Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

What I do not know about most of all is myself and why I always think that the sky is about to fall.

  A close second is women. I am an educated, politically aware, liberal, Bill-of-Rights sort of guy, who has supported every NOW issue since I can remember. Viscerally, unconditionally, and with total commitment. So why do I know so little about these people? Who I have revered from about the age of four when I told a girl called Sally at preschool that I wanted to marry her, and she threw sand in my eyes, which only made my heart grow fonder. Or Constance, to whom I wrote a scrawled letter in, get this, second grade, proclaiming that my status as wounded soldier and hers as ballerina foresaw a life of bliss for us. The teacher found the note and gleefully read it out loud to the class. Constance was so embarrassed that she never again talked to me, which, again, made my heart grow fonder. By fourth grade I had kissed a girl with tongue. Not to brag or notch, but because she was so beautiful that kissing her was the only paradise I sought. Nonsexual and profoundly romantic. And the legions of young ladies at high school, pursued with vigor and determination, some requited, some not. Thought about them constantly. Talked to them as often as possible. Hung out with them. Chatted on the phone with them. Masturbated to their images. Had inarticulate but meaningful sex with some. Had my heart broken, mended, remolded, shattered, reanimated, deflated, dirtied, buffed, and shined. Sometimes in the course of a week.

  I shared their concerns, their triumphs, and their disappointments. I sought out their company, in massive preference to male friends. Not that I had no male friends, but the mystery of these strange people was like the strong nuclear force: the closer you got, the more the attraction tended toward asymptotic. Not attraction actually, but something more magical, like allure. These people are almost like my gender. They have hands and feet and nostrils and teeth. But a little smaller, a little more slender, with higher voices and more intriguingly, soft, swaying protuberances on the chest that trigger ancient longings and an astonishing set of folds and textures and odors and wetness and open invitations lower down—deep, dark, and overwhelming. Beyond ken. Beyond reason. Beyond reckoning.

  “Krystal, I don’t understand you.”

  “What are you talking about, Meyer?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Again, what are you talking about?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to do what I tell you to.”

  Well that’s settles that. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps I should do what she tells me to.

  Bunny was different toward the end.

  “Bunny, I don’t understand you.”

  “You’re not supposed to understand me. You are supposed to understand yourself. Which you don’t. Which is why this marriage is in trouble. Why don’t you go into therapy?”

  Touché.

  “Isobel, I don’t understand you.”

  “Of course you don’t understand me, I’m a teenager.”

  I call Farzad.

  “Farzad, I don’t understand women.”

  “Of course you do not. Nobody understands women. Least of all psychologists. Especially male ones.”

  “Bullshit. Do you understand your wife?”

  “Certainly. We have a simple understanding. I tell her what to do. This is built into my history and culture. Patriarchy is the only workable solution to the gender gap.”

  “Does it work? Does she do what you tell her to?”

  “Of course not. She is an American. She does what she wants.”

  “So what happened to your simple understanding?”

  “It gets lost in the implementation.”

  “So you don’t understand your wife?”

  “Of course I do. We have a simple understanding.”

  “Which gets lost in the implementation.”

  “Exactly.”

  CHAPTER 23

  EXCEPT GRACE.

  I always understood Grace. Her heart had been warmed by the Zimbabwe sun and a barefoot youth on a small farm where echoes of British colonialism had grown faint, save for good cheer, early mornings, and benefits of a straight-backed education. The leaden weights of unquestioned physical safety and success-fed isolationism have stunted the natural curiosity of many a US childhood and tainted many of my generation who are now beset by a lamenting apathy. So when Grace arrived here she was lifted above the crowds—good-natured, optimistic, widely read, inquisitive, passionate, enthusiastic, grounded, moral, innocence dented but intact. And the scabrous and violent desecration of her country has left her grateful for the abundance of everything that she finds here. Not the sort of gratitude proclaimed by the wild-eyed my-country-right-or-wrongers, but the gratitude of the thankful immigrant.

  We rent a car and a debate ensues as to whether or not we should get the cheapest. I am dead set against it, spewing dire warnings about how easily they crumple on impact. Grace won’t let me help with money, so I have to bow to the tiny box into which we squeeze.

  We arrive at the B&B B&B with newly purchased emergency items of clothes and toiletries. It is a modest green clapboard house in Berkeley, in a residential part of town not too far from campus. It has two stories. As we sign in I note with a ping of excitement that they have placed us in adjoining rooms on the top floor.

  We walk to our rooms and open our doors simultaneously. I look over to Grace just before she enters. I feign disinterest.

  “Don’t even think about it, Meyer.”

  “Moi?”

  But she is gone.

  We pick up Innocent from his place, low-rent stucco student accommodation that looks unfit for human habitation, which makes it perfect for the aspiring Berkeley intellectual. He is a gangling young man, with a tall gene that I can only ascribe to Grace’s father rather than my little ancestors. He has a lopsided smile, Grace’s perfect proportions, and my propensity to grin a lot. Or maybe an early-twenties Berkeley student’s propensity to grin a lot. Film-star looks, thankfully balanced by an early receding hairline.

  He slides into the back seat and leans forward to kiss his mother on the cheek.

  He looks sideways at me. I raise my eyebrows. I get my kiss too.

  “Forgotten how to kiss your dad, now that you’re a college boy?”

  “Means something different up here,” he counters.

  My family was loving, but not particularly physically affectionate. There was a time in my late teens when I became fixated on Italian movies. I remembered a few of the plots—some had none as far as I could tell, but I was deeply struck by all the hugging and kissing. Plotting a direct line from the discovery of heated baths to Michelangelo to Florentine architecture to sleek sports cars to physical warmth, I imbibed the family-should-always-kiss-and-hug ethos, now firmly imprinted on Innocent.

  “Like old times, hanging with my mom and dad.”

  “You were about one year old when we split, Innocent,” I remind him.

  “I have a good memory.”

  “How are things, Innocent? You eating properly?” asks Grace. Mothers are the same the world over.

  I turn in my seat to look at him. It is a good question. He looks tired. Burning-the-candle-at-both-ends tired.

  “Mind if a friend joins us for dinner? She lives just around the corner.”

  I feel my eyebrows bob up.

  “Sure, of course.”

  Grace is staring at him through the rearview mirror.

  “Girl friend? Or girlfriend?”

  “Ha ha. Nosy parents. Just a friend. For now.”

  It is dark by the time we reach the restaurant, a place called The Green Fig, a health-food restaurant priding itself on fair trade, everything-free, union-picked food, which is predictably tasteless, edible only with liberal gobs of soy sauce.

  We have picked up Innocent’s friend, a rake-thin, pallid-skinned girl named Wanda. She is logorrheic, words tumbling out of her mouth, subjects careening off each other, tangential thoughts exploding from nowhere, inappropriate giggles bursting forth from phrases without humor. It
is unnerving. I have seen this many times before.

  “Oh my God, I have heard so much about you both I mean Innocent just loves you guys talks about you all the time he is so smart Innocent oh my God look there’s Jerry don’t let him see me that’s such a nice jacket Mrs. M where did you get it and Innocent that is such an awesome name combo which is not to say I don’t like the name Meyer too Innocent says everyone calls you by your last name but I should stop talking now you guys need to catch up please excuse me I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Cocaine. Or meth. But probably coke because she still seems to have all of her teeth.

  I glance at Grace. She is smiling at her son. I turn to Innocent.

  “My, she’s sparky, isn’t she?”

  I can tell he is a bit embarrassed.

  “She was excited about meeting you. She’ll calm down.”

  He picks up the menu and pretends to read. I look at him more intently now. There are dark rings under his eyes. His skin is sallow.

  My son is doing drugs. What kind and how often is not the issue. He is doing drugs and he is fucking a cokehead. I have a long history here, both personal and by close witness. This is a fetid breeding ground for dread, a swamp in a humid summer. I know coke. It is a stupid fucking drug. Unlike dope, which is occasionally a very clever drug, which when mixed with the right company or food or music or conversation can make for a great evening with little next-day residue. Alcohol, ditto, a versatile lubricator, if you have an off switch that kicks in just before melancholy, violence, or vomit. Heroin, king of the drugs, not really that stupid because it is a premeditated choice basically to commit suicide slowly and pleasantly, interspersed with moments of sheer panic. Ecstasy, mindless rather than stupid, in a fun/dance/sex kind of way. Meth doesn’t even count as stupid because it is just shrieking death.

  But coke? The most stupid of drugs. I cannot remember a single interesting thing that I said or did under its dictates. And I have watched more people embarrass and debase themselves under an illusion of fascination and self-importance than I care to remember.

  CHAPTER 24

  WANDA IS MERCIFULLY long in returning from the bathroom. Grace does not know the world of sparkling substances and altered realities and seems blissfully unaware of this dark cloud gathering over Innocent.

  “Innocent, I’m serious, you look thin and pale. I want you to eat more and get into the sun occasionally. Are you studying too hard?”

  “I am fine, Mom, really. How’s the PhD going?”

  “Nearly done. It’s been good.”

  “My mom, the doctor.”

  He flashes a white-toothed, off-center grin. Even in the circumstances it is hard not for me to feel proud of his pride in his mother.

  “And Dad, you?”

  “Same as. Playing and programming.”

  “You playing easy?”

  “Easy as pie. Easy as a 2-chord jam. Easy as Norah Jones.”

  “And Sis?”

  “Isobel is in full teenage mode. She is a danger to herself and others. She should be sent to a nunnery. She should be forced to wear a chastity belt and sent to live in a tower. She is fine. Sassy and smart. You won’t believe it when you see her.”

  “Krystal?”

  “Krystal who? How are your studies? Anything grab you?”

  “Yeah. Genetics.”

  Grace jumps in.

  “Genetics? I didn’t know you were doing Genetics?”

  “I’m not. I went to a guest lecture by that Venter guy. I’m sold.”

  I can get behind this. A brave new world indeed. Genetics and its practical cousin, genetic engineering, represent an intersection of hard-ass practical science, molecular biology, chemistry, medicine, evolutionary theory. Among other things. With it man will supplant God, sculpt and mold life in ways that will at first alarm us and then eventually nurture and comfort us.

  In my day, which admittedly was not that long ago, a student chose a field and walked down its path, which was reasonably well worn. Medicine or computer science or law or math or engineering or psychology or astronomy. And within those fields, the sum of past knowledge had reached such a volume that even the most determined individuals could only glimpse the whole from the one or two parts in which they labored. But human progress these days is much broader. It requires the melding of many ingredients, multidisciplinary fusions and crossovers and borrowings that blur across vast and cluttered silos of old and new knowledge, bewildering and crushing even the most excellent of intellects, who get lost in sheer bulk. A scientist friend of mine, an old school friend, now an assistant professor and the only real live polymath I know, complains bitterly about this.

  “I spent seven years getting my doctorate. Now I find I have to study ten other subjects to gain any new insight. I spend my days and nights reading textbooks and research papers on abstruse subjects that were not part of my original degree, trying to make connections. I have no life.”

  I am cruelly unsympathetic.

  “Hey, you want to win a Nobel, you have to pay the price.”

  “It has nothing to do with winning prizes. It’s about keeping my job.”

  “You were the one who wanted to be an academic. You thought the vacations were cool, and you thought that you would have an endless supply of women.”

  “Yeah, well, no time for that now. Maybe I should move into the commercial world. I didn’t sign up for this, it’s too damn hard. There is no end to it. Is there a job for me where you are?”

  “Sure, we can really use someone in neuro-patho-psycho-cosmo-philo-onto-chemo artificial evolutionary intelligence imaging whatever the fuck it is you study.”

  “Nice to get respect from you, Meyer.”

  But he was wrong. I am pretty much in awe of him and his ilk, foraging around in the totality of human knowledge to synthesize and codify something gleaming and new and useful, to turn ignorance into algorithm, to push the boundaries of our species, if only by a smidge. As opposed to, oh, I don’t know, writing enterprise resource planning code for a big company that makes stuff. If I had the remotest chance of edging the sum total of the universal knowledge forward, I would do it, and effort and sacrifice be damned. That would definitely take care of the dread problem.

  Innocent is holding forth, in between anxious glances toward the bathroom.

  “So I’m going to drop some subjects and take some of the audacious hairy monsters next year.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like math, biology, chemistry, that sort of thing.”

  “And what are you dropping?”

  “The dumb subjects.”

  Grace takes offense.

  “There are no dumb subjects.”

  “OK, Mom. The easy subjects. Dad calls them the fuck subjects.”

  “He does, does he?”

  I make a show of studying the menu, my eyes earnestly downcast.

  Wanda arrives back from the bathroom. She is wiping her nose in the matter-of-fact way of all cokeheads.

  “Sorry, there was such a long line and I ran into Jerry who I was trying to avoid what a douchebag sorry about my language have I missed the waitress I’m not really hungry anyway I had a huge lunch you’re soooo pretty Mrs. M I can see where Ino gets his looks.”

  Wanda sits down, eyes ablaze. I am scared of setting her off again, so I decide to ignore her.

  “So, Innocent, who are your friends?”

  But alas, there is no stopping her.

  “Ino has such cool friends they’re all so smart and they like partying I like partying more than studying I’m so jealous of these guys you’ll really like them there’s Alan and Philip and the Chinese guy and the Arab guy and the guy from Australia what’s-his-name and the weird fat one who never goes out and oh my God just reads and reads and reads and I’m so glad Ino can be serious and fun you know what I mean?”

  There is a stunned silence as we all stare at her. Innocent’s face has gone red. Grace turns around to summon the waitress and I catch a brief t
ransaction under the table between Wanda and Innocent.

  “Gonna hit the head. Be back in a moment.”

  Innocent returns a few minutes later. His eyes are also ablaze. His voice has gapped up a major third in pitch, his rhythm is now allegro. His appetite has disappeared.

  My beautiful and talented son has become a cokehead.

  Fuck.

  CHAPTER 25

  WE DROP INNOCENT back at his student digs. He piles out of the car with Wanda. I suspect that for them the night is young. I am about to break the grievous news to Grace—who is totally oblivious, believing him to have only been in high spirits—when my phone chirps.

  “Hey, Josh. It’s me.”

  Only one person on the planet calls me Josh. My father, Samuel. He lives in Florida, a late-life widower. He is old now, slow moving, tentative, beset by irritating short-term memory loss, but all there. Still drives to the market once a week, against my advice. And reasonably happy in the old-age community in which he is ensconced, playing canasta and bingo with residents whose names he cannot remember and flirting with Latina nurses and administrative assistants who dislike their jobs as much as their charges. When Mom died, he went into pause mode, staring at the TV in a house too large for him, walking the dog, eating only peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, writing letters.

  He never was able to make the leap to electronic communications and, with Mom gone, letter writing became his last opportunity to be heard. He was, in his day, one of the great letter writers. Long rambling outpourings of opinion and news and jokes and concern. A lost art now. And with most friends dead or demented, and only me left in what was always a small extended family, he continued to write. But like a tap drying up, the volume of output diminished year by year. When I suggested the move into the facility he was relieved.

  He was a good man, my dad. Is a good man. In every aspect of his life he bathed warmly in mediocrity—he wasn’t a genius, he wasn’t rich, he wasn’t charismatic except for an edgy wit and a command of the art of clever repartee. And an occasionally sparked sense of steely rectitude and moral outrage. At these he excelled. He worked hard. He loved his wife, his son. Paid his taxes. Watched football. Cleaned his car. Cared about the middle, not the edges. He adored me quietly and I him. On shoulders like these America was built.