Giving Up (18 page)

get to the point
and stop trying to conceal what it is he did behind some complex rationale that's impossible to understand anyway and does nothing to change the fact that he probably got conned out of four hundred dollars, she would only be prolonging his little act and he'd end up heaping on even more needless detail, because, in his words, he got the ‘impression that she didn't understand what he was trying to tell her.' ‘No,' he would say, ‘it's not like that at all,' and then he would go off on some weird tangent that wouldn't change her impression of the situation in the least, except to piss her off for being forced to sit and listen to even more horseshit. But once James has started on one of his explanations, it is impossible to convince him that he is wasting his time, that nothing he says will make a difference and that, if anything, instead of giving her a more nuanced and sympathetic perspective on what happened, it will end up making her more upset than if he had laid everything out at the start. Why couldn't he face up to the reality of the situation? Why did he think that he could somehow end up with an alternate reality, as if he could talk his way into another world? She is sitting and listening to James as he is going on about forging triplicate forms, when a feeling of hopelessness starts to take over. How many times have they sat on that couch, just as they were doing now, while James tried to explain the world away? If he forgot to pick up groceries after he promised he would, then she would be forced to listen to him explain why, instead of being thoughtless and annoying, he was actually
too thoughtful
, and by overthinking what he should pick up for dinner he ended up getting distracted, and before he realized what had happened he was back at the apartment, empty-handed. Or, when James made a bizarre and hurtful remark about Mary's body during a dinner with Veronica and her new boyfriend, once they got back home and Mary confronted him, she would have to sit and listen as he told her that what she thought was criticism was in fact a type of ironic praise. Far from trying to humiliate her in front of her friends, he had wanted to put her at ease, since he knew that she was sensitive about the little bit of weight she'd put on in the last year. Nothing is what she thinks it is, everything is the opposite of what it appears to be. He never let her have her own thoughts and constantly forces her to adopt his. It doesn't matter what her perspective is, he won't leave her alone until she sees things the way he sees them. By now she is so used to this that she's got in to the habit of keeping her thoughts to herself so he doesn't try to change them. This is why she doesn't interrupt him while he tells the story of his encounter with the stranger, because if he suspects that she doesn't wholeheartedly believe everything he tells her, then he'll keep heaping on more and more examples and excuses until he's satisfied that she's given up her own opinions and taken on his instead. ‘Even though I knew he was full of shit,' James says, ‘part of me was almost desperate to believe what he was telling me. Do you know what I mean?' She nods, yes, she knows exactly what he means, while she thinks to herself, ‘What the fuck is he talking about? Why the hell would he want to believe the story of some sketchy guy off the street? What did it matter to him if the guy was lying?' It seems to her that it would've been better if the guy
had
been full of shit, because then it would've been easier to refuse to help him out. If it had been her, and she'd thought the guy was telling the truth, then she may have felt bad about it, but she still wouldn't have handed over four hundred dollars. From what she can tell, James is saying he never really doubted that the guy was a con artist. ‘I thought that maybe he just seemed like a con man because that was the most obvious possibility,' he explains. ‘Like it was such a cliché – from out of town, car trouble, a money order that he can't cash, if I could spare a couple minutes I'd be a hundred dollars richer for my trouble – everything about it was so pathetically obvious that I started to think he must be telling the truth. Otherwise he would've come up with something more plausible. Does that make any sense?' ‘Of course it does,' she says, even though she is thinking that he must be out of his mind. This is the man she is trying to have a baby with? This naive and reckless fool? How could she have ever thought that this was the right thing to do? How had she missed so much about him? His impracticality? His profound gullibility? This destructive insecurity? Maybe he hadn't always been like this? Maybe he used to be stronger, clear-sighted, level-headed, simple. But this isn't the case. It had all been there at the beginning, she just hadn't seen it for what it was. She used to listen to him talk for hours about his life's work, happy to sit there as he explained what he was working on and hoping to finish
before too long
– it had been early in their relationship, and she was secretly proud to be going out with someone who had a calling and devoted his life to accomplishing something grandiose. Without thinking about what actually lay in store for her, she would even fantasize about what it would be like to be famous one day. Even if he wasn't very successful, she would think, eventually he was bound to be recognized. It wasn't that he seemed particularly brilliant that made her think this – she could tell that he was smart, but there were loads of smart people out there. It was that he was so obsessed with the goal of accomplishing something original and relevant and significant that he ended up convincing her he was capable of it.
Somebody
has to devote themselves to great works, she would say to herself, why not him? ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,' her dad used to say. If James is willing to devote himself to working non-stop on some monumental project that most people don't even bother attempting, let alone actually pull off, then he must have that one percent of inspiration that her dad was so dismissive of, and as long as he was willing to do the perspiration thing then he might even succeed. She had never been with someone who talked so much about some far-off and likely fanciful day in the future when he will have done something truly great and all that work will have finally paid off and he'll be recognized for his singular genius. It's undeniably exciting, when you're young, to sit and listen to someone talk about how, through the force of their own will, they will shape the world around them. ‘Don't worry about how things look right now,' they say, ‘because once I'm finished everything will have changed for the better. We may be struggling to pay our rent and bills while our friends are getting rich and moving into luxury condos and nice suburban homes, and we may spend most of our time fighting over the most mundane crap, something in the news, or the exact itinerary of a trip to France we took five years ago, there may be nothing about me that would lead you to believe that I'm destined for great things – in fact, everything you know about me would discourage great expectations of any kind – but if you just hang on and put all your trust in me, if you invest everything you have to give, then I promise you that one day all of this will change,' they say. ‘Your faith in me will be redeemed and I promise that you'll even be rewarded for your
loyalty
. We will have a life that is the exact opposite of the one we are presently living. Instead of aimlessly wandering through each day and blindly going through the motions our lives will be filled with purpose and meaning. Instead of obligations, you will have goals. In fact,' they claim, ‘it may not feel like it, but everything you are doing right now is infused with this higher purpose. When you do the groceries it only feels like a chore, but what you are actually doing is fulfilling an essential role in the great pursuit of my life's work. It may seem like getting into a desperate argument over how to spend the tax return is just another trial in the unending drudgery of our monotonous lives, but what you are actually doing is supporting an essential aspect of the process that will result in a monumental accomplishment.' It's with this sort of talk that James would try to convince Mary that, although their friends were better off in the form of really nice apartments and houses, as well as frequent vacations and nights out to nice restaurants, their lives were in many ways much less rewarding than they actually seemed. And sometimes she even believed him. But she eventually developed a bunch of nagging doubts that she couldn't reconcile with this vision of some glorious future. For starters, James's day job is completely unrelated to his life's work. At first this hadn't bothered her, it even reassured her, since, according to James's reverse logic, it confirmed his
outsider status
. ‘Outsiders,' he would say, ‘always find a way in. That's what makes them outsiders.' When he talked like that it
did
bother her, because without any outside confirmation of the validity of his life's work, all she had to go on was his ability to convince her, and that seemed to be weakening over the years. She also got the impression that he had given up, and in some ways that's what bothered her the most. It felt like a betrayal, or at least a mean trick. She felt the same sort of swelling anger she experienced whenever he got them lost on one of their vacations or camping trips. He always wanted to find the route that nobody else took, or the place that nobody went to see, the hard-to-find, out-of-the-way, exclusive spots he felt would distinguish them from the endless stream of tourists that passed through these locales. ‘We don't want to go there,' he would say, ‘that's where everyone goes,' as if this fact were enough to discredit the destination. ‘I was doing some research online,' he would say, basically telling her that he was planning on ruining what she had hoped was going to be a relaxing and uneventful trip, ‘and apparently there's this beach. . . .' So instead of going to the famous place that everyone they knew had been to, they would go on an unpredictable quest in search of a hidden gem that was supposedly better than anything the more popular spots had to offer. But all of this wouldn't have bothered her if it weren't for the fact that more often than not they never even ended up at this alleged paradise that hardly anyone else knew about, and even if they did manage to get there it was always a huge disappointment. They might spend the night walking along a deserted country road, no shoulder to protect them whenever a car drove by every couple of hours, so they'd jump down into the roadside ditch and then crawl back out once the car had passed. Maybe James had heard or read about a restaurant that was
extremely authentic
, the sort of place that tourists were always trying to get to but could never find, where the customs and food had been
preserved
. Unlike the tourist traps that they were constantly trying to avoid but invariably ended up visiting, these authentic restaurants and hotels did not offer themselves up. They refused to meet you halfway. Everything was on their terms. Instead of trying to make themselves understood and translating their customs into terms a tourist could understand, these authentic places carried on in the same way they always had, and it was up to you to figure it out. An authentic place didn't need tourists, in fact tourists eventually ruin authentic places, which is why James was so obsessed with these restaurants and hotels, or beaches and lookouts – they hadn't been ruined yet, they were still unique and peculiar to their time and place, they hadn't been transformed into one of the placeless and timeless cultural voids that people refer to as tourist traps. He was so determined to find these authentic hideouts that he was willing to charge blindly into the most precarious and unfavourable circumstances. Up to her knees in ditchwater, Mary would break down and start screaming that she would never let him do this to her again. This was the last time his deranged infatuation with authenticity would lead them to an obscure Spanish town that nobody had heard of, not even the Spanish people they had spoken with in cafés and on buses as they passed through the equally obscure towns they had to go through to get there and to a cantina that James had read about in a travel magazine, where you could apparently watch one of the last great masters of Flamenco perform. What did it matter if she was the greatest living Flamenco dancer when they knew absolutely nothing about Flamenco and had never even seen it performed? Why couldn't they have stayed in the city and caught one of the dozen excellent dancers featured nightly? She just wanted to have a nice relaxing vacation but instead they were stranded on a stretch of country road, diving into the fucking ditch every time one of these maniacs flew by, the only sign of life being the sounds of howling dogs (especially frightening because they hadn't seen a house for miles). So when they finally came across a house with a light on, she forced James to knock on the door and ask if they could use their phone to call a cab. But the man that came to the door was clearly confused and James couldn't make himself understood, so after a flurry of pointing and nodding and saying ‘si, si' about a thousand times they found themselves sitting in the back of the man's truck as he drove them to the bus station that they had set out from about four hours before. This was how James's little quests usually turned out. They would reach some sort of crisis and he would admit that he wasn't sure they were headed the right way so they ended up giving up on reaching the authentic restaurant, or waterfall, or whatever, and on their way back Mary would point out that they could have just gone to the inauthentic tourist trap where they wouldn't even have noticed how inauthentic it actually was, and they may have even had a good time. Because, in her experience, when James actually did pull it off and locate one of these authentic places, they ended up being run-down (if it was a restaurant or hotel) or underwhelming (if it was a beach or waterfall) and she couldn't help thinking that the reason that the other places, the ones they avoided, were so popular and overrun with tourists was because they were better. Sitting and listening to James drag out the story of his encounter with the sketchy drug addict, she is suddenly overcome by the same sinking feeling she gets once she realizes that James has tricked her into one of his stupid quests for authenticity. She no longer has the patience to listen to him talk about whether he ended up handing over the four hundred dollars (as though there was ever any question). ‘The definition of insanity,' her dad used to say, ‘is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.' This annoying maxim, which her dad would trot out whenever he stood over Mary and watched as she tried and failed at a task he was eager to demonstrate, and which she's since discovered is ridiculously common, precisely described James's behaviour. Here he is telling her about getting tricked by a maniac as though it was completely unheard of, when in actual fact it happened all the time. James doesn't say, ‘I did it again.' He says, ‘I can't believe what I just did.' He doesn't come right out and tell her that he gave away more of their money to a good-looking street person, even though he does this so often that the reason he is so nervous and is dragging out the story for so long is because he wants to convince her that