“No thanks,” Jill said. “Coffee’s pretty much a deal breaker for me. What’s wrong with coffee anyway?”
“Short answer? It’s addictive.”
“So is wine.”
“No alcohol either,” said Katie.
“Even wine?” Jill was horrified.
“Even wine.”
“But the Bible’s all about wine,” Jill protested. “Have you even read the Bible?”
“Short answer?” said Katie again. “Modern clarification. It’s important for people to be in control of themselves at all times. Important and hard. Wine does not help that endeavor.”
Jill rolled her eyes. “Why are you so desperate to learn to cook anyway?”
“For when I’m married,” Katie said.
“You’re engaged?”
“No.”
“Seeing someone seriously?”
“No.”
“Have a great feeling about someone you’ve just met? Falling in love with a friend? Embarking on an arranged marriage?”
“Waiting impatiently,” said Katie. “Preparing in the interim.”
“I kind of liked her,” I admitted sulkily after Katie left.
“She’s so weird,” said Jill. “She said she wanted to learn to cook, and then she didn’t even pay attention.”
“So did you,” I said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t really want to learn to cook. I wanted you to learn to cook for me.”
The next Sunday Jill and I shopped for food while Katie tagged along and figured if she didn’t pay for anything, it was okay to look. She was becoming an expensive archnemesis. Then we went home and I cooked, and Katie and Jill sat in the living room and chatted. Katie had evidently decided that being sociable was more fun than learning to cook anyway. She held her own against a none-too-gentle Jill. She came and stayed. What could we do? We were down one archnemesis. We were nemesisless.
Later, much later, like my grandmother, he will also wonder how it started. He, who will know us all so intimately, will wonder how such different people came together. And why. That will be his real question. And so I will skip the Waldorf-Astoria and tell him this story instead, for here is where his story really begins, somewhere between the wild things and the cream puffs, with a friendship. Well before the eggs and sperms, I will tell him, there was this at the beginning: brilliant, beautiful, glaringly bright, embarrassingly blind, unspeakable faith.
Three
T. S. Eliot must have been in graduate school when he concluded that April is the cruelest month. In April, I had two twenty-five-page seminar papers to write, roughly a dozen books per paper to read (and not the good kind; the literary criticism kind), and fifty research papers to grade, at about forty-five minutes apiece, for the two Intro to Composition courses I was teaching. It’s because, nearly four years on from the cracker aisle and the start of grad school, though I had figured out what I was doing, I had not figured out how to make it doable. On the one hand, I was teaching at Rainier University, an A-list institution if ever there were one, and reading and thinking about literature for a living, however meager. On the other hand, I was distinctly not a professor, never mind the hours and hours every week I spent planning lessons and meeting with students and grading and grading and grading. My professors are teaching at the same school I am, teaching, as I am, two courses per semester, and being paid, as I am, to teach and read books and write about them for a living—except there are two major differences. One, they really are paid enough to qualify as a living. Sometimes they even go out to a nice restaurant for dinner. Two, though they are teachers by profession, their priority is their research not their classrooms. Some of them don’t even like to teach. Some of them are very old and have forgotten how. Some of them have ceased to care at all. In contrast, I never go out to a nice restaurant. But I do care quite a lot.
My students sense this. Apart from their English class, most of my students’ first year of school is spent in enormous halls with three hundred other people listening to a professor lecture while they furiously scribble it all down. So when these students have a crisis, which is often because they are eighteen, away from home for the first time, and living in a dorm with about five hundred other eighteen-year-olds away from home for the first time, they come see me. During office hours, I usually have a relatively small number of rough drafts but a steady stream of students in crisis.
For instance, on the day from which I will really start telling this story, a day which was another kind of beginning, Isabel Rallings was in my office in tears. Through the snuffling, I came to understand that her boyfriend hadn’t been calling (typical), hadn’t visited in a few weeks despite promising to do so (typical), didn’t sound very excited to hear from her when she called him (typical), and that she thought she might be pregnant (not so typical, but not unusual either; I average about two pregnancy scares a semester). Relatively easy, maybe not for Isabel, but for me. I’ve had practice. We talked about the importance of communication. We talked about how cycles become irregular by this time of the semester. We concluded with how pregnancy tests are fifteen bucks, a fortune for an undergraduate (and, hell, me) but worth it maybe for her peace of mind. I handed her Kleenex, made kind soft sympathies, and sent her on her way.
“Next,” she said, smiling tearfully at James Rains, sitting in the hallway against the wall waiting for her to be done. He slunk ruefully, half ashamed, half already smiling, into my office. James was the third of these that week. I knew what he wanted before he even said anything. “So,” he started, “you’re gonna think this is really funny.” For sure, I was already amused though I doubted this was what he meant. He was grinning but wouldn’t look up from his shoes. “We went out last night, but I came home early to start writing my paper, but then my roommates came home, and they were all drunk, and I had just finished my essay, and one of them accidentally sat on my computer, and I lost the whole thing.” I mocked him for a little while, so he knew I knew he was full of crap, and then I gave him a one-day extension. It’s not like I was going to grade them all in one night anyway. Plus I felt sorry for him. If it was true, it was a very sad story. Imagine doing all that hard work—and giving up a night of partying besides—and losing it all. If it was a lie, I pitied him anyway—I felt sorry he couldn’t come up with a better excuse and had to embarrass himself with that one.
At the ends of semesters, there is a steady stream of James Rainses seeking extensions. To me at least, the women come with more involved, sadder excuses (sick roommates, crying little sisters, relationships in need of repair), the guys with a flurry of technical problems (lost flash drives, broken laptops, beers on keyboards—there are endless permutations of these as well). It’s not that one or the other of these excuses is more likely to be true—there’s no way to tell for sure. And it’s not that the guys don’t have emotional crises too; it’s that I’m less likely to hear about them. These excuses annoy my colleagues, but I don’t mind so much. My slacking students make me feel on the ball.
Which I never am. At the ends of semesters, I can’t even carry all the grading I have to do let alone all the books I have to read. Faced, as I was that afternoon, with a couple hours of free time, I should have gone home and read. I should have canceled office hours in the first place. I shouldn’t even have been allowed out of the house—that was how much reading I had to do. But you don’t get through graduate school by plowing through. You get through graduate school by taking breaks. At least that’s what I tell myself. Thursdays, after classes, after office hours, before the weekend, I met my breaks for drinks.