“I can’t. Julie said she isn’t going to speak to me for one full week.”
“She actually said that?”
“Yes. Starting yesterday. She made it very clear. She drew a circle around the date for reengagement on the family calendar.”
“What did you do?”
“Why do you assume it was me?”
I just looked at him. I suppose we were all a little predictable.
He shrugged. “I’m not telling you.”
“You can be in the house together but not speak,” I said. “It’s easy. My parents built a marriage out of it.”
“It’s uncomfortable.”
“But peaceful.”
I could see that Dan wanted to talk more, but I turned to my computer. I was embarrassed that it actually made me a little bit happy to know that, at the moment, his life was in more of a shambles than mine.
While my computer powered up, I went into the department kitchen and made myself a cup of instant Starbucks coffee, a useful beverage for the long day ahead. I knew I’d need at least two more cups to get me through my classes.
For the next hour, I busied myself with prep by going through my PowerPoint slides, adding one here, removing one there. I knew these lectures by heart. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d shown up to campus five minutes before class. But getting here early made me feel that I was working hard.
“You expecting a call?” Dan asked.
“Why?”
“You keep checking your phone.”
“Don’t judge me,” I said, pushing the phone away.
“Did you read this story about Jews in India?”
I ignored him.
He reached out again. “Jews in India?”
“Yes, Dan. Jews in India. Maybe you should convert and move. I’m sure Julie won’t even notice you’re gone.”
“You think your mom wants to convert with me?”
I stuck out my middle finger as I continued to work.
When I was done with my class prep, I Googled Bill Brown and the name of our local hospital. His profile came up, which listed his bio, specialty, and education, along with his phone number and email address. I wrote down the email on a scrap of paper. What exactly would I write to him? What would I put in the subject line?
A video had also popped up in the search results: “Stanford’s Brown: Long rally and then THIS.” I clicked on it. It was an old video of Bill in college, very poor quality, but I could see him, in tennis whites, playing a match against a guy from USC. Bill serves and they rally, hitting the seams off the ball. Bill has an all-around game, gliding back and forth on the baseline. He almost seems bored waiting for the ball to arrive, so casual until he hits it back with full force. He has a beautiful one-handed backhand. He gets down low and explodes forward as he hits the ball. The two rally and then rally some more—the ball flies back and forth at least fifty times. I’m getting tired of watching. I’m tired for them. Then finally, Bill rushes the net, and his opponent hits the most beautiful lob, the shape of the Gateway Arch. There, I think. This is the “THIS.” Bill swings around, runs toward the baseline, and with his back to his opponent, hits the ball through his legs and down the line. His opponent lunges for the ball, and misses. The camera closes in on Bill’s face: the same easy smile he had when I met him the night before.
I laughed aloud at the perfection of it all. Whenever I’ve tried that move, I end up smacking my shin with the racquet.
Dan turned to me. “Something more interesting than Jews in India?”
“Nothing is more interesting than Jews in India,” I said.
My phone buzzed. I assumed it was Eva, but it was Suzanne. I suddenly felt nervous. It was too early for her to be calling. I didn’t want to pick up. But if I silenced it, she would know I was screening her. And so I let it ring.
“Pick that thing up,” Dan said. “I’ll do it if you won’t. Who are you avoiding?”
“I’ll tell you later. You’ll get a kick out of it.”
I waited to see if she left a voicemail. She didn’t.
As I was leaving, I said, “You know they have showers in the gym.”
“Gyms are for rats,” Dan said.
I liked Dan. His humor was sharp, but didn’t hurt. We survived the absurdity of our work together. But he also had a slackerly indifference to the world and his job that I didn’t want the department to think I shared. If the budget ax fell and they could only keep one of us, I was sure it would be him. He fit the role of the disinterested scholar much better than I did.
I walked out of the office and headed to my 9 a.m. lecture. Because the campus was essentially a beautiful oceanside resort, it attracted students who felt comfortable blurring the line between beachwear and schoolwear, so I had made it my practice to keep my head down when I was outside. On the way to class, I went through the small lot where I had parked. A sporty Audi had just pulled into a spot, and I knew whose car it was.
Josh Morton was roughly my age. And that’s where the similarity ended. He was the newly christened Bay Alarm Chair in Insecurity Studies, a burgeoning field studying humanity’s fundamental insecurity—political, social, and emotional. And Josh was its leading light. His star had ascended thanks to complete dumb luck. He had taken a trip to Sweden with a girlfriend and come across trygghet, a governing principle of Swedish social life. The gist of trygghet is that you can’t be secure and happy if your life is full of the markers of insecurity—fear, anxiety, uncertainty. Josh took that idea and ran with it.
Seemingly everyone had read and loved his book The Poetics and Politics of Insecurity. In it, he had interviewed people from across the American social spectrum—a prison guard in Tennessee, a twenty-four-year-old tech billionaire in San Francisco, an aging model in Beverly Hills, the black mayor of a predominantly white town, and on and on—and concluded that the country was moving into an age of insecurity, regardless of class, race, or any other difference. The book opened with this line: “If the brilliant Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard were alive today, how would he assess the fear and trembling occurring all around us? What would he post on Twitter? Would he have an Instagram account?” It had won nearly every academic prize possible, and become the sort of book that nonacademics liked having on their coffee tables, something that happened to about one academic book in a thousand. I’d heard a rumor that Josh had just gotten a big contract with a mainstream publisher to translate some of his ideas for a more popular audience.
I had to admire him for the sheer brilliance of using insecurity to earn him a lifetime of major security. And yet, of course, I hated the fucker. It wasn’t just that he held up a mirror to me and my life; he was admiring himself in a completely different, gold-plated mirror. I tried not to think too much about it, because when I did, getting from my place of insecurity to his place of heightened security seemed as daunting as scaling Everest.
I saw Josh now, and I know he saw me, but he pretended not to. This happened on campus a lot. I was a lecturer; he had lifetime employment. He looked right through me. My insecurity was of no concern to him.
As I walked to class, my phone buzzed again. Eva often called to check in after dropping off the kids. I saw her name, but I also noticed that, as had been happening more and more of late, my phone had taken a while to register a voicemail, and Suzanne had indeed left a message. Eva’s call kept buzzing. I thought about picking it up, but I didn’t want to feel agitated before the lecture. Just as the phone stopped ringing, a text came in. “I know you’re not teaching yet. Pick up. WTF? I just saw Leslie.”