COLLEGE CUSHIONS US from the cruel truths of the working world. In college, if we enroll in a class on astronomy, we are astronomers. If we take a class on French literature, voilà!, we are French scholars. Diploma in hand, I planned to be a writer who would pen pithy short stories and novels rife with subtle literary allusions and interweaving plots. I hadn’t quite figured out how I would stay well-dressed and off the streets, but my penchant for excessive optimism and self-delusion took over. I assured myself (and my mother) that everything would be splendid, really. But then it wasn’t, and I had to take a circuitous path to those dreams. I’m still circling.

My muse first appeared in a strange earthly form. Eddie, the Most Valuable Employee in the telemarketing department of the Fresh Springs Bottled Water Company, lacked a front tooth and had greasy black hair that stuck unevenly to his forehead. I was the least valuable employee at Fresh Springs, stationed there by the malevolent temp-agency fairy as I tried desperately to finance a trip to the annual Prague Summer Writers’ Workshop. My meager salary at Fresh Springs depended upon coercing innocent consumers into a “free trial” of our repackaged Watertown tap water. After one week, I had no takers. I was a roaring failure.

Eddie approached my cubicle, singing Bon Jovi, the cord from his unplugged headset dancing around the knees of his acid-washed jeans. “Sara,” he whispered, “think about the psychology of the customer. Look at their names, their businesses, get into their brains!” Eddie smiled, his missing tooth like a darkened window in his mouth, and danced off with the headset cord wrapped around his leg.

Perhaps the problem was my accent. Mostly I called Southern area codes, so I adopted the slow, syrupy drawl of my college roommate from Arkansas. My success rate crept upward. I changed my name to fit the customer’s business. For florist shops, I was Rose or Lilac. Ophelia dialed the bookstore crone, Prometheana called the fire station, and Mary Catherine rang up churches. Ginger and Candy, my porn-star alter egos and most successful saleswomen, phoned gas stations and hardware stores. These names inspired comments such as “You must be thirsty, Candy. Like a drink of me?” Or “I’m a very dirty man, Miss Ginger. I’d like it if you were dirty for me.” I lapped up my commission and headed off to Prague. I drank 50-cent glasses of delicious Czech beer and marveled at the city’s soot-black statues. I wrote fables and short stories, started a novel and abandoned it.

THIS PAST summer I moved to London to intern at Vogue magazine. “Now you will become a real writer,” I told myself. My Vogue writing amounted to little more than taking down lunch orders. Viola, a statuesque blonde in her late 30s with a forehead smoothed by countless Botox injections, adopted me as her particular lackey. One day, Viola was wearing a camel-colored wool skirt unzipped almost to her crotch. “Saraaaa, dahhling,” she said, taking a long drag on her Marlboro Light. “Could you be a love and run out and fetch me some panties?” She exhaled in my face. “I don’t have any on and this skirt is just so bloody itchy.” A fitting metaphor for my time in Vogue’s offices, I decided.

Eventually, after working other odd jobs, I saved enough money to embark on another non-lucrative literary endeavor. Auberon Waugh, son of the famed author Evelyn Waugh, ran the Literary Review out of a drafty, tilting blue building in Soho. Auberon, a Falklands War veteran, had a glass eye, one lung, no spleen, and seven fingers. He had a regal, owlish way about him and had been friends with Princess Diana.

Each year, the scholarly Literary Review hosted a Bad Sex Contest, awarding a prize to the most hilariously odd sex scene. I spent days skimming the year’s novels for references to genitalia, sweat, bumping/grinding/rocking, adultery, and animal husbandry. At first it was amusing, even titillating. But after 40 hours of reading about a man having sex with a lamb (“its eyes bulging”) or how Gertrude from Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius would “lick her pillow,” “clench her buttocks,” and “lay down in pig shit” for Claudius, I grew wary, even repelled. I began lingering in church doorways and listening to Mass on the radio.

Auberon had a spotty memory. “Sara, what’s it called when you fuck an animal?” he asked me one day in his Buckingham Palace accent, absent-mindedly burning a hole in the cuff of his tweed jacket with a Benson & Hedges cigarette.

“Well, either bestiality or sodomy,” I replied, honored and disturbed at being the resident expert.

“Splendid, brilliant,” he murmured, withdrawing his cigarette from the singed wool.

I FINALLY have a real job with benefits and a salary. I’ll be a teacher at my old high school, the same place where I first fell in love with a lacrosse player, learned the subjunctive in Spanish, and read Lolita with fascination and horror. I’ve returned to Boston after two years of following an elusive muse through France and England with odd jobs and uncertain paychecks. In moments that don’t fit into my original plan of a straight shot to writerhood, I step out and say from a great distance, “No, this isn’t me.” But perhaps this is an important skill, to step back and view situations from a distance, to take on another person’s personality. If it isn’t me, who is it? If it isn’t my life, what is it? A story, of course.

Sara Houghteling is a freelance writer living in Boston.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001