Read We Need to Talk About Kevin Online

Authors: Lionel Shriver

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Teenage Boys, #Epistolary Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Massacres, #School Shootings, #High Schools, #New York (State)

We Need to Talk About Kevin (3 page)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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It may have been disingenuous of me to imply at the start of my last letter that when we conferred at the end of a day, I told all. To the contrary, one of the things that impels me to write is that my mind is huge with all the little stories I never told you.
Don’t imagine that I’ve enjoyed my secrets. They’ve trapped me, crowded me in, and long ago I’d have liked nothing more than to pour out my heart. But Franklin, you didn’t want to hear. I’m sure you still don’t. And maybe I should have tried harder at the time to force you to listen, but early on we got on opposite sides of something. For many couples who quarrel, just what they are on opposite sides of may be unformed, a line of some sort, an abstraction that divides them—a history or floating grudge, an insensible power struggle with a life of its own: gossamer. Perhaps in times of reconciliation for such couples the unreality of that line assists its dissolve.
Look
, I can jealously see them noting,
there is nothing in the room; we can reach across the sheer air between us
. But in our case, what separated us was all too tangible, and if it wasn’t in the room it could walk in of its own accord.
Our son. Who is not a smattering of small tales but one long one. And though the natural impulse of yarn spinners is to begin at the beginning, I will resist it. I have to go further back. So many stories are determined before they start.
What possessed us?
We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. I knew this about myself in advance, too: that I was just the sort of woman who had the capacity, however ghastly, to rue even so unretractable a matter as another person. But then, Kevin didn’t regard other people’s existence as unretractable—did he?
I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to avoid it. I may not know what to call it, that
Thursday
.
The atrocity
sounds torn from a newspaper,
the incident
is minimizing to the point of obscenity, and
the day our own son committed mass murder
is too long, isn’t it? For every mention? But I am going to mention it. I wake up with what he did every morning and I go to bed with it every night. It is my shabby substitute for a husband.
So I have racked my brain, trying to reconstruct those few months in 1982 when we were officially “deciding.” We were still living in my cavernous loft in Tribeca, where we were surrounded by arch homosexuals, unattached artists you deplored as “self-indulgent,” and unencumbered professional couples who dined out at Tex-Mex nightly and flopped about at the Limelight until 3 A.M. Children in that neighborhood were pretty much on a par with the spotted owl and other endangered species, so it’s little wonder that our deliberations were stilted and abstract. We even set ourselves a deadline, for pity’s sake—my thirty-seventh birthday that August—since we didn’t want a child who could still be living at home in our sixties.
Our sixties! In those days, an age as bafflingly theoretical as a baby. Yet I expect to embark to that foreign land five years from now with no more ceremony than boarding a city bus. It was in 1999 that I made a temporal leap, although I didn’t notice the aging so much in the mirror as through the aegis of other people. When I renewed my driver’s license this last January, for example, the functionary at the desk didn’t act surprised I was all of fifty-four, and you remember I was once rather spoiled on this front, accustomed to regular coos over how I looked at least ten years younger. The coos came to a complete halt overnight. Indeed, I had one embarrassing encounter, soon after
Thursday
, in which a Manhattan subway attendant called my attention to the fact that over-sixty-fives qualified for a senior discount.
We’d agreed that whether we became parents would be “the single most important decision we would ever make together.” Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbellina that wets itself for Christmas.
I do recall a sequence of conversations during that period that lurched with a seemingly arbitrary rhythm between tending toward and tending against. The most upbeat of these has surely to be after a Sunday lunch with Brian and Louise on Riverside Drive. They no longer did dinner, which always resulted in parental apartheid: one spouse playing grown-up with calamatas and cabernet, the other corralling, bathing, and bedding those two rambunctious little girls. Me, I always prefer socializing at night—it is implicitly more wanton—although wantonness was no longer a quality I would have associated with that warm, settled Home Box Office scriptwriter who made his own pasta and watered spindly parsley plants on his window ledge.
I marveled in the elevator down, “And he used to be such a cokehead.”
“You sound wistful,” you noted.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s happier now.”
I wasn’t sure. In those days I still held wholesomeness to be suspect. In fact, we had had a very “nice” time, which left me bafflingly bereft. I had admired the solid oak dining set seized for a song from an upstate tag sale, while you submitted to a complete inventory of the younger girl’s Cabbage Patch Kids with a patience that left me agog. We commended the inventive salad with ingenuous fervor, for in the early 1980s goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes were not yet passé.
Years before we’d agreed that you and Brian wouldn’t get into it over Ronald Reagan—to you, a good-humored icon with easy flash and fiscal ingenuity who had restored pride to the nation; to Brian, a figure of menacing idiocy who would bankrupt the country with tax cuts for rich people. So we stayed on safe topics, as “Ebony and Ivory” crooned in the background at a grown-up volume and I suppressed my annoyance that the little girls kept singing tunelessly along and replaying the same track. You bewailed the fact that the Knicks hadn’t made the playoffs, and Brian did an impressive imitation of a man who was interested in sports. We were all disappointed that
All in the Family
would soon wrap up its last season, but agreed that the show was about played out. About the only conflict that arose all afternoon was over the equally terminal fate of M*A*S*H. Well aware that Brian worshiped him, you savaged Alan Alda as a “sanctimonious pill.”
Yet the difference was dismayingly good-natured. Brian had a blind spot about Israel, and I was tempted to plant one quiet reference to “Judeo-Nazis” and detonate this affable occasion. Instead I asked him about the subject of his new script, but never got a proper answer because the older girl got chewing gum in her Barbie-blond hair. There was a long maunder about solvents, which Brian put an end to by lopping off the lock with a carving knife, and Louise got a little upset. But that was the single set-piece commotion, and otherwise no one drank too much or took offense; their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice—nice, nice,
nice
.
I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. Why would I have preferred a fight? Weren’t those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought? Wasn’t I married to a man I loved, so why did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt when I helped him bring in bowls of Häagen-Dazs from the kitchen? In retrospect, I was quite right to kick myself, too. Just a few years later I’d have paid money for an ordinary, good-spirited family gathering during which the worst thing any of the children got up to was sticking gum in their hair.
You, however, announced boisterously in the lobby, “That was great. I think they’re both terrific. We should be sure to have them over soon, if they can get a sitter.”
I held my tongue. You would have no time for my nit-picking about how wasn’t the luncheon a little bland, didn’t you have this feeling like, what’s the point, isn’t there something flat and plain and doughy about this whole
Father Knows Best
routine when Brian was once (at last I can admit to a guest-room quickie at a party before you and I met) such a hell-raiser. It’s quite possible that you felt exactly as I did, that this to all appearances successful encounter had felt dumpy and insipid to you as well, but in lieu of another obvious model to aspire to—we were not going to go score a gram of cocaine—you took refuge in denial. These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a
good time
. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnamable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.
You
regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turn up their noses at
Terms of Endearment
just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks—what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.
As we spun through the revolving doors onto Riverside Drive, I’m sure my disquiet was unformed and fleeting. Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the
is
with the
ought to be
—your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.
I proposed that we walk home. On the road for Wing and a Prayer I walked everywhere, and the impulse was second nature.
“It must be six or seven miles to Tribeca!” you objected.
“You’ll take a taxi in order to jump rope 7,500 times in front of the Knicks game, but a vigorous walk that gets you where you’re going is too exhausting.”
“Hell, yes. Everything in its place.” Limited to exercise or the strict way you folded your shirts, your regimens were adorable. But in more serious contexts, Franklin, I was less charmed. Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.
So I threatened to walk home by myself, and that did it; I was leaving for Sweden three days later, and you were greedy for my company. We roistered down the footpath into Riverside Park, where the ginkgoes were in flower, and the sloping lawn was littered with anorexics doing tai chi. Ebullient over getting away from my own friends, I stumbled.
“You’re a drunk,” you said.
“Two glasses!”
You tsked. “Middle of the day.”
“I should have made it three,” I said sharply. Your every pleasure rationed except
television
, I wished that sometimes you would let go, as you had in our salad days of courtship, arriving at my door with two pinot noirs, a six of St. Pauli Girl, and a lecherous leer that did not promise to hold off until we’d flossed.
“Brian’s kids,” I introduced formally. “They make you want one?”
“M-m-maybe. They’re cute. Then, I’m not the one who has to stuff the beasties in the sack when they want a cracker, Mr. Bunnikins, and 5 million drinks of water.”
I understood. These talks of ours had a gameliness, and your opening play was noncommittal. One of us always got lodged into the role of parental party pooper, and I had rained on the progeny parade in our previous session: A child was loud, messy, constraining, and ungrateful. This time I bid for the more daring role: “At least if I got pregnant, something would
happen
.”
“Obviously,” you said dryly. “You’d have a baby.”
I dragged you down the walkway to the riverfront. “I like the idea of turning the page is all.”
“That was inscrutable.”
“I mean, we’re happy? Wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure,” you concurred cautiously. “I guess so.” For you, our contentment didn’t bear scrutiny—as if it were a skittish bird, easily startled, and the moment one of us cried out
Look at that beautiful swan!
it would fly away.
“Well, maybe we’re too happy.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I wish you could make me a little more miserable.”
“Stop it. I’m talking about story. In fairy tales, ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is the last line.”
“Do me a favor: Talk down to me.”
Oh, you knew exactly what I meant. Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.
BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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