Vladimir(7)

When I was in my PhD program, I had lunch with one of the university’s writers in residence. I was a messy and distended twenty-seven-year-old with yellow teeth and bad clothing who smoked incessantly, but I remember believing that there was a flirtation to the lunch. And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath. At this lunch I was supposed to be asking questions about melding creative work with an academic life. I was in the English lit department and the lunch came about because I had attended one of his classes and mentioned that I wished to write fiction, and he, who had taken the same path of academia and literature, extended an offer of advice. We had lunch in a spot he suggested, which felt like the pinnacle of elegance—not fussily fancy, not achingly hip, a place that was refined, classic, the kind of place I could never imagine picking. John and I were engaged to be married at the end of the year. There was a moment at this lunch when the writer in residence (whose career I thought at the time was enviable, but now I realize was probably an ongoing series of disappointments and slights) reached for my hand and I pulled mine away as if from a hot stove.

I still, to this day, do not know if he was truly reaching for my hand or if I misconstrued the gesture—he could have been reaching for the salt. The moment sticks in my mind mostly because it reminds me of how timid I have always been (God, you are a pussy, Sidney used to scream at me during her teenage rampages). I had lusted after this writer in residence, constructed elaborate fantasies about us meeting in darkened hallways or him sitting alone in a classroom and me straddling him on the chair from where he taught. But when he moved his hand toward mine it was as if I was as limited and repressed as an Edith Wharton heroine. A swirl of fear and morality welled as I jerked my hand from the table back into my lap. We continued speaking as if nothing had happened (and again, perhaps nothing had). I remember one thing he said about writing at the time, which enraged me with its cliché. I had asked him, in a pretentious way, I’m sure, if he had any credo about writing—anything he truly lived by. He said, “I only write if I have something to say.”

I remember feeling so angry about this bland statement—about how hokey the advice was, how banal and corny. But there was a deeper rage as well—the rage of embarrassment. I was a working-class girl who, despite a parental divorce and some suffering in my adolescence, had gone to a decent university. I had become energized in the academic setting and got myself into a well-regarded graduate program. There I had met my future husband. I would never have anything to say. I knew theoretically that everything was happening all the time and that I only needed to sit and look closely and I would find a story worth telling. I didn’t yet know that many writers find what they want to say in the writing. After I left the lunch I avoided the writer in residence. He called several times to discuss a short story I sent him and I never called him back. I saw him at a conference many years later—we were waiting for the same elevator. I said hello and he deliberately ignored me, almost comically so, for the entire week.

Reflecting on Vladimir’s book I was struck that I was in the literary presence of someone who, for whatever reason, had something to say, and a way to say it. I researched his backstory. He was the son of Russian émigrés, obviously, and grew up in Florida. He attended an Ivy League, then volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent time in Africa like his hero, Norman Rush, had done. When he returned, he was accepted to and enrolled in what is widely considered the best writing MFA program in the country. Then he stalled. I assume he was unable to sell his thesis book after graduation. He and Cynthia, a fellow MFAer, were married. He took several adjunct positions at scattered colleges in and around New York City. Eventually his work began to appear in literary journals, and then the sale of his first book was announced. He was thirty-eight when it was sold and is now forty years old. Cynthia has a book deal with HarperCollins for a memoir that has not yet been completed. She is thirty-two.

From the window of my office I could see a young girl leaning against a tree with her hands behind her back. A freshman—I met her at an orientation event this year. Her body is the kind that could only belong to eighteen-or nineteen-year-old women—pencil legs, rounded hips, a lean flat stomach, an impossibly small waist supporting immense breasts. Even in one year, that body, despite all her stubborn urgings and attempts, would thicken in the waist and haunches to support the load of her curves. Her hair had been bleached blond and grown out at some point; it extended to her waist, half-yellow, half–walnut brown. She wore circular sunglasses, tiny cutoff shorts, and a sweatshirt that was cut to reveal her shrunken midriff. If I remembered, she had poor skin, though I couldn’t see from out my window. A skinny, ugly senior boy held his hand at the right side of her hip, tentatively. He was clearly out of his mind with desire and trying to hide his inexperience. He held a SoBe Green Tea bottle between two fingers in the hand that was not touching her. The girl’s pose was both eager and deflective—the desire for admiration trumping the lurking suspicion that this homely boy was able to be so forward with her only because of the disparities in their ages. He leaned in to kiss her with an odd, wide mouth. Even from fifty feet away I could see the laboriousness of this activity between the two of them—a smashing motion that brought neither pleasure.