But now it all counts. There’s nowhere to hide here. No blending in or fucking off. I’ve never felt so terrified or so exposed.
IN THE past week, I’ve cleaned my apartment, scraped together a quasi-professional wardrobe for teaching, finalized my syllabi for the upcoming semester, eaten at every single nonfancy restaurant in town, and answered some variation of the question “who are you” approximately eight thousand times. I ran into Carl, whose apartment I’m renting, at the diner and he was solicitous—how’s the apartment, how do I like Holiday—but I got the sense that it was mostly for the benefit of everyone else in the diner who was listening when he asked me if I had a partner. Kind of like he wanted to prove that he didn’t have any problem with me being gay.
Bernard Ness, the chair of the job search committee, had me over to his house for dinner. It was pleasant enough, and it’s lucky we have work to talk about, since I don’t think we have much else in common. He filled me in on enough departmental gossip to last a lifetime and the entire time I prayed that this would not become my life: gossiping about which of my colleagues is getting a divorce and whose forthcoming article should never have been accepted for publication.
And all week I’ve wondered when I’d run into him. Rex. Last night, I had a dream that I walked into the diner and he was working there, only it was one of those old-timey soda shoppes and he was wearing the whole soda jerk getup: white shirt and apron, black bow tie, dorky white hat perched on his perfect head. He made me a delicious-looking milkshake but then refused to give it to me. I know, right? You don’t have to be Freud.
Classes start on Monday, so the town has begun to buzz as students get back. Still, it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday night and it doesn’t look like anything is going on. At least I won’t have any distractions while I’m here; it’ll give me time to work on turning my dissertation into a book, which, among other things, will be required of me to get tenure at Sleeping Bear. More to the point, I’ll need to have a publication offer in hand if I have any hope of getting a job that isn’t in the middle of nowhere.
Now, though, I’m antsy as hell. It’s hot in my apartment, even with the air conditioner that I had to drive an hour to find. I spent the day making sure I knew where everything was: my classes, my office, the library, the one pizza joint that stays open after ten. I’ve finished all the reading and done course planning for my first week of classes. I’ve watched four documentaries that have been in my Netflix queue for ages. And I may or may not have googled “Rex + Michigan” to no avail.
I decide I just need to get out of the house, so I throw on shoes and grab my beat-up copy of The Secret History. I’ve read it a hundred times, but it fits perfectly in my back pocket and it’s a comfort book: as long as I’m reading it, it doesn’t matter where I am. Besides, the main character of the book leaves his home in California to go to college in a small town where he’s never been before, so it seems particularly relevant to my life right now. I figure I’ll take a walk and find a park bench to read on or something.
It really is beautiful here once it’s not sweltering. I’m actually looking forward to the winter; I bet it looks like a storybook village when everything’s covered with snow. The quiet freaks me out, though, so I pop in the earbuds of my beat-up iPod, saying a tiny prayer to the music gods, as I do every time I use it these days, that it’ll last me just one more year.
That was my mantra all through grad school. When I first started, it was a nightmare. Everyone at Penn came from good colleges that had prepared them for the classes. I went to community college for three years, then transferred to Temple and squeezed all my remaining credits into one year since it’s all I could afford. I’m pretty sure I only got into grad school at Penn because they needed to fill a quota of first generation college students or something. I was totally unprepared, but I told myself that after one year, the playing field would have evened. One more year. Then, when I was so exhausted from doing all my reading and writing for coursework while bartending five nights a week, I would tell myself, Just one more year and then you’ll be done with coursework and starting your dissertation. When I felt like I would never finish writing, I told myself, One more year; you just have to hang on for one more year.