The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  Things did come to a head, though, on an evening when the Keller Academy was playing Sudbury Prep and Henry was having a particularly dismal game. Henry’s performance had elicited groans from the crowd on three separate occasions, but when Henry’s father (and Henry) heard the young bully Pete’s father (a thoracic surgeon named Dr. James Paulson) yell in an unusual state of parental agitation, “Take that fucking kid out!” (just after Henry avoided the puck because he was afraid of being hit), it was something of a transformative moment.

  The rink was large, but there were not that many people in attendance, and it wasn’t hard for everyone to hear such comments. Henry didn’t feel particularly bad. He really didn’t. Acts of physical bravado never excited him, and his failure to perform them (and the ridicule that might follow) always felt irrelevant. For Henry’s father, though, the comment was intolerable. He apparently held his temper through the rest of the game, but afterward, as the fathers greeted their sons as they exited the locker room into the ice rink’s food court and video game parlor, he grabbed hold of Dr. Paulson’s elbow and said, “This is my son, you dumb fucking jerk, and I want you to apologize to him.”

  Strangely, it didn’t seem as though there was meant to be a fight, despite the crude language and the elbow-grabbing. Even Dr. Paulson didn’t seem to think that punches would be thrown. But the emotional and verbal anger of Henry’s father had a kind of influence on the physical positions and angles of the two men, and, although it was impossible really to say “who started it,” as some sort of law enforcement person might put it, what was a fact was that Henry’s father, as he stepped back and put up his right arm (Dr. Paulson had raised his own fist in the air), thrust his elbow into Dr. Paulson’s face and (as was perfectly clear to anyone who saw the blood spurt and the man’s sudden collapse to the floor) broke his nose in such a painful and conclusive way that there was simply no question that Henry’s father’s enemy had been entirely defeated.

  Of course, good New Englander that he was, Henry’s father quickly stooped down to help his adversary and even mopped up the blood with his sleeve and called for an ambulance. (None was called because none was really needed.) And Dr. Paulson, now sitting, feebly insisted that he was just fine, after he managed to put a handkerchief up against his nose. His family, he said, had a long history of weak capillary walls. “I get nosebleeds like this all the time,” he said.

  At any rate, the two men involved, and the people who stopped to watch, seemed to think that the best thing to do was to pretend nothing had happened and head to their cars. And as they walked through the parking lot, Henry and his father were silent, although as they opened their doors and took their seats, Henry’s father began to apologize. It was what Henry had expected, and it followed a standard sort of script about “appropriate behavior” and that it was “wrong to let your emotions lead you to violence.”

  And Henry did what he could to assure his father that no real harm had been done, that it wasn’t really a “fight” but a “scuffle” (Henry was an insightful young literary man even then and understood the rhetorical advantages of precise linguistic distinctions), and that in a “scuffle” a person gets hurt by the event and the emotional circumstance, not by a willful decision.

  At this, Henry’s father nodded and said, “Well, I appreciate your kind interpretation of everything, Henry.” Then, after a pause, he added, “But human beings are just not supposed to behave that way to each other. No matter what the justification.” There was then another pause, after which (quite to Henry’s surprise) his father added, “But, I have to say, as I think about this with some perspective now, I really loved laying that guy out like that. Dropped him like a rock, in case you didn’t notice. I know it was just ‘a scuffle.’ But this isn’t the first time your old man threw an elbow to defeat a villain. And Henry, guys like that, and I say this as a man of great emotional equilibrium, really need their asses kicked.”

  Henry decided that it might not be the best idea to point out the somewhat accidental nature of Dr. Paulson’s defeat and instead agreed that his father had done quite well for himself.

  And it was good that Henry restrained himself in this way because what came next was surprisingly moving. Henry’s father paused and then said, “And no one will ever treat you badly as long as I’m around. I mean, I don’t think you should count on me getting into a lot of fistfights on your behalf. But Henry, I will always be around to take care of you. I’ll never let anyone do anything to hurt you.”

  Even at Henry’s young age, he realized the importance of what his father had just said, and as a memory it had always sustained him. And despite the fact that his father was now dead, Henry (as secular a man as he was) still felt that what his father had said about protecting him was somehow, in an emotional if not a spiritual way, true.

  What all this meant in terms of what was going to follow with Kipling, though, wasn’t exactly clear—a thing that struck Henry very hard as he arrived at Sixty-second Street. But Henry did feel somehow that even timid writers from Harvard had moral obligations, and that protecting people you loved was the only route a thinking, reasoning human being could take. What he was going to actually do on the visit to Kipling’s hotel, however, really was a mystery. At the very least, Henry did imagine that he’d be telling Kipling that he’d be going to the police whether Abby liked it or not. But then, once more thinking that he couldn’t do that to Abby, he began to imagine that he’d rather follow his father’s example and find some clever way to kick the shit out of Kipling (as it were), although this also seemed unlikely. But if he did it, if he found some way to physically injure Kipling, even if it was underhanded and not at all virtuous, well, what could Kipling do about it? If Kipling called the police himself, he’d only make his own exposure likely. Henry couldn’t help but feel happy that the thing that made Abby so hesitant to involve outsiders would be the same thing that prevented Kipling from taking any retribution, should Henry, in fact, somehow manage to injure him.

  And with this reasoning, after making his way through the hotel’s lobby and stepping off the elevator on Kipling’s floor, and after spotting a bronze statuette of a naked woman about the size of a wine bottle that sat on a table in the hallway, he came up with a small plan. Figuring that if he could just break an arm or a leg it would make him feel much better, Henry grabbed the statuette and concluded that Kipling would just have to suck up the pain without retribution, unless he really wanted to ruin his career.

  So Henry slammed his fist on Kipling’s door and when Kipling opened it he was indeed surprised and even looked just a little frightened. Henry stepped forward, his hand with the statue just behind his right hip, and quickly said they needed to talk.

  “Actually,” Henry said, bringing the statuette forward, “I’m here to beat the shit out of you.”

  These were quite threatening words, Henry felt, and at the very least he imagined that Kipling would assume some kind of defensive stance and try to explain to Henry that whatever bad things he thought about him were certainly not true. Instead, however, Kipling (a naturally muscular man and a person who, again, clearly spent a lot of time with a personal trainer) stepped forward and punched Henry right in the neck, so hard that Henry could do nothing but fall to the floor and roll over, losing his bronze weapon in the process.

  “What?” Kipling yelled. “You’re fucking here to avenge your fucking dumb bitch cousin?”

  He kicked Henry in the face.

  “You think you can come over and fuck with me?” He kicked Henry again. “You cannot fuck with me, and your little bitch cousin cannot fuck with me. I’ve got too much fucking money and too many fucking lawyers for you to fuck with me, and you, you little fucking asshole, I’m a million times tougher than you, so fuck you and your little fucking sculpture.” With this, Kipling bent down, picked up the bronze statue, and clubbed Henry several times on his right shoulder. Kipling then picked Henry up by his collar and his arm, stepped forward, and threw him into t
he hallway, slamming the door behind him without ceremony.

  And so that was it. The door was closed and locked. Sixty seconds and Henry’s dreams of revenge were lost.

  As Henry lay on the floor, his arm strangely numb, and now bleeding from both his nose and his mouth, he suddenly (and against his will) recalled one of Kipling’s movies, a film that dealt with Maine fishermen. Kipling played the upstart younger brother of the stoic leader of a small fishing-boat crew that was trying to cover up a murder—a murder that was retributional, and just, and cheered by any decent and freethinking moviegoer. The thing about this movie—this was what Henry thought about as he struggled to attend to his bleeding nose and mouth with an old cocktail napkin he found in his pocket—was that Kipling was magnificent in it, so totally moving in the small moments when he spoke about justice and compassion and human virtue, that as Henry leaned forward and tried to wipe the blood away from his face, it struck him as one of the strangest things he’d ever confronted: that Kipling could so perfectly play a person that he was so different from. It was entirely confusing—too confusing to begin to pick apart at this point, now, as his attempts to arrest the blood flow from his nose failed and his shoulder now began to throb with astounding pain.

  It was here that Henry concluded that he had to go to the police. It was impossible to imagine that Kipling could get away with all this. But then Henry again thought about Abby, and how she was so worried about becoming some sort of tabloid freak, and he decided that he’d never do anything to bring that about if she didn’t want to face it, even if it meant he got his ass kicked and couldn’t retaliate. It was just such an unbearable idea that Kipling should walk away from all this unharmed.

  And the fact was that if Henry did go to the police, Kipling still might win the day—Kipling was right about that, aside from all the bluster about how rich he was. How hard was it for a good PR firm to accuse Abby of being some kind of opportunist, lying about being on the pill or desperate to hang on to the movie star who was so successful and so well loved and probably benefiting her musical career? Plus, could she prove that it was Kipling who beat her up? Why hadn’t she gone to the police right away? What, the magazines might ask, was she hiding? And it was also the case that Henry did show up at Kipling’s apartment with what was surely, technically, a weapon. What was Kipling supposed to do when Henry arrived? Let the intruder club him to death with a piece of hotel art?

  The entire calculation was very distressing. But as Henry now at last got to his feet, he had another idea, although perhaps it had been on his mind for some time. In the end, as Henry thought about it, he realized that he did, in fact, have something over Kipling, at least in terms of his artistic reputation, and in the next moment he was on his phone to Whitney, describing what had happened to Abby and to him, and then announcing that he was on his way over.

  20

  WHITNEY WAS STUNNED when he saw Henry at his door. Henry had prepared him somewhat, but only in the more formal details—a split lip and a badly bruised shoulder muscle, etc. Still, he apparently had not quite given Whitney a proper sense of the extent of everything, and there was, of course, the psychological toll, which Henry was sure was completely evident as he saw Whitney’s reaction to him.

  “You’re so pale,” Whitney said. “I’ve never seen anyone so pale. And you’re already a very pale man.”

  “I know, I know,” Henry said, stepping through the door. “But I’m okay. Really.”

  Here Henry even managed a smile, but he immediately began talking again as he walked toward Whitney’s kitchen.

  “I want you to write an essay,” Henry continued. Then, as he opened the refrigerator and took out a beer, he added, “For your free leftist newspaper. About how I wrote The Best of Youth and about how Kipling has been lying about it.”

  Henry opened the beer and then looked at Whitney, who seemed to be avoiding having a reaction to this idea. Maybe he was going to let Henry have his moment of fury and then talk him out of it after he’d calmed down.

  “You can put it in the literary section if you want,” Henry continued, “but I think it might be good on the front page as well. The day it’s published, we’ll email copies to every media outlet we can think of. No way Kipling can stop it then because it will already be out there and people will just be reporting on your story. Anyway, I can prove everything. Show me one single word that Kipling ever wrote for this book. We’ll subpoena Merrill if we have to. He’s not going to lie under oath, although he might get pretty pissed. Or maybe not, given what Kipling has done and given the kind of guy Merrill is. Anyway, I’ve got stacks of notes and edited manuscripts and a hard drive full of drafts that I wrote. What does Kipling own to prove that he wrote anything? The guy barely knows the names of the characters.”

  Here, at this point, Whitney allowed himself to react, although the distressed look on his face was a little inscrutable. Finally, he just said, “Fuck.”

  “He deserves this,” Henry added.

  “Yeah, but fuck, you’re going to be fucked if you do this.”

  “I want to do it.”

  “What about that Survivor analogy Merrill gave you? The nondisclosure thing. No way you’re not going to get crushed by this.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Whitney looked at Henry for another instant and it appeared as if he were going to speak again, but instead he stepped forward, opened the fridge, and grabbed a beer of his own.

  21

  IT WAS NOT A difficult article to draft except that the blinding light of passion was tempered a few times with more frank warnings from Whitney as they sat in front of Whitney’s laptop and wrote.

  “Honestly, you’re going to get sued for everything you have and you’re going to lose. You know that, right? Tell me you understand that.” Whitney said this after they’d just finished constructing a sentence that made clear that Kipling had no hand at all in a single sentence of the book.

  “Kipling fucking deserves this,” Henry said. Then, after a pause, trying to keep his cool, he added, “And I think the government can’t take your house if you declare bankruptcy. I’ll still have my apartment.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll have to sell it because what are you going to live on?” Whitney replied. “You’re totally unemployable.”

  It was a good point, but Henry quickly changed the subject by noting that he’d really like more parentheses added to the paragraph Whitney had just typed, and after that the conversation stayed entirely on the subject of the standards of the prose.

  At any rate, by midnight, after quite a bit of beer and coffee, the article (officially penned by Whitney) was completed. It was simple and not at all vicious in style—more reportage than polemic. But it laid out the facts of the situation, namely that Kipling, the great literary phenomenon, had hired Henry to write his book for him, and that Kipling had had nothing to do with its creation or editing and that Kipling was now posing as a literary master when he knew nothing at all about how to construct a novel, likely hadn’t even read the one he was calling his own. It was quite a satisfying thing to see, especially the quotes that they manufactured and attributed to Henry, but as Henry went to sleep on Whitney’s couch that night, with a high-quality down comforter wrapped around him, he wondered if he’d regret all this. Probably he would. At this point, though, again, not to go ahead would be like making an active decision to let Kipling off the hook, which was not a thing Henry could consider.

  Fortunately, Henry was so exhausted that these internal ruminations only lasted for a few minutes before he finally fell asleep, the comforter twisted tightly around his neck—a mode of sleeping that Henry had employed ever since he was a small boy.

  22

  HENRY WOKE UP LATE the next morning and decided that he ought to make it to work that day. He called Abby to see how she was. She sounded fine—or better, or calm—and it didn’t seem to her that Henry would do much good for her if he visited. “I just want to lie on my couch and watch TV,” she
said. “I think I’m more tired than I’ve ever been.”

  Henry left for Red Hook shortly after hanging up, but by the time he made it to the library warehouse he suddenly became afraid to see Sasha. Cosmetically, his face had actually come through the fight all right, after the blood had been stopped and wiped away. Still, it seemed likely that he looked terrible and he was quite positive that he smelled very bad. And Sasha confirmed at least some of Henry’s more superficial fears when he arrived. “Boy, do you stink,” she said when she greeted him. She was smiling, and she reached out to touch Henry’s hand as she said this, so it wasn’t too much of an insult. Still, it made Henry feel self-conscious. And after stepping away for a second, he was soon explaining what had transpired over the past day and what was likely coming in the time ahead.

  Sasha looked genuinely distressed by what Henry said, but mostly she was silent and only nodded when it seemed that her input might be appropriate. After about ten minutes, though, during which time they were not doing any of their work, she finally asked, “So, what, you used to try to sleep with your cousin?”

  Henry felt the blood drain from his face (what was left, at least), and his only thought was that, yet again, he’d entirely misjudged the nature of his interactions with another person. And he even began to explain once more that in most cultures that kind of thing was totally normal. But Sasha abruptly grabbed hold of Henry, pulled him forward, and kissed him with unmistakable affection. “I’m just joking, Henry,” she said. “Jesus. It’s amazing you’re not institutionalized. I’m just trying to cheer you up. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

  This, Henry could only conclude, was entirely true. But he was pretty happy in that instant, so he endured the insult, although he added, “I think I really do smell very bad. I don’t think I can hug you for too long.”