John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  And then I stepped wrong again, “Where do you work?”

  He looked up at me for that one. “I don’t. I play. I do what I want.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Yes. Very nice.”

  That caused a bit of quiet while I studied the room and the view and made the rather obvious assessment that this was all, indeed, very nice. And clearly the result of a lot of work by itself.

  He set two oversized plates down at the table, along with two mugs of black coffee and pulled up his own chair close so that we were only a couple of feet apart.

  “You know, I think I’m becoming a philosopher, John.” He smiled at his pronouncement. “You probably remember my disparaging of philosophers.”

  I repeated it pretty much word for word from memory. “Idiots who think their assholes are singularities.”

  He laughed at hearing his own joke retold.

  “Right. Well, all of this is enough to make anyone think twice. You don’t have to be your old hero Thoreau to realize there are important elements not on the periodic table. I’ve gone over to the dark side, you might say. But what I‘m playing with up here is trying to understand what the hell is happening to civilization. You know—as in: is all that shit necessary?”

  I figured Gary was trying to push the conversation into something he could manage. He’s smarter than I am. I’ve always known that much. But he doesn’t digest his knowledge very well.

  The sausage was incredible. The bread was fantastic. Whatever argument he wanted to have, he’d already won.

  I said, “Yeah. I think it’s necessary. You can’t just keep consuming without producing a certain amount of shit.”

  This did not seem like an appropriate subject matter over such good food.

  He says, “No. Listen. You know this. Philosophy—real philosophy—grows from a ‘love of knowledge.’ Right? But most ‘philosophies’ actually discourage the pursuit of knowledge in favor of perfecting ‘systems.”

  I nodded in agreement without any idea where he was going. I repeated the word, “systems,” to let him know I was listening. I was thinking that I should learn to bake bread if this was what I might get out of it.

  He leaned over his plate to get closer. “We’re talking a set of theories here, or methods that simplify the categorization of knowledge or keep what’s learned within certain proscribed bounds. Pretty typical of this would be systems that use math as the key, for instance. I know you never liked math. We’ve had that conversation. So you’ll like this. . . ”

  I said, “Math is fine. It’s what people misuse it for that troubles me.”

  I was actually trying to figure out the added taste in the sausage. I had just decided it must be sage. But he had both hands in the air now.

  “The love of math is really an appreciation for the clean hard edges of the numbers and the absolute finish. The sum. The reproducible result, whether it’s useful or not. The sum becomes the goal. A philosophical theory put forward without the ‘proof’ of a sturdy mathematical equation is not even considered a serious challenge these days. . . . And that, as you well know, is not much different than most theology. A Moslem philosopher has no interest in the work of his Christian counterpart any more than a mathematician has for a novelist. And with mathematicians, the effort to acquire knowledge—to comprehend the world about us—has long since been abandoned for the pursuit of confirmation—a translation of every aspect of existence into numbers similar to the reduction of data down to simple 0’s and 1’s for computation. You already know that too well. What occurs then is little more than a census—an accounting of the angels on the head of the pin.”

  He took a breath. I took the opportunity. “And as I’ve said to you before, why bother?”

  Gary shook his head with a quick impatience. “But I’ve been thinking about knowledge in a different way now, John. Like pieces of genetic code. All a matter of sequences and context. Not 0’s and 1’s but some more flexible combination of A, U, G, C. Sequences that work together—”

  I held my left hand up.

  “You’re losing me Gary. Personally, I think you should have stayed at M. I. T. You had a home there. You could go back. I bet they’d take you back even now. And I could stay here. I could look after this place for you. I’d feed the dog. I could learn to bake bread. I’ll bet. I could sit right here and write novels that nobody wants to publish just as easily as I can do it down there. Easier! I’ll bet I could.”

  He looked up from his own plate, finally re-directed. He kept a pretty straight deadpan. “Maybe. But I don’t think you could handle Milly.”

  I said, “Maybe not.”

  He said, “It was a very comfortable life, you know. Very secure. Bought and paid for. The university is the ultimate womb.”

  That was more to the point. He knew I knew him that well. Gary was never big on the safe move. I never saw him wrestle, but I’m pretty sure that was why he won more often than he lost.

  I asked, “Is that why you left?”

  He nodded, “Yes. Born again, you might say.”

  “And life is good?”

  “Better than good. I’ve actually felt moments of happiness. Glee. Ecstasy. And the sex is better too.”

  I threw my next question out just to put things back into context. “Don’t you think you ought to be more involved in the world.”

  He shrugged, “I am. Totally,” and took up another mouthful of eggs on a piece of bread.

  “But you walked away from a good life by most standards. You walked away from your family. From your friends.”

  He smiled for a moment, looking at me as if I should be smarter than that.

  He said, “Friendships are like love affairs, really. More than people seem to think. You start off with a certain infatuation. You like the sound of a voice. A mannerism. You start paying attention. What you see strikes some primordial chord. You know? You like the person. It’s like our different standards of beauty. It’s not so easy as saying we get it from our parents. I’ve met your mother, John, remember? She looked nothing like Mary Ellen. I met your father. He was a lot like you, but he didn’t like me from the first. Remember? Anyway. You struck me as an interesting guy. At least that. And something else. I always knew where you were. No guessing. You were consistent. At some point, though, I guess that became a hobgoblin to me. Small minds, and all that.”

  I wasn’t wanting to be drawn into argument.

  “So, if I get this right, you started holding my small mind against me.”

  He smiled, “Well, yes. You aren’t stupid, John. I know that. But you have a very narrow view of life. I couldn’t take it. Any more than I could take living in Newton anymore and riding my bike down the Charles River every morning as if that bit of natural order made teaching at M. I. T. bearable.”

  I wasn’t about to manage the conversation, but I thought I might channel it a bit. “I may be stupid as well, Gary. It seems to me that you chose the life you had. Every step of the way. You had commitments there. Vows. You walked away from your own word.”

  He didn’t have to think about that. I imagine he has thought about all that a few thousand times.

  “Yes! I did. I’d made a mistake. More than one. I was wrong. Same as you, my boy. Your marriage was no better than mine. Maybe worse. That was one more way we were alike. The difference is I didn’t hang around to wallow in my misery.”

  The words that came to mind were the very ones I had heard from Gary’s mouth a hundred times.

  “There is a natural cost to everything.”

  His eyes widened with familiarity. “Yeah. Well. That’s why I think you are fundamentally a religious man, John. You see consequences very differently that I do. I’m not coming back. Metaphorically, or otherwise. I only have one life. I wanted a little happiness. I wanted it before I died. And I got it. If I got hit by a truck tomorrow, at least I got a taste of it. How about you, John? How’s it working out for you?”

  There really wasn’t any other
answer for that.

  “Not the way I wanted. True enough.”

  Gary poked his fork at me across the table. “I warned you, John. Right? I told you how it would go down. When you told me you were going to quit teaching so you could write, I warned you. You were deciding more than the simple use of your time. It’d be the end your marriage. It’d be the end of all those other small consistencies of everyday life you cultivated so carefully. But you argued with me. And I thought, when push came to shove, you’d cave. You wouldn’t be able to get your mouth off of Mary Ellen’s tits—.”

  I looked him back in the eye. “You said that. I remember that you used that exact vulgarity.”

  He smirked. Gary has a convincing smirk. “Vulgar. Sex is not vulgar. Wasting a life is vulgar.”

  I wasn’t going to pass on it. “Your use of sexual imagery is vulgar. It’s crude. You’ve always had that ability to be crude when you actually wanted to hit someone.”

  Eyes can, in fact, flash. It’s the flare of the eyelids that opens the eye to the reflection of light. Just then, Gary and I were very close to going at each other’s throats across the table. And just as suddenly I realized, in another of those epiphanies, that Gary was my brother. As much as my actual brother Martin was, really. How many times had Martin and I gone at it over less important matters. And here was Gary, eye to eye with me, and I loved him. I had no idea why.

  I sat back in my chair instead.

  After a second he said, “I think you might have won that. You have about forty pounds on me. And it looks like you’ve been working out again.”

  “No. We’d have both lost, I think.”

  He looked out at the river just long enough to gather his thoughts.

  “It’s all your fault, you know. I think that’s why Zoe has sent you up here. Punishment. She thinks you still owe her.”

  “What’s that about?”

  He shrugged at me. “I just move a little quicker than you do, John. You told me you were going to quit teaching and start writing again, and then I used my vulgar metaphor about tits, but by that night—that very night when you told me you were going to quit teaching—while I was wishing Zoe had tits at least as big as Mary Ellen’s, I had made my own decision to get out. I knew you were right. I was killing myself. . . What was the word you used? Soul. You’ve always loved those religious tags. But I knew my soul was dying. You? You stayed on till the following June. How very responsible of you. But I didn’t even come back for my next semester at M.I.T. Remember? I just stayed long enough to get my shit together, and I was gone.”

  “That was an ugly Christmas.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  He had never told me until that moment that his decision to walk out on his life had begun with my own ideas about changing things. I had wondered. The coincidence of timing was there. But he had never spoken about his own decision to me.

  I said, “I wonder if Zoe and Mary Ellen ever spoke about that?”

  He shook his head. “My boy, they had that pegged from day one. I’m surprised Mary Ellen didn’t lay into you a few times about it.”

  I told him why she might not have. “I think she was relieved. She was tired of fighting to keep things together. But I’m fairly certain Zoe was in a state of shock. She didn’t see it coming. Mary Ellen used to talk to Zoe about our problems. Zoe had always thought she had it made.”

  Gary shrugged, “She did.”

  It was a callous throwaway remark. There was no place to go with it. Any defense of Zoe at that point would have been counter-productive. My opinion on the matter was meaningless.

  I finished my food. I drank the rest of my coffee and poured myself another cup. Gary sat there looking at his piece of the river.

  Then he said, “Mid-life crisis. So prosaic. That’s what Zoe called it. And I let her believe that. There was no way to explain to her that what I was really doing was starting all over again. As if she had never existed. As if there was no Todd and no Sally. Nothing.”

  I was not about to be satisfied with that. “Nothing except the royalties on your little brainstorm plus the family trust fund. That’s all.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Jealousy. I can appreciate that. Jealousy is a common enough human fault.”

  I said, “True enough. . .”

  He leaned back in his chair and scanned the room around us. “See this, John. I built this with my own hands. Every post. Every beam. I cut the trees down right back there on the side of that hill where the sheep are now. You can still see the stumps in the snow if you look. I lived in a trailer for two years while the wood dried. I designed it. Everything here except for Milly’s curtains and Milly’s underwear on the line by the fireplace in the living room is mine. It doesn’t get any better than this. Do you think Zoe would have made it through one black fly season up here? Heh? No. Because you don’t know her. But I do.”

  This was a subtle attack. I was willing to argue this out. “Maybe. Maybe not. But she’s a friend. You don’t have to know it all to be a friend.”

  He shook his head at me like I was a fool. “Women don’t make good friends, John. Maybe to another women, but not to a guy. They do things you can’t begin to fathom. Mary Ellen should have taught you that much. You used to say she was your friend. Remember? But she never understood what you were about. Never.”

  I came back with the easy punch. “No. Maybe. But then, some of my other friends didn’t do a lot better on that score.”

  It wasn’t necessary.

  “Right. Well, I was mistaken. I thought I did. I made some bad assumptions. I thought you were after something more in life than a job. I thought you might give me credit for that as well.”

  Perhaps I should have given him that credit. But there seemed to be other priorities.

  I said, “It’s a different world, I guess. I suppose it’s more your world than mine. People walk away from what they’ve done now. They have abortions today rather than face responsibility for their own actions. They decide that a life is not a life because it’s inconvenient. But you didn’t leave your kids in a bloody basket at the maternity ward. You took the responsibility long enough to make a few of us think you were the real deal—and then you dropped it.”

  He raised his chin a bit. He does that before he enters a fight. But he stayed back in his chair.

  His chin was still up when he answered. “Alright. Okay. Like I said. It was a mistake. But there didn’t seem to be any other way at the time. There was no math for it. No numbers at all. I just knew that night that I needed to go. Sally and Todd weren’t going to be any happier with me around regretting every minute. I made a mistake. There was no correction for it. It just had to end it before it was too late.”

  I had thought about that myself. Back then. I thought about walking out a few hundred times a day. Especially after Gary just packed up that day and left without a word. I had seven thousand dollars of savings in the bank. I had thought about buying a motorcycle and just disappearing. That memory was there still, clear and bright. I had put it away with all the other baggage of that time. And here it was again. If it had not been for my girls, I might have been gone and done it, just that way.

  Gary only did what I had dreamed of doing. Could I be so hard on him for actually doing it?

  And then, another epiphany. Certainly, Des might have done as much to me. But that would mean that she had walked away from me as well. I really wasn’t ready to think about her doing that to me. This was something else to chew on at another time.

  Gary was staring at me. “What are you thinking about?”

  I decided I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t think he deserved to know anything about that.

  I said, “But it’s not over. The kids are still there. You may not want to be part of their lives, but you are. And Zoe needs your help.”

  He shook his head once, quickly.

  “I gave her the house. I gave her every stinkin’ piece of property we owned. And she agreed to the child
support. She signed that piece of paper. And—not that it’s any of your business, but she gets half my royalties. My lawyer sends out the check to her every six months.”

  I said, “Things have changed. Taxes on the house have doubled since 2005. Todd wants to go to graduate school. And now Zoe has lost her job.”

  Gary turned to me with a rather nasty look in his eye.

  “My mother died in August. Did you know that, John? That’s what this is about. Zoe wants what my parents have left me.”

  His parents had moved to Florida many years ago. His father had died last year. I had not heard anything about it. But I could guess then what the matter was.

  “Zoe doesn’t want it. She wants you to put some part of it in the name of your children. That’s all.”

  “She wants her hands on it.”

  “You can work this out Gary. It’s not that hard.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  He turned away from me, staring at the perfectly still picture of the river through the window until a crow entered the frame and found a perch on a fence post.

  I waved my hand at what surrounded us. “Why aren’t you happier?”

  The pretense of a smile was gone. He said, “I’m not stupid. I knew she’d want more in the end. That’s another thing about women, isn’t it? That’s the way they all are. Zoe’s been that way all her life. That’s why I set the divorce agreement up the way I did. I accepted that from the beginning. She got more than her share. I can’t help it if she lost her job. She should have seen that coming. I even warned her about that. And now the royalties aren’t what they used to be anyway. I told her: sell that damn house. It’s in her name. She doesn’t need to live in Newton. But she wants to be close to her friends. So there she is. And she can’t afford it. And she can’t sell it now the way she could have when the market was hotter. And she wants more from me.”