My Unsentimental Education

days before he was in trouble with the IRS and banks in Houston—this was why he’d moved to Utah— and he paid that bill on time every month. If I got requests for interviews at the conference, Chet said, he would charge my plane ticket, and we’d pay that back slowly. I didn’t have my own credit card yet because this was before banks gave credit to students. I got calls for interviews at the conference.
This might sound like an ideal time for me to have removed myself from the marriage. But we were newlyweds. A lot happened fast. Interviews could lead to a job, money. So I shelved conjecture about good and bad love until this busy spell was over.
When I got to the conference, I consulted a notebook in which I’d taped a subway map, a conference map, notes I’d taken about the universities interviewing me. Fourteen. “Fourteen,” my professor said, “no way! Well, you’ll get just one or two interviews on campus.”
During the first interview, I had a frog in my throat. I worried compulsively that I’d forgotten to hook my blouse at the back of the neck, a pearl button with a loop, and as I answered a question my hand flew involuntarily to check—it was hooked—and the professors interviewing me jumped, then becalmed themselves, assuming, I guess, I had an itch. But my answers were logical. I’d written out questions I imagined I might be asked, trick questions, hard questions, obvious questions, and composed my answers, edited for clarity, and committed them to memory using tricks I’d developed memorizing Luther’s Catechism when I was twelve, and the wine list and daily specials when I was twenty-nine. When I’d pause to access my mnemonic triggers, I’d look bemused but not clueless.
I had one last interview the morning before I flew home. Tired, woozy, I dragged myself to it and answered the only question for which I hadn’t prepared an answer. My old personality seeped out. I cussed, saying, “It’s bullshit that savvy readers don’t look for causality. A story is one thing after another, a chain that teases out the desire for cause-and-effect answers to life’s big questions, and since the point of art is to give us what life can’t, even sophisticated readers crave clear-cut causes and effects, phony effects, resolution.” I stared at the gray-haired men on the edges of their chairs staring back as if I were an opinionated trained seal. “In life, though,” I said, “there are flukes, happenstance.”
I had eight calls for interviews on campus.
In January, the landlord stopped by and said he was selling the house and we could have first shot, no down payment. I’m not clear what instigated what, chicken or egg, but Chet started asking people what they’d heard about cities where I had interviews, reported dire details, pressed me to bow out and pick up classes around Utah like my old folklore boyfriend did. But Chet hated Utah. He’d wanted out. I didn’t ask what was wrong in a wifely, patient way. I said I wasn’t staying in Utah just to buy a house. And I couldn’t consider Chet’s doubts for long. I was overscheduled, reading a book a day as I traveled.
I flew to Nevada one sunlit day; to Colorado on a sparkling white day; to North Carolina on a balmy day; to Cleveland, where a professor, assessing my worth while also convincing me of the job’s worth, pulled back his office drapes to show me his splendid lakefront view. Loading docks. Smokestacks. I didn’t understand that, in urban terms, this was attractive. I felt nostalgic for cattails, lily pads. I lay in my hotel room that night and pretended I was home, and that didn’t help. I pretended I was in my childhood bed in Spooner, and that didn’t help. I pretended I was on the pier in front of the vanished summer cottage, sunshine and the sluice of waves calm, restorative, and I started to sleep but not long, sitting up and thinking of myself on the basement ledge in Utah, how I’d felt wrongly safe there, unlocked, open to the world. Then I got out of bed and looked out the window at Cleveland’s high-rises lit like checkerboards and thought: I’m all over the map here.
I flew to Washington state during a squall, and this was the department that had been my last woozy interview at the conference, and the professors must have decided I was fun, or they were. On the last night they took me to a Robert Burns festival, where we drank whiskey and ate haggis. In the morning, at the airport, they waved as if saying so long, see you soon, and my journey was uneventful until it came time to land. A storm had settled into the Valley as if in a bowl, and we circled, people vomiting into their little bags.
When we landed at last, I hauled my suitcase through the airport and passed a guy sleeping next to a duffel bag and pair of skis, and he opened his eyes and smiled. The extreme sports guy, I thought, who’d seemed so nice with his talk of studying, dinner, laundry, movies, and I’d failed to notice in time, and now I wouldn’t live in Salt Lake City long, assuming I passed my comprehensive exams, also the foreign language exam on which I’d so far scored high enough for only moderate proficiency. Then he shut his eyes, and I realized it might not be him. I’d seen him just twice. Ski bums look alike. Besides, I was married to Chet, waiting curbside, irritated at another late-night airport pickup.
The next morning I had calls to make. Though I had two more interviews, and good times in Washington notwithstanding since the salary was low, I had offers, the most high-profile one from a department that wouldn’t give me more time to decide because they had their second choice waiting. I accepted that job quickly, no chitchat. I had to