The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

  Dear Sara,

  I don’t know where you are, or what you’re thinking. But I do know that Jack loves you more than anything, and has been in something approaching constant agony since you disappeared. He told me everything that happened. I was horrified by what he had done. I can fully understand your grief and fury. But … yes, here comes the but … he is as much a victim of the insanity that has gripped our country as your brother. This is not to condone his choice, or to excuse an action which many would interpret as self-serving. Faced with an appalling choice, he panicked. In doing so, he knows he killed your love for him. He has been trying to make contact with you for nearly a year, but has failed. Your lawyer informed him that you were refusing to read his letters. Once again, I cannot blame you for feeling that way. And, believe me, the only reason I am writing to you now is because Jack is currently suffering from something akin to a nervous breakdown - which is related entirely to the overwhelming guilt he feels about naming your brother and losing you.

  What can I say, Sara? Except this: I know how deeply you once loved him. I don’t ask for a miraculous reconciliation. All I ask is that, somehow, you find a way to forgive him - and to communicate your forgiveness to him. I think it would mean an enormous amount to him. He is now a deeply unhappy man. He needs your help to find his way back to himself. I hope you can put the tragedy you suffered to one side, and write him.

  Yours,

  Meg Malone

  I was suddenly angry. All the pain I had put away suddenly came roaring back. I rolled a piece of paper into my Remington. I typed:

  Dear Meg,

  I think it was George Orwell once who wrote that all cliches are true. With that in mind, here’s my response to your plea on behalf of your brother:

  Jack has made his own bed. He can lie in it. Alone.

  Yours

  Sara Smythe

  I pulled the letter out of the machine. Within a minute I had signed it, folded it, shoved it into an envelope, addressed it to Meg, and affixed the appropriate stamps and air-mail sticker to its front.

  Two weeks after I mailed that letter, a telegram arrived for me at the offices of the Herald-Tribune. It contained four words:

  Shame on you.

  Meg

  As soon as I read it, I balled up the telegram and threw it away. If Meg’s reply was designed to make me feel awful, it succeeded. So much so that I ended up going out with a new friend from the Herald-Tribune - Isabel van Arnsdale - and drinking too much vin rouge, and telling her the entire damn story. Isabel was the paper’s chief sub-editor - a stocky Chicago woman in her late forties. She’d moved over to Paris in ‘47, right after her third marriage collapsed. She was known to be a consummate journalistic pro, and someone who could put away a bottle of whiskey, yet still seem sober.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when I finished telling her the tale of the past year. ‘Correction: Jesus-fucking-Christ.’

  ‘Yeah - I could use a spell of boredom,’ I said, sounding deeply tipsy.

  ‘No - what you could use is a life without encumbrance.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘True - but take it from a veteran of three crap marriages: there are ways of insulating yourself against further pain.’

  ‘What’s the secret?’

  ‘Don’t fall in love.’

  ‘I’ve only done that once.’

  ‘And, from what you said, it ruined your life.’

  ‘Perhaps. But …’

  ‘Let me guess: when it was right, it was … I dunno … Transcendental? Incomparable? Peerless? Am I getting warm?’

  ‘I just loved him. That’s all.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I wish he’d leave me alone.’

  ‘What you mean is: you wish you could stop thinking about him.’

  ‘Yes. That is what I mean. I still hate him. I still love him.’

  ‘Do you want to forgive him?’

  ‘Yes I do. But I can’t.’

  ‘There’s your answer, Sara. From where I sit, it’s the right answer. Most women would never have had anything to do with him after the way he initially disappeared on you. To then betray you and your brother …’

  ‘You’re right, you’re right.’

  ‘Your response to his sister’s letter was the proper one. It’s finished, over, kaput. Don’t look back. He’s a bad piece of work.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Anyway, as you already know, this town is crawling with interesting guys. Not to mention a lot of uninteresting guys who are still baisable, if you catch my drift. Go out, have some more adventures. Believe me, in a couple of months, you’ll have gotten over him.’

  I wanted to believe that. And to accelerate this distancing process, I continued my series of cavalier flings. No, I didn’t turn into a femme fatale, with three guys on the go at once. I was an old-fashioned serial monogamist. I met someone. I took up with them for a little while. I let the thing run its course. When it started getting serious, or tiresome, or simply routine, I’d jump ship. I became an expert at disentangling myself from a relationship with the minimum of fuss. Men were useful for companionship, for occasional acts of tenderness, and for the ephemeral pleasures of sex. Anytime I found someone getting too dependent on me, I’d end it quickly. Anytime a guy started trying to change me - to wonder out loud what on earth I was doing living in a small atelier, and why I favored Colette-style pants suits over more ‘feminine’ apparel - they’d be politely shown the door. In the four years I resided in Paris, I had three marriage proposals - all of which I turned down. None of the men in question was wildly inappropriate. On the contrary, the first was a successful merchant banker; the second, a lecturer in literature at the Sorbonne; and the third, a would-be novelist, living on Daddy’s trust fund. All of them were, in their own way, thoroughly charming and intelligent and emotionally stable. But each of them was on the lookout for a wife. That was a role I wasn’t interested in ever playing again.

  The years in Paris evaporated far too quickly. On December thirty-first, 1954, I stood on a balcony overlooking the avenue Georges V in the company of Isabel van Arnsdale, and assorted other Herald-Tribune reprobates. As car horns sounded - and a fireworks display illuminated the winter sky - I hoisted my glass towards Isabel and said, ‘Here’s to my last year in Paris.’

  ‘Stop talking crap,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not crap: it’s the truth. By this time next year, I want to be on my way back to the States.’

  ‘But you’ve got a great life here.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  ‘Then why the hell throw it all away?’

  ‘Because I’m not a professional expatriate. Because I miss baseball, and bagels, and Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King, and Gitlitz’s delicatessen, and showers that work, and a grocery store that delivers, and speaking my own language, and …’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘No goddamn way.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘When have you last heard me speak about him?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘Then when are you going to do something stupid, like fall in love again?’

  ‘Hang on - you told me that the only way to get through life was by never falling in love.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you really don’t think I’d expect anyone to follow that advice?’

  But the thing was: I had followed her counsel. Not intentionally. Rather, because, after Jack, no one I met ever triggered that wonderfully strange, deranged, dangerous surge of … what do you call it? Desire? Delirium? Passion? Completeness? Stupidity? Self-delusion?

  Now I knew something else: I couldn’t be with him, and I couldn’t get over him. Time may have numbed the ache - but like any anaesthetic, it didn’t heal the wound. I kept waiting for the day when I would wake up and Jack would have finally fled my thoughts. That morning had yet to arrive. An ongoing thought had started to unsettle me: say I never came to terms
with this loss? Say it was always there? Say it defined me?

  When I articulated this fear to Isabel, she laughed. ‘Honey, loss is an essential component of life. In many ways, c’est notre destin. And yes, there are certain things you never really get over. But what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s so damn painful … that’s what’s wrong with it.’

  ‘But living is painful… n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Cut the existential crap, Isabel.’

  ‘I promise you this - the moment you begin to accept that you’re not going to get over it … you might just get over it.’

  I kept that thought in mind during the next twelve months - when I drifted into a brief fling with a Danish jazz bassist, and wrote my weekly column, and spent long afternoons at the Cinematheque Francaise, and (if the weather was clement) read for an hour each morning on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and celebrated my thirty-third birthday by giving notice at the Herald-Tribune, and writing Joel Eberts that the sublet of my apartment should end by December thirty-first, 1955. Because I was coming home.

  And on January tenth, 1956, I found myself back at Pier 76 on West 48th Street, stepping off the SS Corinthia. Joel Eberts was there to meet me.

  ‘You haven’t aged one damn bit, counselor,’ I said after giving him a hug. ‘What’s your secret?’

  ‘Constant litigation. But hey, you look wonderful too.’

  ‘But older.’

  ‘I’d say, “exceedingly elegant”.’

  ‘That’s a synonym for “older”.’

  We took a taxi uptown to my apartment. As per my instructions, he’d arranged with the janitor to have it repainted when the tenants moved out before Christmas. It still reeked of turpentine and fresh emulsion - but the whitewash of the walls was a cheering antidote to the ashen January morning.

  ‘Only a crazy person decides to return to New York in the thick of winter,’ Joel said.

  ‘I like murk.’

  ‘You must have been a Russian in a former life.’

  ‘Or maybe I’m just someone who has always responded well to gloom.’

  ‘What a lot of dreck you talk. You’re a survivor, kiddo. And a canny one at that. If you don’t believe me, check out the pile of bank and investment statements I’ve left in a folder on your kitchen table. You hardly touched a cent of your capital while you were in France. And the rent from the sublet built up rather nicely. Also: your stockbroker is one sharp operator. He’s managed to add about thirty per cent value to both the divorce settlement fund and Eric’s insurance payout. So if you don’t want to work for the next decade …’

  ‘Work is something I can’t do without,’ I said.

  ‘I concur. But know this - financially speaking, you’re damn comfortable.’

  ‘What’s in here?’ I asked, kicking a cardboard box that was by the couch.

  ‘It’s all of the accumulated mail I didn’t forward to you over the years. I had it sent up yesterday.’

  ‘But you forwarded me just about everything, except …’

  ‘That’s right. His letters.’

  ‘I told you to throw them out.’

  ‘I decided that there was no harm keeping them until your return … just in case you decided you did want to read them, after all.’

  ‘I don’t want to read them.’

  ‘Well, your building gets its garbage collected once a day, so you can throw them out whenever you like.’

  ‘Have you ever heard from Jack or his sister again?’

  ‘Nope. Have you?’

  I’d never told Joel about my reply to Meg’s letter. I wasn’t going to now.

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘He must have taken the hint. Anyway, it’s all history now. Just like Joe McCarthy. I tell you, I’m no conventional patriot - but on that day in fifty-four when the Senate censured the bastard, I thought: unlike a lot of other places, this country has the reassuring habit of finally admitting that it got something wrong.’

  ‘It’s just too bad they didn’t censure him three years earlier.’

  ‘I know. Your brother was a great man.’

  ‘No - he was simply a good man. Too good. Had he been less good, he’d still be alive. That’s the hardest thing about coming back to Manhattan - knowing that every time I walk by the Ansonia or the Hampshire House …’

  ‘I’m sure that, even after four years, it still hurts like hell.’

  ‘Losing your brother never gets easier.’

  ‘And losing Jack?’

  I shrugged. ‘Ancient history.’

  He studied my face carefully. I wondered if he saw I was lying.

  ‘Well that’s something, I guess,’ he said.

  I changed the subject. Quickly.

  ‘How about letting me buy us lunch at Gitlitz’s?’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a pastrami on rye and a celery soda in five years.’

  ‘That’s because the French know nothing about food.’

  I hoisted the box of Jack’s letters. We left the apartment. Once we were outside, I tossed the box into the back of a garbage truck that was emptying cans on West 77th Street. Joel’s eyes showed disapproval, but he said nothing. As the jaws of the truck closed around the box, I wondered: why did you do that? But I covered my remorse by linking my arm through Joel’s, and saying, ‘Let’s eat.’

  Gitlitz’s hadn’t changed in the years I had been away. Nor had most of the Upper West Side. I slotted back into Manhattan life with thankful ease. The bumpy readjustment I had been dreading never materialized. I looked up old friends. I went to Broadway shows and Friday matinees at the New York Philharmonic and the occasional evening at the Metropolitan Opera. I became a habitue once again of the Met and the Frick and the 42nd Street branch of the Public Library, and my two local fleapit movie houses: the Beacon and the Loew’s 84th Street. And every other week, I punched out a ‘Letter from New York’ - which was then dispatched, courtesy of Western Union, to the offices of the Paris Herald-Tribune. This bi-monthly column was Mort Goodman’s farewell present to me.

  ‘If I can’t get you to stay and write for me in Paris, then I better get you writing for me from New York.’

  So now I was a foreign correspondent. Only the country I was covering was my own.

  ‘In the four years I was loitering with intent on the rue Cassette (I wrote in a column, datemarked March 20th, 1956), something curious happened to Americans: after all the years of economic depression and wartime rationing, they woke up one morning to discover that they now lived in an affluent society. And for the first time since the Roaring Twenties, they’re engaged on a massive spending spree. Only unlike the hedonistic twenties, this oh-so-sensible Eisenhower era is centered around the home - a happy, reasonably affluent God-fearing place, where there are two cars in every garage, a brand new Amana refrigerator in the kitchen, a Philco TV in the living room, a subscription to the Reader’s Digest, and where grace is said before every TV dinner. What? You expatriates haven’t heard of a TV dinner? Well, just when you thought American cuisine couldn’t get more bland …’