The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  These were my paying customers. I had courted them. Yet faced with a particularly egregious e-mail, I would quake internally with a type of malaise that came from knowing that this person was so stupid and inconsiderate that I had no hope of engaging him in a rational exchange about his assignment. (I recognized that this very incompetence was at least one reason my job existed in the first place. But of course, this was rarely the first thing that came to mind when my customers berated me.) I would be overcome with a sort of socially conscious desire to revoke this individual’s right to waste oxygen that somebody else might have used to make a thought, a desire to reach my hand through the Internet and cram my fingers right up his nostrils.

  I was working through a lot of my own issues at the time, granted.

  Once, I wrote a six-page paper on organizational communication and conflict resolution for a master’s-level class. The assignment came with the following instructions:

  comments: there is no topic as such, there are few questions to b nswered.

  I completed the assignment using the questions forwarded by the client. I received the following response:

  Hello!

  I recieved paper from David.

  It was absolutely different. he didn’t answer those questions that I sent him.

  I am suppose to fail for this. It is not those questions that I sent him to answer, he just put together my different classe that i sent him as an guidelines.

  The paper he sent me is nothing, I can’t show it to my teacher.

  My deadline is tomorrow untill 11 pm.

  I hope you will fix it. Or i am lost. You have to do something. wating for your reply.

  It is urgent.

  “You have to do something,” he said.

  How about that? What a power trip. This kid thought he was my boss. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a boss. As I have said, I would try to be fair and give revisions where revisions were due. But I’d be damned if I was going to take this kind of insolence from anybody, let alone one of my half-brain customers. His stupidity was paying my bills, so I suppose I wasn’t really in a position to be self-righteous. But I was anyway.

  And so I was always just on the fringe of conflict.

  Like any good, healthy passive-aggressive, I turned in assignments with habitual lateness, I ignored customer e-mails, and to those who were impetuously entitled assholes, I displayed contempt in the quality of my work.

  Try to guess what kind of paper a repeat customer got after writing the following e-mail to request an assignment about Laurel and Hardy:

  Let me tell you that my research paper better get a better grade then my essay because I am not happy with a 70 as a score. I paid a lot of money for that one and this one. I would like a refund on my essay you know I can’t even make this one up!

  Thinking back now, I can’t be sure, but I probably wrote that paper while drinking.

  I dedicated half of my emotional energy on any given day just to breathing out the impulse to tell every customer exactly what I was thinking.

  “I apologize that this assignment appears not to answer the questions posed in the instructions. Below, please find a link to a dictionary. This contains the definitions of words. These will help you to better understand the English language.”

  “Thank you so much for your constructive criticism. I will take your notes on ‘sentince stricture’ and ‘gramer’ under advisement. I’m getting such good advice here that I almost feel like I should be paying you. Please provide me with your home address and a self-addressed stamped envelope large enough for a letter bomb and I’ll send a check directly.”

  “I’m sorry that your assignment did not receive the grade that you anticipated. However, if I were in your position, I’d probably be super-polite to the guy who has enough information to destroy you and all your hopes and dreams for the future… not that I would, but you should just know that I could.”

  I never e-mailed any of those clever things, though. I tried to remind myself that this was the business I’d chosen, that this was simply the nature of the clientele, that I should at least be grateful that none of these fools was actually my boss.

  How had I gotten myself into such a position, taking orders from morons, absorbing hostile e-mails from losers, enduring wantonly brandished exclamation points from people who wouldn’t know a good sentence if it jumped up and expressed all over their faces?

  I was working hard, but dispiritedly. And out of the imperative to make money, I continued to take on too many papers, more than I could handle. Leaving aside material exigencies, the more work I did, the less time I would have for personal reflection, which was something I generally avoided at this determinedly single and isolated point in my life.

  I had moved through high school and college in a series of melodramatic adolescent relationships with a dozen incompatible girls. That’s all right. You’re not meant to marry every woman whom you love. And in my experience, you’re not even meant to particularly like every woman whom you love. But after a series of these relationships, varying in length from ten minutes to ten years and leading right into the middle of my early adult years, I was suddenly alone in a crowded place.

  Fortunately, Philly was a growing scene. At first, it was just me and Ethan there. But after a few years, the city started to become crowded with good company. Country Sam moved into the hood with his bong and his banjo. Damon, a salesman with the industrial cleaning supply company, rehabbed a house with Paulie and moved down from the suburbs. I ran into Gould on the street one day. We had been in the same bunk at camp years back. My oldest friend, big Harmon K., moved back home from school in Boston.

  So we started a Thursday-night poker game, with my buddies and I hunched around a coffee table until four in the morning, occasionally standing to stretch, grunt, complain, and muse on how terrible it would be to go to work in just a few hours. Once in a while, the drunk who lived to one side of us or the drug dealer who lived to the other side would join the game.

  Then Bree transferred from Rutgers to Temple, up in North Philly. She moved back into her mom’s cozy log cabin in the pines of South Jersey, but she spent most of her time in the city. We split pitchers of beer, went out to nice dinners, rented crappy movies, and ate junk food together on Saturday nights.

  It was just like old times.

  She was my late-night call, the last word of my day, and the reason I sometimes appeared to be elsewhere when I was with whomever I might be dating at the time. We had gotten through college with not too much more than the occasional ill-advised kiss or yet more ill-advised wandering hand; there was never a discussion, very few explicit confrontations with jealousy, but endless dancing around the obvious intensity and intractability of our emotional investment in this relationship. We partied with the same people, behaved with handsy familiarity in public, silently attempted to cock-block one another wherever possible, and, ultimately, went our separate ways when it came time to pair off for the night.

  But things were different when she got to Philly. We were both single, and we both did everything in our power not to acknowledge this as an opportunity. Nevertheless, my various incipient love interests vanished anticlimactically, and I became quietly inconsolable about the fact that Bree and I were in all probability meant to be with one another but never would be. After ten years of friendship, even on the blurriest night, the boundaries remained sharply defined.

  A customer ordered a love poem, and I swiped it off the board. I was hardly in a position to dispense romantic lyricism, but a job was a job. He wanted a poem that would reveal his true feelings to a beloved ex-girlfriend. According to the customer, the girl already had a new boyfriend, but he was convinced that the right verse would persuade her to break up with her boyfriend, run open-armed toward him, and passionately embrace him in a golden meadow of dandelions.

  He asked that the poem be “emotional” and that it “rhyme.” The standard two-page paper is about six hundred words, earning me be
tween twenty and thirty dollars in twenty minutes. A rhyming poem would probably be several fewer words, and would therefore earn me a slightly better rate.

  Besides, to break up the monotony of research papers and book reports, a sordid love triangle certainly had its appeal. I was in the mood to satirize love. I’d listened to more than enough Journey to know how a bad love poem should sound. I delivered the following completed work:

  I hold you in my arms

  In dreams that plague my sleep.

  I’m taunted by your charms

  In daylight’s plodding creep.

  The minutes spent without you

  Drip mercilessly slow

  Down time’s jagged avenue

  But I doubt you even know.

  Because I’m idling through my days

  Struggling to remember your touch

  And I’m thinking of you always

  Wondering if you think of me as much.

  But I know you’re not alone at night

  Warmed by memories of me

  Instead, I know, he holds you tight.

  He’s where I want to be.

  If you’ll give me another chance though

  I can be the one

  We can start out nice and slow

  Like we’ve only just begun.

  I’ve never gotten over you

  And I fear I never will

  So I hope that we can start anew

  There’s a void in my heart you can fill.

  What happened in the past,

  We’ll forever leave behind.

  Happily together at last.

  Our futures are combined.

  I don’t know where we’re going.

  It’s inscribed unseen above.

  But the horizon’s brightly glowing

  With the promise of our love.

  One hundred and eighty words in ten minutes. Killer.

  If this guy had been my friend, I probably would have advised him that writing poetry to a girl who didn’t already like you was basically sexual suicide; that she would most likely think it was pretty creepy; that if it did somehow work because she just loved poetry that much, she would wonder why he wasn’t as good at rhyming stuff in real life; that if she did ultimately become suspicious and rifled through his old e-mails, she would be horrified to learn that the great testament to his love, the gesture that he would otherwise recount, teary-eyed, for his children with increasing sentimentality at the passing of each year, was little more than a custom-made Hallmark card that had taken me less time to write than a one-page paper on bladder control issues in older adults.

  But who knew? Maybe this girl was just waiting for this guy to make a play. Maybe she felt the same way. Maybe she just needed him to make some grand and romantic gesture like charging his mom’s credit card to an academic-ghostwriting website for a poem composed by a total stranger in order to see her own true feelings. Maybe.

  Maybe not. Two weeks later, the client’s situation appeared to have only gotten worse. Being lovelorn myself, I certainly did not intend to minimize whatever it was that the client was going through. I just wondered why he didn’t maybe visit a florist or a chocolatier instead. Ours was not one of the businesses that saw a jump in revenue around Valentine’s Day.

  Whatever the case, he didn’t blame the poem. If anything, he was more convinced than ever that this girl just needed to read a really persuasive rhyming poem about his feelings. He came back to me with another set of instructions.

  Now he wanted a poem that basically said that he was willing to wait for her. He wanted her to know that he valued her friendship and that he felt that, eventually, their love would prevail. He didn’t want to put any pressure on her. He just wanted her to know. He also wanted this one to be emotional and to rhyme.

  I guess for this one, I was thinking more Meat Loaf than Journey. Frankly, it may even verge on REO Speedwagon.

  I remember when first I met you

  How fast my heart did beat

  You were tight with my x-girlfriend

  But you would make my life complete

  You’ve become my closest friend

  The only one who counts

  Those times when I had nobody

  You gave me every ounce.

  I know that you’ll be there for me

  You know I’m there for you

  I’m layin’ it on the line to say

  I know that you’ll be true.

  If I could spend my everyday

  Looking deep into your eyes

  Then maybe I wouldn’t need any other girls

  And you wouldn’t need other guys.

  Your beauty is entrancing,

  Your grace, your smile, your wit

  You bring happiness with your company

  And I cherish every bit

  I’m sure if I didn’t have you

  My life would be much worse

  My heart is spending money

  That you kindly reimburse

  Who can say where this will lead

  But of this one thing I’m sure

  Whatever is between us

  It rings down to the core

  I’m content today to see you

  In any manner fate will allow

  But I look ever toward the future

  While relishing the now.

  The dawning is wide open

  To rays of morning anew

  So from the dusk of one long day

  Will be a sunrise for me and you.

  I have no idea how that all turned out. For all I know, they are married by now. They could have three kids, a dog, and a thrice-mortgaged house.

  Or maybe she filed a restraining order against him, and my former client is not allowed within one hundred yards of her property. Ah, the mysteries of love.

  At the time, anything less than devastating heartbreak would have surprised me. And not just for this guy—for all of my pathetic customers, and for me, too. I had taken to a sort of brooding defensiveness around Bree that intensified with the presence of other men.

  For months, really, I had been stricken by her, and everybody seemed to know it but us. I guess that what we were both too dumb to see just struck others as obvious. Over the years of hanging out with her, I had even gotten to be pretty close with her dad. We would hang out and listen to records. One day, as he was leaving my house, he said, “I hope you and my daughter get together. Y’know. She’ll figure it out.”

  This obviously did not help. It got to the point where I could hardly stand to be around her with this feeling pushing its way through me. There was little she could do or say that didn’t set me off with jealousy, that didn’t touch my insecurities over her passive rejection. One night, as we tried to talk out dinner plans, the reality that we were fake-dating and in all likelihood had been fake-dating for the better part of a decade simply came to a head. And Bree doesn’t put up with bullshit. So she called me on it.

  “What the fuck is with you?”

  “Nothing. What?!”

  “Don’t give me that shit. Something is up. You’re totally weird with me.”

  “I’m not.”

  I couldn’t even look at her.

  “You are. Are you mad at me? What the hell?”

  “No. There’s nothing. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine.”

  Silence without eye contact.

  “Yup,” she said. “This is definitely weird.”

  More silence.

  “Well? You gonna say something?”

  “There’s nothing to say. Things are messed up between us, and I think maybe we need to not hang out for a while.”

  “Well…,” she said, thinking about this for a minute, “well, you’re simply going to have to get over whatever this is because that isn’t an option.”

  “You don’t get to just call the shots like that. This whole situation, this whole arrangement between us is fucking me up and…”

  “And what?”

  “And… I don
’t know what. I don’t know what to tell you.” “Well, tell me something, because you’re not making a whole lot of sense right now.”

  I supposed I wasn’t, but I just figured we both knew what I was talking about here. But she kept pushing, and finally I snapped.

  “Fine! Fine! You want to hear it. I’m in love with you… and I always have been. And there’s nothing I can do to talk myself out of it. And there it is…”

  Stunned silence.

  “I don’t know… what…”

  “Yeah, well, I tried to keep it to myself, and now you’ve forced me to say it.”

  “Well, no offense, but you weren’t exactly doing much to hide it.”

  “Yeah, well, there it is, and now everything is fucked up…”

  “It’s not that I don’t love you. You know I do. I just…”

  “Yeah, I know all about it. And I’m not trying to have a whole conversation about this with you. I know where you stand. But I want what I want.”

  “That’s not fair! You can’t just change everything because you can’t handle our friendship. Handle it.”

  “I can’t. I think we need to not see each other for a while.”

  “Yeah, well, I really think you need to get over that shit.”

  “Nice. Real nice.”

  “So then… what?”

  “I think we need to not see each other for a while. I need to not see you for a while.”

  And we didn’t see each other for a while. A year passed. I went about my business with the passion of a surgically impaired lab rat. The apathy came through loud and clear in my work.

  The angry customers ate me alive.

  “Oh My God! What is this paper that has been delivered to me?? It has NOTHING to do with what I’ve asked for—it’s not a research proposal, it’s not about global marketing, the paper is about globalization in economic perspective with ONE reference in it, and no bibliography included. Bad is not even a word, it’s completely irrelevant. In fact, a word marketing is not mentioned ONCE in a paper. Is this a cruel joke?”

  I’m thinking back on it now, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intended as a cruel joke. Maybe it was. I don’t remember.