FIC: All Amiss Employed
Title: All Amiss Employed
Author: angevin2
Play: pre-Richard II (but the canon is weirdly distant)
Characters/Pairings: Richard/Anne, Henry/Mary, Aumerle
Warnings: Lots of cursing, discussion of infertility, vomit, public information films, jokes about prostitution, anvilicious foreshadowing, references to George W. Bush, small children under sinks, Teletubbies, academic job interviews, violent insect death, and utterly shameless self-indulgence
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3684
Summary: Richard has poor impulse control, Henry is mildly obsessive-compulsive, Edward is very damp, and Anne throws up a lot.
Notes: For gileonnen, who put the idea into my head. A greater-than-usual portion of the events in this fic are based on things that actually happened to me. The conference locations are historically accurate to the best of my knowledge; all faculty members affiliated with real institutions in this fic are invented. The movie that traumatized young Richard is also real; it's called The Finishing Line, it's on youtube, and it is mentally scarring. Finally, I highly recommend looking up the Duel of the Mignons, which, like The Finishing Line, is all about ill-advised sporting events in which basically all of the participants die. Fun!
1. Somewhere over the midwestern U.S., January 1995
"Remind me again why we're doing this?" Anne says, for at least the fifth time in six hours. She is slumped against Richard with her face (currently rather greener than usual) buried in his shoulder, as much as she can manage in a cramped airplane seat, and he has his arm wrapped consolingly around her as she clutches nervously at a tattered airsick bag.
Richard rubs her shoulder and kisses the top of her head. "It's a great opportunity," he says, again. "Chicago has a brilliant program." They've talked this all out, of course, but Richard does understand that it's hard to be cheerful about potential major life changes when you've been throwing up on and off on a transatlantic flight.
"I don't want to move to America," she says, clearly reconsidering any concessions she's made about the opportunity's greatness. "You don't want to move to America. You already have perfectly good interviews in England!"
"And if I get an offer from York or Sheffield, I'll take it," he says. "I promise."
"You're lucky I really, really love you," she mutters.
Richard smiles and pulls the armrest up in order to hold her closer. "I know I am," he says.
Anne clutches at Richard's arm as the plane begins to dip in preparation for landing, and dives for the airsick bag once more. "I'm going to die," she moans. "I am going to die from throwing up all of my internal organs and it will be all your fault."
"No, you're not," Richard says in his most soothing voice. "You'll be fine."
"You don't know that," Anne says, and although her gaze is still aimed at the bag Richard has the impression she is glaring.
"I promise," Richard says, "that if you do, I'll give you the most elaborate funeral ever and then join a monastery out of guilt."
"If you give me an expensive funeral, I'll haunt you forever," she says, with a wan smile.
"Promise?" Richard says, as she settles back against him, pressing her face into his chest. "Because I think I'd go quite mad if you didn't."
2. Orlando, January 1996
The phone is on its third ring, and Henry is berating himself for going on the academic job market when he has five kids (plus one more pending) to support when Mary picks it up.
"Henry!" she exclaims. "How was your interview -- hold on a second -- HUMPHREY, GET OUT FROM UNDER THE SINK RIGHT NOW -- " There is a clunk as the phone drops onto the table, and then another as it slides off the table onto a chair, and a muffled thud as it finally falls from the chair onto the floor. After a moment there are some shuffling noises, followed by a tiny voice declaiming "'ello 'ello 'ello!" into the phone.
Henry smiles. "Blanche, is that you, sweetie?" he says.
"No!" Blanche exclaims. "Nonononono."
Her tirade is interrupted when Mary returns; Henry can hear her voice at a distance from the receiver: "Are you talking to Daddy, honey? ... why don't you give Mummy the phone now? ... yes, you do want to go in the other room with Aunt Elly now..."
"She's just discovered no," Mary says, when she gets the phone back. "It's her favorite word ever."
Henry asks, "Should I call back later?"
"No, I think it's all right for now," Mary says. "I've got Eleanor distracting them with Teletubbies -- she's got the patience of a saint. How was the interview?"
"It's not until two-thirty," Henry says. "Oh, God, Mary, I hate it here. Florida is hideous, and there are enormous cockroaches, and the conference is packed with people, and half of them are talking about bloody Disney World. It's not like I'm even going to get the bloody job."
"You're going to be brilliant," Mary assures him, and she is emphatic enough that Henry can almost believe her. "I doubt that anybody else they're talking to is as prepared as you are. And don't worry about what it's like in Florida -- the job you're interviewing for is in New York. Did you remember to take your meds?"
Henry calls to mind the image of his seven-day pillbox sitting in the hotel bathroom; he pictures the individual compartments and the pink Paxil tablets therein, counting off the days in his head: Sunday (empty), Monday (empty), Tuesday --
-- oh, shit.
3. Chicago, January 2003
The only thing that motivates Edward York as he trudges up Michigan Avenue through the snowstorm is the cursing, performed in time to the wretched squelching of his sodden socks: fucking AHA, fucking overflow hotels that are a fucking mile away, fucking academia, fucking Chicago, fucking boots that are not even a little bit waterproof, fucking Ian getting to go to fucking San Diego for MLA instead of this fucking frozen tundra, fucking fucking snow, why the fuck am I even doing this fucking thing.
It doesn't really help. He's already had to go back to the hotel once to change his shoes after the first pair filled up with slush. He had thought that perhaps his less stylish but theoretically designed-for-this-sort-of-thing hiking boots might allow him to make it to the conference hotel with dry and unfrozen feet, but apparently even they are no match for eight blocks' worth of a Chicago winter. He cannot remember why the hell it is he keeps saying Chicago is one of his favorite places, since every trip here in the last five years has been objectively awful, but then, he clearly has no judgment whatsoever (cf. also: waiting around for Ian to dump him and then feeling like crap about it. God, what a shit year this has been).
Edward looks up at the street sign on the corner and is filled with overwhelming despair when he realizes he's only at East Washington. It has been two damn blocks and he's already waterlogged another pair of shoes and he is thinking about his stupid ex, which has got to be a sign of impending delirium brought on by hypothermia, and if things get any worse he'll probably start missing him or something stupid like that, which, what the hell (and it is not like pretentious Romanticists with red hair aren't a dime a dozen anyway). The only sensible thing to do at this point is to go back to the hotel. Possibly by taxi. It can't be that expensive. Or at least it's worth it if it keeps him from not getting the Anglia job because he looks like he has crawled up to the suite from the swimming pool. Which for some reason he has been in with all his clothes on, plus his shoes and his coat, and possibly this simile is getting increasingly stupid.
At least if he hurries back now he might be able to beat the line at Starbucks.
4. Chicago, January 1995
Richard shifts his weight from foot to foot as he stands in the hotel corridor, checking his watch repeatedly. There are five minutes left, and he doesn't want to knock on the door in case there is someone in there, because God, how awkward would that be? Not that the whole thing isn't awkward anyway, because what the hell is wrong with Americans, what with the whole interviewing-in-hotel-rooms thing they have going on that feels sordid enough to be downright comical. Or it would be if he didn't feel vaguely like throwing up. At least they will probably find him terribly charming, because he is British and Americans tend to love that sort of thing.
He waits for precisely two-and-a-half more minutes before knocking on the door, and is instantly ushered into a whirlwind of handshakes and completely unironic pleased-to-meet-yous (but of course they are, that is another Thing Americans Do) and there he is, sitting on the couch in someone's hotel room -- admittedly, a very nice one, it's not like he's sitting on the bed or anything, but really, it's still someone's hotel room, and it's damned creepy, and they ask him how America's been treating him and before he knows it he can hear the words coming out of his mouth --
"Well, apart from feeling like the world's most committed male escort, I'm quite well, thanks..."
Six eyebrows go up at once, and the committee exchanges glances. Richard cannot help but think of the godawful film he saw as a boy at school, about not playing on railways, where at the end the entire cast walks into a bloody great tunnel and the parents go in the other end and line up their mangled corpses on the tracks, but the worst part is that when they're all in the tunnel, you don't see a damn thing, but you know what's going on even though the film's not showing it, because you see the train coming at the other end. He is pretty sure that that is what is happening to him, in the heads of the committee members.
"But!" he adds, altogether too brightly. "I'm thrilled to be here. Really thrilled."
He smiles at them. It feels like his face is going to crack.
5. Orlando, January 1996
Henry supposes that it's worth it to arrive at his interview having been properly medicated, even though it means he's arrived with only ten minutes to spare, which is just enough time to work up a respectable panic without sufficient time to talk himself out of it. He has managed to step on several specimens of the local insect life (WHY are there bugs in January, WHAT) and is convinced that he can feel their chitinous remains clinging fiercely to his shoes.
He double-checks the portfolio he's brought with him: sample syllabi, exams, worksheets, and handouts. It's too late to go back for anything he's forgotten, but at least he won't find himself offering anything he doesn't have to hand. Then he repeats, like a rosary, his one-sentence description of his dissertation, followed by his one-sentence description of his teaching goals, checking them against the index cards he's got stashed in his pocket. And then he checks his portfolio again.
Henry is not the sort of person who habitually wishes to cope with his situation by drinking, but right now, he feels he could really go for a pint. Or several.
6. Chicago, January 2003
Edward has spent the elevator ride to the eighteenth floor reminding himself that despite what the book his mother sent him about the academic job search says, they are probably not going to ask him what kind of African-American intellectual he considers himself to be, and that nobody interviewing him will know that this morning he spent a half-hour sitting on the floor of his hotel room blowdrying his shoes. (They have almost dried out by now.)
He's as surprised as anyone when at the interview he ends up telling them about it, during the last five minutes when things are winding down, and everyone laughs. Which isn't bad, in context. It genuinely feels like they're laughing with him. It's kind of nice.
"I grew up in Michigan," he says, "so it's not like I'm not used to rough winters, but nobody does them like Chicago."
"Well," says Dr. Di Paola the committee chair, "you'll do well at Anglia, then!" He stands up, and as the rest of the room follows suit, he goes over to shake Edward's hand and tell him he should expect to hear something by the end of the week, and everybody exchanges a string of pleasantries that actually seem relatively sincere as far as this sort of thing goes; they have been talking about how he might fit in with the department in a way that suggests he might manage to land a campus visit.
"I'd love to see that article you mentioned on the Duel of the Mignons," Dr. Pritchard (who also does French history) says, smiling as she hands him a business card.
"I'll send it to you!" Edward says, and he grins at her, and he finds that he does not mind that it is cold and still snowing and his socks are still damp, because he has just done an AHA interview and he did not suck. As far as he's concerned, that's a damn good cause for celebration.
7. Chicago, January 1995
Anne hasn't thrown up since getting off the plane, and the constant exhaustion is probably just jetlag. She knows this, rationally. After all, you don't really get that many opportunities to get accustomed to long-distance air travel when you've grown up in East Berlin. She reminds herself of this in order to convince herself that it's only wishful thinking when she wanders into the pharmacy down the street from the hotel while Richard is off doing his interview.
Still, it never hurts to check on these things. You never know, after all.
When the little minus sign comes up she drops the test into the trash can, where it falls with a resounding clang. She crawls back into bed, trying to ignore the vague, comfortless, and imperceptibly sticky scent of industrial laundry soap.
8. Oxford, January 1996
Henry hasn't been back in the UK long enough to have gotten over the jet lag, so he is passed out on the sofa when the call comes. When Mary wakes him up he is briefly quite confused: yes, the fact that he has been dreaming about explaining the Fourier transform to Jeremy Clarkson is probably because Tom, who has that encyclopedic knowledge of cars peculiar to seven-year-old boys, has been sitting in front of him raptly watching Top Gear, but it's a little disorienting nonetheless.
"There's a call for you," Mary says, picking up Blanche at the same time and fishing the crayon she has been gnawing on out of her mouth. "From someone who sounds American -- no, sweetie, crayons are NOT FOR EATING, let go of that -- "
Any post-nap fogginess dissipates quickly at the prospect of a campus visit in his near future, and he dashes to the phone. "Hello?" he says, with considerable trepidation.
"Dr. Bolingbroke?" says the voice on the other end. "This is Anthony Liu, from Anglia University." Henry nods, briefly losing track of the fact that he's on the phone. "We were very impressed with your interview at the JMM, and we'd like to bring you to campus for another interview, if you still consider your application active."
...and that is pretty amazing, right there. Henry has been convinced that his interview was utterly rubbish, although Mary has told him he always thinks that, and it's very likely it was in fact quite good.
Henry contemplates that he had better get his voice to work properly very quickly if he doesn't want them to hang up. "Oh," he forces out, "yes, certainly I do. Thank you very much -- that's wonderful news."
Once they have worked through the logistics of scheduling possibilities and emails and so forth, he sits at the kitchen table to process everything, and it's then that Harry comes in, looking terribly sour-faced.
"Mum says we might be moving to America," he says accusingly.
Henry tries to smile in a reassuring manner, except that because of the terribly dry winter air his lip cracks painfully. "Maybe," he says. "We won't know for a while."
-- but, of course, inwardly he has gone over all oh God we're going to have to plan a transatlantic move.
9. Chicago, January 2003
The worst place to drink during a gigantic conference is the hotel bar, because it's packed and overpriced and there is usually no place to sit down and the drinks mostly suck anyway, but by the time Tobias aka Satan's Own Placement Director has finished pontificating at them about how they shouldn't get their hopes up because the job market is terrible, they're competing against people from Yale and Princeton and Berkeley, and if you fuck up once they'll have written you off just like that, it's almost late enough that there are actual seats open.
"Oh God, this is so fucking awful," Rhonwen Davies mutters, staring mournfully into her gin and tonic. "I'm so doomed."
"Don't listen to Tobias," Edward says. "He's just resentful on account of being an idiot."
"The whole thing seems totally random, anyway," adds Ellen Vasquez. "I don't even know how you're supposed to prepare. I mean, they asked me what motivates me. What kind of question is that?"
"They asked me why it took so long to finish my dissertation," Charlie Kennedy chimes in glumly. It's actually a perfectly reasonable question in this case, since Charlie had already been in grad school forever even when Edward started, but everyone politely neglects to say so.
"I have absolutely no idea what to think," Julian Tindall says, and for all that he is a total cloudcuckoolander most of the time (albeit a cute one), he is probably justified in this case. "Mostly it was okay, but I think the committee chair didn't appreciate my answer to how I'd teach the Crusades in a post-9/11 world. I think he expects we'll have flattened Baghdad by then."
"Oh, for God's sake," Charlie mutters, rolling his eyes. "Are we really going to have the George Bush is Destroying the World conversation again?"
Edward leans over to Rhonwen, who is still nursing her G&T. "Hey, you want to go drink somewhere else?" he says. "I don't think there's enough alcohol in the world for where this conversation is going." She nods fiercely, and they make a break for it before Charlie (being their token conservative, at least for the past year and a half) can start in on the I Can't Believe People Who Live In New York City Have Already Forgotten 9/11 speech.
"So," she says, once they've snagged a couch on the other side of the lounge. "You didn't mention how your interview went!"
Edward smiles. It's sort of nice to be the only person in the bar who is not completely depressed, for once, although it probably means he is going to get crapped on spectacularly in the near future.
"You know?" he says, and maybe it's the Scotch talking, even if he hasn't really had all that much, but what the hell -- "I actually feel pretty good about it."
10. Chicago, January 1995
By the time he gets back to his room, Richard isn't sure whether he wants to cry, get drunk, or just leap out the window, or some combination of the above, because he is a complete fuckup who is never going to get a job because he can't keep his damned mouth shut for half a second. Half a fucking second -- that's all you really need to figure out that making prostitution jokes during your job interview is a stupid idea, especially right after they meet you. Like that even needs figuring out. Does the room have a minibar? Richard cannot recall, but the prospect of getting pissed in relative isolation is probably worth the 500% markup. At least the exchange rate is on his side.
He's been dithering about whether or not to wake up Anne, but stops in his tracks when he notices the empty EPT box sitting on the sink in the loo. They've been talking about it a lot and finally agreed that they're not trying to have a baby, but they're not trying not to either. Richard thinks he knows what's up, though -- if it had come up positive, he suspects that, jet lag or first-trimester exhaustion or whatever it was notwithstanding, Anne would probably have stayed awake long enough to tell him.
Richard crawls on top of the regrettably-patterned duvet and slides an arm around Anne's waist. She has always been a light sleeper, so the movement is enough to wake her; she turns over in his arms and kisses him hello.
"How was your interview?" she says.
"Let's just say I don't think we'll be moving to the States after all." He tries to smile, and it's more like a wince. "But what about you? Are you...you know, all right?"
She smiles wanly and looks closely at him in the dim light, as if trying to figure out whether he's noticed or not, and gets out "I'm fine -- " before breaking out in tears.
"I don't even know why I'm so upset," she sniffles. "Because -- I knew it was probably just from flying in. I kept telling myself that, but -- I suppose I didn't want to think so. People fly all the time, don't they? Look at you -- you're just fine! And I can't help thinking that if it hasn't happened by now -- it isn't going to, is it?"
"I don't know," Richard says helplessly, stroking her hair. "But if you want to? Once we get back to England we can go to the NHS and see what our options are. Maybe we just need a little help."
Anne nods, wiping frustratedly at her eyes. "God, I feel like such a wreck," she says.
Richard leans in and kisses her forehead, and then he smiles at her. "If it helps? You've probably never opened a job interview by comparing yourself to a male prostitute."
That actually makes her laugh, and all of a sudden the whole ridiculous affair is worth it.
"I'm sorry," she says, moving the covers aside so she can get her arms around him. "I shouldn't laugh -- "
"It's all right," he says. "Really. I mean, it is rather funny. Maybe not the part where it happened to me, but the rest of it."
They lie there in silence for a while -- it's oddly peaceful, even if they are both feeling like complete failures.
It's Anne who finally breaks the silence. "Aren't you having drinks with someone tonight?" she murmurs.
In fact, he has been invited to a reception with one Dr. Fabian Schroeder, from Cornell, after running into him completely randomly in the book exhibit and striking up a conversation. He was completely thrilled about it at the time, because Schroeder's book about gender and Galenic anatomical models is one of the most brilliant things he's read recently, but now? It matters a lot less than being with Anne.
"So I was," Richard says. "You know what, though? To hell with that."
Author: angevin2
Play: pre-Richard II (but the canon is weirdly distant)
Characters/Pairings: Richard/Anne, Henry/Mary, Aumerle
Warnings: Lots of cursing, discussion of infertility, vomit, public information films, jokes about prostitution, anvilicious foreshadowing, references to George W. Bush, small children under sinks, Teletubbies, academic job interviews, violent insect death, and utterly shameless self-indulgence
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3684
Summary: Richard has poor impulse control, Henry is mildly obsessive-compulsive, Edward is very damp, and Anne throws up a lot.
Notes: For gileonnen, who put the idea into my head. A greater-than-usual portion of the events in this fic are based on things that actually happened to me. The conference locations are historically accurate to the best of my knowledge; all faculty members affiliated with real institutions in this fic are invented. The movie that traumatized young Richard is also real; it's called The Finishing Line, it's on youtube, and it is mentally scarring. Finally, I highly recommend looking up the Duel of the Mignons, which, like The Finishing Line, is all about ill-advised sporting events in which basically all of the participants die. Fun!
1. Somewhere over the midwestern U.S., January 1995
"Remind me again why we're doing this?" Anne says, for at least the fifth time in six hours. She is slumped against Richard with her face (currently rather greener than usual) buried in his shoulder, as much as she can manage in a cramped airplane seat, and he has his arm wrapped consolingly around her as she clutches nervously at a tattered airsick bag.
Richard rubs her shoulder and kisses the top of her head. "It's a great opportunity," he says, again. "Chicago has a brilliant program." They've talked this all out, of course, but Richard does understand that it's hard to be cheerful about potential major life changes when you've been throwing up on and off on a transatlantic flight.
"I don't want to move to America," she says, clearly reconsidering any concessions she's made about the opportunity's greatness. "You don't want to move to America. You already have perfectly good interviews in England!"
"And if I get an offer from York or Sheffield, I'll take it," he says. "I promise."
"You're lucky I really, really love you," she mutters.
Richard smiles and pulls the armrest up in order to hold her closer. "I know I am," he says.
Anne clutches at Richard's arm as the plane begins to dip in preparation for landing, and dives for the airsick bag once more. "I'm going to die," she moans. "I am going to die from throwing up all of my internal organs and it will be all your fault."
"No, you're not," Richard says in his most soothing voice. "You'll be fine."
"You don't know that," Anne says, and although her gaze is still aimed at the bag Richard has the impression she is glaring.
"I promise," Richard says, "that if you do, I'll give you the most elaborate funeral ever and then join a monastery out of guilt."
"If you give me an expensive funeral, I'll haunt you forever," she says, with a wan smile.
"Promise?" Richard says, as she settles back against him, pressing her face into his chest. "Because I think I'd go quite mad if you didn't."
2. Orlando, January 1996
The phone is on its third ring, and Henry is berating himself for going on the academic job market when he has five kids (plus one more pending) to support when Mary picks it up.
"Henry!" she exclaims. "How was your interview -- hold on a second -- HUMPHREY, GET OUT FROM UNDER THE SINK RIGHT NOW -- " There is a clunk as the phone drops onto the table, and then another as it slides off the table onto a chair, and a muffled thud as it finally falls from the chair onto the floor. After a moment there are some shuffling noises, followed by a tiny voice declaiming "'ello 'ello 'ello!" into the phone.
Henry smiles. "Blanche, is that you, sweetie?" he says.
"No!" Blanche exclaims. "Nonononono."
Her tirade is interrupted when Mary returns; Henry can hear her voice at a distance from the receiver: "Are you talking to Daddy, honey? ... why don't you give Mummy the phone now? ... yes, you do want to go in the other room with Aunt Elly now..."
"She's just discovered no," Mary says, when she gets the phone back. "It's her favorite word ever."
Henry asks, "Should I call back later?"
"No, I think it's all right for now," Mary says. "I've got Eleanor distracting them with Teletubbies -- she's got the patience of a saint. How was the interview?"
"It's not until two-thirty," Henry says. "Oh, God, Mary, I hate it here. Florida is hideous, and there are enormous cockroaches, and the conference is packed with people, and half of them are talking about bloody Disney World. It's not like I'm even going to get the bloody job."
"You're going to be brilliant," Mary assures him, and she is emphatic enough that Henry can almost believe her. "I doubt that anybody else they're talking to is as prepared as you are. And don't worry about what it's like in Florida -- the job you're interviewing for is in New York. Did you remember to take your meds?"
Henry calls to mind the image of his seven-day pillbox sitting in the hotel bathroom; he pictures the individual compartments and the pink Paxil tablets therein, counting off the days in his head: Sunday (empty), Monday (empty), Tuesday --
-- oh, shit.
3. Chicago, January 2003
The only thing that motivates Edward York as he trudges up Michigan Avenue through the snowstorm is the cursing, performed in time to the wretched squelching of his sodden socks: fucking AHA, fucking overflow hotels that are a fucking mile away, fucking academia, fucking Chicago, fucking boots that are not even a little bit waterproof, fucking Ian getting to go to fucking San Diego for MLA instead of this fucking frozen tundra, fucking fucking snow, why the fuck am I even doing this fucking thing.
It doesn't really help. He's already had to go back to the hotel once to change his shoes after the first pair filled up with slush. He had thought that perhaps his less stylish but theoretically designed-for-this-sort-of-thing hiking boots might allow him to make it to the conference hotel with dry and unfrozen feet, but apparently even they are no match for eight blocks' worth of a Chicago winter. He cannot remember why the hell it is he keeps saying Chicago is one of his favorite places, since every trip here in the last five years has been objectively awful, but then, he clearly has no judgment whatsoever (cf. also: waiting around for Ian to dump him and then feeling like crap about it. God, what a shit year this has been).
Edward looks up at the street sign on the corner and is filled with overwhelming despair when he realizes he's only at East Washington. It has been two damn blocks and he's already waterlogged another pair of shoes and he is thinking about his stupid ex, which has got to be a sign of impending delirium brought on by hypothermia, and if things get any worse he'll probably start missing him or something stupid like that, which, what the hell (and it is not like pretentious Romanticists with red hair aren't a dime a dozen anyway). The only sensible thing to do at this point is to go back to the hotel. Possibly by taxi. It can't be that expensive. Or at least it's worth it if it keeps him from not getting the Anglia job because he looks like he has crawled up to the suite from the swimming pool. Which for some reason he has been in with all his clothes on, plus his shoes and his coat, and possibly this simile is getting increasingly stupid.
At least if he hurries back now he might be able to beat the line at Starbucks.
4. Chicago, January 1995
Richard shifts his weight from foot to foot as he stands in the hotel corridor, checking his watch repeatedly. There are five minutes left, and he doesn't want to knock on the door in case there is someone in there, because God, how awkward would that be? Not that the whole thing isn't awkward anyway, because what the hell is wrong with Americans, what with the whole interviewing-in-hotel-rooms thing they have going on that feels sordid enough to be downright comical. Or it would be if he didn't feel vaguely like throwing up. At least they will probably find him terribly charming, because he is British and Americans tend to love that sort of thing.
He waits for precisely two-and-a-half more minutes before knocking on the door, and is instantly ushered into a whirlwind of handshakes and completely unironic pleased-to-meet-yous (but of course they are, that is another Thing Americans Do) and there he is, sitting on the couch in someone's hotel room -- admittedly, a very nice one, it's not like he's sitting on the bed or anything, but really, it's still someone's hotel room, and it's damned creepy, and they ask him how America's been treating him and before he knows it he can hear the words coming out of his mouth --
"Well, apart from feeling like the world's most committed male escort, I'm quite well, thanks..."
Six eyebrows go up at once, and the committee exchanges glances. Richard cannot help but think of the godawful film he saw as a boy at school, about not playing on railways, where at the end the entire cast walks into a bloody great tunnel and the parents go in the other end and line up their mangled corpses on the tracks, but the worst part is that when they're all in the tunnel, you don't see a damn thing, but you know what's going on even though the film's not showing it, because you see the train coming at the other end. He is pretty sure that that is what is happening to him, in the heads of the committee members.
"But!" he adds, altogether too brightly. "I'm thrilled to be here. Really thrilled."
He smiles at them. It feels like his face is going to crack.
5. Orlando, January 1996
Henry supposes that it's worth it to arrive at his interview having been properly medicated, even though it means he's arrived with only ten minutes to spare, which is just enough time to work up a respectable panic without sufficient time to talk himself out of it. He has managed to step on several specimens of the local insect life (WHY are there bugs in January, WHAT) and is convinced that he can feel their chitinous remains clinging fiercely to his shoes.
He double-checks the portfolio he's brought with him: sample syllabi, exams, worksheets, and handouts. It's too late to go back for anything he's forgotten, but at least he won't find himself offering anything he doesn't have to hand. Then he repeats, like a rosary, his one-sentence description of his dissertation, followed by his one-sentence description of his teaching goals, checking them against the index cards he's got stashed in his pocket. And then he checks his portfolio again.
Henry is not the sort of person who habitually wishes to cope with his situation by drinking, but right now, he feels he could really go for a pint. Or several.
6. Chicago, January 2003
Edward has spent the elevator ride to the eighteenth floor reminding himself that despite what the book his mother sent him about the academic job search says, they are probably not going to ask him what kind of African-American intellectual he considers himself to be, and that nobody interviewing him will know that this morning he spent a half-hour sitting on the floor of his hotel room blowdrying his shoes. (They have almost dried out by now.)
He's as surprised as anyone when at the interview he ends up telling them about it, during the last five minutes when things are winding down, and everyone laughs. Which isn't bad, in context. It genuinely feels like they're laughing with him. It's kind of nice.
"I grew up in Michigan," he says, "so it's not like I'm not used to rough winters, but nobody does them like Chicago."
"Well," says Dr. Di Paola the committee chair, "you'll do well at Anglia, then!" He stands up, and as the rest of the room follows suit, he goes over to shake Edward's hand and tell him he should expect to hear something by the end of the week, and everybody exchanges a string of pleasantries that actually seem relatively sincere as far as this sort of thing goes; they have been talking about how he might fit in with the department in a way that suggests he might manage to land a campus visit.
"I'd love to see that article you mentioned on the Duel of the Mignons," Dr. Pritchard (who also does French history) says, smiling as she hands him a business card.
"I'll send it to you!" Edward says, and he grins at her, and he finds that he does not mind that it is cold and still snowing and his socks are still damp, because he has just done an AHA interview and he did not suck. As far as he's concerned, that's a damn good cause for celebration.
7. Chicago, January 1995
Anne hasn't thrown up since getting off the plane, and the constant exhaustion is probably just jetlag. She knows this, rationally. After all, you don't really get that many opportunities to get accustomed to long-distance air travel when you've grown up in East Berlin. She reminds herself of this in order to convince herself that it's only wishful thinking when she wanders into the pharmacy down the street from the hotel while Richard is off doing his interview.
Still, it never hurts to check on these things. You never know, after all.
When the little minus sign comes up she drops the test into the trash can, where it falls with a resounding clang. She crawls back into bed, trying to ignore the vague, comfortless, and imperceptibly sticky scent of industrial laundry soap.
8. Oxford, January 1996
Henry hasn't been back in the UK long enough to have gotten over the jet lag, so he is passed out on the sofa when the call comes. When Mary wakes him up he is briefly quite confused: yes, the fact that he has been dreaming about explaining the Fourier transform to Jeremy Clarkson is probably because Tom, who has that encyclopedic knowledge of cars peculiar to seven-year-old boys, has been sitting in front of him raptly watching Top Gear, but it's a little disorienting nonetheless.
"There's a call for you," Mary says, picking up Blanche at the same time and fishing the crayon she has been gnawing on out of her mouth. "From someone who sounds American -- no, sweetie, crayons are NOT FOR EATING, let go of that -- "
Any post-nap fogginess dissipates quickly at the prospect of a campus visit in his near future, and he dashes to the phone. "Hello?" he says, with considerable trepidation.
"Dr. Bolingbroke?" says the voice on the other end. "This is Anthony Liu, from Anglia University." Henry nods, briefly losing track of the fact that he's on the phone. "We were very impressed with your interview at the JMM, and we'd like to bring you to campus for another interview, if you still consider your application active."
...and that is pretty amazing, right there. Henry has been convinced that his interview was utterly rubbish, although Mary has told him he always thinks that, and it's very likely it was in fact quite good.
Henry contemplates that he had better get his voice to work properly very quickly if he doesn't want them to hang up. "Oh," he forces out, "yes, certainly I do. Thank you very much -- that's wonderful news."
Once they have worked through the logistics of scheduling possibilities and emails and so forth, he sits at the kitchen table to process everything, and it's then that Harry comes in, looking terribly sour-faced.
"Mum says we might be moving to America," he says accusingly.
Henry tries to smile in a reassuring manner, except that because of the terribly dry winter air his lip cracks painfully. "Maybe," he says. "We won't know for a while."
-- but, of course, inwardly he has gone over all oh God we're going to have to plan a transatlantic move.
9. Chicago, January 2003
The worst place to drink during a gigantic conference is the hotel bar, because it's packed and overpriced and there is usually no place to sit down and the drinks mostly suck anyway, but by the time Tobias aka Satan's Own Placement Director has finished pontificating at them about how they shouldn't get their hopes up because the job market is terrible, they're competing against people from Yale and Princeton and Berkeley, and if you fuck up once they'll have written you off just like that, it's almost late enough that there are actual seats open.
"Oh God, this is so fucking awful," Rhonwen Davies mutters, staring mournfully into her gin and tonic. "I'm so doomed."
"Don't listen to Tobias," Edward says. "He's just resentful on account of being an idiot."
"The whole thing seems totally random, anyway," adds Ellen Vasquez. "I don't even know how you're supposed to prepare. I mean, they asked me what motivates me. What kind of question is that?"
"They asked me why it took so long to finish my dissertation," Charlie Kennedy chimes in glumly. It's actually a perfectly reasonable question in this case, since Charlie had already been in grad school forever even when Edward started, but everyone politely neglects to say so.
"I have absolutely no idea what to think," Julian Tindall says, and for all that he is a total cloudcuckoolander most of the time (albeit a cute one), he is probably justified in this case. "Mostly it was okay, but I think the committee chair didn't appreciate my answer to how I'd teach the Crusades in a post-9/11 world. I think he expects we'll have flattened Baghdad by then."
"Oh, for God's sake," Charlie mutters, rolling his eyes. "Are we really going to have the George Bush is Destroying the World conversation again?"
Edward leans over to Rhonwen, who is still nursing her G&T. "Hey, you want to go drink somewhere else?" he says. "I don't think there's enough alcohol in the world for where this conversation is going." She nods fiercely, and they make a break for it before Charlie (being their token conservative, at least for the past year and a half) can start in on the I Can't Believe People Who Live In New York City Have Already Forgotten 9/11 speech.
"So," she says, once they've snagged a couch on the other side of the lounge. "You didn't mention how your interview went!"
Edward smiles. It's sort of nice to be the only person in the bar who is not completely depressed, for once, although it probably means he is going to get crapped on spectacularly in the near future.
"You know?" he says, and maybe it's the Scotch talking, even if he hasn't really had all that much, but what the hell -- "I actually feel pretty good about it."
10. Chicago, January 1995
By the time he gets back to his room, Richard isn't sure whether he wants to cry, get drunk, or just leap out the window, or some combination of the above, because he is a complete fuckup who is never going to get a job because he can't keep his damned mouth shut for half a second. Half a fucking second -- that's all you really need to figure out that making prostitution jokes during your job interview is a stupid idea, especially right after they meet you. Like that even needs figuring out. Does the room have a minibar? Richard cannot recall, but the prospect of getting pissed in relative isolation is probably worth the 500% markup. At least the exchange rate is on his side.
He's been dithering about whether or not to wake up Anne, but stops in his tracks when he notices the empty EPT box sitting on the sink in the loo. They've been talking about it a lot and finally agreed that they're not trying to have a baby, but they're not trying not to either. Richard thinks he knows what's up, though -- if it had come up positive, he suspects that, jet lag or first-trimester exhaustion or whatever it was notwithstanding, Anne would probably have stayed awake long enough to tell him.
Richard crawls on top of the regrettably-patterned duvet and slides an arm around Anne's waist. She has always been a light sleeper, so the movement is enough to wake her; she turns over in his arms and kisses him hello.
"How was your interview?" she says.
"Let's just say I don't think we'll be moving to the States after all." He tries to smile, and it's more like a wince. "But what about you? Are you...you know, all right?"
She smiles wanly and looks closely at him in the dim light, as if trying to figure out whether he's noticed or not, and gets out "I'm fine -- " before breaking out in tears.
"I don't even know why I'm so upset," she sniffles. "Because -- I knew it was probably just from flying in. I kept telling myself that, but -- I suppose I didn't want to think so. People fly all the time, don't they? Look at you -- you're just fine! And I can't help thinking that if it hasn't happened by now -- it isn't going to, is it?"
"I don't know," Richard says helplessly, stroking her hair. "But if you want to? Once we get back to England we can go to the NHS and see what our options are. Maybe we just need a little help."
Anne nods, wiping frustratedly at her eyes. "God, I feel like such a wreck," she says.
Richard leans in and kisses her forehead, and then he smiles at her. "If it helps? You've probably never opened a job interview by comparing yourself to a male prostitute."
That actually makes her laugh, and all of a sudden the whole ridiculous affair is worth it.
"I'm sorry," she says, moving the covers aside so she can get her arms around him. "I shouldn't laugh -- "
"It's all right," he says. "Really. I mean, it is rather funny. Maybe not the part where it happened to me, but the rest of it."
They lie there in silence for a while -- it's oddly peaceful, even if they are both feeling like complete failures.
It's Anne who finally breaks the silence. "Aren't you having drinks with someone tonight?" she murmurs.
In fact, he has been invited to a reception with one Dr. Fabian Schroeder, from Cornell, after running into him completely randomly in the book exhibit and striking up a conversation. He was completely thrilled about it at the time, because Schroeder's book about gender and Galenic anatomical models is one of the most brilliant things he's read recently, but now? It matters a lot less than being with Anne.
"So I was," Richard says. "You know what, though? To hell with that."