Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “You smell like perfume,” she said after she released me.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, like the nineties.” She took in another quantity of the air between us. “It’s Exclamation.”

  My heart began to thump a gangster rap bass line. I flashed on the scene when Talia came to see me on campus. I could tell she had on her old scent when she sat in my office. How could it possibly have clung to me this long, throughout all the places and fragrances I’d passed between the previous afternoon and now? It seemed so impossible. Then again, with Izzy and her preternatural powers of olfaction, the impossible wasn’t only probable but inevitable. From her earliest days sneaking tastes in the liquor store, to her first restaurant waitressing job serving Denny’s patrons who ordered White Zinfandel when they wanted to drink something “exotic,” to her inaugural tours of cellar inventory duty in the basement at the Cattle Company, to the bistro and beyond, she’d been amassing and cataloguing scent memories. She could recall any of them instantly. Trying to refute her would have been tautological. I almost confessed to save myself from escalating heartache.

  “The party,” I said then, practically blurting it out. I cleared my throat to try to cover over my panic. I feared it was too late to go unperceived.

  Izzy, surprisingly, looked at me as though acknowledging this were a plausible scenario. It prompted me, like a caught criminal, to continue bolstering my alibi with details to make what I said sound more convincing, even though it would accomplish anything but. “All the girls were overdressed and over-scented. Grad students. So considered in matters of their diction, yet always so mannered in their aspect. Their idea of style is Edith Wharton’s.”

  “Were you dancing?” she asked, though not in an accusatory way.

  “No,” I said tentatively. “But these sorts of fetes are attended by a lot of mawkish hugging and hand-talking.”

  “It smells like it was close to you.”

  “What was?”

  “I don’t know. Temptation.”

  “I thought you said it was Exclamation.”

  She looked at me searchingly. Her mouth was poised like she wanted to say something. I barraged her with more unnecessary details. “We had a heated debate.”

  “About what?”

  I prefaced with a simper. “Marisha Pessl.”

  “Well,” she said, almost sounding playful, “it must have been pretty serious.”

  “I don’t think it was,” I said. “Only in the moment, fueled by alcohol and departmental party anxiety. But not after.”

  She smiled a white flag. It was evidence that her momentary apprehension had relaxed. “As long as you got it out of your system.”

  My mind breathed a sigh. “I did. I definitely did.”

  She smelled me again. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s definitely fading.”

  “You want to get some dinner or something?” I asked.

  “Nah,” she said. “I don’t want to stay up too late.”

  “I’ll walk Ishiguro, then,” I said, and reached into my back pocket to check for a sandwich bag. There I felt the index card Berkal had given me. “Shit. I shouldn’t stay up too late, either. I forgot I have to be on campus early in the morning.”

  “Why? You’re not teaching tomorrow, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Stupid meeting with Schultz. I guess I’ll find out if I’m getting any summer classes.”

  “I hope you do,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know. It’s what you do.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with low-slung bitterness.

  I found the statement mildly insulting, despite its veracity. It was what I did. That was true. But had it been a foregone vocational conclusion? What if I hadn’t become an academic? I wondered then. What if my training had come from a wine cellar instead of a lecture hall? If I’d spent my salad days brunoising turnips and chiffonading basil instead of sitting in a dusty booth at the C-Shop explicating Hemingway and Fitzgerald in spiral notebooks, where would we be now? Izzy might have stayed out of trouble if I’d grown up to be a guy who swaggered, who took women as if they were wine, without asking and drinking directly from the bottle. I could have ended up a ballsier version of myself, someone more like Pacer Rosengrant, minus the inarticulateness, I hoped. What if I had been the one who did what he wanted without any guilt or fear? What if I’d been a real restaurant person, instead of just someone who imagined them?

  “It would be like me not being able to . . . taste wine,” Izzy said.

  “Heaven forbid,” I muttered.

  She looked at me like she didn’t hear what I’d said, but avoided asking me to repeat it. Instead Izzy just flashed some bright teeth, as though happiness—feigned or otherwise—was really the panacea everyone pretended it to be.

  11

  I let myself into Shelley Schultz’s office. “Is there a problem, Peter?” the adjunct coordinator asked. The sternness in her voice was patently theatrical. She scowled at me. She attempted, I supposed, to look authoritative. Sadly, her Stella Got Her Clothes Back dark-blue, clingy turtleneck and short skirt life-affirming costume of the recently divorced didn’t imbue her improvisation with much verisimilitude. Her curly-bordering-intractably-frizzy shoulder-length hair kept me from feeling too threatened. I imagined she had a similar failure to affect the affable, veneered, pacemaker-equipped widowers and scheming financiers she sat across from on eHarmony dates at Highland Park restaurants. I also suspected these dates ended before nine o’clock as an anticlimactic result.

  “I thought you wanted to speak with me,” I answered.

  She stood up and retrieved a sheet of paper from the top of her gray filing cabinet. She pressed the document to the table. With three fingers, she pushed it a measure closer to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. It was an agenda for another new hire orientation. Ostensibly the meaningless, hour-long meander I’d just missed. The border she chose from clip art was suitably incongruous. Her design was more appropriate for a homemade wedding save-the-date reminder flyer than it was for outlining the proceedings of a serious pedagogical discussion.

  “Sorry you couldn’t make the event. I thought it would be useful for you to meet the new teachers.”

  “Useful for me? How?”

  “To get some perspective on teaching methods.”

  “I have my own methods, and they’re fine, but thanks.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure about that. I think you might want to have a look at this.” She slid over another piece of paper. This one was tattered and wrinkled. It appeared to have been folded and refolded multiple times. Ink bled through from one side to the other. A grease stain adorning a corner called to mind a middle school election nomination petition.

  I opened the note. It was the multiple-choice midterm evaluation form I’d handed out a week or two earlier. On the back was an anonymous complaint letter from one of my students. The handwriting looked familiar, yet I’d been so disengaged this semester, I couldn’t attribute it to a source.

  An absolute waste of time. Hapworth simply goes through the motions of teaching, recycling the same curriculum over and over again, regardless of who his students are. His grading system benefits the young and inexperienced and the class material is too similar to topics previously studied. The only A’s he gives out are to those that he deems morally worthy. Any challenge to readings or thinking outside of the box will put you in the “trouble” corner. He seems to only like good, quiet, female students. The years of negative feedback on RateMyProfessors.com have gone nowhere. Bummer of a course.

  I folded the note and slid it back across the desk.

  “Do you know who wrote this?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Not really. To be honest, I’m not terribly concerned.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No
,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Shelley, I’ve been here a long time. I’ve come to expect that one or two students every midterm evaluation will, for whatever reason, express dismay with my—what did she call them?—‘curriculum’ and ‘grading system.’”

  “How do you know the student is a she?”

  It was pretty obvious by the penmanship. The thugs’ cursive didn’t tend to prance through a garden of curlicues and I-dotting circles. Not to mention, who else besides a female would accuse me of favoring the girls? But I refrained from answering. I didn’t really give a shit. The complaints had no bearing on me. And if Schultz was this oblivious to the bigger issue of campus ethos at the end of the leader decade of the twenty-first century, whatever it was called, in which education had become commodified and students felt that entitled them to the right to consumer-driven expectations about the “service” the instructors provided, for which they’d paid, and to voice their perceptions on the quality of it in ungrammatical Yelp-restaurant-review-like performance evaluations twice a semester, I couldn’t really do much to help her.

  “And that’s all you have to say about this?”

  “I think the student should be sent to the ‘trouble corner’ for failing to realize that ‘good,’ ‘quiet,’ and ‘female’ are not coordinating adjectives.”

  Shelley Schultz looked at me blankly. I highly doubted that she knew what a coordinating adjective was. I was fairly certain she would have taken a Longman Handbook from her window ledge of unread complimentary desk copies—essential for decorating the set of an educator’s office—and searched for the definition, had I not been sitting before her.

  I was aware I had two choices here of how to proceed. I could apologize and throw myself at the mercy of the coordinator. This would require fabricating a story about a stressful semester. If I added details about finding my famous spouse’s ex-boyfriend in our bed yesterday to portray myself as a pathetic cuckold, she’d have sympathy. It wouldn’t even be that difficult of a method-acting exercise. The encounter, in short retrospect, regardless of Pacer Rosengrant’s protestations, made me feel like Izzy had cheated on me. I could do that and protect my job. Or I could take a completely different approach.

  I thought about Izzy. We’d been to so many places together: the wine festivals, the seminars, the speaking engagements. She made speeches I always listened to intently, no matter how many times I’d heard her deliver them, in Kohler or South Beach or Seattle or Jacksonville. Audiences wanted to pay attention to her. They were compelled by her knowledge and her charm—and her ability to fuse the two made her a true commodity. And I didn’t mind being there to support her, with nothing to offer except my presence. It was what she wanted. It was what she needed. She asked for little in return now, but eventually she’d have to want me to be something more than just a travel companion who genuinely laughed at jokes she told rooms over and over and gazed at her lovingly from a seat in the front rows. What if by then it was too late for me to achieve anything of significance? It hit me that toiling away like this, semester after semester, had gotten me nowhere. It was also turning me incredibly dull and unimaginative. It was astonishing that it had taken this long for me to realize I was going to have to take a stand, once and for all. Do something that couldn’t be undone. That’s what my life with Izzy was, since the moment we first met. What we’d done together had been—and would always be—consequential for that very reason. None of it could be taken back. Not easily, anyway. All this time here, all this shiftlessness, all this buffoonery, I’d been doing nothing more than decathecting from a job that was never truly meant for me. I didn’t really want to teach. I never had. What I needed to do was learn! My adjunct comp instructor sentence had come to a syntactic full stop.

  And Schultz confirmed it with what she told me. I’d asked about the summer classes. Her tiny, hard eyes bulged. Then her face flooded with heat.

  “We have nothing for you, Peter, I’m sorry.”

  “What about the fall?” I asked.

  “Those course assignments, as you know, have yet to be made, to be approved of, there are budgetary constraints, grad students who need to have teaching assistantships as part of their tuition waivers . . .”

  The equanimity I’d been convincing myself I was experiencing throughout this meeting all at once fell away. “When were you going to tell me?” I asked, half angry, half brokenhearted.

  “We were going to distribute memos at the end of the semester.” She paused. “Peter, it wasn’t—it isn’t—personal. The economy has been going through some rough times. This is a temporary situation. Maybe the best thing for everyone is if you took a furlough.”

  She pressed her thin lips together. Her eyes decamped for the back of the office door. I wondered if she’d arranged to have someone escort me out. But nobody came. It was just the two of us, employer, so to speak, and employee, so to speak.

  “You are such a piece of shit, Shelley.”

  “Don’t you dare—I still am—”

  “You only care about yourself, about making sure your stupid sections are covered. Admit it. You weren’t going to say anything because you knew I’d walk out of here and you didn’t want to have to trouble yourself with finding a sub for the rest of the semester.”

  “You’re right about one thing,” she said evenly. She now looked at the computer screen, as though reading lines she’d prepared ahead of time for a situation exactly like this. “I’m going to have to find a substitute to cover your sections for the remainder of the term. And you’re right about something else: You’re walking out of here, and, if I can have anything to do with it, you’ll never be back. You’re fired, Peter.”

  I didn’t even bother to clear out my desk. Berkal could keep all the tchotchkes masquerading as instruments of education. I’d never again have any use for the dry erase markers, pens, and pencils. The campus organization–sponsored mouse pads, the UIC Flame articles that had turned from newsprint to parchment that I’d clipped and had hanging, they were just disparate and hollow relics of my meaningless tenure here. I didn’t even want to retrieve my Apple Holler mug, the one I got with Izzy on the way back from Kohler. It had been irreclaimably tainted by its employment here. Just like I was. I took the elevator down nineteen floors without it stopping to pick up anyone else. I revolved through the University Hall door, exiting the Waffle for the last time. As I bounded away from the lecture centers on the quad, I felt like I was reclaiming essential, lost pieces of myself. The more distance I got between the blurry academic persona I’d been freed of and the bon vivant I was now, the more it seemed liked the future was coming into focus—though I had no idea yet where I was headed. To trumpet my “furlough,” I dropped my Orwellian laminated identification badge and the unduly cheerful lanyard to which it was clamped into a garbage can at the corner of Harrison and Morgan.

  I stopped in a Greek diner. Nobody was at the host stand to greet me. I slid into the first of a long row of empty booths. After receiving a cup of black coffee I hadn’t yet ordered, I took out my cell phone to ring Izzy. I had to tell her, right? I dialed. But before the call connected, I hit END three times in rapid succession.

  12

  And a couple of weeks later, I still hadn’t told Izzy what happened. I couldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t understand. She’d only ever known me as an employed adjunct professor. She’d think I’d been a baby, that my grievances were imaginary. She’d say that people who existed in the real world had to subject themselves to worse things, greater indignities. She’d be right, too. How could I dispute the fact that in the real world it didn’t matter who used “affect” or “effect” correctly? So each morning she’d expect me to, I left for school. I’d have coffee and read the Times at a corner bodega. Today, instead of taking a bus to campus to sit in the library when I finished, I returned to the apartment. I wanted to look for jobs.


  The MacBook awoke from its slumber quickly. Izzy, the last to use the laptop, hadn’t shut it down. I sifted through my documents, found a recent copy of my vita, and cleaned it up.

  Firefox wouldn’t kick in when I entered the Chronicle’s URL. I closed the window and opened another, but couldn’t connect to the Internet. In despair, I pulled down the Apple menu, selected Force Quit, and terminated the browser process. There were other applications running, too. Safari, Microsoft Excel, Address Book, Adobe Reader, Bluetooth File Exchange, and Preview were all open. Jesus. Really, was it that hard for Izzy to exit a program when she was finished with it?

  To a detached Vintage Attraction Excel production schedule, I chose not to save changes. I closed Adobe and Preview in a command-Q flash. Then came Bluetooth Exchange. Before terminating, I instinctively scanned the open transaction history file. Izzy must have been synching her BlackBerry e-mails and calendar from the bistro’s server. I discovered she had, inadvertently, maybe intentionally, downloaded data to the hard drive. In the factory-installed Outlook client on the desktop that I thought nobody used, I could view all her messages.

  There must have been some reason for her pathological indifference of late, skipping the dog’s meals and walks, not turning the TV and the lights off at night, the parade of shoes and clothes down the hall. Judging by the number of her e-mails that originated from the same sender, I had a pretty good idea now of the cause of her carelessness. She couldn’t be bothered to cover her computer maneuvers probably for the same reason she left the faucet hemorrhaging water for ten minutes when something called her attention away from her cooking or toothbrushing. Probably for the same reason she stopped coming home directly after working a night at the bistro. Probably for the same reason that she could never go out for one drink and really mean it. Someone I’d hoped could vanish back into the past without my having to confront Izzy about him in the present was still preoccupying her. And they’d been corresponding.