The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  But this is exactly what Penelope wanted to do: enjoy a pure encounter with Arthur’s book. To be told nothing about it, and on the day of its release buy a copy in the bookstore, spend all day reading it, and return through the apartment door so he could have the satisfaction of seeing her reaction—helping him to close that circuit. Audience. Artist. Art.

  It occurs to me that Will’s absence from these get-togethers may seem like a writerly convenience. The truth is, though, the only memorable conversations I had with them, as a couple and individually, were those that happened in Will’s absence—indeed, were only possible through Will’s absence. There were any number of other occasions when I might encounter Will and his mother in the hall or the three of them in the elevator, and I would hear how they were off to see Star Wars: Episode One for the third time or were just coming back from Leandra Williams’s birthday party. Will would be the focus of these encounters—children, I’ve noticed, become the center of gravity in a room—talking rapidly about something hilarious Tyler said at the party or demonstrating the proper way to avoid the jaws of a T. rex. It wasn’t that Will was especially precocious or that what he was saying was especially interesting; it was just that he was the one with the most energy and with it he commanded the most attention. It was like this on the few occasions I knocked unannounced, to encounter the three of them preparing for a typical evening in: Will on the floor staring up at the television, Arthur at the table trying to concentrate on a stack of papers and Penelope picking up stray clothes and toys around the apartment and yelling at Will to turn it down! Even with Will occupied, it was hard to keep the thread of a conversation going, as our attention would gravitate to what he was watching. When Will wasn’t at the television, he wanted to be a part of our talk, and soon enough we would find ourselves learning about something hilarious Tyler had said about Mr. Boinkman today or the absolutely true story he’d heard about the vampire living in the school basement.

  And it’s not that I don’t like kids. It’s that they make me nervous. They’re unpredictable. Their problem with personal space is no different than that of a crazy homeless person’s. One minute they’re saying you remind them of creepy Freddy Krueger and the next they’re trying to shimmy your torso for a piggyback ride. Other people don’t have this problem. Dave, for instance. He had a rapport with Will, which began, I suppose, that night on the roof. Will would show up randomly, without notice, to discuss movies or video games, and Dave would let him in, offer him a soda, as though he were Seinfeld and Will were Kramer.

  “The kid’s got pretty sophisticated taste for an eleven-year-old. His favorite movie? Reservoir Dogs. He says Pulp Fiction is too stylized for his tastes. He used that word: ‘stylized.’ I asked him, ‘So your parents let you watch movies like that?’ I mean, this is pretty violent stuff. And he’s like, ‘I get to make my own decisions.’ He’s a funny kid.”

  Will would appear while the three of us were working in the editing suite and plop right down on the couch next to us. Suriyaarachchi didn’t seem to mind. He liked Will too. Will would be in his costume, black suit and tie with a badge that read FBI. Orange gun in one hand and a large policeman’s flashlight in the other. “Trick or treat,” he said the first time I encountered him at the door.

  “Who are you supposed to be?”

  “Special Agent Fox Mulder, he said, shining the flashlight in my face.

  “You look like a Jehovah’s Witness.”

  “Jehovah? He’s under federal protection because he knows too much.”

  “You’re lucky I’m not a truant officer. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Half day. I’m looking for Agent Suriyaarachchi and Agent Dave. They around?”

  Dave told me that Penelope would occasionally call on him to babysit last-minute, which entailed getting twenty bucks to have Will come over to do what he normally did. Dave used the money for takeout, which the two of them would eat while blasting the limbs off of zombie hordes.

  Will took after his mother, slightly plump with thick black hair and the delicate lashes of a pretty girl. He liked to eat and often came prepared with a knapsack of Tupperwared food Penelope had packed for him.

  Will said to me one day, quite out of the blue, “Mom and Art are fighting a lot.” I was looking through the sublet listings in the Voice. Dave and Suriyaarachchi had gone out to the post office. Will had come in during their absence and asked if it would be okay if he played a video game. It had been intended as a rhetorical question—he was already kneeling in front of the console—but I said that he would have to ask Dave’s permission when he got back from his errand.

  “When will he be back?” Will was used to being adored by adults, but I had made it clear I was immune to his charms. He would often find himself blinking at me, unsure of how to proceed. I had hoped my answer would discourage him from sticking around, but instead he took a seat next to me and picked up the entertainment circular of the paper and held it out in front of him, as if to read. Cute. I resumed my task of starring any long-term sublets within my budget—there weren’t many—when Will said what he said about Penelope and Arthur fighting. I waited for him to go on, bracing myself for a discussion about how he shouldn’t worry, sometimes parents fight but it doesn’t mean that, et cetera.

  Will said, “Mostly it’s Mom who does the yelling. Art listens. I think it’s because she loves him more than he loves her.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Stray hair floated up off his head from the static of the hat he’d just removed. A crust of mucus ringed his left nostril. He set down the paper and opened his knapsack, removing a round bin that contained apple slices, a little browned. “I’ve always thought that. She does the hugging and the kissing. He accepts it. It’s not like he doesn’t like it. He’s like me that way. And I don’t hear them doing it anymore, which is another thing. Not since we moved here.”

  “You know what ‘doing it’ sounds like?”

  He rolled his eyes and popped an apple slice into his mouth.

  “What kind of son are you, who doesn’t hug his mother?”

  “I hug her. Of course I hug her. But sometimes I need to play it cool.”

  Suriyaarachchi and Dave returned. “Will, my man,” Dave said. “Let me score some of that apple. I’m surprised to see you just sitting there. Thought for sure I’d find you warming up the PlayStation for me.”

  Will looked over at me as if to say, See?

  After dropping Will off at school, Penelope stops in at Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of Arthur’s new book. Crinkly green bag in hand, she heads up and east along Sixty-Sixth Street, into Central Park. She’d planned to find a quiet spot under a tree, but the benches are wet from the overnight rain. Somewhat at a loss, she wanders around and ends up ordering a pretzel from a vendor cart even though it isn’t yet ten in the morning. It’s an autumn smell, it beckons her, but the pretzel leaves a pasty taste in her mouth with overtones of ashtray and makes her instantly sleepy. She finds a line of dry benches under an eve, above and behind the old proscenium band shell around which people Rollerblade to music on their headphones in bright colored spandex. There is the distant treble of a faraway boom box. She sits and shrugs off her coat, humming a tune that takes her a moment to realize is the song on the boom box. She slips the book from its bag and cracks it open, giving it an involuntary sniff before turning to the first page.

  She is shocked anew by the power of Arthur’s writing, its ability to take her in. Is this just the power all authors have? The mere mention of a red shawl—like a command you are powerless to resist—and there it is, the chenille soft in your hands. Even though the title prepares her somewhat, it’s also a shock to be taken into the fictionalized realm of her own life—a version of déjà vu, not unlike hearing her own voice on an answering machine. She reads, and winces, reading, and reads on, and then falls asleep.

  In her dream, she is twelve and in braces, self-conscious of her breath and of being naked. She is
in a stable, shivering. There are horses stamping and farting around her. Something terrible has just happened, or is about to happen, but she can’t figure out what. She wakes herself so that she can remember and finds that her coat is on the ground and her shirt is hiked up and she is freezing.

  She finds the book, which has fallen under the bench. She returns to the last page she remembers reading and continues, but she can’t shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong. Her dream has entered the atmosphere of the book, or maybe she is picking up a subtle atmosphere from the book itself? It’s hard to tell now. She puts her coat back on and zips it up and continues reading.

  In the manner of other contemporary fiction, there’s little story to speak of—the dilemmas of everyday life—and yet it’s also compelling. It’s the sentences, the train of thought—it’s persuasive. So she turns the pages to see where it all might lead, because it does seem to be leading somewhere, each scene a preparation for some defining moment. How could he call this a novel? She checks the cover again. The Morels: A Novel.

  The main character is named Arthur Morel, who is married to a character named Penelope, and their child’s name is Will. The voice is conversational, less formal than the I-voice of his previous book, closer to Arthur’s own. Main-character-Arthur works as an administrative head at a university library, a job real-Arthur had for a short while, before being let go. It had not been a good time for them. Arthur was miserable. This was three years ago, before his first book was published. Will was eight.

  We find ourselves at the beginning of The Morels with Arthur struggling to make meaning from what has become a mundane domestic existence—he works; he comes home; he washes dishes and bundles garbage. The burden of fatherhood puts a strain on him, on the marriage. Manhood does not come naturally; he is not a natural father. What to say, how to behave. His father-in-law tells him not to worry, that it’s eighteen years of on-the-job training, to follow his heart and he would be okay.

  The only problem for Arthur is that his heart is a mystery to him. Most of the time, Arthur doesn’t know what to feel and suspects that deep down he feels nothing—for anyone. In the meantime, he fakes it. He watches Penelope for clues, imitating her expressions of affection, her declarations of love—and as such, Arthur feels as though he’s making up his feelings, inventing them as he goes along—careful to feel whatever is appropriate for the situation. His job brings him little satisfaction—it requires a kind of leadership he does not possess—he must motivate his staff as well as those he answers to. He dreads work, feels in over his head daily—the suits he’s required to wear have been given to him by Penelope’s father, his father’s suits, as it were. He looks in the mirror to see that he is no longer himself, but with every passing week, living the life he is living, he is no longer sure who that is anymore.

  DEVOTED HUSBAND, LOVING FATHER. It feels like an epitaph.

  His thoughts turn morbid. He feels like the walking dead. A man of no consequence. He has given up the immortality of Visionary Artist for the mortal and inconsequential role of Family Man, indistinguishable from eighty-three million others just like him. It is a long slow march toward the grave, no doubt on which will be written DEVOTED HUSBAND, LOVING FATHER. Within two years, less, his family will have moved on, forgotten him. It would be as if he’d never existed. His struggles at his job and at home take on the proportions of life and death—it’s a struggle he is waging—and losing—for his own survival.

  In lieu of lunch, Arthur goes into the library stacks, and here he can finally breathe again, a fish returned to water. He drifts among the sea of words, stopping randomly at an unfamiliar or interesting title. Opening the book, he allows himself to dream for a while inside, and when it’s time for him to make his way back to work, he feels as though he is leaving a part of himself there—that part of himself has become trapped within the covers of the book he’d been browsing—and so he must go back the next day, and the next.

  He tests his limits. He skips meetings in which he is not expected to speak. He spends entire days lost in the stacks or behind his desk, holding all calls, in front of his computer. When someone enters, he does not look up.

  He begins writing e-mails to himself.

  At night, unable to sleep, he fires up his laptop to find his inbox full. The messages are addressed to himself, from one part of his brain to another. Cries for help from a man in the trenches. He details his troubles at work. His restlessness, his suffocation. He used to be able to shut the stall door in the men’s room and with a visual cue of Dean Bartholomew’s secretary—her parted legs under her desk, the small patch of hair—masturbate to climax in less time than it took most men to wash their hands. These days it is a different story entirely. He works at his flaccid penis there in the stall, trying to fully picture the space underneath the secretary’s desk—unsuccessfully—until the bathroom door bangs open, the sound of unzipping at a urinal, and Arthur’s concentration would be fully broken. What has he become, that he can’t even give his secret work crushes their proper due? That this last refuge of freedom, his sexual imagination, is closed to him?

  Arthur reads these e-mails from himself in the monitor glow of the darkened bedroom, Penelope asleep not five feet away—addressed as though he were someone else, an estranged friend. So he does what any friend would do: he writes back.

  He commiserates. He relates his various miseries on the home front. His life with Penelope and Will is just a series of small lies—from the moment he walks through the door. I missed you, she says, and he says, I missed you, too. But he has not in fact thought about Penelope throughout the day—should he have? He feels guilty, and so when he tells her that he has missed her, too, he is lying. Or maybe willing himself to have missed her, not so much a lie as it is a kind of apology. When he says, I missed you, too, what he really means is I want to have missed you, too. He means I will try my hardest tomorrow to miss you too.

  She asks him how his day has been, and when he says that it was fine, when he doesn’t tell her that it was decidedly not fine, this is another lie.

  These overtures about their day are no more prelude to a real discussion of their true feelings as the peck on the lips as he’s taking off his coat is a prelude to sex.

  This is married life.

  It isn’t what it used to be. Back when he was just shelving books—infant Will at the apartment with his mother-in-law—Penelope would show up in an easy-access skirt and no underwear, and they would fuck right there in the stacks. They used to get such a kick out of playing house, out of peeling the blistered skin off of a butternut squash and placing it in the new Cuisinart; add a little cream and look—soup! Now dinner is just another chore, the Cuisinart a tool like any other in the kitchen, no longer a novelty. A pot of chili on Sunday for a week of leftovers. Frozen portions of split pea in individually microwavable containers. Life at home. Asleep by nine thirty, up at six to do it all again.

  Back in his office, he shuts the door and checks his e-mails; deleting those from his boss, he opens the one from himself. He reads it over, then spends the rest of the morning crafting a reply. Why is it so hard, just living? he writes. I am married, my wife is healthy and beautiful. I have a son who is healthy and beautiful. I, too, am healthy and have a job that supports us, that allows us to live in relative ease. So why am I not living with the ease in which I live?

  His troubles at work, his miseries on the home front. With these out of the way, he moves on to other concerns, to the darker corners of his mind. He reminds himself of a passing childhood acquaintance, a boy his own age. Acts of sexual pleasure engaged in with this boy. How old had they been? Nine? Arthur used to worry over the thought of being gay. Did these acts he used to perform make him so? He would think of his time with this boy and become aroused. Even now—as a husband and a father—when he remembers these encounters, he becomes aroused. In fact, it’s the only image potent enough these days, sitting there in the men’s room stall, to get him off. What does
this mean? How is he to reconcile this with the life he lives as an average family man?

  Arthur finds that by pursuing this correspondence with himself, he feels better. The more he commiserates, the less miserable he feels. Airing dark truths help lighten his spirit; and writing obsessively to himself these long dark weeks cures him of the need to write obsessively to himself. In one long last e-mail, he talks about his new contentment, about how at peace with himself he has become. He thanks himself for listening, for commiserating. He describes venturing out of his office now to engage with fellow staff and administrators, a new desire to tackle the overflow on his desk. He tells of a home life in which he is now fully and happily engaged with Penelope, with Will. His heart is brimming with new love for them, a love he does not have to fake anymore. He brings in pictures of them and tacks them up on the board above his desk, puts one in his wallet.

  The big shock comes on the final pages, suddenly, although in some way it seems to be the culmination of all prior moments in the book, the destination that all sentences point to.