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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

The Professor's First Wife

The only way she knows she’s happy is when other people tell her. It always comes as a surprise. “I look happy? I’m glad,” followed by a startled smile.

Claire is scared of getting older and of dying young. She’s scared that she’s not enough for Peter and that she’s too much for him. She’s scared that infidelity wipes out fidelity the way bad currency wipes out the good, fast-flooding the carefully cultivated marketplace of their home and of their lives.

She tries to content herself with the pleasures of a piece of cake, an interesting article from The New Yorker (which her husband no longer reads) and clean, creatively designed rooms, but she can’t do it anymore. When her sons and her husband are out for the evening she feels like she’s babysitting herself and wishes somebody would pay her for it, the way she used to get paid at 15, when sitting in a quiet house and keeping it that way was considered a job.

She suspects that her husband resents her all-embracing and unconditional affection as much as she resents his apparent inattention. Claire’s preoccupation with detail and the boredom of her evenly distributed and excessive reassurance and comforts is not enough to hold Peter’s imagination. She despises herself for not being able to make her husband lost in her and she despises herself for trying. She longs for independence, but what, exactly, would it be independence from?

She hated their first house. A one-level ranch, a brick and clapboard construction on a small irregular patch of land, not even a quarter acre but this was way before they thought of property in such terms. They were happy to play house anywhere, to be relieved of the anxiety caused by the baby crying, or Peter returning home at dawn or her own weeping at midnight. His early writing years, like all pre-tenure lives, was tough and relentless. He loved it. He thrived on the sharp, metallic taste of impending doom. She counted the days and sometimes, towards the end, the hours until it would be over: the dissertation, the job search, the reappointments, book contracts, tenure, more book contracts, hints at better jobs, more important books, important promotions.

Nobody told her it would be easy, but that didn’t mean she was prepared for how hard it was. It was during those years she became hooked on the snooze button. Peter would work until dawn and she’d hit the snooze button to get ten more minutes — but she’d keep hitting it for an hour, like it was the handle of a slot machine and she might win back in a lump sum all the time she’d lost. He’d come to be bed on early nights at two or three and she’d wait up for him at first, but after the first baby this didn’t work anymore and she’d stay asleep.

Or pretend to sleep. How many nights has she made herself rigid and unmoving in order to fake sleep?

Even though they were born exactly two months apart, Claire knows she and Peter are wildly different ages now, that she is a middle-aged woman and he’s a relatively young man, that graduate students 25 years his junior would date him if they ever split up. Whereas her only suitors, she tells herself, would be widowers or weirdos, men who for some reason were left on their own, men looking for a nurse with a purse to keep them comfortable up until the day they died.

Life with Peter wasn’t so bad — not if she looked at it that way.

She thought and still mostly thinks of her life as an extended happy ending, except it keeps going on and she has to prevent the plot from ever changing.

Each year that goes by is another award ribbon in her glass case, another notch in her belt, or another nail in her coffin, depending on how you look at it. How could anything change after this long?

Does she want it to change?

Posted at 11:29:22 AM on July 5, 2008 | All postings by Gina Barreca

Comments

  1. Why any fit and moderately good-looking heterosexual male professor who works in the vicinity of a graduate program and has no intention of being a parent would ever marry (until, if ever, quite late in life) is a mystery to me — and, to many of those who do so, a gnawing source of regret.

    — Anonymous · Jul 5, 06:19 PM · #

  2. once again we are back to this: is the only reason to marry the raising of children? according to this tale (fiction, non, cautionary? who knows?) the male professor did marry to raise his kids only to dump (emotionally at least) his first wife after they were grown. maybe academics should not be permitted to marry or to breed. maybe monastaries and abbeys were were where male and female intellectuals should have been sequestered.

    — anon (female) · Jul 5, 07:02 PM · #

  3. Shewantsittochangebutdoesn’tbelieveitcanorwill.

    — Franny · Jul 5, 10:42 PM · #

  4. Presuming—and this is a large presume—Claire is anything but a straw woman or a composite character constructed to elicit sympathy for the female lot in middle-class American life—she’s awfully late to the game to be indulging in such interior whingeing. If the sons are, say, 12 and 15, they were born in the early-to-mid-90s. If they came along after Peter’s Ph.D. and first job, Claire was married in the early-to-mid-80s, which means that Claire—let’s say she has at least a B.A.—went to school in the late 70s. Which means that Claire knew all the feminist warnings and should have known better. In a Richard Yates novel or as a character on “Mad Men,” she might get a little consideration. But not in 2008. Sorry.

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 6, 10:01 AM · #

  5. My point (Comment #1), directed as it is to an appropriately qualified class of males, is the complement of that put so well by JST: bear very carefully in mind before deciding to get married, especially if you don’t intend to have children, that working among young female grad students puts you at an especially high risk of infidelity and boredom with your marriage.

    — Anonymous (again) · Jul 6, 10:43 AM · #

  6. AA: or is it that a boring marriage puts you at high risk of infidelity with young female graduate students?

    — frg · Jul 6, 10:55 AM · #

  7. A doctor, a lawyer and a grad student are sitting having lunch one day talking about the positive affects having a mistress has on their lives. The doctor says to his friends, “Having a mistress has been so good for my health! All the exercise from sex and running around pretending that I am playing golf with you two has increased the health of my cardio-vascular system by 60%.”

    The lawyer insists that is better for his profession: “By constantly making up stories and strengthening my skills of persuasion, I am winning more cases in the courtroom!”

    Lastly, the grad student says, “No, no. It is so much better for a grad student to have a mistress because I am making so many publications! I tell me wife that I am spending the night with my mistress, and then I tell my mistress that I am spending the night with my wife, and then I go to the library…

    — V.Funny grad Sex Joke · Jul 6, 10:57 AM · #

  8. Surely the Anonymous poster of comments #1 and 5 must realize that young female graduate students might find his (for surely it’s not “her”) suggestion—that they are reason enough for reasonably attractive male academics to forgo marriage—more than just a little creepy. Thinking of female graduate students as an ever-changing pool of potential sex partners is not only incredibly sleazy, but also potentially unethical, particularly if the “attractive” male faculty member is acting as a mentor or adviser to the graduate student he wishes to bed.

    — Hmm...no · Jul 7, 06:46 AM · #

  9. frg: it is fairly obvious, I think, that the risk obtains independently of the quality of marriage, but fluctuates according to the degree of boredom irrepressibly intrinsic to conjugal life.

    — Anonymous · Jul 7, 06:52 AM · #

  10. Hmm… no: I’m not referring to relationships between between faculty and grad students involving predatory or exploitative wiles of the former, and rigorously disapprove of such relations. However, if you mean to suggest that such relationships — which everyone should disapprove of — exhausts very much of the extent of erotic relationships between faculty and grads, I think you are quite mistaken.

    — Anonymous · Jul 7, 07:01 AM · #

  11. I should also add that the risk at issue that I’ve raised is not simply infidelity but boredom, which requires for its corrosive effects on a marriage neither actual infidelity, and probably occurs most frequently in conjunction with utterly irreproachable relations with grad students. It is the mere regular exposure to intellectual women at that ineluctably charming season of life that is the culprit.

    — Anonymous · Jul 7, 07:21 AM · #

  12. Anonymous: I certainly didn’t mean to imply that all erotic relationships between male faculty members and female graduate students are necessarily predatory (although they often are). Instead, I hoped to point out that it seems rather seedy to suggest that a reasonably handsome, heterosexual male academics uninterested in procreating shouldn’t bother marrying, not only because there is a steady stream of young, attractive graduate students to choose from, but also because interacting with said graduate students will inevitably cause male academics to lose interest in their wives.

    Also, phrases like “that ineluctably charming season of life” are a bit too Humbert Humbert for my liking.

    — Hmm...no · Jul 7, 09:05 AM · #

  13. HOW DID THIS BECOME ABOUT HIM? IT STARTED OFF WITH A POST ABOUT HER.

    — LC · Jul 7, 10:16 AM · #

  14. Because her situation is so obviously (and sadly) parasitic on his. Hence the title of the story.

    — Duh · Jul 7, 11:38 AM · #

  15. I trust most reasonable people would agree that Humbert Humbert’s lyrical veneering of his tyrannical pedophilia is a far cry from my characterization of the obvious fact that the typical age range of grad students contributes an additional charm to those already connected with intellectuality in women (if not also, of course, in men).

    — Anonymous · Jul 7, 11:56 AM · #

  16. Hmmm…no, there is a quality of judgement in your comments to this particular post that I am not comfortable with. Furtermore, “ineluctably charming season of life” is a beautiful phrase full of juice.

    — Luke Warm · Jul 7, 08:38 PM · #

  17. The title of this post also invites speculation as to what became of the two after their marriage ended. I would like to think that she redeemed herself from her stereotypical, self-pitying and passive existence as the unfulfilled professor’s spouse by eventually subjecting herself to a daily regimen of sustained cardiovascular exercise and deep reading of Proust — thereby qualifying herself for an active existence as a college-town urban cougar on the prowl for grad students of her own fancy.

    — Anonymous · Jul 8, 10:07 AM · #

  18. She’s sad. Grad students? they don’t look at her. That’s the tragic ending. AND it is NOT her fault. She signed on and then disocovered after many years the contract was null and void. He gets choices and she doesn;t.

    — Cougar · Jul 8, 11:24 PM · #

  19. I’m not quite sure why him sticking his head up his own ass and keeping it there — except for those times when he’s losing himself in one of those glorious grad students (of course, yawn) who’s caused him to lose interest in his wife — is somehow her fault. Clearly, the enlightened path is to stun your advisor with your brilliance and beauty and then boff him in his office while his wife is at home changing his children’s nappies. The contempt with which baby academics dismiss women who’ve made choices that are different from their own is so… boring.

    And Cougar, my friend, who wants a grad student anyway? Just reading their narcissistic drivel here confirms what you and I already know: the sex is never as good as their constant yammering would lead you to believe.

    — Oh, grad students... so cute and unoriginal · Jul 15, 01:14 PM · #

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