On the plane yesterday everyone had been drinking and carousing, like they were in a commercial for Las Vegas, and Dorothy was in the commercial, too, cast as the slightly sour, stick-in-the-mud friend who would have to be cajoled into having a good time but who, by the time the city and all its seductions had gotten into her, would never want to go home. The plan had been to use the flying time to get work done, so while the people around her downed miniature bottles of spirits, Dorothy put in her earplugs and opened a much-annotated copy of The Way of the World. She had been anticipating returning to this text as one anticipates a reunion with an old friend with whom one is not in regular touch—with a mixture of forced enthusiasm and hesitation, the insistence that it’s so great to see you doing battle with the shared conviction that one would really rather not. She found her page, and almost immediately the book began to speak.
Look at me! the book said.
What? said Dorothy, underlining a sentence about how Middlemarch is the only nineteenth-century English novel “which dares to deal with the major theme of the European Bildungsroman: failure.”
I have read all of Stendhal in French, the book informed her nonchalantly. Dorothy nodded and proceeded to the useless labor of underlining the phrases “objective historical demands” and “significant for novelistic narration,” both of which were already italicized. I understand the internal logic of formal contradictions, the book added, straining to be heard over the chatter in the rows behind. Tell me again what you do?
That’s not my field, Dorothy started to say, but the book talked over her.
Greater minds than yours, it said, minds more serious, more synthetic, with better recall, more command of foreign languages—and actual political commitments, by the way, which you, for reasons relating to your own disappointed cynicism, hatred of groups, and existential damage that manifests as useless contrarianism and resignation, can’t bear to make—have toiled and turned this loamy field.
Loamy? said Dorothy.
It means fertile, said the book.
I know, Dorothy said, flipping back to the pages about fairy tales. Your work is superfluous, her unpleasant companion went on, but far from being superfluous in the lovely, decorative sense of a sweet, impermanent trifle that will bring delight and assuage the sufferings of others, like birdsong, your superfluity is a ghastly excess.
Dorothy opened the air vent above. The book raised its voice, shouting through the creases in its wrinkled spine. You, it exclaimed, pausing to clear a frog of phlegm from its throat, are a dilettante, a prosaic clog in the pipes of discourse. The problem of the twenty-first century is a problem of waste! She closed the book, but the blurbs taunted her. Don’t you know anything, you joke of a humanist, you walking fatberg of consumer debt?
The flight attendant was leaning over her, trying to give her peanuts. She took the peanuts. She lowered her tray table and suffocated the muttering book between her leg and the armrest and selected from the in-flight entertainment system a movie about undercover police officers infiltrating a high school. The officers were on the trail of a potent new drug. One of the officers was short and fat and one was conventionally handsome, but according to millennial logic, it was the nerd who was cool and the suave jock was passé. Dorothy was in the aisle seat, using a big sweater as a blanket. The man in the middle was highlighting passages in a book about blackjack strategy. The person in the window seat had thrown an airline blanket over their face and was sleeping or pretending to sleep. When the movie ended Dorothy started it again, without bothering to research the other entertainment options. She did that not because she was in a state of depressed indifference or ennui but because she had genuinely enjoyed the movie, and didn’t want it to end.
The taxi ride from the airport was confusing. Dorothy did not feel capable of processing the landmarks. It was her first time in Las Vegas. She hugged her bag and kept saying to herself, I’m in Las Vegas, as if that would help.
After depositing her luggage in a small, dim room in the upper heavens of Harrah’s, she went for a walk on the Strip. The number of young children was a surprise. Everyone was drinking through twisty straws. All ages. It was like Disney World, except there were no animals and no rides and when you thought about the mass transfer of capital from individual Social Security accounts into casino coffers you wanted to stab yourself with a twisty straw. The crowd meandered, stopping frequently to gawk or take photographs of signs or themselves, but Dorothy, trained to walk purposefully on New York streets, moved with precision, finding the undefended pockets of space as skillfully as any professional athlete. It was ninety-two degrees and the sweat pooled behind her knees and gathered at her brow. The back of her neck, under her hair, was sweaty. The casinos were so big that there was no one place to stand that offered a satisfactory experience of seeing them in their totality; being across the street helped, but only a little. They had impressive architectural entryways, large mouths that wanted to swallow you and you let them do it because it was cool inside. She crossed the street to be closer to the jumping fountains outside the Bellagio. Presumably the water was recycled and recirculated but it still seemed, in its ostentation, a gross celebration from simpler, happier times. The fountain said, Don’t worry about resources. It said, There is enough for everyone and more for the show. That was all it said. She liked watching it.
She made it as far as Paris before turning back, panting and thirsty, for the opening reception of the conference, where conversation revolved around the conference organizers’ choice of first, Vegas, and second, Harrah’s. On the edge of the group she saw Keith, an—acquaintance? Friend? Ex?—from grad school, who had gone on to a tenure-track job at Johns Hopkins. Keith was more handsome than she remembered—grayer and leaner, like he had taken up a fitness regime. He wore red threads around his wrists. He was glad to see her. His eyes latched on to Dorothy’s with barbed hooks. His hand grabbed her hand, his mouth kissed her cheek. Dorothy tried to remember when she had agreed that any man who felt like it was permitted to put his open mouth on her face. It didn’t make her angry that men did this, she just wanted to know when she had signed off on it.
She used to think a lot about how different her life would be if she had wound up with Keith—in an idle way, not as a real counterfactual. It would never have worked out. It didn’t work out. Keith was rich, which Dorothy had liked, but stingy, which she didn’t. He always wanted to split the bill. Their thing lasted only a couple months. It might have gone on forever except one weekend he brought her to his little cabin in the country, where, instead of having sex and letting her fall asleep with her face in his armpit, which smelled amazing, he announced that he wanted to “try something.” This something turned out to be whispering into her vagina for almost an hour while she shivered beneath a thin flannel blanket and occasionally remembered to pet his head. Poems by Frank O’Hara. He whispered poems by Frank O’Hara into her vagina.
He did stuff with his tongue, too, but it was all timed to the poems and Dorothy lay there under the single Edison bulb with its lightning rod of golden filament crackling, wondering how, when, where he got the idea that this was a good idea. Was she the guinea pig? Or was this tried and true? Had this been somebody’s favorite thing? He wasn’t talking to her vagina, it wasn’t like he had original content he needed to communicate to it; it wasn’t like she, Dorothy, was being addressed. She had been confused for somebody else, the kind of person who could orgasm over a poem. Or was the idea that you could say anything into any vagina and the vibrations of air would have their effect? In that case, why poems? Dorothy didn’t even like poems. How had Keith gotten the idea that she did? Did she seem like a poem person? What was wrong with how she was presenting herself to the world that this kind of misrecognition was even possible?
“I thought you loved language” was what he said when he finally gave up. A good sport, he reached down with his hand, but Dorothy pushed him
away as politely as she could.
“Wow” was what she said.
What she most remembered about this unpleasant night was Keith’s face, which he periodically withdrew to assess his progress and announce each subsequent title, like he was giving a reading, like he had written these poems himself. It was so eager and proud, like a dog’s after it brings some disgusting prize to its owner. Remembering it now, Dorothy recoiled with shame. What was wrong with the way they had done things before, that was what Dorothy still could not understand. Life was hard enough without taking easy victories away. But Keith, it seemed, had been bored by her, or he hated her, or, most disturbingly, their ideas of pleasure were so different that his way of expressing affection was perceived by Dorothy as an affront bordering on an offense. The next week she met Rog and a couple weeks after that Keith got together with a pint-size art historian and when they saw each other in seminar he acted like everything was totally normal, they were just two overeducated chimpanzees who used to take off their pants and whisper into each other’s genitals in Connecticut and now were content comparing notes on Franco Moretti.
What she had shared and done with Keith—even if she hadn’t done it herself, she had been there, she was implicated—was, Dorothy knew, more intimate than anything she had ever done or shared with Rog. But intimacy wasn’t in itself a good thing. There was such a thing as privacy. Rog would never impinge on her the way Keith had, would never expose her. Through disinterest or tenderness he permitted her to remain intact, a little hidden from him. He always showed her exquisite courtesy.
* * *
—
“Did you hear,” said Keith, leaning close in a way that suggested drunkenness, “about Elyse?” Dorothy knew Elyse slightly from a Texas conference two years prior where they had presented on the same panel. Elyse’s research was about the history of meteorological reports; she had a theory about how practices in weather observation had impacted the development of literary description. It was a clever idea, and timely, and Dorothy had enjoyed Elyse’s paper. Usually Dorothy was jealous of what she enjoyed, but on that occasion she was aware that she did not wish Elyse’s research was her own. Elyse’s conclusions were interesting, but arriving at them seemed boring; Dorothy had no appetite for data. She would never call her work “research.”
In addition to her scholarly virtues, Elyse was widely acknowledged as sexy, rather in the way of an artist or elementary school teacher; she always looked a little sloppy, she carried around some aura of bedsheets and papier-mâché. Her eyebrows were dark and unruly and she never wore the typical female academic uniform of black blazer enlivened with large pendant or “statement necklace”; she favored slouchy overalls, interesting collars, dramatic patterns, and large hoop earrings. It was like she was dressing for a different life, or had a different life, off this stage and on some other. She had been married the last time Dorothy had seen her, but, according to Keith, in the intervening period Elyse had gotten a divorce. He tottered back and wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. It was no surprise that Keith desired Elyse or that he was friends with her. Elyse and Keith had done the same postdoc and friendship blossomed between them as easily as professional laurels were exchanged; after the Texas panel, in fact, Keith had solicited Elyse to contribute to a journal issue he was editing, an issue celebrating the work of the scholar Lauren Berlant and her theory of “cruel optimism.”
“Cruel optimism” was Berlant’s way of theorizing why and how people remained attached to fantasies and aspirations of “the good life,” how those aspirations injured them, and the resulting affect—something she called “stuckness.” “Cruel optimism” was Dorothy’s entire life. But Keith had not solicited a contribution from Dorothy. He had, instead, emailed her to explain that this lack of invitation was not a sign of disrespect but the contrary—he respected her so much that he did not want to burden her when he knew, as all of Dorothy’s circle knew, that she was behind on her manuscript, her only chance of escaping, as he put it, “adjunct hell.” In other words, Dorothy knew too much about cruel optimism to write about it. When the journal arrived, she put it on the dresser/nightstand on top of the other books and magazines she intended to read. After months of not reading, she moved it to the coffee table, where it lingered until Rog, in a rare burst of tidying fever, moved it to the pile of catalogs and boxes by the recycling bag and then, some weeks later, after Dorothy informed him that she had every intention of devoting herself to its contents, back to the dresser/nightstand, where it currently resided, facedown, under a coaster.
Dorothy said she was sorry to hear about Elyse’s divorce. Keith shrugged.
“We’re in the lull between first weddings and second weddings,” he said. “The parties for the second weddings won’t be as good, but we’ll be older, so we’ll appreciate them more.”
The consensus among the young professors at the mixer was that while it was fun in a “try anything once” way to be in Vegas, Harrah’s was gross. They wanted to be at the Wynn, or New York–New York.
“I like Harrah’s,” said Keith, but he was only being contrarian—or ironic, Dorothy wasn’t sure. Being around Keith usually didn’t bother Dorothy, in fact she liked him as a person and respected his intellect, but tonight he made her feel like she was molding. Was that what you called it when you turned into mold? Or did that imply she was turning into a cornice? She resented being forced to think this way. She didn’t want the memory; she wanted to give it back. She said something about needing to finish her paper and excused herself. No one begged her to stay.
Harrah’s permitted indoor smoking but had not installed a ventilation system, so when Dorothy wandered the aisles of slot machines, as she did before going up to her room for the night, she covered her mouth with her hand and breathed in her own recirculated air, shivering. She fell asleep hungry, because she had eaten all her granola bars on the plane. Four hours later she woke in all her clothes, her contact lenses cracking in her eyes, and stumbled to the bathroom to pry them out with unwashed fingers.
* * *
—
That was yesterday. Now it was today. Her panel had begun early, promptly at nine a.m., in a well-refrigerated ballroom. The other panelists were strangers to her but she noticed, during the second paper (she was last), all the way in the back of the room, a woman with huge, inquisitive eyes, gripping the back of her neck in furious concentration. It was Elyse.
The quiet of the ballroom was broken by the occasional shifting or rummaging through a bag, but it was otherwise very silent; even the cooling system, which was working to maximum effect, was silent. The second panelist leaned in close to the microphone and heavily aspirated his p’s and t’s. Dorothy had listened keenly to the first panelist, whose paper was on shadows, but the second panelist, who droned on through long thickets of quotation, was harder to follow. Was this how people felt about her work? Elyse must have been trying to catch Dorothy’s eye for some time because as soon as Dorothy allowed her gaze to drift over the sparsely filled seats—there was a more exciting panel taking place several ballrooms down, not the keynote but a panel of big, contentious personalities, who attract conference-goers like a fireplace attracts weary travelers, or flies descend, convivially, on a dumpster—Elyse pointed frantically at her watch, made a sad face, pointed to the exit, tapped herself repeatedly on the shoulder, waved a sheaf of papers in the air, danced a finger over them, and shrugged, a series of honeybee imitations that communicated—what, Dorothy was not sure. If Elyse had her own paper to give, she would have already been up on a dais somewhere; if she wanted to attend the more exciting panel of noted personalities, why wasn’t she there? Satisfied that she had been understood, Elyse pulled on a shapeless white coat (even across the room it muted her complexion, somewhat diminishing her beauty), made a “hang ten” gesture, and put her hand to her ear like a receiver and then corrected herself by thumbing an imaginary phone, indicating that
she would text Dorothy later, which she did, first apologizing, then explaining—an explanation that morphed seamlessly into a boast—that she had run off to finish writing her own paper, which departed from her previous interest in clouds to explore her new interest, botany, and had gone over better than she ever could have imagined. Then she suggested that they meet for dinner that night. Dorothy wrote back, “Sounds good!”
* * *
—
After the panel Dorothy went to her room and took off her uncomfortable booties. Odd how her fanciest shoes, which she wore only when she needed to seem mature or command respect, were also the ones with the most infantile name. She knew she ought to be attending the other panels, where, if she were smart, she would distinguish herself by asking pointed and memorable questions, questions that, if they were pointed and memorable enough, might lead to being deemed by her peers to be a significant voice, or even, if her questions led to conversations that led to invitations to contribute to journals, appear on other panels, give lectures, etc., her redemption from the limbo of contingency—a phrase she preferred to “adjunct hell,” which at once overstated and understated (by glossing over) her position—but she had an appointment to keep.
The Life of the Mind Page 10
