Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  As predicted, I failed.

  I was no better than he was—Dad, the man who was too honest—who couldn’t say the words outright—I love you—and so had chosen to moan aloud at his condition instead, and my forcing of it.

  Don’t do this to me, kid.

  But what I had said to Miriam was worse.

  Some gasbag parry of the question posing as wisdom.

  Love is a strange and complicated thing?

  What was that?

  I’d have walked out, too, in Miriam’s place.

  But Miriam isn’t my child. Surely that counts?

  No. It doesn’t matter. In the end it doesn’t matter. You should have just lied and told her what she wanted to hear. You should have said I love you and worked on the feeling afterward. Maybe it would have come with effort in time.

  Now all you have is the mistake.

  24

  When I came into the house, Monica was there waiting for me. She was sitting at my desk looking at the obituary for Dr. Cunningham with a slack expression on her face.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up, momentarily startled.

  “Oh, hey.”

  She tapped the paper with the back of her hand.

  “Did you know him?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Your doctor?”

  “No. A friend’s.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Which friend is that?”

  “No one you know.”

  She threw the paper on the desk, seeming to accept the dodge, and turned toward me.

  “So what’s the emergency?”

  Her tone was hard and superior, as if she were talking to a hysterical child prone to blowing life’s little mishaps all out of proportion. I felt a pang of embarrassment. Embarrassment that I had been so in need, so without emotional resources as to beg someone I hardly knew—via someone else’s voice mail no less—to come and rescue me in my own home in the middle of the night.

  “It’s passed,” I said curtly.

  She raised her brows skeptically.

  “That was quick.”

  “Emergencies usually are.”

  This came out reproachfully instead of coolly, the way I had meant it to.

  “Yeah, well, that’s one of the downsides of being untraceable,” she said. “Can’t rush to help a fuck buddy in need.”

  “Since when do you say fuck buddy?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Since I got a fuck buddy, I guess.”

  I did not like this mood, whatever it was. Not now especially. She could be of no help to me like this.

  “Glad to know I’ve made a lasting contribution,” I said, trying to match her nonchalance and failing.

  “I wouldn’t say lasting,” she scoffed. “Isn’t that the beauty of fuck buddies? They come and they go?”

  I smirked.

  “Usually.”

  She nodded, pursing her lips dismissively.

  “Why are you so hostile?” I said.

  “I’m not hostile.” She smiled fakely. “I’m just not making an effort to be nice.”

  “Was it so hard before?”

  She thought about this for a second.

  “Yes, actually. Often it was.”

  “So why bother? Why did you show up at all?”

  She looked away.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t judge you about Damian. I just didn’t know how else to get in touch with you. I’m sorry if it put you in a bad spot.”

  “It didn’t,” she said.

  “So what is it then? Are you angry that I called you to ask for help? I know it’s been a while and maybe you figure I have no right, which is true, I guess, but I’ve been . . .”

  I couldn’t think of how to describe it.

  She straightened attentively.

  “You’ve been what?”

  “I’ve been through a hell of a lot.”

  “Really?”

  She still had that condescending barb in her voice.

  “Yeah, really,” I snapped.

  She took this in.

  “Where were you tonight?” she asked. “Your car was here. I thought I heard a voice outside.”

  “I was next door,” I said without thinking.

  “At four in the morning?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I had the keys,” I said, as if this made sense. I slumped down on the arm of the couch. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Just working something out with my dad, I think.”

  “Through Gruber?”

  “Sort of. And through stalking around at night.”

  She didn’t ask me to explain.

  “It’s an incredible feeling,” I said. “Being out in the world when everyone else is asleep. Walking around in people’s private spaces. It makes you feel powerful and privileged, like you’re looking at what the world would be like if you could peel back the cover and see underneath.”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Being able to access that world in different ways is really the only thing that makes life livable. That’s sort of what shoplifting is like for me. That, and living out of a coffee can. The whole soft-criminal life. It keeps it interesting and off center.”

  She shuddered and turned the corners of her mouth down.

  “If I had to live in the waking, working world all the time, doing what I’m supposed to do—I mean, Jesus, there’s no place more depressing than a mall or a Wal-Mart—but when you’re stealing or casing or you’re there in the middle of the night, everything about it changes.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So then you know what I mean. All that shiny, plastic coating on everything and everyone melts away. And—I don’t know—it feels more honest somehow.” I paused, thinking about the cameras. “But it isn’t, really.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. But it’s how we survive.”

  I searched her face for disapproval but found none.

  “I can’t,” I said, letting myself fall from the arm into the body of the couch. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “I don’t know. Play this game. Be artificial. Be strategic. Be angry. All of it. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired and I have no explanations for anything. Just more parties to the suffering.”

  She came and sat beside me on the couch. She put her arm around me and kissed my temple.

  “All these people caught up in an invisible person’s pain,” I said. “Me most of all, and I don’t understand it. I don’t know why we’re all still talking about it and trading pieces of something that happened so long ago. I mean, how does one person cause that much wreckage?”

  “You mean Gruber?”

  “No—well, yes, actually. Now that I think of it, I mean everyone on this block. It’s the same thing over and over again in every house. But I was talking about the doctor and Mrs. Bloom, and, fuck, even my father.”

  She sighed heavily.

  “I think the causes and the effects are hard to separate. That’s all. Everybody is somebody’s cause and someone else’s effect. Everybody’s doing harm and being harmed in big ways and small ways. That’s life. Family life. Relationships. Love. Even doctors and priests and accountants get caught up in the tussle. It sounds stupid when people say that we’re all connected. But it’s true. How could it not be? We’re all stuck here together maneuvering in the same small space. Contact is inevitable.”

  “And that’s why you live so cut off from the world?” I said.

  She thought about this, rolling her lower lip gently between her thumb and index finger.

  “Mostl
y, sure. The less contact I have with other people, the safer, the cleaner it is for all of us.”

  She smiled, poking me in the chest. “And you’re not exactly a hub yourself, you know. If you didn’t need to get laid so often, you’d never leave the house.”

  “I go to the gym almost every day.”

  “Only to get laid.”

  I laughed.

  “No, to stay in shape.”

  She laughed, too, nodding, sewing up the conclusion.

  “Right. So that you can get laid.”

  “Well, okay, maybe partly, but it’s mostly emotional. It’s mostly because—you’re right—otherwise I wouldn’t leave the house enough, and because it’s the only way I know, other than booze and sex, to manage the pain.”

  She pulled a mock serious face.

  “What pain?”

  “Don’t be an ass. You know what pain.”

  “Yes, right, I know. How could I forget? How could anyone forget? But I’m curious to hear you say it. Describe it.”

  “No.”

  “No, I’m serious. I want to know what it feels like. What it really feels like.”

  I shot her a rebuking look, then looked away.

  “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

  “Oh, come on. Enlighten me. Here’s your chance. Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t work that way. I can say, it’s pain, it’s terror, it’s desolation. But what does that mean? Describing it doesn’t get you any closer to the experience. It’s like trying to describe what it feels like to be high. The closest you can come is . . .”

  I didn’t want to say this part.

  “Oh, forget it,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “You don’t want to know anyway.”

  She leaned forward to get the rest, prompting.

  “The closest you can come is?”

  Is hurting other people as much and as often as you can, I thought but didn’t say. Just so that you can have some company. You know, break hearts occasionally, if you can, even if they’re soppy stupid half hearts and easy marks, and even if the very notion of breaking hearts is just too embarrassingly Harlequin to admit.

  So, keep that crap to yourself.

  And leave the hearts out of it.

  So what, then, if not that?

  More often insult, appall, or if all else fails, offend, and then you’ll have something in common with the other crawlers that you seek out every weekend at the Swan. What else can be done? Reducing them to your condition or thereabouts is all you have to comfort you because on some days—don’t all the buzzards know—being broken solo is worse than sitting on a bar stool mean drunk and mindfucking the unsuspecting stranger.

  “The closest you can come,” I said at last, “is having it done to you.”

  She took this in, unable to suppress a smirk.

  “So you’d have to find my parents and kill them,” she said archly, “and then I’d know.”

  Reluctantly, I smirked, too.

  “Or, ideally, have them kill each other. Yeah, then you might know.”

  “Right. I see,” she said. “Well, besides that, what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice going mean. “What have you got in your grab bag of pain? . . . What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”

  That took the tease out of her voice quick enough.

  She sat up.

  “Unh-unh. Nope,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “I’m not going to share something painful on a dare just so that you can shoot it down as lightweight.”

  “Maybe I won’t. Is it lightweight?”

  “And what if it wasn’t?” she said, suddenly angry. “Wouldn’t you feel like the biggest self-pitying prick in the world if I could one-up your pain? Wouldn’t you feel pretty foolish if you found out . . . I don’t know . . . What would even count as worse to you? . . . Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t think you would feel foolish. I think you just wouldn’t know who the hell you are anymore. I mean, who are you if you’re not the wounded man under the thundercloud?”

  “No one,” I said, still partly trying for a joke. “Not a soul.”

  She wasn’t buying.

  “Right. So I guess you see why a person might not be so eager to share herself with you. You make it pretty impossible on both ends.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Me and you. Either I’d feel dismissed right at the moment I’m most vulnerable, or you’d disappear.”

  “God,” I groaned. “I really am my fucking mother.”

  She didn’t reply.

  I wish I could hurt you, I thought, and almost laughed at how cheap that sounded, even just in my head. Still, there it was.

  “I don’t really have the power to hurt you, though, do I?” I said instead. “I mean, honestly. You don’t respect me enough.”

  This fell between us like something wet and foul-smelling spilled on hard ground. We both recoiled.

  “It’s not that,” she said, trying to deflect.

  “What, then?” I insisted.

  There was no lightening this now.

  “I don’t have to explain that. There is no explaining it.”

  “Can you try? I’d really like to understand.”

  “This again.” She groaned dismissively. “Why?”

  “Because I care what you think. A lot. Sorry. Believe me, I wish it wasn’t true, but it is, and I know you don’t feel the same way, and I know it’s irritating, but I just want to know why.”

  “It’s not a question of why. You know that.”

  “No, it is. It is. People say it’s not because they can’t be brutally honest, or they don’t want to take responsibility for what they really think and feel. But there is always a reason—at least one clear, identifiable reason.”

  “But even if there were, what difference would it make?”

  “It might help me.”

  “How could it possibly help you?”

  “To use the rejection for something productive, I guess.”

  “Productive? That’s got to be one of the most harebrained and self-indulgent things I’ve ever heard you say. Rejection isn’t productive, Nick.”

  “You’re wrong. My whole life has run on that principle. Rejection can be made into fuel. You can live on it, and that’s better than letting it kill you.”

  “But it is killing you, you idiot, and you know it. And besides, you can live perfectly well—much better—on support and acceptance and good will.” She laughed sarcastically. “Everybody’s doing it.”

  “Yeah, everybody’s doing it. Right. Look around. That’s my point exactly. Nobody’s fucking doing it. Nobody that I’ve seen. And I’m no different. I never had acceptance. What I got . . . what I got a lot of was rejection. Over and over again. So I learned to use it. And now acceptance and support wouldn’t even work if I had them. I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake . . . so what? What do you want from me?”

  “The details.”

  She burst out.

  “Please. Really, this is just—”

  “Come on. It can’t be that hard.”

  She was back to rage instantly.

  “Hard? What the fuck do you know about hard, you spoiled little brat? God. This is so basic, and you don’t have a clue . . . You really don’t, do you? . . . Well, here’s the truth that would smack you in your arrogant head if you gave it half a chance. It’s the luxury of the loved and whole and privileged person to seek out reasons for pain and make them into food. Real, total devastation isn’t like that. You don’t think about it. You don’t examine it. You don’t convert it. And you don’t get off on it. You get away from it any way you can, if you can, and you s
tay away. You survive and you thank God that you have, and you look for any hint of happiness or kindness wherever you can find it, and you hold on to it for dear life.”

  She glared at me.

  “And if you want your ridiculous detail, there it is. I don’t love you—whatever the hell that means to you—because you’re a baby. You’re a self-satisfied, lucky baby who thinks he’s a tragic hero because he’s joined the vast majority of the rest of the human race in finding out that life is hell.”

  She laughed nastily.

  “You wish you had the power to hurt me? My God, do you have even the smallest inkling of how . . . luxurious and oblivious to actual suffering that is? Like the richest man in the world looking down on the bloody writhing pile of human misery and wondering why—O great sadness—he can’t have his fresh figs today . . . It’s unbelievable.”

  She stopped as abruptly as she had begun, turning her head to the side away from me and staring blankly at the floor.

  I was looking around the room absently, watching, out of habit, the glow of the hall light reflected in the windows across from us. The black of the nighttime windows was just barely beginning to fade. The sun would be up soon.

  “I guess your story must be pretty damn bad,” I said, wearily.

  She shrugged.

  “No worse than anyone else’s.”

  “When you think about the ragpickers in India,” I agreed.

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Jeez, Mon. That’s got to be four ‘fucks’ for you tonight alone. And there I was thinking I had the foulest mouth.”

  She turned up the edges of her lips derisively.

  “Foulest mouth. Biggest pain. Deepest soul.”

  “Okay, okay. Let up a little, will you? Jesus.”

  “You wanted to know.”

  “I know, I know . . . So I got it. Honest, I got it. You don’t have to elaborate any more.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Of course.”

  “Right,” she murmured.

  “For what it’s worth,” I offered, “everything you said was true. I can’t deny that.”

  She sighed impatiently, but I went on.

  “And I’m really sorry for it. Sorry because it’s so shameful and exposing and petty—you’re right about that—but sorriest because it’s cut me off from you. Maybe it’s cut me off from everyone . . . No—of course it has. You can’t go around hurting and offending everyone as a matter of course and expect anything but solitary confinement. Or a good, hard slap in the face.”