I’m anchorwoman material?”
And soon she
was
an anchorwoman, at least on weekends. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she shared the fortresslike anchor desk with an aggressively cheerful fireplug of a guy who doubled as the weekend weatherman, wearing his immensedouble-breasted blazer like a cuirass. Paul was bemused to realize that the guy had a crush on Kym; at the end of one of their first broadcasts together, as he reminded viewers of stormy weather heading their way, he laid his stubby little hand on Kym’s wrist and said, “You be careful driving home, pumpkin.”
“ ‘Pumpkin?’ ” said Paul when Kym got home. “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The news director told him not to do it again. He was
crushed.”
“He looks like a lawn statue,” Paul laughed. “The Weather Gnome.”
“Stop!” laughed Kymberly in a two-syllable singsong, batting his arm, but over time she seemed to find the sobriquet less funny. Paul was too busy foundering professionally to notice. He taught composition at Lamar Community College for a couple of semesters, for a thousand dollars per course, but when the budget was cut they let him go. After that, Kym agreed to support him for six months while he wrote a book. He worked fitfully on a memoir of his expulsion from academia, leaving out the adultery and cat drowning, only to learn from an acquaintance in publishing that the market was glutted with memoirs of downsized academics recovering their self-worth, saving their marriages, and becoming better fathers through redemptive manual labor. Everybody was looking for a gimmick; one guy, Paul was infinitely wearied to discover, was writing horror stories set in academe.
When Kymberly found out that Paul spent more time napping and going to the movies every day than he did writing, she bullied him into taking a job at a textbook company, the Harbridge Corporation. For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to update an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, whitesugar, or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism, and homophobia). Pretty quickly the effort to write exercises that were simultaneously inoffensive to Dallas and San Francisco left Paul struggling to stay awake in front of his computer screen by the middle of every afternoon. In his stupor he began to imagine an actual battle on his desktop, a ragged collision of Lilliputian armies out of
Spartacus:
a well-drilled phalanx of Promise Keepers and West Texas cattlemen on his right versus a scruffy rabble of Berkeley vegans and Earth Firsters on his left.
Paul’s supervisor, Bonnie, was an embittered former high school English teacher from Little Rock who had lost her job to budget cuts. He attempted to express solidarity with her as one academically displaced person to another by dropping quotes from Milton and Pound, but this only humiliated her; Bonnie’s knowledge of the canon was limited to middlebrow high school “classics” like
Catcher in the Rye
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and she didn’t get the jokes. In return, she never missed an opportunity to remind him how far he had fallen from his prestigious Yankee university. “Guess they didn’t get around to adjective clauses up there in Minnesota,” she’d say, handing him back a clumsily executed exercise to do over. Paul retaliated by surfing the Web all day and deliberately missing deadlines. When he was really pissed off, he composed items with inappropriate references that he figured Bonnie wouldn’t get—“Mr. Humbert
(brought, brung)
Dolores a
And soon she
was
an anchorwoman, at least on weekends. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she shared the fortresslike anchor desk with an aggressively cheerful fireplug of a guy who doubled as the weekend weatherman, wearing his immensedouble-breasted blazer like a cuirass. Paul was bemused to realize that the guy had a crush on Kym; at the end of one of their first broadcasts together, as he reminded viewers of stormy weather heading their way, he laid his stubby little hand on Kym’s wrist and said, “You be careful driving home, pumpkin.”
“ ‘Pumpkin?’ ” said Paul when Kym got home. “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The news director told him not to do it again. He was
crushed.”
“He looks like a lawn statue,” Paul laughed. “The Weather Gnome.”
“Stop!” laughed Kymberly in a two-syllable singsong, batting his arm, but over time she seemed to find the sobriquet less funny. Paul was too busy foundering professionally to notice. He taught composition at Lamar Community College for a couple of semesters, for a thousand dollars per course, but when the budget was cut they let him go. After that, Kym agreed to support him for six months while he wrote a book. He worked fitfully on a memoir of his expulsion from academia, leaving out the adultery and cat drowning, only to learn from an acquaintance in publishing that the market was glutted with memoirs of downsized academics recovering their self-worth, saving their marriages, and becoming better fathers through redemptive manual labor. Everybody was looking for a gimmick; one guy, Paul was infinitely wearied to discover, was writing horror stories set in academe.
When Kymberly found out that Paul spent more time napping and going to the movies every day than he did writing, she bullied him into taking a job at a textbook company, the Harbridge Corporation. For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to update an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, whitesugar, or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism, and homophobia). Pretty quickly the effort to write exercises that were simultaneously inoffensive to Dallas and San Francisco left Paul struggling to stay awake in front of his computer screen by the middle of every afternoon. In his stupor he began to imagine an actual battle on his desktop, a ragged collision of Lilliputian armies out of
Spartacus:
a well-drilled phalanx of Promise Keepers and West Texas cattlemen on his right versus a scruffy rabble of Berkeley vegans and Earth Firsters on his left.
Paul’s supervisor, Bonnie, was an embittered former high school English teacher from Little Rock who had lost her job to budget cuts. He attempted to express solidarity with her as one academically displaced person to another by dropping quotes from Milton and Pound, but this only humiliated her; Bonnie’s knowledge of the canon was limited to middlebrow high school “classics” like
Catcher in the Rye
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and she didn’t get the jokes. In return, she never missed an opportunity to remind him how far he had fallen from his prestigious Yankee university. “Guess they didn’t get around to adjective clauses up there in Minnesota,” she’d say, handing him back a clumsily executed exercise to do over. Paul retaliated by surfing the Web all day and deliberately missing deadlines. When he was really pissed off, he composed items with inappropriate references that he figured Bonnie wouldn’t get—“Mr. Humbert
(brought, brung)
Dolores a
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