Good Trouble

by Joseph O'Neill

  “No, I completely understand. But you’ll have no objection to accepting this”—Tom hands him a five-dollar bill—“as a token of my appreciation?”

  “Tokens of appreciation are always welcome,” the attendant says. “But I don’t expect or ask for anything. No, sir.”

  “No, no, no,” Tom says quickly.

  The three friends eat chicken fajitas in an airport restaurant. A final computation of all monies is made, with paper and pencil. Aaron asks for a special dispensation regarding the double payment of the valet, and gets it. They fly to Miami, change planes, and fly home to New York. On this final leg, they are seated together for the first time. As happened on the outward flight, they are starved and dehydrated by American Airlines, which offers them no more than a tiny bag of pretzels and one soft drink for the three-hour journey. To relieve hunger and boredom, they buy five-dollar mini-bottles of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, messily split the Sunday Times, and make anagrams of a hard-on product—Levitra—that’s advertised in huge spreads in the newspaper. Mick, an ad copywriter, barely has to scan the word in order to instantly to come up with evil rat and vile art and I travel. “Fucking Venti,” Aaron says in admiration. A single cab zigzags through Brooklyn to their respective homes. Tom is back with his family by nine o’clock.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, a Monday morning, Tom is on Fifth Avenue, walking to work, when he hears, piping out of the loudspeakers of a department store, none other than Billy Joel—which, given his death, makes perfect sense. He extracts his phone from his breast pocket and calls Suzanne.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he says. “Did you hear about Billy Joel dying?”

  “No. He died?”

  “Yeah. On Friday.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen anything about it. Wait a minute.” Suzanne, who is already at work, consults people in the office. “No,” she says, “nobody’s heard anything about it. Are you sure?”

  “I saw something on the CNN ticker about Billy Joel, aged fifty-five. I’m assuming there’s no other reason for him to be on the news.”

  Suzanne passes on what Tom has said. He hears indistinct talk followed by his wife’s clear peal of laughter. “He didn’t die, honey,” she says. “He got engaged. To a twenty-two-year-old or a twenty-six-year-old, we’re not sure which.”

  “Oh, right,” Tom says. “Jesus, I went through the whole weekend thinking he was dead.”

  “Well, he isn’t,” Suzanne says. “Quite the opposite.”

  Tom continues walking down Fifth Avenue. It’s cold. Ice is piled up everywhere. He has twelve days left before he’s forty. Tom perceives—as, apprehending the anniversary as a deadline, he begins to walk faster—that he must in the meantime understand, somehow or other, to soap himself with the shriveling world.

  Ponchos

  ◇

  When William Mason made a daily habit of eating breakfast in the dark, tunnel-like interior of the Starlight Restaurant, he was thankful that his parents had called him William. William abbreviated to Bill, and Bill, he believed, was a name to stand a fellow in good stead at the Starlight, a twenty-four-hour diner that served men with no-shit, no-flies-on-him names such as Frank and Steve and Champ. But for all the Starlight regulars cared, William discovered, he may as well have been called Mavis. None of them spoke to him, not even after nine months of spending five mornings a week on the same revolving counter-stool, one of a half dozen bolted fast to the ground like every other stick of Starlight furniture, as if (William reflected one January day) the diner were afloat at sea and not grounded in Manhattan, New York.

  No sooner had William conceived this notion than he was dissatisfied with it. As he joined the other solo breakfasters at the counter, he devised a more elaborate nautical idea of the Starlight: as a dockside inn frequented by men waiting for their ships to come in—waiting even as they understood that, for every tattered skiff of fulfillment that entered the harbor, there set forth a fleet laden with new if-onlys, why-oh-whys, and where-is-she-nows.

  Ruminations of this kind were typical of William Mason, a man so compulsively prone to extravaganzas of figurative self-absorption that his wife had only the day before accused him of “living in a fucking private joke landscape.”

  “Joke landscape?” William said. He frowned as he thought about the conceit.

  Elisa Ramirez threw a vintage cocktail shaker in the direction of her husband’s head. On the shaker were inscribed the words:

  HAPPY DAYS AT THE CENTURY OF PROGRESS, CHICAGO.

  The cocktail shaker was a multiply commemorative article. Manufactured as a souvenir of the 1934 Chicago Exposition, it also functioned as a relic of Elisa’s grad-student days at Columbia University. The cocktail shaker had been the main subject of her dissertation.

  Applying Prownian close-reading techniques, Elisa had unpacked the beverage mixer’s sociohistorical content with the same ferocity and magical skill with which (in William’s opinion) she sometimes conjured rabbits of wrongdoing from the top hat of her husband’s ostensibly blameless conduct. Her contention (as she’d explained all those years ago to William, a fellow-student on the point of abandoning a Ph.D. thesis titled Prufrock, Pale Ramon, and the Predicaments of Presumption) was that the cocktail shaker embodied a false promise of leisure and escape. How could the carefree realm of the aperitif, with its happy hours and drinks parasols, its egg whites and angostura and curaçao and maraschino cherries, its mud in your eye and its bottoms up—how, in the Great Depression, could it represent anything other than a dream world for the vast majority of Americans? Elisa suggested that this cloudcuckoolandishness was captured by the movie-within-the-movie in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which the character played by the character played by Jeff Daniels—an archaeologist embarking on a “madcap Manhattan weekend”—repeatedly proclaims his intention to consume a cocktail that he never gets around to drinking.

  Elisa invited William to her place in West Harlem to watch the movie and see for himself what she was driving at. The young academics took in the bittersweet comedy while mixing eye-openers. Following recipes engraved on the cocktail shaker, they sampled an Old-Fashioned, a Manhattan, and an Alexander. Finally and aptly, they knocked back a Between the Sheets. This intoxicating carnal ritual—noggin and snoggin’, as William was pleased to call it—survived, with diminishing vitality, for two years. By the time five years (two of them matrimonial) had passed, the cocktail shaker no longer saw active service. Propped against a pile of cookbooks and gathering a sticky coat of cat’s hair and cooking fumes, it functioned (in William’s mind) as a totem expressive of the couple’s enduring commitment, through the cooped-up years, to each other and to the idea of the Great Love.

  As he ducked the whizzing missile, William was alive to the profane dimensions of what was happening. His first thought was to check on the damage suffered by the shaker, which had bounced off a wall with a hollow crash.

  “Fuck the shaker!” Elisa shouted clairvoyantly. “This is not about a fucking shaker!”

  William straightened with a submissive air. She was right, of course. But he could not refrain from viewing the incident as roughly representational of the problem confronting the couple. The emptiness of the hurled object; the unhappiness of its trajectory; the fruitlessness of its terminus: it all added up to an analogy for their unsuccessful attempts, these last two years, to produce a child.

  Then William saw that Elisa was weeping, and, detecting an unspoken invitation, he approached his wife and held her and waited for the storm to pass.

  For this was how William apprehended episodes of this kind: as akin to the rains that fall daily on an otherwise sunny and pleasant place. The fertility treatments had given Elisa a decidedly tropical temperament—which was funny, since he was himself (in the non-climatic sense) tropistic. “Tristes tropiques,” he whispered into Elisa
’s hair.

  * * *

  —

  But the following morning, even as he took retrospective pleasure from this phrase, he could not help feeling that his grasp of the situation, however figurally attractive, was shaky; and on his way into the city he was pained afresh by the powerful resignation with which Elisa, after she’d untangled him from her, turned to prepare dinner (soup with scallops). Precisely how, William wondered as he emerged from the subway and leaped over a frozen curbside pool, should he take her remark about his private joke landscape? After all, the alternative was to dwell on the bare heath of literalism; the alternative was howl, howl, howl. Could she not see this?

  As often happened when his thoughts touched on this question, there entered William’s mind the image of the fish roundabout at the San Francisco municipal aquarium, which he’d visited with Elisa’s sister and her kids. The fish roundabout consisted of a ring-shaped tank of seawater in which pelagic creatures from San Francisco Bay sped by in a counterclockwise direction. William stood silently in the dark of the viewing area as large and small swimmers orbited him. Gangs of Pacific mackerel and yellowtail jack came around again and again. A solitary stingray, looking harassed and out of place, flapped clumsily into the one-knot current. No sharks, William noted. He contemplated the rush of fish from a metaphysical perspective. These circuiteers were incapable of seeing, let alone comprehending, the nonaquatic dimension in which he stood. Ignorant of the nature and limits of their element, cluelessly and helplessly circumfluent, they went onward, for the entertainment of unimaginable extraneous beings, without the slightest prospect of progress or illumination or salvation. William filled with despair. The fish roundabout was an unimprovable metaphor of the human condition.

  The revelation compelled William to abandon his artistic activities, which was to say, his nocturnal attempts to write poems. As a poet, he was animated by mankind’s relationship to the spatial and temporal infinities. Since the fish roundabout constituted the last word, or image, on these themes, silence was the only intellectually honest course of action open to him. William toyed briefly with the idea of constructing a fish roundabout of his own and displaying it as an artistic installation, but he lacked the vocational urge and desperation for fame that were necessary to realize such a project. Released from the ambitions of high art, he applied himself more contentedly to his work as a copy editor. His office was on West Twenty-third Street, a hundred yards from the Starlight Restaurant.

  “Menu?” said the man behind the counter, George.

  “Toasted muffin, extra jelly, decaf black,” William said heavily.

  Every day George asked William the same question, and every day William gave the same answer. What would have to happen, William wondered, for George to ask “Usual?”

  William looked down the counter at three members of this class. Two stools away was Johnny, who had painted the photographic depiction of Ted Williams that hung in a corner of the Starlight. Beyond Johnny was a septuagenarian in a New York Mets jacket—Donnie—and beyond Donnie was another old-timer, whom William knew only as the magician. A thin, desperate-looking man—he made William think of the dying Charles Schulz—the magician always carried a pack of cards in a holster attached to his belt. William had seen him do tricks only once, and they were astonishing. Afterward, when asked how he did it, the magician replied, with noticeable bitterness, “Hard work and practice.”

  William removed a copy of the Times from his otherwise empty computer bag. As he leafed through the newspaper, he listened in on the conversation between the other men.

  Donnie and George were mumbling to each other about odds: Donnie was a bookie, and George (who thirty years ago had abandoned his post as a border guard for the Bulgarian army and defected across the Greek frontier) liked to bet. Johnny, meanwhile, was delivering the angry monologue that invariably accompanied his reading of the New York Post, a harangue typically directed at one or more of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Latrell Sprewell, Alec Baldwin, Sean “Puffy” Combs/“P. Diddy,” Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Tom Daschle, personages who day after day popped up in the pages of the newspaper like maddening fairground targets. William did not hold Johnny’s tiresome pronouncements against him because Johnny could be entertaining to an eavesdropper, albeit in a disgustingly frank and self-pitying way. It was Johnny who’d propounded the monkey test: if a woman’s enthusiasm for sex was exceeded by her enthusiasm for seeking out a man’s pimples, blackheads, overlong mole hairs, dangerous-looking freckles, and pluckable gray hairs—for, in Johnny’s words, “picking at you like a fucking monkey”—then it was time to “shut that shit down.”

  Suppressing a query that had surfaced in his mind—what if one’s wife was uninterested in both sex and personal grooming?—William recalled a test he had himself devised: the Ibsen challenge. If a romantically promising other could not name a play by Ibsen or at least display some familiarity with the Ibsen phenomenon, there was no point going any further. William knew or cared very little about Ibsen, but the unexpectedly fierce dismay he’d once been caused by a date’s complete ignorance of the literary giant had taught him something very important: he could never fully respect a woman who lacked knowledge of the father of modern drama.

  Elisa had known all about Henrik Ibsen. His birthplace, she informed William (who had casually brought up When We Dead Awaken), was Skien, the Norwegian town whose name was related to the Old Norse noun that gave us “ski.” William felt an internal chute-like movement. This was, he understood, love’s falling.

  When William finished with the sports section and his toasted muffin, his neighbors became animated. They were talking about the mysterious appearance on their TVs of a free pornography channel. Donnie had been the first to pick up the rogue broadcast. He’d tipped off the magician about it a few days earlier.

  It made William uneasy to hear old men giggling about dirty movies.

  Johnny was also bothered. “What the fuck’s the matter with you guys? How old are you, seventy-five, seventy-seven? And you’re still beating off to this shit?”

  Donnie jiggled his fist. The magician laughed.

  “Let me ask you something,” Johnny said. “You still thinking about women like you used to? They still drive you nuts?”

  The magician, a discreet man, raised his eyebrows.

  Donnie said, “It don’t go away.”

  “Oh boy,” Johnny said. “That’s just terrific.” He had a drooping, graying mustache, thinning black hair, and a colorless and shadow-stained face. He ran his thumbs along the inside of his waistband to release the pressure on his gut. This was a signal that William recognized: Johnny was about to ventilate a theory. “Now hear me out,” Johnny said. “You got women’s rights, OK? Women suffer because they’re exploited like sex objects. OK. We’re OK with that. But here’s what I want to know: what about men’s rights? That’s right: men’s rights. We’re the ones they’re bombing with the sex. We’re the ones being targeted here. Right? It’s all aimed at us. You can’t walk down the street or listen to the radio without somebody pushing tits in your face. You seen what they put on billboards?” Johnny clawed at the air with one hand. “Scratch, scratch, scratch. The magazines, the websites, the cosmetics companies, the women: they’re all in on it. They all got us simmering. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re programmed like fucking dogs. We’re going to respond whether we like it or not. We’re talking millions of years of evolution.” Now Johnny’s speech had assumed the fluency of outrage. “And it’s all about money. Did you ask for porn on your TV? No. But guess what? It’s there anyway. Can you not watch it? Course you can’t. You gotta watch it. You’re a man. You’re an animal. See what I’m saying? I don’t care if you’re the frigging Pope; you were born to jerk off. Right? They’re taking our natural instincts, and they’re twisting them for profit. We’re the victims here. The billion-dollar Viagra industry? The billio
n-dollar porn industry? That’s our fucking billions of dollars.”

  Donnie winked at the magician.

  Johnny said, “Yeah, that’s right, wink, you goddamn felon.”

  Donnie, who did not like to be reminded of his past, took a sip of chamomile tea. Looking at the magician, he said, “You don’t fuck around. You fuck around and you get caught? You know what you got coming to you.”

  Johnny said, “What are you talking about? This isn’t about me and Daleen—although as a matter of fact, now that you’re bringing it up, as a matter of fact she made no allowance for me being a man. She gave me no leeway at all. One strike, that’s all I got. Zero tolerance. That’s what I’m talking about. Women don’t have the slightest fucking idea what it’s like for men. Nobody talks about the struggle we have to go through, every day. There’s a conspiracy of silence. Nobody gives us any credit for dealing with the shit we have to deal with. That’s right,” Johnny said. “We should get credit for all the women we don’t sleep with.”

  The magician and Donnie started laughing as if they were at a comedy show. Donnie said, “Yeah, I’m just fighting them off. I’m a real hero. I should get a medal.”

  The magician said something under his breath. This started them off again, laughing so hard that Donnie had to get off his stool.

  Johnny crumpled his napkin in disgust. “What’s the point in discussing anything with you people.”

  * * *

  —

  This was the moment when Johnny swung round on his stool and spoke for the first time to William Mason. He said, “So how about it, bud? You with me on this one?”

  William was too surprised to immediately respond. Then he said, “I think it’s an interesting question.”