In the Middle of All This by Fred G. Leebron Page A

repeated song: Get well, feel better, get well. Finally she bundled them neatly and tossed them.
    She didn’t like flowers either, and she couldn’t bear the smell of champagne.
    But she felt great.
    Only if she really rooted around inside herself, looking for it, could she find it and know it and understand it. But if she refused to understand, was that merely the mercy of denial, or the thin, impossible chord to wellness?
    â€œMartin.” She tapped him another e-mail. “This sucks, sucks, sucks. Oh baby, it sucks.”
    She hit DELETE and watched it evaporate.
    â€œThose notes I saw you taking during discussion.” Annka wagged her pen at him. “Do you do anything with them?”
    â€œAll the time,” he said. He’d only gone to the board twice, for a total often minutes, in a seventy-five-minute class. “I try to create minilectures from the issues they raise. I try to meet them on their own points of engagement.”
    â€œI see.” She squinted her eyes and offered him what someone who was drunk might have termed a smile. “Could I get a copy of one of those ‘minilecture’ notes sometime?”
    â€œOf course,” he said.
    â€œI mean, if it’s no bother.”
    â€œNo bother at all.”
    She looked at him as they sat in the empty classroom, all the students long gone. He felt as if he was being kept after. She just looked at him.
    â€œI guess I’d better get going,” he said.
    â€œThat’s fine.”
    He packed up his briefcase while she sat there. What did she think behind those glasses, those blank but narrow eyes, under the dark brown sweater set, in that however-the-fuck-old-she-was body? Sometimes he wanted to shake her and shout I know, I know! about how she had fought their hire, how she hated them. But you weren’t allowed to do that. You weren’t even allowed to accost her in the hall and say quietly, Look, I understand you didn’t want us here and you don’t want us here and you’ll never want us here and you have to do what you have to do but we would like it to be—what?—civil, respectful, restrained, fair? Or could he say, Look, we’re going to humiliate you before you humiliate us, eviscerate you before you eviscerate us. God, he wanted to tell this blank face, this empty face, this wicked face, At least now I know what the fuck you do with all your time. He snapped the briefcase shut.
    â€œSee you.” He tried to smile easily at her. “Thanks for coming.”
    â€œThat’s fine,” she said.
    In his office his hands still trembled. Fear made no sense here, there was so much else to fear. He tried not to think of it. But what was the point of serenity? What was the point of calm? He picked up the phone.
    â€œHow was it?” Lauren said, not even bothering to ask who was calling.
    â€œShe just sits there.” He tried to stop himself, knowing how fatigued she was by his review and how the process awaited her, too. “And then afterward she interrogates me. Do I ever use any other models? Do I ever use any approach besides observer-participant? Do I ever give substantial lectures? Do I ever do anything with the notes I take? Do I wipe myself after I take a shit? Jesus!”
    â€œDavid Lazlo is leaving Cindy,” she said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI stupidly called Mary again about getting someone into one of his courses for the spring, but it turns out he’s not teaching, because he’s got somebody out in Kansas and he’s taking the spring off to be with her.”
    â€œWow.”
    â€œIt’s been going on for months.”
    â€œI thought all that crap he pulled with you was harmless. I thought Cindy was the one who made him tolerable,” he said. “Why is everybody falling apart? It wasn’t like this in Atlanta.”
    â€œSure it was. We just didn’t know about it.” Max squealed happily into the phone.