December 30, 2007--Saturday Story: The Passive Voice--Part One

Found separated and divorced within a year of his discovering Lydia’s graphic Diary were Lloyd and Lydia. And with that, he entered a period of life where the objects of his actions became more important than its performer. Lloyd, in other words, found himself living life in the passive voice.

The Writers Workshop never again convened after the blackout because Bobby Richman of Kiddihood fame crashed his car on the way home; and though he escaped serious injury, was found to have more than the legal limit of alcohol in his blood--any in his case would have been damning since he was too young to drink legally--and traces of non-prescription drugs were discovered in his system—no one was old enough for a discovery of that kind to be ignored.

Nor was faculty advisor Zazlo’s responsibility for this or, worse, its lack thereof to be ignored; nor was it by the administration of Brooklyn College, which suggested that it might be a good time for him to find another campus that could serve as his professional home.

Which he miraculously was able to do by simply answering an advertisement on the Education page of the Sunday New York Times—Queens College’s English Department was seeking applicants for non-tenure track instructors in Composition and Literature. Within a month of submitting his résumé and a well-crafted cover letter he was interviewed and the following day hired. The chair told him it was this clever and self-deprecating letter that drew attention to his application—otherwise it would had been ignored in the stack of the more than 100 that were submitted, most, the chair seemed to take pleasure in informing and tweaking Zazlo, from young scholars who had already completed their PhDs and had publications in refereed journals. Lloyd realized, from this, that he had been wise not to make reference to the story that was published in that rag Black Sun.

Thus assigned to him were two sections of freshman Composition and one of the required genre course—The Novel, in which Pearl and His Brother and The Dirty Books was unlikely to be found on the reading list.

This move to Queens College also meant that though the college was quite near Patty Moriarity’s house in Flushing, without the Workshop there was no natural way for them to stay connected; and he did not want to make any active efforts to see her or continue to commit adultery with her while fighting with Lydia and her lawyer about alimony and the division of their meager assets. With Lydia’s Diary in his possession as evidence of her perfidy he held all the strong cards and did not want to give away any of this advantage by any illicit activity of his own.

The teaching went reasonably well. The students at Queens College were indistinguishable to Lloyd from those at Brooklyn—typically the first in their families to attend a college, occupationally ambitious, and without much interest in or pretence about the value of learning for its own sake. Or maybe, he thought, it was just the way they responded to his teaching. When he took the risk to ask one, over a quick sandwich gobbled down in the college cafeteria (at Queens there was no concept of lunching—everyone was too busy running from home to class and back home and then off to part-time jobs) they invariably told him, no, it wasn’t him at all, actually quite the contrary—they liked his ironic style and enthusiasm for the subject matter. But in addition to all of this necessary racing about, which interfered with anything resembling careful study or reflection, they represented themselves, with averted eyes, as less “cosmopolitan” (some said “sophisticated”) than the students he was familiar with at Brooklyn College. They, they claimed, were serious about their studies—“Not like us.” Hadn’t there even been Nobel Prize winners who were Brooklyn College graduates they asked? Not, he thought, during the years I was on the faculty. Not since 1943. But he did know that Dr. Frank Field, the popular TV weatherman was a more recent graduate.

But they clung to their contention, citing the fact that Queens College was geographically further from Manhattan than Brooklyn. As he was still living after the separation in their house in Flatbush, he knew that too was not true. From the top floor of the Queens College administration building you could at least catch sight of the Manhattan skyline. But from even the tallest building near where he continued to sleep and eat (Lydia departed like a gleefully escaped prisoner to a sublet in Greenwich Village) all you could see were other undistinguished apartment houses and, if the air was clear, the wooded hills of Green-Wood Cemetery. How fitting, how ironic he thought.

Thus it came to him to attempt to make his professional way at an institution from which the City could only be partially glimpsed, where Patty had undoubtedly already forgotten him, and in a borough through which he needed to drive back and forth along roads laid over the ancient cinder fields of Flushing, under the fictive relentlessly udging eyes of The Great Gatsby’s Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.

To be continued . . .