I remember her tongue felt like wet fruit. I remember, when I looked at her the next day, feeling like an ice cube coming apart in hot tea. Extremities tingling. Heartburn-like sensation around the, um, heart.
The promotional brochure that Collegiate sent to newly admitted students had a picture of Golden Memorial Library on the cover. Golden was meant to resemble a Gothic cathedral, which it more or less did. Construction crews must have exhausted New England’s quarries to assemble its granite and limestone façade; must have wondered if they were, in fact, building some sort of church when they erected the portentous entrance hall, with its sixty-foot vaulted ceiling, and the fifteen-story tower destined to hold books — millions upon millions of books acquired as part of a literary arms race with the nation’s competing research universities.
Below Golden was New Campus, an underground library that Collegiate never featured in its advertising materials. Whereas Golden was lousy with stained glass and gargoyles and marble reliefs and chandeliers, New Campus had buzzy fluorescent lights, cubicles shaped like swastikas — if you took the bird’s-eye view — white plaster walls, and poster reproductions of forgotten midcentury pop art. Golden had overstuffed couches and internal courtyards. New Campus had “weenie bins”: windowless, closet-size rooms for private study. To move from Golden, built in the 1920s, to New Campus, built in the 1970s, was to witness the devolution of American architecture.
Yet there was something comforting about New Campus. I was sitting in a swastika, hungover, determined to thicken my too-thin dissertation, and as I stared at an ancient water spot, I reflected that New Campus did not demand anything of its visitors, like Golden did. Golden expected heady gratitude. New Campus accepted wallowing.
A PhD in English should, in theory, take five years. In reality, it was considered well within the range of normal to finish in seven. But I was midway through that seventh year and still the end evaded me. Relatives who’d once admired my precocity were beginning to wonder what was taking so long. “What, still in school?” my aunts and uncles asked at family gatherings, doubtful they’d heard me right. I was twenty-six, then twenty-seven, then, to my amazement, twenty-nine. A terrible, liminal age. As if by sleight of hand, my twenties had disappeared. They’d oozed into books I couldn’t remember reading, seminars I couldn’t remember attending, conversations I couldn’t remember having.
I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.
The muscles under my right shoulder blade were throbbing again, the rhomboids. I slouched along them — I sat lopsided, right lower than left — and they protested this treatment frequently, sending bursts of pain diagonally across my back. The problem wasn’t bad enough to drive me to a doctor, but it should have been sufficient to make me improve my posture. Should have; was not. It helped to stretch both arms above my head and thrust my chest forward. Arms up; chest out.
Six and a half years in New Harbor. Three years since I’d passed my oral exams; three summers, with the length of three long winters. Roughly 1,100 days; 26,400 hours; 3,000 meals; 300 Pop-Tarts; 120,376,000 heartbeats — my Nokia had a calculator — assuming an average resting rate of seventy beats per minute. And in that span of time: It’s a little thin.
That judgment applied equally well to my social life. Other people could excuse their lack of progress by pointing to offspring or a passionate affair or even an obsessive interest in something pleasurable but meaningless, like video games or football. I could not account for what I did all day. I walked around. I read. I ate. Sometimes I loitered in pharmacies, overwhelmed by branded bounty. What else? Next to nothing. I had nothing to distract me from nothing.
My rhomboids whined as I considered the possibility that I would have to find a new career, start afresh in some horribly grinding profession like the law, the last refuge of the academic. How awful it seemed to go back to the beginning. How tiring to study for the LSAT and ask my disappointed parents to pay for law school or dig into my inheritance to do the same and then have to actually attend law school and, worse yet, have to actually practice law. No. No. I wasn’t there yet. No. I was O.K. O, period, K, period. I knew what I was doing. I was a star — or had been recently and could be one again. Would be one again. Just as soon as I found a case study. A good case study. Which I would do right away. Of course I would.
The water spot on the ceiling looked like a rabbit with fangs. One ear turned down, the other upright, drops of blood trickling from long teeth. There was a word for this psychological phenomenon, seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or on the surface of the moon or in stains. But I couldn’t remember it. There was also a word for the inability to remember a word, which I couldn’t remember either, although I knew it sounded Greek — contained Greek — and that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had coined it. Amnelogia, maybe. I could, at least, recall the various words that meant “behind”: delinquent, overdue, delayed, belated, and retarded, the last of which was sadly unacceptable, no matter the context, thanks to the euphemism treadmill.
My laptop had gone to sleep. A flick of the touchpad revealed my dissertation. Forget it. I slinked over to the Fiction and Literature section, found the twentieth century, and pulled out a copy of Frederick Langley’s Complete Works.
I first heard the name Frederick Langley in middle school when my eighth-grade English teacher recommended Brutality and Delicacy. He impressed upon me that Langley was a serious author and made clear he wouldn’t entrust just anyone with Langley’s work. It was a mark of distinction. Although reading Langley felt like my official introduction to literary culture, the aura of formality in no way spoiled my pleasure. I encountered Langley slightly before it became automatic for me to underline or take notes, that prelapsarian period when fiction was just for enjoyment.
My attachment was short-lived. In high school, I became acutely aware that the students who didn’t care for reading cared for Langley the most. They found him delightfully outrageous. They loved “Longer,” the grotesquerie in which the circumcised protagonist tries to regrow his foreskin. One boy could recite the entire dinner-table scene from memory. His girlfriend pledged never again to eat calamari.
The idiots liked Langley. The idiots who thought they were countercultural because they were bad at tests. The idiots who thought that any book published before the twentieth century was boring. The idiots owned that dumb T-shirt with a bulging eyeball on the front and, on the back, We see each other in glances. The idiots never bothered to learn the difference between a dactyl and an anapest — didn’t see the point — yet had the energy to track down old magazine articles about the time Langley wowed a Greenwich Village crowd: he’d read the first half of a story and then improvised three possible endings. (And it really did require energy to find those articles. I went to high school in the dark pre-Google age, when the internet was still the domain of math nerds and pedophiles, so the idiots’ best option was microfiche.)
The idiots liked Langley. So I stopped liking Langley. The fact that Langley was my introduction to literary culture made him seem introductory. The fact that I enjoyed reading his stories made them seem frivolous. I formed the impression that he wasn’t sophisticated. He was, in my adolescent assessment, serious enough for a serious eighth-grader, not for a budding literary critic. That judgment stayed with me. Still, when Helen told me that she was Frederick Langley’s niece, the information produced in me a childish excitement.
I skimmed the introduction to Complete Works, which divided Langley’s stories into two major categories, “epiphanies” and “compulsions.” The epiphanies were formulaic: something happens to X that changes his perspective on Y.
The quintessential
