Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

  Whoever had walked into the gallery had already walked out, so I sat down at the reception desk, but it occurred to me that if you’ve been fired you don’t go back to work, although just sitting there doing nothing, which is probably what I would do for the rest of the afternoon, isn’t really working, but still. So I decided to walk out. Let someone come in and steal all the garbage cans if they wanted. Let my mother answer the phone in the rare event that it rang. I stood up and looked at the desk, searching for what I should take home with me. It always seems that in movies when people get fired they pack up all their personal belongings in a cardboard box which they carry forlornly away with them. Usually there’s a spindly plant, a THE WORLD’S BEST (fill in the blank) coffee mug, and a picture frame with photos of ugly beloved people. There were none of these things on my desk. Granted, I had only worked there for a few months, but it was kind of depressing to think that my tenure there had left not the slightest mark.

  So I just walked out, down the hall, and waited for the elevator, which of course was lost somewhere in space, and since I just wanted to get out of there I ran down the five flights of stairs and out onto the street.

  I leaned against the wall outside the building, because I was panting from running down the stairs and had to catch my breath. The old man with the basset hound was walking toward me. It seemed so long ago I had seen them walking on the opposite side of the street and I thought that time had moved differently in the gallery and on the street. I often have that feeling, a sort of jet-lagged feeling just from moving from indoors to outdoors, or even from one room to another.

  I stood there and watched the man and dog pass me by. I didn’t want to think about what had happened upstairs so I was trying not to think. That was probably why I felt so spacey. Every time I felt a thought forming I would think, Don’t think that. Don’t think that, don’t think that. Don’t think that. It was like whacking a lot of flies with a flyswatter. I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough so that the man and dog walked all the way to the end of the block and disappeared around the corner. And then I realized I shouldn’t stand in front of the building because my mother might come out and I didn’t want to see her. So I walked over to the Hudson River promenade and sat down on a bench. It was very hot and unpleasant. Sometimes you can sit on the promenade and look out across the water and forget about the city behind you and the ruined, ugly shore of New Jersey in front of you, and just focus on the river, the light on the water or the boats passing by, or the way, if the tide is rising, the water seems to be going in both directions at once, the salt water pushing up and the fresh water pouring down, but this wasn’t one of those times. I couldn’t lose the sense of the city behind me and the river didn’t appear to be flowing in any direction, it just looked stagnant and defeated. I stood up but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t want to go home because I knew Gillian would think it was hilarious I got fired by my own mother. And I didn’t really want to see my father either, especially with his new eyes. I had already seen Dr. Adler and I had been a jerk with her and I wouldn’t see her again until Thursday. And then I thought I’d like to see John, that he was the only sane, normal person I knew, but then I remembered I couldn’t see John because of what I had done the night before, that I had fucked everything up with the one person I liked and that I’d probably never see him again and he would never think about me or if he did it would be to tell people about this weird pathetic boy who had stalked him.

  15

  Tuesday, July 29, 2003

  EVEN THOUGH IT WAS ONLY FOUR O’CLOCK, GRAND CENTRAL was crowded and everyone was running and pushing to get on their trains so they could get out of the city. It was like some mass evacuation at the end of the world, everyone fleeing in this exhausted way from one miserable life to another. You could tell they hated their office lives but weren’t exactly looking forward to returning to their irritable spouses or bratty children, or to no one, if they were alone. The train ride was this little hiatus between two parts of their lives during which they could simply be themselves, no boss, no wife, no colleagues, no children.

  The woman I sat beside read the Bible. She had one of those laminated religious bookmarks with a gory picture of Jesus and a little pink tassel and she used it to follow the text from one line to the next. She moved her lips and very softly uttered each word while she read. There was something about the juxtaposition of the bleeding Jesus with the pretty pink tassel that unnerved me. It was like putting a severed heart into a box and covering it with pretty wrapping paper. When she got off (at Woodlawn) she kissed the bookmark and then closed it into the Bible. Sometimes I envy religious people for the comfort of believing. It would make everything so much easier.

  I walked from the train station to my grandmother’s house, through the residential streets with nice old houses and big trees and green lawns. A team of Mexican gardeners worked at one house, and a boy who I could tell was younger than I was pushing a lawnmower almost as big as he was across the lawn. He looked at me and smiled as I walked past, smiled in a very happy, friendly way, exposing his beautiful white teeth, as if he was proud of being seen mowing the lawn. I smiled at him, and he waved. It’s odd to connect with people like that and then just walk away. I don’t get it. And it’s weird because I’m antisocial, but when I connect with a stranger—even if it is only exchanging smiles, or waves, which I suppose isn’t really connecting, but for me it is—I feel like we can’t both go on with our lives as if nothing had happened. For instance, the Mexican boy, cutting a lawn in Hartsdale, how did he get there, where did he live, what was he thinking? It’s like there’s this pyramid of his life, an iceberg, and I just see the tip of it, the tiny tip, but it spreads out beneath that, spreads out and back and back, his entire life beneath him, inside him, everything that ever happened to him, all adding up to equal the moment, the second, he smiled at me. I thought of the lady beside me on the train reading the Bible. Where was she now? In her home? I know I shouldn’t have gotten off the train at Woodlawn and followed her home, but what if I should have? What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How did you know? Should I turn around and talk to the Mexican boy? Maybe he was lonely like me, maybe he read Denton Welch. I felt that by walking away I was abandoning him, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.

  I realize it makes no sense to feel that and yet never make any attempt to interact with people, but I am beginning to think life is full of these tragic incongruities.

  It was eerily quiet and still on my grandmother’s street. She lives in the kind of neighborhood where the kids are too rich and privileged to do something as simple as play outdoors. They were all at their violin or judo lessons or had been packed off to equestrian or theater camps. The only animate things were the sprinklers, the clapping spigoty kind, spewing shimmering jets of water low over the perfectly green lawns. The sidewalks were old and made of separate plates of concrete, which were cracked by tree roots and the constant shifting of the earth. They were warm and dusty. I thought about the sidewalks in the city, about how mostly gross they were, how you would never want to lie down and rest your cheek on them. But the sidewalks on my grandmother’s street were different, they were like the ruins of ancient Rome, purified and ennobled by time, baked clean by the sun.

  The front door to my grandmother’s house was closed. I knocked, but there was no answer, so I went around to the back. On the porch table sat an empty mug of coffee and a half-smoked cigarette smashed out in a lopsided ashtray Gillian had made at a tender, talentless age (not that she ever became a talented ceramicist at a later age). My grandmother used to smoke a lot, but now she only smoked a couple of cigarettes a day: one in the morning, after breakfast, and one in the evening, after dinner. Always out on the porch. There was a bright scarlet smudge of lipstick on
the rim of the coffee mug, and I liked the idea that my grandmother put on lipstick first thing in the morning, even though she might see no one all day.

  I looked through the screen door into the kitchen. She wasn’t there, but the radio was on (All Things Considered), so I went into the kitchen and called her. I knew if the radio was on, she must be in the house because she would never go out and leave it on. She had a hearing aid, but she rarely wore it, especially if no one was around.

  She didn’t seem to be downstairs, so I went upstairs. The door to her bedroom was open, and I looked in and saw her lying on the bed, on her stomach, with her arms and legs sort of flung out toward the four corners. It looked as though she had been dropped on the bed from a great height. I knew my grandmother would never sleep like that; there was something scary about it. Her face was turned toward me, the lower half mashed into the bedspread, and it looked as if she had been drooling. I thought she was dead.

  Everything stopped for a moment, as if someone had hit PAUSE. And then I heard her snore, and I knew she was not dead.

  I entered the room and stood close to the bed and said Nanette, but she did not wake. I could see her eyes moving beneath her nearly translucent eyelids. I worry sometimes about her skin—on the backs of her hands, her eyelids—it seems as if it’s been worn to an almost unbearable thinness, like fabric damaged by too much time and light. I wondered what she was dreaming. If it was a good dream I did not want to wake her from it. So I sat down in one of the antique straight-back chairs on either side of her bureau.

  The soft summer evening light seeped through the trees around the house and fell in golden swaths through the bedroom window. I could hear the clackety thrum of the sprinkler next door. And a bee trapped inside the screen window, buzzing and hurling itself softly against the mesh, again and again, as if it had all the time in the world, as if it might, at some moment, find a hole in the screen and fly away. I thought how patient and trusting so many lower forms of life are, how they had faith in something beyond human comprehension.

  I sat there for about an hour. I might have fallen asleep myself, but I don’t think I did. I just kind of zoned out, forgot who and where and what I was. Just let everything go, turned the net of myself inside out and let all the worried desperate fish swim away.

  And then I heard my grandmother say, “James.”

  I looked at her. It had grown dim in the room, but I could see her face, still pressed against the coverlet. Her eyes were open, watching me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She looked at me for a moment with no expression, as if I was always there when she woke from a nap. Then she sat up. She patted her hair and dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, wiping away the drool. There was something uncharacteristically coarse about this gesture.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She looked around the room for a moment, as if to orient herself. Then she stood up and gently clapped her hands. “Well, I’m sure it must be time for a drink. Why don’t you go downstairs and make me one, and let me attempt a reconfiguration. There is nothing uglier than an old lady woken from a nap.”

  Downstairs, I made her drink—rye and water on the rocks—and poured some assorted nuts from a tin into a little ceramic bowl that had the castle at Heidelberg painted inside it (I knew this because beneath the painting it said The Castle at Heidelberg, 1928) and put a record called The Fountains of Rome, which my grandmother thinks is “lovely cocktail music,” on her old cabinet stereo and sat down and waited.

  After a few minutes I heard her coming down the stairs. She entered the living room and I saw that she had changed her dress—she was now wearing a cream-colored, short-sleeved dress covered with big pink and blue hydrangea blossoms. And she had fixed her hair and face and put on some lipstick that matched the pink flowers on her dress. She saw the drink waiting for her on the coffee table and said, “Doesn’t that look delicious.” She sat down and said, “And I see you’ve made one for yourself, how smart you are.” Then she raised her glass and said, “We’re alive.” This is a toast my grandmother often makes, but it means different things at different times: sometimes it means Well, at least we aren’t dead, and sometimes it means Isn’t it wonderful we’re alive! I wasn’t sure how it was meant this evening. I leaned forward and touched my glass to hers and said, “Yes, we’re alive.”

  She sipped her drink and then said, “And it tastes as good as it looks.”

  I sipped my drink. I didn’t really like it. I don’t like drinking alcohol very much: it tends to make me sad and tired. Or sadder and more tired than I usually am. I always wait to get that happy funny feeling that supposedly comes with inebriation, but it never arrives. So I had made my drink much weaker than hers.

  “So,” she said. She opened a box of silver coasters and removed two. She put one down in front of each of us and then placed her drink onto hers. “So,” she said, “to what do I owe this great pleasure?”

  “What pleasure?”

  “The pleasure of a visit from you.”

  “Can’t I just come visit you?”

  “Mayn’t I. Yes, you may. Of course you may.”

  “Actually …” I said, but faltered. I didn’t know how to continue. It seemed exhausting, to try to tell someone what was wrong with you. I remembered the Mexican gardener who smiled at me, and how I had thought about the pyramid beneath him, and it felt like that—that no one could understand who you were at a particular moment unless they understood the pyramid beneath you, and my grandmother probably knew me better than just about anyone in the world (including my mother), but it still felt impossible to tell her what was wrong. So I lowered my face and said nothing.

  Most people would have said something, prompted me, but my grandmother didn’t. She took another sip from her drink and then replaced it on the coaster, and then moved the coaster a few inches, as if it had been in the wrong place. And then she sat looking at it, as if it might move itself back. After a moment she reached over and put her hand on my knee and said, “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. She waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t she leaned back into her chair. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think I can. I’m not sure what it is. It’s not just one thing. It’s everything.”

  “Everything,” she said, confirming rather than questioning.

  “It seems like everything,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps there’s one thing, one part of it, you could tell me about. What is it that made you come out here?”

  “There was nowhere else I could go. Or wanted to go.” I realized that sounded terrible, like I was there as a last resort. But in a way that was true. I felt bad.

  “Well, you’re always welcome here,” my grandmother said. “We can just sit and listen to the music if you’d like. Are you hungry? Would you like some nuts?” She picked up the bowl and held it out to me.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  She put them back on the table and then adjusted them, as she had her drink. My grandmother spent a good part of her life adjusting things, moving objects a few inches this way or that, as if there were a perfect place for everything.

  We listened to the music for a minute or two and then she said, abruptly, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I don’t usually take a nap. I never have. You see, my father wouldn’t tolerate naps. He thought they were bad for you, and bad for commerce. Bad for the nation. He did a lot of business overseas, and the offices in Italy and Spain closed in the afternoon, everyone went home and took naps. Siestas. Or did something much worse, even wickeder than napping, I’m sure he suspected. It infuriated him. He was a real curmudgeon and didn’t trust people who enjoyed life too much. That wasn’t the point, as far as he was concerned. I remember once I came home from a party and was gushing about something I ate—I think ther
e had been a lobster Newburg, or something exotic like that—and he told me it wasn’t polite to talk about food like that. That it wasn’t as good as all that and if it was that good there was something wrong with it. We always had very plain food at home. He wouldn’t eat anything that had a foreign name. And he wouldn’t put gravies or sauces on his meat because he thought it was decadent. Imagine—gravy! He tried to stop us from using gravy, too, but my mother wouldn’t allow it. He let her be soft with us, but he pretended it disgusted him. Perhaps it did.”

  “So I don’t usually nap. I still feel guilty when I do. But I was sitting out on the porch this afternoon reading a magazine and I must have fallen asleep, because I woke and felt so strange. I didn’t know where I was. It took a minute, and then it all came back, but I still felt tired. So I thought, I’ll just lie down for a few minutes, and I went upstairs. That was about three o’clock. And now”—she looked at her watch—“now it’s six-thirty. I must be getting old.”

  “How do you feel now? Are you still tired?”

  “No,” she said, but in a tired way. And she looked tired, too. As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “I’m feeling as fit as a fiddle. Although why fiddles are fit I know not.” She paused and smiled at me. I noticed that her pink smile didn’t quite match her lips. I looked down into my drink. My grandmother was going on about the fitness of fiddles, but I wasn’t really listening. And then I realized she had stopped talking, so I looked up at her. She stared at me for a moment and then said, “Oh, James. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

  I didn’t know where to start. Maybe it was the rye—I had already finished my drink—but I suddenly felt warm and happy. I still believed that everything was wrong, but I didn’t really care. It was like I was looking down on myself from the moon and could see how tiny I was and how tiny and stupid my problems were. So I had been fired, so I had acted like a jerk and alienated John, so I was a loner/loser, and so I didn’t want to go to college. None of that really mattered. It wasn’t like I was on a plane that had been hijacked and was flying toward the World Trade Center.