Apparently not. For here I am trying to climb the sheer cliff face of North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain, using the ladders and cables to try to hang on to the damn thing, as cloud cover swirls beneath me, promising a truly sharp and jagged death if I let go of the rope. I am a classic acrophobe, worried that a part of me wants to let go of the rope. But I know that if I can’t drive a car or ride a bike or play fetch with a disgruntled Welsh corgi, I should at least climb a mountain with this nimble countrywoman, who even now is bounding up the wall of rock with mountain lion dexterity.
Or, as I’ll write to her after I get back to Little Neck: “I’m not good at adjusting to a new environment, especially when I feel like I can lose you by doing something wrong.”
Or, as I’ll write to her after we break up: “When I think of the most important moments of our relationship, I seem to see myself staring at the dashboard of your car.”
Yes, in the passenger’s seat, staring at the clicking odometer on that enormous chrome dashboard, staring at the passage of trees and hills and the Blue Ridge Mountains, staring at the scenery of the country that’s been promised to me on my certificate of naturalization. And there she is, driving for me, one of her hands on the wheel, the other maneuvering the drinking straw to her lips, the perspiring, transparent cup full of southern ice tea, which, for those not in the know, is the best ice tea in the world.
And at night, in the half-deflated tent that I have failed to correctly pitch, in some national park, with the last sparks of our lovemaking extinguished, with our stomachs filled with hush puppies and grits and fried haddock, I lie there reading We Don’t Die: George Anderson’s Conversations with the Other Side by flashlight, hoping against hope that everything Stuyvesant and Oberlin have taught me—the immateriality of our personalities, the quickness of our time on this earth—is not altogether true.
* * *
* From a future girlfriend in 2004, a hotel room in Prague or maybe Vienna (increasingly it is hard to tell the two apart), after she has just met my parents for the first time: “Why are they so mean to you?” Me: “Oh, it’s just cultural.” Her: “Boy, that sounds like an excuse.” Me: “Let’s not, okay?”
So ready for heartbreak.
IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL THAT JENNIFER, something else happens, which, I suppose, can be called college. When I close my eyes, I see myself walking down the ramp of the Mudd library, a kind of postmodern academic fortress, replete with moat, my backpack burdened down with statistics on Khrushchev-era barley harvests. My senior thesis in the politics department will be called “Back in the USSR: The Evolution of Current Reintegrationist Trends,” anything to take me back to the country that has just fallen apart so unceremoniously. When I keep my eyes closed for a few beats more, I see Big Blue, the bong I am athletically smoking as Ice Cube instructs his nonexistent female audience: Bitch … you should have put a sock on the pickle. When I keep my eyes closed for another second longer (I promise you, I will open them soon), I am back in the West Village with my roommate, C-cup Irv, the two of us tripping out on ’shrooms at his parents’ house, as those fascinating new fractal patterns bloom and die on the screen of his Mac desktop.
“Dude, this guy in the Con[servatory of Music] fucked me,” Irv tells me.
Me, nonjudgmental, used to anything by now: “Cool. How did it feel?”
“Pretty good. Like I had a piece of shit up my ass.”
All this is leading somewhere.
Now that I have true friends who tell me about what goes inside their asses, now that I am able to talk honestly about my life with a woman who loves me (“I love you, Gary,” to quote yet again from her letter), I can finally begin to think of myself as a serious person. And that seriousness will not lead to Fordham Law School, where I would most certainly clown around for the first two difficult years and then fall into a disastrous cocaine-fueled tailspin by the third. For me, this means the one thing I pursue with competence and with passion. I write.
Let me reiterate: I don’t know how to do anything. No fried egg, no coffee, no driving, no paralegaling, no balanced checkbook, no soldering a fatherboard onto a motherboard, no keeping a child warm and safe at night. But I have never experienced that which they call writer’s block. My mind is running at insomniac speed. The words are falling in like soldiers at reveille. Put me in front of a keyboard and I will fill up a screen. What do you want? When do you want it? Right now? Well, here it is.
My output is a story a week or a batch of poems. I write as soon as I wake up, the hangover still pulsing in the damaged front of my brain, to the thwacka-thwacka sound of roommate Irv’s first vigorous masturbation. I write before coffee; I write with Big Blue gurgling in the corner; I write like a child who needs to prove something. The Oberlin creative writing department takes me on, takes me in. There is a professor called Diane Vreuls (such a strong Dutch last name), tall and striking, approaching retirement, who gets what I’m doing. In her tiny cramped office in the basement of the building that resembles the first three floors of the World Trade Center, she points out a passage where one of my characters crawls through the woods. “How does he crawl, Gary?” she asks. And then she gets down on all fours, and, with all six feet of her plus the gray halo of long hair, she crawls every which way. And I get it. And I understand how it’s done. How the words convey the world around me and the world trapped inside me.
I am walking on water. Yes, that’s what writing can do. I am walking across the Atlantic Ocean at a diagonal, looping up the English Channel, making hash of the Danish archipelago, sliding up the Baltic Sea, down the Gulf of Finland. “Well, we know where we’re going,” David Byrne is singing on the stereo, “but we don’t know where we’ve been.”
I am going to Moscow Square, to Tipanov Street, but what I don’t know how to do yet is to go beyond my childhood courtyard with its sooty black pipe and rusty rocketship.
To the Chesme Church. To the helicopter launching pad. Up, up, into the air and between the spires.
I write with J.Z. cross-legged across the bed from me, buried in statistics and psychology textbooks. Years later, she will become a healer, just as she promised herself.
I’m desperately trying to have a history, a past. I’m flooding myself with memory, melancholy and true. Every memory I repressed at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, where I pretended to be a good East German, is coming back to me. I write about eating pelmeni dumplings with my mother by the mermaid statue in Yalta. I write about the mechanical chicken I used to play with in the Crimea. About the girl with the one eye in our first apartment in America, the one who played Honeycomb license plates with me. I proudly use words I just picked up, words like “Aubusson,” writing next to it, in parentheses, “French rug.” I stick the Aubusson into a kind of literary action story called “Sundown at the International,” complete with “jet-black Sikorsky helicopters.” Fifteen years later, that story will be expanded into the novel Absurdistan.
Sometimes my writing sucks, but sometimes it strives for the truth and it works. My parents are fighting across its pages. I am learning English. I am learning to be second-class. I am learning Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Faced with an American pizza parlor, my “mother instructs me to order a pizza with meat on it so that I’ll have a complete meal.” My imagination is allowed to roam in all directions, even ones that fail (especially ones that fail). I hand in a truly strange character sketch of Nikita Khrushchev celebrating a lonely seventieth birthday on a collective farm. I write about my grandmother’s fictional meeting with Pope John Paul II.
And then it all comes to a halt.
Oberlin imports a hot young teacher, a disciple of the guru editor Gordon Lish, famous for his editing of Raymond Carver and his grueling $2,600 workshops back east. Every story I hand in comes back with “Gary, I know what Gordon would say about this story so let me save you $2,600.” At first, I don’t give a fuck what Gordon would say, and, given Oberlin’s impressive tuition, my parents (and the federal governme
nt) have paid way more than $2,600 for this class anyway. But the teacher wears skimpy outfits—a tiny floral spaghetti-strap number in the middle of the Ohioan winter—and she breaks our flannelled hearts with each and every workshop. I want to please her badly. So I begin to write in the terse, indecipherable bullshit-mysterious style that Gordon Lish, somewhere in Manhattan, is clearly asking of me. “The shuka is in the pot.” Whatever that means. Several of my classmates decide to quit writing once the semester is over, which, subconsciously, may be the goal of the entire Gordon Lish program, to reduce beginners to nothing, to clear the decks of those who would disobey the master. On certain cold days, I unwittingly fall into a Hebrew school prayer on the way to class, rocking back and forth to keep warm, chanting, “Sh’ma Oberlin, Gordon Lish Eloheinu, Gordon Lish Echad.” (Hear, O Oberlin, the Gordon Lish is our God, the Gordon Lish is One.) But it doesn’t help. The spaghetti-strap teacher tells me what I am writing is not literature, although she does have more hope for me than the other students because “I have a better understanding of grammar.”
The Lish professor is there only for a semester, and then I am returned to Diane. It takes me a while to recover. Diane is tough with me but also patient and kind. More important, she knows how to laugh with every inch of her six-foot-long Dutch-Serb body, ridiculous laughter, Eastern European laughter. People who think literature should be Serious—should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will never take off—are malevolent at best, anti-Semitic at worst. Within Diane’s welcome embrace I stop writing “The shuka is in the pot.” I return to the work at hand. I plow on Napoleon-like toward Moscow Square and then toward Moscow itself.
There is an exchange program with the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite institution that once educated the Soviet Union’s future diplomats. Moscow is not St. Petersburg (hometown patriots might say it is the opposite), but Moscow is really Russia, by which I mean Asia. It is my holy truth.
I am all set to go to Moscow for my junior year, to reclaim the Little Igor inside me.
And then the women in my life tell me no.
My mother is scared of Russia in 1993. Yeltsin’s tanks firing at the parliament building. Chechnya getting ready for full-scale war. Gunfights in broad daylight. In the decade since we’ve emigrated, my parents have never said one good word about the country, other than to praise its many bearded writers and creamy Eskimo ice cream. The Internet as we now know it is not yet a fact, but Mother presents me with a Xeroxed wire piece about some hapless student thrown to his death out of the window of a Moscow University dorm.
I write a story called “Three Views from the Avenue of Karl Marx,” an earnest homage to my uncle Aaron and the labor camps. My professor tells me to send it off to The New Yorker, nearly precipitating a happy heart attack on my part. Am I really that good? My mother reads it, sighs, and tells me, “That’s not how it happened.” The details are all wrong.
I am heartbroken. Oddly enough, the pain feels similar to being called a Red Gerbil in Hebrew school. There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction. When the inevitable rejection slip comes from The New Yorker, I decide I have to go back to Russia to get the details right.
But then there is the other woman.
J.Z. understands that I need Russia for my stories. But she doesn’t want to lose me for a year. We are just getting started. We are so very much in love. And so I have a choice: my writing or, possibly, my girlfriend.
It is not even a choice.
Fuck Russia. I will spend a semester with J.Z. in then-trendy Prague.
Within minutes the brick and mortar appeared on both sides of the road, like a signpost signaling VLADIMIR’S CHILDHOOD, NEXT HUNDRED EXITS: an endless stretch of rickety plaster Soviet-era apartment houses, each edifice peeling and waterlogged so that the inadvertent shapes of animals and constellations could be recognized by an imaginative child. And in the spaces between these behemoths were the tiny grazing spaces where Vladimir sometimes played; spaces adorned with a fistful of sand and some rusty swings. True, this was Prava and not Leningrad, but then these houses formed one long demented line from Tajikistan to Berlin. There was no stopping them.
These sentences appeared in my first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. Needless to say, Prava is a kind of Prague, and Vladimir, the hero, is a kind of me. When I saw those Soviet bloc apartment buildings, paneláks in Czech (literally “prefabricated panel housing”), out of the window of a bus from Prague’s airport, J.Z.’s hand clasped in mine, I knew I wanted to write a novel, and I knew what it would be about. When you’re twenty-one there really is only one subject. It appears in the mirror each morning, toothbrush in hand.
The semester in Prague was my reconnaissance mission. In practical terms, I learned nothing, not even Czech, which should have been fairly easy for a Russian speaker. Maybe I learned that a half draft of pilsner spilled over a plate of onions and cheese and then sopped up with thick country bread could make me happy.
Along the way, some things happened that happened also in my novel. In a small village north of Prague, I was nearly beaten to a pulp by Czech skinheads who mistook me for an Arab. I was saved by my New York State driver’s license and my American Express card, proof of my non-Arabian nature. (In the novel, my hero, Vladimir, gets the beating from which I escaped, and then some.)
Then there were some things that happened nearly as they did in my novel. Jealous after J.Z. had danced with an Australian or an Israeli, I drank myself so stupid that I found myself crawling along the tram lines to our dormitory, my death forestalled only by the ferocious nighttime clang of the number 22 tram and the intervention of an equally drunk Czech policeman.
And then there were some things that didn’t happen in the novel at all. On Buda Hill, overlooking the bulbous and overdone Hungarian parliament building, J.Z. stared into my camera lens, her black hair picked up by the wind, the combination of Armenian and southern Wasp features finally settling into something undeniably Eastern European, the smile that wasn’t, the pale beauty that was.
A cold, rainy, muddy, miserable day in late May. The Oberlin College commencement exercises of 1995. Two-thirds of the manuscript of what will be my first novel is under my arm. I am happy and I am scared. J.Z. and I are breaking up. It is not anyone’s fault. She wants to return to North Carolina. I want to be in New York, where I mistakenly think another love will quickly swoon into my arms.
But I don’t want to end my Oberlin story there. Let me go back a year. There is a dorm called South, which, as I’ve mentioned, resembles a lost terminal of Newark Airport. This is where I’ve just had an asthma attack, my first in five years and the worst one of my life.
It’s been several weeks since I’ve checked out of Oberlin’s pitiful hospital, several weeks since J.Z. held the phone clamped to her ear, my mother relaying to her my health insurance information as I struggled to breathe in my sweaty little dorm bed; the two women in my life, their Russian and southern accents, my mother’s awful exactness, J.Z.’s love and fear.
She has nursed me back to health, has spent every hour by my side. The circles under my eyes are larger than usual. Because of the asthma I haven’t been able to smoke pot in weeks, and I’m nervous and depleted. One of the many things I never learned how to do is dance. But tonight J.Z. says she will teach me. She puts on Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Sign Your Name (Across My Heart),” the 1988 slow jam that has somehow survived the full Kurt Cobaining of Oberlin’s stereos. She puts her hands on my hips, and I put mine on hers. I let my eyes fall shut. Slow, rhythmic breathing. The ugly dorm, the sad college, the unhappy students. I sway in one direction; I sway in another. What am I doing wrong? I don’t want to have another asthma attack. My hands are resting on my lover’s hips, and part of me, perhaps because of the recent asthma, has left my body. What I don’t
yet know is that this will be my last asthma attack ever. But for now the two of us are still here, swaying to Trent D’Arby’s earnest crooning.
“J.Z.,” I say, “I don’t know how to do this.”
She keeps her hands on my hips. Her dark hair with its brown highlights pools across my chest.
And then, suddenly, I do.
The author is tripping out of his mind on psychedelic mushrooms while being videotaped for a documentary called Only Children by his new friend John.
ON THE NINE-HOUR DRIVE HOME from Ohio, my diploma in hand, my parents and I stop in for a McDonald’s lunch. Remarkably, the hamburgers haven’t changed in price over the years, so I order three, plus a medium Coke and medium fries, and my parents also go in for a hamburger each and share some of my medium fries as well as their own private small Coke. Because of my fine grades and impending job as a paralegal, and then, presumably, ascension to law school, all of us are a happy family and five times sixty-nine cents for the hamburgers plus another three dollars and fifty cents for the hamburger accessories seems well within reach. We’ve earned this now. Across the aisle I espy one of the prettier Oberlin graduates, a girl who uses lipstick, and we both roll our eyes at one another, as if to say, Ugh, can you believe we’re at a McDonald’s? If only I could tell her how much each bite with my parents really means to me.
The other thing I’m excited about is going back to New York, the place I know will be my home for the rest of my life. With J.Z. no longer my girlfriend, going home means mainly one thing: going back to my new best friend.
Little Failure Page 28
