1988
GREAT EXPERIMENT
“If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?”
It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago, refulgent in early-evening, late-capitalist light. Kendall was in a penthouse apartment (not his) of an all-cash building on Lake Shore Drive. The view straight ahead was of water, eighteen floors below. But if you pressed your face to the glass, as Kendall was doing, you could see the biscuit-colored beach running down to Navy Pier, where they were just now lighting the Ferris wheel.
The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were all going organic. They had light green façades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.
There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.
Kendall was gazing at the luxury buildings and thinking about the people who lived in them (not him) and wondering what they knew that he didn’t. He shifted his forehead against the glass and heard paper crinkling. A yellow Post-it was stuck to his forehead. Piasecki must have come in while Kendall was napping at his desk and left it there.
The Post-it said: “Think about it.”
Kendall crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he went back to staring out the window at the glittering Gold Coast.
* * *
For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt. It had welcomed him when he arrived with his “song cycle” of poems composed at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It had been impressed with his medley of high-IQ jobs the first years out: proofreader for The Baffler; Latin instructor at the Latin School. For someone in his early twenties to have graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, to have been given a Michener grant, and to have published, one year out of Iowa City, an unremittingly bleak villanelle in the TLS, all these things were marks of promise, back then. If Chicago had begun to doubt Kendall’s intelligence when he turned thirty, he hadn’t noticed. He worked as an editor at a small publishing house, Great Experiment, which published five titles per year. The house was owned by Jimmy Boyko, now eighty-two. In Chicago, people remembered Jimmy Boyko more from his days as a State Street pornographer back in the sixties and seventies and less from his much longer life as a free-speech advocate and publisher of libertarian books. It was Jimmy’s penthouse that Kendall worked out of, Jimmy’s high-priced view he was presently taking in. He was still mentally acute, Jimmy was. He was hard of hearing, but if you raised your voice to talk about what was going on in Washington the old man’s blue eyes gleamed with ferocity and undying rebellion.
Kendall pulled himself away from the window and walked back to his desk, where he picked up the book that was lying there. The book was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville, from whom Jimmy had got the name for Great Experiment Books, was one of Jimmy’s passions. One evening six months ago, after his nightly martini, Jimmy had decided that what the country needed was a super-abridged version of Tocqueville’s seminal work, culling all of the predictions the Frenchman had made about America, but especially those that showed the Bush administration in its worst light. So that was what Kendall had been doing for the past week, reading through Democracy in America and picking out particularly salient bits. Like the opening, for instance: “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.”
“How damning is that?” Jimmy had shouted, when Kendall read the passage to him over the phone. “What could be less in supply, in Bush’s America, than equality of condition!”
Jimmy wanted to call the little book The Pocket Democracy. After his initial inspiration had worn off, he’d handed the project to Kendall. At first, Kendall had tried to read the book straight through. But after a while he began skipping around. Both Volumes I and II contained sections that were unspeakably boring: methodologies of American jurisprudence, examinations of the American system of townships. Jimmy was interested only in the prescient moments. Democracy in America was like the stories parents told adult children about their younger selves, descriptions of personality traits that had become only more ingrained over time, or of oddities and predilections that had been outgrown. It was curious to read a Frenchman writing about America when America was small, unthreatening, and admirable, when it was still something underappreciated that the French could claim and champion, like serial music or the novels of John Fante.
In these, as in the forests of the Old World, destruction was perpetually going on. The ruins of vegetation were heaped upon one another; but there was no laboring hand to remove them, and their decay was not rapid enough to make room for the continual work of reproduction. Climbing plants, grasses, and other herbs forced their way through the mass of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities and a passage beneath the lifeless bark. Thus decay gave its assistance to life.
How beautiful that was! How wonderful to imagine what America had been like in 1831, before the strip malls and the highways, before the suburbs and the exurbs, back when the lakeshores were “embosomed in forests coeval with the world.” What had the country been like in its infancy? Most important, where had things gone wrong and how could we find our way back? How did decay give its assistance to life?
A lot of what Tocqueville described sounded nothing like the America Kendall knew. Other judgments seemed to part a curtain, revealing American qualities too intrinsic for him to have noticed before. The growing unease Kendall felt at being an American, his sense that his formative years, during the Cold War, had led him to unthinkingly accept various national pieties, that he’d been propagandized as efficiently as a kid growing up in Moscow at the time, made him want, now, to get a mental grip on this experiment called America.
Yet the more he read about the America of 1831, the more Kendall became aware of how little he knew about the America of today, 2005, what its citizens believed, and how they operated.
Piasecki was a perfect example. At the Coq d’Or the other night, he had said, “If you and I weren’t so honest we could make a lot of money.”
“What do you mean?”
Piasecki was Jimmy Boyko’s accountant. He came on Fridays, to pay bills and handle the books. He was pale, perspirey, with limp blond hair combed straight back from his oblong forehead.
“He doesn’t check anything, OK?” Piasecki said. “He doesn’t even know how much money he has.”
“How much does he have?”
“That’s confidential information,” Piasecki said. “First thing they teach you at accounting school. Zip your lips.”
Kendall didn’t press. He was leery of getting Piasecki going on the subject of accounting. When Arthur Andersen had imploded, in 2002, Piasecki, along with eighty-five thousand other employees, had lost his job. The blow had left him slightly unhinged. His weight fluctuated, he chewed diet pills and Nicorette. He drank a lot.
Now, in the shadowy, red-leather bar, crowded with happy-hour patrons, Piasecki ordered a scotch. So Kendall did, too.
“Would you like the executive pour?” the waiter asked.
Kendall would never be an executive. But he could have the executive pour. “Yes,” he said.
For a moment they were silent, staring at the television screen, tuned to a late-season baseball game. Two newfangled Western Division teams were playing. Kendall didn’t recognize the uniforms. Even baseball had been adulterated.
“I don’t know,” Piasecki said. “It’s just that, once you’ve been screwed like I’ve been, you start to see things different. I grew up thinking that most people played by the rules. But after everything went down with Andersen the way it did—I mean, to scapegoat an entire company for what a few bad apples did on behalf of Ken Lay and Enron…” He didn’t f
inish the thought. His eyes grew bright with fresh anguish.
The tumblers, the minibarrels of scotch, arrived at their table. They finished the first round and ordered another. Piasecki helped himself to the complimentary hors d’oeuvres.
“Nine people out of ten, in our position, they’d at least think about it,” he said. “I mean, this fucking guy! How’d he make his money in the first place? On twats. That was his angle. Jimmy pioneered the beaver shot. He knew tits and ass were over. Didn’t even bother with them. And now he’s some kind of saint? Some kind of political activist? You don’t buy that horseshit, do you?”
“Actually,” Kendall said, “I do.”
“Because of those books you publish? I see the numbers on those, OK? You lose money every year. Nobody reads that stuff.”
“We sold five thousand copies of The Federalist Papers,” Kendall said in defense.
“Mostly in Wyoming,” Piasecki countered.
“Jimmy puts his money to good use. What about all the contributions he makes to the ACLU?” Kendall felt inclined to add, “The publishing house is only one facet of what he does.”
“OK, forget Jimmy for a minute,” Piasecki said. “I’m just saying, look at this country. Bush–Clinton–Bush–maybe Clinton. That’s not a democracy, OK? That’s a dynastic monarchy. What are people like us supposed to do? What would be so bad if we just skimmed a little cream off the top? Just a little skimming. I fucking hate my life. Do I think about it? Yeah. I’m already convicted. They convicted all of us and took away our livelihood, whether we were honest or not. So I’m thinking, if I’m guilty already, then who gives a shit?”
When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d’Or, when someone’s misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this, Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down. He took in the bruise-colored bags under Piasecki’s eyes, the addictlike clenching of his jaw muscles, his bad suit, his corn-silk hair, and the blue Tour de France sunglasses pushed up on his head.
“Let me ask you something,” Piasecki said. “How old are you?”
“Forty-five,” Kendall said.
“You want to be an editor at a small-time place like Great Experiment the rest of your life?”
“I don’t want to do anything for the rest of my life,” Kendall said, smiling.
“Jimmy doesn’t give you health care, does he?”
“No,” Kendall allowed.
“All the money he’s got and you and me are both freelance. And you think he’s some kind of social crusader.”
“My wife thinks that’s terrible, too.”
“Your wife is smart,” Piasecki said, nodding with approval. “Maybe I should be talking to her.”
* * *
The train out to Oak Park was stuffy, grim, almost penal in its deprivation. It rattled on the tracks, its lights flickering. During moments of illumination Kendall read his Tocqueville. “The ruin of these tribes began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing its completion.” With a jolt, the train reached the bridge and began crossing the river. On the opposite shore, glass-and-steel structures of breathtaking design were cantilevered over the water, all aglow. “Those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation yet unborn.”
His cell phone rang and he answered it. It was Piasecki, calling from the street on his way home.
“You know what we were just talking about?” Piasecki said. “Well, I’m drunk.”
“So am I,” Kendall said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m drunk,” Piasecki repeated, “but I’m serious.”
* * *
Kendall had never expected to be as rich as his parents, but he’d never imagined that he would earn so little or that it would bother him so much. After five years working for Great Experiment, he and his wife, Stephanie, had saved just enough money to buy a big fixer-upper in Oak Park, without being able to fix it up.
Shabby living conditions wouldn’t have bothered Kendall in the old days. He’d liked the converted barns and underheated garage apartments Stephanie and he had lived in before they were married, and he liked the just appreciably nicer apartments in questionable neighborhoods they lived in after they were married. His sense of their marriage as countercultural, an artistic alliance committed to the support of vinyl records and Midwestern literary quarterlies, had persisted even after Max and Eleanor were born. Hadn’t the Brazilian hammock as diaper table been an inspired idea? And the poster of Beck gazing down over the crib, covering the hole in the wall?
Kendall had never wanted to live like his parents. That had been the whole idea, the lofty rationale behind the snow-globe collection and the flea-market eyewear. But as the children got older, Kendall began to compare their childhood unfavorably with his own, and to feel guilty.
From the street, as he approached under the dark, dripping trees, his house looked impressive enough. The lawn was ample. Two stone urns flanked the front steps, leading up to a wide porch. Except for paint peeling under the eaves, the exterior looked fine. It was with the interior that the trouble began. In fact, the trouble began with the word itself: interior. Stephanie liked to use it. The design magazines she consulted were full of it. One was even called it: Interiors. But Kendall had his doubts as to whether their home achieved an authentic state of interiority. For instance, the outside was always breaking in. Rain leaked through the master-bathroom ceiling. The sewers flooded up through the basement drain.
Across the street, a Range Rover was double-parked, its tailpipe fuming. As he passed, Kendall gave the person at the wheel a dirty look. He expected a businessman or a stylish suburban wife. But sitting in the front seat was a frumpy, middle-aged woman, wearing a Wisconsin sweatshirt, talking on her cell phone.
Kendall’s hatred of SUVs didn’t keep him from knowing the base price of a Range Rover: $75,000. From the official Range Rover website, where a husband up late at night could build his own vehicle, Kendall also knew that choosing the “Luxury Package” (preferably cashmere upholstery with navy piping and burled-walnut dash) brought the price tag up to $82,000. This was an unthinkable, a soul-crushing sum. And yet, pulling into the driveway next to Kendall’s was another Range Rover, this belonging to his neighbor Bill Ferret. Bill did something relating to software; he devised it, or marketed it. At a backyard barbecue the previous summer, Kendall had listened with a serious face as Bill explained his profession. Kendall specialized in a serious face. This was the face he’d trained on his high school and college teachers from his seat in the first row: the ever-alert, A-student face. Still, despite his apparent attentiveness, Kendall didn’t remember what Bill had told him about his job. There was a software company in Canada named Waxman, and Bill had shares in Waxman, or Waxman had shares in Bill’s company, Duplicate, and either Waxman or Duplicate was thinking of “going public,” which apparently was a good thing to do, except that Bill had just started a third software company, Triplicate, and so Waxman, or Duplicate, or maybe both, had forced him to sign a “noncompete,” which would last a year.
Munching his hamburger, Kendall had understood that this was how people spoke, out in the world—in the real world he himself lived in, though, paradoxically, had yet to enter. In this real world, there were things like custom software and ownership percentages and Machiavellian corporate struggles, all of which resulted in the ability to drive a heartbreakingly beautiful forest-green Range Rover up your own paved drive.
Maybe Kendall wasn’t so smart.
He went up his front walk and into the house, where he found Stephanie in the kitchen, next to the open, glowing stove. She’d dumped the day’s mail on the kitchen counter and was flipping through an architecture maga
zine. Kendall came up behind her and kissed the back of her neck.
“Don’t get mad,” Stephanie said. “The oven’s only been on a few minutes.”
“I’m not mad. I’m never mad.”
Stephanie chose not to dispute this. She was a small, fine-boned woman who worked for a gallery of contemporary photography. She wore her hair in the same comp-lit pageboy she’d had the day they met, twenty-two years earlier, in an H.D. seminar. Since turning forty Stephanie had begun asking Kendall if she was getting too old to dress the way she did. But he answered truthfully that in her curated, secondhand outfits—the long parti-colored leather jacket or the drum majorette’s skirt or the white fake fur Russian hat—she looked as great as ever.
The photos in the magazine Stephanie was looking at involved urban renovations. On one page a brick town house had had its back end blown out to make room for a boxy addition of glass; another showed a brownstone that had been gutted and now looked as bright and airy inside as a Soho loft. That was the ideal: to remain dutiful to a preservationist ethos while not depriving yourself of modern creature comforts. The handsome, affluent families who owned these houses were often pictured in carefree moments, eating breakfast or entertaining, their lives seemingly perfected by design solutions that made even turning on a light switch or running a bath a fulfilling, harmonious experience.
Kendall held his head next to Stephanie’s as they looked at the photos. Then he said, “Where are the kids?”
“Max is at Sam’s. Eleanor says it’s too cold here, so she’s sleeping over at Olivia’s.”
“You know what?” Kendall said. “Screw it. Let’s just crank the heat.”
“We shouldn’t. Last month’s bill was crazy.”
“Keeping the oven open isn’t any better.”
“I know. It’s freezing in here, though.”
Kendall turned around to face the windows over the sink. When he leaned forward, he could feel cold air blowing through the panes. Actual currents.
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