Howard Edgar couldn’t see through Morgan Degas’s glasses, behind which lay bloodshot eyes.

“Hello Morgan,” Professor Edgar said. “We don’t really have much time before classes start, so we should get down to business quickly.”

Morgan was trembling. It was unusual for him to be this nervous, but these days were much different. He hoped that the results of too many sleepless nights would not be evident. Much was riding on this.

“Associate Professor Degas, I like the ring of that. Many other people in the department do too, Morgan. And as department chair, I think it’s about time that you realized your true potential.”

“I would like that.”

“You’ve worked here for nearly six years, and done an excellent job of it. You deserve this very much.”

“Thank you. I’ve done my best.”

Professor Edgar laughed and said, “How is your wife doing?”

Morgan’s eyes narrowed, but he tried to take attention off of it by adjusting his glasses. “Fine. She enjoyed the reading.”

“Yes, I really do like Redman. He’s one of the better poets I’ve seen these days.”

Professor Edgar blabbered on about it, not noticing a suppressed glare in Morgan Degas’s eyes.

“So yes, we expect to consider your tenure at the next board meeting. But of course, there’s nothing to consider, as everyone agrees that you’ll get tenure. It would take a major scandal for you to be turned down.”

Degas’s teeth rattled. He knew very well what the professor was hinting at.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Edgar said.

A slim and elegant young woman walked in, a tote bag in hand.

“Cindy,” the professor said, smiling. “Always a pleasure to have you here. Your husband and I were just discussing the upcoming tenure decision.”

“Is that so, Morgan?” Cindy said, beaming not at her husband but at the professor.

“Yeah,” Morgan said, trying hard to keep his hands out of sight. They were trembling with rage.

“That’s wonderful.”

Cindy walked over and kissed Morgan on the cheek. It was a hollow kiss, though, a gesture more fitting for a pet than a lover.

“I have to be going to class now,” Morgan said.

“I’ll see you at 5:00,” Cindy said.

“What’re you going to be doing?”

“Working on tonight’s benefit,” she said. “There were some last minute changes in the schedule that we have to go over.”

Morgan faked a smile, and then slowly opened the double doors. He took one glance back, then walked down the hallway, his Oxfords clicking against the floor.

* * *

“You don’t seem too excited about it,” Cindy said. “They are going to give you tenure!”

“I am excited,” Morgan replied, but his hands clutched the steering wheel like those of a dead man.

“You’ll be working late, I guess.”

“Yeah. Grading papers. They just completed a big essay on Kant.”

“The benefit’s going ahead as planned. Ravi Shankar is setting up right as we speak. It was a real coup getting him for tonight.”

“A real coup,” he laughed grimly. There was an awkward moment of silence, and then Morgan spoke again. “You want me to go? I’ll defer the papers until later.”

“No, I don’t want to inconvenience you,” Cindy insisted. “I’ll go by myself. Those papers are important. I remember how late you were working when I was in your class.”

“Is there anyone you know there?”

“Well, there’s Sarah, Mimi, and Lisa.”

And of course, Morgan thought, there was Professor Howard Edgar, who was known for his “hospitality” towards young women.

* * *

True to his word, Morgan raided the coffee machine and spent the night reading through sloppy essays on what he assumed was an out of whack idea of Kant. However, the burning anger never faded. It stayed submerged within him. He was sorely tempted to fail everyone, but duty to the inflated grade policy kept his instincts in check. He could imagine in his mind what was going on at the benefit. Most likely, Sarah, Mimi, and Lisa were at Fred Segal doing late-night shopping rather than hearing some sitar great play. Edgar and Cindy probably left early to head for drinks, and then fucking the living daylights out of each other. And Morgan knew it well because he had snagged the leggy woman when she was barely 21, a student in his philosophy class. She already had a boyfriend, but a clueless one. Morgan knew almost everything about the fine art of cuckoldry, except now he was no longer dashing and young. He was forty, and grounded firmly in his work. No more time for frivolous games, drunken sex, or near-Roman decadence. Somehow he felt a lot like Leonard Cohen….

He had known what was going on for a long time; it was just that he had failed to acknowledge it in his mind. Edgar had him by the balls, and he thought it better just to leave it is. Still the anger wouldn’t go away. So he lost himself in work. As the hours went by, he grew so focused that he didn’t hear the crash of the door opening, didn’t hear the drunken giggling, and didn’t see the hand snake down a short minidress. He continued grading his papers and didn’t pay any mind to the moans, the garments furiously tossed aside, the crash of two bodies slamming against the wall. He couldn’t smell the seductive French perfume or the stink of an excessive serving of liquor. But he could feel it. He could feel the anger rising. And he could see in his mind’s eye a trusted friend inside his wife, a vandal smashing into pieces what remained of a marriage.

He gritted his teeth, but no more papers were graded that night. Morgan Degas headed down to the bar. He would surely kill someone tonight unless he could drink himself into a stupor. The tenure was all he had left. He had better not throw it away based on such a silly thing as pride.

* * *

In the days that came, Morgan Degas remained normal on the outside. He still walked to classes and regaled the students with abstract theory, cajoling them into enlightenment in his own unique way. He still carried on his workaholic tendencies. He still listened to Leonard Cohen and the Beatles. However, he walked with a slump. Dirty jokes he once indulged in seemed to hurt him. And he often took his papers down to the bar instead of the faculty lounge. He was more sedate, the frustration and passion that seemed to drive him forward a thing of the past. His wife didn’t seem to mind the time he spent drinking down at the bar. She had other things to pursue. It seemed that there was a new sale at Bergdorf every week. Her clothes were extravagant, but Degas didn’t seem to care about the cost. It was obvious that she was paying out of someone else’s pocket. He had fantasies of stabbing Professor Edgar with a pen, black ink replacing red blood in a torrent that filled up that damned lecher’s office. But he always reached for the Jack Daniels after that horrible vision came about. Remember the tenure, he thought. It’s all I have left. And indeed, it was. And he focused on killing a part of himself. The nights and days blended together now. He saw things through a haze of bright colors and dying stars. And he made frequent trips to the bathroom to vomit during class time, enough to make Edgar worry and give him sick leave. All through it, Degas repeated to himself, “It’s all I have left.”

* * *

It’s 1:00 AM. Do you know where your wife is?

Degas didn’t. He didn’t pay attention to her explanation, because he simply didn’t care. He was at the bar again, grading crappy papers. He didn’t care about the content, he would slap grades on them based on their fonts: A for Arial Black, B for Century Gothic, and C for Times New Roman. He slumped lower and lower, and under the drinks he finally started to cry. He stopped himself quickly, but his self-control was fast vanishing. His mind was wandering like crazy. A smile. He saw it. It was his wife smiling. She was the only one in her class who could actually write an intelligent paper. Since she had graduated, no one else could. Nostalgia is a bitter thing. What had gone wrong? he could hear a nagging voice in his head saying. “You were married to your work.” But he knew that already. It was all he had left.

Suddenly he felt himself lurching backwards off the stool. He tried to hold on but his limbs felt like jelly now. It was all falling away from him. Cindy, his job, the beer, everything. There was a loud crash now but he didn’t feel anything. People stared at him sprawled on the floor, his corduroy blazer stained dark. After his head stopped spinning, he picked himself up and slowly inserted himself into the barstool. But something had changed. His glare burned like a furnace. He felt like he had looked God straight in the eye and the almighty had blinked.

“Scotch,” he gurgled.

Suddenly he felt now like he could handle the papers. And for hours he did, furiously scribbling until his pen was drained of all the ink. He felt like Superman, without the gaudy costume, and certainly without Lois Lane. Scratch that, who needs Superman when you can be Lex Luthor? To be bald, malicious, and constantly aspiring to take over the world…how Morgan wished he could be that.

* * *

“You walk strange,” Cindy said. “Kind of like one of those chimps at the zoo.”

Her words echoed dimly in his head, because for all purposes Morgan Degas was on autopilot. She had to drag him out of bed in the morning. Cindy was honestly afraid for her husband’s well being. He hadn’t taken the sick leave, despite Professor Edgar’s urgings.

“I’ve been down at the bar,” Degas said, his eyes glazed.

“Too much. All that time alone in the bar, why don’t you go with Sarah and me down to the jazz lounge? You can grade your papers there.”

“No. I got a job.”

Cindy rolled her eyes and then said, “Whatever works for you, honey.”

Degas watched her walk out the door. In his blurry vision, she was sashaying like a stripper, no, there were two Cindys, both echoes bouncing into his vision, fragmenting. It was time for class. He barely focused on the road as he drove in. Even when the police officer gave him a ticket for stopping in the intersection, Degas did not lose his bliss. Students were wary of him, and kept their distance from the assistant professor as he shambled in. This was clearly a man on the edge. Degas had a stack of papers in his hand, the results of the much vaunted philosophy essays. A wave of dismay rose up as the students found out that the grading pen had not been kind to them. This wasn’t natural. The grade inflation policy had been thrown aside, and for the first time since high school, they were getting the markings they deserved for their shoddy craft.

That week, Degas was a quite different man. Students wondered what had happened to him. He developed a habit of making crude sexual jokes in class, often to winsome young freshmen girls. His behavior was erratic, the only consistent thing being his tough grading. He slaughtered tens of thousands of words, entire research reports, wielding his little red pen like a machine gun in the trenches of the Marne. Mowing down the students just like Germans had wrecked the cream of British and French youth so long ago, Degas became a man to be feared.

“You must be easier on them,” Edgar said. “They are not Nobel laureates yet; it’s your job to make them less stupid.”

To which, Degas replied, clipboard in hand, “This is the class criteria and grading rubric for the papers.”

That became his mantra. And Edgar began to sweat.

* * *

Degas went down to the bar more often. The grimy, low-lit landscape became blurred to him, the sights and sounds molded into one complete sensory package. It was like he had reached a state of serenity, found his Buddha sitting on the barstool, legs splayed instead of cross-legged. That was his home, not his house. He was married to the lady on the scotch bottle now, not Cindy. The lady on the scotch bottle was a most faithful wife indeed, and Degas an unusually attentive husband. He was a regular at the bar, an institution, whose entry and departure came to be used by the other drunkards as a kind of Big Ben to calculate their own labors. And what a strange man indeed—clad in a tweed suit, a bottle in one hand, and a stack of reports in the other. An uninformed observer might have said that Degas was half the man he used to be. But they were dead wrong. Degas was everything he wanted to be.

One night, the lightning lashed at the trees and the rain pummeled the roofs. Degas’s face was now as red as his eyes. He cast a holy aura that spake unto the entire world “badass” in all its forms. He was Shaft, the Archangel Michael, the Terminator, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins all rolled into one. None of the other barroom regulars approached him. He laughed and ranted incoherently. Tenure and class was as far from his mind as could be. The music in his head grew steadily louder. Random memories circled through his mind: he thought of his college friends from the days of yore, crashing on the couch, leaving cigarette burns in the plush couch, and tossing back shots of supermarket tequila. All of it annoyed him after a while. It was time for him to go home. So against the angels of his better nature, he climbed into his car and drove through that familiar, quiet neighborhood again.

There was already another car parked in his driveway, annoying Degas. How dare they steal his parking space! Demons! He’d show them. He grabbed a garden rake and swung it like a terrible, swift sword. There was a tremendous crash and the car windows shattered in a thousand shards. Degas ran his key along the side of the car from the trunk to the headlights and then inspected his handiwork. Satisfied, he limped toward the door. It wasn’t locked, thankfully, as he had long since forgotten in his haze which one was the house key.

The door creaked upon. There was a foreign presence in his house. Rage coursed through Degas’s bones. This was his castle, his primal territory. Someone had pissed on the walls and marked it as their domain. So Degas wandered into the kitchen to find that the old French wine was open and drained. They had drank his blood, the vampires. The wine he had bought for the anniversary. He heard the rhythmic pounding from upstairs and his muscles tensed. He got on all fours and barked. He scrambled over to the side of the staircase and spotted some undergarments. A bit large in the waist to be his. Invaders!

He howled and then charged up the stairs, passing more discarded clothes as he went. The top door to the bedroom was halfway open. He could see some blurry images romping around on the bed. Their quick movements were fevered and angry. Fools! They were defiling his bed. The center of his power. They were insulting his very manhood. A wild look developed in his eye, and he knew what he had to do. He threw himself at the door and lunged inside. The woman in the bed screamed, but she was of little concern to Degas. It was the invader, the defiler, he was after. He jumped at the naked man. The man dodged this clumsy blow, but Degas quickly grabbed a poker from the fireplace and swung it around. Like the knights of old, he would protect his castle with the sword. The man’s eyes were melting, melting into a pastiche of fear, surprise, and humiliation. He was saying something, pleading for his life, but Degas did not hear anything he said. The woman was violently shrieking about something, but Degas did not catch that either. His swings were clumsy and easily dodged, but they put the fear of God into the defiler. He ran. Seemingly in slow motion, but he got off running.

He didn’t stop to pick up his clothes; he ran stark naked. His balls were jumping up and down as he pushed his feet to the limit in order to escape this madman of an assistant professor. Degas stumbled along after him, gangly in appearance now. He bounced off the walls and rolled down the stairs, getting up in time to chase the intruder from the stairs and out the door. Degas followed him out the doorway, and then comically tripped on one of the garden hoses. The naked man shivered in the cold before hopping into his car and speeding off. Degas picked himself up and then stared up at the moon. He howled. He had defended his home and hearth from an intruder and protected his honor.

No matter that the next day Degas would recoil in horror, realize exactly what he had done, once the buzz from the liquor wore off. No matter that Degas would lose his job, and all semblance of acceptance from academia. No matter that he would become a laughing stock, neighborhood legend as the wolfman from the ivy leagues. And no matter that Degas would soon lose every single thing of which he was proud, including Cindy, who served him with divorce papers, successfully painting him to a judge as a raving, drunk, unreliable madman. This was to happen later, once the euphoria had faded. This was his victory in the now, a moment to savor while it lasted. Because for one night, Degas was a true man.