“Aren’t you, Mr. Timmins, simply projecting modern attitudes and your own repugnance for homosexuality onto works of literature from an age in which norms of behavior were quite different from ours? Aren’t you, after all, reading too much into the comedies?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Professor Druse, I don’t know about Congreve or any of those dudes, but I know that us gays aren’t ashamed of ourselves anymore.”
“You say ‘we gays.’ What might you mean by that?”
“I mean I’m gay.”
“Well, I don’t suppose that’s anything to be ashamed of,” responded Druse, after a significant pause during which he formed a new conception of Garth Timmins, the old image—home in the right neighborhood, two children in private school, the proper kind of wife—having been shattered. Now Garth was dancing with another man in a disco and going to bath houses. Druse was even a bit revolted by the possibility that Garth was already infected with herpes or AIDS.
“I’m not ashamed. I’m proud. Danny McLatchy, the tailback, he’s gay too. And several fellows on the team are switch hitters. And let me tell you, I happen to know that two of song girls are lesbians.”
“Enough! Quite enough!” Druse was genuinely peeved. “I have no desire to discuss the sexual aberrations of our students. If you feel a need to talk about such matters, you should go to the counseling service or the chaplain.”
Timmins’ smile vanished. He leaned forward, glaring at Druse. “I guess you don’t like queers, do you, Prof? We’re either crazy or sinners—or both—so we should go to the school shrink or the chaplain and get ourselves straightened out. I’ll bet you think blacks should be kept in their place, too.”
Druse chose his well-rehearsed role as the icily aloof scholar-mentor. “Mr. Timmins, I haven’t the slightest interest in any of my students’ sexual preferences or habits. What you do in your own bedroom is your business. However, I don’t allow sex either in my office or in my classrooms.”
Timmins leaped at the opportunity. “Oh, I don’t want to have sex in your office, let alone in your classroom, Professor. All I want is freedom and equality.”
“You’re not funny at all, Mr. Timmins. In fact, you’re downright impertinent. Perhaps you’d better come back at a later time, after you have thought about your manners, to discuss your term paper.”
“Look, Prof, tuition at this place is astronomical. Us students pay your salary.”
Druse’s tone was lethal, prussic acid. “Leave my office immediately. And don’t come back. Drop my course. I never want to see you again. Out! Out! Out!”
Timmins scurried out the door of the office.
“These assholes are barbarians,” muttered Druse. “What a bunch of shitheads. Why couldn’t I have got a job at Johns Hopkins, where I wouldn’t have to put up with these philistines? A homofuckingsexual, probably buggering the goddamn quarterback, or the quarterback buggering him. Christ, what a filthy, rotten mess. And I’m stuck. I can’t get out.”
Druse took a deep breath. The flash of Timmins’ ass in the skintight white polyester flannels, when he flounced out the door of the office, had left the professor with a distressing thought. He had another twenty years before retirement, two decades of the likes of Garth Timmins. Graduate students worked on dissertations under the direction of Alex Hamilton, whose whining voice drove Druse nuts; Potty Tinker had graduate students in spite of the perpetual “hrumph . . . hrumph” that made Tinker’s lectures virtually incoherent; Max Schinken had to deny requests to serve on graduate committees. But Druse had no graduate-student following; hence, he was incomplete, not achieving the status that adulation from advanced students brings about. Mel shook his head sadly. Twenty years of Garth Timmins.
Druse took Mr. Sammler’s Planet from his bookshelf and prepared, this third try, to get through the masterpiece, but he had just opened the book to the first page when the door to his office burst open, and Garth Timmins stood defiantly before him.
“I want to inform you, Professor Homophobe, that I just reported you to Dr. Burden, and Monday I’m going to Dean Amore. There are laws against people like you.”
Before Druse, astounded and trembling, could respond, Timmins slammed out of his office—the dirty little queer sonofabitch, the goddamn fruit. He probably goes around smelling bicycle seats.
Now nothing could rescue the remainder of the waning day, and the only immediate prospect before Professor J. Melongaster Druse was a two-hour hiatus prior to his departure for Adam Adam’s place, where he would meet Bobby, his wife, to endure the rite of the annual departmental cocktail party and get-together. A bleak two hours those would be.
He listened to the sound of a jet overhead, followed by the whack-whack of a helicopter. From somewhere he heard a shrill, brief laugh. Uninterestedly he glanced at the mail on his desk before him.
As he was about to open the first envelope, his phone rang. “ . . . Just catching up on a little work before I go to the party. . . . Nothing important. I’ll be right down.”
Warren Burden, department chair, had asked to talk with Druse. What a pain in the ass. He knew what the subject of this interview would be, and he tensed his system for the walk down the hall and the ordeal of putting up with Warren’s namby-pamby remonstrances regarding the Garth Timmins episode.
The outer office was deserted, and Warren’s door was open. As Druse entered, Warren said, “Sitzen Sie sich. I mean, setzt euch. Assiez vous. I’ve got to run down the hall for a minute.”
Why didn’t the ostentatious jerk just say, “Have a seat”? Druse plunked into a chair by the coffee table, waiting for Warren Burden to reappear. As if in a trance, a deep preconscious state, he stared at an African fetish on the coffee table, an ojet d’art that Burden had brought back from his guest professorship in Nigeria. It was about two feet high, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. At the moment, she seemed like one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He stared at her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protruberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins.
So engrossed was Druse that Burden entered and settled at the desk without disturbing the trance.
“Uh, Mel, are you with me . . . or in Africa?”
“Oh, Warren. I was in Africa, I guess. I’ve seen that hideous figure a thousand times, but it’s new, different every time I look at it. Deep down, I must be primitive. I’m attracted to that horrible thing. If it comes up missing, you can look for it in my office.”
“You should go to the ‘Dark Continent.’ It’s darker now, I think, than when Conrad was there. The old tribes, the old rites, the old ways—they’re dying out slowly, but they still exist. That Dark Goddess there still reigns. The old ways, the savage ways are just a few steps outside of town. Oh yes, Kurtz is still in Africa, but he’s no longer at a station far up the river. He’s in Lagos—where the lights come on and go off according to the whims of . . . of . . . well, probably, of that Dark Goddess there. And Kurtz is chauffeured through impossibly filthy streets, thudding into potholes, in his Mercedes. He does a little banking, a bit of smuggling; it’s even said
