He turned on the answering machine and listened. There were three messages, all from students in his Tuesday-Thursday seminar who were going to hand their papers in late. He let the message tape switch off.
“I’d complain about late papers,” he said, “except that all my papers in graduate school were late, too. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Of course I am. I said I was.”
“I was hoping I’d get a message from Ms. Daniel. I don’t suppose she’ll be staying long, now that Mr. Markey seems to have disappeared, but you never know. I would have liked to have met her.”
“Haven’t you already?” Delmore looked confused. “We called her. Didn’t you talk to her when we called her?”
“Of course I did, but on the phone. I meant it would have been nice to meet her. It doesn’t matter. We’re still blessedly free of Mr. Harrigan’s noise, if only for another twenty-something days or so. Things have been quiet around here.”
“Yes, they have,” Delmore said darkly. “You have to wonder why that’s the case, don’t you? Things shouldn’t be quiet around here. There should be protests. And stuff.”
“Protests about what?”
“Protests about the war,” Delmore said. Then he seemed to flounder.
Jig took pity on him. It was never a pretty sight, Delmore floundering around, trying to remember what the point of the conversation was. “I’ve told you and told you,” he said. “It’s the tuitions. You want to know why it costs more to go to college these days than people in the bottom fifth of the income stream make in a year, so that students will have huge loans they have to pay off when they get out? And why is that? Because students with huge loans to pay off have to worry about where they’re going to get a job that will pay enough to pay the loans off. Social work won’t pay that kind of money. The arts won’t pay that kind of money. They’re forced to get jobs in banking and industry, and if they want jobs in banking and industry—”
“—They have to keep their records clean,” Delmore said, looking triumphant. “I remember, yes. No antiwar demonstrations, because they might get arrested, or get a reputation as a troublemaker, and that would make them unemployable. I don’t understand how people can live like this, I really don’t. What are loans, after all? They’re not going to throw you in jail for not paying loans. Just don’t pay them and do what you want with your life. In a decent society, university education would be free anyway.”
Jig was going to say something about capitalist hegemonic discourse, but then he didn’t. His headache wasn’t that far in the past, and he was feeling so much better that he could barely remember what the pain had been like. Besides, it was true, Drew Harrigan was not on the air today, and wouldn’t be tomorrow.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. Maybe I’ll pick up the papers. I couldn’t read mine at home. We can watch the mayoralty campaign and you can complain about John Jackman.”
“He puts a black face on reactionary politics,” Delmore said piously.
Jig was about to launch himself at that one, too, but finally he just led the way out of the office, waited until Delmore followed him into the hall, and locked up. It was Monday. He had no other classes, and he could take his laptop to the student union to work on the article he had to have finished by Friday. He could pipe classical music in his ears and tap away on the subject of media brainwashing and the public blackout of dissent. He could work on an equation that had been bothering him for two years, but that he wasn’t likely to be able to solve now, at his age.
He just wished he had heard from Kate Daniel, although he had no idea what he wanted her to say to him, or what he’d do if she called.
He just felt a little …uneasy… not knowing what was going on with all things Drew Harrigan.
2
Ellen Harrigan was rarely faced with the truth about her life as Drew Harrigan’s wife, and when she was, she responded to the information by going shopping. That was what she was doing today, in spite of the cold and the wind that made even the lobby of her own apartment building feel uninhabitable. It wasn’t that the lobby was cold. The lobby was never cold. It was the sound of the wind rattling the doors that caused the problem, which was that sitting there in one of the chairs arranged for visitors, waiting for her car to show up, she felt as if she were in a house with a ghost in it. Ellen Harrigan believed in ghosts. She believed in angels, too, and in a God whose personality was very like that of Fred Rogers, although she didn’t like Fred Rogers or his neighborhood at all. PBS was bad. She knew that. She’d known it even before she’d married Drew. PBS was taxpayer-supported television for rich people, and not rich people like her.