All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 14

My friends during these years were all busy becoming lawyers and getting married, getting married and becoming lawyers. Ferdinand, a lawyer, got married to another lawyer; Josh, a community organizer, got married to a social worker; Ravi Winikoff, now a lawyer, married a banker. It had recently been proposed, at the monthly discussion hosted by the journal Debate Debate about "what went wrong with the Left" that the Left had failed to replace the deep culture of religion with a culture of its own. "When I attend the funerals of my social-democratic friends," the elderly editor of the journal had said, "no one knows what to about "what went wrong with the Left" that the Left had failed to replace the deep culture of religion with a culture of its own. "When I attend the funerals of my social-democratic friends," the elderly editor of the journal had said, "no one knows what to do. do. Whereas at the funerals of religious friends, everything is minutely prescribed. It's very comforting." Well, the weddings I attended were neither social-democratic nor religious-they were rich! Money was the form their oaths had taken-and love, I think. A kind of yearning, and relief. As for myself, while I dutifully attended all these weddings, I had other plans. I spent most of my time alone, walking through my neighborhood, past the famous strip club Scores, around the giant Bloomingdale's flagship store, as big as an aircraft carrier, and writing my long pieces of political a.n.a.lysis. Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPE-TENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the Whereas at the funerals of religious friends, everything is minutely prescribed. It's very comforting." Well, the weddings I attended were neither social-democratic nor religious-they were rich! Money was the form their oaths had taken-and love, I think. A kind of yearning, and relief. As for myself, while I dutifully attended all these weddings, I had other plans. I spent most of my time alone, walking through my neighborhood, past the famous strip club Scores, around the giant Bloomingdale's flagship store, as big as an aircraft carrier, and writing my long pieces of political a.n.a.lysis. Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPE-TENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the New Yorker New Yorker and opposing-too late- the war in Iraq. and opposing-too late- the war in Iraq.

Toward the end of the time I'm describing I too met a pretty girl, named Gwyn, who worked at a famous book review for which I wrote. She was younger than I was, by a lot, and she still worshipped, or so she told me and I had no cause to disbelieve her, the life of the mind. Gwyn was quiet and studious in person- like Jillian-but wrote sharp, affectionate e-mails from work and sometimes, or at least often enough, laughed at my jokes when we were home alone in bed or walking down the street together holding hands. She was only a year out of college, and the difference in our ages seemed a scandal to me, at first, but I got over it. She often stayed late at the review, messing up our evening's plans, but in return she brought me review copies, hundreds of review copies, an entire underground publishing economy filtering directly in to me. Gwyn was filled with bright hope for the future and also uncertainty, of course, as to what would become of her and who she really was. (She kept asking me.) And even with her youth, life had not entirely missed her-she'd been involved with an older guy, like me, a graduate student in history, who'd gone off one day to Syracuse and never, apparently, returned.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoons I met up with some friends-the unmarried ones-to play touch football in the park. Touch football is a limited game, frankly, a shadow cast on the wall by the real thing, and I kept losing at it. I played with some writers and magazine editors, we kept our teams the same each week, and my team always lost. Week after week this happened, for reasons that were beyond me, and week after week, after we had a few pitchers of beer at Oscar's, I walked home to my place on First Avenue (where more often than not now Gwyn would be waiting), wondering what had gone wrong.

Everyone was getting married; it was like some kind of cold people were catching. Ferdinand's wedding was lavish and in another country; Ravi's was lavish in New York. Arielle was getting married! After years of picking up men and discarding them, half alive, she picked one up and let him stay.

Then Jillian got engaged. I had seen her a few times, with varying degrees of pain and discomfort, when she'd come down from Boston. She was doing her medical residency there and it occupied all her time. When we'd seen each other there was no more talk, as there had been for a while before I'd left the country, of us getting back together, though we still clung to each other in the vast universe of other people.

Then one day she called, sounding very nervous, as I sat in my Starbucks reading the political pages of the so-called liberal New American. New American. To be connected to the world through a cell phone means getting all sorts of news in very strange places, and it was in the Starbucks on 60th Street that Jillian gave me the news about her engagement. To be connected to the world through a cell phone means getting all sorts of news in very strange places, and it was in the Starbucks on 60th Street that Jillian gave me the news about her engagement.

I said, "To a doctor?"

"What does that matter?" she said. "But yes, to a doctor."

Wow, I thought, almost involuntarily. A doctor.

"Are you OK?" she asked. "I mean, are you OK with it? You're not mad?"

"No," I said, then rummaged about in myself for a moment to make sure. I found no anger there. I was relieved, happy, in shock. So that was that. The end of Jillian and me. "How could I possibly be mad," I said. And then, knowing I got to ask this only once: "Is he a nice person?"

"Yes," she said very seriously. "He is."

"OK." We were silent for a moment. "I'm proud of you," I said.

And I was. It was almost like a victory for us together, that she had managed to move on and find someone nice. And for me it was a dispensation, an annulment. It was the end of something, even if of course everything one does reverberates through the universe eternally, so that there is no end to anything, technically speaking. Jillian was getting married. For her, at least, I was glad.

And then, in November 2006, the Democrats won races for the Senate and House in many states and districts. They took back the Congress. The newly const.i.tuted committees began to exercise the privilege-and what a privilege it now seemed!-of congressional oversight. In the spring of 2007, if you'd walked into the Starbucks on First Avenue and 60th Street, you'd have seen a jaded thirty-one-year-old man reading first the New York Times, New York Times, and then, if you'd stuck around and sipped your latte, the and then, if you'd stuck around and sipped your latte, the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, and, in a crooked, lopsided, jaded way, grinning like a little boy. I was reading about the House Committee on Government Reform. I was reading about the Senate Judiciary Committee. Occasionally I logged on to the better political blogs-there were still some left-and grinned along with them. It was not a happy time, exactly, it was not party-time, exactly, and eventually the Democrats would cave on Iraq, but still something was changing. Things were going to change. and, in a crooked, lopsided, jaded way, grinning like a little boy. I was reading about the House Committee on Government Reform. I was reading about the Senate Judiciary Committee. Occasionally I logged on to the better political blogs-there were still some left-and grinned along with them. It was not a happy time, exactly, it was not party-time, exactly, and eventually the Democrats would cave on Iraq, but still something was changing. Things were going to change.

I was sitting in Starbucks one day happily reading my papers when I got a call from Gwyn's book review.

"h.e.l.lo?" I said, because there was a slight chance that it was the editor, not Gwyn.

"Hi, baby," Gwyn whispered. "What are you doing?"

"I'm reading the outtakes from the Judiciary Committee," I whispered back. "It's awesome."

"Baby, I'm late."

I knew right away what she meant. "How late?"

"More than a week. I had the dates wrong."

"That time . . ."

"Yes. That's the one. I mean, maybe. But really maybe."

I formed, in the Starbucks, the most neutral expression I could summon and tried to channel this, my G.o.d-like neutrality, through the phone to Gwyn. Now, she was too young to be having babies, and I, I was too old. But I believed in history, as always, and if history had declared this, then that was history talking.

"Baby," I said. "My baby."

"I bought a test," she whispered. "Can I come over tonight and we'll take it together?"

"Yes, of course," I said. "My sweet. You can pee on the test in my apartment."

She laughed, a little nervously. "Thank you," she said.

We hung up. It was not a great joke but it could have been worse. Now I sat in the Starbucks and suddenly noticed, until then I'd only cared about the perfidies of the Bush administration, that I was surrounded by women and baby carriages. It was 2:00 p.m.-the women-and-baby-carriage hour. The women cooed at their little baby carriages, and exchanged horror stories of baby fevers and baby puking. So I was to be among them, with my own little baby carriage? I made a little cooing noise, to myself, to practice. Coooooo. Cooo-coooo. Coooooo. Cooo-coooo.

Of course Gwyn was too young to have a baby, and I, spiritually, was too old. I had done too much damage-to my own life, and to Jillian's, as Jillian had occasionally pointed out. Gwyn would see that. At the same time, if she didn't, I wasn't going to pack her off to the abortion doctor. Was I? I looked back at the papers. The Russians were threatening to cut off EU gas. E-mails were being released proving that the Bush people had suppressed scientific evidence of global warming. Another suicide bombing in Iraq. Another suicide bombing in Iraq. The Sunni and Shia were going to slaughter one another. Gwyn knew about all this; she worked at a great book review. We were going to bring a little baby into this world, this this world? No, believe me, I loved babies. But you were going to have to find me another world. world? No, believe me, I loved babies. But you were going to have to find me another world.

I spent the day worrying and thinking.

It was warm out now. The winter had been so strange-January was hot, then February and March were cold, biting cold, and now it was April, and it was raining, and warm, and life was back to normal. I wandered around in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. One of the nice things about my life, I thought, if also one of the sad things, was that I'd managed to remain unattached-to places, and other people, and even, aside from my despair at 2000 and the gerrymandering of the districts, to long-term political causes. I was still moving, I was still a few steps ahead. And to think that having finally achieved a separate peace with everyone, including Jillian, I was going to commit myself to fifty years of Gwyn-that was tough to take, for me, right then. After all the things I'd done wrong, it seemed a little foolish to go and do one more.

I thought too of all the lives I could have had-could still have. I could have stayed in Russia. I could have stayed with Jillian. I could have gone to Israel. I could have gone to graduate school- and graduate school sometimes takes you to strange places. I could have moved back to Clarksville and lived in an attic and coached high school football, as I'd once wanted to do.

There were so many things I'd once wanted to do! The trouble is that when you're young you don't know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways, so your ideas of what the world is like are jumbled; when you imagine the life you want for yourself, you imagine things that don't exist. If I could have gone back and explained to my younger self what the real options were, what the real consequences for certain decisions were going to be, my younger self would have known what to choose. But at the time I didn't know; and now, when I knew, my mind was too filled up with useless auxiliary information, and beholden to special interests, and I was confused.

I wandered around in the warm spring air. Gwyn was pregnant-I knew it in my bones, and her testing positive that evening in my apartment, which she did, which she spectacularly did, was a formality. She was pregnant. We spent the night in shock and professing, over and over, that it was up to the other person.

"We'll do whatever you want," I said.

"We'll do whatever you you want," answered Gwyn. want," answered Gwyn.

The next day we played football.

What was I supposed to do? Gwyn was pregnant and I played football. I ran crossing routes, b.u.t.tonhooks, end routes, and deep routes, and then some routes that surely were not routes at all. For moments-during the sharp pa.s.ses, the soft pa.s.ses, the pa.s.ses laid right into outstretched hands and the pa.s.ses that fell, ineffectually, out of reach-I forgot about the predicament I was in. Then I remembered again. I caught a pa.s.s lying on my back. The guy I covered-he was a novelist, actually, and he was the one engaged to marry Arielle-caught one, improbably, after it bounced off his shoulder. b.a.l.l.s were swatted down, batted up, redirected. Fingers were caught and crushed. I jammed my thumb. I was called for pa.s.s interference, after putting my elbow into someone's stomach-I should have put it in his throat. We played on. Blunders were committed, I dropped an interception, I failed to get open in the end zone, I lost track of the end zone and caught a pa.s.s on the one-yard line on fourth down and was tagged. We lost. So it went. We lost.

Sitting in Oscar's afterward, I went over all the promises I'd made myself after Jillian left. No more rushing into things, I had said. No more proceeding on the basis of hope. And, thinking over all the time that had pa.s.sed, how I wished that I could be other than I was! How I wished that I could be younger for Gwyn; that we had met ten years earlier, or even five. That the things that had happened had not actually happened, or had happened to someone else, or had, barring that, happened to us together.

But they had, and hadn't, and hadn't, and here I was.

Here I was, and walking out from Oscar's slightly drunk into the warmth of the day, because it was still day, I realized all at once that I'd been gone four hours. And it occurred to me, now that I was walking back, that Gwyn, my Gwyn, my quiet Gwyn, may quietly have let herself out, while I was gone, and made her way, alone, to the clinic on 70th Street, then sat quietly in the waiting room with the other women, until they called her name. And I began to walk faster, and then, my bag with cleats and clothing awkwardly beside me, I began to run. Because it wasn't over yet, I thought, remembering my friends at Debate, Debate, my gentle social-democratic friends-there was still work to be done. A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said-but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We'd keep the Congress. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we'd have many left-wing babies. My love. my gentle social-democratic friends-there was still work to be done. A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said-but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We'd keep the Congress. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we'd have many left-wing babies. My love.

I turned the corner finally, unlocked the door, and bounded up the stairs.