SEPTEMBER

Blue Nation Coffee

SCHOOL YEARS HAD a dependable rhythm, one Eph always found comforting. This was his favorite time, September—the anticipation, the excitement of reconnecting after summer break. Official move-in day wasn’t until tomorrow, but many students had come early for orientations or team practices, so the sidewalk was busy. Walking down Ellsworth, a commercial street that ran along one edge of campus, he saw eagerness painted on the passing faces. He had little doubt his own face looked just the same.

Blue Nation Coffee was a favorite hangout for both students and faculty. It had the usual coffeehouse design elements—menu boards of colorful chalk and bare Edison lightbulbs hanging from high ceilings of antique tin tile. Today the place was a white-noise cocktail of chattering students, soft modern jazz, and grinding Fair Trade coffee beans. After waiting through the line, Eph sat at a communal farm table with two lemongrass kombuchas, one for D’Arcy. He ran his hand along the distressed wood. It had a reassuring solidness. A small, tented sign said the wood had been reclaimed from a barn in the Berkshires. That was pleasing somehow.

Propping open his brushed-aluminum MacBook Air, Eph took the comforting aroma of coffee deep into his lungs. He longed for the caffeine, but D’Arcy kept pestering him about probiotics, whatever those were.

Someone pierced the coffeehouse calm, barking shrilly into a cell phone. It was a spandex-clad woman at the head of the line. Eph recognized her from around campus, but didn’t know her. The cashier stood there sheepishly waiting for the order, but the woman—evidently someone of authority—was busy tearing someone a new asshole while at least ten people waited in line behind her. This went on for some time, with no one quite sure what to do. Eph knew they would do nothing. The woman was African-American, and in a university town allowances were made for cultural differences. A polite silence was observed until the woman hung up her phone and placed her order as if nothing had happened.

Eph tried to focus on the lesson plan staring at him from his Retina Display but knew it was impossible, not after his meeting with Cooley. He settled on looking busy, navigating to Blue Nation’s website to see what causes they backed. Blue Nation donated a percentage of their revenue to progressive causes, so lattes came with a side of virtue. It looked like they funded lots of environmental causes and sustainable-food initiatives. They had stopped providing straws, too. Eph liked straws, but heard they were bad for the environment, so he supposed it was okay.

“Hey!” It was D’Arcy. His D’Arcy.

“You’re late. I’ve been sitting here trying to look busy.”

“Sorry, those Lampoon kids from Harvard were pranking our Wikipedia page again—at least, they’re the primary suspects.”

“Off with their heads.” Eph said, finding the whole thing amusing. He handed her the other kombucha, which, when D’Arcy opened it, gave an audible hiss.

“So?” She smacked Eph playfully with her free hand.

Eph unconsciously flipped his hair, throwing back a youthful swoop of brown locks from above his dark-framed glasses. The gesture revealed a glimpse of a small scar on the edge of his forehead, an imperfection that highlighted an otherwise winsome face. “Cooley confirmed it. I’m up this year. April.” He gave her that thousand-watt little-boy smile he had.

“I knew it! I wonder, will you remember the little people?”

She smiled back at him, her teeth gleaming impossibly against smooth chestnut skin. D’Arcy worked as an administrative assistant for Milton Strauss, Devon’s president. She and Eph had met a year ago at a climate rally. Eph often imagined how they looked to others, the perfect modern couple, emerged from different backgrounds, each finding a home here in the highest echelons of academia.… Oh, no …

Ebony and ivory

Live together in perfect harmony

That damnable earworm! It played in his head on continuous loop whenever he thought about his relationship with D’Arcy, mocking him for any feelings of cultural smugness. Damn you to hell, Paul McCartney.

“It all seems unreal, to be honest,” Eph said, willing himself to hear the light jazz coming from unseen speakers.

“C’mon, you totally deserve this. The book was wonderful. You’re their little rising star.”

Eph had recently published a book called Ralph Waldo Emerson: Muse of the Private Man, which had sold six thousand copies, a smashing bestseller in the world of works about nineteenth-century literature.

“Don’t forget about Smallwood. Atkins’s retirement means there’s only one spot, and Cooley said it was between the two of us.” Barrett Smallwood taught modern American lit, while Eph taught nineteenth-century, so there was a natural rivalry already.

Eph was making $85K, not bad money in Havenport, the smallish Northeastern city that was home to Devon University. After taxes, though, it was $50K, and that meant few luxuries. The perks helped, with the university providing most meals, full health and dental, plus university-subsidized housing—in Eph’s case a tidy one-bedroom with exposed brick one block from campus. He supplemented his income by teaching in the summer program. All in all, things were comfortable, but tenure would more than double his salary, which meant some creature comforts would be within reach, plus he could start actually taking summer vacations. He could even put in for a sabbatical after five years.

It wasn’t just about money, though. It never had been. Eph grew up modestly, so he lived frugally. He simply wanted to stay, here, in this place. Going back was unthinkable.

“Smallwood, isn’t he the one who wears those funny neoprene shoes?” D’Arcy asked.

“Yes, with the little individual toes. It’s his signature look. Doesn’t matter if it’s ten degrees and snowing. You have to admire the commitment. The kids—and frankly most of the faculty—call him Toes behind his back.”

“Toes!” cried D’Arcy, laughing. It was more of a honk, really. Eph thought it was one of her more endearing habits.

“He putters around campus on a recumbent bike and calls his students ‘dude,’ even the women. You know, he doesn’t even require actual writing in his class. He thinks it’s part of an antiquated power structure or something, but I happen to know he dabbles in nanofiction on the side.”

“Dare I ask?”

“It’s just what it sounds like. Really, really short stories. Some of them are called twiction, a literary form required to stay under Twitter’s character limit.”

“Sounds cutting-edge.” If D’Arcy was being sarcastic, it was hard to tell.

“Hey, maybe I need a signature look. Any ideas?”

D’Arcy took in Eph’s ensemble: khakis, blue button-down shirt, blucher moccasins. At least he’d ditched the flannel he’d favored when he first arrived. “I think it’s in my best interests not to comment,” D’Arcy said, lifting the bottle of kombucha to her mouth to hide the smirk.

“I read Toes’s thesis, you know. I found a copy in the stacks.”

“Aren’t you the literary stalker. What’s it on? Do I want to know?”

“It’s an exegesis of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. His theory is that it’s an antinovel with no beginning, no end, no structure … a rage against conformity. The paper was”—Eph groped for the right adjective—“thorough.” It came out thurr-ah. Despite his efforts, Eph’s childhood accent occasionally surfaced.

“Isn’t Pynchon a recluse or something? I don’t know why I remember that.”

“He is. Very clever, that Toes, interpreting a recluse. Who’s going to contradict you? Maybe I should have cut my teeth on Salinger.”

“Way too obvious. Plus he’s dead anyway.”

“You have a point. Anyway, Cooley. He got all mysterious on me. He shut the door to his office and said he really shouldn’t say any more, which of course is what people say when they’re about to do just that, and then he said I definitely had the inside track. Toes has his backers, but if I stayed on the straight and narrow, it was mine. ‘Don’t make any waves,’ he said. Then he winked.”

“He winked?”

“He winked.”

“I don’t understand,” D’Arcy said.

“That’s too bad, because I was hoping you would.” Eph sipped his kombucha, trying and failing to like it. He made a mental note to ask Peterson in Bio what probiotics were, exactly, and why everyone made it their business that he have more.

“Well, straight and narrow—not much of a stretch for you, my dear. And don’t you think Cooley was probably just underscoring what he’d said … with the wink?”

“Yeah … maybe. But think about it, isn’t a wink meant to suggest that there’s more than what’s being explicitly said?”

“You’re the English professor. Isn’t deep inner meaning your department?”

Eph took one more reluctant sip of kombucha. The drink’s intense carbonation lit up his chest and suggested it would like to explore his nasal cavity at the slightest opportunity. Bleh. Back to coffee next time. “When was the last time someone winked at you?”

“I am going to say no one’s ever winked at me. I think it’s more of a white thing.”

“Miss Williams, are you suggesting an ethnocultural skew in winking? Don’t let on to anyone in Sociology or you’ll cause a stir. Careers have been made on less.”

D’Arcy smiled. She loved Eph’s wry sense of humor.

“You know,” Eph continued, “there was this TV show when I was a kid, I can’t quite remember what it was called, where the father would wink at his son. It was a kind of intimate thing, a silent connection. I remember wishing my dad had been a winker.”

“Should I get you a couch so you can continue sharing?”

“No, but I still wonder about Titus.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that Titus O. Cooley, venerable chair of the Devon University English Department, was trying to establish an intimate connection with you, silent or otherwise. Unless you’re telling me I should start getting jealous.”

Eph ignored her. “Still, it’s kind of a dying gesture, don’t you think?”

D’Arcy looked exasperated. “Are we really still talking about winking? You have managed to find a subject I have no more opinions on.”

“On which.”

“On which what?”

“On which you have no more opinions.”

“Shut up, just shut up.”

“Sorry, if I’m going to be a tenured professor of English, I’m going to have to insist you don’t end sentences in prepositions.”

“Fuck off.”

Eph winked.