Schadenfreude, a Love Story Page 24

  The adjunct job I was offered at the small honors college associated with Witold’s university was a few sections of the introductory freshman literature course, which contained no German texts, but for which I had trained as a TA back in Irvine, when I taught a section of the humanities core sequence. That had been a welcome diversion from my normal duties, of teaching German 101 to half-snoozing freshmen who used Google Translate for most of their assignments, which is not as intellectually fulfilling as you might think. But the literature courses I taught, both in Irvine and then as an adjunct in St. Louis, were different. Demystifying texts with students—difficult ones that they never would have chosen for themselves, that they approached with trepidation or sometimes hostility—was, it turned out, even more enjoyable than demystifying them alone in my room.

  After every semester, I would rip into my student evaluations like they were a plate of the chocolate-chip pancakes I now rarely allowed myself.

  It was a surprisingly enjoyable class to go to.

  If I could take any class at college over again, I’d pick this one.

  One of the most interesting classes I’ve taken, and one I will never forget.

  Dr. Schuman is pretty much the smartest person I’ve ever met ever.

  Dr. Schuman is the best teacher I have ever had, not just here, but in my life.

  The good news was that I clearly and at long last had found the place I belonged. The bad news was: What if nobody would let me do this for a living wage, ever? If I stopped teaching college, I’d feel destroyed—but if I kept adjuncting, I’d be destroyed. So that is why I couldn’t just leave. That is why I couldn’t just tell the Doorkeeper to go fuck himself, and get Botox so I could be hired at the Gap. That is why, after another market cycle again yielded no tenure-track offers, I kept waiting outside that door for two more years—even though it damn near killed me.

  I don’t mean this existentially. I almost died courtesy of an appropriately Kafkan disease. But let’s backtrack a second: What if the Doorkeeper allowed the man from the country in to the Law for exactly two years, with the promise that almost everyone who has been allowed to do this got full and permanent access afterward? That’s what happened to me. I applied for—and won—a postdoctoral fellowship from a high-profile granting institution, one that was for “promising scholars” who were in danger of Leaving the Field, a fate worse than death.

  “Many of our fellows have had their positions converted into tenure-track jobs,” explained the program’s director during a terrifying orientation webinar (largely terrifying because of the word webinar). “Just work hard and make yourself indispensable.” Sounded feasible enough.

  I was placed at a massive research university in Ohio, in a department whose chair sold me on four impending retirements (nudge nudge, wink wink), and “collegiality” (academic shorthand for “we actively pretend not to hate each other”). This is it, I thought. I was going to go to Ohio alone, take advantage of my solitude and turn that dissertation into a book, crank out articles, overprepare for class, and suck up to my collegial new colleagues with such believable sincerity (believable because they, being so collegial, would be nice people I’d enjoy pleasing) that they’d have no choice but to look at each other and go: Why even bother with a stupid national search to replace these retirements, when Rebecca is right here being indispensable?

  When I arrived, the department manager pointed to the unopened box of books and teaching materials I’d had mailed to myself and told me I might as well take it home. “We thought about petitioning the Dean of Space for an office for you—but for such a short time, will it really be worth it?”

  All I could think to say in answer was: “You have someone called a Dean of Space?”

  After I held office hours with unimpressed students in the department storage room for several weeks, one of my new colleagues took pity upon me: since he had two offices, he’d allow me to use one of them—so long as I didn’t make him clean it out. That had been a true moment of collegiality, yes—one that almost made up for the start-of-semester party, when the department’s most eminent professor came up to me and said: “Amy! It’s nice to meet you. It must be so nice to be almost finished with your dissertation.”

  “It’s nice to meet you too,” I said. “My name is, uh, actually Rebecca, and I am happy to report that I finished my dissertation two years ago.”

  She looked at me like she wanted to spit poison. I was reminded of the scene in The Trial where Josef K. has his first interrogation, and the magistrate says, “So, you’re a house painter!” This isn’t true, and K. tries to set the record straight—but that actually just ends up making him look worse in the eyes of the ever-shifting Court.

  “Rebecca is our new faculty fellow!” said the chair, in a good-faith effort to rescue me. “Remember? She’s going to be here for the next year.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I’m actually going to be here for two.”

  “Oh, but you’ll find a job before then,” she said. “Surely, you will.”

  I had hoped to find a job there—I’d already been investigating a spousal hire for Witold, since this was finally a big institution with money (or at any rate a very rich football team). I had been led to believe a job there wasn’t out of the question. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this whole thing was going to turn out differently than I thought. If only some force in Wittgenstein’s ineffable realm of the transcendent would give me a signal as to what to do next. If only.

  Seven months later, I got pneumonia.

  It started out like a bad cold. Witold was visiting for the weekend, and on Friday night I declared, midway through an episode of Homeland (which was currently “our show”), that I would be taking to bed. Witold harrumphed around my cavernous living room—the apartment was too big for one person, furnished in matching red and black décor via one frantic trip to an IKEA a hundred miles away, loneliness radiating from every particleboard surface—unsure exactly why he drove the four hundred miles if I was just going to slink off alone. When he finally slipped in beside me, he recoiled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “you’re burning up.”

  I couldn’t eat. I could barely sit. I would sweat through my clothes every hour, overcome by shaking chills. On Sunday afternoon, Witold had to leave, due in the classroom the next morning at nine.

  “Go, go. I’m fine. It’s probably a flu.”

  “Are you sure?”

  What was he going to do? Take FMLA so he could keep me company while I did the world’s most cursory course prep and gnawed halfheartedly on frozen waffles?

  “Can’t you get a friend to cover your classes for you?” he asked.

  “My colleagues are German. It takes like seven years to become someone’s actual friend. You know that. I’ll be fine. Go home.”

  I waved him out the door, but I wasn’t actually sure I’d be all right. In fact, I was pretty sure that with Witold gone, I could die in my apartment and nobody would notice for days. So I took his advice and composed what I thought was a fairly brave (and desperate) e-mail to my colleagues, quickly reminding them of my name and rank, and asking if anyone might be able to pop into my class the next day, just to hand out a group activity (“Worksheet attached!”) and then leave again.

  Those who didn’t ignore me sent back apologies: There was a bigwig visiting that week, a finalist for the “Eminent Scholar” position. Everyone was too busy showing him the racquetball courts and attending his mini-seminar on Nietzschean semiotics. What did I expect? They didn’t know me. I can’t imagine I would have done a thing different in their places. And so, I forced down two more Tylenol, dragged jeans over my legs and a semirespectable shirt over my head, and wrapped a cashmere scarf around my neck a half-dozen times, before walking—grandpas everywhere, take note—a half-mile, in the sleet, with a 103-degree fever, to go teach my fucking class.

  As the week progressed, my condition deteriorated past the point that my la
st flu had started to improve. My dad called up with the radical suggestion that I seek the counsel of a medical doctor.

  “I don’t have a doctor,” I explained. “I just moved here.”

  “Then just go to one of those rent-a-docs at Walgreens,” he begged.

  “Those are such a rip-off!” I said, before dissolving into coughs.

  “I will spot you whatever it costs,” he said. “Just go.”

  Twenty minutes and a delirious bus ride later, I shuffled into a Minute Clinic looking every bit the pill-scheming druggie: skin that had progressed from waxy to hanging off my craggy visage; eyes that had disappeared into the sunken purple caverns that surrounded them; hair that had touched neither suds nor comb in a week; breath that could have caused a conflagration had I exhaled too forcefully in the nail-care aisle.

  “I think,” I said to the nonplussed nurse-practitioner, “I have the flu.”

  “You think you have the flu?” she said. “The flu,” she said with a resigned exhale, “is a high fever that lasts for—”

  “I’ve had a temperature of a hundred and three for eight days,” I said.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “You need to go to the emergency room.”

  At the hospital, I was spirited into a cozy cot with clean sheets, in my very own partitioned-off room with its own TV and everything. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air kept me company while I waited for test results. Once they plied me with enough Tylenol and Motrin to get my fever down, I even kind of enjoyed the break. I had been too out of it to bring my laptop with me, and so now, for the first time since I’d arrived in Ohio, I couldn’t feel guilty about the few hours per day I didn’t spend working on my godforsaken book or answering student e-mails about whether or not I could “just bump up” their grades from an A-minus to an A. Nurses flanked me with warmed blankets, soup, hot water, more Tylenol, and care. Yes, I know they were being paid to care, but after a week alone in my apartment shivering into my soaked pillow, I didn’t give a shit.

  The doctor attending me was also named Rebecca, and looked about twelve. That’s the thing about academia; because you’re thirty-five and still applying to entry-level positions, you forget that most thirty-five-year-olds are already established in their careers. Forget middle management; they’re partners in their law firms and medical practices. They’re upper management or even executives. So you get administered to by medical residents of perfectly average medical-resident age, but suddenly they’re all Doogie Howser. Anyway, teen wonder medical-doctor Rebecca surmised that since I’d flunked—or perhaps passed—the flu test (whichever it was, I didn’t have the flu), I probably just had “some other virus” that apparently couldn’t be pinpointed, and was about to be sent home.

  “But I guess we’ll do a chest X-ray, just to cover our bases.”

  “I always appreciate some perfunctory radiation,” I said, before falling into a brief fever dream about doing the Carlton dance in front of my Intro to German Prose class. The next thing I knew, medical-doctor Rebecca was nudging me awake, telling me I had pneumonia.

  “Holy shit!” I said. “The walking kind?”

  “Nope,” she said, “the regular kind. I guess that chest X-ray wasn’t a bad idea.”

  Pneumonia. An actual Lungenkrankheit, a “lung disease,” not unlike the sort that killed Franz Kafka. The kind of illness that, if left untreated—if, for example, its sufferer is a reclusive German professor in a new town with no primary care provider—kills people even today. I sent out an unsolicited but searing follow-up e-mail to my colleagues, explaining that I would have to cancel class for a few days—“given the pneumonia,” I said, lest they have not read the first two sentences, most of which were comprised of the word pneumonia, nor the subject line, which was “PNEUMONIA.”

  After I got better, I went onto Etsy, where you can purchase jewelry in the shape of literally anything, and found a necklace in the shape of lungs. I wore it to remind me, not of the pneumonia per se, but of the helplessness that went with it. And of the fact that out of my seventeen colleagues, one taught at the same time as I did, one was pregnant and couldn’t come within thirty feet of me, and the other fifteen did not know me well enough to think I was anything other than a melodramatic hypochondriac.

  Was contracting a 1920 disease—the result, according to my teen doctor, of stress—sign enough for me to find something else to do with my life? It was not. Here’s why: What if, instead of just being told maybe later, the man from the country had actually and legitimately gotten a little bit closer to the Law every time he tried to get past the Doorkeeper? Like, to use a random example, let’s say the first time, he was ignored completely; the second time he was granted a preliminary interview of sorts for admittance to a low-level Law anteroom; the third time he got an even better interview—for full access to the Law—and the fourth time, he even got a follow-up invitation to come and spend two days hanging out with all of the Doorkeepers as a sort of final audition. In this case, it would seem like the man from the country was making progress and shouldn’t give up, no?

  The year after my first attempt’s gaping void, I got a single non-tenure-track interview (for a position that was later canceled); the year after that, I was at last granted an uncomfortable seat at the foot of a hotel bed at the Modern Language Association conference (an interview I blew by “having a personality,” as one of them put it). Finally, the year after that, my personality and I somehow made it past the interview stage to the coveted position of finalist at another university in Ohio not far from where I already worked. That meant I was invited on a campus visit, which is a two-day gauntlet of more interviews, teaching demonstrations, and “casual” meals where every gesture would secretly communicate to the search committee the innermost nuances of the quality of my mind and my likelihood to remain in rural Ohio forever.

  The visit was an unmitigated disaster, largely because I bombed my teaching demo. It wasn’t just the worst German class I’d ever taught; I was pretty sure it was the worst class of any sort that anyone had ever taught. To be fair, I never stood a chance: it was nine on a Friday morning at a school known for its fraternity culture, on a day that was both in the single digits temperature-wise and on which the students had an essay due. You couldn’t have come up with a better formula for calamity if you tried: day everyone wants to skip + reason they have to be there anyway. But, to be fair to them, I did whatever the opposite of rising to the occasion is: their resistance threw me off so terribly that I flubbed every exercise, and ended the class near tears.

  In hindsight, I now know that teaching demonstrations in foreign-language classrooms are an impossible minefield. The students are timid about speaking in front of strangers; they’ve got their own stresses and commitments (and poorly timed essay assignments and frat parties) without a visibly terrified, overenthusiastic, suit-wearing rando plunking name plates down in front of them. I should have come in with five games aimed at total beginners that would have immediately made them feel smart and relaxed, and just played the whole time—of course, then I wouldn’t have gotten to demonstrate my precious pedagogy, and I still wouldn’t have gotten the damn job. One option was the mousetrap and the other was the cat. I just wanted to go home, sink into my wobbly red IKEA couch I put together myself, and wait for the slow embrace of death.

  But first, I had four more interviews and what’s creatively called a “job talk,” a brief lecture about research that’s supposed to be the final tribunal, where the candidate is lobbed a bunch of withering criticism and, if she vanquishes her opponents properly, is then deemed worthy to join their ranks. Mine was called THE CASE FOR A LOGICAL MODERNISM: the Tractatus, Kafka’s ‘The Judgment,’ and the Ineffable. (Mildly Clever Thing; three-part list; made-up word, check check check.) I gave it to a tiny smattering of the faculty, most of whom spent it texting. Afterward, nobody lobbed me any scathing This isn’t a question so much as a comment questions, which a normal person might take as a good sign, but which a seasoned academi
c knows to mean that nobody is taking you seriously. Jesus, word about my Chernobyl of teaching demos must have gotten around fast. After that, even though at that point nobody was even pretending I was still under serious consideration, I still had one last dinner, where allegedly I could just be myself, which my mentors were clear to warn me meant be nothing like yourself.

  Sometime on the glacial walk between my on-campus hotel and the restaurant—where, since I had no need to impress these people further, I decided to see how much free food I could get and ordered an appetizer, main course, and dessert—it dawned on me that I didn’t want this. I wanted to be offered the job, yes. I wanted to be good enough to get a tenure-track job, and more than that I wanted everyone else to know that I was good enough, too. But I didn’t want this job. I didn’t want to move to rural Ohio alone in the agonizing hope that someday Witold would get laid off and have no choice but to come move in with me and be an adjunct, the exact reverse of what I’d done two years before. I didn’t want to wade through knee-deep snow on a Friday morning just to be glared at by twenty future Mitt Romneys of America who still reeked of booze and called me our Frau, with an unrolled American r. I didn’t want to spend every waking second I wasn’t prepping for class churning out meticulous thirty-page articles that, best-case scenario, would appear three years later in some journal with a circulation of 125.