Manhood for Amateurs

The Hand on My Shoulder

I didn’t play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer, inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.

He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent, straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed, like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn’t seem to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world, or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism, unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.

The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.

When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they had known for longer than I’d been alive. All the restaurants they favored had been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins, shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years’ worth of lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.

God, it was a seductive thing to a deracinated, assimilated, uncertain, wandering young Jew whose own parents had not been married for years and no longer lived anywhere near the house in Maryland where, for want of a truer candidate, he had more or less grown up. They were in many ways classic WASPs, to be sure, golfing, khaki-wearing, gin-drinking WASPs. The appeal of such people and their kind of world to a young man such as I was has been well-documented in film and literature; perhaps enough to seem by now a bit outdated. But it wasn’t, finally, a matter of class or style, though they had both. I fell in love with their rootedness, with the visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle, with their ability to bring a box of photographs taken thirty summers earlier and show me the room I was sitting in before it was painted white, the madrone trees that screened the porch before two fell over, the woman I was going to marry digging for geoduck clams on the beach where she had just lain sunbathing.

Of course, they were more than a kind of attractive gift wrap for their photographs, houses, and the historical contents of their drawers. They were ordinary, problematical people, my in-laws, forty years into a complicated marriage, and over the course of my own brief marriage to their daughter, I came to love and appreciate them both as individuals, on their merits and, as my marriage began so quickly to sour, for the endurance of their partnership. They had that blind, towering doggedness of the World War II generation. I suppose it’s possible that with two daughters, they’d always wanted a son, my father-in-law especially; I do know for certain that I have never been one to refuse the opportunity to add another father to my collection.

He offered himself completely, without reservation, though in his own particular, not to say limited, way (it is this inherent limited quality of fathers and their love that motivates collectors like me to try to amass a complete set). He took me down to Nordstrom, the original store in downtown Seattle, and introduced me to the man who sold him his suits. I bought myself a few good square-cut, sober-colored numbers in a style that would not have drawn a second glance on Yesler Way in 1954. He introduced me to the woman from whom he bought jewelry for his wife, to the man who took care of his car, to all of the golf buddies and cronies whose sons he had been admiring from afar for the last thirty years. He was a bit barrel-chested anyway, but whenever we went anywhere together and, as was all but inevitable, ran into someone he knew, his breast, introducing me, seemed to grow an inch broader, the hand on my shoulder would administer a little fight-trainer massage, and I would feel him — as first the wedding and, later, the putative grandchildren drew nearer — placing, for that moment, all his hopes in me. He took me to football games, basketball games, baseball games. He let me drive his Cadillac; naturally, he never drove anything else. Most of all, however — most important to both of us — he let me hang out in his den.

As the child of divorced parents, myself divorced, and a writer trained by five hundred years of European and American literary history always to search out the worm in the bud, I have, of necessity, become a close observer of other people’s marriages. I have noticed that in nearly all the longest-lived ones, if there is space enough in the house, each partner will have a room to flee to. If, however, there is only one room to spare, it will always be the husband’s. My in-laws had plenty of room, but while she had her office just off the bedroom (where I would sometimes see her sitting at a Chinese desk, writing a letter or searching for an article clipped from Town & Country about flavoring ice creams with edible flowers), my mother-in-law’s appeared to serve a largely ceremonial function.

My father-in-law, on the other hand, sometimes seemed to live down in the basement. His office, like him, was mostly about golf. The carpet was Bermuda-grass green, the walls were hung with maps of St. Andrews and framed New Yorker covers of duffers, and the various hats, ashtrays, hassocks, cigarette lighters, plaques, novelty telephones, and trophies around the room were shaped like golf balls, tees, mashies, mulligans, and I don’t know what. In the midst of all this sat an enormous black Robber Baron desk with matching black Captain Nemo chair; an old, vaguely Japanese-looking coffee table on its last tour of duty in the house; a cyclopean television; and a reclining armchair and sofa, both covered in wool patterned with the tartan of some unknown but no doubt staunch, whiskey-drinking, golf-wild highland clan.

It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an “unhappy husband,” drinking a “cocktail” and “watching the game.” This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke — I have long since quit — and I made the most of it (a man’s den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I’ve ever found.

My ex-wife and I–I won’t go into the details — had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother’s funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.

What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped QUEEN CITY RIBBON CO., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.

The Story of Our Story

I’m reading The Arabian Nights, in Husain Haddawy’s wonderful translation, and I’m struck by the presence in the book’s frame story — surely the single most beautiful story any human being has ever told — of a girl named Dinarzad. Everyone remembers the older sister, Shahrazad, wily and noble, who saves her own life and the life of all the maidens in the kingdom by spinning out a thousand and one nocturnal stories to the wife-murdering king Shahriyar; but no one ever seems to recall the nightly attendance, in that fraught bedroom, of young Dinarzad, even though her presence is crucial to the working out of Shahrazad’s plan. For the job entrusted to Dinarzad is the universal job of younger siblings the world over: not merely to witness history but to demand it. It is Dinarzad night after night — not the king — who speaks up, asking (as Haddawy renders it), “Please, sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad’s sister thrives — survives — on her sister’s stories and recollections of stories, and by gently demanding them, she ensures the salvation of herself and her elder sibling, whom she obliges, in so demanding, to become a hero.

My younger brother’s wife came home from the hospital yesterday with their second child, another boy, and this new pair of brothers has me thinking about the boys’ father and me. Our mother brought Steve home laid across a hospital blanket, asleep on his belly, red-faced and milky-eyed, no longer than the width of her lap. I’d been waiting for him on the patio of the apartment, and when the family car, a white Dodge Coronet 550, finally pulled into our assigned spot, I shuffled half unwilling down the grassy knoll to the parking lot to get my first long look at him. I had been alive for five years, three months, and fifteen days. In that time I had known love and sorrow. I had lived in Silver Spring, Staten Island, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Flushing, and now we were back in Maryland again. I had learned to work a record player, tell lies, read the funny pages, and feel awkward at parties. But it was not until that morning, in early September 1968, that my story truly began. Until my brother was born, I had no one to tell it to.

When Steve and his wife were about to have their first child, I said to him, “I remember the day we were having our first, and how you were there.”

“I was the first one to see her,” he said. “After you guys. Not counting the doctors.”

“They don’t count,” I told him.

Then I told him how I remembered his being there, in the LDR at Cedars-Sinai, that day in 1994. My wife was twenty-odd hours into her labor when he showed up, and she had just lost her battle to do the thing without recourse to drugs. My brother showed up around lunchtime, bringing some very good corned beef sandwiches from Jerry’s Deli that my wife was not permitted to eat. She railed with some heat against the injustice of this, but then she appeared to take a certain pleasure in the sight of us enjoying them, two brothers slumped identically in plastic chairs, splitting a corned beef on rye. I felt buoyed by the sight of him, too. She was not progressing well, and though despair had by no means set in yet, by the time my brother appeared, it was long since clear to both me and my wife that the labor was not going to be one of the easy ones that you heard about and hoped for. Doctors and nurses were beginning to mutter and make troubling allusions to Pitocin and decelerations and the strain on the baby of a prolonged labor. I could see the fear and the doubt beginning to work their way into my wife’s calculation of her chances to have the birth go well, and I hated that sight. I would have given a lot to be able to extinguish or even allay those fears and doubts for a moment. I was trying to be strong and hopeful for her; I was trying to be her hero.

To this end, it was of incalculable value to me to have my brother around. Until the birth of that first child (by cesarian section after thirty-six hours and some scary moments beside the fetal heart monitor), no one but Steve had ever cast my actions in a heroic light, and this was precisely the light that was required. (It also didn’t hurt when Steve did that old M*A*S*H* number of pulling a latex glove halfway down his head and face and puffing it up with exhalations until he looked like some kind of cartoon-balloon rooster.) I made it through the rest of the long afternoon and evening without losing my cool or my faith in my wife to make it through the ordeal to the story at the other side. But when it came time for the baby to be cut from her mother’s belly, Steve and I were obliged to part ways.

“You can do it,” he said.

I did it. I held my bloody new daughter and gazed into her wide, staring eyes. I spoke to her while they put her under the french-fry lights and drizzled clean water across her peely belly. I assented to the reckoning of her weight and length and learned how to swaddle her in a blanket just like the one in which my brother had ridden home, on our mother’s lap, in our family Dodge.

But at some point they had to wheel my wife into the recovery room so she could shake off the nausea and fog of anesthesia enough to meet our child, and I got separated from the helpful nurses, and from my wife, and from my sense of purpose. I found myself dazed, exhausted, and lost, wandering the corridors of Cedars, aimless, clueless, holding in the crook of my right arm a human I did not really know. I kept turning and turning, trying desperately to look as though I knew where I was going and what I was doing. And then I turned a last corner, and ran, almost literally, into Steve.

“Oh my God, Mike,” he said, looking into the face of his niece. “I can’t believe.”

“I know.”

“You’re a dad.”

“Pretty strange,” I agreed.

“What happened?” he said, reading my expression, seeing some lingering hollowness of doubt.

“I got a little lost,” I said, and I thought of an afternoon with him years before on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

“Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

“Here we are.”

“Have a seat.” He found us a pair of chairs in an alcove off the corridor. “Hold your baby. You’re tired.”

“Remember that time in Kitty Hawk?” I said. “In the dunes?”

“I remember the dunes,” he said. “We were running.”

I told him the story of how, when I was sixteen and he was not yet eleven, we had gone down to Nags Head with our mother. The Outer Banks was a place we had visited last when we were small and our parents were still together. On this trip our mother was ensnared deep in the tangles of life as a single woman of the 1970s, and I had just learned how to drive, and in the fall Steve would be leaving to go and live with our father in Pittsburgh, and here, on the sand dunes, we were. In coming to North Carolina, our mother had fled the attentions of a persistent, repeat-calling, fundamentally creepy suitor (today we might call him a stalker) named Francis who, appropriately for a suitor, liked to wear a blue suit, and whom neither of us liked any more than we liked the idea of our mother being troubled by men not our father, or of our soon being separated for a terribly indefinite period by Steve’s departure for Pittsburgh. We ran deeper and farther into the dunes, plunging and scrabbling and ass-sledding down their shifting slopes, frightening and delighting ourselves. After a while we lost track of our mother and, hot, weary, I was called upon to lead the way back to her. I had no idea where I was going, or where she might be found, but I let Steve see none of that doubt. I took readings of the sun, and held a moistened finger to the wind, and looked for tracks in the trackless sand. And then we started walking.

“It’s like that time,” I told him as we searched for our mother. I wanted to keep ‘him occupied and’ to conceal the degree of our lostness. “In Pittsburgh.”

“Tell me,” he said.

I told him the story of how we had decided, one summer afternoon when he was eight and I was fourteen, to walk home to Squirrel Hill from our stepmother’s office in the Cathedral of Learning. This was our first joint visit to our father’s new hometown, and so far we had never walked alone farther than the four blocks from his house to the Isaly’s store on the corner of Forbes and Murray avenues. But we had been driven back and forth a few times between Squirrel Hill and Oakland across the Panther Hollow Bridge, and I had some vague notion of the way. Steve had no idea where anything was, and quite blindly and typically, he put all his faith in me to get us home.

In time I managed to bring us face-to-face with a stretch of asphalt, some patchy-looking trees, and the tall slender stacks of an unmarked, unidentifiable factory of some kind, windowless and fenced. Heat was rising off the asphalt in tall plumes, slicing the mysterious pale factory into long shimmery ribbons. Though I attempted not to show it, I was quite surprised to find us there — wherever there was — in the enigmatic zone behind the Carnegie Institute. Steve looked to me, awaiting my wisdom, my account of the situation. And though I had no idea where we were, I pointed to the patch of trees and scrub and declared those scrubby trees to constitute Schenley Park. We should walk that way, I told him.

It was a pretty good guess, considering the near-total extent of my ignorance — Schenley Park was actually over there, in that direction, somewhere. We started walking, but somehow or other, I managed to miss the bridge I knew we wanted and brought us instead to a stairway, or rather a concrete landing from which a set of stairs led down into a hollow. There was no obvious way to get up the other side, but it seemed reasonable to me that if stairs went down here, there must be stairs over there that went up. It was a very long stairway down, the steps of concrete, with a railing of painted steel pipe. Indeed, the stairway seemed to lengthen Alice-in-Wonderlandishly as we descended it infinitely; it took us down into a substratum of Pittsburgh that lay even deeper than the dead-bird-filled basement of the Carnegie Museum. We were going down through tangled brambles, climbing vines, and a marvelously thickening growth of blessed shade. That endless stairway got cooler and darker and more silent as the city noises faded away. At the same time, we began to become aware that the strange territory we had discovered was inhabited. There were houses down here, streets, a ball field. From the heights of the stairs it all looked very small and idealized: dollhouses, toy streets, a baseball diamond of green cellophane and modeling clay. We could even see some tiny figures we were eventually able to identify as the native children, children not too different, perhaps, from ourselves, yet adapted to life down here beneath the city. And here we were, Steve and I, exiles from the land of our own childhood, a land of parents who stayed married and families who were not separated by hundreds of miles. We had discovered another lost world, not the irretrievable world of our family but a real one, alive and flourishing and yet somehow mysteriously forgotten.

It turned out that there were all kinds of flaws in my plan to get us home: train tracks to cross, complete with an actual train; a steep, thorny hill up which we were obliged to bushwhack our way, tearing our skin and clothes in the process. In a short story, the character of the younger brother would have been obliged to experience an epiphany about his brother’s fallibility, would perhaps see him as having passed irrevocably into the flawed world of adulthood, but Steve just went on trusting me, and following me, and doing what I told him we were going to do, the way he followed me years later on our search for our mother across the dunes of Kitty Hawk.

And then we came upon her along the shore, looking out to sea, her sundress stirring in the breeze, and she turned to us, and for a moment it felt like this was the last summer ever, that life was changing and we were changing, and that everything depended for its preservation on my saying the right thing.

“Look out, Mom,” I said, pointing to the nearest line of dunes. “Here comes Francis!”

They both turned, and I laughed, and then we all laughed at the image of big, soft, harmless Francis in his Clark Kent glasses and his blue suit, trudging up the snaking ridge of those random dunes, 350 miles from home.

“We got lost,” Steve told our mother. “Just like that time in Pittsburgh.”

“Just like that time in Kitty Hawk,” I said, sitting in the corridor of Cedars-Sinai somewhere in the maternity ward.

“You found her,” Steve reminded me. “Now what about Ayelet? I bet she wants to hold her daughter.”

I stood up, having told him the story he wanted to hear, the one about how I knew what must be done — how I was brave and wily and never really lost, no matter how much it might seem that way.

“Let’s go find her,” I said.

“But hey, I’m the first one to see you, Sophie,” he leaned in to explain to the baby, “after your mom and dad.”

I reminded him that I had been the first person to see him after he was born, unless you counted the doctors, and he told me that the doctors don’t count.

“I remember,” I told him, as the older of my nephews will one day tell his younger brother — his witness, his partner, his inventor, his heart, his courage — the story about the day their story began.

The Ghost of Irene Adler

One summer many years ago, at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, I gave a reading of a short story of mine called “Millionaires.” It’s basically the story of Harry and Vince, roommates and best friends, whose long friendship is spoiled when they both fall in love with the same young woman. They have always shared everything — not just housing, books, clothes, and record collections but enthusiasms, manias, and passions. The only thing they have never shared successfully is a girl — not sexually, not emotionally, not at all. All of their individual relationships with women have petered out amid uneasiness and hurt feelings. And yet until this woman Kim comes along, they manage to weather every disruption, their friendship surviving each girl’s advent and departure. They have accumulated a small treasury of little mementos and forgotten items, barrettes and bits of jewelry, one for each girlfriend, which they keep on a shelf, almost as a kind of shrine to the durability of their bond with each other, a bond that ultimately, Vince betrays.

I recently ran into an old good friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in years — in the years after our respective marriages, a certain distance had imposed itself — and since then I’ve found myself thinking about that story, and about the response to my reading it aloud of a young female participant known to history only as Alexis from Texas. Actually, what I might like to talk about is Alexis from Texas, one of those legendary women — the kind Mr. Bernstein recalls in Citizen Kane—whom you never forget even though you have nothing, really, to remember. She wore a short black dress, black cowboy boots, and a pair of clunky black Buddy Holly horn-rims (she was the first beautiful woman I ever saw adopt that strategy of inverse enhancement), and when she shot pool, which she did very well, she would cantilever herself way out over the pool table in the breathtaking way of cantilevers everywhere, and one of her long legs would arise behind her as irrepressibly as an accurate new model of the universe, and the skirt of her dress would hike up a couple of inches, and all the guys standing around the pool table would manifest signs of bodily pain.

Anyway, that’s all there is to say about Alexis from Texas, except for her criticism of “Millionaires,” which, offered as she pumped the cue stick back and forth a few times along the saddle of her thumb, was this: “I liked your story. Everybody knows guys like that. Of course”—sinking her ball with an irrefutable smack and a thud of finality—“it’s all about them really being in love with each other.”

“Yeah,” I said, uncertain. A bit uneasy. “Oh, yeah, you bet.”

I swear, this interpretation of Harry and Vince’s behavior had never occurred to me. I was just trying, I had thought, to write a story about how a couple of guys — guys like me and my best friend (let’s call him Harry) — could share everything, hold everything in common, but a girlfriend. Like, you know, Jules et Jim. Did any beautiful young woman ever clean François Truffaut’s clock while explaining to him how Jules and Jim were in love only with each other? The problem for Harry and Vince, I thought, was that romantic love was not a thing that could be held at all — collected, curated in a shrine, played with — and thus, it could not be shared. It was unruly, uncontrollable, unreliable, and destructive: a force that in character was opposed to, and in strength, alas (so I probably would have argued at the time), greater than, the force of “simple” friendship.

But I was willing, then and now, to concede that Alexis from Texas had a point. The love between Harry and Vince was the product of sublimated mutual physical attraction. It was also the expression of a mutual sympathy, an affinity that had nothing, and could have nothing, to do with sex; it was beyond sex and yet no match for it. Maybe love was a kind of force or radiation that, like light, should be understood as both wave and particle.

Almost twenty years later, having seen a number of friendships come and go, for all kinds of reasons and for no reason at all, I think Alexis from Texas and I missed the real point of the story, or rather, I left out of my story the reason that a friendship between men most often falters, fades, and dies when a woman—the Woman, in Sherlock Holmes’s formulation — intrudes. Yes, sure, sometimes both guys fall in love with her, like Harry and Vince, or Jules and Jim, or Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn in that movie with everybody wearing buffalo-hide coats and smoldering at one another; and a lot of the time, on some level, it’s not really the girl they each want to do, or not only the girl. But most of the time, pace Alexis and the author of “Millionaires,” what happens is that one guy’s girl — the wife, as things with the Woman usually turn out — just really gets on the other guy’s nerves. And strangely, he gets on hers.

She has no understanding of Pavement; she won’t—won’t—eat even mildly spiced Indian food, let alone the vindaloo at Biki’s that, when you finish it, leaves you bald with a ring of hair lying around the legs of your chair; she hates baseball, believes in astrology (oh, so he’s a triple Gemini, guess that explains the third nipple), got him to go snowboarding (Him. On a snowboard. In one of those little llama hats with the earflaps), to decorate his living room with angels, and to give a shit about women’s issues and the Planet, of all things; and worst of all, most egregious of all, you cannot believe the way she talks to him. No, worst of all: You can’t believe that he puts up with it.

At first glance this appears to be merely a subspecies of a greater failure, one that ultimately explains almost all the ills and wrongnesses of the world, cataclysmic and trivial. I mean the failure of imagination. And I suspect that when a male friendship dies over a woman, the failure of imagination is to blame. But for once — just this once — I might be tempted to argue that in this case the failure of imagination is not entirely our fault, not entirely the product of our inveterate human tendency toward withholding or bankrupting the faculty of imagination at the very moment when it is most required. When the Woman enters the life of the Holmes to whom you have always served as Watson, and vice versa, it’s not simply that you can’t or won’t imagine what he sees in her. It’s that you aren’t meant to understand; you have not touched to the innermost core of another person and hence the zero limits of imagination.

That’s what gives the process of losing a friendship over a woman such a lasting sense of distress and confusion: The loss obliges you to confront the fundamental mystery of another man, one whom you believed you knew as well as you knew yourself. But there is something in the guy, something crucial and irreducible, that you do not understand at all, and She is the proof. You have no access to that innermost kernel of him, and you never did. And in turn, this leads you to question everything you ever thought you knew, not only about him but about the man you thought you knew as well as you knew your best friend — yourself.

Because after all, look who you chose — look at your Irene Adler. You and your best friend fell in together, laid your collections on the table and traded for duplicates, found each other amid the slim pickings in life’s great battalion of idiots, made friends. You chose each other, but the Woman was chosen for you, bonded to you through the actions of some mysterious agency that, however much you and she might have in common, however much you enjoy birding together, or watching The Wire or Peter Greenaway movies, or co-reigning as duke and consort of your local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism, has nothing to do with any of that. This agency operates as forcefully, and binds with as much upheaval, as much power and delight and comfort and destructiveness, when two lovers have nothing in common.

What became of that friendship is what became of your heart in love: You lost it. And once it’s gone — friendship, heart — you never get it all back. That’s what makes her the Woman; that’s what makes the keeping of an old friend through all the vicissitudes of love and fortune such a rare and wonderful or an empty and terrible thing. Either you and your old friend encountered the black box at each other’s core, with its scatter of mystery particles on which the invisible forces of love and fate operate, and by some miraculous luck, you imagined or muddled your way past, beyond, or around that mystery; or, tragically, you were never obliged to encounter it at all.

The Heartbreak Kid

One night when I was nineteen or twenty, I sat drinking Rolling Rock beer and smoking marijuana in an artfully squalid Squirrel Hill apartment with a friend who liked to get drunk and stoned and tell you what was wrong with you and what you ought and ought not to expect from a life such as yours. That probably meets the legal definition of an asshole, but I liked the guy, and his opinion meant a lot to me. “Joe the Lion,” I called him, after the Bowie song (A couple of drinks / on the house / and he was / a fortune teller he said / nail me to my car / and I’ll tell you who you are). “You have no tristeza” was his diagnosis of me on this particular evening. “And you never will.” He was not a Spaniard or a Mexican. He was not a native speaker of Spanish at all. A Pittsburgh kid, Slovak on his mother’s side. But I believed he knew what he was talking about — he spoke with unfeignable authority, and his words haunted me afterward for a very long time.

Tristeza means sadness, and common sense would suggest that I ought to have been pleased with his analysis of my life and fate. But he seemed to hold my lack of sadness against me or, rather, to pity me for that lack, and it was not long before I began to regret the absence of tristeza in my soul or destiny. I was by nature (whatever that means) a cheerful person, born into comfortable circumstances during a time of unprecedented plenty, free, male, able-bodied, reasonably clever, fortunate, and willing to work. Socially, things for me had been a bit rough there for a while, but over the past few years I had been doing better in that regard. I had fallen in love, gotten laid, made friends with interesting people who understood the world in terms of abstract Spanish concepts. Now it turned out that I was suffering from a grievous lack of tristeza.

Actually, I was all right with the idea — how could I deny it? — that I was not then in possession of a usable quantity of heroic sadness. It was the part about my never getting hold of any tristeza that rankled me.

My upbringing and the thing called my nature had accustomed me to thinking that if I applied myself and took advantage of my opportunities, there was nothing I might want to become or possess that I could not. Without saying anything to my friend — without ever announcing my intentions to anyone, least of all to myself — I set out to remedy this grave deficit of heartbreak or, as I understood it, of the aura, the ineradicable residue, of heartbreak. I implemented a crash program and, like a middle-tier regional power seeking weapons-grade plutonium, went out and got myself a broken heart.

A study of the available literature — or part of it, since the available literature occupied half the world’s library shelves and three fourths of the attention of its poets — seemed to suggest that one indispensable precursor to the production of tristeza was regret. There were others — grief, exile, loss — and along the way, I might reasonably expect to acquire them or at least get a few leads on their whereabouts. But regret was the one prerequisite for heartbreak that I could hope to ensure a steady supply of. All I needed to do was start making mistakes, but I must do so diligently and clearly, taking full advantage of all my opportunities. I must put my trust in unreliable people, take on responsibilities I could not hope to discharge, count on impossible outcomes, ignore blessings that were right under my nose while expending my youth and energy in the pursuit of dubious pleasure. I must court disappointment, miscalculate, lie when the truth would serve better and tell the truth when the kindest thing would be to tell a lie. Above all, I would have to stick to a course of action long after it was clearly revealed to be wrong.

A year passed in much the same way as those that had preceded it, and although I had gotten into difficulties and hurt people’s feelings, lost money, and wasted time, I remained more or less the same cheerful and fortunate person I always had been, not unduly prone to regret, with nothing to grieve and everything still to lose. I had cheated on one girlfriend and been cheated on by another. I had done incredibly stupid things, such as buy gum sticks of hashish from unknown Africans on a scary street in Paris called Rue de l’Ouest. Finally, I had removed myself from the company of Joe the Lion and all my other friends and lovers, decamped to California, and holed up in a rented room in Berkeley. I had started work on a novel that would display to the world the depth and understanding of my sorrowing soul, and at night sometimes I would lie in my room feeling alone and friendless and contemplate the ache in me with a distinct sense of anticipatory pleasure, like a child watching his lima bean sprout on a damp paper towel in a dish.

That fall I began graduate school at UC Irvine, in the MFA writing program. There was a girl I used to see around the English department sometimes, a cute blonde with a gamine face and a Jean Seberg haircut, plump lips, snub nose, big eyes, an air of being fun to be around. One day I saw her, or thought I saw her, in the restaurant of the old student union. She was getting up from the table where she had been chatting with some friends, and as she carried her tray to the trash, I decided to go over and say hi.

I’m not sure how long it took — not more than a few seconds — for me to realize that this was the other blond gamine of a PhD candidate in the Irvine English Department. I had seen her before and had confused her before with her colleague. She was not as pretty as the other girl, and in place of the other’s slightly hardened pertness, she wore a doubtful, cautious half-smile, as if she knew you intended, like the rest of the world, to try to put one over on her, but she was hip to you, she was on to your methods. People had tricked her and deceived her and let her down in a number of ways, and it had left her embittered and a little punchy. She was older than me by seven years, and probably no wiser, but she knew enough, at least, to be on her guard.

It turned out she lived on the Balboa Peninsula, where I was living at the time, and she was just about to head home in her worn old Toyota hatchback. Did I maybe want to catch a ride?

She had a big nose and strong legs and eyes that were an unusual shade of golden green, as pale as champagne — and sad; she was a pretty unhappy girl. I looked at her, this woman who was not the one I wanted to talk to, and I wasn’t even sure if I really liked her much. I remember thinking, as I stood there weighing her offer, This is going to be a mistake.

“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Eighteen months later, I married her on the back lawn of her parents’ house in Seattle. It was, in a way that I found almost intoxicating — the way slamming a trunk lid on your hand or missing a step as you climb a stairway in the dark can be intoxicating — a great mistake.

I did like her, as it turned out. She had an eye for furniture and flowers, a rich history of weird sex, weird jobs, and weird scenes, an ear for quirky pop tunes. I found that you could make her intensely happy for a little while with a handful of sweet peas or by putting her in a dinghy and handing her a pair of good binoculars and sending her out very early to row softly among the coots and the buffleheads. Most important for me, she had expectations of how a man ought to act and speak and shoulder his obligations, and in the three years of our marriage, I learned how to be a husband.

But she was often miserable — sometimes justifiably, usually for no reason at all — and in a short period of time, I found that I was miserable, too. There were operatic arguments, all-night ransackings of the contents of our souls, drunken vituperations, migraines, rages, grim gray bitter mornings. We traveled, and moved, and bought a house and acquired animals, and engaged in all the standard ploys and dodges, short of having children (thank God), employed by couples trying to outrun the shadow of that first enduring mistake. The first wrong kiss, the first broken fuck, the first harsh word, the first false apology, the first slap and fiery imprint of a hand on a cheek.

Then one spring night I found myself fleeing the house we had bought in all our desperate and mistaken hope for some kind of future together. There had been shouting and tears and a decision to maybe, maybe really, take a little time off. I was steering my car through the rain along a country highway on an island near Seattle, and it was getting dark. It had been raining for days, weeks, months. I had a tape in the player of Te Kanawa singing “Un bel di vedremo,” and there was something about the dreamy stretch of road, the gray light of dusk, the throb of grief in the voice of the singer, the helpless hopelessness of the song, and the long hard stretch behind me of months and years of living with the consequences of my mistake. Something inside me broke, and my face was wet with tears.

I remembered Joe the Lion then, and his prediction that night years before. If he could see me now, I thought to myself. Then I turned off the music, and opened the window, and let the rain come into the car. I drove to the island’s one town. I stopped at the market and bought myself an ice-cream sandwich and sat in the car with the ball game on the radio. At some point I realized, to my horror, that I was perfectly content. I passed a few minutes working my way around the edges of the ice-cream sandwich with my tongue, listening as a wondrous rookie named Ken Griffey Jr. caught the admiration of the announcer and the crowd; just sitting there, fulfilling my terrible destiny.

A Gift

On my twenty-eighth birthday, I got a package from my father, a small padded Jiffy envelope containing two neat little bundles wrapped in white tissue paper, folded and pleated and sealed up in their pouch with the slightly neurotic precision that is characteristic of my father and that he inherited, I believe, from his mother, Irene, who wrapped everything, even the unpeeled oranges on her kitchen counter and the silverware in her drawer. He’d neglected to include a note or a card. I unwrapped the first neat little bundle and found, in their clear plastic sleeves, four baseball cards printed by the Bowman Gum company in 1952, the year my father was fourteen. There was a Bobby Adams, and a Billy Goodman, and two pitchers named Howie, Judson and Pollet. I consider myself a baseball fan and a moderately accomplished student of baseball history, but I confess that I had never heard of any of these players. Thinking that I had inadvertently opened the “auxiliary” portion of my birthday present — perhaps some duplicate cards of my father’s (he’s a collector) that he had thrown in as a kind of bonus — I tore open the other bundle and found three more cards, also Bowmans, also in their archival plastic PVC-free sleeves: a Mickey Harris, and a Vern Bickford, and then a Randy Gumpert.

Despite the note of faintly derisive disappointment inherent in any sentence that ends in the word Gumpert, I was not at all disappointed in my father’s gift. The 1952 Bowman cards are among the most serenely beautiful exemplars of a popular art form not notable, it must be admitted, for works of great beauty, serene or otherwise. The baseball card has generally and throughout its hundred-odd-year history been an object supremely suited for insertion into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Though to the true fan, any awkward old photograph of some square-jawed, wall-eyed fellow named Carlton Molesworth in a peaked beanie, staring off into the outfield on some long-gone sepia afternoon, may have a kind of poignant charm, and though some of the cards of the thirties and forties, such as National Chicle’s Diamond Star and those issued by the Leaf Gum Company, have a kind of flat, primary-colored crudeness that makes them resemble so many tiny Warhols, most baseball cards are, as specimens of the photographic and design arts, at best uninteresting to look at and, far more frequently, outright ugly.

The 1952 Bowmans are different: Accidentally, perhaps, they attain a cool and evocative beauty. For one thing, there is no printed text on the obverse of the card, no goofy bird or Injun or sock; there is only a small simulated autograph — say, “Randall P. Gumpert”—modest, dignified, perfectly legible, stitched across the portrait of the Boston right-hander. And the portraits themselves! The ballplayers have been depicted not in the usual glum mug shots, nor in the clumsy hand-drawn caricatures found on cards of earlier years, but in an odd combination of painting and photograph, photographs not merely tinted and retouched but painted over, transformed. Bloodred Boston B’s on caps, radium-white uniforms, dreamy powder-blue textbook skies — all the colors run rich and surreal; the lace cornices of Yankee Stadium over the shoulder of Randall P. Gumpert are a luminous cake-icing green, his resolute mouth a jet-black cartoon line; and one feels that these are unquestionably idealized paintings of ballplayers. But all the men have been caught in mid-windup, or after letting fly, or stooping to short-hop a grounder, as only a photograph can catch a man with his mouth open, or his teeth clenched, or his forehead furrowed in candid anxiety over the location of this next pitch, or with his thoughts patently elsewhere, his eyes looking strangely lost and vacant the way eyes can in photographs.

And then, inexorably, you turn the card over. Because the great secret theme of baseball is Loss (with its teammate, Failure), reading the backs of baseball cards is always an exercise in pity, and this is particularly true of the reverse of an older card like a 1952 Bowman, where the details of a ballplayer’s career are usually given not in the clean, bloodless statistical charts of today but in terse prose paragraphs, where they take on some of the mighty sadness of narrative, and each card can become the tiniest of novels whose plot is the familiar tale of futility and squandered promise and a ballclub’s giving up. Howie Pollet “began the 1951 season with the Cards. In 6 games for them, with no wins and 3 losses. With the Pirates Howie took the mound 21 times, with 6 wins and 10 losses. Season’s record: 6 and 13. Led League in 1946 with 21 wins. Had 20 wins in 1949. Broke into majors with Cardinals.” At the bottom of every card is the send-away offer of a baseball cap of your favorite major league team (“a $1.00 value”) for five waxed wrappers and fifty cents.

The thing was, I didn’t really collect baseball cards, and I thought my father knew that. During the winter of the Lockout of 1990, just before my first marriage ended, in the miserable grip of a Seattle January that consisted, without exaggeration, of thirty full days of rain, I had dabbled in the hobby out of a kind of desperate yearning for a season that, it then appeared, might not have its Opening Day. But I’ve never had the collecting temperament — not the way my father has it — and when the package arrived, over a year had passed since I had bought my last card. But that wasn’t important. I owned a little-used copy of Dr. Beckett’s Price Guide, in which I could look up the values of the seven cards and see that my father’s gift was a generous one, but that wasn’t important, either. That was what I was thinking, at any rate, as I took down the copy of Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia that had been my father’s birthday gift to me in 1970, and I discovered that Billy Goodman was actually a pretty good ballplayer who in 1950 led the American League in hitting with a.354 average, and that Vern Bickford, in the same year, pitched the season’s only no-hitter. It wasn’t important that I didn’t collect 1952 Bowmans nor care what they were worth (not really), or that when I was finished turning each card over and over and wondering at that lost expression in Howie Pollet’s eyes, I would put them all away in my sock drawer and “lose” them for many years (they recently turned up again, ageless in their Mylar jackets). The important thing was the nature of the gift, was my father’s saying to me after twenty-eight years during which we had lost Roberto Clemente and our beloved Washington Senators and my father’s mother and father, and had split two divorces between us, and had known all the usual guilt and bitterness and recrimination, and had moved, in modern and terrible fashion, to opposite ends of the continent, “Here, son, have seven baseball cards.” What’s important was that baseball, after all these years of artificial turf and expansion and the designated hitter and drugs and free agency and thousand-dollar bubblegum cards, is still a gift given by fathers to sons.