Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories by Christine Sneed

Author:Christine Sneed
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Stories
ISBN: 9781620400456
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Interview

with the

Second Wife

Eleven years ago, a young man traveled through four states to meet with me. It was a few months after Patric had died, and until yesterday, I don’t think I had thought about this man in a few years. His name was in yesterday’s paper, not on the front page, but this is a newspaper at least two or three million people read each day, and there was his picture, section 2, page 4, the story an unfortunate one. It seems he had plagiarized a large portion of one of his former students’ dissertations and sent it off into the world as his own. The student had died two years ago, in a diving accident somewhere in Italy, but his girlfriend recognized the prose that Dr. Krenek had claimed to have written.

When we met, I wouldn’t have thought he would be capable of such a disingenuous act. But it could be that I’m likely to assume the best about people who appear keenly interested in who I am, not just in who Patric was. In the years since we met, Dr. Krenek has become a professor of comparative literature at a very old and admired university in New England, and such scandals, I know, inevitably ruin careers, if not also lives. His was the second professorial plagiarism scandal that this school had experienced in a year, and the tone of the article was overtly cynical. I’ve thought about writing and offering to help him, but I suspect that he wouldn’t be happy to hear from me because if nothing else, it would alert him to the fact that yet another person knows of his crime, a person who had once been very close to a man whose work Dr. Krenek studied and admired. I also think he believed that I thought well of him during our short involvement, which I did, despite the sometimes puzzling evidence that he did not have all of his facts about Patric and me in good order when he arrived to conduct the interview, one I agreed to so that he might write his own dissertation, one that helped him secure the position at the university where he now finds himself in disgrace.

Some of the questions he asked me were extraordinary—because of their unexpectedness and because of his apparent ignorance of the reasons why two people decide to form a couple. I answered almost all of them, sometimes trying not to make a funny face or laugh at him outright. Having little experience with interviews, I didn’t know if I was being foolish to find him odd or naive. He included portions of our conversation in his dissertation, which met with some acclaim after he published it with a university press in Chicago. When I read the excerpts of our interview in his book, I wondered if he might never have had any intention of using those strange questions and instead only wanted to satisfy some prurient element of his curiosity about Patric (and myself? It’s hard to know if in Dr.

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