All Figured Out

by

  John Bruce

Ed wasn’t exactly thrown out of graduate school: except in the most egregious cases, the English Department didn’t work that way. In a stroke of academic subtlety worthy of our great universities, it had, years before, instituted a set of policies which, if applied with only ordinary rigor, ensured that no graduate student could complete the doctoral program. This meant in other words that for anyone actually to finish, some exception to policy had to be made, and for that reason, the graduate studies policies were the only ones in the department that were fully in writing. All the graduate studies committee had to do to wash someone out was to point out that exceptions were not normally made to established policy.

Conversely, while the policies themselves were fully documented and accessible to all comers, the means by which one obtained the all-important indulgences were not. This had the admirable effect of forestalling the possibility, however remote, that a student might slip through due to absent-mindedness on someone’s part, purely on the basis of having completed the requirements for the degree. The practical result was that nobody got through who wasn’t thoroughly beholden to the unspoken network of off-the-balance-sheet favors and obligations.

It would be nugatory, as an English professor might put it, to catalog the venial and mortal sins in Ed’s progress that made it ultimately convenient for the department not to intervene in the application of policy. His biggest error was perhaps the most understandable: he’d allowed himself to be appointed program chair for the English Department’s monthly tea. This unremunerated job involved reserving the room in the Burkett Center, making sure sufficient folding chairs had been laid in, ordering the sherry from the faculty lounge, requisitioning the napkins, crockery, and other refreshments from the student union, serving as master of ceremonies, and not least, securing speakers.

One might assume that being selected for such a duty was a sign of favor among the faculty, perhaps also a prefiguring of academic success, since it demanded of the incumbent a certain basic competence and reliability, an ability to work with people at all levels in the university, and a flair for cajolery, flattery, even political maneuver, when needed to persuade faculty members to speak. On the other hand, the last four well-seasoned graduate students who’d been selected for that job had seen their careers truncated. There was no way to do it without offending someone important on the faculty, whether by scheduling a rival, passing over a protégé, making a gaffe in introductions, or even selecting the wrong brand of sherry. Thus when the time came to decide whether to make an exception in Ed’s case, the graduate committee found him too controversial and allowed his funding, as provided by policy, to expire.

Just as Ed wasn’t exactly thrown out of graduate school, Cathy, his live-in, didn’t exactly move out on him when it happened. She did, however, receive the Graduate Student of the Year Award, and it was announced at the English Department tea in May, which was the last one at which Ed would officiate. The award carried with it a year’s fellowship at Oxford University in the UK, and this inevitably meant that the relationship, if it wasn’t going to be called off altogether, would at least be on a different basis.

Any irony in the scheduling of Cathy’s award announcement escaped Ed, at least then. He was, though, puzzled in a minor way at how she might have won it: since May marked the end of spring semester classes, Cathy had been distraught – as she always was – at the course evaluations her students had turned in. They were always remarkably bad. A persistent problem they pointed out was that, although the freshman composition sections required a standard number of papers, Cathy tended to forget about assigning them until the last few weeks of the semester, overloading the students at a busy time when ordinary planning would have distributed the work evenly. Some of the students (the critiques were anonymous) observed that she betrayed a befuddlement in discussion that suggested she either didn’t fully understand, or hadn’t herself completed, all of the assigned readings.

Ed had never quite consciously entertained the question of how Cathy kept her own graduate assistantship when department policy made it plain that instructors whose evaluations were so uniformly poor were not renewed. It was one of those issues that, if he focused on it, could only lead to unpleasantness, and Cathy’s own explanation was that there was an effort in the fraternities to bring down certain unpopular TAs. Thus the composition committee had made an exception to policy in her case.

It often happens that, when offspring enter their parents’ professions, it gives them a Darwinian fitness for survival. Certain habits of personality, which is to say certain fundamentals of professional gamesmanship, are somehow transferred across generations, when for those not born into the family profession, some time, and indeed some careers, must inevitably be sacrificed in trial and error. Cathy’s father was himself an English professor, tenured though unpublished and unassuming, at a third-tier institution. His dissertation had traced the hitherto unrecognized influence of Edmund Gosse on Charles R.B. Southwick, a Canadian poet, and although his own work hadn’t reached publication, he’d been engaged for many years in a thoroughgoing if feckless reappraisal of Gosse himself.

As some people give lavish gifts to their children on occasions like confirmation or graduation, her father gave Cathy what, in his estimation, was the most valuable gift he could give on the occasion of her enrolling in graduate school: a draft of an essay on Gosse. You could interpret this as simple complacency and self-absorption on his part, but it in fact represented a greater understanding than we might expect of his daughter’s real capabilities and actual needs. And perhaps instinctively responding to this intention, Cathy took the draft and polished it, helped by numerous professors, throughout her graduate school career, and it formed the core of the only article she ever published. That, in turn, was eventually sufficient to earn her a full-time job, and later tenure, at a community college – but this is beyond the scope of our story.

For now, we need only know that she eagerly accepted the one-year fellowship to Oxford that came with her award. The whole thing came as a great surprise to Ed, hearing of it as he did only with the rest of the English Department at the announcement during the May tea. It wasn’t until many years later that he wondered idly one day if Cathy might have known something about the award before that general announcement.

But at that time, Ed’s main preoccupation was finding himself a new job. On the advice of a friend, he went down to City Hall to see what kind of civil service opportunities were available. The personnel department there had a big, high-ceilinged lobby like you would see in a post office, with tall windows casting sunlight into all corners of the room. The job openings were posted on bulletin boards covered with glass, giving the salary ranges, exam dates, duties, and qualifications, all spelled out for anyone to read. Ed was overwhelmed by the wholesome good intentions of that Progressive-era system, especially in contrast to the Byzantine ways of the English Department he’d just left.

He was in luck: the city was on a hiring cycle, and he took an exam for one of the entry-level administrative jobs. He scored high enough that he got called into an interview right away, and not only that, the bureau with the opening saw him as a fit. They did statistical analysis of city census data, and they needed an editor to make their reports understandable. Ed had been taking editing jobs on the side for the whole time he’d been in graduate school, so he got an offer and started work right away.

Cathy in the meantime left for Oxford. It wasn’t really clear what the status of their relationship was; she packed only what she’d need in the UK and left her books, the rest of her clothes, and everything else in their place. Maybe, they agreed, Ed could come visit her in the winter or spring if he could get the time off from his new job. But once she left, he couldn’t shake a bad feeling. A few days later, he got a postcard simply saying she wasn’t feeling well and was looking for a doctor. That was routine; Cathy was always not feeling well. A few days after that, there was another postcard with a not completely coherent message saying she wanted to buy all the postcards on the rack and send them all to him. And then, for many weeks, no word at all.

Once he started his new job, he fell in with two co-workers who had cubes on either side of him, Al Haines and Don Strickland. It wasn’t, he quickly understood, just a new job: it was a new world. Where in graduate school many things had been hidden, more were visible outside it. He went to lunch with Al and Don most days and used them as an anthropologist might use informants to explain a strange culture.

But the new impressions were also changing the perspectives he had on past events, and he began to enumerate some of those to his co-workers, too. “You don’t trust me to drive your car,” was the subject of the last fight he’d had with Cathy before she left. This was one of their standard fights, in fact. Cathy didn’t have a car. Either Ed drove her, or she took the bus, or she got rides with other people. But for reasons that hadn't ever quite crystallized, he never let Cathy drive his car.

One summer, though, a married student couple left for home in Texas and let Cathy use their car until they came back in the fall. On their return, there was a dispute over a dent in the door. Ed had never looked closely at the car and had no opinion over whether the dent had been there or whether she’d caused it; the fact that they were from Texas seemed to count against them in some vague way, especially since the lady had big hair, and all that happened was that Cathy refused to pay for the damage, while the Texans were no longer their friends, if that’s what they’d ever been. On the other hand, Ed now found it increasingly convenient to find reasons why he needed his car himself if Cathy thought she might want to use it.

The result was a new subject for a regular fight. Ed finally scratched his head and asked himself if, in fact, he was being reasonable in not letting Cathy drive his car. He didn’t have an actual policy against it. He’d never really thought about it. Perhaps, as Cathy insisted, he was being unfair, even anti-feminist, in not trusting her with his car, though on the other hand, he'd certainly never expressed any opposition to the idea of her buying one of her own if she so chose. So, not long before she left, he gave her the keys to go to the supermarket. She backed the car out of its space, turned it around, and smashed the right front fender into the apartment building, just like that.

"I couldn’t help it,” she said. Ed hadn’t said anything yet. She was already angry and defensive. “All that happened was I looked away for a moment, and next thing I knew, I’d hit the apartment building. How can you blame someone for that? I just looked away for a moment. There’s nothing wrong with looking away for a moment, is there?” She glared at him as if he was going to insist there were.

Ed recounted this to Al and Don.  It was a new experience for him to have people as sounding boards who weren’t, as they are in an academic department, friends or acquaintances of everyone involved. Beyond that, Cathy’s departure had introduced a silence to his evenings, at first unwelcome, but recognized soon enough as an opportunity to catch up on his thinking.

“Crashing my car into the apartment building wasn’t an exception,” he told them a day or so later. “The more I look at it, the more I think she screwed everything up that she came in contact with. If it was her turn to cook the dinner, she’d likely burn it up. All of a sudden, you’d smell the food burning, and the place would be full of smoke. She’d have been in the kitchen the whole time, but she wouldn’t be paying attention. “I forgot to turn down the heat,” she’d say. She’d be really angry, not at herself or at the stove, but at me. “Can’t you give me a break? Can’t you just give a person one – little – break? What’s wrong with forgetting to turn down the heat?”

I began to realize that if a recipe was complicated at all, it had to be my turn to cook it, or it would get burned up.” Ed paused for a moment. “Where do you go to find people who are just plain competent about basic things?” he asked.

Al shook his head. Don watched him. Al, it was becoming clear, was the leader as far as Don was concerned. “All women are that way,” said Al.

That settled it: “He’s right,” said Don. “All women are that way.” Ed got a distinct sense that they were beginning to think he was wasting their time. Al began to explain it all to him, one more time, in a tone that suggested Ed was a slow student. “Life is a series of market choices,” he began. Ed was beginning to think Al resembled the butler in The Moonstone, except that instead of consulting Robinson Crusoe, he relied on Adam Smith. “We have costs that we accept for everything we do. Some of them are obvious: how much we pay for lunch, or what we trade in salary for our time at work. But other things aren’t obvious, like love and marriage.”

Don nodded his head. He’d been married to his second wife for several years. Al was engaged, with his wedding coming up soon. “When people get involved in relationships, they’re calculating what they’re worth relative to what the other person is worth. It’s a market transaction like any other. If a person is physically attractive, people are going to rate that highly, and they won’t expect as much in intelligence, or the money they bring to the table. It all balances out. People get what they’re worth.”

“Al really got a good deal, though,” said Don, referring to Al’s fiancée. He said “good deal” the way you’d say it if a car salesman gave him a break on the leather upholstery.

“So Ed,” Al went on, “you really ought to be asking yourself what you’re bringing to the table in this relationship with Cathy. Maybe she can’t drive, maybe she can’t cook. What does she have? And how are you worth so much more than that?”

“There comes a time,” added Don, “when you’ve got to settle. You’ve got to think about what you’re worth, and you’ve got to settle for what you can get. That was something I really had to think about when I married my second wife. Maybe Cathy is all you can get.”

A day or so later, Al decided to take pity on Ed. He gave him directions to a pickup bar and a quick introduction to what to do when he got there. You had to work out a cheesy pickup line, something like “I love your smile,” or “Gee, heaven must be missing an angel tonight,” and if you used it on 50 women, maybe one of them would start a conversation, and you'd take it from there.

Considering Al’s devotion to the market, with his keen sense of how it applied to the relations between the sexes, it stood to reason that he’d recommend such a place to someone like Ed, who was perplexed. Or maybe not: if successful market participation requires some element of intelligence, or at least shrewdness, then a market where the participants are expected to ingest at least moderate amounts of alcohol would seem oxymoronic.

Beyond that, no small number of the participants in such markets go to some length to conceal their identities, their occupations, and their marital status, not to mention their health histories, which is another way of saying that the participants aren’t making informed market decisions. Had Al met his intended at a pickup bar? There were certain questions, Ed decided, that it would be politic not to ask. And anyhow, maybe Al just thought Ed needed some hair of the dog: if he’d run into trouble by getting laid, what he needed was just some more screwing.

The whole business of a corny pickup line struck Ed as a really bad idea. On the other hand, he knew nothing about pickup bars: graduate students don’t have the money for such things. They drink cheap wine out of cardboard cartons at their own parties, and they have sex with the rich people who take graduate courses that they see in their classes (who think, probably correctly, that they'll find a better class of people than they'd meet in a pickup bar), and sometimes with each others’ spouses and live-ins. But it was a new experience, he was game, and with a real job, he had the money.

He tried a pickup line two or three times, and it worked about as badly as he expected. But then he ran into Ellie Hendricks. Ellie was there a lot, even though she was, by her account, living with a guy. Apparently the terms of the arrangement didn’t exclude spending her evenings, and a good part of her nights, at a pickup bar.

He met her early one evening, before most of the customers had shown up. She was sitting at the bar, nursing a drink, and she turned to him. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I’m new,” he said.

“I watch people here. That’s mostly what I do. My name is Ellie.”

“I’m Ed.”

At that point, the bouncers came through checking IDs. Ed pulled out his wallet for the guy to look at his license. When he was done with the check, Ed started to slip it back into his pocket, but Ellie grabbed his hand. She pulled it back up, with his wallet in it, and opened the wallet up again. She didn’t say anything, but it was clear she was double-checking the name he’d just given her. When the bouncer was finished with her wallet, she handed it over to Ed. Her name was, in fact, Eleanor.

This was the kind of check people normally didn’t do in a place like that. You took people’s stories at face value, or you didn’t take them at all. The point of the whole game, after all, was to be agreeable. If you challenged anyone over anything, you weren’t going to score – at least not under those ground rules. The message Ellie sent was subliminal, but Ed pretty much got it: she found him interesting, but she wasn’t going to sleep with him. You could sleep with anyone, after all; not everyone was interesting.

This, as far as Ed could see, had nothing to do with the rules Al had explained. Al probably didn’t know much more about people there beyond how to be agreeable anyhow. If Ellie wasn’t going to go to bed with him, that was fine; it wasn’t what he needed right then. He needed to talk.

So he gave her the whole story on the live-in who hadn’t exactly moved out. “You sound surprised that all this happened,” she said. “There must have been some signs that would have told you what was coming. But there are other things that have me asking questions here.”

“Like what?”

“Like how she could be in the kitchen and not notice the dinner burning. Was she drunk?”

“She doesn’t drink. She has a bad reaction to alcohol.”

“Doesn’t want to lose control?”

“Something like that, I guess.”

“Well – I’m wondering how to put this. Has she had attention from a, uh, mental health professional?”

“Well, yes. She would get into a really bad state, and then she’d go to a counselor the university provided for free. But he said she was okay. In fact, she told me he said he should be bringing his problems to her.”

Ellie’s eyes got big. “You know what was going on, don’t you?”

“What?”

“That guy was screwing her, Ed.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Honey, he was head over heels in love with her.”

“That would be unethical.”

Her eyes got big again. She patted his hand. “Ed, I told you there had to be signs that something was going to happen.”

“I’ll think it over.”

At City Hall, Ed discovered that the writing he had to edit was, by turns or in combination, pompous, condescending, recondite, prolix, vague, incoherent, or cheerfully tautological. The analysts who turned this stuff out were, in his view, simply freshman comp students at later stages of their lives, so he laid into the job with a vengeance. The stuff cooked down like cheap hamburger; it looked like a lot when you started, but there wasn’t much left when it was done. The bosses, discovering that they could finally send material to the aldermen that was concise and understandable, loved it. The analysts, of course, were of a different view.

It had taken him a while to understand who did what in his new office. Al Haines, for instance, was the lead analyst on police-related statistical projects, and in fact Al was one of the few who wrote well. It took longer to discover what his buddy Don Strickland did, and when he found out, it came as a surprise: Don was an editor, too. Al and Don, in fact, had been thick in past years, and Al had wangled it so Don could come to work there a year or so before. His job had been the same as what they’d hired Ed for, but as far as Ed could see, Don hadn’t changed much at all of the stuff that had been going out. The analysts, of course, liked Don.

But with the bosses now happy with the writing that was going out the door, and no need for Don even to pretend to edit the stuff, the bosses did the logical thing: they promoted Don. They could get around the civil service rules that required an exam and a list by declaring that Don’s promotion was an emergency. Then, when personnel scheduled an exam, Don could get a higher score by being an incumbent in the job. Ed kept wanting to ask Al what kind of market demand that satisfied, but there were some questions you didn’t ask the guys you ate lunch with.

The day for Al’s wedding arrived; he left on his honeymoon, came back, and everything seemed idyllic. He commented during one lunch hour that negotiations were under way so he could have a night out, but that, it seemed, was the only potential issue. In fact, everyone in the office seemed utterly comfortable: those who weren’t married all had domestic arrangements that suited them perfectly. Every day at precisely 1:45 PM, a guy in a nearby cube called his wife and asked what was for dinner. There probably weren’t many choices in a life so circumscribed, but Ed at least admired the feeling of certainty that attached to such a schedule.

Another guy called his girlfriend as soon as he got to his cube each morning, and they took up their fight where they’d left off after breakfast. There was, again, something reassuring about such a regular schedule. Nobody’s partner or live-in crashed a car into their apartment building, nor routinely burned the dinner, nor, presumably, had sex with her psychotherapist. They had routine and reliable domestic arrangements. They were well-paid and well-fed, and troubling existential issues of any sort, if they were recognized as a potential problem at all, somehow always remained at a safe distance.

Thus the low-key lunch hour debate, between Ed on one hand and Al and Don on the other, ambled along. Al, whom Ed generally respected, had gotten married and essentially completed what both he and Don regarded as his life’s purpose. In doing so, Al had gotten a good deal. Don at least had settled. If you surveyed the office, in fact, you would, in Al’s view, see the operation of an efficient market. People had named their prices, and the world had met them. Insofar as it was capable of human attainment, they were happy. Indeed, Al and Don suggested, only partly in jest, that it was Ed’s insistence on applying an unrealistic standard of readability to their manuscripts that kept them from an altogether serene and peaceful state.

“You know what those people are?” asked Ellie the next time Ed saw her. He’d been filling her in on the characters at the office. “They’re lowballers. They don’t expect much, and they don’t get much. But it’s not much different from the people here.”

“How so?”

“Everyone here comes in expecting to tell lies and get laid. In return, though, they don’t quite understand that everyone else is telling them lies, too. The world meets their price, as you put it. But they don’t see that if they’re selling at a discount, the world is buying at that same low price.”

“Oh, gosh.,” Ed said. “I think I just understood something else.”

“It’s about your ex, isn’t it. By the way, have you figured out that she was sleeping with that shrink?”

Ed nodded, a little sheepishly. “But there are prices for everything, aren’t there? I started to wonder how it was that she kept her assistantship with all the bad evaluations she had, and then it started to occur to me that beauty is as beauty does. If she screws up everything, how did she get the graduate student of the year award?”

“Do I need to tell you, Honey?”

He sighed. “There are prices for everything.”

Right then, something caught Ed’s eye in the crowd. He focused in that direction, and, much to his surprise, he saw Al Haines. Al hadn’t been back from his honeymoon all that long. Al suddenly saw Ed, too. Al made a cool-it gesture and mouthed the words “NIGHT OUT!” at Ed, but at the same time he was making for the door as quickly and unobtrusively as he could.

“Who’s that?” asked Ellie, having seen the exchange.

“Just a guy from work.”

[11/08] Pushcart Prize Nomination, 2008

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John Bruce's writing has appeared, or will appear, in Backhand Stories, Byline Magazine, Dark Sky Magazine, The Dartmouth Review, and others. He had degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California.