We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  • • •

  When he entered the lobby of the building on Park Avenue, he beheld a scrawny kid in an ill-fitting doorman’s uniform looking as if he was playacting in his father’s clothes, and another in a porter’s outfit giving a sopping mop a desultory pass over the tiles. “Where did you go to high school?” he asked the kid at the control panel, and he cringed to see that familiar mix of deference and condescension in the kid’s eyes that said that this was a pit stop for him. The kid confirmed his suspicion: there had been a steady stream of graduates since his own stint.

  He asked for Mr. Marku. The kid spoke into the intercom in a muted voice that strained after maturity, and a few minutes later Mr. Marku emerged from his apartment and hugged Connell with a warmth that caught him off guard. They went into his office. The fish in the tank were smaller now, but there were more of them, and they were more colorful.

  “You’re feeling well,” Mr. Marku said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re looking well. You finally shaved.” He rubbed his hand on his own chin, his eyes betraying his delight. “You came to pay me a visit.”

  “And to see about something,” Connell said. “About work.”

  Mr. Marku gave him a long look. “You’re finished college.”

  Connell clicked a pen on his thigh. “Yes.”

  “You want to come back here.”

  “I do,” he said. “I’m sorry about how things ended.”

  Mr. Marku waved his hand as if swatting away a fly. “Summer work.”

  “I was thinking beyond that,” Connell said.

  “You have other options. A smart kid like you.”

  “I’ll do a good job,” Connell said. “I’ll do a better job than before.”

  Mr. Marku stopped blinking, his lightly appraising gaze shifting into a harder stare.

  “These guys have wives, families, bills. It’s a steady paycheck for them, a respectable job. Maybe not for you.”

  “No more books,” Connell said. “I won’t read, I’ll wear the hat. I’ll shave every day. I know the ropes.”

  Mr. Marku shook his head. Maybe he was remembering Connell’s flaws—the tardiness, the way he nosed his way into people’s business in the building, how he sat down at every opportunity.

  “I’m not a kid anymore,” Connell said. “I get it now. I’ll never be late, I’ll keep my mouth shut and my nose down. I won’t ever sit down.”

  Mr. Marku laughed. “Even I sit down.” He shook his head again, but this time it seemed as if he was trying to work it out. “I don’t have anything full-time.”

  “Anything,” Connell assured him.

  “You want to look somewhere else with your college degree,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I like it here,” Connell said. “I don’t want to go to an office, sit at a desk all day, push paper.”

  A long silence followed, punctuated by a sudden frenzy of activity in the fish tank.

  “You’ll show up tomorrow at eleven forty-five,” Mr. Marku said finally.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Summer work,” he said, and Connell nodded. “That’s all I have. Then you have to move along.”

  • • •

  Connell covered for the doormen when they rotated out on vacation, or else worked by the service entrance gate, where he logged the entrances and exits of the crews and ran the A elevator line. He’d earned more money three years before, but since then the union had struck, and a concession had been made toward a hierarchy of seniority. The summer relief rate was now only eighty percent of the fully vested rate. He would have to wait a year to make what the other guys made, but he was fine with it; maybe they’d look at him as less of an upstart that way.

  He kept his face shaved and his hair cut short and wore the hat. The high school kids deferred to his seniority, regarding him with wary politeness. They saw him, he suspected, as a man who’d fallen through a sinkhole in his life.

  At the beginning of August, a beloved doorman and tribal elder known variously as Scottish John, the Scotsman, and Scottie, though never simply John, retired to a little salute of cake and coffee after thirty years on the seven-to-three shift, leaving a vacuum of leadership. Mr. Marku called Connell into his office.

  “Tell me how long you plan to stay here.”

  “How long can I? I thought my time ran out in September.”

  Mr. Marku luxuriated in a pause. “You’ve come back to make things right.”

  Connell felt an uneasy gratitude hearing this declaration and looked at Mr. Marku in silence.

  “You’ll show up tomorrow morning at six forty-five,” Mr. Marku said.

  “Scottie’s shift?”

  Mr. Marku nodded. Connell nodded back, feeling as if he’d graduated into adulthood. Seven-to-three was the only shift that presented a modicum of complexity, with shareholders leaving for work and school, nannies and contractors reporting for duty, packages arriving, and mailmen dumping teeming bags of mail to be sorted into little cubbyholes in a big rolling sorter.

  After a little while, he saw a subtle shift in the way the full-timers related to him, as if he were separating himself from the gently self-absorbed youths around him, whom he covered for whenever he could, masking their incompetence at practical matters and wringing what assistance he could out of them the way any doorman would. When they went to college in September, he felt he’d become one of the regular guys. The only difference between him and the other doormen was that during breaks he read books instead of the newspaper, and he didn’t bullshit in the locker room during lunch but took walks around the neighborhood, peered into the Guggenheim Museum, or sat at restaurants with a book open before him.

  He became a reliable fixture in the lobby. He knew all the shareholders’ names and apartment numbers. He knew the names of their kids who came home from college on the weekends. He knew their nannies’ names, the names of their masseuses who arrived with portable tables, the names of the lovers they never discussed. He kept their secrets and knew the front desk like a mole knows its burrow. As soon as a familiar figure appeared in front of the building, he had his finger on the button to hold open the appropriate elevator door. When someone unfamiliar approached, he had the intercom receiver in his hand, ready to put it to his ear and hit the proper buzzer.

  He could tell his presence made a few shareholders uncomfortable. It would have been easier for them if he spoke halting English or hadn’t gone to college or hadn’t gone to a good college or looked a little Balkan or Mexican. To avoid fanning the low flame of their unease, he talked as little as possible about himself. The summer kids were one thing; they caused a temporary ripple in the waters of class identity and were tolerated, even indulged. By collecting a decent check and moving along to good schools, sometimes even schools the shareholders’ children didn’t get into, they confirmed the rightness of the shareholders’ way of life and the durability of their meritocratic ideals.

  His mother pressed him about graduate school or another line of work. How could he explain that he’d never finished college, after all the money she’d spent on his education? He heard her talking as though through a body of water, the sounds muffled by some mysterious viscosity in his spirit. He felt his mind working slowly, his imagination straining. He felt himself becoming thicker all over.

  The one purely bright spot in his failed last year of college had been the time he’d spent tutoring Delores. He started giving time to Mr. Marku’s kid Peter, who was in eighth grade now and hadn’t gotten anything lower than a ninety since third grade. Connell drilled him on vocabulary words and sat him in the little room off the lobby and made him practice taking standardized tests.

  Over Thanksgiving break, the college freshmen dropped in like conquering heroes and asked to see Mr. Marku, who came out and gave them big hugs that made Connell unaccountably jealous. They deferred to Connell like a cool older brother, but he didn’t feel cool, and their condescension stung.

  He shared an apartment in Gr
eenpoint with a guy he’d met through Todd Coughlin, his old cross-country teammate, whom he’d run into at a concert at the Bowery Ballroom and who lived across the hall. In the evenings, he went to galleries, parties, shows. He dated a girl named Violet, an actress who worked as a bartender. She never questioned his choice of a job, only assumed it was a temporary solution while he figured out the creative direction of his life.

  He wrote a check to his mother to pay down some of the college loan principal. She ripped it up in front of him. “Don’t do this on my account,” she said. “I took this tuition on. Don’t think you can pay your loans back and not have to feel guilty about staying at that job.”

  He couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t gone back to school in the fall. Partly it felt as if returning would be a lie; as if it would be making a promise to himself, or to his mother, that he couldn’t keep. Then there was the matter of telling his mother he hadn’t graduated in the first place. It wasn’t that he didn’t care to do anything ambitious with his life; he just wasn’t sure what that ambitious thing was yet.

  After a few months had passed, the cup of guilt he’d been carrying around—for having gone away when his father needed him, for letting him go into a home—simply dried up, and he was left holding the empty vessel of his routine. He’d stopped feeling he was living someone else’s life, but he hadn’t started feeling he was living his own.

  He never checked his bank balance, just kept depositing the checks. There was always enough to pay the bills. He didn’t want to consider the long-term implications of his financial decisions, because the idea of so many years strung together—twenty years, thirty years, forty years—filled him with terror.

  In early January, when Peter Marku was admitted to Regis, Connell felt a surge of joy. He wanted Peter to grab the world by the throat, and he took pride in having helped him.

  He was invited to a celebratory dinner at the Markus’ apartment. He found it remarkable how quickly he forgot that it was his boss’s quarters. It could have been any Park Avenue apartment. A couple of times the intercom rang, and Mr. Marku rose to answer it. Tony brought a large envelope to the door. Otherwise, it was as if Connell were a valued tutor who had been invited into their home as a reward for his role in securing their son’s advancement. They ate ravioli, shared a couple of bottles of wine, and polished off a delicious cake that Mrs. Marku said was traditionally Albanian.

  As they sipped their coffee, Connell looked at Peter’s proud face. The boy’s gratitude was palpable, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t, because Connell knew the difference he’d made. That was when it struck him, all at once, that he would very much like to be a teacher. The thing to shoot for, of course, was a college professorship. Even if he managed to get into a decent doctoral program, though—he would have to get his BA first—he wasn’t sure he could survive it. He had enjoyed writing papers in college, but he didn’t have the zest for the professional side of academia—the specialization, the obsessive focus on publication. The most he could hope to do would be to teach high school. That wouldn’t do, though: every generation was supposed to do better than the previous one; every man was expected to surpass the achievements of his father. If he were to become a high school teacher, he would have to accept that he’d never be as successful as his father had been. His mother wanted big things from him, and instead he was manning the door at a building. But at least at the moment he inhabited something that must have looked to the outside world like a chrysalis. If he did this thing he was now imagining doing with his life—which he could now see he might enjoy quite a lot, this helping people through the thorny thicket of adolescence—he would not only remain a disappointment, he would be a bigger disappointment than ever.

  He was now a favorite son among the doormen. He had helped deliver the super’s kid to the doorstep of respectability. There would be privileges attached to his new status, something subtly easier about his experience on the job. And something like a home was available in the building—in the lobby, in the locker room in the basement, in this, the super’s apartment. He could come over for more of these dinners. He could live through Peter for at least four years, guiding his decisions, giving him the benefit of his perspective, sending him off to a good college on a scholarship. And when Peter came home from college, and later when he came up to visit from his loft apartment downtown, when he pulled up in front of the building in the company town car, dropping in for dinner with the folks, Connell would open the car door without resentment, because by then he would be old enough not to feel resentment anymore. All he had to do was bide his time. Everything would get simpler once enough years had passed. He wouldn’t need to go anywhere; he could stay in the lobby and the years would come to him.

  If you had to pick a perch from which to watch the world go by, Connell thought, the lobby wouldn’t be the worst—especially on quiet summer evenings when you had all the doors open and you got a nice breeze going and dusk was overtaking the city, the setting sun reflecting off the windows on the other side of Park.

  When Mr. Marku proffered the coffeepot, Connell held his hand over his mug. Mr. Marku looked determined as he asked if Connell were sure he didn’t want another cup. Mrs. Marku cut another piece of cake, and a queasy feeling of betrayal set in as Connell watched it cover his plate. He knew it was only cake, but it took on a strange, almost numinous power. It felt as if he would be giving up on an idea he had of how his life would go if he ate it. He would be declaring a new oath of allegiance. They were buying his future off for so little: a home-cooked dessert, the promise of further intimacy, a hint of family, an elder brother status of sorts. He had no energy to fight them, not when he had nothing better to argue for. His hand was drawn to his fork and he pressed down into the cake, watching a chunk separate from the rest. He took his hand away from the mug and let it be filled. Peter looked on quietly, taking everything in, an observer more than a person observed. Connell was surprised to suddenly see, with a piercing keenness of perception, that this was no longer his own experience. He was in the middle of an experience Peter was having. He hadn’t seen the usurper coming.

  96

  When Eileen was a teenager, she had dreamed of going to Death Valley and sleeping under the night sky and its canopy of stars. As a fifty-eight-year-old woman, she compromised and stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn, a luxury resort.

  She went in February, during the cool season, because she’d never been able to stand the heat and didn’t want to bake her pale skin in the sun. Despite this precaution, after the first day, when she took a walk out into the immense emptiness of the desert and felt spooked, she found herself indoors most of the time. She stayed on the resort’s grounds, splitting time between the dining rooms, the fireplace lounges, and a deck chair by the heated pool.

  One night she went with a group into the national park. She stood on the Racetrack Playa, which was cracked and dry enough to resemble the skin of a lizard. She didn’t need a guide, or even a rudimentary understanding of astronomy, to know what she was seeing when she looked up, because it was simply and unmistakably the Milky Way. The guide pointed out sailing stones: wandering rocks, he said, pushed along their lonely way by means that had never been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. One of the tourists held forth about how the movement of these rocks might be due to the effects of wind or ice. His grip on the science was shaky, Eileen could tell, his knowledge anecdotal and obviously derived from popular magazines, a pale shade of Ed’s earned erudition. Ed wouldn’t have spoken unless he knew what he was talking about. She would have enjoyed watching him soak it all up, the flickers of a theory in his gaze. She could have taken a lesson from his patience with this nattering tourist. He would have liked the way these stones left a long trail, never coming to rest, defying explanation.

  97

  On the first anniversary of his father’s death, Connell took the train to Bronxville to go to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. His mother picked him up at the station and drove to
Tryforos & Pernice.

  “Get something nice,” she said.

  He was overwhelmed by the choices and selected a premade, mixed-bouquet arrangement. When he returned to the car, his mother was annoyed.

  “They didn’t have any roses?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just got what looked nice.”

  “Those are mums and daisies. You should have gotten roses.”

  “You didn’t say anything about roses.” His mother looked genuinely upset. “I can go back and get roses.”

  “No, those are fine,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t know the difference anyway. He probably would have picked the same ones you did.”