Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had other business. It doesn’t matter. Look—” I clapped him roughly on the shoulder. “All of this was already happening before you and I even had our first clue. Robin was a twisted bitch, okay? Sorry, but she was, and she’d have said it herself. This is what she wanted.”

  He was shocked.

  “What, to die?”

  “And to tie us all in knots in the end. Big-time . . . If she’s anywhere now, I guarantee you, this conversation is making her laugh. Hard.”

  He looked at me with disgust.

  “God, Nick.”

  “What? Am I ruining your orgy?”

  “Have some res—”

  “I knew her, okay?” I said angrily. “I knew her up to the last moments of her life, and I knew what she was doing all along. There’s nothing you can tell me. Nothing. Got it? And I’m not going to give you a handshake and a smooth-over because you feel kinda sorta bad about all this and you’ve figured out that you were wrong about me.”

  It was his turn to balk.

  “I wasn’t wrong about you at all.” He snorted, shouldering past me with a last glare. “You’ve made that clear enough.”

  He pointed his finger at me.

  “I’m watching you.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway,” I called after him.

  He shuffled off without turning, huffing to himself and shaking his head. Within a few steps he ran into someone he needed to impress, and he pulled out his swooping, asskiss handshake again and the nauseating grin that went with it.

  I was still gawking at him when Dorris touched me on the shoulder. She’d been trailing behind Jonathan with the kids, scrounging fistfuls of comfort from the cake table. She hadn’t heard my exchange with the good doctor.

  She was all sheepish pursed lips and motherish oh-isn’t-it-just-awful, which softened me slightly, but only slightly. The rest of me wanted to nudge her into a pileup with Dave and kin, whom she was assiduously avoiding, and watch her squirm.

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” she said, surprising me.

  I nodded stiffly. “Okay.”

  “No, really. I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry for the accusations and the ugliness that happened between us. I had no right.”

  She looked down at Miriam, who was now standing between us, her needy thumb hanging loose in the gape of my trouser pocket.

  “I’m really ashamed . . . I got so caught up.” She shot a look across at Dave, who was huddled by the bar sans famille, sucking obscenely on a can of Coke. “I just lost all perspective on everything and I shouldn’t—”

  I felt again the old pathos of Dorris Katz sobbing in the mirror. I could see her face there up close in the glass, through the glass and through the dark glass of my TV, with all the furrows of grief gouging themselves deeper in the image of her face. I thought, too, of her ripping Miriam out of my grasp, or, rather, ripping me out of hers on my doorstep and marching her into the dungeon with Dave. I could see now, once again at close range, the copper-colored sideburns on her cheeks, poorly bleached, and the desperation they exposed. I thought of how hard I’d cried the first time I’d seen Dorris sobbing and cutting herself at home, a mother like my own, lost in motherhood and afraid and angry at the diminishment of her person in the role that had been prescribed for her.

  “He was punishment enough,” I said, nodding at Dave. “And I really don’t deserve an apology. I’ve treated you and a whole hell of a lot of people only marginally better than Dave treated you, and that’s nothing to be proud of. I’m the one who should be sorry, and I am. I really am.”

  I smiled down at Miriam.

  “Do you accept?”

  She looked up, confused.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Do you accept my apology,” I said.

  She frowned and shook her head.

  “Unh-unh.”

  Dorris and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “Yes,” said Dorris. “I do. I do accept.”

  “Well, okay, then,” I said.

  She took Miriam’s hand from my pocket and squeezed it.

  “Well, okay, then,” she repeated. “Good.”

  She kissed the tips of her fingers at me and slid into the crowd waving backward as she went. Miriam didn’t even turn around.

  Meanwhile, Dave had seen us watching him. He was still waiting to catch my eye. When I turned to him, he shrugged exaggeratedly, threw up his hands, and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “So what now?” or “What’s been has been, right?”

  A nasty piece of work, I thought. Yeah, there. That Alders creature, she’d said. How strange to hear that, to think of it being on her mind and thrusting to the fore in the last argument. And now it is written here in these last transcripts, my long association with this emblem. Dave, the standing image of every base inclination I have ever hated in myself. This was the self that I was still being, or still capable of being in the company of my neighbors—hadn’t Jonathan said or shown as much?—the self that I would always revert to with them, because they could provoke me like no one else. Like family.

  Here was the front of the familiar, the mask that had been my face. All of these people, this place, this revolving grief and punishment growing out of this neighborhood and this ground, as surely as we had. Robin was right. The knots you tie that make a net you cling to. With every turn the trap cuts deeper.

  Get away, I said to myself then. Just get away. That’s the message. That’s the course. And as I said this, I believed it for the first time. I could move. A plan and motion conceived. You cannot stay here and change. Isn’t this the proof of it, standing right there, courting liquored apathy with you as usual?

  I looked across at Dave, and as kindly as I could, I shook my head. No, I just can’t do it, fatso. Not anymore.

  He cocked his head sideways, like a dog trying to get a tone of voice.

  I shook my head again, more slowly. Just quit it.

  Then his face fell, in surprise, I think, as much as anything else. He knew I meant for good. But he recovered quickly, sliding into that lazy, sleazy turn of mouth that I had come to know so well.

  He would be fine. He would be Dave, eternally standing in line at the all-night drugstore buying Twizzlers and chew. He would slop over himself over the years, in great globular folds, a row of teats down his front, and he would shuffle to and from the bathroom with a cane by the time he was fifty, if he made it that far. And then, one day, they’d find him dead in his basement chair with his flesh fused to it.

  Leave now, I said to myself, and someday you’ll read about it in the paper.

  And so I did. I turned and I went.

  And as I was squirming through the crowd with my shiny, freeing resolution in mind, eyes down, avoiding, making my way purposefully for the first time in years toward an exit, it was then that I knew I was going to have to sell the house in absentia. Gut it, scrape it, clean it, and leave it. Right away. As in: now. A mission. Go out. Go home. Go quickly. There is nothing else to do but this.

  I didn’t even say anything to Mrs. B. on the way out. She was busy being gracious to the gawkers in a corner, and, anyway, she would understand. I had a plan for that, too.

  I walked out in the automatic daze of my intentions, drove home, and started in.

  I took the smashed video equipment first, eight heavy-duty garbage bags full, and ran it to the dump. And I can tell you, right from the overbearing heart of a boy who cried for elusive absolution, no confession to the parish priest ever felt that good. Watching those bags tumble down the embankment into that ripe, piled, rag-strewn midden, I felt high and soaked through with the shirking of it.

  I made a dozen more trips to the dump this afternoon and evening, my car piled with bags full of everything detachable
in the house, until all that was left was the furniture and a duffel bag full of my clothes.

  I am writing this now sitting at my emptied desk, in this criminal room, for the last time. When I finish, I will take my duffel bag and my laptop and put them in the car. I will drive to the FedEx/Kinko’s on Maple and Fourth, print these pages, bind them, and post them to Mrs. B.

  Then she will understand everything.

  * * *

  And that is an end to our acquaintance. An exit. As quick in the making as it was slow in coming. A decision and change. An escape, which can happen only when the moment is right, and must happen in the moment. Now. A complete break, a run for the gate when the guard turns, when the guard and the prisoner are both me.

  Flit. That’s the way. Slip out and gone. Become someone else somewhere else, and you will know the story of names changing, and the hitch of people not quite changing, their pasts forever lost but never leaving.

  * * *

  See what happens.

  I had a short-term girlfriend at boarding school senior year who said that to me all the time. It was her answer to everything. It was the way she lived her life. Just wait. Just hang around and see what happens. That’s all you have to do.

  It was the main reason I broke up with her. That, and the fact that her name was Sunny. No joke. Sunny. I told her right out: Look, I can’t be with someone named Sunny. I just can’t do it. It makes me want to punch you in the face, and I don’t think that’s very fair to you.

  She agreed, and we went our separate ways. She wasn’t in the business of changing anyone. She didn’t think she had that much agency. Hence the mantra. She was a happy person. It was as simple as that. And after we broke up I’d see her around campus occasionally just being happy. Being happy with her friends, being happy in the library, in the cafeteria, in geology class, in the infirmary for a week with the flu—wherever. Just hanging around and breathing, taking what came and not getting angry or upset or even that excited about anything.

  I envied her, of course. I still do. And now, of all times, after everything that’s happened, I’m thinking mainly of her and the mind-blowing simplicity of those three words.

  See what happens.

  When I say that to myself now, I feel my bowels unclench and my shoulders drop and I am almost able to laugh aloud at how easy it could all be if I just stopped trying so hard.

  I am at the far end of something that has gone on for all of my thirty-four years, the last thirteen of which have been excruciating. And for what? I have gained nothing. I have lost time.

  I have thought, like a spoiled child, of wanting to die, because I was uncomfortable. I have put my toe in the riptide. I have put myself in danger and asked fate to intervene. I have tempted the violence and vengeance of others. Yet all of this has been a flying at life, not a relinquishment of it. You do not shake your fist at the world when you want to leave it. You cannot shake your fist at the world and be taken seriously as an adult.

  I will never get this part right. How to be serious. How to say what’s on my mind without reaching. I do not have the right circuitry for serious, or for musing or joking in earnest, either. I can hear it even now as I am saying this. The tone is wrong. The adolescent is still there protesting, making a show of his conscience and the big ideas that he has just discovered. Life, death, I don’t have to take this anymore, and so on.

  It’s funny to look at myself this way. Genuinely funny, because I am laughing with kindness for the first time as I am looking in the mirror. This is friendly ridicule.

  I accept that I have made a poor showing. I accept that this acceptance is still itself a poor showing, still self-conscious and posed and overly didactic. That’s me. Here I am. The germ behind the clown in the polo shirt revealed as he has been throughout. I have been a baby and I have been through something unimaginable—as Mrs. Bloom would say, both are true.

  Dr. Cunningham was wrong. Knowing has released me. I know what has been done, the awful things that were done by whom to whom and why. I have even heard some of my parents’ last words, and contrary to everything I expected, they were banal. As banal as my father’s poems and promises and threats on paper. As unimaginative as any fight between two married people dragging out the same old six or seven grievances, slurring the same dull insults back and forth.

  I have seen Dorris and Jonathan do the same with a different ending. I have seen Ellie and Gruber not do it, because Ellie figured this out a long time ago and simply turned off the receiver. To think that all this time she has been the happiest, knowing the secret that fullness lies in silence. She must have practiced it. Or did she just know? Every time you feel the rope go taut, walk away. Every time you feel your feet slipping, let go.

  Mrs. B., you have a way of doing this. But you learned it. You had to practice it, which meant that at the key moments you would always fail to embody it. You would put your hands to your mouth and scream when the news came. You would sit up in bed in the middle of the night, not able to help it. You would feel the hoofbeats on the ground from miles away, and cold worry would have its way with you.

  We are alike in this. I will practice, and I will get pretty good at hanging around. At the easiest times, I will seem like a master, as you seemed to me that day I first rang your bell. I will even make wispier jokes and learn to speak in lassos that never cinch. Some days, you will be amazed by my equanimity. Others you will see me fighting myself and losing and breathing deeply to regain control, and you will rightly laugh at how neurotic I still am. I will have forgotten that control is not the point, and I will have to settle for gaining control of my need to control.

  I will find a way to paste a laugh over all this, because I will concede that I can do only so much with who I am. I will change, but you will always know that I am there under the garment. There is a singular person in there after all, a man with qualities, though I cannot say what those qualities are, and neither really can you. But you will know them and smile to yourself and say, yes, there is the Nick Walsh I know, and I will smile, too, affectionately, having found that much forgiveness for myself.

  But the verdict now is for life. Striding life. And I will do my sentence with joy and constant invention, because Denmark is not a prison after all.

  As mad as I sometimes am, it really isn’t.

  But Hamlet is.

  I know that now.

  He is a prison.

  And at the end of the tragedy—guess what?—Hamlet dies.

  He dies along with everybody else.

  Thump.

  Everyone except Horatio, whose name itself sounds like a cheer and whose temperament is cool and light as a cloud and shaped like a scoop of ice cream.

  Horatio, who passes up suicide.

  Horatio, who is there at the beginning—did you notice?—and at the end, too, surrounded by soldiers and ghosts.

  Horatio, who completes the circle, who persists and tells the story again.

  See what happens.

  He is the hidden hero, the narrator, and the floating moral of the sleight of hand.

  Hamlet is just the decoy.

  * * *

  So, in momentary contradiction of everything I have just said, and one last maudlin time, I say this.

  Mom? Dad? Here’s the thing, if you’re listening. Take this as a conclusion. The baby’s valediction that is not one, because the baby can never stop saying what the baby always says as long as he is speaking.

  This is the best I can do for closure.

  This testimony has been for you. My life up to this point has been for you. And every part of me that I have put down here in these pages has been a form of pleasing you, still, and a form of explaining and excusing myself for what I have become and what I have failed to become.

  That is over now.

  I exist, and in violation of a
ll instruction on this matter, I do not have to justify myself to anyone. I am not your continuation. I am not your mistake, or the bright spot in it. I am just another person, and nothing that I have read or not read or achieved or failed to achieve has any bearing on that fact. Your conflicts have not made me, and your crimes, your deaths have not condemned me. Not anymore.

  I have heard your voices and your judgments and your petty conceits, and how anticlimactically they ended your life together. I am not impressed by your complexity.

  Now I am for living below the frequency of obsession. I am for the great defiant act of taking up space, of continuing simply.

  I am not for death anymore, or half in love with it, even in quotation marks. I am not enamored of my pain. I am not sophisticated. There are no answers. There are not even any questions.

  It is the noise that kills us.

  So I am for bland as bread, Mommy. I am for the inadequacy of language, and I am against its very real power to do harm. I am against the cruelty of a little learning and the bludgeon of memory.

  And, Daddy?

  Finally.

  Yes, finally. You.

  I am for the limits of genes and influence, father to son. I am for reinvention. I am for burning paper and what is written on it: poor imitation to a despicable end.

  And

  lightly now,

  shallow,

  go,

  I am

  for

  no

  more

  words.

  I would like to thank my editor, Paul Slovak, for his belief, kindness, and support, as well as my agent, Eric Simonoff, for the same.

  Also by Norah Vincent

  Voluntary Madness

  Self-Made Man