The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  More praise for The Sleep-Over Artist

  “Beller is the master of the profound and fatal flaw…poetry is everywhere.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “The Sleep-Over Artist by Thomas Beller is one of the best collections I’ve read…. Detail and emotion are rendered with astonishing precision and clarity…. Readers of Carver and Philip Roth will not only be satisfied by this book, they’ll be thrilled.”

  —Dear Reader, Square Books Newsletter

  “Beller is writing in a genre—the guy-coming-of-age—that has been around for a while. But in his modest way he changes the rules.”

  —Sarah Kerr, Vogue

  “Smart and funny…Beller has an admirable eye for detail and a cutting observational wit.”

  —Deborah Picker, LA Weekly

  “Thomas Beller’s new collection The Sleep-Over Artist is a lot like a summer romance: passionate, moving and intense…he is also a brilliant comedian, and lets us know it.”

  —Amy Sohn, Hartford Courant

  “In these tales of a young man growing up to encounter the confusions of modern masculinity, Thomas Beller has created a witty, observant, and often very poignant bildungsroman for our time. Fresh, sophisticated, and most of all utterly readable, The Sleep-Over Artist strikes a perfect balance between timely ironies and perennial emotional truths.”

  —Eva Hoffman

  “Like his hero Alex Fader, Thomas Beller is incorrigible, wryly laying out the confusion of youth and the pitfalls of romance, the heartfelt regrets of youth. The gentle humor and delicacy of The Sleep-Over Artist remind me of the stories of another young cosmopolite, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  —Stewart O’Nan

  “Thomas Beller is gifted with a wry, dry appreciation of life’s sweet and unlikely subtleties. Amid bum deals and bad fate, The Sleep-Over Artist manages to relish the little victories and happy compensations—as Thomas Beller puts it—the seconds of pleasure that make it all worthwhile. This is a book that is surprised by surprise. It is also a work of great optimism and ambition and all that other good—and rare—stuff.”

  —Elizabeth Wurtzel

  The Sleep-Over Artist

  BOOKS BY THOMAS BELLER

  Seduction Theory

  Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of 20 Young Writers (editor)

  The Sleep-Over Artist

  Thomas Beller

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2000 by Thomas Beller

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the periodicals in which portions of this book appeared, often in different form:

  “Falling Water” in the New York Times Magazine; “Great Jews in Sports” in Southwest Review; “Stay” in The St. Ann’s Review; “Caller ID” in Writer’s Harvest 3; “Personal Style” in Time Out New York; “Say It with Furs” in Elle; episodes of “Seconds of Pleasure” in Harper’s Bazaar and Reportage.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beller, Thomas.

  The sleep-over artist / Thomas Beller.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-10414-1

  1. Motion picture producers and directors—Fiction.

  2. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E53364 S55 2000

  813'.54—dc21 00-026111

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For my father

  The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one’s pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

  —Robert Musil

  Contents

  Falling Water

  Natural Selection

  Great Jews in Sports

  The Harmonie Club

  What Ever Happened to the Yippies?

  Stay (On Falling Asleep in the Company of Another Person)

  Vas Is Dat?

  Say It with Furs

  Personal Style

  Caller ID

  Seconds of Pleasure

  New Windows

  The Sleep-Over Artist

  Falling Water

  ALEX FADER GREW UP IN AN APARTMENT ON THE FOURTEENTH floor of a large prewar building that took up an entire block of Riverside Drive. From his bedroom window, which looked north, he could see a broad patch of sky, the tops of buildings, a multitude of wooden water towers, and off to the left, visible only if he pressed his cheek to the windowpane, the Hudson River. The view that most fascinated him, however, was the one to be had by looking directly down.

  Once when he was six, he suddenly rose from his bath, opened the narrow bathroom window above it, and leaned out. He balanced on his wet stomach, arms and legs outstretched like Superman, contemplating what it would be like to take the plunge and if his life so far had contained enough satisfaction so that it could now reasonably come to a close. He stayed teetering on the windowsill, looking at the distant pavement below, trying to imagine what it would feel like to land there and what he would be thinking during those thrilling seconds of flight.

  Half his body felt the moist familiarity of the bathroom, and the other half, wet and gleaming like a dolphin, hung in the cold air of the unknown. Then a faint curiosity as to what would happen after his fall—the ensuing hours and days—asserted itself. He pictured himself in a steaming heap on the concrete below, and a few minutes later his parents would be staring confusedly at the bathtub, full of murky water, but empty of him. He teetered for a while longer. The image of his parents trying to make sense of the empty bath was amusing at first, but then became unpleasant. With the same entranced conviction with which he had got up on the ledge, he got down, closed the window, and resumed his bath.

  Having decided that he would not throw his body out the window, he began throwing smaller, less valuable objects.

  First a cracker: it went spinning out the window and out of sight, and its absence seemed profound. Next were water balloons, whose wobbly downward trajectory he always monitored until they hit the ground, after which the small figure of the doorman would appear hustling onto the wet pavement, looking up. Alex loved the sight of this tiny figure, so formidable in real life, appearing on the sidewalk, but in watching from above, he was usually spotted from below.

  Things were different at his friend Walker’s apartment. Walker lived a few blocks south of Alex on Riverside Drive, also on the fourteenth floor. They were ten, and new best friends, and Walker was constantly surprising him with new and interesting ways to express malice. With regard to throwing things out the window, it was Walker who introduced the idea of a human target. They would stand perched at Walker’s kitchen window, both holding on to a pot full of water balanced on the ledge, waiting for a suitable victim.

  The windows of Walker’s apartment all looked out over the Hudson River, and directly below was a broad lonely patch of sidewalk onto which people arrived like actors walking onto a stage.

  They once observed an attractive young woman walking briskly with a bouquet of flowers in her hands towards a man who was standing with several suitcases around him, as though waiting for a taxi, right beneath their window. He was a perfect victim. They were about to douse the man with water, but it looked like something incredibly romantic was about to occur, some long-awaited reunion, and Alex and Walker instinctively held back and watched.

  The woman had a strapless top on, and even from the distance of four
teen floors Alex could make out the subtle jump of her shoulder muscles and the tremulous softness of her breasts as they bounced up and down with each step. The flowers had delicate pink petals. The man with the suitcases stared at her as she approached with bold strides. His body was still and unmoving. His gaze fixed. He was oblivious to everything else in the world but her. She walked right up to him and bashed him in the face with the bouquet, a violent forehand smash. The petals scattered like confetti. Then, without missing a beat, she turned on her heel and stomped back in the direction she had come, still clutching the considerably less flowery bouquet. The man just stood there.

  Alex and Walker were so transfixed by this scene that they forgot to pour water on him.

  Other people were less fortunate. Alex and Walker would stand guard at the kitchen window until someone appeared on Riverside Drive. There would be time to size up the target—gait, posture, clothes. At a certain ideal moment the water would fall forward from their pot in one solid translucent mass, and then split in half, and then in half again and again, so that what started as a single glob on the fourteenth floor ended as a thousand pellets of water on the ground. The pale pavement darkened and the victim became completely still. This momentary freeze was, for some reason, the most delicious part.

  There was one set of victims who stayed in Alex’s mind for a long time afterwards. A little girl wearing a pink coat, white stockings, and shiny black shoes ambled down the sunny street, a half step behind her mother. She looked as if she was on her way either to or from a party. She walked with unsteady steps, and her mother walked beside her, looking down and talking, but also giving the girl her independence. They were two small objects alone on the sidewalk. The water hit the ground in a great hissing mass and they froze like everyone else.

  But in the several seconds between the pour and the splatter, as Alex watched the water fragment and descend, a tremendous pang of regret leapt up in his stomach instead of the more familiar thrill. As he watched the jerky awkward expressiveness of the little girl walking beneath the water’s widening net, he understood that there was a small corrupting moment about to take place—one kid introducing another to the random world of fate and bad luck.

  Natural Selection

  ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, WHEN SPRING WAS IN FULL bloom and the school year almost over, the entire fifth grade was assembled for a special announcement regarding Becky Salatan. They were gathered in the science section of the huge, loftlike space in which the fifth grade spent their days. For the traditionalist Wave Hill School (“Educating Young Boys Since 1907” had once been its motto, until it also started educating young girls), this open-plan arrangement was a departure.

  The special announcement was that Becky Salatan’s father had died the previous day, and everyone should be considerate of her when she returned to school tomorrow.

  Mr. Gold, the science and social studies teacher, delivered the news. The science section, with its miniature zoo, was Mr. Gold’s domain. Located next to the room’s entrance, it was a maze of desks and chairs and numerous clear glass aquariums within which fish and rabbits and guinea pigs and turtles and a garden snake writhed and twitched and nibbled and slept and shat.

  Alex Fader thought that perhaps the real purpose of these glass boxes was to make him and his fellow students appreciate the amount of space they could roam in, while other species, and even other humans (like sixth-graders), had to occupy limited and constrained spaces and generally live much less free lives.

  Now they all sat quietly amidst the animals and listened to the news. Mr. Gold looked solemnly at the assembled class before speaking. His forehead, made huge by a receding hairline, was a bit like a lightbulb, and tended to color whenever he felt any strong emotion. His mouth was exceedingly broad and expressive, like a clown’s, and in repose possessed a clownlike sadness. His ability to provoke emotion on the part of his students was always just exceeded by his ability to provoke contempt.

  “There is nothing you can really do for Becky, except be considerate,” he told the class. “Be nice to her, give her some space, try and respect the gravity of what has happened.”

  Several people groaned. Mr. Gold’s solemn face seemed to empathize with his students’ pain. But the groans were in response to his use of the word “gravity.” The uncensored version of this story had already made the rounds at lunchtime, when word got out that Becky Salatan’s dad had jumped out the window and Becky had been the first person to wander into the room, just home from school, and find the window wide open with the sounds of shrieks and screams emanating from the sidewalk twenty-two stories below.

  Alex had thoughtfully chewed his microwaved pizza upon hearing this and tried to remember what Becky had been like before, so he could better gauge how this event might change her. His own father had died exactly a year minus one day earlier. He had died of natural causes (to the extent that cancer, compared to jumping out a window, was a natural cause), but he didn’t think he would want to be the subject of an announcement like the one made for Becky. He was of the opinion that disaster ought to be respected with silence, the better to acknowledge that nothing can be done to reverse it.

  Tomorrow afternoon he and his mother were supposed to drive up to the cemetery and visit the grave.

  “Later this week it’s going to be one year since Papa died,” his mother had said a few days earlier. “We’ll bring flowers and good things and have a visit.”

  “We can’t visit him,” said Alex. “He’s dead.”

  “We’re going to visit the grave,” she said.

  “We’re going to have a picnic on his grave?” said Alex.

  “Not on it, exactly,” she said. “Next to it. We’ll spend some time and try and make it nice.”

  His mother was always, as far as Alex could tell, trying to make things nice. It was tiring.

  “What about school?” he had said. On the day of the funeral he had missed school.

  “I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll drive up.”

  “You don’t have a car,” said Alex.

  “I’ll rent a car,” said his mother.

  “What if we’re not allowed to sit on the grass?” he had said.

  HIS MOTHER WAS a dancer. This meant that she could be found on certain afternoons on the second floor of a building on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway, standing barefoot and in a leotard on a vast wooden floor, often in some strange position. His father had taken him a couple of times to the empty room with an upright piano in the corner. Together they walked up a long narrow flight of dimly lit stairs, at the top of which was a large sunlit space. Sweating men and woman in leotards were either jumping around or standing and watching some other person jump around. Their leotards gave them the quality of something encased, like M&M’s. His mother always stood in their midst, panting.

  She was also a choreographer. Alex understood this word to mean that she could tell people what to do, and they would listen. Once, when she told him he had to take a bath, he responded, “You’re not my choreographer,” which had the desired effect of shocking her into a kind of marveling silence and therefore postponing, if only for another ten minutes, the bath.

  She was a modern dancer. This distinction confused him. He asked his father about it.

  “It means she’s not a member of the Rockettes,” he said.

  One day, when he was seven, she told him that she would soon be having a concert.

  “What’s a concert?” he said.

  “It’s when I perform in front of many people with my company.”

  “What does your company make?” he said.

  “It’s a dance company,” she said. “We make dance.”

  “Can people buy dance?” he asked. At the age of seven he was demonstrating certain capitalist proclivities that had the effect of making his parents look at him with concern, as though he might be coming down with a fever.

  “They can buy tickets,” she said.

  She seemed to take some odd p
leasure in his questions. He was trying to deal in facts and work things out logically, but she was always able to attach an invisible meaning to the facts which made her smile.

  As the concert approached, she rehearsed more and more frequently, and certain routines were interrupted. Alex often found himself alone in the apartment with his father. One day his father cooked dinner for just the two of them while she was at rehearsal.

  “What’s for dinner, Papa?” he had asked.

  “Wiener schnitzel,” said his father. He said it in that slightly emphatic but questioning tone teachers use when they are calling attendance and someone does not respond, and they then repeat the name a second time as if perhaps the person (in this case, Schnitzel) had just been nodding off, though they are also posing the question: What happened to Schnitzel?

  On the occasion of being chef, his father took off his jacket and went so far as to loosen his tie, but that was all. It was as though he was determined not to let his wife’s rehearsal schedule impinge on the normal rhythms of the household, though the very fact he was making dinner was unusual.

  Alex was very pleased with the whole situation and particularly liked the way his dad pronounced that night’s meal. So he kept asking, “Papa, what’s for dinner?”

  “Wiener schnitzel,” came the matter-of-fact reply each time.

  The seriousness with which he said it—“Veeena Schnitzel”—combined with the fact he said it with a slightly German accent, and the additional fact that the words themselves had a strange relationship to each other, as if they were a comedy team (Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Wiener and Schnitzel) made Alex burst into laughter every time.