The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  She started to laugh but caught herself. “Oh yeah. He wrote a great one on Hamlet’s soliloquies.”

  “His answer was ‘Not to be.’ ”

  “Exactly. Lee Harvey Oswald took it very seriously.”

  “The conspiracy theorists need to know this.”

  “I’ll send out an email to their listserv.”

  “You’re well connected.”

  “I’ve always made friends easily.”

  “Crazy friends.”

  “Everyone’s crazy,” said Deirdre.

  “Not me. I’m the only one. Anyway, I’m still in the early stages of my project, obviously. But I’m interested in Berryman’s relationship with Beryl Eeman. Do you know of her?”

  “The name sounds familiar. Remind me, though?”

  I explained who Beryl was and we chatted awhile longer, then exchanged email addresses, shook hands, and parted ways. In the hallway I bought a pack of peanut butter crackers from a vending machine and checked my phone: a call from Sadie. No message. I sat down on a bench in the atrium and texted Laura that I’d see her in half an hour. It was my last night in the city and we’d planned to have dinner with Dan and see a movie. Then I checked espn.com—the NBA lockout had entered its third week—and called Sadie back.

  “My mother died.”

  I don’t remember most of what I said in response. I didn’t react well, I think. How could I say what was actually true, that I hadn’t known her mother, up until yesterday, had still been alive? I wondered if I’d misunderstood or misremembered what she’d told me about her. At some point I asked Sadie how she felt, and she said, How do I feel? My mother died. I am in mourning. That’s how I feel. I apologized, then apologized again using slightly different words. I think I’d thought that since Sadie had all but disowned her mother, she might not feel how people usually feel when their mother died. The silences between me and Sadie grew longer as the conversation went on. I’d never heard her sound so distant. I didn’t know what to say. I asked about the funeral, it was in France, Sadie didn’t think she’d go. More silences, more saying the wrong things, more silences, searching for words. I was running late for dinner with Laura and Dan and suggested we talk later that night.

  “Of course. You should go. We can talk later.”

  “Look, I know I’m not responding well. I’m tired. I have a headache. I just spent five days in the reading room.”

  Another long silence, then: “You know I love you. But I’m starting to think your coming to New York isn’t such a good idea.”

  Outside, a fitful wind pushed dead leaves across the brick-and-concrete plaza. Students walked past, absorbed in their phones. I wandered around, eating crackers. After some time, as if controlled by exterior forces, I found myself walking toward the bridge over the Mississippi that connected the west side of campus to the east. When I reached it I stood on the sidewalk, grabbed the railing, and looked down. Berryman had missed the water, I’d read; his body was found facedown on the frozen embankment. I had problems, but they weren’t as bad as his. I texted Laura I’d be late.

  * * *

  —

  I decided to extend my stay with my parents for a couple of weeks. Then I could recalibrate with Sadie and go to New York—or not. I sensed a finality to our last conversation, and a part of me was relieved. If I didn’t feel equipped to be there for her in the way that she needed, I also felt that being there for her was a role better suited to her husband of twenty years. And while there were advantages to returning to New York, even if Sadie and I weren’t together, it was also very expensive, and I’d already lived there, and I could go anywhere I wanted.

  At my parents’ house, though, the sadness descended. Even after just a few days of silence, I’d started to really miss her. I missed her vulnerability and playfulness and sadness and seriousness. I missed how seriously she took me; it had made me better, I felt. And I was ashamed that I couldn’t meet the gravity of her suffering. To distract myself I spent long hours at a desk in the basement, trying to weave a story from the texts I’d photographed in the archives. This task proved trickier than I’d expected—what were my criteria for selecting what to include? how could I justify excluding anything?—and at moments I felt a grudging appreciation for the work of Berryman’s biographer. I thought of Maria, wondered how she was doing—the Berryman biography, as much as anything, had been what brought us together—and I thought of the novel I’d abandoned, the disfigurement of my grandfather’s memoirs. While working on it I had felt a gnawing unease, verging at times on disgust—what was the point of distorting reality according to whatever whim?—but now I missed the sense of freedom that came with making things up.

  Evenings, I ate dinner with my parents. We talked mostly about their lives—the friends they had made through the Nordic skiing club, their progress on hiking all 310 miles of the Superior Trail, the classes they were taking through a senior program at the University of Minnesota Duluth. When they asked about my life, I said little. I’d told them a while ago about my breakup with Ashwini, and they didn’t mention her even once. I wondered if they knew about me and Sadie. If they did, I felt sure, they wouldn’t mention her either unless I did so first. That was how it was in my family, and I liked it, it made me feel safe. At the same time it gave me the unnerving sense that the past six months had taken place in another world.

  One day, a week or so after I arrived, I discovered Ashwini’s novel on a shelf in my parents’ office. Of course my mother would have bought and read it, she’d always liked Ashwini. I took it to the basement and started from the beginning. The novel was very good. Like its author, it luxuriated in sensation—fabric against skin, the color of the sky, smells of spices and flowers and rain. The narrator’s eye was drawn to well-crafted objects, a mahogany door, a brocade curtain, a rug with a “gorgeous fringe.” Paragraphs and chapters tended to land on the striking image, burning banana leaves flaring like fireworks, moths flying away like something shattering. I’d forgotten how attuned Ashwini was to the physical world, so sensitive to it, I used to think, that it was as if she went around without skin, everything pressing against her organs. I remembered how when we first started sleeping together she’d take deep sniffs of my neck and hair, trying to memorize the smell, she told me later, so she could categorize it and store it away (no doubt she can recall it exactly to this day). Or how she ran her hands up and down my face, like a blind person forming an image through touch.

  Her novel wasn’t about me, as Maria had predicted, but it was semi-autobiographical, as they say, a portrait of her childhood and adolescence and young adulthood as they might have played out if her father had died when she was two or three. The family moves into a smaller home, the mother takes a second job, she’s forced to rely more strongly than before on the support of the region’s large Indian Canadian community. But the lives of the Ashwini character—whose name is Parvati—and her sister and mother strongly resemble their real-life counterparts. In fact, some scenes and stories seemed directly transposed from life, and I wondered if Ashwini had been trying out anecdotes on me to test them for pathos and humor. Parvati is a book lover and hyperaware of language and seems on track toward becoming a writer, but instead she ends up going to med school and becoming a doctor. In real life, when Ashwini dropped out of med school to go to grad school for creative writing, her father didn’t speak to her for three and a half years. Now, in the novel’s counterfactual, she had somehow managed to combine propitiation with revenge.

  When I finished I sat down to write her an email of appreciation and apology. We hadn’t been in touch since our contentious G-chat, and I wanted to reestablish friendly relations. I wrote some sentences praising her book, but when I read them over they seemed insincere, or at least impersonal, as if from a book review, so I started over and wrote some sentences apologizing for not having been a better communicator, but why should I be the o
ne apologizing when she had been as uncommunicative as me? I clicked out of my email to The New York Times, and when I clicked back I saw an email from an unfamiliar address. Subject: docs. Hi there, it began, I’ve been meaning to write. I found a couple documents you might be interested in. The letters, Deirdre wrote, were addressed to Beryl but apparently never sent. They were dated several years after she and Berryman had broken off their engagement. Deirdre had guessed—correctly as it happened—that these had eluded my attention, since they had been filed in different boxes than the main cache of Beryl materials, and so, with touching thoughtfulness, she’d photographed them for me.

  The first letter, from the late forties—after the Chris affair, but well before Berryman and Eileen divorced—is in response to a letter from Beryl that Deirdre couldn’t locate and may not be extant. For Berryman, Beryl’s letter is like a trapdoor through which he falls several years into the past. It has come “like lightning into a crisis of character, as well as into the pure, never-ending, desolate sense of my loss of you.” He writes feverishly but without direction, his letter is full of erasures and false starts, he doesn’t know what he wants to say. “I have been feeling an atrocious urgency,” he writes, “as if, if I didn’t hurry, you would disappear again, reject me, not exist.” He starts to reminisce about his final years with Beryl, reassuring her that so long as they were together there was no question of marriage with Eileen, but—unable to sustain the lie—he breaks off. “It seems after all impossible to write!” Beryl’s letter was so magnanimous, so lucid; why can’t Berryman respond in kind? “Perhaps if I had sent the sheets I reserved out of my imagination of your good—but I dare not think of this. Only, B., let us not be silent again.”

  The silence that ensued lasted almost a decade. Then the second letter, again apparently in response to one from Beryl. The date is July 10, 1956, a few months after Berryman married a graduate student named Ann Levine. “I don’t understand yr letter,” he writes; “you never did me anything but good—only I cdn’t receive it, owing to my pa’s suicide long before and my own lifelong illness….I did you, I think, w. grief, only harm—and I have v. imperfectly forgiven my self—or not at all—& yr rather unreal letter I know wishes to help but doesn’t.”

  Deirdre didn’t know exactly what to make of these letters, she wrote, but she was moved to find that so many years later Berryman was still brooding on his relationship with Beryl, and she thought they might contribute something to my project. “I guess it’s up to you to say what Berryman couldn’t,” she wrote. I wrote her back thanking her for the letters and suggesting we get coffee next time she was in town (though who knew if she’d ever be back to Minneapolis, or how long I’d stick around). After I sent it an exciting thought occurred to me: Maybe Beryl was still alive. I resolved to track her down if she was. Then, remembering Deirdre’s recommendation and wanting to linger a while longer in her presence, I checked out a volume of Berryman’s Shakespeare essays from the University of Minnesota Duluth library. Back home, I turned to “Shakespeare at Thirty.” “Suppose with me,” the essay begins, “a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, congratulated, on a day in latter April long ago—about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday…a different world.”

  A few days later I turned thirty, and instead of celebrating with Sadie, as we’d planned, I spent the day with my parents. In the afternoon we went on a short but strangely draining hike in a state park on Lake Superior’s north shore, then drank a bottle and a half of wine together on their screened-in back porch. I’d gotten it into my head at some point that I wanted to end the day by myself—taking stock of my thirty years on earth, I guess—and so, though I would have liked to stay with my parents on the porch drinking wine, I told them I was meeting Laura for dinner at the revolving circular rooftop restaurant thirty stories above Duluth. In fact I had made a reservation there for one, and half an hour later I was gazing out its windows, moving almost imperceptibly in a circle. Outside: the dark harbor, the twinkling city, dark harbor, twinkling city, dark harbor. Whenever my parents and I drink together they end up telling stories about their past, and today they had told, with my encouragement, the story of stories, their coming-together story: the friends in common, the college dance, the moonlit walk, and (of course) the kiss—so uncomplicated, so old-fashioned, in their telling, as to be almost as unimaginable as their eventual deaths. I sank into the story helplessly, as into a childhood memory; and in fact it had seemed to me as though the three of us had entered a world akin to childhood—elemental, full of nameless delights, unself-conscious, scornful of time. Maybe, I thought now, that’s what love was: two people rediscovering through each other a child’s sense of the eternal. Who cared if that sense rarely lasted? You’ve got to try, as Berryman said. Because the World never stopped showing up at your door with news of pain and uncertainty and loss: loss above all, its animating constant, without which the screen flickers out and dies.

  My entrée arrived and Lake Superior edged for the tenth or hundredth time into view, and for a moment I saw Sadie’s eyes above it, imploring and vaguely accusatory and sad—sad and lovely, with bright things in it—and, though it had been years since I’d read the book, I remembered that this was where James Gatz of North Dakota became, through a feat of imagination, Jay Gatsby—“the unreality of reality,” goes the passage, descending on the seventeen-year-old boy for the first time. Moved by passions I didn’t understand, toward destinations I never quite reached, and no doubt under the influence of the wine and my birthday negroni and my parents’ story, I felt a connection with Fitzgerald’s dreamer and all the American dreamers he stood for—Wounded Warriors, each of us; Bachelors, Berrymans, Henrys. Dad wasn’t destiny. Destiny was destiny. Dad was Dad, and I loved him. I was the confluence of a million forces, not quite all of them beyond my bending. Heroic feelings, or almost heroic, gathered and rose within me to an accompaniment (Bach?) I wouldn’t be able to hear until months later when I watched this episode. I knew I was supposed to be full of regret (Berryman: “At thirty men think reluctantly back over their lives”), but instead I felt full of gratitude and excitement: gratitude for everything I had ever been through (not much, unimaginable multitudes), excitement for everything that would come. A resolution: sow only seeds of love. Another: read aloud. Time opened up into a panorama that evening in the rooftop restaurant on my birthday, and, ignoring the vibration against my thigh, I saw in a flash of overlaid images Dave in House Above the Morning Clouds, my grandfather flying above fallow farmland, my teenage self typing birth certificates on the thirty-second floor of the Ruan Center, Berryman leaping from the bridge to his death, the Bachelor sitting on the floor of his apartment, gazing out over his city.

  He has a twin brother, I recently discovered. They co-own four Austin-area bars: the Dizzy Rooster, the Chuggin’ Monkey, Molotov Lounge, and the Dogwood, an “indoor/outdoor concept” named after their grandmother’s favorite tree. He still hopes to find the love of his life one day. Maybe she’s sitting in the room he’s about to enter. No longer young, not quite middle-aged, he’d still make quite a catch for a woman who didn’t mind his unconventional dating history. Meanwhile, if he finds himself feeling down, he can always watch the footage of himself watching himself, miraculously sealed as in a magic tank, kneel on one knee and say to the woman who will never stop being his future wife, “You’re the one, Em. You’re it. You’re my once-in-a-lifetime. I’m asking for you to please give me your forever.”

  For Liza

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not be what it is without the contributions of many people and organizations. Thanks to Brian Platzer, Rachel Monroe, and Greg Jackson for their early readings. Thanks to my agent, Sarah Bowlin, for her wisdom, patience, and textual insight. Thanks to my editor, Alexis Washam, for her excellent suggestions, and to Jillian Buckley and the rest of the Hogarth team for their behind-the-scenes support. Thanks to Salvatore Scibona and Ma
tthew Neill Null for their unwavering advocacy of my work. Thanks to Paul Cavanagh and Molly Schaeffer for publishing an excerpt of an early draft in Big Big Wednesday. Thanks to Kate Donahue for granting me access to the Berryman archives at the University of Minnesota, and to Martha Mayou for giving me permission to quote from the archives. Thanks to Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Corporation of Yaddo for the time and space to work. Thanks to the late Stephen Dixon. Eternal thanks to my parents. And thanks to Liza Birnbaum for her conversation, her encouragement, her countless readings, and everything else.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Palmer’s writing has appeared in Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker online, and McSweeney’s. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a resident at Ucross, the Anderson Center, and Yaddo. He grew up in Iowa and lives in Seattle with his partner and their dog. The Bachelor is his first novel.

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