Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Read Free Page A

Arnold
(another joke). Which was not necessarily a bad turn of events,
however, since Jim was lucky enough to secure a teaching position
at a small private college in southern Pennsylvania. College
instructors certainly didn’t pull in the loot like lawyers, but
there was adequate prestige in it back home with family and former
boyfriends. Things could have been worse was the way Judy looked at
it. She could have ended up married to the driver of a beer truck,
which was a job Jim, frankly, would have traded up for.
    After a couple of years
teaching at the small college, Jim applied to and was accepted by a
prestigious Ph.D. program in Victorian Studies, where he rather
jokingly planned to explore and catalogue every dark sexual
archetype that informed the Victorian imagination. Jim requested a
leave of absence from his teaching job to begin his studies, and
that June he and Judy traveled to the university town, where they
put a deposit down on a lovely first-floor flat with a working
fireplace. Judy had already secured a teaching position at a good
local high school, and she enrolled to attend evening classes to
continue her work toward an M.A. in Guidance and Counseling. Judy
began sewing curtains for the new apartment, and they splurged
from their meager savings to buy two pole lamps, a wood-tone cuckoo
clock for the mantel, and several framed Keene prints of children
with enormous, concentration-camp eyes, which Judy had always
considered decorative.
     
    But then, in early August,
Jim suddenly withdrew half their remaining savings and boarded a
bus for San Francisco. In San Francisco Jim moved into a commune of
expatriate, doper West Virginians, and in a letter of explanation
to Judy announced that the sick, dark sexual longings of the
Victorians meant little to him really, and that he had been a
closet flower child all along and he could no longer live a lie.
Judy suspected that her husband was deranged from drugs, which was
more or less true. Clearly, in the selection of one’s lifemate
department, Judy had really dropped the ball. Divorce was the only
answer, Judy decided, especially after she had secured the word of
her loverboy, a junior high school football coach named Doc, that
he would forsake his wife and retarded baby daughter for a new life
with Judy, after all.
     
    It astonished Judy when Jim
wrote her that he had won a writing fellowship to Stanford
University (she hadn’t even known Jim had applied). At the end of
the two-year-fellowship period he would have an M.A. in creative
writing under his belt, which was a terminal degree and in some
ways more marketable than a Ph.D. in something goofy like Victorian
Studies. Maybe there was something to this writing goofiness, after
all, Judy speculated. What if her goofy husband actually wrote
some old book and sold the thing to the movies?
    Because her loverboy coach
was balking about abandoning his retarded baby daughter, Judy told
him to just forget it, and somewhat relieved, she joined her
husband in California to launch a new life.
     
    At the end of his fellowship
period, Jim was offered a three- year appointment as a Jones
Lecturer, which did not pay beans, true, he acknowledged to Judy,
but the prestige of teaching at Stanford would enable him to secure
very promising teaching positions in the future, he assured Judy.
Jim’s first novel, a sort of revenge upon his childhood, had been
published by then to generally good reviews, but had sold less
than a thousand copies. For months after the novel was published,
the first thing Judy would ask Jim when she arrived home each
evening from work at the end of her rope was were there any calls
about the book? Nope, Jim would inform Judy, nope, no phone calls,
no big paperback sales, no calls from tinsel town.
     
    Then one evening at dinner
Judy informed Jim that it was time they started planning their
family. She hated her job as a sportswear buyer, hated traveling,
hated flying in airplanes. She wanted to be