one couch to the next. Soon enough I learned that the price of a few nights’ hospitality was that I retell my sob story from the beginning, usually to the woman of the house but sometimes to him, too, the two of them sitting opposite me, brows knit concernedly, holding hands as though to shield themselves from my virulent bachelorhood. Given my druthers, I would have stayed with other bachelors. Aside from Drew, though, I didn’t know any. That’s what happens when you’ve been coupled for two years: you know only other couples. And I couldn’t go back to living with him, not because he wouldn’t let me but because his apartment was an atrocious sty. It was just as unbearable as being forced to explain yet again how Yasmina could have possibly punted me when we’d always seemed so happy.
I needed my own place. That much was obvious. Less obvious was how to go about obtaining it, given that my bank account held a hair over two hundred dollars. I was no closer to finding work, having failed to submit a single application. My standards were high, cripplingly so. Whatever I did, it would have to be at least minimally intellectual, while still leaving plenty of time for my dissertation. Some friends thought I ought to be open to the idea of working at, say, a bookstore: a job with an aura of scholarliness, and unlike the visiting lectureships I spent my time ogling on academic networking sites, one I might conceivably get.
“Or you could tutor,” they said.
I told them I’d rather starve.
At that point I saw no cause for panic. Sooner or later, Yasmina would call, begging me to return. It made no sense to get comfortable elsewhere if I was just going to have to pick up and move back in with her. So I kept ringing up one friend after another, calling in favors, burning through all the goodwill banked over my dozen years in Cambridge. Every morning I’d rise up from whatever junky couch I’d slept on and take my laptop over to the Yard.
Emerson Hall, which houses the philosophy department, has its own dedicated library. It is proof of the extent of my alienation from colleagues and teachers that I avoided the place unless absolutely necessary, preferring to sequester myself in an abandoned corner of the sixth floor at Widener, where I sulked and pretended to write.
It was on one such afternoon that I found myself halfheartedly skimming through the Crimson, picked up more for diversion than anything else. The writing always made me smile—bumptious undergraduates proclaiming home-brewed solutions to global problems—until I realized that, five years hence, those same undergraduates would be editing the opinion page for the New York Times.
Classifieds in Ivy League newspapers cater to the young, the smart, and the desperate. Several ads solicited attractive, non-smoking women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine as egg donors. Infertile couples would pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars plus expenses, a figure that made my head spin. My yearly stipend—back when I had a stipend—had been less than that. All for a single cell. I made a mental note to call a sperm bank and investigate the going rate.
One ad offered custom tote bags for your sorority; another a ten-year-old Volkswagen Jetta in good condition, below Blue Book. A third appeared to promote a self-published book about the history of the universe, for sale through the author’s website. I say “appeared to” because the copy was nigh on unintelligible and the person who’d written it quite plainly delusional. Anyone can advertise in the Crimson. All you need are no fewer than fifteen words at sixty-five cents apiece.
So, actually, I could not have advertised in the Crimson.
The eighth and final ad came in just over the minimum.
CONVERSATIONALIST SOUGHT.
SERIOUS APPLICANTS ONLY.
PLEASE CALL 617-XXX-XXXX
BETWEEN SEVEN A.M. AND TWO P.M.
NO SOLICITORS.
Contemporary philosophy’s primary activity is the hard scrutiny of language. I reread the text several times, understanding it and yet not. What kind of conversationalist? Sought by whom? Merely “sought,” in the sense of being necessary, the way a cheap source of alternative energy is “sought”? Can something be sought without there being a seeker? Of course not; that’s not the way the verb works. Presumably the seeker in this case was the person who had placed the ad. As the sentence stood, however, lacking an agent, I felt as though I was reading the description of a state of being, rather than a job offer.