Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  “Your ‘love,’” my mother said suspiciously. It wasn’t a word that we used much in our family. I must have stumbled across it in the library.

  I treated myself to a pizza that night, a pie with everything on it except pineapple. I ate alone. Kate had gone back to California. Afterward, on Nassau Street, I returned to the storefront where I’d seen the toggle coat. The new display featured autumn back-to-school clothes. Corduroy pants. Shirts with alligator insignias. Belts of pebbly hide. I had the money to buy a couple of items, but I’d have to wait until the morning, and I knew that by then I’d lose my nerve. I’d saved myself, by all appearances, but suddenly a new concern arose. With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even career desires (my vague interests in drama and poetry didn’t qualify), the only game I’d ever learned to play—scaling the American meritocratic mountain—was, I feared, about to end.

  MAKING MONEY DIDN’T INTEREST ME. WHILE MY CLASSMATES signed up for on-campus “face-to-faces” with recruiters from Wall Street brokerage firms (becoming an “arbitrageur” was all the rage then, even among students who as juniors had vowed to spend their lives dancing or composing), I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. I hadn’t learned any lessons from my breakdown. The curse had me right back in its grip. Here I was, just this side of mental paralysis, and again I was starving for medals, stars, acceptance letters. To me, wealth and power were trivial by-products of improving one’s statistical scores in the great generational tournament of aptitude. The ranking itself was the essential prize.

  I applied for two scholarships to Oxford, an institution I regarded much as I’d regarded Princeton once—as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold classes in the back. The first application was for the Rhodes, created to fashion leaders for a future utopian global order dreamed of by the diamond-mining magnate who’d passed down his genes to the girl in the TV room whom I’d been too cowardly to court. Why I imagined that I was “Rhodes material”—which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely known recipient of the honor—I had not a clue. The other kids I knew who had applied were conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat who’d burped out a blank-verse play on Andy Warhol that hadn’t been staged yet and might never be, unless Adam dug up some funds for the production. I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus.

  Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I’d learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs. I suspected that they only did this to keep more qualified candidates on their toes, but I also knew that an opening is an opening. Just get in the room, and then act like you belong there while cozying up to the folks who clearly do—this had always been my winning formula and I saw no good reason to abandon it.

  To increase my chances of success, I made no contingency plans for failure. I threw myself on the mercy of the universe. V., who was seeking spots at various grad schools, cautioned me against overconfidence, but once I explained my superstitious reasoning—I wasn’t showing confidence at all; I was soliciting an act of grace—he backed me up by citing Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century who’d argued that faith in the divine makes sense only because it makes no sense whatsoever. Hearing my position thus affirmed should have heartened me, but it made me antsy. Philosophers weren’t reliable authorities on how to operate in the real world. Indeed, if you found yourself acting in accordance with one of their mad principles, it was probably wisest to change course.

  When a letter arrived to tell me I’d been chosen as one of about a dozen state finalists, I prayerfully thanked the god of desperadoes, bought a blue suit at the store on Nassau Street, and flew back to Minnesota for my interview. I told a flight attendant on the plane that I’d already secured the prize—this to preview the awe I might expect if I ever really did. The woman poured me a Pepsi and moved along.

  An hour after I landed, a doorman at the Minneapolis Club showed me upstairs to a gloomy paneled lounge where my name-tagged fellow aspirants were enjoying a get-acquainted party with the distinguished members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning. I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten the jump on me and wouldn’t loosen the tight perimeters around the professors and businesspeople tasked with assessing our leadership potential. To my mind, the vaunted mission of the Rhodes smacked of a sort of science-fiction Nazism, but perhaps because it hadn’t yet borne fruit in the form of a smarty-pants universal directorate (and because it paid for swank gatherings such as this one), no one had seen fit to put a stop to it.

  I poured myself a second glass of wine and went on circling the inner circle. Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been abstract, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group that was no more real to me than the tens of thousands of other nine-year-olds vying for the presidential fitness prize. But this time the competition was all too personal. One short-haired young woman in a pressed dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept peeking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were vivid through her dress. A crew-cutted young roughneck whose tag identified him as a West Point cadet was describing his diet and fitness regimen to a lady who seemed to be sleeping standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

  Then I noticed something more disturbing: the other contestants weren’t drinking their wine. They were using their glasses as props, as things to gesture with.

  I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

  By the time I succeeded in cornering a committee member, I was feeling squirrelly and light-headed. To give the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary garnered from my brain-restoring drills. I even got off the word “heuristic” once, an elegant bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I pronounced it in the manner of Johnny Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but by then I’d committed to the performance and feared that shifting to another register would only compound the impression of schizophrenia. The best I could do was gradually fall silent and pretend to be an avid listener. That, and refrain from lighting another cigarette. Besides being the party’s only young drinker, I was its only smoker, it turned out, aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whose name tag marked him as an English professor at a local college, Carleton. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my love of Whitman, a name I’d plucked out of the air. He seemed to sense this.

  “What about Whitman do you admire?” he asked me.

  “Well, his first name for one thing.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m kidding. Because it’s my name. Walt.” I tapped my name tag for proof. The old man squinted. I wondered what qualified him as a Rhodes judge. Not his powers of observation, surely. Some feeling that only an engineered elite could rescue humanity from doom?

  “Actually, I admire his populist empathy. Dockworkers, farmers, soldiers—he loved them all.”

  “But did he just love them as aspects of Walt Whitman? He called the poem ‘Song of Myself,’ remember.”

  “Right.”

  “And you wrote a poem once, at Macalester College, for which you won a prize, and which we’ve read, because you submitted it in your application, called ‘From an Uncolored Room.’”

  I confessed the truth of this.

  “Enlightening chat. Quite helpful. Good luck, young man.”

 
At the end of the cocktail party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the very first slot: seven sharp. I showed up white and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cherry Danish I’d wolfed. My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them paging through The New York Times, one of them filling out the last few squares of its famously challenging crossword puzzle, which he must have begun long before he reached the club. This was a stroke I wished I’d thought of, though I would have handled it slightly differently. I would have put random letters in the squares, since who was going to check?

  My name was called and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of grim interrogators equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. “What, in your opinion,” one woman asked me, not even giving me time to sip my coffee, “is the primary problem facing our world today?”

  The moisture returned to my mouth, but it was sour, as though mucus membranes can perspire, too. I’d expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people who’d woken up early to serve the citizenry by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations ambassadors. The only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and war. My chance to show originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: “And how would you deal with this problem?” That’s where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry—but how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless through a concern with the universal values of justice and mutual respect?

  That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

  But I couldn’t remember anything. All I could think about were the other applicants pretending to read their papers in the lounge while secretly wishing an epileptic fit on me. I could feel their ill will oozing in under the door. I could feel the high-pressure cell of their massed ambition pressing against the hinges of the door.

  “Miscommunication would be my answer.”

  Horrible. But my ad-lib would have to stand.

  “Expand on that, please,” said a quiet female voice as pens began scratching across important papers. “Miscommunication among whom?”

  I offered a roster of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women, adults and children, and even—absurdly—human beings and animals. Halfway through my speech I knew I’d lost. Aside from the presidential rope climb, I’d never lost at anything before except for a spelling bee in Phoenix, and the feeling was like waking on the moon after having gone to bed on earth. I left my body. Or maybe my body left me. They zoomed away in opposite directions, with only an echoing “human beings and animals” indicating the spot which they’d once shared.

  I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later, after a ceremonial round of questions about my beliefs as a “young artist.” My rivals scanned my face for clues: How had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might rule all earth, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

  “You’re safe,” I announced to all of them. “I blew it.”

  “How?” said someone, eager for a tip.

  “Don’t worry. It’s only going to happen once today.”

  My competitors couldn’t help grinning. Then one girl hugged me—the health-care expert, whom I realized I’d known at Macalester, back when. “You really shouldn’t consider it a loss,” she said. “You should feel honored that you reached this level.”

  I returned the hug against my will, my desire for pity prevailing over my dignity. Then I turned away and left the building, unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I learned that the health-care girl was one of them—one of only two Rhodes from our home region—which made her gesture seem false in retrospect. She knew she was bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely rehearsing her royal manners.

  “Is this Walter Kirn?” asked the phantom of Nassau Hall.

  “It is,” I said. “It’s him.” Anxiety over poor grammar ensures poor grammar.

  “The provost would like to meet with you next week about a confidential matter. Would Wednesday at noon work?”

  “Any time would work. May I ask you a question?”

  “Please,” the ghost said.

  “How bad is it?”

  “It’s good.”

  The meeting spot was a modest diner across the street from Princeton’s grand front gate. A letter I’d received the day before explained why I’d been summoned: to talk about another overseas scholarship, less coveted than the Rhodes but more exclusive (only a handful were awarded each year) sponsored by the Keasbey Foundation, an organization based in Philadelphia. I’d applied for the Keasbey at the urging of a junior English professor, the cheerful medievalist whom I was fond of because he paused between his sentences and went light on theory. He’d won the Keasbey himself a few years back and thought it the finest scholarship on offer because it gave winners a choice of universities—not just Oxford, but also Cambridge, Edinburgh, and even Aberystwyth, in Wales—as well as supplying a generous “wine allowance” of a few hundred dollars per year. I asked why this was. “It’s in the will,” he said. I asked him whose will. “Marguerite Keasbey’s.”

  I ordered a BLT and perched on a stool in the window of the diner, wondering how I’d recognize a being whose title had always been a cipher to me. It was easy, though. Provosts behave exactly like provosts. They shake your hand a moment before you’re ready, they lay a heartening arm across your shoulder that drops away the instant you feel heartened, they lightly scold you for using your own money to buy your BLT, and they don’t touch their coffee after the first sip because they’re granting you their full attention, which they somehow convince you that you deserve.

  “The first round of judging for the Keasbey is done by the university itself. That process has been concluded. Concluded in your favor, I’m pleased to say.” He brought out a sheaf of neatly folded documents and slid it across the Formica toward my plate, a gesture familiar from movies about espionage. I followed what I gathered to be the script and immediately tucked the papers out of sight, in a pocket of my jeans.

  “Don’t lose those. Make sure to read them,” the provost said. “They contain details on next week’s interview.”

  “I’m grateful. Thank you, sir. Sincerely. Wow.”

  “You don’t want to read them now and ask some questions?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “It’s whatever you want.”

  “Really?”

  The provost accompanied me back to campus, a ghostly red carpet unfurling before him that I was allowed to set my feet on, too. People waved at him, people I’d never seen before. I imagined that they were deans, administrators, and I wondered through what quirk of quantum physics they’d suddenly managed to gain materiality. At the foot of the staircase to Nassau Hall’s front doors, watched by the twin bronze tigers, who were purring now, I received a second provostian handshake, a second fleeting shoulder clasp, and then he was gone, in a twinkling, my own Saint Nicholas, traveling undercover in a brown suit. I touched the papers in my back pocket. Real.

  The euphoria only lasted a few minutes. In my dorm room, I sat down on my bed next to the leafless potted plant in which I sometimes urinated when the hike to the men’s room felt too long, and handicapped my chances in the last round. The Rhodes debacle had broken my confidence, but rather than learning from it the obvious lesson—that I should prepare for auditions before the wise ones—I doubled up on my old strategy of conjuring mercy through helplessness and squeezing inspiration from despair. I drifted through my classes the next day, and every day for the next week, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, particularly the ones I’d written papers on, and my math skills, once adequate for the SAT
s, had atrophied to nothing. The science classes I’d been required to take, on geology and psychology, had been graded pass-fail, and though I’d passed them, barely, I’d already forgotten what “igneous” meant and where in the brain short-term memories were stored.

  Worse, I had no prospects. All around me friends were taking positions with worldwide corporations and securing places in lofty grad schools, but I had nothing but three sheets of paper, one of them mapping the quickest route from Princeton to downtown Philadelphia, the site of my upcoming ultimate rebuff. I’d never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end, as would the game of trading on previous trophies. Once I had nowhere to go but up. Now I had nowhere to go at all, it seemed. The only suspense was what shape defeat would take. There he goes, the Ivy League grocery bagger. There he lies, the hobo with the diploma.

  “Stop it,” said V. during one of my moping orgies. My interview was just two days away. “This is unwarranted. And it’s beneath you.”

  “It isn’t Kierkegaardian? No, you’re right. It’s Schopenhauerian.”

  “The fact that you can even make such jokes means that you’ve come further than you know.”

  “But you’re the only person I can make them to. They’re good for another few months, until we leave here, and then I’ll be all alone with them,” I said.

  “You don’t know what ‘all alone’ means, obviously.”

  “What? It means something different in Pakistan?”

  V nodded. Not immediately, reluctantly. Then he folded his hands and stared down into his lap. He seemed disappointed in me, or in our friendship. I began to understand. His time here was precious, he’d stolen it from his government, and he’d paid for it with a separation. The fact that he’d spent so much of it with me—who not only didn’t appreciate the privilege but didn’t appreciate anything, apparently, beginning with himself—must have struck him as a ghastly waste.