Julia K and Others

I’d finally gotten a handle on my morning when Michael White posted his story about me. It was as if the starter journalist had sensed that I was at last on track to make gains on my new book. And of course, in my absentmindedness, I knocked over the cup of coffee beside my laptop, thankfully sparing the keyboard, but staining the manuscript I’d been editing.

White’s article had been just the latest in a series of distractions. My inbox was full of unread emails. Requests, inquiries, accusations. Someone always awaiting something and with expectations bordering on demands, most of them unreasonable. The daily catalogue of insults from anonymous readers of my articles or former students took up their share of bandwidth, too. I was Ho Chi Minh crossed with Hannah Arendt to some, or Michael Moore melded with Bernie Sanders topped off with a helping of Pier Paolo Pasolini to others. Sometimes, I was compared to Lorraine Hansberry or Rosa Luxembourg or Yuri Kochiyama; others cited Mao or Stalin. Fair criticism was always welcome, but much of the pejoratives were lazy and imprecise. I’d have taken Slavoj Zizek as a compliment—the frenetic lovechild of Marx and Luxembourg had his lunatic charms. Everyone had problems with my politics.

Many more messages came to me through several of my social media accounts. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Colleagues questioned the appropriateness of posting photos and comments at my age. And station. I could have argued that even into our mature years, we remained eternal teenagers. At least in America. I could have told them that they were out of touch, that even Nobel Prize winners and “legitimate,” “serious” authors maintained virtual profiles, but I lacked the constitution to convince anyone of my preferences anymore. I hadn’t created these accounts to stay connected with friends and family in places like Sofia, Bulgaria, where I’d spent much of my childhood and still had kin, or London, where I took my doctorate and kept close acquaintances. No, no. I used social media as a tool. As a means of research.

Joshua Antonioni, my chair at Princeton, where I’d taught for almost a decade courses in philosophy—critical theory and “socialist propaganda” (a complaint found on more than one student eval)—believed I should reconsider including the websites in my classes and in my book.

“They’re integral to the subject, Josh,” I’d said in my defense during one of our tedious weekly department meetings wherein tenured professors defensively talked over adjuncts, that population of underpaid, voracious geniuses who were quickly supplanting us. “And to the lectures. They illustrate theory. Democratize ideas.”

What would Joshua say about White’s article? Everyone had surely read it by now. They release The Daily Princetonian early and it was already noon. In his email to me, White stated his story would run on the cover. My alleged alias, “Sabina,” and the spying I’d purportedly done for the Communist Party of Bulgaria years back would be today’s hot topic, certain to persist for days or weeks or even months. The news would trouble my friends and colleagues, though they’d undoubtedly find it intriguing fodder for cocktail parties. My students would have something to regale their families with during winter recess.

“This is Julia Kahill, and I’d like to speak with Michael White, please.”

“Oh, okay.” I could hear the disbelief in the young girl’s voice on the other end of the line; people never actually called the paper. They texted or emailed or Tweeted or private messaged. But calling over an actual telephone, never.

“He’s like in and out all day today, so maybe try coming by later, I mean he’s out now, so you know, Professor Kahill. Evenings are usually best, like, after classes. The staff like to drink beer and eat pizza while they layout the—”

“Is this Mindy Kota?” I’d now recognized the voice. She was a student in my Introduction to Moral Epistemology class.

“Hi, Dr. Kahill.”

“Mindy, did you see what your editor ran on the cover of the paper today?”

“Yes, uh, it was, I mean, you know, kind of like, well…”

“Do you have his cell number?”

“We can’t really give out that kind of—”

“I can get it from the registrar.”

Mindy paused and swallowed hard. I could actually hear her gulping, a comical affectation. She breathed heavier now into the phone. I was caught off guard by my own reveling in the awkward moment, an uneven dynamic.

“It’s all on file, Mindy. You’re not doing anything criminal by sharing his number with me.”

Mindy sighed and I could hear buttons nervously clacking on the other end. She was still breathing heavily.

“Okay, I found it, Dr. Kahill.” And she read me the number, which I jotted down.

“Did you assist him with the article, Mindy?”

“It’s not really … and I mean … you should … but …”

“Do you think it’s okay to make up stories about people?”

“I only help manage the office, Dr. Kahill. I’m not really a reporter here, so, I …”

“Right. I’ll stop by later this evening and with luck I’ll run into him.”

I fired off the text to White as quickly as possible if for no other reason than to return to my book.

“Michael, this is Dr. Kahill. I’d like a word with you. Today. Text or call me back, quickly, please. Thank you.”

In the editorial, White wrote that he corroborated the accusations from a source at the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing the Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army. He’d stated that I’d spied for Bulgaria during my time in the “Second-Wave Paris Intellectual Scene,” while being mentored by Jacque and Roland before and again after my three-year stay in Bulgaria. He said that, despite my opposition to all totalitarian states, that I somehow supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, the only details White got right were that I lived in Bulgaria from 1999-2003 and spent my time doing post-doctoral research on socialism at the University of Sofia under Aleksander Paunov, the current leader of the Communist Party of Bulgaria. That and the fact that my birth name is indeed Jasia Krumova.

***

Pierre began to grunt and whine, and while Pascal was busy in his study editing his latest existential detective novel due for submission in only a week’s time to Foucault Press, the onus of checking on our son was, as always, on me; his condition beckoned hourly for competent management.

“Darling!” Pascal cried from his study down the hall, between our bedroom and Pierre’s. “Pierre needs you!”

“Naturally!” I’d jumped up, leaving alone again my book, and hurried to Pierre’s room, but not before mindlessly stubbing my toe on a pair of free weights that Pascal had left by the bedroom’s threshold.

By the time I found him on the floor of his room, Pierre had scratched the scabs off his thighs and stomach, again breaking the skin, something that happened several times a week. As was his custom, he also flapped his arms as if they were wings and quoted Disney movies in a repetitive cycle that grew more manic and agitated with each passing.

“Hakuna Matata means no troubles for the rest of your days.”

“Love is a song that never ends.”

“You’ve got a friend in me.”

“Hakuna Matata means no troubles for the rest of your days!”

“Love is a song that never ends!”

“You’ve got a friend in me!”

“HAKUNA MATATA MEANS NO TROUBLES FOR THE REST OF YOUR DAYS!”

“LOVE IS A SONG THAT NEVER ENDS!”

“YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME!”

The ointment was a tedious affair, pungent and sticky, and he fought me through the entire ordeal, thrashing and crying and hitting his face and even mine. He’d given me a black eye in the past and once even detached his own left retina during one of his tantrums. I could never imagine the rage and strength required to do such a thing to yourself.

An hour had passed once I’d bandaged him up and strapped the gloves on to avoid further self-harm. Even as I dug the flesh and dried blood from under his fingernails with a nail clipper file, the premise of my book never left me. I was good at separating myself from the mundane tasks of supervising and correcting Pierre’s behaviors. The actions were monotonous—pull the inedible objects from his mouth before he swallowed, apply ointment to his sores whenever they were unearthed, clip his fingernails daily, wrap wounds, wrap fingers, remind him of medication times (there were six drugs that required administration five times a day), supervise his hand washing, supervise his microwave operations, remind him to wipe after using the toilet. It was a full-time job, and I’d already had three—educator, writer, and wife. My book had my mind. My son, my husband, and my pupils had my body. I could perform convincingly enough. Pretend I was present during special needs child-rearing or lovemaking or lectures.

“You really did a number on yourself this time, honey. Please just watch your movies.”

I set him in front of the television and programed a festival of innocuous fare—Toy Story, Jurassic Park, and The Lion King. Superhero movies were dangerous as they inspired him to mimic their daring feats. He’d once punched out his bedroom windows after watching Spiderman 2 and kicked his math tutor down the stairs after Batman Begins. Talking dolls, rampaging dinosaurs, and singing warthogs were safer bets.

I’d published inchoate articles in the past, piecemealing my theories to readers, justifying my place at Princeton, securing my job. I was honest with myself, even being a public intellectual was a job. And readership reception was performance review.

White wrote that while in Sofia, I’d had an affair with Paunov. That we’d attend meetings together in government halls and countryside taverns, holding hands under the table, and would dine out after rallies and idealize our pro-Maoist views in bed. That the anger of the politics served as aphrodisiacs. These last bits were salacious and libelous, and also how could he have possibly known the extent of these intimacies? It was true that I’d attended meetings and rallies and that there would be dinners involved—the tastiest, heartiest foods imaginable, including banitsa, tarator, meshana skara, sarmi, shkembe—as the gatherings and events ran long into the next morning on occasion, but it was all for the sake of research, all meticulously documented and examined with a dispassionate eye and rigorous scholarship. His inclusion of a romance was tawdry and smacked of sensationalism. Michael White’s essay was a hit job and nothing else. But at least the official faculty photo he used of me was flattering.

***

I’d gotten back on track, circled closer to my thesis, but how to relate it clearly? Not that critical theory needed to be clear. I mean, Judith Butler, Felix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze made their careers on impenetrable prose. However, their approach lacked a healthy socialism. They were prime examples of how jargon could be used to exclude others, to lord above the uneducated masses, which was in itself classist in its difficulties. I’d be announcing myself as a hypocrite if I did the same. Of course, they’d argue that every discipline required its own language, its own code. This was a specious argument, though.

“Julia!”

Pascal, again. I slid off the bed, which is where I did my best writing, though the urge to recline and sleep was great during moments of blockage, and strolled past Pierre, who sat mesmerized by Woody and Buzz, and entered Pascal’s study, where he was hunched over his laptop and scribbled notes in a well-worn pad on his lap. His grey beard revolted, and he’d likely not brushed his teeth yet, even at this late hour. I tried not to inventory the many decorative missteps of his study. Though we’d lived in the house for ten years, every time I entered “his parlor,” it was as if it were for the first time and the assault on my sensibilities felt fresh at every entry. The Fragonard and Watteau reproductions. The Biedermeier secretariat. All the markers of affluence that were so anathema to me. Rococo was not an aspiration.

“Are we having lunch today?” he asked, which was his way of asking me to make him lunch.

“Do you want oatmeal? I can mix in berries and honey and cinnamon.”

“Well …. Hmmm…”

“I’ll make eggs.”

“Oh, wonderful, dear. Thank you! How’s the writing coming along?”

But I left instead of answering because I knew he was not really curious about my writing. He resented my writing. If he had it his way, I’d quit teaching, quit writing, and solely adore his work and manage Pierre and keep the house tidy and cook three meals a day and give him sex during breaks. He was far too progressive to ever say any of this out loud. He said out loud that I should teach and should be proud of my position at Princeton and should champion my articles and should tout my book that I’ll never finish.

As I mixed too much sea salt and parmigiana cheese and oregano and crushed red pepper into his scrambled eggs, I replayed the routine. The coffee in the morning and afternoon that I was expected to make and serve, the lunches and dinners I’m expected to prepare and serve, the intermittent cleaning, the scalp massages on his bald head, the foot massages on his dry feet, the fielding of complaints about his publishers and dwindling advances and his very old mother and his psoriasis and his toe pain and his occasional hemorrhoids. I had to fight for every minute of solitude and productivity, but he did not. It was all handed to him without discussion, without effort. If I weren’t type A all of my intellectual and creative pursuits would fall quietly through the cracks and no one would miss them. Let it be known that half of the rent, utilities, groceries, car insurance, and medical items and therapies for Pierre came from my salary. Nothing was ever handed to me. And though I paid half, the relationship lacked equality. I nearly burned the eggs but caught the stove’s knob before lunch could be charred.

As he enjoyed his too salty, spicy, cheesy eggs, I massaged Pascal’s overly long feet. He was effective in guilting me into “mitigating his agonies.” Pascal pressed his heels into my thighs as I rubbed Nivea lotion over them to soften callouses and scaly patches. He chewed with his mouth open, an old habit that occurred when he was deep into a new project.

“This will be the one that should widen the audience, says Garth. He already got Rolling Stone to publish an excerpt.”

Garth was Pascal’s agent at Curtis Brown. A young man who took Pascal as a client after he’d fired his old one, a legend in the industry who’d rested too heavily on her laurels and stopped pushing his work and who’d proclaimed too many times that fiction was dead. Garth had gotten him published in The Paris Review and Harper’s within the first year of signing a contract. He had energy and was dazzled by Pascal’s legacy. My husband was a sober writer and his stories had sinew. They were deeper than one would expect at first blush, even if they were becoming repetitive. Garth never minded the self-cannibalizing. He thought that all great writers eventually consumed themselves.

“He likes that I made the imposter a woman on welfare. Enhances the plausibility.”

I nodded, too distracted by the hangnails and fungus beneath Pascal’s big right toe. His nails required trimming and the tops of his feet had become coated with varicose veins and thick gray hairs. Though he was thirteen years my senior and now sixty-one, I never thought of him as an old man. The perception had begun to change.

“Well, it’s a questionable choice, Pascal. Do you really want to portray a poor single mother as a criminal?”

Pascal pulled his feet away and swallowed the last bit of eggs. He pushed his plate to the far corner of his desk and continued to edit. I nodded, returned the ottoman on which I’d been sitting to its dusty corner, and left the plate on the desk as I headed for the door.

“I’m going to campus to meet with Antonioni and try to get some work done. Watch Pierre.”

Pascal breathed deeply and slumped forward, as if the request was too taxing a burden.

“Thanks,” I said and left.

***

The Downtrodden Allegiance was the working title of my book, though Pierre and Garth told me to reconsider it. They were in the worlds of literary fiction and commercial storytelling, so I wasn’t too concerned about their opinions. As I stepped out of the house, I wondered if I should have told Pierre about White’s article. He’d probably dismiss it, saying it was a student newspaper and not at all consequential, and since he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, he’d likely never hear about it.

Princeton, as a town, still felt forbidding, despite its idyllic charms and the fact that it’s a mere forty miles from where I’d spent my formative years in Westfield. New Jersey, generally, has a way of being uncanny, both familiar and alien, even to its natives.

The title’s propriety weighed on me as I made my way past simpering academics shuffling between buildings and cafes and diners with cups of coffee or tea or Danishes. They’d eyeball and nod with a sneer. They’d undoubtedly read the article. Frauds. Most of them fancied themselves Leftists to their students, because such a political affiliation had a panache that made them appealing to young people still fawning over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie and Caesar Chavez, but when push came to shove, they’d never relinquish a penny of their tenured, six-figure salaries or ally themselves with a known communist! It was convenient—even marketable—being the university’s resident eccentric socialist with extremist views; proof of agency in actualizing these viewpoints was another matter entirely.

This made me angry and I once again wrote Michael White.

“It’s been three hours since my last text. I insist that you get back to me immediately!”

Maybe it wasn’t professional to go after a student like this, but he needed to answer for his crime. The subsequent step would be litigation. I would mention that in my next text.

Rather than go directly to my office where colleagues and Joshua and students would no doubt find me and want to discuss White’s article, I ducked into a café furthest from campus, the one least commonly frequented by students and staff and the one least likely of putting me in an indelicate position. Their scones were dry and their coffee tepid, but at least the space was dark and often empty and run by a cranky old Hungarian woman, a proud Roma, within whose company I felt at home.

I’d found a small bistro table in the back of the café tucked into a dark corner, under a dim chandelier with most of its lights knocked out and beside an acrylic painting of someone’s black kitten playing with a ball of pink yarn. I’d managed to get my laptop, coffee, and apple strudel balanced precariously onto the small tile mosaic tabletop

White’s piece even featured a single quote by Paunov: “She was certainly an asset to our program and did the righteous, noble work of a true comrade.” A fiction, surely, as White would never be able to reach him and even if he had, Aleksander would never speak with an American journalist, even one at a college paper. However, White did somehow capture the cadence of Alek’s English and his diction. No matter, such things could be fabricated, mimicked from YouTube videos.

“Professor Kahill!” I’d looked up and saw John, Kate, Rhonda, and Damian.

“Oh, hi,” I stammered, mousy and defensive. “Hello, what…”

They held cups of coffee or tea and Danishes.

“Did you see the cover story in today’s Daily Princetonian?” asked Kate, her complete lack of makeup and short-cropped hair and boyish clothing always somehow a threat.

“I don’t want to talk about that. It’s all rubbish and I have a meeting with the editor later today to straighten it all out.”

“Good, because it’s really out there,” said John.

Really out there, meaning out there in the ether or crazy?

“Yes, it’s truly absurd,” I’d said, trying to be polite. I wanted so badly to tell them to go away. But the wall between me and them demanded dissolution.

“Professor Krumova, I mean—” began and then stopped and laughed Damian, in a way that felt insincere and disrespectful.

I feigned a laugh, too.

“I mean, Professor Kahill, sorry! Did you get around to writing that letter of recommendation for Stanford for my Master’s?”

“I did not, but I will this weekend, I assure you—you’ll have it by Monday.”

Damian forced a smirk and bobbed his head. “Your photo in the paper looked sublime, though!” Unctuous swine with his oversized beanie and faux Rasta shirt made of hemp and his severely undersized round glass frames, bushy orange beard and mop top. Maybe it was merely a false gut feeling, but to me he’d always occurred as too self-satisfied, too self-congratulatory for having someone with such a controversial background and corpus as a teacher. I could see him touting my radical rants to girlfriends on cheap, egalitarian first dates.

Rhonda—her lustrous blonde hair and lanky figure always occurring to me as a self-possessed boast of sorts, a young Joan Didion—sipped her drink loudly and smacked her lips before issuing orders. “Also, I was wondering if you finished grading my critical response essay on Lady Gaga and deconstructionism? I wanted to show it to my uncle. He teaches cultural studies at NYU and was curious about how I did”

“I’m sorry, Rhonda, but next week, for sure.”

“Oh,” she said with so much judgement in her tone, eyes, and body language that I felt the disapproval waft through me like a rank breeze. Her type. The kind that claims secret ownership. Her emails had always contained vague suggestions of ownership, as if she were the boss, the one with power, the one for whom I worked, her civil servant, her plumber, her manicurist. The entitlement could send me into a frenzy on off days. Poor Pierre and Pascal would close their doors when I’d yell about her timelines and deadlines.

“And not to put more on your plate, doctor, but I was hoping you’d make time for me on Monday to discuss my thesis. You missed last week’s advisement and I really need to finish a first draft if I’m going to have time to revise and turn it in on time.”

“Yes, I’m so sorry, John, but Monday will be fine. I’ll make time for you.”

John nodded and tried to restrain his frustration with me better than his peers. His alarming strait-laced, almost boyish appearance was ineffably calming; the hyper-ordinary fashion sense was a relatively new form of hipsterism called “norm-core,” I’m told. Nothing about him provoked except for his tenacity, always delivered with aggressive respect and faux patience, but always ostensible, repeating requests, recycling reassurances, a passive domination.

Kate leaned in. “How come you never sit with us anymore after class to discuss your work, prof?”

“Honestly, I’ve just been swamped. You see … My book …” I trailed off and pointed to the laptop sitting open on the table, and I must have looked despondent or sad or tired doing so because they all suddenly looked at me like they wanted to give me a hug.

“Well,” said John, gently. “We’ll let you get back to it.”

The others waved or smiled or waved and smiled and then they were gone, but not before again cluttering my mind and my schedule with further chores.  And as they left, I turned back to my laptop too quickly, knocking my half-eaten apple strudel and half-consumed cup of coffee to the black and white tile floor, shattering porcelain, leaving stains, prompting the elderly Hungarian Roma proprietor to hurry over with a blushing smile and a broom and a dustpan.

***

On my way back across campus, I again wrote White.

“It’s been two hours since my last text and I want you to know that I’ll be consulting with my lawyer tomorrow morning. He’s very litigious and I’m certain I have a libel case.”

I didn’t care if this was unprofessional or immature at this point. I wanted him to speak to me and explain why he would write something like this and without at least talking about it with me first, if for no other reason than to get a quote for the sake of balanced reporting. His was irresponsible journalism.

In my small, cramped office, surrounded by Rodchenko collages and Konstantinov grotesqueries and Malevich Russian constructivism, I would finally get down to it.  The smallness of the space, the great art, the stale air somehow compelled concentration and helped me produce. At least a passable first draft.

Joshua Antonioni popped his head into my office, waving his Mont Blanc like a baton.

“Julia, you free?”

I sat up straight and balled my fists against my desk.  “Of course, Josh.”

He closed the door with a delicacy that rankled and slunk to the chair across from my desk.

“The article, Julia,” he said with a tone of disappointment. “The article.”

“Nonsense, of course.”

“Of course, but still…”

“But still, what? I can’t control what students write, Joshua.”

Joshua did that thing that I hated when discussion got serious: he straightened his plaid bowtie and pursed his lips.

“Did he tell you he was going to write this?”

I waved my cell in his face, perhaps a bit too impetuously.

“No, and he’s been dodging my texts all day.”

“You know he’s a libertarian and a confirmed Ayn Rand enthusiast.”  He’d smugly tap his expensive fountain pen against his chin when he referenced what he thought were rarified items.

“I know, we’ve argued about her in class.”

“And he publishes a series on Objectivism in the paper in every issue.”

“I read the student newspaper, Joshua. Of course, I do.”

“Well, this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, then.”

“So, what, we disagree on economic systems and that entitles him to make up lies about me? To humiliate me? Jeopardize my career and reputation?”

Again, the bowtie and the lips. “I didn’t say that.”

“Pascal and I are meeting with our lawyer tomorrow and we’re going to explore legal options. We may end up suing Princeton, too, so just, you know, be prepared for a shitstorm.”

“Julia, don’t be silly.”

“Maybe if this department supported me a bit more rather than undermine me at every turn—”

“That’s not fair, Julia.”

On instinct, I looked at my cell and delivered a command performance. I was already on my feet, packing up my notes and laptop—and dropping two pens and a box of paper clips to the floor—by the time I’d implemented my exit strategy.

“Oh no, it’s Pierre. I have to get running, Joshua.”

“Oh?” Thankfully, he stood up. “How is the little guy?”

I was at the door, waiting for Josh to exit, affecting a frantic mien.

“Pascal just texted, said he stuck himself with a fork, again!”

“Oh dear,” he said as he stepped out, flustered, fumbling with his Mont Blanc. “Okay, I guess—”

“Bye, Josh.”

I was down the hall and out the door before he could gather his next thought.

***

I was becoming more patient as it wasn’t until I’d sat on the bench under the horse chestnut in Grover Park that I finally sent White another text.

“You are a sorry excuse for a journalist and remain one of my most mediocre students. You should be ashamed of your behavior.”

Perhaps I should have gone directly to the paper and stopped fooling myself into thinking that I’d actually get any meaningful writing done. The day was ending, and even though Mindy encouraged me to stop by in the evening when the staff supposedly kept their drunken hours, I should have trusted my gut and surprised them all sooner. It was possible she was doing his dirty work, protecting him, trying to throw me off. No matter, I would meet White in due time and hold him to account for writing about my parents.

He alleged that they were communists who might have also spied for Bulgaria, then a soviet satellite. He claimed they may had moved to New Jersey in 1984 to gather firsthand intel for The Kremlin. My mother was a seamstress and my father a physics teacher in Bulgaria. In America, my mother sold groceries at a bodega in Elizabeth and my father drove taxicabs in Newark. If anyone had a reason to betray America it was them, but they had not, and neither had I.

It was getting dark and I still had to pay White a visit. The paper’s staff should be gathering for their nefarious nocturnal deeds by now. And Pascal and Pierre were probably wondering where I was, so unlike me to keep such hours. I would soon be late for dinner. Lord knows, they wouldn’t be able to prepare anything for themselves. And if Pascal allowed Pierre to operate the microwave himself, he’d likely burn the house down.

***

The Daily Princetonian was on the third floor of a red brick building. Like all the edifices on campus, it was old and stately. The cramped, messy, flop pad interior belied the majesty and seriousness of the facade. Notes, photos, posters were haphazardly tacked to pinboards and drywall like a dorm room and the space smelled of mold and pizza. To my surprise, the office was empty except for Mindy Kota, still sitting at the desk, fielding calls and visitors and clacking away on her laptop while drinking seltzer and eating potato chips.

“Doctor Kahill!”

“Mindy, is Michael White in? I hope he is.”

“You know, you should have come earlier, he was here for like two hours, but just left.”

I would have taken my frustration out on Mindy, but her perpetually confused manner and giant marsupial eyes sweetened me.

“Did he mention me? My texts?”

“Uhm, no. He didn’t.”

“Well, please tell him I stopped by and to return my texts. I’m seeing the lawyer in the morning. So, it’s quite urgent.”

Mindy nodded and mouthed my words and she scribbled them down on a notepad.  

***

As I stirred the diced potatoes into the casserole dish, already brimming with ground beef, minced mushrooms and garlic, paprika, cumin, and nutmeg, I reconsidered the article, took a holiday from the book. Bulgarian Moussaka demanded more elbow grease than Greek Moussaka because potatoes are denser than eggplant. I beat the yogurt, flour, eggs, and baking soda, and contemplated White’s agenda. However, before I could formulate a cogent understanding of his motives and gains, Pierre began banging on the table and flapping his arms, promising to fly away, and shouted more lines from Disney movies.

“Some people are worth melting for!”

“Good friends will help you until you’re unstuck!”

“Can you feel the love tonight?”

“Some people are worth melting for!”

“Good friends will help you until you’re unstuck!”

“Can you feel the love tonight?”

“Some people are worth melting for!”

“Good friends will help you until you’re unstuck!”

“Can you feel the love tonight?”

Pascal, instead of calming him, narrated his afternoon, leaving out none of the minutiae.

“And Pierre watched all those movies you programmed for him on Vudu, but I think it’s a lazy approach to raising a child, even one like ours, and then Garth called and told me that he needed the first draft of my novel a month earlier than originally agreed upon because the publisher wants to make sure that all of my facts are straight and Curtis Brown must always appease them! Can you imagine the temerity? I brought in the mail on my own and shaved, as you see, and organized my notes, and all in an hour’s time. And after all that, I was both trying to give the New York Times a suitable quote and microwave a snack for Pierre, but couldn’t possibly be expected to do both, so I overcooked the food and made a typo in the quote, and so I had to restart …”

My brain had finally had enough for the day and so I turned it off. I nodded and smirked at all the right places and furrowed my brow and approximated a sympathetic outrage when expected and intermittently sautéed and seasoned the Moussaka with expert precision—though in my preoccupied fugue, I’d realized I’d mixed far too much cumin into the bowl—and never missed a beat as a dutiful wife and competent chef and patient mother, never once raising my voice to Pierre’s tantrum or Pascal’s prattling, and finished cooking, and ate pleasantly, and cleaned deftly, and then retired to the living room to steal a few final minutes of the day for myself. A required mercy.

“Too much curry,” said Pierre as I stepped away.

In review of the day of wasted time and lost minutes, I thought about the company that I kept; no, the company that kept me. My colleagues, Antonioni, my students; none of them understood or cared to understand. They saw no real connection between my work and ideologies and those on whose behalf they claimed to advocate. They could never accept how anyone who had anything could want less for themselves or more for others. In their situations the notion was not just foolish, but evil. Antonioni and the other teachers at Princeton felt safe championing such a thought but they’d all admit on the condition of anonymity that the notion was a nonstarter. These ruminations became unnecessary when I checked my email.

Aleksander’s return address startled and soothed. A warm wave of ecstasy corrupted by dread. An indescribable mix of relief and horror. I’d half expected it to be true, but the confirmation even before reading it sedated. Who else could it have been? The details in White’s article had been too accurate. A betrayal but also a gift. I opened it with a lump in my throat and read it so quickly I skipped words only to return to them three more times. His admission was both violating and validating.

“Jasia, I must apologize at once for speaking with that reporter. And for including the romance and the closeness, but these details were necessary for the sake of veracity and my bond with you. He emailed me the literary assassination this afternoon your time/ evening for me. It is quite late now in Sofia, as you must realize, as I write this. The photo he used of you was lovely. You should be proud of your work and commitment, darling. You have done something singular with us and for the world. Yours was not the crusade on behalf of Bulgaria or even the political cause itself. Yours was the mission for humanity entire, a compassionate, altruistic leap into a future that will forever meet you with misunderstanding. And with hostility. The brutal, brittle minds of mediocre and selfish men will seek to stop you. You continue to collapse barriers between ego and others. Praise be, your loving, generous heart. Love, A.”

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Brian Alessandro holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has taught the subject at the high school and college levels for over ten years.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and the Independent Book Publisher Association Best New Voice Award. In 2011, he wrote and directed the feature film, Afghan Hound, and has adapted Edmund White’s 1982-classic “A Boy’s Own Story” into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. Brian currently writes literary criticism for Newsday.