Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  Call IT, he said. I need a new laptop.

  It happened that day. He decided enough. He was going to resign. Really resign, not half resign. Pull away. Thirty years, nearly thirty years, was enough.

  It happened after one of the meetings.

  Stirred by his growing realization that there is a difference between serving a real need, based in the habits and desires of a community, a society, a culture, and instead constantly creating needs, deploying vestigial nostalgic notions of community and culture, George said: Wanting things leads to misery.

  Katrine, beside him, shifted, looked at him. Yes, he knew he was becoming ever less helpful.

  People wanting things is how we live, Burke said.

  But we have to promote an idea of not wanting things while selling people things. It’s the final lie. Spare. Zen. Wooden walls, tatami floors, empty rooms, what little you own in jars and bowls behind the cabinet doors. And one-hundred-and-sixty-dollar-a-pound white tea. With proper service.

  A manufactured lifestyle of peace, Burke said. One you can almost afford.

  Right.

  I’d call it consciousness of the moment, Katrine said. Presence. This is really what people are going to want next. The ability to be and know you are in a place, in a moment of time. Awareness. The final, single drop of espresso falling slow-motion into the demitasse.

  She was already building an image campaign.

  These manipulations of reality are starting to make me sick, George said. I think they’re giving me cancer.

  They’re not manipulations of reality, Katrine said. They are the discovery of some vein of common desire.

  Burke said, Right, and the assurance that we know—that we share that desire.

  I mean, Katrine said, we know you’re not going to get peace from a caffe macchiato. But we know that you want, you need, to create a little space around yourself. You want to hearken back to something simpler, something easier, than all this. All this bullshit. We’ll need new cups. Little square white china cups in square saucers, perhaps.

  George watched the marketing and advertising directors writing it all down. A few of them wrote on their iPads, with little nibs that looked like colonial-era floor nails.

  After the meeting, George took Katrine by the elbow and guided her into Burke’s office.

  Burke walked to his desk, turned to face them.

  George said, Here she is. She can replace me. You don’t need me anymore.

  Essentially that’s true, Burke said. We have some details to work out, though, don’t we?

  I can leave, Katrine said. She seemed eager to do so.

  No, stay, George said.

  Details, Burke said again.

  The lawyers can do the details, George said. I want to go to Mexico for a while.

  You and Mexico, Burke said. You and Mexico, it’s like watching a fat man trying to seduce a cheerleader.

  Lawyers, George said, and left Burke and Katrine together to talk. Burke, once she’d been elevated, would want to sleep with her. George had to remember to warn her.

  * * *

  HE DID GO to Mexico. He almost bought a house on the Pacific coast: with its boathouse it would have been a place to keep a lovely wooden sloop he’d discovered for sale in Boca del Cielo. He came back to New York, and managed, in a kind of isolated desperation, to start up again, by Skype, with Clarissa. After a month of long conversations he flew to Geneva, where she’d moved to work with an NGO doing refugee relief in sub-Saharan Africa. He had written to declare his love and need. He would help her have a child, he knew she wanted one, even at his advanced age, fifty-six going on fifty-seven in the fall—he didn’t care. She was seeing some guy. She was into this guy. She was into him, to be specific, as an erotic obsession. She saw no future there, she admitted. George and she skyped. They skyped and skyped—all hours. Perhaps taking the long view, she had allowed him to visit her. Now she was asleep.

  George tried to sleep but couldn’t. He rose and sat at her dining table in the darkened apartment—it was a kind of European loft, all one space formed by two rectangles in an L position. Moonrise had come from France, to the southeast, emerging from behind the left haunch of the mountain; it’s always a struggle to be born. But it had managed to slide out and over the course of the past hour he had found it by turns symbolic, historical, divine, mundane. It shone for a time over the city, and then passed, almost the color of flame, into invisibility behind a black cloud. It was just past three a.m.

  In her apartment, a simple, elegant place in a middle-class district not far from the airport, rather surprising, she could have afforded anything, a house in the old city if she’d wanted it, he was sitting at her table, by the wide window, with its view of the low mountains, watching this passing cosmic drama. The larger of the two mountains, Mont Salève, was to the right. I read, much of the night, and go south in winter. He loved Europe, loved it firmly but almost always from a distance: he had never been free in his life—he’d lived his life in chains. And now, here, he had woken to the intolerable. Behind him, she breathed audibly, snored just a little, delicate, like a baby’s snore; occasionally she moved in her sleep. He heard her move, and half hoped she hadn’t woken from his having risen, and half hoped she had, and would rise too, and join him, so that he could sting himself again in the beauty of her company.

  He watched the sky: the moon underwent a second slow birth, from behind its heavy cloud: it was now whiter, more still: less maudlin: cold. His eye registered these changing attributes and delivered them, already catalogued, to his brain.

  The dreams: he had been dreaming with a kind of manic fervor. He dreamed that her newest lover had denounced him in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, which was absurd and almost wonderful—the man was barely literate, and it was George himself who sometimes appeared in magazines. He knew this in the dreams, this symbolic reversal. He had dreamed she was his (George’s) wife, that she was holding a party, and was upset about the hors d’oeuvres. He tried to give the dreams code words while he was dreaming, phrases to remember so he’d be able to put the dreams back together, but now he remembered only a few of them: hot oil: she was in charge of the deep fryer in a restaurant and she was frighteningly angry that every time she put anything in the basket and lowered it, the grease spat up and stained her clothes. He was working in some other part of the kitchen, he could see her and wanted to tell her to stand farther back, to immerse the food a bit more slowly, to find an apron… But he was too busy and not allowed to leave his post so could tell her nothing at all: just let her burn and rage.

  The rock? Was there a rock? Bare feet gripping wet rock? Something—but he couldn’t remember.

  He would have to work very hard now not to fall under the train again, depression; his companion of many disparate months over the past few years; to survive in the face of pain, to accept it, to feel it, and to go on, feel it again the next day, go on. Etc. So far, he felt a lot of pain, but no depression, no perfect paralyzing isolation, no rich gray blanket of melancholy. Indeed, he was vitally energetic; he was profoundly pissed off, pissed off over a lifetime of enforced failure; his dick was hard for the first time in two days; he was eager for game two, for which he would change his strategy, take a different approach.

  The bright moon had disappeared again, leaving a glowing nimbus behind the clouds; the sky was a velvet black curtain, impenetrable.

  Words words words: another black curtain. He stood behind it, waiting.

  Eventually he tried to sleep again, and almost did, but then began to shiver. He settled, grew drowsy, but then she moved; he looked at her; he was electrified. Her limb, her shoulder, her hair. In the silver light. Soon he was hard again, and it felt to him as if every nerve in his body would jump out of his skin. He thought about waking her and shoving his cock into her; this was broadly speaking the M.O. of the character she was enamored of at the moment, but for that reason and for others in his history, and in hers, and in theirs together, he kn
ew he would not do that. Could not. More rage at this. And he could not stay in bed with her; another minute or two and he’d start screaming. His situation was comic, was idiotic; last night when they were talking he had an easy time making his little position into a dirty sitcom sequence—he had needed very much to relax and laugh at himself and at her, but the hours between three a.m. and the waking life of sunlit morning are notoriously the least funny of the day; these are the hours for dying.

  She was in Geneva for the year. When he’d flown in, the previous Wednesday afternoon, she had insisted on meeting him at the airport, but she was twenty minutes late—she looked tired, no makeup, a little unhappy. That day, a Wednesday, and the next, Thursday, were very bad. Confrontations—he was pushing her, he was arriving here in the middle of her life and insisting on some right or privilege that he did not have or deserve to have. Friday was nice in the a.m., foul after lunch. Nap, work. He apologized. They walked through the center of town and had a dinner in the old city, which initiated a loveliness that carried through the rest of the weekend. They rented a Peugeot at the airport and drove to Ticino, stayed in Lugano for the night and saw Bellinzona and Locarno before driving back in the afternoon on Sunday. He was aware of traveling paths Anna had talked about, had loved, from so many years before. The mountains were as she had described them—astonishing.

  He would leave on Monday morning. He and Clarissa had sex, briefly, incompletely, in the Lugano hotel, the Splendide Royal, after drinks at the bar overlooking the lake; from the hotel they walked out for dinner, stopping at a place they liked the looks of, on a plaza between the shopping district and the lake. The dinner was superb. It was late April, and the resort was only mildly populated. A long walk back to the hotel: his leg hurt, as it did intermittently since he’d torn the knee ligament two years prior, running; when it did, as now, he limped and because of this she was, he could tell, mildly irritated with him. The next day they ate breakfast in the big dining room, analyzing the other guests—a few of them were frightening, seemed actually insane, two large men, severe, both Americans, which he thought odd as Americans on holiday usually looked like dumb cows in shorts and striped shirts. Then they drove to Bellinzona. She received her second speeding ticket of the trip (a hundred Swiss francs each) en route, though they wouldn’t know this until later when it was mailed to her—everything was automated and efficient, this being Switzerland after all. Lunch in Bellinzona was perfect, with a wholly unexpected perfection; perfect in that way when something was lovely and you knew it in the moment and experienced it in the moment and knew too that you would never lose it. And then you didn’t lose it. Fettuccine alla carciofi. A light fresh tomato sauce with artichoke hearts. Wine. A neighborhood place just off the small piazza they’d parked in; families eating midday dinner on a Sunday. He had seen in a brochure that included a few pictures that there was a church nearby, with frescoes—Santa Maria delle Grazie—nothing spectacular or famous but it looked more interesting than the endless castles of the place, the buildings in which these Europeans had all held up between bouts of slaughtering one another with arrows and spiked clubs: deadliest race on the planet: when the Europeans do it, they do it full scale, all out. And so it was, the church, more interesting than the castles—especially in the rearmost chapel on the church’s north side, one of a half dozen chapels running up the two sides of the apse, for there had been a fire a few years before and in this particular chapel the fire hoses had washed away all the paints of the frescoes—a tragedy, one would think—leaving the plaster bare and haunted with faded remnants of the original charcoal cartoons on white plaster, ghostly figures reaching toward him, or turning to look at him, or gazing upward, some scene now erased, barely tangible, eyes outlined but empty and white as in some living death, all of it like a memory of communal sadness and joy. And yet these shadows of art, these ghosts, were the most compelling and beautiful art in the building. He prayed here—joking with her that they should fuck behind one of the altars, the place was abandoned now that it was afternoon and the last Mass had been said—he prayed silently to himself for her, for him, for them. She wanted a child. He prayed for that. They drove back to Geneva that afternoon; they got lost looking for the highway and ended up on a one-lane road crossing the Alps—one lane, literally, so that at every curve, and there were many curves required to get up and down these mountains, you had to stop and crawl forward to make sure no one was coming down, unseen, to plow into you. She drove and endured the stresses of this—he looked out the window, across at ridges and down into chasms rich in water and leaf and stone, wet and dappled and at play in ten zones of light. The place vibrated with the divine. They reached Montreux at nightfall and stopped for dinner—another fine meal—and she drank a third of a liter of wine and staggered laughing and holding him back to the car. He drove them into Geneva, grinding gears, riding the clutch, awake and alert to the bright lights and tricky reflections of the night and universe. And then he did not sleep.

  Monday morning: the airport. The look on her face as she walked away: she hugged him quickly, not hard, with a yielding sense of affection; she was glad though, to have him go. Her face, her eyes especially, presented a complex mixture of sadness, regret, and, most of all, have-tos. He smiled at her after she kissed him. He was jovial: Have a good time kid, he said. Meaning with her other man. She slipped under the ribbon barricade and walked toward the exit. Perhaps she turned to wave at him, but if so he didn’t see it—he was determined to look away from her. He didn’t begin to face his emotions, the digging pain in the gut, until after he boarded the plane, stowed his bags, sat, and considered the possibility of her getting pregnant, that very night, by this intermittently employed construction worker she was fucking.

  The flight was interminable. The data on the screen told him it was already after four o’clock in Geneva and they were just passing Newfoundland. He could see her, moving through her day without him.

  Two months later Clarissa returned to New York. She was, indeed, pregnant. Just as he’d predicted: that very night. She’d known too, by next morning, and had dumped the guy by the end of the week; then, she said, she’d had to endure the fifty SMS messages per day. For almost a month. Night rings of the buzzer. She did not call the police though she threatened to do so, because she didn’t believe he was altogether legal. Eventually it stopped and then she left the country. He would never know.

  George wanted her to live with him. He would be father to the baby.

  I don’t think so, she said.

  He took think hopefully.

  Burke said to him, at lunch, two weeks later: I’m going to be a grandfather.

  George looked at him. Really?

  I hope so. It’s early yet.

  How far along?

  Only twelve weeks. I suspect you knew this already.

  I know nothing, George said. I see nothing.

  Right, Burke said. Like Sergeant Schultz.

  * * *

  TO BURKE, WHO asked him one day about his financial position, he said, Well, I have considerable stake, sharewise, in this outfit called Brown et Co.

  Yes, we know that, Burke said.

  My big financial score was that I put a hundred grand in Apple in late 2002, another hundred in early 2003. It was shortly after Nate got his first iPod. I knew when I saw the kids with that thing that Apple would own that market. I didn’t even realize the phones.

  What was it? Burke said. I’m gonna cry when you tell me.

  Eleven dollars a share. By early 2003 it was a little more.

  Jesus. How many times has it split?

  Fourteen essentially, George said. Two to one in ’05 I think. Seven to one a few months ago.

  So you made like ten million?

  More like thirteen.

  Right, like nine thousand shares became a hundred and twenty-five thousand shares going at a hundred ten bucks a pop. Fuck. What have you got in Brown, like three hundred thousand shares?

  Closer to four,
George said. But I’ve been selling them off a little.

  Yeah, I noticed. That’s very inspiring.

  I’m converting a little to cash and munis. Coming apocalypse.

  So you’re worth like fifty million?

  Plus cash and real estate and a few good paintings, yeah. So maybe fifty-five.

  That feels like enough?

  It’s enough for three small countries, Steve.

  You called me Steve.

  Yeah, warm feelings now that we’re talking about net worth. And I don’t work for you anymore.

  Anyway that wouldn’t be enough for me. I got big plans.

  I know. You’re worth three hundred times that. We’re different that way.

  Yeah, Burke said. I’m three hundred times better than you.

  What George would not tell Burke, at least not yet, was that he was selling out gradually in order to give his money away. He was in the midst of making a trust of ten million for Nate and after that he was willing to die with just enough in the bank for a funeral. It turned out, however (something he learned after twelve thousand dollars in lawyer meetings), it was quite difficult to give your money away. You couldn’t just give it. You had to have a foundation. A foundation had to have a mission. It had to have a board. Its gifts had to comport with the mission. Its gifts in any one year should, for fiscal responsibility’s sake, only be equal to the earnings minus the operating costs—leaving the investment intact. The tax consequences the tax consequences the tax consequences the tax consequences, they sang. It was the show-stopper tune from a big Broadway musical: the tax consequences. His secret weapon was that he didn’t give a shit about the tax consequences. In theory he didn’t pay enough taxes as it was and if he’d had a better government he’d accept that as a fact in practice as well. The lawyers looked at him with peculiar expressions, except the one, a woman who was originally a labor specialist Brown had used in establishing employee practices, whom George had admired, and who now did the law of charitable institutions.