Portrait of Jonathan Franzen
as a Young Man
OUR FRIEND DANNI’S young husband had been intending, since before he was her husband, to talk about his feelings about having children, but because these feelings consisted mainly of reluctance and aversion, and because Danni, who was a few years older than he, was unmistakably determined to have a family, this conversation promised to be so unhappy that the young husband still hadn’t managed to begin it by the time Danni reached a career plateau and announced that she was ready. The young husband told her that he needed to go to Burlington, Vermont. He said he needed to replenish his store of antique lumber for his custom-renovation business. From Burlington he called Danni every few days, sounding worried about her emotional state, but it was not until Danni received a card from the postal service, confirming the young husband’s change of address, that she understood that he wasn’t coming back. She said on the telephone, “Did you leave me? Are we not together anymore?” For the young husband, unfortunately, answering these questions would have meant initiating precisely the conversation that he couldn’t bring himself to have. He replied that all of a sudden, in Vermont, nobody was naïve about lumber anymore. Every single person in the state seemed to know that antique thirty-foot oak beams now sold for three thousand dollars. Even very stupid and isolated rural people were aware of this. He said that, as information became cheaper, markets became more perfect and real bargains impossible to find. Probably online auction sites like eBay contributed to this trend, which was bad for entrepreneurs like himself but good for rural Vermonters, he had to admit. A few days later, while Danni was on a business trip, the young husband drove to New York in his pickup and fetched his personal things, including a sixty-pound chunk of maple burl, from their apartment on East Tenth Street. Even after Danni had met a twenty-seven-year-old psychotherapist and become pregnant with his child, the young husband remained unable to tell her that he didn’t want children and should never have married her. The divorce was done by mail.
Danni’s old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist and a fixture in the downtown free-improv scene, had been living with a fabric designer named Jillian for seven years when he informed his friends that he was getting married. “Yeah, so, Jillian’s the love of my life at the moment,” he said, “and she really wants to make things official, so.” Jillian had lately grown impatient with Stephen’s poverty and his insistence on staying out until three every night and the favors he was always doing for nuns, such as giving nuns rides to family funerals in distant states or hauling around crappy nun furniture in a truck provided by his parish priest (Stephen had been schooled and intermittently raised by nuns), and it was Jillian’s notion that marriage would settle Stephen down, make him less susceptible to the wishes of nuns and more susceptible to her own wishes, and he would start cleaning his fingernails better and getting home before midnight and so on. These expectations of Jillian’s came as a surprise to Stephen once they were married. On the weekend after their little wedding, which was held on the lawn of an upstate friend in bright October sunshine, Stephen retiled the bathroom of a nun named Sister Doina and returned from a late-night gig near dawn. Jillian moved out three weeks later. When the time came for the newlyweds to use their plane tickets to Pittsburgh for Christmas, Jillian jostled her way through the US Airways concourse at LaGuardia, looking for the one seat that was maximally distant from each of the many barking airport TV screens. She knew she had finally located this seat when she found Stephen sitting in it, his fingers pressing on his special miniature deep-insertion stereo earphones, which doubled as noise-reducing earplugs. In Pittsburgh, he and Jillian received felicitations from eighty-odd party guests of Jillian’s parents, who were well-to-do and had also bought the plane tickets, and for several nights the newlyweds had trembling, furtive kiddie sex in Jillian’s childhood bed, although she had already filed New York State paperwork for a legal separation and was constantly on the phone with her new, non-Catholic, nonmusical boyfriend in Manhattan, reassuring him, every day, that she was so, so over Stephen.
A few months before Ron started introducing his friends to his new girlfriend, Lidia, his father died and left him enough money to buy the kind of West Village duplex that Ron had always wished he could afford. Ron taught philosophy at the New School. Over the years, he had confided to various friends that he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women; the roster of insertees included both former students and students actively enrolled in one or more of his classes, various junior and senior New School faculty, fellow-guests at philosophy conferences in other cities, the grown daughters of his accountant and his wine dealer, the fabric designer Jillian, the girlfriend of a former next-door neighbor, and several female staff members at the local branch of the New York Sports Clubs. Ron’s academic specialty was moral philosophy. A big reason women fell for him so hard was that he was a person of great feeling and conscience. He listened to women with patience and active sympathy; he was like the tender, respectful brother or father they’d always imagined having. And even though these were the very qualities that led women to invest their trust in him and thus advance what he feared was his sole mission in life, he genuinely was a nice man; there genuinely were good reasons that he had so many loyal friends. Which was why, as the years went by, he chastised himself so bitterly for his inability to stay faithful to any girl for longer than about sixty days. Every once in a while, he confessed his sins to his friends, who were grieved to see him suffering and beating up on himself and who hastened to reassure him that he was not a sick monster. His bad behavior caused him so much pain that you wanted to comfort him, not condemn him (although it certainly helped, in this regard, that you never got to see whatever pain his behavior might have caused the girls who trusted him). Whenever a new girl entered his life, he disappeared with her behind closed bedroom doors, as if to avoid potentially compromising interactions with his friends (in whose minds, as the years went by, his many identically slender and dark-eyed young dates and short-term girlfriends all kind of blurred together) and to minimize the fuss of dumping the girl when the time for dumping came. Finally, though, with the death of his father, and with his acquisition of a duplex on Bank Street, and with the looming of his fortieth birthday, Ron decided to put childish things behind him. Within weeks of meeting Lidia — a young Ecuadoran beauty from Jackson Heights who prosecuted drug cases for the Manhattan district attorney — he made a point of introducing her to all his friends. Sitting beside Lidia in various restaurant booths, he averred to his friends that he had finally met his intellectual match. While Lidia was in the bathroom, he further disclosed that his relationship with her was “basically a done deal,” that there was “no backing out now,” that he and she were so definitely “on track to get married” that he was preparing to adopt her three-year-old daughter from her short-lived first marriage, and that, although it would obviously require titanic effort on his part, he was determined to stay faithful to Lidia for the rest of his life, because he was in awe of her intellect and she had such a great sense of humor. Ron delivered this huge news in a curiously abstract tone of voice, without meeting his friends’ eyes. When Lidia returned from the bathroom, having darkened her lipstick and mascara, Ron’s friends couldn’t help noticing that he sat facing away from her, leaving twelve or fifteen inches of space between them, and that she said “expresso” and “eck cetera” and “between you and I,” all of which famously grated on Ron’s ears. You almost got the sense that Ron wasn’t even listening to Lidia. While she spoke of their upcoming camping trip to British Columbia, glancing eagerly at Ron to reassure herself of his approval, he gazed off into the distance like a man trying to empty his mind while a phlebotomist took blood from his arm. Now and then he came back into focus, leaned over and put his arm around Lidia, and instructed her, for example, to tell his friends about the word she’d played in Scrabble the other night for eighty-seven points. Lidia lowered her eyes to her napkin. The word, she said, was “plenary”—not even that great a word. But Ron insisted that he had never seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and, absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one Scrabble play. “I’m happy,” he said simply, his body angled toward the restaurant’s front door. “I feel like I could be content to play Scrabble with Lidia for the rest of my life.” A few months later, during summer vacation, when some of his friends asked him how things were with Lidia, Ron sounded distracted and impatient, as if his feelings were well known by now and he found it weird even to be asked about them. He said that he and Lidia had recently passed their six-month mark and might as well be married — it was pretty much a done deal; he couldn’t back out now — and, yeah, O.K., sometimes it was hard to imagine having sex with the same one person for the rest of his life, but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up, and he was committed to making this relationship work, and so, basically, yeah, things were really, really, really good between the two of them. A few weeks later, he dropped out of all voice, e-mail, and face-to-face contact. When he surfaced again, toward the end of August, it was to send his friends terse e-mails with a new postal address and phone number. Pressed for an explanation, Ron replied in an irritated tone that he’d rented a two-room box on East Twenty-eighth Street and was working on his Heidegger book. Lidia he preferred not to talk about at all, though he did refer to a summer-school student named Kristin several times, and under close questioning he admitted that taking moral responsibility for his many broken promises to Lidia had been costly to him financially. Lidia was devastated, he said, when his involvement with Kristin came to light — an involvement that he didn’t insult his friends’ intelligence by pretending was going to last past Labor Day — and, since there was no conceivable excuse for his misbehavior, he’d made amends as well as he could by providing a thirty-per-cent down payment on a comfortable West End Avenue apartment, a classic six suitable for a single professional woman and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, which had necessitated putting the Bank Street duplex on the market and pricing it to sell, which was why he was now living in an anonymous box in Murray Hill. Ron was probably the world’s leading authority on Heidegger’s moral philosophy; he was renowned for his extemporaneous and wittily annotated classroom translations of knotty Greek and German texts; and so his friends, even his very smart friends, were simply too intimidated intellectually to question his cash payment of several hundred thousand dollars for the sin of cheating on his girlfriend of six months. That his real-estate transactions must already have been in motion even as he was assuring his friends that he and Lidia were practically married — that the entire private drama of exposure and shame and penance couldn’t possibly have been jammed into the three and a half weeks that he’d dropped out of sight — became just another of the never-again-referred-to mysteries that were the price you paid for the pleasure of Ron’s company.
Stephen’s cousin Peter, on the other hand, when he’d been having unprotected sex with his Pilates instructor, Rebecca, frequently enough (and then some) to make her pregnant, went straight to his wife, Deanna, with whom he already had two children, and said that although he was committed to their marriage he was also in love with Rebecca, and he wanted to be involved with raising their child, and perhaps everyone could just learn to get along? Peter’s plan was financially realistic — he was a radiation oncologist with a busy uptown practice — and he felt that if Deanna was realistic herself she could hardly say no. Peter was a nice, late-blooming Midwestern boy who had married his plain and rather clingy college girlfriend and let her go to work at a bank to support him in med school. He could see now that a successful Manhattan oncologist could do a lot better, spouse-wise, than a sour, fussy, pinch-faced mom with large thighs, and that to stay with her would be like continuing to pay eighties-level interest rates while the rest of the world refinanced its mortgages — there was no earthly reason for it, basically — but, at the same time, he recognized that he owed a lot to Deanna, and he loved his kids, and one of the many excellent things about Rebecca was how comfortable she was with the idea of French-style family arrangements. So it wasn’t like there were any jerks in the picture here. Everyone was doing his or her best to be nice and responsible while remaining, of course (as Peter stressed in his presentation to Deanna), realistic. It was only after Deanna had hired a capable lawyer and won full custody of the kids and a financially eviscerating divorce settlement that Peter realized how wrong he’d been, from the very beginning, about Deanna — she’d never really been nice at all! she was homely and mean! — and how lucky he was to have Rebecca, who was not just young and shapely but also (as witness her willingness to share Peter with Deanna) genuinely menschy, although, as he sometimes admitted to himself in the shower, or in bed at three in the morning, when his second Martini was wearing off, or when he happened to think of Deanna in her bloated new house up in Harrison, with her atrocious S.U.V., and caught himself mentally addressing her in terms like “Old Pig Eyes,” niceness was a relative term and Deanna probably viewed the matter somewhat differently.
Or, as Peter’s friend Antonia liked to tell visitors to the high-floor parkside unit on Central Park West that she’d bought with the proceeds of her own divorce settlement, there came a point in every failing marriage when you found yourself in a room with a waxwork hologram of yourself: when you saw, through your spouse’s demented eyes, the monster he projected in your place, a monster who resembled you superficially (though it was probably somewhat fatter and more wrinkly than you really were, just as his youthful idealization of you had probably been firmer and sexier than you’d really been back then) but was in every other respect a fantastic and wholly unfamiliar creature. Antonia made all her visitors remove their shoes at the door to her place on the Park and never let more than one friend at a time come to see her; even her daughters had to visit one at a time, without bringing overnight guests or wearing shoes inside. These were just some little house rules that Antonia allowed herself to enforce after twenty-plus years of motherhood and hellish corporate-wifedom in Palo Alto. The decisive moment in her own marriage had come in her Palo Alto kitchen, after she made an unloving remark to her husband. The remark was no different from a thousand other unloving remarks she’d made in the previous ten years; but this time the husband, who was a small and mild and nose-scrunchingly nervous man with a face familiar to viewers of “Wall $treet Week,” grabbed her by the throat with his right hand and pressed his thumb into her windpipe. With his left hand, he pinned her wrists against her chest. He brought his face very close to hers, which was rapidly turning purple, and pleaded with her: “Why are you doing this to me?” To which Antonia could only say, “Kegh. Ecck!” And so the husband screamed directly in her face, “Why are you doing this to me! Would you please stop doing this to me!” As Antonia later told her visiting, shoeless friends, one by one, this was the moment when, in spite of her growing fear, she had suddenly seen herself as her husband saw her: as a crushingly strong and evil person who had been causing him terrible harm for many years; as the monstrous figure who kept him from attaining every pleasure and every freedom he’d ever wished for, who annihilated his manhood with her cunning and her wit. Nevertheless, she tried to point out the patent absurdity of his plea. “Guaggh — kgheck,” she said. Some time later, when she regained consciousness, she found herself lying on her back on the kitchen floor. The husband was leaning against the utility island, eating a folded-over piece of sandwich-style rye bread. Antonia’s throat was raw and clogged, but she had more of a sense of humor than of self-protection. “I was trying to say,” she said, coughing as she laughed, “who’s strangling who?” The husband’s reply was matter-of-fact: “I wasn’t strangling you.” “Then why,” Antonia said, “is my windpipe practically broken and me lying on the floor?” The husband stated flatly, “I never touched you.” And the curious thing, Antonia told her friends, was that he believed what he was saying. And she saw what he meant, and she believed him, too; because how could he have touched her when she, the real she, wasn’t even in the same room (or, possibly, the same universe) that he was in? Nevertheless, she said, it worried her to see him behaving psychotically. “Honey?” she essayed tenderly, from the floor. At this, the husband reached out and seemed to strangle invisible Antonias in the air all around him, his eyes beseeching Heaven. “What will it take to get rid of you?” he cried. “What do I have to do to make you stop doing this to me?” Oh, the poor little man, Antonia thought; I’ve nearly killed him. “Just give me half the money,” she said, putting her hands on her throat. “Just—haugh, guagg, hack, kkgh! That’s all! Just aaaghkk the money, honey!” She laughed and coughed, and the husband ran from the room ashen-faced, as if he’d seen a fulminating witch, a dead woman speaking, some kind of horror-flick apparition. In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends’ hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew himself so poorly. And her friends, listening to her tell these stories in a voice that grew more cartoonishly little-girlish with each year she spent on Central Park West, felt sorry for the husband, too.
AND THEN THE PERFECT COUPLE, Pam and Paul, who first hooked up in college, co-writing operettas and co-founding a cabaret, went on to amaze their classmates by marrying in Reno six months before they even graduated, and finally, at a combined age of forty-three, set up shop in California as a comedy-writing duo. They were still only twenty-seven when NBC picked up their pilot for a series about suburban teen-agers with funny yesteryear hair styles and funny yesteryear teen difficulties. Every Wednesday night, for the next five seasons, tens of millions of smiling Americans watched the heart icon in the show’s closing credit (“A PAMELA BURGER ♥ PAUL MATHER CREATION”) twinkle once to the sound of a little chime. In joint appearances at their alma mater’s Career Day — Pam resembling a freckly Bartlett pear, Paul a cartoon scallion with well-gelled rootlets — the two of them dispensed encouragement to aspiring young writers. “Work hard, don’t compromise, never settle for the easy deal,” Pam said. “Failing that,” Paul said, “at least make sure the easy deal is for eight figures.” The happy couple, whose three Emmies had the effect of confirming the literary rightness of their relationship, retired from the show in 1998, sold their bungalow in Santa Monica, and bought a thirty-acre spread up in the mountains, because, as they quipped in joint interviews with their old home-town papers in North Carolina and Massachusetts, Paul had become psychologically incapable of remembering whether the “O” in “Michael Ovitz” was long or short and therefore couldn’t appear in public anymore.
At their mountain hideaway, to which, for a pleasant few weeks, magazines sent reporters to profile them and transcribe Paul’s one-liners, they were attempting to write an original romantic comedy. (“We want to push each other creatively,” Pam told Good Housekeeping. “Pam, for example,” Paul said, “has taken to pushing me creatively down the stairs.”) Despite several months of pushing, however, they remained nowhere with the script until, one Monday morning, the FedEx truck arrived with a copy of their latest profile in L.A. Weekly. Pam saw the headline of the article, “TWO’S COMPANY,” and was thunderstruck. “Two’s Company”: perfect title! “The thing we know best is the romance of marriage,” she declared. “The world doesn’t need another gag about a girl with come in her hair. The world doesn’t need another drama about adultery. What would be truly original, at this cultural moment, would be a straight-up celebration of monogamy. To create a couple who are so funny together, so right for each other, that you’re rooting for the marriage from the very first frame.”
Paul, who was frowning unhappily at the photograph that accompanied the profile, said that he agreed with her — mostly. His only tiny worry was that a too perfect couple might come across as more cutesy than ha-ha funny. As possibly even outright irritating. He also wondered what to make of the fact that the funniest married movie couple he could think of offhand, Nick and Nora Charles, were hopeless drunks. “Just, you know, wondering,” he said.
Pam said she didn’t see why Paul was being so pissy. To prove him wrong, she went to her study, which was a den of deep-pile silk rugs and pillows the size of armchairs, to create some scenes of a marriage that was both perfect and hilarious. Paul’s own office contained a four-drawer file cabinet and a folding chair. He went out to the pool and dutifully opened a notebook for one of the three pilots that he and Pam were contractually obligated to develop. In this one, called “Playing House,” two great-looking high-school seniors get married after their parents, who are friends, are killed together in a helicopter crash, and the newlyweds have to learn how to behave like grownups with big mansions and millions of dollars and how to cope with being C.E.O.s of the family businesses even though they’re still just eighteen and applying to colleges. Paul, for whom first drafts tended to be a torment, had uncharacteristically looked forward to writing the scene in which the two kids lie in bed in their middle-aged pajamas and lament the shrivelment of their sex drive; but now he didn’t see the humor in it. He felt compelled, instead, to go and lock himself in the guesthouse bathroom with a head shot of the twenty-year-old actress, Tracy Gill, whom he was hoping to cast in the pilot’s lead female role, and when he emerged from the guesthouse, nearly an hour later, his mood extremely sour, he went straight to his vintage yellow BMW roadster and gunned its extravagantly polluting engine and steered it toward the city.
Paul’s childhood had been the stuff of comedy. His father was ordained as a Presbyterian minister but left the Church to work in human resources at Raytheon and devote his leisure time to sports betting and solitary drinking while Paul’s mother found Jesus, moved to Colorado, and started a second family with an Air Force colonel whom Paul, as an adolescent, dreamed of murdering with a hatchet. At boarding school, he took to wearing all black and smoking black Sobranies, and he helped form a literary comedy troupe that played scenes like the tsar’s near-execution of Dostoyevsky for slapstick. Paul’s favorite role was a cheerful Jehovah’s Witness who kept tapping on Sylvia Plath’s kitchen door while she was trying to kill herself; he also liked to play Sartre’s alter ego, Roquentin, and stare at a tree root until its disgusting raw existence made him barf.
When Pam discovered Paul, in their second week of college, he was a gaunt loner who was almost as disdainful of girls as he was of alcohol and sports. On his dinner tray, the night she plunked her own tray down beside it, were three dishes of jello cubes, one dish of vanilla pudding, two glasses of Pepsi, and one flagrant turkey cutlet. Pam’s opening line was “Are you sure you should eat that cutlet?” By Thanksgiving, she was well on her way to having civilized him. She took him home to Durham and introduced him to her plump, jolly parents. Her father had co-written the standard college intro text in macroeconomics, and every time the family needed another million dollars he put out a new edition. (“This is my private mint,” he snickered, showing Paul his home office.) The father gave him tutorials in wine appreciation, the mother taught him to say the family motto in Latin—“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”—and every night, in Pam’s bedroom, which the parents had winkingly forbidden Paul to enter after 10 P.M. (“There’ll be hell to pay, young man, if you so much as lay a finger on our daughter!”), Pam unstoppered the carnal energies that had long been building up in the steel-clad cooker of Paul’s New England psyche. Prior to Paul, Pam herself had been naked only with a French exchange student, whose thick accent and single-minded pursuit of sex later became the basis for the amusing character of Pierre on her and Paul’s hit TV series, but she was such a well-loved child that she was neither surprised nor frightened when the strange, intense Yankee she’d picked out for herself became obsessively devoted to her; she took it as her due.
Which was, perhaps, Paul felt, as he drove his roadster down the 101, both the excellent and comforting thing about Pam and the root of his problem now: her lack of doubt. The funniest lines in their work, the lines with that satisfying crackle of sadism, were mostly his, but he was aware that it was Pam’s confidence and Pam’s higher tolerance for cliché that had won them their big contracts. And now, because she wasn’t engineered for doubt, Pam seemed to think it didn’t matter that she’d gained fifteen pounds since moving to the mountains and that she was thumping around the house with the adipose aquiver in her freckled upper arms; she certainly seemed not to care that they hadn’t had sex since before Labor Day; and she’d been pointedly deaf to certain urgent personal-grooming and postural hints that Paul had dropped during their photo shoot for L.A. Weekly. Indeed, the person he now imagined murdering with a hatchet was that paper’s photo editor, who, Paul was certain, had deliberately selected a shot in which Pam looked like Jackie Gleason, in order to punish her for her complacency and to ridicule Paul for his too sincere avowal, in a paragraph not three inches from Pam’s splotchy face, that everything good in his life he owed to her.
He felt trapped and isolated by the freakish particulars of a romance that Pam, even now, was endeavoring to celebrate in a film script. He wished that he could call up some other woman, but it seemed to him unlikely that there was a single attractive female in all of Southern California who had not been nauseated by his and Pam’s repeated public declarations of their delight in each other. And so, arriving at the little office of Mathburger Productions, he simply took what he had driven down for — an old, lovingly preserved folder of his high-school scripts, and a Tracy Gill career-compilation video that his assistant had put together and that Paul was hoping might include a few scenes that Gill now regretted having shot.
Pam, meanwhile, was laughing out loud while writing her pages. These pages concerned a slightly neurotic but charming couple, Sam and Paula, who arrive in Maui for a week’s vacation. Paula, whom Pam described as “extremely attractive in a thinking man’s way,” has managed to convince herself, despite turning the heads of the resort’s buff male staffers, that she is old and dowdy and losing her appeal, and a deftly handled series of comic misunderstandings quickly persuades her that Sam is flirting with a brainless bombshell, Kimbo, whom, in reality, he couldn’t care less about.
“Uh, and why couldn’t he?” Paul said when Pam, after a month of hard work, finally showed him Act I.
“Because she’s a big-titted dolt,” Pam answered. “You know, the kind of person you’d expect a guy to be drooling over, which is what makes Paula so paranoid, which is what makes Sam feel like he’s so busted, when in fact—”
“In fact what?”
“In fact, he’s embarrassed by how uninterested he is in Kimbo. You know, like, what’s wrong with him? All the other guys in Maui are drooling over this girl. And Sam is like, Am I gay? Am I less of a man for being monogamous? Because the idea here is that it’s hard, it’s comically awkward, to still be so in love with his wife after all these years, while there’s this huge cultural pressure for him to be hitting on little chicklets like Kimbo.”
After a pause, Paul nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, O.K. I get it. That’s interesting. But what if, then, in Act II—”
“No,” Pam said in a voice that made Paul wonder if she were quite as oblivious as he’d thought. “I’ve been thinking about this sixteen hours a day,” she said, “and no. That’s the totally obvious beat: she suspects him, her suspicion gives him ideas, he tries to act on these ideas, compromising positions, crisis in marriage, love reaffirmed, lesson learned, happy ending.”
“No, I agree, that’s stale,” Paul said. “It’s just, why does Kimbo (unfunny name, by the way) have to be so cartoonish? Why can’t she be like Paula, only younger? Kind of a thinking man’s beautiful twenty-year-old?”
“Well,” Pam said, “because that wouldn’t be funny. Apart from that one little problem, its total lack of funniness, it’s a great idea.”
Paul retreated to his own study to view the regrettably quite PG-rated Tracy Gill video for the fourth or fifth time and to reread his high-school scripts and imagine them as the basis for a “Monty Python” cum “Fractured Fairy Tales” type of cable comedy hit. It was the surprisingly durable brilliance of these scripts that gave him the courage finally, after painful hesitation, to pick up his phone and call Gill’s agent to arrange a private pre-meeting meeting with the potential star of his and Pam’s potential new hit series.
The meeting took place at a Starbucks in Westwood at two on a Tuesday afternoon. Paul’s only serious complaint with the lovely Gill, in person, was that she had brought along her mother.
Mrs. Gill reminded Paul of his own mother. Her first question was “What exactly does the phrase ‘pre-meeting meeting’ mean?” Her second question was “Where’s your wife?” Her third question was “Why aren’t we meeting at your office?” Her fourth question was “Why did you not want Tracy’s agent here?”
Paul’s answers to these questions were syntactically complex. To change the subject, he went ahead and pitched his idea for a cable show based on his high-school scripts. Tracy Gill averred, with a squeal, that she’d just read “The Bell Jar.” Mrs. Gill asked Paul what he thought was funny about a young mother putting her head inside an oven.
The meeting was over in thirty-five minutes. Back up in the mountains, after a high-speed drive that Paul spent picturing a hatchet buried in Mrs. Gill’s forehead, he found his overweight wife by the pool. He was breathless with wrongdoing. His wife asked him to guess who had just telephoned her, but Paul couldn’t. “Tracy Gill’s mother,” Pam said.
Paul stopped breathing altogether. “You and Tracy Gill’s mother have been talking on the phone?”
By way of reply, Pam gathered her robe around her and stood up. “Paul,” she said, “I want you to move out. Right away.”
Her words were so unexpected, and they made Paul feel so guilty and fearful, that even though he was basically sick to death of Pam he tried to defend himself and argue for their marriage: “You’re splitting up with me because I had coffee with Tracy Gill and her mother?”
Pam shook her head. “It’s just that, before I go any further with the script,” she said, “I want you at a different address.”
Paul said, “Are you out of your mind? You think I’d actually try to steal credit?”
“At this point, Paul, I’d consider you capable of almost anything.”
“Even, my God, the crime of drinking coffee at two in the afternoon!”
“You had your chance to sign on with this project,” Pam said. “I gave you weeks and weeks and weeks.”
“This project,” Paul cried, “is a fraudulent, wishful middle-aged woman’s fantasy!”
To which Pam simply shook her head and said, “You are such a disappointment to me.”
A month later, as part of their separation agreement, Paul signed an affidavit in which he renounced all claims to “Two’s Company.” Pam’s publicist confided to Variety, “He’s a really nice guy, but she’s been carrying him for years. It finally just got to be too much.” After “Two’s Company” grossed a hundred and ten million in theatres, and Pam was photographed looking twenty pounds thinner than Paul had ever seen her, even in college, and she hooked up with a boy so chiselled and pectoral that even if he wasn’t gay he should have been, and she went on to produce more comedies for an older female audience, each more profitable than the last, Paul came to see that what had looked to him like a wishful fantasy had been a fantasy only because he personally had not believed in it: because it offended his taste. Back in Pamland, the wish was still congruent with reality; and every ticket for a film of hers, every video rental and every rave review on AM radio, was like another vote to ratify her reality at the expense of his. The whole country was against him, and so he moved to New York City, where, well-insulated financially, he worked on recasting his comic literary vignettes as little formalist short stories that he mailed out to journals. You could see him at a certain kind of party, standing near open windows, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, and hoping to talk about his favorite subject, which was the badness of his ex-wife’s films.
ROOM 471, THE FEDERAL BUILDING, Eighth Street, Philadelphia: a perfectly square room which for no obvious reason had an eye chart on the southern wall. A leak in the roof two floors up had spread damage across the ceiling and down two other walls — ricotta-like eruptions of plaster, arrested avalanches of softened latex paint. In one corner where the cracks were especially complex, the ceiling was actually sagging. The room gave the impression of a desperate beleaguerment, as if an immense weight of water, that enemy of paper documents and even more so of anything electrical, were bearing down from above. There was a yeasty, incontinent smell of damp plaster, and rustles of official business outside the door.
In the room: two white men. From the fingers and arm and thorax of one of them, Andy Aberant, half a dozen wires in elementary colors stretched down a cheap particle-board table to a partition behind which the other, Special Agent Barry Thewless, was adjusting levels. Aberant looked wired for a virtual-reality experience, but the signals were all outgoing — respiration rate, skin moisture and so forth. Thewless’s pants pockets were tumescent with Kleenex, his knobby face a bright pink from his morning shave. Watching over the table was a video camera with the sleek body and long legs of a shore bird.
“You’re smiling why,” Thewless said to Aberant.
Aberant, who had indeed begun to smile, said, “I was remembering the one time I ever had the courage to ask my father why he didn’t fight in the Second World War. He was the right age for it, and I always had the feeling he felt like less of a man for not having fought with everybody else. That all his life he didn’t feel like he really fit in. So I asked him once, and he said high blood pressure. He said he was late for his physical and he ran up six flights of stairs to the doctor’s office. They took his blood pressure and they said he was unfit.”
“This is amusing why,” Thewless said.
“Because it just occurred to me that maybe he was lying. He was a bulldog, healthwise. He took like three sick days in his entire career. He was also uncontrollably honest. When he was dating my mother he told her she wasn’t half as pretty as her sister, stuff like that. He couldn’t control it.”
Thewless inclined his head to read his watch. “The point being what.”
“The point being that he didn’t tell the doctor that he’d run up those stairs. He didn’t ask to be re-tested. So either what he told me wasn’t true, or he wasn’t completely honest with the doctor. You have to understand, this was a man who never lied. I didn’t put it together until this minute.”
Outside the only window, which was closed, the Philadelphia sky hovered proximately. The Ben Franklin Bridge, looking too big for its setting, came to an awkward end among warehouse roofs. On the broad sidewalk below the window, a handful of Catholic pacifists held aloft placards urging an end to the death penalty. There was light residual morning traffic on Eighth Street, the less serious commuters.
“I thought of it because of the blood-pressure thingy here and of course the whole topic of lies,” Aberant said.
“The plethysmograph,” Thewless said affectionately. “I’m going to pump that up again, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll do the questions a little differently.” He reached over the partition, gave the rubber bulb a few amorous squeezes and returned to his instruments. “Your full name as it appears on your passport is what.”
“Andrew Kearns Aberant. Stress on the first syllable of the last name.”
“Your father and mother are alive, yes or no.”
“No.”
“You have three older sisters, excellent though substantially overweight Christian women with many children, all of whom reside in Texas, yes or no.”
“Yes.”
Thewless belonged to the Neutral Phrasing school of polygraph operators, and he read the questions on his clipboard in an unstressed monotone, as though dictating to voice-recognition software. To speak to a machine, one made oneself machine-like. And this, of course, was the point of the poly: that Aberant was a machine, that the organic wiring that instructed his arteries to constrict and his sweat glands to open partook of the same materia prima in which his “higher”-order thoughts held court. There were rumors even now, gnomic whisperings on Wall Street, of new technologies that could patch into this wiring directly and decode, if not thoughts and images, certainly intentions and emotions. The old government-issue poly in Room 471 was Eisenhowerishly sincere and primitive, however, and quite out of its league when it came to reporting on the inside of Aberant.
“You are or have in the past been an anarchist or a member of or affiliated with any Communist or other totalitarian party including any subdivision or affiliate, yes or no,” Thewless said.
“No.”
“You’re mentally ill or homosexual, yes or no.”
“No.”
“You’re currently sleeping with who.”
“I think you mean whom. Julia Fuller, in Manhattan. I see her on weekends.”
“Who else?” Thewless said, somewhat less robotically.
“The whom here again would be nobody.”
“Prior to your hiring by the Securities & Exchange Commission your position was what.”
“I was a full-time law student at Columbia University.”
“Prior to that you resided where.”
“Bozeman, Montana.”
“Your means of support was what.”
“I had a small inheritance from my parents’ death.”
“The cause of their death was what.”
“There was a freak windstorm in Lawrence, Kansas. They were blown off an overpass.”
“At the time of their death you were employed as what.”
“I was a staffer with the Environmental Defense League.”
“At that time you engaged in activities that were in opposition to the United States government or you knowingly associated with individuals engaged in subversive activities, yes or no.”
“No.”
“You’re aware that Environmental Defense League literature calls for the establishment of a New Holistic World Order, yes or no.”
“To the best of my knowledge the EDL is a law-abiding group and always has been.”
“Yes or no.”
“No, actually.”
Thewless had no more questions. He released the pressure in the cuff on Aberant’s arm and gingerly untaped the other sensors.
Aberant put on his shirt and jacket with the compact, dignified movements of a man whose honesty had been vigorously impugned.
In front of the Federal Building, under the Eakins-like vacancy of the sky, a broad-shouldered, big-chested woman in a thigh-length red T-shirt detached herself from the other Catholic protesters and intercepted Aberant in the no-parking zone where he’d left his car. “Hey you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking a lie-detector test.”
“No shit. How many times did you lie?”
“Six.”
“So kiss me six times,” she said.
With a laugh he removed the parking ticket that was lodged beneath his wiper blade, tore it in two and dropped it in the gutter.
Although he’d been lying for as long as he could remember, had incorporated deception so thoroughly into his being that it almost seemed as if his entire life had been a preparation for passing with flying colors the final random polygraph test that stood between him and full federal security clearance, Andy Aberant had seldom been pathological about it. He was simply a skilled withholder of pertinent information, a sower of red herrings; an extrapolator, an interpolator. Having visited North Carolina as a child, he saw no harm in claiming, as an adult, that he’d also been to South Carolina. After all, he had no memory of either state.
When he was young there was a mania for science fairs, and for various disreputable reasons he keenly wished to win a regional science fair trophy; the main reason, perhaps, was that his aptitude for science was substantially nil. He went to the university library and combed its holdings in plant physiology, which his class at school was studying, and he found a technical paper on plant growth substances that was both obscure enough and simple enough to be mistaken for the work of a brilliant eighth-grader. It concerned GIBBERELLIC ACID and some mysterious elusive chemical factor named K2, also the name of a mountain. The junior-high biology lab happened to own several grams of GIBBERELLIC ACID and using some plywood and white paint Andy built a controlled environment in which to grow oat seedlings in test tubes. Once it was all painted and electrified and turning green with young oats, he photographed it with an Instamatic from many angles. Then he ignored it for so long that his mother began to complain about the smell. (At the Aberants’ church great stress was placed on Christ’s painful crucifixion, but in Andy’s own private version of His passion, Christ had been allowed to die of neglect in a terrarium, flowerpot or fishbowl.) To determine the effects of GIBBERELLIC ACID in concert with mysterious, elusive, chemical factor K2, he was now supposed to weigh the oat seedlings, but at this late date they were little more than crusts of dried-out blackish slime. It took him several long afternoons to draw the graph showing the experiment’s “correct” results and then work backwards, fabricating a long list of seedling weights with some artful random variation, and then work forward again to make sure the fictional data produced the correct results, which they did, and he won the three-foot-tall first-place trophy and special commendation from the judges for his photographs.
Afterwards his father took him aside and told him he should smile and thank people who had praised his work; that his self-deprecation looked to them like arrogance, and he hoped that Andy wasn’t arrogant about his victory?
Andy said no, he wasn’t arrogant about his victory.
So to a house with a fish symbol or a Galilean crowd scene in every room there came a hollow pagan icon — a silver-plated Winged Victory on a faux-walnut base with Andy’s name engraved on it incorrectly (“ABERANT”): SCIENCE VICTORIOUS, presumably, over the forces of darkness and superstition. Whenever he noticed the trophy gathering dust in the family room, what he experienced was not so much guilt (though there was some of that too) as a curious sensation of seeing an artifact from the life of the boy he was supposed to be, the authentic Andrew that he emphatically was not. From here it was a short step to oiling the hinges of the front door and nailing down the loose floorboards of the hallway so that he could silently slip from the house after everyone (including him, with much yawning and stretching of arms) had gone to bed. While the putative Andrew slept, the inconveniently actual Andy drank apple wine with other junior-varsity golfers at the bottom of a gravel pit. And the next morning, so badly hungover that after chewing a bite of toast for a minute or two he determined that swallowing it was not remotely an option, his transgressions were rewarded with special concern from his mother. She put him to bed and brought him liquids and then hurried off to church, because the funny thing about Andy’s bouts with stomach flu was that they always seemed to come on Sunday mornings.
The problem was not that he was spoiled, or even, in a household as evangelically correct as the Aberants’, particularly over-indulged. The problem was love. The last foamy wave of it, sweet and red as Strawberry Crush, would still be clearing through his gunwales when a fresh wave hit. As the youngest child, the long-wished-for son and little brother, he was inundated, capsized, sunk. There were possibly as few as eight candles on the birthday cake in front of him the first time he found himself, in the glow of their flames and of the expectant smiles that ringed him, feigning pleasure. To the aunts and grandmothers who had remembered his special day he wrote I love the present and will think of you whenever I use it, but the truth was that he thought about himself a great deal and about his aunts and grandmothers (who loved him) almost never. He was the best student in his family but he felt stupider than his sisters and parents, who at any given moment had room in their heads for the contemplation of people less fortunate than themselves and for thanking the Lord and for excitement about proms and new curtains for the living room; they were capable of astounding feats of parallel processing, and the only way he could keep up with them, the only way to avoid betraying his unworthiness of their love, was to perfect the art of seeming. He felt like the lone oxygen-breather in a house whose atmosphere of helium made everyone else’s voices high-pitched with festivity and optimism. The only place where he could breathe was a private place inside himself, and fortunately his family loved him so much that they didn’t notice he was missing.
His father, Gene Aberant, was a home-improvement maven, a traveling agronomist for the state of Kansas and perhaps the most tender-hearted man in the Sunflower State. Wiry and balding, with thick-lensed glasses and big teeth that were forever exposed in his happiness to be alive, he weighed not a whole lot more than half of what his wife did. He loved and was loved by every small child he ever met, which would have included Andy had Andy not been a sour middle-aged French philosopher (this was approximately how alien he looked to himself in hindsight) trapped in the body of a child. For Andy’s thirteenth birthday, after his victory at the science fair, Gene unilaterally built him a full-service laboratory bench in the basement, and for many months afterward Andy was so stricken with guilt over the misunderstanding that he spent all the money he earned as a caddie to amass supplies for the lab. He was devoid of scientific curiosity but he genuinely liked the supplies as sensual objects: fresh packages of microscope slides, slabs of paraffin for the microtome that he never figured out how to use, retorts and ring stands and Erlenmeyer flasks, rubber tubes and rubber stoppers, anything related to the deliciously austere word “reagent”, a secondhand microscope with a rack-and-pinion focusing mechanism and knurled brass knobs; killing jars, agar-agar, vermiculite. He bought a hardbound ledger in which to record his observations, but it remained empty. His concern was simply to appear scientific, and his lab activities were strictly demonstrations—“experiments” that produced smoke or flame or attractive arrangements of glassware or colorful liquids or death to insects.
“We’ve got a budding young scientist,” Gene announced from time to time.
Only after Gene was dead did Andy become cynical enough himself to suspect the utter absence of cynicism in that household, and to see how he in his young cynicism might have been the most innocent of all of them, because he’d bothered to be a liar, had bothered to try to preserve his family’s innocence, had actually wanted that stupid trophy and, worst of all, had believed himself to be uniquely deceitful — as if, when the rest of humanity said I love the present and will think of you whenever I use it, they actually meant it. He recognized, too late, that innocence is always willful. After all he must have reeked of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine when he was put back to bed on Sunday mornings, and he was often caught in his lies, and his ever-more outrageous second-order lies were swallowed with peculiar readiness. Why had his mother heard him opening the front door at five in the morning? He said he’d been stargazing. How had he used half a tank of gas driving twelve blocks to the university library? He said he’d heard on the car radio about an interesting partial solar eclipse south of Wichita. Could that possibly have been Andy whom Mrs. Sternhagen had spotted with Alicia Rutting on the eleventh green of the Lakeview Country Club three hours after he’d gone to his bedroom with much yawning and stretching of arms? He took the opportunity to ask his parents for a birthday gift subscription to Sky & Telescope.
If his parents had survived to old age, had lived even just a year or two longer, there would surely have been a correction. Andy would have gotten around to admitting that his postgraduate apartment on West 122nd Street was not “a few blocks” from Wall Street, that the Environmental Defense League had not been founded by Marlin Perkins, that the woman who sometimes answered his telephone was not his roommate’s sister but the girlfriend with whom he was “cohabiting” (a word which to evangelical Kansans connoted lewdly fucking), and that he had majored in astronomy at college because the old gin-smelling chairman of the department would not fail any student who came to his weekly rooftop star parties. Or maybe the correction would have run the other way. Maybe one of Andy’s sisters would have found a new God and blown the roof off the house of Aberant, announced to the world that shy, “honest” Gene had sexually abused each of his three daughters in turn, and that their mother had worn those hideous floral pants suits not because she had bad taste, but because her legs were covered with bruises and burn marks, and that all the piety and cheer, the baking for bake sales and the cherishing of Andy and his pleasures, had in fact been an elaborate quintipartite conspiracy whose aim was the achievement of innocence on Andy’s part, because they needed one innocent in their family or they all would have gone crazy. They needed him to believe that he was deceiving them lest he suspect the enormity of their deception of him, because the ravages of Boone’s Farm, the moist comforts of Alicia Rutting, the Saturday-afternoon pilgrimage to the Foxxxy Club Cinema in Kansas City, the exhalation of cannabis smoke into the fiberglass insulation between attic rafters in the heart-rendingly naive belief that no one downstairs could smell it (for Andy had done this too), were all just lilacs and bunny rabbits compared to the sick truths that they were conspiring to keep from him. .
But there was no correction of any kind. In the year of Big Brother, which was also the year when high-speed monorails rendered the automobile obsolete, which was also the year when Malthusian famines swept the overpopulated planet, his parents took a walk together on a Sunday afternoon, and a wind out of nowhere lifted them off the Harrison Avenue overpass and dropped them on the pavement forty feet below. When Andy flew into Kansas City the next morning, FREAK WIND and KILLER GUST were the lead stories in the two local papers. Apparently the gust, some weird sort of back-door frontal disturbance, had descended full force into a day of perfect calm, like an invisible twister that was everywhere at once, shearing off awnings, denuding billboards and upending mobile homes. According to news reports, a lot of people had believed the wind was the end of the world; it had hit with the uncanny suddenness of a shock wave from a pre-emptive strike on the silos twenty miles west.
During the week he spent at home, it seemed as if everywhere he turned he saw an exact replica of his old science-fair trophy — the identical Winged Victory and fake walnut pedestal. Behind the cash register of the gas station where he filled the tank of the parental Olds: “Manhattan Kansas Stalk Car Derby, Second Runner Up.” In the richly panelled employee lounge-cum-casket showroom where he shook the soft, pickled-seeming hand of funeral director Ollie Engdahl: “First Prize, Kiwanis Bowl-A-Thon, Engdahl Funereal Home Employees.” And in the den of the pastor who led him and his sisters and brothers-in-law in a lengthy private prayer: “Pilsbury Regional Bake-Off, Daisy Fawcett, Lemin Bars.” The big windows of the Fawcetts’ modern split-level were so clean that they lent a painful definition to the late-winter wheatfields and woodlots outside them, the stubble and oak branches blown clean by a sky so starkly blue that there seemed not to be a sun in it anywhere, nor any birds or other life. While the rest of his surviving family went to the Fawcett kitchen and loaded plates with Mrs. Fawcett’s famous lemon bars, Andy did a thing he later lost sleep regretting. He stole a black Sharpie from the pastor’s desk and defaced the trophy’s inscription, changing the “i” in “Lemin” to an “o”. He knew this was a cruel thing to do because he knew that Mrs. Fawcett was in midwestern awe of authority and so almost certainly preferred a professional error to an amateur truth.
In later years when people asked him how his parents had died, he generally said “a highway accident”—which was hardly even a lie — because the true cause of their death seemed ridiculous to anyone who didn’t come from Kansas. In Kansas people took the weather seriously; almost everyone had seen a funnel cloud or had slid off a road in a blizzard or knew somebody who’d known somebody incinerated by lightning, usually a golfer. But the sad truth was that even Andy found his parents’ deaths ridiculous, and he hoped that they too had been so shocked and amused to find themselves tumbling off that overpass that they hadn’t had time for terror before the impact shattered their skulls and a lot of their bones. When he viewed them in their caskets he saw that Ollie Engdahl had been unequal to the task of adjusting their skeletons into restful poses. The bodies lay lumpily in the white satin cushions like battered dolls — crude replicas of two late-middle-aged Kansans who, as far as Andy knew, had done nothing worse in their lives than maybe love him a little too much. He was particularly unimpressed by the smaller doll’s pretense of being his father, whom he could not imagine otherwise than as a tiger of lean power. As, for example, when Gene had rushed to get the family’s new sprinkler system installed while a summer sky hatched thunderstorms, had sprinted back and forth across the front lawn with undulating lengths of plastic pipe while the sky turned the green and black of spoiled beef and the thunder came from every direction, the muscles in the globes of his shoulders braiding and unbraiding as he tried to shovel all the Kansas clay back in the trenches before the deluge struck, an actual freshet of sweat, not just isolated droplets, coursing from his face. The sky opened before he’d refilled his orderly trenches, and where a different man, a man who had fought in the war, might have shouted curses at the weather, Gene simply grinned and shook his head as a bolt of lightning blew out a nearby utility-pole transformer in a malign experiment of ozone and evil-smelling PCBs, and what basically qualified as a flash flood ripped through the trenches and carried a good part of the Aberant family’s topsoil, along with various not-inexpensive pipes and sprinkler-system fittings, down the hill and into the culvert where Andy, then about eight years old, had recently impressed two neighbor girls by cavorting naked. Standing by the caskets sixteen years later, he wept but unfortunately also watched himself weep.
In later years he said “a highway accident” because he had learned that it was just too wearisome to persuade people of the truth when an easily swallowable half-truth was available. And the weariness became a way of life. He drifted for a decade in a slow curve that eventually landed him in law school, that modern refuge of the aimlessly clever, and from law school he edged by default into public service. The feeling of stupidity from his childhood stayed with him always. He considered himself a person to whom nothing interesting had ever happened. If someone had asked his father if he’d ever been to South Carolina, his father would have said, “No, but I hear it’s a beautiful state,” and then would have listened, beaming and nodding, while the person told him interesting facts and legends of South Carolina, and after ten minutes Gene would have learned a great deal about the state, and the person would have enjoyed talking to him.
Andy, his only son, somehow came into the world needing people to believe that he knew everything, which was another way of saying that he believed he knew nothing about anything but himself; and what he knew about himself, which was that he was very afraid, he dedicated all his energies to concealing. When he told stories, they were usually stories about someone else. In these stories he felt more truly alive than he did in the few he ever told about himself. He had the nagging suspicion that if it had been someone other than himself in the vicinity of whose shattered ulna an orthopedic surgeon had left the cap of a twenty-five-cent Bic pen, someone other than himself who had unwittingly locked himself in an aft lavatory of an L-1011 and spent six hours in a USAir hangar before being rescued by a cleaning-crew member (these were the two most colorful things that had ever happened to him), he might have told the stories with relish. But since it was he to whom these things had happened, he quickly lost interest in them, because they were simply colorful and there were only two of them, and two seemed approximately his allotment as a citizen of a well-ordered republic in which mildly zany or tragic things once in a while befell almost everyone — the freak gust of wind, the massacre at a Wendy’s, the six-legged calf, the red bell pepper which when photographed from the proper angle uncannily resembled the head of Richard Nixon. Why bother mentioning one’s own few contributions to the general static? There was no truth whatsoever to his stories. They did not begin, “I met the woman of my life at” or “I found God when” or “I decided to join the Revolution because.” He seemed to himself an anti-raconteur. The only thing about himself that felt singular was the degree to which he experienced the shallowness of his personality and the emptiness of words. He had the breadth and depth of knowledge of a card catalog. He was full of data which often proved not very reliable. He was good at taking tests, at causing women to fall in love with him and at escaping from these women with his reputation for kindness intact. Only once had he failed to escape in time; he was living in Bozeman with a girl who was seriously Catholic, and her last words to him were: “Your soul is dead.”
Had his father deceived the army doctor? He would never know. Had his father deceived him? He would never know. By missing the war and then living in a house of women, Gene Aberant had become estranged from the world of men. Andy had simply completed the development and become estranged from the world of everyone. The only rules he believed in were rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. And now he really did love the present. It was the only place he could bear to live.