A story about a loser trying to get back in the game, inspired by my friend’s beautiful red-haired daughter, seventeen, who was sensing her peers edging ahead of her, getting good grades and cool summer jobs and hunky boyfriends, meanwhile a twerp beat her out for class president and she was horrified by a rash of pimples, so one night at supper her father tried to buck her up and tell her that life is not about racking up points, while the girl ignored him, her face in a book, as he murmured something about the virtue of self-awareness, whereupon she looked up from her book and asked, apropos of nothing at all, “Is fellatio considered a normal sexual practice?” and her poor father almost coughed up his meatballs. It was her way of declining his sympathy by firing a warning shot into the air. I was there. I was impressed.
I remember exactly when the marriage took an odd turn. I was on the examining table with my shorts around my ankles and my tail up in the air and Dr. Miller surveying my colon through a cold steel periscope and making hmmmm sounds, his ballpoint pen scratching on a notepad, and at this delicate moment, he said, softly, “Do I strike you as a selfish person?”
“No . . . why?” I asked. The periscope felt like it was about six feet up me and I’m only five foot eight.
“I took a personal-inventory test in that book about getting ahead that everybody’s reading—you know, the book that I heard you’re related to the author of,” he said. According to the test, he said, he was rather selfish.
I groaned, feeling the excavation of the Holland Tunnel within me, but of course I knew which book he meant. My dumbbell brother-in-law Dave’s book, that’s which one.
He told me Dave’s book had meant a lot to him. “I never buy books other than science fiction,” he confided, “but my partner, Jamie, gave it to me for my birthday and I opened it up and I couldn’t put the rascal down. Heck of a book.” Meanwhile, the periscope was way up there in my hinder, probing parts of me I had been unaware of until now. “He says that what holds us back is fear, and that fear is selfish, and that getting ahead is a problem of getting outside yourself,” and he gave the periscope a little nudge for emphasis. “You have to really focus on a goal outside yourself in order to succeed. My goal is to open a restaurant. Jamie’s a wonderful cook. Chinese and Mexican, what do you think?”
I felt sore afterward. I went home and told Julie that a person as dim as my proctologist was exactly who Dave’s book was aimed at, one ream job deserves another, and so forth. I was steamed.
She said, “You’ve always resented my brother, Danny, and you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because your life is in Park and the key isn’t even in the ignition. You’re all about negativity, Danny. You stopped growing twenty-six years ago. And how would I know? Because I’m your wife, that’s how I know.”
• • •
Twenty-six years ago I graduated from the University of Minnesota journalism school with honors, the editor of the Minnesota Daily, and got a job as a professional copywriter at a Minneapolis ad agency. Dave Grebe was a clerk in his dad’s stationery store, peddling birthday cards, and he and I played basketball on a Lutheran church team; that’s how I met his sister Julie; she picked him up after the game because he’d lost his driver’s license for drunk driving. He was twenty, big, and porky and none too bright, just like now. “I’d sure like to get the heck out of stationery, I hate the smell of it, mucilage especially, and the damn perfume, it’s like someone vomited after eating fruit,” Dave remarked to me once.
So I was not too surprised when, one fine day, Dave walked away from his job and shaved his head clean and moved to a commune in south Minneapolis, living with sixteen other disciples of the Serene Master Diego Tua, putting on the sandals of humility and the pale-green robe of constant renewal. “I have left your world, Danny,” he told me on the phone.
Julie, who had become my wife, thought that Dave “just needed to get away for a while.” I pointed out to her that the Tuans were fanatics who roamed the airport jingling bells and droning and whanging on drums, collecting money to support their master and his many wives and concubines. The Tuans believed that they possessed the immaculate secrets of the infinite universe and everyone else was vermin.
Julie thought they were Buddhists of some sort.
“They could be Buddhists or nudists or used-car salesmen who like to dress up in gowns, but whatever they are, they’re working your brother like a puppet on a string.”
She thought that Dave was only following his conscience and exploring life beyond stationery. Subject closed. So I did double duty for a few years—was a copywriter and kept the Grebe stationery store going—and Dave went around droning and whanging and announcing that he possessed the true light and making a holy nuisance of himself.
“We are God’s roadblocks,” said the Happy Master, Diego himself, “warning the people that the bridge ahead has fallen into the river of uncaring.” His real name was Tim U. Apthed; he chose the name Diego, Die-ego, and crunched his initials into a surname, and founded a church for jerks. My agency, Curry, Cosset, Dorn, flew me to Atlanta or Boston or Chicago occasionally, and I’d come running through the Minneapolis–St. Paul terminal to catch a plane and hear the drums and bells and there were the Tuans in the middle of the concourse, holding up their signs, “YOUR LIFE IS A LIE,” and chanting, “Only two ways, one false, one true. Only one life, which way are you? Back! back! turn away from your lies! And God will give you a beautiful surprise!” and I had to squeeze through the crowd of shaven-headed men in sandals and robes, including my blissful idiot brother-in-law, and get on board the plane. It was like Run, Sheep, Run.
“Well, when he talks about people being so materialistic, I think he has a good point,” said Julie. Who loves her kitchen, her eight-burner range, her big stainless-steel fridge with the glass door, her copper skillets, her king-size bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, et cetera, et cetera.
Then, fifteen years ago, Mr. Grebe died of a cerebral hemorrhage—clapped his hand to his forehead one morning and said, “Oh mercy. Call Ann and tell her I’ll be late,” and fell over dead onto the mechanical pencils. The rest of us were living in the rollerball era, but Mr. Grebe never gave up on mechanical pencils, or on carbon paper, or the mimeograph, despite the advent of photocopying. The family was devastated at the loss of this vacuous and bewildered man. They mourned for weeks, during which I was the bulwark, arranging the funeral, paying the bills, ordering stock for the store, hiring part-time help, and Dave sat in a corner weeping and chanting. They never found out who Ann was.
Dave left the Tuans and let his hair grow out and went back to work at the Wm. Grebe Stationery Shop. Every few days he’d call up and say, “I don’t know how I can ever make it up to everyone for the embarrassment I have been. I was a dope and I don’t deserve forgiveness. I ought to change my name and join the merchant marine and never come back.”
You get tired of remorse when it becomes a broken record. Dave kept saying, “You’ve been so great, Danny, and I’ve been a big zero. I don’t know why God lets me live.” After a few months of it, I told him that I didn’t know either but that he could take his guilt and put it where the moon don’t shine. He reported this to Julie. She canceled our vacation trip to the Bahamas out of sheer spite. “I can never forgive you for saying that to my brother,” she said, and she was right, she couldn’t.
Meanwhile, Dave, who once had renounced material things, took over Wm. Grebe, stocked it with rollerballs and home copiers and iPads and iDoodads, and expanded into malls and branched out into discount bookselling, got rich in about three years, and became one smooth guy: bought a Hasselblad camera, Finnish furniture, a 1927 Martin guitar, four Harleys, a Peterbilt truck, an original Monet (Girl with Light Hair), and next thing I knew he was going around giving pep talks to basketball arenas full of shiny-faced men, and then, he wrote his book about getting ahead, Never Buy a Bottle of Rat Poison That Comes with Gift Coupons. It sold more copies than there are rats in New York. He turned Tuanism inside out and restated it in capitalist terms, and made low cash flow seem like a denial of God’s love.
On the same day that an interview with Dave appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, I got canned at the ad agency. Twenty-five years I had labored at Curry, Cosset, Dorn, and on Monday morning, as I sharpened my pencils, a twenty-nine-year-old yahoo with a red bow tie leaned over the wall of my work cubicle and said, “The folks at Chippy called and cut back on the campaign, Danny. I’m going to have to let you go for a while.”
“Are you sure?” That’s all I could think to say. A quarter-century with the company—“Are you sure?” He was sure.
I crawled home, bleeding, and Julie was glued to the TV, watching Dave talk about the irrelevance of suffering. It was a videotape, not a live appearance, but even so, she did not turn it off when she heard my tragic news. She said, “That’s too bad,” and then, “I’m proud of him. This is so cool, it’s one of his new videotapes. He’s going to put out twelve of them. He just seems to touch a chord in people, don’t you think? People can’t help but respond to him. It’s a natural gift.” She recommended that I study Rat Poison to give me the confidence to find a new job and wait for his next book, How to Find Your Rear End Without Using Both Hands.
“Your brother,” I said, “is one of the world’s biggest B.S.-ers.”
This was when Julie decided that we needed to face up to my problems. “You are a dark cloud in my life, Danny. A small dark cloud,” she said.
I don’t know what she meant by that. I’m a happy guy who loves life, it’s just that I have a moony face. A guy can’t help it that his face won’t light up. Inside, I’m like a kid with a new puppy. Though being flushed down the toilet while your brother-in-law is getting rich certainly puts a crimp in a guy’s hose. Dave was hot. I was dead. For twenty-five years, I had been a happy guy who created dancing ketchup commercials, who made high-fiber bran flakes witty, who wrote those coffee commercials in which the husband and wife share a golden moment over a cup of java. I brought lucid emotion to capitalism, and Dave brought gibberish, and he walked off with the prize.
The next day, Julie told me that Dave thought that she and I should go away and be alone and he’d given her fifteen thousand dollars so we could charter a fifty-foot schooner for a two-week cruise off Antigua, where we could try to put the marriage back together.
“Fifteen thousand dollars would come in handy in other ways than blowing it on a vacation,” I pointed out. “We could invest it. I’m unemployed, you know.”
“Aren’t you willing to invest in our marriage?” she said.
“We could buy a boat for that kind of money and sail on the Mississippi every weekend.”
She said that fifteen thousand wasn’t enough to pay her to get into a boat with me at the tiller.
“Remember the time we drifted powerless down the river because you put oil in the gas tank? Remember how you tried to rig up an overcoat on an oar to make a sail? Remember how we drifted toward that oncoming coal barge and stood and waved our arms and cried out in our pitiful voices?”
Ten years had not dimmed her memory of that one bad afternoon.
So off we flew to Antigua.
• • •
We flew first-class, in those wide upholstered seats, where everything is sparkly and fresh and lemony and candles flicker on the serving cart. A painful reminder of how cheery life can be for the very rich. People like my brother-in-law. The flight attendants wore gold-paisley sarongs slit up the side and pink-passion lipstick, they were Barnard graduates (cum laude) in humanities, and they set a vase of fresh roses on my table, along with the ceviche and salmon loaf and crab puffs with Mornay sauce, and they leaned over me, their perfect college-educated breasts hanging prettily in place, and they whispered, “You’ve got a nice butt. You ever read Kant?” They only flirted with me because I was holding a first-class ticket, they wouldn’t have given me the time of day back in economy class; I wanted to say, “I’m forty-seven, I’m broke, ashamed, in pain, on the verge of divorce, and sponging off a despised relative. I’ve hit bottom, babes. Go away unless you want to see a has-been burst into tears.”
• • •
We stayed one night at Jumby Bay, dropping a bundle of Dave’s dough, and headed off by cab to the Lucky Lovers Marina, and there, at the end of the dock, lay the Susy Q. I put my arm around Julie, who was shivering despite the bright sunshine and eighty-five degrees. She did not seem to welcome my arm so I removed it.
“Is that a schooner or a ketch?” I said.
“It’s a yawl,” she replied. It was hard not to notice the frayed rigging and rusted hardware, the oil slick around the stern, the sail in a big heap on deck, and what appeared to be sneaker tread marks along the side of the hull. Evidently the boat had capsized at one point and the crew had to evacuate—even worse was the fact that nobody had scrubbed the marks off. But we had put down a deposit of fifteen hundred bucks already, so we banished doubt from our minds and tried to be hopeful.
“Hello! Anybody below?” I hollered. There was a muffled yo, and a beautiful young man poked up his head from the cockpit and smiled. His golden curls framed his Grecian godlike face, his deep tan set off by a green T-shirt that said, “Life Is a Series of Beginnings.” He was Rusty, our captain, he said. “I was just making your bed downstairs. Come on down. Your room’s up front!”
This struck me as odd, that he said downstairs instead of belowdecks, and I mentioned this to Julie as we stowed our bags in the cabin. “How can you get upset about poor word choice when our marriage is petering out and there is so little real love between us?” she asked.
The Susy Q cleared port and sailed west toward Sansevar Trist, and she and I sat below discussing our marriage, which I have always believed is not a good idea, certainly not for Julie and me. My experience tells me that we should shoot eight ball, sit in a hot tub, go to the zoo, rake the lawn, spread warm oil on each other’s bodies, do anything but talk about our marriage, but she is a fan of those articles like “How Lousy Is Your Marriage: A 10-Minute Quiz That Could Help You Improve It,” and of course the first question is, “Are you and your husband able to sit down and discuss your differences calmly and reasonably?” No! Of course not! Are you kidding? Who discusses these things without raising their voice and becoming very emphatic? Name one person! So she launched into a reasonable discussion of differences and how she needs engagement and I am basically a narcissist, and two minutes later we’re hissing and slamming our fists on the table and striding to the other end of the room and saying things like “I can’t believe this!” and “Where do you get this hogwash?” We simply are unable to discuss our marriage—does that make us terrible people? Our marriage is like the Electoral College: it works okay if you don’t think about it.
“Truth time. Do you love me?” Julie asked as the boat rocked in the swell, Rusty thumping around on deck overhead, dragging something.
“How do you mean that?”
“I mean, is it worth it to try to stay together? Marriages have their rough passages. It’s only worth it if there’s love. If there isn’t, why waste time trying to patch this up.”
“Do you love me?”
“I asked first.”
“How come I’m the one who has to say if I love you or not? Why is it always up to me?”
There was a loud crash above, like a tree falling, and Rusty let out a cry, “Oh shoot!” I poked my head up out of the hatch. “It’s the steering thing,” he said. The tiller had broken off and was now bobbing in our wake. I told him to lash an oar in its place and come around and retrieve the tiller, and I ducked back down into the cabin. Julie was sitting on the bunk, her back to the bulkhead, her trim brown legs drawn up.
“I better go up and help Rusty,” I said.
“You can’t run away, Danny,” she said. “It’s a simple question. Do you love me or not? What’s so complicated about that?”
I flopped down on the bed. “Why can’t we converse about this in a calm friendly way instead of beating ourselves up over every little thing—”
“A little thing,” she said. “Our love. A little thing. Oh right. Sure. Great way to start off a vacation. Our love, a little thing.”
There was a loud cra-a-a-ack above and a muffled splash. I stuck my head up. The sail was gone, and the mast. “I was gonna turn right and the whole thing broke and fell off,” he said, shaking his head. “Boy, I never saw anything like that! Whole sail just fell off!” He shrugged and grinned, like he’d just burned the toast. “Oh well, we still got a motor.” I told him to come about and retrieve the sail and mast and then head for port.
I told Julie that we had serious problems above and maybe we should postpone our talk. She said we had been postponing it for twenty years.
I was about to tell her how full of balloon juice she was, and then I heard the motor turn over, a dry raspy sound, like gravel going down a chute, and I got the impression that Rusty had neglected to gas up and that the Susy Q was not going anywhere. Still, it wasn’t as aggravating as Miss Priss there, sitting and telling me about my marriage.
“Dave recommended a great book to me and it opened my eyes. The Silent Chrysalis. I read it twice. Danny, in some way my love for you is a symptom of my denial of myself, an attempt to make myself invisible.”
The starter cranked over once and wheezed and coughed a deep dry cough.
Julie’s eyes locked with mine. “We need to change that love from something angry and selfish to a mature giving love,” she said. “I can’t use you as an instrument of my self-hatred.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Dave thinks you’re trapped in narcissism, like a lot of guys. You just honestly are incapable of thinking outside the box that you are in.”
How does a stationery-store clerk suddenly become an expert on the human heart? I wondered, but then Rusty’s face appeared in the hatch, his boyish confidence gone, a little taut around the eyes. “We may have to ditch the boat in a minute, you guys. We’re coming real close to the reef, I think. The water looks sort of bubbly out there.”
Julie grabbed my arm when I got up to go topside. “You’re not going to just walk away from this one, Danny. You’re going to face up to what’s wrong, which is your selfishness. Your selfishness is a fact, Danny. Let’s stop denying it. Let’s deal with it.”
Rusty’s voice was hoarse. “Come on, folks. No time for yik-yak. Gotta go.”
I poked my head up. The Great Navigator had a horrified expression on his face, and his chin was aquiver. He wore an orange life jacket. “Want me to take the helm?” I asked.
“No helm left to take, and there’s big jagged rocks up ahead, folks, so if you see a cushion, better grab on to it. This is not a test.”
There was a distant roar of waves that was not as distant as before.
I ducked down and told Julie we were about to abandon ship. “If you can’t deal with the truth, Danny, then I can’t be married to you,” said Julie, softly. “I don’t want a marriage based on a lie.”
I was just about to tell her that she wouldn’t have that problem much longer, when there was a jagged ripping tearing crunching sound from just below our feet, and the boat lurched to a dead stop. Water began boiling up from below. I grabbed Julie and hoisted her through the hatch, grabbed a carry-on bag and a couple cushions, and took Julie by the hand, and we jumped into the water. Rusty was already on shore, waving to us. It was shallow, all right; the water frothed around our hips as we crossed the jagged coral, but we managed to wade in to shore, a beautiful white sandy beach that curved around and around a very pretty island—uninhabited, we soon discovered. “Well,” said Rusty, “looks like you guys may get a little more than two weeks. Nice place, too.” And he glanced down at Julie. Her T-shirt was wet from the surf, and her breasts shone through. He looked at her a little longer than a hired man ought to, I thought.
We made a hut from palm fronds and the jib sail. Julie had rescued her purse and suntan oil and four books about marriage and communication, and I had dragged in our suitcase and a bottle of Campari, and Rusty had salvaged the oregano, sweet basil, rosemary, chives, coriander, cayenne pepper, paprika, orange zest, nutmeg, cinnamon, pine nuts, bay leaf, marjoram, tarragon, caraway, and saffron.
“The boat sinks and you rescue the spice rack?” I cried. “You’re the captain and your boat goes down and you come ashore with the spice rack?”
Rusty looked at Julie. “Just because we’re marooned on an island doesn’t mean the food has to be bland and tasteless,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s no dumber than bringing a bottle of Campari. You don’t like Campari,” she said. “You only like beer.” I didn’t explain that Campari is useful as a bug repellant; I read that somewhere.
And an hour later, Julie had made beds out of pine boughs and Rusty had carved a salad bowl from a stump and tossed a salad in it—”Just some ferns and breadfruit and hearts of palm,” he said. He had also baked a kelp casserole over an open fire. Julie thought it was the best salad in salad history. Actually, it was okay. “And this casserole!” she cried. “I have never tasted kelp that tasted like this kelp tastes. What’s the secret?”
“Paprika,” he said.
Julie couldn’t get over it. She said, “Danny couldn’t boil an egg if you held a pistol to his head. I kept offering to teach him the rudiments of cooking, but he never wanted to learn.”
It was hard not to notice that she was talking about me in the past tense.
“No, Danny couldn’t have made a salad like this in a million years. Are you kidding? Not him,” she chortled. “No, no, no, no, no.”
We sat under the palm tree as the sun went down, and Julie and Rusty talked about the American novel, how they didn’t care for John Updike, who had never written strong women characters and was hung up on male menopause and had no ear for dialogue.
“No ear for dialogue?” I cried.
“No ear for dialogue,” she said.
“John Updike? No ear for dialogue? Are you kidding me? Updike? That’s what you said, right? Updike? His dialogue? No ear?”
“He has none,” she said.
“None. Updike.”
“Right.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “You’re sitting here under this palm tree and saying that John Updike—the John Updike, who wrote the Rabbit books—that he has no ear for dialogue? Tell me something. If John Updike has no ear for dialogue, then who do you think does have an ear for dialogue?”
Rusty looked at Julie. “Maya Angelou. Alice Walker. Doris Lessing,” he said.
“Doris Lessing,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Doris Lessing.”
“Pardon me if I should lose my kelp,” I said. I stood up. “You know, I must be going deaf, but I could swear you just said Doris Lessing. Or did you say Arthur Schlesinger?” I kicked a little dirt toward Rusty.
“I said, Doris Lessing,” he said.
It was the first of many discussions where I was in the minority. One morning, over a dried-seaweed breakfast, Julie said she thought there is such a thing as a “masculine matrix” and that it is basically controlling and violent. Rusty agreed. “But some of us are working to change that,” he said. Julie felt that men are inherently competitive, i.e., linear, hierarchical, and women are circular, i.e., radiant. “I think you have a good point,” said Rusty. Julie and Rusty started meditating together every morning, sitting on the beach facing east. “Hey, mind if I sit in?” I said cheerfully.
Julie squinted up at me. “I think you’d block the unity of the experience,” she said.
Rusty nodded.
“Well, far be it from me to block anyone’s unity,” I said, and walked away.
That night, Julie and Rusty were cooking a bark soup and she looked up at me and said, “Rusty is such an inspiration. I’m glad this happened, this shipwreck. Out of this wreck, something wonderful is coming.”
I grabbed her arm. “This numbskull who ran the boat onto the rock is an inspiration?”
Rusty confronted me later that night, after Julie went to sleep. “I’ve decided to take Julie away from you,” he said. “You two do nothing but fight, and she’s obviously attracted to me, so if she and I paired up, at least there’d be two happy people on this island. It makes more sense that way. Two out of three isn’t bad. So why don’t you go and sleep in the jungle someplace. This tent is for Julie and me.”
I said, “Okay, you’re right,” and I turned and bent down and picked up my Campari bottle and then whirled and swung it straight up into his nuts and he staggered back and I threw a handful of dirt in his eyes. He bent down, blinded, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the gut, and he went whooomph, like a needle sliding across an LP record, and down he went, and I picked him up and threw him over the cliff and into the ocean and suddenly the water was whipped to a froth by thousands of tiny carnivorous fish and the frenzy went on for a half a minute and subsided and whatever was left of Rusty sank bubbling to the bottom.
It wasn’t the Zen way but it got the job done.
Julie was distraught in the morning. She dashed around the island screaming his name. “What have you done to him, Danny?” she shrieked.
“He got high looking at the Milky Way and he fell into the water and the fish ate him,” I said.
“You killed him!”
“Nothing ever dies. He is at one with the fish.”
Two weeks later, when the big cruise ship saw us and anchored a half mile to leeward and sent in a launch to take us off, Julie had calmed down and was almost ready to talk to me again. I could tell. I yelled up to her where she sat on the ledge of the rocky promontory, “You know something? I think the secret of marriage is that you can’t change the person you love. You have to love that person the way he or she is. Well, here I am!”
“You didn’t think of that, you got that out of a book,” she called back. It was the first time she’d spoken to me in two weeks.
A man in officer whites with big tufts of hair on his chest was on the launch. He said, “You the couple who went down with the Susy Q? Where’s the captain?”
“He drowned,” I said. Julie said nothing. She still has said nothing about Rusty to me at all, and nothing about our marriage, but we have had sex more often than any time since we were twenty-four. It has been nice. I definitely think there is a vital connection between anger and an exciting sex life.
When we got back to the States, I saw a newspaper in the Newark airport with a picture of Dave on the front page glowering at the photographer and trying to stiff-arm him. He had been arrested for fondling a couple of young women in his swimming pool at his birthday party and was charged with six counts of sexual assault. I chuckled, but it was a low chuckle, and Julie didn’t hear it. We were back two days and a publisher offered me $50,000 for a book about our “desert-island” experience. “Nah,” I said, “nothing happened. Worst part was having to go around in a wet bathing suit.” Since returning, I have done little except be a help and a support to Dave and Julie and the whole Grebe family. I have been a monster of sympathy and understanding. I have been there for them every moment in their terrible suffering. Dave sat weeping in our kitchen and told us, “I’ve been under so much stress, and it was like it was somebody else tugging on those girls’ thongs, and I was only watching.” I said, “Don’t feel you have to talk about it.” He told me that he didn’t know what he would do without me and thanked me for the strength I gave him in this awful time. “It’s my pleasure,” I said sincerely. I suppose he will write a book about this. I don’t care. Heaving Rusty into the sea has given me an enormous sense of peace. I suppose it was a transformative experience for him, too. Death is the ultimate reality check. His death at my hands has leached away all my anger and I am devoted to Julie in a way I never could be before. She wants to return to our island and erect a stone cairn in Rusty’s memory and maybe take Dave with us. I am all in favor of it. I can’t wait. We never did learn Rusty’s real name—the owner of the Susy Q had vanished—but in whatever plane of existence Rusty is experiencing now, names don’t count for much, and we feel there is a universality about a cairn with no name on it. Both Julie and I do.