Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  Dark mornings seemed even darker from within this building. It was a surprise to find Berkal at his desk. He was reading student stories for his 212. Berkal’s lamp was on. He had the overhead fluorescents off. The warmer light made the place look a little more congenial.

  “How do you explain to an engineering major that just because something happened in your life doesn’t mean it belongs in short fiction?” Berkal asked.

  “Don’t ask me. Do you realize it’s been a year since I got to teach a workshop?”

  Berkal stood up. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “It has,” I said. “It’s been that long since I’ve even been able to get more than two comp classes.”

  “Schultz is doing the summer schedule now. You could get in and—”

  Hearing the name of the adjunct coordinator and chief departmental course distributor made me wince. “Fuck no,” I said. “I hate teaching summer classes. It’s always either too cold or too hot in the building, nobody wants to be there, everyone wants to have class outside, which you say is a bad idea for acoustic and general comportment reasons, but nobody cares. People just see you as the overdressed asshole who won’t let them enjoy the weather.”

  “I always have class outside,” Berkal offered unhelpfully.

  “Of course you do,” I said, “because you’re a grad student, and, by definition, brilliant and infallible. The times I’ve tried it, it’s been a disaster.”

  “You want me to talk to Schultz? I am lead GPTI.”

  “Since when? And no. I’m sure she’s already slotted me in for whatever the shittiest fall class is, in the worst room on campus, with the students who won’t have even passed the admissions requirements, but will matriculate for the sole purpose of—”

  “Of tormenting you,” Berkal interrupted. “Right. It’s all for your benefit, or whatever the opposite of benefit is. It all seeks to destroy you.”

  “I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t. I’ve been teaching here a long time.”

  “And?”

  “How much longer do you have?”

  “Coursework is done. I’m basically ABD.”

  “My advice? Don’t rush to terminate that terminal degree. A lot of good an MFA does me.”

  “It says you can write, and that at least at some point in your life, you did.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to end up on the tenure track with it.”

  “And you think I will? Even with a PhD, I’ll be lucky to get a couple of adjunct gigs at the city colleges. I doubt UIC would ever look at me as anything more than a grad student. This, my friend, is about the best I’m gonna get.”

  He had a point. The chances of full-time employment for post-grads in English had been bleak even back when I’d finished my first master’s. Prospects had become further dire in the many years since I was a newly minted MFA. Forget about a full-time job with benefits and security. Now my meager, tenuous role here was actually desirable and possibly even sought-after.

  “Hapworth, why do you think you have to have a PhD to get on the tenure track?” Berkal asked. “Because academics can’t write and writers can’t teach. You choose one or the other. Or one or the other chooses you. It’s as simple as that.”

  “What’s chosen me?”

  “The right thing will come along.”

  “I think I better not quit my day job in the meantime, as the cliché goes.”

  “I’ll make you an appointment to see Schultz. How’s Friday?” He printed a reminder for me on the blank side of a student’s old index card.

  I folded it and put it in my back pocket. “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem. Maybe it’s not too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “To—to—you know, to get a smart room. Have you been in one of them? Computer, Internet, audio, video, dry erase boards with clean erasers. Twenty-first century, dog. You can do a film-as-literature unit and spend a week or two showing the director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate. Is—is—that what you’re wearing tonight?”

  “I have a tie in my bag. I didn’t want to teach in anything too bureaucratic. Scares the kids, you know.”

  My officemate turned off his lamp. He packed his messenger bag and put on his coat and hat. I followed him into the hallway. “What about Izzy?” Berkal asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about doing something with her?”

  “Like getting married? We did that. For what it’s worth.”

  “Like working together.”

  I shrugged.

  “Carpe diem.”

  On my way out of University Hall and to the library, my mind was on Izzy and the bad Dunkin’ Donuts this morning and The Garden of Eden. When I was a grad student teaching assistant and had my own classes, I put several chapters on the reading list. Some students who’d never even read any Hemingway before told me they were “fired up” and “super psyched” by the preview. They wrote outstanding response papers and ran off to the library to check out the entire book. Only then did I ever feel like I was actually accomplishing something in a classroom. The students listened. They took notes. They let themselves be galvanized by the texts. In so doing, they galvanized them in return. It was just as I had experienced my life-changing Modern Lit winter quarter in that musty, heady little lecture room back in Harper Library, on my beloved ivied and gargoyle-adorned first campus. But teaching comp at a commuter school designed with the austerity of a Bergman film, embodying the practicality and earnestness of a Minnesota congressman, it wasn’t at all like that. Now I considered it a major accomplishment if I was able to induce a majority of the kids convening for my course to even angle their faces in my direction for an appreciable duration. One early semester at UIC, I tried swapping out the syllabus boilerplate “Hills Like White Elephants” for an excerpt from Eden. Few even bothered to read it. Several copies I reeled out of the wastebasket after everyone had left. I still kept them in my desk drawer as a reminder, because it was horrible. I swore I’d never again attempt to teach prose that really meant anything to me. What was the point? The remotely insightful were outnumbered. The arrogant and entitled rest just didn’t care. I wasn’t going to be able to do much to improve things. If you cannot respect the way you handle your life then certainly respect your trade.

  Two minutes before the library classroom clock read the official commencing hour, I dropped myself into the chair at the head of the long conference table. Teaching was just about the last thing I wanted to do right now. I was hungover. I was pissed off at Izzy. Whether or not she actually cheated on me, I couldn’t stop feeling I’d been betrayed. I missed Ishiguro. And I had nothing prepared. It was going to take days to get through this class. Even if I started fifteen minutes late, ordered some in-class writing, and then had a generously untimed break afterward, I still would struggle. For the next two and a half hours, I’d have to be here, my knotted brain arteries throbbing, my fingertips slightly numb, my heart chagrined.

  As though presaging my mood, the students, shuffling in, looked more despondent than usual. They wordlessly claimed seats, more or less the exact positions they’d staked out on the first day of the semester. My favorites, the grade-favor curriers, the ass-kissers, ambled in first, as always. They took their places around mine at the head of the table. Ordinarily, I appreciated the proximity. Today they just seemed a little too near. I kind of wished they’d go over and sit with the Trench Coat Mafia. I wasn’t ever sure why these Goths, burnouts, and militants enrolled in English classes. Weren’t they usually business majors? Though the Mafia Midwest chapter members sat with crossed arms, torsos and legs encased in perennially heavy leather, and sneers permanently affixed to their ever-so-unsubtly lipsticked mouths, they were harmless and mostly kept their distance. Even so, a part of me always feared they might beat the shit out of me or blow up
Norlin Library when I returned their inarticulate paragraphs stippled with red objections.

  The Trio, Lindsay, Lindsey, and Lindsie, sat near each other at the far end of the room. I still considered it a skill worthy of bragging that I could precisely correspond the spelling and girl. AY was beautiful. She styled her long, dark hair in a variety of ways. This afternoon, it curtained her face. Her tresses tumbled down her white open-buttoned shirt and concluded at her breasts. When I first took in her frighteningly alluring eyes, encased in don’t-fuck-with-me black mascara, I decided she’d get an A whether or not she chose to do any work in this class. She must have sensed this. She paid me little attention from then on. EY, with her ponytail and Iowa farm-girl freckles and soft eyes, was dim but attentive. Despite her unabashed lack of sophistication, or because of it, she was precociously trenchant. And IE was a hippie with long, dirty dreads. She wore no makeup on her face. Her lips were always cracked. She carried a black handbag with a silver closure that I once believed toted her lunch. She told me later in passing that it actually contained the handmade bongs she sold on campus.

  Heather, Sally, Nikki, Dave, David, Seth, and Stereo came in. The noise level in the room was high with the collective volume of all of the separate conversations taking place. I directed a finger around the conference table, attempting to count the heads, but I kept losing my place. Finally I gave up and reached for my attendance book. Checking off their names seemed easier.

  “Where’s Adam?” I asked the grid.

  T. J.’s was always one of the first arms in the air. He chimed, “Adam dropped.”

  “He did not,” I said.

  “Wait,” T. J. said. He was never easily contradicted. “Which Adam?”

  My eyes bulged in front of the list. Could I really have gone all this time without knowing I had multiple Adams?

  “You should say last names. You never call last names,” T. J. said. Generally I was cheerful in the face of T. J.’s smugness. He seemed to like and respect me, even if his officiousness sometimes felt mocking. Today I was diminished to the point that the gangly boy with insincerely mussed hair, thick Weezer glasses, and a cliché of a goatee might just have finally found his chance to usurp my authority.

  “Let’s move on. I’d like us to do some writing today,” I said. I spoke loudly, in as strong a voice as I could offer.

  At the sound of the word writing, a cacophonic symphony of academic sounds commenced. The prepared kids opened the notebooks already before them. They flipped past the pages they’d previously filled until they landed at a blank opportunity. Accompanying this was the music of the unready. Piles of undesired books slammed down onto the table. Zippers on messenger bags pierced the air with high-frequency vibrations. Velcro closures that secured backpack compartments ripped apart. They scavenged for pens in pockets and jackets, borrowed from neighbors if necessary, and then uncapped or clicked into action. T. J. unsheathed a battered white iBook with a very large screen and deployed its initializing Mac chime.

  “Okay,” I began, when the fourth movement had concluded. “I know we’ve been talking a lot about research papers over the last few weeks, developing theses, finding and cataloging sources, but I’d like to move on to a different form of essay, the narrative.”

  T. J. had the syllabus in hand. He said, “But you have on here that today we’re going to be learning how to . . . use MLA format.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And MLA format is very important. But I kind of feel it would be of more use to us now to return to a simpler mode of thought.” I was catching my stride. I cleared my throat and spoke more assuredly. “I’d like us to take a moment to diverge.”

  “But what about the syllabus?”

  “What the adjunct coordinator doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

  “Nice,” went Heather. T. J. nodded his unqualified approval.

  “Are we going to turn this in at the end of class?” David asked.

  I sighed. “If you want to. If you want to keep working, you can have it for me—”

  “Can we e-mail it to you?”

  “I’m not going to be here next Tuesday, so can I give it to you after—”

  “Look,” I said testily. Then I quickly corrected my tone with a stock good-natured grin. “I haven’t even told you what I want you to write about.”

  “About what you want us to write,” T. J. said. Was he trying to be funny?

  “Yes. Right. And if anyone ends any sentences with prepositions, he or she must answer to T. J.”

  The three or four who didn’t have their eyes to their notebooks stared at me confusedly.

  “Never mind,” I answered their searching gazes. “Okay, here is the prompt. I want you to write about a time when you were deceived.”

  Lindsey raised her hand. Her pen still seesawed between two fingers. I nodded for her to go ahead. “Like, you mean when a boyfriend cheats on you?”

  “That makes an instant ex-boyfriend,” Lindsay coolly added.

  I immediately envisioned Pacer Rosengrant, twisted up in electrified embrace with Izzy at his new apartment within walking distance of hers—ours. Then I saw him later, cashed, a shell buried under the sheets as Izzy pried herself away to return to me, her husband. “Could be. Sure. Yeah, of course. But not limited to that.”

  “Like if we got ripped off on eBay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Right. Like Sally says. There are probably times you recall having been swindled in a transaction.”

  “This one time, I was, like, fucking this hooker, but she couldn’t make me come, so I, like, didn’t want to pay her,” Kevin, one of the thugs, offered. It was a rare moment of volubility for him. The guys in the room laughed. Most of the girls looked off to the bookshelves that lined the perimeter between the windows. I shook my head, my official response to an interruption. I was secretly pleased that I’d gotten one of the thugs to speak.

  “What I’d like you to concentrate on,” I began, once the students were no longer amused or appalled by Kevin and returned their attention to the front, “is an instance in your life when someone led you to believe something was one way and you found later on that the situation was something quite different.”

  A girl with a square face and a rectangular torso said, “Like . . . when somebody starts dating a guy and finds out he’s still hooking up with his ex-girlfriend?”

  “Yes, Dana. That’s a good example.”

  “Danielle.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My name is Danielle.”

  “Shit,” I said. A few nervous giggles fired around me. “Sorry. Danielle. What did I say?”

  “You called me Dana.”

  “Did you once go by . . . Dani?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway, yes, Danielle. Danielle had a very good example, everyone. Hello? I’m glad to see you’ve already gotten started. Can I have just one more moment of your time? Hello? Guys? Please?”

  The pens came down after this last exhortation. Most of the eyes turned to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, sincerely appreciative. I was in no condition to battle unruliness. “Just write about a time when you got cheated. Fooled. Misled. Basically any opportunity you’ve had to disabuse yourself of misconceptions about a situation you were in. Okay?” I waited for someone to ask me to define “disabuse.” Luckily for me nobody did.

  “Is it only if we’ve been cheated on by someone else? What if we did the cheating?” T. J. asked. By this point everyone else had begun working. I answered T. J. individually, with a consenting wave of the hand. We both knew he was going to write what he wanted to regardless of whether or not I approved. But in the classroom, ceremony triumphed.

  I pretended to scrutinize a piece of departmental junk as though it contained critical information. It was a flyer for a talk. An emeritus professor lectured on “The Declining Significance of
Prose.” A Q-and-A, light refreshments, and non-alcoholic beverages followed. I’d found it newly delivered to my mailbox a week after the event was scheduled to take place. “Because sometimes that happens,” T. J. continued.

  “Yes, T. J. Sometimes we do cheat and lie and swindle.”

  T. J. looked scandalized. I thought I was only agreeing with the boy.

  “Are you writing yet?”

  He pointed at his iBook. “Already done.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious,” T. J. said, his voice low. He leaned in my direction as though we were buddies chatting next to each other over beers at a pub. “I started writing about this pyramid scheme for fiction workshop. I can just add to it.”

  “Well, do something with that,” I said. I had to cut him off. I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to argue with T. J. I returned to the flyer in front of me. The boring but, strangely, soothing design of the Microsoft Word template the advertiser—Shelley Schultz—used to frame the event details put me into a moiré trance.

  Twenty minutes later, the students with little sympathy for those still locked in concentration started to get itchy. First two whispered back and forth. Then another two turned to each other. I ignored them. The conversations joined forces. Before long, most of the students were chatting, even those whose scribbling pens suggested they probably still had more to write. It was too loud for me to keep pretending I didn’t hear.

  “It seems like you’re more or less done, so who wants to read?” I asked.

  Danielle raised her hand first. I was panicked by the earlier name mix-up and stammered when I went to call on her.

  “Danielle?” she gave me, with a linguistic hip shake. Some of the other girls snickered.

  “Yes. Read yours.”

  She opened her mouth, but I stopped her.