A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “It’s hardly the case that I—”

  “Wouldn’t our conversation be more interesting if you promised never again to open a sentence with It’s hardly the case . . . ?”

  “Hey—”

  “Or, My own opinion is . . .”

  “Look—”

  “Look, you’re on medication, isn’t that right? Have been ever since that girl left and you had that little nervous breakdown, right? And here you are, drinking the hard stuff in the afternoon . . .” And my Uncle Conrad shakes his head ponderously, lugubriously at me.

  I meet his glance, drain my cognac, and say to him, “Point one: I’ve been on medication since before Angelina and I separated. Point two: I never had a nervous breakdown and you’ve got to stop talking like I did, you’ve even got Adelle thinking I’m some sort of psychic invalid.”

  “What medication?”

  “Various.”

  “What medication?”

  “For different things.”

  “What medication?”

  “Sixty milligrams of Inderal—that’s a beta-blocker—and Nardil, fifteen and thirty milligrams, on alternate mornings. That’s an old-fashioned antidepressant, and fifteen and thirty means, incidentally, I’m on lower doses than more than half the people I know.”

  “You’re spooked, face it, Luke. Eyes like a hare and look at the way your hand shakes. I notice it each time you pick up your glass.”

  “It’s the Lithium. Four hundred and fifty milligrams at bedtime. Shaking’s a common side effect. And Zoloft, fifty milligrams, also at bedtime.”

  “You’re pale, you’re shaky, your hair’s coming out in handfuls, your eyes are bloodshot.”

  “Oh and ten milligrams of Ambien. That’s for insomnia. I’m cutting back on all the dosages now that I’ve left Gribben . . .”

  “You look like a patient in a shell-shock ward.”

  “I feel swell.”

  “I don’t know what it is about your generation,” Conrad continues dolefully, downing his drink and dipping a Dorito first in the guacamole and then in the sour cream—leaving a green ribbon in the latter. “None of you can cope with reality, can you? You’re all on drugs, aren’t you? All the little pleasures of this world just aren’t enough for you, are they?”

  It’s a comic send-up, surely—this version of a Conrad Sultan ready to extol the elementary joys of rose-gardening, or a glass of cold water, or a brisk constitutional at dawn. But then he says, “With your dad dead, I suppose it ought to be my job to tell you to watch it now and then,” and all at once I can’t say to what degree the mournful look on Conrad’s face, or the abruptly maudlin tremble in his voice, is in fact genuine. “Kiddo, you’ve got a lot of time left to fuck things up. Young people always think they need to fuck things up—but they don’t. Life will do it for them. What’s your hurry, Luke? Look, I don’t want to see you die the way your father did.”

  “Mm?”

  “In a bar.”

  “But he died in a hospital.”

  Conrad shakes his heavy head. “Wes was dead. By then. By the time they got him to the hospital. Dead by the time the ambulance arrived.”

  “A bar?” I say, after a moment. “Where?”

  “Stags Harbor.”

  “And what was its name?”

  “The Silk and Satin Saloon.”

  “Of course it was,” I say. “What else would it possibly be named?”

  “It’s no way for you to end up,” Conrad tells me.

  “Piss time,” I counter, and rise to my feet. I feel a little wobbly, though I’ve had very little to drink. But Conrad’s words are dizzying—his entire presence is dizzying . . .

  On the way to the bathroom I pass his bedroom and all at once I feel a powerful longing for another look at that aquarium. I want to verify my memory—to see whether Conrad’s aquarium is as pure and imposing and magically ornate as what I recollect. But the door’s closed. For a moment I lean my head against the door, catching—maybe—the rich, cleansing hum of the filtration system. Or maybe it’s my own—medicated—blood in my ears.

  On the way back from the bathroom I turn the knob and nudge the bedroom door with the side of my shoe. It opens slowly. The aquarium is still in place, as outsize and ornate and as magical as ever, but this time I notice something new about the room—a far less spectacular feature. On the wall between the bed and the aquarium hangs a painting. It’s a nondescript gray canvas in a garish red-and-white frame. A painting? This can only be the artwork that triggered one of the fiercest battles the two Sultan brothers ever fought. Yes: agoraphobic Dora Sultan’s treasured vision of downtown Chicago. Michigan Avenue in the Rain.

  When I return to the living room, Conrad has found a new tone and subject:

  “Tell me about Hibernation.”

  “Bernie? He spent most of my visit watching a football game.”

  “And Adelle?”

  “Very down on Tiffany this time around.”

  “And that surprises you? You had to fly out to Michigan to figure that one out?”

  “She’d changed her tune. Last time I’d seen her, she went on and on about how Tiffany broke Wes’s heart. As if nobody else ever had. This time around, she made it sound like Tiffany was just one in a string of broken—”

  And once again I’ve said something to stir Conrad into high dudgeon: “Wes’s heart broken? Jeezo Christo, it’s the most absurd thing I ever heard. Honestly, don’t you understand anything? That that was merely the last step in the Great Wes Sultan Act? His little trademark finale? The one that proved how sensitive he was? Actually, actually it was the one real inarguable stroke of genius in the guy. You hadda hand it to Wes. Your average Don Juan, he makes a conquest and walks away without a second thought. Maybe even takes pride in never giving the woman a second thought. Well, Wes prided himself in being a Don Juan with a Difference, a Don Juan for Our Times.

  “If for Wes the richest phrase in the universe was It’s working— I’m charming her, what was the second-richest? It was Poor sensitive Wes really got his heart broke this time around. Don’t you see? Don’t you understand how much he enjoyed going to Adelle with another tale of heartbreak? Wes was never happier than when his heart got broke . . . God help him, he saw himself as some sort of country-and-western singer. Don’t you get it? How sweet it was, when a relationship was coming undone and he was dumping another woman, to say to her as he was buttoning up his shirt, You know, honey, I really fell for you? From Wes’s point of view, nothing was more noble than declaring after a night in the sack with some woman he hoped he’d never see again, some woman who was missing a front tooth or weighed two hundred pounds, to declare, I know I don’t mean anything special to you but gee, darlin’, you really turned my head there for a while. And this went on for forty years! He took his darlin’ act on the road, Wes went out on tour, and he played the same act night after night for forty years! Look, I guarantee you, America today is positively chockablock with sixty-plus-year-old women, most of them probably fat as fat Conrad, who occasionally say to themselves, Once, once I broke the heart of a beautiful boy.” The image is finally so disturbing to Conrad that nothing is to be done but to dip an entire fistful of Doritos all at once into the sour cream and to bite down upon it in a great shattering clatter. Still chewing, he revs right up again: “Wes’s heart broken ? The first thing you have to realize about Wes is that whatever he ever said about love or sex or passion was absolute nonsense.” The sweeping grandeur of this denunciation brings a lick of joy to Conrad’s crafty eyes. “He never in his life made an honest remark on the subject.

  “Wes’s heart broken? If it ever was, it was Sally who did it. Because it turned out she had backbone, and Wes never figured on that. Turned out when she said enough, she meant just that. Wes could never get his head around it. Couldn’t believe he could train those blue eyes on Sally, do the big soulful swallowing with that gorgeous Adam’s apple of his, sigh and promise her, Everything will be di ferent, I’ll take you to the moo
n, and she could reply, Sorry, I’ve got other plans. Of course it scared him that her IQ was about double his. (Let’s see, seventy times two is one forty. . . . Yep, that’s about right.) He worried she’d finally seen through him. It was the beginning of the end for Wes, who would later discover other women, too, who would say Enough, and all sorts of folks at Great Bay Shipping whose hearts didn’t go pit-a-pat when he batted his eyelashes. So he had his fall, just the way Mother had her fall—she fell all the way from Crestview Boulevard to the duplex on Scully Street.”

  “I went over and looked at that place. The last time I was in Restoration.”

  “You know what the weird thing was about Scully Street? The really painful irony? The thing that Wes could never see and Mother could never see? It’s this: that Scully Street was actually a helluva nice place to grow up. Had the Sultan family fallen? Hell, Luke, we’d fallen into clover. You had the park right there. And the Michicabanabee River. And if the guy next door sat on his porch in his T-shirt all day and didn’t cut his lawn, well you didn’t have to worry anymore about what the neighbors thought . . . Summers in particular, those were lovely down there. Summer nights,” Conrad says, or sighs, and the look on his face is as far as I’m concerned a new face, the tone in his voice a new tone. For this is the expression, and the pitch, of a man looking deep into his past and locating there, gratefully, beauty and liberality and ease. This is the closest I’ve ever seen Conrad come to a nostalgic interlude. “Summers, down by the Michicabanabee, we used to see fireflies, hundreds and hundreds of them, and Wes and Adelle and I would go out hunting them with mason jars. And the better you did, the more your jar glowed; those jars glowed just like lanterns. You know what I’d heard somewhere? Some kid told me, I don’t know if it’s true. But I always wanted to see if it was true . . . I heard that sometimes when frogs swallow a firefly their throats will glow for a second, they’ll glow with the light they’ve swallowed inside them.”

  There’s a glow in any case—delicate, but enduring intact over half a century—on Conrad’s face. He takes another shot of cognac and says, abruptly, “You know, something tragic has happened to me.”

  I give him a sympathetic nod. I’m naturally supposing that he’s alluding to his health problems—to those little dry dusty gray rooms being hollowed out inside him. But I ought to know better. Even an ailing Conrad, and a tipsy nostalgic Conrad, isn’t about to go soliciting my sympathy in so open a fashion. “It’s just horrible,” he murmurs. “I’ve become a philosopher.”

  “About your own life?”

  “About my own life, and Wes’s, and yours, and Sally’s—about everyone’s. I told you last time, you can put it on my tombstone: Thinking stinks. I’d trade every interesting thought I’ve had in the past two years for one more of my little miracles.”

  He pats at his crotch and says, “I said as much to Sally maybe a year ago. I explained that I’d figured out the central mystery of my life, but I didn’t find it all that fascinating really, and she said to me, ‘But what about culture, Conrad?’ Now tell me something, Luke. Is there anything in it—culture? What’s the real point of culture?”

  Oh, now there’s a look of pleased arch ingenuousness on his face—but also, if I’m reading him right, some gravity too.

  “I’m working on that one, Conrad.”

  “Now this is the woman, remember, who once guided me to an art exhibition of shoelaces glued to plywood. Am I going to look at one of those artworks and say, My life’s mystery is restored? And is the Metropolitan Opera or the Louvre Museum in Paris really much more than plywood and shoelaces? Luke, I don’t like art. [No, Conrad, though you fought like the devil for Michigan Avenue in the Rain.] Or music. Or the movies. I used to like TV, even though everybody says it’s an insult to your intelligence—but Jesus, I’ve always liked insults. And then, what the hell, it finally got too stupid even for me. So what am I supposed to do all day but eat all day, and drink all day? You get the monkey off your back and what have you got? Nothing. You’re not free, you’re just broke. That’s when you say, Wait a minute, at least I used to have a monkey. Instead, I’m stuck philosophizing . . .

  “You know I read somewhere that scientists, physicists I guess, were trying to come up with their big TOE, do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Not precisely, Conrad.” I pour myself a second drink.

  “A Theory of Everything—a theory to explain everything.”

  “Oh well yes, actually I—”

  “So one day, what the hell, what did I do? I came up with a theory that, if it doesn’t explain everything in the world, comes pretty close. You want to hear my theory? You want to have the whole goddamned world explained to you once and for all?”

  “Very much.”

  “All right, it goes like this: Every time an idiot’s born, I’m a little better o f.” And the expression upon the man’s face truly is something to behold: a look of absolutely incandescent triumph. No doubt about it, my Uncle Conrad is expecting applause, congratulations, awe.

  “Maybe a little amplification . . . ,” I suggest.

  “All right, all right. Look, take hotels. What sort of idiot pays three dollars for a bag of chips from the minibar when he knows he can get a bag four times the size at half the price one block down the street? The answer is: an idiot idiot. But I’m an accountant, so let’s look at it from the accountant’s point of view. The sort of person who pays the minibar price, the person who says, Go ahead and rob me blind, he’s the one keeps the hotel profits up. He’s the one allows them to keep room rates down, you get what I’m saying? The idiots are subsidizing me. Okay, take airplanes. What sort of idiot is it who buys a newspaper for two hundred bucks—which is basically all the value you’re buying— Here’s your complimentary newspaper, sir—when you fly first-class? The answer is: an idiot idiot. But they’re just the sort of idiots who keep my own ticket price down. Once again: They’re subsidizing me. You could extend this out well beyond the field of economics, incidentally. It pretty much explains how the world works: Every time an idiot’s born, I’m better o f. It’s also why you’ve got to be grateful anytime anybody builds an Idiot Attractor—it gets them out of our hair for a while. Man, they can’t build enough riverboat casinos to suit me.

  “Do you get it? Every time an idiot’s born, I’m better o f. It’s what I tell myself whenever I go shopping or to the post office and I have the bad luck to run into an idiot. In my mind I say to him, Thank you, my friend, you’re making my world a better place, you goddamned idiot. It’s what helps me keep my temper.”

  “But you have the worst temper of anyone I know, Conrad.”

  “But think how much worse it would be if the world weren’t full of idiots! Christ, man, they’re the only thing holding me together . . .” And with the last stroke, his big ruddy round face glows once more like a mason jar full of fireflies. He has outbantered me, hasn’t he?—out-bantered the Princeton boy, the megamoney Manhattan finance man? Amusement, jubilation, self-righteousness dance in his eyes. And something in addition: a boyish look that declares, I’ve won! I’ve won!

  But abruptly Conrad’s gaze goes cold, his features harden. He drains his glass and says, “Okay, fun’s fun. But isn’t it time you told me what you’re doing?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I mean, cut the shit.”

  “Beg pardon.”

  “And quit pardoning me, or pardoning yourself, Mr. Prissy Etiquette: what’s the matter with What? for God’s sake?”

  It’s all come on so fast . . . No, this is no joke, and the sincerity and the amplitude of Conrad’s rage are puzzling. I’ve never seen so many facets of the man as I’ve been seeing this afternoon, and yet this particular side to him isn’t one I’m eager to meet. No, for the first time in my life, as the old wrestler thrusts his shoulders toward me, and trains on me that hooded reptilian glance with which, forty years before, he must have psyched out one opponent after another, I feel genuinely fearful of my uncle.

&
nbsp; “I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Conrad . . .”

  “But I’ve just explained it, weren’t you listening? There’s no big mystery so far as Wes is concerned. Period. Okay then: How long can you go on pretending to play Sherlock Holmes when there isn’t any mystery?”

  “I’m still not sure I—”

  And Conrad erupts, cries with a great howling wail of a voice: “Goddamn it, it’s Sally, isn’t it?”

  I haven’t a clue what he means, not a clue . . . I only know his dark apartment shudders with anguished feeling, that every last bit of raging intensity in his gaze is authentic. I say: “Please, I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  Conrad says: “Of course it’s Sally, it’s always always bright little Sally, pulling the strings behind the scene. I can just hear her now, in that goddamned sweet charitable voice of hers, Go visit your Uncle Conrad, Luke, he’s lonely and miserable. And, He’s very ill, Luke, go get to know your uncle before he dies.”

  For a few seconds I sit there dumbstruck. Then I say, softly, “But Sally has nothing to do with it, Conrad. Completely nothing at all to do with my being here.”

  And Conrad storms on: “What are you expecting me to believe, huh? That the New York high-finance hotshot comes down here because he just can’t get enough stories about a small-town loser like Wes Sultan? You weren’t in any such hurry to see Wes when he was alive.”

  “Maybe I’m making up for things . . .”

  “Or maybe you’re making things up! You telling me you quit your megabucks job just to track down the doings of a pathetic little flimflam like Wes Sultan? You may have had your famous nervous breakdown, buddy boy, but you’re not as batty as that. No no. You? You’re a cagey little shit.”

  More softly still, I say, “Point one: Yes, I gave up my job in order to do things like sit here with you. Point two: Yes, I quit my job in order to pursue the ‘doings’ of a small-town loser like Wesley Sultan. I’m afraid you’re going to have to believe it, Conrad. Because it’s all true.”

  “That so? Okay, then tell me one thing: Where does it lead you? Tell me just one thing: What’s the what-for? What’s behind all your careful little grave-digging?”