All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  “George? This is Margaret Snyder. I used to teach English for you,” I added helpfully.

  “Of course, of course!” he exclaimed. “Good to hear from you, Marge! What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

  This would have been an excellent time to make something up along the lines of the Peace Corps, but I perversely dragged my frustrated project once again through its public paces. “Well, I left Gordonhurst, you might remember, to write a novel. And I’m nearly finished.” This was not necessarily a lie. I did not say that the book itself was almost complete. Metaphorically speaking, I was “nearly finished.” “But you know how well first novels sell. Or rather how poorly they sell,” I said, and then added, “heh, heh,” a chuckle at my own self-deprecating drollery. “And so I’m looking for a teaching position in the fall and wondered if the English department might have an opening.”

  “Well, that’s marvelous! Marvelous!” He had a habit of wringing his hands, and I could imagine him doing this now, the phone clenched against his jaw. “You know it looks like we might. Yes, this might be excellent timing for both of us. We’ll have to set up a little interview for you with Neil McCloskey—just as a formality, you know. Can’t have it be said we didn’t follow procedure, now, can we?”

  I assured him that I was happy to follow procedure and hung up the phone feeling as if I’d been thrown a life buoy that would save me from the sea of my own hubris.

  My “interview” with Neil began equally well. “You know we’d love to have you back, Margaret,” he said, gently pounding three packets of saltines with his fist and then pouring the crumbs over his chili. We were lunching in the familiar Gordonhurst cafeteria, the wood paneling worn slick along the wall where students had slumped for decades, waiting for the line to move. “And it would make the school look good,” he added kindly, “having a published writer on the staff.”

  “Mmm,” I said, leaning over my souped-up baked potato.

  “Margaret!” Evelyn Cook, the Latin teacher, who’d long held the position of celebrated writer among the faculty on the strength of a self-published account of her trip to Rome in 1963, was bee-lining across the room as fast as the obstacles created by thirty or so long tables allowed. “When does the great American novel come out?”

  “Nice to see you, Evelyn,” I said. A bacon bit sprang away from the pressure of my fork like a tiddlywink and landed in Neil’s bowl. “No definite date yet,” I mumbled.

  And then we were off: me, limping gamely through the grass, leaving a trail of sweet blood with every step, Evelyn in hungry pursuit.

  “I can’t wait,” she exclaimed, “to go into a bookstore and see your name on the cover of a novel! Who’s your publisher?”

  “Well, you know, since the book isn’t quite done, I haven’t got a publisher yet.”

  She pressed on, nearly drooling. “Was it hard to find an agent?”

  “Margaret’s thinking of coming back to us,” Neil interrupted, digging up a spoonful of chili. He seemed not to have noticed the bacon bit.

  “Really?” Evelyn cocked her head and raised her eyebrows dramatically. “I’d assumed you’d set your sights well beyond our little pond,” she said. “Of course, I’ve found teaching to be conducive to writing myself. You may remember the sketch that was printed in The Charioteer a couple years ago. ‘Tuscany in the April Breeze’? But maybe that was before your time.” The Charioteer was Gordonhurst’s literary magazine. “You know, Jimmy Smithers, over in the math department, writes poetry. Maybe we could all get together. Form a little writing group. We could serve wine and hors d’oeuvres. Tea for the nondrinkers.”

  “That would be nice,” I lied. How pleased Evelyn would be, I thought, when she realized she would never have to read the name Margaret Snyder in print, not even in The Charioteer.

  Obviously, I reflected later, as I walked one of the intimate, shadowy cross streets toward a Lexington Avenue subway station, returning to Gordonhurst had its drawbacks. Still, such a position was infinitely preferable to being an intern at a barely solvent magazine, as I told Simon when he called several weeks later.

  “Do you still want that internship?” he asked. “One of them isn’t showing. Her parents surprised her with some graduation trip to China.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m going back to teaching.”

  “Well, that’s good, Margaret. At least it’s a dignified job, not making copies at less than minimum wage, which is what we’d have you doing here. But what about your book?”

  I explained the efficacy of the five- to six-a.m. slot, but we both knew the novel was over.

  I spent March and April rereading the familiar texts, marking passages for discussion, reviewing sticky points of grammar, and devising assignments for which CliffsNotes would be useless. I decided that when George Temperly called to discuss my salary and benefits, I would demand a raise. As a known quantity, I should certainly be worth a great deal more to the school than I had been as a cipher from Virginia. I also outlined a spiel I intended to deliver to every colleague, well-meaning and malicious alike, who asked me about the status of my novel. It included phrases like “getting some distance” and “taking time to truly understand my characters.” In early May I called Neil, and though I was actually quite eager to begin and so leave the ruin of the previous year behind, I affected a weary sigh.

  “Just organizing my calendar, here,” I said. “I’ve bought the latest in picks and shovels at Bloomingdale’s. When do we head for the salt mines?”

  “Margaret!” Neil’s terrier, Montmorency, barked in the background and I heard a soft thud, like a book falling from a table to the floor.

  “Neil? Have I missed a meeting?” Although August was usually the month boobytrapped with faculty meetings about inexplicable insurance alterations and whether this would be the year to crack down on those who’d neglected their summer reading, occasionally such housekeeping occurred at the end of the school year. As someone who knew the ropes, I would probably be expected to attend.

  “Margaret … no … you haven’t missed anything.”

  “Good,” I said. “Listen, I think I’m all set for September, but are we doing Jane Eyre or Great Expectations this year?”

  Neil cleared his throat several times, as if a bit of popcorn had lodged there. “Margaret, have you been out of town?”

  Why did he keep repeating my name? “No,” I answered.

  “And no one has called you?”

  “Called me? No. Why? Has something happened?” I imagined a fire set in the corner of a science lab by a pressure-crazed junior or a flood among the precious records in the basement. Maybe George Temperly, or perhaps Evelyn Cook, had suffered a heart attack.

  “No, no, nothing’s happened” Neil said. “I mean, it’s just that …” He cleared his throat again. “Well, the thing is, Margaret, we hired someone.” Montmorency began to bark again.

  I did not immediately grasp the significance of this. “You mean someone else?”

  “Well,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Instead of me?”

  “Montmorency! Be quiet!” The dog continued to bark. “Well, you know, she’s just gotten her Ph.D. From Brown, actually. She’s very nice. Kind of bubbly, but smart as a whip. Very interested in Faulkner. I think you’d really like her.”

  I experienced a strange squeezing sensation in my chest, as if I’d held my breath underwater for too long. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the sound of his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret,” he was saying. “We really should have called you.”

  “OK, then,” I managed. “Well, thanks for telling me anyway.” My voice was high and unnatural. “I think the water is running. Or the stove. I better go.”

  He said something about lunch or brunch. I could do no more than nod. “OK, well, better go,” I said again.

  But he was relentless. “… writing group,” he was saying. “Thinking of taking a semester off to write it up. It’s sort of a mystery, but li
terary, of course, set in a private school. The head of the English department,” here he laughed modestly, “solves the murder.”

  So many ways I could have gone, so many choices I could have made. If I’d studied French instead of cuneiform. If I’d taken a computer class instead of Intro to Chaucer. If I’d gone to those recruitment meetings, if I’d gotten a Ph.D., if I’d become an electrical engineer. Behind me, doors opened onto gorgeous vistas and intriguing corridors. But somehow I had missed these and had instead wormed my way into a glorified closet with a window on an airshaft, from which there seemed no way out.

  And, so, I became an intern, a second-choice replacement for someone still eligible for graduation gifts.

  CHAPTER 13

  Margaret

  A YEAR AGO, despite my public protestations to the contrary, I’d been pretty sure that an elevated place in the world had been reserved specifically for me. I’d assumed that I only needed to reveal my long-hidden talent, to throw off the bushel basket, so to speak, and those who had disdained me would gather round in awe to admire my light. But what if, after all, I had no light? What if the basket had been a useful cover allowing me to pass among those who otherwise would discern my undesirability? I now had to consider the possibility that I’d thrown off my bushel basket and lay naked on the grass and still people stepped over me as if I were a clod of earth.

  On a Sunday in late May, when Ted had gone into his office—he did this regularly now on the weekends to avoid the sullen, snarling creature I’d become—I crawled into the back of the bedroom closet and exhumed Robert Martin from his cat-fur-clouded box. I’d intended to use the backs of my manuscript pages, having just alphabetized a list of potential advertisers for In Your Dreams and run out of paper to feed the printer. But there, with one knee pressed uncomfortably on the straps of a run-down sandal, I determined that I was not finished yet. All the public and private humiliation I had suffered would only fuel my renewed efforts. So what that the list of those to whom I now had to prove my worth had grown? I would show them all.

  If only I’d given up. If only I’d cleaned out the closet, applied to teach at another school, and devoted my creative energies to amateur theatricals.

  I recognize now that I’d have gotten off cheaply then. A year, a stalled novel, and a few callous rejections were not so high a price to pay for clear-eyed disillusionment. But no true gambler stops just because she’s run through her wad, not when borrowing, begging, and stealing remain. I didn’t see it that way then, of course. My illusions bruised but essentially intact, I mistook my folly for strength. I clenched my teeth and shook the printed pages in my hands. I would use my desperation, marshaling it to speed my fingers forward. I would write a novel, I told myself, or die in the attempt.

  As if it were only a matter of will.

  I sat down at the table with the manuscript. I opened my legal pad to a fresh page and turned on the computer. I watched the screen alight and waited while it worked through its various procedures. I opened the file called “Novel.”

  And the familiar malaise settled around me like a fog.

  For forty-five seconds or so I stared at the last few sentences I’d typed in February. They were trite and flat. I deleted them. I drew a cube on the legal pad, and then another on top of it. I constructed a tower of cubes. I shaded alternate surfaces. Then I checked my e-mail.

  There was a single message, from macfamily; subject: west-woodho.

  While fortunes, such as they were, had steadily declined over the past year for the Hansen-Snyders, they’d continued to grow for the MacMillans. In January, Letty had dropped all pretense of “just seeing what was out there” and had begun to house hunt in earnest. So far, the process had been as disillusioning as my search for employment. On New Year’s Day, she’d written, “There are certain things we want, otherwise it’s just not worth moving.” These included location on a quiet, tree-lined street on the Westside, a good school system through high school, which instantly ruled out all of the Westside other than laughably overpriced Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, a house built before 1950 unless it had been designed by a well-known architect, a formal dining room, a decent-sized yard, a bedroom for each child plus a study, at least three bathrooms, hardwood floors, and no aluminum-frame windows. They were willing to forgo a fireplace, if all other criteria were met. A guesthouse would be a plus.

  After the first weekend, the five essential bedrooms had been whittled down to four, and there was no more talk of guesthouses or fireplaces. By February, they would settle for three bedrooms and an attic or garage that could be converted into a study, if everything else was “perfect.” In March, they agreed to make do with two bathrooms, as long as one, at least, had a tub, and decided that Michael’s office at the museum gave him plenty of space to work.

  Letty’s descriptions of the houses they examined had at first been long and detailed, full of careful weighings of pros and cons. More recently, however, they’d deteriorated into snippets of faults that rendered the places “unlivable,” although mostly these were difficult to remove errors in taste: bathrooms large enough to host spa weekends, walls covered in mirrors and marble, “Ionic columns in the living room again!” and wet bars, wet bars, wet bars. By May, she was ready to consider a three-bedroom, one and a half bath seventies ranch backed against a ninety-degree weed-covered canyon wall—basically the same house they now owned without the yard but, since it was located in a tony neighborhood, a house that “cost more than a mansion in Kansas City!” A house that would, in fact, be only slightly better than my “starter” job with In Your Dreams.

  They carried a lot of debt, which was probably inevitable given the fact that they lived in a major metropolitan area on one academic salary and were raising four children and which was certainly exacerbated by their good taste and haphazard accounting habits. Letty and Michael were the types who, rather than recording checks diligently in their register, made frequent, frantic calls to their twenty-four-hour automated banking system to find out their balance. Also, Michael tended to be rather acquisitive. On what they considered their first date, a campus movie and coffee, Michael drew his credit card from a vintage billfold of supple calfskin but was unable to cover the cost of Letty’s cappuccino. “I hoped you’d order a latte,” he said, digging into his pocket to display a handful of change. “I had enough for that.” However, three weeks ago, when they were preapproved for a home loan, Letty was pleasantly shocked.

  M—

  The bank says we can afford way more for a house than Michael and I thought we could. Isn’t that great? Not only that, but we can get a loan through the bank the Otis works with that’ll let us put only five percent down. Of course, the interest rate isn’t the most competitive, but this way, once we sell the house we’re in now, we really will have enough to look at some decent properties.

  L

  “Properties.” This was how one began to talk when one had been house hunting for nearly half a year. Letty did not seem to realize that the bank didn’t care if her kids went to college or if she ever ate out in another restaurant. So long as she had enough to meet the mortgage, she could “afford” it. Not surprisingly, being given permission to spend more than they possessed greatly accelerated the house-hunting process, and within days Letty sent the following:

  M—

  We’ve found it, the house I’ve been looking for my entire life, at least since January. That’s not to say it’s perfect. I admit that the house I pictured while resting my head against the steering wheel, waiting for Marlo’s Girl Scout troop to finish decorating their egg carton jewelry boxes and trying to shut out the “wheels of the bus go round and round,” had a porch with roses twining around the railings and the beach within walking distance and bedrooms with huge windows hung with gauzy curtains that billowed in the breeze—in other words, a house in a commercial for feminine products. But if a house like that even exists in this city, it costs at least two million dollars and the windows in its sing
le bedroom look directly into the bedroom of the house next door.

  This real house is a 1920s Spanish style in Westwood, north of Wilshire. Did you get that last key phrase—north of Wilshire? Yes, south of Sunset—but who wants to live in a dark canyon, anyway? But north of Wilshire. (Must learn how to work that into all casual conversations—“Oh, you know, north of Wilshire, where we are, the traffic isn’t so bad.”) I know, I know, so much for a decent public high school. But elementary is superb and we have to compromise somewhere! Anyway, we’d already decided on private for Marlo and her top choice—single-sex, with lots of scholarship girls so there’s almost the same economic diversity you’d find at a public school and with cars in the student parking lot that aren’t significantly different from those in the faculty spaces—is right down Sunset. You’ve seen the campus in movies.

  What I love about this place is the neighborhoody feel. The quietness. It’s on this pretty, hilly block where I’ll wave from the window to the kids as they run over to their friends’ houses, just like we did, although I don’t actually remember my mother ever waving. The gorgeous, exotic shrubbery is expertly maintained by exploited illegal immigrants—but we won’t have to continue that. We’ll water our own lawn, thank you.

  Beverlywood, where Letty lived now, was also a neighborhood of well-constructed sidewalks and reasonably safe streets, allowing children easy access from house to house. Of course, Beverlywood houses contained ordinary Game Boy-playing, skateboard-riding, TV-watching kids. I suspected that Letty envisioned some different breed of neighborhood child in Westwood.

  The house has great bones (that’s real estate speak) and an impressive carved wooden door that’s recessed into the wall, so it sort of feels like you’re entering a cave, except in a good way. And it’s big, Margaret, substantial—almost three thousand square feet. It’s not a mansion, but it’s a “real” house, a come-to-our-place-Brad-and-Zoe kind of house. It needs a few adjustments to make it work for our family, but nothing too daunting. Our turn to ruin a place with tasteless renovations!