The Executor (6 page)

I was naïve—not to mention arrogant—to expect an exemption. Yet all the great thinkers have that presumptuous streak, a sense of the universe waiting on them. I also had a notion that scaling back my goals would be an insult to the memory of my brother, who had, directly or indirectly, set my course.

My first graduate advisor was Sam Melitsky, a lion of the department best known for his work in the exquisitely misnamed field of ordinary language philosophy. As an undergraduate I had read several of his books, coming to admire his tortured, wordy prose. His author photo showed a craggily handsome man with a stiff thatch of dark gray hair and a prizefighter’s nose, one that suggested he had gone to battle for his ideas. It was a photo more than four decades out of date when we first sat down to discuss my project. By then the rugged maverick had been replaced by a kindly, doddering fellow with gaudy sprays of ear hair. I counted my blessings, though: more than tolerating my pretensions, he encouraged them. I suppose that I misstepped in trusting a man of eighty-four. He had nothing to lose by backing me. In the unlikely event that I did turn out to be a genius, he would be vindicated in his old age. If I failed, he’d be dead too soon to give a damn.

In the end it didn’t come down to that. Not exactly. What happened, rather, was this: two days after I handed in my first draft of my first chapter—a discursive, bloated thing more than one hundred seventy pages long—he had a stroke that left him unable to read or speak. The nasty but entirely predictable joke around the department had my shoddy editing as the culprit. In short order, Melitsky’s daughters came to Cambridge and fetched him back to New York City, leaving me devastated and forlorn, even more so when I learned that the only person available to replace him was one Linda Neiman, logician par excellence and a legendary hard case. She loathed Sam, and me by extension. At our first meeting she shredded me, rattling off a long list of demands that would have to be met before we could have any hope of working together, starting with the requirement that I pick a new topic.

“I think I can make it work,” I stammered.

“You can’t,” she said, and began the abuse anew.

Three years passed in a deadlock. The more Linda denigrated my ideas, the more I overvalued them, and vice versa. She seemed to take my long-windedness and ceaseless requests for feedback as a personal attack—a fair interpretation, actually, as I was resisting her in the only way I knew how, with words, adding sentence after sentence after sentence in the hope that by piling on enough text I could get her to submit. This was a terrible strategy. She had power; I had none; the onus was on me to adapt, and my refusal to do so served only to confirm her low opinion of me. I was coddled, I was entitled, I needed a good spanking and then some. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I’ll say that her attitude toward me was corrective, at least in the beginning. Soon enough, though, it became punitive, and then plainly sadistic. She ignored my e-mails, restricted my teaching, blocked my grants, and poisoned my reputation. When I referred to her as my “so-called advisor,” I wasn’t being cheeky; the phrase was hers. “As your so-called advisor ...” she liked to begin, before drilling me yet another new one.

Several times I tried to replace her. I’d have the switch lined up, only to find the offer retracted at the last minute. The consistency with which this happened led me to believe that it was Linda herself who wanted me close at hand. Perhaps she wanted to make me an object lesson, a specimen in a jar she could take down and wave at other obstreperous students as a scare tactic.

And still I wrote. The highest praise you can give an analytic philosopher is that his work is perspicuous. By that measure even I could see what trouble I was in. I kept changing directions, reconsidering, restructuring. Every time I made a major revision, I saved the document as a new file, numbering these drafts successively. At one point I had forty-two versions of the introduction alone. I would cut a paragraph but refuse to let it go, moving it instead to a clippings file that eventually grew to twice the size of the manuscript—itself nothing to sneeze at. As the poem goes, a little learning is a dangerous thing. And ambition is a perverse master, lashing hardest those who bow down.

Aware that I was in way over my head, I nevertheless couldn’t stop, having staked so much of my self-worth on my success. Melitsky had once written, “In large part, excellence consists of the willingness to stomach monotony.” I printed that out in letters four inches high and taped it to the wall of my carrel. When I felt discouraged, I looked at those words and thought of good old Sam. All around me, my peers were toeing the line, staking out some picayune corner of the field for themselves. I scorned them, telling myself that what I was doing was not pointless but brave, clinging to the existentialist idea that one must learn not to fear solitude but to embrace it.
They
wanted job security.
I
had the courage to venture forth into the unknown. Each additional page acted like so much swaddling, helping to shield me from the chill fact that I was getting nowhere. When Linda asked how
the book
was coming, I told her that Hegel didn’t finish
The Phenomenology of Mind
until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had eight years.

She replied that—speaking as my so-called advisor—if I wanted to read Hegel, she would gladly write me a letter of recommendation for the University of Texas.

It all came to a head one rainy day toward the end of my sixth year, when I went to Widener to do some writing and found my carrel cleaned out.

I looked back at the elevator. Had I gotten off on the wrong floor? No: there was the blue mark on the wall where I’d dropped a Sharpie. There was the deep scar that ran the length of the desktop; I had wasted hours, days, if you added them all up, tracing it with my fingertips. There was the chair in which I’d eaten, read, written, slept. This was my carrel—my home—and yet everything that identified it as mine—the Melitsky quote—all the books—not to mention the work that had gone into collecting those books—months spent poring over the catalog, cross-referencing, mining bibliographies—the tape flags and marginalia—
everything
—was gone.

For a moment I stood paralyzed. Then I rushed forward, as though to stanch the bleeding. There was nothing left to keep in. The sole remaining trace of me was a list of call numbers in my handwriting. I crumpled it into a ball, hurled it down the aisle, and stormed over to Emerson to confront my so-called advisor.

 

 

SHE WAS THEN in the first of a three-year stint as department chair, which meant that before I was allowed to see her, I had to contend with her idiot receptionist, Doug.

“One sec, please,” he said, simpering.

While he was gone, I stole all his pens.

“Joseph. What a nice surprise.”

Linda’s office had been arranged to accommodate her wheelchair, all the furniture spaced a few inches wider than normal. Even when she was sitting, her personality was such that she could still seem to tower over me. I noticed, not for the first time, that her shoes were flawless—literally unused—whereas mine looked like they’d been fished out of the trash.

“I was just finishing up an e-mail to you,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”

“I would.”

“My pleasure. Although if you don’t mind, I’m going to make myself some coffee first.” She pushed her joystick, turning her back on me. By the window was a lacquered sideboard with a drip machine and several mugs. “Sit down.”

I sat, dropping my bag as loudly as I could.

“You seem upset,” she said. “Is there a problem?”

“The problem, Linda, is that my carrel has been emptied.”

“Really,” she said.

“Really.”

“Hm.”

“It didn’t occur to you to warn me?”

“What makes you think I had anything to do with it?”

“Didn’t you?”

“That wasn’t my question,” she said, wheeling to her desk. “The question of whether I had anything to do with your carrel being emptied is completely distinct from the question of whether you have any grounds to suggest that I did.”

“For God’s sake,
did you
or
did you not
—”

She put up a hand. “Calm down.”

“What did you do? Expunge me from the records?”

“Joseph—”

“I mean, wouldn’t it’ve been easier to have me shot, or—”

“Joseph,” she said, leaning forward. “Stop it right now.”

Though she spoke to me like I was a poodle, I instinctively shut up.

“Thank you. Now I’m going to read you that e-mail, and I want you to listen very carefully. Can you manage that?”

“I’m listening.”

“Good.” She turned to her computer, moused something open, cleared her throat.

Dear Joseph,

“‘It is my duty to inform you that, effective June fifth, your active student status will be suspended. Notice has been filed with GSAS and with the registrar.

“‘I regret that the situation has come to this, and I hope that you will understand why the faculty has found it necessary to take such a measure.

“‘We both know that your work has come to a standstill. Despite having been granted numerous extensions—extensions granted on condition that you submit work—you still have not given me, or anyone else, a single satisfactory dissertation chapter. This is unacceptable. Twice last year you failed to file applications for an academic extension. Additionally, you failed to file a tuition waiver. That in itself would constitute grounds for your removal. However, the faculty and I decided to give you one more chance, and to that end I have repeatedly sent you e-mails—’”

“But that’s absurd,” I said. “I never—”

“‘—none of which you answered. I—’”

“But I never got any—”

“I’m not finished. ‘None of which you answered. I left a letter in your mailbox. This, too, went unanswered. I was therefore compelled to report to the faculty that you had grown noncompliant.

This decision will not preclude completion of your doctorate. For the time being you may retain your e-mail address, along with limited borrowing privileges. Provided you submit all outstanding coursework’”—a long stare—“‘you may still qualify to graduate. However, your name will be removed from the department roster, and your active status suspended.

“‘I doubt this change will affect you much, seeing as how you have already ceased to attend lectures, and have not taught in three semesters.’ ”

“That’s because you
told
me I couldn’t teach anymore.”

“I’m not finished, please. ‘I understand that you may wish to explain to me the cause of your dereliction, and to plead your case for yet another round of extensions. You are welcome to do so. You may also appeal to GSAS. However, be aware that, having consulted Dean Blevins prior to making this decision, the faculty are not alone in considering the burden of proof to rest on your shoulders rather than ours. Our patience is thinning.

“‘On a more personal note, I wish you to be aware that while I respect Sam Melitsky, I cannot and will not permit his reputation to keep you in clover indefinitely.

“‘Sincerely,

Linda Neiman.’”

She put her manicured hands on the desk. “Several of your cohorts are already assistant professors elsewhere. Gil Dickey is at Pittsburgh. Alexi Burgher is at Stanford. Nalini, as you know, is here. As we speak, both Hudi and Irit Greenboim are interviewing at Oxford. Everyone’s moved forward—except you. How do you explain that? You can’t, so don’t even try.”

I said nothing.

“Listen,” she said, adopting what she must’ve thought of as a gentler tone; it only made her sound more patronizing. “I’m simply saying what someone should have said to you years ago. This is not the right place for you. It never has been. I appreciate your commitment to your principles. But other people need the resources you’re taking up. Just the other day I sat here with a student from Brown—with publications—looking to transfer here. What am I supposed to tell him? ‘Sorry, no can do, we’re saving that spot for someone.

No, hasn’t produced anything of value in six years. But Sam thought he was the
Next Big Thing
!’ I mean, honestly. When does it end?”

The mortification had gone on long enough. I stood up.

“My door is always open,” she said, right before it swung closed.

A
ll this carnage had one upside, and that was Yasmina.

By my penultimate year in grad school I’d run out of philosophy classes to take and had started picking my way through the rest of the course catalog, reasoning that I was doing myself a favor by broadening my horizons. I went first to our pet subjects, math and quantum physics. Nobody looked askance when I took an artificial-intelligence seminar. Nor did they take notice when I signed up for Greek. Film theory raised some eyebrows; but it was after I wangled a spot in an undergraduate photography studio that my so-called advisor not-so-politely suggested that I’d veered off course.

Chastened, I next semester enrolled in a political theory class given jointly with the law school. While meandering through the law library stacks I came across a pretty woman in a black cashmere coat, her brow furrowed in the unmistakable distress of a first-year. I asked what the problem was, and she showed me: the call numbers had switched mid-shelf. Having become something of an expert on the Harvard system, I escorted her to the right place, and she repaid me with a date.

We were halfway through dessert before she realized I wasn’t a law student at all.

No, I wasn’t.

“That’s good. Lawyers are assholes.”

I pointed out that in three years’ time, she would be a lawyer.

“Then I’ll be an asshole,” she said.

She picked up the check.

At first blush, we made an odd couple. Yasmina came from Los Angeles, where her family was prominent in the Persian Jewish community. Back in Tehran, they had owned several carpet and furniture factories, amassing a minor fortune before the Islamic Revolution forced them to flee. Servants, a chauffeur, two vacation homes—this was a life known to Yasmina only in pictures, as she had been born in Rome, where her parents lived while awaiting U.S. visas.