by James Wood
When the tattooed Prius turned left, off the main road, he did the same, slowing down to adjust to the smaller road. He was passing bare wintry fields, and was in farming country, or so it seemed—a church-like barn, silvery silos standing upright like missiles. A quad bike with a trailer. The road had no verge; a foolhardy pedestrian would have to make do with a grassy ditch. But the countryside never stopped being urban: a big modern high school came and went (GO KNIGHTS); there were petrol stations, and some kind of veterans’ hall (CHICKEN DINNER, MONDAY); a beaten-up Ford pickup truck for sale, ninety-two thousand miles, parked in the middle of a vast, clean, snowy front lawn, like one of those brutal modern poems self-consciously surrounded by a lot of white page; an unconvincing motel—tiny, low wooden cabins somewhat resembling veal hutches—that seemed likely to have closed in 1957, but which still advertised vacancies; a shack whose hanging sign offered geeks’ help for computer problems (Only Connect, the business was called). For miles and miles, so it seemed, the spoiled enterprising landscape persisted—or subsisted, thought Alan, for it was clear enough, clear as navy coffee indeed, that outside Saratoga Springs, life was extremely difficult, hard, austerely poor in a way that strongly reminded him of North East England and his childhood: how he and his parents wore everything out to extinction, how he and Mam walked everywhere (those smoky Newcastle streets). Before they moved to Durham—and moved up in the world—Mam pretended to the fancy neighbors at the end of the street, in the big corner house, that they ate meat at least three times a week for dinner. The old dirty-laundry smell of boiled cabbage: to this day, he refused to eat cabbage, refused to buy it. And yet he liked what he saw here. It was distinct, everything had sharp outlines, the shock of its difference had its own kind of strong pewter taste.
He wanted to drive to Troy, to see what Helen had been talking about, but he turned back because an idea had formed—to get to the campus and watch Vanessa’s lecture, which began in forty minutes or so. He turned round, accelerated, insofar as that was possible in a Prius, and got back to town in half an hour.
32
Skidmore’s campus had the pleasant woodsy feel of Saratoga generally, as if the students were at university to study forestry: all these wonderful trees, rootless in the high snow—the thick maples, the tall nude poplars (nothing looked more abandoned than a poplar in winter), the slender silver birches with their tattered, wounded-looking bark. Too many car parks, the besetting American sin; but he used one of them now, pointed toward it by a helpful student (he had had to suppress the inclination to ask, “You’re not also on your way to Professor Querry’s lecture?”), and entered an anonymous-looking brick building with deeply recessed window frames. Up the functional staircase, through a series of plain doors, and he was at last in the philosophy department. Well, what had he expected—the Parthenon? Trinity College, Cambridge? It was very small, barely larger than the village post office at home. At what seemed to be a reception desk or secretarial outpost, he asked where he might find Professor Querry’s noon lecture. “You mean ‘Introduction to Ethics: Action and Reflection’? You’re in the community auditors’ program?” Alan said that he was. Then you go through the door, down the corridor, and turn right. Just look for the Ballston Room. He was nervous like a child, he could feel his arms trembling as he walked along the corridor; a student pushed past him. The kid was going to the same place—to a room that resembled the interior of a church, with long, banked, semicircular desks. Alan scanned the place for an unobtrusive seat. At the back, top row, next to the only other old person in the room, who was presumably legitimately enrolled in the community auditors’ program. Who was—ah, Dr. Kunis … stylish and elfin in a green woolen cap. An elegant green elf. Of course. Alan despaired for a second, then reminded himself that Dr. Kunis was not in fact a therapist, and that Alan had been inexplicably curt with him in the last minutes of their previous encounter. With warmth he gripped the outstretched hand, and pretended to be fulfilling a long-standing engagement: to come and listen to his daughter lecture. Who entered now, down the stairs, papers in hand. Alan had a schoolboy’s instinct to rise to his feet (Old World Kunis would understand that impulse, surely); he tried to control his shameful anxiety, his wobbly knee. He feared he would impair her performance, that she would be thrown, angry, offended by his presence. That she would somehow disgrace herself before the students. (How few there were! Why so few? That made no sense.) Vanessa looked down at her notes, made a mark or two with her pen, and raised her eyes for the first time. And remarkably, she saw her father in the back row of the small lecture room, looked directly at him, exchanged a glance, and smiled, with transparent happiness and confidence. She was not daunted, she was not awkward, she was not angry; she was simply thrilled that he had bothered to come, thrilled as adults rarely are or can rarely admit to.
She stood calmly in front of her audience, and spoke with gentle authority, squinting a little in concentration, her usual manner, explaining that this was the first lecture of the term, that it would be introductory in nature and that she hoped the students wouldn’t be too distracted by her pine-green cast—“a recent tussle with the stairs, which the stairs apparently won. Not the color I would have chosen if I’d been sober—no, no, that was a joke—but for those of you keen to explore the philosophy of color, and fascinating philosophical questions like whether such a property as ‘green’ actually exists outside your perception of it—you still have time to sign up for Professor Isaacson’s highly recommended class on David Hume. As long as you realize that it can’t possibly be as good as this class.” She continued: her class would focus on the history of ethics, pretty much from the greats to now, from Aristotle to Adam Phillips, with a double emphasis on philosophy as action and philosophy as reflection. There would be a guest lecture at the end of the semester, by the British psychotherapist Adam Phillips, attendance at which was mandatory. Yes, that’s how we can pay him the big bucks, she joked.
“What does the philosophy major prepare you for? Life! Some of you will recognize that: I’m quoting from our department’s own website. Is this true? Does philosophy prepare you for life? Well, you could say that if philosophy means anything, it means a discipline—in both senses of the word—that is at once abstract and practical, theoretical and concrete, intellectual and moral, affective and effective, a way of thinking that would ideally negotiate a modus vivendi between reflecting on life and living life.” She referred her audience to some words on the handout, words she had reproduced from one of the course’s required texts, by Bernard Williams: “the only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection; moreover (though the distinction of theory and practice encourages us to forget it) we have to live during it as well.” The only serious enterprise, she reminded her audience, is not philosophy—“Williams perhaps suggests that if we had to, we could do without philosophy. Because the only serious enterprise is living. That we can’t do without. Yet to be alive properly, fully, is also to reflect on being alive, to think about life. Which is one definition of doing philosophy: so we come full circle. Thinking about life and living life. What is the difference? Is there a difference? Can we choose? Another wise philosopher, a teacher of mine at Princeton who herself had three children—she was always running hither and thither, always late for everything and super-busy and harried—once said to me that if you want plenty of time and freedom to think about life, then don’t have any kids. It goes without saying that hardly any of the great philosophers did. But, my wise friend continued, if you want to actually be alive, then you should have children and enjoy having children. Which will make you a better philosopher—so she said. Williams, by the way, had three children.” His “very eloquent passage,” said Vanessa, would act as a kind of motto for the entire semester.
Alan’s nervousness had quickly disappeared, as if he’d taken an aspirin: his impressive daughter was in easy control of her small audience, bringing up quotations and names and dates with what seemed to him mag
ical authority; pausing occasionally to make a joke; turning at one moment to write “Categorical Imperative” on the blackboard. Kant’s famous law will come up often, and whenever it does, she said, “I’ll just refer to it as ‘C.I.’—it isn’t a forensic detective show on TV.” (Some laughs from the keener students.) Lulled, weary, proud (she was different in front of the students, and how attractive Van seemed, too, in her smart “teaching clothes”), he got sleepy, and had to use his old driving trick—sharply nipping his right earlobe with his nails—to stay alert. Now she was talking about Aristotle and eudaimonia, “sometimes translated as happiness or well-being, but perhaps best captured as human flourishing.” Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Adam Smith, Nietzsche, Freud, Simone Weil, Bernard Williams, Peter Singer … Alan’s mind drifted from the subject, but not from the subject of Vanessa. Though your child was only briefly a child, you never quite got used to seeing her no longer one: there she was—how strange—a formidable grown-up. Wasn’t adulthood, really, a fantastical and frail thing? And it was unbearable that this confident, appealing, intelligent, authoritative woman was the same person described by Jerry Dent—just a sad child again, weeping like a child in church, the pain “coming out of her,” lying at the bottom of her stairs, “in pretty bad shape.” If he described that person, that failed adult, to the students, not one of them would believe him. Dr. Kunis would not believe him. He loved Vanessa with all his heart; and he detested the idea that he had ever loved her because he pitied her. Vanessa was always going to have everything. The special first child. She was brilliant and fortunate from the moment she emerged into the world: the Nigerian midwife, the birth blood still on her dark hands, lifted tiny, red Vanessa up, then laid her on Cathy’s breast, and said, in her beautiful accent, words he never forgot: “It’s a girl, and a very lucky girl—only the best for her. Only the best for her.”
33
Dinner that night was unexpectedly easy. Alan had skipped lunch with Vanessa—after the lecture, she was busy with students and suggested that they eat quickly, with Dr. Kunis, at the campus café, an atrociously Van-like notion—and had set out again in the Toyota, to do some sightseeing. In the evening, he reported on his “findings.” Sitting at the pine table, Josh and Vanessa gently teased Alan. Perhaps because the subject was America and not England, he was breezy and genial, as proud of his ignorance as of his newfound knowledge. He would leave the news of Jerry’s “intervention” to the next day.
Alan had got his lunch that day at Scooby Don’t, a diner in town he selected because of its promising shabbiness, as you choose the second cheapest wine on the list. At Scooby Don’t, he had something called a Hypocrite Burger (veggie burger with cheese and bacon)—one of the most delicious things he’d eaten in a long while.
“Yeah? Truly? I’ve never eaten there,” said Josh.
“Nothing hypocritical about the flavor,” said Alan. “But I have a question. What exactly is American cheese?”
“Okay—it’s a fairly bland processed cheese, usually orange or yellow, that you, um, get in America,” said Josh.
“American cheese is … American cheese,” Van said, laughing.
Alan had experienced another moment that involved the word American. After lunch, coming out of the diner, he almost tripped over a small dog, whose owner had stopped to light her cigarette. Even though he didn’t like the dwarfish mongrel at his feet, but because he’d almost killed the damn thing, he reflexively praised it. What kind of dog is that? he politely asked. “What kind?” A small pause. “Oh—it’s American,” she had replied.
“The thing is, I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not,” said Alan.
Almost in unison, Josh and Van assured him that the owner was joking. Americans do have a sense of humor, you know, added Vanessa.
“I’m getting the hang of it,” said Alan.
“There’s a lot to get the hang of,” said Vanessa, “and some of it’s quite weird. I still can’t stand all the American flags everywhere. That’s the mark of my foreignness, I suppose.”
“What cracks me up,” said Josh, “is these massive stars and stripes flying outside totally ordinary buildings, like Toyota car dealerships and McDonald’s, like the country is collectively shouting: this is what we’re proudest of. At least in Chicago they hang from some actually cool modern buildings.”
Alan was really struck, for the first time in his visit, by Josh’s physical appeal: his interesting, handsome eyes were shining; he was full of vigor and quick intelligence. His lisp evaporated when he wasn’t nervous. Also, how much younger than Van he seemed: Vanessa spoke pretty much like her dad, while Josh sounded—well, young and American.
She was cheerful tonight: her first class of the semester had gone well; Dad had seen her at work. And Helen had left. She missed her, she always missed her sister when they were apart. Helen was as close to her—that terrifying line about Allah—as her jugular vein. But it was an awful truth that Helen’s absence made everything easier simply because her presence made everything more difficult. Helen was taking a BA night flight from JFK, she would be in the air by now, laying her businessclass seat flat over the Atlantic …
And Josh was gentle tonight, keen to leave a good final impression, perhaps because he was going tomorrow for a two-day trip to Boston—a big assignment, interviews with a couple of computer scientists at MIT—and now it wasn’t clear that he would see Alan again, before his departure for London.
The trip to Boston caused the only moment of disturbance. Vanessa had thought Josh was away only for a day; she was clearly disappointed by news of the extra night. Not just disappointed, thought Alan, looking carefully at her, but almost fearful—a gleam of disquiet, of need, crossed her features. She quizzed Josh. Where was he staying? When precisely was he coming back? Nowhere fancy, said Josh defensively, just the Holiday Inn in Somerville. “Back almost exactly forty-eight hours later. I told you about this two weeks ago.”
“Then you won’t quite miss Dad, actually.”
She insisted that he had never mentioned the two nights, only the one, but of course he should take as long as he required. The sound of permission hung in the air for a second, until Vanessa caught it, and herself.
“Wish we could come with you,” she said lightly, “but I’ve got my other class tomorrow, and Dad has another appointment at Scooby Don’t.”
34
Alan woke around 3:00 a.m., with no idea of where he was. This had occurred once or twice before in hotel rooms, but always resolved itself quickly: like a computer screen going from “sleep” to active. In the stifling bedroom in the Alexandria Hotel, he seemed to be unable to summon his past, as if some terrible amnesia of the night had rubbed him out. Where am I? He turned on the light, but the room was completely unfamiliar to him. Have I had a stroke? All right then, I know what “a stroke” is, so I have language. But where have I come from, who am I? He climbed out of bed and stumbled to the desk. I can move, perhaps I haven’t had a stroke. Where am I? The room stared back. His fear was rising, and to control it, he looked down at the desk, and saw a pad of paper, with “Alexandria Hotel, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.” printed on it. He could feel these words moving around in his head, slowly, like huge pieces of furniture. So slowly! And then, in an instant, everything was restored to him—yes, I have come from Northumberland, I am in Saratoga Springs to see Vanessa, Helen had come, too. And by definition and extension, I am Alan, son of George (deceased) and Jenny Querry (still alive), former husband of Cathy Pearsall (divorced and deceased), partner of Candace Lee, father of Vanessa and Helen. He felt suddenly very sick, and spent a minute hanging over the bathroom sink. The nausea passed, and when it did he sat on the cold lavatory bowl—he’d left the seat up—and wept with gratitude and shameful fear.
Of course, in the morning, with dry American light as solid as truth on the other side of the window and the smell of hotel bacon drifting under the bedroom door, he had no fear, only unease and puzzlement. Was it some kind of seizure? He
felt perfectly fit. What was really unpleasant about the incident was that it reminded him of something that had occurred a couple of years ago, which he had privately named “the Hadrian’s Wall moment.” It was late July. He had decided, on an afternoon whim, to drive to Housesteads, and take Otter for a walk along Hadrian’s Wall. The air was soft and mild, the grass springy. Cow parsley made milky fringes on either side of the road. He parked the car and started walking with the dog. There was a high point, which he reached after twenty minutes, from which you could see the great wall stretch over the undulating landscape, for miles and miles—an immense Roman fortification, an achievement of Empire, the northern limit of Europe, as far as the Romans were concerned. But also appealingly native: the local stones looked like any other drystone wall in the area, only bigger. As far as the eye could see, the great wall prolonged itself into the far distance, all the way to the sunlit horizon, where it disappeared into wide vagueness. It was beautiful. And then suddenly, as quickly as a sudden wind, it was frightening, too: the wall seemed to stretch all the way into the vagueness of death. That was the only way he could think of it. He was looking at a ribbon of life, at the ribbon of his life, and he was looking at the end of life; and far away, in that wide, diffusely sunlit, invisible horizon, was all of death and all the dead, past and future—his grandparents, Cathy, his father, his mother (all too soon), Van and Helen (sure enough, in time). And himself? Sure enough, in time. He felt dizzy, and sat down on the damp grass. Where the wall ended, there was death, waiting. It was not, he thought afterward, a religious insight. It was older than religion—the certainty of extinction, the shortness of life. Over there, where the light thinned into infinity, over there it awaited him. For two thousand years, the wall had stood guard over the futility of human endeavor. No, that wasn’t quite right, he thought now, because in fact the wall spoke not of the futility of human projects but of their longevity. You could build something, something grand, that would silently chaperone generations of people through the futility of their smaller existences. The thing well made, that our children’s children may be beholden to us.
