Problems with People by David Guterson

garish light. His people were flagrant. You could see all their blemishes. He exposed them as assailed, as vulnerable.
    She had the postmortem with Mark in the midst of her hangover. It was Thursday, a little warmer, and raining heavily. There would be no walking this afternoon. Behind Mark, on his credenza, a photograph of him and his wife looking like the Republicans they were on vacation in Mexico; another of the Mitchell family taken in a studio against a dark-blue backdrop. Mark handed her a copy of his evaluation, which she folded, unread, and slid into her bag. His actual subject: Clement Grimaldi’s tearful objections to the excising of Drawing III from the curriculum. Not a judgment, he added. Instead, by the numbers. No class in the building had lower enrollments. Clement could be emotional, he was emotional, he was recently divorced, he’d been ill with a MRSA infection, he took things personally, Clement was an artist. Mark clicked his pen a few times as he spoke. “What do you think?” he asked her. “You’ve been in this building for a long time.”
    She knew what to say. She said, “I’m not sure what being an artist has to do with it. Clement is a friend of mine. I like and respect him, but he has a hard time with reality. I agree—he takes things personally.”
    She thought of something. “Speaking of artists,” she said, “Les and I went to the Nash yesterday to see Hamish McAdam’s photographs. Remember Hamish? He’s teaching somewhere”—she had forgotten where—“I would guess low-residency.”
    “Not low-residency. He’s at Grosvenor College.”
    “I wonder how he got in front of students again.”
    “Well, we certainly did what we could to help him. Oh,” said Mark, “that stuff. Yeah. It went nowhere, contrary to … hearsay.”
    She didn’t answer. Mark took it as an invitation. “We even tried to bring him back,” he said. “Wouldn’t do it. Fortunately, he didn’t bring suit against the district. Not that he would have won, necessarily, but it could have been a much bigger hassle.”
    “How so?” she asked.
    “False allegations. Admitted to. In writing. By a girl I’m not going to name—she made an error. I thought faculty knew all about this,” said Mark. “I assumed you knew. Nothing,” he stressed. “Hamish never did a single thing wrong. Other than being a little … different.”
    That night she told her husband about Hamish. They were in bed with books; he was about to pull the beaded chain on his lamp. He listened to her story without interruption, and then said that maybe she was obsessing about nothing and that probably, in the end, there’d been little or no harm. Why do you do this to yourself? he asked. Is it going to make the situation better? A situation—his real point—that wasn’t even a situation? The guy in the park had probably forgotten it—probably forgot it within a few minutes. It didn’t even exist, her husband suggested, except as thoughts in her head.
    On Friday, she handed back the American civil rights movement quizzes and the set of Jim Crow era essays. The last bell of the week finally rang. She sat down and looked at the weekend weather, the starting times of movies, the hours the pool was open for lap swimming, restaurant dinner menus, and her retirement portfolio.
Should institutions of higher learning be allowed to use race as a factor in determining admissions?
Why or why not? She put those essays in her bag with dread about the work it would take to respond to them—to make comments, give feedback, give grades. Then she remembered that she’d forgotten about Hamish, had forgotten about him in the course of the day. Was that good or bad? She couldn’t say.

Hot Springs
    Eleven months out of twelve, the judge ignored being Jewish. Then Christmas slid into view, and for a while he was reminded of it. People who knew he was Jewish would say “Happy Hanukkah” in lieu of “Merry Christmas,” and though he wanted