One Coffee With

3

IN a department rampant with egoists, eccentrics and aesthetes, the chairman's secretary, Sandy Keppler, was sensible, efficient and decorative, with long blond hair, fair skin and a smile that began in blue eyes and ended in devastating dimples. But even her considerable tact and charm were taxed by the effort of soothing Professor Quinn's ruffled feathers when he came storming into the Art Department offices on the seventh floor of Van Hoeen Hall shortly after eight-thirty.

Sandy listened to him rage and then put through his telephone call to the office of Buildings and Grounds. Before long Quinn's voice could be heard repeating stridently, "S-z-a-b-o. Szabo! Mike Szabo. The man's a lunatic! Every time I turn around, there he is, accusing me of the most incredible actions. I want him fired. Yes, I'm aware that unions-yes, I know about due process-damn it, I do have sufficient grounds! Haven't you been listening?"

The official in Buildings and Grounds might have been inattentive, but those members of the department who had come to work early were all ears, drifting in and out of Sandy 's office on flimsy pretexts. Quinn was usually such an imperturbable bastard. A born critic and as such, little loved, he was sharp-tongued and thick-skinned; very seldom could anyone slip a needle under that armor. How a clumsy workman with broken English could make him fall apart was a question that puzzled almost everyone, especially the junior members who didn't know Mike Szabo's history.

It did not puzzle Piers Leyden, however. Not only did Leyden (Assistant Professor, Life Painting) know why Quinn was irritated by the very sight of Mike Szabo, it was Leyden who had spoken to a crony over at Buildings and Grounds and caused Szabo to be hired. He had done it deliberately and with malice aforethought, and now he stood in Sandy 's office enjoying the fruits of his labors.

Quinn caught sight of Leyden 's grinning face through the open office door and with a visible effort drew himself together.

"An interesting phenomenon, laughter," he observed coldly. "I shall certainly have to incorporate more of it myself in my new book."

Quinn's comment was a pointed reminder of the power he, as a critic, had to make or break artistic careers.

It was Leyden 's turn to glower.

Sandy managed to prevent open warfare by reminding Quinn of his nine-o'clock class, but when he popped back in at nine-fifty for the slides he needed for his ten o'clock lecture, he was still in such waspish temper that he insulted two more of his colleagues and sent a graduate assistant home in tears.

By ten-twenty-five, though, the floor was quiet, things seemed almost normal, and Sandy felt she could safely start on her usual trip to the cafeteria for coffee. Although she was really secretary only to the chairman, Oscar Nauman, Sandy considered the whole department her responsibility. She sheltered its people from Administration's hectoring; she typed their essays for scholarly art journals and their subsequent angry rebuttals to the editors of those same journals; she listened with amusement to their jokes and with sympathy to their diatribes; and-as with her intercession between Leyden and Quinn earlier-she trod a fine impartial line between the studio artists and the art historians.

In that uneasy coexistence Sandy Keppler's artful curves were one subject both factions could usually agree on, although Piers Leyden, a neo-realist, thought she could have modeled for Fragonard, while Dumont, a baroque specialist, argued for Tiepolo. It was a spirited battle, but since Sandy 's heart belonged to David Wade, one of the young untenured lecturers, discussion of her body remained purely academic.

To add to her charms, she did as favors tasks that others might have considered demeaning. She wanted a midmorning cup of coffee, and she wanted to drink it in her big, shabby office amid rowdy, disputatious staff and students, so why should she be selfish about it? As long as it was her choice and not something demanded, Sandy was quite willing to fetch refreshments for anyone else.

As she skimmed down the hall to the elevator, she was intercepted by Associate Professor Albert Simpson (Classical Art History) and Lemuel Vance (Associate Professor, Printmaking), who both fumbled in their pockets for change. Vance wanted hot chocolate.

"Tea for you, Professor?" asked Sandy.

"No, I think I'll have coffee today," said Professor Simpson. "Black with one sugar, please."

Lemuel Vance couldn't resist the gleam of Sandy 's long bare legs beneath a spring green cotton skirt.

"Summer must be 'icumen in,'" he grinned. "Those are the first female legs I've seen since last fall."

Vance knew all about the practical aspects of pants-their comfort, their convenience, their warmth in cold weather-and one always ran the risk of being called a chauvinist if one expressed a simple admiration of female anatomy, but how lovely were young girls in spring dresses! The pale green and gold of her reminded him of Botticelli's Venus, and he was unwisely tempted into a classical allusion. "You look as fresh as Aphrodite when she was first fashioned from sea spray!"

Professor Simpson could never let a classical misapprehension go uncorrected. "Actually she wasn't formed from sea spray, you know," he told Vance kindly. "If you'll recall, Cronus mutilated his father, Uranus, and flung the-"

Belatedly the elderly historian remembered that Sandy was a living, breathing girl, not a mythological abstraction. Unwilling to elaborate further on Cronus's unfilial behavior, he broke off in old-fashioned reticence.

Vance waited questioningly. "Flung what where?" he prompted.

"I'll lend you a book," Simpson said austerely and moved away.

Sandy slipped into the elevator, choking back laughter at Lemuel Vance's blank look. She knew exactly what part of Uranus's anatomy Cronus had thrown into the sea. David had explained the birth of Aphrodite very graphically once. Still, it was sweet of Professor Simpson to be too embarrassed to recount the three-thousand-year-old tale in mixed company.

On the first floor she picked up the department's morning mail, then walked downstairs to a snack bar adjoining the main cafeteria. There was the usual assortment of students: some munched corn muffins and worked crossword puzzles with buttery fingers; others sipped weak tea and idled away the time in conversation till their next classes; still another, a determinedly solitary girl, hunched over a chart of French conjugations with the desperate and fatalistic air of one who had flunked too many pop quizzes.

At the rear of the deep room three smaller tables had been pushed into a single long one, and there a number of the clerical-administrative staff sat together with their backs against the wall, openly dissecting everyone who passed. Middle-aged women all, most were plump, beringed and elaborately coiffed and made-up. They delighted in red tape, deadlines and all regulations pertaining to IBM grade cards, and their exasperated sighs when asked to perform any service out of the routine could chill newly appointed faculty members. Only half in jest they agreed that Vanderlyn would be an ideal place to work if one could dispense with the teachers and students.

Unlike them, Sandy liked most of the students and considered her own charges on Art's faculty rather fun. Still, she was savvy enough to realize how difficult those career secretaries could make her job if they chose not to cooperate with her in interdepartmental business, so she was careful not to appear rude even when avoiding them. She waggled her fingers in friendly greeting as she passed but continued on to the service counter, aware of their neutral eyes on her progress.

The line at the counter was short; and as the five cups of hot beverages were placed on her tray, Sandy scrawled an abbreviated note of each cup's contents across its plastic snap-on lid with felt-tipped pen: coffee with sugar-C/W/SUG; chocolate – CHOC; coffee black – BLK. Heading back toward the door, she spotted a familiar profile and detoured to the table.

"Hi, Andrea. You're in early today." Andrea Ross (Assistant Professor, Medieval Art History) looked up from her sketchy breakfast and smiled at the girl, ruefully aware of her own passing youth. Not yet thirty, she was only now acquiring chic; never again would her thin face hold the spring-fresh appeal of Sandy's own prettiness. Still her career offered compensations. Or it had until recently, she thought with another flare of well-concealed anger.

"I've got to pull slides for my eleven o'clock, but if you want company, I'll wait," Andrea offered.

"No, I'm going back, too," said Sandy, wistfully eyeing Andrea's cheese Danish.

Professor Ross knew Sandy 's weakness for pastries. "They're fresh for a change," she said. "Why don't you put that tray down and go get one?"

"I really shouldn't," Sandy murmured, unconsciously smoothing a hip line that seemed to stay perfectly trim no matter what she ate. But she parked her tray on the older woman's table and hurried back over to the service counter.

When she returned, she perched on the edge of a chair while Andrea finished the last few bites and regaled her with a brief synopsis of Sam Jordan's sculpture and Professor Quinn's angry encounter with Mike Szabo.

"Do you think Professor Quinn is a thief?" she finished.

Andrea shrugged, not wanting to ruin her digestion with speculations on Riley Quinn's character, and changed the subject. "Who're the extra two cups for?" she asked, gesturing toward the tray.

"Lem and Professor Simpson. Your 'friend' Jake Saxer was around somewhere," she added meaningfully, "but I certainly didn't go looking for him."

She hesitated briefly, as though debating something in her mind, then leaned forward and blurted out, "Look, Andrea, why don't you let me talk to Professor Nauman for you about this Jake Saxer-Professor Quinn business?"

"Absolutely not!"

"But you know how out of it Professor Nauman can be sometimes. He probably hasn't noticed how high-handed Quinn's getting. I know he'd stop it if he realized how unfair it is."

"I mean it, Sandy. I'll fight my own battles with that Riley Quinn. You don't have to get involved. Besides," she added as they rose and walked toward the elevator, "you've got enough to worry about. How are David's job prospects looking these days?"

Sandy shook her head, her bright face momentarily dimmed. "He's still just getting the usual form letters: 'We regret to inform you that we anticipate no academic openings in the foreseeable future; however, we will keep your letter on file and should circumstances alter'

"Sounds as though you have the whole routine memorized," Andrea said. She pushed the button to signal the self-service elevator.

"I ought to. I mail out enough of the same sort of letter every week." She tilted her head toward the stack of mail on the tray she carried. "I'll bet at least five of these are job applications. Everyone wants to teach in New York."

"Something's bound to turn up for David," Andrea encouraged.

"Oh, well, if worse comes to worst, I can keep working here after we're married. We could get by on my salary while David finishes his doctorate."

The elevator door opened, and everyone inside exited except a brown-coveralled figure.

"Miss Sandy!" the workman beamed. "Only now I am coming to see you. That chair you want me to fix."

"Oh, that's all right, Mike," Sandy said hastily. "It can wait till next week sometime."

"No, no. I get it today." Armed with the assurance of one who knows himself firmly in the right, Mike Szabo had no hesitation about entering his enemy's domain. He was a stocky man in his late thirties, with dark hair beginning to show gray around the edges of a broad East European face. He took the tray of cups from Sandy 's hands with a determined air of rough courtesy.

The elevator stopped for more passengers at each floor until everyone was jammed together, and Sandy, standing in front of Szabo, felt the tray he was holding cut into the back of her thin dress. She hoped all the lids were on tight; she'd hate to walk around all day with a coffee stain across her back.

"Where's Quinn right now?" whispered Andrea in her ear.

"In class for another ten or fifteen minutes if I'm lucky," Sandy whispered back.

It was, in fact, ten-thirty-eight when they parted in the hall: Andrea Ross top ull slides for her eleven o'clock class on Gothic architecture: Sandy to distribute the hot drinks and ease Mike Szabo out of the area before Quinn came back from his lecture at ten-fifty.

Although the number of staff and students in the Art Department had doubled since open enrollment several years earlier, its original office space atop Van Hoeen Hall had not. Partitioned and repartitioned, that wing of the seventh floor had become a maze of overcrowded, interconnected offices, each shared by at least two (though usually more) staff members. An elevator and stairwell were at the top of the hall opposite a set of rest rooms. The first office on the right was occupied by several art historians, including Andrea Ross; the second was mostly art-studio personnel; and at the end of the hall a third door opened into two small offices and the slide library, a tiny room lined with banks of file drawers sized to hold the two-inch-square glass-mounted slides that were used to illustrate the survey courses.

There were more than fifty thousand slides in the collection, yet the historians were always grumbling about the needf or more. "More French impressionists, African primitives, German cubists! And okay, so we have all of Picasso's blue period," they might concede, "but what about his rose period? Practically zilch!"

Only two doors opened on the left side of the hall. A person could enter the first and turn left again into the nursery-so called because eight of the most junior staff members shared the six desks shoehorned into that narrow office-or veer right into Sandy's office. A two-sided mail rack with pigeonholes for each departmental member jutted out into her office. Beyond the mail rack, doors led into two smaller offices, and a third door gave onto the hall again.

The decor was late government surplus: nothing matched. Tables, chairs, desks, file cabinets-almost everything had been scrounged over the years. Whenever a more favored department got new furnishings, Piers Leydens's friends in Buildings and Grounds would let someone from Art salvage such desirable objects as desks with unbroken drawers, chairs that still swiveled or better desk lamps. Other offices had carpets and matching draperies. Art's floor and windows were bare, and thec hairman's telephone was a simple black extension of Sandy's-there was no way to put someone on hold, no push button to route in extra calls.

All this was not a deliberate shortchanging on Administrations' part. Not entirely. By a sort of unspoken agreement Art balanced its unyielding attitude toward Administrations' officiousness by not clamoring for more amenities. Most members of the department were happy to relinquish bigger offices and fancier furnishing in return for their relative independence.

With Mike Szabo trailing her like a shaggy brown dog. Sandy entered this shabby warren of offices by the first door, lifted a cup from the tray he still carried and stepped aside to let the Hungarian pass through to the main office.

"You can just set the tray on the bookcase," she called"after him. "The broken chair's that one on the other side of the encyclopedias."

"Hokay," replied Szabo, who'd given Professor Simpson a cheerful salute in passing.

Sandy smiled at the gray-haired professor also and set the cup marked C/W/SUG on his desk in the front corner of the nursery.

Juniors were usually stuck with the early-morning or late-afternoon schedules; they rarely got the desirable midday classes, so the room was empty now except for Professor Simpson. He looked up from a thick tome as Sandy placed his coffee on a desk cluttered by student themes, IBM grade cards, folders and stacks of books with scrap-paper markers fringing their ends.

Albert Simpson had once carried much weight on a large frame. The weight was gone now, and his boniness made him look older, as if he'd shrunk into himself. He seemed to embody the idea of the absentminded professor whose suits were always untidy, whose socks might not match, and who forgot contemporary dates, but who could make dead eras come alive with thousands of intimate details. The elderly classicist had been working on his book about Roman art for almost thirty years, yet it had never progressed beyond the research stage. He kept wandering down too many fascinating side paths ever to organize his mass of findingsi nto a publishable manuscript; but he was David Wade's graduate advisor, and Sandy was fond of him, so she defended him whenever Professor Quinn or Piers Leyden made caustic remarks about eggs that never hatched.

"Is David in this morning?" Simpson asked now, peering over his glasses at an outdated schedule taped to the wall above his desk. "I've just come across another passage in Maiuri that supports his thesis."

"No, he's taking in that exhibition at the Metropolitan," Sandy said. She made a mental note to replace the three-year-old schedule with a new one, and this time she'd tape it up herself instead of just handing it to him to get lost on his desk again. "He should be in around noon, though."

"Good, good," murmured the old scholar, already reabsorbed in his text. He probably wouldn't think of the coffee again until it was stone-cold, Sandy thought.

She turned and almost collided with Mike Szabo, who now carried a battered wooden chair over his head. One of the legs had come unglued and was hanging by its stretchers, the result of some too strenuous roughhousing among the teaching fellows and graduate assistants.

"I have it fixed good for this afternoon," Szabo promised, and Sandy smiled her thanks.

Leaving the nursery, she skirted the mail rack and paused by a long, waist-high bookcase beside the chairman's door. It was another castoff-battered looking but sturdy and capacious enough to hold the department's Britannicas, and unabridged dictionary, several art encyclopedias and a dozen or so other reference works. Szabo had left the tray on the end nearer the door to Professor Nauman's office, and Sandy picked up Vance's CHOC and continued on around the corner with it.

Lemuel Vance was a vigorous fifty, with thick black hair only lightly sprinkled with gray. He was more of a technician than an intellectual, but he knew as much as any living man about how to achieve every subtle effect possible in the realm of graphics. He raged, bellowed, cursed, had even been know to deliver a stinging smack to the backsides of his most talented students when they slacked their standards; but he was an effective, respected teacher, and he got results. Over the years many of his former students had carved out quite respectable niches in the art world.

Sandy found the barrel-shaped printer lusting over a glossy catalog of heavy equipment and preparing his annual raid on the department's budget.

"You could type up the requisition order, slip it in with some other stuff, and Oscar'd never notice he's signed it," Vance said, continuing an earlier argument.

"I still don't see what's wrong with the printing press you have," Sandy smiled.

"Are you kidding? Eighteen inches-that's the biggest plate that antediluvian junk heap can take. Now this beauty," he crooned, touching a picture in the catalog with inkstained fingers, "can take plates twice that big."

Sandy studied the description. Most of the technical terms were beyond her. The astronomical price she could understand, though, as well as the machine's gross shipping weight. "Could the floor support that much extra weight?"

"So they have to put jacks under it, sow hat?" Vance said impatiently, dismissing what would certainly be screams of outrage from Modern Languages directly beneath the printmaking workshop. "Come on. Sandy, help me talk Oscar into it. How can I teach etching without a decent press?"

"Professor Nauman isn't a dictator, Lem. Something this expensive he'd want the whole department to vote on. Anyway, you know Professor Quinn doesn't feel the historians have been getting their fair share of the budget. Haven't you heard him? He thinks the slide collection should be doubled, and that'll mean new file cabinets and probably remodeling, and there goes this year's budget."

"Those parasites! Without artists where would those damn historians be?" he asked darkly. "Riley Quinn won't be happy till he's bought a slide of every piece of art that's ever been photographed. To hell with buying necessities to teach new artists! You think he cares that I've got kids waiting in line half the period to use a press?"

Vance was still griping at 10:43 when Sandy slipped down the hall to wash her hands. Considering the lavatory's location and clientele, the caricatures and graffiti decorating its walls weren't too pornographic. Figure classes increased one's draftsmanship but took a lot of fun and spice out of anatomical nudes. Of course, someone had rather wittily combined Piers Leyden's reputation for romantic dalliance with a well-known Pompeian wall painting of Priapus; and someone else's despairing scrawl 'I hate periods!' had been 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 repassed 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,h e 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 onto 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 major museums all over the world, Sandy overlooked his peevish insult.

Suddenly the door of the inner office opened, and a thin blond man emerged. "Phone calls," he announced blandly, and Sandy wondered how much he had heard of her outburst. Jake Saxer was by no means one of her favorites.

Everything about him was just a little too crisp and hard-edged. Even his straw-colored beard was precisely clipped to a Vandyke point. Andrea Ross called him a Plexiglas construction straight out of minimal art, and he did have the brittle two-dimensional intensity of a man who expects to make it before forty. At twenty-seven Saxer already had his Ph.D. and an assistant professorship. Upon his arrival at Vanderlyn College two years ago, he'd analyzed his opportunities like a hard-nosed curator assessing the authenticity of a dubious Etruscan warrior and then deliberately ingratiated himself with Professor Quinn. Quinn had just begun another definitive book on postwar trends in modern art, and Saxer was knowledgeable about sources, references and illustrations. He had made himself so indispensable that Quinn had used his authority as deputy chairman to cut Saxer's teaching load to one survey course this semester-ostensibly so that Saxer could sort and catalog the department's chaotic slide library but in reality to give him more free time for Quinn's research chores.

The office continued to fill up as people drifted in from classes to check their mail or just shoot the breeze. Piers Leyden and Andrea Ross were followed by Vance, who came in sipping his hot chocolate. Graduate students and lecturers, holding coffee and cigarettes, elbowed for space at the corner table, gossiping about the morning fiasco in hoots of laughter, which moderated slightly when Riley Quinn returned from his ten o'clock lecture, 'Conceptual Divergence in Modern Art.'

All signs of the deputy chairman's earlier loss of control had vanished. Once again he was a supercilious, dapper executive with a tanned face, crisp gray hair and shrewd brown eyes. Quinn always seemed to have just emerged from an expensive barbershop, his nails freshly manicured and trailing a faint scent of after-shave lotion; and in a department not noted for sartorial elegance his perfectly pressed fawn-colored suit, dark brown shirt and paisley tie set him apart. Not a speck of city dust dulled the gleaming surface of his shoes, and his pigskin slide case was custom-made and unbattered.

Harley Harris rose from a chair beside the bookcase.

"Professor Quinn-"

"Not now," Quinn said brusquely. " Sandy, get me Dean Ellis." He reached around Harris and picked up one of the two Styrofoam cups on the bookcase.

"Now just a minute!" Harris squeaked. "I have a right-"

Quinn ignored him and, seeing Sandy signal that the dean was on the line, went into his office and closed the door in Harley Harris's face. Harris turned angrily and almost collided with Professor Simpson, who was balancing his coffee on two thick reference tomes.

"Excuse me," murmured the old man and, nudging the boy aside, returned the books to the shelves below. Beyond Simpson's bent back Harris spotted Oscar Nauman just making his way through the crowded office, and his truculence wavered.

White-haired, six-foot-two and possessed of deep blue eyes that seemed to look past externals to the heart of any matter, the chairman towered over his colleagues mentally as well as physically. He tended to forget appointments and responsibilities, and left most departmental routine to Quinn and Sandy. When aroused in intellectual debate, his speech often became tangled and elliptical because his mind outran his tongue; but in his writings and especially in his paintings his brilliance shone forth unhindered. The only criticism ever leveled at Oscar Nauman's work was that it was too starkly cerebral.

Now he took the last cup from the tray on the bookcase, discarded the snap-on lid, swallowed deeply and grimaced, "God, Vance! This tastes like one of your acid baths!"

All this time Harley Harris, who barely came up to Nauman's chest, had been dancing for attention, and the artist looked down at him in mystified bewilderment as a Great Dane might gaze at a yipping chihuahua. Frustrated, Harris shrilled, "You just wait then! You'll be sorry! And I hope you roast in hell!"

Nauman watched him flounce away through the nursery exit and, honestly puzzled, appealed to Sandy.

"Is he upset about something?"

Malicious laughter rippled through the big room as Sandy reminded him of Harley's failure. "Professor Quinn told him yesterday that he wouldn't qualify for an M.F.A., but I think he was hoping you'd override the committee's decision. He was supposed to have a meeting with you today but it had to be postponed."

Nauman frowned, uncomfortably aware that he'd been unintentionally rude to the boy. He could be, and often was, merciless in his treatment of those with intellectual pretensions, but picking on someone of Harley Harris's mental size was not very sporting.

Around him the conversation had reached a raucous pitch. Among the younger staff members at the corner table, battle was joined over whether or not there was a shred of individuality in the whole second generation of abstract expressionists. Both sides had fervent, articulate defenders who shouted to be heard.

A bearded latecomer pushed his way into the group, snarling good-naturedly at a friend who'd maneuvered him into dating his girl friend's cousin. "You promised me a Venus," he grumbled. "She was a Venus, all right. The Willendorf Venus!"

Which led to fertility symbols, Paleolithic cave paintings, Stonehenge, Toltec technology and present-day earthworks and "-so his uncle's in the business, and he can borrow a bulldozer whenever-"

"I'll be damned if I'll buy it. What kind of art is it if you've got to go up five miles in a frigging helicopter everytime you want to see the whole thing?"

"Ah, you're a reactionary-"

"-combines soft sculpture with collage and gets-"

"-so I told him where he could put holography, and she said-"

Nauman shook his head over so much simultaneous vociferous enthusiasm, but on the whole he approved. Some of his best paintings had been generated by freewheeling debate. He took a final gulp of the really unpalatable coffee and set the empty cup on the file cabinet between two of Sandy 's potted geraniums while he pulled out an elaborately carved meerschaum pipe.

As he lit it, he was cornered by Lemuel Vance, who began buttressing his demand for a new printing press for the graphics workshop with data from three different catalogs. He almost had to shout to be heard over the surrounding din.

In the midst of all the loud hilarity and noisy arguments Sandy noticed a girl hesitating by the mail rack. At Sandy 's gesture the girl, a student aide from Dean Ellis's office, edged her way over. Clearly such bedlam never occurred in the hushed sanctuaries below.

"The dean wants to know if Professor Quinn's all right," she whispered.

"All right?" repeated Sandy in a puzzled tone. The decibel level began dropping as others became aware of this new diversion and paused to eavesdrop.

The girl nodded. "Dean Ellis was speaking with Professor Quinn on the telephone when he suddenly started-I mean, the dean said it sounded like Professor Quinn was-" Embarrassed, she groped for a diplomatic term. "Like he was, well, you know, upchucking"

Sandy half rose. Nauman was closer to the door, but before he could move it was wrenched open and Riley Quinn staggered across the threshold. He clutched a wastebasket to his soiled shirtfront, and an acrid stench reached their nostrils as he heaved into it spasmodically. His eyes were glassy, his skin green white beneath its deep tan.

"Help me!" he gasped hoarsely, retching at every word.

"Oh, my God, I'm dying!"

The ambulance responded in record time, but Quinn had passed into a deep coma before it arrived. Death occurred shortly after twelve noon.