lacked was an obsession, and apparently there was no cure for that. Had he been a horse, his trainer would’ve put blinders on him, narrowed his field of vision. Intellectual curiosity, moreover, was not the same as talent, and he gradually came to understand that his own particular aptitude was for fixing things. From an early age he’d possessed an intuitive grasp of how and why things went off the rails, as well as how to get them back on again. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together. Whereas most people hated assigned tasks, especially complex ones, Teddy in fact enjoyed them. For this reason, the notion of fixing Everett’s botched job was appealing.
It had taken him the whole month of August. Once finished, he slipped the manuscript into Everett’s department mailbox on a Friday afternoon; on Monday morning, when Teddy arrived on campus, Everett was sitting on the floor outside Teddy’s office, staring off into the middle distance with the book in his lap. When he looked up, Teddy could see the man was crestfallen. At the sweeping changes Teddy had wrought? At how little of himself remained in the text? Probably both. “Wow,” Everett said. “I really suck, don’t I?”
Standing over him, Teddy felt surprisingly little empathy. He’d agreed to fix the book and he’d done so. Was he expected to shield its author from self-knowledge as well? “How about you come into my office, Everett,” he said. “You’re scaring the kids.”
Inside, the man slumped into the chair provided for students, and on his face was the same mixture of bewilderment, fear and anger that Teddy associated with undergraduates who wanted their grades explained. To complete the picture, Everett said what they always did: “It was really that bad?”
“Well—”
“No, I mean…you did an amazing job,” he said, riffling the manuscript’s pages. “Your title is much better than mine. The whole thing’s a lot better. It’s just…I don’t know…not mine anymore.”
“Of course it is,” Teddy assured him.
Everett looked up hopefully. “Yeah?”
“Send it out.”
“To publishers? I’m not sure I can.”
“You did before.”
“I know, but they’ll think—”
“They’ll think you revised it. That’s what it needed. Revision. It’s what we tell our students, right? Revise, revise, revise.”
“I guess,” Everett said, though Teddy couldn’t tell whether he was agreeing that, yes, he also told his students this, or if it was finally occurring to him that the advice might actually be true. “Anyway,” he went on, “I owe you…”
Teddy waited for him to complete his thought—a bottle of wine? dinner at a good restaurant? a horsewhipping?—but he seemed unable to. Finally, he got to his feet and just stood there with his manuscript over the wastebasket, and for a moment Teddy thought he meant to chuck it in. “You know, it’s funny,” he said, though you needed only to glance at the man to know that whatever he said next wouldn’t be funny at all. “When I got my PhD, I thought I was all done feeling like this.”
“Like what?”
“Inadequate.”
“You’ll feel better when it’s published,” Teddy told him.
“You think?”
“Yes, I do. Your name will be on the cover. You’ll get your tenure. That’s what matters, right?” Okay, it wasn’t what Tom Ford thought mattered, but he’d been an outlier, even back in the seventies. As anachronistic then as Teddy was now.
By the end of the week Everett seemed to have gotten over his dejection at least enough to take Teddy’s advice and resubmit the book. Unfortunately, it came back by return mail with a note from the publisher saying that, having already rejected the book, they were unwilling to reconsider their decision. In the ensuing weeks half a dozen others followed suit, and Everett was crestfallen all over again. “I feel awful,” he told Teddy. “After all your hard work.”
Teddy felt bad, too, though for him there was a silver lining. As he saw it, even if The God Project (Teddy’s title) never saw the light of day, the month he spent whipping it into shape hadn’t been wasted. He’d discovered something about himself. He’d both enjoyed fixing what was wrong with the book at the macro level and also the micro work of editing, the phrase-to-phrase, comma-to-comma fine-tuning that most people found brain scalding. Tom Ford, who’d encouraged Teddy to consider a career in journalism, also told him that in addition to being a good writer, he possessed excellent diagnostic and editorial skills. Until now he hadn’t had anything to apply them to.