Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (13 page)

Our behavior attracted attention from a guard whose flashlight beam swarmed with photons the size of snowflakes. He asked us what we were doing. We tried to tell him. The guard seemed kind; not a guard at all—a guardian. He aimed his cone of fluffy radiance in a direction that struck us as the true one. We thanked him, he nodded, and we set out.

“Back from your journeys,” said a bearded figure when, by a route impossible to map, we finally arrived in paradise.

His name was Greg, we learned.

He made us soup.

O
ther trips ended badly.

A self-proclaimed Marxist from New York City and part of the Joy Division crowd, Barry Lehrer was the only child of a classics professor and a nightclub singer. When we met, he’d just returned to Princeton from a one-year suspension for some infraction he claimed to be innocent of but wouldn’t talk about. I assumed it had to do with drugs. He wore his shirts unbuttoned to the breastbone, not to display his unimpressive chest but for the same reason he rarely flushed a toilet, wiped his shoes before entering a building, or pulled a door completely shut: his philosophical hostility to social niceties and common courtesies. They were forms of unpaid labor, he felt, which propped up a system destined for collapse.

“Everything’s labor.
Everything
,” said Barry. We were sitting up late in my bedroom at the veggie house smoking pot and talking socialism. “Waiting for green before you cross is labor.”

“What’s wrong with labor?”

“Nothing. Labor’s noble. Unless it’s coerced, converted into capital, and used to manufacture the very chains”—he held his wrists together in front of him and mimed a failed attempt to separate them—“that bind us from the hour of our birth.”

“The only reason I wait for the green light is so I don’t get run over by a car.”

“It’s an act of submission. Face it.”

“That’s extreme.”

“I hold to a pretty high standard, I realize that.” He reached for the milk-crate bookshelf beside my bed and extracted what was, at the moment, my favorite book: an anthology of American poetry put out by a major textbook publisher.

“Can you believe this corporate perversion? Wake up, Walt Whitman, you’re a commodity. Get with it, Emily Dickinson, you’ve been marketed.” He opened the book and flipped through its thin pages—I heard their fragile corners tearing—and read from a poem whose title I couldn’t see.
“America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India?”

“Who is that? I like it.”

“Don’t get stuck on authorship.”

“Tell me. Show me.”

Barry closed the book.

A few days later he pulled up to the house in a compact car with mismatched tires. He looked to be on the fourth day of his labor-saving five-day shaving cycle. He invited me on an outing to New York to buy some cocaine from a “batshit party girl” whom he said he’d gone to high school with. He instructed me to bring cigarettes and cash. I had a little money for a change because I’d just cashed my first paycheck from my new job bartending at the Princeton faculty club. He jammed the bills I gave him in his back pocket and asked me if I was holding out on him. I was honest. “Yes,” I said. “I kept a few bucks for myself, if that’s okay.” He proceeded to lecture me on why it wasn’t, battering me with quotes from Marx. He even disputed the legitimacy of the term “myself.” He broke me down. My last twenty was transferred to his trousers, where it had belonged all along, supposedly.

We drove to the Engineering Quad and picked up Barry’s friend, Jason, a pale computer whiz with all the characteristics of a bad stutterer except for the stutter itself. We shot down Route 1 past motels and pancake houses, entered a tunnel tiled like a bathroom, and emerged onto a downtown street full of police cars and the types they shadow. I’d been to Manhattan three or four times before, but always with Nina, to see plays, so all I knew of the city was Times Square and the plaza of Lincoln Center. From these visits I’d formed the impression that New York was largely populated by middle-aged couples who didn’t get along well and went to shows so they wouldn’t have to speak.

This excursion was different; I got to look around. I saw that, in fact, most New Yorkers were lonely pedestrians preoccupied by their reflections in store windows. What also struck me, quite pleasantly, were the city’s angles, cuts, and edges—its thrilling, un-Midwestern jaggedness. I also liked its hollowness, which announced itself when our car drove over manholes, rattling their iron lids, and again when I poured the dregs of a papaya drink over a grating we were standing on and watched the liquid drip down into the gloom. How high the city stretched was plain to see, but I hadn’t appreciated how deep it went.

The elevator to the girl’s apartment—her parents’ place, Barry told me on our zoom up—let us out not in a hallway but in the middle of a living room. Its chief architectural feature was a long sheath of spotless floor-to-ceiling glass that aroused my suicidal side by seeming to promise an endless plunge through ecstasies of light. The rooftop of the nearest building was at least ten floors below us, its surface littered with sheets of paper (newspaper?) that seemed to have been deposited there by some unfathomable updraft from the streets.

“Bizarre perspective, isn’t it?” said Jason, joining me at my observation post behind an L-shaped leather sofa. He’d just emerged from the girl’s bedroom, where he and Barry had gone to wake her up. I got the sense it was usual with her to be in bed at nine p.m.

“It just seems strange to me,” said Jason, “that we can look down on it this way. Shouldn’t it be the highest thing around?”

“Shouldn’t what?”

“The UN. That’s UN headquarters.”

Jason held a knife blade under my nose and I snorted powdered cocaine for the first time. I felt nothing, absolutely normal, until our hostess, our connection, Holly, materialized at my side in a white bathrobe and pressed a bottle of beer into my hand. The chill of the moisture-beaded glass was the purest cold I’d ever felt, an elemental condition, not just a temperature. Holly’s skin seemed elemental, too. The front of her robe was open, open wide, exposing all that she offered as a female, from her collarbone on down. I’d never seen such a swath of softness. It was skin that might have been cultured in a lab or harvested, through some blasphemous new process, from the wrists of infants.

“You’re Howard?” she asked me. The crust that rimmed her nostrils was like salt on a margarita glass.

“Walter.”

“That’s mostly a black name nowadays.”

“Really?”

“Like Luther. Don’t take that wrong or anything.”

“So how should I take it?”

“To mean you have a big one. Or that I hope you do,” she said.

Barry proposed an outing to a jazz bar that featured a notable combo on Friday nights. He pressed the plan with fervor, naming the players and the greats they’d played with, hinting that some were ill and might not live long, and hinting, too, that the combo might break up soon. It would probably be our last chance to hear these legends, but we had to leave now to get a table, he said. I thought I knew his game. His aim was to get Holly out in public where we could share her. He’d noticed how much she liked me.

She didn’t want to go. “Everyone says it’s the great American art form, but I think jazz just makes it hard to talk. Even if you can hear each other over it, you’re meant to pay all this attention to the performances. Like they’re magic or something. Blow, man, blow. I hate it.”

Barry fought her. Barry won. His argument wasn’t explicitly based on Marxism, but it did exploit notions of guilt and obligation that a non-Marxist wouldn’t have thought to use. At the club, we were shown to a table by the stage and fawned on by a desperate waiter. The place wasn’t empty but it wasn’t mobbed, and the players looked healthy and solidly united. I was so buzzed I forgot to drink my drink, but then I remembered and couldn’t get served fast enough. Holly’s behavior was disengaged. She rose from the table in the middle of solos and drifted around the room, smoking and peering down into her glass. The only person she spoke to was poor Jason—about computers, of all things. He seemed unused to attention from pretty girls and shut his eyes as though protecting himself whenever she leaned in close.

Barry gave in. We drove back to Holly’s building. She rolled her eyes at the doorman, which I interpreted as her way of telling someone who knew her well that, once again, she’d been forced to take the reins back from people who’d promised her a night of fun but hadn’t delivered, same as always. He tipped his cap as if to say: good job.

Next, we got involved with makeup. I sat on a stool in the converging beams of several recessed ceiling lights as Holly dragged a stick of eyeliner across the tender edges of my lids. She liked making guys look androgynous, she said, but they had to have high cheekbones, and mine were gorgeous. She chose a rich, cigar-colored mascara which she said matched “the under tint” of my complexion, but when she leaned back to scrutinize the job, she seemed unimpressed by the effect, so she covered the brown with a sparkly purple-green. Next she concentrated on my lips, seeking “a Cheshire cat effect.” She adored it, declaring it a masterpiece, and forced me, physically forced me, with both hands, to turn my obstinate head to face the mirror.

“You’re not half bad at the glam look. You pull it off.” She found a music magazine and held up a photo of David Bowie next to my face for comparison’s sake. It stunned me to see she was right, that this mode suited me.

“Is any of Barry’s coke left? I haven’t done any lately. He keeps avoiding me.”

“The only coke tonight, as far as I know, is mine,” said Holly. “I thought he slipped you some.”

I shook my head. “And I’m the one who gave him money to buy it.”

“No one bought anything. You didn’t hear me. I share my dangerous narcotics. Free. Barry!”

“Don’t.”

“He conned you. You’re his friend. Barry, get in here, you greedy traitor Jew!”

“Holly—”

“I’m a Jew, too. I have the right.”

But Barry couldn’t be called to task, I learned. His radar for others’ displeasure was too keen. He knew instinctively when the game was up and when to make himself unavailable. He’d probably run to the deli for cigarettes.

“If Truman weren’t sick in bed upstairs, I’d ask him down to hang out with us,” said Holly. “Barry says you’re an author.”

“I wrote one play.”

“I’ll call upstairs anyway. He might be better. Truman’s the best. You should meet him. He’s a blast.”

I shifted without warning in my chair and Holly’s pencil skittered down my chin. I knew some things about this Truman fellow. My mother had befriended him at the exclusive, lakeside rehab clinic where she’d night-nursed during my high-school years. “Truman said something interesting last night. We were drinking decaf at my station. I mentioned you. Your vocabulary. Your grades. I told him you might want to be a writer. He said, ‘Millie, your precious little boy is either a writer or he isn’t.’ So I said, ‘How will he know if he’s a writer?’ And Truman, my little Martian, he shook his head, his dear little head, and said, ‘If he keeps on doing it.’”

“Let’s not bother the guy,” I said to Holly.

“Truman loves to party. He won’t be bothered.”

“I’ve heard that maybe he needs to take it easy.”

“You’re what now, his doctor? His psychiatrist? I’ll bet he’s all by himself up there tonight.”

“Then he’ll probably want to spend it writing.”

“You don’t know many writers,” Holly said.

We went out again, I wasn’t sure why, and over the next three hours or so the night turned into what I’d learn to call, once I’d spent more time in New York City, “one of those.” Just one of those. There was an ashtray full of bloody napkins, a limping pigeon with no beak, two convincing sightings of Andy Warhol twenty minutes and thirty blocks apart, and a woman taxi driver who read fortunes by gazing deep into her rearview mirror. Later on, when the coke was running out, there was a stairwell whose stairs went so far down I couldn’t believe we’d ever climbed them. They also went so far up that I quit trying.

I decided this was symbolic in some fashion, perhaps the basis for another play. Feeling trapped and short of breath, I opened a steel door beside the stairwell and was confronted with a storage area for what looked to be at least one hundred heavy-duty upright vacuums. They were lined up like tanks about to enter battle, their red dust bags suggestive of pent-up fury. They radiated hegemony and praxis, ambiguity and hermeneutics. They were a text, but one I found unreadable.

I heaved the vault-like door shut until it latched.

“How far did they have to go to find a store?” I said, speaking directly into Holly’s left ear. I was lying on top of her, on her bony back, in a bedroom from which I could see a distant bridge packed with stationary cars. Which rush hour was it? Wasn’t it the weekend? A helicopter hammered past the window on a warlike upward vector. Barry and Jason had been gone for hours.

“Roll off or have at me,” Holly said. “Wait, though. I need fluids.” She wriggled free and left me in the room gazing into her enormous closet at a long regression of what appeared to be identical black dresses. She gave me a wine cooler when she got back, but it was too pink to drink, too sickly sweet. “If you’re nervous about getting back to school,” she said, “we’ll call the garage and have my Jag sent over. Its oil cakes up when it just sits.”

But I wasn’t nervous about returning. What worried me was leaving. Above me, Truman Capote with the flu, below me the General Assembly of the UN, and off to the side—to every side—figures whom I might never meet again. Not that I’d met them this time. But I might have. Movers and shakers, living, working, suffering, inhabiting their fame. The only reason to return to Princeton was to equip myself to come back here.

“What do your parents do?” I asked.

“My stepmom primarily just beautifies. Beautifies and goes on pilgrimages. The kind where you chant and drink yak milk and sleep with monks. That’s basically beautifying, too, but she calls it ‘peace work.’ I’m cool with it. It’s fine. Of course, if she dies in a bus crash in Bhutan, I wouldn’t mind that, either. I hope she will.”