It started with a beautiful girl at Starbucks, at least I think it did.
I was standing in line on a Tuesday morning like any other, waiting for my daily coffee and croissant, when someone caught my eye. I was under the impression she did a slight double-take when she saw me. A twenty-something girl in a white Angora sweater, brown hair in a messy bun on the top of her head. She was probably twenty years younger than me, and not someone I recognized from the staff or faculty at the college, though of course work-study interns come and go. She had what I’d call speaking eyes. She looked familiar.
“Don’t I know you?” I said and immediately cringed at how banal the line was.
She shook her head, her lips curled in disgust. “I don’t think so,” she said, and I saw what she did: a middle-aged man, scrawny and overeager, making advances in Starbucks. Pathetic.
A more confident man would have answered something like “My mistake,” his tone casual and unconcerned. But I was so paralyzed by embarrassment that I said nothing.
❦
It wasn’t the only moment of déjà vu that day.
Wanda, the secretary in the dean’s office, was telling me about some romcom she’d just seen. “So Nicolas Cage is one of these angels in Los Angeles, and nobody can see him but this heart surgeon, Meg Ryan. He falls in love with her because he wants to feel something.”
“I know I didn’t see this, but it sounds familiar, like I dreamed it,” I said to her. I can’t recall how we came to be talking about the movie, or why. I’m not much for chitchat at my workplace.
“You saw the original version,” Wanda told me. “It was German, or French, or something. You told me about it last year.”
Why would I tell her about a movie? I was sure she was thinking of someone else. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen angels wandering around a city before.
❦
Soon after, I had the first of a series of related dreams. I was at a circus sitting on bleachers filled with children. I was as excited as they were by the enormous elephant that managed to stand on a tiny stool, the costumed clowns that tumbled across the arena and played a raucous game of musical chairs, the knife thrower who hurled flaming knives at a helpless young woman, the beautiful trapeze artist with white feather wings, and the breathless moment when she hesitated before taking another step on the tight rope. Suddenly the circus disappeared and I was standing in an empty parking lot in the grim industrial section of a city I didn’t recognize. Scrubby grass poked up through the cracked concrete. The cement wall behind me was covered in unreadable graffiti.
I searched my mind for memories. I couldn’t remember ever going to the circus when I was young. My mother was always counting pennies, and her idea of entertainment was invariably educational. Where did the dream come from? What did it mean?
❦
My habits had always been regular. I rotated six button-down shirts—two light blue, two pin-striped maroon, two gray—with three pairs of trousers—tan, gray, and black. I took five shirts and two pairs of pants to the dry cleaners every Friday and picked them up on Saturday when I did my other laundry. Weekdays were all the same. I stopped at Starbucks for coffee and a croissant every morning on my walk to work and ate the same ham and cheese or roast beef and cheese on a roll from the takeout truck by the Student Services building for lunch. I rotated the same five frozen meals for dinner on weeknights, with Chinese takeout and pizza on the weekends. My administrative job at the university kept me busy but never surprised me. I didn’t think I minded. In fact, I thought I liked living that way.
❦
The encounter with the girl threw me off. When I saw her leaving Starbucks a week later, I could feel the blush rising in my cheeks. What must she think? Why was I so sure I’d seen her before? My face grew hot when I reflected on Freud’s essay about déjà vu and the uncanny. Didn’t it all have something to do with one’s mother’s genitalia? I couldn’t remember and was loath to look it up since surely it was irrelevant and would only make things worse. My embarrassment, that is.
I was half a block away when she came out the door. I wasn’t sure whether she noticed me, but I slowed down and pretended I didn’t see her.
That morning one of the new hires in the English Department raised his hand to greet me in the hall, but I hurried by as if I were on an important errand. As I said, I don’t go in for chitchat at work, or anywhere really—I’m not one to trade pleasantries at the dry cleaners—and apparently he didn’t know I was persona non grata among the faculty. I was sure that even Wanda looked at me with pity in her eyes.
ABD: All but dissertation. It’s a transitional title for candidates on the academic job market who are almost finished with their degrees. In cases like mine where the transitional limbo becomes a permanent state, you don’t generally say ABD. Most of the Ph.D. students in what would have been my graduating class got jobs, including my girlfriend at the time; there were some who finished but were unable to land tenure-track positions. A few took jobs as adjuncts elsewhere. Two of us were ABDs. I’m the only one who stayed. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
❦
In the next circus dream it was the girl from Starbucks who swung back and forth on the flying trapeze and then balanced on the tight rope, one leg raised like a ballet dancer’s. She was graceful, and her performance looked effortless, but the expression on her face was serious and intent. Again I found myself alone in an urban industrial area. I woke wondering: was the bleak warehouse parking lot my life now?
I tend to overread, a residue of my training in literary interpretation. My dissertation, which would have been on the short side if I’d finished, centered on one short story. I had no luck on the job market as an ABD. It could be that future employers weren’t interested in two hundred pages on Melville’s “Bartleby,” a story in which less and less happens. A lawyer who knows very little about him tells the story of an employee who stops doing the job he was hired to do, saying “I would prefer not to.” Eventually, the lawyer moves out of his office, because Bartleby won’t. When Bartleby is finally hauled away, he dies because he prefers not to eat. That would be the most literal way of summarizing it. There’s a lot more to say, of course.
I was interested, for example, in the contrast between “assumptions” and “preferences” in the story, set on Wall Street, the heart of American capitalism. Would the American economy grind to a standstill if everyone did what they preferred instead of what it was assumed they would do? And in all the walls in the story, starting with Melville’s subtitle, “A Story of Wall Street,” but extending to the law office where Bartleby works as a scrivener, which has views of walls outside the windows, and walls separating employees inside the office, an early version of today’s cubicles. Bartleby is completely separated from everyone around him, and his rumored previous job in the Dead Letters Office is about failed connections too—disposing of letters that didn’t reach their recipients. “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness,” Melville writes, “can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?”
Ah, Bartleby! “Pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!” It could also be that I didn’t get any job offers because of my demeanor in interviews, which one of my mentors described as “colorless.”
❦
I was so disturbed by the prospect of encountering the girl again that I was considering a new coffee shop. There’s a Peet’s two blocks away. It would have been an unwelcome break in routine, however, and if the girl was less regular in her habits than I, she might show up at Peet’s herself. I considered drinking the coffee in the break room in the dean’s office instead. But that could bring its own set of uncomfortable social encounters. And the coffee was execrable. No one drank it but the teaching assistants called in for performance reviews.
For a while, I stopped dreaming. Or I no longer remembered my dreams.
And then, just as I’d feared, I saw her in line by the register one morning as I was entering Starbucks. Without even thinking, I immediately turned tail and ran. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but really it seemed the easiest course. I thought I saw the Norton edition of Melville’s Short Novels on top of the small stack of books she was carrying. It was just a glimpse out of the corner of my eye and may have been nothing more than my desire to see Melville’s Short Novels among her books. I distrust moments of apparent synchronicity.
By departing so precipitously, I missed my chance to ask her about the book, and I remembered the look of distaste she gave me too vividly to want a replay anyway. And what if I asked her and she said yes, she was studying Melville? Would I tell her about my unfinished project, the forlorn stacks of pages all too visible in the bookcase in my living room? One pile of notes and drafts for each chapter furred over with dust. Impossible to talk about that.
❦
I began to doubt myself. What if it wasn’t Melville? What if it wasn’t even the same girl? Pretty, twenty-something girls with brown hair pulled up in topknots were not uncommon in this college town. And my eyesight wasn’t what it once was.
But what if it was her and I misinterpreted the look of distaste at our first meeting? Perhaps she’d welcome some intelligent discussion of Melville.
I couldn’t decide. It was all very wearying.
❦
I missed three days of work after fleeing from Starbucks and worried that I might actually need a doctor’s note for an absence that lasted any longer. There was nothing pressing to be attended to at the office. In fact, there was rarely anything pressing at my job, which consisted largely of filing documentation associated with tenure and promotion cases and ensuring that all personnel files remained confidential. The work-study student in my office could handle the work without my help. A monkey who knew the alphabet could probably handle the work without our help.
Bartleby’s profession as a scrivener has long since been replaced by photocopy machines. Can you imagine what it must have been like to make multiple copies of lengthy legal documents by hand? I knew that my position would be replaced by digital files eventually, but administrative jobs proliferate at about twice the rate of faculty positions, which in some departments are actually declining, so I wasn’t concerned about employment. There’s always something else that keeps the wheels of bureaucracy turning, particularly university bureaucracy.
I wasn’t sure anyone would even notice if I vanished from my current job, except for the paperwork it would entail. You can’t actually disappear at the university without following the proper procedures. Sick days and unused vacation and your pension must be calculated. A separation agreement must be completed verifying that you haven’t stolen anything, that no library loans or fines are outstanding, and that you’ve returned your office keys. There’s more probably, and stacks of forms.
It was too tiring to contemplate.
I was vested. I certainly didn’t want to lose my pension, small as it was that early in my career, or medical or dental or vision insurance. Was my disinclination to go to work just about a girl, or was it some deeper malaise? What did I want anyway?
I should have been able to answer that question, but I found it difficult. I didn’t think I even wanted to talk to the girl. I just wanted to not appear pathetic or ridiculous. The momentary glimpse of myself I saw reflected in her eyes brought my current state home to me all too keenly. I was no longer young and hadn’t been for some time. I was a laughable figure of fun: a confirmed bachelor whose friends had all drifted away, whom faculty members and students and even office staff considered a loser. Whatever future I’d imagined in my twenties wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t just the young girl I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to leave the house and see anyone. Or rather I didn’t want anyone to see me.
❦
I turned off the ringer on my cell phone since I wasn’t sure what to say about my continuing absence. “I seem to have caught what’s going around” is what I said when Wanda called at the end of the first week. She was sympathetic and didn’t inquire further; lucky because I didn’t know what I would have said. What? What’s going around?
❦
Days passed. I began sleeping more and more, up at odd hours watching TV. I found the news distressing, and the weather channel was filled with disasters, so I watched HGTV, even though I had no desire to buy or renovate a house or find an apartment in Rio de Janeiro or Berlin, though the latter seemed a possibility I could warm to if there was a friendly real estate agent with just three choices and a deadline for my decision. There was something soothing about the remodeling shows, particularly the moment when the dumbfounded homeowner exclaims, “It doesn’t look like my house anymore!” It was a moment of Entfremdung I could identify with. (Entfremdung, alienation; somehow the English translation doesn’t quite work.) Sometimes I looked around the colorless living room in my townhouse—the shelves of scholarly books untouched for so many years, the stacks of notes and drafts for my dissertation, the plain gray couch and tan velour recliner, the bare walls, the blank television screen—and though nothing had changed, I felt the same. “It doesn’t look like my house anymore.”
I’d moved twice since graduate school. There was nothing special to keep me in the bland complex I lived in then, apart from low rent and location. I imagined buying a house and knocking down some walls. Should I try open-concept living? I wasn’t sure why anyone would want that sort of transparency.
I considered getting a pet. But what would it do all day while I was at work? If I ever returned to work.
❦
I wondered whether the girl and the book were signs that I should finish my dissertation. But that would require reading all of the scholarship written on “Bartleby” in the fifteen years since I’d stopped writing, a mind-boggling task that would drive me to desperation.
Or perhaps the girl was not my muse at all. She was my replacement, ready to tackle the accumulated scholarship on Melville herself—indecipherable graffiti on top of graffiti on top of graffiti—and unburden me of the albatross around my neck. Could I burn those piles of papers and notecards, or at least throw them away?
The thought made me recoil. I couldn’t see myself doing that.
❦
By the time he was in his forties like me, Melville had written Moby Dick, which was a flop, and “Bartleby,” which seems to be his farewell to letters. He’d pretty much given up prose. He was trying to make it as a poet (you can imagine how well that turned out) and is rumored to have been beating his wife (not part of the scholarship when I studied him). His life may have been even more depressing than mine was at that point.
He lived another twenty-some years, but it didn’t get much better. His marriage didn’t improve. He’d browbeaten his daughters into working as scriveners for his lengthy manuscripts and continued to abuse them. His son committed suicide. He finally landed a steady job as a customs inspector, but the work was dull and demanding and left no time for writing. He started Billy Budd when he retired, but didn’t finish it.
❦
After close to two months of sleeping and indecision, I was summoned to the dean’s office. First a voice mail—Wanda, sounding very concerned, then an email, finally a certified letter to my home address.
What would Melville do? I didn’t have a clue. He’d been pretty cagy about holding onto his Customs House job when others were fired with each new federal administration. But was it for the best? I’d been thinking about Melville’s travels on the South Seas when he was a young man. I couldn’t ship on a whaler (there are no whalers), and I wasn’t young or particularly robust. But perhaps my minuscule pension would stretch further there.
I wondered whether a friendly real estate agent could be found who would locate three apartments for me somewhere on one of the larger South Sea islands. I decided I could do without a view if the price was right.
❦
I’d had plenty of time to think at home, between sleeping and watching TV. A moronic discussion of angels on some daytime talk show made me recall the movie Wanda was talking about, and I realized I had indeed seen its predecessor: Wings of Desire, in German with subtitles.
Wim Wenders’ Berlin is filled with invisible angels listening in on the travails of human beings who seem almost to be sleepwalking through the city, locked in their own miseries. Even the angels aren’t happy. I was probably just confusing them in my memory, but it occurred to me that the beautiful girl in Starbucks bore a striking resemblance to the tightrope walker that the angel fell in love with. Wenders’ acrobat must have been some German actress and would be older than the girl. It couldn’t be her.
I’d also remembered more about Freud’s uncanny. The German word, unheimlich, contains two contradictory meanings in German, familiar and unfamiliar. Which felt like an explanation of my current paralysis in some way I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
At least I hadn’t asked the girl whether she’d been in some movie I couldn’t remember the name of. I can just imagine her stare if I’d said, “Weren’t you a circus performer in a European film?” I also didn’t say something stupid like “Do you come here often?” However, if I’d asked and she’d said no, maybe I wouldn’t have stopped going to work.
I decided to call and make an appointment with the dean. The university has an antediluvian suicide policy: they send the campus police to call on students deemed at risk of harming themselves. I was afraid they might try that with me.
I didn’t consider my somnolence suicidal. I just preferred not to do anything.
❦
I managed to get dressed and put on a tie. The conference with the dean could have been worse. He was as embarrassed as I was. “I’ve been under the weather,” I told him, and he nodded gravely as if that made sense. Of course, it made no sense at all and is a ridiculous expression. What could it possibly mean? Can one be over the weather? On top of the weather? One can be on top of things, which I certainly had not been for the past seven weeks.
Wanda put her hand on my arm when I emerged from the dean’s office. “Are you all right now?” she asked, as if she really cared. I told her I was fine and even made a joke. “I think an angel must have touched me on the shoulder. I remembered the movie, by the way. You were right. I’m thinking about watching it again on Netflix.”
“I’d love to watch it with you,” she said, completely flooring me. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe the look in her eyes hadn’t been pity after all. Maybe she didn’t know about the unfinished dissertation or knew and didn’t care. I’ve never been very good at reading people.
I’d always found Wanda attractive. A bit on the ample side, with full, soft curves that were very appealing. She favored bright colors and silk scarves. She’d shown me pictures of a small dog that she was quite attached to. I’d taken a peek at her personnel file and knew there was an ex-husband, but he seemed to be well out of the picture. I knew that Wanda liked to cook, and didn’t think much of the dean.
There weren’t any female angels in Wenders’ film, and the angels only saw in black and white. Wanda featured in my circus dream that night, lush and technicolor, wearing a tight-fitting red dress and ostrich plumes. It was unclear what role she would play, and I was disappointed when the dream was interrupted by my alarm clock.
❦
So I returned to my job as if my Bartleby period had never happened. It didn’t become any more interesting, but it was a job. I was no longer under the weather. Wanda pronounced Wings of Desire better than the remake. She was not a big reader, but we both liked movies and adapted to each other’s tastes. We spent a lot of time in her cozy apartment. She watched Masterpiece Theater and foreign films with me; I watched romantic comedies and documentaries about the British Royals with her. I got used to her great cooking, and going out to restaurants, and her warm body in bed. She bought me a Hawaiian shirt for my birthday. I stowed my notes on Melville in a box at the back of my closet to make room for some plants in the bookcase. We talked about taking a trip to Berlin together. Or maybe Paris.
If this all sounds somewhat sudden, well it was. We didn’t really have much in common—Wanda was more of a homemaker than an intellectual companion—but it really did seem like an angel had tapped me on the shoulder and changed my life.
❦
This would have been the happy ending in one of Wanda’s romcoms. Alas, I came to take my new blessings for granted all too quickly. The relationship with Wanda only lasted for about a year. We never did make it to Paris, or Berlin, which would have been a different city from Wenders’ with the Berlin Wall down.
I’ll admit that was my fault. I made the mistake of telling Wanda I didn’t want to marry her, a fatal wound from which the relationship did not recover.
She was making popcorn in the microwave in the kitchen and I was sitting on the couch in front of the TV when we broke up. So we both had our voices raised slightly and the sounds of the popcorn accelerated as we spoke. At first just a pop here and there, then more pops, and more, then a rapid fire of popping. I remember the background noise and the smell of buttered popcorn more than what we said. “This isn’t going to work,” I think I said, and when she asked, “What isn’t going to work?” I said, “Us.” There was a long pause punctuated by a machine gun burst of popping. “You want to get married, and I don’t,” I explained. I should have told her face-to-face, instead of the way I did. If I’d planned it in advance, I would have done it differently, or maybe not at all. She started to wail. The popcorn was burnt. It was too late to take it back.
In the version of Wings of Desire with the director’s commentary, Wenders mentioned that the actress did all of the trapeze and tightrope acrobatics herself, without a stunt double or safety net, and that one time she fell fifteen feet, landing on her head. Wanda said that was how she felt that day. She has a new boyfriend now, a guy in IT, but I believe she’s somewhat bitter.
There was a part of me that just couldn’t picture a mindlessly happy life spent sitting on the couch watching TV with Wanda. Maybe it was Bartleby’s isolation and unwillingness to make compromises that attracted me to the character to begin with. Even his negativity. “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness,” Melville said, and whether by nature or misfortune or both, I recognized him immediately.
Wenders also happened to mention in the interview that the actress was his girlfriend at the time and they planned Wings of Desire together. Past tense was his girlfriend, so he’d failed to hold onto a woman as ravishing and talented as the trapeze artist, or she failed to hold onto a director as brilliant as Wenders. Either way, someone lost their grip. I never ran into the beautiful girl in Starbucks again, by the way, so I can’t verify that she actually looked like the actress, or that I was even thinking of Wings of Desire when I saw her.
There aren’t any female characters in “Bartleby.” I hear they added a voluptuous secretary to the movie version, which is set in present-day Silicon Valley, but I didn’t see it and I can’t imagine that working at all.
❦
My life didn’t go back to what it was like before Wanda and the girl. I got a promotion and now work in the provost’s office, a job with more deadlines and crises than my last one, which gives my work a fictional sense of purpose if I don’t think too hard about it. Somehow they overlooked the lack of documentation in my personnel file about going AWOL when they promoted me. Which goes to show what will surprise no one: it’s not that hard to move up the ranks in administration if you’re male and wear button-down shirts and can compose complete sentences in the passive voice. I’ve added several ties and sports coats to my rotating wardrobe, befitting my elevated status. I bought a small house and some furniture that isn’t gray or tan. I didn’t knock down any walls. Wanda’s adoration emboldened me to become more confident, even daring, and I dated a sophisticated, older professor in the French Department for a while, but we eventually parted ways with no hard feelings. Right now I’m seeing a receptionist in a crematorium, a thirty-something, tattooed, former English major who writes poetry about death. She doesn’t seem interested in getting married either. The unhappy angel in the film got the girl of his dreams in the end, but Wenders didn’t, as far as I know, and I doubt I will. I expect I’ll be one of those people who end their days alone, never feeling fully at home or finding true happiness.
Sometimes life seems like a game of musical chairs, where we keep popping up and down when the music starts and stops, going in circles until there’s no chair left for us. Or like a big-top circus where the children are joyous and excited but the adults are afraid that the beautiful trapeze artist might fall off the tightrope, the knife thrower might make a fatal mistake, the sword swallower might swallow his last sword, the lion tamer might fail to keep his lion in check and be mauled to death before our very eyes. We know. Any one of us might not get up tomorrow. Ah, the circus we call humanity. Step right up.
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