At the end of the period, the student who’d asked the question walked by on his way out.
“You going to take the class?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said, smiling.
I knew he’d be back.
I didn’t take off the jacket until I returned to our apartment that evening.
“What happened?” Eva asked, breaking into a huge smile. “Not the right day for wool?”
I glanced down. My shirt looked like my fingertips did after I had been in a pool for two hours straight. No matter.
“I just had a perfect day.”
The road to that day had not been quite as I had planned when I started college. I’d assumed I would go to law school. Until that dread eventuality, I took a lot of English and anthropology classes. I would sit in the library for hours, barreling through Walker Percy one day, Lévi-Strauss the next. But I became truly obsessed with two writers, the subject of my only published essay, “The Impossibility of Second Acts.” I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the novelists Ralph Ellison and G. V. Desani, both of whom had written brilliant first novels but never published a second one, at least not in their lifetimes. Why not? I reasoned that both had formulated an entire world—and an entire worldview—in their books the first time out, so there was nothing else for them to write, even though Ellison in particular had tried and tried.
I had worked so hard on that essay. It had won the English department prize and a college-wide undergraduate award. And my thesis advisor had helped me get it into print just as I was graduating. It had appeared in a highly reputable journal next to work by scholars who were deep into successful careers. All this didn’t mean much in terms of guaranteeing me a stable career, but it did give me a window to see a life for myself beyond law school. I turned my attention fully to anthropology because I’d loved those classes the most. And by the time I was done with graduate school, and in my first job, I thought I was ready for my first act.
But it never came. The excitement of that first day never amounted to anything more than that. I had trouble turning my dissertation into a book. John Williams, who I thought would be my mentor, spent most of his time patronizing me. The phrase “Let me put it more simply” seemed to slip out of his mouth without fail during our conversations, and I was sure that as he spoke to me, he slowed down and enunciated his sentences more carefully, as if he thought I had gained fluency in English only recently. I entertained the hope that all this was in my head, until he asked to see the syllabi for my classes and recommended easier readings for the students, for their sake, but also because he thought I’d have difficulty with some of the more complicated articles.
I never complained to anyone about this, partly because I had a job and some of my friends from graduate school didn’t. It seemed bad form to be upset when so many people I knew didn’t even have health insurance. But also, I knew that there would be a cost to crossing John Williams. His books had given him a semblance of fame, which had translated into power, in the department and the discipline at large.
So throughout the years I was in the job, the resentments piled up between us, until eventually we had a disagreement in a department meeting. He didn’t like me contradicting him in front of everybody. Afterward, in the mailroom, he got in my face. “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this work?” he asked. “Since before you were born.” Nervous, I let out a squeal of laughter—perhaps another instance of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time—and that enraged him more. I can still smell his staleness. I then stepped away from him, and as I tried to squeeze my way out of the small mailroom, I accidentally bumped his shoulder with mine. That was it. A tap. And he flopped and fell to the ground. Since no one else was around, his seniority was all the proof he needed to say that I had attacked him.
Not long after that, the chair of the department called me in and said, without bothering with euphemisms, that the rigors of research and publishing were not for me. It was true, I hadn’t been publishing. But what he was also telling me, without saying it, was that I didn’t quite fit with the culture of the place. I fit in with the students, with the changes they were bringing to campus. But John and his older generation of colleagues still made the decisions, and they had no interest in fostering a new energy within the university.
Eva had wanted to return to California for a while at that point, and so I’d left the job. We headed west, and I ended up with the much lesser job I now held, taking a serious drop in rank. There were certainly aspects of it that I liked: the two-day-a-week teaching schedule; the after-lunch strolls to the ocean; the freedom to teach what I wanted; smart, engaged students.
And yet, the place was filled with lecturers like me, many of whom had fancy PhDs, but by happenstance, bad luck, lack of skill, and a shrinking supply of positions had not gotten or kept the plum tenured jobs that offered lifetime employment and the freedom to write and say whatever you wanted. We were the contingent labor that made this university—and most universities around the country—run these days. We did most of the teaching, packing more and more students into our classrooms, and wrote letter after letter of recommendation so that our students could go on to better careers than ours. But if budget cuts started, we’d be the first out the door. And thus the dull, constant ache of stress and anxiety that I felt now, that circulated through my chest every time I arrived on campus.
* * *
I opened my office door, and Dan, my lanky officemate and fellow detritus of academic life, was already there. We taught on different days and were assigned the same office, which had two metal desks and two large bookshelves. Dan had made it a point to leave his shelf completely empty, a poetic nod to the impermanence of his job. On mine, I had placed stacks and stacks of unclaimed, graded blue-book exams that students had failed to pick up after their course had ended. There must have been two thousand little books filled with scribbled pen and pencil. No one wanted to see what they did wrong anymore. Several months before, Dan had written on the back of a business card, “Pass/No Pass,” Raj Bhatt, Mixed Media, 2016, and taped it to the shelf. Site-specific art.
Dan was tall and skinny. He always seemed uncomfortable when seated; his knees never could find their proper resting place.
“Hey, bubba,” he said. He was in his boxers, an old white T-shirt, and brand-new tube socks, eating dry raisin bran out of the box and reading the New York Times online. He offered me the cereal. “Breakfast?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered. “What if I had been someone else?”
“Who else bothers to get here this early?”
I noticed a toiletry kit on his desk. “You didn’t.”
Dan shrugged his bony shoulders. “The floor isn’t very comfortable. I somehow thought it would be.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I need a break.”
“A break? You have a sweet, mellow daughter who likes to read books. You don’t need breaks. This job is your fucking break.”
“What’s up with the language? A little hostile this morning.”
I didn’t respond.
“Don’t judge me,” Dan continued.
“I’m not judging you. I’m just telling you to go home.”