The Dilettantes

by Michael Hingston

  Alex had already grown to hate these flights of fancy. Was it too much to just write his two essays, earn his 10 percent participation grade, and move on? Was nothing allowed to be just boring anymore? Did university have to be wacky, too?

  Eli cocked his head, looking first bemused, and then increasingly unsettled. He’d expected more of a reaction. Several seconds passed.

  Oxford shirt eventually gave in. “But what is the alternative?” he asked in a flat deadpan.

  “Ah, so glad you asked, Jeremy! After consulting with Professor Devereaux, I am thrilled to announce that, should any of you choose to do so, you may officially forgo all of the assignments listed on the syllabus.” He paused again, evidently expecting gasps of disbelief. But Alex’s generation lived in decidedly more jaded times than whatever was running through Eli’s head. “Just—just ditch the whole lot,” the TA added.

  Only one student, a 2nd-year in a black turtleneck who always sat at the TA’S immediate right, was still furiously taking notes.

  “Okay …” Alex said.

  “What’s the catch?” asked Eleanor.

  Eli’s jowls seemed to frown with him. “Geez, you guys. No love for the art of suspense, huh? You just want answers, answers, answers. ‘Will this be on the test?’”

  “Actually,” the double major said, “we’re trying to figure out if there’s even going to be a test.”

  Eli held his hands out in surrender. “Fine. Wonder no longer. No need for a drumroll or anything.” There wasn’t one. “If you decide to take on this alternate curriculum, the only thing you must produce by the end of the semester is: your very own Shakespeare adaptation.”

  Jeremy coughed into his sleeve. The turtlenecked girl’s pen scratchings only barely filled the silence.

  “Now, don’t worry,” Eli continued. “It doesn’t have to retain all of the nuances of the source material—in fact here I suggest you follow Professor Devereaux’s ethos, and consult it as sparingly as possible—and it doesn’t have to be fancy. If you want to make a film, it doesn’t have to be feature-length. Your Richard III–inspired hot air balloon doesn’t have to meet Transport Canada regulations.”

  Slowly, the implications of this new project began to dawn on the class. Restrictions, possibilities, and especially loopholes. And since the social barrier had already been weakened by their shared pre-class snack, actual discussions started to break out, to Eli’s shock and joy. Cheap sugar lasered through the students’ veins. They took turns pulling apart their TA’S idea and reassembling it, looking for weaknesses like a raptor at an electric fence.

  Eleanor raised her voice to interrupt. “Are you sure Professor Devereaux approved this?”

  The rest of the class froze.

  “Absolutely,” Eli snapped back—though his cheeks twitched a little as he said it. “So as I was saying, your adaptation doesn’t have to be perfect. But it must be artful. And it must capture the spirit of the Bard’s ideas, in whatever style, length, and medium you choose.”

  Alex, who had been privately mulling the project over, thought back to what he’d half-joked to Tracy earlier. Maybe he should sculpt something. When else would he get the chance to do something so perverse for a pretty much guaranteed A?

  The conversations grew steadily louder and more expansive. Alex wasn’t included in any of them, but his mind was racing with too many possibilities to be envious. Falstaff pop art. Titus Andronicus brand meat pies. A re-worked clip from Aladdin with Shakespearean verse dubbed overtop of the cranky parrot. It became a kind of Mad Lib, an undergrad’s drinking game: see how badly you can desecrate a legend. (Tyson had a similar trick he played with Beach Boys songs, where he’d quietly sing to himself his own ultra-graphic reinterpretations.)

  Alex felt up to the challenge. His lungs swelled with adrenaline, just like they had at the outset of his viral video stakeout. After all, he’d always considered himself an artist. Time to prove it.

  He started scribbling down notes of his own.

  At the front, Eli took in the room with a huge smile. The number-one topic of conversation in TA offices across the department was not which pedagogical—nobody was so crass as to say teaching—style worked best. No, it was how to make the students do anything. Literally, any thing. Speak, sneeze, whatever.

  “Everyone,” he said, “settle down.” His voice wavered with emotion. “Is it fair to assume that some of you would be Interested in doing this?”

  Seventeen hands shot straight up.

  After tutorial let out, and Eli had re-gathered his mountain of paper and tottered off to his office, flush with pride, the same bunch of students who’d bonded in the hallway waited behind in the classroom, still buzzing with sour keys and their gossip-worthy new assignment. It was now after noon; a plan to “continue this discussion” at the Pub was quickly taken up.

  Eleanor nudged Alex, who was sweeping a series of pens back into his bag. He looked up and saw her cheeks flaring a light Braeburn red. “Do you want to come?” she asked, before quickly adding, “We’re going to the Pub. Didn’t know if you heard.”

  “Oh,” Alex replied. “Yeah. It’s nice of you to ask, but I have to meet a professor. Office hours.”

  What? Why am I saying this?

  She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “See you next week.”

  Alex couldn’t believe it. He realized, watching Eleanor’s ass sashay out the door, that his automatic response was to say no to things—even to things that would almost definitely not be torturous. It was out of his control. No. Nah. I would, but. Who builds a brain with such shoddy reflexes?

  The classroom wasn’t booked for next period, so Alex took his time getting ready to go. It was a nice ass, he thought. A bit too big, but she used it well. He imagined her demurely sitting on the edge of a private swimming pool, a curvy Pink Floyd model awaiting her spray paint artist. The image came to him almost too easily.

  Alex went to close his binder, and saw that his absent-minded doodling during class had transformed into something far more elaborate. He’d accidentally drawn a crude blueprint of SFU itself, with lazy but unmistakable circles written all over it: in front of the library, in Maggie Benston and West Mall, at the bus loops, and dotted throughout the AQ hallways. The locations of the Metro boxes.

  So much for not letting it get to him. A line from the ether of his subconscious leapt to the fore: The lady doth protest too much.

  Alex crumpled the page up and pitched it into a nearby garbage can. No kidding, he thought.

  9

  NO SOAP RADIO

  Tracy looked up from her chair at Cornerstone, saw Anna coming her way with a cheery wave of her coffee cup, and panicked. She wiped her nose and tried to look away, but not fast enough. It wasn’t until Anna got a few steps closer that she made out Tracy’s red eyes, and the way her hands were balled inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt, the fabric stretched taut up each arm. Anna’s cheeriness gave way to a look of concern. She rushed to Tracy’s side, and went in for a hug just as Tracy fell toward her, sending a dry, unsatisfying, bottom-scraping sob into the edge of her armpit.

  “We broke up,” she managed to get out. “He left. It’s done.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Anna said, lowering herself into the next seat over. “Everything makes sense when you start at the beginning.”

  Privately, Tracy remembered Dave’s rules about campus friendship. They were both sitting. Hell, they just embraced. It was official.

  “The beginning,” she repeated, for the moment feeling a little calmer. Her breathing came in practised intervals, and she was wringing a slippery bag of Kleenex between her fists. “See, I find that’s when everything looks worse—when you can see it all cleanly laid out, but still nobody reacts in time. It’s like watching a bird fly into a window in slow motion.”

  She didn’t want to say the other part out loud, the part that was gnawing at her the hardest and also the one she couldn’t begin to explain. Namely: why was she the one who felt
like her bones were being snapped, one by one, from her toes on up, when for weeks she’d been on the brink of doing the exact same thing? She felt almost jealous. Attic-dwelling Dave had finally stepped up to the plate.

  She ought to be relieved. So why did she have to be the one who felt like garbage? He was the one who’d been so horrible. Well, so had she. But so had he.

  They sat in a back corner of the café, near the windows. An artificial fire blazed nearby behind glass, while a muted TV dangled from the ceiling, its closed-captioning lagging a few hopeless seconds behind the action.

  “The beginning,” Tracy said again. “Okay. Basically we met at the very start of 1st-year, and we’ve been dating ever since, minus maybe the first ten minutes or so after we met. It happened really quickly.”

  Anna sipped her coffee. “Where did you meet?”

  “Rez, actually. In the Land of Endless Sweatpants. We lived on the same floor. There was this party—what they officially call a ‘community-building exercise’—where we played this drinking game called Edward Fortyhands. Do you know it?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Probably for the best. It’s also sometimes called 80 Oz. to Freedom, after that horrible Sublime song. All you do is duct-tape a huge bottle of beer to each of your hands, and then you can’t take them off until they’re both empty.” She gave a watery smile. “Like most things in residence, it’s about getting way, way drunker than you want to.

  “Actually, in its own weird way, it is a community builder, since you’re all in it together, doing this ridiculous thing as a group. I mean, it’s, like, two litres of alcohol. The only thing anyone can talk about the whole night is how crazy it is that they’re even having a conversation with these huge beer mitts on.

  “But the problem is that if you get there late, after everyone else has started, it’s impossible to catch up. The train has left the station. And that’s exactly what happened with us: Dave and I both showed up to meet friends, and we each got there late enough to see everyone giggling and, you know, belly-bouncing without us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m having trouble picturing this game. How do they open the bottles with no hands?”

  “Ha!” Tracy laughed, and immediately regretted it. Her head was a delicate potion of fluids, and any slight jolt could set the whole thing off foaming again. “Teeth, mostly,” she said. “Or feet. Sometimes you’ll find a busted-up countertop the morning after.”

  “Weird. Okay. So tell me about Dave.”

  Hearing his name spoken so matter-of-factly was another strange sensation. The contents of her head started to slosh from side to side, and she drank more of her own coffee to try to even herself out. “Well,” she said woozily, “the first thing you should know is that he didn’t always look this way.”

  Anna took another polite sip. “I never had the pleasure.”

  “Right.” Of course she’d never met him. How could she have? Tracy and Dave had just been together for so long that she felt as if some ghostly projection of him followed her wherever she went, broadcasting her taste in men and companionship to everyone around her. Was that what people meant when they called their partner a ball and chain? Hers wasn’t a literal weight, though that might have actually been preferable: at least chains broke when you dropped something heavy enough on them.

  “He was wearing this green cardigan,” she continued, now nearly whispering. “Buttoned all the way up. With a T-shirt that said ‘LOCAL SPORTS TEAM.’ He was easily the best-dressed person there. I remember laughing at how depressing that was—the first of my many lofty hopes for university falling flat. But he thought it was because of some joke he’d made. In retrospect, I think that must’ve softened him up.” Tracy stared out the window at the rain tapping against the pavement. “Neither of us had much to say, until I mentioned I was reading Baudrillard for the first time. I might have used the phrase changed my life. Or blew my mind. Maybe both. Dear god.”

  “Let me guess: Simulacra and Simulation?”

  “Not sure. It was that ten-page excerpt everyone reads. Something about copies and originals, truth and Disneyland. Undergrad catnip. Anyway, Dave perked right up. It turned out he’d devoured that essay as a fourteen-year-old—you have to understand, he never got out much. We started talking about how university itself is a perfect example of simulacrum: how everyone grows up seeing people on TV playing characters in university, and how that completely shapes the way they think you’re supposed to act once you get there. But that’s what everyone does. So there’s no such thing as an authentic university life, because blah blah blah. You can imagine how clever we thought we were.” Tracy drained the last of her latte. “Then I slept with him. Do you want another one of these?”

  “I’m okay,” Anna said. “Wait. What? You what?”

  “Hold on.” Tracy stood up and patted at her pockets. “Be right back.”

  A few minutes later she returned, bearing a steaming crimson mug. “Sorry about that,” she said. “The barista insisted on showing off the new pattern he’d learned in my foam.” She tilted the cup toward Anna, who, still confused, straightened up to take a look. “Don’t strain yourself: it’s a leaf. What a shocker. When you’ve got a jug of hot milk for a paintbrush, your options are limited. Leaves, and hearts—and those are just slightly less busted leaves. Jesus, those people. It’s not a skill.”

  “You seem in better spirits,” Anna said.

  Tracy considered this carefully. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Where were we again?”

  “You were at the part where you slept with a guy you’d just said hello to.”

  “Ah. Right.” Tracy felt herself warming up to a story that had long been workshopped into perfection. “Dave got this devious look on his face. He asked me if I wanted to live out another part of our pre-ordained ‘authentic’ university experience. ‘Have you ever seen Undeclared?’”

  “No. What is that?”

  “That’s what he asked me,” Tracy said.

  “Oh.”

  “So in the pilot, the two main characters sleep together at their first college party, just to see what it’s like. They figure randomly having sex is something you’re supposed to do there—just another habit you pick up. But then it gets awkward again, and the rest of the show is about them maybe getting back together.”

  Anna bit her lip, fumbling for the right tone. “Let me get this straight. You had sex with Dave because of a TV show?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because of an episode that was itself about simulacrum.”

  Tracy shrugged. “Yeah, basically.”

  “Is that ironic?”

  “Probably.”

  “And this sex on the show, it essentially wrecked the people’s chance at having a normal relationship, yes?”

  “What can I say—Dave was a charming fellow. Probably still is, in his way.” This last sentence trailed off.

  “Okay. I think I understand. And,” Anna leaned in conspiratorially, “the sex was—?”

  “Well, a bit rushed, as you can imagine,” Tracy said. “We went to the communal bathroom on the next floor, and while we were doing it I think we were both trying to remember what it looked like on the show. But it was good. Surprisingly good, actually. No psychological damage on either side. Though I never did anything like that again, for obvious reasons.

  “And, of course,” she added, “I found out later he was on mushrooms the whole time.”

  “This is a very strange way to meet someone,” Anna said.

  The ballad of Tracy and Dave went on for another half-hour, with Tracy’s every effort to omit or abridge thwarted by Anna’s anxiously raised eyebrows—the look of a child who can tell her parent is skipping ahead in a bedtime story. Anna was an excellent listener. She never checked her watch or looked out the window, except out of courtesy during the most intimate sections. Her body appeared slightly magnetized forward in her seat. Tracy noted that her new friend would
probably make a pretty good copy editor: she took the text on its own terms, and patiently followed it wherever it led.

  After that first time sleeping with Dave, things did indeed get awkward between them, just as the prophet Judd Apatow had foreseen. For the next few weeks when they saw each other at school, neither was sure of the proper etiquette for their situation. A kiss on the cheek seemed ridiculous, but so did not touching at all. They settled on a goofy salute, until Tracy declared the whole thing too bizarre, and insisted they start from scratch and take each other on a real first date. At the end of the night, Tracy kissed Dave once on the lips and went back to her room alone. She shut her door and beamed.

  Once they were back on the usual relationship trajectory, Tracy and Dave got along swimmingly. When they announced they were moving in together, it wasn’t much of a shock to their friends and family; in fact, half of them could’ve sworn it’d already happened months earlier. The sex cooled off rather quickly—especially given its initial prominence—but they settled into a routine of late-night studying and complementary hobbyhorses. She put the bug in his ear about farmers’ markets and podcasts. He got her to listen to Hüsker Dü, and told her old-timey anti-jokes like The Aristocrats and No Soap Radio. They met somewhere in the middle.

  “And then I got pregnant.” Tracy had seen this part of the story coming, but couldn’t stop herself. Now it would all have to come out. “Right away, Dave wanted to terminate it. I wasn’t so sure. But what choice did I have, really? It’s not like he had any room to backtrack if I did decide to keep it. As soon as I walked out of that filthy clinic—alone, by the way—that was the exact second I knew it was over between us.”

  “Oh, Tracy.”

  “And he never figured out how to talk about it. Not to apologize, either. Nothing. I just remember that first night, I couldn’t stop crying. And when Dave came home, all he said was, ‘There’s a population problem anyway.’” Tracy’s voice was steadily rising. “A population problem! Can you believe that?”