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Show Anting Alone Page 199 useful paragraph here, Mr. Edwine," he'd say with tons and tons and tons of controlled irony in his voice. His own fiction, of course, relied for its effect upon implied points, all cloaked in artfully deliberate ambiguity. Sometimes one could almost apply the term pointless to his writing, and moral vacuum to his life, even to his face. He had vacuum eyes, like Nancy Reagan's, and a face that belied his years, seeming twenty years younger, in vacuity of expression as well as in skin texture; no wrinkles had been dug into his face with any depth. He was fond of telling his grad students of how disappointed in himself he'd been on graduation day x-number of years ago, when he'd donned cap and gown and received his doctorate. "I've had to fight the academicians every inch of the way," he was fond of revealing. The Volvo seemed to be his. At least he was driving. Professor B, on the other hand - (see, we'll organize these brief introductions in the most lucid, natural, graceful way possible: from A, and then on to B, followed inexorably by C. You see? Alphabetically! Sam hadn't been going to grad school all this time for nothing!) - , Professor B was the departmental poetry-writing man. He was palpably younger than the other two; but, deep in his glands or his atman or someplace, he was inarguably the most professorial. God, how he would have twitched to be called that! He hated the word professorial. He was a native of the east coast, but early on had realized that he'd never get published back there, so transformed himself into a mid-westerner. He thought he might break into the journals and learned quarterlies more easily out here. So he tried to cover his accent with artificially hard |
