The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney
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had become a collector of degrees. I chose not to pursue my doctorate at Dartmouth in order to add a different school to the list. I moved to New York, to Columbia, to begin my work in Early Modern Europe.
The second of my addictions was to change myself as I changed my location. As I left my graduate housing up in the woods, one of my female classmates said, “You need a haircut.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, and firmly. The person I would be in New York wore his hair much differently.
Street View seems to have delivered a higher-resolution image of that apartment building on Morningside Avenue, and I tilt up into overcast sky to see the window of that walk-up on the fifth floor, with the fire escape outside, where as a man of long hair and fading history I smoked weed and romanced girls from Marymount. Histories indeed are like sediments; I accumulated personas in a way that, should I be asked something of what I had been, I had ready anecdotes and winning yarns. I look at that building on my computer screen and I smell the burn of the joint, and feel the throb of The Bird , and remember moist kisses but not the names of the girls being kissed.
Was I dishonest in all this? I would say not. I was who I was at any moment; my growing scholarly success suggested I was now who I should have been. In kind, I had escaped being the person I should never have been. I avoided judiciously any study of the South, with its Gothic tragedies, and I also abandoned in time the backwaters like Serbia, focusing instead on the great empires. Provincials are provincials, no matter where you go looking.
I was living on stipends and fellowships, a kind of welfare for the brainy, but New York fashioned my fashion. I roomed with a student named Will Featherly, of Short Hills, New Jersey; he became my primary observation subject. He was who he was. Never a doubt or veer. Money, smarts, and blond looks. Good at tennis. We shared a nodding and polite proximity; I was never invited by him to do anything or go anywhere. Yet I noted every nuance of his clothing. As I could squirrel money away, I accumulated like items, then never wore them. They were for the next stop. I could stare for hours at the custom-made shorts, with their mother-of-pearl buttons and hand-stitched plackets.
The doctorate came in quickly, and the offers of postgraduate fellowships were many, spread on the table as the array of people I could next be. I favored juxtaposition that year.
At UCLA, my faux-British accent returned to full flower, as did my bow-tie habit. It gave me a fish-out-of-water superiority that played surprisingly well in that sunny clime, both among my flip-flop-shod students but also my open-neck-shirteded faculty colleagues. I was presumed, with my Ivy degrees, to be a prince-in-waiting for higher stations.
Then I met Estelle.
The low hills west of campus, as it meanders toward Bel Air, come up on my screen vivid and bittersweet. Cars still triple-nose into the parking spaces under the canopies of apartment buildings on Midvale Avenue. Like pups pushing for the teat. The buildings are utilitarian, just grids of rectangular slider windows. I had my own “unit” of plain Sheetrock walls, a kitchenette, and a foam mattress on the floor, but I walked out that door each day as if to the manor born.
Estelle wore her South like a pair of chew-stained dungarees. She was a graduate assistant who came from Arkadelphia, “But I was born in Umpire!” she said in her bright twang, playing it up. Why she gravitated toward me I don’t know, but I was to her like a familiar smell. I watched her from a distance in the fifth-floor lounge, trying to read her. But then I saw her likewise reading me, as through a two-way mirror that isn’t fully silvered. Why me? She stared at me as if trying to place a face.
She was much younger, and by then no one I could have possibly known in my Arkansan youth, but she kept circling.
“Something about y’all that’s hard to pinpoint,” she finally said.
We began an affair of the most perverted kind: She took me to places like those I’d spent my life trying to escape, under the rubric of broadening my horizons. Cheap country bars with long-necked beers and thick-necked women, and Kuntry Kitchens tucked on side streets of far suburbs, with their steam pans of grits and hush puppies.
“How marvelous!” I cried from behind my bow tie, wielded like armor, as I sampled the fare of the hoi polloi. “Just this once, at least . . .”
She would stare me down. But I was partaking. We ended up in her frilly bed, making love under the ceiling fan, and, as I withdrew, I had something like a fever dream. I saw below me the chilling alternative: This same girl, rougher and cigarette-smelling, on a soaked mattress in some cheap town; I saw us—she and the Me I might have been—sweatily heaving in an airless room. Grunting razorbacks come to root.
“What?” she said, alarmed at my expression.
“Nothing,” I replied, knowing it was over.
“You’re not who you seem,” she finally said.
“Either are you,” I said, a dagger to her: She was in fact a UCLA graduate student, not some hick with country sass. I know we felt more naked in that knowledge than we were in that moment.
The problem is, I have no way of remembering her address, where via Street View I could skulk outside her window, with these complicated memories. She had driven me there in her pickup truck; after I left her place in rising dawn I simply walked away from the sunset. I want to say she was somewhere like Sunset and La Brea. I have walked my little golden Street View man up and down those sun-drenched streets (it occurs to me he must have been purposely modeled after Oscar ), but we’re searching for something we’ll never find. All those places look the same, with only degrees of variation in a surprisingly depressing facade.
I went for a breakup beer with her a few nights later, in a country bar off Melrose. I patiently talked her through it and she laughed.
“Not unexpected,” she said. “Because you know that I know.”
“What do you know?” I said. I thought, What am I afraid of? I’ve committed no crime. Each degree on my wall was fairly earned, each publication the result of my own thinking and research. Why was she making me feel fraudulent?
But you get into it, maybe too deeply. She had rattled me.
“You know that, too,” she said.
It was upon my return to school, this time to pull an accelerated doctorate in linguistics at Cornell (I was collecting Ivies on the premise that I’d otherwise risk backsliding, but here I had full teaching schedules and was treated as the peer I was). I was fully adult, nearly middle-aged, and I knew this would lock me into high stations. When I met Margaret, I knew she was the woman for me. The brittle patrician aloofness, the cultivated disinterest. She was a woman who exuded no secrets of her own, and no airs. But she came from the right kind of family in Utica, and craved larger venues. We married at her family church in a snowstorm, and I waited for the letter to come from Cambridge, which it did.
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