7. ARTHUR

You know, after a while you get used to failure, standing underneath the star of failure, and maybe even take a grim kind of satisfaction from it, the years of rejection that hang heavy on your shoulders but which you never seem to take personally because the modern world is unimportant, that grand tapestry of casual ignorance and crass prejudice which surrounds you but never took you as one of its own.

I always felt above it all, an old soul from the start, unique, lost, but somehow still triumphant because I knew that my dreams and aspirations would eventually become true. Now I’m seventy and alone and my eye sight is not as good as it once was, I realise that the promises that I made to myself were a confidence trick. I was never a genius or an artist or an activist; it’s ludicrous that I ever thought I was. I spent my youth like monopoly money, dozing while others fought to make the world a better place, while they drank, fucked, got married, had children; they dived in with brave and open hearts and deserve everything that they won for themselves. I risked nothing and deserved nothing. A snappy comment was more important than a fair or kind one. Even the knowledge that I horded, the thing that I treasured most: no-one will ever come to rob me of it. Some days, I wish that they would. What did it ever give me? What on earth did I ever think I was going to do with it all?

Now that I know that it’s nearly over, the one thing I didn’t expect was pleasure. After all this time, real pleasure. No more awkwardness, no more desire, no more obsession, just that warm fuzzy feeling that you get when you’re in love or you find yourself with a blank slate and endless possibilities. The irony of finding myself free as a consequence of accepting that my life has run its course, embracing the one thing that has most crippled me most over the years, death, is not lost on me. When my grandfather died, I told myself that I would not waste another second. And when my father died, I told myself that I would not waste another second. Those little bursts of energy never lasted long before I sank back into apathy, which of course is yet another insult to their memory. Death has always felt like family to me, perhaps even closer than my real family, which is a horrible thing to admit, I know. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I really thought it would never come to my door. I was the one chosen for special treatment and that if I sat still, slowed my breathing, took part in life with brief but confident brush strokes, death would pass me by.

I did fall in love once, a girl named Melody. We were studying at Columbia University Chicago at the same time, me a philosophy major and her anthropology. We had a mutual friend who thought that we might hit if off, although I suspect he was being mischievous because our personalities couldn’t have been further apart. She was excitable, perverse and energetic, and I was fiercely ethical, languorous and a physical coward. We hated each other at first, but after we talked for a while, we found that we shared a similar curse: an overactive imagination. It’s funny how irrelevant everything else becomes once you realise you’re in the presence of another genuinely open mind. I must have met thousands of people over the years and often I’m struck by a strong character trait, whether it’s kindness, or a guillotine-sharp sense of humour, or intellectual brilliance, but I’ve only ever met a handful of people with genuinely fearless minds, the kind of mind that joys in different ideas, loves knowledge and isn’t fixed in their worldview. I’d like to think that’s what she saw in me too.

We spent most of the next two months in each other’s pockets, stumbling in and out of bed and bars, pulling out our tongues at small minded people, saying rude things about Reagan and Shakespeare and Ginsberg because we could, taking taxis we couldn’t afford to concerts we couldn’t afford, and generally acting like reprobates. I don’t remember why we fell out, but it was typically explosive and ended with her throwing a glass of milk in my face and storming out of the flat. She didn’t return my calls after that and we both had new partners before the end of term.

For what it’s worth, I did meet her one more time, some ten years later. We were both in a bar in Brooklyn but she was with a group of friends so we couldn’t talk for long, but I got the impression she was happy with that. We didn’t recognise each other at first, but a raised eyebrow gave her away and we met outside the men’s toilets a few minutes later. She was a different woman, of course. She’d moved to San Francisco, had a kid, and was working at a charity for peanuts, but it was her voice that told the real story; she related the facts of her life as if ordering items off a menu. I made a couple of provocative statements for the sake of it, but she simply rolled her eyes and looked nervous.

I thought I’d left her behind, me with my wonderfully limber mind, but now it’s clear the opposite was true. I felt sorry for her, but she probably saw my shabby clothes, the two days' worth of facial growth, the sneer I’d had on my face since I was born, that cubist sneer, and probably thought I was still stuck back in University. What a grey creature I must have seemed to her!

There are so many things I got wrong during my life that I don’t know where to start. I don’t understand why I thought that having a vibrant internal life meant that I had to look down my nose at everything. I guess that if you think you know everything already, if you feel you’ve stuffed everything inside your head and it’s fit to burst, all the outside world can do is reinforce what you know. The yob shouting racist obscenities on a street corner, the bum begging for cigarettes outside the seven – eleven, the boy stealing lyrics from a song he once heard to try and seduce a woman: it was as if nothing could be new or worthwhile. It’s impossible to justify now, but I really did believe that I was going to famous for something (Lord only knows what) and from that point onwards my life would be a succession of events and dinner parties with other famous people who saw the world the same way as me, a society of wild dreamers. There would be dancing on roof tops, although I would be the urbane fop in the background too cool to join in. I would learn guitar and Spanish. I would travel Europe and Latin America and meet other kindred spirits. There would be esoteric discussions about the difference between the cynic and stoic schools of philosophy. I would drink shots with fire bursting out from them.

Instead, I’m here, without even a valid passport to show for my troubles. Here, inside my palace of old and crumbling second hand books, face to face with God, the universally un-acclaimed and unclaimed Arthur Forrest. My life is singularly without anecdote. I would take a bow if I thought that I could bend back up without any pain.

As you get older, you actually become a connoisseur of different pains; when a new type hits in a strange part of the body, you learn to smile at it like a new friend, with a wry kind of acceptance.

I think perhaps every accidental bachelor goes through a similar life cycle. They should make a genus of us, study our actions or inaction, our lack of mating opportunities, pin us up behind panes of glass in museums so children can look at us with curious awe and fear. Surely there’s much to learn from a man who sits for hours in a café hoping that one of the pretty waitresses is an aspiring intellectual, or when he takes books out of library, believes that the female librarian, a goddess behind her spectacles, is impressed by his choice of reading. Study the ailing romantic as he wonders if the flowers that the girl draws above her name on the bill are for an extra tip or genuine flirting. We should watch him as he takes each long subway ride quietly and darkly, cowed by his reflection in the opposite window, keeping up the pretence that he’s a dazed convert taking part in an unfamiliar ceremony for fear that someone might talk to him. See him buy one boxed meal at a time. See him return back to his natural habitat. Feel the gasp of loneliness that escapes from his flat each time he returns back home from a hard day of wandering, too scared to stay out into the evening because loneliness is more apparent in those hours. Cringe in terror at his morning ablutions, his impatience with what he finds in the mirror. Weep as we see him on holiday, acting like a much younger man; at the beach, he takes off his shoes and socks and dances in the tide with other people’s puppies.

Men can be barren too, no less than women. They say be true to yourself, but what if your true self is miserly, pitiable? There has to be some room in a personality, some give, otherwise you might as well be a machine. Machines are the ultimate in being true to yourself.

I hate books now. They’re little coffins lying around the flat. I daresay they’re part of the reason why my eyesight is failing, another irony that really hits the sweet spot. Books reinforced my worst tendencies, in particular every bogus idea I ever had about being an outsider. The truth is that if you don’t take part in the world, you’re not an outsider, you’re a monster. I was genuine in my love of knowledge, at least I think I was, and I loved the feeling of recommending great books or films or music, but eventually all knowledge solidifies into pedantry if you don’t do anything with it that’s practical. It’s one of the first things you have to leave behind before you become an adult, the primary importance of ideas. I imagine it’s impossible to keep a completely open mind about things and have children, go through the process of rearing children. They force you into the world, I would have thought.

It’s odd to think that there are youngsters out there right now following the exact same patterns we did and making the same mistakes. I still have contacts with the University and talking with the fresh crop of students, you pick up similar things you might have said or done all those years ago, the same sense of galloping self-mythology and obsessive self-reliance, the joy of outlining in detail how impossible you are to get along with or else surrounding oneself with such a sense of mystery that no-one can guess what you really think. You can get away with that kind of thing if you’re a girl and pretty enough, but not a boy. I met one young man a few weeks ago who could well have been my mental double; I gave him advice, too much advice, as if I thought I could save myself. He didn’t want to hear a word I said, of course, but he did perk up when I suggested I thought he might be borderline autistic. Anything to extend the myth: a clockwork boy.

Part of it is implicit in our current society, I think, pseudo – autism, pseudo - anhedonia. We’ve become shadows in the face of such an immense stockpiling of information, retreating into precision and speciality or narcissism and pretence. How we value existence has changed. I’m reminded of this quote from Orwell: "one of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitivity which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude". Biology takes on an increased importance in such a community because it’s not just undeniable but iconoclastic.

I don’t know why I’m dragging this out. I’m not a philosopher or a scientist. Mute inglorious Art. No-one is going to read this and I’m not saying anything new. I imagine there’s someone writing this same note right now in another room much like this one. There might be some variation in tone, God might come into the picture a bit more, but it’s the same ending.

Do you know why no-one writes about the old? It’s because no-one wants to read about it, especially not the old, who are happy to delude themselves that they remain important. There was a brief craze a few years ago for films about balding intellectual failures who spent half their lives in a dressing gowns, but it disappeared before I could get any mileage out of it. For the most part, I meet with suspicion every time I attempt to change the course of my life this late in the day. Last year, I tried to volunteer for charity work helping African American kids in the projects but I could tell from their attitude that they believed I should be receiving charity rather than doling it out. I thought about joining an internet dating site, but when it asked me to describe the woman I wanted, it dredged up a lot of memories about Melody and I ended up more or less writing an essay about her and the intoxication of first love. A few women in their Forties caught my eye, but dating someone that age almost feels like kiddy snatching. Besides, what could they want with someone of my age and condition? I would have to tell them about my eyes. I would have to be honest.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting at a table in a Manhattan café and I noticed a couple of pretty Asian teenagers sitting a few tables ahead. They were giggling and taking photographs with their phones and comparing those photographs. I looked ahead to see what they were snapping and it was a middle aged grey haired man, probably in his early forties, sitting at a table with a Japanese woman in her twenties. They were holding hands and smiling and looking into each other’s eyes.

I coughed to get the teenagers attention, to show them I was in on the joke, but when they noticed me, they curled up with embarrassment and put their phones away. The joke of course wasn’t just the teenage Asian bride of folklore, but that old people in general and the nonsensical way in which they hold on to their sexuality. I was just as silly to them as the grey haired man, perhaps worse because I didn’t even have someone to call my own.

Maybe I should just let nature take its course. Old people die of loneliness all the time. That might not be what it says on the certificate, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The doctor flicks his wrist to check the time of death and signs off on something or other, the family get together but act like strangers, the box is lowered into the ground, the priest is cheery but lonely, the group disperses. The whole obscene game is better with you gone.

 

So I see no point in continuing.

 

You dream that the city is yours, but really it’s taken you to pieces.

 

There’s nothing after, I know that.

 

There was never any time for dancing, no time for fun, no time for dancing.

 

To me, the lowest level of responsibility you can conceivably accept is the responsibility for the world you create for yourself. If you can't grasp that low a threshold, the chance of you being able to take on responsibility for the wider world, to contribute to a larger community, in any form other than as a refuge from your own personality, is next to zero.

 

I wonder if things would have turned out differently if I wasn’t an only child, had a brother to compete with or a sister to love.

 

I wonder if my parents suspected I was the end of their line.

 

If I’d killed myself earlier, I could have easily slipped into another skin. I could have been a different person. It would have been easy.

 

I wonder if success would have changed me, made me into a better person.

 

If I knew then what I know now, I would have lashed out more often.

 

It's terrifying that I've got the end of my life and nobody wanted to see my soul, not even a dog.

 

There’s nothing after, I know that.

 

You can say from the sidelines I can do better than this, or I can improve this, you can say it a thousand times over, but the truth is you will never get the chance because you never joined in. You never said I want to be part of this. All you ever said was “this isn’t good enough”.

 

Nobody changes after the age of 30 unless they have to. The patterns are too entrenched.

 

O world o world o world.

 

Tonight I danced with a young woman in a short Lincoln-green dress, not much more than twenty. She swung me around and the smell of her perfume curled into my nostrils, touched my cheek, slipped inside my collar. I touched the warmth of her neck. She let me touch her neck. She let me touch. That’s enough for me. Enough now.