All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 13

The next night, his last before the defense, he met Gwyn in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a bar in the East Village; a friend of hers, from Syracuse, was in a band. Before moving to New York Mark had been to stadium concerts and concerts in protest of wars, but never, to his great regret, to an intimate show, show, like the s.e.x Pistols' first show, in a bas.e.m.e.nt. Now for his sins he was summoned to one such show every other week. They cost eight dollars for admission and then the bar overcharged for beer. The sound quality was miserable. The bands were bad. Nonetheless he'd convinced Toby to come along by promising to pay his cover, and he shut off his cell phone entirely, so it would seem he'd been on the subway, if Celeste called. like the s.e.x Pistols' first show, in a bas.e.m.e.nt. Now for his sins he was summoned to one such show every other week. They cost eight dollars for admission and then the bar overcharged for beer. The sound quality was miserable. The bands were bad. Nonetheless he'd convinced Toby to come along by promising to pay his cover, and he shut off his cell phone entirely, so it would seem he'd been on the subway, if Celeste called.

This would be the last time he did this, however, as he was going to end it finally tonight. He was going to try to make it work with Celeste. He was not a boy, after all, or a publishing a.s.sistant, to be attending rock shows and paying five dollars for bottles of Rolling Rock. This wasn't why he'd spent the past eight years of his life looking up references to Mensheviks in all the triumphalist Bolshevik literature. And he was tired.

At the same time Gwyn was strikingly good-looking, unquestionably the best-looking girl he'd ever gone out with-and she was so young. She was so young. She believed in the Mensheviks and she believed, it seemed, in rock and roll. And she reminded him of Sasha, the Sasha he'd known. She believed, just as Sasha and he had once believed, in saving money-she thought it was fun. And also like Sasha, because she was young, and because she was so beautiful, she really didn't mind, it really didn't matter, that she didn't have any clothes to wear.

One year while Mark was in high school, the hockey team had practiced at an outdoor rink next to a river. And several times during that year the weather had been such-warm, Mark supposed now-that the air coming off the river and the outdoor ice combined to create a thick fog on the ice surface, so you couldn't see more than ten feet ahead of you. Coach Rezzutti loved those practices: "You'll develop your hockey sense," he said. Hah-key, Hah-key, he said it. And it was true: without seeing the puck at all, merely hearing it off sticks and only barely at that, Mark could sense not only where the play was just then but often the direction in which it was heading. he said it. And it was true: without seeing the puck at all, merely hearing it off sticks and only barely at that, Mark could sense not only where the play was just then but often the direction in which it was heading.

In the same way, he could always spot Gwyn upon entering a room. The attention of the room, the direction of its attention, plus a kind of phalanx of men, one or two talking to her, and several hanging around waiting, told him exactly where she was. This was because she was handsome, yes; but it was also because, having looked this way for a while now, she had learned that she could keep men's attention by encouraging them. So, for example, as he entered this bas.e.m.e.nt Mark saw her put her hand on the shoulder of a tall young man in black pants and a black T-shirt with hair falling down around his ears. This was annoying, especially as Toby saw it, too.

But that's what you get! Mark handed Toby a ten for beer (not quite enough, he knew) and maneuvered over to Gwyn-he always overdressed, in a nice blue shirt and his one brown sport jacket, when going out with her, so that it was clear he wasn't about to start apologizing for being older than everyone-and put his arm around her waist. "Oh h.e.l.lo!" she said, and reached up with the hand that had just been on the young man's shoulder to put it around Mark's neck and pull herself up to him in a hug. She introduced him to the young hipster, who didn't seem to have much to say to Mark, or to Gwyn now that Mark was there, and soon slunk off into the corner.

Yet this was enough. Mark could not possibly stop seeing Gwyn. It wasn't that he couldn't live without her. He could probably live without her. Or maybe he couldn't. That wasn't the point. The point was that he couldn't possibly stand to see her with that dips.h.i.t.

"Can we leave?" he asked Gwyn. Her friend's band had stopped playing.

"Do you want to?" she said.

"Yeah," he said. "I'd like us to have some time together tonight and I have to get up pretty early in the morning."

"I'll go if you want to. I'm a little drunk."

She had her arm around his neck. "You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen," he said.

"No I'm not."

He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed-Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she-but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn was a little straitlaced, like Sasha, and she was a little awkward, like her, and also like Sasha and very much unlike Celeste she was meant, clearly, for existing with with someone in the world-and perhaps all the things he'd done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he'd made, all the money he didn't spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they'd spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he'd allowed to slip through his lips-not to mention his s.e.xual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now-he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn's and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn't do right all that he'd once done wrong. someone in the world-and perhaps all the things he'd done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he'd made, all the money he didn't spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they'd spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he'd allowed to slip through his lips-not to mention his s.e.xual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now-he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn's and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn't do right all that he'd once done wrong.

He thought.

"Let's stay a little longer," Gwyn whispered.

"OK," said Mark, as he always did.

At the end of the night, they took the subway back to Brooklyn. Toby had disappeared to somewhere, so they were alone. Mark looked out at the bridge again, wondering if this was his last all-time date, the date that ended it, if he might finally just give this a shot. "What are you thinking?" Gwyn asked him.

"Oh," said Mark. "I missed the Rangers game."

"Ah," said Gwyn, disappointed.

By the time they arrived at his place it was past three, and they fell asleep in positions of cuddling, with their clothes on.

And then it was May Day. Mark opened his eyes-Gwyn was already gone to her internship, she'd washed her face and brushed her teeth and looked as fresh as a cut flower-and jumped out of bed. All right, he thought. Bring on the dissertation committee.

Instead, out in the kitchen, sat the social committee: Toby and Arielle, at his father's big green kitchen table, drinking coffee.

"Good morning," said Mark.

"With all due respect," Toby began immediately, "but is it likely that in any other American city you would get so much as a hand job on a regular basis?"

"It's not likely," Mark admitted.

"Which is a poor reflection on other American cities."

"Yes, it is."

It was like a Socratic dialogue.

"We saw Gwyn on her way out," Arielle said.

"Ah," said Mark. "She's very young."

"And gorgeous."

"Yes."

"But what happened to Celeste?"

"Nothing."

"You could learn a lot from Celeste. Just the way she dresses."

"I know."

"Is it just that Gwyn is younger? How much? Five years? What's five years?"

Five years was the length of Sidorovich's jail sentence in 1931.

Five years was the amount of time he lived with Sasha.

Four years was the number of years they'd now been apart.

"Eight," he said. "It's eight years."

"Jesus," said Arielle.

They sat for a moment in silence at Mark's father's green table.

"You wouldn't do that to me, would you?" Arielle asked Toby.

"It would never occur to me!"

"You're nice," said Arielle, and laughed skeptically.

Mark watched them. He was very moved. What if Arielle ended up with Toby? Old Sam wouldn't mind, he didn't think. He should write Sam, Mark now realized, when all this dissertation business was over. Sam was in New Haven now for law school, apparently, it wasn't far, and Mark had already forgotten what it was they'd fought about that time. Was it really Israel? In any case, Toby and Arielle-yes, it would give all their lives a pleasant circularity.

"Excuse me," he said, and got up from the table to check his e-mail and his phone messages from the night before.

"Mark!" Arielle called after him. "Choose wisely!"

"Hey." Toby cut in again.

"No, I need to say this," Arielle insisted. "I've known guys like you, Mark. You think girls need to be saved. But we don't. We're OK. Save yourself!"

Mark was already listening to his phone messages. There were three.

The first was from Jeff, thanking Mark for having lunch and gently imploring him to show up tomorrow (now today). So far so good.

The next was from Celeste, at around ten last night. "Hey, Marky-poo, just got home from a fun Sunday at work. Call me if you get this, I'll be up."

Ah, thought Mark, very quickly. A strategic error. It meant she couldn't call again without seeming like a crazy person, and he could claim he didn't get the message until too late. Poor Celeste.

Except the next message, received just after 1:00 a.m., was also from her. "Mark," it said. "If you're f.u.c.king that little tramp of yours, I will cut your d.i.c.k off, do you hear me? Just kidding. Where are you? Call me!"

And of course he hadn't gotten the message, and he hadn't called.

We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rose wine, and then we give each other pain. We don't want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one's hands-like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one's hands-and touch all the people and tell them: I'm sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can't. We can't. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That's what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.

Mark was on the bus up to Syracuse as he thought this. There was a moment, not long after the bus emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, and then took a sharp turn, upward out of the tunnel so that it was heading back momentarily toward the city, and the entire vista of midtown Manhattan opened up before you: you just knew things, then, the truth of things.

He had been so early for the ten o'clock bus, so uncharacteristically early, that he'd walked over to Celeste's office and called her from the street.

"Hi!" she said a little quizzically.

"Hi," Mark had said, miserably. "Can you come down? I'm downstairs."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm out on the street. My defense is today. I'm on the way to the bus. It's May Day, baby."

She came out a minute later in her business suit, looking smart, her hair pulled back. She wore a little blush on her cheekbones. It was a slightly cool day, for May 1, but she did not put on a coat.

Mark stood against the building with his enormous backpack, looking, as he'd often looked in his life, like a homeless person.

Celeste began to say exactly this but then saw the look on his face.

"Oh, you," she said. "You're sleeping with someone."

Mark nodded miserably.

"I can't believe this. You're sleeping with someone! And you're breaking up with me!"

Mark nodded again.

"Say something then! Don't just stand there!"

"I'm sad," he said.

"You're a s.h.i.thead! How much longer do you think you can do this?"

"We weren't doing that great, baby."

"Oh, f.u.c.k you! You think I don't know that?"

Suddenly her face scrunched up and she put her head into his shoulder, hiding it. "I have to go back to work like this," she said. "You couldn't have picked a time when I wasn't at work?"

"Baby" was all Mark could say.

"Are you sure?" she asked his shoulder.

Mark nodded with his entire body, his arms around her now.

"OK," said Celeste. She pulled away from Mark slightly, composed her face, blew her nose into his sweatshirt, and placed her palm tenderly on his cheek. She expelled a breath. "Good luck," said Celeste. That was all. Then she turned on her heel and walked back into the skysc.r.a.per.

In the bus Mark played the scene repeatedly in his mind. Celeste-and Sasha. These were the most impressive people he'd known in his life and now they were gone. He got a call from Gwyn but he didn't take it. She sent a text-"I miss you."-but he didn't take that either. He took a nap instead.

Four hours later he was in the Syracuse bus station. It was-here was the joke-the cleanest, most modern, best-lit and comfortable bus station he'd ever been in. It gave you the wrong idea about Syracuse, boy. Of course, that's what bus stations were supposed to do, throughout history. Give travelers the wrong idea.

He checked the city bus schedule-he had twenty minutes until a bus would take him to campus. He bought a m.u.f.fin and a coffee at the station Dunkin' Donuts and sat down on the handsome blue metal mesh seats. The station may have been incongruously nice for Syracuse but it was not incongruously crowded, that is to say it was empty, and Mark's backpack also got a seat, next to him.

He sometimes wondered what happened to Sidorovich in 1941. Had he died in a train station, like Tolstoy? Or had he left the train somewhere, say in Sverdlovsk, and simply walked into the city and disappeared? Perhaps he taught at the university? Or at a high school? He couldn't teach history, with his views on history, but why not geography? The names of the rivers, the cities, the cathedrals-he knew them all. Maybe Sidorovich taught geography and coached hockey, in Sverdlovsk, thought Mark.

He looked up at the board of departures. There was a bus for Buffalo, a bus back to New York, and a bus to Montreal. It left in fifteen minutes. Just as he looked up they announced it over the intercom: "The bus for Montreal is now seating pa.s.sengers at Gate Three. Gate Three."

Sasha was in Montreal. He could go up there, say h.e.l.lo. Maybe Sasha would know what he should do. She'd read a million books. She was very wise. And Canada gives people a nice perspective on things.

Now the bus that could take him to campus pulled up outside the station, a little ahead of schedule. Or maybe the time on Mark's cell phone was off-maybe it was confused, being this far north.

Or maybe he should just get back on the bus to New York.

He hadn't yet finished his coffee and m.u.f.fin. They had cost $2.74, for the love of G.o.d.

He had left Sasha, he had allowed Sasha to leave, because he could no longer abide the person he had become with her. He lied and lied and when the lies had mounted festering in the corner he covered them with further lies. Then he had suffered in Syracuse alone. Or rather the loneliness was the suffering. He had dated. He had Internet dated. And even when he'd solved all these problems of dating he-well, continued to date. As if only the women he dated could tell him who Mark was. As if he would not be a full person, a full Mark, until he'd found the perfect complement. Except every woman he dated took a chunk of Mark with her. And vice versa. So that if you looked, if you walked around New York and looked properly, if you walked around America and looked properly, what you saw was a group of wandering disaggregated people, torn apart and carrying with them, in their hands, like supplicants, the pieces of flesh they'd won from others in their time. And who now would take them in?

Mark hadn't yet finished his coffee and m.u.f.fin. He was like the knight errant in the tale. If he went north he would see Sasha. If he went into Syracuse he would find Jeff and his dissertation committee. Go back south and there'd be Gwyn.

Save yourself, they had told him. Save yourself, Mark. Save yourself.

2008.

And then I too moved to New York. I was not, after all, an idiot.

The city had changed, but I had also changed, and neither of us had changed very much. New York had grown richer and glitzier, and so had I; deep down it was unchanged, and so was I. For all the new gla.s.s condominiums and coffee shops in Brooklyn, the BQE was still an awful road, full of monstrous gaping holes, and as I bounced around on it in my U-Haul, past the warehouses of Sunset Park, I worried the wheels would fall off the truck, I worried that I'd get lost here and be all alone, and, just like every other time I'd visited, I was afraid.

I got over it. I had just spent several years abroad, mostly in Moscow, watching a government slowly strangle an entire nation. I had seen what the world looked like before you covered it up with two hundred years of acc.u.mulated wealth (it wasn't pretty). I probably could have stayed there, writing long, indignant dispatches for American magazines, but I came back. Life was here.

I had not fallen behind while away; in fact the others had fallen behind, and I had grown stronger, my vision was wider, and I saw more clearly than my contemporaries. In Brooklyn I quickly finished my book about the Bush administration's foreign policy (The Damage Done, I called it-it was an angry book) and found an agent, a fancy agent, and she took me to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art. Then, magically, she sold my book and told me to take a vacation. I did not take a vacation. I rented another U-Haul, bid farewell to Brooklyn, and moved my stuff to a little corner of the city tucked just under the Queensboro Bridge. My parents had had friends who lived in Jackson Heights, and when we'd visited them, and then driven to Manhattan at night, we had always gone over this bridge. It remains the most dramatic way to enter the city: one second you are in the grimiest section of Queens, where they drop off prisoners from Rikers, and the next second you are told that a left will get you FDR Drive, but a right, my friend, a right will put you at 61st and First. And that's where I found a place, 61st and First. I called it-it was an angry book) and found an agent, a fancy agent, and she took me to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art. Then, magically, she sold my book and told me to take a vacation. I did not take a vacation. I rented another U-Haul, bid farewell to Brooklyn, and moved my stuff to a little corner of the city tucked just under the Queensboro Bridge. My parents had had friends who lived in Jackson Heights, and when we'd visited them, and then driven to Manhattan at night, we had always gone over this bridge. It remains the most dramatic way to enter the city: one second you are in the grimiest section of Queens, where they drop off prisoners from Rikers, and the next second you are told that a left will get you FDR Drive, but a right, my friend, a right will put you at 61st and First. And that's where I found a place, 61st and First.