Dear Committee Members: A Novel (10 page)

In any case, I can assure you he’s writing. About a month ago he called me near midnight, and after we went through our usual ritual—I offered to loan him money and he refused—he segued from desultory conversation into a monologue; it took me a moment, but hearing the crinkle of a page I finally understood that he was reading. I listened for forty or forty-five minutes, without comment, and roughly once a week since then we’ve engaged in similar telephonic performances about which, not being the idiot you believe me to be, I have said nothing: if I spoke, he’d clam up. But I tell you, Eleanor, he is even better than he was before Navia died; he has inscribed his suffering into this work. The piece he read to me a few nights ago
was astonishing, crystalline, elliptically structured, an ouroboros devouring its own exquisite tail. The point is: Troy Larpenteur is alive and writing, and with the blessing of William Gass you and Bentham can save him from the anonymous tin enclosure of his P.O. box and be the conduit to his second career. Don’t ask him to teach (I doubt he’s ready for that); just put him in one of the isolated cabins—the ones near the lake—and let him get his work done.

If you’re worried (reasonably so; Troy has always been a perfectionist) that he’ll move too slowly and sit on the second book forever, well: you’re friendly with his editor—Andrews—at Folkstone, aren’t you? He’s not speaking to me, for various reasons, but if you were to wave the Gass essay under his nose and tell him that Folkstone needs to reissue
Second Mind
… It’s much better than the waterlogged tripe they’ve been publishing lately, and the reissue will stir up interest and give Troy the kick in the pants he’ll need to complete the next book. A simple phone call to Andrews, to let him know that Troy is at Bentham and writing again, may be enough.

Should you already be scanning the Bentham date book, about to inform me that every whitewashed cabin is reserved through the millennium, here’s news: Vivian Zelles, to whom you offered a six-month stay beginning in July, will be turning you down. She’s been admitted to medical school, and she just earned several years’ worth of tuition by selling her quasi-memoir, a
book in which she narrates her own childhood from the point of view of a sibling-regurgitating feline. She came vibrating into my office yesterday to give me the news. Our old pal Ken sold it for her: six figures.

Do what you can for Troy, will you?

Your problematic onetime colleague, Jay

P.S.: I sent a note of condolence to MTV’s husband, care of Caxton, but the letter came back. Predictable irony: I hadn’t spoken to Madelyne for years, but now that she’s dead I find there are so many things I’d like to tell her. She and I had an argument once about speculative fiction, and TV claimed that the future didn’t interest her, because the proper concern of the writer was always the past. I hope she lived a full life. I wish I had kept in better touch with her and seen it unfold.

March 4, 2010

Galloway Foundation Research/Travel Awards

27 West 59th Street

New York, New York 10019

Gentle Readers and Committee Members, My colleague Franklin Kentrell has asked me to recommend him for a Galloway Foundation Research and Travel Award. I would have quickly refused with a clear conscience except that Kentrell penned a Galloway recommendation for me a dozen years ago (I did not receive the award), and in his oily, sidewinding way, he trapped me in the corridor this morning, clutched the lapel of my jacket with his untrimmed nails, and suggested that “tit for tat was only fair.”

Kentrell will never survive round #1 of your deliberations; therefore, secure in the knowledge that this letter will soon join thousands of its brethren in a rolling bin destined for recycling—presumably before it is read—I am comfortable endorsing his application.

Wishing you the best of luck with your process, Jay Fitger

Payne University

March 11, 2010

Ken Doyle

Hautman and Doyle Literary and Colonic Cleansing Agency

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Ken:

I didn’t notice your ad for a summer intern (you might have sent it to me), but I have an undergraduate who did: Ms. Daniella Macias is ambitious, intellectually aggressive, yadda yadda yadda, and in light of the mutual reverence with which (I assured her) you and I regard each other, she has already lined up a summer sublet in Brooklyn for herself and an elderly diabetic cat. Given the pay scale (you’re not paying
anything
?), I assume you’ll be glad to have her around. She won’t expect you to hand over your winningest clients; she just wants to soak up some atmosphere and dip her beggar’s tin cup into your font of wisdom.

On another topic: congratulations on the Big Sale. Six figures! Apparently I need to reinvent myself as a debut novelist, preferably young, beautiful (has Vivian sent you her photo?), and en route to med school. I confess I hadn’t expected it (perhaps I should have, given public enthusiasm for the teratological and the macabre)—but, kudos! Once you’ve finished with
the champagne toasts I hope you’ll remember on whose say-so Vivian sent you her work; you might even decide to take your seven-hundred-dollar shoes off the desk and reconsider your opinion of Browles—which was crude and slapdash, Ken; the book is not a “turgid, pedestrian belaboring of a minor classic.” The first hundred pages may drag a bit: I’ll tell Browles to streamline and send them back to you as soon as he’s done.

Finally, I’m sure you’re plugged into the hype about Troy:
The New York Review of Books
’s ecstasies, a forthcoming residency at Bentham (or so I’ve heard—but don’t quote me as your source), and the long-awaited second book under way … Is he going to lone-wolf it again, or have you persuaded him to take you on this time as his agent? I suppose if you brokered a repub at Folkstone he might view you favorably, and more fully understand your agently charms …

Daniella Macias’s earnest little résumé will probably be on your desk by the time you read this—give her a chance, will you?

Speculatively, Jay

P.S.: Janet sent me the note you wrote to the alumni website about MTV. You’re right: she was a candle.

P.P.S.: Where does the time go?

March 15, 2010

The Ides of March

Office of the Provost/Attention: Dean Rensselear Shepardville College

88 Cordry Hall

Tumbling Springs, GA 30350

Dear Dean Rensselear:

Carole Samarkind has asked that I submit this letter of recommendation on her behalf, as she is applying for your associate dean of student affairs position; with great regret I comply. The prompt in your online form (which I am ignoring in favor of this more accurate anachronism of a letter) asks that in addition to addressing Ms. Samarkind’s qualifications, I evaluate her past and current performance, disclose the context in which I know her, and discuss her liabilities (if any) and her future promise.

I. Past and Current Performance

Ms. Samarkind has served steadily, diplomatically, magnificently in the Student Services/Fellowship Office here at Payne University for eleven years. She is an enviable constant in the chaotic and demanding environment in which she tactfully holds sway, managing to advocate for student welfare, calm the neuroses of the faculty, and assuage the bilious and unpredictable tempers of the myriad deans (I have often pictured her
stage-managing a fashion show of monsters) with whom she has, for over a decade, worked.

II. Context of My Acquaintanceship with Ms. Samarkind

Carole and I slept together—without cohabiting or making promises we would be unable to honor—for almost three years. Though we met via the many letters of recommendation I sent to her on behalf of my students (an odd sort of wooing, consisting as it had to of my praise for others), we came face-to-face, I believe, for the first time when I stormed into her office to protest the dissolution of an undergraduate award, which had been advertised, applied for, and then withdrawn. I had expected Ms. Samarkind to be an officious group-thinking gorgon who would proffer a bushel of vapid excuses by way of toeing the university’s line; instead, she listened, then agreed that the discontinuance of the award was unfair and quickly saw to its restitution.

Our years of tumbling in the hay began, if memory serves, soon after that. Apologies for the candor—which, as dean of what was recently known as a Bible college, you may experience as a bit of a shock—but I assure you these personal comments are entirely relevant. Why is Ms. Samarkind applying to Shepardville College? At the risk of revealing myself to be an egotist, I submit that I figure prominently into her decision. Let’s consider the facts: Carole is comfortably installed at a research university—dysfunctional, yes; second tier, without question—but
we do have a modest reputation here at Payne. Shepardville, on the other hand, is a third-tier private college teetering at the edge of a potato field and is still lightly infused with the tropical flavor of offbeat fundamentalism propagated by its millionaire founder, a white-collar criminal who is currently—correct me if I’m wrong—atoning for multiple financial missteps in the Big House in Texas. You’ve reinvented yourselves and gone secular, but clearly, in various pockets and odd recesses of the campus, glassy-eyed recidivists and fanatics are still screaming hosannas, denying the basic tenets of science, and using a whetstone to sharpen their teeth.

III. Liabilities

I would argue that Carole’s are limited to her three-year blind spot with me. Obviously I failed her rather than vice versa; I was ruminative, churlish, and illiberal regarding endearments and other attentions. Just past the two-and-a-half-year mark, she accused me of being in love with my despotic ex-wife—one does not, after all, twist affection closed like a spigot—and though I denied it, Carole had discovered in me, or more accurately in my writing (I should not have inscribed and allowed her to read
Transfer of Affection
), a love of conflict, a fondness for rivalry both sexual and literary that pointed toward a vestigial tenderness and susceptibility to my ex-wife’s adamantine charms. In short, I was disloyal and selfish. And it is my continuing selfishness—my desire to maintain for my own and the university’s benefit an exceptional human being and employee
like Carole—that allows me to include in this letter all the things it contains.

IV. Future Promise

Ms. Samarkind’s stellar administrative skills, as detailed on her résumé, are enhanced by intelligence, tact, steadfastness, optimism, kindness, perseverance, and unwavering good sense. Your institution may gain her—depending on how fervently she hopes to insert some miles between us—but there is nothing Shepardville can possibly do to deserve her.

With candor, regret, and a whiff of vengeance, I am Jay Fitger, Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University

Author,
Stain; Alphabetical Stars; Save Me for Later;
and
Transfer of Affection

cc: Carole Samarkind. (Carole: I didn’t think it was fair to send this without cc’ing you. Hate me if you like—you’re too good for Shepardville and both you and they know it.)

March 16, 2010

Theodore Bo_i, Chair Depa_tment of Engli_h Dear Ted,

Obediently complying with your latest summons for superfluous information, I am, yes, thoroughly willing to recommend Arabella McCoy for the position of teaching assistant mentor, her duties to begin midsummer, a period of time during which, one can only hope, the poisonous vapors seeping through the vents in Willard Hall will have dispersed, and the economists, scepters agleam, will be reinstalled in their throne rooms over our heads, emerald chalices raised in a grand
huzzah!
for the coronation. You understand of course that Ms. McCoy is a stranger to me: I may have glimpsed her in the hall, poor burdened wight, as she trudged from one lecture to another in her yard-sale clothes, thick piles of yet-to-be-graded undergraduate essays under a rawboned arm; but mainly, as required, I have skimmed her CV and her letter of interest, both of which express the requisite theater-of-the-absurd language about pedagogy and the euphoria of learning. Suffering creature! By all means, yes, yes! I endorse her bid for the mentorship: may the bump in salary allow her to avoid scurvy by adding fruit to her diet once a week.

While we’re on the important topic of health: there must be something you can do, Ted, about the thick coils of tubing that,
as of yesterday, emerged from a sizeable hole in the wall outside my office. Resembling the heads of a modern-day Hydra, these tubes periodically cough up flocculent curds of unidentifiable gray material, as if issuing a warning to those who remain in Willard Hall.

Sometimes in my daydreams, Ted, I envision our building in a cutaway view as if it were a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: the economists placidly robed in the uppermost quadrant, nearest to God, and beneath them, on the lower floors, close to the churning wrath of the boiler, the condemned in a bloodstained, pulsing version of Hell.

I’m sure Ms. McCoy will be an apt and responsible mentor.

Extracting pleasure from the task as always, Jay

March 19, 2010

Reverend W. T. Dap, Admissions Emanuel Lutheran Seminary

Corcoran, SD 57106

Dear Reverend Dap,

Dennis White has asked me to write a letter recommending him to the Emanuel Lutheran Seminary (Master of Divinity Program), and I am happy to grant his modest request. Four years ago Mr. White enrolled as a dewy-eyed freshman in one of my introductory literature courses (Cross-cultural Readings in English, or some such dumping ground of a title); he returned several years later for another dose of instruction, this time in the Junior/Senior Creative Writing Workshop—a particularly memorable collection of students given their shared enthusiasm for all things monstrous and demonic, nearly every story turned in for discussion involving vampires, werewolves, victims tumbling into sepulchres, and other excuses for bloodletting. I leave it to professionals in your line of work to pass judgment on this maudlin reveling in violence. A cry for help of some sort? A lack of faith—given the daily onslaught of news about melting ice caps, hunger, joblessness, war—in the validity or existence of a future? Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.