David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

She graded papers on the train uptown. At 116th Street, she got off and had the handsome Armenian from the corner cart refill her thermos with strong black coffee before hurrying up Broadway to the main gates. In April, Barnard’s campus radiated like a veritable oasis of green, the patina’d statue of the torchbearer, the yellow and green and blue banners flapping along the mullioned face of the library, the lovely expanse of lawn bordered with hedges and trees. As she made her way across the flagstone walk, Claudia took in the magnolia, its riotous blooms of dark and pale pink as beautiful as they were brief, an otherworldly confection balanced against a china-blue sky, whose petals were already letting go, tips curling with brown and wheeling through the air to make a shaggy carpet at the base of the trunk. She considered it for a moment, the sad beauty of the tree that proved if you looked at something long enough, you were bound to see its end in it, coiled, perhaps remote, but there. Amused by her own moroseness, she walked on, slipping into the steel-and-glass wedge named not only for the donor whose millions had made the building possible but also for the virgin goddess of the hunt, the Romans’ protector of women. Her office nestled in the architecture department on the fifth floor.

She took the stairs, expecting perhaps to find her favorite grade grubber, the only student who turned Claudia’s office hours into an occasion for weekly pilgrimage, who took up residence outside her door like it was the entrance to Lourdes, but Dylan (née Emily) Speck had yet to appear. In his place, sturdy and attractive as some particularly robust weed, stood Jennie Halvorsen, scribbling on a Post-it note she’d stuck to Claudia’s door. Claudia, having no idea the frustration that co-chairing a committee with Jennie would cause, had agreed to oversee two other faculty members, a handful of students, and selected staff on the Campus Beautification Council. Because the primary task of the council — reviewing the design and installation of campus way finding — had stretched from a two- to four- to eight-month commitment, Claudia and company had been recruited to offer their opinion on a number of smaller (supposedly simpler) improvements, from the color and weave of rain mats meant to spruce up the lobby of campus buildings to the placement of a tree to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (the planting of which now lagged eighteen months behind schedule), jobs that, in Claudia’s opinion, required due consideration and a quick rubber stamp of approval, but that, thanks to the likes of Jennie, seemed doomed to languish in a swamp of academic inertia. Claudia had witnessed this phenomenon before. She’d seen the launch of the college’s refreshed website, the adoption of its visual identity system, the delivery of stationery and business cards specially designed for faculty (because the suite of materials designed for administrators didn’t quite pass muster) derailed by professors whose criticisms flowed as endlessly as the minutia they focused on. Ready with an angry tirade against a “childish” shade of blue or the Oxford comma, one could always rely on a Jennie Halvorsen or Jack Yu or Linda Garcia-Silvestre to steer a project into the bog.

Jennie, hearing the decelerating approach of Claudia’s heels, looked up with a sour expression (her default) that immediately turned sweet. Her angular, deeply lined face brightened as she said, “Claudia! I was hoping to catch you.”

“Jennie.”

“Do you have a second?” she asked, not waiting for an answer but following Claudia into the cool white hush of her glass-fronted office. “I’d like to run something by you before tomorrow’s meeting.”

Claudia dropped her bag on the floor, shrugged out of her jacket, and, indicating a lime-green plastic chair for Jennie, sat herself.

“It’s this tunnel project,” Jennie began, digging into the folder in which she collected notes on the photo exhibition to be hung in the underground tunnel that ran from one end of campus to the other and allowed students to attend classes, even during the coldest months, in their pajamas. She pulled a photo from the stack of papers and slid it across Claudia’s desk like some ominous classified document. “I think we need to revisit some of these images.”

Claudia pried her attention away from Jennie’s preferred hairdo, a thin, perpetually damp ponytail that made her look like a woman who’d just been pushed into a pool, and gave the printout a long, quizzical look. She couldn’t immediately see why a photo of a slender Asian girl striding across the quad with a college tote bag under her arm had been condemned with a question mark scrawled on one of Jennie’s infamous purple Post-its. Perhaps the girl’s boots were too militaristic? Her blazer too businesslike? Claudia apologized, opening a desk drawer to find her reading glasses, but Jennie rushed in to provide a clue.

“It’s the bag. Look at the bag.”

Claudia did.

“It looks like a shopping bag, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not really. It looks like a tote. It says Barnard on it.”

“If you’re looking closely, yes. But most people in a rush see only a bag. A bag that looks very much like a shopping bag, I think. It strikes me as somewhat classist. And, well, frivolous. As if our students came here simply to buy shoes.” Jennie, an associate professor in the English department, who had signage consultants tearing their hair out to find a sans serif font with more “oomph,” fed herself on lecturing more than debate. Claudia couldn’t say how so many of her colleagues, whose minds were supposedly engaged with the highest concerns, with the most sophisticated and enduring questions, came to be so hopelessly humorless and petty. Just as she couldn’t say how a woman who dressed in loafish brown flats and lumpy sweater sets felt so comfortable posing as an authority on questions of style, but here Jennie sat, outraged once again, ready to do battle in a cardigan the color of canned peas over the semiotics of a tote bag.

“But students selected these photos,” argued Claudia. “It’s their campus, Jennie. They should feel invested in the renovations being done on it.”

Claudia’s mind drifted as Jennie raised the rafters of a rebuttal— vendability, elasticity, metaphoricalness: she rattled off these and a half dozen other nominalizations and set to weaving her languorous intellectual web between them. With great effort, as if turning a car without power steering, Jennie drove the conversation toward Marcuse and the dehumanizing effects of capitalism (all from a shopping bag that wasn’t one!), when out of the corner of her eye, Claudia noticed an approaching shadow slide across the outside wall. At first, she thought the shade moving like a piece of charcoal smudged across paper announced Dylan’s approach, but the charcoal turned out not to be her FTM overachiever but her brother.

Benji looked good. Surprisingly good. With his eight-month-old sobriety, his new work going well enough for Alluvia High to consider paying him for it, and his commitment to a four-days-a-week running schedule, he looked fifteen pounds lighter, several years younger, and walked perhaps a little taller. His arrival came a day before she expected it. The visit, something of a mystery, involved a bit of uncharacteristically vague “business” to attend to, after which he’d promised, very uncharacteristically, to take her to dinner.

Not noticing Claudia’s distraction or the happy journey her eyes made to Benji on the other side of the door, Jennie kept driving square pegs into round holes, until Claudia raised a hand like a traffic cop and brought her to a stop. “Jennie,” she broke in, “I hate to cut you short, but my brother is here.” She nodded at Benji, whom Jennie turned to scrutinize with all the enthusiasm of Inspector No. 25 stamping her approval on a cheap pair of underwear. “I need to speak with him.”