Loitering: New and Collected Essays (23 page)

With Danny, years have passed and I still feel a deathly guilt. I never did anything but love my brother and that wasn’t enough. And now every breath I take is a betrayal, a refusal of his choice. It’s not sentimental indulgence, it’s not so much that I ask myself what happened to the hand I held in crosswalks, but rather that I cross all those streets again. I stay with him now, I’m
always
nearby. I am always ten and he is always three, and I sit in the kitchen spooning canned peas into his mouth, swallowing most of them myself, and he gets a bowl of spumoni for being a good boy and eating his vegetables. I’m with him and I never feel like I belong
entirely to present-day life. I’ve never really held a serious job or applied myself to anything worthwhile, I’m an unreliable, shitty friend, and I’ve never loved anyone deeply or satisfactorily. Killing the robin was an early experiment in grieving and acceptance that didn’t work too well. I knew the bird had no life ahead of it and I wanted to anticipate that doom rather than stand off at a safe distance. I didn’t want to be uncertain. But where before I had too much feeling, after drowning the bird I felt nothing, I was indifferent, I was remorseless. I thought I could rejoin the universe by being cruel and unfeeling, but obviously I was having trouble with focal distance and zeroing in on the exact right place where most of life was happening.

Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I treasure for capturing one side of how I feel. It gets me closer to acceptance and understanding than anything else. It’s from his
Letters and Papers from Prison
, and was written, I think, at a time when he knew he would die in the concentration camp, so he speaks from inside the heart of his death.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but
at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

From the get-go, my brother Mike’s suicide attempt struck me as a piece of comedy. Maybe that’s because it came to me like the comedian’s idea of the topper, the rule that says you follow up a good joke with a second, even better joke. Keep them laughing! Maybe it’s because I always picture Mike tumbling haplessly through space, and falls are a staple of comedy and clowning, as is anything that turns the body into an object. Maybe it’s because when he jumped over the rail he was being chased by the devil and then he was aware, halfway down, that the devil was gone and he was all alone, falling like a rock. Or maybe, as in
King Lear
, it’s just too much, and the wise man sees life like the fool and laughs; either that or he cracks. Mike was really wrecked-up, his body broken, and when I saw him at the VA hospital he had nuts and bolts and this kind of light-gauge medical rebar rising like scaffolding from his smashed pelvis. His right shoulder was
immobilized, so that, in combination with the broken pelvis, and his ruined bladder, which was being drained by a catheter, he seemed like just another malfunctioning contraption or a Rube Goldberg contrivance. At home we always had old jalopy equipment like black-and-white televisions with no horizontal hold, and our cars were ancient and unreliable and broken-down—in one of our cars the transmission would overheat and the carpet in the backseat would catch fire and smolder on any drive longer than ten miles, so we did the obvious thing, we kept a jug of water in the car. In the hospital Mike looked to me like just another one of our crappy busted things, where the attempt at repair was funny in a way that the initial problem was not. Whereas I remember helping Danny eat his peas, I remember laughing at Mike as he tried to get a hamburger to his mouth. I sat in a chair and watched. He couldn’t do it—you can’t sit up straight with a broken pelvis—and his mouth and the hamburger just hung there, apart from each other, it seemed, for all time.

And so over here, Henri Bergson’s essay on the comic suggests another side, a possible path for me in my ongoing attempt to understand life by reading books:

I would point out . . . the
absence of feeling
which usually accompanies laughter. . . . Indifference
is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. . . . In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.

Put in a slightly different way, it was Charlie Chaplin, I think, who said that life up close is a tragedy, but from a distance it’s a comedy. Somebody slipping on a banana peel is still funny, unless it’s you. And the genius of Salinger is that, speaking through Holden Caulfield, highly emotional, in tune and unison with life, with events re-echoing still, he told us exactly what it feels like to feel too much.

Misreading

Brooklyn.

I had to borrow money to make the move. This was long ago, in a vanished world, when my father was still alive. I was standing outside his den, waiting, because when I’d knocked on his door he’d lifted a silencing finger to signal that he was in the middle of something important, some business. So characteristic, that gesture, the air of preoccupation. It always hurt, even though I understood that it was theater, like a frozen pose in Kabuki. Now he’s gone, gone for good, and only my memory of the gesture remains, a knot of puzzled meaning that chokes off other sympathies.

When I was fourteen I’d asked him about premarital sex because I knew it was out there, in the offing, and
I was looking for guidance. I was hoping for a path out of Catholicism, a loophole in the homiletics I knew by heart. I put my question in a note because that’s what we did when the matter was difficult—we wrote it down. We thought it through and considered the alternatives and then we made a careful plea. Eventually he’d write back, sometimes by hand, often typed. The waiting was murder. We swapped these notes in cubbyholes, a grid of wooden boxes like you’d see in the lobby of an old hotel. The cubbies were by the kitchen, and you’d check them like it was Delphi, to see if the Oracle had gotten around to your business. Communicating this way might seem quaint or curious, the sort of departmentalism that develops in response to managing seven kids, but here’s what happened: it kept us quiet. Our deepest concerns were treated as secrets, and our needs, sealed in envelopes, felt illicit. In time my father wrote back, telling me that he didn’t believe in premarital sex, nor did he believe in extramarital sex. His response had the rote sound of the Baltimore Catechism. I had been hoping for something more lifelike. A week later I banged my thirteen-year-old girlfriend on a dusty bed in her basement without birth control.

My father pulled out his ledger and wrote a check to cover a one-way ticket. He handed me the check but didn’t ask any questions, didn’t seem to register that
I was at a juncture in my life and that I might need something more than a loan and our usual silence. A few weeks later I left Seattle for Brooklyn, casting my lot with a woman I knew to be a liar and a cheat.

I think it goes, “You can never get enough of what you don’t want.” I’ve taped the spine together but the pages fall out anyway; flipping through them in search of the exact quote is like shuffling a deck of cards. It’s a cheap edition, a pocketbook that would have originally been sold in a drugstore, the cover a little too loud, clamorous in a lime-green jacket meant to compete with pomades and hairpins. In 1971 it cost $1.50. Striking a cautionary note, the copy on the cover says that it’s “the highly provocative best-selling analysis of the fanatic, a man compelled to join a cause, any cause . . .”

The book belongs to the precocious childhood of my brother, who once read all of Plato’s
Republic
to my mother, a few pages every night before bed. He was twelve then. He was that kid. Though I was older, I admired him, saw something rare and auspicious in his intelligence. I’d brag to friends, reading those signs, seeing prophecy in his hungry mind, but as the years wore on, as my brother ran away, as he stole and pawned our tiny treasures, as he turned seventeen and joined the marines, as he went UA and hit the bush and lived on a meridian
strip on the I-5, as he was dishonorably discharged and then locked away in the VA mental ward on Beacon Hill, as his life became ever more shadowy until the shadows alone were real, only then did I change my tune and come to understand that reading the
Republic
at age twelve was not a sign but a symptom, not an augury at all but an alarm, one that could hardly have been any clearer.

Somewhere along the way I inherited my brother’s copy of
The True Believer
. It was Eric Hoffer’s first book, and I saw in it—and in Hoffer himself—what my brother must have seen—a familiar face, a face you could trust. Hoffer had the roughed-up look of someone we’d seen around. A character out of our childhood, wandered up from the waterfront, grandfathered in. A stevedore, his right thumb destroyed, the collar of his wool coat turned up against the cold. I read that book in a single sitting, I read it and I romanced it. Hoffer spoke to me, he looked me in the eye and addressed me directly, each sentence delivered like a confidence, a matter of deep mutual trust. But I also happened to be that true believer, that fanatic, the man compelled to join a cause, any cause . . .

The actual quotation reads: “They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.”

Our whole time together she was less a girlfriend than a hypothesis, a vague guess at the truth, in constant need of testing and verification, further research. Before Brooklyn, we’d arranged to live abroad, in Paris, but as soon as I arrived she said she wanted to go to Geneva. When I agreed to go, she said she needed time alone, and the very next morning she packed a bag and left for Barcelona with someone else. After we parted ways, I was sure I’d never see her again. But then she called me, she called and we talked, and suddenly I was waiting outside the door of my father’s den, standing there, hoping he might help me out.

She took a job as the assistant to the producer of a movie, and by the time I got to Brooklyn she was fucking the director. Two weeks later she hired a helicopter for her brother’s birthday, and a party of movie people flew off the roof of some building in Manhattan to see the city from above. I hadn’t been invited, though I had been lied to, meaning I knew. Her lies embarrassed me because I could see them. I remember looking up at the sky a lot that Sunday afternoon. The whole time I lived in the city, drifting from borough to borough, I never once saw a helicopter without wondering if that was her, if she was in it.

I knew she was lying to me, but that doesn’t mean I knew what was true. In this way, our relationship had the
character of a rumor, something I’d heard about, something I knew only secondhand. Still, we managed to resemble a couple for a while. I’m not sure who we were imitating. Even in the passionate throes of youth, we kept up appearances, but the fit was poor and awkward and I kind of suspect people saw through the charade. I certainly felt as if people could see right through me, like I had no substance, like every tiny wheel, every whirring mechanism, every ratchet and pawl were visible.

That I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether her apartment was in Cobble Hill or Boerum Hill or Carroll Gardens indicates something about the radical disorientation I felt in those days. Even now, the names of those neighborhoods sound far-off and dreamy. I remember them coming up in conversation with an almost incantatory insistence, but the borders they were meant to mark—the classes they created, the hopes they defined, the precise distinctions they were meant to articulate—completely escaped me. I know all of it mattered; it just didn’t matter to me.