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“I should ask — is there something going on?” he said.

“No.”

“Some reason you’re finding it so hard to finish?”

“My parents think I’m lazy.”

“Oh?”

“They say I need to stop procrastinating.”

Professor Davidoff scratched the dry skin around his nose, a compulsive habit.

Again the conversation flagged and I thought back to the time, many years earlier, when I’d attended a Quaker meeting in backwoods Vermont. It began with twenty minutes of enforced silence, at the end of which congregants were encouraged to speak their minds if “the Spirit moved” them. It didn’t move anyone. Three-quarters of an hour in I felt so oppressed that I considered jumping up, maybe reciting poetry. But I only knew Ogden Nash by heart, which didn’t seem appropriate.

Anxious parent, I guess you have just never been around;

I guess you just don’t know who are the happiest people

Anywhere to be found;

So you are worried, are you, because your child is turning

Out to be phlegmatic?

The professor lurched inelegantly out of his chair, walked cautiously, like a much older man, over to his desk, and shuffled his papers. His suit jacket had deep creases along the shoulder blades, suggesting he didn’t have someone at home to look him over. He did, though: a viperous woman who always served me last at end-of-year dinner parties, certainly because her husband had predicted, at the first of these parties, that I would one day sit alongside him as a colleague. She was jealous of what our relationship was, or had been; a relationship between a man who was fiercely proud of having graduated from Williams, Cambridge, and Princeton — he’d framed his diplomas and mounted them to the wall above his desk — a man who looked up to no one, straight ahead to almost no one, and a young woman with the potential to match him. If she’d heard his Fisher-Price quip, she might have treated me rather differently.

“No … no … no,” the professor muttered, to himself as much as to me. “Here it … no. Now, where did I put that? Hang on. Yes, this is it.”

He unfolded a week-old university newsletter and pointed to an item on the second page that read Francis Goodman, the New York Times bestselling author and life-hacking expert, will deliver a lecture on efficiency and work-flow techniques at the School of Management on January 15.

That was it. The professor squinted at me.

“You might find it useful,” he said.

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“The dissertation’s close. I think it’s close. It’s close, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be frank, Anna.”

On weeknights, GPSCY, the offensive-sounding Graduate and Professional Student Center on York, sold two-for-one margaritas. After my meeting with Professor Davidoff I ventured there, as I’d learned from movies that in moments of distress, adults invariably resorted to alcohol. The bartender looked me over brazenly to see if I was worthy of his unwanted attention and apparently decided that I was not.

Another failed romance. Aborted. Uprooted. For months that side of my life had been totally dormant; my last flirtation had ended disastrously. Benjamin was a student at the medical school who said he wanted to help people but would probably end up a plastic surgeon. For our fifth date he’d invited me to the movies and, to seem worldly, had picked out a French film called Baisemoi, which he thought meant “kiss me.” It meant “fuck me” and had been banned in several countries because it featured numerous graphic rape scenes. Our fragile relationship couldn’t handle the awkwardness.

Double-fisting margaritas, I drifted through the bar, eventually spotting someone I knew in one of the red-pleather booths: Evan. He was my contemporary in the English department and a notorious grind, the kind of guy who never turned in anything late, never left the library before it closed, never went on vacation without his laptop. He’d once considered me a rival.

I liked to think, though, that my mild distaste for his company came not from competitive anxiety but from a tribal aversion to his ethnic whiteness. He was a high WASP with perfectly coiffed blond hair, prominent cheekbones, a square jaw, broad shoulders, and a seemingly endless supply of Nantucket Reds. That night he wore a Barbour jacket, which added to the impression that he might start shooting foxes at any moment.

Out with Evan was another classmate, Evelyn, who also played the role of Evan’s fiancée. She had smooth black hair (inherited from her father, a Chinese ophthalmologist) and symmetrical features (inherited from her mother, an Alabama hand model). Her most notable trait was dullness: she never said anything particularly smart, funny, or controversial. Mostly she echoed and amplified Evan. Under his influence, she’d even embraced a Northeastern prep-school aesthetic, filling her closet with pastel slacks and cashmere sweaters.

When she saw me she waved like a beauty queen on a float, beckoning me to approach. She said they’d descended on GPSCY to celebrate Evan, whose job search was going well. The University of Chicago wanted to fly him out for an interview.

“Congratulations!” I managed.

“Thank you. Are you here by yourself?” Evan asked, noticing that both my hands were full.

“Tequila’s good company.”

Evan peered vacantly into the middle distance while Evelyn bragged on his behalf: More than five hundred people had applied for the tenure-track position at Chicago, many of them already assistant professors at other universities. Only five of them had been offered interviews, and Evan had cause to believe that he was the front-runner. On the phone, the head of the hiring committee had said that he was “very, really, very impressed” with Evan’s “precocious and lively” dissertation on moments of enlightenment in mid-twentieth-century American literature. When he heard that Evan was in a committed relationship with another graduate student — meaning Evelyn — he said Chicago might be able to find her an adjunct position. It didn’t even cross Evelyn’s mind to feel ashamed of a hanger-on posting. For Evelyn, engagement meant parasitic self-abnegation. She would henceforth derive her value entirely from her partner’s success.

“Nothing’s certain yet,” said Evan, “but I have a good feeling.”

“So do I,” said his amplifier. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed, for both of us.”

Like a film critic for a small-town rag, Evelyn resorted routinely to set phrases. She’d — famously — once described Romeo and Juliet as “a refreshingly good love story.” In response, Professor Davidoff had called her an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” — the best insult that I had ever heard.

Evan and Evelyn were happy in Evan’s success. Oh so happy.

“I wonder — just thinking out loud here — if Chicago is a safe place to live?”

“What? What are you talking about?” asked Evan.

“Lots of gangs there, so say the newspapers. High murder rate. Muggings. Drive-by shootings. You’ll need to watch yourself if this works out.”

Evelyn glared at me. She was as toothlessly protective as one of those tiny dogs that travel in purses.

“Chicago’s dangerous, sure. That’s why the university has one of the largest private security forces in the country, right up there with the Nation of Islam,” Evan said, determined to put down my rebellion swiftly. “I think they can shield me from spraying bullets while I teach. Anyway, who cares what the city’s like so long as the university in that city has a good reputation? That’s what matters for my career.”

Appropriately, the conversation turned to “our work,” and I tried hard to enter a meditative state in which the mind separates from the body, no longer registering external stimuli. I must have succeeded because the next thing I knew, Evan was saying: “Everything all right?”

“Sorry, what?”

Evelyn took the liberty of answering: “He said, how about you? What are you working on?”

I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.

Instead of prevaricating, I changed the subject, offering to pay for a round of shots. My classmates struggled to remember the proper order of operations. Lime, then salt, then liquor? Liquor, then lime, then salt? Not that it really mattered. Unlike baking a cake or solving a math problem, the sequence didn’t affect the result: drunkenness. Evelyn coughed, sending flecks of spit in my direction. I thought of her cozy in Chicago’s Hyde Park, an adjunct professor, a professor’s wife, and my stomach constricted, as if the day’s disappointments were crawling through my gastrointestinal tract. On consideration, that may have been the tequila.

The restroom — I’d never before had reason to appreciate — was intended for individual use, meaning I wouldn’t have to worry about eavesdroppers in adjacent stalls. My stomach constricted again as I touched the door handle, sticky with other people’s perspiration. A good alliterative title: Other People’s Perspiration. I removed my sweater and found a relatively un-ghastly place for it on the floor. If I had to buy a new one, so be it. Still too hot, I removed my T-shirt and then crumpled. It seemed like a fantastic idea to press my face against the porcelain toilet, the stand part that connects to the floor. I could see streaks of urine along the sides but I didn’t care. The coolness of the porcelain was more important, as refreshing as a good love story.

Toilets were amazing devices. Their beauty was, of course, universally recognized, at least since Marcel Duchamp, but enough could not be said about their practical worth. As an engine for flushing waste, toilets were arguably more important for civilization than more vaunted engines: the steam and internal combustion. They used only gravity and water. Just gravity, water, and ingenious design to keep away infection and keep at bay the rough truth of our disgusting animality.

Pre-toilet, even aristocrats had to live with their waste nearby until servants came around to remove their chamber pots. They stowed their shit and piss beneath their beds and slept on top of it. The smell during asparagus season must have been nightmarish. Whereas I, a lowly graduate student who’d fallen behind, could make my vomit disappear by applying pressure to a trip lever.

The Notebook

Alana catches the train from Boston to Cincinnati, snagging a window seat. Deborah sits next to her and strikes up a conversation about fur coats. It’s as good a topic as any. War. Peace. Life. Death. Fur coats. When Deborah exits the train, Eleanor takes her place. Eleanor’s topic is animal cruelty. After Eleanor, Francine talks pet insurance, and Georgina talks vegetarianism. Alana politely plays her part, never acknowledging the alphabetical chain or thematic connections, which, anyway, never amount to anything. Not only is there no climax, there is no sense of building, of anything wagered or gained. Each conversation, each story, is as meaningless and effervescent as the last. If there’s any point at all it’s to show my hand.

Sergeant Davis calls his troops together. Vietnam. They need a volunteer for a perilous mission. “I’ll do it, sir,” says Private Johnny Johnson. Sergeant Davis describes what Private Johnson has to do in extreme detail, every step of the way, to retrieve medical supplies accidentally dropped behind enemy lines. This will go on for pages and pages until the reader feels bored stiff and absolutely despises me. Private Johnson salutes his superior in a patriotic fervor. He sets out. Before he can complete step one he trips over a branch right onto a mine and gets blown up. Guts everywhere.

Strange to say Vietnam was nothing to me. Five years younger, it would have been everything. I was just old enough not to have to really care, in life or in writing. A lucky year for boys, 1938. What would the Chinese call it? Year of the … some animal just the right size to hide in a burrow while the predators get their fill.

Lewis and Don, old school friends, haven’t seen each other in years and years, stretching into decades. Too long. Far. Too. Long. Lewis recently won a prize — he’s an architect — and he can’t wait to tell Don all about it. Before Lewis gets the chance, Don starts talking about himself. He got a raise at work. His mistress is young and beautiful. His car is fast. His son is a quarterback. Banal, small-bore stuff, not nearly as significant as the prize. (The prize is a Big Deal.) Lewis is turned off. He decides not to share his accomplishment. And suddenly he feels wonderful. Elated. He doesn’t understand but what’s happened is simple enough. What he doesn’t share belongs to him alone.

I was fourteen, skipping rocks at Walden Pond. Veronica Lancet was there with her family but she managed to get away from them. In a quiet moment she kissed me. It was my first kiss. I remember her tongue felt like wet fruit. I remember, when I looked at her the next day, feeling like an ice cube coming apart in hot tea. Extremities tingling. Heartburn-like sensation around the, um, heart.

Freddy Remembered

The promotional brochure that Collegiate sent to newly admitted students had a picture of Golden Memorial Library on the cover. Golden was meant to resemble a Gothic cathedral, which it more or less did. Construction crews must have exhausted New England’s quarries to assemble its granite and limestone façade; must have wondered if they were, in fact, building some sort of church when they erected the portentous entrance hall, with its sixty-foot vaulted ceiling, and the fifteen-story tower destined to hold books — millions upon millions of books acquired as part of a literary arms race with the nation’s competing research universities.

Below Golden was New Campus, an underground library that Collegiate never featured in its advertising materials. Whereas Golden was lousy with stained glass and gargoyles and marble reliefs and chandeliers, New Campus had buzzy fluorescent lights, cubicles shaped like swastikas — if you took the bird’s-eye view — white plaster walls, and poster reproductions of forgotten midcentury pop art. Golden had overstuffed couches and internal courtyards. New Campus had “weenie bins”: windowless, closet-size rooms for private study. To move from Golden, built in the 1920s, to New Campus, built in the 1970s, was to witness the devolution of American architecture.

Yet there was something comforting about New Campus. I was sitting in a swastika, hungover, determined to thicken my too-thin dissertation, and as I stared at an ancient water spot, I reflected that New Campus did not demand anything of its visitors, like Golden did. Golden expected heady gratitude. New Campus accepted wallowing.

A PhD in English should, in theory, take five years. In reality, it was considered well within the range of normal to finish in seven. But I was midway through that seventh year and still the end evaded me. Relatives who’d once admired my precocity were beginning to wonder what was taking so long. “What, still in school?” my aunts and uncles asked at family gatherings, doubtful they’d heard me right. I was twenty-six, then twenty-seven, then, to my amazement, twenty-nine. A terrible, liminal age. As if by sleight of hand, my twenties had disappeared. They’d oozed into books I couldn’t remember reading, seminars I couldn’t remember attending, conversations I couldn’t remember having.

I’ ll be frank, Anna: You’ve fallen behind. Find a case study. A good one. Do it right away.

The muscles under my right shoulder blade were throbbing again, the rhomboids. I slouched along them — I sat lopsided, right lower than left — and they protested this treatment frequently, sending bursts of pain diagonally across my back. The problem wasn’t bad enough to drive me to a doctor, but it should have been sufficient to make me improve my posture. Should have; was not. It helped to stretch both arms above my head and thrust my chest forward. Arms up; chest out.

Six and a half years in New Harbor. Three years since I’d passed my oral exams; three summers, with the length of three long winters. Roughly 1,100 days; 26,400 hours; 3,000 meals; 300 Pop-Tarts; 120,376,000 heartbeats — my Nokia had a calculator — assuming an average resting rate of seventy beats per minute. And in that span of time: It’s a little thin.

That judgment applied equally well to my social life. Other people could excuse their lack of progress by pointing to offspring or a passionate affair or even an obsessive interest in something pleasurable but meaningless, like video games or football. I could not account for what I did all day. I walked around. I read. I ate. Sometimes I loitered in pharmacies, overwhelmed by branded bounty. What else? Next to nothing. I had nothing to distract me from nothing.

My rhomboids whined as I considered the possibility that I would have to find a new career, start afresh in some horribly grinding profession like the law, the last refuge of the academic. How awful it seemed to go back to the beginning. How tiring to study for the LSAT and ask my disappointed parents to pay for law school or dig into my inheritance to do the same and then have to actually attend law school and, worse yet, have to actually practice law. No. No. I wasn’t there yet. No. I was O.K. O, period, K, period. I knew what I was doing. I was a star — or had been recently and could be one again. Would be one again. Just as soon as I found a case study. A good case study. Which I would do right away. Of course I would.

The water spot on the ceiling looked like a rabbit with fangs. One ear turned down, the other upright, drops of blood trickling from long teeth. There was a word for this psychological phenomenon, seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or on the surface of the moon or in stains. But I couldn’t remember it. There was also a word for the inability to remember a word, which I couldn’t remember either, although I knew it sounded Greek — contained Greek — and that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had coined it. Amnelogia, maybe. I could, at least, recall the various words that meant “behind”: delinquent, overdue, delayed, belated, and retarded, the last of which was sadly unacceptable, no matter the context, thanks to the euphemism treadmill.

My laptop had gone to sleep. A flick of the touchpad revealed my dissertation. Forget it. I slinked over to the Fiction and Literature section, found the twentieth century, and pulled out a copy of Frederick Langley’s Complete Works.

I first heard the name Frederick Langley in middle school when my eighth-grade English teacher recommended Brutality and Delicacy. He impressed upon me that Langley was a serious author and made clear he wouldn’t entrust just anyone with Langley’s work. It was a mark of distinction. Although reading Langley felt like my official introduction to literary culture, the aura of formality in no way spoiled my pleasure. I encountered Langley slightly before it became automatic for me to underline or take notes, that prelapsarian period when fiction was just for enjoyment.

My attachment was short-lived. In high school, I became acutely aware that the students who didn’t care for reading cared for Langley the most. They found him delightfully outrageous. They loved “Longer,” the grotesquerie in which the circumcised protagonist tries to regrow his foreskin. One boy could recite the entire dinner-table scene from memory. His girlfriend pledged never again to eat calamari.

The idiots liked Langley. The idiots who thought they were countercultural because they were bad at tests. The idiots who thought that any book published before the twentieth century was boring. The idiots owned that dumb T-shirt with a bulging eyeball on the front and, on the back, We see each other in glances. The idiots never bothered to learn the difference between a dactyl and an anapest — didn’t see the point — yet had the energy to track down old magazine articles about the time Langley wowed a Greenwich Village crowd: he’d read the first half of a story and then improvised three possible endings. (And it really did require energy to find those articles. I went to high school in the dark pre-Google age, when the internet was still the domain of math nerds and pedophiles, so the idiots’ best option was microfiche.)

The idiots liked Langley. So I stopped liking Langley. The fact that Langley was my introduction to literary culture made him seem introductory. The fact that I enjoyed reading his stories made them seem frivolous. I formed the impression that he wasn’t sophisticated. He was, in my adolescent assessment, serious enough for a serious eighth-grader, not for a budding literary critic. That judgment stayed with me. Still, when Helen told me that she was Frederick Langley’s niece, the information produced in me a childish excitement.

I skimmed the introduction to Complete Works, which divided Langley’s stories into two major categories, “epiphanies” and “compulsions.” The epiphanies were formulaic: something happens to X that changes his perspective on Y.

The quintessential epiphany was “Alone at Green Beach,” featuring an eleven-year-old boy, Oscar, who’s infatuated with his adult cousin Roger and daydreams that they’ll run away together to lead a storybook life full of adventure. One afternoon at Green Beach, Roger encourages this fantasy. Roger tells Oscar that he’ll need to pick up survival skills if the two of them want a shot at making it on their own: How to gut and scale a fish, how to skin a deer. When Roger runs out of beer — he’s been drinking all day — he drives to the market, leaving Oscar alone at the beach. Oscar waits and waits, but Roger never returns. Close to midnight, Oscar accepts that his cousin isn’t coming back and that Roger isn’t worthy of his adoration.

What made Langley famous were the compulsion dramas, in which he took an ephemeral thought or urge and followed through to a logical-yet-extreme conclusion. Many compulsion dramas were intentionally unrealistic, even fantastical.

In “While You Were Out,” a man takes a sedative after a root canal and falls into a deep sleep. His wife, watching over him, feels a sudden, irresistible desire to pluck one of his white hairs, which blossoms into an almost Ahab-like commitment to totally depilate him. She starts with a tweezer, upgrades to clippers, and then resorts to a razor. By the time he wakes up, she’s shaved off all his head and facial hair. “You’ll look better once you’ve had a little sun” is the last sentence.

In “Baby Crazy,” an old maid — Langley’s term, not mine — folding clothes at the laundromat finds a tiny white T-shirt that must belong to someone’s infant. She writes a lost-and-found ad — Missing something? Baby tee, newly washed — which her pretty young neighbor answers. It’s her daughter’s. She must have left it in the dryer by mistake. The old maid dreams about the T-shirt that night and realizes that she desperately wants a child of her own. So she assembles a miniature wardrobe and kidnaps the neighbor’s girl.

Line by line, Langley didn’t offer much. He wasn’t a great prose stylist. Nor was he a deep thinker. He rarely fleshed out his characters’ motives and provided only the briefest glimpses of their interiority (the old maid wants a child). Like a behaviorist, he generally confined himself to describing observable actions. His stories were often extremely short, sometimes only a few pages long, and I wondered if that was because he didn’t have much to say. Yet I warmed to the material. Langley was versatile, by turns crude, exuberant, and quiet. He could write by numbers — as in the simplistic epiphanies — but he could also veer off trail. And after spending so many years in a classroom, I appreciated that he seemed unambitious.

Browsing through the stacks, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Literature, which had a short paragraph on Langley.

Langley, Frederick (1938–1981). American short-story writer born in Concord, Mass. Released his debut collection, Brutality and Delicacy (1960), while an undergraduate at Faber College. Published two more collections in quick succession: Alone at Green Beach (1962) and Omega (1964), which cemented his reputation as a short-form master. Although popular with the public from the start, not recognized by critics until Omega. Died in a car accident.

Three books at two-year intervals, then nothing in the last seventeen years of his life. That struck me as odd. Since no one had gotten around to writing Langley’s cradle-to-grave biography — as a short-form rather than long-form master generally considered more fun than important, he probably wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list — I settled for something called Freddy Remembered, a slim oral history published in 1990.

On the inside flap I found a black-and-white head shot captioned simply The author, 1963. Langley had long wavy hair, a delicate nose, and an unusually pronounced supraorbital ridge. I tried, and failed, to think of a word to describe his gaze that wasn’t piercing or penetrating; and I tried, and failed, to find in Langley’s face some trace, however faint, of his niece.

The introduction claimed that “the people who knew Freddy best” had sat for interviews, which were then cobbled together into short “remembrances.” There was no contribution from Helen Langley or, for that matter, anyone with the last name Langley, which arguably put the “best” into question. Oh, well. A common refrain was that the author found writing amazingly easy.

Paul Church: I was editor of the Faber College Beagle when Freddy was a freshman. He started submitting stories as soon as he arrived on campus, and I liked them. They had a dashed-off quality. I don’t mean that as an insult — better to say they seemed effortlessly produced, as in fact they were. He had that kind of genius. He found ideas everywhere. On a walk or listening to the radio. The joke on campus was that while other writers labored, Freddy’s manuscripts arrived fully formed, delivered by stork. In the course of an afternoon, he could set down a whole story.

He barely revised. When we first worked together I suggested improvements. But he found the editing process frustrating. He didn’t like going back to a story. We got into a fight once because I called him lazy. Freddy said, “I’m not lazy, I’m accepting.” I think he meant that he didn’t put on airs. He knew what he was capable of and what he was not capable of, and he didn’t see the point in striving. I thought he was dead wrong and that there most certainly was a point. In the end, it was Freddy who got his way.

Rebecca Johnson: I dated Freddy when he was finishing up Omega. He was a really affectionate guy and he always had time for me. That was a surprise. I’d been with artists before and they always wanted whole weeks to themselves so they could work. “Becky, if you don’t let me be, I’ll never finish!” “Becky, get out of here, you’re ruining my career!” It was like they needed a hundred hours of absolute silence just to get a few words on the page. Not Freddy Langley. He wanted to go out and have some fun. He loved going to fancy restaurants and ordering for everyone at the table so he could taste a bit of every dish. One time a waiter thought he was a food critic and gave us all free chocolate cake.

I did see Freddy in a dark mood this one time when he had to go see his dad. He said he had to “kiss the ring,” which I guess was a reference to the Mob, which was strange because his dad was the headmaster at a religious school. Afterward he was in an even worse mood. He said his dad, who at first wasn’t too pleased about the writer thing, was finally coming around. Freddy’s dad saw that Freddy was doing well, making money, getting his name out. Everyone likes success, right? The way Freddy’s dad saw it, if writing was what Freddy did best, and he was good at it, and he could earn a living at it, there was no harm in it. I was confused. “Shouldn’t you be relieved, Freddy? Shouldn’t you be happy he feels that way?” Freddy sneered.

Andrew Cafferty: In October of 1963 — I remember the month because the Dodgers had just swept the Yankees in the World Series — I threw a dinner party at my country house in Maine and I invited Freddy. I’d recently returned a pair of boots to L. L. Bean, the retail company, and was extolling their great customer service. I’d had the boots for eight or ten years already, but when I told the salesclerk that they were letting in water, he gave me another pair, no trouble at all. I guess I was going on.

All of a sudden Freddy stood up and declared he had an idea that he couldn’t let get away. He demanded a pen, paper, and privacy.

In the morning — he’d spent the whole night writing — he came downstairs with “Lifetime Warranty,” the famous story about a woman who purchases her husband from L. L. Bean via mailorder catalog and then returns him decades later because he no longer satisfies her. You know, sexually. That was the husband’s “design flaw.” He “did not perform as advertised.”

October 1963. Langley’s final collection, which contained “Lifetime Warranty,” came out in September 1964. Assuming Andrew Cafferty had the date right and building in book-production lag time, then “Lifetime Warranty” must have been among the last stories that Langley completed for publication. I skipped ahead to the remembrance from Langley’s book editor. He also mentioned “Lifetime Warranty.”

Richard Anders: The highbrow crowd mostly ignored Freddy, I suppose because he was popular. There’s nothing they despise more, you see. But they loved “Lifetime Warranty.”