her thin dress. She hoped all the lids were on tight; she’d hate to walk around all day with a coffee stain across her back.

  “Where’s Quinn right now?” whispered Andrea in her ear.

  “In class for another ten or fifteen minutes if I’m lu
cky,” Sandy whispered back.

  It was, in fact, ten-thirty-eight when they parted in the hall: Andrea Ross to pull slides for her eleven-o’clock class on Gothic architecture; Sandy to distribute the hot drinks and ease Mike Szabo out of the area before Quinn came back from his lecture at ten-fifty.

  Although the number of staff and students in the Art Department had doubled since open enrollment several years earlier, its original office space atop Van Hoeen Hall had not. Partitioned and repartitioned, that wing of the seventh floor had become a maze of overcrowded, interconnected offices, each shared by at least two (though usually more) staff members. An elevator and stairwell were at the top of the hall opposite a set of rest rooms. The first office on the right was occupied by several art historians, including Andrea Ross; the second was mostly art-studio personnel; and at the end of the hall a third door opened into two small offices and the slide library, a tiny room lined with banks of file drawers sized to hold the two-inch-square glassmounted slides that were used to illustrate the survey courses.

  There were more than fifty thousand slides in the collection, yet the historians were always grumbling about the need for more. “More French impressionists, African primitives, German cubists! And okay, so we have all of Picasso’s blue period,” they might concede, “but what about his rose period? Practically zilch!”

  Only two doors opened on the left side of the hall. A person could enter the first and turn left again into the nursery—so called because eight of the most junior staff members shared the six desks shoehorned into that narrow office—or veer right into Sandy’s office. A two-sided mail rack with pigeonholes for each departmental member jutted out into her office. Beyond the mail rack, doors led into two smaller offices, and a third door gave onto the hall again.

  The decor was late government surplus: nothing matched. Tables, chairs, desks, file cabinets—almost everything had been scrounged over the years. Whenever a more favored department got new furnishings, Piers Leyden’s friends in Buildings and Grounds would let someone from Art salvage such desirable objects as desks with unbroken drawers, chairs that still swiveled or better desk lamps. Other offices had carpets and matching draperies. Art’s floor and windows were bare, and the chairman’s telephone was a simple black extension of Sandy’s—there was no way to put someone on hold, no push buttons to route in extra calls.

  All this was not a deliberate shortchanging on Administration’s part. Not entirely. By a sort of unspoken agreement Art balanced its unyielding attitude toward Administration’s officiousness by not clamoring for more amenities. Most members of the department were happy to relinquish bigger offices and fancier furnishings in return for their relative independence.

  With Mike Szabo trailing her like a shaggy brown dog, Sandy entered this shabby warren of offices by the first door, lifted a cup from the tray he still carried and stepped aside to let the Hungarian pass through to the main office.

  “You can just set the tray on the bookcase,” she called after him. “The broken chair’s that one on the other side of the encyclopedias.”

  “Hokay,” replied Szabo, who’d given Professor Simpson a cheerful salute in passing.

  Sandy smiled at the gray-haired professor also and set the cup marked C/W/SUG on his desk in the front corner of the nursery.

  Juniors were usually stuck with the early morning or late-afternoon schedules; they rarely got the desirable midday classes, so the room was empty now except for Professor Simpson. He looked up from a thick tome as Sandy placed his coffee on a desk cluttered by student themes, IBM grade cards, folders, and stacks of books with scrap paper markers fringing their ends.

  Albert Simpson had once carried much weight on a large frame. The weight was gone now, and his boniness made him look older, as if he’d shrunk into himself. He seemed to embody the idea of the absentminded professor whose suits were always untidy, whose socks might not match, and who forgot contemporary dates, but who could make dead eras come alive with thousands of intimate details. The elderly classicist had been working on his book about Roman art for almost thirty years, yet it had never progressed beyond the research stage. He kept wandering down too many fascinating side paths ever to organize his mass of findings into a publishable manuscript; but he was David Wade’s graduate advisor, and Sandy was fond of him, so she defended him whenever Professor Quinn or Piers Leyden made caustic remarks about eggs that never hatched.

  “Is David in this morning?” Simpson asked now, peering over his glasses at an outdated schedule taped to the wall above his desk. “I’ve just come across another passage in Maiuri that supports his thesis.”

  “No, he’s taking in that exhibition at the Metropolitan,” Sandy said. She made a mental note to replace the three-year-old schedule with a new one, and this time she’d tape it up herself instead of just handing it to him to get lost on his desk again. “He should be in around noon, though.”

  “Good, good,” murmured the old scholar, already reabsorbed in his text. He probably wouldn’t think of the coffee again until it was stone-cold, Sandy thought.

  She turned and almost collided with Mike Szabo, who now carried a battered wooden armchair over his head. One of the legs had come unglued and was hanging by its stretchers, the result of some too strenuous roughhousing among the teaching fellows and graduate assistants.

  “I have it fixed good for this afternoon,” Szabo promised, and Sandy smiled her thanks.

  Leaving the nursery, she skirted the mail rack and paused by a long, waist-high bookcase beside the chairman’s door. It was another castoff—battered looking but sturdy and capacious enough to hold the department’s Britannicas, an unabridged dictionary, several art encyclopedias and a dozen or so other reference works. Szabo had left the tray on the end nearer the door to Professor Nauman’s office, and Sandy picked up Vance’s CHOC and continued on around the corner with it.

  Lemuel Vance was a vigorous fifty, with thick black hair only lightly sprinkled with gray. He was more of a technician than an intellectual, but he knew as much as any man living about how to achieve every subtle effect possible in the realm of graphics. He raged, bellowed, cursed, had even been known to deliver a stinging smack to the backsides of his most talented students when they slacked their standards; but he was an effective, respected teacher, and he got results. Over the years many of his former students had carved out quite respectable niches in the art world.

  Sandy found the barrel-shaped printer lusting over a glossy catalog of heavy equipment and preparing his annual raid on the department’s budget.

  “You could type up the requisition order, slip it in with some other stuff, and Oscar’d never notice he’d signed it,” Vance said, continuing an earlier argument.

  “I still don’t see what’s wrong with the printing press you have,” Sandy smiled.

  “Are you kidding? Eighteen inches—that’s the biggest plate that antediluvian junk heap can take. Now this beauty,” he crooned, touching a picture in the catalog with inkstained fingers, “can take plates twice that big.”

  Sandy studied the description. Most of the technical terms were beyond her. The astronomical price she could understand, though, as well as the machine’s gross shipping weight. “Could the floor support that much extra weight?”

  “So they have to put jacks under it, so what?” Vance said impatiently, dismissing what would certainly be screams of outrage from Modern Languages directly beneath the printmaking workshop. “Come on, Sandy, help me talk Oscar into it. How can I teach etching without a decent press?”

  “Professor Nauman isn’t a dictator, Lem. Something this expensive he’d want the whole department to vote on. Anyhow, you know Professor Quinn doesn’t feel the historians have been getting their fair share of the budget. Haven’t you heard him? He thinks the slide collection should be doubled, and that’ll mean new file cabinets and probably remodeling, and there goes this year’s budget.”

  “Those parasites! Without artists where would those damn hist
orians be?” he asked darkly. “Riley Quinn won’t be happy till he’s bought a slide of every piece of art that’s ever been photographed. To hell with buying necessities to teach new artists! You think he cares that I’ve got kids waiting in line half the period to use a press?”

  Vance was still griping at 10:43 when Sandy slipped down the hall to wash her hands. Considering the lavatory’s location and clientele, the caricatures and graffiti decorating its walls weren’t too pornographic. Figure classes increased one’s draftsmanship but took a lot of fun and spice out of anatomical nudes. Of course, someone had rather wittily combined Piers Leyden’s reputation for romantic dalliance with a well-known Pompeian wall painting of Priapus; and some else’s despairing scrawl “I hate periods!” had been answered by a brisk “Then try semicolons—they’re more artistic.”

  With her mind elsewhere Sandy barely noticed the decorations. She dried her hands and hurried back down the hallway. Professor Simpson didn’t look up from his books as she passed him, and his unopened coffee was still sitting exactly where she had placed it.

  Inside her own office she took the cup marked BLK from the tray and set it and the cheese Danish on her desk. The last two cups—both labeled C/W/SUG—she left on the bookcase for Professors Nauman and Quinn, chairman and deputy chairman, who shared the inner office, a preference for sugared coffee and very little else.

  As she distributed mail among the pigeonholes of the large rack at the front of the office, a noise drew her attention to a weak-mouthed young man who had appeared behind her by the closed door to the inner office.

  “Oh, Harley,” she said. “I tried to call you before.”

  “What about?” the graduate student asked suspiciously. Harley Harris was shorter than she, with petulant eyes and beardless baby-smooth cheeks. He had tried to coax his lank brown hair into an Afro, but it was uncooperative and merely looked messy.

  “I called your house three times,” Sandy said, “but no one answered. That meeting you wanted with Professor Nauman at eleven—he’s scheduled to see the dean of faculties at 11:15 so you’ll have to wait till two to meet with him. I’m sorry, Harley.”