Moretti led him to one of the blocks of classrooms. A key opened the room that turned out to be his. It looked like, well, a high school classroom. Instead of sitting behind his big wooden desk, he plopped down into the nearest steel-tube-and-plastic jobs the kids got stuck with. He waved Bryce into the one in the next row over. The easy assumption of equality made Bryce like him better.
“You’ve got a steady job that pays you more money,” Moretti said. “Why would you rather do this?”
Bryce had been wondering the same thing. When you got out into the real world, cash often seemed the most important thing there was. But he answered, “I can do the job I’ve got, but I’d sooner use some of what I studied and pass it along. There aren’t any university positions out there—the way things are these days, they’re shutting down classics departments, not hiring new people for them. So this looks like my next best bet.”
“I see.” Vic Moretti steepled his stubby fingers. “If a university post did come along, would you take it?”
“Of course I would.” Bryce wasn’t going to lie to him, not when he already had a job and wasn’t desperate to grab any spar in the sea. He did go on, “But I don’t think that’s likely. I only wish I did.”
“Hmm.” Moretti wrote something down. “You’re up front, anyhow. I’ll say that for you.”
Is he saying it for me or against me? Bryce wondered. Aloud, he said, “You may as well know where I’m coming from.”
“That’s true. We also needed to know whether your degree was genuine. We’ve had a couple of applicants who knew just enough Latin to order a pizza—if they didn’t want pepperoni on it.” The Junipero teacher looked thoroughly grim.
“Oh, wow,” Bryce said.
“Yeah.” Moretti nodded. “You were talking about how things are these days yourself. Some people watch too much poker on TV. They think they can bluff their way through anything. Maybe they hoped they could stay half a chapter ahead of the kids the first year, and then they’d have it psyched out. With priests on the faculty, though, that doesn’t fly.”
“I guess it wouldn’t,” Bryce allowed. “I can do the Latin. I can do the history, too. They make you learn it at UCLA.” He probably would have to stay half a chapter ahead of the kids for some of the more modern stuff, but that was one more thing he didn’t say.
“Professor Harriman thinks you can,” Moretti said.
Even though Bryce hadn’t expected anything else—he wouldn’t have listed his chairperson as a reference if he had—hearing that still warmed him. It also told him his chances of landing this job were pretty decent. Sure as hell, Moretti started talking about money, and about benefits. No, neither was on a par with what Bryce had now.
“When will I hear back from you?” he asked. Do I really want to do this?
“Within a week, I expect,” the older man replied. “We do have two or three other people who we think are legit, and we need to talk to them, too.”
“Okay. Fair enough.” Bryce said the polite thing. Whether he meant it . . . As far as he was concerned, all those other people could geh kak afen yam, one of the handful of Yiddish phrases he knew.
Or could they? Do I really want to do this? he wondered again. He would be doing something he enjoyed a lot more than sitting in the DWP’s cubicle farm. And they would pay him a lot less for doing it, too. Could he scrape by on what they did pay him? If he didn’t think so, what was he doing here? Besides wasting his time and Vic Moretti’s, that is?
“Let me run you back to the bus stop,” Moretti said. “Boy, that’d be a hellacious commute from the South Bay. It wouldn’t be any fun if you could drive it, and bus and subway are a lot slower.”
“Unless the 405 clogs up,” Bryce answered dryly.
The teacher chuckled. “Yeah, there is that. But you probably would think about moving up here, huh?”
“It has crossed my mind,” Bryce said. As they walked down to the Prius, he went on, “I never thought I might end up at a Catholic school.” He didn’t say he was Jewish. Miller could be anything. Some people knew at a glance he was a Landsman. Others, especially the ones his red hair threw off, hadn’t a clue.
“It’s a Catholic curriculum, yeah,” Moretti said. “The kids—the kids are Valley kids. We’re maybe ten percent Jewish, including the quarterback on the football team. We’ve got Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Koreans. You name it, they’re here. Anybody who figures the Los Angeles Unified School District stinks—”