All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 8

"And now I have to go to Vermont. But no house-sitting."

"Right."

"And I'm not doing this here anymore, I repeat."

"Right," I also repeated. I would bluff my way through. I said, "I'll get a hotel room when I come up."

"And?"

"And-we can spend time there, when we're not out on the town having fun!"

"Hotels are slimy."

"Not the clean ones!"

She turned her head to look at me, her big blue eyes and thin mouth turned down in an expression of fine sarcasm. We were lying on her bed in a state of partial undress. She was a thin girl, and pale, her jeans hung loosely on her like a boy's, and it was a source of endless amazement to me that I was so fixated on her-and yet I was, I was! We'd meet up, have a few drinks, then a few more, and then go home and wrestle. "The rape game," Arielle called it. "I don't think that's funny," I'd say, and she'd say, "Yes you do." I'd wrestle her out of some clothes, then myself, then she'd say "Stop," then we'd wrestle some more, then she'd say, "Really, stop," and then we'd negotiate. Right now we were in a negotiation. I had managed to get my shirt off but not hers. Then we'd had the fight about the hotels. She said: "Please don't become hysterical."

"I'm not becoming hysterical," I said. "What do you propose?"

"Don't you have an uncle in the city?"

"No. Not really. We're not on speaking terms."

"You should get on speaking terms. And in the meantime get out."

"What?"

"Out. Now. Have you put on weight? My bed's too small."

"It's two in the morning. It's cold out."

She was sitting up against two pillows, like a queen, miles away from me.

I said: "I have a great parking s.p.a.ce, I have it until Tuesday."

"That's all right, there's plenty of parking in Baltimore."

"But it's dangerous!"

"I'm serious," she said. "Go."

It was late by then, too late to ask someone if I could stay over, and anyway I didn't want to. Ferdinand lived with his girlfriend and now disapproved of anyone who didn't; Nick would start a long argument with me about the failures of the Left. I had momentarily lost my taste for New York. I walked, frozen and unhappy, to my car-so elegantly parked on 38th Street-and wondered at all the apartments that were not my apartment, and all the people living in them. Such warmth inside them! Such injustice! And there in the distance Grand Central Station looming like a cathedral. "Back then," someone had written of the old Penn Station, "one entered New York like a G.o.d." It was true now of Grand Central, and earlier in the evening I too had entered like a G.o.d (through the Holland Tunnel). Now I pulled out, defeated and still a little drunk, enough so that I didn't trust myself on scary, speedy 34th and crawled instead on side streets and marginal avenues until I reached the warmth of the tunnel again, almost empty at this hour, and went in.

Driving back through Pennsylvania on 78, nearly falling asleep, it was just too dangerous to fiddle with the CD player, the thing kept skipping and resetting, skipping and resetting, and before I pulled over at a truck stop near Harrisburg to finally change it I listened over and over to the first song of an alb.u.m called American Water. American Water. "I asked the painter," it went, "why the roads are colored black. / He said, 'Man, it's because people leaving / know no highway will bring them back.'" My life, I thought then, as I briefly considered taking 496 down and reconnecting with 95 on the other side of Philadelphia, before reconsidering-"You don't know anything about 95! You don't know anything about anything!" my father had yelled at my uncle the time they'd had a blowup over the route-my life was not very rock and roll. In a rock and roll life, you forgot everything and just moved on. Whereas I, if you asked, could still list all the people I'd ever been friends with, and all the people I'd ever loved, and all the things we did, and what they'd said. What is more I had a fellowship at a Washington think tank to write a postmortem on the 2000 election-what had gone wrong? I was looking into it. I'm still looking into it. "I asked the painter," it went, "why the roads are colored black. / He said, 'Man, it's because people leaving / know no highway will bring them back.'" My life, I thought then, as I briefly considered taking 496 down and reconnecting with 95 on the other side of Philadelphia, before reconsidering-"You don't know anything about 95! You don't know anything about anything!" my father had yelled at my uncle the time they'd had a blowup over the route-my life was not very rock and roll. In a rock and roll life, you forgot everything and just moved on. Whereas I, if you asked, could still list all the people I'd ever been friends with, and all the people I'd ever loved, and all the things we did, and what they'd said. What is more I had a fellowship at a Washington think tank to write a postmortem on the 2000 election-what had gone wrong? I was looking into it. I'm still looking into it.

Uncle Misha had an apartment in Washington Heights. I even happened to know that he was usually out of town on weekends. But things had been said by him, years ago, that could not be unsaid, and not just about highways.

He'd arrived in bucolic, isolated Clarksville when I was fifteen years old. My mother, whose brother he was, had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and for a long time I thought that Misha had come because he'd heard the news. Later on I realized that, as with certain hurried weddings, the dates did not add up. But how else to explain it? He had no business there. He was thirty-five, he had a degree in American literature from Moscow University, a fairly dubious degree even in Moscow, and a just plain ludicrous degree for a Russian immigrant in the States. Before emigrating he'd had an exciting, or anyway a reasonably interesting, life in Moscow. He had girlfriends, he had briefly been married: an educated nonalcoholic with most of his teeth intact, he was considered something of a prize. But he had accomplished little of actual substance, and perhaps he began to feel-I begin to feel it with him, or rather I begin to feel it too-that what he needed was a new place, a new city, he needed to see the world anew so that it could see him that way, too.

In the meantime my father was keeping up a steady campaign on behalf of the States. He was like Radio Free Europe, my father, except he wrote letters instead of producing radio broadcasts, and he wasn't directly funded by the CIA. We had a nice house by then, and two cars, in a prestigious town where there were almost no Russian immigrants, even if our part of it was not as prestigious as some others. So maybe it was just vanity on my father's part, the wish to make people see what he had done. Misha would later think so, certainly. But also it was just his belief-his beautiful belief. Halfway through life my father found himself in a place where he'd been spit on almost daily and insulted-and he left! He f.u.c.king left, and halfway through his life he went halfway across the world and found the capacity, inside himself, to believe that this new place was cardinally, was essentially and deeply different. This required courage as well as naivete; and it required strength, too.

But all beliefs have their victims, and Misha was my father's. He made some brave forays into the world upon arriving in America- he went to the libraries, the mall, he went to movies and even some bars, though he couldn't afford those, and then he stopped. Eventually he settled in, to the partial annoyance of my father, who thought he was turning down good job opportunities, in the room next to mine and at the dinner table, feeling trapped. He spent all his time feeling trapped and fooled, and he believed it was my father who had fooled him.

"You're like the Bolsheviks," Misha said one day. It had come to him, he said, as he drove through the old Protestant section of Clarksville, past the big churches, the grand mansions set way back from the streets with lawns stretching to them like golf courses- all the places Misha knew by now he'd never be able to afford. "You keep talking about this bright luminous future, meanwhile we're all living in s.h.i.t and you don't care. You just keep talking about it and feeling great."

"Are you talking about this house?" my mother said. She was going through chemo and had lost her hair and wore a little cloth on her head, to cover it up. "You consider it s.h.i.t?"

"It's a nice house. But you think that means the people around here like you. They hate you! Haven't you noticed? There are f.u.c.king swastikas at Pimple-Face's school!"

"Bozhe moi," said my mother, at the vulgarity. said my mother, at the vulgarity.

"I'm sorry if I express myself too strongly." Misha suddenly became poisonous. "You used to be a believer in strong expression."

"Misha, polno, polno," my mother said. Enough.

"What do we care if some kid draws a swastika in the bathroom? " my father thundered over them. "GET A JOB!"

My mother had been offended by Misha, but it was the sound of my father's terrible voice that caused her to break down and weep-at the table, in her little do-rag, in her dentures, and all for nothing, as it turned out, all that medicine and all for nothing. It was she who had suffered in this place; it was she who abandoned her books to become a computer programmer, learn to drive, learn about American ma.s.s culture, and now she had a pimply jock son who was forgetting Russian . . . and attending a school where, in fact, there had been a couple of swastikas on the bathroom wall. They were innocent swastikas, at least as far as we were concerned-people were suspicious of us for being Russian, but no one knew or cared that we were also Jewish, and in any case the only ethnicity people in our part of Maryland could ever really hate was blacks-but that wasn't the point. Misha was right, is the point, and though my mother hated him for saying it, she hated my father for yelling, for she herself had thought all these things too-had thought them and stifled them, the way mothers during the war would stifle their little babies, strangle them to death if necessary, if a baby by its crying was going to reveal a hiding place and get everyone without exception killed.

Misha must have thought that our house, our life, our two cars would insulate us against the whining of a thirty-five-year-old man with no money, no prospect of earning any money, no social position, and with bad smoke-ruined teeth and skin. He had not yet moved to New York, reconstructed his life; for now, in Maryland, he was nothing, worse than nothing. And as my mother ran from the kitchen weeping, Misha sat there with a look of deep perplexity upon his face. He must have thought, I thought, that we wouldn't care.

Which is just to say that I drove and drove. My father's route added sixty miles; I don't think even he would have prescribed it at night. But it was a way of seeing the world, I suppose. At around four in the morning, as I was getting onto 83, my cell phone rang. It was Arielle.

"Where are you?" she said.

"I'm coming up on York, home of the forty-five-pound steel plate."

"In Pennsylvania?"

"Yes. You can drive a lot faster on 78 than 95."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Look, it's how we do things."

"Why didn't you just call your uncle?"

"Because I didn't. And I won't. He-he didn't vote in the last election. He abstained."

"He did?"

"Yup. He said it made no difference who was President."

"He did?" Arielle was momentarily speechless. "Well," she recovered, "we'll avenge ourselves by doing terrible things in his apartment he wouldn't approve of."

"He's from the Soviet Union, Arielle. They were atheists. He doesn't disapprove of anything except money."

"We'll order expensive takeout."

"In Washington Heights?"

"We'll throw money in the fireplace."

"I'm not calling him."

"Ugh," said Arielle.

I loved the way she said it. "Do that again," I said. "Make that noise again."

"No," said Arielle, and returned me to the road and myself.

We tried to forgive Uncle Misha, and he us. Or maybe we didn't try, exactly-we just a.s.sumed it would happen. No one had really done anything. Money had not been expropriated, wills not contested-my grandmother had an apartment in Moscow, and it would be Misha's, no problem. We thought things would just work themselves out and instead they grew worse.

I finally got back to my neighborhood at six in the morning.

I drove up St. Paul, past our place, and there was nothing. I went over to Calvert and nothing. There was "Area 28" parking and meter parking, but I was not going to take a spot and then get up two hours later to move again. This was Baltimore! It's practically impossible to rack up parking tickets in Baltimore and yet I'd managed to do it, in no small part because my father had insisted I register the car in his new town, to save on insurance, and so I was not a member of Area 28. I wasn't a member of anything. I was a man in my late twenties who had accomplished next to nothing, had loved, properly, no one, and who was driving a dying car around a city in whose suburbs he'd grown up, but which remained to him, as he to it, a stranger. I drove up to the monument now, to the big obelisk honoring our nation's founding father, and then all the way down to Biddle, which really was as far as I was willing to go. Still nothing. I got back on St. Paul, and then made a quick left onto Eager, almost involuntarily, onto that crazy little on-ramp, and suddenly I was back on the highway, and a few turns later, I was actually on 95. I headed south. We no longer lived in Clarksville, we lived now on the water, near the naval academy, but I kept driving, and before I knew it I was getting off 95 again-it was actually a pretty nice road, between Baltimore and D.C.-and onto 108. h.e.l.lo, River Hill HS. The football stadium, if it could be called that. I had once run the ball thirty yards downfield in that stadium before some guy accidentally stuck his helmet into it and caused it to pop in the air like a flying fish. And then, on weekend evenings, drawn there by some mysterious force, we returned to get drunk behind the tennis courts. I pulled into the lot now, tired and smelly and nearly thirty years old. It was empty, the entire lot was empty. I pulled the lever to the side of my seat, fell backward, and immediately pa.s.sed out.

I woke up to someone tapping on the window. I had left it open a crack, so as not to suffocate, and now, awake, I found I was shivering. The person knocking wore a dark heavy coat; the person knocking was a cop.

"Good morning!" he said when he saw I'd woken up.

"Hi," I said, squinting up at him and very slowly and deliberately lifting myself up toward a sitting position. "Sorry about this."

"You can't be here."

"Yes." I explained that I'd been driving home and became sleepy and this was the only place I could think of to stop.

"Were you drinking at all?"

"No, Officer. I was driving from New York, there's a kind of complicated situation there, and I just became very drowsy. I'm going to move on now."

I could see him trying to think of some way to keep me under his dominion, for just another minute. But I was too old, I was too confident, even as a total derelict, sleeping in my car, I was still not really in any danger from him and he knew it.

Things do change. They change, but sometimes it's hard to tell the reasons why or what it means. We had spent so many nights running from the cops in this very place: before we figured out where to buy beer, we used to make bizarre drinks from our parents' liquor cabinets and sit on the baseball field behind the courts with the alcohol, and the cops, sensing us there with their special cop sense, would shine a spotlight on the field as they drove by. We'd hide. Occasionally they got out of their car and we ran.

Now I could sleep in the parking lot and still nothing would happen. I'd aged out of the bracket of hooligans; I'd consolidated the family's cla.s.s status; my car was dying, but unless you felt the clutch stick under your foot every time you went into third, you wouldn't really know it. And for me, as the cop helplessly let me go, this suddenly took some of the flavor out of life. I left the lot and went back down Tridelph and then out of perverse curiosity to Columbia, to see which chain stores had replaced the chain stores I'd grown up with, and, feeling my useless freedom in my lap like a cup of coffee growing stale there, I drove down to Annapolis Junction, and then beyond, all the way to the coast.

My father's house is set back from the road, and the bulk of it lies on a downward slope from the driveway, so that pulling up you see only the front hall and my father's office, the rest of the house hiding behind them like a secret reservoir of wealth.

When I pulled up on this morning my father was out-running errands, I later learned, for my sister, who lived abroad and often needed things from the States, the world's convenience store. My father had not yet remarried and so, briefly, I had the house to myself. It had once been a barn, as you could still tell from the windows in the small upstairs vestibule, and now it sprawled down from its former barn self, down and out into the downstairs rooms, one of which was mine, and the downstairs bathroom, and there was even a Ping-Pong table down there, the dream of all young men who were too humble or too chaste or too dumb to dream of f.u.c.king girls on the billiard table in their bas.e.m.e.nt. I was all three.

Now it had become so important to me that I sleep with Arielle! In retrospect it's hard to explain, but in that period after my breakup with Jillian, s.e.x was all I could think about. It seemed there was a truth in s.e.x that I needed to have about myself, and Arielle would be the one to tell it to me. And I was prepared to do anything, to drive down all the highways and byways of Pennsylvania and Maryland, to get her into bed. I was almost prepared to call Uncle Misha. But I was not prepared.

My father, my optimistic father, had spent too much on this house. Or rather, he was in the process of borrowing against it dangerously and putting the money in places where it was not as safe as one would have liked. The effects of this came later, but they were on their way now, even as I stood there, though I did not know it yet; they were an undercurrent in the house, a kind of premonition. That is another story. On this day, when I drove from Arielle's in Murray Hill, away from my Uncle Misha's in Washington Heights, and then to Harrisburg and past my apartment, where I couldn't find parking, out to my high school, where I could, all the way to the Bay-my father's troubles, which would shadow a good portion of my thirties, that is to say, are shadowing me now-were still very far away, or anyhow I had no inkling of them. I was still trying to piece my own life together. Because it had fallen apart.

Things fall apart. My father wanted nothing more to do with their old house, their old things, after my mother died. He sold the house, left the firm he was working for, and moved here; the furniture and dishes he gave to Jillian and me. When we moved to Baltimore after college we were able to drive down practically every weekend, almost, and while I followed political developments on the all-day cable news channels from the one old Clarksville leather chair, Jillian put away her textbooks and helped my father furnish the house. They studied the furniture catalogs, they made the rounds of the furniture stores, new and antique, they argued interminably about fabrics for the curtains and throw pillows. In general there was a lot of talk about the fabrics. My father was nominally in charge, as the bearer of the purse, but Jillian made all the final calls. Uncle Misha, the one time his opinion was solicited with regard to the fabrics, quite perceptibly sneered.

My dear Jillian. A year had pa.s.sed since she'd last set foot in this house, possibly more, and it was likely that she'd never set foot in it again. Gradually my father was picking up knickknacks here and there, and lamps were breaking, and people brought him gifts, sometimes, which he had to display, and so little by little the colors and chairs and paintings Jillian had chosen were being diluted or occluded or replaced. Eventually there'd be nothing left here of her but the big plaid armchair in the library. Of course, even before then other things would happen, involving the movement of international capital and the hiking of the interest rate. But this was happening, too.

I sat down on the couch and turned on the television. My father had a thousand channels-eight HBOs, six Showtimes, and then Cinemaxes, Movie Channels, multiple ESPNs. On either side of the television stood two sets of sliding gla.s.s doors leading onto the woods and the pond below, and so watching television you could pretend you were merely looking out the window.

Suddenly Jillian called. I had dialed her number at some point during the night, but she hadn't picked up.

"Hi," she said, a little warily. We didn't talk much anymore.

"Hi," I said.

"I saw that you called. Is everything OK?"

"Yes. I'm sorry about that. I was just driving to the Bay, actually, and I thought of you. Sorry."

"Oh, sweetie," she said.

"Hi."

"Where are you now?"

"I'm here."

"How's your dad?"

"I haven't seen him yet. How are you?"

"I'm OK. I've had a lot of work. I was going to call actually: I'm coming to a thing at Hopkins next month. We could get dinner, if you wanted."

I said I did want to, though the prospect filled me with a kind of dread. We'd sit across the table from each other, looking sad, looking lonely-and there wasn't anything for it, in the end. You can't go back to things, I was learning. And neither did I want to go back, truth be told.

We hung up. I hadn't checked my e-mail since leaving my apartment the day before, nearly twenty-four hours of no e-mail, but I didn't care. I got up and walked into the little library off the main living room, filled with my mother's old books on Russian literature, most of them put out by the emigre presses-Ardis, L'Age d'Homme, YMCA-Presse. Like everyone else, she'd been forced into programming, Russians like some poorly dressed gang of programming mercenaries, but her old books from her old life had stayed, and occasionally I would look into them. The arguments no longer made much sense-over and over that Lenin was Stalin, that Brezhnev was Stalin, that if you didn't think so, you were Stalin-but the type, so clumsy and cheap, not ma.s.s produced and thin, like the Soviet books on the shelves, but as if an individual had gone into the DNA of every letter and somehow made it look awkward on the page, each letter in a different way- the type spoke of a world in which publishing these words and getting them to readers was the most important thing imaginable. I did not long for that world; I knew very well how much it cost; and I did not feel rebuked by it. But having been lived in once, by people I knew, and in these books-the world remained.

Here was this library, transported from Moscow to Clarksville and finally down I-97 to the water. It was like the legal discovery process that Arielle had told me about, where a suite of lawyers tramps into an office and seizes all the property to photocopy it. "The lawyers, meaning me," said Arielle, her big blue eyes lighting up at the hilarity of it, "we take the most detailed imaginable notes on where everything is, so we can reconstruct it exactly as it was-second file cabinet, third drawer, fifth file from front-and then off it goes in a truck."

"It must be strange to get it back," I'd said, considering it. We were sharing a final beer after a number of other beers and drinks.

"It must be so so strange," she answered, laughing. "Is it still the same stuff? You'll never know." strange," she answered, laughing. "Is it still the same stuff? You'll never know."

I'd leaned across the table to kiss her and she batted me back.

My father finally pulled up. Immediately I wondered, standing in the library, whether I was doing anything wrong.

The door opened. "A-oo!" my father called in, having seen my car out front, still living.

I walked toward the front door. "A-oo," I called back, more softly.

We shook hands.

"Kakimi sud'bami? " he said. By what fate? He was happy to see me. This enormous house, despite all the new furnishings, still filled with so many of the old things. he said. By what fate? He was happy to see me. This enormous house, despite all the new furnishings, still filled with so many of the old things.

He made us lunch. It was too cold to eat outside on the porch, but the early-afternoon light flooded onto the big rectangular wooden table at which we sat. In the past twenty-four hours I had slept just that one hour in the parking lot; I must have looked bad; I felt horrible. My father made a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon-an old specialty of the house, prepared by placing two generously cheesed and baconed slices of bread into the toaster oven and waiting for the whole thing to melt down.