My Education Read Online Free PDF Page B

from dependent pupil to dependable colleague, another and far greater danger had passed. The evocation of his forthcoming baby seemed to ratify this.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Uterine Dystopias: The Legacy of Dora;
Pynchon and Postmodernism;
Fetishes and Freaks: Strategies of Queering the Gothic; never could I have imagined, filling out my registration at the start of the fall, how quickly these interesting courses could take on the appearance of make-work, of the false tasks of investigation and organization that parents invent to keep small children busy. Only Chaucer seemed to have any substance. His writing felt particularly hard and elemental, like a lump of coal or a potato, a thing of obvious use grubbed up out of the ground. The same afternoon I had met with Brodeur I’d started working through
The Canterbury Tales
, and right away had felt the thrill of mastery, perhaps because having known nothing, I actually doubled my expertise with each couplet I painstakingly muddled out.
    â€œOf course he didn’t mean you should catch up with all of the reading before your first day,” Laurence Pumbleton said to me now. “Or he probably did, but you don’t really have to. Ignore him.”
    â€œBut I’ve never read any at all. And I’m coming in late. If the class wasn’t so huge and so popular I might be less worried.”
    â€œYou have nothing to worry about. Each week you’ll sit in his lecture the same as they do. I guarantee that’s all you’ll need. In section you go over his lecture at a remedial pace and you force them to make little comments. You’ll be wonderful.” Tilting his head back he poured in his mouth the whole contents of the second of two dainty and conical glasses that had been sitting on the table before him, with a last shake to dislodge the olive.
    After calling and arranging our meeting Laurence had picked me up in a cream-colored two-seat Alfa Romeo convertible and driven me, as if I’d been Grace Kelly on the coast of Amalfi, to a nearly defunct ski resort on the Tompkinsville Road half an hour outside town. The place seemed neglected for reasons beyond the still-warm autumn weather. Perhaps fifty years earlier the small glacial escarpment in the shadow of which it was built had won acceptance from area farmers as an Alpine landscape, but now the Swiss-chalet style of the buildings only poignantly reemphasized their inadequacies. In the dining room nonfunctioning cuckoo clocks crowded the faux-split-log walls, and a faded motif of red hearts was melancholically repeated on the dingy white curtains and the dingy white lace tablecloths. Where there were not cuckoo clocks there were antlers, or elaborate beer steins with hinged pewter lids. No music played. The scattered other patrons sat hunched over wide plates of shingle-stacked meats overwhelmed by a viscous brown sauce. At noon, not one other table had drinks, but the taciturn woman in a dream-catcher T-shirt and Nikes who apparently served as host, waiter, and bartender had shown no surprise when Laurence, declining the menu, ordered us four gin martinis with olives. Laurence was arrestingly suave, in the Jimmy Stewart mold; his very lack of handsomeness seemed to burnish his charm and make him that much more handsome. He was taller than the average tall man and even so his long, spidery limbs were out of proportion to his exaggerated height, so that his arms and legs seemed to have extra joints, as with expensive umbrellas. His mode of dress, Brooks Brothers everything, was rigorously perfect down to woven leather belt and cuff links. On top he was going bald in an unusual pattern, like a monk’s tonsure with decorative fringe. He had a wide gap between his front teeth amid features that were otherwise slightly too narrow. But his close-set eyes were mobile and penetrating, and he was so coordinated in his subtle attentions, holding doors and hanging coats and