At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  By the time I went to bed that night (having gone into the bathroom a few times to check for evidence, having not thought about Claire for whole half hours at a time), I’d decided, first, that I would never tell anyone, including Joel, and second, that this would only happen once, and that if Anna tried to arrange something again I would tell her that she was beautiful and wonderful but that it was just too weird and sorry.

  No and no and no. It didn’t work like that at all.

  As I’m remembering my friendship with Thomas, it’s hard not to stop here, to plant a flag on the spot in my life when problems meant embarrassments and when I couldn’t imagine someone not being able to sleep through the night. But memory’s like a six-year-old: And then? And then? And then?

  By that summer Thomas and I were best friends in the society-of-two, not-necessarily-cheerful way that sometimes happens with kids that age. We had sleepovers every weekend, we spent afternoons walking the bike trail behind his house. My mom sometimes asked me, not quite suppressing her worry, what it was we did in all that time we spent together. At first she’d been thrilled that I’d found a best friend—she’d been in a more or less perpetual state of nervous guilt about having made me leave my school in Baltimore—but maybe she’d seen a Dateline special on troublesome teens, or maybe my stepdad, Frank, had muttered something to her; she may even have worried that we were gay. We weren’t, of course—our desire to find girlfriends was one of the foundations of our friendship—but even if I’d wanted to explain to her why we spent so much time together, I couldn’t really have done it in any way that would have made sense to her. Adult friendship is all talking and laughing and bickering and planning; teenage friendship can be more of a joined solitude, like oxen yoked together. The not-having-to-do-anything can be the whole point.

  “You’re going to be happier than I am in high school,” Thomas said to me one day. “I don’t seem to have the courage to disappoint my parents, which seems like a crucial ingredient.”

  By then he knew everything about my family: about my parents having gotten divorced when I was one; about my mom’s years of dating (which I remembered mostly as her frizz of red-dyed hair and a parade of nervous men handing me toy trucks or Nerf footballs, as if I were a baby chimp). He knew about the awkwardness of my stepdad, who I often thought I could stump by asking him my middle name, and about Frank’s son, Ian, who I knew only from a handful of trips home from Wash U, during which he drank weight-gainer shakes and showed me naked pictures of his girlfriend. I knew, of course, that when I told Thomas all this I was selling out my family, but I didn’t care. My family was like the cardboard Apollo astronauts outside Blockbuster—you could sweep them aside, fold them into the Dumpster, without thinking about it.

  Halfway along the bike trail there was a homeless encampment—clotheslines and a fire pit and a few half-empty water jugs—that we liked to poke around in, imagining that we heard people coming. For some reason this was where we always had our best and frankest talks—about whether happiness was more valuable than intelligence; about whether women really cared about penis size; about the neighbor of mine with OCD who’d swum laps until the lifeguards had dragged him out of the pool. We called these talks symposiums, which was a word I’d learned from Thomas. We really thought that we might, sitting there past sunset, picking up used condoms with sticks (these were the first condoms I’d ever seen, and at first I took them for some kind of food wrapper), solve the problems that had been troubling humans since the beginning of time.

  Symposiums were also often when Thomas’s version of a wild side came out—not the kind of wildness the bad kids at school had, breaking things and pulling down their pants, but the kind of wildness woods had: he turned strange, indifferent, a little dark. “I’m not sure I feel a lot of the things that you’re supposed to,” he said once. “Except for you and my parents, I’m not sure whose death I’d actually care much about.”

  (My biological dad, who lived in Tucson and who I’d seen only a handful of times in the past decade, happened to die that summer. He had a heart attack while he was playing tennis with his girlfriend. My mom woke me up buzzing with the news, as if she’d been plugged into some sort of charge; she seemed to expect me to act upset, so I did. I only felt capable of figuring out how I actually felt about it—mostly annoyed that everyone thought I must be devastated—once I could talk to Thomas.)

  At the homeless encampment, Thomas liked to pile leaves and garbage into the fire pit, which was just a ring of stones, and then light them with matches that he’d taken from one of the restaurants near where the bus let out on Connecticut. The fires burned blue, orange, white, gave off stinking curls of oily smoke; he’d watch and take a couple of seconds to respond to whatever I said to him. “I think I’d like to be cremated,” he said. “Fire seems like the best state that matter can aspire to.”

  One afternoon a park worker (we called him a police officer when we told the story to each other afterward) stepped through the trees just as one of these fires was as its peak, and once I’d started to run, my body clanging with disaster, I looked back and saw that Thomas hadn’t followed me—he was walking calmly in the other direction. I hid behind a tree, too far to hear what Thomas and the officer were saying to each other, but I imagined that Thomas had had an inner collapse and that he was turning himself in. I’d make my way home alone.

  But he came strolling over, not with the officer, and as we walked back to his house he told me, sounding almost bored with the need to explain, what he’d said. “My friend and I were out walking along the path and we thought we saw a fire burning, so we ran over to put it out but we couldn’t find any water.”

  And like that: resolved. I was slightly, silently mad at him for the rest of the afternoon for being so much better than me at coping in an emergency. The practical world was supposed to be my realm.

  When we weren’t in the woods, we spent most of our time at the Pells’ house, despite my mom’s pleading. I knew she’d embarrass me in front of Thomas; I knew Frank would want to take us to the country club, where he’d turn red in the sauna and fart like a silverback gorilla. The few sleepovers we had at my house felt like exhibition games; whatever fun we managed was halfhearted and conditional.

  And as I got to know his parents, I began to feel that way about my house even when I wasn’t with Thomas. When my mom and I had first moved into Frank’s, just before seventh grade, I’d felt like the kid on Silver Spoons—my new bedroom was the size of our old living room; the kitchen had two dishwashers and two sinks; in the backyard there was a little heated pool hidden by a hedge where Frank liked to float on Saturday afternoons. But now that I knew the Pells, now that I’d seen the look on Thomas’s face as Frank showed us how to turn on the jets, it all seemed pathetic, like a SkyMall catalog you could live inside. Could the Pells’ dim, golden dining room really exist just a few miles from this one with its fake fruit and stacks of Time magazine? My mom and Frank, the house, their whole lives, seemed now like a microwavable meal, plastic wrapped and artificially colored.

  Thomas’s mom, Sally, sometimes asked polite questions about what it was like having a mom who was a pharmacist (“She must be just wonderful when you have the flu”), but I knew that they could never be friends, that they could never even really have a conversation, and I knew that Sally knew it too. She practiced some sort of law that was the opposite of my stepdad’s; she was always talking about fraud and city agencies and the lobbyists who actually wrote our legislation. She carried binders and tote bags. She might have been the only mom I knew with undyed gray hair. She’d taken to calling out both Thomas’s and my names as soon as she walked in the door. “Well, don’t you two look comfortable!” Her accent (she was from Georgia) made everything she said sound as if she were curtsying. “I was thinking about steak tonight—sound all right by you two?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Adam, you check with your folks?”

  “They don’t mind!”

&
nbsp; “Why not go ahead and give ’em a call, just to be sure.”

  “OK!”

  I’d never been around an adult who seemed actually to like me; not to love me, in the smothering and depressing and animal way my mom did, and not to feign interest in me, in the professional, blank-eyed way my teachers did, but actually to want to sit down and hear what I had to say about something. Sally would pour herself a glass of white wine and, while Thomas sat at his computer in the other room, say to me, “So, did they let y’all out to watch the verdict? Everyone in my office was gathered around a portable TV like it was a campfire.” Or she might ask me what I thought about the idea of seventy-minute periods, which the high school had just decided to try out. I had no practice in sitting at a table and coming up with opinions; it felt like learning to sing.

  “Mom?” Thomas would call out without looking away from the computer. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, we’re just gossiping in here.” And then sometimes she’d say (I loved to hear this the way a cat loves having its back stroked), “Adam, I just love to talk to you. If Thomas was in charge I think I’d just slide his meals under the door and come get him when Richard gets home.”

  A lot of Sally’s liking me, I knew, had to do with my influence on Thomas; she was happier to see him finally with a best friend than he was. Even the parents of a boy like Thomas, parents who are confident that their son will one day in the not too distant future write books and invent cures and design cathedrals, even they’re secretly worried that he spends too much time alone. And of course Thomas did, pre-me, spend huge amounts of time alone. At his computer he’d stare into games that seemed to consist of geometric figures shooting each other, pyramids sliding toward rectangles, beeping. He read for hours at a sitting. Never once do I remember him putting music on just to have it on; it would have been as weird as if he’d one day put on a Santa hat.

  But I’m putting off describing Thomas’s dad, Richard. I have a sense, like someone trying to describe Michelangelo’s David, that I won’t be able to get any of the important parts of him onto the page. This would sound strange, maybe even crazy, to someone who was just meeting him for the first time; all you’d see would be a not particularly tall, ordinarily handsome, suburban D.C. dad in his forties, proud of his posture, serious about his handshake. But he had, if you stood close to him, a shimmer that certain people have, a kind of celebrity extra-reality, as if he existed both where you were with him and in movies or on newsclips. When I read The Odyssey, that first year of high school, it was Richard I always imagined as Odysseus—and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Thomas told me that he was doing the same thing.

  Richard wore jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Later, when I was in my early twenties, I realized that the style I was going for, the look I had whenever I most approved of what I saw in the mirror, was Richard’s. He had a pink bald head and close-set, Doberman-ish eyes. He was as thin as Thomas, but he was athletic—he was the only dad I knew who worked out, though his working out actually wasn’t anything like what we (or people slightly older than us) did. He ran; every morning you could find him out before sunrise, floating along the edge of Connecticut, wearing weightless clothes and white Reeboks battered brown. He also rowed, alone, out on the Potomac. Until seeing him I hadn’t known that this was a sport, but there he was on this boat that looked, with his oars going and himself sliding up and down, up and down, like some sort of floating insect. Racing into a V of ripples, disappearing under bridges, while Thomas and I walked alongside onshore. At home he did chin-ups on the bar between the kitchen and the front hall, what seemed to me countless at the time but really couldn’t have been any more than, what, twenty? I imagined that he would have been capable of tearing up railroad ties or punching through doors. In one of my most vivid memories of him, Thomas is hanging from his legs and Richard isn’t slowed down in the least; you’d only know he was having to do any extra work at all by the slight smile that joined his usual workout expression.

  Even at twelve, thirteen years old I understood: I wanted him to be my father. And he was, to an extent that couldn’t possibly have delighted me more, up for the job. He was a teacher. Not just literally (he taught about the Civil War at Georgetown) but in terms of temperament, inclinations. He knew things. He attracted disciples. I couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without learning some astonishing thing, some way of thinking, that I wouldn’t be able to wait to misquote as my own.

  For instance:

  “The early Christians, the people who were coming up with this stuff, they weren’t going to movies, they weren’t living in cities. They were farmers. Farmers of what in particular? Grapes. And you’ve probably never seen grapes grow, but the plant is this hideous, gnarly thing, like a hand with arthritis. And the grapes come up, and then they vanish. Just leaving the hand again. And then back they come the next season. And so what did these people, watching the holy life—because a crop to a farmer is holy—birth and death, birth and death, come up with? Resurrection. Reembodiment. Lazarus. Christ was a crop. He has risen.”

  Or:

  “So there’s impression, the buzz of sensory data, and the mind says, Sir, yes, sir, and constructs a world, a story, fits it all together, hides the circuitry. Which people think ends as a dorm room chew toy: is my green your green, OK, boring, got it. But now neuroscience is saying, What if the you who thinks he gets it is a story too? What if ‘you’ are just the face your mind makes out of the disconnected dots? Have you ever seen a Chuck Close?”

  After dinner, once Sally had gone back into the living room, I would sit at the table with Thomas and Richard, silently sucking on what I had to say, what I’d been planning to say for the past ten minutes, wondering whether it would, in some way I couldn’t forecast, reveal me as not having understood what they were talking about.

  But when I’d finally hold my breath and come out with it—my question about why, if Catholics believed so much in the life of the fetus, they didn’t hold funerals for miscarriages, or my idea about how the American colonists could have rationalized what they did to the Indians—Richard would, almost without fail, respond in such a way as to convince me, for as long as we were talking, that I was every bit as smart as Thomas, that my brain too was a rare burden. “ ‘Ignorance is not an excuse.’ That’s very, very good. Wow. I may have to use that.”

  Sally sometimes sang in the other room, and Richard would stop talking to listen, and close his eyes, as if he were about to sneeze. One night, alarmingly, he said, “Jesus, I love that woman.”

  “I think my parents have a lot of sex,” Thomas said once when we were walking along the bike path. “Like a lot.”

  I didn’t understand at the time that this was a kind of bragging, or if I did understand, it didn’t bother me, because I felt that the glow of it included me. “Adam,” Sally said one night, “pretty soon we’re going to get so we’re just going to fill out adoption papers for you. Your mom and I may just have a tug-of-war.”

  Anna and I met again that Friday afternoon, while Nicholas and Teddy were over at friends’ houses (she answered the door in a blue silk kimono). On Sunday when they were with their father. The next Wednesday during music lessons. We were like teenagers.

  We had sex against doors and on closet floors and in not-yet-entirely-warm baths. We were nearly caught by the UPS man. We took turns in the shower. She claimed to be dazzled by my young mannish stamina, which made me feel, for the first time in at least a year, as if I might actually still be young.

  “What year were you born?” she said.

  “Eighty-two.”

  “Wow. OK.”

  “You?”

  “Sixty-nine. I know women are supposed to lie or something, but I don’t really care. I’m kind of proud of it.”

  One afternoon she said, “You know, I think Peter was always jealous of you. I’m serious! I don’t think he liked having a younger guy around.”

  She
did turn out to have a streak of craziness (she flipped straight to the horoscopes, she didn’t believe in flu shots) but she also had a streak of hardness, the kind of personality that settlers have, women who till fields with guns strapped to their backs.

  She’d grown up in Vermont with just her mother, a school librarian, and three older brothers. She’d never had female friends, because they made her feel feral, with their creams and polishes. Instead she had boyfriends: she was the girl who’d let you practice taking off her bra, who’d explain how to know if a girl was faking. She’d gone to Johns Hopkins for college and then spent a couple of years trying to become a children’s book illustrator (she showed me some of her old notebooks, and her drawings were better than I’d feared; cats somehow given personalities in three strokes, trees with old men’s faces in their bark).

  She’d met Peter through a friend at a fancy firm (he was an associate, five years older) and they’d only dated for nine months before he proposed; he seemed so serious and hopeful, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no. She said that while she walked down the aisle, literally as she was holding her bouquet, trying not to stumble in her heels, she was thinking, This is a mistake, this is a mistake. She got pregnant with Nicholas just over a year later.

  “This isn’t the first one of these for you, is it?” I said.

  She pursed her lips. “No. Is that a problem?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tell me if you start thinking you might get hurt,” she said. “I feel like I’m responsible for you. We’re all happiness all the time, OK?”