Chapter Text
January 2007
“Professor Medeiros?”
“Ah, yes, Diane. Please come in.”
Diane entered the small, stuffy office of her advisor, a striking, fashionable woman whose hair contained artful flecks of gray. She was made uneasy by the renewed awareness that they were around the same age, but that only one of them had progressed beyond eternal studenthood.
She breathed in the radiator-baked air and felt a balmy surge of blood course to the surface of her skin.
“May I ask a favor?”
“Certainly.”
Diane put a hand to her head and shut her eyes, trying to will the droplets of sweat back into her pores. “Could you please open a window?”
"Ah, of course,” the professor replied with an understanding nod that Diane for some reason found insufferable. “I know of what you speak.”
“Thank you.”
The professor did as Diane asked and returned to her chair.
“Now then, your manuscript.”
Diane folded her hands in front of her. “Yes."
The professor smiled and shook her head. Diane didn't know what that meant, but all of a sudden she feared the worst. And it came.
“Diane, my dear, I just don't understand.”
“Understand what?”
“How you can go through so many years, having the life experiences you've had, and yet still come up with something so… facile.”
Diane's face fell into a righteous frown. “Facile? Professor Medeiros, this happens to be a feminist retelling of Walden!” She tapped the packet with her index finger.
The professor cleared her throat. “Indeed. Well, more’s the pity. You seem to be so enamored with the chance to deliver long, florid ruminations about nature and the female condition that you’ve failed to do the concept justice. You’ve sacrificed insight on the altar of frippery.”
“Well, I suppose I could revise a few passages,” was Diane's glum, mumbled concession.
“I’m afraid the problems go deeper than that. This is, to be frank, a completely inadequate start to a master’s thesis.”
Funny—she’d congratulated herself on finishing it so soon.
“Professor Medeiros—”
“Oh, come now. There's no need for formality at this stage, Diane. You can at least call me Carla."
What was it about that name? Diane wondered. Were all the world's Carlas members of a secret anti-Diane Chambers cabal?
"...and I am afraid the roots extend much deeper than this text. Your screenwriting experience aside, I believe you've spent far more time tending to your personality as a writer than actually, perish the thought, writing."
Another hot flash—or was it rage? Embarrassment?—overtook Diane.
“For I see before me an exercise in total self-absorption," the woman continued. "The clanging tonal discordance of someone far too in love with the sound of her own voice to think beyond it. It's a bad enough trait in a 23-year-old neophyte. But for someone your age—"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You mustn't take it as a personal slight. You must be able to accept such criticism soberly, or there's no hope for you. But I fear there isn't anyway, if you haven't broken this pattern of narcissistic preciousness by now."
Diane wondered if she'd ever received such a savaging. Oh yes—the fall of 1980. A scathing assessment from her literature professor that unleashed a wild crying jag that became a guilty attempt to console that became an embrace that became a hasty night together that became an engagement that nearly turned her into Mrs. Sumner Sloane. And that, of course, set her up for her life’s most significant detour—her five years as a sesquipedalian Boston barmaid.
The professor folded her arms. “In fact, I believe I can see the whole sorry trajectory of your life in this—the little blond pinafored angel that everyone adored until they got to know her better. And you've spent your whole life fixated on the slight of people losing interest in you instead of using that opportunity to better yourself.”
Good lord. Even the other Carla, vituperative gadfly that she was, had never subjected her to such an evisceration.
"In truth, I wonder how someone like that manages to get anything published. Even Hollywood has standards, if I recall.”
She sighed and placed a hand on Diane’s arm, putting on a show of concern for her pupil that, given the extended broadside that preceded it, could only ring false.
“Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, Diane?"
Holding her chin firm, Diane moved her arm and rose with the slow, purposeful restraint of a monarch confronted with an act of lese majeste.
"I understand," she said, "that I must start looking for a new advisor."