My Unsentimental Education

and drank. But my key was still in the lock when I heard my phone ring. He had a plan. He’d leave his girlfriend, and we’d see each other every Christmas, spring break, and all summer, when we’d write in the day and make love at night. I was skeptical, though one colleague in North Carolina had a wife who lived in Ohio. A professor in Utah was married to an opera singer in Germany. This career mixes badly with marriage, you see. Dreams get sacrificed.
Before we gave up on each other, Landon told his department chair that he’d met The One. Landon’s department chair told Landon to stop running up the department phone bill, calling me. Landon left his girlfriend; he moved into a cheap apartment. Yet there were no blinds on its windows, and he was used to better quarters, so he crept home. He got a therapist who looked like Bonnie Raitt, with her red hair and cowboy boots, but she lost Landon’s respect by saying, “Many people see the proverbial cliff and think about jumping, but you literally jumped.” He explained that literally requires a real cliff.
One night, I dreamed I wore a brown dress that was once shabby chic but now was just shabby—a wash dress, my taskmaster grandmother used to say—and I was in a lecture hall with marble floors, and Landon, in a suit behind a podium, said the Southern Agrarian manifesto was doomed but seductive, and I nodded in agreement, but in the dream I was in the back of the hall, hunched over an oven with a can of Easy-Off, greasy streaks on my forearms as I scrubbed, while well-dressed hordes whispered that Landon was brilliant. But he couldn’t hang window shades in an apartment. And why, you ask, didn’t I feel bad about his wine-drinking girlfriend? I did. I’d turned into a version of my mother’s nightmare, the Other Woman, or at least the other woman. I didn’t sleep. Landon’s longtime girlfriend probably didn’t either, I thought, unhappy, wandering the dark.
Then it was Veterans Day, no postal delivery. No artful, well-edited letter today, I thought. I was grading papers. No spontaneous phone call either. Landon had moved home; he couldn’t use that phone. He couldn’t use his office phone either. But there’d likely be two or three letters tomorrow, I thought. I was steeling myself to write a stern one, saying this extension of summer love had lasted too long into winter. The phone rang.
A woman on the other end introduced herself, saying she’d found my number on the cover page of a forty-page manuscript—the first forty pages of my second book that a writer in the audience at the conference had asked me for after hearing me read. My reading had lasted ten minutes, but the writer had wanted more. Then he’d given my pages to his editor. She’d buy the whole book, she told me on the phone. I wasn’t done yet, I said. I had maybe fifty pages left to write. She wanted the paperback rights to my first book too. She said, “If you don’t have an agent, get one, because we’re making a deal.”
So I was writing, blocking out worry, quibbles, dread, when Land-on’s letters stopped. Silence arrived as a pile of mail I sifted through, searching for what wasn’t there: a hand-addressed, creamy envelope with a postmark from the town of S—. My worrying ratcheted up. I got sick. I broke out in hives. For ten days I thought he’d died in a wreck and no one would tell me. Or he’d come to his senses and wouldn’t say so, which was less alarming, yet cruel. No, he’d had a grand mal seizure. When he phoned at last, he said, “I know you worried.” I said, “I was okay. But I thought you weren’t.”
He still wasn’t, he said. A seizure causes months of lethargy. He broke up with me. This was for the best because my breakups, evasive, apologetic, lack clarity. I hung up, thinking it was helpful I had that book deadline because deadlines preempt regret. And Christmas was coming, a holiday I found difficult—I’d need temporary seasonal help.
Not Felix, I decided, who still called because I’d come back from the conference too distracted for long conversation. Like a high school girl, I’d told him we needed to take a break. I thought it was a short leap from “take a break” to “break up,” and he’d know. But he wanted to bring me food his mother had sent on dry ice. He wanted to buy me a wristwatch. I wasn’t hungry, I said. Also, “I don’t need a wristwatch, but thank you.”
I met a professor, born in France, teaching literature-in-translation at a tiny private college in a neighboring town, Seguin. At a party, he asked the host, married to a colleague in my department, to introduce us. He borrowed the host’s car to visit me in my dark cabin— darker as the solstice approached—bearing wine. He told me I drank too fast. “Like a thirsty horse,” he said. Yet I was not unattractive, he said. Could I drive him to the airport for his departure for his Christmas holidays because he didn’t have a car, not because he couldn’t drive, but because he was bad with money? “Hopeless,” he said.
In mid-December, I met Jed Pharr in a village restaurant. He was tall. He had a huge beard and eyes that were blue or green, shining or sad. He owned the restaurant—the building, not the business. He owned a house next door. He built using nineteenth-century designs, insisting, for example, that the stately house next door, with star-shapes hanging like pendulums from its eaves, have an outdoor staircase, since settlers didn’t waste interior space on stairs. So the house sat empty because no one wanted outdoor stairs.
When Jed stepped out of his indigo-colored stepside truck onto my driveway, Sim charged off the porch, teeth bared, and leapt for Jed’s throat. Jed used