One Coffee With Read Online Free Page B

answered by a brisk “Then try semicolons—they’re more artistic.”
    With her mind elsewhere Sandy barely noticed the decorations. She dried her hands and hurried back down the hallway. Professor Simpson didn’t look up from his books as she passed him, and his unopened coffee was still sitting exactly where she had placed it.
    Inside her own office she took the cup marked BLK from the tray and set it and the cheese Danish on her desk. The last two cups—both labeled C/W/SUG—she left on the bookcase for Professors Nauman and Quinn, chairman and deputy chairman, who shared the inner office, a preference for sugared coffee and very little else.
    As she distributed mail among the pigeonholes of the large rack at the front of the office, a noise drew her attention to a weak-mouthed young man who had appeared behind her by the closed door to the inner office.
    “Oh, Harley,” she said. “I tried to call you before.”
    “What about?” the graduate student asked suspiciously. Harley Harris was shorter than she, with petulant eyes and beardless baby-smooth cheeks. He had tried to coax his lank brown hair into an Afro, but it was uncooperative and merely looked messy.
    “I called your house three times,” Sandy said, “but no one answered. That meeting you wanted with Professor Nauman at eleven—he’s scheduled to see the dean of faculties at 11:15 so you’ll have to wait till two to meet with him. I’m sorry, Harley.”
    “Puke on the dean! Let him wait! Or is Nauman afraid to see me? Afraid I’ll raise a stink?” His voice rose in a whine. “Listen, Sandy, they’re wrecking me. If I don’t get that degree, I can’t teach; and if I don’t teach, when’ll I have time to paint?”
    Sandy gave an inaudible groan. If Harley Harris were lazy or less dedicated, she thought, echoing departmental sentiment, he could have been deflected from the Master of Fine Arts program long ago; but what could be done with an energetic grind whose mawkish, ill-proportioned, beetle-busy landscapes weren’t even good kitsch?
    It was Piers Leyden, with his perverted sense of humor and disdain for degrees, who had conned the department into letting Harris into the program; who had insisted Harris had the makings of a primitive artist—another Rousseau or Bombois. Unfortunately Harley Harris wasn’t even another Grandma Moses.
    The joke had stopped being funny. A graduate, after all, reflects the quality of the institution awarding the degree, and the other faculty members were determined that Harley Harris was not going to reflect on them. He had been informed that he would not be receiving an M.F.A. degree next month.
    “If I can’t teach, I’ll have to take a job with my old man,” Harley complained.
    “Oh, stop whining!” said Sandy, stuffing pigeonholes angrily. “You’re lucky to have your father to fall back on.”
    The senior Mr. Harris owned a thriving window-dressing business in Brooklyn. He had loved the way Harley could write SPRING FASHION SALE in bluebirds and daisies when the lad was only sixteen, and he didn’t think six years of college had improved his son’s technique. Most of Vanderlyn’s Art Department agreed with him.
    “You don’t have the foggiest idea of how tight the job market is right now,” she added impatiently. “Do you know how many people in this country can’t find a job? Not just the job they want, any job! And if you think an M.F.A.’s a sure ticket to college teaching, forget it! Look at David—for the last three months we’ve papered the whole country with his curriculum vitae, and he still hasn’t found an opening!”
    The murmur of changing classes signaled the end of the third lecture period. Ten-fifty. Sandy turned and saw Harley Harris now leaning over the bookcase to glare at a jewel-toned abstract on the wall above.
    “Nauman says my work’s fuzzy and tasteless—what the hell does he call this muck?”
    Since examples of Oscar Nauman’s “muck” hung in