The university left me dangling over my employment prospects until nearly the end of the term in late April, believe it or not, before which I shuffled the campus followed by a cloud of opprobrium like Pig-Pen in Peanuts. Meanwhile, my colleagues cut me a wide berth. I wasn’t invited to departmental meetings (which made me lucky). From this extraordinary delay, I could only infer a degree of sadism. I was never grilled a second time, and I couldn’t imagine my Int Lit students were able to provide a lusher version of events when my offense reduced to a single class. Meanwhile, post-Poot, I had announced to those students a reading list reversal. Not only was a certain title potentially “troublesome,” but for a survey course, I said, all Dostoevsky novels were simply too prolix—an adjective the vultures were free to look up. They wouldn’t.
When the letter finally arrived, it was anything but an exoneration. The Office of Cognitive Equality was declining to pursue the matter further, but the complaints lodged would remain on file. I was put on notice that I could continue to fulfill my duties as an instructor only in a probationary capacity and left in no doubt that I was being watched.
A piss-poor excuse for a party, you would think, but as a backslid Witness I took opportunities for occasions where I could find them. I asked Emory over that weekend to raise a glass to our household’s continued solvency. For once she was between suitors and arrived unencumbered by any prissy moral arbiter who might mince from our house in an indignant huff, so she could let her hair down. Since she was currently keeping it pixie-short, she would let her hair down only so far.
I feel self-conscious about the fact that I always seem to describe what Emory Ruth was wearing. I can seldom recall most people’s clothing, which, despite the anguish we can devote to sartorial matters, is par for the course. In truth, you can get away with wearing the same gear for days on end and no one will notice. But Emory was the exception to this rule. I can always visualize what she turned up in on a given evening. I don’t think she spent an inordinate amount on her wardrobe, but she was good at mixing and matching, so that she never seemed to show up in the same outfit twice. It took me a while to realize that whenever she was on her way over I took an uncharacteristic interest in my own appearance. Was I competing with her? It was subtler than that. I was always battling to be received as an equal. Anyway, if I was competing, I was losing. Should I accessorize to the hilt, she’d appear in a supremely pared-down guise whose simplicity made my getup seem fussy and overplanned; should I go for simplicity myself, she’d overshadow me with flamboyance and my minimalism paled to plainness.
That night, she went for simple: loose mid-calf black trousers that rode low on the hips, a magenta top with a scooped neckline, and one of those ballet-type overblouses, also in black, that tied at the waist. She looked elegant and at her ease. She never seemed to be trying hard.
“Look at you, the employed person!” she said, kissing my cheek. “When you told me during Sandy that you were going to teach you-know-what, I never imagined you’d go through with it.”
“Are you admiring or chiding?” I asked.
“A bit of both. Have you learned your lesson?”
“I’ve come to better appreciate the depths of lunacy into which this country has sunk, if that’s what you mean.”
“It wasn’t. Say, where are the kids?”
They’d commonly have dive-bombed Auntie Em by now. “Lucy’s in bed. Darwin and Zanzibar have become . . . more subdued. And conspiratorial. They huddle and whisper together all the time. They used to include me, and now they don’t.”
Emory shrugged. “Darwin’s a teenager.”
“Not until next month.” I popped out the spout of the wine box. “He vacillates between furious and phlegmatic. I think I prefer the fury. As for Zanzo—have you noticed how this equal-everything-we’re-all-the-same is starting to spread? That is, beyond intellect? She tried out for the school’s spring play, and we’re pretty damned sure that she wasn’t cast because she was too good.”
“Why would being good matter? If everyone’s ‘the same’?”
“Talent exposes the lie. So the gifted have to be punished. Suppressed. Shoved in the closet.”
Emory accepted her glass of mediocre merlot and eyed me critically. “You shouldn’t allow this stuff to eat you up, Pearson. Resentment is a nasty emotion with the half-life of strontium ninety.”
“I just came within an inch of losing my job over what was, at worst, a verbal prank. How do you expect me to feel?”
“Relieved. I thought we were celebrating.”
“Hey, the cops finally captured that joker,” Wade said, coming in from the den to grab a beer.
“That Djokar,” Emory said. “I’m embarrassed to admit I find him rather dishy.”
“He looks like a lost puppy,” I said. “The pic the FBI dug up could pass for a high school yearbook photo—you know, of a guy all the girls were sweet on but who never noticed he was a heartthrob. He looks so innocent. But here’s the weird thing. On the news, that Boston Marathon bombing disappeared for days. You’d think an attack on such an iconic event would capture the national imagination. Instead it’s been like ‘The search for the perpetrators is ongoing’—at the end, as an afterthought.”
“The American collective psyche is incapable of thinking about more than one thing at a time,” Emory ventured. “Islamic terrorism is so yesterday.”
“Totally,” I said. “It’s not a part of the ‘last great civil rights fight.’”
“Lotta trouble to go to,” Emory said. “All that planning, investing in those sturdy pressure cookers—only to be ignored. I worry we’re hurting their feelings.”
“I didn’t ignore it,” Wade said. “Not just the deaths. Dozens of people’s lives will never be the same. Lost legs. Fucked-up faces. If I was them, I’d take exception to it.”
We all fear physical injury, but Wade was especially leery of a calamity that could destroy his livelihood. Besides, some people inhabit their bodies more profoundly than others, and Wade was one.
“You know, plenty of other shit is getting squeezed out besides terrorism,” I said. “Like, whatever happened to the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage? It was going great guns, and now the issue has been dropped cold. Gay marriage is as illegal as it ever was. The only thing that’s changed is nobody cares.”
“Huh,” Emory said. “Guilty as charged. I forgot about that whole thing.”
“All that matters is that stupid people can get married,” I said.
Emory’s predictable comeback—Fortunately that’s always been the case, or the institution would have died out—was not forthcoming.
I grabbed my wineglass and slung into a kitchen chair. “But talk about tunnel vision? I keep going back to that grilling by Dean Poot. See, what I couldn’t determine at the time, and still can’t, is whether she believed this hogwash or was just acting as if she believed it. She was definitely wearing a mask. That face gave away noo-thing. But what was underneath? A completely different face, a different person, who may even have thought that her cross-examination of me was pointless, because there was obviously nothing wrong with a literature instructor assigning a Russian classic? Who maybe even yearned for the return of the days when there was such a thing as stupid, and when being stupid was more than enough to prevent your admission to VU? Or did the face under the mask look exactly like the mask? Like, was she just incredibly good at parroting what she was supposed to, or was she a full-fledged fanatic?” I had begun this reflection genuinely ruminating about Diane Poot, but toward the end my color must have risen, because I could as well have been talking about Emory Ruth.
“We all do what we must to get by,” Emory said dryly. “Speaking of which, I have some news myself. Someone in New York has been following my editorials on WVPA and is favorably impressed. I’ve been offered a two-hour interview-plus-straight-to-camera slot on cable TV. It’s New York One. Not CNN—yet—but a step in the right direction.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re climbing the greasy pole pretty fast.”
“I’m nearly forty-one. I wouldn’t call my rise meteoric. Besides, the image of my climbing some ‘greasy pole’ seems ungenerous. I’ve waited for this chance since graduating from college.”
“Sorry,” I backed off. “It’s just an expression. I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re not moving to New York, are you? I’d be heartbroken.”
“No, it’s not a bad commute, and Voltaire is way cheaper.”
“That’s a relief. Except . . .” I should have stopped there, but I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe I’d be the tiniest bit happier for you if you’d impressed New York One with your boffo hosting of a local arts show, even drawing from a miserable pool of talent.”
Taking Wade’s advice, I hadn’t been listening to Emory’s radio editorials, though they made enough of a splash from time to time that I’d overhear faculty members in the department (most of whom weren’t speaking to me) mulling over their content—always with a superficial approval whose sincerity was opaque. Apparently aggressive promotion of Mental Parity continued to dominate Emory’s content.
“New York One was impressed with the opinion pieces instead,” Emory said steadily, “because the opinion pieces are more impressive.”
“Maybe . . .” I said. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You don’t listen to them.”
“I don’t think my listening to them is in the interest of our friendship.”
“You’re doing that again. Basically threatening me with excommunication. And implying that I’m doing something evil.”
Wade shot me a sharp look. He knew full well I was about to fire back, “I think you are doing something evil.” Instead I strained to be diplomatic. “There’s no getting around the fact that you’re paying lip service to an ideology I don’t support. Is New York One at least halfway balanced? Broadcasting opposing views?”
“I don’t think any network is broadcasting opposing views on MP,” Emory said. “Even Fox hedges up a storm.”
“Maybe that’s because Fox is full of folks relieved they can’t be called out for being fucking idiots anymore.” I’m afraid that in my experience trying to keep from getting angry almost never works. It wasn’t working.
“Why can’t you give it a rest, scout?” Wade implored. “Gotta say, I’ve never understood why you’re so determined to keep fighting your corner on this one. It’s a losing battle. It nearly cost you your job. What would you sacrifice by giving in? Just—accept. Everyone’s equally smart. Then move on. Get on with your life. Who gives a shit.”
“In a way, your constant resistance means the opposition is always winning,” Emory chimed in. “What could be a sideline issue, or no issue, is consuming all your energy. It’s occupying your time. Meanwhile your private rearguard action is accomplishing jack. You’re hooked, and you’re stuck. You’re not setting your own agenda. Wade is right. Real victory is getting your life back. Capitulate, even if you don’t mean it, and voilà: you get to think about something else.”
“If you two don’t understand why I can’t just concede the point, then you don’t understand me at all,” I said. “Fact: everyone is not equally smart. I may pander to the notion at VU to help pay our mortgage. But at least here behind closed doors I refuse to be bullied into embracing a ludicrous paradigm that flies in the face of what I’ve observed about other people my whole life. What I’ve observed about myself, too—because you know I’ve never considered myself all that bright—”
“Pearson, that’s just a vanity of yours,” Emory said. “It means ‘I’m so smart that I know how dumb I am.’ Which is no different from ‘I’m really, really smart.’”
“You sound like you’re writing another of your editorials.”
“How would you know?” Emory shot back.
“Look, scout,” Wade said, “stop trying to pick a fight with someone who’s on your side. You were almost fired. Emory came over here to help you celebrate the fact that, miraculously, you weren’t. And you’re not answering my question. What’s at stake for you? MP or no MP. Why does it matter?”
“Well, if we’re going to leave aside how destructive the movement has been to the quality of American education—which matters to us, because we have children who are now learning virtually nothing I don’t teach them myself, and Darwin is such a natural math whiz that he should be teaching me . . . Well, this pie-in-the-sky egalitarianism doesn’t make sense even in the context of our own family. I don’t like to bring it up often, because I don’t think it’s good for your relationship with Darwin and Zanzibar to remind you they’re not—”
“I’m well aware I’m not their biological father,” Wade said wearily.
“Well, someone else is,” I said, “and he may be anonymous, but he had, or has, a genius-level IQ, right? So—and this isn’t a ‘vanity,’ Emory—our two older children are wildly smarter than I am. There’s a reason they could converse by two and read by four. They’re sponges for information, and you don’t have to tell them anything twice. Both those kids have the innate mental agility to rise to the top of whatever field they choose to excel in. That’s not proud Mommy talking; it’s medical reality. And they deserve the opportunity to achieve their potential, just as their country deserves to benefit from that potential. By contrast, and I know this is awkward, and I don’t mean to impugn your genes, Wade, and for that matter they’re my genes, too. But Lucy . . . she’s not unusually quick to pick up new information and new skills, is she? I mean, she’s an adorable little girl, and a bundle of energy, but to get her to remember something new, you have to repeat it, like, fifty times! Which hardly means she’s of any less value as a human being, but—”
“You’re calling our daughter dumb,” Wade said.
“Only in relative terms! Not that it’s remotely her fault, and it’s only the luck of the draw. In the big picture, she probably occupies the very center of the bell curve, like most people. But yes, in comparison to Darwin and Zanzibar, Lucy is dumb.”
That’s when a rustle attracted my attention. Maybe the grown-ups’ arguing had woken her up, because there was my seven-year-old in the doorway, glaring at her mother with raging hatred.