Elise Neimand, “Love in…” continued

spouses and exes are still in place, untenured, teaching twice the courses for half the pay. This is fiction, you understand, mostly, maybe a little poetry, and, of course, some drama. There was the “really funny” story of how they were told they had to hire a woman and one was walking down the hall so they called her into the office and asked her if she wanted a job. The Chair of the search committee pointed out that they were only interviewing cute blond girls; one of the interview questions was what “out” was doing in the phrase, “eat you out.” They invited the Christian minister who believed homosexuals would burn in hell forever to campus to speak. Her advisor (they were discussing her thesis) leaned across the table to put his hand on her breast. It was very late, which is to say, in this translation, they had all been drinking. He sort of wanted to fuck her in that “I’m really a Marxist but now I work in Science Fiction” way, meaning it came to nothing. “We had to stop letting him have female editorial assistants,” the program Director sighed, speaking of the well-known poet, “We could hear the screams from upstairs…” It wasn’t unusual to find, written on your office door, commentary about what someone guessed were your sexual proclivities. He invited her back to his hotel room, to “talk about [her] work.” He made sure she knew she was “only hired because of Affirmative Action…” It’s true that the police were often involved at some point in her close relationships with students. He threw her phone in the pool / She bit his wrist. “Which of them would you fuck if you had to?”—our colleagues were too anxious, we agreed, to be sexy, but she enjoyed reviewing, over dinner, what she admitted was a dearth of choices. Quite a few were maintaining long-distance marriages to people employed by universities in different states, so that every time we had a “line” (to hire), which happened less and less often, one of the unmentioned motifs of the discussion was the question of somebody’s happiness.  The new Assistant Professor brought the undergraduate who was now his girlfriend to the pool party—around that time he also hit “reply all” and let the department know he was looking for “’Mr. Green’.” When the poet interviewed the job applicant the first time he got in a soul kiss by way of goodbye, when the position came open again and they brought her on campus he kissed her a few times and groped her; of course they hired someone else. Do you know what it means to read closely? On the verge of tenure she published a bunch of selfies online in which she was wearing little more than a wig, a lot of make-up, and a transparent mask—not on her face. After the affair was over she started a to do list: “Destroy him the way he has destroyed you. Write to his wife with every detail of his infidelity. The names he called her...” Chapter and verse. Near the end of the semester a graduate student showed his penis to a group of female undergraduates who had not asked to see it, and then he showed “his genitalia” (as the newspaper report put it) to the campus police. This all happened in the library. A male colleague told her she only got the Fellowship “because of Affirmative Action.” They invited the accused rapist (a football player) to campus to speak. At a campus event one young woman shared a long poem about making love with her professor—but the Chair of the English Department insisted it was “complete invention!” This was during the heyday of the school’s recent Title IX violations. “Have you read…”—and a list of names—was the way most conversations started and ended. There are so many books no one person would ever have time to read them all—but, over a lifetime or the course of a career—maybe one sentence from each? (She woke up in her advisor’s hotel room, under the sink.) Think of this as a study guide: you will be graded on the sensitivity of your reading and the depth of attention you bring to the text, as well as your capacity to see the larger context. You will want to remember that we value the imagination: the beautiful imagination and the infinite capacities of the human heart.