The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  As I ate the granola with pleasure and regret, I remembered I had a package to open. Every year since I’d graduated from college, my parents had given me the same two gifts: a year’s worth of daily disposable contact lenses and an ill-fitting dress shirt from Kohl’s or Younkers, which I’d typically exchange for a similar but better-fitting shirt. These presents had never failed to fulfill their apparent purpose: to produce an echo of the joy I used to feel on receiving Christmas gifts as a child. But because it was no more than an echo, they also made me a little sad. My mother had sent the package to Halifax a few weeks earlier, and I’d brought it with me when I left. I’d told her I wouldn’t be arriving in Des Moines till mid-January, after I returned from India with Ashwini, to whom, I strongly implied and may have believed, I’d then be engaged to be married. Later I presented the trip’s cancellation as the result of a decision Ashwini and I had lovingly arrived at together with the long-term interests of our relationship in mind: it would be best, I told my parents, if I returned to the U.S. for the rest of our engagement so I could find a legitimate job (teaching? writing instruction manuals? repairing refrigerators?), and then in a year or so we could start our marriage as real working adults. Once we were married one of us could move to the other’s country more easily. Probably, I told my parents, knowing it would sound true, Ashwini would want to move to America to take the next step in her writing career. (In reality she was aiming for tenureship at the university in Halifax.) Eventually I’d have to tell them the truth, but I wasn’t worried about that yet. I finished my granola and opened the package: contact lenses and a dress shirt from Younkers. I tried on the shirt: too big.

  A couple of weeks later I took it to a dry cleaners to get it altered. This way, I’d reasoned, I could avoid some small portion of the guilt I knew I’d feel if I exchanged it. My mother’s friend had encouraged me to use the Volvo sedan she was keeping in the garage; I’d opted not to tell her I hadn’t driven in many years. A lone bumper sticker said sow only seeds of love. I adjusted the mirrors and started the engine and felt a vibration run through my hands and arms and down my shoulders through my chest. A faint nausea rose up in me and I closed my eyes till it subsided. Then I started to back out, very slowly, checking each of the mirrors several times, obeying a long-standing, dormant habit whose impetus must have been the fear of running over an animal, as my mother had run over our cat Fritz when I was ten. Just two weeks had passed since we’d brought Fritz home from the Animal Rescue League. No one knew how he’d gotten into the garage. I cried a little and my sister wailed and we both petted his bloody and convulsing body as my mother drove us to the animal ER, where a tall man wearing a compassion mask casually injected him with poison. I can still see Fritz sitting on my chest in the middle of the night before he died, pawing affectionately at my face.

  One evening a few years after Fritz’s death—I’ve never told anyone this part of the story, but it feels important to put down here—I found myself in my brother’s bedroom. He was taking a year off between high school and college to work at a cross-country ski resort in the north Minnesota woods. Without motive or even much curiosity, as if controlled by exterior forces, I went through what he’d left behind. Buried beneath folders full of high school homework, in the bottom drawer of the old oak desk I’d inherit a few years later, was a computer printer box full of single-spaced pages lined with hole-punched, perforated edges. The top page said something like: Dear Family, and by Family I mean anyone who happens to be reading this: DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. YOU ARE READING FURTHER. PLEASE, IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR MY HUMAN DIGNITY, STOP. THESE PAGES WERE WRITTEN BY ME FOR ME, AND IF I GRANTED THEM CORPOREALITY IT IS ONLY SO I MIGHT RETURN TO THEM A WISER MAN AND COMMIT THEM TO THE FLAMES. I remember that phrase, commit them to the flames, so antiquated and melodramatic, as I must have realized even then. The next page said something like: I am on my knees, begging you to stop. Proceed if you will, but know that if you proceed you are tearing out my very soul. I read these top two pages several times. Tearing out my very soul. The next page was a journal entry dated three years earlier. It was about how my brother enjoyed talking to a certain friend, but only one-on-one, and only about “ethics and metaphysics,” and otherwise found him insufferable, and were these infrequent conversations enough to justify remaining friends with him? Two years’ worth of similarly precocious journal entries followed; I stayed up late and went through them all, possessed by an unfamiliar impulse: I wanted to be absorbed into my brother’s words. I was angry that I couldn’t become my brother. I don’t think I’d really believed in him before that night—hadn’t believed in his existence, I mean.

  Most of the journal’s content passed quickly from my mind, but one entry has stayed with me all these years. In it, my brother confessed to being the one who failed to close the door that opened onto the garage—where Fritz must have been drawn by the smell of dust and damp newspapers, or by the grass and trees and neighborhood cats beyond—and tried to trace the various interconnected causes for that single fatal act. Was it really accurate to call Fritz’s death an accident? What if my brother hadn’t been so eager to get to the woods after the humiliation of the “homecoming bullshit” in the high school parking lot? (He didn’t elaborate on the nature of this humiliation.) What if Fritz had been asleep upstairs, instead of lurking as he apparently had been somewhere near the garage? The rule in our house was to keep doors closed at all times; did my brother realize as he exited that evening that the door hadn’t shut completely? If so, how had he justified to himself, as he headed toward the woods, leaving it open? Did he actually do it, on some level, on purpose? Ultimately, he wrote, it doesn’t matter. I am the sum of my actions, good and bad; with free will comes responsibility; guilt and innocence have little to do with intent; I am alive and another soul is dead.

  The night I read that I lay awake in bed feeling what I recognized as a new kind of sadness. I think I understood it had something to do with guilt—my brother’s for leaving the garage door open, filtered through mine for reading my brother’s journal (could I somehow have been responsible for Fritz’s death?)—and also something to do with writing: the intimation, in my brother’s words, of a kind of aloneness that suddenly seemed necessary to honestly confront the world; the mystery that my brother’s self-interrogation contained and illuminated: some things were unknowable—unwritable, unreadable—no matter how old you got.

  I returned to my brother’s journal every day for the next week, reading new passages more or less at random, until he came home from Minnesota for Christmas. In one entry he wrote that a book called The Stranger was “the only truly essential novel,” the first and last word on how to live, not to mention how to die, and so I found it on his shelf and spent the next two evenings reading it and decided my brother was right. Did Maman die yesterday or today? It didn’t matter: because nothing mattered. I bought a spiral notebook and copied out my favorite passage—for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world—and this became the epigraph for my first journal, in which I transcribed sentences from novels and books of philosophy and tried to work up my nerve to become a writer. I determined to write a short story and filled several pages with notes for it: its protagonist would be a middle-aged, balding, unmarried obituary writer for the Des Moines Register who requests and is (yet again) denied a raise from his boss but who continues to move calmly through the tedium of his days and finally hangs himself, because nothing matters, nothing matters in this life….A few years later I made a small but crucial revision to my philosophy: not nothing matters, but everything matters. I wrote it in my journal to make it stick. Then I wrote, “What’s the difference?”—a good question.

  I shifted into first and set off for the dry cleaners. The sky was cloudy-bright behind the dusty windshield. Holiday lights still hung from many of the houses, and several lawns were strewn with skeletal white wooden deer i
n various poses—head bent to the grass as if grazing, neck craned as if listening for predators, staring stoically ahead. Christmas trees lay dead on curbsides. Iowa Hawkeye and Iowa State Cyclone flags hung unmoving from their poles. In one yard a giant inflatable Santa or snowman lay flaccid. Menorahs filled the windows of my childhood home. I drove past the house of T. J. Davis, 1998’s Mr. Iowa Basketball, who everyone thought would make it to the NBA (last I heard he was in real estate in Missouri), and turned onto Lower Beaver Road and continued past the Kum & Go that used to be the Kwik Shop where as a kid I’d ride my bike to buy candy and gum and pop and basketball cards. I drove past Lawnwood Elementary, which looked too small to hold the dozens of classrooms I could only assume still lay inside; past the Muslim Cultural Center, new to me and both more and less real than the surrounding buildings—more in that my vision of it wasn’t fogged by memory, less in that it lacked the depth and texture memory would have given it. I drove past the redbrick veterans’ hospital where my childhood best friend Taylor’s father was a surgeon (we used to play H-O-R-S-E and one-on-one on a concrete court on the hospital grounds), then turned south onto Thirtieth Street and headed down what might be the steepest hill in the city. My high school driver’s ed teacher had once told me, I remembered, that you know you’re a good driver if you can maintain a constant speed as you descend and ascend the Thirtieth Street hill—really more of a ravine—which seemed like a metaphor for something, I thought, and also seemed obviously false, since maintaining a constant speed on a hill doesn’t test a driver’s steering, traffic awareness, freeway maneuvering, or any number of other skills that make good drivers good. Then I remembered remembering and rejecting my driver’s ed teacher’s assertion every time I drove down Thirtieth as a teenager. At the bottom of the hill the street was flanked by thick woods, which I was for some reason pleased to remember sheltered a creek that ran east to the Des Moines River.

  The woman behind the waist-high pink counter looked between forty-five and seventy. Her body and face were shapeless in a comforting way, maybe in an Iowan or Midwestern way, and her smile was so intimate I wondered if I knew her. She was wearing a red knit Cyclones cardigan over a red-and-“gold” Cyclones T-shirt, and called to mind cross-stitches, doilies, baby powder. We exchanged overfriendly smiles and hellos and I told her what I wanted done with my shirt. She worried that if she did that it would end up being too small—though of course she’d be happy to make whatever alterations I wanted. I told her I liked my shirts relatively tight-fitting, not quite sure whether that was true, and if so by whose standards. Several days had passed since I’d interacted with another person and I worried I wasn’t doing it right. As the woman folded and stuck pins in my shirt I felt vaguely chastened by the disapproval I sensed from her.

  “Having a good year so far?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.” I’d forgotten it was a new year.

  “Getting lighter every day now, isn’t it.”

  “I guess it is!” I said with too much excitement in my voice.

  “I wonder if the snow has something to do with it.”

  “Mmm,” I said, “all that reflected sun.”

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “Oh—the…glare.”

  “Beats me,” the woman said; she must have misheard me. She asked for my name and phone number and I gave them. “Two-one-two, where’s that from?”

  “New York!” I again exclaimed where I should have simply said.

  “New York City?”

  “New York City,” I said maybe too quietly, overcompensating.

  “My granddaughter went to college in New York City. I always wanted to make it out there. Somehow never did!” I wondered why she spoke as if her life were over. She laughed and asked if I’d like to pay now or later.

  “Now’s good,” I said, and reached into my pocket, but my wallet wasn’t there. I checked my other pants pockets, then my coat, patting myself down with mounting concern. I must have looked distraught because the woman behind the counter said, “It’s okay, sweetie!”

  “No no no—”

  “Pay when you come back! We trust you.”

  A big emotion welled up in me, something like gratitude laced with embarrassment—gratitude for the woman’s motherly concern, embarrassment that I should be its object—and I had a fleeting urge to bury myself beneath her Cyclones cardigan. “Let me just go check my car,” I said, recovering.

  After a minute of frantic searching I found my wallet in the glove compartment. I tried to remember putting it there, couldn’t. Was I losing my mind? I laughed at the question. “Am I losing my mind?” was something people said in movies—bad movies—or TV shows. Then I thought, in Ashwini’s voice, “Maybe I have early-onset Alzheimer’s,” which was what she used to say whenever she lost or couldn’t remember something. “Oh my god,” I always felt obliged to say. “You just said that a minute ago.”

  I reentered the dry cleaners and the woman behind the counter was several decades younger and wearing an oversize white button-down and black cardigan and seemed to know tricks involving hair clips and bangs. She sat hunched over a thick black hardcover, reading with a look of concentration so intense I found myself unable to interrupt her. I stood there, waiting. The room was silent. I considered leaving; I could pay when I returned. Behind the counter, freshly dry-cleaned clothes hung from an electronic revolving hanger that curved through the room in an elegant “S.”

  “Find your wallet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Gimme all your money!” Her voice was a muted shout. A part of me didn’t understand she was joking, and, a little scared, I tossed my wallet onto the counter. She laughed, and I laughed, parroting her. I told her she could use any card she wanted; she took one. She swiped it a few times before it took. As she waited for the information to go through she said, “So my grandma tells me you used to live in New York.”

  “That’s true,” I said, aware I should say more.

  “What did you do there?”—a complicated question.

  I confessed that I had written a book. It was the easiest answer, but also the most dangerous; I segued into “Your grandma says you went to college there?”

  “That’s right.” I could tell she wanted to ask about my book.

  “NYU or Columbia?”

  “NYU.”

  “Political science?”

  “Close: art history and religion.”

  She slid me my receipt and I signed it and we talked for a while about neighborhoods and trains and real estate. She exuded a sort of “New York is so over” attitude in which was concealed, or so it seemed to me, an affection or even love for the city. I accused her of this and she smiled in a way that neither confirmed nor refuted my suspicion but seemed to acknowledge me as a potential ally. I got the sense she hadn’t been smiling much lately, and I felt a rush of sympathy. I asked her what she was doing in Des Moines. She’d just graduated a few weeks ago, she said—a little sheepishly, I thought—and was spending a few months with her parents, saving money, reading, going for walks. She had no idea what she’d do next, nor where she’d “end up.” I told her it was nice to meet another transient, and she smiled again. I was about to leave when I noticed four numerals stamped on the spine of her book in metallic red: 2, 6, 6, and 6. “Good book?” I asked. I hadn’t read it but I’d read enough about it to know it was Bolaño’s masterpiece, the first great novel of the twenty-first century, a towering achievement, unimpeachable.

  “No. It’s not a good book. It’s bad. It’s a bad, boring, stupid book. I’ve never read anything so tedious in my life. On December twentieth, a woman got raped and murdered. On January fourth, a woman got raped and murdered. On March fourteenth, a woman got raped and murdered. Okay, we got it, Bolaño, thanks. And you can tell he sort of loves it, too. He gets off on all those corpses in the desert, there’s something almost fu
nny or cute about it to him. He’s enamored with his own bleak vision of the world. When actually it’s just more fashionable gloom, that hip apocalypticism. And we let him get away with it because he’s a man and because death seems cool and romantic when it’s in Mexico. If an American woman wrote this book and it were set in like, I don’t know, Des Moines—forget it, no one cares. But Bolaño—what a genius! Such bullshit.”

  “Why are you reading it?”

  “I started it. If I start a book I have to finish it.”

  “I’m the same.”

  “It’s a curse.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  The woman smiled and extended a braceleted hand across the counter. Did she notice the moment of hesitation during which I struggled to recall the custom? We shook hands and traded names: hers was Jeff.

  “Jeff?”

  “Jess. With two esses. Ssss.”

  On my way back to my mother’s friend’s house, I considered what Jess had said about 2666. As she was speaking, I’d felt myself agreeing with her, which didn’t make sense, since I hadn’t read the book. Her take on it had struck me as brave, iconoclastic, indicative of an appealing independence of thought. Now, though, in the car’s clarifying solitude, I saw it as affected and immature. What did Jess know about murder or drugs or literature or Latin America? She might feel a little gloomy, too, if she’d had to flee a military dictatorship. Her little speech had been nothing but a pose. What easier way to promote your own discernment than to attack something generally acknowledged as great? (Now that I’ve actually read 2666, I have to confess I agree with her assessment.) I turned on the radio, which was tuned to the classical station, a piano sonata by Schubert or -mann, or possibly a lesser-known Beethoven. On Thirtieth, I held steady at 35 mph. As I waited at the stoplight at the Lower Beaver/Douglas intersection, a cello sonata by Bach came on. There was something big and remote in the music, and also small and intimate, and I thought of aerial time lapses of cities, wives outliving husbands, war, collapsing empires, migrating birds, global warming, cold fronts, planets, orbits, Kubrick, galaxies moving always away; and beneath or within all that a solitary rower, me but also not quite me, rowing a boat against a creek or stream’s gentle current on a moonlit night, and then I felt a familiar presence beside me, apparently come to keep me company on my journey. I waited for the presence to speak or disappear. The light changed and as I drove past my elementary school I realized I was listening to the sonata that had triggered an argument with Laura several years earlier, on a spring-break road trip from Minnesota to Mississippi near the end of our relationship. Laura, who had played cello since she was three, criticized what she took to be the anachronistic Romanticism in the cellist’s undeniably virtuosic performances. I lacked classical training but knew enough to argue that we had no way of knowing Bach’s exact intentions, and that each performer should be allowed to interpret his scores as he or she saw fit, and that in any case the cellist’s expressive playing, if that was the right way to characterize it, sounded good to me. Laura, probably correctly, interpreted my stance as a hostile provocation, and we fought about that and other things for some time before falling silent. The bare branches of the trees alongside the interstate had gradually given way, starting somewhere in Missouri, to a haze of yellow and pale green buds, then to leaves in their familiar fullness, then to a seethe of big, thick, waxy, greedy leaves shooting forth from trees from another planet. It felt like we’d driven from winter to spring. In retrospect we both knew our romance was doomed, and the whole trip had something of the feeling of an afterlife. As we walked through the sad winding garden behind a mansion on the banks of the Mississippi—pecan trees, magnolias, moss-heavy live oaks; derelict neoclassical statues; the scent of camellias, azaleas, and roses heavy in the air—we both felt out of place. Why had we come here? Two Yankees who had wandered off course. On our endless tours of antebellum houses, no one else looked younger than seventy-five. All the guides said the real tragedy of the war was that it caused the South to “lose its way of life.” One unhappy night we actually stayed up late watching a documentary about neo-Nazis. On the way back to Minnesota, sick of each other and silent, we passed through Des Moines on I-35, and because we were only passing through I experienced it, maybe for the first time in my life, as one place among many, a drop in the pool of the universe, an agglomeration of people so unlikely as to seem essentially arbitrary, rather than as the warm center of the world it had been for me till then.