"Should I write to her?"
Phyllis blushed fetchingly.
"Your wife said you didn't have time to write until after term. So I wondered if you could catch her on campus today. I told her you might stop in."
Michael watched her for a moment.
"I guess I owe you, Phyllis. You were a lot of help to me this term."
"I feel so badly about pushing it," said the contrite but determined Phyllis Strom. "But it's so important to me."
"Is it? Is she so terrific?"
"Yes," Phyllis said simply, "she's great. She studied at the Sorbonne. She has a couple of books and she's been a television journalist."
"Wonderful." He had a vague sense of Mme. Purcell. One of the overpaid Eurotrash faculty who frequented each other's houses for edible food and adult conversation and liked to photograph roadside diners and picturesque gas stations. "Lucky us. Sure," he told Phyllis. "I'll call her. Is she in her office this afternoon?"
"Until four-thirty," Phyllis said with a guilty smile. "Please?"
And who could refuse Phyllis, wintry nymph with her tasseled elfin cap, frost-nipped little nose and principled ambition. So, in violation of the library rules, he dialed the college directory on his cell phone and eventually found himself in conversation with Dr. Lara Purcell.
"We probably met at the dean's drinks party," Dr. Purcell said. She had a pleasant voice, with an accent that continually surprised, with Britishisms and French words pronounced in English. It was not disagreeable. She was said to have grown up in the Windward Islands.
"Yes, probably," Michael said. They agreed to meet at her office in half an hour.
All over the campus, college groundsmen were salting walkways to keep traction underfoot for pedestrians, fighting a losing battle with the oncoming cold of night. The offices in the political science building were lighted as Ahearn jogged up the ornate steps, past the allegorical statues attending them.
The secretary had gone home but the department's door was open. He wandered in and found Professor Purcell at her desk. He knocked twice on her office door.
"Are you Michael Ahearn?" the woman asked him. She got to her feet and came out from behind her desk.
"Professor Purcell?"
She was only slightly shorter than Michael, who stood six feet. She was wearing an elegant purple turtleneck jersey with a small horn-shaped ornament on a gold chain around her neck. A short leather skirt, dark tights and boots.
"I've heard so much about you from Phyllis," Professor Purcell said. "You're her mentor and ideal."
"Well, bless her. She's a terrific kid."
"Is she?" asked Professor Purcell.
The wall behind the desk was decorated with paintings in bright tropical colors. There were photographs too, taken in palm-lined gardens with ornamental fountains and wrought-iron balconies. In the photographs Lara Purcell appeared with people of different racial types, all of whom shared a cool, confident air of sophistication. Almost everyone portrayed seemed attractive. The exception was a pink, overweight and unwholesome-looking man standing next to Professor Purcell herself. His features were distantly familiar to Michael — a politician, unsympathetic, one from the wrong side. But Michael had no time to study the office appointments closely. "Well, I think so," Michael said.
"Call me Lara," Professor Purcell told him. She wore her dark hair shoulder length, streaked from the forehead with a shock of white. Her skin was very pale, her eyes nearly green, large, round and unsurprised. Beneath them were slightly swelling moons of unlined flesh, a certain puffiness that was inexplicably alluring. It somehow extended and sensualized the humor and intelligence of her look. Her mouth was provocative, her lips long and full.
Lara offered him a chair. "She's so serious, is Phyllis. And she thinks you make serious things seem funny."
"Who, me?"
The professor laughed agreeably. "Yes."
"Does she think that's good?" Michael inquired.
"I think she had her doubts. She didn't think it could be done. But now she sees the point of you."
The lady's cool impudence made him blink. It was not how people spoke to each other in Fort Salines.
"I'm glad to hear it. I'm very possessive about Phyllis."
"Rest assured you possess her, Mr. Ahearn."
"Please call me Michael. Phyllis," he said, "is very big on you too."
Lara only smiled. She looked at her watch. "I usually stop for coffee at Beans about now. Like to join me?"
Michael's usual refreshment at the same hour was a glass of the whiskey he kept in his carrel. He decided the drink could wait.
It was tough going downhill on the icy pathway. From time to time one of them began to slide and had to be rescued with a hand from the other. Beans, the coffee shop that served the campus, was at the college end of Division Street, four blocks of thriving retail stores and service establishments that ended in the courthouse square. It was bright, its windows cheerfully frosted. The place was full of kids. At a table beside the door, some of the foreign graduate students and junior faculty were gathered at a long table speaking French. Entering with Michael, Lara stopped to chat. She did not introduce him.
They stood in line for their paper cups of cappuccino and carried them to a table at the back.
"I gather," Michael said, "you haven't agreed yet to serve on Phyllis's committee. And that I'm supposed to persuade you."
"She's sweet," said Lara. "She seems to have done her work. But I don't want any tears. I don't rubber-stamp the language requirement. And I expect a capable defense conducted in standard English."
"Phyllis is quite articulate. I can't speak for her fluency in French. She's intellectually curious. And of course she has a social conscience."
The professor looked over Michael's shoulder to throw a backhanded farewell to one of their colleagues.
"Her social conscience worries me," she said to Michael. "Please assure me. Will I hear pious prattle in American kiddie-speak? If I do, you see, she'll be out on her little bum."
Michael made a note to warn poor Phyllis of what awaited her.
"I'll vouch for her. I think we'll survive your scrutiny."
"On your head be it," Lara told him.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"You do hear a lot of silly uplift," he said. "Phyllis isn't that way."
"It's contemptible," she said with a fine sneer. "Life is a fairy tale and they're the good little fairies. The gallant little social egalitarian feminist fairies. It's our responsibility to keep them from getting loose in the world."
"Keep them down on the farm," Michael said, "before they've seen Paree."
"Right. Stifle them aborning. Because, you know, one sees them overseas," she said, "and one's ashamed to be an American."
"They can get nasty too," Michael said. He had somehow not thought of Lara as an American.
"But of course they're nasty. On their own ground, in absurd provincial backwaters of the academy — places like this — they run our lives."
They both laughed.
"You're blushing. I haven't offended you? Oh, but I suppose I have."
"No, you're absolutely right," he said. "Jargon and goodie-speak prevail here. Actually, I'm not sure it's better at… more prominent institutions."
"There are nuances," she said. "Places like Berkeley are exhausted by politics. They're in deep reaction, which is fine with me. At other places — Yale, for example — the powers that be are merely cynical."
"Tell me this," Michael said. "What's someone like you doing in an absurd provincial backwater?"
"It's what I deserve," she said. "And you?"
"I'm a genuine provincial. People like me provide authenticity."
"In fact," she said, "I planned to settle here with my ex-husband. The job was a great convenience."