One Coffee With

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 Qui

"Do you think Professor Qui

Andrea shrugged, not wanting to ruin her digestion with speculations on Riley Qui

"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 Qui

"Absolutely not!"

"But you know how out of it Professor Nauman can be sometimes. He probably hasn't noticed how high-handed Qui

"I mean it, Sandy. I'll fight my own battles with that Riley Qui

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 begi

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 Qui

"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 Qui

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, interco

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.