A Room in the Philosophy Department
In August, the chair of the English department arranges a meeting with a professional mediator. It is held on the top floor of my building, where one wall is all windows looking out over the hazy sky. Off in the distance I can see what everyone says, quite proudly, is the most polluted lake in the Western Hemisphere. I didn't want to meet again. I sensed what was coming. But the chair assures me the mediator is a pro and will be fair. I walk last into the room in the philosophy department and notice that the table where W, K, and H sit is sown with mini Hershey bars the mediator is encouraging us to eat. As I recount this detail, Doctor X snorts. And I tell him the mediator says that chocolate will relax us. I continue my story about the meeting in a room of the philosophy department. I realize the mediator with her big felt pens and clipboards and xeroxed ground rules about "no piling on" is not anticipating the meeting for which I know we have met. She is attempting to manage a group of angry, professionally verbal people with chocolate and chalk. W's most recent book about the trauma of his experience in Vietnam will be a National Book Award finalist. K's new memoir of her childhood will soon be on the best-seller list. Between us I count a couple dozen books and a half century of classroom teaching. The mediator, according to her resume, has authored articles entitled "Teambuilding in a Technical Environment" and "Using Psychology to Reward Teamwork." In her report written after the meeting, she writes that the bad feelings will dissipate. Like the weather, I think. In W's boyhood memoir, the one he autographed for me with warm regards, there is a scene where his evil stepfather sadistically makes him clean out every bit of mustard from an empty jar W threw away. The stepfather twists the jar into W's eye. Is it empty? I call this meeting, the meeting in August in a room in the philosophy department, the Mustard Meeting. We are going to get every bit of mustard. We play along with the mediator a while. I look out the window. The lake. The clouds. K, impatient, says to W, ignoring the mediator who never speaks again, "Do you want me to start or do you want to?" He wants to.
The Waiting Room
This is nothing. I know this is nothing compared to what has happened to other people, what is happening to people now, what is happening to the people here, say, in Doctor X's waiting room. It is nothing in comparison. It wasn't bodily trauma in any way. I am not physically ill. I am not dying. Nor have I struck anyone. I do not feel like striking anyone. This is about something that happened at work, I keep telling myself, something that is now way out of proportion. What happened finally, I think, was I couldn't fix things when I thought I could. I thought things could be fixed. Or I thought things needed fixing. Something. It occurs to me, in the waiting room, that since last March I have been sitting in my office listening to students and colleagues tell me stories about the consequences of D's actions and being helpless, really. How do I feel in the waiting room? Embarrassed. Embarrassed that I am so stunned by this nothing. Embarrassed that I have hired a professional listener to listen to my tale. And I am taken by the luxuriousness of this, of hiring an audience, this utter indulgence. I am depressed, depressed with a small D. To me, the depression is a kind of small black dot, a dot no bigger than the period at the end of the sentence, at once an insubstantial speck of ink while at the same time a collapsed world with the specific gravity of a black hole. I am taken by this paradox. I am insisting too much on this nothing. What has happened is, in my professional opinion, boring, yet I am deeply fascinated with the intricacies of the events. The storyteller in me keeps telling me there is no story here, really. But I can't stop wanting to make it a story. I can't stop telling it. This is nothing but it has become everything. By calling it nothing I can't rid myself of it. And I am quite conscious of the inconsequence of all this to others. They see it as the nothing it is. They suggest, politely, at the end of another rendition that I talk to someone. And here I am. Here I am ready to tell this story again.
A Room in a Basement of a Church
In the middle of things, a friend takes me to an open AA meeting. He suggests that, though I don't drink, alcohol in this crisis has profoundly changed my life. D was drunk when he threw the drink, and he did throw a drink, and has offered that he was drunk as a mitigating circumstance and has indicated that he has entered the program. He is sober now, he says. A changed man. The room in the basement of the church feels, oddly, like my classroom where stories are told, tables and chairs, but it is not like my classroom. The framing of the storytelling is differ ent. And my friend who is a literary scholar tips me as to the aesthetic differences to come. He tells his story to us without the literary flourish I know he knows. He has told me that the notions of creativity and originality are different in this room. The stories are supposed to be repetitious and predictable. And they are. They are relentless in this relentless style, their stylelessness. That's the point. The One Day here does not lead to a rising action, climax, and denouement but to the next one day and the next.
In Camera
After another day of meetings, I sit in the living room, the answering machine on, screening calls. My wife and I watch television and, during the commercials, I rehearse for her the scrolling events at school. The phone rings, and we both start. We hear an angry voice laying down a track on the tape. New threats and curses. An aggressive gloss of the very version of events I have just related to my wife. All night, every night, for months, voices emanating from the machine. "Talk to me, you sorry son of a bitch" or "Call me, I've got something to say to you." The little box of the TV we watch seems to have only one story to tell. Scandal and corruption everywhere it seems. The detective stories, all the investigations only reveal ambiguous evidence. Locally, the story I am involved in disappears in the local news as another sexual harassment investigation blooms at the nearby airbase. Men and women fighter pilots fighting. My wife and I, everyone I know, longs, I think, for an actual dogfight. The gray jets screaming and looping in the gray skies above the city of S. Instead there are the usual waves of statements and denials, charges and counter-charges issued for the press with or without attribution. The whole catastrophe. Behind the stock footage of the F-16s skidding down the runway in the late-season snowstorm, I imagine the G-suited pilots in the cockpit of their offices, the warrens of their bureaus, the meetings and workshops, the sessions with consultants. It is the season of debriefing. And I imagine that cast of characters in their own living rooms watching this broadcast, the one I am watching, listening to this endless reel unraveling, taken from the wreckage, the black box of this crash that keeps crashing.
Another Amplification
For years I have been routinely sketching for my students the theory of realistic fiction, the one that ties fiction to the rise of the middle class and the invention of privacy and leisure. There is time now, I suggest, to read books and there are places now where one can go to read them. And the content of domestic fiction? This reiteration: Intimates keep secrets from one another. The drama is in the discovery of those secrets and the discovery of the depth of those secrets. Adultery, a favorite theme. The metaphoric exhaustion of an upstairs and down. The closets that are rooms within rooms. Could Freud have even evolved his theories without the elaboration of all the specialized rooms within the detached house? The bathroom! The bedroom! The innovation of the hallway was profound, I say. No more walking through rooms to get to other rooms. Doors can be closed in order that secret things go on behind them. I see my students roll their eyes. This is all theory, I say, laughing, this storytelling that takes place within walls that turn transparent, that is about the renovation of the chambered spaces of the house and the heart and the head.