Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  But the way he looked at me, the way he spoke—so clear-eyed, so sharp, cool and contained, not pained—gave me chills. The way he said, “Isn’t that strange?” when I told him the pharmacist couldn’t find his prescription. The way he said his day had been “enlightening.”

  I’d asked, “Where’s Jonah?”

  He’d said, “Jonah’s gone.”

  Jonah erasing me and Kayla from the story was a relief but also a burden, because I could feel Robert hating his own child, and I remember feeling scared. Yes, I was afraid of what my husband knew, but I was also afraid of my husband. He was so bitter and covered in thorns. Fear tightened the line between us.

  Robert said, “You look very pretty in this light,” without warmth or love, grief or regret. He was stone and I was sand. “You look very pretty,” he said, and I knew the rest was best left unsaid. So much of our lives: unsaid and unseen. So many versions of ourselves mutated by other people’s minds. My own husband isn’t imaginative like Stuart, but now I have a stepson who’s hooked on Proust—a fact which, of course, makes me smile, because wasn’t it Proust who said, “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us”? So maybe Robert will never be the one to whom I can say, Isn’t that just too perfect? But Jonah might be.

  And then, of course, the laundry: finding confirmation of Robert’s inner world, folded and hidden in the back pockets of his jeans. “Managing Emotional Shock.” “The Science of Acceptance.” Being reminded that he struggles and copes in his own way. Wanting so badly to soothe his pain. Recognizing that he, too, guards an inner world, just so he can keep secrets with himself. Understanding that it’s not my job to storm his fortress.

  At Penn Station, I take my place in the ticket queue. Once again, my mind returns to the night we sat in the den, watching each other watch the other. The sun was setting, and I was afraid, but then came that strange flash of clarity. It was as though two songs in different keys had landed on the exact same chord at the exact same time, and in that moment, I almost believed this was the point of it all. So much dissonance, so much noise, all in hot pursuit of alignment, and when we find it, for a fleeting moment we are one and the same. Is this why we cycle through ambivalence together, why we create and clean messes together, why we volley words and feelings back and forth, aiming for the places that best reflect us in each other—even as we shield these reflections from judgment and scorn out there in the world? Even as we distract ourselves from other people’s struggles in the world—those with far higher stakes, those caused by challenges not self-imposed? From these, we shield ourselves, too. Maybe my father is right: we plant obstacles just to have something to overcome, and in witnessing our breakdowns and consequential triumphs, we become our own proof that we’ve earned this good fortune and love. This life.

  I looked pretty to him. When he said it I believed him and wasn’t surprised but wasn’t flattered, either, because it hadn’t been a compliment, exactly. He was simply making an observation. Telling me what he saw. But it startled me, because I realized something: I already knew it. I knew exactly how my skin would be glowing in that light, the way shadows were carving my bone structure at dusk, the way his strange mood was unsettling me, and how much it excited him to see me unsettled, and how powerful that made me, exciting him like that. My disquiet had been genuine, at first. Unaffected. And still, in that moment, I knew that Robert saw me as fragile, which made him feel powerful, which makes him happy; and happy is easier to live with, and I was exhausted and desperate to move on; and so I chose to sit there looking fragile, so he could recharge, so we could get back to normal.

  Of course, normal was dissolving already. A spell was breaking in my bones. Sitting there in silence, looking pretty and fragile, I understood: there has never been a time when I haven’t been aware of how my husband sees me. How I look. Looking pretty. Looking like Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli. Looking like Ingrid Bergman on Stromboli, for that matter—which is exactly how Luna and Monique see me too, for entirely different reasons. Like I’m the harlot on their island. Like my supply of what they want or need or loathe is limited, or depleting.

  On a cellular level, with Stuart: always knowing he’d peel me into strips to weave onto a page. Recognizing I’d want to love the thing he weaves, the way I’m seen. Moving accordingly.

  This isn’t the Elizabeth I know, he’d say, and I’d reply, That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?

  The Elizabeth he knew served the story of his life. She existed in his head as a pretty thing who opened his heart and broke it, who created space by leaving; and Robert exists beside me, as I exist beside him, all sparks and noise and alignment; but I am the one who has to live with myself. The Elizabeth in my head is relentless. She’s made of memories, mismemories, thoughts sprouted from smarter people’s thoughts and from misinformed people’s thoughts, too, and of judgments by people who use me as props in their own sagas and judgments about people I use in mine, and of habits, instincts, and emotions, but mostly memories and the beliefs they build. Sometimes, the flashbacks are like flesh wounds, surface-breaking and raw. Sometimes they’re closer to keloid scars, luminous and hard as mother-of-pearl under my skin. They are lodged in my body and mind, cobbled together to fill the shape of the person I believe myself to be. The Elizabeth I know serves the story of my life.

  I hadn’t even realized how clipped my story felt until the morning I found myself face-to-face with Kayla Scott, who had every reason to size me up as a resource but didn’t. Instead, she looked at me like we were already connected. Like helping her and helping myself were the exact same thing. Like I was the channel, not the source. The current, not the charge. Like our supply was infinite already.

  I’d almost forgotten what that felt like—to be seen as a channel and a current, to see that way, too. To communicate in an electric language that doesn’t feel like betrayal, after all. It feels like relief: getting to practice seeing and being seen that way with Bess, a new friend with a fresh start. It’s been so long since I’ve had a friend to practice with. To see what happens. To see.

  Approaching the ticket window, I reach into my bag for my wallet and touch my paperback instead: an anthology of poetry written by dead women whose names have become clichés, whose poems once summoned in me an ecstasy and wonder so raw, so devastating that I considered this volume to be my personal Bible—my holy book, I liked to say. On the day we met, Stuart spotted me reading it at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam, and he’d approached me as a stranger, quoting verse, and I’d said to myself, Why not? And I’d said to him, “I’m Elizabeth.” The rest became our history.

  I couldn’t have imagined then how things would unfold and implode, that I was choosing a partner who’d suffocate me and a grad program I’d come to loathe, or that my parents really wouldn’t be upset if I quit—that they really meant it when they said they just wanted me to be happy, and that “being somebody” meant nothing to them—or that, one day, I’d fall in love again but better, and I’d trade my sticky cocoon of a life for the bright sting of sea salt in a literary Eden. I’d marry a man who lets me keep my own oxygen, and we’d nest in the coziest hamlet in the Hamptons, just like Steinbeck did, and E. L. Doctorow and James Fenimore Cooper did, too. So maybe someday I’ll look back on this summer and say, I didn’t know if we’d ever heal from that horror, but look at us. We really did.

  I thumb the sueded edges of my holy book’s pages, open the back cover, remove the postcard tucked inside: a photograph of a gilded temple, spires aimed toward the heavens, the neon-pink words Bangkok, Thailand printed over the image in fat cursive letters. On the other side, Kayla has written my work address and nothing else. There is no message, no signature, but I know what it means. In the blank space, she is telling me she’s out there, opening, widening. She is thanking me. Reminding me that we’re in this together.

  I return the postcard to its hiding place and drop the book into my bag. “Bridgehampton,” I tell the cashier, who doesn’t look a
t me when she takes my debit card, swipes it, slides it back through a gap in bulletproof glass. The man who’d been behind me moves beside me and shouts at the window, “Great Neck!”

  Back I go, walking the length of a line full of people going home to their families, their lovers, friends, dogs and cats, their couches, and framed photographs—images that have become the memories, galvanized just so—or heading to airports, jobs, parties, plans, or leaving secret meetings, leaving it all behind. Someone elbows me in the ribs, and I apologize, then take it back. Through damaged speakers, a muffled voice announces a track change, and an undercurrent of commuters reverses direction right on cue.

  Below glowing screens where Solari boards should be, a crowd gathers to stare at backlit lists of departure times, tracks, and destinations. I join them and join their upward gaze, too, and it’s like this—squinting alongside strangers, all of us searching for our homes—that I hear my own voice saying, “I’m with you,” out loud. When no one seems to mind, or object, or notice at all, I say, “I’m with you,” again. “I’m here.”

  Jonah

  A man in jeans and a T-shirt steps into the hall and asks if I’m Jonah, and I say yeah and follow him into a room that basically looks the exact same as my advisor’s office—except my advisor only knows how to schedule classes, not how to handle answers to questions like How was your summer? when the answer is, Pretty fucking tragic. For that, she only knows how to pick up her phone and schedule an appointment with this guy, Angus (who is way too chill to be a counselor or therapist or whatever, despite his meat name), but campus policy requires her to blah-blah-blah, so here we are. Me and Angus. He thanks me for coming and asks if I’ve done this before, and I say yeah, once or twice a long time ago, so he explains some stuff and I sign some stuff, then it’s on to small talk, the worst. He asks, “How was your summer?”

  “Pretty fucking tragic,” I answer for the second time today, which cracks me up, because this guy is probably the opposite of my advisor. Angus probably lives for this shit.

  He only sort-of smiles, though, when he says, “I’m fucking sorry to hear that.”

  Even if I wanted to spill my guts, I never can. I made promises—to Dad, to Elizabeth, to Nick. With Kayla. Promises we made together: superpromises. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  Angus shakes his head and says, all somber, “None of us do.” Then again, but quieter, “None of us do,” and I realize he means, like, in an existential way, and with pretty solid delivery, too, so we both laugh now. Hey, he’s got a sense of humor at least. If I told him about the roof—about Nick and our fight, and how Nick swore me to secrecy about Dad diagnosing him—or Kayla and Elizabeth and the shit we did and didn’t do, or Dad’s lies, or the lies we told together (superlies?), Angus would probably assume I’m joking. He’d leave work today with stories about the hilarious client referred to him by a dud advisor. But, well, superpromises. Only, I’ve been wondering something. “What do you think of a person who goes back on a pact with himself? Like, let’s say he promised himself he’d keep a secret, but then he tells?”

  Angus mulls it over. “I think, as long as he asks for and grants himself permission to tell, then the contract is dissolved, so he’s not going back on a promise at all.”

  Of course he’d say that. I change it up and ask, “Do you know who Colette is?”

  “The French writer?” he asks, and I mean, okay, I wasn’t expecting that, but I nod, and he says, “Sure.”

  “I read her memoir this summer. Did you know she had an affair with her stepson? Like, in real life.”

  “I did not.”

  “She did.” I chew a thumbnail. “Her second husband’s teenage kid. That’s not in her memoir, though.” It should’ve been. The true parts are the most interesting parts, no matter how she edits her story. Then—I don’t know where it comes from—I blurt out, “I don’t want to become my dad.”

  Unfazed, Angus shrugs. “Good news. That is scientifically impossible.” He has a point.

  “Well, so the reason I mentioned Colette is because when I learned that thing, about the stepson, it gave me an idea”—and it takes me a sec to say—“to do something.” Deep breath. “Something bad.” I’m over here hanging my head, trying to decide if I should let this cat out of the bag or whatever, when I look up to see Angus is super spooked, and I’m horrified to realize he’s jumping to the worst wrong conclusion, so I intercept his thought, going, “Oh God. Gross. No, not that. Elizabeth and I are friends.” I hold up my hands. “Swear.” We laugh from relief. “We were friends, anyway.” Buzzkill. “So, okay. The thing is, when I read that, about the stepson—”

  Angus rotates his chair a few degrees so he’s facing me completely, but not in an intimidating way.

  “I was really mad at the time.”

  He nods, but not in a patronizing way.

  “Mad at my dad.”

  He’s just paying attention, like it’s no big deal.

  So I ask myself permission to say, “I told a terrible lie,” and grant myself permission to be heard when he says, “I’m listening.”

  Acknowledgments

  Melissa and Pouya Shahbazian, thank you for seeing and throwing sparks from the start. You are truly extraordinary friends. Joanna Volpe, literary agent of my dreams: thank you for being the smartest, savviest, coolest, kindest force of nature imaginable. Jaida Temperly, Abigail Donoghue, Devin Ross, Meredith Barnes, everyone at New Leaf Literary & Media, Chris McEwen, and Jackie Lindert: thank you. Many thanks to Jackie Cantor, editor extraordinaire, for your literary sorcery, and to Jennifer Bergstrom, Jessica Roth, Sara Quaranta, Chelsea Cohen, and everyone at Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster for bringing this book to life.

  A world of gratitude to: Milan Popelka for loving great stories and adventures, too; Adam Wilson for launching this ship; Beth Miller for the Long Island field trips; Dee and Trevor McWilliams for being badasses; Leslie and Joe DeLaRosa and Dr. Philip Siegert for your wisdom; the Kerouac Project, Jentel, Hambidge, the MacDowell Colony, and my MacDowell and Arctic families for your support and magic.

  Big love to sweet Jim, Kimberly, Erica, Christina, Cari, Lisa, Amy, Sara, and Olin for your early reads and open doors, and to my family for everything. Charlotte, David, Alex, Montgomery, Ellie, Layla, my Finches, aunties, uncles, cousins, and our Queen B, Marthann Bennett: I love y’all like crazy.

  Most of all, beyond measure: thank you, Mom and Dad, for being the best guides a human could wish for. I’m so proud to be your daughter, so lucky to learn from you and love you and be loved by you. Thank you for being brave and wild enough to never flinch as I’ve hacked my own path. To, instead, shine light on the path. Thank you for this life.

  • • •

  Despite the things these characters made me write, my respect for modern medicine knows no bounds. I could never have invented a shadow side without so many fine examples of the bright side. Dr. David Walker, thank you for being brilliant and for fielding weird questions and explaining best practices so I could build a character who defies them. Dr. Alexander Langerman, Dr. Randall Starling, Dr. Mazen Hanna, Dr. Robert Lorenz, Dr. Mohamed Kanj, Dr. Edward Desai, Dr. Edward Soltesz, and Kay Kendall: thank you for being so good at your jobs.

  To all registered organ donors and families of donors: thank you.

  A Gallery Books Readers Group Guide

  Man of the Year

  Caroline Louise Walker

  This readers group guide for Man of the Year includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Dr. Robert Hart, Sag Harbor’s just-named Man of the Year, is the envy of his friends and neighbors. His medical practice is thriving. He has a beautiful old house and a beautiful new wife and a beautiful
boat docked in the village marina. Even his wayward son, Jonah, is back on track, doing well at school, finally worthy of his father’s attentions. So when Jonah’s troubled college roommate, Nick, needs a place to stay for the summer, Hart and his wife generously offer him their guesthouse. A win-win: Jonah will have someone to hang with, and his father can bask in the warm glow of his own generosity.

  But when he begins to notice his new houseguest getting a little too close to his wife, the good doctor’s veneer begins to crack. All the little lies Robert tells—harmless falsehoods meant to protect everything he holds dear—begin to mount. Before long, he’s embroiled in a desperate downward spiral, destroying the lives that stand in his way. It’s only the women in his life—his devoted office manager, his friends, his wife—who can clearly see the truth.

  Topics and Questions for Discussion

  1. The novel opens with Robert, Elizabeth, and Jonah suffering through a photo shoot at the Citizen of the Year event. Does this initial introduction to Dr. Hart and his family seem like a metaphor for the picture-perfect façade Dr. Hart wishes to present? Discuss how Nick’s inclusion in the final photo symbolizes a disruption in their family dynamic.

  2. Recall Robert’s reaction when he sees the family photo in print—both in the newspaper (p. 59) and in the proofs mailed to him toward the end of the book (p. 262). How does his perception of the very same image change as his fears, assumptions, and misconceptions change? What are some other ways in which people see things differently based on their own life experiences and access to information?