Chapter 12
Rob was sitting in his parents’ living room when he learned that Natalie would be attending the cabin weekend, thus destroying all his plans for a calm escape.
He’d looked forward to this East Coast retreat for a month now. Every day as he trudged from his apartment to his office under the blazing Arizona sun, he called up the lake in his mind. Its smooth, untroubled surface. Its fringe of firs and other trees that wouldn’t grow where he currently resided. Rob longed to hold a pine cone in his hand.
He’d spent the past year of his life doing a postdoc at the University of Arizona. And while there was much to be said for the school—interesting coworkers, a fine institution—and the state—wildlife, canyons, burritos—the arid climate was not for him. The constant heat prickled the back of his neck, caused him to burn in the sun like a lobster. Rob was made for changing seasons, for temperatures that dipped below freezing. Maybe he could get some relief from the pressure-cooker environment, from the nagging feeling that something was off, if he could occasionally go outside and take a deep breath of chilly air. But the academic job market was not what it had been when his father was starting out (a fact his father could not seem to grasp). Rob went where the openings were. Now he was waiting to hear if Arizona wanted to offer him a more permanent position. A tenure-track job had unexpectedly opened up for January—a professor leaving for a career opportunity in New Zealand—and of course Rob would accept if he were lucky enough to get it. He was good at what he did, but he was in no position to look a gift horse in the mouth.
His mother had gone into the kitchen to refresh their mugs of tea. His father was sitting in an armchair across from Rob on the phone with a colleague asking him for advice. Giving advice, Professor Kapinsky was in his element. At least, when he was giving advice to someone who posed no threat to him. He stretched his left leg over his right knee and sat back, genially ribbing his young colleague. Rob took his phone out of his pocket and checked his email. He was limiting himself to five checks a day during this waiting period. Still nothing from the university. But Angus had sent him a message about the inflatable kayak he’d bought for the cabin.
PS did I tell you Natalie is coming too? Sounds like she’s going through a bit of a rough patch and Gabs wants to cheer her up, which means we’ve been ordered to have even more of a good time than we’d planned to previously. I BELIEVE WE CAN DELIVER!
Rob inhaled sharply. Perhaps it would be better for him to stay here with his parents for the long weekend. It had been a while since they’d partaken in some quality family time. Natalie would inject all sorts of chaos into the lake getaway. Not like here, where Rob knew what to expect: his father bloviating, his mother taking care of them all. A hum of competitive unease, sure, but predictable competitive unease.
Right on cue, his mother handed him a steaming mug. “Here, sweets.” She smiled at him from behind her tortoiseshell glasses, not a hair out of place on her head. He hadn’t seen a hair out of place since he was seven years old, when she’d decreed that she wanted to be her “own person” for reasons he didn’t quite understand. She’d taken Rob off with her to a shabby one-bedroom apartment in NYC, where they’d remained for a full summer, an apartment so infested with cockroaches that Rob had ended up killing a few with his bare hand out of desperation. His mother had worked the lunch shift at a diner while she waited to hear from the jobs she actually wanted. And yet somehow those jobs never came through, and she picked up dinner shifts too while Rob sat in an empty booth and read his way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The day they’d had to put back half the groceries in their cart because her card was declined, he truly understood what it was to feel ashamed, of both their circumstances and the fact that he couldn’t stop crying in front of the cashier. That night, his mother had called his father. Professor Kapinsky showed up the next morning, magnanimous, to help them pack, then drove them all back to New Jersey, and they’d never talked about it again. Failure was not their family way.
“Thanks, Mom,” Rob said. Briefly, she touched his cheek.
“Right,” his father said into the phone. “Well, you just remember that you can dance rhetorical circles around them. You can. I don’t take just anyone under my wing! All right, now go enjoy the weekend. You’re welcome, of course. Bye, now.” He hung up and looked at Rob, indicating the phone. “I should introduce you to Keith. He’s a real killer. When he was on the job market, you know how many places were competing for him?”
“How many?” Rob asked, voice dull.
“Six! But he knew that Princeton was the place to be.” He shook his head. “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t choose a department in which Princeton had more of a concentration. I could have been more helpful to you that way. But ah well. Any word from Arizona?”
“Not yet.” Rob gritted his teeth, then offered up, “They said by the end of the weekend, hopefully. But I did hear that they’ve been passing my dissertation around more broadly within the department, which seems like a good sign.”
Professor Kapinsky nodded sagely. “Ah. And when are you going to let us read, then?”
Rob’s mother shot his father a glance. Because Rob had sent it over to them months ago, a bound copy with the title Understanding How Neologisms Spread: The S-Curve Model and Morphological Innovation (he could fully admit that it sounded boring and pretentious), and his parents had called him up to compliment him on it a week later.
“Honey, we did read it,” his mother said quietly.
“Oh,” his father said, shaking his head. “Of course.” He readjusted himself in his seat, then snapped and leaned forward. “Neologisms, yes. It was very good, I thought.”
Perhaps Professor Kapinsky had skimmed it, and it had meant so little that he’d pushed it out of his mind. It had only been a substandard piece of work from his substandard son, who had entered the same profession but would never reach the same heights. (Though Rob wondered: How would his father have reacted if Rob had surpassed him? The one thing Professor Kapinsky might have had a harder time forgiving than his son’s failure was his son’s success.)
But Rob suspected something else: his father had never even read it at all. He’d looked at a page or two and let Rob’s mom summarize the rest. “What was your opinion on the ultimate conclusion?” Rob asked, folding his arms, fury blooming in him. He’d spent months, no, years of his life working on this, and his father couldn’t even be bothered to pay attention. Briefly, Natalie flashed into his mind, the hurt in her eyes when Rob had thrown it in her face that Gabby wouldn’t read her book. Somehow, this made Rob feel even worse than he already did.
His father seemed legitimately flummoxed, and so Rob’s mother jumped in. “I remember you saying how you enjoyed the way Rob compared the spread of new language to a highly contagious disease.”
Professor Kapinsky brightened. “Yes, that’s right. An interesting intellectual connection.”
Not good enough. “What did you find so interesting about it?”
Rob and his father regarded each other, his father’s eyebrows knitting together, and Rob could tell that it was one of those rare occasions in life when Professor Kapinsky had nothing to say. For a moment, Rob thought he might actually get his father to admit defeat for the first time, and amid his triumph, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted that. But then, his father leaned back in his chair, a wry smile on his face.
“Well, to be completely honest, Robert, your writing was a bit impenetrable for anyone outside the field. This is what separates the good from the great. A good academic speaks to his fellow experts. A great academic speaks to everyone. Something for you to work on.”
There it was, his father twisting things around on him like always, unable to allow Rob a true win. Desperate, Rob played the closest thing he had to a trump card, forcing a smile through his gritted teeth. “Funny, Zuri didn’t have any trouble, even though she’s over in postcolonial art.”
“Well,” his father said, “she must be an extraordinarily smart one.”
“She is,” Rob said, keeping his tone even. “She just had an excellent paper published in Art Journal. I’ll send it to you. I think you’ll find that it speaks to everyone.” Here it was, Rob’s consolation. His father might be an untouchable academic, but at the end of the day, he hadn’t been able to face a partnership of equals. Rob, on the other hand, didn’t have to maintain his own self-worth by only going after graduate students whom he could keep eternally in his thrall. (No offense to his mother.)
“She’s reading your dissertation!” his mother said, beaming. “Things must be getting serious. Can we start officially using the word ‘girlfriend’?”
Zuri was not his girlfriend yet. But things had been going well since they’d met at a university lecture one and a half months ago.
His father raised an eyebrow, dubious. And before Rob could second-guess himself, he replied, “Yes.” Close enough to the truth. He’d make it official with Zuri as soon as he returned.
“Well, good for you,” Rob’s father said. “We look forward to meeting her.”
Rob’s mother smiled. “Now, are you sure you can’t stay longer? I bought fresh corn at the farmers’ market.”
Rob found it hard to look at either one of his parents. Even being around Natalie would be better than this. “No,” he said. “I should get to the lake.”