by James Wood
Dr. Kunis approached Alan, and hesitated. But it was too late, because Alan was staring at him—with a rather sickly look on his face, thought Kunis.
“Parties have exactly the same effect on me,” he said very charmingly.
“Oh, I’m fine with parties. Really I am,” Alan said quickly.
“That’s not how you looked.”
“How did I look?” asked Alan, all indifference. He expected Kunis to say something like “You looked like a lost child, as if you were reliving your childish fears of being abandoned by your mother,” and was relieved when the distinguished guest said, “You looked slightly annoyed, as if you haven’t been able to get exactly the right drink this evening.”
“That’s absolutely true, in fact.”
He told Dr. Kunis that he had to go upstairs for a minute: “nature calls.” And he quickly left the room, avoiding the lavatory behind the kitchen, climbing swiftly the loud, uncarpeted, cream-painted staircase. Kunis had blown it by asking Alan, once again, about his childhood in Durham. Good lord, he wasn’t going to stand here in Van’s house and be psyched out by his daughter’s own therapist. He didn’t need to pee, but went through the motions anyway, quietly entering the bathroom next to Van and Josh’s bedroom, locking the door behind him, and pointlessly standing in front of the lavatory. He hadn’t been in this room. It was modest. And not especially clean—the result of a couple whose higher-order occupations put dirt well below their notice. Sink, console, taps, and lavatory were all of the cheapest kind: the tap was one of those push-pull things topped by a crimped diamantine plastic disc; cheap as hell but hideously indestructible—the washers went on for years. Van’s long dark hairs were on the floor, in the sink, and clogged her large, upturned porcupine hairbrush; he thought of how, at home, the sheep left their cloudy white wool on the barbed wire fences. The underside of the lavatory seat was dotted with blurred yellowish stains. Josh’s dried piss. And Alan imagined Van, rushed and careless, spending two minutes on her knees with bleach and a cloth every once in a while, because although she didn’t care very much about such things, it was getting a bit revolting, and Josh never did anything around the house (of that Alan was absolutely sure)—and when this harried domestic picture came to him, he had a surge of compassion. Van!—he suddenly remembered Candace’s advice, and bent to look under the sink. Nothing there. The flimsy door closed with a cheap snap. Perhaps above the sink? He opened what was almost certainly an IKEA cabinet. Male stuff on the right—shaving foam, razors, deodorant. Female on the left? There was a pill cylinder, made out of an unfamiliar smoked-orange plastic, with a kind of white flywheel cap marked CVS. This was it. “Vanessa Querry. Bupropion (Wellbutrin). 0.5 mg.” The bottle was half-full. He committed the name to memory—certain that he would eventually get p confused with b—and flushed the toilet. It swallowed sluggishly, without much appetite; he wondered how it could possibly do its business when called upon to transfer Josh’s heavy crap.
Downstairs, guests were starting to leave. Dr. Kunis was already in the hall. The air was close, odorous, as if invisibly dropleted with alcohol. Alan was sorry he hadn’t spoken more to Vanessa’s colleagues. Perhaps he would see them in the next few days? Not Gary Mulhall: he was flying tomorrow—“weather willing”—to Austin, Texas, to give a paper at a two-day conference. Amy Isaacson said she would be around “on campus,” but said it in such a way that made very clear—without rudeness, Alan noted admiringly—she would have little time for Professor Querry’s aged old pa. By contrast Dr. Kunis had the ample hours of the elderly retiree: he would be delighted to see Alan again; he lived only three blocks away; Vanessa had all his details. In response, Alan tried to warn him off, with some of Amy Isaacson’s style, but succeeded only in seeming peculiar, even a little hostile.
Once the door had closed—ghosts of dead polar air clinging to them in the crowded hallway—Vanessa turned to her father and said, gently, “So, Dad, did you not like Theo Kunis?”
“Well, Vanessa, I think I have the right not to be psychoanalyzed by my own daughter’s therapist. I’m surely to blame for a great deal, but not for everything.”
“Oh, here we go! Daddy, he’s not a therapist or psychoanalyst, he’s never been one, though I know he’s read a lot of Freud. He was a doctor in town for twenty-plus years. My G.P., and Amy’s, too. Now retired. That’s the only connection. That and the reading group.”
“Is that true? Really?” He felt foolish. “Why did Helen claim he was your therapist, then?”
“I didn’t claim he was,” said Helen. “I didn’t know. I suspected he was.” She was smiling slightly, teeth showing.
“I think you were trying to wind me up, Helen. I don’t appreciate being tricked like that.”
For the rest of the evening, until she finally got Josh to drive them back to the hotel, Vanessa enjoyed playing parent—playing mum—to her warring father and sister. If they wouldn’t keep the peace, she would have to enforce it.
29
As Vanessa saw it—she sat for a while on the sofa, smoking a cigarette as she waited for Josh to return from the Alexandria—her sister and father were condemned to quarrel. They were both proud, impulsive people who considered themselves largely modest and rational. When she was younger, she sometimes envied Helen for the fierce arguments she got into with their parents. When Dad and Helen argued, they were having a conversation of equals, were at least honoring some kind of emotional contract, two confident temperaments who had decided that the matter at stake was truly at stake; that life was action and not only reflection; that a position could be won, not just intellectually but emotionally. Vanessa hated confrontation—partly because she couldn’t believe that anyone who had strongly argued with her could ever like her again.
Besides, didn’t arguments always come a beat too late? They were like thunder, chasing the lightning strike of anger; noisy tributes to an energy that had already dissipated. And another problem was that she could all too easily detach herself from the issue at hand and see that it was—sub specie aeternitatis—about nothing very much. Was this detachment in fact a “problem”? Was it what was sometimes called “a fatal detachment”? Did it stop her living properly? On the contrary, she was passionate about many things, and about some things she was more passionate than her younger sister. Surely she missed Mum more fiercely than Helen ever did, for instance? Perhaps that was because she had been alone for so long, with no partner or children for comfort or distraction. In her solitude, Vanessa had desperately longed for her mother. She would wake up day after day, having seen Mummy in blessed dreams, forced by her visions to relive the scandal of her death. A simple, wailing, childlike question filled her being—one, she understood, both unphilosophical and the most philosophical question anyone could ask: “Where has she gone?” It was astonishing, unfathomable, that she had simply vanished. The woman who, when she entered any room, made it smell like her—her beautiful, particular fragrance. In Northumberland, there was a grave, and a body—well, a meal of bones—which she could visit. But where had her mother’s spirit gone? She wanted to be able to believe in the afterlife of her mother’s spirit, would joyfully have communicated with its presence in some Buddhist way. There was memory, which was everything of course; there was Helen, who so resembled, in certain moments, their mother, and who even smelled just like her. And there was the grave in the north of England with its sunken, ravaged, earthbound receipt. But there was nothing else. No spirit. Not even in the church in Malta, where her neighbors spoke so easily about “conquering death.” She had disappeared. And poor Mummy! Why should she be in the ground while Daddy thrived? With Candace.
She couldn’t bear to think these thoughts, and couldn’t stop either. This was her real “problem”—not detachment but its opposite. In recent years, Vanessa had come to the conclusion that the strengths one needed as an academic philosopher had dismayingly little to do with how she lived her life. In philosophy, you had to keep thinking relentlessly, to examine and r
eexamine, until you came to a stop. That stop, that cessation of argument, was formal rather than actual, intellectual rather than metaphysical. Still, it was helpful. You reached the limit of the designated argument, the end of the length of string you had already selected: the essay had to end, the paper was finally delivered to its audience, the lecture course finished. The professional philosopher usually gestured to wilder and deeper areas of thought, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable complexities, but these lay beyond the formal boundaries of the lecture, the essay, the book. She had decided to become a philosopher after reading—no, while reading—Thomas Nagel’s essay on “The Absurd.” She still had the notes she made: Oxford, 1986. And there was no better example of purposeful examination, and knowing where to stop examining things, than that essay. Nagel knew how to think; and when to stop thinking.
His essay spoke to Vanessa because it spoke calmly (that is to say, philosophically) about metaphysical meaninglessness. Nagel laid out a series of concentric circles: it is natural, he conceded, to step back from the purpose of one’s individual life and doubt its point; it is natural to ask: Why am I doing what I am doing? What is the meaning and design of my life? And natural to wonder: perhaps it has no purpose or design. And outside this circle there is a further, larger circle of doubt: in like manner, we can also step back from all of human history, or from the entire progress of science, or from society or politics, or from the very globe itself, and ask: So what? What does any of this little mundane struggle amount to? What is its design and purpose? And also to wonder: perhaps it has no purpose or design. Everything, says Nagel, seen under the eye of eternity, can be “put into question,” and when we do so, we stand on the brink of the Absurd, we stare into the abyss. Vanessa remembered reading this essay as a twenty-year-old, and furiously underlining those cool, hard sentences, and admiring the acute, even tread of the thought, and nodding in passionate agreement. But then Nagel played the academic philosopher, and closed his argument, finished his brief paper, which was obviously a tightly repressed argument with Camus. We shouldn’t worry too much about the Absurd, Nagel concluded, because if under the eye of eternity, nothing matters, then under the eye of eternity the Absurd doesn’t matter either—“and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”
And young Vanessa sat up—she was reading the essay in bed, in her drafty room at New College—disagreeing violently, and felt that she wanted to quarrel on paper with Thomas Nagel, and that this wanting to quarrel on paper, not in person but on paper, was a philosophical urge. Logically, Nagel was impeccable: if nothing matters, then indeed nothing matters at all, including one’s despair about the fact that nothing matters. But all the same!—how could one, having worked so expertly through the premises of Camus’s eloquent argument in The Myth of Sisyphus, a book she adored, just turn around and calmly ignore those premises? For if nothing matters, then philosophy doesn’t matter, either. The tenured professor from New York University told the uninsured, passionate Frenchman (a heroic figure but not, as Sartre sniffed, much of a philosopher), a man who had lived through the Second World War and the Algerian War, that getting too worked up about the Absurd was a little … absurd. Better to be ironic, self-aware, coolly analytical, than passionate or despairing.
She saw, now, that her own small battle to reconcile analytic philosophy and continental European philosophy could probably be traced back to this moment, in bed in her Oxford college … Sartre was right: Camus was no great philosopher. But Vanessa admired Camus for not being philosophically sophisticated. Now she felt that Nagel stood for academic philosophy, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and that Camus was life, with all its bigger strengths and bigger weaknesses. It was easy to go on functioning and drawing a good salary if one performed according to Nagel. But it was harder to go on functioning if one lived according to Camus, and perhaps this was why she had not prospered in the academic field. It was clearly dangerous to spend too much time, in life, reflecting on life. If one knew how to think and then how to stop thinking, how to open and close the circle of thought, one flourished in life—and in that division of it known as academic philosophy. But what if one’s series of circles just kept on multiplying? What if it was hard to stop thinking about pointlessness, to stop thinking about metaphysical absurdity, to stop thinking about the brevity and meaninglessness of things? What if despair—awful, awful despair—kept on returning, precisely because one could not, like Nagel, put it “into question”?
Josh—Josh put a stop to her solitude, put a stop to her excessive reflection, her abysmal sense that nothing was really worth living for. (You swallow the universe like a pill, but then you piss it out, too, it passes out of you, along with everything else important.) She loved Josh so much. She loved him, for … where to start? For having a body … Start there. Maybe a foolish way of putting it, except that her other boyfriends, such as they were (all two of them!), had been almost ethereal by contrast: embarrassed to have bodies at all. Josh liked his, and was insistent with it. She loved that insistence, the presence of his need, which quickly stoked need in her. She loved his strong arms, she liked to feel his selfish cock pushing against her leg, loved the way he closed his eyes and frowned, as if in deep thought, when he was about to come. When she was with Josh, everything—all this—came to a stop. And how she hated waking, to find that he had already risen; then everything—all this—started up again.
It had all “started up again” three months ago. Worse than the very worst times in her life. At dinner one evening, she had done no more than suggest that she and Josh might move, at some vague point in the future, to England for a while—she’d had enough of Skidmore, she said she was tired of the fifteen American flags bragging from various buildings along Broadway. And Josh got an awful, shifty, uncomfortable look on his face, and she knew, just knew … something terrible. He would never come to England with her.
She could endure that. Fine, they would live in Saratoga Springs—or New York, or Chicago. Wherever he wanted. What she could not endure, could not bear to think about but could not stop thinking about, was the void that opened up when Josh got that shifty, smiling, weak, wary look: the idea that he couldn’t contemplate coming to England, not because he could not imagine living in that country, but because he could not imagine living anywhere with her in the future. Josh was a child, really. He lived in an eternal present, with very few things—a drawer of T-shirts and underwear, and a laptop. She loved this carelessness. It was morally admirable, too: consider the lilies. He rarely looked ahead, gave little “thought for the morrow”; and at that moment when she asked him to, he retreated from her, with a foolish, grinning weakness on his handsome face.
The anguish was indescribable. She couldn’t sleep. At night, Josh lay next to her in bed, extinct, like the corpse of their relationship. In the mornings, she couldn’t get out of bed, either. She could barely drag herself through her classes. So Josh left her, gave up on her really, went back to Chicago to visit his parents, and Vanessa canceled her ticket to go home to Northumberland for Christmas, and she still could not sleep, but she could not really rise either, and Dr. Lasky prescribed Wellbutrin, which did nothing. She wanted her father and sister to come and rescue her, but was too ashamed to tell them what was wrong; she wanted her mother to be alive, wanted Mummy to visit her bedside (Lucozade and grapes) as she used to when little Vanny got sick. She lay in that bed, immobilized, utterly daunted by the day. Just the prospect of showering, or having to make breakfast, or phoning Josh in Chicago, seemed an immense task. Her right arm began to hurt, she could barely lift it, there was some kind of paralysis, and one morning she went into the bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror, and was very afraid that she was going to wound her arm. Barely an hour later, she fell down the stairs and broke that very arm—and then at last the Wellbutrin began to work.
The accident changed everything, as physical wounds generally did. The neighbors, the evangelical Christians who lived n
ext door, heard her cry out and rigged up a sling for her, and drove her to the ER. She phoned Josh, and he returned immediately from Chicago, and was solicitous, attentive. Remorseful. He made a card, faced with a photograph of them both, taken very early in their relationship by Amy Isaacson; inside it, he wrote, sweetly, awkwardly: “England, the U.K., Europe, the World, the Universe. Wherever you want.” Josh was suddenly different. He was engaged with her, he told her stories about his parents, and insisted that she go back with him to Chicago for the Christmas break, to meet them.
On Christmas Day in Chicago, they ate Chinese takeout (no turkey, no Brussels sprouts boiled into ragged submission). Josh’s parents seemed to like Vanessa, and she couldn’t help liking them. They were intellectuals, for one thing. She loved the large, comfortable apartment, mad with books, and its grand view of the shifting acreage of Lake Michigan. And it was a happy house. You could tell these things pretty quickly; homes emitted their qualities like an odor. The household, then, was a good advertisement for Josh’s mother, who was a family psychiatrist. Vanessa liked that the setup was a matriarchy—Josh and his father deferred to Wendy Rich, were tender and solicitous. She, in turn, was calm and even-tempered. Josh got his looks from his mum: Vanessa thought she was beautiful, long-faced and elegant. She flinched at first from Wendy, fearing that the professional therapist was always at work, diagnosing and analyzing. When Wendy stared at her, Vanessa quickly looked away, in order to protect her soul. How much had Josh told his mother? What did she make of the cast on her right arm? But Wendy Rich was much more interested in children than in adults. It was child development that fascinated her. She said that as far as she was concerned, it was “all over” by the age of ten—or was it twelve? Wendy was impressed by Vanessa’s profession, and wanted to engage her in discussion about the philosophers she had read at Columbia in the late 1960s—Marcuse, Arendt, Sartre. Vanessa did her best, but felt she underperformed.
