“John!” the president called.
“Yes, sir.”
“Come in, come in.”
John walked toward Colin Luckfeld counting the steps as he went. By the time he reached the teak table he’d gotten to seventy-two.
The unorthodox desk was a small wonder in the amazing room. It was nineteen feet long and five wide, a single plank cut from the heart of what must have been a magnificent tree.
When John reached the table Luckfeld stood up. He was tall and hale with sun-burnished skin and brown hair that was like a tapered mane. In his fifties, the president had eyes that were olive green, sometimes tending toward brown; his hands were strong with long fingers and perfectly manicured nails. He wore a medium-brown two-piece suit and a black T-shirt.
“Thank you for coming, John,” he greeted him.
Everyone said Luckfeld’s eyes expressed unspoken knowledge. This was his advantage. But the gaze held no power over John — he felt safe behind an exhaustive facade that had taken him nearly half a lifetime to create.
“Sorry I’m late, Colin.”
“Mrs. Whitman says that the faculty database wasn’t properly updated.”
John could see the earbud in Luckfeld’s left ear. The dour assistant had called while John was counting steps.
“Would you like something to drink?” the president offered.
“Water if you have it.”
“Certainly. Why don’t you come around and sit here next to me.”
Seating in the president’s office was one of the many ritualistic elements Luckfeld employed. Most faculty members were directed to sit on hard wooden chairs across the table from the president. He had a seemingly endless number of these chairs which were always set out before his guests arrived.
A few feet behind the big yellowy table sat a camel-colored leather sofa and a matching chair. If Luckfeld asked you to come around and sit on one of these, it was said, he was extremely happy with you and your work.
John counted eleven paces around the table to his host.
“Sit,” Colin Luckfeld said, gesturing at the sofa.
John sat at the window end. The president sat opposite him.
John wondered what the superstition would be about Luckfeld sitting next to his guest on the couch rather than across from him on the matching chair.
“There’s a wooden chest behind you,” the president said. “I’ll have one too.” Professor Woman lifted up the lid and brought out two label-less plastic containers. He leaned over to hand his boss one of these.
“You’re looking well,” Luckfeld said. “Nice summer?”
“I stayed in faculty housing and caught up on my reading.”
“No vacation?” Colin asked as he cracked the seal of the water bottle.
“Life is a holiday if you enjoy the work.”
Luckfeld brought his left thigh onto the cushion and leaned back against the plush bolster arm. This posture made him seem somewhat boyish — very un-presidential. In Professor Woman’s mind this was simply another tactic employed by the high official of the worldwide cult.
“You enjoy history that much?” Luckfeld asked.
“More.”
Luckfeld brought the pad of his left thumb to press lightly on the indentation under his lower lip and stared with those knowing eyes.
John allowed the gaze to continue at least half a minute before saying, “Those portraits along the walls.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve always wondered about them.”
Luckfeld’s eyes relaxed. “Great men and women caught in everyday poses. The artist worked from snapshots taken at some point in the subjects’ past. You have a captain of industry standing over a barbecue; a woman who is the confidante of monarchs and prime ministers screaming on a roller coaster at Coney Island. My favorite is the one of a man who later in life became the leader of a revolution changing the diapers on his firstborn daughter. I find them humbling and revelatory.”
“Revealing what?”
“Humanity,” Luckfeld said. “The fragility of who and what we are.”
“There’s nothing more telling than a man’s mismatched buttons and a pretty woman’s slight limp,” John intoned.
“Where’s that from?”
“Something my father once said.”
“Sounds like a wise man.”
“He was.” John took a swig of water and realized that he was quite thirsty.
They sat there in the cool room, under the desert sun, effecting a natural span between niceties and the purpose for the summons.
“Annette Eubanks was sitting in a chair across the table from me just this morning,” the president said at last.
“And what was Auntie saying?” John used her nickname to show that he wasn’t afraid.
“That John Woman is both a Sophist and a charlatan.”
“Oh?”
“Is that all you have to say?” Luckfeld seemed a bit nonplussed.
“I don’t know in what context she meant. Who knows... maybe I’d agree.”
“Those are damning complaints against any professor.”
“Charlatan alone, maybe,” John allowed, “but sophism was an accepted form of education in ancient Greece and later in Rome. Without Sophists you’d have no Socrates or Plato, Aristotle or Cicero. I lecture, I challenge belief systems and I entertain. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Professor Eubanks says that you’re attempting to undermine the department by teaching that all, or most, history texts are fabrications designed to obscure the past rather than to elucidate it.” The president was smiling now.
“You see?” John said. “I do agree with her. I tell my students every semester that written history is an attempt to re-create so-called actual events according to the political, social or religious convictions of the author.”
“You make it sound like a conspiracy.”
“Conscious conspiracy is the best of it,” John said, his fragmented thoughts knitting together as he spoke. “The travesty is that a great many historians actually believe what they’re saying. Their motives are unconscious and cultural, based on prejudices and wish fulfillment. They create the ideal father as either a saint or an arch-villain; the mother is most often vilified and then relegated to the nursery. But truth... truth is in the distance. It might as well be a mirage because we see it, imagine it, but it’s a place we’ll never attain.”
“You think about these things a lot don’t you, John?”
“Day and night since I was a boy.”
“It’s rare to find an educator nowadays who sees his subject as both the beginning and the end.”
The young professor sipped from his water bottle, having nothing to say.
“I saw you on public access TV having a debate with Professor Carmody four months ago,” Luckfeld said. “I think it was from an earlier date.”
John smiled. “Poor Ira. He’s talks about Greek philosophers but he’s never taken the time to learn the language, relying instead on translators, most of them long dead. That never looks good.”
“You made a powerful enemy showing him up like that.”
John remembered sitting in the air-conditioned aluminum hut in the late afternoon at Lehman-Lawrence High School. Carmody, who looked something like Stalin, was so smug when they sat down. No one knew about the younger man’s facility with languages. It was one of his many secrets.
Every man is a Pandora’s box to someone, Herman Jones said. You shake someone’s hand risking eternal damnation.
The voice was so clear that John almost turned his head to see if there was someone sitting behind him.
“I didn’t expect a debate,” he explained. “I thought we were going to discuss simple phrases from Ira’s monograph.”