By the Book

by Julia Sonneborn

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  To Lisa Sternlieb

  chapter one

  “WHAT TIME’S YOUR CLASS, Anne?” my best friend and fellow English professor Larry asked. He was standing at the door to my office in his pressed shirt and tortoiseshell glasses, his balding head shaved close and his hand clutching an interoffice mail envelope.

  “In fifteen minutes,” I said, scrolling through my backlog of student e-mails. “Ugh, listen to this one.” I read aloud: “ ‘Hey, Prof! It’s Mike. I’m going to miss class today because I’m stuck at Burning Man and can’t get a ride back until tomorrow. See you Wednesday!’ I mean, can you believe it? Burning Man? Why not just say you’re sick?”

  “At least he’s being honest,” Larry said. “I mean, I wish I were at Burning Man.”

  “DELETE,” I said. “God, why don’t they make kids take a class on e-mail etiquette during freshman orientation? You know, like address your professors by their full title, not ‘Prof’ or ‘Yo.’ ”

  “I once got an e-mail from a student that began with ‘What up, Lar?’ I have to admit, I was a bit charmed.”

  “Hmph,” I said. “I’d kill my students if they tried to call me Anne.”

  Larry was a Henry James scholar. He wore cashmere sweaters and tweed jackets and shoes custom-made by John Lobb. You know how people start to look a lot like their dogs? Well, professors start to look a lot like their subjects.

  “Your office is looking . . . disheveled,” Larry said, eyeing my piles of library books, the empty Starbucks cups littering my desk, the academic journals I subscribed to but never read, instead using them as a doorstop. He walked over to my desk and picked up my broken wall clock, which was lying facedown on a stack of papers.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “It needs a new battery,” I said without looking away from my computer screen. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

  “This clock has been lying here for at least six months,” Larry said. “No wonder you’re always running late! How do you know what time it is?”

  “I have my phone,” I said. “Clocks are obsolete.”

  “Preposterous!” Larry said. He always wore an elegant watch with an alligator-skin band, passed down from his grandfather. He disappeared from my office, carrying the clock. A few minutes later, he reappeared, fiddling with the clock hands.

  “I’m setting your clock five minutes ahead,” he announced. “By my calculation, you should be in class right now.”

  “Wait, what? Really?” I yelled, jumping up from my chair and spilling my coffee onto the keyboard. “Where are my lesson plans? Where’s my book?” I rifled through my desk, looking for napkins and cursing.

  Larry picked up my dog-eared copy of Middlemarch, its cover stapled on, its pages bristling with Post-it notes. “Is this what you’re looking for?” he said drily.

  “That’s it!” I said, snatching it from him. I threw it into my book bag, scrambling around the outside pouch to make sure I had dry-erase markers, my lipstick, a pen.

  “I don’t know how you make your students read that book,” Larry said. “It’s one thousand pages of pedantic moralizing.”

  “I don’t know how you can read Henry James,” I retorted. “What was it that Twain said? ‘Once you’ve put down a James novel, you can’t pick it back up again’?”

  “Twain was a philistine,” Larry said, unperturbed. He handed me a lint brush. “You have cat hair all over your skirt.”

  “Ugh, I need to take Jellyby to the groomer. She’s shedding like crazy.”

  “Another lion cut? Don’t you think that’s a little undignified? She’s a house cat, not a beast in the jungle.”

  “Har-har,” I said. I dove under my desk to find my heels, which I’d kicked off as soon as I’d arrived in my office that morning. “Will I see you after class?”

  “I have my shrink appointment now, but yes, I’ll see you later—you’ll be at the reception for our new president, yes?”

  “We have a new president?” I asked, shoving my feet into my heels. Our previous president, a Civil War historian, had retired only a few months earlier due to health issues.

  “He was hired over the summer! Didn’t you see the e-mail? Or did you delete it, like Mr. Burning Man’s missive?”

  “I don’t check my school e-mail over the summer,” I said. “Who is it? Oh, wait—let me guess. I bet it’s an MBA who wants to raise money for a new stadium.”

  “No, this guy actually sounds interesting,” Larry said, hanging my clock on the wall. He stood back for a minute, making sure it was straight. “He majored in English as an undergrad, you know. In fact, you might have known him—he went to Princeton, too.”

  “Really? I’m sure he must have been years ahead of me.” I slung my book bag around my shoulder and headed to the door.

  “Actually, he’s around our age,” Larry said. “Fortyish.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” I snapped. “What’s his name?”

  “Adam,” Larry said. “Adam Martinez.”

  “Wait, are you sure that’s his name?”

  “Yes, why? You recognize it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it can’t be the same guy. It’s a common name, right?”

  “I’m late for my appointment, and you, my dear, are late for your class,” Larry said, pushing me down the hall. “Oscar Wilde may have always been late on principle, but you don’t have tenure yet!”

  *

  I RACED ACROSS CAMPUS, my heels punching holes in the lawn. I hated wearing heels, but since I was barely five foot two, I needed all the help I could get. As I walked, I applied my lipstick and tried to smooth down my hair. I breathed into my palm and sniffed. Not great, but not rancid.

  The campus smelled like freshly mown grass. All around the quad, students were sunbathing or playing Frisbee or making out. It was September at Fairfax, a small liberal arts college tucked into the San Bernardino foothills. The town reminded me of an East Coast college town, just transplanted to Southern California. A two-block Main Street held a constantly changing array of frozen yogurt shops, pizza places, and clothing boutiques. There were picturesque Craftsman-style bungalows on streets named after Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges—Harvard Street, Cornell Place, Wellesley Road. There was even collegiate Gothic architecture. One of the college’s early benefactors, a railroad tycoon, had donated his fortune to the school under the stipulation that all campus buildings be modeled after his alma mater, Yale. If it weren’t for the palm trees on the edge of campus, you would think you were in the middle of Connecticut.

  Adam Martinez. It couldn’t be him, I thought as I cut across the quad. I pulled out my phone and tried to search through my inbox for the invitation to the candidate reception. I had 14,335 messages in my account. Apparently, I hadn’t deleted quite enough e-mail. I searched for “Adam Martinez” and came up empty. Maybe it had gone into my spam folder. Or maybe Larry had just gotten the name wrong.

  I reached my classroom just as the campus clock tower struck ten. There were maybe twenty-five students in the class, minus one or two or five who were stuck at Burning Man or “sick” or hungover. As I’d expected, most of my students were women. The class was “Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,” and it was full of wide-eyed English ma
jors who had read too much Austen and Brontë when they were in middle and high school. I could spot them a mile away because I used to be one of them—young, mousy, and naive enough to believe Darcys and Rochesters existed. My job, I often told myself, was to force my students to look at the novels critically, analytically. These novels weren’t about love. They were about money, and power, and imperialism, and real estate. At least that’s what I said to them, even though, deep down, I was as big of a sucker for the romance as they were.

  I’d assigned the first few chapters of Middlemarch to kick off the class, but it was pretty clear that many of the students hadn’t finished the reading. I knew what they were thinking: Casaubon was a loser, and Dorothea was an idiot, and God, how annoying was it that the Victorians were paid by the word? I could just imagine my students furtively texting each other beneath their desks:

  Student 1: “u read the book?”

  Student 2: “TL; DR.”

  Besides that, school had just started, so we were still in “shopping week,” that period of free choice and zero commitment that students loved and professors resented. Most of my students were still in vacation mode, relaxed and giddy at reuniting with their friends after the summer.

  I briefly lectured, then broke the class up in smaller groups and had them analyze passages.

  “Don’t just give me a plot summary of the passage,” I told them. “Trust me—I’ve read the book.” The class snickered. “Slow down and look more closely at the language. Why does Eliot make certain word choices? What metaphors does she use and why?”

  As I walked around the classroom, dipping in and out of group discussions, I scolded myself for being so distracted. I was as bad as my students, counting down the minutes until class was over, desperate to check my phone to see if Larry had texted or e-mailed me. A student raised her hand and I hurried over, grateful for the interruption.

  *

  ON MY WAY TO my next class, I checked my phone again. Larry had forwarded me the message with the reception info. I scrolled through the event details, and there he was. The new president was named Adam Martinez, and he had previously been provost at the University of Houston.

  It can’t be, I thought, stopping dead in the middle of the quad. Hands shaking, I clicked on the attachment. Slowly, Adam Martinez’s CV downloaded onto my phone. I frantically scanned his work history. He’d been provost at the University of Houston for three years. Before that, he’d served as dean of their law school. Before that, he’d worked in something called “private equity.” And before that, he’d worked as an in-house counsel for a Wall Street bank. I searched for his degrees. JD/MBA from Columbia University. Bachelor’s in English from Princeton.

  I suddenly felt faint. My former fiancé was my new boss.

  chapter two

  ADAM MARTINEZ, THE ADAM Martinez, was my college boyfriend. My first boyfriend, my first (and only, really) love. I hadn’t spoken to him in more than ten years, ever since we broke up in spectacular fashion the night before our college graduation.

  I looked around the quad in a daze. There were dozens of young couples sprawled out in the sun, oblivious to the world around them, oblivious to me standing frozen beside them. It was September, they were eighteen, nothing else was important except the warm body next to them. In class, I’d assume they were paying attention to my lectures and taking notes, but then I would notice the wandering glances and dreamy eyes and realize that the real drama was right there in front of me. Crushes, jealousies, misunderstandings, heartbreak—it was like an endless soap opera, with new cast members introduced every semester.

  Most of the time, I found it entertaining. The romantic travails of undergrads were as predictable as the academic calendar. This was the day school started. This was the day finals began. And this was the day you ended up in the infirmary because your boyfriend cheated on you with your best friend and you drowned your sorrows in a handle of tequila.

  Every once in a while, though, I’d be reminded that what I found amusing was, for my students, practically a matter of life or death. Once, a young woman dressed in ROTC fatigues had tearfully approached me before class, asking if she could please go home. She was usually impeccably made up, crisp in her uniform and with her hair pulled back in a neat bun, but now her face looked raw, her eyes red and swollen and her cheeks wet with tears. “Of course,” I’d said, assuming someone had died. “I’m so sorry—are you OK?”

  The girl glanced despairingly over her shoulder, toward a handsome classmate with a crew cut. Crying so hard I could hardly understand her, she wept, “My fiancé just broke up with me.”

  I felt a sudden pang of recognition and sympathy. I’d been like her once, convinced that my life was over after Adam and I broke up. “You’re so young,” I wanted to tell her. “You’re about to deploy to Afghanistan. You should be worried about coming back home safely, not about some stupid boy. You’ll find someone better, and one day, you’ll think back to how dumb you were for shedding a tear over this guy.”

  But I didn’t say that to her. Instead, I gave her a hug and told her to go home.

  That was years ago, but I thought of her now, her face so full of anguish. I felt my own face tighten and fiercely told myself to get a grip. I had another class to get to.

  By the time I arrived at my next class, I’d successfully composed myself and put on my game face. Inside fifteen students were seated in three rows, waiting for me expectantly.

  “Pop quiz!” I announced.

  The room erupted into groans.

  “Already?”

  “But it’s shopping week!”

  “I haven’t even bought my books yet!”

  “Try your best,” I said, pulling a stack of papers from my bag. “I’ll drop your lowest quiz grade at the end of the semester.”

  One of my students, a premed with sandy hair and glasses who had taken my class the previous spring, groaned theatrically and pretended to face-plant on his desk. His girlfriend, a no-nonsense senior, patted him on the head and said, “I told him he shouldn’t play League of Legends all night.”

  “Is there extra credit?” another student asked, vibrating nervously at her desk.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.” I walked to the board and wrote down a question: “What is EKPHRASIS?”

  The premed whimpered quietly in his corner.

  “Can I write in pencil?” someone else asked.

  “Pencil, pen, your own blood, I don’t care,” I said. “Just make it legible.”

  I passed out the quizzes, stepping carefully over students’ legs, backpacks, and the occasional skateboard. At the last row, I got to Chad Vickers, good old Chad, who always started the semester off strong but then imploded halfway through, showing up erratically and then not at all. This was the third time he was taking my class, and he’d vowed to me he’d actually complete it this time. Last year, he’d disappeared for two weeks. Turns out he’d gotten drunk, punched out a cop (“I didn’t realize he was a cop until later!”), and spent those two weeks in jail. It was a new school year now, though, and Chad was riding the optimism of new beginnings and fresh starts. He pulled out his earbuds and grinned at me, giving me a thumbs-up.

  After passing out the quizzes, I sat at the front of the room and watched the students with their heads studiously bent over their papers, periodically giving updates on how much time was left. For the next twenty minutes, they’d be focused on Victorian poetry while I waited to answer any of their questions. I let my eyes drift across the classroom and toward the large windows facing the quad. They were closed, but the sounds of laughter and distant music still filtered in from the outside. Distracted, I began leafing through my poetry anthology, pausing when I got to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” In spite of myself, I began to read.

  *

  ADAM AND I HAD met in English class. I was a freshman, a shy, bookish girl from Florida who had never been away from home before and who found the Northeast practically a fo
reign country. In high school, I’d been editor of the lit magazine, a member of the swim team, and concertmaster of the local community orchestra. At Princeton, I was a nobody. I tried out for the school lit society and was rejected. I was too slow to be on the swim team. And while I successfully auditioned for the college orchestra, the conductor asked if I might be willing to switch from violin to viola since they were a little thin in that section.

  About the only thing I looked forward to was English class. I’d already read half the books on the syllabus and worshipped the professor, an eminent Victorianist named Dr. Ellen Russell whose first book, a massive study of nineteenth-century women writers, was considered a landmark work of feminist literary criticism. “That’s Dr. Russell,” people whispered when they saw her walking across campus. She was a heavyset woman in her sixties, prone to wearing the same outfit day after day (she was fond of one eggplant-colored suit), her gray hair in a nondescript bob. People said she’d once been married and even had a grown son living somewhere in Texas, but no one knew much else about her personal life. “General Russell,” her graduate students called her.

  We were covering “The Lady of Shalott” the day Dr. Russell called on a dark-haired guy sitting in the corner.

  “Adam, could you read the poem for us?” she asked.

  I’d never paid much attention to Adam before because he rarely spoke in class and kept to himself, arriving just as class started and leaving immediately afterwards. But that day, I could hear Adam’s deep voice clearly, drifting across the room toward me. As Adam read the lines—“And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue / The knights come riding two and two: / She hath no loyal knight and true, / The Lady of Shalott”—he seemed to cast a spell on the class. I looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time. His hair was so dark it was almost black, and it curled over his temples. He had dark eyes, a strong nose that looked like it had once been broken, and the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. His body was lean and sinewy, his shoulders powerful, his arms tan and muscular. I could see a tattoo on his right arm, peeking out from his T-shirt. He must be a senior, I thought.