Chapter 5

Act I, Scene II

Lights come up on Thomas McGrew III and IV, in their same positions on the slide.  Thomas McGrew III is winding his wristwatch.  Thomas McGrew IV is staring upwards toward stage right.  He stands, assumes a sprinter’s pose, and runs with giant leaping strides up the slide.  For a moment, he is suspended in a higher position.  Then he loses footing and slips back down to where he started.

TMGIII (still winding his watch): You won’t get anywhere like that.

Ignoring him, Thomas McGrew IV tries once again to run up the slide. This time he does not get quite as high before he slides back down again.  Defeated, he sits, panting, for one minute, until he is ready to speak.

TMGIV (out of breath): You’ve tried it?

TMGIII: I’ve tried everything.  Nothing helps.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew III continues to wind his watch.

TMGIV: So you’ve given up?

TMGIII: I’ve become resigned.

TMGIV: Isn’t that the same thing?

TMGIII: Maybe.  But it’s not so bad once you accept it.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV watches Thomas McGrew III wind the watch.  Then he looks past Thomas McGrew III, down the slide towards stage left.

TMGIV: What’s down there anyway?

TMGIII (looking downwards towards stage left): Down there?

TMGIV (closes his eyes, scared to look any longer): Yes.  There.

TMGIII:  I wondered when you were going to ask.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV’s eyes remain closed.

TMGIV: What is it?

TMGIII: Down there.  (looks downwards toward stage left again).  Down there is the end.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV sits with his eyes closed.  Thomas McGrew III watches him.

TMGIII: Son?

TMGIV: That is much worse than what I imagined.

* * *

“So.  How did it go?”

Gavin was sitting on a tasteful leather sofa in the ginormous office of his dissertation advisor, Jeremy Frick, who sat across from him on an upholstered armchair.  They were drinking fizzy water out of brandy snifters.  Frick looked thin and tired, which is how he always looked: tired and profound in a way that made women try to have sex with him.

“Good, I think,” said Gavin.  “Okay.”

Over the winter break, he had flown to Boston for the annual Modern Language Association convention.  There, he had interviewed for two jobs: one in Irish Studies at Santa Clarita College outside of Los Angeles, the other in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature at West Kansas Agricultural University.   In accordance with MLA tradition, interviews were held in hotel rooms: three faculty members in rumpled business attire perched on the edge of a queen-sized bed, while Gavin, in his fresh new suit (purchased on sale from House of Coats) occupied the lone chair.

“How was Santa Clarita?  That’s the one you’re hoping for, right?”

Hope was a funny word for it.  Gavin had always hated Los Angeles, but when you compared it to Kansas—well, at least LA was an actual place. This year’s job listings looked like they had been chosen using pushpins and a blindfold. These suck, Frick had said when Gavin showed him back in August.

“It went pretty well,” Gavin said. “They seemed interested in my work on Stump.”

                                                                                              

“Sure they’re interested. It’s Ivy League argumentation.”  Frick swished the water around his glass, sniffed it, and took a thoughtful sip.  “If the job market wasn’t so fucked, they’d never be seeing someone like you.”

There was a framed photo on the wall, from the year Frick gave the keynote speech at MLA.  He stood smiling at the podium—a real smile, not his normal wry smirk—shaking hands with Grover Maloney, who had introduced him.  The photo usually made Gavin jealous and kind of angry.  But today he felt something different: a thrill of excitement that shot from his chest down to his groin like a new crush.  Ivy League argumentation, he said to himself.  For a moment, he felt almost nauseous with hope.

Gavin loved when Frick talked like that, like Gavin was the hottest shit to ever hit mid-century Irish Modernism.  That’s how his comments sounded in the margins of Gavin’s dissertation drafts: Yes. Yes. More like this. You’re killing it.  Gavin’s two other advisors were more prosaic: Confusing. Clarify your use of “abject” here.  EXPLAIN!  These professors, perhaps not coincidentally, were also much less fun than Frick at a dinner party.

“The Kansas interview went okay, too.”

“You don’t want to move to Kansas,” Frick said, which was true, but none of this was about what Gavin wanted, exactly.  It was about strategy and sacrifice.  If Kansas was where he could get a job, well, he would just have to fucking man up and move to fucking Kansas.  It was just a place, and there was no point being scared of a place.

“Santa Clarita is a decent starter job,” Frick said.  “Three years there, get your book published, move up.”

Frick’s phone was vibrating on the coffee table.  He picked it up, squinted at it, tapped the screen with an agitated finger.  Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out one of those long pill sorters with the hours of the day marked on it, and tossed two small and one medium pills into his mouth.  

“And your paper?” he slurred, his mouth full, before he took a gulp of his fizzy water.

That was another MLA tradition: everyone applying for a job had to present a paper.  If you presented, your school would pay for your trip; otherwise you had to cover it yourself.  This led to an unfortunate one-to-one ratio of people giving papers and people listening to papers.  Gavin had read his paper, “Abjecting Silence: Disruptive Pauses in Liam Stump’s Time Slide,” to an extremely drowsy audience of three people.  There were supposed to be four presenters on his panel, which would have been embarrassing, but luckily two of them hadn’t shown up.

“It was okay.  Small turnout though.”

“Were any of them familiar with Time Slide?”

“I don’t think so.  All of their questions were for the other guy.  His paper was about The Divine Sharpness.”

“MLA is a load of crap,” Frick said.  “A means to an end.  Put it out of your mind and get ready for flybacks.”

That was the next step.  If the interviewers liked you, they invited you to visit their campus, where you would give a talk and have a second round of interviews.  He wasn’t looking forward to Kansas, but LA would be okay. Maybe his parents would come down from Northern California for a day.  He hadn’t seen them in almost a year.   

“How soon do you think I’ll be hearing?” 

“In a few weeks,” said Frick. “Definitely before the end of February.  The most important thing now is to—”

The door flew open and a woman in tight black jeans and red heels dropped a full armload of library books onto the floor.  “There!” she said, kicking them into the office so she could close the door.  Then she saw Gavin.

“Excuse me!” she said, grinning like he was someone exciting.  She left the books—there were at least ten of them—in a messy pile on the floor and sat down  next to him on the couch. “I didn’t know you were in here.”

“How’s it going, Kat?” he asked, but he didn’t smile or anything.  Hopefully she would take the hint and leave.  She was a former classmate of his—Katherine Curtis, Renaissance drama—but she had dropped out a few years ago, right after she started sleeping with Frick.   At the time, she had said she was leaving to pursue her dreams of becoming a stage actress in New York, but surprise, that didn’t happen. Frick never talked about her, but based on rumors around the English department, Gavin was about ninety percent sure they lived together.

“Is this like a do-not-interrupt kind of meeting?” She raised the painted arches of her eyebrows.  She was painted all over: pale powdered skin, shiny mahogany hair, deep burgundy lips and fingernails.

  

“What would you do if I said yes?” Frick asked.

“Listen at the door.”

“It’s nothing too interesting,” Gavin said.  “Just my career.”

She pointed at the pile of books. “That’s everything on the list, except the Rhudry and the Williamson,” she said to Frick.  “They were both out but I put holds on them.”

“Oh, no, the Williamson?” Frick walked over to the pile and scowled at it.  “That’s the one I need first.  It’s okay, it’s okay.”  He bent at the waist and picked the books up two-at-a-time, stacking them neatly next to other neat stacks of things on his desk.

“Sorry, babe.  I’m sure they’ll get it back for you soon.”  Emphasis on the babe. She shot Gavin a look that said, Can you believe the nerve of this guy? And also, He might be directing your dissertation, but I’m the one he fucks.  She stuck her arm elbow-deep into her embroidered purse and pulled out a prescription bottle, which she placed on the coffee table between Frick’s phone and the Winter/Spring issue of New Irish Modernism Studies.

“Adderall,” she said to Gavin.  “Need any? It’d help your writing.”

He shook his head.  He was just doing some final revisions, and anyway he didn’t need pharmaceutical speed to get his work done.  He was very organized and wrote on a strict schedule, from nine to two every weekday morning.  

“Where’d you get that?”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Kat said. “You have to walk up to an undergraduate and ask them.  Have you ever taken it?  It makes Jeremy concentrate for hours.  He’s working on his new book.”

Frick was still at his desk, frowning into one of the library books.  “Kat,” he said, without looking up.  “Gavin doesn’t need to know my life story.”

In fact, Gavin did know Frick’s life story.  Everyone in the department knew it, even if Frick never talked about it.  Ten years ago, fresh out of Yale, he had written the book on Funeral of Giants, Romulus Keaner’s famously unreadable experimental novel.  And while that book had marked Frick as superstar genius of the year, it had also almost killed him.  The first heart attack was seven years ago, when Frick was only thirty-three. 

He hadn’t written a book since, so he was stuck at New Buffalo University.  It was a decent English department, in the top fifty and known for its Irish studies, but for a former rock star like Frick, it was like dropping off the edge of the world. At MLA, every time Gavin told someone his dissertation chair was Jeremy Frick, the response was identical: Oh, he’s still around?  Funeral of Giants, right? What ever happened to him?  

“No one likes being on the job market,” Frick said, coming back to sit on his armchair.  Gavin studied his face for new signs of stress, the book, the adderall.  It was hard to tell; Frick always looked so exhausted, his eyes sad and ringed with sickly violet.  “The process sucks, but you learn to let it wash off you and stay focused on your writing.”

He poured another round of bubbly water, adding a snifter for Kat, and raised his glass.

“What’s that line from The Divine Sharpness? ‘Blood is messy, but it’s our life.’ Is that right?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Gavin clinked his glass against Frick’s, and then, grudgingly, against Kat’s. “It’s our life.” 

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