The Rules

There is indeed an institute of higher education which served as a partial model for Locksmith University, as some readers may be able to guess. Nevertheless, there is precious little light and less truth about the university in this story. I must confess I have callously played with details of life in its engineering school for my own narrative purposes. And, of course, the real university's professors of divinity are all models of wise decorum and restraint. Most heinously, I have even altered the football schedule. The game against the arrogant bastards never takes place before Halloween. While universities do exist and, to be sure, they are all well-stocked with rules and committees, this story is otherwise pure fantasy, written chiefly for my own pleasure. I hope some of you may share that pleasure.

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I do know the rules. In fact, I helped write them.

It started, I suppose, at dinner at the Dean's house. Now, you need to know that the Dr. Richard Evans, Dean of Engineering of Locksmith University, is not just my boss; he's the best friend I have in the world and his wife, Maggie, is a sweetheart. She was the also the dearest, closest friend of my sweet wife Robin and sat with me, holding my hand, while poor Robin was dying of ovarian cancer.

Maggie is a big woman, blonde, busty and hearty. She's a second Mom to all the junior professors and grad students, particularly the female ones, and has a heart the size of New England. They all consult her about their love lives and everything else you can imagine.

I suppose that's why Maggie started nagging me about trying dating again, a year or so after Robin died. She's simply fallen into the habit of giving advice to the lovelorn and she thinks I qualify. Women past fifty often experience a sudden activation of the matchmaking gene, I think, and they just can't leave a single man alone, even as lousy a prospect as me.

"Will," she kept on saying, "You're the kind of man who needs a woman and, believe me, somewhere out there, a woman needs you."

That's probably true but I had that woman for more than twenty five years and now she's gone. I'm not the dating type and there's no way I could ever replace my heart's desire after she was taken away from me. About six months ago Maggie seemed to give up on her project to get me dating again. I guess I'm her one failure.

But back to dinner at the Dean's: Richard and Maggie had invited my graduate research assistant, Jenny Chen, and me to drop by for a late meal after we were done at the lab. Nothing fancy, just pizza, Caesar salad and beer, nothing we hadn't done dozens of time before. It was going to be a completely relaxed evening, I thought, with nothing more demanding on the conversational plate than the Bruins' chances in the playoffs this year. Did they have the scoring to make a run at the Cup? Who should start in goal? That would be as deep as it would get, I thought. Wrong.

Richard loves hockey - he was all conference defenseman at Nassau University in his day - and though it was not a game day, he was, in fact, wearing his old black and orange letterman's sweater.

I gave him the gears as usual, "Great colors! Reminds me of Halloween! Tell me: is it true that 'Trick or Treat' is the Nassau Tabbycats' school cheer?" I asked.

I had played lacrosse for Locksmith, or more accurately sat on the bench for Locksmith, and it's the sworn duty of every Locksmith Blue to run down Nassau. There's nothing better than a cold beer and an old joke between warm friends, but, for once, he didn't give it back to me.

He frowned, looked at me over his half moon reading glasses, and said, "Will, I need you to sit as my substitute and representative on the University Sexual Harassment Policy Review committee."

I groaned aloud. "Rich, why me? You know I'm out of here for Palo Alto for good next January and these committees take years to report."

"Not this one. The President is completely pissed off by those media reports of harassment of female students at Locksmith and he wants a review of the rules fast... to show sensitivity to women's concerns and to demonstrate decisive leadership." He lowered his voice to a mock media baritone and made quotation marks in the air on "decisive leadership." Rich isn't a fan of the president.

"But..."

"I know you're gone next year but people respect you and you know very well that I can't serve on this thing."

"Why not?"

Rich looked disgusted, "Because of Maggie, of course. People still remember how we got together."

It was well before my time but I did know the story. Rich had been a brand new Assistant Professor while Maggie was a graduate student in Engineering. They met when he was appointed by the then Dean to serve on her supervisory committee as a replacement for an older professor who had suffered a heart attack. Even though he was not the Director of her dissertation and had never even taught her during her course work, this would be a definite No-No these days.

But Maggie had set her sights on him and the simple truth is that she is a force of nature. He had about as much chance as a beefsteak dropped in the middle a pack of wolves, not that anyone would ever hear him complain. He was then and remains now one happy piece of beefsteak. They were married a year later. It had always been one of your textbook happy marriages but nowadays the way they got together would be considered inappropriate behaviour and even sexual harassment... inequality of power or something like that.

Maggie stirred in her chair. "Will, I know there is sexual harassment of female students and staff here. Who do you think hears about it first?"

That was definitely a rhetorical question as far as the Engineering school goes. The girls, young women, I mean, all head for Maggie. Everyone knows that she has the ear of the Dean... and every other body part as well. The end result is that though engineering is one of the increasingly scarce areas left in higher education where females are still a minority, nowadays there isn't much trouble of that sort here at Locksmith. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of Maggie.

"But in the end, you have to make room for love also. Sometimes young women fall in love with kind, intelligent, strong men in their field, for all the right reasons."

Maggie looked over at Richard and you could read a lifetime's worth of mutual love and respect in her eyes. I knew exactly what she meant and I could tell that Jenny agreed. She was nodding her head also.

"So we are hoping for a voice of reason on the committee, someone who will actually remember human beings are involved," said Richard

"You!" chimed in Maggie.

I didn't stand a chance. Saying "No" to the Dean is one thing but there's no way in the world I can deny Maggie anything.

"Let me think about it overnight," I temporized.

They nodded, contented. They knew they had me.

Rich and Maggie aren't friends, when you come right down to it; they're family. Put it this way: my daughter Amy has a full house of aunts to choose from, three on my side and two on her mother's, and any one of them would have been thrilled to be replacement Mother on Amy's wedding day, last spring. But Amy insisted on being dressed at Maggie's house and having the pre-wedding photos in their garden.

A widower father can do many things for his daughter and Lord knows I have always tried my best, but he surely isn't needed when she is preparing for her wedding ceremony. That's a female thing... exclusively. It ought to be a mother and daughter thing, but that possibility had been laid to rest three years before. When a man loses the wife he loves, it isn't just the sex or even the companionship that is buried with her; it is all those possibilities that are lost, all the memories to be created and then savored together over the years. Gone, all gone, like my sweet Robin.

I couldn't be more grateful to Maggie for taking over on the day. I had been planning to drive Amy and the bridesmaids over to her house to dress but she wouldn't have it.

"Remember Rich on our Katie's wedding day? Total basket case! He might as well have been blind the way he teared up at the least little thing. He almost drove into a lamppost on Gagetown Rd. Men! Just can't control their emotions!"

But she squeezed Rich's hand and gazed fondly into his eyes even as she spoke. I thought about my own probability of weeping factor, or PWF as we engineers like to put it, and realized she was almost certainly right. It would do nobody any good if I drove into a lamppost on my Amy's wedding day.

"I'll take care of all that," she said.

So Maggie sent Jenny over to collect Amy when it was time. They did trust me to carry my daughter's suitcases to the car and also the precious gown, still wrapped in blue paper to keep it from yellowing with age, the gown her mother had worn almost thirty years ago. Sure enough, my eyes filled for the first of many times that day, as I laid the gown gently across the back seat of the Dean's old Lincoln. Jenny squeezed my upper arm and my little girl kissed me good bye.

I waved them on their way and, temporarily blinded, just as predicted, stumbled back into the house to carry out my own preparations. Though I did manage to miss the lamppost.

More than two hours later, Jenny arrived back at my house to pick me up when it was time for the photos. She adjusted my tie, patted my arm, smiled and said, "You're almost as good looking as your daughter." That was an exaggeration of course -- nobody could match Amy on that day - but people are so kind!

I remember that I stepped around the corner of the Dean's house, laid one hand on the garden gate and caught sight of Amy seated in her mother's old wedding gown on the stone bench under the vine laden arbor. Maggie was adjusting the bridal veil and Amy was dreamily staring off in the distance, lost in thought, whether of her late mother or her beloved or both, I do not know. But then, I could not tell if I were thinking more of the young woman who had first worn that gown for me or of the little girl whose life we had created together, now a woman of surpassing grace. If I could not sort out my own thoughts; I do not know why I should suppose that Amy's thoughts were any less complex, nor why I should be able to decipher them.

I stopped, stood dead still, gazed at her, still unaware of my presence as she was. My eyes filled again. I do not know how long I stood there, blinking away the tears. Probably it was but a few seconds. A slender hand slipped two tissues into mine and I wiped my eyes. "It's time," said Jenny and, with gentle pressure on my arm, guided me forward to join my daughter.

Amy picked a photo from that session to be specially framed for me and I treasure it. It is a candid shot of Maggie touching up the edge of the bride's lipstick while Jenny holds back the bridal veil. The love in their eyes is more than I can describe. Maggie can ask me for anything.

After dinner, I dropped Jenny off at the Grad Pad and dawdled back to the farmhouse north of Oldport where Robin and I had made our home. For the longest time after she died, a part of me expected to hear her cheery voice crying out a greeting from the kitchen or the laundry when I unlocked the front door. But that expectation had faded, along with the sharpness of grief. I was alone. I didn't like it.

Over a late night and solitary cup of hot chocolate, I thought about the Dean's request. My mind slipped back to the snafu on my last trip to Japan with Jenny. I'm actually a civil engineer - you know us, the people who design your roads and waterworks and sewers. Civil engineering is the bottom rung of the status ladder in the profession though that's terribly unfair. Civil engineers have probably saved more lives than all the doctors in history put together, just by providing clean water and safely flushing away your sewage.

Locksmith doesn't even have a civil engineering speciality anymore. The Dean saved my position by putting me in materials science. Oh, and the fact I had tenure helped too. But it's one of the reasons, I'm heading out west next January. The other is that my particular speciality has to do with seismic safety, the development of construction techniques and materials that will help structures safely survive earthquakes. For some reason, they are more interested in that subject in California than in New England.

Jenny's research particularly focuses on the safety of nuclear reactors during and after earthquakes. Talk about good timing. Though her family is from Taiwan, not Japan, she had researched the safety protocols and construction techniques of Japanese reactors. At her suggestion, we had published under both our names an article on potential problems with Japanese reactors which mentioned, among other things, the danger of tsunamis. The article had appeared just a few weeks before the terrible tsunami struck in northern Japan. We were in demand, big time, and it didn't hurt that she is a photogenic young woman. There is a newspaper photo of her from that trip to Japan wearing a lab coat, hard hat and goggles, bending over a set of blueprints, the angle of the shot showing just a hint of cleavage, almost geek soft porn, to be honest.

Jenny's been with me a while, first as a Masters student, then a doctoral candidate and finally also as my research assistant. Telling her I was moving to California had been hard.

"Don't worry, I assured her. "I negotiated a delayed departure. I won't take up the new position until January of the year after next. I'll be around to supervise your dissertation to completion."

Jenny was obviously completely shocked, so shocked that she couldn't speak. I could understand that; losing a supervisor in the middle of writing a dissertation is a major league problem. But for one reason or another, it sometimes does happen to students and they mostly battle through it. Besides, what I told her was absolutely true. With normal progress -- and Jenny is way beyond normal in her ability, even by doctoral candidate standards -- she could complete and defend her dissertation before I left. Worst case, there's always telephone and email for consultations.

But Jenny couldn't say a word. Actually, I was a little hurt. I knew this change would be a dislocation for her but I did expect some response, at least a pro forma "Congratulations!" The move made sense on so many levels, after all. Not only was Palo Alto a better place for seismic engineering but my daughter and her husband lived across the bay at what Rich persisted in calling Hippy U. And Rich and Maggie would be moving to the East Bay also to be near their Katie, once Rich retired in two years time. Jenny knows all that.

"If you need academic advice about your options, you know you're always welcome to talk to the Dean."

At last, Jenny drew a breath, turned back to her computer screen, paused for a minute and replied, "Thanks, I may do just that. I imagine that he can give me good advice... and Maggie, too."

I don't know if Jenny talked to the Dean or not but that was six months earlier and everything seemed to have calmed down since then. What has heated up since then, however, is, well, yes, the Japanese reactor cores, but also the flow of data. That was both good news and bad news for Jenny. The good news was that both Jenny and I have been consulted by authorities all over the world on reactor safety. As a result, Jenny will be able to write her own ticket almost anywhere she wants, either in business or academia, when she finally does submit her dissertation. The bad news is that the chain reaction of new data will require a rewrite of substantial sections of her work. But I still think she can submit before I leave.

So, considering all this, it was no surprise that we were asked to travel to Japan to review safety issues with Japan's remaining reactors. Oldport-New York-Tokyo is a looong journey. Well, the second leg is a long journey.

Fortunately, our hosts had provided business class tickets. I pity the folks back in coach. I'm 6'2" and though reasonably slim I just don't fit in those economy seats. Add in the breadth of the Pacific Ocean and it's a pain, literally. Jenny is only about 5'5" but even she would be uncomfortable in economy. In fact, anybody who is too large to succeed as a jockey would be uncomfortable, in my opinion. I was pleased we were seated together in business class. We chatted for the first couple of hours, nothing exciting, just academic gossip and comfortable conversation between friends.

The New York-Tokyo flight takes the Great Circle route amazingly far north, cutting across most of Canada. Jenny was very funny, looking down at the Great White North, telling me a story about a young Quebec engineer trying to pick her up at a conference in Montreal.

"I was sitting on a bar stool in the faculty lounge. The young engineer was on one side of me and an older professor from McGill on the other. The young guy was a little drunk and he kept talking about 'my cool.' 'I admire your cool. Your cool is so beautiful. C'est si beau, comme tes jeunes seines.'"

Jenny can do a very creditable French accent. I could hear some smarmy Frenchman cooing over "her cool." It bothered me to hear about it.

Jenny continued, "Finally he all but shouted, 'You have the most beautiful cool in the world!' I told him that he was very kind but that I had never thought of myself as very cool.

Just then, the professor on the other side plucked me by the elbow and whispered in my ear, 'He's not saying 'cool.' He's saying 'cul." That's French for, uhhh, 'rear end' or, uhhh 'arse.' "Pardon my French, as they say.' Then the professor did say something in French to the engineer. I don't know what it was but I am pretty sure I heard the word 'cul' in there and the young guy disappeared."

Jenny paused, looked down at her lap, lifted her eyes to mine and said, "Sometimes older men are wonderful."

I was glad my fellow old guy was there to help her but an utterly reprehensible thought for a man my age kept worming its way into my brain - The young guy was right; she does have a luscious "cool."

But Jenny has a lot in the top storey as well. She reminded me that she had worked professionally before entering grad school and somewhere along the way, was assigned to a construction project in the Arctic. She had some very interesting and pointed observations about building on permafrost. We'll have to consider whether some of those techniques can be adapted for construction in seismically active zones. Travelling with her is wonderful in its own way but I keep getting reminded of the truth. She's smart and fun and sexy but unfortunately, she needs to find someone much younger than me.

Somewhere over northern Manitoba, Jenny yawned very prettily and told me she needed a nap. Very shyly she informed me, "Sometimes I slip sideways when I fall asleep in an airplane. Would you be upset if that happened and I end up leaning on you?"

"Of course not!" I assured her and raised the armrest between us. I wish I dared to invite her to lie down across the two seats and lay her head in my lap but I knew that would be inappropriate.

Jenny raised her hands to her head to release the lustrous raven hair that she had tied, as she usually did, in a pony tail high on her head. As she did so, her tee shirt pulled tight over her small but shapely and very upright breasts. I stifled a sigh and looked for the airline magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. I needed something to distract me. Instead, I pulled out the vomit bag by mistake. I stared at it as if it were a really interesting vomit bag. If I didn't get control of myself, this was indeed going to be a long flight, I told myself. Concentrating on the bag, I repeated to myself, "In case of air sickness..." That seemed to do the trick.