presumably by Trumilcik himself.
My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldnât have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.
I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For formâs sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik couldhave been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermannâs clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves â should the need to do so arise â than a closet.
But the fact remained that the document, which had been in the computer less than twelve hours before, was no longer there, and that even if I had not been observed reading it, someone had been in the room between my leaving it last night and returning this morning.
Uncertain what to make of any of this, I left to teach my class. We were reading The Bacchae , with a view to seeing whether Pentheus, the âchillyâ opponent (and victim) of Dionysus, might be reclaimable as a prototype for a new kind of male hero. An interesting discussion arose on the death-walk sequence in the last act, where Pentheus, apparently mad, puts on womenâs clothing and sets off for what turns out to be his own violent destruction. I remember that several of us discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in his behavior, counteracting the framing tone of mockery and humiliation cast by the triumphantly scornful Dionysus, as though, at the point of delivering on its hackneyed message about not offending the gods, the play had inadvertently stumbled on some larger, deeper truth about the tyranny of the supposedly ânaturalâ laws of gender, and was surreptitiously offering Pentheus as a martyr figure in the struggle against thistyranny. At any rate, it was a good class, lively and stimulating, and I left it feeling mildly elated.
From there I went to have lunch. I was carrying my tray to one of the small tables by the window (I usually sat by myself in the faculty dining room), when I caught sight of a woman looking up at me from a table in the corner of the room. It took me a moment to realise that it was Elaine Jordan, the school attorney. She had had her hair set in a new way, and in contrast to her usual self-effacing outfits of shapeless acrylic, she was wearing a tailored jacket and skirt with a frilled silk blouse.
I was about to nod and continue on, when I noticed something tentatively solicitous about her look, as though she was hoping I would eat at her table. I moved in her direction, and saw that
My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldnât have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.
I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For formâs sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik couldhave been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermannâs clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves â should the need to do so arise â than a closet.
But the fact remained that the document, which had been in the computer less than twelve hours before, was no longer there, and that even if I had not been observed reading it, someone had been in the room between my leaving it last night and returning this morning.
Uncertain what to make of any of this, I left to teach my class. We were reading The Bacchae , with a view to seeing whether Pentheus, the âchillyâ opponent (and victim) of Dionysus, might be reclaimable as a prototype for a new kind of male hero. An interesting discussion arose on the death-walk sequence in the last act, where Pentheus, apparently mad, puts on womenâs clothing and sets off for what turns out to be his own violent destruction. I remember that several of us discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in his behavior, counteracting the framing tone of mockery and humiliation cast by the triumphantly scornful Dionysus, as though, at the point of delivering on its hackneyed message about not offending the gods, the play had inadvertently stumbled on some larger, deeper truth about the tyranny of the supposedly ânaturalâ laws of gender, and was surreptitiously offering Pentheus as a martyr figure in the struggle against thistyranny. At any rate, it was a good class, lively and stimulating, and I left it feeling mildly elated.
From there I went to have lunch. I was carrying my tray to one of the small tables by the window (I usually sat by myself in the faculty dining room), when I caught sight of a woman looking up at me from a table in the corner of the room. It took me a moment to realise that it was Elaine Jordan, the school attorney. She had had her hair set in a new way, and in contrast to her usual self-effacing outfits of shapeless acrylic, she was wearing a tailored jacket and skirt with a frilled silk blouse.
I was about to nod and continue on, when I noticed something tentatively solicitous about her look, as though she was hoping I would eat at her table. I moved in her direction, and saw that
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