by Lydia Millet
He did not rejoice in this—far from it. He liked things to be as they appeared. The young were at least smooth-skinned and straight; the old were flabby and wrinkled. At least, he thought, they should pony up some piece of timeless wisdom to make up for their wretchedness: yet most shambled from breakfast to bedtime in the same dumb state that had taken them through adolescence. A fair number had grown up quite simply dimwits, and stubbornly remained so even in their dotage. He wanted to venerate them, for with their lined faces and dignified bearing they reminded him of august men of state. But then they spoke.
On the neighborhood black market he was known to have sold purloined bottles of liquor, a dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex, Super Plus size tampons (a novelty item that inspired great speculation among the local boys), brassieres, and once
a Polaroid of Adam Scheinhorn’s naked sister. Her eyes were small as currants in a bleached-white face but the rest of her was so clear that fingers trembled as they held the photo, pinching the frame along the very edge. Oh yes: he knew where value lay.
Although he learned to put the lion’s share in the bank, throughout high school he also kept a small safe in his room. And on occasions when he felt rebuffed, when he perceived an insult or failed at something he had desperately tried, he would retire there and carefully remove the portion of his stash he always kept nearby. With hands in latex gloves he soothed himself by counting out rare dollar bills—the two, for instance—and old coins that were prized by collectors, including many dark and brittle rounds dating from Roman times. These he would remove from his safe in ritualized style and lay out on a sheet of newspaper spread across his desk, in strict order from least value to most.
And it was not only the ritual, not merely the repetitious and the pious act of counting that afforded him comfort. He liked to hold and see the legal tender and then bend his head and close his eyes, the metal or the paper in his hands. He would order himself to concentrate until his jaw was aching from clenched teeth and his eyes beneath his eyelids almost hurt; in the still room both his ears would ring and he would feel himself reeling, as though in one position, bowed over his desk, he hurtled through a static night. He reeled, he reeled: he might disintegrate: his mind was pulsing like a heart.
After such effort he was spent.
•
One of his lowest moments in high school came at the hands of a friend’s mother. The friend was Perry, short for Pericles, who was not a first-order friend but one of the less fortunate (prominent teeth, flood pants) to whom he granted favors in exchange for services rendered. They were playing Donkey Kong when Perry’s mother entered the bedroom.
At first she made small talk, distracting them from Donkey Kong but failing to penetrate; finally she dropped the pretense and called T. away for what she called a “private chat.” Perry rolled his eyes and seemed ashamed, but did not have the upper hand. His mother ushered T. hastily out the door, whereon a large poster of Captain James
T. Kirk was boldly tacked, and into the nearby laundry room. There she shut the door behind them, began to fold towels with agitated precision, and asked him in a whisper where he got off, as she put it, “taking” Perry’s allowance money.
T. nipped this in the bud with a quick denial, but she persisted. Though Perry said he was giving the twenty dollars weekly to T. in exchange for protection from various jocks who had it in for him, she did not think it was “fair” for T. to “extort money on that basis.”
“It’s more than fair,” said T. “Before I stepped in, Perry got beat up like twice a month. One time they broke a tooth. He had to get new braces and a crown. You don’t remember that? I mean how much did that run you?”
“The point is, if you’re friends he shouldn’t be paying you
for helping him. It’s something you do for your friends for free. Friends help each other, T.”
“I’d like to do it at no charge to Perry,” said T. firmly. “I really would. Believe you me. And in a perfect world I could. But here’s the situation: I’m not the problem. I’m the middleman here. Those dollars go straight to the guys who were doing the beatings. In return, they keep their hands off your son.”
“But T.—”
“Mrs. G., we were lucky they took the deal at all. I mean, they really like beating on him, Mrs. G. It’s basically all they’ve got to live for. They didn’t want to take the bribe at first, but I convinced them. So now they target other kids instead. But if we stop paying them—especially now we’ve had this gentlemen’s agreement and everything was going smoothly—they’ll boomerang on him. They have this thing they do with locker doors? He could lose the use of his pinkies.”
“If it’s that serious, T., Perry’s father and I should just take it up with the school administration, or maybe the parents of those reprobates who like to hurt innocent little boys.”
“Sure you could. But I would advise against that, Mrs. G. It would be like killing Perry. I mean socially. It would get out that you had to go in there for him and everyone would be saying one word to him: L, O, S, E, R. Loser, Mrs. G.”
“I can spell too.”
“He might not take as many physical beatings, that’s true, but the psychological scars would be lasting.”
She stared at him, annoyed, gaping slightly, one hand on a stack of towels. He looked her in the eye, affecting an earnest concern for Perry’s well-being. In fact the jocks in question had been easy to convince and now received a mere five a week.
“You’re a slick little bastard,” she said finally, picking up
the towels and turning her back on him. She walked out of the laundry room and slammed the door behind her.
He waited for a few seconds after her leave-taking, drawing deep breaths. Then he summoned his pride, squared his shoulders, and followed.
In the main there was seldom a reckoning, seldom any conflict. In his early adolescence what impressed him most often was the willingness of people to be fleeced—the ease, almost the gratitude with which they surrendered their assets. On his block, at least, where the housewives had expensive hair and his mother was the sole Catholic, his many good works appeared to offer a welcome relief from the mall and the salon. Almost monthly he collected for the United Way, the Boy Scouts of America, the YMCA or sometimes a church group conducting outreach to the poor and unfortunate. He always dedicated a percentage of the take to the cause at hand: so his efforts, if not entirely selfless, yielded what he liked to call a “positive net effect.”
And this was the language he used in the confessional, which he visited at intervals to keep his mother happy. His father, once he recovered from a brief but intense bout of spirituality around the time of the wedding, had declined to set foot in the church. This seemed to sadden his mother, and T. felt it was his duty to take up the slack. He was not hesitant to disclose all his activities; for after all, he reasoned, the priest was bound to observe the sanctity of the confessional and must be quite a sound businessman himself, for the local diocese alone had assets in the hundreds of millions. Indeed he was surprised when the priest did not laud him for his strategies.
“I can’t believe you’re penalizing me. My economic
activities have a positive net effect on the community as a whole,” he repeated staunchly, when he was set the heavy penance of ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.
“They would have a greater ‘net effect’ if you refrained from lying and stealing, Thomas,” said the priest gently.
T. shook his head. “That’s what we call looking at the glass half empty.”
When he recalled those years it was in brief flashes; there was no continuous line but only a few vivid moments. His mother back then was different from the mother he left when he went to college. When he got home after school she was always in the house, a steady glowing fixture. She smiled and was interested in him; she had soft pictures of the Virgin on the wall, some of them holding a baby Jesus T. believed might be a standin for him.
She wore a large cru
cifix beneath the hollow of her throat, which T.’s friends from school decried as “weird” and “foreign.” Their own churches and mothers were unadorned and in their living rooms there were few pictures of anything but water lilies and fall leaves, flocks of geese flying over farmhouses in rolling country.
But they liked his mother and afforded her a certain respect, for she was pretty and kind and discreet. She welcomed the boys into the kitchen with sodas and lemonade in spring and hot drinks in the winter, and there she drew them into peaceful conversation but never kept them too long. All in all she seemed mainly concerned with her son’s happiness.
His father commuted into the city for work and returned quite late at night on weekdays; he was dense and silent in the house on weekends, rarely seeking out others to speak to them. He watched sports and worked in the
yard and the garage; he always seemed to be turning away to what occupied him. Later T. remembered mainly the sight of his back.
As he grew up his love became sophisticated. He no longer needed to touch coins or bills; he found his satisfaction in surges of energy, in the stream of contact between machines that processed binary. He learned to like abstract money better than its physical body. The solid house that money built sheltered him and he felt keenly that money was both everything and nothing, at once infinite, open potential and an end in itself.
Money was commerce and the movement of broad arms. It was how, in the great halls of trade and public service, the walls were so thick that sound could not penetrate and the foundations so strong an earthquake could barely move them. There was the honor and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within—and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums. He gazed upon the paintings steadily and for a moment thought he knew their private beauty as his own, as though it had only ever meant the same thing once, to him and him alone: and as he turned away he felt a hush of air rise in the corridors.
There was the noble trace of money in the half-imagined bodies of the dinosaurs, looming with arched necks in the shadowed halls of natural history museums, the back-lit shapes of toothy deep-sea fish brought up from dark fathoms below; money in the shining link between the Treasury Building and the aircraft that flew across the continent, the trains that ran through mountain towns, the cabins perched
among the pines. There was money in the grandeur of the ranks of the imperial armies as they might march across the deserts underneath the skies, in the great thick cables that ran beneath the surging Atlantic, the intricate and freezing satellites that whirred a thousand miles above the surface of the earth, displaying all the ingenuity and subtlety of humankind as their metal veins ran silver in the moon’s reflected light. It was the alchemy of money then, the shivering power of its quiet numerals, the wish of money that was such a clear command.
Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.
•
Of having private gluts of feeling, holding his secrets close, and seeming all the while the whitest of white bread; of being perfectly opaque and seeming transparent; of being merely well-informed and shrewd while seeming like a prodigy—he was guilty of all of these and in all of them excelled.
By the time he left home to attend college in a small town
in North Carolina he had amassed sufficient funds for an account with a discount brokerage firm. He attended classes in deference to the wishes of his parents but all the while his real work was day trading. He was always discreet, and few knew of his enterprise; when he had losses he did not reveal them and of course his wins went unheralded also, which gave him on some days an air of quiet satisfaction.
The stiff discipline of discretion was part of his training. It was crucial, he believed, to learn which aspects of his character to make available to sight and which to keep hidden. Honesty was seldom the best policy in social intercourse; and when it was invoked as an ideal, he felt, it merely reflected a childish desire for pure simplicity in matters of personal trade. Those who claimed shriekingly that honesty was a sovereign virtue were in fact merely fearful of the complex.
No, honesty was useful chiefly within the confines of the self, where careful scrutiny of successes, failures, victories and losses was necessary for progress.
He joined his father’s old fraternity—less out of enthusiasm than to be respectful of his father and ensure his continued goodwill—and there became treasurer and then vice president. He lost no time in making himself well-liked with the fraternity brothers, and while he did not reveal his dealings in the stock market to them he did include them now and then in other less significant undertakings. Quite soon they came to know him as a skillful card counter who graced the blackjack tables of Atlantic City and Foxwoods when he could find time to drive north for the weekend. Typically he invited a few brothers to accompany him, and they told tales of his acumen back at the frat house.
Both men and women tended to admire him, for he practiced a kindly reserve that invited affection but discouraged any more intimate advance. Men were comfortable with this,
relieved by how little he asked, and women deemed him enigmatic and sought out his favors. But he did not want a girlfriend, nor was he willing to engage in the forced aggression and later awkwardness of one-night stands. Instead he held himself apart.
On evenings when his peers partook too liberally of spirits he alone remained sober, a reassuring presence on the edge of the revels. He was never too close for comfort nor too far away to spring into action, and so could always be looked to for the rapid solution of problems ranging from the merely distasteful (Ian Van Heysen’s dramatic episode of incontinence in the Kappa house dining room) to the outright felonious (Ian Van Heysen’s exuberant vandalism of townie cars during Pledge Week). It was T. who quietly confiscated the keys of brothers unfit to drive, who deftly staunched the flow of blood from flesh wounds caused by gleeful unrestraint; it was he who politicked behind the scenes to dissuade frivolous accusations of date rape, negotiated truces with disgruntled neighbors and bored campus police. It was he who took in hand forlorn and suddenly shameful users of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide who skulked in basement corners, scraping at their sturdy wrists with plastic knives from the dining room and posturing self-murder.
On one occasion Van Heysen, whose father was a tobacco mogul and major donor to the cancer ward of the university hospital, became fleetingly convinced of his own lack of worth and threatened to dispatch himself by jumping off the roof of the university’s observatory. This was in the small hours of a mild spring morning, following a laser light show set to music. During the show—chiefly intersecting colored lines projected onto the dome of the observatory, which at other times displayed the constellations of the northern night sky—Ian had drunk a fifth of whiskey and chased it
with unspecified pills. T. sat with him on the edge of the roof as he mulled over the decision, keeping a firm hand on his shoulder. Even the fact that the roof of the observatory was a mere twenty feet off the ground, above an oleander hedge, did not completely dispel the urgency of the situation.
After the worst had passed Ian dried his eyes and spoke of philosophy.
“It’s like, the world is awesome? And also it sucks.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said T., nodding and consulting his watch.
The Tokyo markets were already closing.
“Sometimes I wish I was like a peasant or a farmer. Like in Guatemala.”
“Trust me, Ian. You don’t wish that.”
“But it’s like, things would be way easier. You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit. Whatever. Then at the end of the day you’re all tired and sweaty and you just take a hot shower and crash.”
“I’m not sure you’d like the part in the middle there, Ian.” “I’m just like so tired of, I don’t know. Everything.”
“It’s tough sometimes. Isn’t it.”
“I have this one dream where my father is a gigantic building? It doesn’t look like him but it is. It’s all gray and gigantic. He’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan. And in the corner of the dream, where no one ever sees it, is this tiny, like, shining mouse. And the mouse, T., get this. The mouse is actually Jesus Christ.”
“Whoa. Slow down there, Mr. Deep.”
“I wrote a song about it. It’s called ‘Jesus Squeaks.’ ”
When they left the roof they were applauded by brothers in the parking lot below. Ian went drinking with them and T. went to sleep.
He was useful to his small society, and few fraternity
brothers who had benefited from his clear thinking could forget it quickly. Sorority girls whose soft, still-shaking hands he had held gently as he persuaded them not to file charges remembered him not with resentment but with tender respect, and Ian Van Heysen, Sr. had been known to show his gratitude to T. with gifts of cognac and Cubans sent by courier.