enough to be mistaken for the work of a brilliant eighth-grader. How he’d built a controlled plywood environment for growing oats and had photographed the young seedlings meticulously and then ignored them for weeks, and how, by the time he went to weigh the seedlings and determine the effects of gibberellic acid in concert with an unidentified chemical factor, the oats were dried-out blackish slime. How he’d gone ahead anyway and plotted the experiment’s “correct” results on graph paper, working backward to fabricate a list of seedling weights with some artful random scatter and then forward to make sure that the fictional data produced the “correct” results. And how, as a first-place winner at the science fair, he’d won a three-foot-tall silver-plated Winged Victory and the admiration of his father. And how, a year later, around the time his father was securing his first of two U.S. patents (despite his many grievances with Alfred, Chip was careful to impress on his dinner guests what a giant, in his own way, the old man was), Chip had pretended to study migratory bird populations in a park near some head shops and a bookstore and the house of a friend with foosball and a pool table. And how in a ravine at this park he’d uncovered a cache of downmarket porn over the weather-swollen pages of which, back home in the basement lab where, unlike his father, he never performed a real experiment or felt the faintest twinge of scientific curiosity, he’d endlessly dry-chafed the head of his erection without ever figuring out that this excruciating perpendicular stroke was actively suppressing orgasm (his dinner guests, many of them steeped in queer theory, took special delight in this detail), and how, as a reward for his mendacity and self-abuse and general laziness, he’d won a second Winged Victory.
In the haze of dinner-party smoke, as he entertained his sympathetic colleagues, Chip felt secure in the knowledge that his parents could not have been more wrong about who he was and what kind of career he was suited to pursue. For two and a half years, until the fiasco of Thanksgiving in St. Jude, he had no troubles at D—— College. But then Ruthie dumped him and a first-year female student rushed in, as it were, to fill the vacuum that Ruthie left behind.
Melissa Paquette was the most gifted student in the intro theory course, Consuming Narratives, that he taught in his third spring at D——. Melissa was a regal, theatrical person whom other students conspicuously avoided sitting close to, in part because they disliked her and in part because she always sat in the first row of desks, right in front of Chip. She was long-necked and broad-shouldered, not exactly beautiful, more like physically splendid. Her hair was very straight and had the cherry-wood color of new motor oil. She wore thrift-store clothes that tended not to flatter her—a man’s plaid polyester leisure suit, a paisley trapeze dress, gray Mr. Goodwrench coveralls with the name Randy embroidered on the left front pocket.
Melissa had no patience with people she considered fools. At the second meeting of Consuming Narratives, when an affable dreadlocked boy named Chad (every class at D—— had at least one affable dreadlocked boy in it) took a stab at summarizing the theories of Thorstein “Webern,” Melissa began to smirk at Chip complicitly. She rolled her eyes and mouthed the word “Veblen” and clutched her hair. Soon Chip was paying more attention to her distress than to Chad’s discourse.
“Chad, sorry,” she interrupted finally. “The name is Veblen?”
“Vebern. Veblern. That’s what I’m saying.”
“No, you were saying Webern. It’s Veblen.”
“Veblern. OK. Thank you very much, Melissa.”
Melissa tossed her hair and faced Chip again, her mission accomplished. She paid no attention to the dirty looks that came her way from Chad’s friends and sympathizers. But Chip drifted to a far corner of the classroom to dissociate himself from her, and he encouraged Chad to continue with his summary.
That evening, outside the student cinema in Hillard Wroth Hall, Melissa came pushing and squeezing through a crowd and told Chip that she was loving Walter Benjamin. She stood, he thought, too close to him. She stood too close to him at a reception for Marjorie Garber a few days later. She came galloping across the Lucent Technologies Lawn (formerly the South Lawn) to press into his hands one of the weekly short papers that Consuming Narratives required. She materialized beside him in a parking lot that a foot of snow had buried, and with her mittened hands and considerable wingspan she helped him dig out his car. She kicked a path clear with her fur-trimmed boots. She wouldn’t stop chipping at the underlayer of ice on his windshield until he took hold of her wrist and removed the scraper from her hand.
Chip had co-chaired the committee that drafted the college’s stringent new policy on faculty-student contacts. Nothing in the policy prevented a student from helping a professor clear snow off his car; and since he was also sure of his self-discipline, he had nothing to be afraid of. And yet, before long, he was ducking out of sight whenever he saw Melissa on campus. He didn’t want her to gallop over and stand too close to him. And when he caught himself wondering if the color of her hair was from a bottle, he made himself stop wondering. He never asked her if she was the one who’d left roses outside his office door on Valentine’s Day, or the chocolate statuette of Michael Jackson on Easter weekend.
In class he called on Melissa slightly less often than he called on other students; he lavished particular attention on her nemesis, Chad. He sensed, without looking, that Melissa was nodding in comprehension and solidarity when he unpacked a difficult passage of Marcuse or Baudrillard. She generally ignored her classmates, except to turn on them in sudden hot disagreement or cool correction; her classmates, for their part, yawned audibly when she raised her hand.
One warm Friday night near the end of the semester, Chip came home from his weekly grocery run and discovered that someone had vandalized his front door. Three of the four utility lights at Tilton Ledge had burned out, and the college was apparently waiting for the fourth to burn out before investing in replacements. In the poor light, Chip could see that somebody had poked flowers and foliage—tulips, ivy—through the holes in his rotting screen door. “What is this?” he said. “Melissa, you are jailbait.”
Possibly he said other things before he realized that his stoop was strewn with torn-up tulips and ivy, a vandalism still in progress, and that he was not alone. The holly bush by his door had produced two giggling young people. “Sorry, sorry!” Melissa said. “You were talking to yourself!”
Chip wanted to believe she hadn’t heard what he said, but the holly wasn’t three feet away. He set the groceries inside his house and turned a light on. Standing beside Melissa was the dreadlocked Chad.
“Professor Lambert, hello,” Chad said earnestly. He was wearing Melissa’s Mr. Goodwrench coveralls, and Melissa was wearing a Free Mumia T-shirt that might have belonged to Chad. She’d slung an arm around Chad’s neck and fitted a hip over his. She was flushed and sweaty and lit up on something.
“We were decorating your door,” she said.
“Actually, Melissa, it looks pretty horrible,” Chad said as he examined it in the light. Beat-up tulips were hanging down at every angle. The ivy runners had clods of dirt in their hairy feet. “Kind of a stretch to say ‘decorating.’”
“Well, you can’t see down here,” she said. “Where’s the light?”
“There is no light,” Chip said. “This is the Ghetto in the Woods. This is where your teachers live.”
“Dude, that ivy is pathetic.”
“Whose tulips are these?” Chip asked.
“College tulips,” Melissa said.
“Dude, I’m not even sure why we were doing this.” Chad turned to allow Melissa to put her mouth on his nose and suck it, which didn’t seem to bother him, although he drew his head
