just work.”
“What is?”
“That’s my alternative theory. There’s no such thing as inspiration. Writing is work like anything else. It’s just creative work instead of physical work or what have you. Bankers bank. Plumbers plumb. Sculptors sculpt. Writers write. I once heard Naomi Wolf quote her father: ‘The writer who goes out with the bucket daily seems to provoke the rain.’ He had the guts to make art sound mundane.”
“Citing other people’s arguments won’t impress me. You always do that when you’re not sure what to say. If you believe the Wolf line, do the work of proving it. You need a case study. I’ve said this before: Enough with the lit review. Choose an author to examine closely. His biography. His output. Think about what it is that caused him to write. Connect what happened off the page to what happened on it. Don’t smirk. This is basic. Fisher-Price My First Academic Paper.”
“Wow.”
“Sorry. I’d recommend Milton if there weren’t already dozens of books on his process. He spent years after university obsessively reading the classics without writing much at all, living off his father’s investments. He traveled through Europe, still not writing, dabbled in politics, then, finally, drafted a drama that would become his epic. He said it came easily! You must know the line — the celestial patroness who nightly dictates to the slumbering poet his ‘unpremeditated verse.’ ”
“How nice, to wake up and find a few more pages of Paradise Lost at your feet.”
Better than a nocturnal emission, I did not add.
Professor Davidoff’s office, laid out like a psychoanalyst’s with a leather armchair for him and a leather couch for his visitors, was overheated and stuffy. I wondered why he didn’t open the window since he was visibly uncomfortable; a few beads of sweat had trickled down his forehead and I had to resist the urge to dab him with a tissue. Some future civilization would master temperature control. It was thirty degrees outside and what felt like eighty degrees inside, hastening climate change.
“I should ask — is there something going on?” he said.
“No.”
“Some reason you’re finding it so hard to finish?”
“My parents think I’m lazy.”
“Oh?”
“They say I need to stop procrastinating.”
Professor Davidoff scratched the dry skin around his nose, a compulsive habit.
Again the conversation flagged and I thought back to the time, many years earlier, when I’d attended a Quaker meeting in backwoods Vermont. It began with twenty minutes of enforced silence, at the end of which congregants were encouraged to speak their minds if “the Spirit moved” them. It didn’t move anyone. Three-quarters of an hour in I felt so oppressed that I considered jumping up, maybe reciting poetry. But I only knew Ogden Nash by heart, which didn’t seem appropriate.
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
