The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  A year or so earlier, my father had heard Geraldine give a lecture on Primo Levi’s career as a chemist, and his ingenuity in solving problems relating to paints and solvents. Enchanted, he discovered that she required all her students, whether in basic chemistry courses or graduate seminars, to read Primo Levi, especially The Periodic Table and Survival in Auschwitz. In assigned papers and end-term exams, she proposed problems of a kind Levi might have faced in his laboratories in Turin or Auschwitz, and would ask students to explain how they would go about solving them, and, for extra credit, to speculate on the relation of Levi’s scientific vocation to his literary sensibility.

  Max composed an answer to the extra credit question and, under a pseudonym, left it in her Hampshire College mailbox. When she responded with a note saying his was the most brilliant essay she’d received on the subject that semester, but that she didn’t recognize the name—Morris Herman—as belonging to one of her students, he revealed his true identity. They were married six weeks later.

  After supper on this visit, my father suggested we take a walk, just the two of us, the way we’d often done after supper during my junior high and high school years. And when, during our walk, I told him how lucky I thought he was to have married Geraldine, and that I hoped I might meet a woman like her some day, he said I’d surely meet women like Geraldine and that they’d doubtless fall in love with me. In fact, he confided, Geraldine had said that were I a few years older, and not his son, she wouldn’t have hesitated to throw him over for me.

  The Smith College campus was only a block away from our house and I loved our walks there. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we didn’t, and it made no difference either way. The campus was lovely, with handsome nineteenth century red-brick buildings, well-tended lawns, lush perennial gardens, a gorgeous pond (on which we ice-skated in winter), and a remarkable variety of trees. The campus was registered as an arboretum, its trees labeled with their Latin and common names, and my father, having taken walks there nearly every day for most of three decades, often said the trees there had become to him like old friends: he watched them grow and change; he watched them become ill and recover from illness—from harsh winters, broiling summers, and occasional maladies; and sometimes he watched them die. And when they died, he said, they usually died the way we did, from the top down.

  What I also loved about our walks were the chances they gave me to meet Smith College students. Then as now, Smith was an all-women’s school, and many of the women—‘Smithies’—would cross the Connecticut River to take advanced writing and literature courses from my father at UMass. During our walks, we’d meet some of them and he’d introduce me, so that when I walked around campus on my own, or around downtown Northampton, and ran into one of them, I’d say hello, we’d get into a conversation, and sometimes I’d get invited to see their rooms, or to parties in their dorms.

  Although the women were not much older than I was, and hardly sophisticated pros at things we did together sexually, because we assumed from the start that what we were doing couldn’t lead to a serious relationship, we were free with one another in ways they probably weren’t with guys their own age (or older), and I surely wasn’t with girls my age.

  What was intriguing about Nick, my father said during our walk, was that he seemed uniquely free because he was that rare species of being for whom the distinctions between right and wrong, and good and evil seemed to have little relevance. Nick struck him as a man who was, to use a psychological term my father didn’t especially care for, well-resolved—a fascinating if unlikely example of the kind of person a successful psychoanalysis might produce. Max went on to talk about writers he’d known or knew about—Bellow, Mailer, Arendt, Sontag—and how one result of their years on the couch had been to endow them, especially in the risks they were willing to take in and for their work, with a profound sense of entitlement.

  So it was with Nick, Max said, though in a non-literary way. He had not often, if ever, met an intelligent man of Nick’s age who radiated the kind of self-assurance Nick did. Since he doubted Nick had spent any time in therapy, much less analysis, my father concluded that Nick’s sense of entitlement was simply part of his nature: he did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it not because he’d trained himself to feel the right to do so, but because he saw no conflict between means and ends—between his desires and his actions.

  That evening and a few times later on, most memorably during a talk we had the day before I left for Singapore, my father qualified his earlier impressions: he could certainly understand why I was drawn to Nick and had become good friends with him. He even invoked The Odyssey to demonstrate his trust in me and my decision. The Odyssey—and he was here, he said, merely paraphrasing a mini-lecture he gave in a humanities course he’d taught for years—was essentially about the education of a hero, and of a hero who was being educated not, as in The Iliad, to become a great warrior, but to become a peaceful prince whose wisdom would derive from what he experienced during his travels.

  A man made his mark, the Greeks believed, by undertaking long voyages during which he associated with exceptional individuals, and by arriving home with valuable possessions, chief among which would be wisdom. What young man—and one not yet burdened with familial obligations—would not be driven by what the Greeks called a demonic urge, and not welcome an opportunity of the kind Nick was offering me?

  There were also the usual things that allowed for friendship—physical attraction, along with common interests, tastes, and experiences (sports, women, UMass)—but what had played the largest part in his revised opinion of Nick was something obvious that he’d previously overlooked: the excellent judgment Nick had shown in choosing me for a friend.

  Still, his warnings about Nick made their home in one of the unfurnished rooms of my mind, and, given how things would turn out in Singapore, did more than that, and in ways, I liked to think, my father would have approved.

  When I’d met Nick at our reunion (he and Trish had split up five years earlier), he pitched Singapore to me by saying that working there would be like being a cop or a fireman, but without the physical dangers, and with infinitely better perks. Cops and firemen put in their time—twenty years of risk, swag, bullshit, and boredom—and were rewarded with pensions that allowed them to retire on comfortable incomes for the rest of their lives, and to take up second careers while they were still young men.

  In Singapore, it was the same, only better—you could work hard and play hard, and get rewarded out the wazoo with buckets of money and all the pleasures money could buy. You could pull in a small fortune—get laid, get paid, get high, have people squat, shit, and bend over whenever you wanted them to—and leave it all behind not in twenty years but in less than a dozen, and never have to work again. Unless I was into some sappy version of the American Dream—into having a devoted wife, two-point-three kids, membership in a swish country club, and a home featured in Architectural Digest—what could keep me away?

  In addition to which—we were hanging out at Chequers, a bar we’d gone to after basketball games during the UMass glory years (when the team had risen in national polls from number three-hundred-something to number one), and we were both fairly well lit—the real dirt on what gave life in Singapore its own bland thrum of glory, he said, was that living there on one’s own—living nowhere, unconnected to somewhere or anywhere—you were free of responsibility. Which meant being free from things that shackled most guys our age: wives, kids, jobs, mortgages, debt, alimony, child support.

  That was when he talked about my relationship to Max. He knew he might offend, he said, but he’d rather risk my anger than watch me continue to stumble around, and he urged me to hear him out.

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked.

  He jabbed me in the arm, hard, and said that we always had choices. For example: He could punch me if he wanted, and I could punch him back if I wanted, and we could keep going and break up the bar (something he’d been known to do durin
g his football days), and we could wind up with one or both of us in the emergency ward or the slammer. To prove his point, he punched me again, harder this time, so that the drink I was holding splashed onto my shirt, and when, after a moment’s hesitation, I pulled back my fist to return the blow, he seized it in his fist (he had huge hands for his size), and warned me not to be foolish—“I love you, Charlie, don’t you know that?” he said, something I remembered him saying before, when he’d whispered the words in my ear at a time when I’d been so looped out of my mind, with him, me, and Trish rolling around in bed together, that afterwards I wasn’t sure if he’d said it or if I’d dreamt he’d said it.

  This time, he had my hand in a kind of death-lock and, his face close to mine, he kept smiling and repeating his we-always-have-choices line while I kept trying not to show how scared I was that if I didn’t call him off, he’d break some of my fingers. But then, without my having to give in, he just let go and talked about me and Max again.

  He had no quarrel with Max, he began. In fact, he said, laughing, he admired him to-the-max, and gave him a ton of credit for being as hands-off and non-judgmental a father as he’d ever met. This was impressive not only because Nick’s father was the opposite, but because it was totally anomalous, in his experience, for a first generation Jewish-American man to be laid back toward an only son the way Max was. What worried him weren’t any dreams or wishes Max might have had for me, he said, but dreams and delusions I had about Max, and how attached I was to him.

  He’d asked himself why a guy like me, oozing with brains and talent, had wound up shuttling from one half-assed job to another. Where was the guy he used to know—a guy who kept his priorities in order, whose persistence matched his grit, especially when it came to playing ball or shagging women, and who had, he suspected, if only I’d give in to it, a real fire in the belly for taking risks that could make the most outrageous dreams come true? So that when, the day before, he’d started making the case for my coming to Singapore and I’d rebuffed him, the answer had been there: My problem, he realized, was that I couldn’t commit to anything that allowed me to put myself in first position. And I couldn’t do this because I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving Max back home by his lonesome.

  The real reason I hadn’t been able to commit to anything was my concern that Max might suddenly need me: that he might become ill, disabled, or senile. What I’d done, according to Nick, was to make a contract with myself to always be available—to always be free, and on a moment’s notice, to move back home and care for him.

  Being an only child to an only parent, my fear had been: What happens to me if Max is gone? And hey—what guy in my position wouldn’t have such a fear? But what I’d also gone and done, Nick said, was to have inverted this, projected it, reversed it—he didn’t know what the current psychobabble term was—and put my feelings into Max so I could worry about what would happen to him if I were gone.

  But this made no sense, Nick said, because Max was the last guy in the world who’d want to tie a son down by obligation or guilt, and he pointed to the obvious—Max’s five wives—as proof. Hadn’t it occurred to me that Max had married so many times and, in between, rarely left himself without a live-in lady-friend, because he was working overtime to let me off the hook—because he wanted me to see that there’d always be someone else who could, when occasion arose, take care of him?

  In truth, I argued back, it seemed to me Max had had so many wives and girlfriends because he liked women. It never occurred to me that he liked them and married them in order to set me free, and I wagered that if I were to present Max with Nick’s theory, he would have laughed it away.

  “Exactly my point,” Nick said. “Neither of you can see what’s happening because it’s been the secret, unspoken deal you’ve had going all along. Sure he likes the ladies, and he understands them, which is why they take to him so often: he knows that no matter how independent and accomplished they are, the great aphrodisiac for them is the famous need-to-be-needed.”

  I told Nick he was full of shit—not about women maybe, because I’d seen enough grade-A women become suckers for sad sacks to know the truth of what he was saying—but about Max. My hesitation about jumping in with Nick didn’t come from his cock-and-bull about me and Max, but from the fact that everything he’d told me about Singapore, and about what turned him on about being there, persuaded me it would be exactly what he said it would be: bland and boring.

  “Oh you won’t be bored,” Nick said. “I promise you.”

  “Because—?”

  “Because you’ll be with me, and because we both know it’s time to up the ante—to take pleasure from things we haven’t even dreamt of yet. Take my word for it, Charlie. Have I ever steered you wrong before?”

  “Rarely,” I said.

  “Rarely?” he laughed. “I’ll put it another way then. Since you said your life’s going nowhere fast, why not take up my offer on a trial basis—a six week or six month lease, round-trip expenses paid for? Plus—and here’s the last, best reason to say yes—if you won’t do it for yourself, how about doing it for me?”

  “That way I won’t be putting myself in first position, is that it?”

  “You got it.”

  A few drinks later, I shrugged, put my arm around him, said, “What the hell,” shook his hand, and told him we had a deal, and to tell me what to do.

  “Get your vaccinations,” he said.

  Nick didn’t talk much about Borneo in all the hours we talked about my going to Singapore, but it was Borneo that made the difference—made me sign up to renew the six week lease, and the six month lease, and any other lease anyone would have put in front of me.

  But Borneo didn’t happen until the beginning of my seventh week in Singapore, when Nick and I visited three of our palm oil plantations there, by which time I’d settled into my job and apartment, and during which time I learned just how accurate Nick’s descriptions of Singapore had been.

  Bland was an understatement. Singapore was the very model of a benevolent dictatorship, with trade-offs everyone seemed to accept without even noticing that they had: a few human rights and civil liberties lost—a life of comfort, efficiency, and safety gained. Singapore made the most tranquil American suburb seem like a cauldron of chaos and danger. All public services—trains, busses, traffic, street cleaning, garbage collection, electrical service—functioned smoothly. The government controlled the number of cars on the road (I never saw a car more than a decade old), and free, eerily quiet shuttles, along with an ultra-modern rail system, connected all major points in the city. Things rarely seemed to go awry (or if they did, they were fixed almost before you knew the repair crew had been there), and people were endlessly, maddeningly pleasant.

  The health care system (offering both Western and traditional Chinese medicine) was world-class, with easy access to doctors, clinics, and hospitals. There were banks on virtually every street corner, fitness centers, swimming pools, tennis courts, health clinics, and mini-markets attached to most condominiums, and a wealth of country clubs offering long menus of amenities. Singapore turned out to be, that is, nothing less than what Nick and the government claimed it was: a model of Western innovation and efficiency with, in its values, traditions, and people, an Eastern face.

  I arrived the third week in July, when the monsoons were blowing through, and though this was a time of year with the least amount of rainfall, the monsoons brought with them intermittent, heavy thunderstorms and the year’s most unrelentingly unbearable heat and humidity. When I had to be outdoors, I perspired so profusely that even my ears sweated, and I’d go through three or four shirts on some days (I kept spares in my briefcase). The heat and humidity turned out to be year-round companions, and despite Nick’s warnings, I never stopped being undone by the toll they took on me, and came to live as much of my life indoors as I could: in air-conditioned offices, apartments, stores, restaurants, and bars that were comfortable, clean, and cool.

 
Our college reunion had taken place in early June, at a time when I was living in New York and working on an interim basis as an English and social studies teacher at a private high school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where I also helped coach the tennis and baseball teams. I’d been enjoying the teaching and coaching, and, even more, the city’s infinite offerings—concerts, museums, parks, restaurants, pubs, ballgames, women—along with the sheer insane diversity of the place.

  I loved walking the streets—would set out ritually every Saturday morning and, using an old 1939 WPA Guide to New York City Max had given me (a guide written and edited, he pointed out, by, among others, John Cheever and Richard Wright when they’d been young, unpublished authors), explore a part of the city I’d never been to before, mostly in Manhattan, but sometimes in the other boroughs. To understand New York, Max often said, you had to understand that despite its being a global center of commerce, entertainment, and ideas, it was also, in its essence, a set of villages, and seeing the city this way—through his eyes—made me feel, each week, as if I were setting off into the unknown—for neighborhoods that were discrete, exotic nations entire unto themselves.

  I loved hearing the multitude of languages you’d hear on any given day—Spanish most of all, but also Russian, Italian, Hebrew, French, German, Japanese, Albanian, Indian, Portuguese, Yiddish, along with those (Hungarian? Roumanian? Farsi? Arabic? Finnish? Chinese? Korean?) whose music and cadences I had to guess at. I loved the contrasts: homeless people sleeping in doorways a few feet from apartment houses with multi-million-dollar penthouses; rundown, abandoned buildings side by side with bright new avant-garde, upscale restaurants (this was especially common on the Lower East Side, where Max’s parents—my grandparents—had lived when they came to America); blocks of high-rise apartment buildings that housed hundreds of thousands of people in an acre or two of concrete, while overlooking enormous expanses of lawns, ball fields, woodlands, and gardens in city parks.