Lucky Joyce

Chapter One
The most southerly affluent of the Mississippi arises in the panhandle of Texas, gathers its greatest influxes from the Caddo and South Fork, then gouges its way to its first sizeable elbow near the town of Trent City, Louisiana, by which time it has sucked up enough sediment the color of a rusty tin can to earn its name, the Red River. Before the Great Flood of ‘07, the Red was a good half a mile from Hollydale University, the oldest and snootiest hall of learning for a two hundred square miles, but now undulations forged in new directions, one in effect removing the watery buffer zone bestowed by a previous flood and leaving a sizeable piece of not un-arable ground in the shape of a chicken’s head. Thus when the summer rains had come and gone, and when the state legislature had ceased snarling over the budget, Hollydale U. students returned to their living-learning communities on an their eco-friendly campus proper now snugged up to over a solid acre of dry silt and tire strewn river bottom, and owned, as any Cartography 101 student could have demonstrated, by North Institute of Technology, their redneck state school neighbor.
This newly emerged geography was more fully complicated by a new enterprising chancellor who garnered funds for NIT living-learning communities of their own, once the state’s injunction which restricted the school’s mission to being no more ambitious than a commuter school reached its statute of limitations. The new communities, once riverbed, were surrounded on the three sides: comb, beak, wattles, with the ever upward expanding University on lands once soy bean fields, and before that nutrient-stripping cotton fields once hunting grounds of the Caddo Native Americans, the descendants of whom had lived off its sale in communities of mobile homes near Binger, Oklahoma, until after the discovery of oil, when they were moved Elsewhere.
Flora reclamation programs for both the hunting grounds and former river bottom consisted of implanted St. Augustine and adolescent mimosas, and there were no ancient live oaks in sight dripping no Spanish moss; certainly there was not even a hint of old ivy, unless one counted the sprigs of poison ivy near the back parking lot of the gymnasium rearing their leaves of three briefly after May Day and before Building and Grounds’ dousing with various neuro-toxic herbicides.
The living-learning communities, or dorms as they were once called, on this east end of campus presented a peculiar architectural incongruity with the rest of the campus-scape. Thanks to an imported contractor from New Orleans, their design was reminiscent of tiny villas of the sort built by Louis XV for Mme. Du Barry, with almost a late 18th century feel in their curved lines of rococo and which, at least to a few faculty, gave a kind of nasty, neo-classical feel to the air.
Juxtaposed older buildings, those housing classrooms, and administration, and the student union had been greatly influenced by a legacy from the Cold War: the practical purpose of the buildings, to withstand bombs and starving mobs, expressed in brick and iron and tile, and in the straight distribution of thin vertical windows, their cold rhythm in fact reminiscent of narrow gun turrets, for which they were most certainly designed. Another architectural exception was the new library.
The new Chappell Library whose very existence owed its thanks to a multi-million dollar donation of books by an elderly literary connoisseur, (and whose donation required the University to unearth the funds for a three-million dollar building to house them in), resembled the particular pyramidal form of medieval architecture in Mexico—the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen-Itza perhaps, but whose general interior layout and décor corresponded to the contemporary baroque forms of Europe—all marble and wasted space and endangered wood. Its salient feature, and one written about in not less than a barrage of letters to the editor in the Trent City Daily Post, was the marble elevator, of such disgraceful elegance and tonnage that a second motor had to be installed to crank it up to the third floor.

Of all the buildings on campus, certainly Findley Hall, housing English, Foreign Language, and Communications, was downright haughty, or at least Ruskin would have called it so, observed Joyce Michalak, assistant professor of Romantic Literature at NIT, not that she is a fan of Ruskin, the prissy old reactionary, but anyone with half an aesthetic could see at least the hauteur if not the sociophallic implications of a ram rod straight building of unadorned brick.
At her first gander at its harmonized monotony she had felt a Kafkan flicker of foreboding, but had shrugged it off, attributed it to regret at losing the tasteful campus she had enjoyed at her last teaching position in North Carolina where she had spent a year as a highly dispensable adjunct professor at Chapel Hill.
Joyce had not been the first person in her family to go to college, but she had been the first person in her family to go to college to have sex. Her older sister and her cousin, in a most unlucky conjunction of stars, one year behind and one year ahead of her, veered into her life at times with classes and meals, and went home every weekend--and told. Actually the tales they carried were tame—different boys with Joyce at every meal in the cafeteria, a little matter of a faked medical excuse that got around, smoking (they thought cigarettes) on the roof of Adams Hall, and the company of a one Dr. Bryant Wilkinson, controversial psychology instructor and serial husband between wives, an agnostic, and a behaviorist, more Skinnerian than Skinner.
Of course, it didn’t matter in the long run because those two, Melba and Louise, ended up roommates together across campus from her in a room full of stuffed animals, Vicks inhalers, and used bus tickets sticking out of their teacher training texts, and missing the bigger picture altogether.
At that point in her life Joyce did not want to be a teacher—she wanted to be a novelist, but the novels she read bespoke such highly exotic settings—the Bronx, the lavish East Side, the Jewish West Side, converted brownstones, White Plains, holocaust Germany, St. Moritz, Swiss sanitariums, Boston boarding schools—and such tony vocabulary painting the real world that she despaired so much attempting a creative writing course. Even when cotton fields, and yard dogs, and prayers for sheetrock became stylish—closer to her alley—she knew that was not the kind of book she wanted to write. Philip Roth, Erica Jong, Emma Lazarus were, essentially, her literary executioners. She, famous in high school for being a colossal slacker except in English, went on anyway to college, away from her religious red-white-and blue collared community, and saw herself majoring in adventure. Fear of Flying, once having made it to the boon dock public libraries, was her bible.
Joyce’s father had been a welder for a little while at Driveline Cutting Torch and Welders in Chicago. Her mother, famous in her own right in the family for bad nerves, went one year to Westwood college, “A Place You Can Succeed,” and then they met over her mother’s cracked universal joint, married, and moved from at least a half way decent Midwestern city nuance back to the south from whence her father had sprung out of generations of agrarian Baptists. So, it was partially their fault too she missed the Great or even Pretty Good American Novel boat.
Her father set up a shop in town, Oil City, the buckle of the Bible belt, and her mother stayed home in their frame tract house sans southern style porch, elaborate cornices, etc. and, already having sheetrock, prayed for better times in general--they were poor but not so hardscrabble poor it would have made good copy. Nor were they rich, so that Joyce could have done the spoiled or the now-I-see southern belle thing. Watered down by the mixed marriage of her mid western mother and her red neck father she had essentially no chance in hell for any kind of decent ambience.
Eventually, sometime during her four years of college, Joyce seduced a Byron scholar, full professor this time and seriously married, and was seduced herself into becoming a Romantic scholar, a suitable enough substitute for the never birthed novel aspirations. Finally academically inspired, she went on to cultivate her inner fuddy duddy at LSU, leaving her relieved lover, and upon her graduation with an M.A. taught for a year in a kind of non tenured existence at a string of mediocre to lame good old boy controlled campuses, then took the vow of poverty, if not chastity, for the terminal degree.
By then her father was dead, her mother busy living on social security, so any stories finding their way back to Oil City seemed more beside the point. Her mother’s nervous disposition was made worse, or better, depending on the viewpoint, by her and many of her friends’ discovery of a new doctor in town, and Valium, which they thought was just a bit stronger version of the over-the-counter Nervine.
Joyce’s real troubles began when she married The Genius. Richard. The novelist. Too late, she remembered old Steinem’s observation that now women became whom they used to marry. So she finally got her novel—Richard’s. It must have been unconsciously The Novel--and her head being turned by the flashy literary life style which gave her instant access to graduate faculty parties since Richard was the golden boy of the grad department, and like Iris Murdoch, had published as a sophomore, a coming of rage suces d’estime, Destiny’s Goose.
At their impulsive marriage—Joyce was late, but not too—the wedding cake was still warm and her only family was the sad sack sister and the cousin who had over the years become alter egos, both exactly three months pregnant pursing their lips together simultaneously at Joyce’s latest antic. After their wedding, Richard, unperturbed by Joyce’s resumed menses (he confessed it might serve as good copy one day) resumed himself the throes of labor for his second book, midwifed by the illustrious Vance Bourjaily, Rodger Komentz, and at least in a desultory cheerleading capacity, Andre Codrescu. Destiny’s Goose, a drug rehab memoir, (highly exaggerated believed Joyce) missed Oprah by inches. The Summer of a Dormouse came hard.
At first it wouldn’t come at all, and there were the rantings, and creative crises, and deep funks, and undignified remorse scenes, and much, much make-up sex. And then it did come. And fizzled. Not so much as an alternate. It didn’t even make use of “potboiler” nomination, but rather “self-conscious”, “colossal disappointment,” “a sense of a story not told,” “actually made soft porn boring.” What had he been thinking, her dashing precocious literati of a husband: A history student is teleported via of acid back to the age of Henry VII, who turns out to be a not-so-bad guy, where said student solves some of Henry’s immediate problems, gets laid by a copious number of chestnut haired bawds [hardly distinguishable one from another] and receives horse’s mouth advice on his dissertation which is published to great critical acclaim. Richard became the poster child of white intellectual males with nothing to write about.
Then there were the attempts at Richard’s dealing with the pain, especially a dealing that took place one memorable evening at a party knee deep in writers and agents and students and semi-famous people—one of Vance Bourjaily’s charming Baton Rouge salon type parties he liked to throw. It happened in his childrens’ tree house…in the back yard festooned with party lanterns…clearly visible from an upstairs bedroom where Joyce had drifted, snooping.
She liked to look at how others lived. Especially looking at how famous others lived, others whose lifestyle resembled those in her original great author dream.
Drawn to the windows to see what greeted Vance and Cleo each morning, she stood injesting the last of an hors d’ oeuvre, eyes roving over the nightscape, the detached deck, prosaic spewing cherub fountain, portentous whispery trees, until caught by the sight of familiar chicken wing shoulder blades stretching the signature James Dean white t-shirt, and the form of a frizzy Einstein do she had less than an hour before lent her own hair gel. And another silhouette, fashionably thin, a veil of long undergraduate hair, briefly, before both dropped out of sight to the floor.
“What cha’ looking at?” came a voice behind her, Regina’s, a TA, who liked to affect slang to ironically belie seven years of straight A’s through now her last year in comparative lit, her monograph beckoning faintly on the published horizon.
“Richard fucking someone. Kristen Springer, I think,” said Joyce, who had spent a life time disassociating herself from her mother’s hysteria and her choice of occupation, nothing. But the last bite of the cream cheese and ham pinwheel was still sliding over her taste receptors, busily synapsing, embedding in her sensory neurons a binding of salty, smoky, cheesy grief, and so forever making a simple innocent grilled ham and cheese her own highbrow Proustian cliché.
At first she’d had no aspirations to put down roots at NIT, which offered her a tenure-track position, with a raise, and most important, a setting devoid of Richard.
She had spent her first year at NIT as one of the tenure track assistant professorial bottom feeders, dependent on her colleagues’ approbation, colleagues whom she saw as mere fellow inhabitants of a temporal fold, she, on her way to better things. She had planned deliberately, diabolically, to use NIT as a stepping stone to a more prestigious university, preferably on the East coast or just any half decent university. “Rots of rut,” said Regina.
Unwittingly, NIT had shored up her salability, so to speak. The chancellor whose reach was under fire for constantly exceeding his grasp had, the year before Joyce’s hire, created a policy that professors, tenured or non-tenured, receiving a book contract with a reputable press (presumably those north of the Mason Dixon Line), would be given a year’s paid sabbatical.
And that is precisely what happened. Joyce, languishing in obscurity among the Chapel Hill’s famous and in the unhappy love triangle machinated by Richard, had thrown herself into her research in a last ditch effort to Get a Decent Job, coming to happy fruition a matter of weeks after her NIT hire, though regrettably too late to be utilized in her salary jockeying. She, with a respectable but just beginning publication record, had been presented the golden apple of academe (and was now grasping it triumphantly if not white-knuckled). Joyce Michalak was to be published by Oxford University Press, the oldest and largest press in the world, yes, the original Oxford Press—England, home of Canterbury, the bishopric seat of Thomas Beckett, the moors of Devon, the coasts of Cornwall, Stratford-on-Avon, the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls, Simon Cowell…
So now she had completed her year of writing and rewriting and she, of course, will be most certainly returning as a hero, a soon-to-be published scholar. (“What a Romantic! What a spontaneous outpour!” Regina said.) Hero or noo, between drafts, she had used her sabbatical also to send out resumes to every prestigious or semi-prestigious university in the contiguous United States.
At this moment her book, not a monograph, but a bona fide treatise, Shifting Ground: Jane Austen’s Uses of Silence, in what she hoped was her final draft, was floating on the ether to Oxford. Joyce was riding the cusp of Austen scholarship, thanks to her old dissertation advisor. Ironic, that someone that old and crusty would recognize cutting edge, that he had called that publishing shot, admonishing her to cast aside her true love, Lititia Elizabeth Lickbarrow and Lickbarrow’s repetitious trope, her messy metaphors, her idiotic rhyme, her undernourished imagery. His idea had come about because Joyce had written a quick but well-received paper on Jane Austen for no other reason than to have her attendance paid for at an Austen conference in Atlanta for the sole purpose to hook up with Richard—this before they were married.
Privately Joyce had not shared her advisor’s feeling about Lititia Lickbarrow; at one time she had had dreams of actively securing Lickbarrow’s rightful place as luminary among Romantic poets, showing the academic world how Lickbarrow’s time and infinity intertwine, how the life force embraces immortality, and in so doing reaches far beyond the confines of the human mind. “But Joyce, you could be filthy rich if a movie producer needed advice from say, a definitive Austen scholar,” her advisor had advised.
And it was true, the world had gone crazy over Jane Austen, not only producing movies but inspiring lectureships and book clubs even in the back waters and the critics had begun to go crazy explaining why. In her book, Joyce was demonstrating in terms of the latest academic catch phrase, the uses of silence, that in the gaps of Austen’s fiction could be found the potential for vast social changes. It stood to reason what was not there smacked of central preoccupation, or what was referred to in the academy as silent pressure.
Within a year of her hire at NIT, however, the same year she had spent polishing her book, 9-11 and the recession had transformed higher education into a monstrosity. Unable to compete with wealthy private schools, the unstoppable state schools were stopped and thus began a slippage between the public and private, especially in hiring. A fork in the road, some administrator in the Chronicle had lugubriously called it, and the solution was to either raise tuition or downsize enrollment. But above all, the hiring freeze. All of which made Joyce suspect that she was stuck indefinitely at NIT, though, on the brighter side, Joyce believed there was no reason she would not be highly valued by the English department now that she had scored a book contract, and a sabbatical, all within the space of two years.
At least it was a job where she will be appreciated. The recession couldn’t last forever, and thanks to her penchant for taking the maximum hours and going to summer school, she had a Ph.D. and a book at the tender age of twenty-six, not bad considering her false starts, her dead ends, her public school that banned Judy Blume.
Just a matter of a few days ago, she felt a lightness come upon her after polishing the last word of her tract, two years work research, her best work, made possible by the sabbatical and by more or less sponging off an old friend from undergraduate school, Laura, who lived in San Antonio, blocks from a Decent Library. Laura had unwittingly spent an appreciable part of her life serving as her loose-of-loin-husband’s research assistant and she had come to a very bad end--two children and no terminal degree--but fortunately it turned out for Joyce--badly in need of a nanny while she settled into her new job as a travel agent, confessing that sometimes she wished she’d hung her life sex and shoddy relationships, which, in retrospect perfectly described Joyce’s life so far.
Joyce sublet her house in Trent City and for the last year she took the girls to and from school in exchange for a makeshift bed in the dining room and the title to an erratically running car, Laura signing her life away at the bank for more dependable wheels. At night and during the girl’s school hours, Joyce had worked and reworked her manuscript, dutifully missing opportunities for vacations and family reunions and …sex. Joyce hadn’t had a decent sex life since the previous Bush administration.