The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  I couldn’t sleep. I was livid. By the time I arrived in her lobby the next morning, I had a speech mapped out. I was trying hard to remember to say everything that I had fantasized about saying while lying awake in bed. I may have even written something down so that I wouldn’t forget. I was trying to remember my anger. I have trouble with this. My anger goes underground fairly quickly, and I wanted to keep it on the surface, to use it to say what I felt I needed to say.

  I arrived before her and had to endure the humiliation of waiting for a long time in her lobby, an hour, maybe more. This helped with the anger.

  She arrived with her sunglasses on. She seemed tired, or bored—and sober. We took the elevator up to her apartment. She told me how tired she was. She said it several times. I had to fight my impulse to be sympathetic and kept my mouth shut. The dog yelped and yelped. She must really have been tired because she didn’t scream at it.

  She sat on her bed and suggested we talk later about this. So far she hadn’t admitted any wrongdoing. Her apology was limited to keeping me waiting.

  (Writing this now, years later, clearheaded, I realize that there really was no wrongdoing—we were not married, had made no vows to each other. But what did this mean to me, who had spent hours in her kitchen, fantasizing a distant future in which she would be telling our grandkids that I had rescued her, that she used to be a bad girl until I had come along?)

  She collapsed on the bed and said again how tired she was. Her sunglasses were still on.

  Again, I felt like a parent here, dealing with an unruly teen who’d stayed out past her curfew. I picked up my laptop bag and checked its contents and then delivered my speech. It was fairly short and ended with the line And I don’t like being made to feel like a fool! In my head the line sounded powerful, a perfect expression of my pain, but when I said it out loud, I just sounded sad.

  And I didn’t get the feeling that she was listening too closely. She told me that she didn’t think I was foolish and that we should definitely talk later, after she’d had a chance to catch up on some sleep.

  I told her that I had nothing else to say, that there was nothing left to talk about, that I didn’t want to talk later.

  I left. Walking down the street, I felt good. I felt the righteous anger of the wronged. I felt a certain power in rejecting Viktoria. I savored it on my way to work.

  Suriyaarachchi was there, browsing the Web. Dave was making a pot of coffee. I could have hugged them both but instead handed them the egg sandwiches I bought and spent the morning in the editing suite, watching the rented videos on the one-hundred-thousand-dollar editing machine.

  They took me out to lunch and let me mope. They told me that I deserved better, that we would go out tonight and get drunk, the three of us. Suriyaarachchi said he would help me pick up any girl I chose, whichever one my heart desired, that he had a way with women, and he could see to my wishes. Dave joked that the only women Suriyaarachchi had a “way” with were the ones who advertised in the back of the Voice. Forget girls, Dave said. Tonight was just for us guys: scotch and cigars. A round of steak dinners on the house!

  Whatever I wanted, Suriyaarachchi said. Today, I was the boss.

  That night Viktoria came to see me at the movie theater and insisted on us talking. We sat in the carpeted window casement, and she took my hand and told me how she’d never wanted to hurt me and that she had things she needed to work out in her life, and she was working on them. She said she would understand if I didn’t want to see her anymore.

  I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore.

  She seemed surprised at this. I got the sense that there was a way this was supposed to play out for her—that she was supposed to be contrite and that I was supposed to forgive her and that I would come back to her apartment and pick up where we left off. But I wasn’t saying the right lines in her drama. Or at least that was what I hoped she was feeling. I was stone, Teflon. I told her good luck with her recovery, with her life—I hoped things would work out for her.

  She thanked me and got up. She hugged me, and then she left, somewhat dazed, saying that she would call me.

  I told her not to bother, that we didn’t have anything to say to each other.

  A few days later she called and left a message on my mother’s answering machine.

  The humiliation of this experience would come back in waves. I spent weeks coming over, cooking for her, cleaning the dishes, listening to her stories of her attempted suicide and her recovery, encouraging her against relapse. I was like her puppy, eager for her affection, frustrated at not getting it, caged off from her bedroom, from the rest of her life. Meanwhile, she was out having sex with her ex, while I was waiting at home. I was convinced of my worth as a boyfriend, baffled that any girl who had experienced the full warmth of my goodwill would want to squander it. Why would she want to squander it? I was such a good listener! She said she thought my pasta was delicious! She said I was the sweetest person she’d ever met! So what was any of that worth, in the end?

  I erased her message, hoping my mother hadn’t yet heard it. But she called again the following day, and again the day after that. She didn’t sound bored anymore, or tired. She was wide awake. She said that she was sorry, that she needed me, could I come over. She sounded desperate, each message more urgent than the last. She called a dozen times over the following week. By the end she was weeping into the phone, begging me to return her call.

  After the first couple of messages, I felt good, satisfied. It was a balm to my humiliation. But each successive message made me feel worse. I became alarmed. She had talked so abstractly about her condition—its symptoms and causes—and it seemed so hypothetical, like it no longer applied to her specifically, as though she were talking about someone else. But here it was, revealed in these messages. They were frightening. I felt guilty, like I had caused this, and fought an urge to call her back, to go back to her and try to make it all better. I erased each message as it came.

  And then the messages stopped. I thought she might have done something drastic. But, I also reasoned, it was just as possible that she’d found someone else, another me. And then I stopped thinking about her at all.

  After breaking up with Viktoria, I felt a loneliness deep in my bones. At first it seemed the result of losing her, but as the days passed, I saw that, in fact, it was the other way around. In the way of certain drugs, whose side effects may include the irritation of just those symptoms one is trying to relieve—an anti-inflammatory, say, that in fluke cases causes one’s swelling to worsen—so dating Viktoria had made my existing loneliness more profound. My only relief came now from the time I spent with Penelope and Arthur. They welcomed me. They wanted me between them. With Penelope I had an audience for my misadventures in love and with Arthur—suddenly interested—my misadventures in film. I think they needed me there. I kept their focus off each other, off their problems; hearing about mine was a way for them to forget their own, and in that sense I became the ballast holding them together.

  As an only child of divorced parents, I was adept at the art of diversion, an art I noticed Will was good at, too. We worked as a team. Will’s strength was games—board games, tile games, card games, puzzles and all manner of brain teasers—and mine was anecdotes. Between us we were able to keep Arthur and Penelope distracted through most of an evening. Then Will would go to bed, and I’d have to work twice as hard to keep the subject trained safely on me. I told them about the hair and makeup artist I fooled around with on the set of Dead Hank’s Boy, the one with the insanely jealous boyfriend rumored to own a hunting rifle—and how, when the jealous boyfriend got wind of me, I had to hide under a desk in our production office to avoid his wrath. I told them how ushers amused themselves on any given night at the theater: by lip-synching as lewdly as possible the closing ten minutes of Good Will Hunting and Shakespeare in Love. Or by performing cross talk at the rear doors as the audience filed out, loud enough to draw attention: Did you hear, Emma Thompson is
upstairs! Another usher: That crazy bitch? Last time she was here, I was an hour in the ladies’ room cleaning up her meth-induced rampage! The trick, I told them, was in making the actor and the outrageous act as unlikely a pair as possible: Steve Martin fistfighting a man for trying to cut him in line, Dame Judy Dench thrown out for spontaneously barking during a show. Paul Newman’s petty theft, Angela Lansbury evading arrest.

  But then I would run out of stories, and things would go south. “Tell me again,” Penelope would begin. At this point into her third or fourth glass of wine.

  And Arthur would say, “We’ve been over this a hundred times.”

  “Is it like you said in your book? Because you were dissatisfied with me? With us?”

  “That had nothing to do with it.”

  “Then what?”

  “I told you, I was speaking out a fear—”

  “Don’t give me that fear bullshit! Answer me. Do you want to do—that—to him?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Well, I don’t understand. Am I phrasing the question correctly? Asking the right question? How can you be afraid that you’ll do that if you don’t want to do it? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I wanted to write a book that would take great courage to write—that no other writer would write. Think of Henry Miller. De Sade. Burroughs. I wanted to be unafraid. These writers looked into the abyss and wrote what they saw.”

  “Were any of those writers married? Were any of them the primary caregiver of an eleven-year-old child?”

  “I wanted to do something bigger. To sacrifice something.”

  “Yourself, that’s who you’ve sacrificed. And your family along with you. You’re telling me you’re a terrorist, is what you’re saying. The kind that blows himself up on a plane.”

  “We live an age where you can write almost anything. The only way forward is to utter what can’t be said. That which carries personal cost. If I were just risking my professional reputation—who would care? Who outside of my professional circle would take notice?”

  Other times, Arthur would be the one on the offensive. In fact, Penelope’s relentless questioning seemed to help him find his voice. “The death of transgression is the death of art—don’t you understand? That an individual artist might do enough damage to be dangerous. This is hopeful, this means that art can still have an impact. If an artist is permitted to do or say anything, it’s proof that art no longer matters enough to care about. An artist becomes the cursing lunatic on the street whom people just shake their heads at. I want to wake people up! You’ve said it yourself, Penelope. The writers around me are writing such little books.” He looked at me. “I warned you about music; it was dying its last breath while we were still in school—and despite all attempts to rouse it, it’s dead. Irretrievably dead. Look at it now—you’ve been there, you’ve had four years of it—an academically sealed mausoleum, written and picked over by graduate students. The same is happening now with literature. Dying its slow death in academia. Its life drained away by writers describing smaller pieces of the world. Dying the death of clever, of marketable. Literature is no longer a word we use anymore. Literary is the current term. ‘Literary fiction,’ quote-unquote. Demoted to an adjective. And rightly so. Little of what’s being published these days deserves the noun. If the endeavor is to survive at all, it needs a shock to the system.”

  “And you’re that shock,” I said. “You haven’t lost your flair for hyperbole, I see. Or self-aggrandizement.”

  “We worry about the rainforest when we should be worried about the extinctions closer to home. We are fast approaching a culture without art.”

  “Arthur. You can’t seriously believe all this. The Pulitzer Prize committee. The acquisitions department at the Whitney. They have no trouble finding great art to celebrate.”

  “Do you think I care about what the institution’s patent office and zookeepers think of the crisis we’re in? Don’t you get it? A culture without art is a culture without a soul, nothing but a lifeless machine. To answer your implied question, yes, I do believe it, and I will take your feigned nonchalance as a sign I’m getting through to you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a fictional account of incest published—if you’re writing from the point of view of the perpetrator? Have you ever heard of Varmes City Press? Neither had I, until they emerged, the sole fringe press that would agree to print my book.” He said this with a kind of incredulity, as though he himself could scarcely believe what he had done. That it hadn’t escaped his notice that perhaps this entire thing had been a colossal miscalculation. The shock of it was in his eyes. But then he went on. “My agent begged me to remove that last section. He said he himself had done this and shown it to Random House, to my previous editor, who said she’d buy it on the spot. But that would have been a little book, a small book. Which would have just contributed to the problem.”

  Penelope stared—no, watched—she watched him. As though he were a stranger. “So,” she said, clearing her throat. “You wrote the book to save literature.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you just say you’re sorry?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Do you see what you’ve done? You’ve killed us, Art. You’ve destroyed this family. Nothing will ever be the same.”

  I should have left them alone to their arguing, but, as I said, I am a child of divorced parents, and old habits die hard. I wanted to get between them, to referee. But all I could do was watch. I could see how much pain they were in, both of them. Arthur could not explain away what he had done. And Penelope couldn’t accept the explanations Arthur gave. Just like Penelope, I, too, returned to that day. Arthur had put the manuscript into my hands as well. Tell me what to do with this. I’d sat out on the balcony holding it as they talked away about its fate. I now imagined chucking the stack over the railing, the pages scattering and flapping out before me like a flock of pigeons. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I came over to watch Penelope burn with the rage of a Homeric war widow. And Arthur, again and again, fail to offer any kind of solace. He would blink at her, big hands dangling stupidly at his sides, baffled to be having this same conversation yet again. Didn’t we resolve this one already? Because, just as abruptly as things would go south at the beginning of an evening, they would, despite Penelope’s dire pronouncements moments earlier, return to normal. Taking Arthur by one of his big dangling hands, she’d say, “Let’s go to bed, hon. I can’t think about this anymore.”

  8

  PENELOPE

  WERE IT NOT FOR THE twin poles of Thanksgiving and Christmas to guide me, I’d remember all this as having happened over several seasons. But it was days, not months, from the holiday blowout around the Morels’ dining room table to my time with Penelope on Balthazar’s outdoor bench—from Viktoria’s first relapse to her haunting messages on my answering machine. The weather was no help; wild swings had gusts of sleet blowing through in the morning and snowmelt streaming in the gutters, baking hot by the afternoon—a time-lapse development to match the overclocked developments in my own life.

  It was the first week of December.

  Here was another thing: Will no longer made me nervous. His maturity amazed me. Were all eleven-year-olds like this—like little men? He seemed fully formed, with thoughts and feelings very much his own. The way he furrowed his brows when worrying over his parents. The way he sighed and rolled his eyes when I failed to understand a point he was making. The way he said actually, the way he said by the way and maybe so and just between you and me. And yet he still had all the features of a little boy; he could fit his fist easily inside my hand. Still thrill at the rifle crack of an empty heel-stomped juice box and make kazoo sounds with his empty lunch-sized box of raisins. He would say, “Do you think they’ll get a divorce?” With eyes that said, Say no.

  I told him that everything would be okay.

  “It’s no big deal if they do. Twenty-one out of the thirty-three kids in my class have divorced parents. I
asked them. That’s more than half. Statistically, it makes sense.”

  “Both of your parents love you very much.”

  “It would work out better for them if they did. They wouldn’t have to fight anymore. And they could marry other people. Most of the divorced kids in my class have four parents. I figure that’s twice the number of presents at Christmas.” I remember giving my uncle the same spiel when he tried having a heart-to-heart about my own parents’ divorce. He told me that it was okay to be angry, to be sad—but I gave away nothing. I told him that it was for the best, that they’d be happier, and that I was better off if they were happier. Two homes were better than one, I said, using the same equation Will used to solve this terrible unsolvable mess.

  But divorce was not our usual topic. Mostly we tackled the more complicated problem of the Smoking Man and the Syndicate—the great mysteries Mulder and Scully struggled every week to unravel. Will orchestrated his life around that hour of television—abandoning all else at exactly nine every Friday evening for a front-and-center position on the couch, remote in hand. It was a needed retreat from the hardships and humiliations of being eleven. I’d forgotten how hard, how humiliating, until spending time around the boy. You could see it on his face after a full day at school. The puffiness around the eyes, the sweat-dried hair that clung to the sides of his face. They spoke of the punch to the stomach for no reason whatsoever. They spoke of the dark-eyed Maria Gutierrez who didn’t (not once!) look at him yesterday. They spoke of the stack of comics that disappeared from his backpack between lunch and recess, and the unsuccessful attempt—after a soccerball to the face—of not crying in front of his entire class. Despite the saying to the contrary, time resolves none of our wounds; it only occludes with more recent ones, one on top of the next, burying what was once so painful until at last we forget. And his parents weren’t helping any with their living room storms. Although I couldn’t see him behind his closed door, I had no doubt he was sitting on his bed, comic book in his lap, trying to shut his ears to what he was hearing—yet craning to hear every word. On the occasions when he needed a partner in make-believe, I found myself caught up in action-figure dramas about young heroes rescuing women from mad-scientist husbands.