The first day of law firm interviewing I wore my grey suit, with the hand-stitched lapels, a dark red Polo tie, blue shirt. I checked the knot once, twice, three times in the window of my car, which had turned into a mirror under the glaring sun. I walked away, towards the building where the firms were conducting the interviews, then walked back to the car to check the tie again. Still fine.

They held the interviews in the basement of the law school's main building. Each interviewer, from each separate firm, sat in his or her own room all day. Law students went from room to room according to a schedule the Office of Career Services had come up with. Each session lasted twenty minutes.

It was about 8:55 when I made it downstairs. My first interview would be at 9:00. I went to the lounge, where five or six other students sat, gripping the leather folders that held their resumes and transcripts, fidgeting with the knots of their ties, doing some last minute reading-up on the firms they were about to try to impress.

I looked at the main schedule, posted on an easel in the middle of the lounge. I moved my eyes around until I saw my interview in the 9 am slot: "Law firm: Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman; Candidate: Martis Furthington."

I read it again. And again, making sure there wasn't something there I hadn't seen before -- was it really 9 am today? Was I reading the right line of the table? I was Martis Furthington, right? Was there another Martis Furthington at the school?

As these questions popped around in my head, another students in the lounge, a guy with slicked-back hair who got the answers wrong when the Property professor called on him, who smelled of cologne, who was always clean-shaven, even when I saw him on Sunday morning in the library, said to me, "Furthington, what the hell are you doing?"

8:58. He sat behind the easel, facing me. "What?" I asked.

"You never leave your collar stays in the shirt when you send it to the cleaners. You can see the marks they leave."

"Ahh, whatever," I said, with a forced smile. I turned and walked to the room where I'd be interviewing for a job at the law firm of Traylor Perkins Fallon and Coleman, room 125

"So, says here you went to Palmer College," said the interviewer after I had come in the room, shaken his hand and taken my seat. He was an elegant, meticulously dressed African-American man, mid-forties, probably.

"That's right," I volleyed. I thought of my collar stays, of the long, straight, pointy-ended, raised edge marks that burst off of my shirt and into the eyes of the successful corporate attorney in front of me, like water shooting out of a prank flower on my lapel. I looked at his eyes, watched to see if they moved down to look at the horror of my shirt. Hard to tell. He scanned up from my chin, perhaps, or maybe my throat, to my mouth, to my forehead, back down to my nose, over to my right ear, up to my hair. Did my hair look strange? Were there red spots on my neck? Did my glasses have too many smudges on them? "I really loved that place," I continued.

He leaned back in his chair so that it rested on its two hind legs. He'd catch himself from falling by snagging an underpart of the desk, at the bottom of one of the sliding side drawers, with his foot.

I never knew that about collar stays before that guy told me in the lounge. My father, the high school teacher, wore mostly button-down short-sleeve shirts when he wanted to dress up. He also didn't dry-clean his clothes. So the combination of no collar stays and no dry-cleaning meant that I had never learned the lesson that you never, ever, send your shirts to the cleaner when they still have those little pieces of plastic holding the collar ends down.

My mother probably knew, I suppose, my big-city mother, my New York City mother, my mother whose father, a knife-sharp salesman of everything, probably sold collar stays by the bushel. He'd killed himself in 1965, before I was born, because, from what I can gather from the bits and pieces I've heard over the years, he went crazy, talked constantly about the Vietnamese informants that he said followed him, about how he had to "get to Cuba, right away," about tracking his mother down (she had been dead for over forty years). I bet it just got to be too much for him. I can understand that. But, whatever, my mom had never taught me the collar lesson.

"Great school," he said, "Great school. And you were a . . . an English major, I see?" He looked down at my resume as he talked.

"Yes, I was," I said. Goddamn collar stays. Goddamn that cologne guy. Why would you say that to someone just as he was going into an interview? Couldn't you wait, tell me when I came out, so you wouldn't make me anxious? God, did I hate that motherfucker. I'd strangle him and bash his head into the side of the street. It appeared in my head, the vision of his head bouncing off the curb as I smashed it down, again and again, like a coconut I was trying to open on a hard rock near the shore. The hot shore, blazing hot under the Caribbean sun, where I was shipwrecked.

"And how was that?" he asked, after a moment. He kept bobbing back and forth, as if he sat in a rocking chair. If he fell, I thought, what would I do? Would I help him? Would I try to protect my resume from the blood that would undoubtedly spew from his eyes, like the water that comes out the top of Brooklyn fire hydrants on summer days?

"It was great. I feel like I learned a lot about literature and how to express ideas in there," I said. I heard myself and I shook my head, not visibly, but inside, so that my inside-my-head head wagged violently from side to side, expressing its displeasure at what the mouth, part of the outside-the-head head, was saying. Even as the words came out, before they sat on the table, like fresh dung left by a scrappy hyena that had run through the interview room, I wanted to stop saying them. I wanted, somehow, to talk and not talk at the same time, to add 1 and negative 1 to get zero, to inhale and exhale at once.

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