Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  “What the fuck,” she said as quietly as she could.

  “Nothing the fuck,” Mark said. “You said you could play. So let’s get you playing. ‘Pretty Polly’ work for you? Like the way David Grisman does it, straightforward in A.”

  Before she could pick up the bow, the guitarist had started the song, and the bass was thumping, and the truth was that Cassie had gone with her father—her conservative father, who lectured her on how sex was an act with a purpose God intended to take place between a man and a woman for the express intent of procreation, any pleasure was an ancillary—to the Mohican Bluegrass Festival in central Ohio every summer since she was three. She couldn’t not play the melody to that song when a band was playing. All at once it was as if she’d changed her name back, as if she was Claire Stankowitcz again, her name less rock and roll but her hands far more adept at their instrument. And here was the thing for Claire/Cassie: it was the freest she’d felt in years. Ever. Though she felt timid for the first bar or two, soon she tore into each fiddle break the band gave her, and the small crowd in the teeming apartment roared. She stayed up there for five more songs, then finished playing and shotgunned six Pabst Blue Ribbons with Mark in the kitchen of her new apartment, just a block and a half from the Eagle Street place, and at a little past five in the morning, as the thin Greenpoint sun was starting to wriggle its wretched bony fingers into her new apartment, she took a man back with her to bed for the first time since her sophomore year of college. His hands were just what she’d hoped they might be when she saw them in CBGB—the soft hands of a man who’d not worked with them, but not too soft, rough and hard at the fingertips from his calluses. Her and Mark’s expressed intent was not procreation—Jesus, she hoped it wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be, and for certain little was expressed other than the need for a condom—but for the first time in years, whatever anxiety she felt, thinking of her father’s imperious face, was gone. Cassie fell into a drunken state that passed for sleep with a strange jittery calm. For now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A YEAR INTO LIVING with him in her new apartment, the only thing that changed for Cassie was everything. Mark got her a job as a fact-checker at US Weekly, a magazine she hated more than she hated the Republican Party—more than the very notion of political parties, even. Natalia had called it “United States Weekly” with as much disdain for the “US” as the “us.” But now here she was, making eighteen dollars an hour calling Hollywood publicists to make sure they’d spelled Tom Cruise’s name right in galley pages (one time they actually somehow hadn’t spelled it right, but that was beside the point). On weekends she and Mark spent their afternoons walking deep into Prospect Park, instruments in tow, where they would head into the woods or over to the duck pond and play some new fiddle tune together. Mark had quit his own magazine job and was working on a Ph.D. at CUNY now, and so he had all the time in the world—to worry about what was ahead. The world wasn’t conforming to his ideas of what it should be.

  “I mean it’s impossible to find a full-time teaching job,” he’d say. “Quentin himself said that after four years on the market, he just decided to go back to his magazine job—but it was gone. Some twenty-two-year-old was doing it, and making a grand a year for each year he’d been alive. There was one disciple of some New Yorker staff writer who’s been at the magazine since like the fifties, who got a replacement gig at Wesleyan last year, teaching a full load for the year, and that’s best-case scenario. Maybe one class at Sarah Lawrence making seven grand if things go well. Meanwhile, some eighty-three-year-old professor still won’t retire.” At times it seemed like he was thinking about it even when they were singing—she’d be blaring a high tenor over his lead on “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way,” and she could see in his eyes all he was thinking about was the English tenure-track jobs wiki and the tenured faculty, already past retirement age, who would be interviewing him if he ever got far enough to be interviewed. The pallor of his face grew more and more like the color of pulped paper.

  It did not seem healthy.

  At the same time, it felt almost as if there was a groundswell rising, people decrying baby boomers in louder ways every day, just like Mark, articles in the Times and the WSJ. Some small pockets of protest had arisen on college campuses. It wasn’t enough and it wasn’t fast enough for Mark. Nothing was ever fast enough for Mark—progress, his own place in the academic world, her solos on Jimmy Martin songs, her orgasms. His face was a pallid mandala of impatience. His whole world was one homogenous inert rush.

  He did encounter a shadow of hope one day the second winter they were together. Mark had been working on his dissertation, and around the same time he started writing about the influence of nineteenth-century American writers on Emma Goldman, there was a prominent reissue of Goldman’s early essays. Mark had always been drawn, intellectually, to the strident tone Goldman took on, her anarchism was secondary, tertiary—Mark cared about language, and he loved hers, the forcefulness of her tone. For years he’d tried to get the editors of the magazine where he worked to send him to Marxism conferences to see what Goldman’s influence was now. But it just wasn’t clear what the story was—there were no assassination-of-McKinley reenactors, no Goldmanists in small cells across the country. After years of failing to figure out how, now he would get to write about Goldman. He’d loved Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman. Mark had sent an e-mail to the editor of the most prominent hipster intellectual journal in the country, The Unified Theory, and the editor was somehow interested. They wondered if he might want to write ten thousand words on Goldman and the great nineteenth-century Americans. Six writers whose work had appeared in The Unified Theory in the past four years had appeared in The New Yorker sometime soon after. The editors were all recent graduates of Ivy League Ph.D. programs in English and Cultural Studies, but they’d gotten the approval of some of their former professors, baby boomers whose word carried a different kind of cultural capital and whose blurbs appeared on the magazine’s covers as if it were a debut novel instead of an intellectual quarterly.

  For the next six months that was all Mark did with his free time—work on this piece on the prophetic voice in Thoreau, Emerson, and Emma Goldman. Cassie had been making good money on the side playing Sunday brunches with the Willow Gardens. Suddenly Mark wanted the Willow Gardens to go on hiatus for the year. It was not a good situation for her, but at the same time there was a thin pink hue to his cheeks for the first time in months. Cassie asked him if he couldn’t do both—play music and write this banal essay no one would ever read (she elided the words “banal” and “no one would ever read” when she said it). He said he couldn’t do both (Mark never elided anything when he said anything). Cassie asked him how he might feel if he was denied the opportunity to have sex with her during the hiatus.

  Mark paused. He looked at her.

  “I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he said. “Fucking and art. They are entirely separate.”

  Cassie agreed.

  For a month and then for another month the Willow Gardens didn’t play gigs, Mark and Cassie didn’t so much as kiss, and Mark’s skin began to look increasingly wan again on the few walks they took in Prospect Park. The only benefit to her from sleeping with a man for the first time since she was an undergraduate was the low-level anxiety over her father it alleviated, that subconscious sense that he might approve that their being together at least could lead to procreation if she would one day allow it. But now they weren’t having sex, which couldn’t lead to procreation, either. At least if she was with a woman, she would be not procreating while experiencing pleasure.

  “Listen,” Cassie said. “I know it hasn’t been a great period for you, but I care about you. I’m a little worried.”

  “What about?” he said. He was not making eye contact. He kept looking at something behind her or next to her, or at her elbow.

  “About you, shithead,” Cassie said. “You’re gonna make me say it out loud? I’m a little worried about you.”<
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  “I’m a little worried, too,” Mark said. “About me. But I gotta get this draft knocked out.”

  “I don’t care about your draft anymore, Mark,” Cassie said. “I don’t know if I ever did. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” She heard a cardinal call out its sharp chirp somewhere in the oaks over their heads. When she was a kid her father had one of those little red wood-and-iron bird-call makers and the one birdsong he’d taught her to recognize was the cardinal’s. Maybe that’s what he’d been looking at instead of her eyes. Three kids rode by on longboards, and once they passed and she could see their faces, Cassie realized they weren’t kids but grown men with beards and more likely than not wives, jobs, kids, 401(k)s, 403(b)s. Was maturity immutable? Like energy, a property finite and calculable in the universe? Grown adults acting like kids. She wondered if it was because they wanted to, or because the baby boomers kept their death grip on all the jobs and possessions they had to maintain their adolescence until adulthood was relinquished to them by the previous generations. She wondered if she thought that because she thought that, or if she thought that because Mark had said it so many times it had become reflexive for her to think it, too.

  Now for the first time in months Mark looked at her.

  “Shit,” he said. “It’s gotten that far?”

  She didn’t say it hadn’t.

  The next weekend, rather than heading down to Prospect Park, Mark told Cassie he wanted to take her on a trip to Midtown. They never went into Manhattan on weekends—Manhattan was where young Brooklynites went to work on weekdays. It was not where they spent their free time. Brooklyn was where they rested, played, drank hoppy IPAs. But on this Sunday they rode the train up to Midtown, and after they got off at Times Square, Mark walked her over to Forty-eighth Street. She was so quietly pleased to see him doing something other than moping, she didn’t yet ask what they were doing there. On occasion they ironically went to the Carnegie Deli for an ironic Reuben. Perhaps they would do so today.

  For one whole block every storefront displayed every kind of jewel and precious metal you could imagine. Emeralds, rubies, but mostly diamonds. Diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. Princess cut, perfect cut, colored and uncolored and VV-2, I-1, every way of evaluating stones was used there. Cassie knew you weren’t supposed to buy blood diamonds, that DeBeers and the others had ravaged South Africa and Zimbabwe (her college anthro professor had still called it Rhodesia) for them, but now they’d walked down a short flight of four steps somewhere in the middle of the Diamond District—every storefront looked the same to her, the way when you were walking through Prague at some point you realized every store selling amber jewelry was selling the same amber jewelry. Across from them was a Hasid with a wide, black-brimmed hat. Cassie was so disoriented it took her a minute to understand he was waiting for an answer to something he’d said. He was asking them questions about how they felt about white gold.

  “One can have a feeling about white gold?” Cassie said. “Like a pre-established feeling? Or one that develops from long experience?”

  The Hasid just stared at her for a moment. She didn’t like being stared at and she didn’t understand why she and Mark hadn’t talked about this first.

  “A woman makes her choice between white gold and platinum,” he said.

  She looked from him to Mark, who sat next to her, at the very front of his chair, both feet propped up on their toes, looking at her. “Or titanium. If you prefer.”

  “What the fuck’s the difference, even?” Cassie asked.

  “Gold is softer,” the Hasid said. His teeth were the yellow of a buttered-popcorn Jelly Belly jelly bean. He’d bared them. He bit into the strip of white gold in his hands. He passed it to Mark, whose fingers slipped over the saliva left there. “See?” the dealer said. “Little marks. Not to worry—that one needs to be melted down for solder at this point. But you pick. Titanium is so hard even a saw can’t cut it. Which means it is beautiful and strong but can pose a problem.”

  “A problem?” Mark said. It was the first question he’d asked since they started talking. He’d been leaving as much space for Cassie to talk as possible. She could tell.

  “Say a couple got in a car accident—let it not be so, Ha’shem, but it does happen, everything and anything can happen—and they can’t cut the ring off. Instead they have to cut the finger off. Very unlikely. But that’s why sometimes a woman will opt against it.”

  Cassie hadn’t given a single thought to the difference between hardness in metals, let alone being in a couple that rode in cars long enough to chance getting in an accident that might require digital amputation. She’d been living in New York without a car for long enough that when she visited her folks at home in Ohio, driving felt like a novelty, like playing at taxi driver. Next she might pretend to be a fireman, she’d think as she passed back down beneath the gargantuan leaves of the oaks lining State Route 36, not far from their house. Next a schoolteacher. Ichthyologist. Philatelist. Limo driver. Maybe her parents’ friends could afford to pay her to drive them around, invest in her rare stamps. Fish research.

  Mark walked Cassie across to the downtown side of Forty-seventh Street, where there was a bazaar of gems—she didn’t even realize when they were in with the Hasid that he was there only to show them settings, that looking at the stones themselves happened in a different market. A woman in her forties, with straw-like hair and a scalp-line that could only be made by a wig, pulled out a tray with maybe three dozen diamonds. She asked Cassie which she liked best. Cassie had to say something, anything—the only thing she wanted less than being here was to make a scene at that moment and draw attention to herself and to Mark—so she pointed to an elongated stone, shaped like the eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings movies, because it seemed to throw light back up at her like a star.

  “That’s the one?” the wigged woman said.

  “Well, we’re looking,” Mark said. He kept not saying much, as if to protect himself from having to admit he’d thought this was a good idea, that it would please her somehow. Cassie hadn’t said anything yet. This was the first time she understood his intentions.

  She said, “We haven’t even discussed it,” and looked at Mark, hard. “Like, ever.” He looked angry. But also a little confused.

  “Well, what did you think we were coming to Forty-seventh Street for?” Cassie said nothing. “Well, you never know,” Mark said.

  “For now I sure do,” Cassie said. She saw how hurt he appeared and she said, “I mean, I think. Assume.” The woman in the wig stared down at her fingers. Clearly this wasn’t a new thing to her, a couple fighting while shopping for rings.

  “Perhaps you’d like to consider an emerald instead? For the time being?”

  Cassie thought that while she had no interest in an emerald it was at least more likely to be something she’d accept.

  Mark turned to the woman.

  “You could e-mail me prices later,” he said.

  As they were leaving Cassie saw that the booth next to it had little white tags attached to the tray each diamond sat on—a perfect-cut like the one they’d seen was labeled $12,988. They could pay rent for six months for what one of these diamonds cost.

  On the subway ride home, Cassie sat staring across the way to an advertisement from the Department of Homeland Security: “If You See Something Say Something,” which had been as ubiquitous as the “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” flyers posted to every bulletin board in every sandwich shop near her office in Midtown during that period. She was more likely to pay Dan Smith to teach her guitar than to say something about something she’d seen. What she’d seen this afternoon was delusion from Mark on a scale so immense she didn’t know what to say. She had to say something. The whole thing was so surprising it was as if she hadn’t had time to comment. The obvious thing to say was: I don’t want a ring because I don’t want to marry you. Marry anyone. At one point she almost did say just that, but when she looked at him, ready to speak, his face h
ad color in it again, and he smiled at her and she just looked back down at the copy of MOJO magazine she’d brought with her as if not seeing or saying anything, at the same time.

  When they got back to their place she let Mark kiss her neck, let him get her near to the point of orgasm and quickly well past it himself. Then, while he kissed her neck, she brought herself around, too. Then they lay there. Three mosquitoes bobbed by the bed as Mark and Cassie lay naked and lightly covered in grime from a Saturday afternoon in Midtown.

  “So did you get a sense of which ring you liked best?”

  “It wasn’t like buying a ring,” Cassie said. He asked her what she meant. “It was like building an avatar—this setting, this kind of stone, this color, this metal. Maybe the diamond could help the woman pick out a new hair color. Wasn’t there a time when you could just walk into a store and give them an ungodly sum and you were paying them to figure out what the fuck you wanted?”

  Neither of them said anything for quite some time. Mark had his arm draped across his eyes. Cassie watched as one of the mosquitoes landed on his forearm, placed its spindly legs on his skin, dipped its needle, and withdrew what it needed to make eggs. Somewhere on his skin the tiniest oil rig dipped and slurred, blood coagulated and sucked up into its parasite. As it withdrew she saw him jerk a bit. He took his arm from his eyes and started scratching. A not-small part of her felt joy watching him injured by the female of a species.

  “You don’t seem all that psyched about it,” Mark said. She wasn’t going to say anything. She thought about how this was by far the longest they’d gone without talking about Emma Goldman in one full year.