Celebrity magazines and blogs had also gotten on the bandwagon, declaring his novel to be among the most important cultural events of the year, and these publications in particular led to another aspect of Kipling’s rise as a distinguished writer: his Amazon preorder numbers were remarkable. His book moved around the top hundred books on Amazon before anyone (any layperson, that is) had even had a chance to read it. And this only fueled more coverage, again from the blogs and celebrity journals, but also again from the trade publications, which began describing Kipling in longer articles, portraying the beginnings of “a publishing phenomenon,” emphasizing that the author’s novel could rival the “very best work produced by writers across all genres.”
Henry did what he could to take Kipling’s success with equanimity, and he even attempted to try to feel a sort of pride concerning what the critics were saying. They loved Henry’s work, after all, and that was surely something to be happy about. But when a somewhat highbrow magazine said that the industry was clearly looking at a sort of modern Roald Dahl, here, at this point, Henry finally burst into tears and faced up to the fact that this was all a terrible development. (Henry adored Roald Dahl, even more than Salinger.)
Even through his tears Henry was able to grasp that Kipling’s previous fame had, of course, great bearing on the warm acceptance of the book. Kipling was well liked by almost everyone, and he’d already authored several successful picture books (although the reception for those was not what Kipling was now experiencing). The truth was, though, that even the most hardheaded reviewer could not help but be swayed by the fact that the book was written by a Hollywood star. Had the book come out under Henry’s name, perhaps the reception would not have been so enthusiastic.
That being said, Henry felt quite strongly that The Best of Youth really was an excellent piece of writing and he could hardly avoid facing the fact that a person he truly hated was getting credit for it. Worse, perhaps, there was a good chance that a woman Henry had deep affection for (whatever the slippery nature of this affection) was responding the way everyone else was: with the thought that Kipling was a mysterious and deeply talented man, a great thinker, and capable of who knew what when it came to the creative and narrative arts. It was really all too much to think about, and eventually, after the tears following that most recent review in the highbrow venue, and after two glasses of Pernod (this was Henry’s new favorite drink), he turned his gaze from McCarren Park and headed indoors to sit at his computer and try to work on “his own stuff” which, truth be told, he hadn’t done much of at all over the past many months.
2
AND IT WAS THIS despair that Henry was now conscious of when he was with Abby. Henry had to remind himself that the bitterness and resentment he felt toward Abby was due to his own problems, not hers. Still, Henry could not help but also feel that Abby had changed in the past months, not in her substance, but in the way the world seemed to wear on her now. It used to be that during their long dinners Abby took a keen and comprehensive interest in reforming various aspects of Henry’s life. Now she said things like, “I can’t be the one to tell you how to handle a problem like that” and “You have to figure that out for yourself.” It was too strange to process, Abby suggesting that she didn’t have the exact solution to Henry’s problems, since in times past Abby had (as she understood it) the very most precise answer to all of Henry’s troubles. I can’t be the one to tell you how to handle a problem like that—it was extremely unsettling. Henry was sure such words had never passed her lips before she met Kipling. Still, one thing was also true: Henry was getting better at what they call moving on, or, at the very least, somehow letting things rest that were beyond his control.
An excellent place to learn such things, of course, is prison, although his two weeks at the “Essex County Farm,” as it was called inside, were surprisingly uneventful. They were almost pleasant, really, in a deep psychological way, since Henry found that he was entirely incapable of altering anything distasteful in his life and simply had to take what came his way. A young man with a bit of money in Williamsburg, for instance, had limitless decisions to make every night concerning dinner. At the Essex County Farm, it really didn’t matter if you were in the mood for boiled potatoes or not. That was what was on the tray and that was what you got. And the fact was that if a person liked salty, fatty food, then prison was just the thing. In that sense, the food wasn’t too far from what Henry often ate in Brooklyn, with the difference coming in the quality and the freshness of the ingredients. No grass-fed cows were slaughtered to make the Farm’s meatballs, and the bread used to make their so-called meatball grinders certainly had nothing like flaxseed or oat bran in it. It was, in fact, the very whitest, fluffiest bread Henry had ever seen.
Henry even found the people to be not too terrible. He was jostled in line a few times, but there seemed to be no culture of rape in Massachusetts minimum-security prisons, and that, after all, was all that mattered. On the other hand, in moments of hope before his incarceration, Henry had also imagined that he’d meet some kind of “old-timer” who would take him under his wing and protect him and tell him stories of life on the other side. Such an inmate, however, never appeared. Of course, Henry’s active mental anticipatory life also included fantasies of knowing karate and being able to defend other falsely imprisoned young persons (maybe other young and distraught Harvard men) from gangs of thieves and murderers. This dream too did not materialize. In fact, the only thing that was true, that did match up to his general ideas about prison life, was the boredom. There was simply not much to do in jail.
And one good thing did come from the experience. It was a lesson, as it were, although the lesson came most forcefully early on, as he was being led through the prison on the very first morning when all his horrible expectations and fears were most ripe. The lesson was that there was simply nothing a person could do to anticipate what came next in life and that a very happy trip up north to recover ancient family artifacts could lead to entirely unexpected outcomes and there was absolutely no way to prevent such events. The world was a troubling and uncertain place, it struck Henry on the Monday morning he surrendered himself to the Essex County Jail, and there were forces at work that could very easily alter the course of your life.
This truth about the tenuous nature of life, of course, was something about which Henry did have some previous experience. To get a call one evening in Cambridge, Mass. (after studying several hours for a very important examination about the Hundred Years’ War) and hearing a young police officer on Cape Cod (with his own kind of sorrow coming through in his voice) make the announcement that both his parents were dead, well, Henry understood that the world was not a place where planners and schedulers really belonged. Still, jail in Essex County, it was not expected, and even if it only echoed lessons learned long ago, Henry felt he had learned them once again.
3
THE END OF HIS jail term did not conclude Henry’s legal obligations, of course, and once he was “back on the street,” as it were, Henry set about fulfilling his community service, which turned out not be so terrible and, in fact, eventually led to something quite good in his life.
Henry’s lawyer had kept his promise and worked out that the community service be performed in New York (some unlucky Massachusetts resident arrested in New York was doing his work back in Essex County in exchange), and on his first day of community service Henry filled out several questionnaires to assess what skills he had to offer New York City. Henry was surprised by how welcoming the whole process seemed to be. It was as if he’d come to volunteer as a free and concerned citizen. When he met with the official who was assigned to his case, Henry was even complimented on his impressive background and it was suggested that the city was in need of people who could teach some of the things that Henry was good at, “Especially general literacy and writing.”
Along these lines, Henry agreed to meet with an HR person at the New York City Department of Corrections, and soon fou
nd himself in a strangely secure office near City Hall talking to an astonishingly tall and imposing man who, nevertheless, seemed very friendly. This placement specialist’s conclusions were, however, that Henry would not be a good match for New York’s prison system. “I don’t think you know what you’re in for in here,” he said, smiling. “I like to hire guys who look like they can take at least one punch if things get dicey.”
“But I’ve been to jail myself,” Henry said. “I know what to expect.”
“You’ve been to a rural jail in Massachusetts, which is a little different than what’s going on in Rikers Island.”
Henry felt a little insulted by this, and he even protested again that he was sure he could handle it. The man smiled again and shrugged and said, “Tell you what: think about it for a few days, but I will say, in the past few years I’ve had teachers stabbed, beaten half to death, and once, a while back, something even worse happened that you don’t want to know about. I can’t think this is for you. Especially writing classes. Some of our inmates can get pretty touchy about taking criticism.”
Henry left the office assuring the man that he didn’t need to think about it at all and that he was positive he could do a good job. But as the rest of the day passed, Henry’s bravado diminished, and he decided he might do well to listen to the HR administrator’s advice, especially since the menace of rape was once again on his mind.
Another alternative was to work as an after-school tutor for young people—with “at-risk students,” as the first placement specialist described them to Henry in a second interview. Henry quickly agreed to this proposal and was given a spot at a school in Bushwick, and soon he was spending three afternoons a week helping several teachers who managed remedial classes.
In this line of work, Henry actually felt fairly competent, and he found that it was easier than he had expected to develop a rapport with the students. Unfortunately, the students (with honest affection) categorically refused to do anything Henry asked them to do. Generally, he worked with groups of four or five students in afternoon study periods to go over homework. But just as Henry would begin to ask if they had any questions about what they’d covered in their classes that day, they’d start asking their own questions concerning things like what kind of music Henry listened to, his various food preferences, and, of course, his romantic life. On this last matter, however, they were impenetrable ciphers, using slang that Henry did not understand at all (but which he was sure described all sorts of astonishing sexual acts) before bursting into wild laughter, often falling off their chairs to extend the theatrical effect. The thing is that they never asked a single question without a broad smile, and on several occasions they told Henry things like, “We like you a lot, Henry. You’re a good guy.” And it really seemed like they meant it. And while Henry blushed and awkwardly avoided answering questions like, “Do you ever bring your girl a cappuccino?” (followed by wild laughter that would throw everyone to the floor), Henry was willing to talk to them about life and his own experiences, ranging from his parents’ deaths to why he didn’t like to eat hormone-treated meat. It was all, actually, very pleasurable. It wasn’t like community service at all. And this, he gathered, was the reason—his failure to provide any actual useful service, that is—that Henry was finally fired, with one of the most explicit condemnations he’d ever received. “Why does every fucking jackass rich-guy criminal think they’re cut out to help young people?” the teacher, a Ms. Ryan, yelled one afternoon. “I have to say, though, Henry, that you, you have been the absolute fucking worst we’ve had. You’ve wasted everyone’s fucking time and as far as I can tell made them even worse readers than when you started. You really think they need a person to sit around and shoot the shit with?”
“Maybe with just a bit more time I could get the knack of it,” Henry replied. He was sincere in this offer, but somewhat certain it would not be well received.
“Listen, any more time with you and they’ll all be in jail themselves. Forget it. Sorry for being so harsh about all this, by the way, but you’re a total fucking idiot and I have too much to do around here.”
Henry left quickly after this, and, despite his hurt feelings, he found himself feeling a certain amount of sympathy for Ms. Ryan. After all, he and his students had, in truth, accomplished absolutely nothing.
At any rate, at his third meeting with the placement specialist, Henry suggested that maybe there was some kind of simple job for him that didn’t involve interacting with other people. “I think that dull rather than engaging might be the best thing for me.”
The placement man nodded and asked, “Inside or outside?”
After they discussed a range of possibilities, including things like park cleanup and building maintenance, they arrived at what was actually a good match. Henry agreed to reshelve books at libraries around the city. “You’d be moved to wherever they need you,” the man said. “Basically, wherever there’s a backlog, although that’s almost everywhere. And they may ask you to do other things around the libraries, but mostly it will just be reshelving.”
“All right,” Henry said. “That sounds good to me.”
4
AND IT TURNED OUT that Henry liked this job quite a bit. It was easy, his bosses were generally nice, and the work actually seemed to amount to something close to community service: at the end of the day, at one branch or another, a large pile of books was put away and ready for new borrowers. The people Henry worked with were also often quite interesting—the backlogs at libraries occasionally required more than one ex-convict to reshelve them—and Henry interacted with rehabilitated drug addicts, pickpockets, white-collar criminals, etc., although most of the time he and his workmates had headphones on, so there wasn’t too much opportunity to chat. There was one exception to this, however, and this exception would end up being very significant in Henry’s life.
In the middle of July (now still some months before The Best of Youth’s advanced reviews came out) Henry was sent to the Inwood Branch to deal with “a catastrophe.” Some sort of crazy person had run through ten aisles of the stacks, pulling off shelf after shelf of books and dumping them on the floor, and by the time the lunatic had been restrained by the security guard, he’d left thousands of books on the floor and in need of being reshelved in their “exact proper order.”
Henry was called early on a Sunday morning and asked if he could come in to help “handle this emergency” and was promised double hours against his obligations if he did so. Thus, on a fairly hot Sunday morning at ten o’clock, he arrived at the Inwood Branch, where he met the head librarian (still astounded by her misfortune) and then, to his surprise, found himself being reintroduced to the tattooed and now-former girlfriend (he’d heard they’d broken up) of the fiction editor at Suckerhead, the woman who had, apparently, loved the short story he had submitted. It seemed that she was some kind of criminal too, also there to earn double hours toward her own community service debt. It was this elaborately decorated woman (Sasha, again, was her name) who would turn out to be so important.
5
IN GENERAL, HENRY was not easily shocked by other people’s modes of self-expression, and he was certainly not against what might be called experimental behavior. It was just that he so rarely engaged in that sort of thing himself. Henry had never even contemplated any sort of “body art” and he was normally dressed entirely in bland clothes from popular but reasonably priced stores—lots of solid-colored shirts and nondescript trousers. But again, this was not because of disapproval of elaborate dress or physical ornamentation. It was simply not the sort of thing that he felt suited him. That being said, Henry could not help but experience a renewed sense of astonishment when he saw Sasha, because of the enormous number of tattoos on her arms and legs, and running up her neck. The truth was that he’d never actually seen her in full light. In fact, he’d never seen her outside of an artfully darkened bar, and the harsh fluorescent lighting of the Inwood Branch actually caused him to avert his eyes
as they shook hands, just after the head librarian reintroduced them. Henry concluded that his averted glance was only meant to hide the fact that he wanted to conceal his fascination and not because of any negative feelings he had. Also, she struck him now as being surprisingly attractive, and this was a thing that often made Henry redirect his gaze.
For her part, Sasha managed to say, “I know you.” But she also seemed suddenly shy as she said this, turning her head away as well. In fact, in the bright light of the Inwood Library, she almost seemed delicate and nervous, especially since the tattoos that crept up to her face were—Henry hadn’t recognized this before—tiny roses. Her face, actually, was mostly free of ornamentation, other than a small clear stud of some sort below her lower lip and a tiny silver hoop in each of her ears. Her arms and calves, on the other hand, were, by Henry’s estimation (eyes still averted but quickly glancing across her body) almost entirely covered.
At any rate, this inspection lasted only for a matter of seconds because the head librarian was still so flustered by the attack of the insane man that she wanted to get started right away. She put Henry at one end of the ransacked aisles and Sasha at the other, and soon Henry was listening to some kind of avant-garde musical podcast he’d found on a Canadian website, and Sasha too had her earbuds in. It was not until the end of the day, in fact, that they spoke again, when they both arrived at the center shelf. They quickly nodded and smiled, but as Henry went back to his work, he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. He turned, pulling out his earbuds, and Sasha said, still smiling, still just a bit shy, “So what’d you do, Henry?”
The Best of Youth Page 15
