Hasty Exits

Today I called Clover's vet to order refills of one of Clover's medications. Clover takes four different pills for her heart: three which we get directly from the vet and one that we receive through mail order (the vet faxes in a prescription). The faxing/mail order thing is complicated because the company that sends the pills is slow and feeble, and it usually takes several fax attempts and phone calls from the vet's assistant to make it happen. For this reason I've gotten in the habit of always working with the same assistant at my vet's office (we'll call her Brandy) since she knows the ins and outs of dealing with this mail order company. But when I called this morning and asked for Brandy the assistant who answered the phone said, frostily, "Brandy does not work here anymore."

I'm just enough of a narcissist to feel a flash of, "It was me, wasn't it? She left because she really could not take one more exchange with that nervous little owner of that nervous little spaniel." But I'm level-headed enough to snap back and remind myself that in all likelihood, this hasty exit is about something going on in Brandy's life and has nothing to do with me.

I've made a few of these hasty departures myself. When I left Brown University for the graduate program at USC, I did it in a big hurry. My departure was so sudden that it took a long time for my subconscious to catch up. For weeks I dreamt I was going to the back lot of supermarkets to pick up empty boxes, then dreaming of packing those boxes, then shipping them and unpacking them in the Huntington Beach apartment I'd already been living in for over a month.

The spring semester had just begun at Brown, and each of the students were to meet with Robert Coover, who taught that semester's fiction workshop. During our one-on-one, he told me that I was not one of the applicants he had "pushed for." He told me that his son was now attending my alma mater, and one of the professors who'd written me a letter of recommendation had made a bargain with him. She told Coover that if his son wanted to be in her workshop (she was a popular teacher and admission into her fiction class was very competitive), then Jennifer Perlman needed to go from the "maybe" to the "yes" pile. While I was taking this in, Coover mentioned another of the recommendation letters in my file. He said, "He spoke so highly of your work, and I just don't get it because he and I tend to agree about everything."

Then he put down my file, looked at me very earnestly and said I should know that while some people feel that writing is their best mode of communication, there are others who come to realize they can better express themselves through skiing.

Back in those days, I did very different things than I do now. I went to school, and I worked thirty hours a week at a surprisingly cozy basement Kinko's copy shop. On weekends I went to pretentious poetry readings (some may call that redundant), drank bourbon (neat) and smoked Dunhills. I had friends who were not as deeply psychologically damaged as they liked to imagine they were. If I encountered a mentally challenged person, which happened rarely, I averted my eyes. But one thing was as true about me then as it is now: I did not ski. I do not ski.

I asked Coover what he didn't like about my work, and he said it was too traditional, linear, and reader-friendly. He preferred more innovative work. I asked if he was talking about subject matter: for instance, maybe he liked things like Kafka's Metamorphosis or Ionesco's Rhinoceros. But no, he meant he liked things that were actually experimental in format. He extolled the virtues of generative fiction, and his favorite novel was written without use of the letter E.

There was no question that I had to leave the program.

That might sound dramatic when we we're talking about the opinion of just one teacher, but it was a grad program of eight students and maybe four professors in total. Coover was the teacher. Him not only disliking my work but being ideologically opposed to it meant bad things for my future at Brown, both practically and emotionally. It could very well mean no T.A.-ship in my second year: something I'd been counting on. Worse still, there was the potential that I would start to believe him.

So I called my dad. OFD has never been capable of ordering a pizza over the telephone, and replacing the ink cartridge in his fountain pen is an iffy maneuver fraught with danger, but he could always make things happen. It turned out he knew a guy who knew a guy who ran the MFA program at USC. Because of the first guy's respect for my dad, he recommended me to his friend even though he'd never personally read my work. And in turn, so great was the second guy's respect for my dad's friend that he was willing to accept me into USC's program via referral alone.

I knew absolutely nothing about USC beyond the moniker "University of Spoiled Children," and I hadn't even known they had a graduate writing program. But when I heard that Richard Yates was on staff, that was all the information I needed.

Five days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles. Mid-flight, I remembered something: a week earlier, before that horrific meeting with Coover, I had a long phone conversation with the girl who edited Brown's undergraduate literary journal. We'll call her Maxine. Because the journal was an undergrad enterprise, only a limited number of grad students were allowed to work on it and it was very competitive, the right to spend hours slogging through fiction submissions without being paid. Several classmates of mine had unpleasant meetings with Maxine when they assumed that of course they could work on the journal and were then told, with less tact than they felt was appropriate, that they could not.

In my case, the conversation went well and I was almost sure I'd get to be on the journal's staff. The longer Maxine and I spoke on the phone, the more I knew that the face-to-face interview we scheduled for the next week was clearly a formality. Maxine was impressed that I'd been the editor of an undergrad literary magazine when I was in college, and since my undergrad education had taken place during the Pleistocene age, I came with secret knowledge of lightboxes and non-repro blue pencils and grueling, manual paste-up sessions to make the large, gridded pages "camera-ready." By 1989 none of these old-time skills would be required for working on any literary journal outside of the Amish community, but it scored me coolness points with Maxine nonetheless.

Maxine and I had spoken on the phone for a long time. Too long. She was so sure that she would be offering me a position and that I would be accepting it that she did something I'll blame on her youth: she told me about classmates of mine who had submitted stories to the magazine and gotten rejected, and she named names.

By the end of the conversation I wasn't so sure I wanted to work on the literary journal after all. The conversation with Maxine had, ultimately, left a bad taste in my mouth. But the next day, I had my meeting with Robert Coover. All thought of Maxine and the journal blipped from my consciousness, not to return until I was on an airplane Los Angeles-bound and realized I was, at that very moment, standing up Maxine.

I'm sure she heard within days that I had left Brown suddenly and permanently. But on that day, when she sat in the literary magazine office and I didn't show, did she take it personally? Did she wait long? Did she replay the conversation in her mind and wonder if it was something she said?

Comments

[Kathy]

I still have my pica pole and x-acto knives. And a complicated relationship with tape, and dreams in which I am cringing while peeling tiny slivers of 1-point border tape off my fingers. Oy.

[Tamara]

I'm really outraged on your behalf, and I'm SO GLAD you zipped out of there as fast as possible.

[kmkat]

Screw Robert Coover. (Sorry, Bob.) He may have liked experimental crap, but the other 98% of the reading public does not. Pretentious experimental writing: another redundant phrase. I LOVE your writing.

So there.

[Amelia]

Well, I am glad that you went to USC because I am assuming that facilitated the meeting with LB? And when anyone mentions Brown I immediately think of Lisa Simpson's disdain. The things you know about that impressed Maxine meant absolutely nothing to me but before you think me 'youthful' let me share with you this fact - the only full-time job I have ever had was working at the Sydney Futures Exchange on the Y2K project. I am sure that as my children get older this will be akin to lamplighting. Do you still write fiction or are you working on a memoir instead? Gore Vidal went with Palimpsest but perhaps X-Acto could work for you?