The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  She moved her face to her elbow, and tried to wipe some spit into the corner of her eyes so that whenever she had to look at Judith again—which she hoped would not be for a very long time—there would be some physical evidence of distress. Dorothy’s real cry was a quiet hiccupy thing—she had been told by men it was disturbingly soundless, and had occasionally been accused of faking it—so she made sure to be audible. As she increased her volume to a wail, the back of her throat opened a little and the crying became less kittenish, more committed to its own sense of aching futility and existential abandonment. She was almost there.

  Judith broke off crying and burst into laughter. It wasn’t nasty laughter, there was genuine pleasure in it—the freedom of flight.

  “I knew I could count on you to make me feel better,” she said. Dorothy raised her head and saw Judith drying her eyes on a white pool towel. She leaned back her head, as if wanting Dorothy to admire the sinews of her long and youthful neck. She yawned, showing silver-filled molars, and announced that she needed a nap. Quickly Dorothy wiped her eyes with her fingers, rubbing away the saliva, and smiled like she was in on the joke. Behold thy life’s work!

  Judith made smacking sounds of goodbye near both of Dorothy’s cheeks, said it had been wonderful to see her.

  “Such a gas,” she added. “You always slay me.”

  She dropped her used tissues into Dorothy’s empty cup, and as she was leaving she turned back to say that she had high hopes for Dorothy’s chances on next year’s job market.

  “You’re special, Dodo,” Judith said, as her kimono flapped its goodbye. “I’ve always told you that!”

  The women of the wedding party noisily emerged from the pool, laughing and blaming one another for the cold. As the bride adjusted her sash and put on the floppy half-sweater that was known as a shrug, Dorothy sought out the decisive and fundamental mistake. It was not one decision she could blame, but all of them. She inhaled the cold air and felt in her left lateral incisor a sharp, definite ache. The ache began at the gumline and radiated down through the face of the tooth. There was an absence behind the pain; it lacked the dense surface area of, say, a molar. She thought that the pain would fade quickly, without anything to retain it.

  That was wrong. In fact, as Dorothy discovered, the whole flat incisor is nothing but a surface for pain, a disc to receive and transmit it, or, more precisely, a surface of pain—the pain being not in, nor on, the tooth, but tooth itself. It was a shard of pain rather than a sliver of sensate bone that hung from Dorothy’s pinkish, slightly inflamed gums. She breathed harder, sucking air over the tooth, and the pain increased. She bit her lip and blinked rapidly to keep the tears from falling. It was no use. They poured down and spilled over her chin.

  There was no tissue box to come to her aid. Dorothy didn’t bother to cover her face. There was something fortifying about crying in public, about letting the snot flow; what felt degrading in private, in public announced one’s sensitivity and the great passions that ruled a life. She dug around in her bag, which was always stuffed with napkins from whatever coffee shop she had last frequented. The napkin she turned up was thick and long, like a dinner napkin. She blew her nose with force, and something about the force knocked the pain off of her tooth, or maybe it had to do with the temperature in her mouth increasing (cold air could make teeth ache; warm air was a comfort), or maybe it was a meaningless coincidence of sensation. Maybe what happened inside her body had no relationship to what was outside it. She cried again, animally, whimperingly.

  She dried her face. She folded the towel Judith had knocked to the ground when she departed and placed it on the chaise longue. The waiter hung back, through some combination of tact and disgust. A breeze rustled through the transplanted palm leaves. They made a noise like shushing.

  * * *

  —

  Elyse: Let’s go somewhere else to check out the vibe

  Elyse: Harrah’s is so depressing!

  Dorothy was in bed and knew enough to know she could not survive another adventure on the Strip. She thought that maybe if she tried she could get herself back downstairs.

  Dorothy: No I want to go to the oyster bar

  Dorothy: It’s here at Harrah’s

  Dorothy: It will be funny?!

  Dorothy did not believe this, but as she expected, Elyse accepted irony as a reason to do something that she perceived to be well beneath her.

  * * *

  —

  The oyster bar had no walls or windows or, god forbid, doors. It opened directly onto the casino. The hostess showed Dorothy, who had arrived first, to a table in the front next to a fake bush, where anybody could see her, but Dorothy wanted more seclusion. There weren’t any tables “in” the restaurant, however—due to the previously observed lack of doors and walls and windows, the restaurant had no “inside” to speak of. It was a permeable zone, a gustatory oasis that bled into the territory of gaming. Dorothy sat at one end of the bar and tried not to look at the lobster tank on the wall next to her. She drank a Bloody Mary. The drink was spicy and strong. It cut through the sweetness of the afternoon’s piña coladas, which, despite a nap and vigorous toothbrushing, had remained adhered in her mouth, or maybe just her memory. She didn’t know what to do so she took out her phone, and she didn’t know what to do with her phone, so she texted Gaby.

  “Heyyyy,” she texted, counting on the extra y’s to imply that her text was fun, that she was fine, that they were great friends, and that she was witty and debonair rather than an exhausted resin-spewing sack overwhelmed by the cold onslaught of vodka penetrating her brain.

  Dorothy: I’m in VEGAS BABY!!!

  Dorothy: [Person with Head Exploding Emoji]

  Dorothy: [Knife Emoji]

  Dorothy: [Crying and Laughing Emoji]

  Gaby: If you’re saying you killed your paper I know u did.

  A pause. Dorothy looked around the restaurant, back to the screen.

  Gaby: …

  Gaby: Have you listened to your therapist’s podcast?

  Gaby: I can’t stop thinking about it

  Gaby: I’m dying to hear it

  Dorothy: I can’t, I’m just pretending it doesn’t exist

  Gaby: Sounds healthy

  Gaby: I still think she should have YOU on it

  Gaby: I think you’re verrrrry relatable!

  Dorothy: but not sympathetic

  Gaby: SHE’S not sympathetic

  Gaby: JK I don’t know her

  Gaby: She’s just threatened cause you’re smart

  Dorothy: I dont think thats it but thank u for yr support

  Gaby: Also it’s like she’s the mistress so of course she has to neg you a little

  Gaby: to keep you interested so you don’t dump her and go back to your main squeeze wife-therapist

  Dorothy: mayyyybe?

  Gaby: I know about these things!

  Dorothy: I know

  Dorothy: [heart emoji]

  Dorothy: ok gotta go [another heart emoji]

  Gaby was a good friend, but Dorothy was glad that the therapist hadn’t wanted her on the podcast. It was the kind of thing she definitely would have agreed to and then massively regretted. The more she thought about it, the worse an idea it was—no matter how masked the details, someone would be sure to figure out it was her. How could she talk about Rog, her mother, her students, her body, knowing it would be broadcast? Besides, her second therapist was sure to use the podcast to raise the issue of her first therapist, and while Dorothy did not believe she was doing anything wrong, in fact believed that her therapeutic entanglements were proof that on some level she was doing something right, that despite professional and personal stagnation she had not entirely given up on the possibility of meaningful change, but was only deferring it to some future date
—still, she didn’t need everybody knowing her business. She didn’t need to become an object of criticism. That would make it even more impossible than it already was for her to find a job. There was an argument to be made that people who bared themselves in public helped others, that by sacrificing their privacy they became examples to light the way, but she didn’t feel exemplary. There had to be something wrong with whoever would do that, would strew their most intimate thoughts and experiences around the world like unopened bills. That should be the subject of the podcast: “What Does It Say About You That You Have Agreed To This Recording?”

  She leaned against the wall but it wasn’t the wall there, it was the tank. Cold damp touched her through her cardigan. Before she could look away she saw them, the lobsters, rubber-banded claws scuttling silently, antennae waving, thrashing in their green-gray antechamber to execution.

  * * *

  —

  Elyse arrived and slid onto the next barstool. She was wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit with a plunging neckline and heels and seemed not at all bothered by or even aware of the subzero microclimate of the bar.

  Dorothy was now in kissable distance from Elyse. Too close. Angling herself at a more comfortable distance required jamming the stool up all the way against the tank. She wedged the stool back and forward and tried to avoid touching her back to the tank and gave up and sank against it and too late realized that Elyse was waiting for her to answer a question. The question had probably been “How are you?”

  Dorothy looked in either direction, as if the moment were a street she had to get to the other side of, and said “you know” in a tone that she hoped indicated that she was incredibly busy and dealing with complex and weighty intellectual matters that while she did not presume were of interest to Elyse, were definitely engaging and fulfilling—that she was an adjunct, sure, but, you know, not hooked up to a ventilator in “adjunct hell.”

  “I’m so glad to see you here,” Elyse said. “But I wish we had been on the same panel. That panel in Texas was seriously the best one of my life.”

  Dorothy wanted to say something real about her admiration for Elyse, about clouds and botany and why people read and what teaching is for, but it was too early in their encounter to plunge in so deeply, so all she said was “Me, too!” Elyse asked about her paper, and Dorothy tried to keep the pep in her voice as she explained about the Christminster cookies.

  “You seem anxious,” Elyse said.

  This sounded rude, but maybe it was merely forthright? “I was reading the news earlier,” Dorothy said, which was true—rather than attend any afternoon panels Dorothy had spent the hours since leaving the Palazzo reading her phone and sleeping off the piña coladas—but she also hoped, by this reference to the unceasing rampage of current events, to explain any idiosyncratic or personal anxiety as the product of sincere sorrow at the looming extinction of the human race and to introduce a conversational thread that would lead them away from the morass of academic competition and toward something safe and neutral: the plight of humanity.

  Elyse groaned. “Not you, too,” she said. “I’ve had this conversation twice already today.”

  Dorothy ordered the surf and turf and sipped her Bloody Mary but Elyse did not order a drink with her oysters. Dorothy wondered if she was pregnant or sober—at an academic conference, only pregnancy or recovery could explain someone not drinking—and was surprised to note how jealous and angry the thought of pregnant Elyse made her. It wasn’t that she wished herself pregnant—more and more she believed the miscarriage to be some kind of divine intervention that had spared her the thing she most feared in life, making a choice—but she felt there should be something in life that Elyse didn’t get. True, Elyse was divorced, and that was hard, but divorce was also a kind of glory. It announced that you had loved and been consumed in the flames, that you had lived; it made you serious and deep. That these were the thoughts of someone who had never been married or divorced was not lost on Dorothy, but what could she do? They were the thoughts she had. There was no other history from which she could speak.

  While they ate, Dorothy interviewed Elyse about her new book and tolerated Elyse’s questions about her paper. They had both finished their food when Elyse flagged down the bartender to ask for a glass of white wine. Not pregnant, Dorothy automatically tallied, hating herself for surveilling another woman, unable to stop herself from drawing a conclusion.

  “Do you want another?” the bartender asked, and Dorothy, conscious of her excesses earlier that day, waved him away.

  Elyse looked sternly at the saltshakers and announced that she needed Dorothy’s help with a problem she was having with her neighbor. In the faintly perceptible affective shift, Dorothy realized that all conversation until now had been preamble; some main event was unexpectedly underway.

  “I know we aren’t really good friends,” Elyse said, “but I respect you, and anyway it’s good that we don’t really know each other. I need the opinion of a neutral party.”

  “We know each other,” Dorothy said, offended by Elyse’s assessment. “I just told you about the Christminster cookies. I only tell people I really like about those.” She said it like it was a joke but it was not a joke.

  “You know what I mean,” Elyse said, and laughed a little, in a rapid, loud staccato. Dorothy had never seen Elyse nervous. She hadn’t seen her most ways; they didn’t really know each other. She wasn’t sure if Elyse needed her in particular, or only needed someone, and she happened to be there, but in either case, Elyse was here, and so was she. Gaby was right: It was a good feeling, to be needed.

  Elyse sighed. She seemed to be preparing herself. She stared through the transparent Lucite half-wall that separated the bar patrons from the kitchen. Flames leapt around the edges of frying pans. After her divorce, she said—Dorothy had heard?

  “Yes,” Dorothy said. “From Keith.”

  “Keith talks,” said Elyse. She grinned. “He talks about you sometimes.”

  “He does?” said Dorothy, pleased and trepidatious.

  “Sometimes,” Elyse said.

  Anyway, Elyse said, after the divorce, she moved to a new apartment. By great luck and a little effort, she had found an apartment in a building inhabited by a friend who taught at another university nearby. They weren’t close friends at first, but due to the geographic proximity and the professional connection, as well as Elyse’s post-marital loneliness, the relationship quickly became close and intimate. Dorothy tried to concentrate on what Elyse was saying, but she was also wondering what Keith had said about her. Did Elyse know about the night in the cabin? Or did he just talk about feeling sorry for her, that she was languishing while they were building bigger and better tenure files, and if so, what did Elyse say in response?

  “I wish there were more people like you there,” Elyse said suddenly, conceding defeat in her staring contest with the condemned lobsters behind Dorothy’s head, and now looking directly at Dorothy. “But most of my colleagues are career automatons; they can hardly talk about anything outside the profession. So this friendship with my neighbor is an important one to me. I don’t make friends easily, especially not with women,” she said, and here she gave Dorothy a look like that a deer gives to an automobile driver before being run over—a look of wounded vulnerability and fatalism that says giving up is preferable to failing to save oneself.

  * * *

  —

  Elyse had been living in the building for a few months when her neighbor began having a lot of overnight visits from her boyfriend. Elyse got to know him, which was natural, since she and the neighbor spent so much time together, and the boyfriend was around, at first only a couple nights a week, but soon every night. At some point he moved in, although no formal announcement was ever made on this front; Elyse had the impression that his living situation was temporary or he was between places, and he and the neighbor seemed to treat it no
t as a formal cohabitation or stage in a relationship but in a more casual way; he was “staying there” was how it was explained to her.

  “I should admit that I had a crush on him,” Elyse said, “and that crush entailed the occasional sexual fantasy, but it was more that I liked being around him. He was funny and in addition to being funny, he clearly thought I was funny, and we had similar taste in music, which we bonded over, because his girlfriend, my friend, has more or less stopped listening to new music altogether. There was no reason for her to do that and in fact she complains about it a lot, the way she and music have parted ways, but she acts like it was inevitable, or a health condition, rather than a choice she was making and continuing to make.”

  Elyse took a last swallow of wine. Dorothy, who since turning thirty had also more or less stopped listening to music, which had come to feel like a psychic intrusion, an unwelcome alteration of natural equilibrium, nodded, and wished she had paced herself with the drinks better, because then she could be ordering another drink now.

  As time went on, Elyse started getting more and more of a vibe from the boyfriend. Sometimes it felt like all three of them were living together in some kind of polyamorous or boundary-pushing Three’s Company–type relationship, because again, though Elyse didn’t live in the same apartment, she was often visiting, or they came over to her place, or they lingered in each other’s doorways, talking, reluctant to separate. It wasn’t that she was hoping to break up her friend’s relationship, although, she said, it would have been a kindness if someone had, because the friend and the boyfriend fought constantly and about anything. They were one of those couples that can’t pick a restaurant without devolving into a meta-argument and sometimes when Elyse came home she could even hear them through the door, which she passed to get to her apartment (she lived two floors above). She couldn’t hear particular words or the content of a fight, but she could tell, from the high-pitched rolling female cadences and the occasional sound of a hand smacking a table for emphasis, that there was, as the saying goes, trouble in paradise.