my stomach constricted, as if the day’s disappointments were crawling through my gastrointestinal tract. On consideration, that may have been the tequila.
The restroom — I’d never before had reason to appreciate — was intended for individual use, meaning I wouldn’t have to worry about eavesdroppers in adjacent stalls. My stomach constricted again as I touched the door handle, sticky with other people’s perspiration. A good alliterative title: Other People’s Perspiration. I removed my sweater and found a relatively un-ghastly place for it on the floor. If I had to buy a new one, so be it. Still too hot, I removed my T-shirt and then crumpled. It seemed like a fantastic idea to press my face against the porcelain toilet, the stand part that connects to the floor. I could see streaks of urine along the sides but I didn’t care. The coolness of the porcelain was more important, as refreshing as a good love story.
Toilets were amazing devices. Their beauty was, of course, universally recognized, at least since Marcel Duchamp, but enough could not be said about their practical worth. As an engine for flushing waste, toilets were arguably more important for civilization than more vaunted engines: the steam and internal combustion. They used only gravity and water. Just gravity, water, and ingenious design to keep away infection and keep at bay the rough truth of our disgusting animality.
Pre-toilet, even aristocrats had to live with their waste nearby until servants came around to remove their chamber pots. They stowed their shit and piss beneath their beds and slept on top of it. The smell during asparagus season must have been nightmarish. Whereas I, a lowly graduate student who’d fallen behind, could make my vomit disappear by applying pressure to a trip lever.
Alana catches the train from Boston to Cincinnati, snagging a window seat. Deborah sits next to her and strikes up a conversation about fur coats. It’s as good a topic as any. War. Peace. Life. Death. Fur coats. When Deborah exits the train, Eleanor takes her place. Eleanor’s topic is animal cruelty. After Eleanor, Francine talks pet insurance, and Georgina talks vegetarianism. Alana politely plays her part, never acknowledging the alphabetical chain or thematic connections, which, anyway, never amount to anything. Not only is there no climax, there is no sense of building, of anything wagered or gained. Each conversation, each story, is as meaningless and effervescent as the last. If there’s any point at all it’s to show my hand.
Sergeant Davis calls his troops together. Vietnam. They need a volunteer for a perilous mission. “I’ll do it, sir,” says Private Johnny Johnson. Sergeant Davis describes what Private Johnson has to do in extreme detail, every step of the way, to retrieve medical supplies accidentally dropped behind enemy lines. This will go on for pages and pages until the reader feels bored stiff and absolutely despises me. Private Johnson salutes his superior in a patriotic fervor. He sets out. Before he can complete step one he trips over a branch right onto a mine and gets blown up. Guts everywhere.
Strange to say Vietnam was nothing to me. Five years younger, it would have been everything. I was just old enough not to have to really care, in life or in writing. A lucky year for boys, 1938. What would the Chinese call it? Year of the … some animal just the right size to hide in a burrow while the predators get their fill.
Lewis and Don, old school friends, haven’t seen each other in years and years, stretching into decades. Too long. Far. Too. Long. Lewis recently won a prize — he’s an architect — and he can’t wait to tell Don all about it. Before Lewis gets the chance, Don starts talking about himself. He got a raise at work. His mistress is young and beautiful. His car is fast. His son is a quarterback. Banal, small-bore stuff, not nearly as significant as the prize. (The prize is a Big Deal.) Lewis is turned off. He decides not to share his accomplishment. And suddenly he feels wonderful. Elated. He doesn’t understand but what’s happened is simple enough. What he doesn’t share belongs to him alone.
I was fourteen, skipping rocks at Walden Pond. Veronica Lancet was there with her family but she managed to get away from them. In a quiet moment she kissed me. It was my first kiss. I remember her tongue felt like wet fruit. I remember, when I looked at her the next day, feeling like an ice cube coming apart in hot tea. Extremities tingling. Heartburn-like sensation around the, um, heart.
The promotional brochure that Collegiate sent to newly admitted students had a picture of Golden Memorial Library on the cover. Golden was meant to resemble a Gothic cathedral, which it more or less did. Construction crews must have exhausted New England’s quarries to assemble its granite and limestone façade; must have wondered if they were, in fact, building some sort of church when they erected the portentous entrance hall, with its sixty-foot vaulted ceiling, and the fifteen-story tower destined to hold books — millions upon millions of books acquired as part of a literary arms race with the nation’s competing research universities.
Below Golden was New Campus, an underground library that Collegiate never featured in its advertising materials. Whereas Golden was lousy with stained glass and gargoyles and marble reliefs and chandeliers, New Campus had buzzy fluorescent lights, cubicles shaped like swastikas — if you took the bird’s-eye view — white plaster walls, and poster reproductions of forgotten midcentury pop art. Golden had overstuffed couches and internal courtyards. New Campus had “weenie bins”: windowless, closet-size rooms for private study. To move from Golden, built in the 1920s, to New Campus, built in the 1970s, was to witness the devolution of American architecture.
Yet there was something comforting about New Campus. I was sitting in a swastika, hungover, determined to thicken my too-thin dissertation, and as I stared at an ancient water spot, I reflected that New Campus did not demand anything of its visitors, like Golden did. Golden expected heady gratitude. New Campus accepted wallowing.
A PhD in English should, in theory, take five years. In reality, it was considered well within the range of normal to finish in seven. But I was midway through that seventh year and still the end evaded me. Relatives who’d once admired my precocity were beginning to wonder what was taking so long. “What, still in school?” my aunts and uncles asked at family gatherings, doubtful they’d heard me right. I was twenty-six, then twenty-seven, then, to my amazement, twenty-nine. A terrible, liminal age. As if by sleight of hand, my twenties had disappeared. They’d oozed into books I couldn’t remember reading, seminars I couldn’t remember attending, conversations I couldn’t remember having.
I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.
The muscles under my right shoulder blade were throbbing again, the rhomboids. I slouched along them — I sat lopsided, right lower than left — and they protested this treatment frequently, sending bursts of pain diagonally across my back. The problem wasn’t bad enough to drive me to a doctor, but it should have been sufficient to make me improve my posture. Should have; was not. It helped to stretch both arms above my head and thrust my chest forward. Arms up; chest out.
Six and a half years in New Harbor. Three years since I’d passed my oral exams; three summers, with the length of three long winters. Roughly 1,100 days; 26,400 hours; 3,000 meals; 300 Pop-Tarts; 120,376,000 heartbeats — my Nokia had a calculator — assuming an average resting rate of seventy beats per minute. And in that span of time: It’s a little thin.
That judgment applied equally well to my social life. Other people could excuse their lack of progress by pointing to offspring or a passionate affair or even an obsessive interest in something pleasurable but meaningless, like video games or football. I could not account for what I did all day. I walked around. I read. I ate. Sometimes I loitered in pharmacies, overwhelmed by branded bounty. What else? Next to nothing. I had nothing to distract me from nothing.
My rhomboids whined as I considered the possibility that I would have to find a new career, start afresh in some horribly grinding profession like the law, the last refuge of the academic. How awful it seemed to go back to the beginning. How tiring to study for the LSAT