The Perfect Order of Things (9 page)

I didn’t go back to the courthouse after that. It sparked off too many ugly, confusing emotions. Part of me,
most
of me really, wanted to see him convicted. I couldn’t get that revolting image of him doing somersaults in the dandelion field out of my head. And I was dismayed that this young man whom I had adored as no other young man in my early life, whom I had envied, even sought on occasion to imitate, this Justin had turned out to be a useless, parasitic bullshitter (Walt Whitman, my ass), a pretend musician, a pretend poet tied now forever to his mother in the sickest of knots (“I know what you did!”) and therefore never, ever free to be anything but her failed son.

His mother, I’m told, paid a hundred and fifty grand for a chic WASP lawyer, a bloated gentleman in a brown suit who looked like an overfed bass. Mrs. Strawbridge didn’t want “some fancy Jew showing off on the courtroom steps.” Certainly her son was in need of deft counsel. How about those brains on the wrong part of the wall? And how do you explain moving the body all over the downstairs? They did everything but pop a cigar in his mouth and dance with him.

After five days of deliberation, the jury found Justin guilty of manslaughter, but not of murder, which was the original indictment. They must have known, these twelve regular Canadians, that something was fishy, but they didn’t have quite the goods for a murder conviction. And yes, I
was
disappointed, terrible as it is to say. I wanted something bad to happen to him. He ended up serving eighteen months in a minimum-security prison and then moved up north to a small Ontario city, where his mother still lives.

I was explaining all this to my wife as we looked across the dandelion field at the house with the crooked spine. It used to look like the house in Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, but it didn’t anymore. A crow cawed from a farmer’s fence. In the far distance, a tractor moved across the gold-green canola fields. It was a tranquil scene. A flash of sunlight glinted off the windshield of a passing car. There was no horror here, no shadow of death; even the image of my naked friend somersaulting in the dandelions had lost its electric charge. I had expected more, a chill,
something
, but it was plainly gone.

Three children issued from the house, burbling down the porch stairs. One of them, a pencil-thin girl with blond hair and pink shorts, shrieked—the wind carried it across the grass to us—and tore off into the field, her brothers in pursuit. And when she’d gone fifty yards, running for the sake of running, she leapt into the air and wriggled like a fish rising from the water and then, from the sheer excitement of being outside and being alive, shrieked again. And in so doing she reminded me of my own daughter, all grown up now but once a child like that, so volatile and operatic. It was, I remembered,
her
I’d thought about that day in the dandelion field, my chest seizing with that terrible drug, a dread that I might miss out on her life. But I hadn’t. I was lucky. That was the word for it. Lucky. Sometimes it’s all these things come down to. Justin Strawbridge had a mother like his; I had a mother like mine.

And recalling Justin, jowly and hungover in the courtroom, his foolish haircut, his mouth full of lies, his forehead furrowed when he addressed the judge, I recalled— and told my wife about—another Justin Strawbridge. I was fourteen, and Justin’s family and my family went to a fancy resort up north for the Christmas holidays. Skiing, snowballs, sleigh rides and dress-up dinners. There was an American girl there, a year older than us: skinny, with a bony face, a clutch of thick blond hair and an overbite. From Arkansas, I think. She spoke in a lazy, nasal accent, as if she was half amused all the time by everything. Sexiness creates mystery, yet she was so at ease with us— and consequently we with her—that she could have been one of the guys. Except she wasn’t. Who could forget her name? Hailey Beauregard.

She must have been there with her parents, but I don’t remember them. For a week we traipsed around the inn together, Justin and I both in love with her. She took us back to her room one evening and tried on a blue dress for us (“Y’all turn your backs now!”) that she was planning to wear on the last night of the holidays, her bony arms popping from the sleeveless material. She was perspiring, I remember, and I could smell her and I found myself trying to sit near her, to stay within its range.

On the final Saturday night, there was a farewell party in the main ballroom. A local orchestra tootled Benny Goodman tunes. My parents danced; so did Justin’s. A clear moon hung outside, cold air clarifying the trees and the lake.

But then, as a concession to “youth,” the orchestra swung into a clunky version of Chubby Checker’s hit song “The Twist,” which had come out a few years earlier, and created a delirious new dancing style; people drying their bottoms with imaginary towels was how it looked, but at the time it figured as a powerful summons to get your hands under the shirt of a sweating teenage girl. Through a piece of singular luck, it was my turn to dance with Hailey when the song’s opening saxophone bars honked from the stage. Swept up with excitement, grinding and twirling, I fancied I was cutting quite the figure, the very image of avant-garde youth, modernity and God knows what else. The crowd pulled back. Such attention, such appreciation on the lips of strangers! On it went; and on still further. I was
transported
by happiness.

The song ended, the final chords died away; the orchestra smiled smiles of good sportsmanship, the audience applauding—everyone, that is, except for a small, dark-eyed woman at the back of the hall. I gave a short bow, my heart thumping in my throat, my shirt soaked, and looked from face to face for
more
. But gradually, little by little, like a ship taking on water and slowly sinking, I noticed that no one seemed to be looking at
me
.

At that second, at that
very
second, as if my thoughts had been read, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Justin Strawbridge, and the slight pressure of his fingers, the almost maternal look on his face, told me everything I needed to know: that the roomful of white faces were beaming at the figure
beside
me, at the skinny girl in the sleeveless blue dress. It was her they were applauding.

I glanced over at Justin. A lesser boy would have melted into the crowd, would have washed his hands of me. (It seemed as if everyone else in the room had also perceived my misunderstanding at exactly the same moment.) But he was unwilling to let me swing alone in my public embarrassment.

It takes great courage to do something like that, especially when you’re young.

Even after he and I fell out, when the damage from that incident in the dandelion field was so profound it couldn’t be fixed, when we were truly ruined for each other, I always guarded that moment on the dance floor, kept it to the side of all the sordidness that followed. The innate “bigness” of his soul, before his foul appetites polluted it, rose unbidden to the surface. He was all the things that I had imagined that day I first laid eyes on him, in the doorway of a classroom, a creature whose perfection seemed so casual, so inevitable, that I felt a flutter of panic at the notion that I might be excluded from its glow.

5

My Life with Tolstoy

I
t was an ill-advised journey. You don’t go to Jamaica in August unless you grew up there. Too hot. And those roosters.

I wanted to go back because six months earlier I’d had such a swell time; got a great tan, danced on the beach, lost twenty pounds (all that Dexedrine) and had an affair with a skinny friend of my ex-wife. But when I came home, everything had slid sickeningly back into place. So I hocked a family heirloom and bought a discount plane ticket. Three weeks, no changes. M., my ex-wife, cooked me dinner the night before I left. Our seven-year-old daughter skittered into the kitchen in a pink track suit. She drew me a picture of a snake in a top hat. For good luck, she said. She knew I was frightened of flying.

“Don’t say anything,” M. said (she had something in her hand), “just give it a chance.” She plopped a fat, gleaming paperback novel on the table in front of me.
War and Peace
was a book I had avoided all my life, a book that, like Proust, only a stiff prison sentence could accommodate. But I loved M. and I knew she loved me, so I put the book in my shoulder bag the next morning (Jesus, what have you got in there, a brick?) and went to the airport.

It was 1988. I was thirty-eight years old.

I don’t care for airports in the early morning. There’s an alarming quality to people’s faces at that hour, a pink brutishness, which extinguishes one’s appetite for conversation. Stuck near the end of a long lineup to check in, I pulled
War and Peace
from my bag and scrutinized its cover. A Russian soldier reared up on the back of a horse, troops and cannon smoke and bayonets in the background.

“That’s a marvellous book,” a small voice said. An elderly woman behind me pointed a finger at my book. You could see she was not a person to intrude on a stranger, but that somehow the occasion, almost as if I were holding a photograph of someone she knew, justified it.

“I’ve read it three times,” she said. “I’m getting ready for my fourth.”

“You’ve read this three times?”

“I try to read it every five years.”

I woke up with a hangover the next morning in a small Jamaican hotel. Finding myself in the same sun-baked room I had so happily occupied only six months before (except not alone), with the same soupy heat trying to squeeze in the door like a fat man, a dog barking mindlessly in the yard below, I couldn’t recall for the life of me why it had seemed almost religiously important to get back here. I lay on my side like a wounded animal, waiting to be rescued by sleep’s second act. When that failed, I opened
War and Peace
(this should do it) and, facing the white stucco wall, sweat already dribbling across my chest, began to read. We are at a gathering in the luxurious Petersburg apartments of Anna Pavlovna, gossip and confidante to the powers-that-be in the Russian court. It is 1805, the talk is of war and Napoleon. “Well, my prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. . . .”

I have kept that copy of
War and Peace
, a spine-broken fifteen hundred pages held together by an elastic band. I cannot bear to throw it out (although I know my children will, twenty minutes after my passing). I have a check mark beside the paragraph where, even in the roller-coaster grip of a white rum hangover, I began to pay acute attention. I had been expecting, as one often finds with nineteenth-century novels, a kind of beautiful boredom. Instead, after only a few pages, I experienced one of those moments when you’ve been half listening to someone you don’t take seriously and suddenly they say something so sharp, so true that it jars you physically, like the sound of expensive material ripping, and you realize
tout d’un coup
that you have completely underestimated them. Three days later I found myself stopping a stranger on the road outside my hotel and asking him, “Have you
read
this fucking thing?” I was the only guest in the hotel. The staff had retreated to their homes in nearby towns. There was only the owner, a big-chested former policeman, and a beanpole bartender who subbed as cook. And me, of course, drifting up and down the hotel steps with
War and Peace
in my hand. Eating a solitary breakfast in the dining room. Wandering down the road to the beach where bare-breasted Italian girls played volleyball on the sand and I, like that poor prick in
Death in Venice
, read in the shade and waited for lunch.

It sounds bad, but it wasn’t; because I had
War and
Peace
and it pulled me out of my unhappiness as if I were on a rail. While the girls splashed in the waves
(“Tonio!
Vieni amore! Vieni!”)
, I followed the doings of a handful of Russian aristocrats on the eve of the Battle of Shöngrabern. The clumsy, illegitimate Pierre Bezuhov comes into a huge inheritance that transforms him overnight into Petersburg’s most attractive bachelor. A teenage Natasha Rostova (after whom men have been naming their daughters for nearly a hundred and fifty years) thrills at the spectacle of her father’s agile dancing at a court ball.

“Look at papa,” Natasha shouted to all the room (entirely forgetting that she was dancing with a grown-up partner), and ducking down till her curly head almost touched her knees, she went off into her ringing laugh that filled the hall.

Then come the great battles. Sweet-natured Count Nicholas Rostov (Natasha’s softie brother) finds himself in combat for the first time. Who, before Tolstoy, wrote a paragraph like this?

He gazed at the approaching French, and although only a few seconds before he had been longing to get at these Frenchmen and cut them down, their being so near seemed to him now so awful that he could not believe his eyes. “Who are they? What are they running for? Can it be to me? Can they be running to me? And what for? To kill me? Me, whom everyone is so fond of.” He recalled his mother’s love, the love of his family, and the enemy’s intention of killing him seemed impossible . . . He snatched up his pistol and instead of firing it, flung it at the Frenchman and ran into the bushes with all his might.

Years later, I cemented an intuitive dislike for a television producer who turned her lovely, careerist features toward me one afternoon and claimed that the battle scenes in
War and Peace
had “bored” her (her ascendancy through the hierarchy of international television remains, depressingly, unchecked), whereas when I put the unforgiving
W&P
question to her husband, a spiky-haired local personality who had always struck me as an articulate flake, he raised his shoulders in a matter-of-fact gesture and said, “Oh, it’s the greatest novel ever.” I’ve adored him ever since.

Like the acting of Christopher Walken or the movies of Éric Rohmer, Tolstoy’s magnum opus is a magnet for foolish opinions. It always has been. When it came out in 1869, a number of Moscow critics denounced it, some for containing too much French, others for being the self-regarding work of an aristocrat. One rancorous fellow attacked it for not “being either a novel or a novella.” Most surprising, though, was Turgenev, who described the first twenty-eight chapters like this: “The thing is positively bad, boring and a failure . . . All those little details so cleverly noted, those psychological remarks which the author digs out of his heroes’ armpits in the name of verisimilitude, all that is paltry and trivial.”
Heroes’
armpits?
Wow. Talk about missing the boat. Never mind. Joseph Stalin liked
W&P
so much that during the Nazi invasion he retooled the country’s military outfits—gilded epaulettes, scarlet and white jackets, trousers with piping— so they might more closely resemble those in the novel.