The Professor's Late-Night

I have been running events at Oakton College for seven years, and in that time I have learned one rule about visiting scholars. The famous ones are always late. They treat a small Midwestern liberal arts college like a gas station stop on the way to somewhere important. So when the visiting scholar in anthropology missed his first meeting with me by forty minutes, I did not panic. I just made a note and mentally filed him under entitled.

His name was Titus Wren. Forty-seven years old, came to us from a decade of fieldwork abroad, here for a long weekend in late October to give a lecture and meet with the grad students. The department had booked him months ago. My job was the logistics: hotel, rides, the welcome reception, the room reservations, the projector that never worked on the first try.

I was thirty-seven, single for years now, and too busy during festival week to care about much beyond my spreadsheets. The literary festival was in town the same weekend, which meant every hotel room within fifteen miles was spoken for and every restaurant had an hour wait. If Titus Wren could not show up on time for the one meeting where I explained all that to him, that was going to be his problem, not mine.

He finally walked into my office at 4:10 on a Thursday, twenty minutes after the rescheduled time, which was already twenty minutes after the original time. He was rumpled in a way that looked deliberate. Corduroy jacket, scarf in October, hair that had not met a comb that morning.

"Roxie? I am so sorry, truly. My flight came in late and then the shuttle driver took a wrong turn and I got to see quite a lot of the industrial side of your town," he said. He had a slight accent I could not place, some eroded edge under the English, like he had lived too many places to keep one way of talking.

"It happens," I said. "Let me go through the schedule."

He sat down and looked at his hands while I talked, which I took at first for boredom. I gave him the folder, the campus map, the lecture time, the dinner with the department chair. He asked a few questions. He did not seem to absorb any of it.

"You will want to change for the reception," I said. "Faculty dress up here, even for these things."

"Of course. Of course. Do I look terrible?" he asked, and he actually seemed to want an answer.

I said he looked fine, which was a lie, and I do not feel bad about it. He thanked me and left, and half the folder stayed behind on my desk.

Dot watched him go through the glass wall of my office. Dot has been the administrative assistant in the events office for twenty years and she knows everything about everyone on this campus, whether you want her to or not. She has cats and does crosswords and has never married and considers my love life a personal project she inherited from God.

"Well?" she said, wandering in with her coffee.

"Well what?"

"Is he another one of the pretentious ones or is he just sad?"

I told her I had no idea what she meant and she gave me the look she gives me, the one that says she has known me since I was thirty and does not buy it.

"Honey, I read the file when the department booked him. His partner died three years ago. Cancer, I think. They were together a long time, over in some field site. He has been alone ever since," she said. "That man is not late because he is full of himself. He is late because he has probably not had to be anywhere on time for anybody in three years."

I did not say anything for a second. Something went through me that I did not expect and did not particularly want. My own thing had ended five years ago, a visiting professor named Rob, intense and brief and over when he took a job abroad. I had told myself I was fine with that a long time ago. Mostly I was.

"Poor guy," I said, and Dot nodded and went back to her desk, satisfied.

The welcome reception was Friday evening in the faculty lounge, which is the nicest way anyone has ever described the faculty lounge. There was a punch bowl and a cheese plate and about forty people standing around pretending they were glad to be there. I ran these things the way I run everything, on time and with a name tag for everyone, including the guest of honor, which is where the trouble started.

Titus came in late again. Fifteen minutes this time, in a blazer that did not fit him and a clean shirt, so he had at least tried. He scanned the room, spotted me by the punch bowl, and came straight over like I was the only safe harbor in sight.

"You must forgive me. I got lost in the building. Your buildings all connect in ways that make no sense," he said.

"You came in the wrong door. It happens to everyone the first time," I said, and I handed him his name tag.

He put it on crooked and then leaned in a little and said, "You know, I noticed at our meeting you seemed unhappy with me. I understand. I have been... scattered lately. But I hope you will not write me off entirely."

That stung, because I had been a little sharp with him on Thursday and I knew it. But the way he said it, all apologetic and wincing, made me feel worse instead of better, so I doubled down, which is a flaw of mine.

"I am not unhappy, Professor Wren. I am doing my job. People fly in, I make sure the weekend works, and they fly out. Everyone is happy," I said.

"Titus, please. And that is a very armored way to talk about your job," he said. He smiled when he said it, trying to be charming, and it came off wrong, like he was reading from a script he wrote for a different woman.

"Roxie is fine. And it is not armor, it is a schedule," I said.

He kept trying. He complimented the cheese plate. He asked whether I had always wanted to be an event coordinator, which is a question you only ask someone if you think their job is small. Then he launched into a story about a conference in Vienna where the projector caught fire, and he was mid-story when the department chair came over to steal him, and I watched him go with the punch ladle still in my hand.

Dot materialized next to me about two minutes later. She had seen the whole thing, obviously.

"He was trying to flirt with you," she said.

"He was trying to apologize and doing it badly. There is a difference."

"He asked if you always wanted to do this job. That is flirting. Bad flirting, but flirting."

"He is grieving, Dot. You told me so yourself, twenty minutes into knowing he exists."

Dot stirred her punch and looked smug in a way that only a woman with twenty years of crosswords can look smug. "Grieving men are the ones who need somebody to be nice to them the most. Also the ones who are worst at saying so."

I told her she was ridiculous and she said fine, fine, and went off to refill the cheese plate. But I kept looking across the room at him. He was standing with the anthropology people now, nodding along, and every so often he would glance over at me and then look away fast, as if checking whether he was still in trouble.

The thing Dot said had lodged somewhere. His partner, three years, cancer. I thought about how he had sat in my office looking at his hands. I had taken it for boredom. It occurred to me, standing there with the punch ladle, that it might have been something else entirely, that maybe he was trying to hold the whole weekend together the same way I was, one detail at a time, and doing a much worse job of it because his details had fallen apart three years ago and never come back.

I did not like him yet. I want that understood. But I stopped writing him off, which for me is practically a love letter. I went back to my schedule, made sure the projector tech would be at the lecture an hour early, and told myself the weekend was going to be simple.

It was not going to be simple. But I did not know that yet.

The trouble started Saturday morning. I got to the office at eight, which is early for a weekend, and Dot was already at her desk with a crossword and a look on her face.

"Roxie," she said. "Sit down."

"I don't like it when you say it that way."

"The lecture hall. Hubert Auditorium. Somebody booked it for Saturday afternoon."

"Somebody being who?"

"Somebody being the literary festival. The college rented it out in August for a poetry panel. Two o'clock." She turned her crossword facedown, which is what she does when something is serious. "Titus's lecture is at three."

I will not pretend I handled it calmly. I said a word Dot pretends she did not hear, and then I pulled up the room bookings and there it was, sitting in the system since August, and my name was on the confirmation email because I had not been the one checking it that week. That was the part that stung. Seven years I have done this job, and I have missed maybe two things, and this was going to be the biggest one.

The lecture was the anchor of the whole weekend. Sixty people registered, some of them driving in from two hours away. And now I had a keynote speaker with no room at three o'clock on a Saturday during a festival that had eaten every spare corner of the campus.

I called Titus at nine. He answered on the second ring, which surprised me, and he sounded awake, which surprised me more.

"Professor Wren. It's Roxie. We have a problem with the venue."

"Yes?" I heard him set something down. "Tell me the problem."

"The festival booked the auditorium for a poetry panel. The booking predates us. Your lecture has no room at three."

There was a pause, and I braced for the annoyed-author voice I remembered from a dozen visiting scholars over the years, the ones who treat a scheduling error as a personal insult to their dignity. Instead he said, "Okay. What do you need from me?"

That took me aback. "You are very calm."

"I gave a lecture once in a field station in PNG with a roof leaking on the projector. A room is a room. What are the options?"

The options were bad. The chapel had a funeral. The science hall closed at noon on weekends because of a broken door sensor nobody had fixed since spring. That left the seminar room on the third floor of Hobb, which seats forty, and a Saturday evening slot at six, if I could get the key and if he was willing to go late.

"Six o'clock works," he said. "Can I do anything? Should I call the registered people? I would not know what to say."

"No, I will email everyone and post notices. You just show up and lecture."

"Roxie." He said my name carefully, like he was testing the weight of it. "This is not your fault. I can hear it in your voice that you think it is."

I thanked him and hung up and sat there for a minute, because he had heard something in my voice I thought I had buried pretty well, and it unsettled me that he had.

The rest of the day was phone calls. I moved the lecture, emailed sixty people, printed new signs, argued with the facilities man about the key, and ordered a tech for six instead of two. By five I had a headache and no dinner, and the plan was to set the seminar room up myself since the student crew had all gone to the festival.

Titus showed up at five thirty with two bags of takeout from the Thai place off campus.

"I assumed you had not eaten," he said. "Nobody working this hard has eaten."

"I can't take, that's..." I stopped, because there was no way to finish that sentence that was not rude. "Thank you. That is very kind."

"It is pad see ew. I hope that is acceptable. It was the only thing I recognized."

We ate on the seminar room floor, because the tables were stacked for a cleaning that was not coming until Sunday. He sat cross-legged with his container balanced on his knee, corduroy jacket finally off, sleeves of his shirt rolled up unevenly. He told me about the leaking field station roof, and about a bus in Cambodia that broke down for six hours with a goat on it, and I found myself laughing in a way I had not laughed at work in a long time. He asked about me, actually asked, and did not steer it back to himself. I told him about the wedding I ran in September where the groom's mother rewrote the seating chart four times, and he said, "Four times," with genuine horror, like I had described a war zone.

Halfway through, he put his fork down and turned to face me.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "Thursday in your office, and then the reception. I was..." He rubbed his thumb along the takeout container. "I was performing. The charming visitor. I have done it so long it comes out