Look Closer

Yes, it can wait. Everything will be fine. I don’t know why I worry so much.

37 Simon

When I finish with my latest entry, I put the green journal into my work bag, where it always stays. Not exactly something I want other people reading, right?

Anshu pokes his head into my office. “Hey, give me five minutes.”

“Fine.”

Anshu’s taking me out to lunch today. He’d never say so, but he’s trying to cheer me up. Today is Friday, the sixteenth of September, the deadline day for submitting the application for full professorship. He knows the dean asked me not to submit my application, and he knows I didn’t submit it, though he doesn’t know why.

Yes, it bothers me, but what bothers me even more is that he can tell it bothers me. I pride myself on not showing my emotions.

“Okay, I’m good.” He walks in with his coat over his arm and bag packed.

“Done for the day?” I ask. “At one o’clock?”

“Well, I figured it might turn into a liquid lunch,” he says. “Hey, it’s a Friday afternoon.”

Yeah, he’s consoling me. Anshu really is a good egg. He’s one of the only people around here I can stomach, one of the only ones who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is probably one of the top ten tort law professors in the country, but you’d never know it to talk to him. He’d rather talk about his wife and kids or the Cubs, who are currently in the midst of another September nosedive.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. I don’t need cheering up.”

“Well, I do,” he says. “I want people who deserve the job. I don’t like people clouting their way into a professorship because of their donor father. This school has enough money already. So help me drown my sorrows, okay?”

How can I say no to that?

“Only if you let me buy,” I say.

“Even better.”

—

The place is just a walk down from the law school, a block south and near Michigan Avenue, a French place that, according to Anshu, has the best monkfish in the world. I’ve never eaten monkfish and probably won’t start today. I’m looking forward more to the well-stocked bar area after lunch.

“Bindra, party of two,” says Anshu when we walk in. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

I glance around the room. It doesn’t take me long.

Dean Comstock and his new protégé, Associate Professor Reid Southern, soon to be full professor, sitting in one of the booths, a bottle of champagne on ice by the table.

You have seriously got to be kidding me. They’re celebrating his ascension to full professor, and I have to be in the same fucking room with them? I mean, why doesn’t someone come over and waterboard me while we’re at it?

“We can go somewhere else,” Anshu whispers. “I really don’t care where—”

“Not at all,” I say, patting his arm. “I’m dying to try that monkfish.”

“Simon, really.”

“They already saw us,” I say. “If I walk out now, I look like an asshole.”

It’s true. They’ve seen us. And now the dean and Reid are whispering something to each other and putting on their good-sportsmanship-pity faces.

“Are we all set, gentlemen?” the woman at the reception podium asks us.

All set! Just don’t seat us next to them, or near them, and maybe I can get through this.

“Professors!” Dean Comstock calls out, Mr. Orange Bow Tie today, his silver cuff link gleaming as he extends a hand to us. I was kind of hoping handshakes would go the way of the dodo bird after COVID-19, but the dean’s an old-school kind of guy, so I shake his hand.

“Good to see you, Reid,” I say, though I’d rather have my fingernails removed with pliers.

As Anshu has pointed out several times, Reid indeed looks the part of a law professor, with his sport coat, circular eyeglasses, salt-and-pepper goatee, and general air of smugness.

“No class today?” Reid asks me, sizing up my usual attire, a button-down shirt and jeans.

Well, that was a little below the belt, wasn’t it, Reid? I mean, you know how I dress, and you know that your buddy Dean Cumstain just bulldozed the field so you could glide into the full-professor spot untouched. You could at least show some semblance of grace, but you can’t help yourself, you have to take me down a peg anyway?

You do know how this all played out, don’t you, Reid? I’d imagine the dean didn’t spell out every detail for you, but I have no doubt that he let you, and your big-bucks daddy, know that he was responsible for “talking some sense” into me or “helping” me “understand” the situation. He “took care of it,” I’m sure he told you, in his faux-diplomatic way.