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M
argot Yarborough had earned four interviews at that winter’s
MLA
conference, where the nation’s institutions of higher learning conducted their preliminary interviews for the following year’s hires. She reviewed her interview schedule, together with the questions and answers she had typed up for each of the schools that might change her life with a job offer. Two of the interviews were to be held in hotel suites—a sign that the colleges had some money—but the other two were in the notorious cattle call room where forty interviews occurred simultaneously, many within earshot of one another.

She still had the one suit she had owned since graduating from college, though it now hung loose on her. She’d lost weight over the years plus a few more pounds as her father’s illness had progressed and the waxing dementia exaggerated the selfish streak he’d always shown. He guarded his dinner plate as though his wife and daughter plotted to steal his war-time rations, and he often took food from Margot’s plate as well as her mother’s, grumbling that they had never appreciated everything he’d done for them. Once, as Margot reached for a dinner roll, he stabbed the back of her hand with his fork, saying “That’ll show you.” She wore the four small, closely spaced bruises for a week.

Margot looked sideways at the full-length mirror on her closet door. Even with the shirt bunched into the waistband, the skirt slid to her hips, but she hated the idea of going to the mall with its bright lights and noisy people. More and more she lived in the literary past. Using two large safety pins, she tightened the skirt around her waist, telling herself that the jacket would hide the fashion wasteland. That thought carried her mind to Elliot, which—curiously or maybe not—brought her to Wallace Stevens. She grabbed
The Palm at the End of the Mind
, thinking it would make fine train reading.

Two hours later, she sat in the lobby of the Wellington Hotel, which swelled with suit-wearing young academics acting out various states of confidence and terror. Their one or maybe six interviews would be their sole chance at landing the coveted academic jobs that would elude, forever, slightly more than half of them. Like the breast man who never looks a woman in the eye, these nervous would-be intellectuals avoided each other’s gaze and searched only for the university affiliations listed on name tags. Where the University of Nevada-Reno brought relief, Virginia sparked envy and Princeton inspired despair.

Because she had been outside the halls of academia for a couple of years, Margot had felt that it would be improper to claim her institution and had typed “No affiliation” onto her on-line registration form. The computer had taken her at her word, and her name tag read: “Margot Yarborough. No affiliation.”

A tall man who looked to be in his twenties approached her. He had a long, blond ponytail, wore jeans, and carried a camera. “I’m making a documentary about the
MLA
convention. Are you here to get a job?”

Margot nodded.

“Can I ask you a few questions on film?”

Margot half shrugged, and the man smiled and switched on his camera.

“How many interviews do you have today?”

Looking into the lens, Margot told him four.

“Are you feeling ground down and humiliated yet? Any horror stories?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m feeling hopeful. If nothing else, it’s a chance to talk about literature with intelligent and interesting people.”

The young man flicked the switch and lowered the camera. “Sorry, love, but that’s not what I’m after at all. Maybe I’ll catch you at the end of the day and see what you have to say then.” He stalked toward another job-seeker.

Margot had read all the interview advice she could find, and she watched the small bank of lobby phones carefully. It was considered impolite to phone up to the room more than ten minutes prior to the interview, because an earlier interview could still be going on. Yet to wait longer was to risk having to stand in a long line for a phone and then be made late by the overworked elevators at the conference hotels.

At twelve minutes before the hour, she moved toward the phones, lurking with a couple of dozen other men and women, most of them young and clutching new but inexpensive briefcases. She got to a phone, and a woman with a pleasant southern accent granted her the room number. Despite a wait for the elevator, she knocked on the hotel-room door at an ideal one minute past the hour, pleased at the perfection of her timing.

The door opened, and a head popped through the crack. “Just a minute,” said a man with a chin-length bob and a red tie. “We’re running a bit behind schedule.”

Margot waited, her eyes tracing the swirls of paisley in the carpet. She was unsure whether it was more seemly to wait by the door or linger back by the elevator bank until the previous interviewee passed her. As minutes elapsed, she fretted about whether she could complete the interview in time to make it to her next appointment, in the group-interview area at a hotel several long blocks away. At last, a young man emerged and brushed past her, visibly trembling in his black suit, his feet leaving no impression in the loudly patterned carpet.

The man with chin-length hair popped out at her. “We’re ready for you now.”

The room smelled of people—too many of them too close for too long. The bobbed head introduced himself as Professor Smith, and two other men stood and introduced themselves as Dr. or Professor something. The lone woman shook Margot’s hand with a lighter grip and introduced herself by first and last name.

“So,” said the man in the red tie, “which job are you interviewing for?”

“Creative writing,” Margot answered, clearing her voice. “Fiction.”

“Oh, right, I’m in charge of that one.”

“We’re an expanding campus,” the woman explained. “We’re hoping to fill twelve positions.”

“Twelve?” Margot knew that each school interviewed ten or so candidates for each job. “I suppose you aren’t getting out of this room much.”

“No,” said one of the men. “We haven’t seen a thing of New York.”

The man with the red tie found her vita, and the interview proceeded well enough, if a bit stiffly.

When it was time for her to leave, the search committee chair said, “I only have one final question. Are you willing to live in rural Missouri?”

Margot nodded. “I’m willing to live anywhere.”

She arrived at the cattle-call waiting area just in time to be ushered to the right table. Two very young men welcomed her and began their rapid-fire questions, mostly answering each other. Both seemed to have drunk too much coffee, and Margot didn’t have to say much.

At this interview, the final question was: “Why would you even consider a job with a 4/4 teaching load that won’t pay you enough to live within a hundred miles of our college?”

Margot smiled at them, seeking eye contact with first one and then the other interviewer, trying to make them remember her when they discussed candidates later. “I like to work hard,” she said, “and I live frugally.”

She had two hours before her next interview and so she toured the publishers’ displays in the exhibits hall of the convention center, looking at the glossy covers of the intellectual biographies published by larger publishing houses and written by those few academic celebrities. She also examined the matte covers of the literary studies texts and poetry volumes of the university presses. The literary journals and magazines were there, too, so Margot paged through a few in the hopes of finding an appropriate one to submit a story she was contemplating. Thumbing through a journal with an austere brown front and no art, she found Frank Hinks’ last story, published post-humously. Margot dug through her purse until she found a ten-dollar bill and four rumpled ones.

“Thank you,” said the older man with the cashbox, seeming surprised by the sale.

At another table, a periodical with Kandinsky-like art on the cover caught her eye. Thumbing through, she recognized the name of the woman she’d been billed with at the CIA Bar: Clarice Aames. Her story, titled “The Lethal,” opened with a child’s pet guinea pig giving birth to offspring with no eyes. Margot set down the magazine and went to freshen up.

For her third interview—for a tenure-track job at a public university in the deep South—the timing of her knock was fine, and Margot was ushered into the room by a skinny man with a goatee, who introduced himself as the department’s poet. She was also introduced to “the Shakespeare guy” and a woman whose specialty was Caribbean literature.

They occupied the only chairs in the room, leaving her to sit on the high bed, her feet dangling several inches above the floor. Their questions were straightforward, ranging from what she would do if a student turned in a truly wretched piece of writing to queries as to her literary influences. They agreed with Margot that reading was the first and best training for any young writer.

Margot nodded and continued, “While I’m not suggesting that writers should be trained as critics—”

“Why the hell not?!” The poet leaped from his chair. “The entire problem with literature is that young writers don’t think enough about what they’re doing.”

Margot tried to explain her point of view. “I agree with you completely that young writers should be trained in literature, probably before they try to write.”

The poet slammed his leg with his fist. “How am I supposed to know whether you’re agreeing with me because you agree with me or because you want the job?” He looked furiously, left to right, right to left, left to right.

“It’s both,” Margot said. “I want the job, but I wouldn’t misrepresent my views.”

“What? I can’t hear you. If I can’t hear you in this small room, how are students supposed to hear you?”

Margot swallowed hard.

“Now I suppose you’re going to cry. Look, you seem like a nice young woman, and I admire you for writing about leprosy—brave choice that—but we can’t have you crying in the classroom.”

With nothing any longer at stake, Margot stood. “I can think of no better words to leave you with than these, from the final paragraph of
The Return of the Native
: ‘He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men. Some believed him, and some believed not; some said that his words were commonplace, others complained of his want of doctrine; while others again remarked that it was well enough of a man to take to preaching who could not see to do anything else. But everywhere he was kindly received.’” She sucked in a large but silent breath. “It’s difficult to imagine that our world might actually be crueler than that of Mr. Hardy.”

The poet nodded vigorously and laughed. “But remember this: those folks tolerated Yeobright because ‘the story of his life had become generally known.’ We don’t know you from Adam. Now, however, I’m a bit impressed.”

Realizing that all might not be lost and that indeed this poet who could quote one of her favorite novels might actually be a kindred soul, Margot slipped her hand tentatively out to shake his good-bye. As she turned to the Shakespearean, though, the safety pin holding up her skirt popped open, and it fell nearly to her hips. She clutched at her waistband and backed from the room, bent over her briefcase and thinking
you won’t call me, I won’t call you
.

As had been the case during her book tour in Vermont, Margot was able to disassociate herself from what was happening to her, to see herself as though she were a character in a novel she was writing or reading. And again, as in Vermont, the book she was living was a minor comi-tragedy. She walked in her increasingly uncomfortable shoes back to the cattle-call area. In the closest bathroom, sardined between women busily brushing hair, blowing noses, and reapplying makeup, she double checked the security of her safety pins, patted her face with cool water, and put on a little lipstick. Get this job, she told herself, and wished she were indeed a character in a novel so that she could write her own ending.

There were three interviewers at the table, two men and a woman, all small and somewhat nebbishy, and she felt more comfortable with them than she had with any group of people in a long while. They actually discussed literature, and Margot grew hopeful as they told her about their library and bragged about their small Illinois town’s farmers market.

“It gives us something to do as well as something to buy,” said the older of the two men, smiling at her in a way that felt more paternal than anything she remembered from home.

W
hen Eddie Renfros read the galley of his wife’s book, he’d known at once that his suspicions had been well-founded. Just as he had always assumed might happen, Amanda was having an affair with Jackson. Worse, she was writing about it for the whole world, which would now know him as the lazy, underachieving, alcoholic spouse of celebrity novelist Amanda Renfros.

Still, he’d been prepared to forgive her, provided that she agreed never to see, speak to, or mention Jackson Miller again. But not only was she uninterested in his forgiveness, she seemed relieved that her adultery had been discovered.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself, and I’m sorry if you’re hurt,” she’d said, her face composed.

“You’re going to stop it right now.”

She shook her head. “No, Eddie. It’s really a question now of who will live where. You’re welcome to the apartment, if you can afford it. You should certainly be the one to stay here for now.”

Calmly, her eyes clear and her hair perfectly shiny, she packed a single suitcase, kissed him on the cheek, and thanked him for those months of their marriage that had been good. “I did love you, Eddie, and I kind of wish that we had never let it get past the point of no return. Probably we were never right for each other, but I don’t think I would have written
The Progress of Love
if it weren’t for you.”

“You’re welcome,” Eddie spat out, but he no longer had the energy for real venom.

It was this listlessness that prevented him from taking scissors to the clothes Amanda had left behind, an idea he relished right up to the moment he pulled the scissors from the drawer, replaced them, and reached for a shot glass instead.

He remembered what Jackson had told him at his bachelor party: “Keep in mind that if you marry a head-turner, she’s going to turn heads.” That night he slept shallowly, jerking fitfully, with dreams that centered on the words ‘head-turner’ and ‘page-turner,’ ‘page-turner’ and ‘head-turner.’ He awoke thinking that he’d write a poem around the wordplay, but he went the day without lifting a pencil.

After wallowing in self-pity and vodka across the spring and summer, Eddie stacked the bills, checked his Amazon ranking, and realized that he should get a job. He was relieved; for the first time in a long time, he knew what to do with himself.

Eddie might not have interviewed at the
MLA
had the convention been held anywhere other than New York. That would have been too much effort, and his vigor waned rapidly after the initial burst of application-letter writing and vita printing. But the conference was in New York that year, and it seemed easy enough to move through the process.

Despite his dearth of teaching experience, Eddie held an
MFA
from one of the most prestigious fiction programs in the country, and he’d published two books—one of them critically acclaimed and the second, if not acclaimed, at least recent. While none of this had made him a success in his wife’s sharp eyes, it served him well in a job market with a glut of one-book writers, many of whom had published nothing in years. He had ten
MLA
interviews for creative writing jobs, which led to three campus interviews, for which he sobered up long enough to receive two job offers. He turned down what many writers covet: a 2/1 teaching load at a large research-oriented university. He accepted instead a position at a small liberal arts college, where he would be expected to pamper the not-Harvard-material children of the wealthy, but could earn tenure without publishing another novel.

He moved to the central part of the state as soon as he was hired, identified the small town’s least expensive liquor store, and settled into a nice old house and his new life while he waited for the students to return, the fall semester to commence, and the leaves to turn fabulous colors.

It was, he told himself, the life he would have chosen had he not married Amanda and her ambitions. Though it would take years to complete the revision in his head, he began to tell himself a different story of their relationship. In this new story, he cast himself as a somewhat roguish but very fine literary writer, who briefly slummed with a shallow writer of slick fiction for the usual reasons that men marry down: beauty and sex.