14. Spanked

The next day Julian was over at Blue Ridge teaching Lit 2. He went back to his usual lesson plan and let Amy take the day off. He got an email from Susan Morgenthaler, the Division head, requesting a meeting. He scheduled it with her administrative assistant for the hour after his class ended. In that hour, he obliterated all traces of his old blog, and wrote few bleats on his anonymous new one. He then sauntered down to Susan’s office. Her door was open. He poked a head in.
“Hi Susan, are you ready for me?”
She shut her laptop and swiveled around in her chair.
“Yes, Julian. Shut the door, will you?”
Uh-oh. He shut the door.
“You wanted to see me about something?”
“I did. Thanks for taking the time. Have a seat.”
He sat.
“It’s come to my attention that you shared with your students a blog.”
“I did. Are we not allowed to share blogs with students?”
“I have to say, ‘it depends on the blog.’”
She ‘had to say.’
“I shared a blog by a woman I thought was writing well, and in a way that might reach the students.”
“One of the students complained about it.”
“Which one?”
“Because of confidentiality, I can’t tell you.”
“What can you tell me?”
“I can tell you that you have to take your blog down, and that you can’t use that woman’s blog in your classes.”
“So much for freedom of speech.”
“You can say what you like, but you can’t say it and work for me.”
“Are you threatening to fire me?”
“If you don’t do as I have asked, I will fire you.”
Julian was very tempted to say, ‘if you fire me for sharing a blog, I will sue you for breach of contract re: academic freedom, but then he remembered the last departed faculty member who had tried that and been rendered homeless. He hit the pause button.
“OK, I don’t want to be fired. I’ll comply. Is that it, is that all you have to say to me?”
“Not quite. I want to add that I think this does not reflect well on the institution. I think that Dana deserves better.”
There is blinking in the mind’s eye at this. The sisterhood has taken over the ivory tower for sure.
“I think that’s two separate things, surely. I’d be tempted to go to bat for the validity of the writing on that blog as not being detrimental to the institution. The idea that my relationship with my wife has been taken up in connection with what you consider to be a dismissible offense, which I consider a personal matter: how is that germane?”
“It is my duty to maintain academic integrity. That blog was by some unknown twenty something. It’s not considered literature by anybody. As for Professor Feminita, she is a respected member of my faculty. That which damages her or her reputation is of concern to me. I am charged with mentoring my faculty.”
“What about me? Are you mentoring me?”
“I consider this to be mentoring. You apparently can’t tell the difference between literature and un-academic casual writing. You also can’t tell the difference between setting a good example for the students by your personal behavior and demonstrating a lack of self-discipline.”
“Don’t you think I’d have to go a bit farther down the road to adultery than reading a stranger’s blog? Have you never read some dude’s blog? You do realize that the woman is anonymous, writing under a pseudonym.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s the perception of the students that you have a crush on her. It bothers them.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“Yes, one of them did.”
“Which one?”
“I can’t tell you that without breaching her confidentiality.”
“So, it was one of the girls.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me exactly what she said?”
“I can tell you that she sat where you are sitting now and told me that you had showed her class a blog by a pretty young woman, and that it was her impression the writing wasn’t worth discussing and that you appeared to be ‘all crazy about her.’”
“That was her exact wording? ‘All crazy about her?’”
“Verbatim.”
“Was it only the one student?”
“So far. I can’t let it go any farther.”
“Isn’t it possible that this student feels jealous?”
“Beg pardon?”
“You know, these women get crushes themselves.”
Julian reddened. This was seat of the pants flying. It seemed to him that to censure him for showing the students ‘Amy Tells All’ because one student detected an attraction between Julian and the anonymous blogger was worthy of a riposte. It seemed to him that a female (or male) student…any student…that felt an attachment to a teacher might get confused and blur the lines that the teacher student relationship was structured around. It happened roughly once a semester. It hadn’t so far made it to Susan’s office. As he sat before the boss taking the heat, he had to take a moment now and reflect on his feeling about “Amy Lissa.” Perhaps the sisterhood had it right. Perhaps he had, in fact, developed more than an affinity for some good writing. He insisted, to himself, that he could tell good writing from bad and not be swayed by physical attraction. The physical attraction was a fact, and he knew it. Perhaps he’d just drop it and move on. There was nothing to be gained by this battle, and much could be lost. He didn’t want to lose his source of income.
“Julian?”
“Yes, Susan?”
“You zoned out on me.”
“I was… thinking about whether I should… seek a formal…”
“If you think you’re going to tie up my faculty and myself over this matter, let me set you straight. You do it, and I’ll have you removed for cause. You haven’t been to a faculty meeting in months. You’re unprepared for classes by all accounts. You’re spending your time writing who knows what, which never sees the light of day. You’re derelict in your duty.”
“You’re a bit too zealous in pursuit of yours,” he muttered.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I want you to stop using that woman’s blog in your class, and I want you to make amends with your wife straight away. Is that clear?”
“You want me to ‘make amends’ how?”
“I want you to buy her some flowers.”
This is intolerable. But he must tolerate it.
“OK. Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
His next sentence should have been,
“I quit.”
But it wasn’t. He loved Dana, and if this were the soup she wanted to swim in, he’d swim. He needed the gig, pitiful though it now became in his new found shackles.
“If that’s it, then, that’s it.”
“You mean you’ll comply with my request?”
“I’ll not use “Amy Tells All” in a class henceforward.”
“There is one more thing.”
“Flowers for Feminita?”
At this Susan smiled. She had been triumphant, she felt. Julian was a huge problem and this was a minor victory, but a victory nevertheless.
“No. As I said earlier, I also I need you to take down that blog.”
“Which blog?”
“Your blog.”
“You can’t be doing that sort of personal writing while a member of the faculty at Blue Ridge.”
“No personal writing.”
“You need to be an academic, all of the time. We pay you to be that. It needs to be your mode at all times. You have too much bad language, hearsay, invasion of privacy, misuse of copyright material, self-disclosure…”
“…Self-disclosure?”
“Do we really need to know who you were bonking twenty or thirty years ago?”
He was now, he felt, purple in the face.
“Ok, ok. I’ll take the blog down. If I have to silence my voice to suit your mission to keep my job, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks, Julian. And yeah, I really do think flowers for Dana would be a good idea.”
He rose from the low sofa, Susan’s un-cushioned and uncomfortable setee. He looked around to see if he’d brought anything in with him that he needed to remember to take back out, other than bits of his battered soul. He walked to the door and opened it. He walked out into the corridor, not looking back. He left her office door open. She had an open door policy, except when administering spankings.

In the faculty lounge, he encountered Itsy and Pinky, his secret names for two other members of the teaching staff. Itsy, the smaller of the two women, was Clarabel Choate, who taught creative writing. She should know. Pinky, the overweight and porcine Gina Helfhaus was an adjunct media and technology instructor. She should know better. She helped the students build their web sites, including blogs and wikis. How they hated wikis!
“Julian! Making a rare appearance in here these days?” said Clara.
“In here after getting scolded by the boss.”
“Oh, yeah. We heard about the blog thing,” said Gina.
“You want the gossip, hot off the press?”
“Only if you need to share, Jules,” said Itsy.
“Hmm. Since I got into trouble for sharing, maybe I’d better pass. On the other hand, I’d like to know what the buzz is from this side of the Division.”
“Ha! The buzz is that the faculty was appalled by the lack of judgment. I read it and I thought it was pretty entertaining. It had some rough stuff in it, though. You know, the stuff about masturbation and whatnot,” said Pinky.
“Masturbation? I guess I’ve fallen behind ‘Amy.’ Last I read she was ‘a cat among the birds.’”
“Yeah, the paw poem,” said Clare. “I read it. I also thought the explication was self-referentially, existentially charming. On first blush, it’s a bauble. But beneath the surface it’s alarming.”
“I noticed it created quite a stir among the students, both men and women,” said Pinky. I was in the restroom, and I overheard two women talking about it at the washstand. I don’t remember the exact. Over the running water, I caught ‘Amy this and Amy that.’”
“Ditto,” said Itsy. “That’s the buzz. You got ‘em going. Way to go.”
“You must be on to something,” said Pinkus.
“I’m off it,” said Julian.
“Oh. You mean she banned it,” said Gina the Pink, nodding her head at the door to the hall that led to the chair’s lair.
“That and she went after my personal blog. I think she basically threatened to dooce me.”
“Dooce?” The women spoke in chorus.
“Yeah, she threatened to fire me if I didn’t take down my blog.”
“I’ve never looked at your blog,” said Clara.
“That seems extreme to me. Wrong, somehow…,” said Gina.
“I don’t have a lot of time for extracurricular reading, either, Julian. You must have hit Susan’s buttons somehow. But as for that other thing, the woman’s blog, I think the faculty, not necessarily myself, mind you, but Sam and Shannon, and perhaps your wife, they were in full chatter mode. I heard them discussing it as not literature. Then, there was apparently an upset student,” said the itsy Clare.

Julian towered over Clarabel. She came up to his chin. He looked down at her and opened his palms.

“None of us are safe from the accusations of students. They get to say whatever they like, and we have no recourse in this Division. I cannot learn what my accuser actually said. I just get a paraphrase, other than ‘all crazy about her.’ I can’t learn the person’s name and respond. It puts an artificial barrier between my class and I, because now every one of those women in there is suspect. “
“We didn’t think it was an accusation. We thought it was more like she was going to bat for Dana. The woman accused you, you know, of cheating on your wife.” Pinky Gina was sympathetic to this take. Her philandering husband had cheated on her. She often bitched and moaned about men, and their alleged inability to keep it zipped. At the same time, she bemoaned that fact that she wasn’t getting any these days.

Julian sat in the old ratty couch. The women remained standing. As he sank in to the upholstery he no longer towered, he cowered.

“It’s a very Clintonian form of adultery, then. ‘I did not have sex with that woman, that Amy Lissa, I don’t even know where or who she is, exactly.”
“The students love your wife so much, she has so much respect around here among all of us, that I guess we look out for her,“ said Pinky.
“That’s true, you know. It’s a small town, a small school, we are maybe a bit too much into each other’s lives.”
“Clare, I think you are, maybe a bit. Clytemnestra can take care of herself.”
“We don’t want to see Agamemnon making her miserable. We’re the chorus in this play.”
“Good one, Clare. Very good. Go sing in some other Lysistrata.”
“It’s only a paper boner,” said Gina. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”
“Heh. It’s you two I’ll miss if I get shitcanned.”

He got up, grabbed his coat, and headed for home. It was the start of his blogging day, his writing life. That life was his real life. But first, he was dying to see what Amy Lissa had to say about masturbation. He wondered if it might not drive him to, in fact, masturbate.

The next time he met with Lit 1, they wanted to know if they could talk more about Amy.

“Nope, we can’t. I have to formally apologize for sharing that blog with you. It was wrong of me, or so I have been informed.”
“Wrong of you?”
“Yeah, what was so wrong about it?”
“For once we liked it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Julian. “I’m delighted that you ‘liked it’ for a change, but remember ‘I liked it’ is a banned response.”
“So Susan banned the blog?”
“She banned both blogs!”
“What? She banned your blog too?”
“Yep.”
“Well that sucks.”
“Sucks. Perhaps you can find a more…”
“Academic?”
“Yes, Dave, that’s the word I was looking for.”
“It is most certainly an unfortunate circumstance that the powers that be have compromised your right to freedom of expression…”
“Very good, Monica. You seem to have more to say.”
“It’s just that if we can’t talk about Amy, we’ll have no ‘professorial experience’ to guide us as we worry about the woman’s fate.”

He shrugged.

“You can go to the counselor if your heads get too bent out of shape. But I can’t spend any more class time on it. “

As he went right back to “Catcher in the Rye,” and “The Secret of My Success,” he did so with his old zeal back. Amy’s effect on his mind was considerable. She whispered in his ear of a nearby world and in words that conjured up an affinity that was attached to serious allure. He saw both the fragility, but also the steel. She was complex and she had him by the intellectual balls. So when he spoke to his class of Bukowski, he could do it with a heightened sense of imagination regarding aging postal worker poets whose beer belly was part of his attraction. Bukowski never lacked for female company, so far as he knew. “Catcher in the Rye,” with its salty language, liberally larded with obscenity and ‘adult’ themes also sailed a bit swifter on Amy’s breeze. It helped to know that there was, just a few hours west, a muse that called out. If she called out for help, he felt, he’d hear it. Perhaps Monica, from her perch in the front row, tuned in as she was to the dog whistle of battery and abuse, would whisper in his ear in time, cluing him in. The problem was, he did not know who she was, exactly, or exactly where he should go to help her (other than the Bald Eagle Airfield northwest of Parkersburg), or where exactly he should send the police.