Julie Schumacher - Dear Committee Members

Should you already be scanning the Bentham date book, about to inform me that every whitewashed cabin is reserved through the millennium, here’s news: Vivian Zelles, to whom you offered a six-month stay beginning in July, will be turning you down. She’s been admitted to medical school, and she just earned several years’ worth of tuition by selling her quasi-memoir, a book in which she narrates her own childhood from the point of view of a sibling-regurgitating feline. She came vibrating into my office yesterday to give me the news. Our old pal Ken sold it for her: six figures.

Do what you can for Troy, will you?

Your problematic onetime colleague,

Jay

P.S.: I sent a note of condolence to MTV’s husband, care of Caxton, but the letter came back. Predictable irony: I hadn’t spoken to Madelyne for years, but now that she’s dead I find there are so many things I’d like to tell her. She and I had an argument once about speculative fiction, and TV claimed that the future didn’t interest her, because the proper concern of the writer was always the past. I hope she lived a full life. I wish I had kept in better touch with her and seen it unfold.

Galloway Foundation

Research/Travel Awards

27 West 59th Street

New York, New York 10019

Gentle Readers and Committee Members,

My colleague Franklin Kentrell has asked me to recommend him for a Galloway Foundation Research and Travel Award. I would have quickly refused with a clear conscience except that Kentrell penned a Galloway recommendation for me a dozen years ago (I did not receive the award), and in his oily, sidewinding way, he trapped me in the corridor this morning, clutched the lapel of my jacket with his untrimmed nails, and suggested that “tit for tat was only fair.”

Kentrell will never survive round #1 of your deliberations; therefore, secure in the knowledge that this letter will soon join thousands of its brethren in a rolling bin destined for recycling — presumably before it is read — I am comfortable endorsing his application.

Wishing you the best of luck with your process,

Jay Fitger

Payne University

Ken Doyle

Hautman and Doyle Literary

and Colonic Cleansing Agency

141 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

Ken:

I didn’t notice your ad for a summer intern (you might have sent it to me), but I have an undergraduate who did: Ms. Daniella Macias is ambitious, intellectually aggressive, yadda yadda yadda, and in light of the mutual reverence with which (I assured her) you and I regard each other, she has already lined up a summer sublet in Brooklyn for herself and an elderly diabetic cat. Given the pay scale (you’re not paying anything ?), I assume you’ll be glad to have her around. She won’t expect you to hand over your winningest clients; she just wants to soak up some atmosphere and dip her beggar’s tin cup into your font of wisdom.

On another topic: congratulations on the Big Sale. Six figures! Apparently I need to reinvent myself as a debut novelist, preferably young, beautiful (has Vivian sent you her photo?), and en route to med school. I confess I hadn’t expected it (perhaps I should have, given public enthusiasm for the teratological and the macabre) — but, kudos! Once you’ve finished with the champagne toasts I hope you’ll remember on whose say-so Vivian sent you her work; you might even decide to take your seven-hundred-dollar shoes off the desk and reconsider your opinion of Browles — which was crude and slapdash, Ken; the book is not a “turgid, pedestrian belaboring of a minor classic.” The first hundred pages may drag a bit: I’ll tell Browles to streamline and send them back to you as soon as he’s done.

Finally, I’m sure you’re plugged into the hype about Troy: The New York Review of Books ’s ecstasies, a forthcoming residency at Bentham (or so I’ve heard — but don’t quote me as your source), and the long-awaited second book under way … Is he going to lone-wolf it again, or have you persuaded him to take you on this time as his agent? I suppose if you brokered a repub at Folkstone he might view you favorably, and more fully understand your agently charms …

Daniella Macias’s earnest little résumé will probably be on your desk by the time you read this — give her a chance, will you?

Speculatively,

Jay

P.S.: Janet sent me the note you wrote to the alumni website about MTV. You’re right: she was a candle.

P.P.S.: Where does the time go?

The Ides of March

Office of the Provost/Attention: Dean Rensselear

Shepardville College

88 Cordry Hall

Tumbling Springs, GA 30350

Dear Dean Rensselear:

Carole Samarkind has asked that I submit this letter of recommendation on her behalf, as she is applying for your associate dean of student affairs position; with great regret I comply. The prompt in your online form (which I am ignoring in favor of this more accurate anachronism of a letter) asks that in addition to addressing Ms. Samarkind’s qualifications, I evaluate her past and current performance, disclose the context in which I know her, and discuss her liabilities (if any) and her future promise.

I. Past and Current Performance

Ms. Samarkind has served steadily, diplomatically, magnificently in the Student Services/Fellowship Office here at Payne University for eleven years. She is an enviable constant in the chaotic and demanding environment in which she tactfully holds sway, managing to advocate for student welfare, calm the neuroses of the faculty, and assuage the bilious and unpredictable tempers of the myriad deans (I have often pictured her stage-managing a fashion show of monsters) with whom she has, for over a decade, worked.

II. Context of My Acquaintanceship with Ms. Samarkind

Carole and I slept together — without cohabiting or making promises we would be unable to honor — for almost three years. Though we met via the many letters of recommendation I sent to her on behalf of my students (an odd sort of wooing, consisting as it had to of my praise for others), we came face-to-face, I believe, for the first time when I stormed into her office to protest the dissolution of an undergraduate award, which had been advertised, applied for, and then withdrawn. I had expected Ms. Samarkind to be an officious group-thinking gorgon who would proffer a bushel of vapid excuses by way of toeing the university’s line; instead, she listened, then agreed that the discontinuance of the award was unfair and quickly saw to its restitution.

Our years of tumbling in the hay began, if memory serves, soon after that. Apologies for the candor — which, as dean of what was recently known as a Bible college, you may experience as a bit of a shock — but I assure you these personal comments are entirely relevant. Why is Ms. Samarkind applying to Shepardville College? At the risk of revealing myself to be an egotist, I submit that I figure prominently into her decision. Let’s consider the facts: Carole is comfortably installed at a research university — dysfunctional, yes; second tier, without question — but we do have a modest reputation here at Payne. Shepardville, on the other hand, is a third-tier private college teetering at the edge of a potato field and is still lightly infused with the tropical flavor of offbeat fundamentalism propagated by its millionaire founder, a white-collar criminal who is currently — correct me if I’m wrong — atoning for multiple financial missteps in the Big House in Texas. You’ve reinvented yourselves and gone secular, but clearly, in various pockets and odd recesses of the campus, glassy-eyed recidivists and fanatics are still screaming hosannas, denying the basic tenets of science, and using a whetstone to sharpen their teeth.