Please Miss by Grace Lavery

Author:Grace Lavery [Lavery, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Let me try this again. A year or so after I had started the horms, and everyone except my mother had already forgotten my old name, I decided I was ready to take Cecilia to breakfast. It was not that we had had a bad breakup—we hadn’t, especially. We said goodbye at Birmingham airport a few years previously, calmly and with some remaining tenderness, despite the chaos of the previous year. It was a chaos we had brought to each other, or perhaps just the product of two combusting chaoses, interacting: mine, that of an alcoholic in the yearlong descent into madness that preceded my getting sober; hers, that of an ambitious and brilliant woman who was always hustling and every bit as professionally driven as I was. She was attracted to the charm I pressed into each handshake with a potential contact, and by the rage and self-disgust I had lost the ability to suppress. I took cocaine in her presence often. One time, just after I had done a couple of lines, she turned quite serious and said to me, “careful with all this… it’s okay to like cocaine, but you love it. Like, you are in love with it.”

The summer after Cecilia and I split up, I took up a short-term gig as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Osaka University. I did not then, nor do I now, understand how I came to be offered such a position—despite the fact that my first book involves Japan, and that I had already done some substantial research in a Japanese archive (the Tokyo Ruskin Library), nobody at Osaka seemed to know that and, in any case, it was very clear that the office handling these VAP positions had no awareness of my research, or anyone’s research. I had, probably, applied for this gig in a blackout, and gotten lucky, but I don’t remember that now, and I didn’t think of it at the time. As far as I was concerned, I had been offered a lucrative and professionally advantageous position at an internationally renowned university, and could use the opportunity to conduct some further research towards the book and perhaps connect with some Japanese scholars who might be interested in reading my work.

I showed up to the office building on the first day of my appointment, and was met by a young woman named K, who spoke English with a slight London accent, because she had done an MA in London. She and I had in common that we both liked William Morris, and we talked about that a little—I had recently gone to the Morris exhibition at the Birmingham Museum, and was planning to write something on the topic. She explained to me that she would not be able to supply me with accommodation, and that I might find it difficult to find somewhere for the whole trip. But, she said, Airbnb operates in Osaka and you should find it possible to find short-term accommodation for the whole summer on there.

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