IMAN YAWNED. Her limbs rose and stiffened in a semi-voluntary stretch, loosening joints torqued tight by slouching. The monitor on her desk displayed an open PDF, the text of which her mind had long since stopped following, even as her eyes dutifully scanned the lines. She blinked the document back into focus and started again. Gradually, her concentration wriggled its way into the flow of sentences. She swivelled side to side in a slow rhythm as she read, her office chair silently accommodating the motion.
A cup of green tea unspooled fragrant steam into the room. She took a sip, wincing at the heat, and set it down as Professor Motes arrived. He wore a starched white dress shirt and brown slacks with ironed creases. Wingtip shoes glinted blackly below neatly-hemmed pantcuffs. He was a consummate square, though tiny details hinted at a bohemian past. Iman sensed it in his round-rimmed glasses, the sprigs of black hair trimmed half an inch short of shaggy, the snippets of Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock that occasionally drifted through the gaps in his office door. A messenger bag hung from a strap around his shoulder. He held a Tim Hortons cup in each hand, the larger of which he set on Iman’s desk.
“Good morning, Miss al-Qaddari.”
“Morning, professor. And thanks. You didn’t have to get me anything.”
“I’d feel like a cad walking in here with only one cup. It’s French vanilla.”
“My favorite. Thanks again.”
“Not a problem. I hope it doesn’t clash too much with your tea.”
“I can always reheat it.” She set her mug aside and pulled back the lid on her cappuccino. A whiff of vanilla and foam tickled the tender skin around her nostrils. She blew on the steaming liquid and regarded Motes from over the cup. “I thought you had a faculty meeting all morning.”
“It let out early, mercifully. Ullman’s attending a conference in Glasgow, which left Pearl bereft of her favorite target for her complaints. She tried to take aim at me, but I’ve become adept at feigning bouts of convenient amnesia.”
Iman laughed. Lydia Pearl was well-known around campus as a class-A shit disturber, the sort of woman who never met a text that didn’t brim with patriarchal, heteronormative hostility. “Ah, Professor Pearl’s okay. She taught my Introduction to Romantic Poetry class in first year. Anyone who loves Coleridge can’t be all bad.”
Motes rolled his eyes. “That’s the trouble with you. You like everyone. Scorn is the spice of life. Without it, your day is just so terribly bland.”
“I thought it was variety.”
“Only for people with dull tongues and duller brains. Speaking of which . . . ” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a stack of papers. “The dreaded day is upon us. Essays from the grammar gulag.”
Iman groaned theatrically. In truth, she didn’t mind grading papers, even those from Motes’ Mechanics of Writing class, a first-year course for remedial students who fumbled commas and thought a semicolon was part of the human anatomy. But Motes loved nothing more than a bit of commiserative griping, and it was fun to indulge him from time to time.
“It’ll go quickest if we divide and conquer. Be firm with them. No rounding up to spare feelings. A failed paper deserves a failing grade.”
“Yeah, I know. But an F just seems so . . . harsh.”
Motes shook his head. “Far, far too nice. I expect chipmunks and finches alight on your shoulder whenever you walk through a park.”
“Better Mary Poppins than Ebenezer Scrooge.”
His finger tick-tocked in mock admonishment. “Tsk. A life in academia will squeeze the kindness from you soon enough. Only curmudgeons make tenure, you know. You’d best crab up, or you’ll find yourself in the private sector, earning vast sums and reading books for pleasure.”
“It sounds awful,” said Iman.
“You have no idea.”
Motes rounded Iman’s desk and disappeared through the door at the back of the room, which led to his private quarters. The setup suggested a more secretarial role on Iman’s part than she liked, but it gave her a de facto office of her own and meant virtually constant access to Motes, who was her thesis supervisor as well as her boss—a level of accessibility most graduate students could only dream of.
Taking a drink from her cappuccino, Iman began settling back into her reading when a man stepped into the office. Her first thought was that he had the wrong room. He wore a leather jacket festooned with buttons and zippers, atop a jaundiced t-shirt spotty with pinhole burns. Bits of metal jingled in the pockets of his cargo pants, which bore the scars of hard use in their threadbare seat and ragged knees. His hair, thinning up top, ran long in the back, black curls spilling into bushy stubble two days shy of a full beard. Tattoos twined out his jacket cuffs and up his neck. He looked to Iman like a holdover from the 70s punk scene merged with a 1930s steelworker, a man built from angles and vices and scars. He held a battered leather briefcase in one hand.
“Can I help you?” Iman asked.
The man glanced at her, saying nothing. The tip of his tongue slithered across his lower lip, leaving a trail of spit. He walked past her without stopping and barged into Motes’ office. A punky smell of pot smoke and car exhaust followed him like a great billowing cape. Iman caught a glimpse of Motes’ expression of annoyance before the door swung shut, frosted glass panel rattling in its frame.
They spoke for several minutes. Iman caught the timbre of their voices, but couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Curiosity goaded her towards the door while propriety held her at her desk. Curiosity proved stronger, and she was still in her seat when the man left Motes’ office, his stride loose and cocky. He favored her with an up-and-down glance, concluding with a lupine smile. Iman stared back, unimpressed and afraid in equal measure, hoping the former sufficiently obscured the latter. When the man was gone, she leaned forward to catch a glimpse into Motes’ office. The professor sat at his desk, clutching his coffee mug to his chest with both hands. His computer monitor, positioned to his left, divided his face into hemispheres of light and shadow.
“Who was that?” Iman asked.
“Hmm? Oh, no one. A student, enquiring about a grade.” He smoothed a crease in his shirt with his thumb.
Iman raised an eyebrow. Motes wasn’t the sort of professor who took kindly to students barging into his office unannounced. She opened her mouth to question this and closed it again. The exchange was really none of her business.
She’d almost forgotten about it by the time Motes left his office twenty minutes later. He carried a loose stack of papers under one arm, the individuals sheets poorly collated and threatening to spill with every hitch and fidget of his shoulders. His glasses sat precariously on the tip of his nose. He pushed them into place with the heel of his hand.
“Well, I’m off. I trust you have everything you need from me?”
Iman smoothed the furrow of confusion creasing her brow with some effort. “Um, yeah, I guess. You’re going already? You just got in.”
“Yes, I know, it’s just that there’s something I’ve forgotten that I must attend to.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Oh yes, fine fine fine. Only a minor matter.” Motes chuckled as if he’d told a joke. He fiddled with the pens on Iman’s desk, fastidiously arranging them into parallel lines. “One other thing. I have a tutorial for my second year CanLit course in about an hour. I wonder, would you mind terribly if I asked you to cover it for me?”
“What, you mean teach it?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to lecture. They’re supposed to have read Monkey Beach and you’d simply need to chair a discussion on it. You’ve written on Robinson’s work in the past, I’m sure you’re more than capable.”
“Well, I guess . . . ”
“I hate to ask. It’s just that something urgent’s come up that I really must see to.”
“It’s fine. I know Blood Sports and Monkey Beach inside out.”
“Perfect. I thank you kindly. Please take the rest of the day off after that. I shan’t be in until tomorrow.”
He was gone before Iman could say anything more. Her gaze lingered on the doorway as if regarding an afterimage of his sudden egress. What the hell was that? She tapped the end of a pen against her bottom teeth and pondered what could possibly have driven Motes away in such a frenzy. A sick relative, maybe? If so, she figured he’d mention it, at least generally. Motes was no oversharer, but nor was he the sort who refused outsiders any glimpse of his personal life. She’d met one of his boyfriends in the past and heard reference to a couple more, and knew his mother was living in a nursing home—though thankfully not the one that had burned down a few nights prior.
Her thoughts circled the question for some time, but could find no foothold, and eventually withdrew. It remained a curiosity, jutting from the topography of her afternoon like an obelisk in the shrinking distance. By the time she stood before Motes’ bemused class, it disappeared over the horizon, not to be seen again for some time.