Little Failure (51 page)

The problem with chronicling the lowest moment of my life is that I can’t recall much of it.

Here’s what I do remember.

I am hitting the door. The tough Brooklyn door, probably wrought in the time of Walt Whitman, does not budge. Instead my hand turns red, then purple. I feel nothing. Maybe my hip is starting to ache some from being hit by the car on Atlantic.

Then I am inside, because someone (Pam?) has opened the door, and I am racing upstairs to confront my nemesis. The thing about Kevin is that he truly is very handsome. He has a real jaw, a serious nose, and tight clever eyes underneath a well-stocked brow. Immediately, I can tell that I am outclassed.

What happens in the next few seconds, minutes, or hours seems to be this: I scream and cry, something like “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it anymore! It is better not to live!” and Pammy screams and cries with me. Kevin, as far as I can remember, remains fairly immobile and unmoved. He says a few things here and there, perhaps along the lines of
I’m sorry it has to be like this
. But what’s truly amazing about this scene is that Pamela and I are essentially putting on a performance for Kevin. The two outsiders, one drunk out of his mind, the other depressed and eternally abandoned, are dancing and singing and weeping for Kevin, our God. I cannot fully choreograph Pamela’s dance, but I can surely remember the lyrics to my own. They are in Hebrew, of course, and I learned them in 1979 in a school in Queens.

Yamin, smol, smol, yamin
, left, right, right, left,
troo-loo-loo-loo
.

Pamela guides me downstairs, my hand already throbbing to the point where my eyes are clouded in a different brand of tears. She goes no farther than the door I had hit with twenty-seven years of frustration, a door that she slams shut behind her. Angry, accusatory emails will stream in from her end by morning’s light. It would appear that by meeting Kevin I have broken the rules of the game.

And outside it is warm either in the fading way of fall or the rapturous,
tenuous way of spring. And I am standing there holding my hand as a bearded, academic-looking man walks a set of Welsh corgis down State Street, a mirror of some earlier time and place—summer break, North Carolina—that should have pleased the early Nabokov so.

Three years later, Pamela Sanders is in a creative writing M.F.A. program at the University of Florida. One night, she sees her latest ex-boyfriend—a Ph.D. student in English, who, rumor has it, has done something terrible to her—sitting on the patio of the Market Street Pub & Brewery. When he gets up, Pamela follows him through the bar and into the restroom. She is carrying a carpenter’s hammer, its head wrapped in plastic. In the restroom, as he is taking a leak, Pamela hits the back of his head repeatedly with the claw end of the hammer. “I’m going to kill you!” Pamela is screaming, according to the arrest form. “You ruined my life!” He wrestles the hammer from her in the bathroom, and she runs out of the Market Street Pub, leaving her victim to stagger back into the bar. He suffers multiple lacerations and contusions to the head.

Pamela flees the state of Florida; she is charged with attempted murder. Eventually, she returns to Florida and turns herself in. The charges are reduced to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and she is sentenced to a year in the county pen.

The first time I hear of the crime it is 2004, and I am at a writers’ conference in Prague, following the publication of my first novel. My beer-hoisting interlocutor tells me the tale with a smile, which may indicate that he knows of our past relationship. I can only imagine how quickly and gleefully a story like this must have spread through a college town. How quickly the term “Pamma Hamma Slamma” would be coined. Even before the attack, she was a mystery to many of her fellow writers and teachers, but several of the women in the
creative writing program rallied behind her, one apparently going as far as to take her into her home, in Gainesville, after she was released on fourteen years’ probation. Some time later, she returned to New York City.

“That guy whose head she bashed in,” my drinking companion in Prague tells me, “he kind of looked like you! He had a beard!”

I am later told that Pam’s fiction was really coming into its own before the attack, something that does not surprise me, because she was always an exceptionally strong writer, if maybe a little too scared of the truth she was leaving behind on the page. But that kind of work requires a bravery different from the kind needed to bash a human being over the head with the claw end of a carpenter’s tool in a stinking subtropical bathroom, again and again and again.

The author posing for his first novel. What he will gain in readership, he will soon lose in hair
.

A
BOOK FULL OF DYSFUNCTION
and hammer-armed assassins needs an adult in the room. Someone has to enter from stage left,
way
left, and tell our deluded hero,
You can’t live like this anymore
. Someone with two ounces of wisdom and at least as many of kindness needs to change our hero’s life. How romantic it would be if said person was a willowy American blonde or a sharp-tongued Brooklyn girl. Nothing doing here. We all know who it’s going to be.

But, oh, thank God there is
someone
. No, let me be emphatic: Thank God there is him.

When I graduate from Oberlin, John is at the center of my life and the center of my abuse. I hate him so much for being from a prosperous American family, for being older than me, for being generous to Maya, whom he’s installed in the first decent apartment of her life and who, thanks to his kind offices, no longer has to whip businessmen inside a Manhattan dungeon. And I hate the little muscle under his
left eye, the one that twitches when we watch something sad at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the one that allows the sheen of liquid to coat the bottom lid, the one that shows that he is human and aware of the pain of others. That, more than anything else, is unforgivable to me and to my origins. So I respond by sabotaging his documentary, by offering him nothing but clownish songs and stupid accents whenever he flips on the camera. I want to punish John for trying to see beyond my goatee and spiteful tongue. I want to make him pay for his curiosity and his love.

But despite this hatred, I want his life, too. I pass by the Frank Stella shop on Columbus where John gets some of the shirts he wears effortlessly to places like Le Bernadin or a production of Mamet’s
Oleana
. To me, Frank Stella, this old-fashioned middle-class shop, looks like nothing less than a well-lit jewel box. Just the simplicity of it, the lack of pretension, the lack of Stuyvesant striving to be the best. If only my eye could twitch and cry. If only the silent coldness inside me could dissipate. If only my apartment had green silk curtains, a 1920s burgundy mohair couch, and a letter from Bette Davis thanking me for sending flowers when we stayed at the same hotel in Biarritz. If only I could drink a few glasses less each day.

When I come home after a day of paralegaling to discover the world’s biggest water bug flapping around my studio, I call John and beg him to come over and kill it. He won’t, but it’s a relief to be able to call him and tell him something no one else must know. That I’m scared.

John is generous enough to go over dozens of drafts of my first novel, for which I reward him with five years of derision. “The Challah character [read: Dominatrix Maya] needs more development,” he tells me.

“Well, what do
you
know?” I say, seething like a small samovar on his plush mohair couch. “
You’re
just a television writer.
You’ve
never written a novel.” And what I’m really telling him is:
Why do I have to work so hard, why do I have to rewrite this fucking novel over and over again just to get a little bit of your praise? Why don’t you just adore me like my grandmother did?

When I’m with my real parents, I regale them with funny tales of Rich American John—“A woman comes every week to clean his apartment and he pays her handsomely!”—a profligate, silly individual whom we may all safely look down upon. And yet, despite his Americanness, or perhaps because of it, we also respect him. At Thanksgiving family dinners he tries to steer them from their dreams of law or accountancy for me, telling them stories of his own years as a television writer. “And how much money did you make from this writing business?” my father wants to know.

He tells them. “Ooooooh.” It is a fine figure. “Gary’s very talented,” John says to my parents. “He can make it as a writer.” And I blush and wave it away. But I am thankful. A soft-spoken American whose apartment my parents and I have estimated to be worth close to a million 1998 dollars is my advocate.

Later, I realize that just as I tried to puff up my family’s barely existing wealth when I was in high school, I am attempting to make John richer and more generous in the eyes of my parents, my friends, myself. I am trying to make John the parent who would take me right out of Solomon Schechter. The parent who would say, “We can do better than this.” The truth is, John’s father did not own half of Salem, Oregon, the glittering state capital from which John hails, as I always claim to others. He owned a hardware store. The Upper West Side apartment, bought in the mid-1990s, cost John two hundred thousand dollars, not one million. The single Armani blazer he owned and bequeathed to me was hardly the Gatsbyesque wardrobe I made it out to be. And even those trips to Le Bernadin or La Côte Basque were rare. More often than not there was sugar-cane shrimp at the Vietnamese joint around the corner from his house. But, honestly, who cares? I was just happy to be with him.

No, I want the safety of John’s imaginary riches to rescue me from my mother’s $1.40 Kiev-style chicken cutlet. “When you have to pay for everything, you will know that life is hard,” my mother says the night she sells me the stack of butter-stuffed poultry and a roll of Saran Wrap for twenty dollars even.

And I realize then the dissonance between my parents and John. We’re in America, and, frankly, life is just not
that
hard. She
needs
to make it harder. For her. For me. Because we never really left Russia. The orange Romanian furniture, the wood carving of Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress, the explosive Kiev-style cutlets. All of it means one thing: The softness of this country has not softened my parents.

At the dinner table in Little Neck on the Night of the Cutlets, John and my parents are discussing what to inscribe on my grandmother’s gravestone. A year has passed since she died.

My father wants to write the English translation of a Russian inscription, which translates roughly as “Always mourning son.”

“But you won’t always be mourning,” says John. “You’ll always miss her, but you won’t be mourning.”

My father looks mildly horrified by John’s pronouncement.
He’ll always miss her?
What kind of American bullshit is this? His mother has died, so he has to literally be the
always mourning son
.