Lost in the Meritocracy Part 12

He picked me up at the station in D.C. in his most recent Mercedes diesel. Back when, he'd bought a new one every few years, but this one had deeply seamed and wrinkled seats, some of them repaired with tape. But there was a compa.s.s on the dash, as usual, mounted up high and polished with Windex, and the floor mats had been vacuumed spotless. He looked old, but no older than before, when he'd already struck me as ancient, even immortal.

"We'll drink some Chock Full o'Nuts with cake," he said.

Until we reached his apartment, that was all he said. I sensed I was still a little boy to him and that he could only picture doing now exactly what we'd done back then. I guessed right. We sat in his kitchen at a small old table that had to be the same one, because why buy a second small old table. He sliced the pound cake with a b.u.t.ter knife and served me the slice I'd remembered: thick enough, but no more than enough. The chicory coffee in my mug stirred memories: of drinking chicory coffee. I looked around for other links to memory but the place, as before, was spa.r.s.ely decorated-to the point of bleakness, I now felt. But maybe the feeling was unfounded. I'd been living in awfully grand surroundings lately.

"I won a nice fellowship, Uncle Admiral. To Oxford. I know how you always loved London."

"I did," he said. He turned his fork on its side above his plate and cut off a square from a corner of his cake. A perfect square, of one square inch. His mood was flat and hard to gauge. It had probably been that way when I was small, but when I was small I'd had no cause to gauge it. I was his pupil, he loved me, he loved the world, and he loved "mankind," his name for the great community of dreamers whose dreams, with his own, had sent him out to sea, to map the boundaries of the dreams. What did his mood matter in all of this?

"I like to dunk my pound cake in my coffee now." This was new. He showed me how he did it. I smiled and did it the same way. We weren't going to talk much, it was growing clear. But we'd done all our talking, so it was fine with me. I hadn't come here to talk. Or even to listen. I'd come here just to be here.

And then, at sixteen hundred hours-to give himself time to mix his daily c.o.c.ktail and sit on the lawn chair in the yard from which he could see across the river to the white tip of his favorite obelisk-he drove me back to the station and said, "Safe trip."

As I rode home on the train, I read a copy of the letter Uncle Admiral had sent for me to the Rhodes Committee and gave to me as I left his apartment.

I am pleased to support the application of Walter N. Kirn III for a Rhodes Scholarship.I have known the applicant since he was a babe in arms and during the first four or so years of his life was his surrogate father. From the time Walter could talk it was evident to me that he was a child of great potential and with a span of attention of great length. Many examples of precocity could be cited, perhaps one will suffice: when Walter was about five years old, I gave him a slide rule and in one lesson of an hour or less taught him to use it in multiplication and division.Walter is personable in appearance, enjoys excellent health, and is modest about his scholastic accomplishments. If accepted in the Rhodes program I am certain that he will be a great credit to Princeton University and the United States.Very truly yours, Robert W. Knox RADM USC&GS (Ret.) That summer I found myself back home, drinking beer with an old high-school friend in a pickup truck parked next to the river. His name was Karl, and he'd stuck around the area to lend a hand on his family's dairy farm. Most everyone else from our crowd had moved away, part of the ongoing small-town diaspora that may someday depopulate much of rural America and in some districts already has. Our old buddies had mostly gone down to the Twin Cities, but some had gone farther. They did different things. They dealt cards in Las Vegas. They sold Toyotas in Denver. Some, having grown up with low-wage shift work, were studying computer programming or starting small businesses with borrowed money. I had a hard time envisioning their lives, especially if they'd married and had kids, but I didn't have to: they were gone. I'd gone away, too, up a ladder into the clouds. Up a ladder made of clouds. And thanks to the miracle of Miss Keasbey's will, a cloud had appeared that I might be able to stand on.

"So what are your views on Emerson?" Karl asked me.

We'd been discussing books, at his request. He'd looked me up that night for this very purpose. While I'd been off at Princeton, so busily polishing my act that I wore right through it and it cracked, he'd become a tireless reader as well as a devoted Buddhist. He said he had no one to talk to now, no one who shared his interest in art and literature and the "way of non-attachment," so when he'd heard I'd be home for a few months before moving to England, he'd driven right over. We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn't, in fact, or much less than he a.s.sumed, and I didn't know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn't quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone, reliably. I'd honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some "cla.s.sic" or "masterpiece," for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They'd gotten me through Princeton, they hadn't quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now-not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I'd found out a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new cla.s.s that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The cla.s.s that runs things.

But I kept all this to myself; I didn't tell Karl. He was a reader, a Buddhist, and an old pal, and there were some things he might not want to know. I wasn't so sure I wanted to know them either.

My cynicism was creeping back, but later that summer something happened that changed me-not instantly but decisively. A few weeks before I was scheduled to fly to Scotland to spend a few days before I started at Oxford (Adam was staging Soft White Kids in Leather in Soft White Kids in Leather in a secondary venue at the Edinburgh Festival), I came down with a drippy summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia, forcing me to spend ten days in bed inside a fog bank of mentholated steam. One feverish night I found myself in the living room standing before the bookcase containing my mother's cla.s.sics for the ma.s.ses. I'd pa.s.sed right by them a thousand times, scanned their t.i.tles no more than once a year, skimmed a couple of them, finished just one (and hilariously misread it- a secondary venue at the Edinburgh Festival), I came down with a drippy summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia, forcing me to spend ten days in bed inside a fog bank of mentholated steam. One feverish night I found myself in the living room standing before the bookcase containing my mother's cla.s.sics for the ma.s.ses. I'd pa.s.sed right by them a thousand times, scanned their t.i.tles no more than once a year, skimmed a couple of them, finished just one (and hilariously misread it-The Great Gatsby), but that night, bored and sick, I took one down and held it tight: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it to my steamy bedroom and actually let it absorb me, page by page, chapter by chapter, straight on to the end. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I'd somehow gotten through Princeton without opening. Shockingly, I already knew the story: Miss Havisham, a lunatic old woman, is thought to be the secret patron of Pip, the waifish boy who becomes a London gentleman.

And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.

I wanted to find out what others thought.

Also by Walter Kirn.

The Unbinding

Mission to America

Up in the Air

Thumbsucker

She Needed Me

My Hard Bargain