The Life of the Mind Read online

  The Life of the Mind is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Christine Smallwood

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, P.C. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen, copyright © 1987 Bruce Springsteen (Global Music Rights). International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smallwood, Christine, author.

  Title: The life of the mind : a novel / Christine Smallwood.

  Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Hogarth, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020022737 (print) | LCCN 2020022738 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780593229897 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593229903 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3619.M3578 L54 2021 (print) |

  LCC PS3619.M3578 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020022737

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020022738

  Ebook ISBN 9780593229903

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Alicia Tatone

  Cover photograph: Natalia Bazina/plainpicture

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The End of March

  The Next Day

  Five Days Later

  A Few Weeks Later

  Saturday Night, the Next Week

  Ten Days Later

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The End of March

  Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail. The therapist was calling because Dorothy, who at this moment was rereading the flyer for student health services taped to the wall above the receptacle for used feminine-hygiene products, had left a voicemail at eleven o’clock last night canceling today’s session. It wasn’t that the miscarriage was such a big deal or that she was broken up in grief about it; it was that she hadn’t told her therapist she was pregnant, and didn’t want to have a whole session about her tendency to withhold. In the asymmetrical warfare of therapy, secrets were a guerrilla tactic. Not that Dorothy had been plotting to keep things to herself. She wasn’t the plotting type.

  It was day six, and she was still bleeding. Not the unceasing hemorrhage of the first ten hours—now it was thick, curdled knots of string, gelatinous in substance. In most cases of gestational stall it wasn’t necessary to intervene; the body knew to spontaneously expel its failures. Perhaps that accounted for the trauma in other women’s accounts—the element of surprise. You will know not the day nor the hour! In her case the body had held on, deferential, waiting for her to clear her schedule. The result was less than a trauma and more than an inconvenience. She would never know exactly when it had happened—when it had stopped happening—only that she had persisted for some time idly believing that she was persisting, her body busy fulfilling its potential like some warehouse or shipping center. How typical of her not to know something was over when it was over. And how typical that it was proving more difficult to extricate herself from the dead-end pregnancy, the halted progression, than it had been to become pregnant in the first place. Her womb would not let go. The contractions had needed two Cytotec suppositories before they would even start. Misoprostol was the drug’s generic name, the same one they gave you for a medication abortion. But when she did it, when she self-administered the uterine evacuation, terminating a—what was it, exactly? What did you call it when a life stopped developing, but didn’t end?

  TESTS GOT YOU STRESSED? the flyer quizzed. DON’T DESPAIR. TEXT TO TALK IT OUT. A sad stick figure in one corner, a smiling stick figure in the other. KILL YOURSELF, someone had written in green ink above the smiler. STOP THE HATE, someone else had written alongside, in letters so small they seemed afraid to draw attention to themselves. Then the hand in green ink had returned to draw a drooling penis with a thick beard and a natty top hat. Dorothy wondered if she had taught any of these students. It was possible.

  She hadn’t intended to lie to her therapist—if an omission even counted as a lie. Dorothy hadn’t been pregnant for very long, but she had been pregnant long enough to understand that unless she was very tactical in her behavior, her body and what she did with it, what she put into it, would be a matter of community interest. Maybe pregnancy changed the body from a private to a public thing, or maybe it exposed the nature of the body as already public. Whatever it was, it was something she wanted to talk out with her therapist, except when it was on her tongue to do so, the therapist had interrupted a warm-up story that Dorothy was telling about her boyfriend, Rog, to remark that he was “a keeper.” Dorothy saw at once that after the language of “keeping” had been introduced into the room, it would be impossible to keep it from becoming attached to the pregnancy, to define the pregnancy in terms of a keeping or a not-keeping, when in fact Dorothy was not ready to talk about retention, even as a future decision toward which she was inevitably hurtling, and so she, driven into a cul-de-sac by a linguistic overdetermination that would have been rich material if she only could have borne it, said nothing.

  The therapist had apologized for calling Rog “a keeper.”

  “Who you keep is up to you, not me,” she had said, gazing earnestly into Dorothy’s eyes, willing her into compliance, but Dorothy disagreed. What was this American fixation on doing it yourself? Wasn’t she in therapy so that someone would tell her what to do? What use was expert knowledge, the years paid out acquiring experience, if it was kept in reserve, hoarded like canned goods, while the masses stumbled about, starving and ignorant? Voicing these opinions only worsened the situation; they spent the rest of the session processing the incident, and when Dorothy returned the following week, she couldn’t find her way back, couldn’t justify not having confessed the pregnancy right away. Time had intervened; an innocent delay had become a falsehood. So she kept it to herself. And kept it the next week. And again the week after that. And then she “lost” the pregnancy—misplaced it, like a keychain—and now she thought she might keep it forever, so awful was the thought of returning to the beginning of the story, now that she was in its end.

  * * *

  —

  Martin Luther thought up the “95 Theses” while he was on the toilet.

  Dorothy couldn’t remember where she had read that.

  She wiped, examined her fingernails, wiped again. She wiped back to front. She knew this was incorrect, but she had been doing it her whole life, and there are habits one gives up on breaking.

  The toilet didn’t have an automatic flush, so Dorothy could sit for hours if she chose and never be sprayed with water. She opened her phone and scrolled back through her photos. There was an old one that she liked a great deal, of Rog playing with his brother’s dog. Rog was at peace, and the dog’s face wa
s a rictus of joy. Rog had dumb long hair then. The dog in the photo was now dead. It had died of a mysterious ailment that manifested as a sudden explosion of tumorous growths all over its long body. Dorothy remembered stroking the dog the day before they put it under. It was like stroking a sock filled with gravel.

  Dorothy did not frequent the large women’s room by the water fountain, with its row of six open-bottomed stalls under which could be passed fistfuls of paper or whatever else a person required. She used the single-occupancy bathroom by the critical-theory reading room. The bathroom was large—designed to be wheelchair accessible, though everyone used it—and smelled faintly of disinfectant. She bent over and took from her bag a small bottle of peppermint oil and sniffed.

  The handle of the bathroom door shuttled back and forth.

  “I’m in here!” Dorothy called.

  If she had opted for the in-office procedure, they would have vacuumed her clean. But she had wanted to bleed at home. It had seemed less official that way. She hadn’t known how degrading the dribble would be. Dorothy was starting to fear it might never end; that until the last of her days, whenever she wiped, the tissue would come back bloody and brown. She didn’t have much experience with blood, abscesses, sores, things of that nature. She had never broken a bone or needed stitches. Once she saw a cyst explode. It happened in college. Her roommate, Alyssa, had developed a soft lump on her elbow that over several weeks expanded like a balloon being pumped with water until one afternoon she bent her arms to put her hair in a pony and streams of white confetti burst out, decorating the books, pencils, etc., on her desk, as well as her denimed lap, with foamy spray. Dorothy ran from the room in horror, but Alyssa, fascinated by the materials of the body, took photographs.

  Alyssa had a “natural” approach to life. Dorothy had learned this early in their friendship, when during a wild party for spring fling they fell into an embrace. Dorothy would estimate the number of rum-based drinks she enjoyed that evening at five. She and Alyssa kissed and groped and were soon scouring the building, whose name was Trotter, for a room with a door, pursuing like two moles the feeling of being shut in, unobservable, burrowed. The classrooms were locked, but the spacious single-occupant bathroom on the ground floor was open.

  In her memory the floor sparkled cold and blindingly white, as did the lavatory’s other features: the walls, the sink, the toilet, the light, the grout that separated and conjoined the tiles. There was a word for that, “cleaving,” for what joined together and pushed apart. Alyssa jerked down her pants, exposing a tangle of hair, and reached a hand inside. She pulled out a maroon latex cup that came to a point like a nipple. It was called, Dorothy remembered, a keeper. Hippies used them, vegans, people like that. In her drunken enthusiasm Alyssa was clumsy and spilled the blood. It left a trail like drizzled syrup on her blond leg, across the clean tiled floor. Alyssa’s reaction was merry. She tossed the cup into the sink and wiped the blood away with the cheap single-ply toilet paper, leaving smudges everywhere, and without pausing to apologize showed Dorothy how to form her first two fingers into a rod and ram it back and forth in the place where the keeper had been, and as Dorothy did this for Alyssa she was overcome with a feeling of desolation and loneliness and fatigue. Dorothy wasn’t used to being so active, sexually speaking. She preferred lying down on something soft and warm like a bed and letting someone else do the ramming.

  * * *

  —

  The knocking at the door turned harassing.

  “I’m in here!” Dorothy called again.

  While the footsteps receded down the hall, she listened to her voicemail. The therapist had a pleasant phone voice. “I’m sorry that you’re not feeling well,” she said. “Rest up and I’ll see you next week.” In the pauses between the words hung no distrust. Before she could put her phone away, Rog texted to ask how she was feeling. She wrote back, “Still bleeding.” She flushed. She inspected her fingernails.

  Thinking back on it now, Dorothy marveled at how clean the Trotter bathroom had been. Her own finger had been the dirtiest thing there. Other than the spatter, which was not really so big—the Keeper cup could hold only thirty milliliters, less than a shot of liquor—there was not a speck of dirt or grime anywhere on any part of the toilet. Not the lid or the lip or the rim or the trunk. The library toilet was similarly pristine. You could lie down with your face pressed up against the ceramic base and it would be incommodious but not repulsive. But Dorothy’s toilet at home was always dirty, and covered in her own hair. Some days it seemed like Dorothy’s hair was threaded with magnets and the toilet was burnished in steel, the way they attracted each other. And how does she have any hair left at all, she thought, considering how it clogs the drain and collects around the edges of the bath mat, how it fills the crooks of her fingers when she tugs on the ends in concentration, how so much of it has been falling out, day after day after day?

  * * *

  —

  No one was waiting outside the bathroom door. Dorothy dipped her head to the water fountain, which was clogged by a piece of chewing gum. Some water spilled over the side, and she stepped back to stay dry. Other people had jobs that kept them well away from gum-lined troughs. They had seltzer machines, snack dispensers, expense accounts. The gum had once been blue or green and was now a sickly pale. The fountain water was lukewarm. It would have been better to have drunk from the bathroom tap.

  There were, to be sure, other things in therapy that Dorothy had kept to herself, questions that lingered unasked, doubts she had failed to articulate. For three years running they had been meeting every Tuesday (save a New Year’s holiday and the thirty-one days of August) in the stuffy fifteenth-floor studio on Central Park West, with its treetop view and standard-issue décor: African masks, Oriental rugs, afghan throws, South American flutes. Dorothy was comforted by the therapist’s warmth and womanliness, her aging but elastic skin, the way she clucked and wiped her hands like someone who had seen it all and intended to save you the trouble of seeing it for yourself. Still, more and more it worried Dorothy to have entrusted her mental health to one who made such little effort against the tide of cliché. It was one thing for problems—even solutions—to be unoriginal; another for presentation.

  When the worrying got too intense, Dorothy had a choice of palliatives arrayed in pouncing distance of the saggy patient sofa: stress balls, beads, figurines for rubbing and handling, various-size pillows for pounding and embracing, and the eternal tissue box, draped in its hand-knitted elephant-gray cover. The box was always full. The therapist must be keeping watch on the box’s levels. Dorothy respected her attention to detail. Fullness, plenitude, preparedness, a material well of empathy—excellent clinical values all. But where did the therapist hide the half-full boxes? Or did she cram new tissues into the same old box between sessions? How old was the box, and how old were the tissues at the deepest, most archaeological substratum, and what might happen if Dorothy had a particularly lachrymal session and made it all the way down to the bottom?

  She took the elevator down to the stacks. She was not sorry she had skipped the session, but she missed seeing her therapist. She wondered what she was doing with her free hour. Not long ago Dorothy had started seeing a second therapist, in whom she confided her doubts about the first therapist. This was only a temporary situation. Dorothy wasn’t a millionaire.

  * * *

  —

  The buzz of fluorescence increased in volume as Dorothy got farther from the elevator. One of the overhead light panels was refusing to go quietly from this world. The agonized industrial hum pushed into Dorothy’s head until she felt it emanate outward from within rather than inward from the room. The grating of a metal chair against the floor made her jump. It was freezing down here, like a storage facility, which it was. She buttoned a brown wool cardigan over her black cotton cardigan, already buttoned to the clavicle. She opened her laptop, and when the gray rectang
le in the upper right quadrant of the screen opened itself to prompt her

  Updates Available

  Do you want to restart to install these updates now or try tonight?

  she selected “Later” and then, “Remind Me Tomorrow,” as she had every day for months—no, it had definitely been years.

  She opened the finder and clicked through the metaphorical folders until she located this week’s prompt for her Writing Apocalypse course. Dorothy was an adjunct professor—a member of the “part-time” or “contingent” faculty—who taught two or three or sometimes four courses a semester in the English department and first-year writing program of a private university whose list-price tuition was twice her annual earnings. In addition to Writing Apocalypse, this semester she was also teaching Writing Affect Theory and two sections of Introduction to the Major. She had taught all the classes before and devoted to them the minimum effort required so she could write the sample chapter that would get her the contract that would get her the job that didn’t exist. It didn’t matter how much time she cleared; she was not making progress. All her samples had to be thrown away. She hated producing so much waste. Her subject—female confinement and the gothic novel—had become a source of nausea as her own career had come to resemble the situation of one of the characters she wrote about. She was like a poor relation who had tagged along for a weekend at a formerly grand estate and wound up marked for death by the invisible hands lurking in the wallpaper.

  Last fall there had been six job openings in her field. This fall there had been none. The hiring climate had dried into a dust bowl. She couldn’t go on like this, she knew, but she also couldn’t not go on. She vaguely recalled a time when wanting to do the job she had trained for did not feel like too much to want. Now want itself was a thing of the past. She lived in the epilogue of wants.