although she said it in Dutch. Other times, she looked at me and just said, Klootzak!
Which is Dutch, more or less, for Asshole!
“Yes,” said John Barth. “I wanted to tell you that you’ve been accepted for the graduate program at Johns Hopkins. We were all impressed with the felicity of your invention.”
That girl in the Vermeer just rolled her eyes. Klootzak! she said, although I did not know if she meant John Barth or me.
“Well, thank you, Professor Barth,” I said as the truth sank in. I’d been accepted to grad school! Me, the lunkhead!
“Jack,” he said.
* * *
After I’d been accepted to graduate school, but before the semester actually began, I had a long, strange summer in which I knew that the world I lived in was shortly to disappear. I felt like a scuba diver running out of air. I quit my job at Viking after it was brought to my attention that many of the books I was working on were “riddled with errors,” although in my defense I would like to note that those errors had their genesis with those books’ authors and not with me. Still, some of the allure of parsing the difference between mantel and mantle (for instance) had begun to wane. Instead, I took on a series of temp jobs. In the mid-1980s, I was what was then referred to as a “word processor,” a vocation for which I was particularly well suited, given my ability to type nearly one hundred words a minute. One day I worked for an imperious man in a Park Avenue tower who, upon my arrival, looked me up and down and then stated, “You’re a man?” He sounded disappointed; he’d wanted to get me to make him coffee, but now he wasn’t so sure.
I wanted to tell him, Dude, you don’t know the half of it.
At a company called Schlumberger I worked on the oil trading floor, sending telexes, which was, in the summer of 1985, the high-tech version of instant communications. I spent all day sending telexes to Venezuela, where No. 2 fuel oil was pumped onto tankers. They had a particular way they wanted you to answer the phone there—you had to say your name and your department. Thus, I also spent some time responding to a bell that demanded I then say, in a clear, calm voice: “This is James Boylan, in oil.”
Rachel and I trudged through that summer. She wanted to talk about ways of sustaining our long-distance relationship in the year to come. I held up my end of this conversation, but the fact of the matter was that I was sneaking off to Baltimore at least in part because it felt like a not dishonorable way of getting out of the relationship without having to actually break up.
I didn’t know the first thing about how to end a relationship. Where would you learn such a thing? My dogs had always stayed with me, even Penny, whom I had done my best, in her declining years, to ignore.
One day I was temping at a company called Dun & Bradstreet. My mother reached me, somehow, and told me that my father was starting a new drug called vinblastine.
“He’s going to be all right,” I said to her. “Isn’t he?”
A few weeks later Rachel left on a business trip—the American Historical Association, I think. I would be alone for three days. I knew that On the Waterfront was going to be on television that night, and I imagined getting Chinese takeout and a six of Beck’s beer and watching Marlon Brando get beaten up. I coulda been a contender.
I was working for the New York Post at the time, and as I left work that day, I stepped into an elevator that contained Rupert Murdoch, all alone, and the two of us descended in silence. The doors opened, and we headed out into our respective worlds—Rupert to his, I to mine. People rushed around me as I wandered aimlessly across Manhattan. I walked more and more slowly until at last I stopped in front of the Empire State Building.
There was a shop on the first floor that sold wigs. I stared at all that hair, perched atop featureless Styrofoam heads. I looked east and west. I saw no one I knew.
There was a bell on the back of the door. It went: Ding.
* * *
Everything I know about love I learned from dogs.
From Playboy I learned that it is perfectly fine if everyone