Page 87 of Katabasis
But she’d fled down the hallway, heart pounding against her ribs. And though she knew he wouldn’t follow her, though she’d forgotten her coat, and though her heels wobbled perilously against the cobblestones, she did not stop running until she had gone down the street, up the bridge, all the way along the river, and back to her apartment.
After that night Professor Grimes turnedso cold.
She saw it coming, yet she was gutted by the sudden withdrawal of his support. When she showed up at lab the next day, timid and fragile, she found her workstation had been cleared and all her possessions redistributed to the annex office down the hall. She wandered tentatively toward his office, hoping delusionally there had been some mistake, but Charlotte informed her that Professor Grimes would be in London all morning. When he did return, she was standing in the hallway on a tea break with the other postgrads. She lifted her face to greet him, but he brushed past her without a word.
“What did you do?” Michele asked.
“I don’t know,” said Alice.
“He looks so mad,” said Michele. “I’ve never seen him look so mad.”
Professor Grimes wouldn’t talk to her the day after, or the day after that. From anyone else this kind of silent treatment would have been funny, childish, but from Professor Grimes it terrified her. There was no sign of when it might end. She didn’t know when he would retaliate, if he was planning some further punishment. She didn’t know whether she even crossed his mind at all—whether he’d simply written her wholesale out of his field of thought. She could only tiptoe around his office, hold her breath when he was near, and, day in and day out, hope for his mercy.
She did have reason to keep showing up at the department. She had projects in place, papers to write, classes to teach. He couldn’t just invalidate her work. She was good at what she did, and had proven her mettle to the other faculty many times over by now. And he couldn’t continue ignoring her in front of everyone else. In public, at least, he had to keep up the pretense of a good advisor. He wanted to invite questions even less than she did.
But he could whittle away at her confidence comment by comment; snub by snub. Little blows. He no longer welcomed her in his office for tea. When he was announced editor of the latest collected volume on linguistic magick he did not ask her to contribute, though she would have been the obvious choice to write the introductory chapter on false friends and cognates that he instead assigned to a first-year who could barely spell his own name.
This went on for months.
Meanwhile Peter’s stock rose again in Professor Grimes’s eyes. Whatever mysterious slight he’d committed over the summer was forgotten. Whenever Alice wandered past Professor Grimes’s office, she could see Peter already there through the window; leaning forward on the edge of his chair, hands flapping animatedly as they talked. Suddenly all everyone could talk about was the exciting new paper Murdoch and Grimes were coauthoring; how it was sure to be accepted inArcana, how it might revolutionize the field of set theory, how it was making Bertrand Russell turn over in his grave.
The rest of the department sensed this shift, though none of them could guess at what had actually happened. The faculty assumed Alice had irritated Professor Grimes with shoddy work, and subsequently began to treat her with kid gloves. They had watched students burn out before. They’d witnessed the deterioration that came before the crash.
“Jacob can be tough,” Professor Byrne told her in the lounge one day, without prompting. “But—well, just keep your chin up and do good work, and things will be back to normal in no time, all right?”
The undergraduates, who were afraid of their own shadow, saw the way Professor Grimes spoke to Alice and assumed (perhaps rightly) that her stink of failure was contagious. Students began trickling out of her sections into Michele’s and Peter’s. The graduate students were savvier. They knew, just the way everyone had known about Charlotte. Even if they could only sense the general outlines of the story, they knew. Michele was sympathetic, always offering Alice a kind sad smile when they crossed paths. Belinda, however, became quite cool toward Alice. Alice sensed that she thought, perhaps fairly, that Alice should have known better. That if Alice hadn’t acted like such a whore, that if Alice had been as careful as Belinda had always been, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
Word had spread, and Alice overheard. Eventually every single person in the department had some opinion on Alice, whether it was pity or condescension or abject curiosity. Still, Alice was used to rumors. She was a Grimes student, after all. And she could have weathered it all, if it were not for Peter.
She could not bear the way things had changed with Peter.
He became unbearably awkward after that night. He seemed not to know what to do with her. He seemed afraid of her, angry with her, and baffled by her all at once. He couldn’t even keep up a veneer of professional rapport. He never looked her in the eyes. If he wanted to tell her something, half the time he asked an undergraduate to do it. Once she called hello to him across the lab, and he promptly dropped his coffee. Once she had thought his indifference was the cruelest thing, but she would have preferred it to whatever they were now: all brittle tension, and too-vivid memory. She saw it constantly; it overlaid her vision every time she so much as glanced at him. Peter in the doorway. Books clutched against his chest. A faltering hand. Eyes wide, disgust spreading across his face.
She thought often about telling him the truth. She knew what he assumed; she wanted him to know it was not so. Oh, but she was so ashamed! Just the memory of his eyes, wide in confusion, made her want to shrink into the floor. She could not decide what would be worse, his resentment or his pity. “Something’s happened to me,” she would say, and all his respect for her would vanish.
At last she decided: pity was better than disgust. She needed at least one person to know it wasn’t true. She had to at least try. And Peter Murdoch was the one person for whom her words might carry meaning, for whom shreds of nuance might untangle the truth. It took her weeks to muster up the courage, but she was going to do it. If only she hadn’t spoken first to Belinda.
“Do you know when Murdoch’s coming in today?” Alice asked her.
“Peter?” Belinda shrugged. “Dunno. Think he’s gone nocturnal. Why, what’s the matter?”
“No, it’s stupid—there’s just something about this paper, and I don’t want to bother Grimes.”
“Right. Grimes.” Belinda had an odd expression on her face. “You know, he did say something. Peter did.”
Alice felt cold all over. “What’d he say?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Belinda’s mouth worked, for no sound came out. She had the look of someone deciding how to mince her words, to hint at an accusation without actually making one. “He just mentioned you and Professor Grimes were getting—close.”
“He said that?”
“Something... something about a late night, and how you’re a teacher’s pet?”
Alice felt the ground plummeting from under her feet.
“You do know that’s against the rules, right?” Belinda’s eyes narrowed. “You have to disclose things like that?”
Alice could not speak. Towers knocked over in her mind, whooshing wind and cyclones, and all that was left was rumbles and dust. She was vaguely aware that Belinda was still standing there, mouth pursed, waiting for an answer. She knew this was the one chance she might ever get to defend herself. That if she did not speak now, then the rumors would grow and grow, and petrify into fact, until it was part of departmental common knowledge—that just as Elspeth Banks had failed her comps and killed herself, Alice Law had fucked Professor Grimes.
