Chapter 16

Act II, Scene I

Thomas McGrew III and Thomas McGrew IV are still on the slide, but have each moved several feet downwards and towards stage left.  Thomas McGrew III has a small table in front of him, set with sandwiches and tea. Thomas McGrew IV is standing, immobile, staring down the slide past Thomas McGrew III.  He is gaunt and his hair stands up at funny angles.

TMG III: Come have a bit of lunch.

Thomas McGrew IV continues staring past him. 

TMG III: Just look at you.  You’re getting too scrawny.  You need to eat.

No response.

TMGIII (holds up a plate of food): A sandwich. You love a nice sandwich.  (He pulls off the top piece of bread).  Tongue.  Your favorite.

No response.

 TMGIII: You were such a chubby baby.  Good-looking, too. Everyone said you should be in adverts.

Thomas McGrew IV pulls off his shirt.

TMGIII: Ah, that again?  (He takes a bite of the sandwich, chews it).  S’tasty (points at his full mouth as he chews).  You need to learn not to take things so serious.  The end will come for all of us. No point in getting all snitted up about it.  You know, we all have our worries.  It’s not all blooming roses and puppy dogs for anybody in this life, that’s a sure thing…

While he is talking, Thomas McGrew IV drops the shirt onto the slide.  It slips downwards, towards Thomas McGrew III, who only notices it as it slides past him.

TMGIII: Say now!

They both watch the shirt as it slides all the way down towards stage left and disappears behind the proscenium.

TMGIII (highly agitated): Can you tell me, what was that for?

Thomas McGrew IV is still looking down the slide. He lets out a little grunt.

TMGIII: You’re going to need that, you know.  Don’t come crying to me when you get cold.

Thomas McGrew IV grabs a large chunk of his hair in his fist and rips it out of his head.  He tosses it down the slide.  It travels past Thomas McGrew III to the edge of the stage and disappears. Thomas McGrew IV stands watching it, a trickle of blood dripping down his forehead.

Thomas McGrew III watches in silence for a moment.  Tears well in his eyes.  

TMGIII (not much more than a whisper): Son.

* * *

“Studies of No No Not Now have categorically presumed the severed hands to represent Maddy and Paddy’s deteriorating marriage, overlooking the relationship that preceded, and, I will argue, prefigured that marriage.”

Not like you fuckers give a shit.  

The room was packed, but no one was really listening.  People in the middle rows were reading books or articles, or staring at their phones as though he couldn’t see them fifteen feet across a classroom-sized event hall. The graduate students in the back were basically asleep.  Even the three professors on the hiring committee, in their reserved seats right up front, looked bored.  But at least they were taking notes and nodding when he made points that sounded good. 

“The obscuring of Maddy’s youthful affair and subsequent pregnancy through the forced adoption of her baby constitutes a foundational abjection which, like Macbeth’s lies that beget lies,  necessitates a series of further abjections. This trauma must be denied as a precondition of her marriage, an act of abjection that is renewed with each subsequent performance of abdication of her child.”

Not half bad for a lecture he had typed up on the airplane.  Two double espressos in the airport and four hours in the sky with nothing else to do, and suddenly all his sentences came out like art. This one was especially awesome:

“As viewers and readers, our disregard for Maddy’s earlier affair and subsequent illegitimate pregnancy reenacts this originary instance of abjection.”

A few eyebrows raised, subtle signs of life. That was about as good a reaction as you were going to get from a roomful of academics.  Damn straight it’s intriguing, motherfuckers!  You guys are gonna hire the crap out of me.

Forty-seven minutes, and it was time to wrap this thing up. Opposing critics had been refuted—you’d better believe he’d quoted heavily from Grover Maloney—appropriate textual evidence had been presented, relevant aspects of Kristeva’s theory had been reviewed. At least two graduate students had woken up and left (half a lecture counts as being there).  

“Critical consensus has painted Stump’s work as a mere spectacle of bodily destruction, a cynical or absurd rejection of humanistic significance.  But an examination, not of what Stump’s characters say, but of what they must never say, motivates a starkly different interpretation, one that emphasizes the painful experiential truths that unite us as human beings. Ultimately, for all the grotesque spectacle in No No Not Now, the play serves not to alienate us from our humanity, but to make us more keenly aware of the very real suffering that underlies it, a message conveyed not in spite of this grotesqueness but because of it.  Thank you.”

There was polite applause, a few tepid smiles and a lot of scowling.  Perfectly normal: that’s how you were supposed to look after a talk.  Either you suspected something was wrong with the argument, or you knew something was wrong, or you liked it pretty well but were waiting to hear what everyone else said was wrong before committing.  The quality of the talk was basically irrelevant.

“I’d like to thank Gavin Cheng-Johnson for his insightful presentation.”  It was Talbot de Kesel, the hiring committee chair, a tall, thick-necked guy with a big square head and long, noticeably well-kept tawny hair.  Like all the Santa Clarita faculty members, he didn’t appear to have any body fat. 

“You know, Gavin, I’ve been curious to ask you.”  Talbot’s voice seemed to boom directly out of his giant chest.  “Do you get depressed?”

Gavin could feel his eyes narrow at this question, which was a) inappropriate, b) kind of a redundant thing to ask a graduate student, and c) illegal, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I mean, working on Stump,” Talbot boomed.  “I’ve just always found him so depressing.”

Aha.  He was being funny.

“It’s rough.” Gavin shaped his face somewhere between a deadpan and a gracious smile. Aren’t I game? “But I’m willing to sacrifice myself for the good of humanity.”

Phew.  That got a laugh.  Hopefully an I’d really like to work with this guy kind of laugh.

The first question was from Remi Walker, a feminist-looking black lady with short hair and arms that looked like she worked out. She was the diversity on the otherwise white-male hiring committee.

“Your explanation of the multiple layers of perspective in Stump’s work brought to mind, for me, Mikhail Bahktin’s notions of heteroglossia and dialogism.  I was wondering, given Kristeva’s interest in Bakhtin’s work, if you see some connection there?”

She asked this question with a straight face, like it made perfect sense.  In fact it made no sense at all, which was okay, because that’s exactly what Gavin had been expecting.  The formula was: “What does your talk have to do with my area of interest?”  And your answer should show that a) yes, I know who Bakhtin is, and b) I am willing to pretend like that has anything to do with the meticulously crafted talk I just gave that you didn’t even listen to.

Gavin worked up a response about the contrast between what Maddy said and what she meant, blah blah blah, with a quick aside about how Bakhtin’s theory referred specifically to novels, not plays. (He didn’t say, Therefore your question is pretty much invalid).  Remi nodded, Talbot nodded.  No one smiled but no one grimaced or rolled their eyes either.  He was killing it.  

By the time Talbot announced that unfortunately we’re going to wrap things up, Gavin felt—what?  Drained?  Exhausted?  That’s what he would have expected, after one point five hours in the spotlight showcasing his critical prowess and winning personality.  But really how he felt was fucking invincible.  The questions had been almost exactly what he had studied for: Freud’s death drive, something about Marxism, a couple on Grover Maloney.  He’d even nailed the one about Aristotle (he had totally spaced on reviewing the Greeks).  He had not said one thing that made him look confused, ignorant, or anything less than the calm, confident bad-ass he was auditioning to be.

They took him to dinner afterwards, at a place “down the street” but they still drove.  Five professors, three graduate students and Gavin piled into two sporty compact SUVs and caravanned five blocks down the broad boulevard to the restaurant.  It was in a strip mall, between a financial planning place and a jazzercise studio. 

Right.  Los Angeles.  

Santa Clarita hadn’t seemed too bad when he was inside the English department building.  But it only took a minute outside in the weird, enveloping heat, with the giant cars, the blinding glare off white cement—the fucking palm trees—to instigate a mid-level panic attack.  Luckily, the restaurant was called Comfort.

“Our new favorite spot,” Talbot said, holding up the menu. “I mean, when’s the last time you had fish and chips?”

Actually last week.  They served it at every sports bar in New Buffalo.  But Gavin remembered how quaint regular stuff like that seemed when you lived in California.  Before he moved to Indiana, he’d never had noodle casserole or apple pie with cheese on it or a sack of sliders.

They sat at a giant table in the back, in order of importance: Gavin in the middle, the hiring committee surrounding him, then the extra professors.  The grad students were out at the far edges where they had to lean in to hear anything.

“So, you’re in upstate New York?” asked one of the non-hiring-committee professors.  She was one of those middle-aged white ladies in tasteful drapey clothes, but she still had defined cheekbones and a lean torso.  If I get this job, I’m going to have to start actually going to the gym. 

“Indiana.”

“Oh, Indiana.”  She scrunched up her eyebrows: Do I know anything about Indiana?  “I hear Bloomington is nice,” is what she finally came up with.  Not surprising; that’s what basically every academic he’d ever met said about Indiana. There wasn’t much else to say.  “Are you close to there?” 

“Not too far.” 

“I was interested to see that Jeremy Frick is your dissertation advisor,” said Talbot.  “What ever happened to that guy?  I really enjoyed his book on Funeral of Giants.”

“He’s around,” Gavin said.  “He’s working on a new book.”

“Trying to get the hell out of Indiana, right?”  Talbot’s hearty laugh was a little too loud.  Everyone else at the table smiled like, ouch, sorry.

“I did my PhD  in Ohio,” said the third guy on the committee.  He was really young, early thirties maybe, and didn’t usually say much. 

“See, people do make it out,” Talbot said.

“God, I’d never survive somewhere like that,” said Remi.  “I mean, I’m sure it’s fine.  I could just never live in a place like that.”

“You’re from San Francisco, right?” Talbot asked.

“Cupertino,” Gavin said.  “About an hour away. It’s in the Silicon Valley.”

“You probably can’t wait to get back out west.”

Gavin knew it was okay to lie, to gush about how much he loved Los Angeles, that anyone would do that to get a job.  Still, he felt weird catering to their dumb California prejudice against Indiana.  And he hated Indiana.

“It sure would make my parents happy.”  That got a laugh.

The waitress came and interrupted them—thank you—to take their orders.  Gavin ordered the fish and chips, which was actually sustainably harvested Alaska pollock, fried in a cornmeal-amaranth crust and served with yam fries.  Everyone else—even Talbot, who probably burned a week’s worth of calories just brushing out his hair in the morning—got a salad.  

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