The Life of the World to Come (7 page)

“I would've liked a ceremony, sure. Candles. Some chanting, you know, Gregorian chants, maybe. Or a live band. A ceremony would've been nice.”

“There's that rapier wit. He lives! I gotta run,” he said, and started to walk out of my haunted apartment. “Are you going to kill yourself?” he asked me, I think at least half-earnestly, from the doorframe.

“No.”

“Is that a promise? Because if I leave here, and you kill yourself, I'm going to be furious.”

“I so promise,” I said, saluting for no reason.

“Okay, great.”

“I will say,” I started, “you know, thank God my number one fear is death. Because I'm pretty sure my number two fear is having to live like this, without her. I will say that.”

“Okay, Leo? This is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about. That's the sort of thing that people who kill themselves say before they … do it.”

“I was just making an honest observation.”

“Alright. I gotta go pick up Emily at the airport. Sona said she's bringing you food tomorrow. Don't kill yourself!”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

“Don't do it!” he shouted from the hallway, leaving the door open, as he always did lately, just so that I would have to distinguish myself from the easy chair for a few seconds in order to fling it shut.

*   *   *

“Leo, will you teach me about contracts?” Fiona asked me once from behind a pair of her mother's oversized glasses she borrowed from the 1970s.

“Serious or kidding?”

“Serious, I think. I'd like to know something about it, in case, you know, anyone ever asks me to sign one. For acting, I mean.”

By the spring of 2010, this wasn't out of the question; Fiona was still a year and several months away from booking
Mercy General
, but did have several small television spots to her credit.

“Well, you know that they're essentially, just, agreements,” I began.

“Obviously.”

“The terms of which are bargained for.”

“Uh-huh.”

“By two or more parties acting in good faith.”

“
Leooooo
.”

“I'm not sure what you're looking for here, Fiona. In class, we usually only deal with them after somebody has breached their end of the agreement.”

“What do you do then?”

“What do
I
do then?”

“I mean, what happens? Wait, no—I know what happens: they sue. It's a lawsuit!” she declared, and she did a little lawsuit dance.

“Well, sure. That's pretty much it.”

“Tell me about that. How do they fix a broken contract?”

“Okay, well, the idea is that, usually, at least, the courts will try to restore the party who's been aggrieved to the position they'd be in had the contract not been breached. It's called ‘expectation damages.' I mean, there's a lot more to it than that, but the sort of basic, fundamental idea is that you want to make the other person—the non-breacher—the courts will focus on making the other person whole.”

“Making the other person whole? That sounds so romantic!”

“I assure you it's not.”

“You know what I'm going to say now, right?”

“I assure you I don't.”

“Yes you do. Leo…”

“Fiona?”

“Leo, darling…”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“Leo, my dearest, deepest love…”

“Can I help you?”

“Light of my life … fire of my loins … my sin … my song…”

“It's ‘soul,' not ‘song.' Don't come at me with the
Lolita
if you're not going to—”

“It's both for me. Soul, song. You know why?”

“I don't.”

“
You
 …
make
 …
me
 …
whole
.”

She pounced upon me like a devilish idea, cackling to herself and pinning my arms against the deep-red spackle of the wall. We were in the waiting area of some Moroccan restaurant; the grim hostess and a blond couple with their blond child glared at the scene we were making, and we glared right back.

“There's also restitution,” I hissed into her ear as she nipped away at my neck.

“Restitution doesn't make you whole?” she breathed up to me.

“It puts you back,” I muttered, “it puts you back to where you were pre-contract, before you ever exchanged promises.”

She clamped down hard now on what I believed to be my jugular vein.

“Sounds like it makes you whole.”

“I guess so, in a way,” I answered, “it makes you the whole version you used to be. But it doesn't make you the whole that you could have been, in the future, had the other side come through the way they were supposed to.”

“That's still mostly whole, though. It's like you never made a contract at all?”

“Uh-huh. Ow! Mostly whole, sure.”

“Leo, party of two?” sang the sad-eyed hostess, and we whisked past the disapproving blondies to a table in the back.

*   *   *

The first time I met the actor, Mark Renard, he complimented me on my handshake.

“That's a great handshake, bro,” said he.

Mark had dark features and was inexcusably handsome—Fiona once pointed out aptly that he resembled the evil prince from just about every Disney movie. He was also probably the dumbest human being I have ever met. Not just dumb: he was eagerly dumb, aggressively so. He maintained a stunning capacity for misapprehension and verbal crisis. Every thought his bird brain bred seemed to wriggle its way free from the leash of basic intelligence. Every sentence he deployed was a kamikaze pilot, content to destroy itself and everything around it in the service of stupidity.

Fiona used to rag on him constantly—a sure sign, of course, but only in retrospect—confiding in me each new act of witless wonder her co-star managed to perpetrate on set.

“His favorite book—no kidding—is
Atlas Shrugged
. I don't even think he's political or anything; I think he just genuinely likes the story.”

Heh
.

“He called me a nerd last night because I used the word ‘superfluous.'”

That's hilarious, Fee.

“He wants us to go to the MoMA with him and his new girlfriend, only he pronounces it ‘momma.' She's an actual runway model!”

Please tell me we're not doing that with them
.

“He told me today that he's ‘looking into Scientology.'”

Whoa. Cuh-razy.

“He wears a fucking hemp necklace.”

This guy seems pretty absurd.

At that time, Mark could reasonably be called a B-lister: famous enough to play a major character on a long-running television show, but not famous enough to have yet broken into film. As an actor, he was reliably one-note—that tired note, though, was of course the very tonic of commercial success. He could look deeply into anything and think deeply into nothing, and on screen that was enough.

I think he was my opposite. He had the look of a person who slept soundly, every night. I was, and am, completely uninterested in the lives of the well-rested. What is it they're not up thinking about each evening, over there, sealed off from the bountiful haunts and burdens of personhood? It's almost inhuman. And how could a person so self-conscious not also be at least mildly self-aware? I decided that Mark Renard was little more than a born philistine desperately eager for soul. Who really knows, though: maybe it isn't true. But I am allowed to decide things about the person who took Fiona away from me. He really did seem this way; he really did wear a hemp necklace.

I used to hang around the set of
Mercy General
sometimes, and marvel at the operation. Everybody whirring; everybody so damn serious—about what? The show was terrible. Assistant directors flailing wildly about like shot birds; extras gamboling across the lot; craft services people busying themselves with the precise placement of endless tureens of hummus. Mark, with his trapezoid jaw and oafish perma-furrow, running lines with my Fiona—a twelve-dollar kiddie-pool of hair gel splashing pitifully against the ocean of her inborn talent. I used to hang around that set, before the whole of the world got away from me.

The summer that her character was killed off was the same summer I spent studying for the bar exam. Boots and I were set to begin work at the New Salem Institute that fall, and, for the first time in my life, I had discovered a bona fide professional ambition. I actually
wanted
to be a lawyer; not simply to get smart or fend off the future, I wanted to use this degree of mine for a purpose—the only cause I would ever deem worthy of my sweet, constantly diminishing time. I wanted to advocate against death.

As it happens, they don't pay you to advocate against your own, and so representing people for whom the state had wrongly (or, at least, in a constitutionally suspect manner) invited the monster along early struck me as a decent enough surrogate for the time being. Death couldn't be abolished, not yet, at least, but it could be staved off. And who better to stave it off for than those who were facing the prospect of an artificial ending brought on by a wrongful conviction? If I had to engage daily with this world of stern dictates and high-handed falderal, better that it should be done in this way, with this firm posture—opposed, opposed, opposed to death, and not merely to the penalty, but to the very premise as well.

This newfound fervor—my solitary crusade to halt, for a handful of wretches, the inching glacier of death on a technicality—sparked an unexpected urgency around passing the bar. Summer nights were given over to lamp-lit flashcards and byzantine mnemonics. Summer mornings belonged to interminable lecture videos, which always featured some gray shill holding court in an empty room, waxing breathlessly on third party interpleaders or the exclusion of relevant evidence or the Takings Clause. Fiona rose at seven most mornings to make it over to the set; even on those days when she wasn't on the call sheet, she'd occasionally leave just as early to practice her lines or get breakfast with the cast. Some days, I didn't see her until the evenings, when I'd take a break from studying and she'd return after the shooting had wrapped, and she would be airtight, reserved, humble, and quick to seek sex.

“Is something wrong?” is what I didn't ever say. We were not used to spending full days apart, and I imagined this was simply what that was like. This had to have been it—growing upward and older, like a tree that had been split by lightning: two towering stalks aspiring towards the sun at independent angles, yoked forever by a common stem and braced far under the earth by roots as sturdy and discreet as pythons. Branching out, to be sure, but always conjoining back home on the ground. That was what this was. It had to be. But: I felt a bug in my blood, a small spot of chill coursing through me in quiet moments, and it wouldn't go away.

“I've been talking to my agent about stage names,” Fiona called out to me one evening from the kitchen that summer, adding, of two sweet onions, “come chop these for me.”

“Why do you need a stage name?” I asked once beside her.

“I don't
need
one,” she replied, “but Linda says it could be beneficial. Not sure why, but a lot of actors do it. Probably more than you'd think. And besides, Haeberle is—it's always been—I don't really know. It's a bit cumbersome, I guess. A little bulky.”

“Bulky?”

“Mmm.”

She absently poked at a simmering pan of eggplant with one hand, and pulled assorted detritus off of the back of my sweater with the other.

“Well, if Linda says so…” I started.

“You're not on board?” she asked, and then, wide-eyed and plaintively, “you're not on board!”

“It just feels a little, I don't know, unseemly,” I fretted between chops. “It makes me wonder: what else do they want you to change about yourself? Where does it stop?”

“It stops there,” she declared hotly.

“Okay, well, if it stops there, and if it's what you want, then you should go for it,” I said, sliding a knifeful of diced onion from block to pan. She froze a moment, then started poking me in the shoulder with one finger.

“So?!” she hollered after a few seconds of this.

“So what?”

“So, are you gonna try to help name me, or what?”

“Of course I am. You think I wouldn't try to exert influence here? You think I wouldn't
love
to name you?”

I flicked the last of the onion residue toward its new home, and rinsed the knife.

“So?” she demanded again, tugging at my clothes.

“Oh, you mean right now?”

“Yes! I mean right now!”

“Phyllis Goldberg.”

“Here we go.”

“Eileen … Nissenbaum.”

“You're almost
too
hilarious, Leo. Such a card.”

“Ruth Bader Lopez. Actress Jones. Oprah Winfrey, Jr.”

“This is all just supremely helpful. I'm glad you take my career so seriously,” she said, and pushed me away with two palms.

“No one takes your career more seriously than I do, and you know this,” I countered, suddenly defensive. And this was true.

“So why are you being such a goon about this name change project?”

“Because changing your name is goony, Fiona. Because you've railed how many times about how shallow and vapid actors are, and here you are artificially altering yourself to please … I don't know, the industry, or something.”

She tugged me back in, and lifted her eyes to mine.

“Look, I get your opposition here. I get it, Leo. But now that the doctor show is wrapping up and people are becoming available for other projects, things could happen quickly. My name will be out there—”