Nonetheless, we live in the moment, and the handing down of pain defines Jeff’s fatherhood.
The way that Mayor Sophinisba Breckinridge’s policies affected Jeff’s damaged life was that, in the past, he would have been financially responsible for trying to fix the kids. Since he was inept, he never would have had the money, and Dominick and Freddy would have been detritus in the sea of life. But now, with the new Mediserve System, Jeff was not the only person who had to cough up the cash for the consequences of his earlier inactions. Others would chip in. So Dominick and Freddy actually got the treatment they needed and, therefore (under the new system), deserved. Simply by having been born.
That’s why Jeff was such a wreck at the time Claire fell in love with him. Not only was he his old bad self, but he also suffered from lack of penance in the face of all the pain he had caused.
Ah, the unforeseen nature of forgiveness without amends, it gives the transgressor nothing to wish for.
Fuck that bitch, Sophinisba, Jeff thought. She took all my responsibilities away. Now I have nothing to shirk or pretend.
It was a horrible burden, this loss. He felt excluded from a dynamic relationship to the world. Remember, treating someone awfully is still a relationship, no matter how paltry. For some people, inflicting undeserved pain is the only intimacy they are capable of. Take away their ability to hurt someone they should love, and then what?
Jeff lay on his dirty, embarrassing couch with Claire, all curled up in their post-shower towel. There was a drop of water on her exquisite shoulder. That is what life is all about at its best.
Stay here, he begged internally. Stay here. Stay in this ecstatic moment. Wait, don’t move. Why do they have to move?
She ran her fingers through his long, balding, boring hair before departing. He knew where she was going. To Harrison’s house.
Jeff saw himself being loved. It was cinematic, unreal. The woman departing, leaving her fingertips in his hair. It wasn’t a real feeling. It was someone else’s image. He felt love. He felt dead.
Since she loved him, why was she leaving? Because that’s what people do. They like to destroy. Jeff looked at her blankly, but inside he was a wreck. Claire thought she was benign, but she was genocidal. How could someone miss a detail like that about themselves?
What Jeff could not imagine was that his thin banal hair reminded Claire of her beloved late grandfather’s hair. And that, therefore, his head held meaning for her that did not originate with him.
Claire’s grandfather gave her unconditional love and a back rub every night. Jeff could have no idea of all the associations working in his favor. He thought all that love was for him alone. He squeaked out the words
I love you.
Jeff had not uttered that phrase in fifteen years—hence, two addicts for sons. Long ago, there had been another human walking the earth to whom he could honestly say “I love you,” but she was too much of an asshole to let him say it. She hung up the phone every time he called. FOR FIFTEEN YEARS. That’s how fearful she was of the truth. A Life Waster.
This time, with Claire, it came out of his mouth like blood.
It was devastating. It was something.
Being that close to tenderness and not being able to possess it. All because of that fucking Harrison Bond. His rival.
14. GIN
AS YOU CAN see, the lure of potential power had changed my mind completely. The entire focus of my consciousness had become the jet-ski set. The glams: Harrison, Claire, Ginette. They were all suddenly more important to me than I was.
Nadine noticed this occasionally, as she was busy focusing all her mental attention on Glick and the promise of being a pure artist.
Each of us was seduced by our fantasies of people who did not know us or think about us. Nadine and I were consumed by one-way spiritual relationships with imagined personalities who didn’t give a shit about either of us. We had marketed ourselves right out of our intimacy.
And that was somehow so comforting.
It was like being on TV instead of in front of it.
We pretended and pretended that other lives were our lives, and the days went by.
Meanwhile, back in Bombay, Harrison was still mad. Ginette was coming over to his pad in an hour and he still had not started his amazing second novel. Too much was at stake. Looking for inspiration, he picked up a jar of hand lotion and read the label:
1.7 fl oz
Hey, that might make a good title!
Or, how about a groovier version?
One Point Seven Flozz.
Now there is a prize-winning book.
He could coin a phrase, flozz, uh, a word.
Harrison picked up some copy for the next week’s issue of BNY. That stupid bitch (me!) had given him eight pages instead of eight words. What a moron. He knew it was a set-up. He’d cut it down to eight words himself, and then she’d yell prejudice.
Exhausted, he just took the first eight words. They were fine enough. No one would read them anyway; it was just a bone to The New Era.
Tired, he keyed them into the graphascope.
Passion interrupts me on the hot sun porch.
That would be a great title for his novel. It was so sensitive. It conveyed everything that he wanted to convey about himself. They’d call it Passion for short. But it wouldn’t have the risky weight of actually being named Passion. That would just be its nickname. Like Gatsby. Everyone forgets about The Great that preceded it.
What a fantastic manipulation of both reader and bookseller.
Coerced, Harrison began to type:
Passion Interrupts Me on a Hot Sun Porch
by Harrison Bond
CHAPTER ONE
I am not my sperm.
The doorbell rang. It was Ginette, just in time to ruin his
concentration.
But, hey, he felt, reaching for the bottle.
Ginette was the unique person in his life. She’d marked him. She’d promised him a permanence he didn’t need—then. The second he’d come around to the idea, she would pull out the rug. But because they were so wonderful as a public couple, no one would believe his version, and he’d be ruined, eternally.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
She’d change him into a mealy, needy, clingy man.
Then, only he would know that she was very, very mean. Everyone else would only notice her good manners and nice shoes.
This, consequently, would put Harrison on the defensive. He would have to be extra-specially nice and accommodating and do whatever she said just to keep her from hurting his feelings. Even the thought was exhausting. It dried him up. It made him unable to leave the relationship because he would never recover. Furthermore, it was tragic.
Everything else about her was right.
He waited. He was waiting, hoping every single morning that she would change her nasty ways. That she would no longer snap at him for wanting to look at the blurbs on the backs of book jackets and for being tired. Major crimes like that. If Ginette could just check it, they could both live happily ever after and polish each other’s mirrors. Why didn’t she want them to be happy together? He had no idea.
15. TWO
AS FOR ME, your Emcee?
When two people love each other, they sometimes forget to mention it. In those natural trancelike dry spells, strange transformations take place in the dark. For example, they could each find entirely new interior lives and change their relationship in a snap. Like that.
Nadine had fallen obsessively in love with a woman in her office, but she never mentioned it to me. Between Glick and Love Object Girl, letting me in on it slipped her mind. Many times she called this woman and then hung up the phone. Called her, and then hung up the phone.
Amazingly, this woman’s name was … Ginette.
Can you imagine? For weeks, my Nadine had only two thoughts: Glick, Ginette. Glick, Ginette. But she only said “Glick” in my presence.
Whenever I found her daydreaming, I would ask:
“Honey? What’s up with you?”
And she would recover by lying.
“Oh,” she’d hum, “I was just wishing that I could paint non-marketable images like Glick instead of sitting at a computer doing graphic design.”
Okay, so the first time I heard this, I thought it was true. A truthful wish. And I was moved by her tender smile.
But the next time it happened, something started to sink in, it was that sinking-in feeling. My lover’s dissatisfaction was before me like her cunt on a plate. Her frustration twitched. I suddenly grokked that she was walking around all day dreaming of a better, different life. I didn’t want her to go there alone. So I woke up, got off my own horse, and focused everything on what we both wanted for her,
I thought about her more and more. How could I help Nadine realize her dream? What could I do? We were in this life together, after all. And I began to look differently at my own day. I tried to picture a way to better our common situation, RIGHT NOW.
Yet this new desire, designed by both of us to bring us closer together, was all a ruse. A ruse named … Ginette.
I think that if Nadine had actually spoken to Ginette, if she had had a full conversation, perhaps it all would have ended differently. But she was afraid, and so Nadine withheld her true feelings from both Ginette and I. The more she withheld, the more repression Nadine engendered, the stronger and stranger the tension between Nadine and her world. After many, many weeks of lying, Nadine decided to see if she and Ginette could become friends.
She started saying “hi” in the hallways of THE MEDIA HUB.
Ginette looked the other way.
She sat next to her at lunch.
Ginette spent the whole meal programming her cell phone to turn on her air conditioning back home.
The more Nadine tried to create a situation of mutual human acknowledgement, the more Ginette withheld. The more she withheld, the stronger the tension.
After all, withholding doesn’t wither. Its force is cumulative. This is what my hero Walter Benjamin called AURA. The false power of distance.
I hate withholders. Especially the seductive kind. They cause ruin.
One day, Nadine and I were walking down the street and we passed Ginette. Nadine smiled weakly and Ginette smiled falsely.
“Hi,” Ginette said vaguely, and then kept walking.
I didn’t realize that this was the first time Ginette had ever actually spoken to Nadine. I didn’t even know that Ginette existed. All I saw was some kind of superficial smirk on the face of a strange but chic woman. I knew, subconsciously, that Nadine was being snubbed.
As a result of this experience, I too started thinking about Ginette.
Thinking of myself as more curious than Nadine would ever be, I started secretly searching for information about Ginette. Who was this charismatic withholder? I found out a lot of stuff that didn’t matter, but it added dimension.
Then, one night, I was listening to a conversation outside my window. It was the iceman, come to repair the elevator. He said,
“I guess you identified with her.”
As soon as I heard the word “identified,” I did it. It was like hypnosis. Later, I found out that the iceman was a hypnotist, working on elevators on the side. I identified with Nadine’s unspoken obsession with Ginette. That’s how tuned in we were.
That night I dreamed that I had called Ginette and hung up the phone. I woke up, filled with regret. Why did I do that? I wondered. I thought, somehow, that I had become inexplicable and ruined my own life.
It took most of the morning to assimilate that this had only been a dream. That, in fact, I was not calling up strange people who owed me nothing and asking for something. Acknowledgement. That’s what those kind of phone calls are about, are they not?
And so on.
Nadine became more and more distant. Because I had compassion for Nadine, and could accept her consciously and subconsciously for who she is, I admired her. What I admired most about her was that she was a woman who could be distant, but still elicit the kind of love from me that I wished to feel from her. I hoped that someday, soon, Nadine would wake up again, remember that she also accepted and admired me, and we could get back to the equilibrium we had worked so hard to reach.
Given the sudden lack of mutual attention, I realized that Nadine was doing something right and I was doing something wrong because she had all of my love, but I only had part of hers.
She had me listening, empathizing, forgiving.
I had her barely noticing.
Therefore she was more worthy and someone to be adored.
In this new state, I admired her more and more each day. I longed to be more and more like her, in order to be loved the way she was. I longed to be seen—and not at a waning lover’s mercy.
Clearly, for the first time since this story began, I was in pain.
Why?
Strangely, I decided it was a Bond thing. My themes had converged. Although it had been clear to me for some time that Harrison Bond was never going to get back to me, I found that hard to accept. I mean, if I needed to blow someone off, I’d call them and let them know. But to pretend that there was a “Big Change,” and then leave me hanging in the old style—that sucked.
But Nadine’s turning away woke up his abandonment big time. It was twosies. Twice removed. Which made the Bond thing hurt more.
Basically, I had been diminished by Harrison pulling that old-style switcheroo. That’s when they tell you to call them, and then you do, and they never call you back, and you keep calling, and then you become a pest, and then they say bad things about you to other people, about what a pest you are—while never, ever mentioning or remembering that they told you to call in the first place. At this point, calling becomes a futile act with no one ever at the other end. While all along you thought it was right to keep your word and follow through, but there ain’t another soul who seems to agree.
Bewildered as to why I was being excluded simply for following directions, I became emotionally disheveled. Bedeviled. Satanic. In fact, I became the flea in the elephant’s nose. All I could do to make myself feel better was to think about Ginette every day and night. It was the only action I could take where I knew for sure that I wasn’t the only one doing it.
I asked Nadine about my conundrum, but since her love was diminished, she decided that I had superceded my quota of how many times I could discuss the problem of others not calling back. She said it was a fact of life, like the stars, and that that was that.
“What do you suggest instead?” I asked, admiring her so.
“Hold the pain inside you,” she whispered, turning out all the lights. “Then, accumulate that dark, dark sadness that all repressed irresolution accumulates. Become a darkly sad person with too much to explain to anyone new, and therefore do not accrue or maintain friends.”
“Okay,” I said. Such was my lot, apparently, thanks to Bond Fucker.
Feeling apocalyptic, I took a story and threw it out the window. It was called “Two,” and it was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
16. TOO
IRONICALLY, AND YET naturally—since we are often connected to each other by chance, wish, design, task, fate, aesthetics, fear, antiques, stamp-collecting, faux cheese for vegans, technology, horses, Turkmenistan, and gout—Jeff’s son Freddy had gotten a release job working garbage detail, and it was through this path that he got hold of that same discarded story.
In the Yiddish world, Isaac Bashevis Singer was not called Singer. He was called Bashevis. Had it been up to the Yiddish readers to select their own choice for the Nobel Prize, they would have preferred his brother, I.J. Singer. In Yiddish, when you say Singer, you mean the brother. Odd, isn’t it? How defenseless minor languages must tolerate the selection of their representative heroes by the Swedish Academy. I.J. wrote long, epic Russian-style novels in Yiddish about such serious topics as the industrialization of Lodz. They were filled with characters: gamblers, prostitutes, laborers, bos
ses, the religious, the antireligious, and the dark soot streaming out of the factories’ chimneys. Some Yiddishists believed that Bashevis got the Nobel Prize because he wrote about sex, something the goyim seem to love.
Freddy, knowing none of this, adored the story “Two.” He read it over and over again, carrying its tattered pages in the front pocket of his no-label pants. It was the kind of dream that only a found story, floating through the air over a pile of garbage, can bring to a man just out of the Tank. Its entrance into his New Life gestured toward some possibility of justice buried deeply within fate.
In this story, two boys studied together on the same bench, sharing one volume. It was a romance.
Together they came across an Ecclesiastical phrase. The rough cloth of their trousers serenaded each other’s thighs as they contemplated meaning on a smooth wooden slab. In this manner, they learned sensual experience and intellectual perplexity at the same moment. They fell in love, and therefore had to flee to a faraway land. Nothing bad had happened to them yet, but they knew that it would. They had to flee their true homes and then misrepresent themselves in their new home to avoid an inevitable degradation.
Later, the very people who had originated the threat claimed they had never done anything to hurt these boys. And, somehow, sneakily, that was true. They were brilliant, these people. They managed to enforce a thorough condition of deviance on the lads. One so complete that it required their anonymity, exile, and humiliation. And yet, the perpetrators never had to carry out any of the understood threat. In other words, their hands were clean while the job got done.
The race is not to the swift.
That was the biblical phrase that bonded these lovers. They discovered it together, at the same time, holding one book on two laps.
Other, more protected classmates interpreted those words to mean that a goal can be attained equally through slow steady preparation and caution as it can through speed. They thought this in the standard way that protected people miss all subtlety.
The Mere Future Page 7
