THE DAY AFTER she started dating Bill Stoner—and everyone knew exactly when it started; they showed up at the monthly faculty reading series together, and Christina was wearing lipstick—people started treating her differently. She didn’t mind it one bit. She didn’t care if people thought she was sleeping with him to secure a position in the department (She and Bill had never once talked about her career. They had never once talked about her future at the university. They discussed only her thesis, a study of transcendentalism in the books of Louisa May Alcott. Bill was a huge Emerson fan and collected first editions of his books). Nor did she care if they thought she was seeing him because he was filthy rich from his books. (The first was still his most successful, a noisy novel called Hanover’s Last Stand, about a harried husband removed from the life of his children by a controlling wife. He eventually stands up for himself and his independence as a man and takes his children with him on a wild cross-country ride, at the end of which he asks the children to choose between him and his wife. “Do you want a simple or complex life?” he said. “Have I not taught you to roar?” It became wildly successful after its embrace by the men’s movement in the ’80s. An only slightly more politically correct film version was made of it, where the wife joins them at the end of the trip, and she and the children embrace in the mountains as the sun sets behind them. The eye contact between the husband and the wife tells the viewer that there will not have to be a decision. They can work together for the sake of the children. Nick Nolte got an Academy-Award nomination for best actor, and there was also a nod for best adaptation. Christina saw it once in a feminist film-theory class during her undergrad days. Several of her classmates hurled objects—pens, wadded-up paper, and a tampon—at the video monitor as the credits rolled. Christina was embarrassed to wipe away a few tears at the end of the film, and kept her head down as she walked out of class.) And she didn’t care if they thought she was impressed with his fame (a frequent talk-show guest, Bill reportedly played golf with Charlie Rose whenever he was in town).
She didn’t care because she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong. After so many years in academia, four years of undergrad, a misdirected master’s in philosophy, four years of teaching at a private high school (sullen rich kids on better drugs than she’d had at their age), one year of culinary school, and then this seemingly endless foray into a Ph.D. program in English, she’d had enough crushes on older teachers—all unrequited for a variety of reasons, but mostly related to a long-term, long-distance boyfriend and a brief and highly unflattering lesbian relationship that haunted her through her early postgraduate years—to realize when she’d finally hit the fantasy jackpot. He could have been poor, untenured, and working at a small state school, but as long as he had wisdom and passion about his work, she’d be smitten, and Bill was well known as a top lecturer and an inspirational advisor. Rumor was, he had been thanked in the foreword of more academic books than anyone else in the history of the state of California. He’s the grand prize, she thought.