We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  • • •

  Three months into the marriage, Eileen was astonished to realize that she hadn’t entered a bar, restaurant, or party with her husband. She’d grown tired of making excuses to her friends; when they called and she had to say she couldn’t go, she wanted to hand the phone to Ed to have him explain. She showed up alone if she went at all when they got together at each other’s houses, and after she’d faced enough inquisitions about where Ed was, she decided it wasn’t worth it to go. She’d envisioned playing euchre with him at the Coakleys’, or watching him save Frank McGuire from grilling disasters, or seeing his entertainer side come out at the piano after everyone downed a couple of banana daiquiris at Tom Cudahy’s place. She’d envisioned her own dining room, which was finally appointed hospitably after Ed had agreed to let her spend the money on furniture, thronged with friends around the table, Jack Coakley clapping his hands and dramatically sniffing the roast chicken’s lemon-pepper aroma as she carried it proudly past him, but instead what she had for company were the dog-eared pages of novels as she sulked in the armchair. The only reason she even had that damned chair was that her mother had shamed Ed into buying it so she’d have somewhere civilized to sit when she came over. Her mother flatly refused to sit on their ratty couch, which they’d inherited when Phil left for Toronto. As long as Ed had a place to rest his head—and it could have been the floor for all he cared—he was content to go about his work as though the body’s needs were nuisances and the soul’s demands, illusions. The only thing he seemed to consider authentic was his work—not work in the abstract, because he hardly listened when she spoke about her day, but his work, his precious, important work that was going to make a contribution to science. She would pause in the doorway for a moment before she headed out for solitary walks around the neighborhood, looking at his back hunched over his infernal notebooks, his hand not even rising to give her a perfunctory wave good-bye.

  She walked the path her youthful self used to tread on dates, when Jackson Heights was the neighborhood to be seen in. She’d pass Jahn’s, where she used to have a burger and a shake after the movie, and remember how whatever hopeful young man she was with would escort her up and down both sides of Thirty-Seventh Avenue before returning her home on the train. Sometimes she’d take them on detours onto side streets, not to find an alley to make out in—though she did that too—but because she liked to look at the co-ops and houses and imagine a future in which she lived in that privileged setting.

  Sometimes, she would feel that sense of possibility reenter her chest, and then she’d keep walking until it had worn off and the blocks looked strangely unfamiliar. She would stop at Arturo’s and gaze in at the couples dining in neat pairs, or the families passing plates around, and wonder when things would settle down long enough for her to enjoy some of that hot bread with him, buttered to perfection, a glass of red wine warming the stomach, the two of them in no hurry to get anywhere, choosing from an inviting menu. There needed to be time for that kind of leisure, or she didn’t see the point in living.

  One day, the heat was unusual for early spring, and Ed was at his desk in his underwear and T-shirt. She’d begun to resent that desk, beaten up around the legs and stained a dull brown. She knew she’d never be free of it, that it would follow her wherever she went.

  Getting that desk, Ed had told her, had been one of the few happy times he’d shared with his father as an adult. His father walked in from work one day and told him to get up and come with him. They drove into the city; his father wouldn’t say what it was about. They went to the Chubb offices. “The place looked like it had been cleaned out,” Ed said. “He led me to a storage closet. There was a desk and chair in it—his desk and chair. He’d had a handyman buddy hold them for him. They were getting new furniture for the whole office the next day. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Pull out the drawers. Pretend to work.’ It was strange to have him watching me. My mother was the one who peeked over my shoulder when I worked. ‘Can you get your work done at it, or what?’ he asked. I said, ‘Who couldn’t get work done at this desk? It’s beautiful.’ My father, being my father, said, ‘Good. Now I can read the paper at the table.’ But I knew he was glad to do something nice for me.”

  The story had touched her when she’d first heard it, but now the ugly desk seemed a symbol of how little her husband would ever be equipped to see beyond the limits his biography had imposed on his imagination.

  She watched him work, his pasty legs sticking out absurdly from his briefs, and waited for him to swivel in his chair to face her, to be a normal man for a moment. Angry, disappointed, she walked over and turned the air conditioner on. Ed rose without a word and turned it off again, then went back to work. He didn’t even look in her direction. They went back and forth like this several times. She couldn’t believe she’d signed on to live with a man so committed to his own pointless suffering. They weren’t poverty-stricken by any means; they were even able to put aside a bit of money from every check for a down payment on their future house. But Ed thought even minimal indulgences were best lived without.

  When they were courting she’d seen his eccentricities as a welcome change. There was a bit of continental flair about him. Certainly he was more charming than the doctors at work. He was as smart as any of them; he only hadn’t gone to medical school because he was too interested in research to stop doing it. There was something romantic about that, but living with him made his eccentricities curdle into pathologies. What had been charmingly independent became fussy and self-defeating.

  The heat broke her. She told him she’d had enough and started walking to her parents’ apartment in Woodside. She sweated through her blouse, her resentment spurring her forward. Ed could have all the heat he wanted in that apartment by himself. She wouldn’t be cooped up for another minute with him.

  When her father came to the door and saw her fuming and drenched, he knew what was up. “That’s your home now,” he said. “Work it out with him.”

  In her rush to leave Ed, she had neglected to bring her purse. She asked for change for the bus.

  “You walked here,” her father said. “You can walk back.”

  By the time she got home, she had grown so angry at her father that she’d forgotten all about being angry at her husband. Ed didn’t say anything when he saw her, but after she showered she emerged to an apartment bathed in the cool of a churning air conditioner.

  They made love for what felt like forever that night. She didn’t mind the sweat at all.

  • • •

  She was in Woodside visiting her parents when she saw a sign taped to the window of Doherty’s: “Big Mike Tumulty vs. Pete McNeese in a footrace. Friday, July 21, 7:00.”

  She knew Pete, and she’d never much liked him. He was tall and skinny, and he always seemed to speak a little louder than came naturally, as if he were imitating another man’s voice.

  “What’s this about a race?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen. He was sitting sideways at the table with a cup of tea, looking out the window. He wore a new white undershirt and slippers.

  “He was running his mouth off about how fleet of foot he was.”

  “You’re almost sixty years old.”

  “So what?”

  “Pete is barely thirty.” Her father put the kettle back on.

  “So he’s half my age,” her father said. “He’s also half the man.”

  She thought the whole thing ridiculous, but on the race’s appointed day, she couldn’t help dropping by Doherty’s on the way home from work. The bar was fuller than usual, almost visibly crackling with static energy, as if a prizefight was about to take place instead of an absurd pissing contest. Happy shouts rose over the din, and everywhere she looked, men huddled and clapped their palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Someone asked her father how he planned to beat Pete. “I’ll blind him with the tobacco juice,” he said through a cheekful of chaw, to a round of hearty laughter. Guys were taking final
book. “Two dollars on Big Mike,” she heard one say proudly, and she imagined that if all the money her father’s adherents were willing to lose to support him were piled on the bar, it would be enough to buy the establishment from the owners, or do something worthwhile.

  The course was set: they would start in the bar, at the back, run out to the sidewalk, circle the block once, and return to the bar. It wouldn’t be easy to watch. Pete and his horse-long legs would come around the corner upright and easy, and her father would follow with his cheeks puffed, his face carmine red, his legs churning. Everyone gathered would watch an era end.

  “Give me a glass of Irish whiskey,” her father said, gently rapping his knuckles on the bar. “I’m warming up.” He took his shirt off, then his undershirt. He resembled a bare-knuckled fighter. Pete tried to smirk, but he looked unnerved. Her father put his foot up on a stool. There were packs of muscle shifting under his skin, and when he leaned over to tie his shoe, his back looked broad enough to play cards on.

  “Jimmy,” he called out with mock sharpness. “Get those kids out of the street. I don’t want to run any of them down.”

  Guys laughed, exchanged looks. Her father and Pete toed a line in the back of the bar. The bartender counted down from three and they headed through a crowded gauntlet on either side, reaching the door at the same time. Her father shifted his massive body laterally like a darting bull and crushed Pete in the doorframe. They never made it outside. Pete staggered, out of breath before he’d even begun.

  “They broke at the gate,” her father said as he returned to his stool, heat radiating visibly off his naked skin, a slight glower to him, a hint of violence in his eyes, the pride of a clan chieftain in his heavy step. She watched his friends retrieve their money and felt their eyes on her long, lean body, which her work suit clung to in the summer evening heat. They regarded her appreciatively, with a slightly wistful longing. She was the chieftain’s daughter, and she’d married outside the clan.

  They hadn’t won anything, but they hadn’t lost anything either—neither money nor their idea of Big Mike. Her father had played Pete’s game, but by his own rules. It was a Solomonic solution, and she thought sadly of the difference he would have made with his gift for inspiring men if he’d been born into another life.

  10

  Ed was an expert on the brain. His subspecialty within the field of neuroscience was psychopharmacology, specifically the effects of psychotropic drugs on neural functioning. While doing his dissertation research, he ran an experiment in the aquaria of the Department of Animal Behavior at the American Museum of Natural History, studying the relationship between the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and learning in the black-chinned West African mouthbrooder fish, whose female laid eggs and whose male spat sperm at them and gathered them, then heated them under its tongue. Ed housed them individually in small aquaria in a greenhouse whose temperature was maintained at 26°C, and performed experimental tests in a separate room at the same temperature, injecting them with drugs that either enhanced or depressed action. The fish saw a red light, and if they didn’t jump over a barrier in five seconds, they received a shock. He was testing the effects of drugs on an organism’s ability to augment its decision-making abilities—in short, to learn.

  The subject of learning fascinated him. He told Eileen it was because it had happened almost by accident in his own life. “If I hadn’t run into that chemist at Kohnstamm’s,” he said, “I don’t know what would have become of me. I think about that narrow escape.”

  He experimented on the fish faithfully six days a week for almost a year, going in even when it was supremely inconvenient to do so, missing family functions and dinners with friends, leaning on colleagues for favors when she put her foot down and demanded a sliver of his time. He never slept enough, he seldom ate enough, and his back always hurt because he sat too long at his desk, but the way the work was coming together gave him so much energy that he glowed as he neared the end, so much so that she went shopping without him and put a coffee table, two couches, a pair of end tables, and some lamps on the American Express, thinking he’d be too happy to complain. Still, she was so nervous about the cost that a few weeks later, on the Saturday when the furniture was supposed to be delivered, she still hadn’t told him it was coming. She was relieved when he left early for his lab to gather data, and after the men delivered the pieces and hauled the old couch to the backyard until the Monday pickup, she sat on one of the couches, fretting over what she’d say. When the front door finally opened, she leapt to her feet, ready to spar, but Ed stepped in from the vestibule wearing that tranquil expression he wore when he was deep in his work, that made it look as if he’d just come from meditating. As he took in the room, she waited to see his face fall and readied to say she’d send it all back, but all he did was sit on the couch and say how nice and firm the pillows were compared to the lumpy ones they’d been living with. She’d never even thought he’d registered the lumps.

  He was about two weeks shy of having gathered all the data he needed when the heating plant broke down and the aquaria froze, killing his specimens.

  He didn’t smash equipment or hurl insults at the plant manager. He didn’t come home and make life miserable for her. He ate a quiet dinner and lay on the floor in the living room, between the glass-topped coffee table and one of the couches. She lay on the other couch reading to keep him company. She understood he didn’t want a pep talk. When it was time to turn in, she leaned over him and saw in his eyes not sadness but extreme fatigue. She knew enough not to tell him everything would be fine. She gave him a kiss on the lips, told him to come in soon, and shut the light off. He remained behind in the silent dark. He came to bed very late, and the next day he began again from the beginning, with new fish, because he needed a full set of data.

  When he finished a year later, he had worked on the fish for so long that the species’ scientific name had changed twice, from Tilapia heudelotii macrocephala to Tilapia melanotheron to Sarotherodon melanotheron melanotheron.

  “You never get anywhere worthwhile taking shortcuts,” he said when she asked how he’d gotten through that difficult time. She couldn’t have agreed more. Not taking shortcuts—not settling for someone inferior—was the only reason she’d been free to marry him.

  • • •

  They started going out again. Ed got them a membership at the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Once, when they were heading to the symphony, he picked a wounded fledgling off the sidewalk and carried it in his handkerchief for a few blocks, until he bowed to her protestations and deposited it in a planter. He gave her the silent treatment until they got home. When she was shutting off the light she said, “Good night, St. Francis of Assisi,” and he laughed despite himself and they made love and fell asleep.

  • • •

  In December of 1970 she headed to the city with Ed to see the window displays on Fifth Avenue. She was excited to see them, despite how corrosively ironic Ed had been about them the year before, when at one point in his jeremiad he’d called them “altars to consumer excess.” She wasn’t about to let his grousing spoil her enjoyment of a tradition she’d observed whenever she could since she’d first gone with her mother as an eleven-year-old.

  Ed refused to pay for a parking garage. It took them half an hour to find a spot, and they ended up on Twenty-Fifth and Seventh, almost a mile from Lord & Taylor. He refused to let them take a cab, even though she was wearing heels and it was twenty degrees out, with a wind that whipped up the avenue. The sun was setting, and store gates were being pulled down as if in protest of the cold. The sidewalks of Seventh Avenue were unusually empty. She noticed that most of the cabs that passed were occupied.

  As they neared the store, the sidewalks grew more crowded, the bells of the Salvation Army collectors jingling on each corner. They saw a pack gathered in front, which quickened her step and made Ed sigh and slow down.

  She had been delighting in the scene of a golden retriever pulling at th
e corner of a wrapped gift when Ed—who had been munching his way toward the bottom of a little bag of roasted nuts—broke the spell.

  “These things seem here for the purpose of entertainment,” he said, “but really they’re here to get you to come in and part with your money.” He spoke in a breezy, careless way that suggested he believed a new understanding had sprung up between them. “They’re like organisms that have evolved elaborate decorative mechanisms to lure you in. People fall for it. It’s fascinating, actually.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “The bee orchid, for instance, has flowers that look like female wasps. Males try to mate with it, and in the process they get pollen on their feet and spread it around. It’s not about the window. It’s about pulling you into the store. It’s about getting you to leave with something.”

  She was attempting to concentrate on the little animatronic girl whose hand was traveling slowly to cover her mouth, which had fallen open at the sight of Santa Claus’s ebony boots disappearing up the chimney.