Margot looked sideways at the full-length mirror on her closet door. Even with the shirt bunched into the waistband, the skirt slid to her hips, but she hated the idea of going to the mall with its bright lights and noisy people. More and more she lived in the literary past. Using two large safety pins, she tightened the skirt around her waist, telling herself that the jacket would hide the fashion wasteland. That thought carried her mind to Elliot, which — curiously or maybe not — brought her to Wallace Stevens. She grabbed The Palm at the End of the Mind, thinking it would make fine train reading.
Two hours later, she sat in the lobby of the Wellington Hotel, which swelled with suit-wearing young academics acting out various states of confidence and terror. Their one or maybe six interviews would be their sole chance at landing the coveted academic jobs that would elude, forever, slightly more than half of them. Like the breast man who never looks a woman in the eye, these nervous would-be intellectuals avoided each other’s gaze and searched only for the university affiliations listed on name tags. Where the University of Nevada-Reno brought relief, Virginia sparked envy and Princeton inspired despair.
Because she had been outside the halls of academia for a couple of years, Margot had felt that it would be improper to claim her institution and had typed “No affiliation” onto her on-line registration form. The computer had taken her at her word, and her name tag read: “Margot Yarborough. No affiliation.”
A tall man who looked to be in his twenties approached her. He had a long, blond ponytail, wore jeans, and carried a camera. “I’m making a documentary about the MLA convention. Are you here to get a job?”
Margot nodded.
“Can I ask you a few questions on film?”
Margot half shrugged, and the man smiled and switched on his camera.
“How many interviews do you have today?”
Looking into the lens, Margot told him four.
“Are you feeling ground down and humiliated yet? Any horror stories?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m feeling hopeful. If nothing else, it’s a chance to talk about literature with intelligent and interesting people.”
The young man flicked the switch and lowered the camera. “Sorry, love, but that’s not what I’m after at all. Maybe I’ll catch you at the end of the day and see what you have to say then.” He stalked toward another job-seeker.
Margot had read all the interview advice she could find, and she watched the small bank of lobby phones carefully. It was considered impolite to phone up to the room more than ten minutes prior to the interview, because an earlier interview could still be going on. Yet to wait longer was to risk having to stand in a long line for a phone and then be made late by the overworked elevators at the conference hotels.
At twelve minutes before the hour, she moved toward the phones, lurking with a couple of dozen other men and women, most of them young and clutching new but inexpensive briefcases. She got to a phone, and a woman with a pleasant southern accent granted her the room number. Despite a wait for the elevator, she knocked on the hotel-room door at an ideal one minute past the hour, pleased at the perfection of her timing.
The door opened, and a head popped through the crack. “Just a minute,” said a man with a chin-length bob and a red tie. “We’re running a bit behind schedule.”
Margot waited, her eyes tracing the swirls of paisley in the carpet. She was unsure whether it was more seemly to wait by the door or linger back by the elevator bank until the previous interviewee passed her. As minutes elapsed, she fretted about whether she could complete the interview in time to make it to her next appointment, in the group-interview area at a hotel several long blocks away. At last, a young man emerged and brushed past her, visibly trembling in his black suit, his feet leaving no impression in the loudly patterned carpet.
The man with chin-length hair popped out at her. “We’re ready for you now.”
The room smelled of people — too many of them too close for too long. The bobbed head introduced himself as Professor Smith, and two other men stood and introduced themselves as Dr. or Professor something. The lone woman shook Margot’s hand with a lighter grip and introduced herself by first and last name.
“So,” said the man in the red tie, “which job are you interviewing for?”
“Creative writing,” Margot answered, clearing her voice. “Fiction.”
“Oh, right, I’m in charge of that one.”
“We’re an expanding campus,” the woman explained. “We’re hoping to fill twelve positions.”
“Twelve?” Margot knew that each school interviewed ten or so candidates for each job. “I suppose you aren’t getting out of this room much.”
“No,” said one of the men. “We haven’t seen a thing of New York.”
The man with the red tie found her vita, and the interview proceeded well enough, if a bit stiffly.
When it was time for her to leave, the search committee chair said, “I only have one final question. Are you willing to live in rural Missouri?”
Margot nodded. “I’m willing to live anywhere.”
She arrived at the cattle-call waiting area just in time to be ushered to the right table. Two very young men welcomed her and began their rapid-fire questions, mostly answering each other. Both seemed to have drunk too much coffee, and Margot didn’t have to say much.
At this interview, the final question was: “Why would you even consider a job with a 4/4 teaching load that won’t pay you enough to live within a hundred miles of our college?”
Margot smiled at them, seeking eye contact with first one and then the other interviewer, trying to make them remember her when they discussed candidates later. “I like to work hard,” she said, “and I live frugally.”
She had two hours before her next interview and so she toured the publishers’ displays in the exhibits hall of the convention center, looking at the glossy covers of the intellectual biographies published by larger publishing houses and written by those few academic celebrities. She also examined the matte covers of the literary studies texts and poetry volumes of the university presses. The literary journals and magazines were there, too, so Margot paged through a few in the hopes of finding an appropriate one to submit a story she was contemplating. Thumbing through a journal with an austere brown front and no art, she found Frank Hinks’ last story, published post-humously. Margot dug through her purse until she found a ten-dollar bill and four rumpled ones.
“Thank you,” said the older man with the cashbox, seeming surprised by the sale.
At another table, a periodical with Kandinsky-like art on the cover caught her eye. Thumbing through, she recognized the name of the woman she’d been billed with at the CIA Bar: Clarice Aames. Her story, titled “The Lethal,” opened with a child’s pet guinea pig giving birth to offspring with no eyes. Margot set down the magazine and went to freshen up.
For her third interview — for a tenure-track job at a public university in the deep South — the timing of her knock was fine, and Margot was ushered into the room by a skinny man with a goatee, who introduced himself as the department’s poet. She was also introduced to “the Shakespeare guy” and a woman whose specialty was Caribbean literature.
They occupied the only chairs in the room, leaving her to sit on the high bed, her feet dangling several inches above the floor. Their questions were straightforward, ranging from what she would do if a student turned in a truly wretched piece of writing to queries as to her literary influences. They agreed with Margot that reading was the first and best training for any young writer.