THE PROFESSORS: A NOVELLA

Image licensed via Adobe Stock. Edited.

“And do you tell me of a woman's tongue, 
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?
Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs.”

– Petruchio, The Taming of the Shrew

“OURS BEGAN, LIKE ALL GREAT LOVE STORIES, IN A CRITICAL THEORY CLASS.”

It was one of his favorite jokes to tell, and one of her favorites to hear him tell. He told it at the first dinner party they hosted as tenure line faculty at the prestigious research university in Connecticut. It went over so well that he told it at every party thereafter, until she got sick and they weren’t getting invited to parties anymore.

“I was fresh off the market and salivating at the prospect of early tenure,” he’d begin, grinning at the table of eager faces inclined towards him. “I was churning out papers on this and that, going home to my one-bedroom hovel and cooking instant noodles like I was still a PhD student.” Then he’d rest his hand on hers, and they’d exchange a knowing twinkle of a look; sometimes, she’d even giggle pre-emptively. “Do you know those students who are simply so good at being students that they remind you why we do all this in the first place?”

There would be nods from around the table every time, doting grins at her. She’d redden and reciprocate, turn back to him. 

“So, yes, I married my graduate student,” he’d say, a blunt confession that inevitably led to laughter both knowing and nervous, adjustments of blouses and jacket sleeves and widened eyes. “But that’s only because my tastes are peculiar. You see, I prefer my women to be much, much smarter than me.”

This was what she loved about him: his humor, certainly, but also his honesty and intellectual rigor. It wasn’t true, she felt, that she was much, much smarter than him—being much, much smarter than Lucas Fairfax was a distinction held by no one—and she frequently doubted that she was even as smart as him, but she was certainly smart enough to know what made his scholarship so appealing, and why he was such an incredible teacher. It was his ability to piercingly identify the truth and then just say it, not with a provocateur’s selfish showmanship but with a stately, calm eloquence that afforded his students an opportunity to have their own epiphanies, to realize what they already knew. Knowledge just takes form in your mind, she’d written in her student evaluation of the class in which they’d met, not as something he’s “given” to you but as something you’ve already had, didn’t realize you’d been mulling over for years. Dr. Fairfax risks accusations of taboo in order to be a brilliant steward of the truth, and I am one of many who have directly benefited from this. 

In his own words, upon receiving a lifetime achievement award from the prestigious research university after a thirty-year career there: I’ve always taken joy in saying the quiet part loud. 

At this point in the co-authored anecdote, she usually got the sense that the general interest had shifted in her direction, which meant that it was time for her part.

“Reader, I married him,” she’d say, at which the other English professors and their wives would smile and laugh. She could imagine what they were thinking. Such a brilliant and progressive couple. Undoubtedly major assets to whatever institution they’re at. What luck that they’ve landed here, with us.

____

She had spent all of elementary school anticipating the seriousness of high school, and when she’d gotten to high school and seen how unserious it was, she longed for college. There she would take whole classes dedicated to the Norton Shakespeare, which she’d read through three times from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, as well as English poetry from 1500 through the present. Not just a two-week long unit on the same two sonnets she’d been made to read since freshman year and a handful of unmemorable sestinas and villanelles, but an entire course on poetry, starting from Old English devotional poems all the way up through Sylvia Plath, whose poem “Daddy” made her blush when she first read it in Mid-Century Women Poets, which she pulled off her father’s shelf. Blushing still, she read it again and again, and finally she got up the courage to ask her dad who Sylvia Plath was. 

“One of the greatest female poets to have ever lived,” he said.

He’d chosen her name, Titania, because he knew she’d be a force to contend with. Like a Fairy Queen. Though what she wanted was to be more like her mother, who was both beautiful and a survivor of the impossible. Even though she often joked that she hadn’t read a fraction of what Tina’s father had, it still seemed quite clear to Tina that she knew more about the world than him. She had little sayings that sounded funny but had a second layer of meaning once you mulled them over. If your boss steals your wages, you can steal his time. The first man you trust is the second one you’ll marry. Inside a man’s drawers are the receipts for his lies; inside a woman’s is a kick in the teeth.
It was out of love and respect for Tina’s father that her mother agreed to the name Titania. But she told Tina she’d made sure to push for a middle name that could be shortened easily, just so you’d have something to go by in school. For this, Titania Christina McCrum had been very grateful. 

Her father felt she was fit for the Ivy League and encouraged her to apply to only the best schools, including Yale, his alma mater.

“You’ve got to believe in yourself,” he commanded. “If you apply and don’t believe in yourself, it’s a fait accompli. The cosmos can smell fear.”

 It was a rare moment of mysticism for him, and Tina’s mother assured her that the cosmos wasn’t actually capable of smelling her fear, and that it was probably wise to apply to a range of schools, including a few safeties. Feeling daunted by the entire process, Tina thought this was wise, though she found herself exasperated by what her mother said next: “And keep in mind that you’re not just going for the academics, but for the other students, too. You may just meet your future husband there.”

Laughing at husbands in the abstract while still obsessing over the men in their orbit: it was one of her mother’s many contradictions. At certain hours of the day, Tina observed her to have the grace and beauty of an old Hollywood starlet, flawlessly complected in her farm girl jeans and flannels, like Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly dressed down for an adoring magazine profile. And then at other hours she was a bony finch who flinched at the touch and complained in her squeaky child’s voice of little sleep, too much sunlight, allergies to everything from the cat’s dander to falling leaves. 

She had been Canola Princess at the 1973 Oklahoma State Fair, where she and Tina’s father had first met. She was just out of high school, and he was a young professor at the University of Tulsa. She was playful, stopping everything to dance whenever her favorite Tina Turner songs came on the radio, making her famous spaghetti á la Norman (spaghetti and meatballs arranged to resemble her farmer father’s chubby, mustachioed face), delivering monologues memorized from her favorite romantic comedies. But by the time Tina was looking at colleges, her boughts of misery had begun to take on the dimensions of a pathology, confining her to bed for whole afternoons or resulting in missed hair appointments, forgotten dry cleaning, minor traffic accidents. It was something Tina and her father whispered over with a combination of worry and exasperation, like two doctors saddled with a treatment-resistant patient. 

“Your mother is a traditionalist,” her father offered once, the sad lilt of pity in his voice. “She doesn’t believe women can achieve greatness, and she doesn’t realize that this belief is responsible for her own unhappiness.”

This was confirmed for Tina by her mother’s charm school admonishments to walk gracefully with her shoulders back and sit ladylike instead of slouching forward. She hadn’t pursued an education beyond a few community college classes taken before meeting Tina’s father, and she tended to abandon even the easiest books days after starting them. None of it squared with her hard-bitten pearls of wisdom, least of all her obsession with marrying well. 

“I don’t care who’s in the White House, who’s burning their bra, or who’s giving you a promotion—you’ve still got to marry well,” she was fond of saying, at which Tina’s father shook his head and Tina rolled her eyes. 

But when Tina heard back from the Ivies—we are sorry to inform you…a very competitive year…regrettably, even some of our strongest candidates have been waitlisted—she wondered if she hadn’t paid close enough attention to her mother. She searched through her application: it couldn’t have been her grades (all perfect) nor her extracurriculars (Model UN, mock trial, founder of her high school’s Jane Austen Society). She wondered if it had been her essay. It was supposedly about  Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” but it was also about the trial of the local Methodist pastor, who’d been convicted of grooming and assaulting a handful of his young congregants. Tina’s mother had been one of those congregants, beginning when she was just eight and ending when she was fifteen, and Tina had been so impressed by her mother’s strength during the trial, how unwilling she was to let her abuser’s corruption shake her own faith. Tina had concluded that literature was her own safe haven, and that she knew studying it would provide her with an unshakable foundation upon which to build a life of the mind.

Her father had read it through several times, even proofed it, and told her it was excellent. 

“I don’t know what it could be,” he said bitterly. “It’s like they’ve stopped being able to recognize actual talent. I’ve half a mind to call the Yale admissions committee.” Though he said this many times, he never made any calls. 

The safety schools all accepted her, some with large scholarships. She got a full ride to Taft Astor University in Texas, including a personal letter from the chair of the English department expressing her enthusiasm for “such a strong application” and offering Tina a small scholarship the department reserved for a promising incoming freshman with a stated interest in studying English literature. 

“This is a university that respectful young men go to, the kind who will hold a door open for you,” her mother said, struggling with the cap of her Valium bottle. Tina got it open for her, and she swallowed two pills and slept for sixteen hours.  

Tina was prepared to be disappointed by this university her mother was so enthusiastic about, and for the first year she was. It appeared to be a party school founded by Methodists, which should have been an unresolvable paradox, full of cheap beer and bad sex of Greek life. The handful of gen ed requirements Tina hadn’t yet fulfilled through her high school Advanced Placement classes were packed full of sorority sisters, faces garishly shellacked with dime store makeup, paying less attention to the lecture or even to each other than to their fraternity brothers, who sat dazed and hungover at the backs of classrooms and lecture halls, swarmed by foul clouds of cologne intended to overpower their potent admixture of vodka and body odor. She went to a few of their parties but always found a way to leave the minute one of them grabbed her wrist or tried to sneak a hand up her shirt.  

She was seriously considering dropping out after freshman year until she received the next year’s course catalogue in the mail, and realized that she had enough credits to declare an English major early and begin taking the classes she wanted to take. And what classes there were! Animal Rights in Victorian Literature and Psychoanalysis and the Feminine in Poe and Beginning Poetry Writing. There was one class that seemed to be a prerequisite for all the most enticing-sounding upper-level courses, and that was something called Intro to Critical Theory with Dr. Lucas Baxter. The course description was just two sentences long: Do we enjoy texts more or less when we think too hard about them? We’ll put three Big Books to the stress test and find out. 

Professor Baxter was on leave in the fall, so she had to wait until spring to take Intro to Critical Theory. The class was small: ten students, the women sporting colorful hair and Doc Martens and the men glasses and black turtlenecks. Tina arrived on time to find that she was the last one to class, which was the first time such a thing had happened to her. Many of her classmates were reading novels that weren’t any of the three on the syllabus. 

Ten o’clock came and went and no one said a word, so Tina pulled out her own recreational reading: Memnoch the Devil, the latest installment in the Vampire Chronicles that she’d been struggling to pry herself from for the past few days. But as she studied her cohort’s reading choices more closely, it occurred to her that maybe hers was what one might call a guilty pleasure. There was someone reading Play It As It Lays and someone else reading The Stranger and someone reading The Group, which was a book she’d never heard of. These were serious and dignified books, different from Memnoch the Devil with its quasi-Biblical cover and Anne Rice’s name in giant white lettering. She hurriedly stuffed it back into her bag, only to look up and see Professor Baxter at the front of the classroom. 

He was not as she’d imagined him. He was young and bearded and handsome, with the kind of body that probably unfurled when it stood. He must have been over six feet tall and his chest and shoulders were broad but still fit neatly beneath his dress shirt, so it took her a minute to realize that yes, he did have the physique of someone who regularly did bench presses. He rested his briefcase on his desk and then clicked it open, adjusting his glasses while rifling through the papers within. He did this for a few seconds before looking up and grinning and saying, “It seems you’re all more prepared for this class than I am.”

Tina hadn’t realized that there’d been a kind of reverent silence in the room until it filled with laughter, joyful ebullient excited laughter. Tina joined in, snorting a little.

Professor Baxter produced two books from his briefcase and set them down on the table in front of him: Madame Bovary and A Lover’s Discourse. Obediently, everyone else in the room removed the same two books from their bags. Tina followed suit. 

“Okay, you lucky ten who didn’t get stuck on that giant waitlist.” He took a seat on the edge of the table. “What do these two books have in common with the statement President Clinton just made to America last week?”

Confused, they looked among each other. Tina was embarrassed at how difficult it was just to conjure her memory of the president’s statement, a national event she should by all rights know about, let alone connect it to two books she’d never read. Was Professor Baxter talking about the thing with the White House intern and the blue dress?

Her relief was profound when he spoke next: “That was a rhetorical question, folks. I don’t think even you’ve read all the assigned books yet, Brooke.” A green-haired girl in the front row giggled. “I’m talking about desire. I’m talking about the age-old human conflict between what we want and what we feel it is good to want.”

He stood, checked his watch, and then began pacing slowly among their desks. “President Clinton has—forgive me—a come thither dalliance with a White House intern. Emma Bovary feels she would be better served by Rodolphe than by her droopy husband Charles. Barthes-as-lover reels from heartbreak, lives among shadows of regret and longing. Wouldn’t it be more convenient if all of them had wanted something different in the first place?” 

The heads around Tina were nodding; she could feel herself nodding as well.

“Who here has heard of political lesbianism?” Professor Baxter surveyed the room with a curious, open face, but no one raised their hand. “Oh, come on! Where are my second-wave feminists?” He raised a fist to appreciative titters. “Gloria Steinem, anybody? Naomi Wolf? What about The Female Eunuch?” He smiled impishly as he began walking back to the front of the room. “Too bad. Feminism may actually be the thing that saves us. Write that down, Soren.”

Soren, rail-thin and white-blond with chunky black-framed glasses, dutifully opened his notebook and wrote it down, smiling and laughing a little as he did so. The class laughed with him. 

“Read it back,” Professor Baxter said.

“Feminism may actually be the thing that saves us.” Soren’s voice was squeakier than Tina had anticipated.

“Bingo. Soren gets it. See, ladies? Plenty of fish in the sea.”

More confused yet joyful titters. Professor Baxter took a seat on the desk once again, this time leaning back to cross his legs. “I can’t imagine we have any Neanderthals in the Intro to Critical Theory classroom? Any Stone Age weirdo who’s going to insist that men are smarter than women?”

Everyone shook their heads fervently. 

“Good, I thought not. Because, this would be me otherwise.” His voice took on a cartoonish German accent. “Automatic F!”

Shouts of laughter this time.

 “But really, folks, what I’m saying is that women and men have the exact same capacity for fact-absorption, the exact same potential for worldliness, but men are so frequently ensnared by the booby trap of their pride that they—that we, I won’t separate myself from the pack here—choose desire over becoming.” He turned to Tina, seemed to be addressing her directly. “When we cannot admit of change, we stagnate, and with our stagnation comes the entrenchment of our desires. But then that begs the question: can change be induced? Can our wicked old desires be fashioned into something more…desirable? More politically expedient?”

He pointed with the book to the student sitting next to Tina, a girl in black jeans and black lipstick and a t-shirt screen-printed with Che Guevara’s likeness. Thus far she’d been semi-frozen in a state of tense bewitchment that didn’t quite match her outfit, but Tina could hardly blame her—she was feeling fairly bewitched herself. 

“Can they, Katie?” he asked the girl. 

The girl swallowed, shook her head. 

“Say whatever you’re thinking, like an analysand. Whatever comes to mind.”

“Because, um—you can’t control what you want? It’s like, instincts?”

He nodded vigorously. “Yes, exactly. We’re not Puritans, are we? Those of you who took the American lit survey with me last semester know exactly where Puritanism got us, socially and artistically. I’ll admit that political lesbianism hasn’t fared much better.” 

Scattered laughter. He set down Madame Bovary on the table, gently, as though arranging a decorative centerpiece. “This is why there’s no better critical lens through which to read Flaubert’s masterwork than that of feminism and queer theory. Because who better than Emma Bovary to attest to the fact that the heart wants what it wants?”

He glanced back in Tina’s direction once more, then opened Madame Bovary, and as he began reading aloud from the first chapter, it occurred to her that she’d been the recipient of such a covert look before, in classrooms and at bus stops and in restaurants, from men of all ages and levels of attractiveness. Though it was always the more put-together ones, the ones wearing expensive suits or pea coats or wool sweaters, who’d done as Professor Baxter had: a quick look followed by a polite aversion of the eyes, less out of embarrassment for looking than for the presumed infringement upon her privacy. A stolen glance her mother had called it, and instructed Tina that there was something very important to remember about men who steal glances versus men who ogle, leer, and peep. But Tina couldn’t remember what her mother had said, nor could she hear anything that was being said around her but for the whoosh of blood in her ears and the chaotic drumbeat of her heart. 

The first paper she wrote for Intro to Critical Theory was titled “Emma Bovary as Female Eunuch, or: Why We Can’t Always Get What We Want.” It received a grade of A++. At the bottom of the final page, Professor Baxter had written: Come see me during my office hours? 

____

The university had its own e-mail system, but Tina’s parents still didn’t have a personal computer, so her communications with them were confined to letter-writing and increasingly infrequent phone calls. 

I think I have what it takes to become an English professor like dad, she’d written them towards the end of her sophomore spring semester. At least my professor thinks I do. He wants me to help him do some research over the summer for his next book. 

When the dorms shut down in May, she sublet a room in town and worked a few odd jobs, her favorite of which was Research Assistant to Professor Lucas Baxter, for which she drew a salary of $7.25 an hour—the highest hourly wage she’d ever been paid. Her first job responsibility was to read voraciously, which she already knew how to do, but this time she was reading books far more important and complicated than she’d ever read before: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and a new novel by a Belgian woman writer called I Who Have Never Known Men. Her second job responsibility was to meet with Professor Baxter in his office and discuss these books at length, which was even more exciting than reading them. 

He showed up in shirtsleeves, sometimes even in a t-shirt and jeans, and propped his feet on his desk, making a joke about the Texas heat or fiddling around for a colorful hacky sack which he said a student had given him as a gift. And then he’d say, “Debrief me,” and toss the hacky sack from hand to hand as she debriefed him on that week’s reading. He would pause her occasionally to ask a question, challenge her on a narrow assumption, or correct her on a portion of the reading that she’d misunderstood. But mostly he listened, and after that they’d have a discussion that could sometimes last for hours, with Tina alternately doubled over in laughter and as wide-eyed and spellbound as she’d been in class. Then he’d close by reading to her from his monograph-in-progress and soliciting her opinion—an honor of the highest order that she nevertheless had to pretend was just another unremarkable part of her workaday life.

The monograph was titled The Madman in the Attic: Masculinity, Modernity and the Neurotic Self in the 19th Century Novel. He confided in her that he was nervous because Cambridge University Press had accepted it on proposal after the surprise success of his first monograph with a lesser press, but he didn’t know if this quite had the bite he wanted it to have. When she assured him that it definitely did, that everything she’d heard him read to her had been amazing, he smiled bashfully. 

“You’ve just got to say that because the university’s paying you,” he’d respond. Or: “I’ve been in analysis long enough to know when I’m being flattered.”

But before she could try to protest, he’d make her laugh again. Or he’d ask her a question that required some mulling-over. Or he’d assume the cartoonish German accent and say, “Nein! Ich meine, was ich sage!” And she’d always leave his office feeling like she’d had a front-row seat to an incredible standup performance that was somehow also educational. 

Professor Baxter wants to co-author a paper with me! she wrote her parents with a giddy mixture of excitement and pride. He thinks we can develop some of this summer’s ideas into something publishable!

What luck! So thrilled to hear you’ve got someone there capable of seeing your immense talent, sugarbean, her father wrote back. Your mother will I’m sure be overjoyed to hear this news—that is, if she can ever manage to rouse herself from bed! 

The paper, titled “Charlotte Brontë and Fear of the Feminine Psyche: A Revisitation” was published in Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis, a prestigious journal printed by Cornell University, where Professor Baxter had gotten his PhD. It wasn’t until spring of her junior year that Tina was able to hold a bound copy in her hands: her first publication, and her name listed right beneath Professor Baxter’s. Tina McCrum, Taft Astor University. As though she were a professor there instead of an undergraduate student. 

“You ought to start thinking about master’s programs,” Professor Baxter told her. “It’s never too early.”

So she did, aiming once again for the stars: Columbia, Brown, Stanford—even Professor Baxter’s program at Cornell. She was admitted to all of them, and chose Stanford because they gave her the biggest stipend, and because she’d always wanted to live in California. 

During her first week in Palo Alto, she received an email from Professor Baxter that made her heart ache. So proud of my brilliant and courageous former student. Reach for the stars, Faerie Queene! (He knew her full name by then.)

She wrote back as soon as she had the chance, to which he responded within hours. Their correspondence took off in full force, and like every collaboration with him, she found it both edifying and demanding. Sometimes more so than her classes.

What a great pleasure, getting to upgrade our relationship from “professor-student” to “friendship,” he wrote, and confided in her as a friend. His year was, lamentably, not going very well. Although his monograph was slated for publication in October and had been enthusiastically received by his editors, any excitement about these developments was crowded out by a painful personal development in his life: his divorce.

Tina was shocked. He’d rarely spoken of Margaret, but when he did, it was in the most complimentary terms. She was “a blazingly brilliant woman” who would have been “a giantess of literary criticism in a different life,” but she’d never managed to finish her PhD dissertation. As a result, the university had been unable to approve her as a spousal hire when he was hired, so she’d been confined to the role of adjunct. She’d found this role so unsatisfying that it had led to a years-long depression and a “total drop-off in all her activities, creative and social.”

I’d been encouraging her for years to get out more, to try new things. So what if you have to start with the book club at the library or the quilting ladies at the farmers market? Just accept that not everyone is going to have three-quarters of a PhD, and that doesn’t mean you can’t still be friends. 

Tina snorted as she read this. How was he so funny even in the depths of what she knew had to be incredible pain?

But I guess none of that was enough. Nothing was enough. There was another man. 

At this, Tina was shocked. Margaret had transformed in her mind from a fragile, broken-winged bird, a talented scholar whom the world had cruelly denied a fair shot, to an unrepentant villain—a glutton. She had Lucas Baxter all to herself and yet she’d stepped out? What on Earth did she think she was lacking? What did she expect? It was truly mind-boggling. Tina told him as much, albeit in less incredulous language: Hard to believe anyone worth their salt would want to hurt Dr. Lucas Baxter. 

That’s kind of you, he wrote back. By the way, you can call me Luke. 

Stanford was not what she’d expected it to be. Here at last was a serious school whose students and faculty were expected to undertake world-famous scholarly endeavors, and yet Tina encountered more of the same: the drinking and drugs, the bad sex, the sweaty insecurity. She taught undergraduates whose last names she recognized from ubiquitous household brands, from commercial banks her father had referred to as “criminal money-laundering operations,” and more than a few of them broke down or threatened her if she gave them anything less than an A. A student in her cohort regularly flew to LA for film auditions, told everyone she was just “biding her time” until she landed something.  

So often, those name-brand schools are little else that just that: brands, Luke wrote in response to one of her more beleaguered emails on the subject. All form, zero content. Trust me, I had to learn the hard way. 

He wondered if she’d consider coming back to TAU for her PhD? He knew every school and its mother was probably trying to recruit her, but he’d thrill at the opportunity to work with her again. 

She bit her lower lip as she read his email. Lucas Baxter would thrill at the opportunity to work with her. Perhaps he’d blushed as he’d typed the word, or maybe felt that dizzy elated light feeling she always felt after leaving his office during her summer as his research assistant. Imagining him so moved felt both embarrassing and delicious at once. 

I would be similarly thrilled! she responded. When he wrote back, it was with the news that the chair was prepared to offer her a substantial fellowship if she applied. Which of course she did—she would have applied regardless of any fellowship. 

____

It wasn’t until the second year of her PhD that her parents finally got a home computer and set up email. It was her father who wrote first, an uncharacteristically laconic “e-letter”:

Dear Tina, 

Your mother is very ill—mentally, not physically, though the one has begun to affect the other. Please give us a call when you can, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.

Love, 

Your father

She read the email several times through, puzzling over her father’s words. Her mother had certainly had her bouts of melancholy, her odd flintiness, but it had never overpowered her to the point of illness. Very ill struck Tina as an odd an slightly terrifying combination of words, hinted at an issue that required Tina’s urgent attention. 

So she made a note in her planner to call her parents, but it slipped her mind week after week. She told herself that it was because she was very busy, which wasn’t untrue. Whenever she wasn’t in class or teaching or writing, she was having a lot of sex with Luke Baxter.

It had started the previous spring, when he’d invited her out for dinner to celebrate the successful completion of the first year of her PhD. He was barely over forty and already tenured, hard at work on his next book, a collection of essays that he described as a “toe-dip into cultural criticism.” The divorce had aged him somewhat, though only in appealing ways: silver in his hair and beard, deepened crow’s feet that made his eyes appear kinder. He was still a regular at the gym. 

“I have to distract myself somehow, and you’d be surprised by how much pull-ups help,” he said, and then ordered them both a $115 bottle of Riesling. She began to object as the waiter left, but he smiled and shook his head. 

“I’ve sold the book to Random House on contract. You’re the first to know—I’d like to celebrate with you.”

When they were halfway into the bottle, he said: “You know, I’ve always thought your wheelhouse was feminism and psychoanalysis. Apply that to, say, gender in the 19th century novel and you’ve got yourself a hell of a dissertation right there.”

When they’d finished the bottle, and she was hiccupping and wine-drunk: “Why don’t you let me drive you home? You don’t live far from here, do you?”

She didn’t. And as it turned out, neither did he: just a stone’s throw away, in a condo he’d moved into after the divorce. He gave her the grand tour, and as she perused his bookshelf, dizzy eyes swimming over titles like Sexual Personae and Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, he told her he was getting tired of Texas. He wanted to go on the market again and see if he could do better. 

She spun to face him. “I know you can,” she said without hesitation. “You could teach anywhere you want to, even Harvard or Yale.”

He grinned and cast his eyes to the ground, wedged his hands in his pockets. “Well, I don’t plan to make any moves without you.”

Before she could communicate what she was feeling just then—an airy swirl of confusion with notes of surprise and delight—he was kissing her. And she was kissing him back. 

She realized that she’d fallen in love with him the minute she’d met him as a college sophomore in Intro to Critical Theory, that there had been an almost inevitable progression from that moment to now, when they’d become lovers. A progression so magnificent and fated as to mirror the progression of history itself! 

And she understood that the main difference between loving Luke now and then was that she’d had the time to become an adult in the interim. She’d read some of the books he’d read, all of the books he’d written, learned some facts about the world and formed her own opinions about those facts—opinions he never disputed. Opinions that seemed to delight him, even, and that he told her were confirmation of her brilliance. 

“Your students are so lucky,” he told her, kissing the flesh of her inner thigh. “Watch out—I might just steal one of these ideas when I need a witty riposte during a soul-crushing intro class.”

All of this—kissing in his office, dashing back to her apartment from his condo early in the morning, hours-long conversations about Camille Paglia and Freud and the “modern novel of ideas” followed by session upon session of lovemaking—was what kept her from calling her parents. So it was with a guilt-leaden heart that she picked up the phone on the rare night she was home long enough to hear it ring.

“Hello?” It was her mother’s voice, but frailer than she remembered it.

“Mom, I’m so sorry.” She launched into a litany of excuses: her coursework, her students, a parking ticket she was contesting. “But I just wanted to say I got dad’s email—are you okay?”

“No matter,” her mother said brightly. It was hard to tell if she was affected or not. “Your father and I know you’re busy. We’re both so proud of you. I didn’t really even want to bother you, but he insisted I call.”

“Insisted you call? What are you talking about?”

 “Oh, it’s nonsense, sweetie. Things like this always are.”

“Things like what?”

She heaved a rattling sigh. “The doctors say I’m too depressed, and they want me to go away for a while.”

“What? What does that mean, ‘too depressed’? Go away where—to a hospital?” The lead balloon swelled in Tina’s chest: was it her negligence that had done this? “Mom, tell me what happened. Please?”

“Darling, nothing!” Her voice was bright again. “Nothing happened—I had a little fall, that’s all, and your father got a doctor for me who thought that maybe I should recuperate for a while. Not quite a hospital; it’s called a recovery program. It’s on a lake.”

“That sounds nice, I guess,” Tina said, but she wasn’t sure if it did. For some reason, the face of the pastor who’d groomed her mother appeared long and horse-like in her mind’s eye. “How long is it for?”

“Just a few weeks. See, this is what I told your father, that you’d worry right away and get distracted from your classes.” 

“A few weeks is a long time, mom,” Tina said. 

“The last thing either your father or I wants to do is worry you.” Her mother spoke decisively, as if she hadn’t heard what Tina had just said. “We are so very proud of you, that you’re pursuing your PhD. You’ve inspired me to go back take some classes when this whole ordeal is over.”

Tina said that was a great idea, and her mother promised to call her from the treatment program when she arrived. But Tina never got a call, or else she wasn’t home to receive it. When she rang Luke’s doorbell the next day, eager to talk about the sad news, he answered with eyes aglitter from sleep deprivation. 

“Baby,” he said. “I’ve been up all night drinking and writing and I think I’ve had a breakthrough. The scholarly kind, but also the emotional kind. Do you want to co-author another paper with me?”

___

He wanted to write a paper with her about the novel he was writing. It was a novel about his psychological turmoil.

Haunted by memories of Margaret, on the other side of a joint and two glasses of absinthe, Luke told her he’d sat down at his kitchen table to do “something crazy,” which was write fiction. He’d ended up writing by hand the entire first chapter of a novel plus an outline. It was very hard to read, but he’d explained it to her: man meets wife, man loses wife, man becomes wife, wife becomes man.

A body-swap narrative—she hadn’t pegged him for a speculative writer. She thought it sounded brilliant and agreed that they should co-author a paper about it. When she asked what he was thinking of by way of a thesis or secondary texts, he grinned and nibble-kissed her ear and said, “I’ll leave that up to you.” So she went home and searched her bookshelf. What’s the perfect example of a novel, she wondered, that best illustrates its author’s psychological turmoil? 

And then she hit upon it: Wuthering Heights. Not as biography, or some kind of metaphor-laden autofiction, but as a speculative dream, a compelling counterfactual. Could the great psychoanalysts be called upon to help us infer a thing or two about enigmatic Emily, to treat her as both celebrated novelist and couch-bound analysand? It turned out they could. 

There was no way to travel back in history to check Tina’s work, but then wasn’t all criticism some form of speculation? Heathcliff as raging id, reckless puer, all the things Emily must have most loathed and wanted in herself, being an unusually straightforward woman, sometimes even perceived as mannish. There was the frustrated female eunuch again in Catherine Earnshaw, and the subconscious itself in the vast windswept moors, this entire psychotic dream intruded upon by Lockwood-as-superego (and thereby Emily-as-novelist). It was feminist psychoanalysis, the thing Luke had said she was best at—it was, he said, a landmark paper. 

“All I gave you was my drunken ramblings,” he said. “Put my name second. Say I’m your teaching assistant.”

She laughed, pretended to balk a little, did it anyway. 

The paper was called “Emily Brontë’s Psychoanalytic Dream,” and it was so well received that she decided to turn it into her dissertation. She read and researched and furiously produced chapters that he then offered feedback on, frequently during their languid, postcoital weekend mornings. She had chosen Woolf and Plath to psychoanalyze in addition to Brontë. The working title was Female Genius: A Dream Denied. 

Though he loved the chapters on Woolf and Plath, he was ambivalent about the title. On the one hand, it was simple and definitive, which could be eye-catching. But was it too simple, too definitive? 

“You don’t want to act like yours is the final word on the matter,” he said. “Any hiring committee of tenured white male hominids can and will mistake that for arrogance.”

“But if they just read what I’m saying, they’ll see that I’m not arrogant at all,” she said. “Isn’t that the whole point of the writing sample? And if they actually read the writing sample and still think I’m arrogant, then I don’t want to work there anyway.”

He shrugged and nodded noncommittally. Then he asked her if she wanted to have sex again, which she did.

Her father emailed again, this time with good news: Your mother did fantastically well in her recovery program. We’re hoping to see you at home for Christmas this year. 

Determined not to let this communication pass her by, she wrote back promptly: Wonderful to hear! I’ll be there!

Next year, she’d defend her dissertation, and after that she’d be on the market. Or rather, she and Luke would be on the market together. He said Random House was breathing down his neck, so he’d need to hole up for a few weeks to work on his newest book, which he’d so far been tantalizingly secretive about. He’d also been secretive about their relationship, though his reasons for that made far more sense. 

“Academics are the most judgmental, gossipy assholes you’ll ever meet,” he’d said the first time she asked. “The last thing I—we, really—need is the entire English department chattering about our sex life.” She had to admit he had a point.

His holing-up period having just begun, she decided to treat herself to some time at a favorite coffee shop. She brought Mrs. Dalloway—her third reread since beginning work on her dissertation, and at this point a comfort read.

Curled up in a corner at the back of the shop, nursing a latte and reading the part about shellshocked Septimus Smith jumping out a window, she sensed a hovering male presence. She looked up to see a smiling boy with hair still wet from a recent shower, a confounding bit of latte foam not at the edge of his mouth but on his cheek—almost directly under his eye. He had to be close in age to her, mid-twenties, and wore his flannel unbuttoned to reveal a crisp-looking undershirt. 

“Hi,” he said. He looked startled to have been caught hovering.

She gestured to her cheek. He seemed confused, and then when he realized what she meant, surprised again. He wiped the foam off and asked, “All clear?” 

She smiled. “Yeah. How do you miss your mouth and hit your cheek?”

He laughed. “Hell if I know.” He put out his hand to shake—the gesture was guileless. “Miles. Sorry if this is weird—I thought I recognized you from that talk. You asked a great question about Yugoslavia.”

She scanned her memory and then recalled a Serbian documentary filmmaker’s visit to campus earlier that month. She’d gone without Luke, who’d needed to stay home and work on his book.

“Oh yeah.” She laughed. “That was fun. I need to go to more things like that on campus. I’m just not used to going—” She interrupted herself, unsure of how to finish her sentence. He widened his eyes, nodding encouragingly. 

“I’m not used to going without my friends in my program,” she said. 

“Yeah, I get that.” He fiddled with the hem of his flannel. “I’m in the playwriting program—you tend to really bond with your cohort. But yeah, um, I know about a show happening this Friday? A bunch of us are going, if you wanted to come?”

She surprised herself by saying it sounded fun and exchanging cell numbers with him. He sent her a text message with the time and place, followed by a single sentence: It was nice officially meeting u :)

Luke said he needed to work through the night on Friday, so she went alone. The band was good, but she found herself paying more attention to Miles and his friends. They were witty, self-deprecating without being self-loathing, nerdy about theater the way she was nerdy about novels. They’d grown up watching the TV shows she’d watched, even liked the music she liked. She’d always judged people her age to be willing inhabitants of a cultural wasteland, impossible to reach and too unserious to be worth reaching anyway, but this group was different. 

“Maybe I should’ve done playwriting,” she said after her second beer, the band launching into a psychedelic cover of “Uptown Girl.” 

“I bet you would’ve been really good at it,” Miles said. “You strike me as the kind of person who’s really good at a lot of things.”

She saw Luke only twice in the next two weeks: once to drop off some groceries, and then again to retrieve a book from his condo. He seemed distracted both times, made little eye contact and offered her quick pecks on the cheek, promised this “big long productive haul” would be over soon. She told him she believed in him.

She saw Miles and his friends once more—at a screening of a Fassbinder film on campus—and then hung out twice with Miles alone: once parallel-working at the coffee shop where they’d met, and then again at his apartment, where he invited her to watch another Fassbinder film called Katzelmacher.

They watched in earnest quietness, and as the credits rolled, he put his hand on hers. It made her heart flutter, though not in a good way. She waited a few seconds before pulling her hand away. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry—I, um—” 

He seemed sweaty, embarrassed: she didn’t want to hurt him. 

“I’m seeing someone else,” she said. 

He swallowed, blinked, nodded. “Right.”

“I didn’t mean to lead you on. I’m sorry—I really do want to be friends.”

She braced herself for it: the male rage and humiliation, the panic masked by a torrent of accusations and blame. But Miles just looked tired.

“I get it. I want to be friends, too.” He smiled weakly. “But can I—do you mind if I just ask a question?”

She nodded. 

“The person you’re seeing isn’t—it’s not Professor Baxter, is it? In English? One of my friends, she said maybe she’d heard something about you and him.”

Tina scanned her mind, trying to think of which friend of Miles’s this could be, but then made herself to stop—that way lay madness. Luke was right about academia being gossipy. 

“No, it’s not him. He’s just my dissertation adviser,” she said.

Miles seemed relieved. “Ok, cool. Yeah, that’s what I thought—it’s what I told her.” He shook his head, laughing. “She just has this axe to grind against Baxter. Like there’s this rumor he got an undergrad pregnant years ago and the university kept it quiet and made him take a ‘medical leave.’” 

She noticed his eyes widening and tried to correct the look on her face from “anxious and sour” to “detached and curious.”

“This place is a rumor mill,” he said, clearly trying to reassure her. “I’ve heard the wildest shit about my favorite profs, too. And if he’s doing his job advising your dissertation, like—it’s not your worry what he gets up to on his own time, yeah?”

She nodded feebly, and then made a self-conscious effort to nod robustly, to look unaffected. “Totally.” She turned to him, hoping her smile appeared more confident than deranged. “Yeah, my boyfriend’s actually long-distance right now. We’re college sweethearts.”

“Aw, sweet,” he said, and then after a long exhale: “Well, I should probably be heading out. I can drop off that mix CD later this week—I’ll just put it in your mailbox on campus.”

He didn’t send her a text message that night, nor the next day, but Luke did: All done! Come by and see me, sweetheart.

She wore jeans and a baggy gym sweatshirt, walked to his condo resolutely. He would open the door and she’d say I just heard a really vile rumor and I need you to tell me the truth if we’re going to be together. She rehearsed the words in her head, whispered them aloud.

But when he did open the door—in the Cranberries t-shirt she’d bought him, eyes slightly puffy from overwork but nevertheless glimmering and kind, smile as broad as his shoulders—she thought: My man. And then she thought: Who knows him better, me or the rumor mill?

“It’s been such a productive time,” he said as he brewed them both cups of black tea. “Thank you for bearing with me. How were your adventures in academic Neverland?”

She told him the story of Miles and his friends, making them sound more naïve and uncultured than they were, ending with a laugh on the story of the failed pass, tactfully omitting Miles’s friend’s suspicions.

He laughed along with her. The tea kettle screamed, and he unfurled himself to tend to it. He’d grown his beard out a little. His movements were calm, considered, fluid. She observed with admiration his natural athleticism, how disciplined he was in both body and mind. 

He set her tea in front of her, mixed with milk and honey the way she liked it, and sat down across from her. 

“What if we got married?” he asked. 

____

They were married a week later in the courthouse, with a dinner at his favorite greasy spoon followed by hours of lovemaking. They’d have their real ceremony wherever they lived next, he said. He wanted to get out of the cesspool of TAU first; by now, so did she. Legs wrapped around his thighs, breathing in unison with him, she understood at last what it was to be a real adult. 

Two weeks before Christmas, her father called her cell. Though she was in the checkout line at the grocery store, she flipped her phone open immediately to answer.

Nothing at first, then her father’s ragged exhale.

“Dad?” she said. “Dad? Hello?”

“Your mother’s passed,” he said quickly, sounding like an attorney serving a client with bad news. “She had—she had an accident with some pills.”

“Dad? What?” She felt the blood draining from her head. She wanted to sit down, but there was no place to. The grocery bagger was asking whether she wanted paper or plastic. 

“Please come home as soon as you can,” he said. 

“Dad?” She felt sick, and like the worst person to have ever lived. 

“Paper or plastic?” The teenaged bagger’s voice was guttural with annoyance. 

Luke was angelic: cooking for her, arranging for substitutes to teach her classes, handling all communications with the chair on her behalf. Christmas break began, and they flew to Oklahoma, where they sat at her mother’s gravesite instead of around the tree. 

“She was a great woman,” Tina’s father said at the end of his eulogy, and took his seat next to her and Luke. And while she shook and wept so hard she was embarrassed, felt as if she might crawl after her mother right down into that six-foot hole, she took a little comfort in the fact that Luke and her father seemed to be getting along. After the service they spoke about tenure, about the drudgery of faculty meetings and the vileness of administrators. Her father had never been particularly given to making new friends, so she was happy to see him transmute his grief this way: chatting with Luke at the buffet during the reception, even cracking a smile at a joke Luke made. Tina stood at the front of the room greeting the mourners, each of whom told her what an incredible woman her mother had been, what a surprise her death was to them. She seemed so happy. She was such a beauty, the envy of every girl in town. We wish we’d known. We would have done something.

And yet Tina had known. She’d known her mother had once suffered hadn’t just “had a fall.” She’d known her mother had once suffered a violation that would break anyone. And yet she, her daughter, had done nothing. 

“You two make quite the pair,” her father said as Tina and Luke took their leave just before New Year’s. “And do tell me when that book of yours comes out, Luke. I have some friends at the Washington Post who are always pestering me to do reviews.”

“Thank you, Alan!” Luke squeezed Tina around the shoulders, planting a kiss on the crown of her head. “You’ll be getting your save the date soon.”

“I look forward to it,” her father said. 

Luke offered to connect her with his analyst, a Lacanian in Dallas whom he spoke with on the phone weekly and drove once a month to see in person. She said she’d think about it but knew she wasn’t going to take him up on it. There was a gory, gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be. Her black, shriveled, selfish little heart. 

She anesthetized the pain the only way she knew how: through work. She finished her dissertation and scheduled her defense for the next fall. She read fiercely, angrily, her intelligence sharpened on the whetstone of her self-loathing. She published a chapter about The Waves. It was her first single-author paper. 

In the spring, Luke got the news that he’d been hired with tenure at a prestigious research university in Connecticut. She hadn’t realized he’d gone on the market a year early, but she was grateful to finally be done with TAU. He negotiated a spousal hire for her. 

She was allowed to defend over the summer, and won the department’s highest distinction for a graduate dissertation. They moved to Connecticut in the fall and she was given an office with her name plate on the door: Dr. Christina Baxter, Assistant Professor. She borrowed Luke’s digital camera to take a photo of it to email her father. 

She submitted her dissertation to a number of presses, and was between Cambridge and Harvard when she got a letter from an editor at Picador: I’m a bit of a Woolf buff and former English prof, chanced upon your Waves chapter in The Journal of Modernism Studies and it was far more engaging/exciting than any academic theory I’ve ever read. I’m not sure whether you’ve found a publisher for the book yet, but I would love to read it if you haven’t. 

She sent the book off to her and then promptly forgot about the exchange—not because she was willing herself to be sane and have patience, but because she was swept up in teaching. The sheer joy of teaching the things she cared about, to students who seemed to care about it too. She lectured on feminism and the gender politics of the 19th century novel and how understanding the inner workings of the human mind could make one a better reader and writer. Her evaluations were strong. Dr. Baxter is a natural-born teacher, one read at the end of her first semester. She has made a difference in my life as a reader and student of literature that I honestly am having difficulty describing because it’s so enormous, another said. She is this school’s greatest asset: do everything you can to keep her. 

She smiled as she read these, wider even than when she read the letter of acceptance from the editor at Picador. How strange and bittersweet that this should all be happening when her mother wasn’t around to see it. Though Tina sometimes wondered if maybe she was seeing it. It had been so unlike her mother to go out with a whimper: it had to be that the bang was coming from the afterlife. A doer, her mother: a puller of spiritual strings. I didn’t get to take those classes, but by God, I’ll make sure you teach them! 

Her mother had been right about marrying well, and it seemed Tina had been right, too: women can achieve greatness. 

____

It was spring, which was fairly temperate in their little corner of Connecticut, and Tina’s first year on the tenure track had been a triumphant one. More exuberant evaluations, a two-book contract with Picador—Female Genius to be published in the summer, ideas for the second already percolating—and an enthusiastic email from the chair, Edwin, who’d apparently been on the verge of retirement for over a decade and was notoriously difficult to impress. We were so enthused to be getting Luke that we failed to consider that you, Christina, might be just as valuable a hire—if not more so, ha! (In all seriousness, don’t tell Luke or your colleagues, but I can’t recall meeting a junior faculty member with such a strong set of publications since my time as a guest lecturer at Harvard!)

The email made her blush, and she didn’t show it to Luke—not because he wouldn’t agree, but because he wasn’t in the right state of mind to take Edwin’s jokes in stride. He’d been sleeping in late on the days he wasn’t teaching and drinking heavily in the evenings, brooding with his laptop on the couch and nodding absently when she told him she was going to bed. If he didn’t make it to bed, she’d invariably find him passed out on the couch or in his study in the morning. Once she’d come down early enough to find his laptop still open, and not to his manuscript-in-progress but to hardcore porn. She was shocked he could sleep through the sound of a woman being gang-banged like that. 

She’d decided she’d wait until summer vacation to say something, imagining that it was just the combined stress of a new institution and a challenging book project. She kept quiet, took over some extra household duties in addition to the grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning she usually did. Now she got the car detailed, took out the garbage, mowed the lawn, retrieved the mail.

It was the Monday of final exam week when she saw the letter from the Manhattan Society in that day’s bundle of mail. It was addressed to her, so she set the rest of the letters on the table and opened it on the spot. According to the letter, The Manhattan Society was a progressive think tank specializing in the advancement of humane ideas. They had read an advance copy of Female Genius and wanted to offer her the keynote speaker slot at that year’s conference, an event that will feature attendees and presenters from around the world. The proposed speaking fee was $10,000, though we would be happy to be put in touch with your speaking agent to learn more about your rates. 

“Holy shit,” she whispered, feeling light and fluttery and a little unreal. 

She raced to Luke’s study, but it was empty. So she went upstairs to their bedroom, where she found him naked and flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. 

His penis was limp and worm-like, his jaw slack, his eyes unblinking. His position was less erotic than catatonic, and she suspected something was seriously wrong. Her suspicion was confirmed when he didn’t acknowledge her entrance in the room or respond when she said his name. She folded the letter from the Manhattan Society back into its envelope and tucked it in the back pocket of her jeans. 

“Babe?” she said softly, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She had known him for nearly a decade, but had never stopped to consider how much he’d aged. Approaching fifty, his stomach had finally softened in a way that couldn’t be remedied with crunches or the Atkins diet, and his arms were beginning to lose their bulk and tone. There were the wrinkles, too: not just crow’s feet but mouth lines, and a little row of creases in his forehead. 

“Babe?” she asked again. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

“When are grades due?” he whispered. He sounded like he hadn’t slept in several nights, though she had woken up that morning to him fast asleep next to her. “It’s different here than at TAU.”

“No, it’s the same. Spring semester grades are due second week of May.” She was surprised by her annoyance. She couldn’t tell where the feeling was coming from. 

He shifted onto his side and winced, his deflated windsock of a member rolling lazily across his thigh. “Baby,” he exhaled, his face a rictus of exhaustion and anxiety. “It feels like…this is gonna sound fucking weird. It feels like there’s bugs under my skin? And these, um—strings?”

“Bugs and strings? What do you mean?”

And then he leapt up from the bed, suddenly the picture of chaos in motion. Eyes wide, he began rambling: there were bugs crawling under his skin, and every night after she went to bed, he picked at these lesions on the backsides of his thighs, pulled little pieces of string from them. 

“Black, white and red string,” he said, his voice crazed, and turned to show her the scabbed backs of his thighs, though she was thinking less about how insane he seemed than about the fact that she hadn’t seen the backs of his thighs in over a month, given how little sex they were having.

“Oh shit,” he said suddenly, and clutched his chest. “Fuck, baby.” His face went sheet-white and he dropped to his knees, then touched his forehead to the carpet as though he were heeding an imam’s call to prayer. 

“What?” Now she was genuinely worried. She kneeled down on the floor next to him. “Luke, what’s going on?”

She craned to see his face under his arm, to try to make out his expression, but could see little else than his grimace in profile. She said his name, and when he didn’t respond said it again, and then again. At last he turned to her, eyes bloodshot. 

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said.

____

An ambulance ride followed by a twelve-hour ER visit resulted in a diagnosis not of cardiac failure but of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. He’d been having a longform panic attack. But there was an underlying cause, the grim-faced doctor told them: Morgellons disease, also known as delusional parasitosis. 

“A form of psychosis that causes the patient to experience the sensation of bugs under the skin,” the doctor said, addressing not Luke, who had nodded off in the exam room bed, nor to Tina, who was sitting next to him in a state of teeth-chattering anxiety, but to his chart, which he flipped through with great interest as he spoke. “It’s extremely rare. This is actually the first case I’ve seen in my entire time as an internist.” 

At last, he looked up Tina. “He needs a lot of bed rest. Potentially an antipsychotic if symptoms persist. Does he have a family history of anxiety or depression? And what are the conditions of your home?”

“The conditions of—I’m not sure what you mean?” She tried to clamp her jaw shut, but that just caused the panicked energy to travel down into her legs, her knees and feet bouncing. 

“Is there any issue with hoarding in your home? Any chance you might have asbestos or black mold?”

“What?” It had come out as a quasi-scream. Embarrassed, she tried to assume a more modulated tone: “I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Little is known about Morgellons disease.” The doctor’s attention drifted back to Luke’s chart, like a bored date who’d decided he could do better and was already thinking up an excuse to leave early. “But there may be linkages between environmental factors and the more, um, disadvantageous psychological symptoms.”

He stood before she could respond and looked from her to Luke.

“You’ll want to nip this in the bud as soon as possible,” he said, and left. 

Luke seemed to sleep-walk to the car, unaffected by her chattering teeth and racing heart. He slept for most of the drive home, rousing himself right before she turned into their subdivision to ask if the doctor had said the words nip it in the bud.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what he said.”

“I think I know what he means. I think we need to have someone by to inspect the house.” He turned to her, his eyes clearer and more alert than they had been at any point in the past sixteen hours. “The house was built in 1964, according to the deed. If it’s got something wrong with it, like black mold or dialmite or something, it could affect both us. We need to get it looked at.”

“Dialmite?” she asked, but his moment of lucidity seemed to have gone as quickly as it arrived. His eyes were blinking closed again, his expression drawing into leaden somnolence.

She helped him into bed and lay down next to him but couldn’t sleep. She was still awake when the dawn crested the treetops in their backyard. She went downstairs to the kitchen table, which was doubling as her study until they could afford to remodel the attic, and opened her laptop. She Googled Morgellons disease. After reading those results, she Googled delusional parasitosis and then black mold and black mold causing psychosis. She Googled dialmite, which had the fewest results of any search but perhaps the most sinister: a couple of hits on PubMed and WebMD, an essay by a woman who claimed to have temporarily lost her mind after just a year of exposure to the chemical, a short article on a home improvement site titled “Dialmite: The Silent Killer No One Knows About.”

A rare form of heavy-duty adhesive used in home construction in the 1950s and ‘60s, commercial use of dialmite was banned by the FDA in 1971 after toxic levels of the substance were found in the blood of five housewives in the same housing development who all committed suicide within sixteen months of each other.  

She stopped reading and closed the lid of her laptop. Her heart was beating so hard that it no longer felt like a part of her body. 

She was Googling house inspectors near me when he came downstairs hours later. She looked up and saw him watching her at the kitchen table, where an open cabernet and box of donuts had displaced the notebooks she’d begun filling with research for her second book. 

“You look a mess,” he said. “Did you sleep at all?”

“We need to get the house inspected,” she said. “According to what I’ve been reading, they’re saying as soon as possible.”

He scratched his forearm, burped softly. “Yeah, I know. We will. Jesus—why did you stay up doing this?”

“I was worried about you!” Again, she hadn’t intended to shout, hadn’t intended to come across as angry or unhinged, but clearly she had: his expression flattened, and he seemed to vacate his eyes. 

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said.

They booked someone to come inspect the house, a sturdy little man who spent hours scanning their drywall with a strange series of devices and then plodding around in their basement only to return with the news that he’d seen much worse but he’d also seen much better, and that he needed to send a few samples off to an “independent local lab.” 

She tried to write. She tried to tell herself that she was only going to the library and coffee shops to write for a pleasant change of scenery. She encouraged Luke to come with her, but he didn’t want to: he wanted to lay in bed because he’d just gotten an email from his editor at Random House, the one whom he’d been working with for years. They were postponing the release of his book. 

“They’ve really been giving you the runaround,” she said. “Maybe I should introduce you to my editor at Picador?”

He rolled on his side and sighed. “A new publisher means I’d forfeit my advance. We don’t have the money to pay Random House back, with the mortgage and everything.”

“But what if Picador could give you a better advance? Maybe I could just give Enrica a snapshot?” She didn’t know why she was persisting: there was no way her imprint had the kind of money his did. “What was it about again?”

He grunted. “Babe, I’ve told you about a million times now. You can’t have forgotten.”

Had she? She racked her brain but could turn up only essays and cultural criticism. He must have said something at some point. But when?

Memory loss was one symptom of black mold poisoning, so she wasn’t at all surprised when the inspector called to tell them that they had black mold. She felt a little better after the bleaching and pressure-washing: the house seemed newer, cleaner, even a little more spacious. But then she read online that bleach and pressure-washing did nothing for dialmite, that it could only be removed via specific chemical reagents, and that because of this it was safer to just move out of your house if it was found to have dialmite, to schedule it for demolition.

“You’re taking this way too far, Tina,” Luke said when she showed him her research. “The inspector didn’t detect any dialmite. He did his job, we got the mold, end of story.”

By then it was August, and she hadn’t responded to the Manhattan Society’s letter. They’d requested an answer by July 15th, so she forced herself to type one up and mail it off: Please forgive the lateness of my reply, as I have been dealing with a number of personal exigencies. If you are still amenable, I would be honored to deliver the keynote at this year’s conference. 

The school year began, her second as an assistant professor. Luke seemed to be doing better: he had a fixed publication date for his book and was excited to be teaching the graduate seminar on Lacan, inspired by head-clearing work with his own analyst.

“I’m actually feeling quite well,” he told her on the first day of classes, giving her a quick peck on the cheek. “I’m thinking this book is finally done; I might even try some short stories.”

She nodded. She had no idea why her stomach felt so torn up, nor why the front of her head seemed to be populated by such a dense and inscrutable fog. She had read that both were symptoms of extended dialmite exposure. 

“Sweetheart, you look a little distant,” he said. “I’m worried about you. I actually spent most of my session last week talking about it. My analyst and I think you should do something with your hands to stay grounded and in the moment. Would you consider taking up gardening now that we’ve got this fantastic backyard?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, but she didn’t. Instead, she spent the evening Googling, trying to determine if there might have been dialmite in the house that she grew up in, the same one her mother had died in. The evening became night and the night morning, and she realized too late that her British literature survey had been scheduled for 8:30am, so she arrived late and sleep-deprived to the first class. 

“Professor Baxter?” a student in the front row asked, a nearsighted girl with barrettes whom Tina recognized as one of the best students from her Woolf class the previous semester.

“Yes?”

“You’re um—is there a reason you’re wearing those shoes?”

Tina looked down at her feet and was shocked to find that instead of pumps over her black tights, she was wearing Luke’s giant running shoes. Veritable boats on her feet. How on Earth had she not noticed this? How had she walked and driven like this? 

“Ha!” She laughed, because showing alarm would have been a bad idea. Her students joined her in laughter. “I think one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes applies here: The fool doth think she’s wise, but the wise woman knows herself to be a fool.”

After class, she Googled fugues and dialmite and memory loss black mold and mold growing back after pressure-washing? 

The semester didn’t sail along like the last one had: at best, it stumbled and stuttered. Luke cautioned against letting her anxiety bloom into a psychosis, so she allowed him to persuade her into the backyard, which was badly overgrown. There they mowed and weed-wacked and laid in-ground garden beds using gallons of Round-Up and Miracle Gro. When she became so tired that her thoughts were briefly stilled, she slumped into a patio chair while Luke fixed them tea or lemonade depending on the weather. His concoctions were surprisingly pleasant—blueberry lavender, mango mint—and sometimes spiked. They drank in silence, and she felt grateful for him.

But she didn’t feel better, at least not physically. There came the stomach aches: first just annoying, then distracting, then acutely painful. The headaches were more occasional, but blinding whenever they did come. Her primary care physician said she had ulcers and migraines and prescribed her medication for both. Then he referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed her an antidepressant and Valium. 

“Your problem is you’re just spinning and spinning in your head,” Luke said. “We need to socialize more. This is year two already. We should probably meet our colleagues.”

So they hosted a dinner party, after which they were invited to another, and then another. He scandalized and thrilled their colleagues, telling them the story of the Intro to Critical Theory class and their romance of ideas, pushing the envelope and interrogating desire as only he could. She was impressed by him, and pleased to be his wife, and when he spoke about his book and the possible ensuing fiction, she was even excited to get back to the grand project of their joint scholarly life. After each dinner party, she resolved to resume research on her second book, only to be struck down by a migraine or a surge of vomiting mere days later.

At the end of the semester, her evaluations were mixed. Most were votes of sympathy: Professor Baxter is my all-time favorite professor, so it was hard to see her sick like this and I think the English department is working people too hard and should go easier on the new hires. But there was one among them that haunted her, jabbed into the paper in bad-tempered chicken scratch: 

This professor is actually crazy. As in she is insane, and it was distracting from the class material. She was disorganized with assignments, took FOREVER to grade, and would sometimes trail off while speaking like an elderly person. I was really excited to learn about British Literature but I learned NOTHING because this professor is clearly not well. I will try to never take a class with her again, which is going to be a challenge because I am an English major!!

She showed it to Luke, who laughed and shook his head. 

“We all get at least one of these a semester,” he said. “Welcome to the character assassination club.”

She had gotten lukewarm and even unfavorable evaluations before, but none had felt quite as personal as this. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing the things the student said she’d been doing. And most haunting of all was the fact that he—because the handwriting was so clearly masculine—was an English major. 

She dreamed that she stood at the head of a classroom, her attempts to deliver a lecture constantly interrupted by the colored fishing line dripping from beneath her fingernails. The class was growing increasingly bored and restless as she had to constantly pause to remove the fishing line and then resume lecturing, only for it to come back again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It seemed all she could say. “I’m so sorry.”

There he was the dissatisfied student in the back row: bigger than the rest, burly body hunched to fit in his desk. He was angrily writing his evaluation, never looking up even when she resumed teaching. Finally, she said some mysterious string of syllables that was supposed to be his name—a word from another world, an incantation—and he looked up, and it was not a teenaged boy’s face but her father’s looking back at her. And then it was Luke’s. 

Under-slept and dizzy, she opened the mailbox one morning to find a letter from the Manhattan Society, which she tore open and read on the spot: They had been delighted to receive her letter and wanted to be put in contact with her speaking agent. 

Stumbling back inside, she tore a paper towel from the roll by the kitchen sink and wiped her forehead with it. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been sweating. She opened her laptop and drafted a letter to her editor at Picador: The Manhattan Society was asking for a speaking agent, the sum of money was big, did she know of anyone who could help?

Tina hit send and felt her stomach lurch. An anxiety attack? Or the ulcer? Though hadn’t too much of one caused the other? Her palms were sweating. She had taken some Valium hours ago, but she couldn’t remember when. Perhaps if she did some deep breathing she’d remember. Or some more gardening. 

Then she was racing to the bathroom, kneeling at the toilet and retching into the bowl. 

When she finished, she sat against the wall and closed her eyes. Could it be morning sickness? Had she missed her last period? When had she and Luke last had sex? It was much harder to recall when than how: a mounting-and-struggling affair, him shuddering with satisfaction and then flopping across her rigid body. 

She looked down at her arms, which she expected to find bare and pale. But what she saw made her gasp: a creeping, surging network of bugs and string, wound tightly together beneath her skin, colored blue and green and silver like the pieces of a microchip.

____

The home pregnancy tests were negative, but she wanted a blood test.

“What about more gardening instead of more hypochondria?” Luke asked. “It always used to help Margaret.”

“Are you saying I’m like Margaret?” She was suffering through a minor migraine, legs propped on the ottoman. She couldn’t tell if it was bugs beneath her skin or ball bearings.

“No, darling.” His featured had thickened so that his expression was now one of fatherly generosity instead of boyish effulgence. “Keep in mind that Margaret is a person, too—a person with a life of her own, not just a cartoon villain. And a genius in her own right.”

“A genius at keeping house?” She knew she must have been looking at him with the squinty, screwed-up face of a witch, a woman whose beauty had been deformed by her bitterness. “Or was she a genius at her quilting circle? Did she get the most prestigious cheese cubes from Costco for the book club?”

He laughed, not kindly. “Alright, I can see you’re not in any sort of condition to have a normal conversation with me. Rest your head, Tina.”

They didn’t go back to Oklahoma that Christmas because she didn’t feel well enough to fly. Instead, she spoke to her father on the phone, rattling off the extensive list of her physical ailments, her fears that her career had been permanently thwarted. 

“Titania,” her father interrupted her. 

She was silent. He hadn’t called her by her first name in years.

“Sweetbean,” he continued. “Have you considered—have you considered, perhaps, how your marriage might be impacting all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s, well—there are,” he said, and then cleared his throat loudly. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft. “When you’re old like me, and you get some time to think on the tragic things in your life, you realize that there can be—there ought to be regrets. There are certain things I wish I’d done to be better to your mother. There are ways that situation could have borne out—”

“No,” Tina murmured, less an objection than an expression of pain. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We don’t have to, then.” He paused, and she could hear him breathing. “But you ought to think about Luke, sweetbean. You ought to think about—well, I don’t know. What he’s capable of.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“It’s not that I don’t.” He sounded defeated now. “It’s that I’ve known my fair share of Lukes in this life.”

She fell asleep after they hung up, and when she awoke Luke was sitting at her feet holding something oblong and covered in wrapping paper. She’d forgotten it was Christmas. 

Forcing herself to smile, she tore off the wrapping paper to find the hardback and paperback of Female Genius set in a long rectangular shadow box. 

“For my female genius,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. “I hope you feel better soon.”

She felt her icy heart sweating like a frozen daiquiri in high heat. How embarrassing of her to have forgotten that he was, and always would be, her man.

At some point, the semester began. One could always count on the semester to begin. Inexorable, indifferent. Like love and heartbreak, death and taxes. 

With great effort, taking periodic breaks to dry heave and micro-nap, she wrote her syllabi, submitted her lists of required texts to the university bookstore. She emailed Edwin and CCed his secretary, explaining her unusual health situation. She tried to sound tame and brave, inconvenienced instead of insane. She listed a small handful of her physical symptoms and none of her mental ones, mentioned the black mold but not the dialmite. She tried to sound curious about her body’s malfunctioning, bemused even. It was something to wonder about, to patiently investigate, the numbness in her legs and difficulty walking, her persistent fevers and runny noses, her pre-pre-menopausal hot flashes. Certainly not worth panicking about, and definitely not worth an unplanned—and likely unpaid—medical leave. 

If you wouldn’t mind just scheduling all my classes in the same room so I’m not running around the building too much, she wrote, and if one of the GAs could be spared for a couple hours a week to help me with email, as I am having issues with screens, I would be very grateful! The exclamation point was important. Keep it cheerful, keep it upbeat! A functioning body isn’t a requirement for a thriving life of the mind. 

The response came not from Edwin, as she thought it would, but from his secretary, whose name was unfamiliar to Tina. Apparently Edwin’s old secretary had left the year prior, but the university still hadn’t bothered to change her email. Hello Professor Baxter, I am sorry to say that the class schedule has already been set, and GAs cannot be appropriated as personal assistants. If you require assistance with your email, you will need to contact Disability Services.

But how could she email Disability Services, or even look up their number online, if she’d puked up half her breakfast from the effort of sending her original email? The same email over which she’d struggled for nearly two hours, and to which the new secretary had responded with such speedy indifference?

No matter: she’d go see Edwin in person. She’d do it on the first day of classes. He got an abominable amount of emails every day—he’d probably just overlooked hers. Luke agreed that talking to him in person was best, and said he’d drive her in early. 

“Maybe my book will really take off, and then we can quit the gilded cage altogether,” he said. “Give you more time and space away from all this to write and think.”

“I’d be so grateful for that.” She exhaled slowly, trying hard not to cry. 

“I know the gardening can be labor-intensive, but I’ve also been finding it quite peaceful. Maybe we could get back to it this weekend?”

She nodded distantly. “Things will get better, right?” 

“Of course they will, dearest.” He took her hand in his and kissed the tips of each of her fingers. “For someone with your talent and intelligence, the only possible trajectory is up.”

As she sat outside Edwin’s office and watched the new secretary type emails and file paperwork, Tina began to believe that Luke was right. Drug addicts often spoke of “rock bottoms,” experiences of self-loathing and humiliation so harrowing that their only choices had been to rise up or die. She was no addict, but she certainly felt as if her existence, too, had become one of soul-shrinking shame, that she could either choose life and become that brilliant and energized young scholar again, or she could succumb to whatever was trying to claim her. As her creative writing colleagues would say, the stakes were high. There was no middle ground, nowhere to stagnate in indecision. 

She started, realized the secretary was addressing her. The secretary who was much younger, blonder, and more full-lipped than her predecessor.

“I’m sorry—did you have an appointment?” she asked.

“Dr. Baxter,” Tina said, realizing this woman had not yet met her face-to-face. “I’m Tina Baxter. We spoke via email.”

“Oh,” the secretary said quietly. “Were you not able to get in touch with Disability Services?”

“Not yet.” She nodded toward Edwin’s office door. “But I will. Was just hoping to stop in and chat with Edwin first.”

The secretary’s face seemed to draw closed, like a row of blinds snapping across a window. “I’m sorry, Dr. Baxter, but Dr. Mirman isn’t in today. And he’s actually only taking meetings by appointment right now. I can schedule an appointment for you if you’d like?” Without waiting for Tina’s response, she clicked around a bit on her computer. “Sorry, he’s quite busy the first week of classes. Would next Friday work for you?”

But Tina wasn’t listening to the secretary, chiefly because she could no longer hear her. She had dropped from the chair to her knees, gasping for breath until her gasps turned to coughs, her coughs producing streaks of bloody mucus, silver sparks flooding her vision. By then the secretary had joined her on the floor, was calling frantically around them for help. The feet of the 18th century scholar emerged from somewhere, then the feet of the Director of Graduate Studies. Then someone’s voice was on the phone, describing to 911 what their emergency was. And that was the point at which Tina lost consciousness. 

____

Another thing her creative writing colleagues were fond of saying: You can’t just get to the end of the story and tell us it was all a dream. 

Tina had to agree—that was too easy, and too hackneyed. A convenient way to jack up the stakes and then obliterate them with every consequence for the reader and none for the writer. Cruel and selfish: the novelist masquerading as futures trader.

But what of those scenes in fiction that could be just as easily coded as both dream and reality? For example: the heroine awakens to find herself in a hospital bed, though it’s slightly longer than your average hospital bed, and she is hooked up to some machines, far too many machines for a thirty-three-year-old woman who supposedly has a lot of life ahead of her. And standing at the foot of the bed is that woman’s husband, handsome in his wire-framed glasses and zip-up carpenter’s jacket, the one she got him specifically for the dewy Connecticut springs, and he's speaking to a doctor who is, funnily enough, also quite handsome, and observably younger than her husband. (Her boyishly energetic husband now older than a doctor!) It must be a dream, because it’s night—not just evening, but middle-of-the-night, the witching hour—and the doctor is saying deep vein thrombosis…toxic levels of organo-somethingsomething and her husband is saying, voice strained with concern: She’s been doing a lot of gardening lately. She uses Round-Up on the weeds all the time. And then the doctor says in response: Given these blood levels, you’d think she was drinking it.

Yes, it has to be a dream, because what she hears next isn’t the doctor’s voice but her own as a teenaged girl: round UP, round UP. Robbie Daniels, her lab partner in honors chemistry, had not known he could round up to the nearest decimal, had thought it was acceptable to record the molar weight of the alkaloid they were studying out to the third or fourth decimal place. It’s good to be precise, he’d said, entirely missing the point. Their teacher had grinned at the naivete of Robbie’s answer. This is the molar weight of strychnine sulfate, not brucine, he’d said, and then clapped Robbie, who was on the Science Olympiad team, on the shoulder. 

Hold her to a higher standard like we do in the Olympiad, eh, Rob? the teacher said.

And when Tina awoke from the dream, it was to daylight and an empty hospital room and a normal-sized bed and no more machines than are usually in hospital rooms, her phone buzzing on the bedside table next to her. She leaned over to pick it up, meeting with less resistance from her body than she’d imagined she would. Her phone’s screen was bright with a text from someone whose number she’d forgotten she still had. Miles. 

Hey Tina! Long time no speak, and so sorry that I’m not initiating the convo under happier circumstances. I saw Luke’s Facebook post about your recent hospitalization and wanted to send you all the love and well-wishes. Drop me a line when you’re recovered?

She hadn’t thought about Miles in years. According to his Facebook, he hadn’t become an academic, had instead gone into screenwriting and married a documentary filmmaker named Isabel. He had a few notable credits on IMDB, but Isabel was clearly the higher-achieving of the two, having screened multiple films at Cannes and won an Independent Spirit Award for a documentary about lesbian skateboarders. She also appeared to be Miles’s senior by at least ten years. 

Deeper down the wormhole Tina went, reading interview after interview with Isabel until she stumbled upon one in Variety that seemed especially intriguing. Isabel was discussing her latest project, a film about a “forgotten giant of feminist theory” named Alejandra Yassin. 

She rubbed shoulders with Valerie Solanas and Jean-Paul Sartre, Isabel told the interviewer. She translated numerous feminist texts from the Spanish and the French, was hugely influential in the Greenwich Village art scene and the Brooklyn independent film scene, led one of the most pivotal anti-war demonstrations that I think America’s ever seen, and radicalized half the Cornell student body. And yet her work is lost to time. I wanted to find out why.  

Typing with surprising dexterity into her phone’s tiny keypad, Tina Googled “Alejandra Yassin books” and found seven volumes, all published between 1972 and 1989, all out of print. She clicked on the last book, Strange Desires: “a groundbreaking work of autotheory about what women want, what they need, and what is wanted and needed of them.” From there, Tina found a grainy video that had been uploaded to YouTube entitled “Professor Yassin Strange Desires Lecture Cornell English 1992.” The video was over an hour long, and had a single comment from a user named BillOwen1964: One of the most incredible lectures I ever attended. Still think about it to this day. Professor Yassin changed my life. 

Tina clicked play, watched as a short, silver-haired woman with giant plastic-framed glasses stood at the head of a classroom holding a copy of Madame Bovary in one hand and A Lover’s Discourse in the other. 

“What do these two books have in common with Anita Hill’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year?” she asked. Hers was the kind of hard-to-place cosmopolitan accent that made Tina think of the Parisian Left Bank. 

There were a few reverent whispers, some hands half-raised and then retracted. Professor Yassin smiled. “Don’t worry, that was a rhetorical question. But let me give you a hint: I’m talking about the age-old tussle between desire and virtue. I’m talking about what we are willing to sacrifice to allow the heart to get what it wants.” 

Tina watched, stunned, as Professor Yassin delivered almost word-for-word the same lecture Luke had delivered six years later in Intro to Critical Theory. Almost because Luke’s lecture had subtly inverted the gender roles. In Alejandra’s lecture, it was Clarence Thomas, not Emma Bovary, who had been allowed the hero’s picaresque, and Anita Hill who was met with the public pillorying. 

Luke had begun his PhD at Cornell in 1990 and defended in 1996. Two years later, he’d taught that fateful section of Intro to Critical Theory.

Tina’s condition improved so quickly that she was discharged from the hospital two days early. Luke came to pick her up, wearing her favorite cable-knit sweater of his and a pair of expensive-looking boaters she’d never seen before. He was so glad she was feeling better, so thrilled to have her back home, working and teaching had felt impossible in the week she’d been gone. In fact, he didn’t want to burden her and further, but there was a very small chance he was getting sick once again. He was worried it was Lyme, actually, which was apparently quite prevalent in their area. He’d been going on walks with a friend to ease his anxiety, just walks around the neighborhood—

“What friend?” she asked. 

He seemed startled by the question. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m asking who you were going on walks with. What friend?”

It was as if she’d asked him whether he planned to grow a tusk out of his forehead. “I mean—it was Edwin, if that’s so important to you?”

“You were walking with Edwin in the neighborhood?” She grinned despite herself. “Edwin who lives across town, and whose sciatica is so bad he limps from his office to his car?”

His face hardened. “Jesus Christ, Tina. I’m trying to tell you about what I did to cope in your absence and you’re going all CSI on me. What do you think I planned to do, chop his body up and throw it in the woods?”

“There are no woods by our neighborhood, so you’d have to come up with something more inventive,” she said, and then pretended to doze off for the rest of the drive. 

Later that evening, he texted her an article about a huge upsurge in Lyme cases in their area and announced that he needed to get more work done on the book he still hadn’t published, so was going to “an ad hoc writer’s retreat” at a colleague’s house.

“So soon after I’ve gotten home?” she asked, and watched as he stormed out the front door, wearing his backpack and lugging his attaché case. She mused how nothing is ever as it seems, how at a certain angle, one’s handsome intellectual powerhouse of a husband can look exactly like an undignified Oedipal schoolboy.  

She didn’t text to remind him that he’d left his laptop. Instead, she unlocked it—the passcode was his mother’s birthday, of course. She clicked open and sifted through every single folder on his desktop. Most of it was porn, but there was one thrice-nested folder called IDEAS, and it was here that she found meticulous scans of all of Alejandra Yassin’s books. IDEAS contained another folder called HOMING, and it was there that he kept the sections of her books that he had directly plagiarized with nothing more than the genders altered. The folder contained reams of PDFs.  

In a folder called JANE, she found her master notebook for her second book scanned and assembled into an eighty-page PDF. There were also at least fifty photos in JANE of her sleeping in various states of undress, photos she had not known existed. She went through both his personal and work emails—which she realized was not something you did if you loved a person—and could find no evidence of any correspondence with an editor from Random House, aside from an email he’d sent to a junior editor named Dayton Alder back in 2002, the subject line of which was “Hybrid Lit Theory/Divorce Novel Pitch.” Dayton Alder had not responded, nor had he responded to Luke’s follow-up two weeks later. 

It was simple, she felt, what had to be done. She brought Luke’s laptop out of his study and into hers—into the kitchen—and copied everything she needed off his desktop. Then she went back into his study and took from his shelves every single copy of both his books. There were quite a few, enough to fill three grocery bags. She found only one copy of Female Genius, the hardback she’d inscribed To Luke, the love of my life. Behind it, a first edition of Strange Desires. She packed her favorite suitcase with all her necessities, placing both books on top. 

Her sleep that night was deep and long and dark and formless. When she rose, it seemed as if she had never inhabited any point in time but the present. She supposed it could be argued that this was true for anyone.

He wasn’t home, and she knew he wouldn’t be for a while. As she was making herself breakfast, the doorbell rang. It was a girl who couldn’t have been older than nineteen, in low-rise jeans and a form-fitting sweater, hair styled in a silky fringe.

“Oh god,” the girl said in some combination of shock and horror when Tina answered. “Oh my god, I am so, so sorry.”

“What do you need?” Tina asked, not unpleasantly. 

“I—this is so deeply embarrassing, I’m so sorry.” The girl looked over her shoulder, behind her, then back at Tina. “I, um—Professor Baxter is my adviser for the English major, and he, um—he said he wanted to co-author a paper about Victorian novels and feminism with me? He wanted me to come here today to start on it.”

Tina smiled ruefully. He’d gotten sloppy. “Don’t worry, you didn’t disturb me. He’s not here, but I’m glad you came, actually. Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?”

The girl sighed noisily and nodded, scratched at her stomach under the sweater. She didn’t normally wear clothes like this, Tina could tell. She herself had once worn clothes like this, and she’d hated them. They were so uncomfortable.

She got the girl a favorite soft flannel of hers to change into, brewed them both tea, and explained that professors were not supposed to meet with undergraduates off campus, especially not alone in their private residences. She explained that it was also not common for professors to co-author academic papers with undergraduates, that one should be suspicious of any invitations to do so. 

“Thank you so much,” the girl said, visibly relieved. “You’re so smart about this stuff. Do you teach at the university too?” 

Tina shook her head. “I used to,” she said. “I retired early.”

“That’s so cool,” the girl said. Her smile was one of obvious admiration. “I hope you enjoy retirement. I wish I could retire right now, honestly.”

When the girl had gone, Tina took all 28 copies of Luke’s plagiarized monographs out to the fire pit in the backyard and set them ablaze. When she wanted to see the flames dance higher, she sprayed them with a little lighter fluid from the grill that had been a housewarming gift from her father. Then she dragged Luke’s laptop and desktop computer out into the yard and destroyed them both with the aluminum baseball bat he kept in the hallway closet “in case of intruders.” With every swing of the bat, she thought I’m destroying university property. She left the pieces for him to clean up. 

In her 2005 Toyota Corolla, a small and steady little educator’s car: her suitcase, her laptop, the stacks of books and notebooks she needed for her latest project, enough food for lunch and dinner that day, breakfast and lunch the next. She left him no note, blocked his number in her phone. Instead, she thought of Alejandra Yassin’s words as she pulled out of the garage and onto the street: We are not mad, but driven to madness. We are not born ill at ease, but wide-eyed, euphoric, thrilled by our own capacities for love, joy and wonder. It’s the world’s discontent, not our own, by which we are devoured. 

If the Manhattan Society would still have her, that $10,000 could fund a few small-run reprints of Alejandra’s books, Tina knew. That would be all it would take for someone to find one in a used bookstore or at a garage sale or on a friend’s coffee table, to open it and read a few lines and then decide to take it home, to spend more time with it and realize that there are ways to think about one’s life that are different from how we’ve all been taught. That the world is a place of endless possibility: of second, third and even fourth acts, of rising with the dawn and coming back from the dead.

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Rafael Frumkin is the author of two novels, Confidence (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and The Comedown (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), and the short story collection Bugsy & Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Confidence was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of the Washington Post’s Best Works of Fiction of 2023, and named one of the best books of the year by both CrimeReads and Them. The Comedown is being adapted for the small screen at SONY Trident. Raf spent five years as a professor of creative writing and is now a full-time novelist, essayist and screenwriter. She can be followed at The Cosmic Cheeto.

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