Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline Read Free Book Online Page B

where both of them were enrolled in the English master’s program. She was twenty-five, he was twenty-seven. She’d been writing a newsletter for a women’s health organization in Washington, D.C., a low-paying and tedious job, and had come to the conclusion that maybe she should consider teaching instead. He’d spent the previous two years living in Africa, learning Swahili and contracting intestinal diseases. The first time she saw him, with his curious Indian elf shoes, dark hair, and piercing brown eyes, she thought he must be foreign, but when he opened his mouth she heard the elocution of a New England prep-school graduate.
“Of course,” he’d replied thoughtfully to a small, reedy professor’s assertion that E. M. Forster’s work expressed a dialectic uncertainty about identity versus nature. “But shouldn’t we be interrogating these on a grid of social analysis rather than wallowing in solipsistic interpretations of the text?”
“Yeah,” Kathryn murmured, thinking aloud. Paul, Professor Digby, and the rest of the class turned to look.
“Was there something you wanted to add, Kathryn?” the professor inquired.
She looked down at her notebook, blank except for a shopping list and a few mazelike doodles, and shrugged. “I just agree. That’s all.”
After class Paul caught up with her in the hall. “Thanks for speaking up in there. I’m so sick of these old-school professors who won’t engage current theory.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“So,” he said, loping along beside her, “do you really agree with me, or were you just annoyed at Digby?”
She stopped. “I pretty much agree with you. Though I’m not sure it has much to do with what he was talking about.”
“I know. I just wanted to bring it up. So few professors at this place are really grappling with the imperialist, almost fascistic hold of Western so-called literature over—”
“You know what?” Kathryn broke in. “I’m late to meet someone. I’ve got to run.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“I love your shoes,” she said. “Well, see you later.”
By the third week of school, Kathryn had begun to loathe the English department. She hated the thick burned coffee in the makeshift student lounge, the sign-ups for reading groups on arcane subjects, the desperate tone of the grad-student newsletter, the tense, pale faces of second-years waiting to find out if they’d made the cut. By the end of the first month she decided that she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
“I’m getting the master’s and getting out of here,” she told Paul. Theyhad begun meeting after class and walking across the Lawn to the College Inn, a student hangout, for coffee. “All I’m really interested in is the reading, anyway. I’m no good at the criticism part.”
“So you don’t want to teach.”
“I don’t want to teach enough to put up with all the bullshit.” They walked up the white marble steps of the rotunda. It was late afternoon on a hot day; leafy branches drooped over the wide marble porches extending from either side of the dome. “And besides, I’m sick of being poor and undervalued and anxious all the time. What kind of a life is that?”
“But it won’t always be this way,” he said. He sat on a bench overlooking the grounds and started playing with a large, yellowing leaf.
“Oh, no, not always. The next step is to fight to get a spot in the Ph.D. lineup, then to finish an overly cautious and politically correct dissertation, then to get a job at a mediocre college—somewhere in the continental United States, if you’re lucky—then the whole tenure nightmare, then departmental bickering and backstabbing …”
“You do make it sound pleasant,” he said.
Kathryn sat against the wall, her legs up on the bench. “Well, what about you? What do you like so much about it?”
He started to tear the leaf into little pieces. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Though they had little in common, Kathryn and Paul got along