Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  “I don’t really have any plans,” I said, “because I think plans are kind of dangerous. I think they take you away from the here and now.” I had no idea what I was saying—what came out of my mouth was a surprise even to me.

  Houston looked at me in disgust. “That’s the damned point,” he said. “What’s so damned special about here and now?”

  I looked around. I was on break from washing dishes, smoking a joint with a failed prodigy and an angry ex-wrestler. I was sitting on a crate of rotten lettuce. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You kids with your here and now,” he said. “Y’all a bunch of lazy motherfuckers is what you are. You’ll see one day, you get to my age, you’ll be wishing you had some plans going on. Bunch of hippie-ass shit,” he said, “makes me tired.”

  “But don’t you think that desire,” I said, “is a dangerous thing? It’s a game that goes on and on. The satisfaction of a desire is the death of that desire, and so we just keep forming new ones and satisfying them, and then watching them die, and forming new ones, on and on, and we’re never happy. It’s better to be in the moment.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of college bullshit,” Houston said. And I had to admit it was something I’d heard in a philosophy class. “You been to college?” he said. I nodded. “Then what the hell are you doing here?” He stood up and tossed the joint in the dumpster. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. He shook his head. “You dumbass kids. I had about all the fraternizing I can stand.”

  A few days later, as I was tying on my apron at the beginning of my shift, Houston and the restaurant’s owner approached me. “We have reason to believe,” said the owner, “that there has been drug abuse here in the workplace.” He never actually looked at anyone when he spoke, only stared off to the side, like he was reading from a set of cue cards.

  “Gee,” I said. “Really?”

  “We’re testing a random sample of workers,” he said. “There’s a nurse in the restroom who will help you through the process.”

  I stood there. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not a drug user.”

  “Of course not,” said the owner. “But under the terms of your employment, you’re subject to random testing.”

  I looked at Houston, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. “I have a political problem with that,” I said.

  “Understood,” the owner said. “But it’s policy.”

  “It’s not that I’m saying I’m guilty,” I said. “It’s just a matter of principle.”

  “Well, looks like you’re fired, then,” said Houston, still staring at the floor.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “You better get along.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine!” It was only when I’d stepped outside, by the dumpster, that I could string a sentence together. “Go ahead and keep your stupid job!” I cried. “Like I need to wash your stupid dishes, anyway!”

  I walked home, kicking a stone the whole way, my eyes burning, like the kid from “Araby.” Far worse than the loss of whatever idea I’d been harboring—that I’d stay at the Bavarian through the winter, perhaps forever—was the fact that I’d ever believed in it in the first place.

  Back at the Bavarian Mrs. Strauss stood in the living room, ironing a tablecloth. It was the kind of scene I’d always imagined coming home to as a kid. There was someone waiting there, putting things in order, for the inevitable hour at which I returned home a failure, heartbroken.

  “Home so early?” said Mrs. Strauss.

  “I guess I dropped too many dishes,” I said. “I got fired.”

  “What?” she said. “But what fools they are! To fire a nice girl like you! What fools!”

  “You’ll find something better,” she said. “There are plenty of places in town who would be happy to have a girl like you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I should be leaving.”

  “But of course,” said Mrs. Strauss. She went into the kitchen and a few minutes later appeared with a tray on which trembled two glass mugs, filled with brilliant amber liquid. “Drink this,” she said. “Whenever Karl used to get upset, this would always calm him down. I tried to tell the nurses in the hospital what to make him when he got upset, but they didn’t allow spirits.”

  I cupped my hands around the drink and let its steam rise to my face.

  “You should have seen Karl,” she said. “What a delicate soul he was. No bigger than you are. The world just ate him up.”

  We sat together sipping the drink that her crazy brother had loved, that had calmed him in his moments of despair. We sat in silence for a long time. It was bitter. And it was sweet.

  The next morning I looked to you for sympathy, but you were all sarcasm. That’s a sad story, you said. You had a bright career ahead of you.

  “It’s just not fair,” I said.

  Like my grandmother used to say, if dishwashing doesn’t work out, at least there’s graduate school to fall back on.

  “Well, I guess I’m leaving,” I said.

  Toodles, you said. You didn’t even look up from your newspaper.

  “Toodles?” I said. “All I get is Toodles?”

  Oh, excuse me, you said, still immersed in your paper. Toodleoo.

  Sometime later, when I was a few hundred miles south and going through my glove compartment for a napkin, I found that you’d snuck a bottle of pills into the car. Inside was a note, written in your impeccable, looping script. I thought this might help you get through school. It was only then that I realized you’d arranged to have me fired.

  In graduate school I was almost completely alone. I lived in a small curved room, in a third-floor turret of an old Victorian. Technically the room was classified as an apartment. It had a kitchen (just a sink and a refrigerator) in one corner and a bathroom walled off in another. The only light in the apartment was from a small frosted window that faced the street. This was the kind of place people lived in when there was something wrong with them. There was, I often supposed, something wrong with me.

  I had trouble making friends. A few times I got together with my fellow French students, who sat around eating Brie and drinking Cognac, rolling cigarettes and wearing little berets and disparaging our country’s political and social and educational systems, putting particular emphasis on the Midwest. “Fat cows!” they said. “Dumb fucks!” There was nothing at all wrong with this, except that each of them had lawyers and doctors and corporate tycoons for parents, and each of them received a sizable check in the mail each month—spoils of the systems they despised. True dissatisfaction with the state of the world, I thought, true disgust—I was on its cutting edge. I separated myself from them and lived with the silent rigor of a monk. I read Camus, Sartre. I developed a steely indifference toward human relationships. What did I care about Malinda? Or my mother, for that matter? What the fuck did I care?

  I spent my time writing a thesis on a book called Winter Nights, an obscure French novel I’d found in the library. The book concerned a boy named Marcel who lived in Lille, an industrial city in the north of France. Marcel spent his days at the textile mill and his nights wandering around the city, listening to stories told to him by homeless and crazy people. Every night an irresistible urge came over him to walk the streets. Because he was a mere boy, people were comfortable unburdening themselves to him. Though the boy never said anything in return, he was happy—wandering about at night gave him a feeling of purpose and connection. But in the last chapter Marcel was turned on by one of the crazy men he’d befriended. The man suspected Marcel of being a spy from the police force, or an emissary from the mental hospital sent to lock him away, and the man attacked him. On the final page the boy’s skull was crushed underneath the old man’s boot. It wasn’t until the last sentence that the author revealed that Marcel was deaf, that the connection he’d felt to people, and they’d felt to him, had nothing to do with language, it was something unseen, finer. I liked to think that if I had written a book, it would be something like this.


  My thesis developed into a musing on lost connections, on effort and failure, on meaning and interpretation. I wrote long passages and then crossed them out and wrote even longer passages arguing against what I’d just written. I wrote that there was beauty in Marcel, in the effort he made to connect with people. Then I crossed that out and wrote that Marcel was a fool. “There is no understanding between people,” I wrote, “and one cannot rely on others to make meaning of life. One has only oneself. When Marcel’s false hopes are justly dashed, the novel teaches us to live for ourselves.”

  In the practice of writing the thesis I was enacting its theme—the difficulty of communication, the risk of believing in it—and this, I thought, was something unprecedented, something no one else had ever thought to do. I turned in all the pages I’d written, with the lines stricken out and then rewritten, so that people would be able to see, and appreciate, all of the efforts that had gone to waste, all of the words that had fallen to the floor. But my advisor told me that I was full of shit and I had to rewrite it. “I don’t want any miscommunications,” I said, “I want people to understand not just what I have to say, but what isn’t being said, that when one thing is said its opposite lurks just behind it, as a kind of shadow.” My advisor looked at me over the top of her half glasses and told me not to worry. “I assure you,” she said, “absolutely no one is going to read this.”

  Toward the end of graduate school I signed on to teach French at my old high school, whose graduation rate had dropped even further in the years I’d been gone. The city schools had lost their accreditation, and everyone who could possibly afford it had moved to the suburbs, or sent their kids to private schools. The high school kept losing its teachers to other, better systems, or to personal crises like cancer and suicide. The previous French teacher, whose job I was assuming, had checked herself into a mental hospital. Nonetheless I was convinced that teaching there, working with the kinds of kids I’d grown up with, would be good for me, the first useful thing I’d ever done.

  Back home, my thoughts turned to Malinda again. Everywhere I looked there was some reminder of her. The apartments we’d lived in, the schools we’d attended, the shops and playgrounds we’d frequented. From the bedroom window of my apartment, I could see the street corner where she’d once fallen on her bike and scraped her arm into a bloody pulp. She’d stood crying, right in the middle of the street, while traffic was stopped all around her, and she wouldn’t be consoled, she wouldn’t move. She had always been a champion crier. She wailed, her face turned red, her whole body shook. Even later in life, after she’d affected a callous indifference to just about everything, she would often break down fully, desperately, spectacularly. There was a crack running through her, and the smallest thing would open it up, turn her inside out. She seemed to suffer more than other people, to bruise more easily. Sometimes I sat looking out the window, at that street corner, and thought of her. Wherever she was now, I was sure she was hurting, I was sure she needed me.

  When school let out for break in December I started wandering around the city, going to all the places Malinda used to go. I told myself that my interest was casual, that I didn’t really care one way or the other whether I found her, that I wasn’t even really looking. But one day, overcome with loneliness, I found myself driving north to Ogunquit. The day was cold, but even still I rolled down the window when I approached the shore, to hear the ocean in the distance, to smell the salt in the air. All through town, I didn’t see a single person walking about. A light snow was falling. Everything was closed up, gray and shapeless, as though covered with a sheet for the season.

  I showed up at the Bavarian expecting everything to be just as I’d left it. I had learned already, several times, that this kind of assumption was absurd. But still, it was one I couldn’t do without.

  Mrs. Strauss, in fact, had not changed at all. She was happy to see me and sat me down at the dining room table and began feeding me, as was her custom. When I asked for you, she informed me that you were napping, and I passed the afternoon catching up with her. Her stories changed with the seasons, and she talked of the feats her father and brother had accomplished in cold weather—the felling of trees and their swift dismemberment into firewood; the hunting of snow hares, foxes, deer; the death-defying turns they took on the ski slopes. “When they came in from the cold,” she told me, “I used to warm their shoes in the oven.”

  Then I heard you on the stairs. Well hello, my dear, you said. I’d completely forgotten about you. What a delightful little surprise.

  When I turned toward you I saw instantly that you were a dying man. You were so wasted, so pale, so skeletal, it didn’t seem possible that you were upright and moving around. It all made sense to me then—your resignation, your effective retirement. In fact it was a wonder to me I hadn’t guessed before.

  We spent the next several days together, during which time we never left the house. You said you hadn’t seen Malinda, or heard word of her whereabouts. By now she was just one of those people who had passed through town, then disappeared. This was the nature of seasonal work—there was no loyalty, no memory. Even though you’d been at the Oasis for twenty years, the same would happen to you. You’d taken the past season off, and by the next, you said, no one would even remember your name. No matter, you said. I never cared for those people. And I’ll be dead anyway.

  You declined to name your illness. In fact you hardly spoke of it, except to say that the previous winter you’d twice been in the hospital with pneumonia, and didn’t expect to make it through the current season. You had taken up the role of invalid in the most stylish fashion. You wore a silk dressing gown and walked with the aid of a polished black walking stick. Your slippers were of black velvet. When you coughed, it was into a silk handkerchief.

  You slept much of the day, but we stayed up late into the evenings. You stretched out on the couch and told all the stories of your life again. They were essentially the same as before, though less exaggerated. It seemed important to you, finally, to get things right. Often you paused in your recollections to think, to make sure you had the right names and dates. You had me write them all down in a notebook. You’ve shown up at just the right time, you said. I’ve been wanting to leave a record of some kind, but I’ve never liked writing things down. Yes, you’re just the solution I was looking for.

  All of your stories stopped when you left graduate school, when you’d moved to Maine. If you mentioned the Bavarian, or the Oasis, it was only in passing, as a means of comparison to something from your childhood, and so the whole last twenty years of your life seemed little more than a trip you’d taken once, long ago, and could hardly remember.

  You didn’t mention your symphony. On the last night of my stay, I asked if you had finished it, and you stared off as though you hadn’t heard me. You paused for so long that I began to wonder if I had actually posed the question to you aloud, or merely thought it. But finally you spoke. Failure, you said, is an art form we are all engaged in whether we know it or not. And I suppose I’ve finally accepted it, I suppose I’ve made it my own.

  You stood up and motioned for me to follow you. As you climbed the stairs one of your hairs, which had come loose from the impeccable order of the rest, stood on end and waved about, this way and that, though what current was stirring it I couldn’t tell—you moved so slowly that it took us several minutes to ascend the steps.

  Your room was just as sparse as my room had been. There was only a bed and dresser, a nightstand. Aside from your toiletries, which you kept on a mirrored tray, you seemed to have no personal effects whatsoever.

  You opened the door of your closet, in which hung your suits and shirts—the very same your grandmother had purchased for you before you left Arkansas. Stacked on the floor of the closet were several crates, which held your composition notebooks. My life’s work, you said. An exercise in failure. You picked up one of the notebooks, flipped through it, squinted, frowned, as if you couldn’t imagine w
hat had captivated you for all that time. Take them, you said, they mean nothing to me. I don’t quite have the strength to destroy them myself, but I’d be glad to know they were gone, I’d be glad to know they were in the hands of someone educated.

  A week later I called the Bavarian to see how you were. When Mrs. Strauss answered the phone it was a voice even more manic that usual—“Hallo!” she said—and I sensed right away that you were gone. “We’ve lost our James,” she told me. “Just after your visit, my dear.” She said that you had taken too many pills, that your pain was so great you’d accidentally ingested an excess of sedatives. “It’s the delicate souls,” she said, “that get eaten up.” I was touched by her naïvete, which I’d always suspected covered up a deep, terrible understanding of the nature of things.

  In the evenings that followed I made a habit of sitting down with your notebooks. On the front page of each book you had written your name (which you signed in long, slashing letters, as though you were carving it with a sword) and the date, and so it was possible to get a sense of their progression over time. At first glance the books were overwhelming. On each page there were ten staffs stacked on top of one another, all of them sounding at once, and it was almost impossible for me to hold all of the notes in my mind. The kind of mind it would take to understand that music was very rare, and to have such a mind, I imagined, must have made it difficult to live in the flat, shallow territory of ordinary life.

  There were a good many things about the notebooks, however, that were easy to understand. It was clear that you were fond of the oboe, for instance—of giving it high, trembling notes that outlasted the rest of the orchestra. In general the notebooks displayed a fairly obvious back-and-forth pattern, between the mess of spontaneous creation and the attempt at discipline that followed. There were times when the notes were slashed down, sloppy, and times when they were perfectly formed, each note evenly spaced. During your first years in Maine you produced at a furious rate, going through two or three notebooks a month, but as the years went by you produced less and less. In one year, 1988, you didn’t get through a single book. In your final days you’d crossed out nearly everything you’d done. Page after page was marked with slashes so violent you’d in many cases broken through the page with your pencil.