Hardscrabble Road(22)
The young woman nodded. “The New York Times bestsellers are right over here. We give those thirty percent off in hardcover, and the latest book is in hardcover, if that’s the one you want. It’s called Heart on the Right Side. That’s true, you know. He has some genetic condition, and all his internal organs are backwards, so his heart is on the right side of his chest instead of the left.”
“I had heard that,” Gregor said.
“It makes it all the more easy to understand how his head got up his ass,” the young woman said. “And if you tell anybody I said that, I’ll deny it. I could get fired.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“God, you don’t know how it embarrasses me. That he’s from Philadelphia, I mean. That he works out of here. I mean, at least Rush Limbaugh moved to Washington, or wherever.”
“I take it you don’t like Mr. Limbaugh much either?”
“At the moment, I like Dean,” the young woman said, “but I don’t really care. I’ll vote for a hamster if that’s the only choice I’ve got. Here’s the book. Over at Boardman’s, they’ve got this thing on display in a trash basket. That’s what I’d like to do. They’re independent, though.”
“Why don’t I just buy this?” Gregor said.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people do buy it,” she said. “Some of them buy six or seven copies at a time. It’s eerie.”
“Maybe they’re buying for friends.”
The young woman gave Gregor a long, pitying look. “Maybe he’s sending people out to get the numbers up,” she said. “Maybe the conservative organizations are sending people out to get the numbers up. You’d be amazed at what people do to get on that bestseller list. This is going to cost you twenty-five ninety-five. You’re going to be upset you spent the money.”
FIVE
1
Jig Tyler always had his classes scheduled as early in the day as possible. He had the eight to ten graduate seminar hour sewn up, and nobody who wanted to teach graduate students in mathematics could schedule simultaneously without risking having no students at all. It wasn’t that students came to do their doctorates in mathematics at Penn because of Jig— although most of them did—but the simple fact that Jig was also one of the most effective teachers in the history of the field. In an academic area known for its eccentrics but not oversupplied with media stars, Jig was not only a familiar face on television but blessed with a teaching style more Barnum than scholastic. He would have been charismatic even if nobody had ever given him a Fields Medal and two Nobel prizes.
This morning, he was charismatic but dead on his feet. He had had a long, unrestful night, in the worst sense in which he experienced such nights, and now his head was pounding as if it was going to explode. He had taken an ibuprofen at breakfast, but it hadn’t helped. He had tried lying down flat on his back on the floor of his office and transferring the pain to the sky blue Chinese vase he kept on top of his old metal filing cabinet, but that hadn’t worked either. He didn’t really believe in the silly “natural medicine” remedies he accepted from researchers he met at conferences and symposiums, but it was only polite to accept them, and there was no reason not to give them a try. In the end he had had to admit that he was going to have to take something serious to get rid of the ache, and that had put him in a bad mood for the entire last hour of the seminar. It didn’t help that his Monday seminar was his worst, full of students he thought of as rank idiots. Of course, he thought of most students as rank idiots, and a good proportion of professionals in every field he’d ever worked in, too, but that was a natural hazard of being who and what he was. He knew there were people like him who were not like him, so to speak. That is, he knew there were people who could do what he could do intellectually without being so alienated from everybody and everything else around them. He’d even been careful to read books by one of the more famous examples, Richard Feynman. He still hadn’t been able to get it. The Monday seminar was not full of the usual idiots. The Monday seminar was full of the kind of people who questioned the very legitimacy of education, never mind of high literacy. Jig had never understood why so many people in mathematics and the sciences found it impossible to understand why people read Shakespeare or listened to Bach.
And then, of course, there was Delmore Krantz. Delmore Krantz was in the Monday seminar. Delmore Krantz could give a lecture on “elitism” that lasted for several days and never come up for breath. Every once in a while, Jig wanted to take Delmore by the shoulders and tell him that everybody who was worth anything was an elitist of some kind.