Chapter One #2
All of this brings me to now, two hours later, after I filed a thirty-day lease termination on my apartment and sent a polite but definitive I don’t think we should see each other anymore text to Noah, which he replied to with a simple OK, telling me everything I need to know about our relationship and leaving me with a gulf of loneliness as big as the sinkhole I almost fell into this morning.
I’m also wrestling with the growing awareness that I’ve panicked my way out of my job, my home, and the closest thing I’ve known to a romantic relationship in a decade, not that it was romantic in the conventional sense, but the sex was good, and I really liked Noah’s dog.
I’m standing in my office (a.k.a. my “tiny little closet”), yanking books off my shelves while trying to decide which ones to keep, when Amelia Leung pops her head through my open door.
She’s my favorite colleague, an English professor, and the only person at this school with whom I can even remotely claim a friendship.
With her petite frame, cool retro glasses, messy black topknot that sits precariously atop her head, and librarian-chic wardrobe, she often looks like she’s about to bumble into a meet-cute with a hot billionaire or a sexy fireman who rescues flood-stranded puppies.
She’s also one of the sharpest, most intense researchers I know.
“Tell me it’s not true,” she says.
I spin toward her, my arms full of books. “Actually, the Cubs won. I owe you a dollar.”
“I was at the game last night. I know they won.” She takes a seat in the folding chair that barely fits between my desk and the door to the hallway. I added a cushion to make it less austere, but that cushion never fooled anyone. “I’m talking about you giving Carl your notice.”
I drop the books onto a growing donate pile, keeping only one aside.
“It is true,” I say. “HR has been informed. T’s are crossed. I’s are dotted.”
“I had no idea you’d applied for another job.”
“I didn’t.” I sweep another stack of books into my arms and rapidly discard them with only a brief glimpse at each title. I might be edging toward manic, but only edging.
“But you will,” Amelia confirms, now looking more than a little concerned. “This is just a pause until academic job listings are posted in the fall and you see what your options are?”
I open my mouth to say of course. The words are right there, waiting, but I can’t say them, not when we both know how limited my options will be.
Colleges and universities have been gutting humanities departments; tenure lines in all fields are getting carved into exploitive, grossly underpaid, part-time adjunct gigs; the job market has grown more competitive; and I’ll be less likely to get an entry-level position after earning tenure than I would be if I’d more recently finished my PhD.
Also, and no less notably, my gut sinks at the thought of another academic job search.
Enduring excruciatingly extensive interviews for positions I might not get.
Starting over as an assistant professor without tenure, or as a poorly paid adjunct.
Proving myself to another set of colleagues who cling to the way things have always been done and another set of students who expect me to answer emails sent at 3:00 a.m. the night before a class.
I don’t know how to do anything else. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. But do I still want to do this?
“I don’t know,” I tell Amelia. “I’m not sure what’s next.”
“But you’re the ultimate planner,” she says, and to her credit, she doesn’t make this sound like an insult. “I’ve seen your calendar. You have ten years of grant applications laid out. Five years of classes and curricular strategies. You even preselected your committee work.”
“Committee work I didn’t actually want to do.” I set an ancient copy of Molly Bunting’s Household Remedies from Bee Balm to Feverfew on my desk. That one’s a keeper.
Amelia gapes with astonishment. “What else would you do?”
I don’t know, I almost repeat, but it was terrifying enough the first time I said it.
“For now, keep myself stupidly busy or blindingly drunk to avoid a total breakdown?”
“Stick with busy. You get mushy when you’re drunk.”
I stop flinging books around, halted by a burst of indignation. “I do not!”
“You do.” She smothers a smile. Badly. “Last time we did shots, you danced with your eyes squeezed shut to Ed Sheeran songs and told the cute bartender he looked like a great cuddler.”
I resume sorting while muttering under my breath, “You have no proof.”
Amelia does an even worse job of smothering a smile, which I duly ignore while frowning at the growing pile of books I once coveted, each one reflecting countless hours spent devouring knowledge and distilling it into engaging and illuminating lectures.
Then there’s the time I poured into my own education and the money, earned through competitive scholarships, the loans I’m still paying back, and the shitty part-time jobs I squeezed between seminars and late-night study sessions.
Plus the scramble to prove myself so I could get a full-time job, then publish, then get tenure, always chasing the next stage of my career.
Where does that effort go if I walk away?
Who will I be if I’m not Professor Flynn, lover of obscure facts about stomachers and scurvy?
“How will you afford your apartment?” Amelia asks.
“I won’t—I can’t—so I gave it up.”
“You’re moving in with that guy you’ve been sleeping with?”
“Nope. I gave him up, too.”
“Wow.” She slumps back in the chair. “So, you’re just . . .”
“Yeah. I’m just . . .” I shrug, as if to emphasize the ugly uncertainty of the statement, not that it requires emphasis, but I’m still an academic at heart. I like a well-supported argument.
For several minutes, I continue clearing my shelves while Amelia watches from the folding chair, shifting occasionally to adjust the cushion so it doesn’t slide out from under her.
I should’ve tied it to the metal legs, but the lack of comfortable seating has sped up meetings with students whose four, seven, or twelve grandparents died in remarkably quick succession or who claimed “not being a morning person” was a serious mental health reason they shouldn’t have to attend my 9:00 a.m. class, instead of being a reason they should take afternoon courses instead.
Amelia’s first to break the silence. “What about your grandma’s house? Or her yacht?”
I let a thick biography about Louis XIV drop with a thunk. It’s a loud thunk, one I feel in my bones, one I suspect isn’t about the size of the book. One I know isn’t about the book.
“What, um, what about it?” I stammer, which is a serious tell. I almost never stammer.
“Couldn’t you live there for free?” Amelia asks. “At least until you know what’s next?”
I shift my stance, suddenly restless. “That’s not really an option.”
Amelia leans forward, her interest piqued. “Why not?”
The question looms large and loud. Too large and loud to ignore, and while I’m not prepared to examine all of my reasons, let alone discuss them, I can share the most obvious ones.
I stop tossing aside books to climb over the scattered pile and stand at my desk.
Since my office wasn’t officially an office on the building’s ground plans, my applications for an office computer were repeatedly denied, so I spin my personal laptop to face Amelia and pull up a street view of a slate-blue three-story house built in the Second Empire style, complete with mansard roofs, a spindly wraparound porch, and no two windows precisely the same.
It was erected on a rocky outcropping on the central coast of Maine in 1877 and purchased by my eccentric, wealthy grandmother more than a century later.
Squinting, it looks like a quirky bed-and-breakfast in the daytime and like a place kids might dare each other to knock at night.
Not squinting, it looks like what it is: an old, weather-worn house that requires buckets under several roof leaks and towels shoved around gaps in window frames.
Banister rails and roof shingles are missing.
A few of the windows are busted and boarded up.
The yard is cluttered with rusty shipping gear, and the carriage house that once worked as a garage is collapsed in on itself.
“Exhibit A,” I say. “The house.”
Amelia cringes before tempering her reaction with an encouraging smile.
“Nothing a good handyman can’t help with,” she says. “Or an exorcist?”
“I can’t afford either. I’m officially unemployed now. Grams left me the boat, the house, and its contents, but most of her money went to my mom, who’s currently enjoying it with my dad in Croatia. Or maybe they’re in Spain. With so many trips, it’s hard to keep up.”
“Right. The world travelers.” Amelia concedes the point with a sigh. “Exhibit B?”
I pull up a photo of the “yacht.” It’s a two-masted schooner modeled after an eighteenth-century Russian cargo vessel, only it doesn’t currently have any masts at all, as both were lost in a violent lightning storm.
What’s left is a hull with an elaborate but faded paint job and a pile of rope and moldy canvas on its deck.
What that rope and canvas hide, I don’t want to know.
Amelia acknowledges the ship’s less-than-seaworthy state with another sigh.
“Is there an exhibit C?” she asks.