Anxious parent, I guess you have just never been around;
I guess you just don’t know who are the happiest people
Anywhere to be found;
So you are worried, are you, because your child is turning
Out to be phlegmatic?
The professor lurched inelegantly out of his chair, walked cautiously, like a much older man, over to his desk, and shuffled his papers. His suit jacket had deep creases along the shoulder blades, suggesting he didn’t have someone at home to look him over. He did, though: a viperous woman who always served me last at end-of-year dinner parties, certainly because her husband had predicted, at the first of these parties, that I would one day sit alongside him as a colleague. She was jealous of what our relationship was, or had been; a relationship between a man who was fiercely proud of having graduated from Williams, Cambridge, and Princeton — he’d framed his diplomas and mounted them to the wall above his desk — a man who looked up to no one, straight ahead to almost no one, and a young woman with the potential to match him. If she’d heard his Fisher-Price quip, she might have treated me rather differently.
“No … no … no,” the professor muttered, to himself as much as to me. “Here it … no. Now, where did I put that? Hang on. Yes, this is it.”
He unfolded a week-old university newsletter and pointed to an item on the second page that read Francis Goodman, the New York Times bestselling author and life-hacking expert, will deliver a lecture on efficiency and work-flow techniques at the School of Management on January 15.
That was it. The professor squinted at me.
“You might find it useful,” he said.
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all.”
“The dissertation’s close. I think it’s close. It’s close, isn’t it?”
“I’ll be frank, Anna.”
On weeknights, GPSCY, the offensive-sounding Graduate and Professional Student Center on York, sold two-for-one margaritas. After my meeting with Professor Davidoff I ventured there, as I’d learned from movies that in moments of distress, adults invariably resorted to alcohol. The bartender looked me over brazenly to see if I was worthy of his unwanted attention and apparently decided that I was not.
Another failed romance. Aborted. Uprooted. For months that side of my life had been totally dormant; my last flirtation had ended disastrously. Benjamin was a student at the medical school who said he wanted to help people but would probably end up a plastic surgeon. For our fifth date he’d invited me to the movies and, to seem worldly, had picked out a French film called Baisemoi, which he thought meant “kiss me.” It meant “fuck me” and had been banned in several countries because it featured numerous graphic rape scenes. Our fragile relationship couldn’t handle the awkwardness.
Double-fisting margaritas, I drifted through the bar, eventually spotting someone I knew in one of the red-pleather booths: Evan. He was my contemporary in the English department and a notorious grind, the kind of guy who never turned in anything late, never left the library before it closed, never went on vacation without his laptop. He’d once considered me a rival.
I liked to think, though, that my mild distaste for his company came not from competitive anxiety but from a tribal aversion to his ethnic whiteness. He was a high WASP with perfectly coiffed blond hair, prominent cheekbones, a square jaw, broad shoulders, and a seemingly endless supply of Nantucket Reds. That night he wore a Barbour jacket, which added to the impression that he might start shooting foxes at any moment.
Out with Evan was another classmate, Evelyn, who also played the role of Evan’s fiancée. She had smooth black hair (inherited from her father, a Chinese ophthalmologist) and symmetrical features (inherited from her mother, an Alabama hand model). Her most notable trait was dullness: she never said anything particularly smart, funny, or controversial. Mostly she echoed and amplified Evan. Under his influence, she’d even embraced a Northeastern prep-school aesthetic, filling her closet with pastel slacks and cashmere sweaters.
When she saw me she waved like a beauty queen on a float, beckoning me to approach. She said they’d descended on GPSCY to celebrate Evan, whose job search was going well. The University of Chicago wanted to fly him out for an interview.
“Congratulations!” I managed.
“Thank you. Are you here by yourself?” Evan asked, noticing that both my hands were full.
“Tequila’s good company.”
Evan peered vacantly into the middle distance while Evelyn bragged on his behalf: More than five hundred people had applied for the tenure-track position at Chicago, many of them already assistant professors at other universities. Only five of them had been offered interviews, and Evan had cause to believe that he was the front-runner. On the phone, the head of the hiring committee had said that he was “very, really, very impressed” with Evan’s “precocious and lively” dissertation on moments of enlightenment in mid-twentieth-century American literature. When he heard that Evan was in a committed relationship with another graduate student — meaning Evelyn — he said Chicago might be able to find her an adjunct position. It didn’t even cross Evelyn’s mind to feel ashamed of a hanger-on posting. For Evelyn, engagement meant parasitic self-abnegation. She would henceforth derive her value entirely from her partner’s success.
“Nothing’s certain yet,” said Evan, “but I have a good feeling.”
“So do I,” said his amplifier. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed, for both of us.”
Like a film critic for a small-town rag, Evelyn resorted routinely to set phrases. She’d — famously — once described Romeo and Juliet as “a refreshingly good love story.” In response, Professor Davidoff had called her an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” — the best insult that I had ever heard.
Evan and Evelyn were happy in Evan’s success. Oh so happy.
“I wonder — just thinking out loud here — if Chicago is a safe place to live?”
“What? What are you talking about?” asked Evan.
“Lots of gangs there, so say the newspapers. High murder rate. Muggings. Drive-by shootings. You’ll need to watch yourself if this works out.”
Evelyn glared at me. She was as toothlessly protective as one of those tiny dogs that travel in purses.
“Chicago’s dangerous, sure. That’s why the university has one of the largest private security forces in the country, right up there with the Nation of Islam,” Evan said, determined to put down my rebellion swiftly. “I think they can shield me from spraying bullets while I teach. Anyway, who cares what the city’s like so long as the university in that city has a good reputation? That’s what matters for my career.”
Appropriately, the conversation turned to “our work,” and I tried hard to enter a meditative state in which the mind separates from the body, no longer registering external stimuli. I must have succeeded because the next thing I knew, Evan was saying: “Everything all right?”
“Sorry, what?”
Evelyn took the liberty of answering: “He said, how about you? What are you working on?”
I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.
Instead of prevaricating, I changed the subject, offering to pay for a round of shots. My classmates struggled to remember the proper order of operations. Lime, then salt, then liquor? Liquor, then lime, then salt? Not that it really mattered. Unlike baking a cake or solving a math problem, the sequence didn’t affect the result: drunkenness. Evelyn coughed, sending flecks of spit