Margaret Maron: One Coffee With

"Puke on the dean! Let him wait! Or is Nauman afraid to see me? Afraid I'll raise a stink?" His voice rose in a whine. "Listen, Sandy, they're wrecking me. If I don't get that degree, I can't teach; and if I don't teach, when'll I have time to paint?"

Sandy gave an inaudible groan. If Harley Harris were lazy or less dedicated, she thought, echoing departmental sentiment,h e could have been deflected from the Master of Fine Arts program long ago; but what could be done with an energetic grind whose mawkish, ill-proportioned, beetle-busy landscapes weren't even good kitsch?

It was Piers Leyden, with his perverted sense of humor and disdain for degrees, who had conned the department into letting Harris onto the program; who had insisted Harris had the makings of a primitive artist-another Rousseau or Bombois. Unfortunately Harley Harris wasn't even another Grandma Moses.

The joke had stopped being funny. A graduate, after all, reflects the quality of the institution awarding the degree, and the other faculty members were determined that Harley Harris was not going to reflect on them . He had been informed that he would not be receiving an M.F.A. degree next month.

"If I can't teach, I'll have to take a job with my old man," Harley complained.

"Oh, stop whining!" said Sandy, stuffing pigeonholes angrily. "You're lucky to have your father to fall back on."

The senior Mr. Harris owned a thriving window-dressing business in Brooklyn. He had loved the way Harley could write SPRING FASHION SALE in bluebirds and daisies when the lad was only sixteen, and he didn't think six years of college had improved his son's technique. Most of Vanderlyn's Art Department agreed with him.

"You don't have the foggiest idea of how tight the job market is right now," she added impatiently. "Do you know how many people in this country can't find a job? Not just the job they want, any job! And if you think an M.F.A.'s a sure ticket to college teaching, forget it! Look at David-for the last three months we've papered the whole country with his curriculum vitae, and he still hasn't found an opening!"

The murmur of changing classes signaled the end of the third lecture period. Ten-fifty. Sandy turned and saw Harley Harris now leaning over the bookcase to glare at a jewel-toned abstract on the wall above.

"Nauman says my work's fuzzy and tasteless-what the hell does he call this muck?"

Since examples of Oscar Nauman's 'muck' hung in major museums all over the world, Sandy overlooked his peevish insult.

Suddenly the door of the inner office opened, and a thin blond man emerged. "Phone calls," he announced blandly, and Sandy wondered how much he had heard of her outburst. Jake Saxer was by no means one of her favorites.

Everything about him was just a little too crisp and hard-edged. Even his straw-colored beard was precisely clipped to a Vandyke point. Andrea Ross called him a Plexiglas construction straight out of minimal art, and he did have the brittle two-dimensional intensity of a man who expects to make it before forty. At twenty-seven Saxer already had his Ph.D. and an assistant professorship. Upon his arrival at Vanderlyn College two years ago, he'd analyzed his opportunities like a hard-nosed curator assessing the authenticity of a dubious Etruscan warrior and then deliberately ingratiated himself with Professor Quinn. Quinn had just begun another definitive book on postwar trends in modern art, and Saxer was knowledgeable about sources, references and illustrations. He had made himself so indispensable that Quinn had used his authority as deputy chairman to cut Saxer's teaching load to one survey course this semester-ostensibly so that Saxer could sort and catalog the department's chaotic slide library but in reality to give him more free time for Quinn's research chores.

The office continued to fill up as people drifted in from classes to check their mail or just shoot the breeze. Piers Leyden and Andrea Ross were followed by Vance, who came in sipping his hot chocolate. Graduate students and lecturers, holding coffee and cigarettes, elbowed for space at the corner table, gossiping about the morning fiasco in hoots of laughter, which moderated slightly when Riley Quinn returned from his ten o'clock lecture, 'Conceptual Divergence in Modern Art.'

All signs of the deputy chairman's earlier loss of control had vanished. Once again he was a supercilious, dapper executive with a tanned face, crisp gray hair and shrewd brown eyes. Quinn always seemed to have just emerged from an expensive barbershop, his nails freshly manicured and trailing a faint scent of after-shave lotion; and in a department not noted for sartorial elegance his perfectly pressed fawn-colored suit, dark brown shirt and paisley tie set him apart. Not a speck of city dust dulled the gleaming surface of his shoes, and his pigskin slide case was custom-made and unbattered.

Harley Harris rose from a chair beside the bookcase.

"Professor Quinn-"

"Not now," Quinn said brusquely. " Sandy, get me Dean Ellis." He reached around Harris and picked up one of the two Styrofoam cups on the bookcase.

"Now just a minute!" Harris squeaked. "I have a right-"

Quinn ignored him and, seeing Sandy signal that the dean was on the line, went into his office and closed the door in Harley Harris's face. Harris turned angrily and almost collided with Professor Simpson, who was balancing his coffee on two thick reference tomes.

"Excuse me," murmured the old man and, nudging the boy aside, returned the books to the shelves below. Beyond Simpson's bent back Harris spotted Oscar Nauman just making his way through the crowded office, and his truculence wavered.

White-haired, six-foot-two and possessed of deep blue eyes that seemed to look past externals to the heart of any matter, the chairman towered over his colleagues mentally as well as physically. He tended to forget appointments and responsibilities, and left most departmental routine to Quinn and Sandy. When aroused in intellectual debate, his speech often became tangled and elliptical because his mind outran his tongue; but in his writings and especially in his paintings his brilliance shone forth unhindered. The only criticism ever leveled at Oscar Nauman's work was that it was too starkly cerebral.

Now he took the last cup from the tray on the bookcase, discarded the snap-on lid, swallowed deeply and grimaced, "God, Vance! This tastes like one of your acid baths!"

All this time Harley Harris, who barely came up to Nauman's chest, had been dancing for attention, and the artist looked down at him in mystified bewilderment as a Great Dane might gaze at a yipping chihuahua. Frustrated, Harris shrilled, "You just wait then! You'll be sorry! And I hope you roast in hell!"

Nauman watched him flounce away through the nursery exit and, honestly puzzled, appealed to Sandy.

"Is he upset about something?"

Malicious laughter rippled through the big room as Sandy reminded him of Harley's failure. "Professor Quinn told him yesterday that he wouldn't qualify for an M.F.A., but I think he was hoping you'd override the committee's decision. He was supposed to have a meeting with you today but it had to be postponed."

Nauman frowned, uncomfortably aware that he'd been unintentionally rude to the boy. He could be, and often was, merciless in his treatment of those with intellectual pretensions, but picking on someone of Harley Harris's mental size was not very sporting.

Around him the conversation had reached a raucous pitch. Among the younger staff members at the corner table, battle was joined over whether or not there was a shred of individuality in the whole second generation of abstract expressionists. Both sides had fervent, articulate defenders who shouted to be heard.

A bearded latecomer pushed his way into the group, snarling good-naturedly at a friend who'd maneuvered him into dating his girl friend's cousin. "You promised me a Venus," he grumbled. "She was a Venus, all right. The Willendorf Venus!"