The Lesson of Her Death

which opened onto the backyard of their house. She tossed the backpack out, hearing the coins in Mr. Jupiter ring loudly. She climbed out, hanging from the ledge, her cheek pressed hard against the yellow siding, then she let go and dropped the few feet to the soft ground.

W hen he hung up the phone Brian Okun recognized a contradiction that would have made a tidy little philosophical riddle. As the black receiver started downward he thought,
He’s got no right to talk to me that way
. As it settled in its cradle:
He’s got every right to talk to me that way
.
    Okun was lanky as a cowboy and his face was obscured by the strands of black beard that weaseled unevenly out of his wan skin. Inky Brillo hair hung over his ears like a floppy beret. He sat in his tiny cubicle overlooking the quad, his tensed hand still clutching the telephone, and developed his thought:
He has no right because as a human being I’m entitled to a mutual measure of respect and dignity. John Locke. He has every right because he’s in charge and he can do what he fucking well pleases. Niccoló Machiavelli cum Brian Okun
.
    The man he was thinking of was Leon Gilchrist, the professor for whom Okun worked. When Gilchristjoined Auden two years before, the horde of eager Ph.D. candidates seeking jobs as graduate assistants largely bypassed him. His reputation preceded him from the East—a recluse, a foul temper, no interest whatsoever in campus sports, politics or administration. While this put off most grad students it merely upped the ante for Okun, who was as intrigued by Gilchrist’s personality as he was impressed by his mind.
    Any doubts that remained about the professor were obliterated when Okun read Gilchrist’s
The Id and Literature
. The book changed Okun’s life. He stayed up all night, zipping through the dense work as if it were an
Illustrated Classics
comic book. He finished it at exactly three-ten in the afternoon and by four was sitting in Gilchrist’s office, being obnoxious, insisting that Gilchrist hire him to teach the seminar sessions of his famous Psych & Lit course.
    Gilchrist asked a few innocuous questions about the subject matter then grew bored with Okun’s answers and silenced the grad student by hiring him on the spot.
    Okun, almost as quickly, regretted the decision. The professor turned out to be more reclusive and odd and aggressively prickish than rumored. Narcissistic and anal expulsive, Okun observed (he too, like Gilchrist, was dual-degreed: psychology and English lit). He gave the man wide berth and had to improvise his professor-handling techniques like a doctor developing new antibiotics to meet particularly virulent strains of bacteria.
    Gilchrist was impossible to outflank. Okun was not surprised to learn that he was more savvy than he seemed and had pegged Okun early as having designs on his job. But by now, after two semesters of continual jockeying if not outright combat, Brian Okun, chic, moody, himself brilliant, an enfant terrible of the Modern Language Association, Brian Okun had nothing but wounds to show from the run-ins with his scholastic Wellington.
    Today, for instance—the phone call.
    The professor had left for San Francisco last week toread a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and had been expected back tonight, in time for tomorrow’s lecture. Gilchrist had called however to say he would be staying another week to do research at San Francisco State. He abruptly told Okun to have another professor prepare and deliver his lecture tomorrow.
    The session was entitled “John Berryman: Self-Harm and Suicide Through the Poet’s Eye.” Okun considered himself a Berryman scholar and fervently wanted to deliver that lecture. But Gilchrist was on to him. He ordered Okun, with a tinny insulting laugh, to find a full professor. He used that phrase.
Full professor
, a painful reminder of what Okun was not. Okun agreed, extending his middle finger to the telephone as he did so. Then he hung up and the interesting philosophical dilemma occurred to him.
    Okun now paced—to the extent he was able to do so in a cluttered eight-by-eight room. As his mind leapt backward, zigzagging through time, he found he was picturing vague scenes of Victorian tragedy (Charles Dickens had given a lecture in this very building as part of his U.S. tour in the 1860s, a fact Okun had collected and cherished) but the image that he arrived at was not from one of Dickens’s books; it was of a girl wearing a