Learning Curves

Joyce had not been the first person in her family to go to college, but she had been the first person in her family to go to college to have sex.

Her older sister and her cousin, in a most unlucky conjunction of stars, one year behind and one year ahead of her, traversed her life with classes and meals, and went home every weekend--and told.

Actually, the tales they carried were tame—different boys with Joyce at every meal in the cafeteria, a little matter of a faked medical excuse that got around, smoking (they thought cigarettes) on the roof of Adams Hall, and the company of a one Dr. Bryant Wilkinson, controversial philosophy instructor and serial husband between wives, an atheist, author of HUME AND KANT FOR EVERYONE.

Of course, it didn’t matter because those two, Leola and Verna, became busy being engaged to boys back home and ended up roommates together across campus from her in a room full of stuffed animals, Vicks inhalers, and used bus tickets sticking out of their teacher training texts.

At that point in her life, Joyce did not want to be a teacher—she wanted to be a novelist, but the novels she read bespoke such highly exotic settings—the Bronx, the lavish East Side, the Jewish West Side, converted brownstones, White Plains, holocaust Germany, St. Moritz, Swiss sanitariums, Boston boarding schools—and such tony vocabulary painting the real world that she despaired so much attempting a creative writing course.

Even when she learned that cotton fields, and yard dogs, and prayers for sheetrock were now stylish—she knew that was not the kind of book she wanted to write. Philip Roth, Erica Jong, Emma Lazarus were, essentially, her literary executioners.

She, famous in high school for being a colossal slacker except in English, went on anyway to college, away from her religious red-white-and blue-collared community, and saw herself majoring in adventure. Fear of Flying, once having made it to the boondock public libraries, was her guidebook.

Joyce’s father had been a welder for a little while at Drumball Cutting Torch and Welders in Chicago. Her mother, famous in her own right for bad nerves, went one year to Westwood College, “A Place You Can Succeed,” and then they met over her mother’s cracked universal joint, married, and moved from at least a half-way decent Midwestern city nuance back to the south from whence her father had sprung out of generations of agrarian Baptists.

So, it was partially their fault she missed the Great- or even Pretty-Good-American-Novel boat.

Her father set up a shop in Crowville, not even the buckle of the Bible belt, one of the belt holes, and her mother stayed home in their frame tract house sans southern-style porch, elaborate cornices, etc. and, already having sheetrock, prayed for better times in general--they were poor but not so hardscrabble poor it would have made good copy.

Nor were they rich, so that Joyce could have done the spoiled-but-now-I-see southern belle thing. Watered down by the mixed marriage of her Midwestern mother and her red neck father, she had essentially no chance in hell for any kind of decent ambience.

Eventually, sometime during her four years of college, Joyce seduced a Byron scholar, full professor this time, and seriously married, and was seduced herself into becoming a Romantic scholar, a suitable enough substitute for the never birthed novel aspirations.

Finally academically inspired, she went on to cultivate her inner pinhead, which she privately called it, at LSU, leaving her relieved lover, and, upon her graduation with an M.A., taught for far too long in a non-tenured existence at a string of mediocre-to-lame good-old-boy-controlled campuses, then took the vow of poverty, if not chastity, for the terminal degree.

By then, her father was dead, her mother busy living on social security, so any stories finding their way back to Crowville seemed more beside the point.

Joyce’s real troubles began when she married The Genius. Richard. The novelist. Too late, she remembered old Steinem’s observation that now women became whom they used to marry. So, she finally got her novel—Richard’s.

It must have unconsciously been The Novel--and her head being turned by the flashy literary lifestyle--that gave her instant access to graduate faculty parties, since Richard was the golden boy of the grad department, and, like Iris Murdoch, had published as a sophomore a coming of rage suces d’estime, Destiny’s Goose.

At their impulsive marriage—Joyce was late, but not too—the wedding cake was still warm and her only family was the sad sack sister and the cousin who had, over the years, become alter egos, both exactly three months pregnant, pursing their lips together simultaneously at Joyce’s latest antic.

After their wedding, Richard, unperturbed by Joyce’s resumed menses (it might serve as good copy one day) resumed himself the throes of labor for his second book, midwifed by the illustrious Vance Bourjaily, Rodger Komentz, and, at least in a desultory cheerleading capacity, Andrei Codrescu. Destiny’s Goose, a drug rehab memoir (highly exaggerated, believed Joyce), had missed Oprah by inches. The Summer of a Dormouse came hard.

At first, it wouldn’t come at all, and there were the rantings, and creative crises, and deep funks, and undignified remorse scenes, and much, much make-up sex. And then it did come. And fizzled. Not so much as an alternate.

It didn’t even make use of “potboiler” nomination, but rather “self-conscious,” “colossal disappointment,” “a sense of a story not told,” “actually made soft porn boring.”

What had he been thinking, her dashing precocious literati of a husband: A history student is teleported via acid back to the age of Henry VII, who turns out to be a not-so-bad guy, where said student solves some of Henry’s immediate problems, gets laid by a copious number of chestnut-haired bawds [hardly distinguishable one from another] and receives horse’s mouth advice on his dissertation, which is published to great scholarly acclaim.

Richard became the poster child of white intellectual males with nothing to write about.

Then there were the attempts at Richard’s dealing with the pain, especially a dealing that took place one memorable evening at a party rife with writers and agents and famous and semi-famous people—one of Vance Bourjaily’s Baton Rouge salon-type parties Yasmine and he were famous for.

It happened in their children’s’ tree house…in the back yard festooned with party lanterns…clearly visible from an upstairs bedroom where Joyce had drifted, snooping.

She liked to look at how others lived. Especially looking at how famous others lived, others whose lifestyle resembled those in her original great author dream.

Drawn to the windows to see what greeted Vance and Yasmine each morning, she stood ingesting the last of an hors d’ oeuvre, eyes roving over the nightscape, the detached deck, prosaic water spewing cherub fountain, portentous whispery trees, until caught by the sight of familiar chicken-wing shoulder blades stretching the white Kurt Cobain t-shirt, and the form of a frizzy Lyle Lovett do to which she had, less than an hour before, lent her own hair gel.

And another silhouette, fashionably androgynous, a veil of long undergraduate hair, briefly, before both dropped out of sight to the floor.

“What cha’ looking at?” came a voice behind her, Regina’s, a TA, who liked to affect slang to ironically belie seven years of straight A’s through now her last year in comparative lit, her monograph beckoning faintly on the published horizon.

“Richard fucking someone. Kristen Springer, I think,” said Joyce, who had spent a lifetime disassociating herself from her mother’s hysteria and her choice of occupation, nothing.

But the last bite of the cream cheese and ham pinwheel was still sliding over her taste receptors, busily synapsing, embedding in her sensory neurons a binding of salty, smoky, cheesy grief, and so forever making a simple innocent grilled ham and cheese her own highbrow Proustian cliché.

At first, she’d had no aspirations to put down roots at NIT, which offered her a tenure-track position, with a raise, and, most importantly, a setting devoid of Richard.

But the new chancellor whose reach was under fire for constantly exceeding his grasp had, the year before Joyce’s hire, created a policy that professors, tenured or non-tenured, receiving a book contract with a reputable press (presumably those north of the Mason Dixon Line), would be given a year’s paid sabbatical.

And that is precisely what happened. She, with a respectable- but-just-beginning publication record, had been presented the golden apple of academe (and was now grasping it triumphantly, if with white knuckles).

Though regrettably too late to be utilized in her salary jockeying, Joyce Michalak was to be published by Oxford University Press, the oldest and largest press in the world, far surpassing the Mason Dixon Line, yes, the original Oxford Press—England, home of Canterbury, the bishopric seat of Thomas Beckett, the moors of Devon, the coasts of Cornwall, Stratford-on-Avon, the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls, Simon Cowell…

So, now, she had completed her year of writing and rewriting, and she, of course, would be, most certainly, returning as a hero, a soon-to-be-published scholar. (“What a Romantic! What spontaneous outpour!” Regina said.)

Hero or not, between drafts, she had used her sabbatical also to send out resumes to every prestigious or semi-prestigious university in the contiguous United States.

At this moment, her book, not a monograph, but a bona fide treatise, Shifting Ground: Jane Austen’s Uses of Silence, in what she hoped was her final draft, had been launched into the ether to Oxford. Joyce was riding the cusp of Austen scholarship, thanks to her old dissertation advisor.

Ironic, that someone that old and crusty would recognize cutting edge, that he had called that publishing shot, admonishing her to cast aside her true love, Lititia Elizabeth Lickbarrow and Lickbarrow’s obscurity, her repetitious trope, her messy metaphors, her idiotic rhyme, her undernourished imagery.

His idea had come about because Joyce had written a quick but well-received paper on Jane Austen for no other reason than to have her attendance paid for at an Austen conference in Atlanta for the sole purpose to hook up with Richard—this before they were married.

Privately, Joyce had not shared her advisor’s feeling about Lititia Lickbarrow; at one time, she had had dreams of actively securing Lickbarrow’s rightful place as luminary among Romantic poets, showing the academic world how Lickbarrow’s time and infinity intertwine, how the life force embraces immortality, and, in so doing, reaches far beyond the confines of the human psyche.

“But Joyce, you could be filthy rich if a movie producer needed advice from say, a definitive Austen scholar,” her advisor had advised.

And, it was true, the world had gone crazy over Jane Austen, not only producing movies but also inspiring lectureships and book clubs even in the backwaters, and the critics had begun to go crazy explaining why.

In her book, Joyce was demonstrating, in terms of the latest academic catch phrase, the uses of silence, that in the gaps of Austen’s fiction could be found the potential for vast social changes. It stood to reason what was not there smacked of central preoccupation, or what was referred to in the academy as silent pressure.

After a year of her hire at NIT, however, the same year she had spent polishing her book, 9-11 and the recession had transformed higher education into a monstrosity, and the accompanying hiring freeze made Joyce suspect that she was stuck indefinitely at NIT, though, on the brighter side, Joyce believed there was no reason she would not be highly valued by the English department, now that she had scored a book contract and a sabbatical, all within the space of two years.

At least it was a job where she would be appreciated. In addition, where she had a health plan. The recession couldn’t last forever, and, thanks to her taking the maximum hours and going to summer school, she had a Ph.D. and a book at thirty-three, not bad, considering her provincial roots and a public grammar school that had banned Judy Blume.

Just a matter of a few days ago, she felt a lightness come upon her after polishing the last word of her tract, two years’ research, her best work, made perfect by the sabbatical, during which Joyce had worked and reworked her manuscript, dutifully missing opportunities for vacations and friends’ reunions and …sex. Joyce hadn’t had a decent sex life since the previous Bush administration.

Joyce turned her elderly Mercedes onto the boulevard that dissected the campus proper. At NIT, no security guard waved her through, but, probably as a result of 9-11, a new professional permanent sign had been erected forbidding firearms, replacing the Building and Grounds’ produced plywood one, a result of Columbine.

The whole campus looked different. In her absence, a new fitness center had materialized. And a golf course. And there, gleaming between a crane and a pile of dirt, Golden Arches. Big Macs had made it to the Ivory Tower. Their new chancellor was a financial genius, she’d heard.

She turned into a parking lot that seemed to be undulating in the end of summer heat. At Chapel Hill, she had had a little card that allowed her into a gated shady lot and gave her quick access to her building. She had to walk a bit here.

The parking lot was dead. By now, at LSU, her alma mater, the campus would have been teaming with professors and students of every nationality crisscrossing the quad, creating a pleasant multicultural milieu.

Crowds of young women, dressed like Jessica Rabbits in flushed anticipation of Rush Week, would be moving about en masse, fashionable ethnographies radiating their premeditated messages for the prevailing ethos.

And the English department, housed in Allan Hall, seat of The Southern Review, stomping grounds of Louis P. Simpson and Robert Penn Warren, of Andrew Codrescu, and NPR, was probably groaning now like an old but reliable furnace ready to roar to life, as talk of latest publications, contracts, sabbatical travels filled the air, and strains of jazz and zydeco wafted through open windows from the direction of the student union.

Outside the mailroom on the second floor, she met her chair, Rhonda O’Hara, and Philip Tinsley, a senior colleague, coming out of the door together.

“Ah, the prodigal child is back,” Philip called. “And how was your state-funded holiday, Dr. Michalak?”

Philip had the same mock jaded look he’d worn during finals over a year ago, the last time Joyce had seen him. He was tall and thin, tennis tanned, and appealingly academic, with his curly graying sandy hair just short of longish. His round wire-rimmed glasses probably reminded students of John Lennon, hippies and the anachronistic protest marches, and Woodstock (now in history books), though, more likely, he was trying to look anti-macho and harmlessly bookish. There were rumors about him and his role as the proverbial male professor predator, but nothing Joyce ever heard that was reliable.

Of course, now in the third wave of feminism, Joyce eschewed essentialism.

Phillip had married a student many years ago when it was not so easy to get away with such a thing. The student, Tina, had come through town with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Troupe playing Lady Macbeth.

Tina had fallen under Phillip’s sexual vibes, or the “it is felt,” as Lacan would say, given up her Shakespearean aspirations, enrolled at NIT, and, it was rumored, never let Philip forget it-- that, and the fact that she had had only a year to graduate Vassar. Joyce had heard Tina once stirred up talk by drinking with a graduate student during, as well as after, the department’s Christmas party.

“Oh, Joyce!” O’Hara, fifty or so, dyed blonde hair in the shape of a modest space helmet, waggled her fingers, and took off, leaving both of them, but talking over her shoulder, as was her wont.

Her voice trailed back to them with a startling resonance. “Welcome back, Joyce!” One would think the chair would be curious over how a professor’s sabbatical had gone and when her book release date was projected, nominal information. At odd times, though, O’Hara could be capable of the most passionate chitchat imaginable, so it was just as well perhaps.

“Don’t forget our meeting at tennnnn.”

“Thank you,” Joyce called out in the direction of her echo. O’Hara had already turned the corner.

Philip was paused outside the mailroom. He was looking at her as though he were doing a close reading of an inferior text. Not a glare exactly, but a most unfriendly stare. Joyce had forgotten how she and Philip never seemed to get around to developing any discernible rapport in her first year. Of course, maybe it was just her imagination.

Philip was thought, at least by some, to be powerful, historically a gatekeeper of the department. And at least one colleague, Marya Ingram, had warned Joyce of his clout by her own obsequiousness to him, if nothing else. Of course, now, Joyce had The Book. He was only one of many who would vote on her tenure, if in fact she actually needed it here. A little current of excitement rippled in her veins. The Book was giving her confidence.

“Hello, Philip,” Joyce deliberately emphasized his first name. His addressing her as Dr. was a slight insult.

“I supposed you are all ready to share your year of research with us poor stiffs who remained behind.”

“I’m sure you have waited with bated breath, Phillip.” Who did he think he was? Now? He wasn’t the only one with a book, now. Phillip’s forte was Francis Mignon and his journals. A good lick, Joyce supposed, if you could stand all that gumbo ya-ya and the schizophrenia needed to sustain an abhorrence of slavery coupled with a love of the bucolic old south.

Phillip was also a New Critic, or that was what he listed in his catalog bio--New Criticism, that specious branch of theory invented by that old former racist John Crowe Ransom fifty years ago.

“But refresh me, what was your research about now? Women’s studies something—or queer theory, post colonialism, sitcoms, some literary equivalent of Piss Christ? You never know now a days. Pornography, mayhap?”

“Oh, Philip,” Joyce forced a laugh. “Jane Austen, if you remember from my hiring interview. Hermeneutics of suspicions, you know, revealing unexamined assignations in which a text may rely on—political, teleological, linguistic…” Sexual, she forbore to add.

Philip rolled his eyes. “Jane Austen—I wasn’t too far off—most certainly pop. And suspicious is right. Say, when are you going to learn to speak English, anyway?”

Philip’s eye rolling was his signature. Even though Philip supported O’Hara as chair and had successfully held other contenders at bay for years, Marya, the tenured but unhappy medievalist in the department, had informed her, on one of her rare days she had her guard down, he was not averse to surreptitiously rolling his eyes in meetings at select people when O’Hara ran on with her academic gobbledygook. Yes…Joyce remembered, suddenly unnerved as hell. She had seen that herself.

“I guess you’ve heard about our new hires—Sep’s idea, actually,” said Phillip.

“Deborah Madsen-Sully?” It took Joyce a second to put her mind into gear. The department had seen fit to hire another Brit Lit tenure hopeful. A Victorian. At first glance at the email announcement, Joyce was stunned, but soon relaxed.

It appeared to be a local hire—Dr. Madsen-Sully’s husband taught at Hollydale. A Wife. She had just graduated with zilch publications, Google had informed.

Joyce took comfort in Dr. Madsen-Sully’s hyphen, which indicated an allegiance to feminism, even though one was seeing fewer and fewer hyphens these days.

Joyce had fortunately not taken Richard’s name, even as an appendage to her own, because of her publications, only two at that point, and not wanting to confuse Google, rather than making it a feminist issue. It was all so confusing anyway. Wasn’t a maiden name a father’s name? So then, one is accepting the mother’s unenlightened choice. And what if one ended up with a monstrosity such as Joyce would have had: Michalak-McClamrock. And do future generations keep adding onto such ungainly names?

Having another Brit Lit around might be a positive thing.

Getting her book accepted, rewritten, and winging in its final form back to Oxford had made Joyce not only a more confident person, but also a more generous person. Perhaps she and Dr. Madsen-Sully could talk shop. Perhaps Joyce could even help her now that she has her own book. That was what enlightened women did.

Phillip was staring at her blankly. “Oh, yes, her, too.”

Joyce remembered. “Oh, you must mean the resident novelists? Yes, I read the newsletter yesterday. This should be interesting.” Sep Prouty, the chancellor, had hired, at the last minute, two Pulitzer nominated novelists as visiting professors. Joyce hoped they would liven up the department.

“Bosnian poet. African-American novelist. We can finally declare ourselves multi-cultural.”

Phillip never said too much to convict himself, but, if Joyce remembered correctly, he always seemed to be testing waters. Right now, he appeared to be treating the multi-cultural aspect as too special. And, she had heard of Phillip’s secret unilateral hiring decisions, so, obviously, he must have been not been in on whatever transpired.

“Well, bravo, for that,” she said. Evidence of injustice always cleared her head. “I never thought I’d teach in a department so completely…white.” What was coming over her?

Phillip shot her a long even look. His sun creased brow seemed to tighten.

“The one, the novelist, has thrust us back into that era when novelists were hired on their novels instead of on their degrees, which in this case, is none.”

“Bravo, again,” said Joyce. Phillip’s even look turned into an almost imperceptible shrewd look then; yes, there it was, unmistakable, and she felt that ripple of skin when she was being faithful to her real, but untenured self. But, now, she had The Book.

“Bravo, indeed.” Then he said, suddenly civil, “We live in strange times, crises everywhere around the nation, but Sep is keeping us going forward. If he thinks famous writers will help our PR, he may be right. Who am I to say? So, is your book contract still on? The recession hasn’t killed it, has it?”

“No, not at all. I have about a year to wait before it’s on the shelves.”

“You must have gotten in under the wire. I’ve heard publishers aren’t accepting anything for two years. The recession has not been kind to men—or women—of letters. Of course, your press is in England, is it not? But I don’t know if they are faring any better. And what is behind that? Sending it off to the Brits? Appeal to your English sensibilities?”

“It’s Jane Austen. Her stomping grounds. I thought I’d have a better chance. And it seems those instincts were right.”

“May I speak frankly?”

Joyce felt her neck stiffen. Speak frankly meant piss you off politely in academia.

“Not to scare you, but Jane Austen seems to be on her way out. And all the fuss about her as well. Seems as though, once a trend is recognized, we are not seeing its high peak, but its ass disappearing over the horizon.”

Joyce tried to look properly respectful. “But I have a publication date and a contract, if you remember,” she said, trying not to purr like a non-feminist.

“But after that?”

Jealous old New Critical fart. In her experience New Critical people were stuck in antediluvian times, peering through smudgy lenses, totally stumped by some unexpected turn of events, like Austen.

As though definite knowledge was obtainable. As though unbiased perception was do-able. What lame perceptions! The New Critics she had known at LSU carried their change in little oval plastic coin purses and sported comb-overs.

“See you in the meeting. Remember where we meet?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned his back and disappeared into the mailroom.

Joyce followed him and grabbed her mail from the faculty boxes and departed in what she hoped was a dignified pace. She had a half an hour before the meeting, time to glance through her letters, find the agenda, check her email, and recapture her sense of space.

She should have said, Austen is two hundred years old and still publishing. She should have said, Read Publishers Weekly with its reviews of Austen-related chick lit, and self-help books based on Austen’s wit and wisdom. And spin-offs, Becoming Jane, and other bios. She should have said, Everybody wants to be Jane, you formalist fucker.

Except, of course, for the part where she died too young and poor.