Though incommunicado, Billy and I have remained friended on Facebook. That’s how I know he’s still in the tristate area, working as a regional sales director, which sounds hopeful. As does the fact that he’s married, with two daughters. But I really don’t want to be in touch with him again, not unless it’s some kind of emergency.
Hey, Billy. All good? Looks like I’m back in NYC. Samantha and I have split. Long story. Not good. Can’t talk about it without beers. Listen, can you do me a solid? I’m in a hole.
Then I type out my plea for a reference letter, and send it, and go to bed.
Travis I’ve texted:
No worries. Stand by.
* * *
—
This isn’t totally disingenuous. I’ve sent messages to two trustworthy people in Portland: my old startup comrade Halil; and Courtney, who is first and foremost Samantha’s friend but who I hit it off with independently, I feel. It’s not ideal to have out-of-towners as my referees, since there may be a perception that they won’t truly grasp the demanding norms that New York co-operators abide by, but whatever.
Cousin Paul, in response to my reminder, e-mails:
Hi Rob so sorry about this could you write it for me?? Crazy busy…I’ll sign off to whatever you write…Thx…
In the morning, I see that Halil has still not replied. That’s not what I expected. When the startup finally collapsed, which happened roughly at the same second that my marriage did, Halil was the guy who went in for farewell eye-locking, chest-bumping, and phrases like “blood brother” and “muchacho.”
Courtney has gotten back to me:
Rob, this is difficult for me to write.
This past year I’ve been very close to Sam as she has gone through this difficult time. She has shared many things with me about what her experience has been. I have to say that I’ve found it painful on many levels. I feel bad that I wasn’t able to see what was going on and that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. I owe her my focus now. So I’m going to have to recuse myself from what you’re asking for. This doesn’t reflect on you at all. This is just about me taking ownership of what I need to do.
What does this e-mail even mean? She wants to recuse herself? Who is she, Sonia Sotomayor?
I can only control the things I can control. Like writing Paul’s letter. That’s something I can take care of right away.
But patting myself on the back, even with an alter ego, is challenging. For support, I go online. There I find plenty of helpful pro forma character references, even though they’re for people in situations different from mine—i.e., people who are applying for jobs or internships or fellowships, not people seeking admission to a residential building.
I’ve got to say, I’m a little taken aback. I accept that I’m looking at invented documents and persons, but we’re in the realm of realism, surely, and the referrers, even if concocted, are quite outstanding. Joe is stellar and can-do and masterly and explains complex systems very well. Mary has grit and gentleness, compassion and superb forensic skills. Arturo is loyal, determined, and reasonable. The most powerful commendations tell little stories: how Emily showed terrific leadership during the power outage; how Ken handled an ultra-demanding client with the sensitivity and effectiveness that have come to be expected of him. The letter in support of Annie, written by her high school teacher, is actually moving in its depiction of a young woman’s industriousness and precocious commitment to social justice. There are a lot of ethical, pleasant, and dependable people notionally out there. It’s intimidating, frankly. I had no idea the bar was so high.
When I get back from work, a tiny bit drunk after a few shots with Tariq, there’s a FedEx packet leaning against the door, and I see that it’s for me, and I rip the thing open. It contains an envelope. My name appears on the envelope, in Billy’s graceful handwriting.
I get myself a beer and take a seat at Paul’s kitchen table.
Billy: when he came east, he stayed with Samantha and me in Williamsburg until he found a room in Manhattan. Brooklyn was out of the question; he had to have a Manhattan address. It was a question of dignity, I suppose, as was his insistence on having “wheels.” He was probably my only New York friend with a car. This came to an end when he was involved in a small collision on the FDR and had no option but to plead guilty to DWUI (weed) and to accept a one-year revocation of his license. I accompanied Billy to court, wearing a suit and tie in solidarity. Afterward we lit up cigarettes on the steps of the courthouse, even though I’d quit smoking. We had a laugh at the expense of the prosecutor, an unfortunate-looking guy who I’d spotted in the bathroom, mysteriously throwing up. Not much else was talked about. It was a sunny day, and we sat next to each other in our suits and shades, smoking and feeling good and, in our minds, looking good. There was something totally canned and anachronistic about the moment, of course, but it was special nonetheless, and for me the highlight of our friendship’s I’d have to say tragic New York phase.
The envelope is high-quality ivory, as is the letter paper, which has been folded into perfect thirds. Billy’s really gone the whole hog. It being an official document, I wash my hands before I open and read it:
FUCK. YOU. ASSHOLE.
OK—that’s not nice. That is really quite hurtful.
Although, when I visualize Billy scheming and finessing all the details—the insult, the fancy notepaper, the same-day delivery—I have to smile.
It is with great pleasure that I commend Robert Karlsson to you. Robert and I have cohabited in my small apartment for several months. In all candor, it has been an entirely harmonious and agreeable experience. Robert has at all times been quiet, helpful, considerate, tidy, and charming—everything one could hope for in a fellow resident. This comes as no surprise, since I have known Robert and his family for over twenty years. I vouch for him without hesitation or qualification. Any co-operative should feel fortunate to have him.
Please feel free to contact me at any time to discuss this matter further.
Yours truly, Paul Robson.
How easy was that? I’d even say it was enjoyable. And I don’t think it’s bullshit. Put it this way: I very much doubt that those whom it concerns will complain, down the road, that they were fundamentally misled, because what’s fundamental is what I’m like, not whether some statement about me is a lie that’s either white or off-white. I honestly believe that I’m someone who doesn’t make trouble, certainly not for my neighbors. To Whom It May Concern: Relax. Rob Karlsson will not make your life a misery. I have known him longer than just about anybody, and I should know. This is the guy who, as a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, went on a two-day hiking trip in the Quetico wilderness with Simon Burch, and carried both his and Simon’s rucksacks on the five-mile trek back to base camp after Simon hurt his back. This is the guy who wouldn’t squeal on Wally Waters after Wally had pushed him down the stairs and the principal demanded to know exactly what had happened. This Rob Karlsson is the Bobby Karlsson who pretended he’d hurt his throwing arm so that Carlos Rodriguez could finally pitch an inning. This is whom we’re concerned with here. With the first boy Amanda McAteer kissed, who never told anybody about it because Amanda didn’t want it to get around. Who in college volunteered for Citymeals on Wheels (albeit unreliably and briefly). Who definitely has no criminal record. Who is something of a sinner and a screwup, definitely, but whose “heart is in the right place,” according to a certain person with credibility on this issue. Who is co-operative by nature, as nobody can deny. Who refrains from unkindness when commenting online, even when drunk and using a pseudonym. Who was a good kid, his father once said. Who when little accompanied his father on rambles, and grew interested in wildflowers, learning about the common yarrow, the jack-in-the-pulpit, and the spoon-leaf sundew, which he remembers only because of their impressive names and not because they are still identifiable by
him, which they’re not. Who liked most of all to walk in the forest, in fact liked the word “forest,” though not as much as the word “glade,” and was always asking his father, Dad, is this a glade?
Promises, Promises
◇
In memory of David Foster Wallace
They’d promised an ocean view, and they’d delivered. Down below was indeed the ocean, with waves that again and again made little white tassels, as if what might actually be on view were a vast, vastly repetitive unfurling of blue and green rugs. It was six in the morning. Six surfers, sitting on their boards, had the water to themselves.
Fritz shouted out, “Coffee?” and Anne, twisting, shouted in, “No thanks.”
She turned back in time to see the sextet spring up and go. Then she saw that farther out, much farther out, the water held a little black head. The swimmer was going directly away from the shore. Anne watched him—“him,” because she perceived something masculine about the movement of the arms. He kept going out, out.
“How far would you say he is?” she asked Fritz.
Fritz took a slurp of coffee. “I’d say half a mile.” If Fritz sounded expert, which he did, it was because back in Tucson they owned a lap pool in which every morning Fritz swam seventy-two laps, which came to a mile, he reckoned, and Anne wasn’t about to check his calculations. She never swam in the lap pool. She found the blue coffin of water oppressive, just as she found oppressive the gym next door to her downtown office, a tank of light in which a row of runners nightly ran toward the window.
They watched the swimmer. “Every beach has one,” Fritz said. “It’s compulsory under the Beach Dramatis Personae Act of 1972. There’s the three hot chicks walking in the surf, there’s the kid with the bucket, and there’s the guy swimming out toward the horizon.”
Anne, who had heard variations on this joke before, said nothing. Her attention was on the seafarer. He was completely on his own. Every stroke out was a stroke he’d have to take back, therefore every stroke counted double. But she wasn’t counting.
The Death of Billy Joel
◇
For his fortieth birthday, Tom Rourke organizes a golf trip to Florida. He e-mails a total of ten men, but only three say yes. A few, including some of his oldest and, historically and theoretically, best friends, do not even summon the energy to reply. Two of the three who agree to join him, Aaron and Mick, are his regular golfing partners in New York and friends of only a few years’ vintage. Only the final member of the quartet, David, was at college with Tom back in the eighties. David now lives in Chicago. Tom hasn’t seen David in a long time, and hanging out with him is one of the things he’s most looking forward to.
It would have surprised the Tom of twenty years ago, when he and his contemporaries clambered aboard the world with a piratical energy he now finds marvelous, to have learned that only one of his undergraduate shipmates would answer such an important summons. But the Tom of today is not surprised, or even disappointed. A foursome is perfect for a golf trip. And if he is to walk the plank into his forties—and it seems, a little incredibly, that he must—then Aaron and Mick and David, who are more or less his own age, will make fine witnesses. Tom is not too concerned about the milestone, at least not yet, because he has almost a month of his thirties left. The only moment of alarm comes when his mother, on the phone from Connecticut, says, “Let me tell you, the years between forty and fifty go by in a flash.” The remark both scares and disappoints him: she has failed in her never-ending duty, thinks Tom, who not without guilt has created two children of his own, to make the business of life and death seem less frightening to him.
Tom makes all the arrangements. He books the hotel rooms and the tee times and three round-trip tickets to Tampa/St. Petersburg. (David is combining the Florida outing with a business trip to Nashville, and will make his own travel arrangements.) The New York–Tampa–New York tickets are only $230, taxes included, but that does not stop his companions from wondering out loud, in the taxi to LaGuardia, if Tom might not have gotten a cheaper deal. “I got them on Travelocity,” Tom says. “They were the cheapest available.” He is handing out the sheets of paper, printed out from the Web, that now pass for airplane tickets.
Aaron says, “You didn’t try JetBlue? JetBlue doesn’t turn up on Travelocity.”
“Yeah, well, these are the tickets I got,” Tom, a little vexed, says. Aaron knows more than he does about food, bars, music, anime, cocktails, clothes, and, Tom has now been reminded, the Internet. Of course, Aaron has the time to investigate such things, now that he’s separated from his wife and son and spending much of his time with a brand-new twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan girlfriend.
The three New Yorkers fly off, separately seated in window seats. Each, it seems to Tom, is glad to be left alone to moon out of a thick plastic porthole undisturbed. Exactly what is being mulled over, Tom cannot say. The men’s encounters are almost wholly confined to golf games, and the possibilities of self-revelation are few in the introspective cosmos of each round, in which the players, roving as couples in buzzing carts, deal mainly in tactful silences, terse or cheerful words of forgiveness and encouragement, and cackling monetary calculation. Tom presumes—not overly gloomily, he thinks—that his friends are grappling with the shaming inward puzzle that, in the last year or so, has come to preoccupy him: how the principal motions of his life—those involving his tolerant and industrious wife, his daughters, his decently affirmative work—have largely, and for reasons he cannot put his finger on, been reduced to a mere likeness of vitality. Which perhaps explains his and his friends’ increasingly inordinate gratefulness for golf. Certainly, being out on the course is one of the few times Tom is convinced of his so-called place in the universe—convinced even though he understands that this adventure with golf, a cliché, expands the funnel of triteness through which his existence ever more rapidly pours.
Queens, when they fly over it, is all snow and inky roads, a newspaper made panoramic. The Hudson, Tom next sees, is mottled by large, semitransparent plaques of ice. It has been a freezing, miserable start to 2004, the second coldest January in half a century, and he feels an enormous relief to be migrating south. At Tampa, the plane swoops around a bay made exotic by spectacular swirls of turquoise. The men all crane to see out, for it’s their first time in Tampa. The land down there looks watery and flat and generously quadrangular: the roofs, the lots, the blocks, the lagoons, all have a squarish spaciousness to them. It is a gloomy morning but not, according to the pilot, a cold one. Tom remembers how earlier in the month, when the temperature fell to one degree, the monstrous cold was uncannily invisible in the sunlit city; it agitates him, this recollection of the vicious unseen. Then he spots the ribbon-like fairways of a golf course, innocuous and pointless-looking from the plane, and is calmed.
At the airport, things go well. Their clubs and bags are practically the first to emerge on the carousel—Tom feels a lurch of emotion at the sight of his small brown leather overnight bag bravely holding its own among thuggish black cases—and they have no trouble finding the Hertz office. Although Tom has booked a midsize sedan, Aaron secures an upgrade to an SUV. They argue mildly on the drive to Clearwater about SUVs and their propensity to kill other road users and flip over, but underneath it all they are excited: to everybody’s disbelief, none of them has ridden in an SUV before. The most pleasing feature of the vehicle is its satellite radio. Neither Tom nor Mick knows how to work it but Aaron, of course, does. He finds a rap channel—fucking this and motherfucker that, which satellite radio is apparently free to broadcast—but Mick, who has taken the front passenger seat on the grounds that he’s bigger than Tom, decides that something more pleasant is called for. He opts for an eighties station. They endure a few minutes of Hall & Oates and then a song featuring one of those watery saxophone solos, the three men agree, that they never want to hear again so long as they live. Mick presses the button on
the satellite radio gadget and they listen to hits from the seventies. The first song up is “Last Dance,” by Donna Summer.
Tom recalls the parties he went to in middle school, where “Last Dance” signaled the last dance. Even now, the song gives him an unpleasant feeling of time running out. Next comes Rod Stewart, who Tom has always regarded as a joke. Nevertheless, he is overwhelmed by Rod singing “You Wear It Well.” Tom thinks of his sister, who loved that song, and is now in a marriage in Arizona, and is lost to him in all kinds of ways. When the SUV comes to the end of the causeway that leads into Clearwater, Billy Joel begins to sing. Tom has never really warmed to Billy Joel. He voices no protest when Aaron says, “I can’t listen to this,” and goes back to the rap station, or channel, or program, or whatever it’s called on satellite radio.
The three golfers arrive at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel and Spa. Tom has booked rooms at a discount rate offered by Hotels.com that is slightly more expensive, they will discover, than the rate the Belleview Biltmore itself would have offered. There is a moment of slight tension as the men thriftily debate whether or not to make use of the valet parking (three dollars plus tip): on the one hand it’s raining; on the other hand there are free regular parking spaces not far from the hotel entrance. What the hell, they decide, and they take the SUV right up to the hotel and delegate Aaron to pay the valet. They don’t yet know that they will be charged a parking charge irrespective of whether the valet parks the car for them or not, and that when they check out they will be charged three dollars on top of the six dollars they paid the valet.
Good Trouble Page 6
