There was a lull in the conversation, and I couldn’t think of anything to ask except for the most boring question of all. “What do you want to do with your life?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “For a little while I thought I was going to be a writer—a few weeks, my whole life, I’m not really sure—but I’m taking a fiction workshop this semester and I can tell my professor thinks I’m not very good, even though he won’t come out and say so, and his negative comments are absolutely on target, so I’m never going to write again.”
“That seems extreme.”
“When you realize a great truth, you have to accept it and then act on it. You must believe that, or you wouldn’t have used the epiphany machine.”
“There’s a lot of disagreement about whether you should or even can behave differently because of what the machine tells you. Adam Lyons contradicts himself a lot on that.” I wished I could confront Adam on this contradiction, which made me miss Adam, which in turn made me annoyed with myself.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
“I think the epiphany machine is for losers who need other people to tell them what to do.”
“I like things that are for losers,” she said. “I don’t like the way we think of winning and losing.”
I recognized the way she was talking. Someone who wanted to be talked into using the machine.
“You could hail a cab and have a needle in your arm in, like, half an hour,” I said.
“I feel like I’ve used it already, and I’ve gotten my one big important epiphany. There are other things I’d like to know, but I don’t want to get greedy.”
This struck me as a throwaway not-really-joke, so I didn’t pursue it. Besides, an idea had just occurred to me that I did want to pursue.
“Listen, do you want to come downtown with me tonight? I’m getting drinks at nine with two friends from NYU.”
This was forward of me, but I decided it would be more tolerable to hang out with Ismail and Leah if I wasn’t wondering whether they were thinking that I was sexless and pathetic.
“Sounds fun! But I’m supposed to have dinner with my parents tonight. Want to come to that first and then we’ll meet up with your friends?”
I looked at her, expecting her to tell me that she was joking, not not-really-joking. But she didn’t.
“I mean, I guess I could,” I said. “Even though . . .”
“Great! It would be depressing to spend tonight having dinner with no one but my parents, since it’s my birthday.”
“Oh. Happy birthday.”
“Thank you. Since it’s my birthday, would you mind coming back to my room with me and going down on me?”
She grabbed my hand, my answer being obvious.
Once we were inside her room, I barely had time to take in her bookshelf—Virginia Woolf, Catherine Pearson, Sylvia Plath, several books on mastering the craft of writing fiction, a prominently placed copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and, yes, both Only the Desert Is Not a Desert and Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine—before she pushed me down on her single bed. She took my shirt off and I winced as she read my tattoo, mostly expecting her to throw me out. And she did give me the disappointed look I was expecting.
“DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS? Is that even an epiphany? Isn’t that true of, like, everybody?”
This felt like exactly the sort of acceptance I needed, like I could just kiss her and the movie of my life would fade to black and the credits would roll.
I kissed her, and the movie continued.
She pulled down my pants and boxers in one unbroken movement, an act that felt as abrupt and strange as this entire afternoon, but as soon as she put my penis in her mouth, I was very glad that I had accompanied her home. Very rarely does life give you unambiguously positive feedback; in fact, I’m not sure that such feedback comes in any form other than oral sex. When my turn came to give her the same feedback, I pled for mercy by saying I had never performed oral sex before. (I decided not to mention that I had never received it either.) Her loud moans felt like the overly effusive praise one gives a fifteen-month-old child trying to walk across a room. She yanked at my hand until I figured out that she wanted me to put first one finger inside her and then another, and once she had control of two of my fingers she seemed to start genuinely enjoying herself. Once we were finished, her cheeks were a very bright red. I told her she looked like a lobster, and she giggled and covered her cheeks. We exchanged theories of the universe and then I went down on her again.
After her second, more subdued orgasm, I kissed my way back up her torso, hoping that this orgasm had been more genuine, and that I was fulfilling the sacred duty of lovers and Americans: Getting Better. But when I reached her chin and pulled myself up to make eye contact, she avoided my gaze and stared at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll keep working at it.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “You should probably know my name is Rebecca Hart.”
“You’re not serious.”
“That may be true. But it’s definitely true that my name is Rebecca Hart.”
“You must hate the machine.”
“No, I’m grateful for it. It hasn’t written on me, but it gives me my epiphany every time I write my name. I would kill any children I have, so I’m just not going to have children. And I didn’t even have to get a tattoo! No tattoos, no children. Nothing permanent for my body.”
“You can’t actually believe that just having the name ‘Rebecca Hart’ makes you want to kill your children.”
As I was saying this, she jumped out of bed and put her shirt back on. “I just met you, so I’ll let it slide this time, but please never, ever tell me what I can and can’t believe ever again. Now let’s go meet my parents.”
CHAPTER
21
Rebecca’s father, seated at a table at the far end of the restaurant, saw us as soon as we came in, and he stood up and waved furiously. If he was dismayed that his daughter had brought a date, he showed no sign of it, and when we reached the table he commenced doing what fathers are supposed to do: state facts in a way that makes their children hate the facts, their fathers, and themselves.
“I see the birthday girl has brought a young man.”
“Venter Lowood, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ Politeness is creepy in your generation. Call me ‘Bob.’ What did you say your name was again?”
“Venter. My parents wanted me to have a name no one else had.”
He looked at his daughter. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with having a name that other people have either.”
I had not intended any comment on the history of the name “Rebecca Hart.” It wasn’t even true that my parents had wanted me to have a name that no one else had—this was just a breezy line I used to get out of talking about my name. I tried to think of a way to explain all this while Rebecca’s father explained that Rebecca’s mother was trying to find a parking space. Rebecca, not having registered any unintentional insult from me and already in chiding-daughter mode, said that it didn’t make any sense for them to have driven, since it would have been much more convenient for them to have taken Metro-North. It struck me as a major failure to learn that the first girl I had hooked up with lived in a town accessible by the rail system that fed commuters from suburban New York and Connecticut into the city and then spat them back out again; I had gone to college hoping for new experiences, but had formed my first real connection with someone who was, apparently, from the same place I was.
After saying that the train always made her mother sick, as Rebecca well knew, her father launched into a monologue about how lucky we were to be in college and how much he missed it. He was an ear, nose, and throat doctor, which, he told me, he considered a ludicrous specialty. It made sense in a way, of course—the medical profession
had sound reasons for carving up specialties the way it did—but he said he couldn’t help feeling that he had been tossed the leftover parts of the body, the ones the other doctors weren’t interested in. He had really enjoyed reading Augustine in college, and in his dorm at night, he used to fantasize about becoming an Augustine scholar, even though there was never really a time when he was going to do anything other than go to medical school, and he was glad he had gone to medical school, since he had friends who were academics and they said it was a miserable life for all but a lucky few at the top. Anyway, he said, his point had nothing to do with wanting to be an Augustine scholar, it had to do with wanting to live the life of an undergraduate, and reading whatever you wanted to in a fun and superficial way, and making all sorts of plans that don’t really mean very much, and that both Rebecca and I should enjoy this time while we could, and we should remember that every moment we weren’t enjoying ourselves was basically a moment that we were adding to our own oblivion, and it would be pretty dumb to add any moments to our own oblivion, since our oblivion already extended into functional eternity in two directions.
Throughout this monologue, Rebecca tried to interrupt to get him to talk about something more interesting, but I appreciated the fact that I was not being called on to talk. Despite my extensive practice, I still wasn’t very good at making conversation with a father who would prefer that I was not there.
When Rebecca’s mother arrived, she took a deep, unhappy breath at seeing me, and then said she was delighted that I could join them for their private family dinner.
“It’s New York, Mom. There’s no such thing as a private family dinner.”
Her mother collapsed into her chair and took Rebecca’s comment as an invitation to complain about New York, particularly the parking. As we all shared some bruschetta, I noticed Rebecca’s mother glancing at me, waiting for the right opportunity to strike and say something nasty. I told myself I was imagining this, until the right opportunity struck and she said something nasty.
“So, Venter, I hope you’re ready to be portrayed unflatteringly in Rebecca’s first novel.”
“I’m not writing fiction anymore, Mom.”
“What? But that’s your dream.”
“Was my dream. And that’s all it was.”
“Is this because you’ve been distracted by your boyfriend? You should never let that happen.”
“I’m totally supportive of whatever Rebecca wants to do,” I said. I was generally supportive of anyone’s artistic inclinations, so I would almost certainly be supportive of Rebecca’s specific artistic inclinations were I ever called upon to do so.
“Young lovers are never going to listen to us, Melanie,” Rebecca’s father said. “Lecturing them will only make them want to rebel.”
“Oh yeah, everything I do is out of rebellion,” Rebecca said. “That’s why I’m dating Venter. Venter’s favorite food is bacon. Bacon-wrapped shrimp is pretty much the only thing he eats.”
“Rebecca likes to tease us,” her mother said. “It’s not as though we keep kosher. We’re secular.”
“Venter’s not just secular. He is a very bad Jew. He’s such a bad Jew he has a tattoo.”
This obvious baiting of her parents was getting tiresome.
“The salmon looks amazing!” I said, pointing to a nearby busboy and lamely trying to recover the moment.
“Is that true, Venter?” her father asked. “Do you have a tattoo?”
“Daddy doesn’t want Jews to have tattoos. He doesn’t like the rhyme.”
“It was a bad decision,” I said. “I should never have gotten it. It’s not worth alienating anyone over.”
“Oh, now I’m disappointed,” her father said. “You shouldn’t care what I think. I certainly didn’t care what Melanie’s mother thought. She didn’t approve of the fact that my father wasn’t Jewish, but I certainly didn’t apologize for my background, or for anything else I did. I’m not sure how I feel about my daughter dating someone who cares what I think.”
“Whoa, looks like the epiphany machine and my dad agree about you, Venter,” Rebecca said.
“Wait, what? You don’t have an epiphany tattoo, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You understand that Adam Lyons ruined our daughter’s life.”
“Ruined her life? She’s a freshman at Columbia.”
“Her entire life, she’s had to endure jokes about Rebecca the Heartless.”
“I recall a different term,” Rebecca said.
“So why did you name her Rebecca?” I asked.
“Rebecca is my grandmother’s name and Melanie’s grandmother’s name, so we had other associations with the name ‘Rebecca,’ if you can believe that.”
“I like my name!” Rebecca said. “Not that you’ve ever cared about that.”
“So what does your epiphany tattoo say?” her mother asked.
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
Both parents laughed at this. “He’d rather not discuss it,” her father said. “He gets it tattooed on his arm for the whole world to see, but he’d rather not discuss it.”
“Not the whole world,” I said. “Just people who see my arm.”
“People like my daughter.”
“People like me,” Rebecca said.
“So let us see it, too,” her father said.
“Let you see it?”
“I didn’t ask to see your dick. I asked to see your fucking forearm. If my daughter is dating a cult member, I’d at least like to see what the cult has told him.”
I stood and shoved up my sleeve for him to see.
“Happy now? Because, uncharacteristically, I don’t give a shit.”
Within seconds, I was out of the restaurant and half a block away, trying to imagine how I would tell this story to Leah and Ismail in a way that would make me sound as heroic as possible.
“I’m sorry I used you as a prop against my parents,” Rebecca called from a few steps back. “How about letting me make it up to you by letting you use me as a prop against these friends you’re obviously trying to avoid?”
I mumbled something about how I wasn’t trying to avoid them, but she hailed a cab and we were on our way.
CHAPTER
22
The bar was so crowded that we found them only when Leah spilled her gin and tonic on the arm of my coat. She was very embarrassed until she saw that it was me.
“Venter!” she said. “I’m so sorry. Just think of it as me dousing you with Adam’s holy water. The power of Lyons compels you!”
“He misses you, man,” Ismail said. “We’ve missed you, too.”
“Rebecca, this is Leah and Ismail,” I told Rebecca. “Although I doubt those are the names on their IDs.”
“I’m an actor!” Leah said. “I am everyone and no one. I am as much Rebecca Hart as I am Leah Marx.” She pulled out an ID purportedly belonging to Rebecca Hart of Chicago, Illinois, born January 6, 1976. The Feast of the Epiphany. She turned to Rebecca. “It’s kind of an in-joke. You probably don’t remember this, but Rebecca Hart was the name of . . .”
Rebecca, to my surprise, laughed. “My name is actually Rebecca Hart. Maybe I should have gotten a fake ID that says Leah Marx.”
“This is a funny girl, Venter, you should keep her.”
“I am funny, but my name really is Rebecca Hart. It’s not your fault that my name is a joke. But I’m not an actor, so I can’t be anybody. I’m Rebecca Hart to the bottom of my heart.”
“I can’t be anyone either,” Ismail said. “I can only be someone who WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP.” He rolled up his sleeve. “No acting for me.”
“Shut up,” Leah said with a laugh and a punch. “You could act if you wanted to. You’re much happier directing me and writing for me.” She then turned to us. “He wrote this amazing monologue for me called An A
uthor’s Undoing.”
“The play’s just okay. The one I’m working on now will be better, I think. But Leah is amazing in it.”
I wondered whether Rebecca thought less of me because my college life was not as productive and adventurous as that of my friends. I also wondered whether Ismail and Leah thought that Rebecca was boring.
“What was it like to use the epiphany machine?” Rebecca asked Ismail.
“It made me realize I wanted to ‘blow up’ my relationship with my mother,” Ismail said. “She was going to force me to go to medical school.” I had forgotten how easy it is to get bored hearing people tell their life stories. “When I told her I was going to go to NYU to pursue theater instead, she tried to make me take organic chemistry, just in case I changed my mind and wanted to be a doctor after all. When I refused, she forced me to get a job as a gas station attendant in town for the remainder of last summer. I guess she just really wants me to stick tubes in things to get them to run.”
Leah laughed, in love with her boyfriend’s sense of humor, and then turned to Rebecca. “You should come to our show! Particularly since you’re dating Venter. I mean, you guys are dating, right?”
“I’d love to come,” Rebecca said, sidestepping the question. “Leah, do you do any of your own writing?”
“Writing’s not my bag,” Leah said. “Although I do want to do one of those testimonial things for Venter. Venter, do you have your tape recorder?”
I didn’t, and I also thought about pointing out that I didn’t take testimonials anymore. But I was curious enough about what Leah would say that I brought my tape recorder along to a coffee date with her the following week. In the meantime, right there in the bar, I imagined the four of us as the group of sophisticated, glamorous friends that I had always wanted, and I could already see how disappointing it would be to have it.
The Epiphany Machine Page 19
