Page 10 of Duke, Actually
“You know, sometimes I think I’m a professor because school has always been my default mode.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m good at school. I always have been. So I kept doing more of it. And I like some of the parts of it—reading and writing, and...” She laughed, a touch bitterly. “Reading and writing.”
Hmm. The reluctant English teacher? “Molding young minds not for you?”
“It sounds terrible. I don’t mind teaching. I just...” She shrugged.
“What?” he pressed. He wanted to know what made Dani Martinez tick.
“I don’t know. I assignedThe Great Gatsbythis semester because most of them would have read it in high school. I thought this would be an opportunity to really get into it in a more meaningful way, but it didn’t work out the way I planned.
“And I hate committee service, or at least the committees I have to be on. Nobody really tells you how much of your life as an academic is going to becommittees. But I can’t say no because I’m junior, and I’m also constantly on edge that I’ll be seen as not pulling my weight. You hear one too many comments about being the ‘diversity hire,’ you get paranoid.”
“Do people actually say that?” How appalling.
“People actually say that. Maybe not in so many words, but youknow what they mean.” She sighed. “Do you ever sit back and look at your life . . .” As she trailed off, she leaned back as if to illustrate her words. He hovered his arm around her for fear she would lean too far on her backless stool. She must have felt the nearness of his arm even though it wasn’t touching her. She looked over her shoulder in confusion.
“Do I ever sit back and look at my life and...?” he prompted.
“And think, ‘How did I end up here? How is this my job?’?” she finished emphatically.
He certainly did. Not in the way she meant, because he didn’t have a job in that sense. But he had been thinking a great deal lately about duty and work and purpose. “What would you do if you could do anything?” Unlike him, she could.
“I wish there was a way to have my research—my writing—be of interest to a wider audience,” she said thoughtfully, all traces of her previous tipsiness gone. “I don’t mean that in a conceited way, like I think I’m some great intellect. Just that we publish in these obscure academic journals, and I sometimes think,Why? What is it allfor?” She shook her head and with it shed some of her seriousness. “Anyway, no one likes all aspects of their job, right? And honestly, I’m lucky to have this one. Tenure-track gigs in English are extremely few and far between, and I managed not only to get one but to get one in New York, so blah, blah, poor me.”
He was tempted to say that a person could be luckyandunhappy, that those two qualities were not mutually exclusive, but he wasn’t sure how such a statement would be received coming from him. And he would much rather talk about her. “When do you get tenure?”
“I go up for it in about a year. And I get a teaching release thiscoming fall semester—my pre-tenure leave. The idea is to allow junior faculty time to really work on their tenure files, but for me it will come too late to really make a difference.”
“Why didn’t you take it earlier?”
“I tried, but I was informed that too many senior members of the department were already scheduled to be on sabbaticals.”
Max was liking the sound of this department and its culture less and less.
Dani snorted. “Anyway, it’s better this way. I already have a strong tenure file, so maybe I’ll just take that semester and be a lie-about.”
“What if youcoulddo anything?” he asked, returning to his original question. “Hypothetically. It doesn’t have to be realistic.”
“I think I’d like to hole up in a garret somewhere far away and write a book that had popular appeal. A popular book about obscure nineteenth-century writers. Ha!”
“So why don’t you do that?”
She looked at him for a long time, long enough that he started to get uncomfortable. “Everything is easy for you, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know how to answer that. Materially speaking, the answer was yes. He didn’t want for anything.
“I mean, you flew to New York for a ‘huge party’?” She made the air quotes with her fingers.
“Yes.” That was what he’d told her. And technically, it was true.
“The Depraved Duke, right?” She laughed.
He did not. “Right.”
The bartender returned, and after they ordered some pasta, she said, “Tell me about this party.”