The draft of my second chapter came back on Monday with more red ink than black. I am Leonie, twenty-seven, a doctoral candidate in literary studies, and the man who did that to my argument is standing across the faculty common room with a glass of wine he hasn't touched, listening to the dean talk about funding.
Professor Elias Thorne. Fifty-one, new to the department, already feared. He wrote in my margin, next to a paragraph I had been proud of for a year: This is decoration. Where is the thought?
I have come to this party to tell him something about that. I have had two glasses to help me decide what.
He sees me coming. He excuses himself from the dean with one phrase and is somehow at the window before I reach it, so that I arrive at him rather than the other way round. That is exactly the sort of thing he does.
“Ms. Hartmann.” The name of my chapter's dead poet is in his voice somewhere. “You've been standing by the door for twenty minutes working up to this. What is it?”
“You called my work decoration.”
“I called one paragraph decoration. The rest I called promising, which is a word I use twice a year.” He finally drinks the wine. “Did you read the last page?”
I hadn't. I had stopped at the red. He knows it; his mouth does something that on another man would be a smile. The room is loud behind us and the window is cold at my back, and he steps half a pace closer than a supervisor should to say, quietly, “Read the last page tonight. Then come to my office at eight tomorrow and tell me whether you still want to argue.” He goes back to the dean. I stand at the window with my glass, my whole argument gone, and a page I haven't read waiting in my bag like a letter.
