“IT’S HALF THE SIZE OF the place we moved from,” Arthur said, opening and closing doors around the apartment, as if to show just how small.
“And where was that again?”
“Jamaica Queens. For the school district. Metal detectors were the final straw for Penelope. Will put up a fight against the move, but not much of one. I think he’s thrilled, secretly, but doesn’t want to show it. Maybe he feels his happiness would be a retroactive condemnation of his old friends—or of us. Who knows? Yesterday we went to a parent-teacher conference at the new place. ‘Magnet school,’ quote-unquote, that’s what they call it—I suppose, because the parents cling to the place for dear life. All of us in this meeting, parents and teachers and administrators, could barely contain our gratitude for one another. The handshaking never stopped.”
It might seem like I’m pulling a bit of authorial misdirection here for the sake of narrative suspense by not immediately recognizing Arthur Morel. From the moment he said my name, the moment he took my hand. How could it be otherwise? He’d have been unforgettable! It’s true. He was unforgettable. I was haunted by that act of his for some time afterward, all the more so for our passionate talk those weeks prior, which seemed to have provoked him into it somehow, and in this way made me feel complicit. In fact, his performance was so powerful, so seared into my memory, that my brain refused to reconcile this man—proud wallet snapshot of wife and child, breezing through his new two bedroom in Herald Square like some sunny realtor—with that brilliant but obviously troubled boy I had known those years ago. Even as we toured the apartment, I trailed in utter disbelief at the seemingly ordinary family man he’d since become.
Arthur opened a bedroom door. The apartment layout was similar to the editor’s apartment down the hall. But there, this room housed the editing equipment. Here it housed Arthur’s kid. There was something familiar—not just in the structural echo of the space I spent my day, but in the spiritual echo of the one in which I spent my childhood. It was an only child’s room. Where unfashionable interests were allowed to flourish, safe from the withering glare of sibling disapproval. Outgrown toys, unembarrassed to be sitting next to current ones: Spawn action figures and a stuffed Barney doll sharing floorspace with a Super Soaker and a glittery pair of silver shoes. Above the bed was a poster of a blurry flying saucer with the caption THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. Looking around I see other X-Files memorabilia: trading cards and comic books and bedding. Arthur: in charge of another human being—with his own room and a preference for campy television. Amazing! Maybe the shock had as much to do with me: it meant that I was an adult, when most days I still felt more like the occupant of this room.
I was led down a short corridor, past several framed photos and a wicker hamper. “Bathroom,” he said, pointing to a door opposite the hamper, “and this one is ours.” There was no room like this at the editor’s apartment. We didn’t dwell, but from what I saw, it struck me as consistent with their adultness. Matching furniture, scathed from the recent move—veneers chipped, drawer faces crooked—gauzy curtains, a side table with a clock radio and a little dish for spare change.
We ended our tour out on the patio. Here a few unopened boxes remained.
I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t think of homeschooling Will.”
“These days they call it unschooling. For one, there was just way too much paperwork involved. Lesson plans, certificates in postgraduate pedagogy. And for another, I’m against it. Penelope pushed for a while, using me as some kind of rhetorical point. ‘Look how you turned out,’ she says. I keep telling her that I barely made it out alive. She thinks I’m kidding! You get the control, as a parent, but at the cost of social isolation. It’s a lonely enough business not having siblings. I didn’t want to make it worse by denying him nine-to-five camaraderie or the opportunity to get away from his parents for several hours a day.”
“Camaraderie? From what I remember, it was mostly keeping your head down so you didn’t get the shit beat out of you. When the chips were down, your ‘comrades’ ran the other way. Not that anyone would blame them—or you. And I’m not talking Bed-Stuy here. This was down on Grove Street, in the heart of lovely Greenwich Village!”
“Well, you can tell Penelope all about it.”
Arthur stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the rooftops.
I said, “I bought your book.”
“Oh no.” He turned. “Well?”
“I went into the bookstore right after we ran into each other, and it’s been sitting in my bookshelf ever since, wedged between Sartre and Henry Miller.”
“Good company.”
“Other books I haven’t read.”
“It’s a strange experience,” Arthur said, “writing a book. For months you’re inside of it, this piece of mental architecture, and it seems to be very important, the most important thing in the world, in fact—every living thought you have comes filtered through the windows of this place. And then it’s finished, you step outside it, back into the world. It becomes public property. You walk past it occasionally and think, What was so important about this place? Well, maybe you can let me know once you’ve read it.” The spiel sounded disingenuous somehow, as though he had said this very thing before in an interview on NPR.
Okay, I was jealous. It used to be that I was in awe of others’ success; not these days. I was too impatient for it myself. Here’s the truth: I had started reading the book (how could I not?), but put it down almost immediately. It was just too good. The way it drew you in from the first paragraph with a tidal force. Each page layered with everyday objects refracted to appear startling and fresh, each observation a reminder of how much in life went by unobserved. Each sentence a jewel, not a preposition out of place. It wasn’t fair that the guy who was the musical prodigy also got to be the guy who could write this well.
I said, “So what happened to you that night?”
“That night.”
“Of the Spring Concert! One day we’re having a—what seemed to me—purely theoretical discussion about cadenzas, and the next you’ve got your pants around your ankles in front of hundreds of parents!”
Arthur sighed like he was relieved to have someone finally, after fourteen long years, ask him about this. “Well,” he said. He gazed at me for a while as though only now taking in who I was, as though my question had prompted his memory of where he knew me from, and not the other way around.
“I remember feeling just—tremendous afterward, just afterward, even as I could feel people’s shock coming at me. I couldn’t really see anything, you can never see anything up there because of the stage lights, but that sense that something, something big, had just happened, and that I had caused it to happen, was palpable. It was an amazing feeling. But then it occurred to me I didn’t have an exit planned. I may have doubted that I could pull it off, so to speak, so I never visualized an after. I remember the need to solve the immediate problems. I had my own feces all over me, and I had to find a place to wash up. I pulled up my pants and just traced my way back down the aisle between the first and second violins, the way I’d come. I went back to the dressing room, used the little water closet there to clean up as best I could. And then I went about the ordinary business of putting my violin away. I took my time, loosened the bow, secured it in place inside the case’s lid, used my cloth to wipe the rosin from under the bridge, and set my violin inside, closed it up, snapped the latches, and when I looked up there was what’s his name.” Arthur pauses, frowning. “Odd. What was his name?”
“The conductor?”
“He was out of breath, forming any number of questions on his lips, none of them coming, and I could hear the slow stampede of the orchestra breaking up, making its way backstage. He finally asked the exact question you just asked: What happened to you? I could tell he was at a loss for how to handle me. His usual method of insults and browbeating didn’t seem quite appropriate here because perhaps he wasn’t sure whether I was entirely sane. Had I had some kind of episode? A mental break? He just sort of stood there—I don’t know if he was really expecting me to answer but seemed braced for me to do some other savage and unfathomable thing. I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking. I was doing.’ Which really must have meant something to me then because saying it felt so true, a paired act to what I had just done onstage. I would recall my saying those words to him afterward and feel, yes—I had just explained something essential about an essential and courageous act. And then, after a while, I would recall the words, recall that I had once felt a certain way, recall that they were meant to explain something, but could no longer remember what. It’s like what I was saying just now about the book. Time sets you apart from your work, your utterance, separates you from it. Some metaphor about birth would be appropriate here. Umbilical cords, et cetera.”
“But what did you do then? After that night you disappeared. What happened to you?”
Arthur tugged at his tie to loosen it and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. He sat down on a stack of boxes that sagged under his weight. “I lost my scholarship. My violin teacher dropped me from his studio. I wasn’t officially expelled but might as well have been. There was no way I could have paid the full tuition, and even if I could have, after that who’d have taken me?”
I shook my head. “Why did you do it? Arthur, you lost everything. And for what?”
“I could say I did it because I wanted to do something that would be unforgettable to an audience. But then you would point out that any number of acts perpetrated on a stage might be unforgettable, though they—like the one I did perform—would none of them be music, and we’d have circled back to where we began, lo those many years ago: what is music, what is its purpose.”
A nonanswer. Intellectualizing away an act that was so self-destructive, so against our basic nature as social beings. If my cousin’s kids were any indication, pooping becomes a private activity fairly early on, its smells and noises associated with shame—by five or six the very muscles and nerve impulses required will refuse to cooperate if others are watching. So why could Arthur? Why did Arthur? These questions were not answered by his ontological ruminations.
I was going to press further, but Arthur’s attention became diverted—I followed his line of sight back into the apartment. His wife had suddenly appeared and was setting a heavy bag of groceries down on the dining room table as his son, toting a bright orange gun, stalked the room shouting silently. From out here there were only the sounds of air conditioners and traffic. Arthur said, “Shall we continue this inside?”
He opened the sliding door in time for us to hear his son shout, “You’ll be lying in a pool of your own guts!”
“Not if I blow your brains out first,” Arthur’s wife said in a cutesy voice, sorting through the mail. She looked up and smiled at us. “Who’s ready for a drink?”
On my way to the diner the following week, I marshaled an argument against firing our editor, but Sri Lanka wasn’t in the mood. “This shoestring budget needs all the lacing it can get,” he said. “Is it my fault? Hell, yes, it’s my fault! But what am I going to do? I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to keep this guy around because you don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
Our eggs arrived, and we ate in silence. When the check came, he told me he’d forgotten his wallet. I paid with a twenty I’d swept up from one of the theater’s dark aisles the night before, which left it up to our editor to pay the delivery guy for the sushi we ordered for lunch.
We elected to shelve the Winnebago stunt in lieu of something simpler. It was a two-shot in a pickup truck between the young reform-school Hamlet and his yokel best friend Horatio, who is telling a story about some roadkill venison his father had once brought home to feed the family, to hilariously disastrous results. Punch line: Projectile vomiting! The scene had been done in one long shot with a car mount, the budget only allowing us a few hours with the thing—we had originally conceived and shot it in Horatio’s living room but decided when screening the dailies that it would be more dynamic if it were told while some action was taking place (the speech was long). It was squeezed into the reshoot schedule as an afterthought—a few hours, a predetermined side road, followed by cutaway footage of telephone poles and passing farmhouses. These shots would be used to cobble together the best moments from each of the half-dozen takes.
But even this fairly straightforward cutting-room task became, in the atmosphere of this place, an occasion for conflict. The editor wanted to do away with the cutaway footage, which he said was overexposed and blended poorly with the much-darker footage in the cab of the pickup, and instead intercut the earlier takes as shot in the living room with the later car-mounted stuff, which made for a rather edgy and stylized edit, one that Sri Lanka argued did not fit with the aesthetic.
“I don’t get it,” the editor said. “You keep saying to get creative with this thing, and here I get creative and you object.”
“Explain it to the man,” Sri Lanka said. I echoed back what Sri Lanka had already said, that while it worked on its own, it needed to blend with the other scenes.
Though Sri Lanka hadn’t given me any explicit order to fire our editor today, the subject hung heavy over me—each look he gave I took for a signal. It was clear that I had two choices here: go through with the firing or offer my resignation.
So when Sri Lanka excused himself to go to the deli for a late-afternoon soda, whether he meant it to be or not, I used the moment to do what I had to do. After I was sure we were alone, I said, “He wants me to fire you.”
We were facing each other, but I was looking down, rolling one of the brushed-steel coasters along the glass coffee table like a wheel.
“Fine by me,” he said. “I’ve been figuring on a way out here for a while.”
“For what we’re paying you, I’m sure it can’t be worth your time.”
“It’d be one thing if I really cared about this project—not that I have anything against your guy, but this thing already feels dated, and it’s not even finished!” He laughed. “Besides, he’s impossible to please. You see how he is. He has no idea what he wants. Is this for festivals or late-night cable? He wants the prestige of the one but the instant market of the other. I’ve seen it a dozen times with these first-time directors. They start out intending to make some groundbreaking piece of cinema, but now that the bills have come due, the money gone, they don’t have the courage to follow it through. It’s a shame—the script is good.”
Why did this hurt my feelings? He was just saying what I’d been thinking—plain truths—but it offended me to hear him say it. I let the coaster roll to the edge of the table and drop to the floor. “The script is the script,” I said. “The movie is the movie.”
“You should just start over.”
“That’s a helpful suggestion.” I got up. “I’ll be sure to pass it along.”
“Listen,” he said, but didn’t get to finish the thought because just then the power cut out. The blinking AV rack went dark, along with the three monitors. A new silence replaced the drone and whir of equipment-cooling fans. Suddenly traffic noise could be heard, the creaking of footsteps above us. The editor left the room and went to the front door.
I followed.
There were already several residents out, feeling their way along the walls, asking one another what was going on. It had been hot for days, unbearably so, with warnings from the city for people to ease up on their AC usage, but if my mother and this editor were any indication, the warnings had gone unheeded. The movie theater kept its cavernous spaces just a little warmer than bone chilling. Two years later, this same situation would have provoked a wild-eyed panic among the residents of this city, an assumption that we were once again under attack—but back then we made no such assumption. A citywide crisis like this was a time of fun, of mischief, and had a way of making that border we must erect for the sake of sanity in a city of nine million seem porous, somehow, allowing for a deep and satisfying sense of connectedness—an occasion to feel grateful for the human beings around you.
So in spite of our conversation just moments earlier, we were suddenly giddy. A crowd gathered by the red emergency light of the open stairwell. A slow line shuffled past, down the steps, clinging tight to the banister. Echoes rang up from below, traveling word-of-mouth reports from street level. In the hallway, the neighborly sharing of a cell phone, good-natured lamenting about melting ice cream and raw meat. “I’m supposed to have people over,” a woman said. “My husband’s on his way right now with people from work.” The rose glint of eye whites and teeth. Voices in the stairwell, the heavy chunk of a door opening and closing and with it the arrival of more residents, Sri Lanka among them. He found us.
“I heard it’s all of the city,” he said.
Another new arrival said, “On the radio they say it’s into Connecticut, New Jersey too, though a guy I just talked to said some blocks in Queens still have power.”
“There’s a grill up on the roof.”
“Why are people so fixated on spoiled food? Just keep your fridge closed, and it’ll be fine for at least forty-eight hours.”
While we were talking, a discussion had taken place between the woman with the imminent cocktail party and those with raw meat. A coalition was formed, a larger shindig. We were invited to join, to empty our freezers and meet up on the roof. I declined.
“Oh, come on,” Sri Lanka said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to the theater today. Projectors and popcorn machines run on electricity.”
“Unless they’re using alien technology.” From out of the darkness, Arthur’s son appeared, orange gun in hand. “Which most people think isn’t real.”
Sri Lanka said, “Most people are idiots and can’t believe the truth that’s right in front of their eyes.”
The boy said, “In a book I’m reading it says that Thomas Edison was an alien, which would mean that everything is alien technology. The lightbulb, the telephone, the compact-disc player. It’s not really a book-book—it’s more like a comic book.”
“What’s your name, little man?”
“I’m Will, even though I shouldn’t be telling you my name.”
“Is it a secret?”
“It isn’t a secret, it’s just you never know. That’s what Tyler’s mom says. You never know. But she needs to worry less about other people’s influence on Tyler and more about her own.”
Adjusting to the dimness, I saw that the hostess of the imminent cocktail party was Arthur’s wife, Penelope—at the moment handing Will several sloshing ziplock bags of marinated meat. She was short, not much taller than her son, with chopped black hair and a small upturned nose, through one nostril a silver loop that glinted orange. She had cherubic cheeks and full red lips. She was wearing jeans and a black tank top that exposed a sleeve of tattoos the length of her arm. “Hold them by the tops,” she said, “like this. Give me the gun, thank you very much. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead. I’ll meet you up there.”
Sri Lanka and I helped the editor empty his fridge of its beer and frozen dinners, and we felt our way back down the hall. On our way up to the roof, Sri Lanka riffed on the submarine, red-lit stairwell—its creative possibilities as an opening location for a low-budget short. “That’s what we need to shake things up,” he was saying to us. “Get back to basics. Just the three of us and a camcorder. Forget all that other crap. Cut it in camera.” He was squinting, framing with his fingers as we made our way upstairs.
The editor and I arched eyebrows at each other. A playful eye roll. A grin.
(How can I describe that feeling, jogging up the stairs after this wordless exchange—that welling up inside? It doesn’t come too often as I am a natural wallflower, closing off the petals of myself to people instinctively, a tendency that has become more pronounced the older I get. But as a child the feeling came to me quite often: the simple desire to be someone’s friend—and the simple hope that this someone felt the same way, too.)
A sign on the roof door read NO PUBLIC ACCESS!, yet the door was propped wide by a rusty beige folding chair. Gravel crunched underfoot and the tar floor beneath had a springiness that made it feel, with each step, like you were about to break through somebody’s ceiling. Clouds of grill smoke and the smell of charcoal and lighter fluid. The rising swell of horns from down below, a massive island-long traffic jam. There were no railings—it was just roof and thin air. A water tower loomed in the center of the space, an everywhere city thing rarely seen this close up—a giant homage to the water towers of New York. Already plenty of people were up here, looking out over the roof, bodies tense and rooted, marveling at the sight of a city without power, eerie even in the light of day.
I considered calling my ex-girlfriend, who still worried over me. An and I met during freshman orientation and immediately settled into a domestic bliss that lasted until the day we received our diplomas. After the breakup, she insisted on our continued acquaintance, checking in weekly. Our most-sought-after bassoonist at school, An had afterward gone abroad to study Byzantine frescoes; like so many others at conservatory, myself included, she had shed the habit of music upon graduation. But she had taken the high road, gunning for a master’s at the most prestigious institution that would have her. An was horrified to learn I had taken up the movies and was doing everything in her power to dissuade me. It was, she said, an aesthetic and intellectual ghetto.
“Aren’t you interested in art anymore? That quintet, oh! I could see it entering the repertoire.” She was referring to my senior thesis, and I knew An well enough to know her praise was meant only for rhetorical effect: she wasn’t pointing out how good a student composer I’d been but rather how little potential there was for me in film. I told her that I was having fun, which was more than I could say for the time spent in the practice room, sweating over that quintet.
“Fun,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Fun.”
Arthur arrived with his work colleagues, two men who looked like they might be twins. His wife greeted them, his son circling as Arthur droned on to his colleagues. I approached but was forced to wait alongside Arthur’s wife as he wrapped up his train of thought.
She gave me a sympathetic look, as did the twins, who seemed to be looking for a way out of this conversation. “It’s the fundamental mistake with the reader-oriented model,” Arthur was saying. “Just because a readership wants a certain kind of literature doesn’t mean it’s a literature that should be written—a literature that literature wants, so to speak. The reader model assumes the reader knows what’s best. But this just encourages fad chasing. And it reinforces existing tastes, which in turn ensures the same kinds of stories get written over and over. Readers can’t be trusted with that kind of responsibility.”
One of the men Arthur was with, upon closer inspection, was a woman. She had on the same outfit as her colleague—plaid short-sleeved shirt with jeans and Day-Glo sneakers. They both wore crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses. Penelope introduced us and, having just met them herself, messed up their names.
“I’m Leslie,” the man said, “and she’s Lucien.” It was unclear if they were related in any way other than their place of employment. Leslie toyed with the strap of his canvas tote like he was adjusting a seat belt.
Lucien said, “You can call me Lucy.”
I was looking to chat some more with Arthur, but he was already being pulled away by Will (“You’ve got to come look at this, trust me, it’s really cool”), leaving me alone with his work colleagues and his wife. I excused myself to find Sri Lanka and the editor, who were sitting in a folding-chair semicircle with a half-dozen others.
“Geography,” the editor said, “Entertainment, Literature, Science, or Sports and Leisure.” He was holding a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards.
“Entertainment,” someone across from him said.
“Make sure you’re rotating them.”
Sri Lanka, when I sat down, said, “So I’ve been on this website lately? And it’s given me some really good ideas for our next project. Why-Frame-the-Juice-Dot-Org.”
The editor read from the card in his hand. “Here’s your question. What actor played immigrant Latka Gravas on the television series Taxi?”
“There’s a theory circulating that the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were masterminded by Andy Kaufman to help O.J.’s flagging career.”
“Andy Kaufman!” someone said. “That’s his name.”
“That’s a wild coincidence,” I said.
Sri Lanka, deadpan, “There are no coincidences.”
“Anyway, isn’t he dead?”
“He faked his death, dude. Everybody knows that.” Then hushed, “Listen. Are you ready to head out?”
“We’re just settling in.”
“But these are adults. If you want to have fun, I know a couple of places we can go.” He took a pull on his beer and belched. “Plus I’m kind of hungry.”
“Why don’t you go ahead then,” I said. “I’m going to stay here awhile.”
Leslie and Lucy joined the circle.
“Okay, this one’s up for grabs,” the editor called. “Entertainment, of course: How many Rocky movies were made by 1990?”
“Who on earth would admit to knowing that,” said Lucy.
“Oh, here we go,” Leslie said. “Let’s hear it.”
“What,” Lucy said.
“It’s such familiar ground you’re covering. Generations of old people have been there before you, kvetching about what heathens we’ve all become.”
Sri Lanka said, “Five! That’s easy.”
I watched Penelope some yards away cuff a small brown paper bag and set it down on the ground. Will was helping. He held the bag steady while she filled it with dried beans from a large bin and set a small candle inside. Will lit it for her and then handed her another bag from the stack he was holding. By the time they were done, the place looked like a proper roof garden.
“I’m not going to apologize for having a problem with this, Leslie. I mean, am I really wrong?”
“Yes, you’re really wrong. Besides, aren’t poets of your generation supposed to have embraced pop culture?”
“Is there even such a thing anymore? Everything is pop. Fucking semiotics.”
Leslie turned to me and said, “Departmental politics. Not all that different from seventh grade, actually.”
“It’s the very thing that bothers me. Trivia. It’s what the age has reduced us to. World knowledge as nothing more than a set of browsable, meaningless facts.”
“Wine,” said the woman next to me, handing a bottle to Lucy. Lucy thanked her and took a Dixie cup from the stack on the ground. The woman, who had introduced herself as Marsha a few moments ago, said, “It’s a good point you make. Didn’t it used to be that only the people in power had knowledge? Keepers of special knowledge?”
“The Church,” Leslie said. “Who had it on good authority that there was a big hole in the South Pole where a race of giants lived.”
Arthur had come over and was standing just outside our semicircle. He said, “You’re thinking of Poe’s novel.”
“Based on a going theory of the time.”
“It used to be that knowledge was power,” Marsha said. “But now knowledge isn’t powerful. It’s—”
“Trivial,” Arthur said.
“Fine,” the editor said, “but can you answer me this: Do porcupines masturbate?”
“That’s not a question!”
“No?” I offered.
“Wrong. Guess again.”
“What’s the question?” This was the man next to Marsha.
“I’m Marsha,” she said to Sri Lanka. “And this is my husband, Greg.”
“Greg and Marsha?” Sri Lanka said. “Are you serious?”
“Except we’re not brother and sister.”
“Neither were your TV counterparts—they totally could have fucked.”
Arthur stood there for a while—large hands shifting from under his armpits to his pockets to his elbows—as he looked around for a way in. After some time, he took a cross-legged seat on the gravel. I became engaged in some lighthearted repartee with Greg and Marsha, then looked over again to see Arthur staring out blankly, the way one does when caught in an awkward social situation. The people on either side of him were involved in other conversations, leaving him alone in this now-boisterous group. Eventually, he got up, brushed at the bottoms of his chinos, and wandered off. I excused myself.
I caught up with him at the base of the immense water tower. We talked for some time there, wandering the labyrinth of an idea I kept losing the thread of. In my tipsiness, I didn’t really care, content enough to drink my beer and nod away as he pursued a train of thought. Then he said, “I’m not good at this.”
“Being with other people. I don’t know how to relax. To chat casually about the world. I do this, what I’ve been doing with you, which seems to alienate most people.”
“We can talk about the weather if you want.”
“Penelope is different. She thrives in these situations.” We regarded her as she stood by the grill some yards off with two others, gesturing wildly with a pair of barbecue tongs. The couple she was with held paper plates, onto which Penelope delivered two blackened pieces of chicken off the grill. She caught us looking and waved with the tongs.
“How did you two meet?”
“On a bus. If I think about that day, I can still smell it, the air inside that bus. That’s memory! The humid earth, the coffee, the cologne. It had been raining. Sometimes I wake up next to her, amazed. A wonderful thing, marriage is—no longer having to navigate the baffling bureaucracy of life alone. To have a partner. Someone who believes in you. Her belief is so strong. Sometimes I wonder if, without her, I’d exist at all.”
“How’d you manage it—if you’re so bad at small talk? She turned on by long tracts about the reader-driven model of literature?”
“I got her pregnant.”
“I like your technique. Effective. I’ll have to remember that. And being a father? As wonderful as marriage?”
“The boy’s a born artist—all children are, I suppose. But you get to see just how natural the impulse is to invent things out of thin air. His most recent project has been Tug, imaginary Rottweiler. Sublimating his desire for a dog through endless drawings of one. We are in the Tug period of Will’s artistic career. Pencil sketches, clay models, glazed tile. Opening a book I’d been reading the other day, I discovered a Tug on the bottom corner of every page: a flip book of Tug running through a meadow. Tug, because Rottweilers are ugly yet powerful—like tugboats. You’ll look through any of the sketch pads in Will’s room to find page upon page of family portraits, featuring Tug front and center. Tug is being willed into this family through sheer force of imagination. Isn’t that right, O Son of Mine?”
Will had been beam-balancing the waist-high railing around the water tower as we talked, giving us each a duck-duck-goose on the head every time he passed. He jumped down between us and said, “I’m over the whole dog thing. What I want now is a poltergeist forensic kit. It’s for discovering unexplained phenomena.”
Will brought us over to see some “suspicious evidence” he and some of the other tenants had found. As we walked off together, I thought of myself at Will’s age, ten or eleven, with my own father. I have vivid memories of our time together—the day we toured the island of Manhattan on the Circle Line, just the two of us, and the hours spent constructing an elaborate scale-model space station I’d gotten for Christmas, heads bowed together at the dining room table, passing a small tube of glue back and forth. Strangely, I don’t much recall playing with friends, although I must have; I spent most of my time at the local playground and at school with those my own age, but I have only the most generalized memories of these as places—sandbox, sprinklers, courtyard—not what I did there. Maybe it’s for their rarity that I remember those moments with my father. He was generous with the time he had for me—but there wasn’t much for him to be generous with. His professional life took so much of him—pedaling twice as hard against the lack of even a high school diploma—that I often found myself on the sidelines having just missed my chance to hold out that cup of water as he passed. At Will’s age, I yearned toward my father, found myself interested in whatever interested him—his favorite television show (Star Trek) became my favorite television show; his favorite author (Isaac Asimov) became my favorite author. This didn’t seem to be the case with Will, I noticed. He was his own man. In this rooftop investigation, Will was the lead detective—Arthur the staid partner with only two weeks left to retirement.
The problem was Arthur didn’t seem to know how to play along. Will, kneeling, picked up a handful of gravel wet with an iridescent sheen—I think it was hand soap—then let the gravel slip through his fingers, back onto the ground. He rubbed his index finger and thumb together, brought them up to his nose. He squinted up at Arthur and said, “This substance has no basis in the natural world. Let’s bag it, have our labs check it out.” And instead of telling his son that the technicians at the labs couldn’t be trusted or that he had no idea what he was getting himself into, that this conspiracy went all the way to the top, Arthur instead began a lecture about how even artificial products were technically part of the natural world because man himself was part of the natural world. And when Will countered that this particular stuff looked like it was of alien origin, Arthur tried arguing that aliens, though they might be from Mars, were themselves still “naturally” occurring, if one included the universe as part of nature.
As the last of the daylight faded, the votive bags shone more brightly. The gathering around the semicircle took on a campfire glow, which is to say it felt intimate—faces flickering in and out of view, everyone drawn into the radius of light—and yet at the same time it felt vast: the dark dancing shadows beyond each light’s small cone a suggestion of the great void above. I found myself standing with Penelope, both of us slurry with beer. Sri Lanka had described her as a MILF, and I guess she was, though she was our own age. She was curvy, and her playful green eyes complimented a high, singsongy voice. The arm-length tattoo was sexy, I had to admit; after she caught me staring, she held it out for inspection. “It’s a snake,” she said. The beast’s mouth was open around her wrist, its scales like chain mail. The illustration was made to look as though her limb was being devoured. “I got it so this would be less noticeable.” She touched three raised patches on the snake’s body each the size of an infant’s palm print and made of what looked like the pebbly skin of a nipple. I hazarded a feel. “The guy who did it is an artist. His ink work costs triple what anyone else on the East Coast charges. The dishwasher where I was working at the time had his back done to look like one of those old anatomy drawings, skin peeled to show the veins and muscle and all that?”
She spoke of Arthur’s mother and father, whom she described as “totally batshit.” She said that Arthur wisely steered clear of them. “They’re Manhattan fixtures. They live downtown in a loft and keep their front door open for anybody to walk in off the street. In fact they encourage it; they welcome everybody in. That place was a madhouse back in the day. Arthur tells me stories. Once, when he was maybe thirteen he was taken by a couple—they came in right off the street and Arthur wandered back to their Lower East Side apartment with them. And here’s the kicker: his parents? Didn’t even realize that he was gone—and he was gone for two days. Two days! Arthur laughs when he tells that particular one, so I don’t think anything too bad happened to him while he was away, but there are other stories he doesn’t laugh about. And a few he refuses to even talk about. I’ve dropped by their loft a few times but didn’t mention who I was. Kind of fun being undercover!”
“They’ve never met you?”
“They’ve never met me, never met Will. They don’t know he’s published a book—even though the bookstore around the corner has it in the window!”
“I’ve been meaning to read it.”
“Oh, you should. He’s brilliant. You read the crap from those people he teaches with, and it’s so clever you want to vomit. Art’s the only serious one of the bunch, definitely the only one those students should be taking advice from.”
“Said the wife about her husband.”
“It’s true, though! Those others?” She cocked a thumb at a clutch murmuring behind us. “They’re just trying to keep up with their careers. They spend as much time sleeping with each other at MacDowell and schmoozing with known members of grant committees as they do thinking about what they write. Art’s different. He could care less about career, about tenure—if he continues to teach, he’ll be an adjunct for the rest of his life, and I say fine. What, you’re surprised hear me say that?”
“You’re living in the city and raising a child. Health insurance and a steady paycheck? That doesn’t interest you?”
“You’re thinking about some other man, some other marriage. I knew what I was getting into when I picked Art. He’s barely employable. He thinks too much, takes too much to heart. But it’s also what I love about him. I figured out long ago that if we were going to be together, I would have to do the breadwinning, so to speak—” She told me earlier that she was the head baker at Balthazar. “It’s okay, though. I’d rather him be brilliant and happy than a miserable so-and-so. Better for me and better for Will.”
I didn’t have a bedside lamp—reading in bed was not a habit—and so I took the gooseneck from its perch on the piano’s music stand and clipped it onto the radiator’s knob by my bed. Pointing it at the wall gave me plenty of light to read by. I slid Arthur’s book from the bookcase and sat back against the pillow.
It had been ages since I last enjoyed a book. As a child I read voraciously, above my grade level, to my mother’s great pride. She was fond of repeating an anecdote my kindergarten teacher once told her, that on my first day when asked to choose a book from the bookcase—arranged in ascending difficulty from lowest shelf on up—I grabbed a chair and nearly split my lip climbing for a selection at the very top. I suppose the bookworm is a common only-child type. But in college I learned the vocabulary of arm’s length. The book was a text. To like or dislike something was to say that it worked or didn’t work, as though we were a classroom of repairmen. The profusion of pages and deadlines made enjoying any of it as likely as savoring a hot dog at a hot-dog-eating contest. And so I lost the habit.
Arthur’s book is about an intense high school guidance counselor, divorced, living alone, who takes an unhealthy interest in a troubled boy he’s convinced is being physically and sexually abused. He calls the boy to his small cubicle daily, trying to get him to talk, but the boy does not want to talk. The counselor tells the boy that abuse has to be dealt with, that unchecked it will eventually eat the boy alive. The boy denies that anything has happened, but only vaguely, in a way that encourages the counselor. His interest in the boy takes on the quality of an obsession. We sense a train wreck on the horizon as the counselor goes through with the purchase of a gun and begins trailing the boy to his home and lurking behind dumpsters. There will be a confrontation between the counselor and the boy’s mean drunk of a father; we see it coming from a mile off and read on to witness the collision. But the head-on never happens. What we don’t see coming is the moment the boy—having been convinced by the counselor over the course of weeks that it was imperative for abuse to be dealt with—arrives at school with his father’s shotgun and blasts a hole in his coach, who, as it turns out, has been the one molesting him, and makes a getaway with the counselor. It ends with the two on a motel room bed, kissing, boy and man, the counselor unbuttoning the boy’s pants and pulling them off.
What’s so shocking about this ending is that although we are unsettled, we find ourselves somehow rooting for it. Arthur has achieved that sleight of hand the best authors make us fall for: we want things to work out for the narrator, whatever kind of person he turns out to be. It’s jujitsu, using the natural momentum of a reader’s desire to see his protagonist’s desires fulfilled to launch us over the line into this transgression, to want this transgression, in a sense. What’s troubling is where it departs from the stories of other reprehensible literary characters. Raskolnikov is crushed by his own guilt in spite of himself; Humbert, though unrepentant, tells his story from a prison cell. But in Arthur’s we have no such assurances of the moral balance of the universe.
I wondered what would have motivated Arthur to invent these characters, to take them—and us—on this journey. That Arthur had written it, not only written it but also essentially performed the role of this character himself—the counselor is the “I” of the book—seemed bold and dangerous. Penelope was right. He was a terrific writer. I disappeared down the hole on page one and emerged 196 pages later, wide awake, disturbed by his vision.