Rock Island, IL

Previously on “The Way to Bliss:

At the phrase “one Tenley Ackerson” a portion of Claudia’s green tea reversed itself. “Oh, my God!” she cried as she leapt out of her bean-bag chair, snorting tea and startling Aunt Jennifer, her cat, who ran and hid behind the free-standing, life-size cut-out of Gloria Steinem. Claudia grabbed her keys and ran to her Volvo 240. She hadn’t a moment to lose. Tenley Ackerson, her dear lost protégé, was found!

“You’re a medievalist,” Lucinda said in the restroom that same Friday some seventy miles away. “You’ll appreciate this.

Years ago the people in Facilities Management had affixed a sign to the restroom that said “Ladies.” Lucinda had dashed off a furious memo to the director of Facilities demanding that the sign on the restroom be changed from “Ladies” to “Women.” Prickett always wished—alas, in vain—that what ensued had been done knowingly: the director of Facilities, following orders according to his custom and practice, produced a sign and affixed it the following day. It read–complete with quotation marks–“Women.”

Behind this same door marked “Women” Lucinda said, “You’re a medievalist. You’ll appreciate this.” Presently she was standing at the mirror adjusting a turquoise silk scarf that twenty years ago would have been fashionable, whilst Barbara sat heavily in the handicap stall. “You’ll appreciate this,” Linda said. “Prickett told his class that not even the Philosopher’s Stone itself could turn a feminist into an intelligent life-form.”

“You’re kidding me! He said that in class?” Barbara was not familiar with the term “Philosopher’s Stone” and could never quite make sense of all the alchemy in Chaucer (her dissertation was theoretical enough that she managed to avoid close familiarity with any medieval text whatsoever), but she understood that this remark of Prickett’s, because it was Prickett’s remark, required outrage. Lucinda heard Barbara spin the toilet paper at least six full revolutions before she tore off a banner-length strip of it. “That’s unexcusable,” she said.

Lucinda winced at the malapropism, reached for her fake black-patent leather brass-studded purse—which also would have been fashionable twenty years ago—and decided once and for all that Barbara must be destroyed.

“And he calls you ‘Babs,’” she said as she left.

A great clamorous noise could be heard in the stall behind Lucinda as Barbara Eaton-Hogg raised her massive self to her feet, pulled her men’s briefs up to her waist, and yanked her stretch pants over her rhomboid hips. Neither flush nor hand-washing could be heard as Eaton-Hogg stormed out of the door marked “Women.”

* * * * *

That same afternoon, Tenley Ackerson, at the very brink of understanding something, had looked in the mirror. Her thin, angular eyebrows appeared sculpted, but they were not. Her high cheek-bones seemed accentuated by some form of applied pigmentation, but they were not. Her hair, which fell in delicate, spiral curls about her face, suggested—even to the illiterate— raven tresses. But Tenley scarcely did anything more than brush her teeth in the morning. She did not labor to be beautiful. Beauty greeted her each morning as if it were a thing ready and waiting for her in the mirror.

What she nearly understood slipped away once again. She sighed at its loss and at her great misfortune, which she could not name—which, indeed, hung about her like a fragrance, like an ambience.

And now, here at The Witch’s Brew, she opened Rhetoric in the Middle Ages and began to read, oblivious of the convocation of football players in sleeveless t-shirts and baseball caps, donned backward in what they imagined the most attractive style. These student-athletes had gathered, without subtlety, to stare at her. At last L’Atrocius Brown stood, pinched at his fly, pulled to make the habitual adjustment, and shuffled over to her table.

“Hey. Uh. I’m Troshe Brown?”

Tenley looked up from her book and, not knowing the answer to this apparent question, said nothing.

“You a stoo-ent here?” L’Atrocius axed.

Tenley nodded and began reaching for her most useful lie.

“Me too. Binniss and Fy-nance. Uh. I was like wunnerin if . . .”

And just as if L’Atrocius were poor Elias Ashmole, Tenley interrupted him. “English. I transferred here from Baxter to be with my boyfriend, who’s a wrestler.”

“Oh. Oh! Whoa! Uh. Dass Coo! I seen you around is all.” Then, pointing a thumb over his shoulder with one hand and pinching at his fly with another, L’Atrocius said, “my boys are ready.”

Tenley stared him down until he turned and walked away to rejoin his fellow student-athletes.

The ridges in his calf muscles caught her attention Did they all have them? How had she failed to notice them before?

Whereupon Dr. Claudia Augen, the sociologist, appeared in the doorway of The Witch’s Brew. Tenley, she knew, would likely be found in a coffee shop of a Friday afternoon. Tenley’s practiced eyes were fixed on her book; Claudia spotted her at once: Tenley was the only person not dressed as a corpse.

* * * * *

“I think he’s biting,” Rottingham said from his usual stool at the bar. The Flask and Bugle was quiet for a Friday. “It’s this new girl, I think. He does naught but stare at her in Boethius. I’m almost offended. But not quite.” He scraped ashes out of his pipe and reloaded it.

“Goddamned Lu-Lu is up to something, and bugger me if I can figure it out,” said Prickett, distracted.

“If that is my option, I prefer you not figure it out.”

“Someone told her my Philosopher’s Stone remark—which I made in the privacy of my own classroom, I might add—and now she’s going to get me buggered. Mark me. She’ll use that fool Babs to do it. All the oceans of time in human history and I have to live at the precise moment they’re here.”

“We get Ashmole into Southern, we’re on our way to keeping the denizens of Furry Valley out of the Dean’s office. Women’s Studies will no sooner put someone up for that job than I’ll ask Grover Johnson at Southern to write a letter about what kind of undergraduate detritus we’re sending their way.” A confident Gus Rottingham trumpeted his pilsner glass and drained a full ten ounces at once.

Whereupon their favorite bartender appeared at his elbow with another pilsner perfectly timed and ready.

“I tell you, living at the same goddamned time as Lu-Lu and Babs–it’s worse than having to teach,” Prickett said.

It’s worse than hearing English at Mass,” Rottingham allowed.

* * * *

“Tenley, dear. Why did you leave us?” Claudia Augen asked.

A startled Tenley Ackerson looked up from her book. “Dr. Augen!” she cried.

“Shhhhh! Please,” Augen said, her hawk-like eyes fixed in earnest. She sat down unbidden and put a claw on Tenley’s splendid thigh. “I was so worried about you,” Augen said, not removing her hand.

Tenley scooted away a little until she was free of Augen’s touch. “What for?”

“At Baxter. You made so much progress toward . . . toward true femininity. The clothing, the righteous anger, the jargon.”

Clearly, her most useful lie was precisely what Tenley needed, save that in her great surprise at seeing Dr. Augen—in sweatpants, no less—she could summon not the smallest part of it.

“I was your friend, wasn’t I?” Claudia asked, touching Tenley again.

“You were my professor,” Tenley said. She was so utterly taken by surprise that nothing but bare obvious truths would come to her. “In one class three years ago!”

The sound of someone blowing his nose broke in, and suddenly Tenley was aware of how thunderstruck she must have looked. She turned toward the blowing and saw Elias standing there, pimply, tragic, heroic. “Excuse me please, Dr. Augen. My boyfriend’s here.”

* * * * *

An inebriated Barbara Eton-Hogg dialed the telephone. The Dean had not been in his office at three o’clock on Friday. The Dean was seldom in his office, whether at three o’clock on Friday or ten o’clock on Tuesday. Years of being the faculty fire hydrant—and not for purposes of putting out fires—had made him prefer being anywhere but at his desk. His greatest skill as an administrator was his ability not to be found.

But Barbara found him at home Friday at dinner time. He answered the telephone with a mouth half-full of tagliatelle and prosciutto with a cream-based mushroom, sage, and gorgonzola sauce.

“That Prickett call me ‘Babs’ and I wanna know what yer gone do about it,” Barbara Eaton-Hogg said to the receiver as Barry, her “husband,” listened on in half-amusement, half-horror. He’d seen “The Creature” (as he called her to his boyfriends) drunk before, but not like this.

“Nothing,” said the Dean, chewing. “He has tenure. Who is this please?”

“Dr. Barb’ra E’en-Hogg,” Dr. Barbara Eaton-Hogg said triumphantly. “I want his ass.”

“You’re welcome to it,” the Dean said, “though no woman’s been near it for as long as I’ve known him. Please hold. I must fetch my wine.” He put the receiver down, motioned to his wife to put on the speaker phone, swirled his wine, took a brief whiff, then a small taste, which he held briefly on his tongue before swallowing. Then he sat down at the table. “Now as you were saying,” he said to the speaker phone.

“That hairy prick hasta be called in,” Barbara said. “No man calls me ‘Babs’ and gess away with it.”

“No person, you mean.”

“No by God I don’t!” thundered Barbara. “I want him formerly reprimanded.”

“Then I shall bend time and do it,” said the Dean. “Remind me, Dr. Eton-Hogg. You’re in the English department, is that right?”

“You know damn well I am!” Barbara cried. “I came here from Southern Amer’can Universee with a recommendation from Allison Peterson-Edinger–thassa triple dactyl, y’know–author of Sinister Seminal Seminoles and the Ovarian Native American Transgressive/Revolting Imagination.”

“Right. Now I remember you. Tell me, Dr. Eton-Hogg. Would boiling in oil be severe enough for Dr. Prickett, or would you prefer that I require him to attend all your classes from now on?”

“Goddamn boiling in oil!”

The Dean heard a click. Barry had uncharacteristically permitted himself an act of kindness on The Creature’s behalf and cut off the connection.

The Dean returned to his exquisitely prepared dinner (for he did love to cook), chewing, swirling, and smiling in the way of an old conspirator.

“Looks like Lucinda wins again,” his wife said, slowly shaking herself into giggles of delight.

“Borstein-VanHocksenbergen. You can’t help but admire her,” the Dean said, raising his glass to Lucinda, who sat grinning between the head and foot of the table.

* * * * *

Tenley had swept her belongings into her bag, taken Elias by the elbow, and marched him through The Witch’s Brew, leaving Dr. Claudia Augen to be alone beneath the nudes in her sweat-panted earnestness.

Whereupon Elias’s heart had begun to pound, his blood to congregate. He bowed his head into his middle finger to push his glasses up his oily nose. When he and Tenley reached the warm afternoon air outside, Tenley stopped and commenced upon an explanation, careful not to look at Elias’s face.

Elias, for his part, had made a quick tug at his shirt so that it draped untucked in front of him, but still his heart pounded. He could barely hear the flute-like voice of Tenley Ackerson for all the banging in his chest and elsewhere.

“So you see,” she said, settling into a business-like tone toward the end of her explanation, “My real boyfriend just left to rejoin his fellow Navy Seals, so I was alone in the coffee shop when Dr. Augen showed up. I hope you’re not offended that I told that silly lie about you and used you to escape from her.”

Elias had attempted to say “not at all,” but his voice cracked like that of a pubescent boy. Then he fell into a sneezing fit, which required the furious deployment of a handkerchief already, by then, at the limits of its holding capacity. Again, things were going badly. In the end, all Elias could say was “excuse me.” He departed in utter defeat, sneezing and blowing into his shirt tails. Soon he was back in his room, more specifically his shower, where, on and off, he remained until well after midnight.

* * * * *

“Ashmole!” Prickett said into the receiver. “Pick up the goddamn phone!” Rottingham’s laughter in the background mixed with the cacophony of The Flask and Bugle’s eleven p.m. crowd. Above the payphone someone had etched, “Play the flute? Call Barry.”

But Ashmole could not hear the phone from the shower.

“Ashmole. This’s Prickett,” Prickett said to the answering machine. “I want you to see Babs Eton-Hogg about graduate programs at Southern. Monday. First thing after Boethius.”

“And bring her flowers!” said Rottingham through a fit of coughing and laughter that fairly resembled a grand mal seizure.

“And be sure to bring her flowers! She loves that sort of thing.” Prickett hung up, and the two of them went wheezing back to their stools, slapping each other on the back in the frat-boy manner they’d made careers of ridiculing.

* * * * *

Having not read the entire letter, Claudia Augen, still unaware that she was out of uniform, was ill-prepared for what awaited her at Barbara Eton-Hogg’s apartment. She rang the doorbell expecting Barbara in her usual over-sized cape-like shirt or jumper, the lipless and skinny Barry somewhere in the background, and Barry’s boyfriend, Timmy, back further still. Instead, she was met with a much-fattened Barry and, over his shoulder, the pallid, slightly pustuled face of someone with long hair combed back and held motionless by hairspray. A purple straw held tightly between the stranger’s diminutive lips like the reed of an oboe plunged deeply into a strawberry daiquiri.

“Come in, my dear!” said Barry enthusiastically. “I haven’t seen in forever! Barbara! Look who’s here!” Claudia could see Barbara sleeping on a pile of herself in the corner. “This is Todd,” Barry said, and raised himself on his toes to kiss Todd on the smooth dimpled diminutive chin.

“Delighted,” Todd said, holding his head and strawberry daiquiri motionless. He seemed afraid that the slightest motion would shatter his hair into tiny, shard-like fragments that would fall like glitter into his drink.

Barry wore a tight navy blue t-shirt that said “Bitch” across the shoulders. “We’ve had the most amazing night,” he said, leading her into the dark living room. An old Commodores album was playing on a turntable. “When Babs sobers up, she’ll tell you about it. Won’t you, Babs?” Barry said loudly.

Barbara rolled on her back and began snoring. Todd and Barry giggled and then, like synchronized hydraulic salon chairs, slowly lowered themselves, cross-legged, to the floor in front of the couch.

“What have you got to drink?” Claudia asked.

“Cabinet above the stove,” Barry said. “Help yourself.”

Claudia walked into the kitchen; she could hear Barry and Todd kissing. She returned with a bottle of scotch and a cloudy tumbler. She filled the glass almost to the top and began to pull on it as if it were water.

“Whatever brings you to this land of cultural, intellectual, and sexual exile?” Barry asked after taking a sip from Todd’s daiquiri.

“Just needed to get away from Baxter,” she said. All that oppressive straight energy on the weekend. All that screwing.”

“Oh, my dear,” said Barry, “Flahtsam is much worse.”

“Fluck Fahtsam,” Barbara said in her sleep. Barry and Todd went into a fit of giggles. They leaned toward each other and touched at the shoulders.

“Was it Chardonnay?” asked Claudia.

“A bottle and a half,” said Todd. “In thirty minutes. Then she called the Dean.”

“Uh oh,” Claudia said, refilling her glass already. “I don’t like the sounds of this.”

Just then a grey cat, a male, came out from behind a large potted plant. It sniffed Todd and turned its back toward him. Suddenly its raised tail quivered, and deep dark spots appeared on Todd’s magenta silk shirt.

“What the . . .?” he said, jumping up.

“Dorian Gray!” Barry said. “Bad pussy!”

* * * * *

Lucinda Borstein-VanHocksenbergen had bed-spins. After the delicious little event at the Dean’s, she’d gone quite celebratory. The Dean, for his part, spotted an opportunity. As the port wine flowed, Lucinda’s tongue loosened, and she’d parted with the ultimate object of her grand design: the Dean’s job.

For which the Dean had little sympathy.

“You know,” Lucinda had said, “I haven’t really tole ver minny people this, but I’ve always thought I’d make a fantassic dean. And given the chance, well . . . .” She stopped to wink and nod assuringly.

Of course she would make a very good Dean. She was mean and stingy and smart enough to know who the frauds were. But no one liked her enough to support her, although many of her colleagues confessed to liking her—it was Prickett who framed the remark—“the way they like having radical reconstructive dental work.”

“Well she was certainly in high spirits,” the Dean’s wife had remarked when Lucinda finally left.

“For someone on medication,” the Dean said sourly, returning several bottles to the liquor cabinet. “The way this faculty drinks, I should claim these little dinners as professional expense.”

“She’s on medication?”

“What, are you crazy? She’s a single female academic. Of course she’s on medication.”

And now Lucinda had bed spins. When she closed her eyes, the bed rotated clockwise at such a rate that the centrifugal force began to draw the contents of her stomach mouthward. When she let one leg drape over the edge and touch the floor, the clockwise motion stopped, which was a relief, but then the counter-clockwise motion began. There was nothing she could do but hope to pass out. But she couldn’t pass out because she’d been foolish enough to refuse the cognac at the end of the evening. She got out of bed, fell to her left against her night stand (knocking to the floor a trashy dime-store romance novel), stood again, paused to get her balance, and then walked straight into the trim that framed the left side of the bathroom door. She got back up a second time, held herself between the door jambs like Sampson at the pillars, and then made one swift lunge for the toilet bowl, whither she delivered a direct projectile hit in the water below her.

* * * * *

Tenley Ackerson finished brushing her teeth, which of course were perfectly straight and white. She washed her face first with warm water, then with cold. She then dabbed her face with a towel, looked into the mirror, and said, “I’ve got to get a real boyfriend.”

* * * * *

Elias Ashmole looked into the mirror and removed his glasses. He neglected to brush his teeth. He neglected to urinate. He drew back the shower curtain to step in but stopped. “I’ve got to get more Noxzema,” he said.

* * * * *

Professor Harold Prickett stood at the toilet for a full eight minutes, dribbling pathetically into the bowl, staring at his own reflection in a mirror inexplicably hung above the tank in his chaotic bathroom. He began cursing Gus Rottingham, Guinness Stout, and modern medicine, “than which nothing is as useless!” he cried as he shook his aging spigot.

* * * * *

Gus Rottingham stood at the door to his bedroom, keeping his balance by leaning against the jamb whilst looking through the darkness at the enormous real estate of his wife’s backside and ignoring most of what she was saying to him from their bed, whence she did most of her high-pitched scolding. It must be said that Rottingham loved his wife, but not when he’d been drinking all night, had missed their dinner party with the Dean, and had failed to call with information of his whereabouts. On such nights she was insufferable.

“Well are you going to stand there swaying like a Bowery bum,” she said at last, “or are you going to come to bed?”

After forty years of enduring pretty much the same speech with pretty much the same closing rhetorical question, Rottingham understood this to be the end of it. He was safe until morning.

“I’m going to pee, if you must know,” he said, though like his friend Harold Prickett he, too, had a constricting prostate strangulating his urethra.

When the unimpressive evacuation was over, he went to the kitchen to drink some water, take three preventive aspirin, and wait for Prickett’s call.

“ A full eight minutes,” Prickett thundered resentfully into the receiver as Rottingham, receiver in hand, looked into the window above the kitchen sink. Rottingham hadn’t even said “hello” when he picked up the phone.

“Three and a quarter,” Rottingham boasted, as much to his own reflection in the window as to Prickett.

“Damn you!” Prickett shouted. “Is it because you’re still a Catholic? Is it?”

“It’s because you historians don’t tend to the present. You aren’t interested in anything until it’s over.

* * * * *

Claudia Augen was passed out in her chair, Dorian Gray asleep with his head nuzzled in her crotch. Half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red stood on the table beside her. Barry and Todd had slipped off to Barry’s bedroom. Lionel Richie continued to sing on the old turntable, which kept playing the record over and over. Mood lamps still dimly illuminated the room. A residue of incense hung upon the still air into which Barbara Eton-Hogg’s enormous slumberous mass awoke.

Aroused, she tried to arouse Claudia, who, like herself six hours ago, could not be made to stir. She drew the arm off the turntable, dragging the needle across the wax and making a terrible screech that only Dorian Gray seemed–and not with pleasure–to hear, turned off the mood lamps, and lugged her massive self into her bedroom, neglecting to brush her teeth.

* * * * *

It was a favorite ruse of Prickett’s to put empty cardboard boxes outside the office of someone whose goose was cooked. Only Rottingham knew the identity of the culprit responsible for this prank, and he was as silent as the grave about it. Poor quaking tenure candidates whose tenure decisions were about to come down knew to fear the appearance of the boxes, for the wag who left them was never wrong.

But Barbara was not this clever, so instead of getting on immediately with the business of updating her CV, she called the janitor and demanded that the empty packing boxes outside her office be removed.

“I am an assistant professor with a Pee Aitch Dee!” she shouted into the phone. “I don’t have to put up with this mess!”

This was Monday. Over the weekend she’d spoken to Claudia about the Madison conference as if Claudia had finished reading her letter, which, in her excitement about finding Tenley, she hadn’t. Claudia had no idea what Barbara meant by the “inter(pretive) tool” and was too distracted with the thought of Tenley Ackerson to think much about anything else.

“Of course I’ll help her get into Southern,” Claudia had said. “It’s just that I’m concerned she might not fit well here.”

“She fits fine. There are no requirements for the major. All she has to do is finish a year of taking courses, basically. We’ll both write for her and she’ll go on to do us proud.”

“I’ve got to get going,” Claudia had said. “I’ve got papers to grade.”

“But we haven’t seen the tool,” Barbara complained.

“The what?”

“You know.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got way too much to do. And my head is killing me.”

Claudia managed to get away, but that was for purposes of finding Tenley, whom she sought first at the coffee shop.

That is, she sought the living among the dead. But Tenley was nowhere near the coffee shop. Tenley was in the least likely of places.

She sat in the warm sun and listened over and over to the voice from the loud speakers: “L’Atrocius Brown the ball carrier.”

* * * * *

So on Monday, just as the boxes were being cleared from outside her office, Barbara heard a rap on the door.

“Come in. Oh, Elias. It’s you.”

Elias bowed his head into the middle finger of his left hand and pushed his glasses up his shiny nose. In his right hand he held a bouquet of flowers. “Could I talk to you about Southern’s grad program for a minute?”

“Southern’s? You want to do history, don’t you?” Barbara leaned back in the chair she amply filled. Three potted plants withered on a shelf behind her.

Ashmole had rehearsed the speech. “Actually, Dr. Eton-Hogg, the old patriarchal narrative of medieval history bores me. I’m interested in the subaltern. I’m pretty sure I want to be a feminist medievalist like you.”

Barbara’s chair broke off its spindle, and her great mass of flesh went flying backward, crashing to the floor. “Jaheezis!” she cried as she bumped a book case and set off an avalanche of potting soil, leaves, and feminist criticism, most of it opening for the first time as it fell.

Poor Elias looked on in wonder. Such things happened to him, not to other people.

“Can’t anyone make a good chair anymore? she thundered once she’d dug herself out from under a pile of colon-bespecked titles.

“Are . . . are you okay, Dr. Eton-Hogg?”

“I think so. Damn Sam. I need a new chair! Goodness! That’s embarrassing.” She straightened what little hair she had and pulled her stretch jumper down over the rhombus. “Now where were we?” She shoved a few books into a corner. “Southern?”

“Yes. Would you feel comfortable recommending me?”

“Of course, Elias,” Barbara said, thinking Elias and Tenley would make two feathers for her cap—a cap that at this point needed feathers. “You’re the bright hope of Flahtsam. I’ll get on it right away. I’ll let you know who to take and who to avoid.”

This was the kind of talk that at Flahtsam put Barbara into a rage. “How dare you tell anyone not to take my classes,” she had once screamed at Prickett.”

“How dare I?” he asked. “Like this. “‘Hey, everyone,” he shouted down Perritt Hall. “Don’t take classes from this moron.’” Then he turned to her, calmly straightened his tie, and, in his most civilized voice, said, “That’s how.”

Of course the Dean was obliged to investigate this, which he didn’t. He was sure Eton-Hogg was an idiot the first time he met her. During her interview he had asked whether she thought “the ars dictaminis is entirely lost in our day.” Eton-Hogg responded by saying she’d seen a movie in which “they’d found Hitler’s brain.” She was sure they’d find the dictator’s other end, too.

“Can you be wholly ignorant of Latin and still be competent in Middle English?” he’d asked Lucinda, the chair at that time who was desperate to hire a protégé.

“Trust me,” Lucinda had said.

“Don’t you mean ‘whom?’” asked Elias.

“That’s what I said,” said Barbara Eton-Hogg, who knew less about grammar than she knew about the Middle Ages.

Elias left with the flowers still in his hand. Time elapsed: three minutes.

* * * *

Tenley saw L’Atrocious approaching from across the cafeteria. She took a large bite of her banana. When he was almost to her table she swallowed and said, “nice game Saturday.”
L’Atrocius Brown, picking away at his fly, stopped.

“Huh? Oh, hey. Hey! Was you there?”

“Yes. I saw you running and then falling down. It was very impressive.”

Awe, thanks, dawg! I mean, thanks, uh, uh . . .”

“Tenley. Tenley Ackerson.”

“Tinnly. Thass right. Whoa!

* * * * *

“Hello?” Lucinda sounded impatient. She’d been trying to reach the Dean all morning to tease out what she had and hadn’t said at his dinner party Friday. But of course he was nowhere near his phone. And now her own phone rang.

“It’s Barbara. Good news. In addition to Tenley, we’re going to get Elias. He just left here telling me he wants to go to Southern to become–are you sitting down?”–because Barbara, whose chair was broken, certainly was not sitting down–“he wants to be a Feminist Medievalist! Isn’t that great?”

“Great,” said Lucinda with all the enthusiasm of a lunch worker. “Don’t blow this.” She hung up and then added, “because you’re fornicated six ways from breakfast.”

Barbara instinctively leaned back, except she wasn’t in her chair. She lost her balance and fell into a pile of feminist criticism. Only after hoisting herself from the pile did she return to the indulgent thought that she’d beat the pants off Prickett and Rottingham.

* * * * *

Who at that very moment were celebrating in The Flask and Bugle, though it was eleven a.m.

“As Plotinus is my witness,” said Rottingham, an artery beating in his pink temple, “I would gladly add five minutes to my post-midnight piss if I could have access to your sources.

“Please. I’m a historian.”

“I’m the one who was supposed to be at that goddamned dinner party—though be it hereby noted I’d rather chew on tinfoil than dine with Lu-Lu—and you have all the news ere Monday dawns.”

“The Dean thought he needed your help getting rid of Babs,” Pricket said. “Turns out you’re unnecessary as usual.” He paused, raised his woolly eyebrows, and gave Rottingham space for rebuttal. Rottingham declined by lighting his pipe. “The point is,” said Prickett, “we needn’t worry about Lu-Lu. The Dean will leave written recommendations, et cetera, et cetera. Here’s to the fall of Lu-Lu and the smell of bacon frying.”

“And one more thing.”

Prickett peered out over his cloudy half-glasses, waiting.

“Guess whose drop slip I signed today.”

“Cheers, old man! Pricket said, clinking Rottingham’s pilsner. “Who cares if we need a weekly planner to schedule our wee-wees?” They trumpeted their glasses in unison, diminishing the modern wasteland by two more pints of the very stuff that made it sufferable. “The question now is, can we come up with an inside candidate for the Dean’s alleged job when he leaves? Someone who won’t bugger us.”

“I’ll put you up, Rottingham said cheerfully.”

“I’ve got a goddamned job! Justin H. Martyr! Can you imagine what his booze bill is each month?”

“My point exactly,” Rottingham said. “You’d save money.”

* * * * *

Bar Jester’s note: It is apparent that at this point the unknown author of this this story, seeing that his readers had lost interest in it, lost interest in it himself. A few scattered notes for a third installment survive, but they are scribbled in the illegible hand of what is obvioulsy a desperate dipsomaniac.

Nevertheless there remain a few questions for the textual scholar, should any other manuscripts come to light. The question of authorship is, of course, an important one. Was he himself a medievalist? A Wilde scholar? Did he work alone or did he have a collaborator? Could it have been the author of Confederacy of Dunces having an elaborate joke on himself during the years of his creative decline?

Another question concerns source material. Did the author work from existing manuscripts? Is the story wholly invented? Are there identifiable historical models for the characters? Oddly enough (for example), the towns “Batavia” and “Elba,” though indistinct, appear in some of the remaining notes and suggest some connection to the local color of certain towns in what is now known as “the burned-out district” of New York state. But then there is a dedication, also barely distinct, to what appears to be the “Tokeville Center” and its “Lecherous Director.”

Which is simply to say that, even though the text extant itself has been satisfactorily established, there remains work for the scholar—or perhaps the directionless Ph.D. candidate—to undertake.

Meanwhile, we may hope that the third but heretofore undiscovered installment will someday be found.

Or not.

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