It would have been sometime that summer when I noticed one evening that Wade was in an unusually dark mood. I congratulated myself for having picked up the change in atmosphere. Wade often spent long periods of time not saying much, while I was prone to getting caught up in my own interior churn—having been for years irradiated by what Emory called the strontium-90 of resentment over the fact that history had taken a big fat dump on my family’s head. Discerning the difference between my partner’s ordinary taciturnity and an aberrant glumness gave me hope that maybe I wasn’t the oblivious, self-involved helpmate that I sometimes feared.
The kids had cleared off, and Wade wasn’t finishing his rosemary lamb skewers, though he was certainly chewing on something.
“What’s wrong?”
In his lengthy pause I read a familiar superstition: a problem that remains unspoken isn’t real yet. “I hired a new assistant,” he said at last.
“Isn’t that good news? You’ve been shorthanded ever since Benjamin left to start his landscaping company.”
Wade didn’t look at me and tapped his forefinger on the table. “I didn’t want to hire this person. He’s not qualified. He has no training in tree surgery.”
“So why did you hire him?”
“The whole qualifications issue . . . It seems to have gotten complicated. I’m not sure it’s acceptable to demand qualifications anymore. Meeting a standard means passing a test. There are no tests. They’re . . . discriminatory.”
“You could still refuse to employ someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, right?”
“No, that’s not right. He threatened me. To demonstrate his ‘skills,’ he started waving around one of my chain saws without the safety on. I . . . was alarmed and . . . not thinking, so I used a word. It was a knee-jerk response. Flew out of my mouth before I knew it. He threatened to take me to court.”
“What word?”
“The same one that got you into trouble at VU. You’re so free with your language around here that I . . . Well, it came to mind too easily.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not ‘free with my language’ around here anymore, much to my dismay. You’re not trying to blame me, are you?”
“No, of course not, I’m sorry. But now I’ve got to work with someone every day who I don’t like and don’t trust. His name is Danson. He’s cocky. He’s lazy. He takes long breaks. He vapes all the time. Some sort of cotton-candy flavor. The smell turns my stomach. And he’s . . .”
“Stupid,” I filled in instinctively. In my defense, the kids, most importantly Lucy, were all upstairs.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“My head is bursting every day with several dozen ways of putting it.” I studied my handsome partner, who still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “You thought you could steer clear of the whole business, didn’t you? You thought Mental Parity had nothing to do with you or your job, so you could sail through your life unsullied. You thought you could sit this whole thing out on the sidelines, watching, or declining to watch. You thought it would never come after you and fuck you up.”
“I work with trees, Pearson.”
“You also work with people.”
“Which is the only thing about my work I can’t stand.”
I sat back and crossed my arms. “I don’t think I told you about going to see that dance troupe with Emory last week. After hosting The Talent Show for so many years, she still likes to keep a hand in the local arts scene. I’m not that into dance, but it was something to do. I know local performances can be second-rate, but this was terrible on a whole new level—which helped explain why the audience was so sparse. Most of the dancers were overweight. They didn’t look fit. They had no sense of rhythm, and they were graceless. Wade, they couldn’t dance. During the intermission, Emory and I sat there and couldn’t say anything. When most of the audience sneaked away, we only stayed out of pity. The handful of other people who also braved it to the end sat there with implacable, oblivious expressions, and they clapped ferociously at the curtain call, as if marshaling enough pugnacious approval could disguise the travesty we’d just sat through. That performance dovetailed with what’s happened to Zanzibar. She’s the best little thespian in the school. So they don’t cast her. They won’t cast her. I think those dancers were chosen in the first place because they couldn’t dance. Picking people who are wiry and strong and who’ve studied for years to get good at what they do no longer seems fair.”
“And your point is?”
“There’s nowhere to hide. There are no spectators in this game. In the end, you’re in this up to the neck as much as I am. Sure, MP started out as a great leveling project in relation to smarts. But now we’re busy leveling every field there is—until the U.S. looks like Ukraine after Putin was finished with it. So there’s no such thing as being good at tree surgery, any more than there’s such a thing as being good at brain surgery. Actually, the situation is worse than that. It’s not only that now everyone is equally good at stuff. We’re undergoing more of an inversion. The people who suck at stuff get to do it, and the people who excel at stuff are annoying and show up the sucky people and have to be squelched. Maybe we’re lucky they haven’t started shooting talented ballet dancers and burying them in pits. And you’re lucky this Danson guy isn’t taking over Treehouse, Inc., altogether as a matter of moral right, because he knows nothing about tree surgery. Blessed are the poor at shit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who muck everything up, for they shall be comforted—that no one will ever point out what a fucking mess they’ve made. Blessed are the bunglers, for they shall inherit the earth.” Every once in a while, my biblical upbringing came in handy, though Wade was raised as nothing in particular and the allusion to Matthew 5:3–12 was lost on him.
I could have explored this theme to a greater extent if Wade weren’t impatient with just this variety of set-piece rant. By 2015, the aforementioned “inversion” had flipped pretty much every discipline. Literary prizes like the Pulitzer and Nobel hadn’t merely deteriorated into a lottery; the awards were deliberately bestowed on authors who wrote bad books, and I mean truly appalling books. The Oscars went to terrible movies and terrible actors, while the Tonys went to the very worst plays (a distinction for which there was fierce competition). Why, the only domain that remained impervious to an aggressive advancement of inaptitude was the visual arts, which, having adulated lumps of dung and bricks on the floor for decades, were ahead of their time.
Thereafter, Wade assured me that he was trying to keep Danson Pelling to the relatively safe, boring jobs like clearing debris, feeding the chipper, and chainsawing logs at ground level, though there was no point in having an assistant if you couldn’t put him to work on the main task at hand. Wade was irascible during this period, because in addition to puffing away on cotton-candy vape pens, Danson never shut up. This had a noticeably negative effect on my relationship. Only long hours in the absence of conversation stored up enough enthusiasm for discourse for Wade to communicate at home. He was newly morose and unresponsive. Meanwhile, I was enjoying the bliss of my reading-rich season of malingering, though it troubled me that summertime reprieve from the classroom had become an even greater relief than it once was.