Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  The elevator to the girl’s apartment—her parents’ place, Barry told me on our zoom up—let us out not in a hallway but in the middle of a living room. Its chief architectural feature was a long sheath of spotless floor-to-ceiling glass that aroused my suicidal side by seeming to promise an endless plunge through ecstasies of light. The rooftop of the nearest building was at least ten floors below us, its surface littered with sheets of paper (newspaper?) that seemed to have been deposited there by some unfathomable updraft from the streets.

  “Bizarre perspective, isn’t it?” said Jason, joining me at my observation post behind an L-shaped leather sofa. He’d just emerged from the girl’s bedroom, where he and Barry had gone to wake her up. I got the sense it was usual with her to be in bed at nine p.m.

  “It just seems strange to me,” said Jason, “that we can look down on it this way. Shouldn’t it be the highest thing around?”

  “Shouldn’t what?”

  “The UN. That’s UN headquarters.”

  Jason held a knife blade under my nose and I snorted powdered cocaine for the first time. I felt nothing, absolutely normal, until our hostess, our connection, Holly, materialized at my side in a white bathrobe and pressed a bottle of beer into my hand. The chill of the moisture-beaded glass was the purest cold I’d ever felt, an elemental condition, not just a temperature. Holly’s skin seemed elemental, too. The front of her robe was open, open wide, exposing all that she offered as a female, from her collarbone on down. I’d never seen such a swath of softness. It was skin that might have been cultured in a lab or harvested, through some blasphemous new process, from the wrists of infants.

  “You’re Howard?” she asked me. The crust that rimmed her nostrils was like salt on a margarita glass.

  “Walter.”

  “That’s mostly a black name nowadays.”

  “Really?”

  “Like Luther. Don’t take that wrong or anything.”

  “So how should I take it?”

  “To mean you have a big one. Or that I hope you do,” she said.

  Barry proposed an outing to a jazz bar that featured a notable combo on Friday nights. He pressed the plan with fervor, naming the players and the greats they’d played with, hinting that some were ill and might not live long, and hinting, too, that the combo might break up soon. It would probably be our last chance to hear these legends, but we had to leave now to get a table, he said. I thought I knew his game. His aim was to get Holly out in public where we could share her. He’d noticed how much she liked me.

  She didn’t want to go. “Everyone says it’s the great American art form, but I think jazz just makes it hard to talk. Even if you can hear each other over it, you’re meant to pay all this attention to the performances. Like they’re magic or something. Blow, man, blow. I hate it.”

  Barry fought her. Barry won. His argument wasn’t explicitly based on Marxism, but it did exploit notions of guilt and obligation that a non-Marxist wouldn’t have thought to use. At the club, we were shown to a table by the stage and fawned on by a desperate waiter. The place wasn’t empty but it wasn’t mobbed, and the players looked healthy and solidly united. I was so buzzed I forgot to drink my drink, but then I remembered and couldn’t get served fast enough. Holly’s behavior was disengaged. She rose from the table in the middle of solos and drifted around the room, smoking and peering down into her glass. The only person she spoke to was poor Jason—about computers, of all things. He seemed unused to attention from pretty girls and shut his eyes as though protecting himself whenever she leaned in close.

  Barry gave in. We drove back to Holly’s building. She rolled her eyes at the doorman, which I interpreted as her way of telling someone who knew her well that, once again, she’d been forced to take the reins back from people who’d promised her a night of fun but hadn’t delivered, same as always. He tipped his cap as if to say: good job.

  Next, we got involved with makeup. I sat on a stool in the converging beams of several recessed ceiling lights as Holly dragged a stick of eyeliner across the tender edges of my lids. She liked making guys look androgynous, she said, but they had to have high cheekbones, and mine were gorgeous. She chose a rich, cigar-colored mascara which she said matched “the under tint” of my complexion, but when she leaned back to scrutinize the job, she seemed unimpressed by the effect, so she covered the brown with a sparkly purple-green. Next she concentrated on my lips, seeking “a Cheshire cat effect.” She adored it, declaring it a masterpiece, and forced me, physically forced me, with both hands, to turn my obstinate head to face the mirror.

  “You’re not half bad at the glam look. You pull it off.” She found a music magazine and held up a photo of David Bowie next to my face for comparison’s sake. It stunned me to see she was right, that this mode suited me.

  “Is any of Barry’s coke left? I haven’t done any lately. He keeps avoiding me.”

  “The only coke tonight, as far as I know, is mine,” said Holly. “I thought he slipped you some.”

  I shook my head. “And I’m the one who gave him money to buy it.”

  “No one bought anything. You didn’t hear me. I share my dangerous narcotics. Free. Barry!”

  “Don’t.”

  “He conned you. You’re his friend. Barry, get in here, you greedy traitor Jew!”

  “Holly—”

  “I’m a Jew, too. I have the right.”

  But Barry couldn’t be called to task, I learned. His radar for others’ displeasure was too keen. He knew instinctively when the game was up and when to make himself unavailable. He’d probably run to the deli for cigarettes.

  “If Truman weren’t sick in bed upstairs, I’d ask him down to hang out with us,” said Holly. “Barry says you’re an author.”

  “I wrote one play.”

  “I’ll call upstairs anyway. He might be better. Truman’s the best. You should meet him. He’s a blast.”

  I shifted without warning in my chair and Holly’s pencil skittered down my chin. I knew some things about this Truman fellow. My mother had befriended him at the exclusive, lakeside rehab clinic where she’d night-nursed during my high-school years. “Truman said something interesting last night. We were drinking decaf at my station. I mentioned you. Your vocabulary. Your grades. I told him you might want to be a writer. He said, ‘Millie, your precious little boy is either a writer or he isn’t.’ So I said, ‘How will he know if he’s a writer?’ And Truman, my little Martian, he shook his head, his dear little head, and said, ‘If he keeps on doing it.’”

  “Let’s not bother the guy,” I said to Holly.

  “Truman loves to party. He won’t be bothered.”

  “I’ve heard that maybe he needs to take it easy.”

  “You’re what now, his doctor? His psychiatrist? I’ll bet he’s all by himself up there tonight.”

  “Then he’ll probably want to spend it writing.”

  “You don’t know many writers,” Holly said.

  We went out again, I wasn’t sure why, and over the next three hours or so the night turned into what I’d learn to call, once I’d spent more time in New York City, “one of those.” Just one of those. There was an ashtray full of bloody napkins, a limping pigeon with no beak, two convincing sightings of Andy Warhol twenty minutes and thirty blocks apart, and a woman taxi driver who read fortunes by gazing deep into her rearview mirror. Later on, when the coke was running out, there was a stairwell whose stairs went so far down I couldn’t believe we’d ever climbed them. They also went so far up that I quit trying.

  I decided this was symbolic in some fashion, perhaps the basis for another play. Feeling trapped and short of breath, I opened a steel door beside the stairwell and was confronted with a storage area for what looked to be at least one hundred heavy-duty upright vacuums. They were lined up like tanks about to enter battle, their red dust bags suggestive of pent-up fury. They radiated hegemony and praxis, ambiguity and hermeneutics. They were a text, but one I found unreadable.

 
; I heaved the vault-like door shut until it latched.

  “How far did they have to go to find a store?” I said, speaking directly into Holly’s left ear. I was lying on top of her, on her bony back, in a bedroom from which I could see a distant bridge packed with stationary cars. Which rush hour was it? Wasn’t it the weekend? A helicopter hammered past the window on a warlike upward vector. Barry and Jason had been gone for hours.

  “Roll off or have at me,” Holly said. “Wait, though. I need fluids.” She wriggled free and left me in the room gazing into her enormous closet at a long regression of what appeared to be identical black dresses. She gave me a wine cooler when she got back, but it was too pink to drink, too sickly sweet. “If you’re nervous about getting back to school,” she said, “we’ll call the garage and have my Jag sent over. Its oil cakes up when it just sits.”

  But I wasn’t nervous about returning. What worried me was leaving. Above me, Truman Capote with the flu, below me the General Assembly of the UN, and off to the side—to every side—figures whom I might never meet again. Not that I’d met them this time. But I might have. Movers and shakers, living, working, suffering, inhabiting their fame. The only reason to return to Princeton was to equip myself to come back here.

  “What do your parents do?” I asked.

  “My stepmom primarily just beautifies. Beautifies and goes on pilgrimages. The kind where you chant and drink yak milk and sleep with monks. That’s basically beautifying, too, but she calls it ‘peace work.’ I’m cool with it. It’s fine. Of course, if she dies in a bus crash in Bhutan, I wouldn’t mind that, either. I hope she will.”

  “What does your father do to support all this?”

  “All this what?” Holly asked me.

  “This life,” I said.

  “Art. He’s in art.”

  “That’s all? Just art?”

  “For now.”

  This news encouraged me. I was only a sophomore; I could still switch majors. I could still learn to paint and cast bronze sculptures. Then again, Truman, whose apartment was probably just like this one, authored novels—and not particularly long ones, either, to judge by the glimpses of them I’d had in libraries. What’s more, he’d succeeded despite his problems with drugs, suggesting that fiction was a forgiving industry.

  I sat with my back against the cushioned headboard, scheming. Holly lay on her stomach on the sheet and drizzled a crumbly pyramid of coke onto a makeup mirror between my legs. The key, I decided, was labor. Don’t withhold it. Button. Flush. Wait for green before entering the crosswalk. The revolution that Barry was predicting seemed to me impossibly far off. In the meantime, I’d place my bets on continuity. Eventually the socialists would have bragging rights, but until then the prudent seemed likely to prevail.

  “He must be talented,” I said to Holly, taking the mirror from her trembling hands. Someday she, too, I imagined, would go on pilgrimages, and the husband who’d finance them would be I, perhaps.

  “My father doesn’t produce,” she said. “He deals.”‘

  My spirits sank. The coke went up my nose. They met in a small explosion of emotion. Disappointment crashed into euphoria, yielding a third state: delirium. I walked around for a minute to clear my thoughts.

  “The dealers make the artists rich,” I said, peering into the mirror world of dresses. They weren’t identical, I saw. Every other one was white.

  “My father’s not that sort of dealer. He sells Old Masters. Italian. Flemish. Like that little Vermeer above the sofa.”

  “I didn’t notice it. A real Vermeer?” I dug in one of my nostrils with a pinkie nail and tried to dislodge a coke crumb that was hanging there, intending to crush and reuse it.

  “It’s invisible where they put it. It needs rehanging. A piece can appraise for all the black in Africa, but if it’s too small in the context of its space, it may as well not exist,” said Holly.

  “I’m thinking you should call down and get your Jaguar.”

  “You’re bolting,” said Holly. “You’re sick of me. I bore you.”

  “I want to drive out to the ocean.”

  “But it’s winter.”

  “Not to swim in it, just to walk,” I said.

  “How spiritual. How literary. I forget all you bookish types aren’t fun like Truman.”

  “Truman has problems, Holly. He has ghosts.”

  “Fun ghosts.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “If you do. Sure.”

  Holly phoned for her car and fetched a coat and gloves. I wondered how she knew the weather had changed; it felt like we hadn’t left the tower for days. We summoned the elevator to the living room and as we stepped into it, she said, “Truman thinks I’m named after the Holly in the book he wrote. I said I was. Sometimes I’m such a liar around old men.”

  “Which book?”

  She stared at me. “You’re kidding?”

  “A book I should know?”

  “If you study English, yes.”

  “English isn’t only about books now.”

  “What else is it about?”

  I couldn’t tell her.

  Down on the street, out front, the car was waiting, waxed and shining, its motor softly roaring. A doorman let Holly into the driver’s seat as I walked around to my side. My door was locked. I knocked on the window. Holly didn’t glance over. She settled a hand on the shift knob, engaged the gears, and glided off into a stream of uptown traffic, slowing for a red light, then surging forward and disappearing between two vans.

  I dug in my pockets for money to buy a bus ticket, found some change and some crumpled dollar bills, and walked away from the cold shadow of the UN.

  ONE NIGHT, ANOTHER BAD NIGHT—I COULDN’T SEEM TO stop heaping them on myself—the eyes of a dead Irish poet preserved my soul.

  I was attending a Joy Division gathering in the filthy kitchen of a house where some architecture students lived. Suspended inside a mound of orange Jell-O were dozens of plastic army men. They brandished bayonets and hurled grenades. Now and then a party guest would fork a hunk of Jell-O into his mouth and spit out a figurine onto the floor. I stepped on one of them in my stocking feet and thought I’d been bitten by a rat. The Jell-O was made with vodka, I learned, not water, and laced with a substance called MDA. People poked at the mound to make it wobble and the rest of the kitchen wobbled with it.

  “I don’t understand the toy soldiers,” I said to somebody.

  “They’re a statement on militarism.”

  “Opposing it?”

  “Why? Do you support it?” asked the architect.

  “I don’t think anyone supports it.”

  “Aside from the majority.”

  “Right. Them.”

  Fearing exposure as a latent reactionary, I hustled upstairs and hid out in a bedroom. It was still hard for me to be against things that I’d grown up being for. Though the point of my high-school social-studies classes had seemed to be that our nation had its faults—racism, poverty, and so on—we’d been led to think that they were temporary. They’d be remedied someday by young people like us, by applying the lessons we’d learned in social studies.

  I shivered as the bedroom changed shape around me. The walls and windows rotated and buckled—cubism coming true. The shrinkage of space into confining rectangles forced me to tuck my arms against my sides, press my legs together, and lie down flat. Then a new plane pushed down against my brow.

  I turned my head to the side and there it was: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. The photograph on its cover, old and silvery, showed a sorrowful, consoling face wearing a modest pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The face had an infinitely layered humanity. I wished it belonged to an ancestor. It loved me. It loved me as part of everything else it loved. The face reminded me of Uncle Admiral’s, and I spoke to it out loud.

  “Help get me out of this,” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything. Tell me what to do.”

  Yeats’s answer was: “Try to sing, my son.”

/>   I was enrolled then in a poetry workshop taught by the editor of the anthology that had introduced me to “free verse” back in Taylors Falls. Professor Birch had the sort of curly hair that seems to indicate a curly mind. He was a few years too young to be my father and a few years too old to be my friend. For the girls he was just the right age, though. They adored him.

  Birch’s fondest admirer was Tessa Marchman, the trim blond daughter of two neurologists. Tessa and I were Birch’s favorites, the students he called on to settle standoffs over the value of other students’ poetry. Our own work couldn’t have been more different. Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions—grief, self-loathing, panic—while mine were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced I grew that I’d borrowed it. I invented an alter ego, “Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of mechanization and macroeconomics. In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque,” but I could tell she didn’t like them. She clearly preferred Professor Birch’s work, which dealt with death and sex and feelings and left out the politics and negativity.

  One day after class I walked Tessa to her room, determined to win her over to my cause. Without being pressured, she invited me up, but I found her manner impenetrable. Perhaps the invitation was mere politeness.

  “Herbal tea or black?” she asked me, holding out a tray. Her room, unlike mine, was orderly and welcoming.

  “Herbal tea isn’t tea,” I said. “It’s herbs.”

  “Which means you want black.”

  “Not really. I just want tea.”

  “You’re prickly,” said Tessa.

  It was true. Her crush on Birch annoyed me. The man was a weakling, I felt, a soft romantic whose work didn’t venture beyond his own five senses. But I didn’t trust my senses anymore, let alone their depiction of the world. To me, an aspiring deconstructionist, the world was an orchestrated deception devised to soothe and numb. It resembled Tessa’s dorm room. Stuffed animals paraded on her windowsills. Cheerful fabrics draped the chairs. The books were arranged on their shelves by height and color. And yet, at the center of all this lively neatness, lived a sad and frightened child of doctors whose poetry spoke of wounds and storms and chains. I saw right through the girl.