Hannah was applying to be a campus tour guide. I heard her in the shower in the morning, reciting Harvard trivia in an enchanting voice. Later, when she didn’t get the job and stopped reciting the trivia, I found that I somehow missed it.
I went with Angela to an introductory meeting at the Harvard student newspaper, where a young man with sideburns told us repeatedly, in the most aggressive manner, that the Harvard student newspaper was his life. “It’s my life,” he kept saying with a venomous expression. Angela and I exchanged glances.
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On Sunday evening the phone rang. It was the visiting artist. “Your essay was somewhat interesting,” he said. “Most of the essays were actually incredibly . . . boring? So, in fact, I’ll be happy to have you in my class.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Sorry?”
“Are you accepting?”
“Can I think about it?”
“Can you think about it? I mean, not really. I have a lot of other applicants I can call,” he said. “So are you in or are you out?”
“I guess I’m in.”
“Good. See you Thursday.”
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I auditioned for the college orchestra. The conductor’s office was a hexagonal room with a bay window, a grand piano, and shelves full of books: orchestral scores, encyclopedias, volumes of music history and criticism. I had never seen a music person with so many books. I played the sonata I had prepared. My hands didn’t shake, the room had great acoustics, and the conductor’s expression was kind and attentive.
“That was lovely,” he said, with some special emphasis I couldn’t interpret. “Just very, very nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. The following Monday, I went back to the music building to look at the seating chart. My name wasn’t there, not even in the second violins, nowhere. I could feel my face change. I tried to control it, but I could feel it wasn’t working. I knew that everyone and his cousin at Harvard played the violin, it was practically mandatory, and there was no way they could all fit in a single orchestra—the stage would collapse. Still, I had never seriously considered that I might not get in.
I didn’t have a religion, and I didn’t do team sports, and for a long time orchestra had been the only place where I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself. The loss of that feeling was extremely painful. It would have been bad enough to be someplace where there were no orchestras, but it was even worse to know that there was one, and lots of people were in it—just not me. I dreamed about it almost every night.
I wasn’t taking private lessons anymore—I didn’t know any teachers in Boston, and I didn’t want to ask my parents for more money. For the first few months, I still practiced every day, alone, in the basement, but it began to feel like a sad, weird activity, disconnected from the rest of human enterprise. Soon just the smell of the violin—the glue or the wood or whatever it was that smelled like that when you opened the case—made me feel melancholy. I still sometimes woke up on Saturdays, the day I used to go to music school, feeling excited to go and play; then I would remember how matters stood.
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It was hard to decide on a literature class. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow na?ve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant. That was how my mother and I had always talked about literature. “I need you to read this, too,” she would say, handing me a New Yorker story in which an unhappily married man had to get a rabies shot, “so you can tell me what it really means.” She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.
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I went to Linguistics 101, to see what linguistics was about. It was about how language was a biological faculty, hardwired into the brain—infinite, regenerative, never the same twice. The highest law, higher than Holy Scripture, was “the intuition of a native speaker,” a law you couldn’t find in any grammar book or program into any computer. Maybe that was what I wanted to learn. Whenever my mother and I were talking about a book and I thought of something that she hadn’t thought of, she would look at me and say admiringly, “You really speak English.”
The linguistics professor, a gentle phonetician with a mild speech impediment, specialized in Turkic tribal dialects. Sometimes he would give examples from Turkish to show how different morphology could be in non-Indo-European languages, and then he would smile at me and say, “I know we have some Turkish speakers here.” Once, in the hallway before class, he told me about his work on regional consonantal variations of the names for some kind of a fire pit that Turkic people dug somewhere.
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I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn’t understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.
The worst part of the literature class came at the end when the professor answered questions. No matter how dumb and obvious the questions were, he never seemed to understand them. “I’m not quite sure I see what you’re asking,” he would say. “If, however, what you mean to say is this other thing . . .” Then he would talk about the other thing, which usually wasn’t interesting, either. Often one or more students would insist on trying to convey the original question, waving their arms and making other gestures, until the professor’s face became a mask of annoyance and he suggested that, out of consideration for the rest of the class, the discussion be continued during his office hours. This breakdown of communication was very depressing to me.
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You were only supposed to take four classes, but when I found out they didn’t charge extra for five, I signed up for beginning Russian.