The Morels (47 page)

During one of these after-class sessions, his teacher pulled a book from his laptop bag. Will had done his best these many years
to avoid this book, successfully, too, since coming back to New York after his time in Virginia. The hardcover edition of
The Morels
, because of its notoriety, had received that year several additional printings past its initial run of five thousand; and a major publisher had taken a gamble on its paperback rights. But by the time Will hit high school,
The Morels
had long since disappeared from the remainder bins. Just to be safe, though, when browsing for something to read, Will avoided the
M
’s entirely, and steered clear of used bookstores. Brandishing this book now, his teacher said, “You’re Will Morel.”

“No,” Will said, looking down, avoiding his teacher’s eye, holding his hand up as if to ward off the book, “You’ve got—I’m not him.”

“It’s okay,” his teacher said, his voice reassuring, not at all picking up on the cues that Will did not want to talk about this or reminisce about his father, not seeing Will’s eyes go black and his hands become fists, pushing on about what a life-changing book this was for him, one of those happy few, like
Naked Lunch
or Michaels’s
Sylvia
, despite what some would say, it could almost be argued—and then he was on the floor cupping a blood-gushing nose.

At the hearing, the dean recommended expulsion, but interestingly his teacher—nostrils plugged with gauze, eye hollows purpled—pleaded for Will’s future at the college. A deal was struck. Will was to be suspended from college for the remainder of the semester, receiving an incomplete in whatever courses he was currently taking. He would lose his scholarship, unfortunately, nothing could be done about that; and when he returned in the fall, he would do so on academic probation. In the meantime, he was to see a college-appointed social worker every week and accept the young writer-professor as his academic adviser.

Will accepted these terms with thanks.

Which is how he finds himself moping about in a hand splint on his twenty-first birthday, the day of his encounter with the Netflix exclusive
Who Is Arthur Morel?

Ironically, this punch landed Will the first true friend of his
adult life. Henry Owen Lawrence. When Will asked if he could call his teacher by his first name, he said, “I’ve got three. You can take your pick.” Will apologized for breaking Henry’s nose, which was when Henry told Will about the mythos of the pugilist scholar, dating back to Plato. He related the story of Rick Bass, who once politely declined to have his nose broken by George Plimpton, editor of the
Paris Review
. Plimpton explained his unusual offer. You see, he’d had his nose broken in a boxing ring by a writer who had
his
nose broken by Ernest Hemingway. “A prestigious line of broken noses,” Will said. “I would have taken him up on it.”

Henry came by Will’s apartment with coffee most mornings. He lived nearby, and stopped over on his way to work. He was trying to encourage Will to take advantage of the daylight hours. Some theory involving the word
biofeedback
that Will did not care to understand. Will had always been a night owl and couldn’t see himself changing anytime soon. But he was grateful for the company—and the coffee—so played along.

“Listen, Achilles,” Henry said one day. “You’ve got to get ahold of that rage of yours. It will destroy you if you don’t.” (The social worker Will had been seeing, a wiry and tenacious older woman, was forcing Will to dredge up all sorts of muck, which darkened his thoughts and made him extremely irritable.) “And you know where that journey begins and ends, don’t you?”

“Come on,” Will said.

“I’m serious.”

“I’ll always hate him—for writing it, for making me the instrument of his death. I’m going to feel this way for the rest of my life.”

“That’s a choice you’re making.”

Will took a sip of scalding coffee and winced. “There’s no way out of it.”

“There is a way.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you but you won’t like it.” Henry pulled a bagel out of the paper bag next him and tore it in half.

“I can’t forgive him,” Will said.

“And yourself.”

“How do I do that? Tell me.”

“You need to get to know him first.”

“He’s dead.”

“So?”

“So how do I get to know a dead man?”

Henry, mouth full of bagel, said, “Use your imagination.”

Had the documentary not been available to stream instantly, Will might never have seen it. In all likelihood, by the time it arrived in the mail Will would have changed his mind, and the disc would have foundered on top of the television until one of his roommates sent it back. But it is available, so with Henry’s words fresh in his ears, Will is emboldened to hit
PLAY
.

His reaction is not what he would have expected. For the first half of the movie, the back of his throat constricts as though he needs to retch, and he keeps a bucket nearby just in case. But after the movie is over, he finds himself—what’s the word? Excited? His hands are trembling. He touches his palm to his chest and feels the knocking. Or maybe nervous. His father, just like that, on his laptop, after ten long years: Adam’s apple bobbing under razor-burned skin, enormous hands that he always seems trying to get rid of, that he hides under his armpits or behind his back. So ill at ease with himself. Strange. That’s not how he remembered the man at all. In the documentary, playing over a voiceover interview, still images of his father in the courtroom pan by, with his orange jumpsuit and his full beard. So thin! He recognizes in those eyes a fellow caged animal.

The collar of Will’s T-shirt is wet. He touches his cheeks, and they, too, are wet. Has he been crying?

He watches it twice, and a third time, invites Henry over, and they watch it together.

They IMDB the filmmakers. “I knew these guys,” Will says. “They lived down the hall from us. Those two used to babysit me!”

Spring semester his first year, Will had taken a class called Research Methods. One of the assignments had been to craft a portrait of someone no longer living, putting to use the techniques they’d learned in the course. Examining relics, interviewing direct and indirect eyewitnesses, synthesizing primary and secondary sources, conducting statistical inference and arguments from analogy. Whatever it took to arrive at an accurate narrative account of some key part of the person’s life and a fuller understanding of his or her daily routines. The best were invited to read theirs to the class. Will found particularly moving a young woman’s account of her great-grandmother of Japanese descent who, under Executive Order 9066 by Franklin Roosevelt, had spent a formative part of her childhood at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Jerome County, Idaho. The student had crafted the story of her great-grandmother’s life on the compound in the first person, which breathed a kind of magical life into this otherwise dry assignment.

It is of this account Will thinks as he starts out on his project. A portrait of his father in the first person. What better way to get to know a man than to see through his eyes, walk in his shoes. He will dust off the old textbook—if he hasn’t sold it off already—and get to work. Henry tells him, “You do this right and you’ll have the catharsis it took your father a lifetime to achieve.”

From his mother, relics. As they’d never formally divorced, she had inherited the bulk of her husband’s effects. In the course of three major moves, she has divested herself of much of it, but what remains—in two large plastic bins—she unearths from the back of a closet. Clothing neatly folded. Random photographs: a woman passed out, a dog and a cat, a guy smiling with a crying kid, several lurid close-ups of bruises and busted lips. An old musical score. A stack of letters addressed to the prison with various return addresses. Old journals and manuscripts. Two books, one by Rushdie and a slim volume in French. He sits with his mother at the kitchen table in her apartment sorting through it all. She says, “Do you remember what you said on your first trip out to see him?”

Will hadn’t wanted to go. He was terrified at what might happen. He wept on the ride up. His mother said he could stay in the car with his grandparents, but she said it in a way that made him ashamed of even considering the option, so he went in. He hardly recognized his father. He was bald, and his eye was full of blood. Will could barely look. But he had never in his life seen his father so happy to see him. He swept Will up in his arms and pressed him close, and he smelled like shaving cream. He sat and listened to his parents talk. His father told his mother about the people that he knew here, and his mother told him about her life, and they talked about Will, even though he was sitting right there. By the end of the visit, they were touching hands across the table. When they said good-bye he hugged his father and whispered in his ear, I’m sorry. His father whispered back, I’m sorry, too. Will wept, hard, heaving for breath, and wouldn’t take his mother’s hand. In the car he made a promise.

“I promised to visit him every weekend,” Will says.

“I should have kept you to it.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I was already at school, fighting for my life.”

It occurs to Will that this project, playing the role of his own father, will require him to complete an Oedipal journey he’s been on for the past ten years. To become his mother’s husband, her lover. Setting the lid on the box now, he regards her across the table. She is still beautiful. Age has hollowed her out some, given her face a new angularity. Her hair is long, which she keeps braided most days in a single black satin rope down her back. In her late thirties, she is younger than the parents of many kids he grew up with. He introduced her to one of his roommates some weeks back who went flush at the meeting. “That’s your
mother
?”

Will says, “You don’t have to sacrifice your life, too, you know. You deserve to be happy.”

“I am happy.”

“When was the last time you were on a date?”

“Ugh, I thought we were talking about happiness.”

“You should find someone.”

“You should get this stuff out of my house. It’ll finally free up enough space in that closet to hang my dresses.”

From the documentary, eyewitnesses. He orders the DVD online; when it arrives, he does the painstaking work of transcribing his father’s words, in a sense trying to learn his father through the very fingertips. He contacts the filmmakers. Two have moved out to Los Angeles. The third manages a movie theater in Soho. Will arranges the meeting. On the phone, the man seemed overjoyed to hear from him, eager for a reunion. And yet, standing in the large atrium of the movie theater, the man does not recognize Will, and Will has to wave him over.

They sit at one of the cast-iron café tables. “This place is going out of business,” he says, “can you believe it? After twenty-one years, it’s the end of an era. There just aren’t enough of these kinds of movies made anymore to sustain a box office for them. At least not in the US. And what’s an arthouse without art? For all of your father’s talk, that was one thing he got right. We live in a post-art world. The promise that Susan Sontag saw in film—it’s lost. We just don’t have the attention span for cinematic art. Two hours squirming in your seat, struggling with something you don’t understand? It’s too much for most people.”

They talk about their time together a decade ago. Halloween, Thanksgiving, the prank-call marathon. The man carefully sidesteps Will’s lie—the confrontation in the court’s bathroom, the man’s own testimony during the trial—which Will is grateful for. Will explains his project. He pulls out a voice recorder and asks if it would be okay to record what they talk about, and with the man’s consent Will presses
RECORD
. Will asks how he knew his father, and the man describes their first meeting in the library at Morningside Conservatory many years ago, the gangly teenager with floppy hair penciling in notes on a piece of staff paper. As it turns out this man and Will’s father have much in common, both native Manhattanites born into the arts. He talks some about his own history—his own mother and father, his pursuits and dreams, his
misadventures in love. He talks about the profound effect Will’s father had on him.

“I was very impressed by your father, Will. I wanted his passion, his drive. This was a time in my life when I was looking for the Answer, capital
A
, and your father seemed to have it—or at the very least was in hot pursuit of it—and so I followed him to the end of his road. He found the answer, I think. Ironic that it turned out to be one I already had. In An, in Viktoria, in Penelope.”

“My mother.”

“I was very taken with your mother. In the end, that’s all I was really looking for. As you know, being an only child can be a lonely business, and back then I thought I needed a packed movie theater of people, a national audience, to end the loneliness. But I didn’t need an audience. I needed a wife. A son. A family.” He had declined the invitation of his two friends to come out to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. He no longer wanted that. What he wanted he’d lucked into some months after his promotion to manager seven years ago. She was his first hire. When the weekend manager quit, he pushed for her promotion just so that he could ask her out and not be in danger of workplace harassment. She now manages their sister theater on the Upper East Side. They were married in 2004, and she has borne him two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, age two and age five. He shows Will the pictures. His wife is now pregnant with their third.