Then Paul found himself idling at the light where he had used to turn off into the leafy neighborhood where he’d lived with Kymberly, and the memory of his fall from grace gathered gloomily on the horizon of his good spirits like a massive Texas thunderstorm. Once upon a time, Paul had been a very promising literary theorist with a very impressive Ph.D. from a very prestigious school, the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota. But within a few years of matriculating, he had found himself stuck in the last year of a nonrenewable postdoc at an undistinguished state school in Iowa, cruelly writer’s blocked, and up to his neck in a pointless affair with a sleek graduate student in communications, a kinetic California girl named Kymberly. His only hope of professional salvation had been to ride the coattails of his wife, Elizabeth, as she negotiated a tenured position for herself at Chicago University. But riding Elizabeth’s coattails depended on Elizabeth not finding out about Kymberly, and that in turn depended on placating Elizabeth’s sinister cat, Charlotte, who lived with Paul in Iowa while Elizabeth commuted back and forth to Chicago. What happened next was sort of willfully blurry in Paul’s memory, but there had been a titanic battle of wills between Paul and the goddamn cat. Charlotte had hoarded evidence of Paul’s infidelity — panties, an earring, wine cooler bottle caps — while Paul had alternated between trying to buy her affection with catnip mousies and fish snacks, and terrorizing her. The battle ended badly for both of them. Call it a draw: Elizabeth found out about Kymberly and cast off Paul like a sack of old clothes, effectively ending his academic career, and Charlotte ended up drowned in Paul’s bathtub. Somehow.
An angry honk from the pickup behind him startled Paul; the light had gone green without his noticing. He jerked his foot off the brake and accelerated grumpily through the intersection. Now he had to let the little mental thunderstorm blow itself out. After Iowa, Paul had followed Kymberly to Texas, where she had gotten a job as a junior reporter at a struggling network affiliate in Lamar, KNOW, channel 48, “You’re in know now with K-Now 48,” intoned the announcer, “your home for news and entertainment in central Texas!” while a giant K meant to appear carved out of limestone rotated in a depthless TV null space. But KNOW was fighting for its life in a tough market, and everything was done on the cheap, and Paul came to refer to the station as Know Nothing 48, Home of the Giant Rotating Styrofoam K. The station’s threadbare budget worked both to Kym’s advantage, allowing a rookie a great deal of airtime on big stories, and against her, allowing her to make all her mistakes live, as she mispronounced names, lost her place in her notes, and asked wildly inappropriate questions of the grieving families of murder victims and death-row inmates.
But then Kymberly toughened up and buckled down. She took a stenography course; she cut her hair into a stylish and professional bob; she bought herself a word-a-day calendar and practiced her pronunciation every morning with steely determination, baring her teeth at herself in the bathroom mirror and carefully working her lips around “eleemosynary” or “prestidigitation.” Her performance improved so much that Paul was surprised one evening to realize that the brisk young woman in the trim, lemon yellow suit he was admiring on TV was actually the woman he was living with. This revelation allowed Paul to tap into previously unknown reserves of lust (his desire for her had begun to wane, for all sorts of reasons), and that evening when she came home, he begged her to keep her suit and makeup on, murmuring in her ear, “I’ve never fucked an anchorwoman before.” And Kymberly, even though she was bone tired, allowed him to do it, asking him breathlessly at a crucial moment, “Do you really think 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 immense double-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, white sugar, 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 banana”—or arranged an exercise so that the first letter of each item spelled out a subliminally subversive message like “MEAT IS GOOD” or “BOW TO SATAN” or (in a twenty-item review exercise he was particularly proud of) “SATAN SEZ EAT MORE CANDY.” And when he was feeling unusually ambitious, he combined the two techniques into one exercise: