Vital Signs

by Jen Michalski

 

The hedge trimmer was Arthur Schlesinger’s final brush with academia. Like some inner voice, it whirred in his ears that day during his 2:30 Introduction to Romantic Poets, a noise of fiendish intensity, filling the blood vessels of his head with white-hot pain. It made the tedium of sitting at his desk, waiting for his students to fill their blue books with their recycled knowledge, that much more unbearable, as if the students somehow had collectively gathered the strength of their recall into one large oscillating blade that threatened to spin down the aisle and slice Arthur in half.

Arthur got up and strolled toward the window, grasping in his pockets some loose change and a rubber band as he watched a campus groundskeeper, a man in his late thirties, already tan in mid-April, attack the bushes near Arthur’s window. The groundskeeper held the electric hedge trimmer like a sword, a golden Achilles swathed in a Budweiser shirt and blue jeans, taming the wild beast known as Ribes alpinum. Arthur freed his hands, white, slightly liver-spotted, from his pockets and placed them on the windowsill in order to open it and ask that he move for the sake of his sanity.

Instead Arthur chose to watch him, the groundskeeper, albeit not with any romantic interest. Only romantic in the interest of his life’s work, perhaps, the Romantic poets. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats. For years he had taught enthusiastic and not-so-enthusiastic students about the visions of these pantheistic men, had sat in libraries in distilled, recycled air and researched the imagery and history of their feelings on nature, had lectured at conferences and slept at sterile hotel rooms, had sat in front of his computer contributing to the literature, the dialogue of their communion with nature and themselves.

Arthur noted the care in which the groundskeeper rounded the edges of the shrubbery, the calm, collected peace in his expression as he tamed the rough edges of the wilderness so that the upper-middle class students could venture on the physical road for postgraduate success with few, if any, obstacles. In his mind Arthur could smell the fertilizer, soft and pungent in the warming sun, the new growth of grass under his feet, hear the black-capped chickadee chirping high above in its perch, feel the vibration of the hedge trimmer in his arms, arms that had not held much of substance since his son, Erik, was born twenty years ago. A turkey from the store at Thanksgiving? A dissembled office chair to storage? Arthur could not recall.

He glanced back at his class, their faces in various stages of discomfort as they tried to remember history in such a way that would please Arthur. Because that’s all that really mattered in school, really. Pleasing one’s professors, just as Arthur spent his years pleasing the editorial offices of obscure British literature journals and the academic board at the university. It was a vicious cycle, and it struck him that he was an unwittingly conspirator in this dishonest chain of personal achievement. He went back to his desk and patiently waited for his students to finish. He decided he needed to talk to the dean.

 

“You’re leaving?” Dean Anderson tipped back his chair in disbelief. “Arthur, you’ve been here for twenty years. Wherever are you going?”

“I was hoping you’d help get me a job, John.”

“Well, I can certainly give you a recommendation, but it would be with great reluctance. Your reputation as a scholar has been quite valuable for our recruitment of other professors, and your reputation as a man is unblemished. Where are you thinking of teaching, Arthur?”

“I’m not. I was hoping you could get me a job on the university maintenance crew.”

Although Arthur felt as if he were cheating, John had convinced him to take sabbatical rather than outright resignation so that, if his “project,” as John had called it, didn’t pan out, he could return in the fall or next spring and resume a regular schedule of classes. Agreeing to such a situation practically doomed him to failure, Arthur felt, especially since he sorely began to miss the quiet, buffed halls of the English Department, the soft lights at the library, the snack bar where he had his coffee and Danish every morning. Yet he knew if he remained he would dissipate slowly, steady, unnoticeably over the years, caught in a fiction that he had created of himself and his life.

 

“I don’t understand what you’re doing, Arthur,” his ex-wife Julia spoke on the other side of the phone. “Well, of course I understand what you’re doing. You’re having a midlife crisis, but can’t you find a young English major to fawn over you or join the gym or something?”

“I can’t go back, Julia,” he explained as he neatly packed most of his double-knit trousers, oxford shirts, and other items he didn’t feel he would need anymore into garbage bags. “It’s not real. I need to do something real.”

“And this salt-of-the-earth nonsense is real? Come on, Arthur, you’re no dummy. It’s either all real or all fake. What about your studies? You’re giving up your studies just like that?”
“Julia, I’ve analyzed for twenty years what other people have said about grass and trees and clouds, and you know what? I barely remember the scenery from my office to my car. I don’t know the trees outside my bedroom window. I haven’t walked barefoot outside in years.”

“It’s called a weekend retreat, Arthur. Sign up for one.”

“Julia, please.”

“I can humor you, Arthur, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve done that since the divorce. It’s everyone else--our friends, your colleagues, who aren’t finding any humor in this situation.”

“Who cares about them? Can we talk later? We still on for lunch Thursday? I’ve got to get to the thrift store before it closes.”