Misreading

Brooklyn.

I had to borrow money to make the move. This was long ago, in a vanished world, when my father was still alive. I was standing outside his den, waiting, because when I’d knocked on his door he’d lifted a silencing finger to signal that he was in the middle of something important, some business. So characteristic, that gesture, the air of preoccupation. It always hurt, even though I understood that it was theater, like a frozen pose in Kabuki. Now he’s gone, gone for good, and only my memory of the gesture remains, a knot of puzzled meaning that chokes off other sympathies.

When I was fourteen I’d asked him about premarital sex because I knew it was out there, in the offing, and I was looking for guidance. I was hoping for a path out of Catholicism, a loophole in the homiletics I knew by heart. I put my question in a note because that’s what we did when the matter was difficult—we wrote it down. We thought it through and considered the alternatives and then we made a careful plea. Eventually he’d write back, sometimes by hand, often typed. The waiting was murder. We swapped these notes in cubbyholes, a grid of wooden boxes like you’d see in the lobby of an old hotel. The cubbies were by the kitchen, and you’d check them like it was Delphi, to see if the Oracle had gotten around to your business. Communicating this way might seem quaint or curious, the sort of departmentalism that develops in response to managing seven kids, but here’s what happened: it kept us quiet. Our deepest concerns were treated as secrets, and our needs, sealed in envelopes, felt illicit. In time my father wrote back, telling me that he didn’t believe in premarital sex, nor did he believe in extramarital sex. His response had the rote sound of the Baltimore Catechism. I had been hoping for something more lifelike. A week later I banged my thirteen-year-old girlfriend on a dusty bed in her basement without birth control.

My father pulled out his ledger and wrote a check to cover a one-way ticket. He handed me the check but didn’t ask any questions, didn’t seem to register that I was at a juncture in my life and that I might need something more than a loan and our usual silence. A few weeks later I left Seattle for Brooklyn, casting my lot with a woman I knew to be a liar and a cheat.

I think it goes, “You can never get enough of what you don’t want.” I’ve taped the spine together but the pages fall out anyway; flipping through them in search of the exact quote is like shuffling a deck of cards. It’s a cheap edition, a pocketbook that would have originally been sold in a drugstore, the cover a little too loud, clamorous in a lime-green jacket meant to compete with pomades and hairpins. In 1971 it cost $1.50. Striking a cautionary note, the copy on the cover says that it’s “the highly provocative best-selling analysis of the fanatic, a man compelled to join a cause, any cause . . .”

The book belongs to the precocious childhood of my brother, who once read all of Plato’s Republic to my mother, a few pages every night before bed. He was twelve then. He was that kid. Though I was older, I admired him, saw something rare and auspicious in his intelligence. I’d brag to friends, reading those signs, seeing prophecy in his hungry mind, but as the years wore on, as my brother ran away, as he stole and pawned our tiny treasures, as he turned seventeen and joined the marines, as he went UA and hit the bush and lived on a meridian strip on the I-5, as he was dishonorably discharged and then locked away in the VA mental ward on Beacon Hill, as his life became ever more shadowy until the shadows alone were real, only then did I change my tune and come to understand that reading the Republic at age twelve was not a sign but a symptom, not an augury at all but an alarm, one that could hardly have been any clearer.

Somewhere along the way I inherited my brother’s copy of The True Believer. It was Eric Hoffer’s first book, and I saw in it—and in Hoffer himself—what my brother must have seen—a familiar face, a face you could trust. Hoffer had the roughed-up look of someone we’d seen around. A character out of our childhood, wandered up from the waterfront, grandfathered in. A stevedore, his right thumb destroyed, the collar of his wool coat turned up against the cold. I read that book in a single sitting, I read it and I romanced it. Hoffer spoke to me, he looked me in the eye and addressed me directly, each sentence delivered like a confidence, a matter of deep mutual trust. But I also happened to be that true believer, that fanatic, the man compelled to join a cause, any cause . . .

The actual quotation reads: “They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.”

Our whole time together she was less a girlfriend than a hypothesis, a vague guess at the truth, in constant need of testing and verification, further research. Before Brooklyn, we’d arranged to live abroad, in Paris, but as soon as I arrived she said she wanted to go to Geneva. When I agreed to go, she said she needed time alone, and the very next morning she packed a bag and left for Barcelona with someone else. After we parted ways, I was sure I’d never see her again. But then she called me, she called and we talked, and suddenly I was waiting outside the door of my father’s den, standing there, hoping he might help me out.

She took a job as the assistant to the producer of a movie, and by the time I got to Brooklyn she was fucking the director. Two weeks later she hired a helicopter for her brother’s birthday, and a party of movie people flew off the roof of some building in Manhattan to see the city from above. I hadn’t been invited, though I had been lied to, meaning I knew. Her lies embarrassed me because I could see them. I remember looking up at the sky a lot that Sunday afternoon. The whole time I lived in the city, drifting from borough to borough, I never once saw a helicopter without wondering if that was her, if she was in it.

I knew she was lying to me, but that doesn’t mean I knew what was true. In this way, our relationship had the character of a rumor, something I’d heard about, something I knew only secondhand. Still, we managed to resemble a couple for a while. I’m not sure who we were imitating. Even in the passionate throes of youth, we kept up appearances, but the fit was poor and awkward and I kind of suspect people saw through the charade. I certainly felt as if people could see right through me, like I had no substance, like every tiny wheel, every whirring mechanism, every ratchet and pawl were visible.

That I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether her apartment was in Cobble Hill or Boerum Hill or Carroll Gardens indicates something about the radical disorientation I felt in those days. Even now, the names of those neighborhoods sound far-off and dreamy. I remember them coming up in conversation with an almost incantatory insistence, but the borders they were meant to mark—the classes they created, the hopes they defined, the precise distinctions they were meant to articulate—completely escaped me. I know all of it mattered; it just didn’t matter to me.

Every lie breaks the world in two, it divides the narrative, and eventually I fell through a crack into the subplot, becoming a minor character in my own life. The surrendering felt much like the blackening of consciousness just before you faint, the letting go, the acceptance, and whatever was good in me turned passive and strange. I knew happy love had no history, and it seemed that any history, no matter how sordid, was better than none. I stayed in the story, and we went on resembling, while I roamed in a world of lesser importance. And in that exile, far from the main action, Brooklyn welcomed me.

I felt at home on subway platforms, down in the heat and stink, waiting for trains, because people avoided eye contact and no single line of vision ever tangled. Those tiny evasions turned us into strangers, and the shifty desperate feel had a dramatic pressure, like a standoff, but always, just when the tension rose to a certain pitch, a train would come and carry us off by the carload. Up on the streets it was like a foreign country. I never understood where anyone was going. Every window on every bus seemed to frame a lonely face. I walked everywhere but I was always lost. People would clot up and form groups that I couldn’t fully comprehend but figured were probably families. The only face that passed for familiar was an ancient Italian woman I saw making her rounds, an old widow in black who shopped for groceries, pushing an antique pram up the aisles, her soda crackers and kippered fish and milk nestled in blankets.

One morning I found a church, St. Charles Borromeo, and I went in because he’s my patron saint. I lowered a kneeler in one of the pews, and just being there with the slightly damp smell of cold stones and the familiar emptiness made me want to confess. Mass was ending but the responsorial chant, the intonation of every line, was recognizable to me from rhythms I had learned as a child. At early weekday masses it’s always Eleanor Rigby and her devout sisters, the secret sufferers, the wounded, the inconsolable, women who show up in their hastily tied bonnets and tattered housecoats, each alone, scattered through the nave, and yet that morning their thin muffled voices held so near to the note and so exactly to those rising and falling rhythms I knew by heart that joining in with them was like letting someone else do my breathing for a while. I had not felt so close to anyone in ages.

Ahead of me the devout prepared their conscience to make a good confession. Bowed heads, closed eyes, and those tough hands, squared off, blunted by the life they’d handled, now folded and resting together. I was calm, breathing deeply, but when I closed my eyes to make a tally of my own venial sins, I could track only random images. There was a day in Brooklyn Heights, along the promenade, when I watched a baby, crawling in diapers, pick a cigarette butt off the ground and eat it. I wasn’t sure what to do, I lived at such a distance from others and from myself. I walked away. Or there was the day I found myself standing on a bridge over a slough of crud, watching two kids toss rocks at the carcass of a dog as the tide slowly dragged it away. I didn’t know where I was, but later I would describe it to people and everyone guessed I was down in a place they called the Gowanus Gulch. I know this is my essay, but does such a place even exist? In the church I watched the women come and go through the confessional and then walk to the altar and kneel and cross themselves and do their penance but when it was my time, I left, not because I was without sin but because I had lost the habit of truth. All I had was this story of walking around, of going nowhere, and I would not know where to begin. Someone else would have to tell me.