Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

  I looked in the refrigerator for something to drink, which you’d think would be a relatively easy thing to find, but since no one in my family ever really shops, it can be difficult. At that moment there was a carton of Tropicana orange juice with only a few drops left in it (since it was the rule that if you finished something, you were responsible for replacing it, the competition not to finish something was keen), a quart of 2 percent milk that was three days past its expiration date, three bottles of Peroni beer, a liter of caffeine-free diet Coke that I knew belonged to Rainer Maria, and some of that disgusting soy milk stuff that Gillian had bought months ago when she was going through a supposed lactose-intolerant phase.

  And so I was running the faucet, waiting for the cold water to get from wherever distant place it was to our kitchen sink, when Gillian came in through the front door. She entered the kitchen and said, “What are you doing here?” as if I didn’t live there and have just as much right to be there as she.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “but I’m on my way from therapy to the gallery.”

  “That all sounds very pleasant,” said Gillian. “Meanwhile, I’ve had the worst fucking morning of my life.” She opened the refrigerator and stared into it.

  “What happened?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Please be sure, because there’s lots of it and it sucks.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Okay. Well, first I had this date to meet Amanda Goshen at the Barneys Warehouse Sale at noon.”

  “Who’s Amanda Goshen?”

  “She’s this sort-of friend from Barnard. She was in my memoir-writing class last semester.”

  “You were in a memoir-writing class? Barnard offers classes in memoir-writing?”

  “Yes,” said Gillian, “and stop interrupting. If you’re going to question everything I say, forget it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I just think it’s a bit odd to be writing your memoirs before you’ve even graduated from college.”

  “These days you’re never too young to write your memoirs,” said Gillian. “So shut up. Okay, first I’m walking along Bank Street past the brownstone that has that ridiculous miniature privet hedge growing in front of it and I’m just running my hand along the top of it, sort of patting it on its head as I walk past, and this lady appears from behind me and says, Don’t touch the privet. And I can’t believe this lady is telling me not to touch the privet. I mean, how sick is that? So I look at her and I say, What do you mean? and she says, I mean this is my privet, it’s private property, and I wish you wouldn’t manhandle it. She actually used that word, manhandle. And I swear I was barely touching it, you know, just running my hand along the top, tickling my palm, and I can’t believe this woman is yelling at me for manhandling her privet, so I grab a handful of it and yank and throw it at her and say, Fuck you and your privet, and keep walking. And she’s screaming after me that she’s going to call the cops. And meanwhile there must have been thorns or something in the fucking privet because my palm is cut and bleeding. Just a little, but still. See …” She closed the refrigerator and displayed her palm, which had indeed been injured. “Okay, so you can imagine what kind of mood that puts me in, and I get to Barneys, and I’m waiting outside for Amanda and it’s sunny and hot, so I’m leaning against the building and I’m wearing this tank top and I pull the straps down so I won’t get lines, and an old man comes up to me and says hello in this very friendly way, as if he knew me. And I thought he was Mr. Berkowitz, so I say hello, very friendly, and then I realize it isn’t Mr. Berkowitz but just some dirty old man that looks like Mr. Berkowitz. And I realize he thinks I’m a hooker or something because he asks me if I’d like to go on a date with him. A date, okay. He wants to take me somewhere and manhandle me and give me money and he calls it a date. So I say, No, I don’t want a date, and he says, Why not, it looks like you’re looking for a date, and I say, I’m not looking for a date, I’m just waiting for my friend, and he says, I’d love to watch you and your friend be friendly together—this is an old man who’s a dead ringer for Mr. Berkowitz, remember—and I tell him to fuck off and he calls me a bitch and starts to walk away and then he turns around and spits at me, but he’s not a very good spitter and it just sort of dribbles down his shirtfront, so he calls me bitch again and walks away. Okay, so by now it’s like quarter past twelve and I’m still waiting for Amanda and I wait for another five minutes and my cell rings and of course it’s Amanda and she says she can’t meet me because guess what, she’s sold her memoir to HarperCollins for $600,000 and she’s having lunch with her editor in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons and if I see a pair of jade green Giuseppe Zanotti sandals would I buy them for her and she’ll reimburse me? Okay, so at this point I decide I can’t deal with the Barneys Warehouse Sale and I walk the ten blocks home and I think about buying an iced coffee and I think no, there’s a bottle of Smartwater in the fridge and that’s much healthier especially since you’ve already had three coffees, and I get home and of course the Smartwater has disappeared. Did you drink it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then it must have been Mom.”

  “Do you think she was lying?”

  “Who? Mom?”

  “No. Amanda Goshen.”

  “About lunch at The Four Seasons?”

  “No,” I said. “About selling her memoir for $600,000. About selling her memoir, period.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s true. She had the greatest memoir; she had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.”

  “What’s alopecia?”

  “Hair loss. She was bald, all over.” She opened the refrigerator and gazed inside again, as if the bottle of Smartwater might have magically appeared. It had not. She closed it. “Oh,” she said, “by the way, before I forget—Jordan Powell called you this morning.”

  “Who’s Jordan Powell?”

  “Your roommate.”

  At first I had no idea what she was talking about and then I remembered getting a big envelope from Brown a few days ago that I threw away without opening, since I thought opening and reading mail from Brown would only deepen my connection to it, the way if you open a box of cookies in a grocery store you are obligated to buy them.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jordan Powell. Or Howell. No, it’s Powell, I think. I wrote it down somewhere. He’s ‘passing through New York on his way to the Vineyard,’ and was hoping to get together with you. I told him you’d call him back tonight.”

  “Well, I won’t,” I said. “There’s no reason to call him, since he won’t be my roommate, since I’m not going to Brown. What did he sound like?”

  “Like someone who would say ‘I’m passing through New York on my way to the Vineyard.’ But besides that he sounded okay.”

  I filled a glass with not even remotely cold water and drank it.

  “Are you going out?” Gillian asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m going back to work.”

  “Would you stop at Starbucks and get me an iced coffee? Please?”

  “What, and bring it home to you in four hours?”

  “No. Go to Starbucks, get the iced coffee, bring it back here, and then go to work.”

  “Maybe I could pick up your dry cleaning while I’m out there,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to get me an iced coffee.”

  “No, but not getting killed doing something is not a very compelling reason to do it.”

  The gallery was empty (surprise!) when I returned and the door to my mother’s office was closed. I sat down at the desk. It was two-thirty, which meant I had to sit there for another two and a half hours. My mother’s gallery was in a building of galleries surrounded by other buildings of galleries, and I thought of how in most of those galleries there was someone like me, sitting alone in
the air-conditioned chill with nothing to do except try to look as if there was something to do, and then I realized it probably wasn’t just at galleries, that throughout the entire city thousands of offices must be sunk into this midsummer, midafternoon stupor. New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.

  I got up and looked out the window and there was no one on the street, and there was something spooky about it. There are these strange moments in New York City when it seems as if everyone has disappeared. Sometimes I go out early on Sunday morning, and there’s no one around, just stillness and quiet, or I’ll wake late at night and look out the window and there will be no lights on anywhere, in all the apartment buildings surrounding us, and I’ll think, Can it be possible that everyone is asleep? Is the city that never sleeps sleeping? Then someone appeared below me on the street: an old man walking a basset hound. The man walked very slowly, but the dog walked even slower. It was almost difficult to tell if they were moving. They reminded me of those sprinklers that follow a hose laid across the ground, rolling it up as they go. When I was young they really bothered me because they seemed to move without moving. I would spend hours watching, trying to see them move. I realize a child who spent hours watching a sprinkler not seem to move across a lawn was destined to grow up to be a disturbed person like me.

  “James.”

  I turned around and saw my mother standing beside the reception desk. She was looking at me strangely, as if she hadn’t seen me in a very long time. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Looking out the window,” I said.

  “Oh.” She seemed to consider this for a moment, as if it was a suspicious activity she had never heard of. She tapped her fingernails on the top of the marble counter and then said, “I’d like to talk to you. Why don’t we go into my office?”

  This seemed odd to me, since there was no one else in the gallery, so we hardly needed to go to her office for privacy. “Okay,” I said, and followed her down the hall into her office. She sat down at her desk and I sat in one of the two Le Corbusier club chairs that faced it. It was a little weird that she was sitting behind her desk. It made it seem very businesslike and official, and that’s not how I think of my mother.

  She moved some things around on her desk and then she abruptly stopped and folded her hands together in front of her, like a news anchor after a commercial break. And she looked at me as if she were looking into a camera. Her face was composed and cheerful, but you could tell she was neither of those things. “I just spoke with John,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He told me what happened last night. He’s very upset, and I don’t blame him.”

  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

  “He told me what you did. That you concocted a profile on some Web site and contacted him.”

  “Actually, he contacted me,” I said.

  “He didn’t contact you, James, because it wasn’t your profile. And I want you to be quiet and listen to me.” Her happy/composed look vanished and she looked at me in a scary/fierce way.

  I said okay.

  “John is very disconcerted by what you did. He doesn’t want to come back to the gallery while you’re here. He seriously threatened to quit. Fortunately, I talked him out of that.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is good. I’m sure you know how difficult things would be for me here if John left. It would be the end of the gallery. I can’t replace him and I can’t manage the gallery myself. And you may think this is all a game, James—the gallery and my life and John’s life and your life—but they aren’t. None of these things are a game. Well, maybe your life is, but that’s for you to decide. Do you think your life is a game?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you seem to. Do you know what sexual harassment is?”

  “Yes,” I said, “of course I do.”

  “Then why did you do what you did? Didn’t it occur to you that it was wrong? Illegal, in fact? That you’re not supposed to put your co-workers in embarrassing sexual situations?”

  “That’s not what I thought I was doing,” I said.

  “Oh. What did you think you were doing?”

  “It was just sort of a joke,” I said.

  “A joke? You think misleading someone and putting them in an embarrassing situation is a joke?”

  “I didn’t think that’s what I was doing. Of course I wouldn’t have done it if I thought that.”

  “Then what did you think you were doing? What could you possibly have been thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I wasn’t really thinking.”

  “Well, perhaps you might start thinking,” my mother said. “And perhaps you might start thinking about someone other than yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I apologized to John. I told him I was sorry. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  “Yes, he did,” my mother said. “But sometimes that’s not enough.”

  “Well, what else can I do?”

  “There’s very little you can do,” my mother said. “At least now. So it was up to me to do something.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told John you wouldn’t be working here anymore.”

  “You’re going to fire me?”

  “Well, I suppose I am, although I don’t really like to think of it in that way.”

  “Oh,” I said. “In what way do you want to think of it?”

  “I don’t think you should talk to me like that, James. Especially at this moment. I did what I did because of what you did. I think you should think about yourself, and not worry about me. Think about what you did.”

  “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps that’s why you need to think about it, because I assure you it is.”

  “Why? John is my friend.”

  “He’s not your friend, James. He wasn’t your friend before this and he certainly isn’t your friend now. And it’s actually worse if you thought he was your friend. That you would do something like this to someone you thought of as your friend.”

  I knew that my mother was wrong—John was my friend, or had been my friend. Maybe he didn’t know he was my friend, and maybe I wasn’t his friend, but he was my friend. And now he never wanted to see me again and probably hated me. I realized that it’s very hard to like people, let alone love them—it just makes you do all the wrong, alienating things. “John was my friend,” I said.

  “Well, maybe he was,” my mother said, “but I don’t think he is anymore.”

  She said this in a smug, pleased way that really bugged me. Like because I had done something stupid in an effort to get close to somebody I deserved to be ostracized and ridiculed. It made me angry that my own mother welcomed my misfortune. I knew she thought it was probably good for me, a so-called learning experience. The problem is I don’t ever learn anything from learning experiences. In fact, I make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because I can’t think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences.

  “James,” my mother said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something and I haven’t quite known how, but after what happened last night …”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ve just wondered if perhaps … Are you gay?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me if I’m gay?”

  “Who else has asked you?”

  “Dad.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, what did you tell him?”

  “Why do you want to know what I told him?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother said. “I suppose it was just another way of asking the question.”

&nb
sp; “Why would you ask me that question? Did you ask Gillian?”

  “No,” my mother said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t think Gillian was gay.”

  “So you think I’m gay?”

  “I don’t know—yes: the thought has occurred to me.”

  “But why would you want to know?”

  “Why would I want to know? You’re my son, James. I care about you. I want to help you.”

  “You think homosexuals need help?”

  “James. Oh, James! I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help you. I’m so worried about you, and I want to help you, but I don’t know how.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mother started to cry.

  I knew she wanted to help me. I knew she was my mother and loved me and I didn’t want to be mean, or I didn’t think I wanted to be mean, but there was something else inside me, something hard and stubborn that was mean. It just bugged me that she thought if I was gay she could do something to help, like give me a Band-Aid or something. And besides, being gay is perfectly cool these days, so why should I need help? And what help could my mother, whose third marriage only lasted a matter of days, be? I knew I was gay, but I had never done anything gay and I didn’t know if I ever would. I couldn’t imagine it, I couldn’t imagine doing anything intimate and sexual with another person, I could barely talk to other people, so how was I supposed to have sex with them? So I was only theoretically, potentially homosexual.

  We heard the chime that signaled that someone had entered the gallery. “I think we should talk more about this,” my mother said. “We can do that at home. And I think you should have a talk with your father. Now, since someone’s come in, you can go back to work.”

  “What?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that my mother could call me into her office, fire me, imply that I was a socially retarded loser, a sexual deviant, and then briskly tell me to go back to work. It pretty much contradicted my entire notion of who she was and how she felt about me. And then I realized I could not bear to hear her repeat what she had just said, so I got up and left her office before she had a chance to.