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"Look, if it's sylvan remoteness you want, move to Acton or Boxford, or some other hole in the woods," Cobb said. "No doubt they offered a higher salary." |
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"If they offered less, I'd be paying them." |
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Charlie laughed. It was a department joke that you were rolling if you made your age in thousands. Calvin was thirty-seven and salaried at $36,225, which not only reflected the fact that English professors were universally an underpaid breed, but as a state institution Middlesex paid according to civil service scales. Were it not for the meager annuities from his writing text, Terry would still be teaching high school. As it was, they had to borrow to build the pool. |
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"You going to tell me how much?" |
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"Just curious how much I'm losing you by." |
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"An endowed professorship at a hundred grand plus walking money and the two courses of my choice per year." |
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Charlie Cobb stared at Calvin for a long moment without expression. Then he said, "What the Christ was your paper?" |
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"A Farewell to Arms as early cyberpunk." |
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Calvin grinned. "Nothing speciala recap of his war years." In fact, it was a patch job of past publications. "I was in the right place at the right time." |
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"But an endowed chair and a hundred grand? That's remarkable. Remarkable," Charlie repeated, his eyebrows arching in dismay. |
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Enough dismay to raise a blister of resentment in Calvin, but he bit back a defensive impulse because they were both thinking the same thing. |
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Calvin was a popular teacher who enjoyed the classroom, but he was not much of a scholar, nor did he endeavor to be. In his twelve years he had published a mere nine papers on twentieth-century American fiction, some travel articles in the popular press, a small university-press book developed from his doctoral thesis on Hemingway to help win his tenure, and a freshman composition text to pay the mortgage. Not the kind of credentials to solicit an endowed chair. Nor were Hemingway scholars in high demand these days. Nobel Prizes notwithstanding, white macho men who posed on the |
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