by Dana Czapnik
Of course it’s occurred to me that the entire current of my life is calibrated to steer me in the direction of the Grueners. That it’s possible my life could end up . . . Just. Like. This. Nice apartment. Bland husband. Spoiled kid. No interesting books. Going to work in the morning, coming home to microwave some leftovers. A drone in shitty clothing. So how does one put on the brakes? Switch up the sails?
I check out the coffee-table books artfully placed on the shelves in the living room, and my eye stops at a photography book entitled Woman in Pieces by a guy named Federico Silvano. There’s something about photography that intrigues me. Not just the capturing-a-moment part of it—I like the idea of using your camera to gain entrée to important events but not have to actively participate. The camera can be a shield or a cloak of invisibility. It seems clear to me that I’m never going to be the kind of iconoclast who will ever make history. But maybe, if history ever happens when I’m alive, there’s a way to just witness it close up.
I take the book off the shelf and shuffle through the pages. It’s an entire book of black-and-white photographs of women, most of them shiny-skinned nudes. Women in shadows and standing against stark white walls and lying on angled concrete ledges. Women on slick rocks, rolling in sand, tangled in ropes. Women confronting the enormity of the ocean or leaving it behind. Women standing in doorways and windows, open or closed to the possibilities that lie beyond each threshold. Every last one of them is a perfect model. Some of them are supermodels. Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington and Kate Moss and Helena Christensen. Some well-placed shadows and limbs here. Some nipples blazing there. Some of the women have their heads cropped out of the picture, so it’s just their naked bodies in the sand or on a black-and-white checkered floor. Others have their faces obscured by scarves or glossy paint. Some photos are just extreme close-ups of faces, legs, arms, artful but perfectly sculpted nooks, tendons, smooth curves. A tan, taut belly with goose bumps and a lone birthmark.
It’s all quite stunning and sexy. But there’s something that saddens me with each page I turn. Every one is such a perfect physical specimen, it feels like there’s no room for the unusual or for artistry or thought. Does physical beauty really matter this much? I know it matters as a currency. But does it actually matter more than that? Are the snow-capped Rocky Mountains or the New York skyline at night as important as Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1? Are the muscles under a cheetah’s rippling skin as he chases down a kill as important as a poem by Pablo Neruda? And what about a human face? Is it possible that human beauty is as important as the soul? I’m beautiful, therefore I am.
The photos arranged this way one after the other in this book, like a catalogue of beauty and influence, remind me of an elucidating moment I had in a Grand Union off the Garden State Parkway about a year ago. We were on our way home from visiting my aunt in Jersey and we stopped in to do some shopping because my mom says there’s no sales tax. There are no supermarkets in New York, just markets. So a visit to a Grand Union in New Jersey is a shocking experience.
I wandered the aisles and marveled at all the choices, all the variations on Teddy Grahams and Oreos and Lay’s potato chips. At some point during my sojourn through the common American experience, the whole store transformed from a place of wonders to a place of waste. It seemed like a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse of eventual garbage. And then I multiplied that by a guesstimate of how many Grand Unions or Grand Union–type supermarkets there must be in New Jersey alone (hundreds? thousands maybe?), times the fifty states in the union, and suddenly the idea that there is a trash island the size of Texas sailing the globe along with the trade winds seemed like an inevitability. Why does Nabisco need to make fifteen types of Teddy Grahams or Teddy Graham–type crackers? What is the purpose of all this excess? I wasn’t thinking about the pictures in the New York Times of people waiting in mile-long lines in the former Soviet Union for a loaf of bread. It wasn’t about “We have so much and they have so little.” It was more “We don’t need all this, do we? We don’t even want all this.”
And then I got to the poultry aisle. Row upon row upon row of disassembled chickens and turkeys. There’s a poultry section at Zabar’s too, but it’s tiny, so the experience doesn’t have the same impact. The American way of packaging meat for the masses consists of dismembering animals, breaking them down to their essential muscular parts—removing their hearts and their veins and their organs, even their skin, even their bones—making them much easier to eat. Legs and breasts and thighs, all plucked and butchered and lumped together in individual containers. They’re in essentially the same packaging as the Teddy Grahams one aisle over. Now, I don’t know if animals have a mortal soul—I suspect they do, but there’s no way to know for sure—but I know there’s a difference between a chicken and a Teddy Graham.
Before my grandfather settled into a life as a fishmonger on Fulton Street, he had been a shochet, a kosher butcher. He said those were the most miserable years of his life. He couldn’t stand killing animals. And yet, he never thought to stop eating them.
In that aisle, in the Grand Union, looking at all the poultry, I realized that if I could never personally kill an animal, I shouldn’t pay to have someone else do it for me. I haven’t touched a plate of meat ever since.
* * *
Here’s Naomi Campbell completely topless. Smiling coyly for the viewer. The ocean looks dead behind her.
Here’s Helena Christensen lying on a rock, her hands covering her breasts. Her hair is mussed, and she has on a please-fuck-me face.
And here’s Christy Turlington twisted in a black veil. Extra fabric is blowing in the breeze. Her mouth is slightly open. Her eyes are downcast.
On the following page is an anonymous naked woman standing waist-deep in a still sea. It’s a full-frontal shot, but her hair, wet and dark like the body of a seal freshly emerged from water, is slick like oil and completely covering her face. Behind her shallow waves are breaking, but the horizon is blurred, so there’s no way to know if she’s turning away from the ocean or the shore.
If I were to have seen just one of these photos as a stand-alone, I might have looked at it and remarked to myself something simple like, “Oh, she’s beautiful” or, “Oh, what a beautiful composition.” But one nude black-and-white woman after the other, after the other? The beauty is . . . drained of its blood. Packaged meat with better lighting. Nothing important or interesting is really communicated. The message is, simply: Look at the gorgeous.
I wonder what Janie Gruener of the ill-fitting khakis and messy gray hair and the Condé Nast business card thinks. Is this why she doesn’t put any effort into her appearance? Or why I don’t bother either? If there are people like Cindy Crawford on earth, why bother trying, since invisibility is inevitable? Or could it be that I’ve sold Janie short? Maybe her makeupless face and her practical clothes aren’t a sign of giving up at all. Maybe her method of protest isn’t standing on a street corner shouting about pornography or making an American flag out of dildos. Maybe her method of protest is just not participating. Maybe there’s something quietly revolutionary in not longing to be beautiful.
* * *
There’s a knock on the door, which is the opening sequence of every horror movie ever made. Young, nubile teenage girl with bouncy hair babysitting alone in a large house, the kids asleep. A sitting duck. But I don’t have bouncy hair, and this is an apartment. And besides, those girls never look to see who’s outside before opening the door. That’s why they always end up on the business end of a chain saw. I tiptoe my way to the foyer to get a look through the peephole and I get a walleyed view of Percy staring right back into the other end. I unlock the triple locks and open the door, which squeaks and echoes through the vestibule outside the apartment.
Percy’s wearing baggy cords, a plain white T-shirt under a blue button-down shirt, which is unbuttoned, and his favorite Yankees cap. The cap is so old, the logo is from the Sixties, and someone, I’m sure not his mo
ther, has sewn blue patches on it where the fabric has been rubbed out. Whoever sewed the patches took care to try very hard to match the color of the fabric, but it’s still slightly off. I love that cap on Percy, I’m sure for the same reasons Percy loves it. First of all, it’s a fitted cap, which is hard to come by. And second of all, it’s lived in, with salty sweat stains around the seams. And third of all, it’s the real deal. It was Percy’s grandfather’s on his mom’s side. He was some third-string baseball player who played a short stint with the Yankees in the late Sixties, at the end of his career. Percy found the hat in an old box of his grandfather’s baseball memorabilia, in his grandparents’ attic in their house in Westchester, right before his mom and uncle sold it after both parents had passed away. Percy quietly took the box home for himself without telling anyone. His grandfather had accumulated quite a collection of signed cards and other such goodies during his playing days. Percy was afraid if he mentioned the secret stash he found, someone in his family would have co-opted it and put a price tag on it and sold it, which seemed to be the default mechanism in the Abney family. But there are some objects in life that have more meaning. I think his grandfather would be happy that Percy wears that cap all the time. It deserves to be seen in the light of day and not accumulate dust somewhere on a collector’s shelf. It’s the kind of object that the pharaohs would bury with them in the pyramids. Percy doesn’t believe in anything eternal, but I think if he didn’t want to be cremated, he’d want that cap with him in his coffin.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Your mom sold you out. Can I come in?”
“I don’t know if the Grueners would be cool with me having anyone else over.”
“Nah, they’d be fine with it. I’m a sweet kid from down the block. Just look at this smile.” I stand in the doorway, hesitating. “C’mon,” he pleads. “I’m so bored, I’ve just played four straight hours of Blades of Steel and I’m going legitimately nuts. I just want to hang out a little. Plus, I have a surprise for you.”
Percy pulls out a used book from the back pocket of his cords and holds it up to my face. There’s a picture of a white draft card on the front cover and a price tag of $1.15 in the upper left-hand corner. The title of the book is 367, and the author is J. S. Adler. The edges of the cover are tattered. It’s either been well loved or abused and forgotten.
“Is this who I think it is?”
“Yeah, that’s him! Joseph Samuel Adler.” My dad’s book. I can’t hide my excitement. “Where did you find that?”
“In that used bookstore on Broadway.”
“But I’ve checked there before, I’ve never seen it.”
“I guess someone cleaned out their bookshelves recently.”
I glance at the clock on the mantel. “Okay, listen—they’re going to be home any minute. Just go up to the roof. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
* * *
I triple-lock the door behind him and walk back into the living room to start packing up, so that as soon as the Grueners get home I can jet. I start to close the photography book, but I find myself staring at Christy Turlington again. Suddenly her soul matters not at all. Violet once told me that it’s deeply tragic when a woman is known only for her beauty. That’s what killed Marilyn Monroe. But what wouldn’t I give to look like this? To have some adorable freckles scattered perfectly along the bridge of my nose for someone to kiss. Some shockingly light eyes, or lips like Alexis’s, full with a brown tint around the edges and pale pink in the middle. Even if the combination looked unusual, at least there would be something interesting there, something hard to ignore. It’s funny how all the intellectualizing fades away when you’ve got a guy you like hanging out upstairs, waiting for you on a roof.
Nietzsche says that the most wonderful kind of beauty is the kind that infiltrates the mind and heart gradually. He calls it the “slow arrow of beauty.” The kind of beauty that maybe doesn’t register at first, but then you find it lingering in your senses. And what a wonderful sentiment. One I wish I could believe. But I’d rather have the beauty of a bullet.
* * *
Across the roof, Percy’s body is a silhouette. The errant light from apartment windows glows behind him as he leans over the edge of the building, a spliff dangling between his fingers. He stands up straight, takes a drag. I watch the cherry grow orange and then explode off the roof as he flicks the butt to the ground. I wish I was a camera and could slow my eyes’ aperture so that the light of the spliff would linger and create zigzags across my field of vision. I close my eyes and admire the afterburn.
“Hey,” I say, startling him. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. I hate standing at the edges of buildings.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a part of me that always wants to jump. I’ve got that jump in me.”
“L’appel du vide.”
“What’s that?”
“The call of the void.”
“How do you know that?”
“My mom has a book full of French expressions.”
He turns around to face me. “Any other good ones?”
“L’esprit de l’esca—esca—escalier, I think. I can’t pronounce it right.” I laugh.
“You’re pronouncing it like it’s Spanish.”
“That’s the only accent I know how to do.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s when you think of the perfect comeback after you’ve left the party and are already on the staircase.”
He laughs. “That’s good. That’s real.”
I walk toward him. “And amour fou.” I’m next to him now, at the edge of the building. We’re facing each other, and the lighting is dusk-perfect. “An unrequited love so strong it drives you crazy.”
He turns away from me and faces the street again. “The French are too intense.”
If I looked like Christy Turlington, for sure he would’ve been charmed by that. In a past life I must’ve been beautiful and cruel.
I notice the book peeking out the back pocket of his pants. I reach over and pull it out, being careful to touch only book. “Let me see this.” I shuffle the pages against my thumb. They’ve softened with time. “We’ve been looking for this for so long, I’m almost afraid to read it.”
He takes out another spliff and lights it up. Offers me a drag, and I take it. I don’t even like cigarettes, but this one fills my head and lungs with a warm, drowsy high.
“The first chapter’s set in 1994,” he says. “Read the description on the back.”
I begin to read aloud, squinting to see the white typeface on the back cover of the book. “ ‘The lives of two young men from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn are set on different paths when one is drafted to fight in Vietnam and the other enrolls in college. We watch their progress through youth and into middle age and see the profound ripple effect of this divergence on the men they become and the lives they lead.’ Gene Orville says 367 will ‘soon be a classic on privilege, the underclass, and who pays the highest price for war.’ ”
“Intense, right?”
“Yeah.” I nod.
“How come it’s out of print?”
“My dad says it was too political and that it came out at the wrong time. That there wasn’t enough distance from Vietnam, that good war novels can’t come out during a war, they need, like, a twenty-year gestation period. He says, ‘There’s only the future and the past. The present is unknowable.’ But he’s thrown out all his copies and basically erased it from his life. So maybe he’s embarrassed ’cause it wasn’t a good book.”
“Or maybe he’s thrown out all his copies because instead of being a writer he became a lawyer, and the presence of the book is a painful reminder of the road not taken.”
“That’s . . . not it. My dad likes his job.”
“Does anyone really like being a lawyer?”
“Yes, my dad does.”
“Okay,” he says all sarcastic. “
What do you think 367 means?”
“The way they did the draft for Vietnam was they assigned every calendar date a number from 1 to 366, and if you were born on that day of the year, you had to go in the order your birthday was picked. It included if you were born in a leap year. So 367 is the first number that could never be picked.”
“Your dad didn’t serve, did he?”
“Nope. He was able to get two deferments—one for college and one for grad school—and then he aged out. Just like his protagonist.”
“Yeah, my dad got out of Vietnam the same way.”
“But my dad became a civil rights lawyer. You told me your dad’s first yacht was purchased using the profits your family made off Agent Orange.”
“To be clear, we didn’t manufacture it, we just invested in the company that did.”
“Same thing.”
“I’m clarifying, not justifying. The spoils of war are called spoils for a reason. That’s why I don’t want to go into business with my dad, like my brother will someday. I want to distance myself from Abney money. It’s fucken’ spoiled.” He pauses and takes the spliff out of my mouth. “But it pays for sus drogas.” He smiles and holds the smoldering cigarette between his thumb and middle finger. “This is an Agent Orange cigarette.”
“So, everything you’ve ever purchased in your life—your video games and your drugs and your books—you think they’ve all been paid for with money made off war crimes?”
He looks at me like I just kicked his dog.
“Basically, yeah.”
“Wow, you think your dad is that bad a person?”
“Shit, I don’t know. What makes someone a good person or a bad person anyway? No one is all good all the time, and no one is all bad all the time. Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer once saved a hurt and helpless bird. Maybe Jane Goodall doesn’t return library books. I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t know if I see a moral framework in the acquisition of money. My dad thinks of business the way you and I think of snagging rebounds—get the ball at all costs. As long as you’re making your money on the level, it doesn’t matter how you earn it—Agent Orange or tobacco or pesticides or Glocks. They’re all going to be manufactured anyway. You might as well make a profit off it. It’s not like he’s personally killing anyone. And he’d argue that his business is doing good in the world. Pension funds and endowments invest in his firm and make a ton of money. He’d say he’s helping to stabilize markets, rewarding innovation, helping the world turn, ushering in advancement. How would we know if something is valuable if someone like him doesn’t set its value? And he gives a lot to charity and he helps old ladies cross the street . . . those things may just be vanity, though.”