by Lydia Millet
That he was mature beyond his years was obvious; and while they placed their trust in him they also knew he stood apart from them, too rigidly controlled to mix his solemn molecules with theirs. He was a father their own age, claiming the loyalty of all and the passion of none.
But while others looked to the present for their pleasures— holding these four years to be both their first and their last gasp of freedom—he looked to the life beyond, past the confines of the fraternity house with its dusty oak wainscoting, the campus buildings with their wide lawns and white porticos, and the small college town with its crowded hilly streets and dogwoods that bloomed so cloudily in spring.
He saw beyond what there was, and in the not-yet-existent imagined a great acceleration.
His parents visited one weekend in October and once in April, always at the same time. His father liked to attend an annual old boys’ fundraiser for the fraternity and his mother liked to pick up an iced tea at the cafeteria and then wander at a leisurely pace through the campus’s Botanical Gardens, holding her purse and gazing at the magnolia trees. She would point at the small, old-fashioned signs on their tidy stakes in the earth, which bore in careful lettering the names of tropical and subtropical plants—Ricinus communis (Christ’s Palm), Alonsoa incisifolia (Devil’s Rattle)—and say how gracious were the stalks, how beautiful the leaves and
languid the flowers. As she said this she would bend her head and a wishful tone would come into her voice. Watching her he saw how she envied the plants, so peaceful in the shade, so smooth and green and cool. They grew there and they died there.
And while his father, as he aged, grew stiffer and more pointed, almost an exaggeration of his younger self, his mother quietly faded. Her warmth rose like vapor and left a still surface; and later, when she had forgotten everyone she knew and even her own name, he would think back to these college gardens and how she had loved them. “I could live here,” she would say, as he walked beside her in the dappled shade and they looked down at irises and lazily floating wasps. “Here, right here, in the waterfalls and the ferns.” She had grown up in a southern climate and the winters were long in Connecticut.
He endured the visits only to see her, to know how she was faring and to try to elicit from her some spark of vigor. For her sake he would stand awkwardly by while his father toured the fraternity, always with a jocular handshake for the sons of old peers, always with what seemed to T. like a desperate and transparent need to be one of the boys again. But the chill of his mother’s absence was steadily deepening. Stepping out of the rental car after the drive from the airport she had a measure of distraction in her gaze, as though her true allegiance was elsewhere while she kept this trivial but mandatory appointment.
And yet she had nothing else; she had no other appointments.
Whenever his mother was visiting he took her to the town’s only Catholic church for Sunday Mass, and for her devotions every evening when the church was empty. She went to church more now that he was gone, she told him.
Once they sat in a pew near the front, and he watched her face as she looked up at the stained glass, where Jesus was pictured in a triptych. On one side he was an infant in the arms of his mother; on the other he was greeting Mary again in his thirty-fourth year, on the way to Golgotha bowed down under the weight of the cross.
In the tall, central window he was crucified and dying. His crown of thorns had been jauntily fashioned, thought T., bored and ruminating. His knees bled in perfect symmetry.
“Look at the Blessed Virgin,” whispered his mother. “Look at her eyes. Her face is sad even when he’s a baby. You see? It’s just as sad as it is in the fourth station, when she meets him going to be crucified. She’s always sad, sad and wise. The sadness on the Via Dolorosa is the part I’ve never believed.”
“You don’t believe she was sad?”
“A mother wouldn’t be sad if she saw her son in the street like that. On the way to his death at the hands of tyrants, and suffering? With blood running down his face from the terrible thorns? Even if she knew it was for the glory of God and for the salvation of every soul the heavens could ever hold. A mother would never be sad, T. A mother would be screaming.” “But she wasn’t any mother. She was the mother of God.
Wasn’t she?”
“Even the mother of God. There’s only one explanation, dear. The Blessed Mother was serene because she was gone. The second she saw him like that she was gone forever.”
The next morning his parents left for the airport, his mother clutching her purse close to her side. She kissed him quickly on both cheeks before she got into the rental car, her lips cool.
When he was a toddler, a young boy, even an adolescent
she had fastened to his every act: how urgent her love had been, how full. There had been no difference between them, his mother and a refuge.
But in the past few years her interest had diminished until it seemed almost to equal her interest in other persons, until he was merely another among them. In ceasing to be a child, he thought, he had disappointed her so fully that she came to believe he was someone else entirely. With this new person she could have civil conversations; with this person she could walk, eat, or drive. But he was no longer hers and due to that she was no longer his either.
Falling asleep at night or walking down a deserted street, craning his neck to look up at the dizzying stars, he made his mind busy by leaving the present behind and situating himself in a moment that was yet to be. As a child he had lived in the present; now he lived in the future; soon, how soon he would live in the past, an older man nostalgic and nodding.
And yet each was its own delight, each relation to time. In the first long moment of life nothing was recognized beyond the present; there was no past to look back to and no idea of the future yet. In the second moment the present was shed in favor of a future that hovered but never arrived, the promise of a realized self; and then that moment passed too. In the third moment, as life declined, the future disappeared, the present was diminished, and all that remained was the past. He was now in the lucky moment of forwardness—this time now—where seeing the future dawn was how he was sustained.
Step forward, he told himself, step, step, step, daily into the night, nightly into the day! The unknown shimmers there. There was a paradise still to come.
He might wonder how much velocity should guide him
and how much calculation; he might wonder this with deliberation, a delicious mulling. It was part of the reward to dwell on strategy. Then, for a moment, it would strike him that the future was sad.
He had already lost something, and in any future it would still be missing—if not his mother’s love, then the fierceness of it. It could not be called back.
But by the square light of day he did not dwell on this or even recall it. Fleetingly it would come to him, as he did something else: not all things could be perfectly arranged; not all things were correctible.
This gave him a start of recognition. Then it passed.
•
During his four years in college—his only vices coffee, a stiff scotch and soda some evenings before dinner, and the occasional cigar—he produced the results he desired, and was gratified to see how effort and control could yield steady returns. This was no myth; it was a law of nature.
He studied the words of Adam Smith and William Jennings Bryan and even J. Paul Getty, the parent of such phrases as “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.” He read old texts with great pleasure, particularly those written by certain stalwart Puritans whose parsimony seemed born of a voluptuous and secret greed. He combed through the texts for signs of this sinful covetousness—a pornography of spirit, for nothing was more of a guilty pleasure than the greed of those who believed themselves righteous. He enjoyed the sermons of clergymen like John Wesley, whom he understood to have advised his
flock it was by definition quite impossible to serve their God and mammon both—much as no color could
be at once pure black and white—and thus no qualms of ethics should stand in the way of a good Christian man who wished to amass great wealth.
Surely little remained of the Puritan legacy of prudish rectitude, he thought: surely this was now a country of excess, gluttony, lust, and sloth; surely this had grown into a land where obesity reigned and even the poor moved ponderously down the street on big thighs that rubbed fatly together. What had become of the pilgrims’ gaunt and stingy oversight? He knew in part it was the visionary genius of enterprising men, but such entrepreneurs were only the tools of a hungry culture. For the descendants of those gray, upright pioneers had cherished cravings for beef patties with ketchup, deep-fried chicken and vats of ice cream, chemically scented and dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and billions upon billions of gallons of soda. Their thirst had never been quite slaked and so they never finished drinking; and this was the market in all its streamlined functionality—which, precisely where the supply and the demand curves crossed, had swiftly produced a nation of paralyzed giants, fallen across their couches much as soldiers on the field of battle, their arteries hard, their softened hearts failing.
The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent it; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.
If Ian Van Heysen and the other brothers did not often show him that capacity he had so treasured a mere ten years before—namely the tending of all people toward the enigmatic greatness suggested by a dollar bill—they could
not be blamed for it. There were times when he stooped to irritation; that he should be the steward of such a wayward flock was occasionally a burden.
But they were children with handicaps, though these handicaps were not always visible: ease, abundance, overstimulation. He thought of their tendencies toward indolence and abuse as a temporary run through the gauntlet of privilege; they would grow out of their puckishness all too soon. For they were correct in believing this was their last hurrah, and most of them would age fast once the halls of the university pulled away behind them. He himself was disposed to a persistent cheerfulness that flew in the face of his rationality; he knew how fortunate he was. He had always been purposeful. But he could see in the faces of others how many were not so disposed, and likely never would be.
Before the rest of life there were hijinks, the joys of brash ignorance and selfishness. But he did not begrudge them their entertainment. It was increasingly clear to him that the company of straight men was seldom a pleasure for other straight men. What the fraternities offered was a last gasp of boyhood before the assumption of a purely adult identity, one that for most would bring loneliness. To each other, men were useful mostly for business: and it was through their ranks that he must move on his forward trajectory, for they held the reins. But most of them lacked important social skills beyond the manipulation of power; most were unable to muster even the pretense of intimacy with others of their gender. This was particularly true among the wealthier classes, where, absent a clear oppressor, there was little need for solidarity.
Moreover most men, he suspected, agreed with him, though they seldom admitted it. Their peers were largely competitors; their wives became all they knew, socially. This was why after they married they rarely looked beyond their
houses again, unless it was for the purpose of changing wives. Meanwhile, at their sides but otherwise occupied, the wives maintained a wide array of friends.
And it became clear to him that his early mentors—the founders, the dead sages of the judiciary—did not have modern counterparts in government. The great roofs that had sheltered them were raised now not over heads of state but over the motile geniuses of corporate novelty; these men now wore the mantles formerly worn by the fathers of the nation-state. They held up economies and reshaped them at will. After the robber barons had come the technophile visionaries, the practical philosophers of earning, and they, not the government men, were the new kingmakers.
He read their bestsellers.
Meanwhile the discipline of watching stocks, keeping up with his classes and managing the welfare of his peers kept him busy, and he was seldom melancholy. And if, when he was roasted along with his fellow fraternity officers shortly before graduation, he felt slightly needled by the remarks about his stodginess, the allusions to Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons, the denigration of his manhood implied by such terms as monk and eunuch in reference to his lack of prurient interest in the fairer sex, he gave no evidence of such. He laughed at every boyish jab and raised his tumbler of Glemorangie from his seat at the head table, and when the fraternity president dealt him a manly clap on the shoulder during the applause he only smiled and shook his head with good humor, to say: How cleanly have the arrows met their mark.
•
Five months after he left the fraternity and the small green town he made his first six-figure profit, not in fact by trading— which he would subsequently give up as a job, though not as an avocation—but by brokering the sale of a derelict apartment building.
It was a building on a beach in south Florida, owned by an aging heiress whose long-dead father had made his fortune growing sugarcane in the Everglades; T. had met the heiress at school through his father, who had pledged with her son Brad. He visited her after graduation, out of politeness, and she offered him the commission. In this way all the hours of his indentured servitude, his careful stewardship of the brothers and many small defenses of their honor were repaid instantly.
Shortly before the sale Brad took him on a tour of the old sugarcane plantation, where they stepped over piles of crumbling yellow brick that had once been the walls of a manor house and looked out over a soggy field of cattails. By way of explaining the recent repossession of his BMW—it had left him driving a cheap rental car for which he felt the need to apologize—Brad gestured to the canefields and said, smirking, “Big Sugar belong to Big Mama.”
On behalf of the mother, and for a modest percentage, T. sold the building to a hotel chain at a price far beyond her original asking.
Several weeks later the gentle old lady sank into a coma, leaving Brad crowing with glee at his suddenly liquid assets and believing firmly that T.—whom he called “this serious, intense guy,” because T. did not laugh at his jokes—had been
his salvation. His patronage, and the praise he repeated in various old-boy circles, would prove vital to T.’s fledgling enterprise.
Around the same time the nightly news was prone to show millions succumbing to famine, far away in a sandy country. More popular than the news was a sit-com about an arrogant bartender and a frigid waitress, which T. watched every week with a female neighbor. He was living near Wall Street in a bare suite of rooms in a high rise; the neighbor was an emaciated model who got into the habit of dropping by with a bottle of bad wine and a packet of good cocaine exactly five minutes before the program began. The cocaine was for her; he partook of the wine; and there was a tacit agreement for sex when the program ended. The model, doe-eyed, quiet, and with low self-esteem, made no demands on him beyond their weekly appointment. When they passed in the hallway in the days between, she slouched past him with her head down and her doe eyes averted.
“Hey,” he said once, for an experiment. She nodded almost imperceptibly and shrank back against the wall.
He regarded the arrangement cautiously, grateful for her favors but reluctant to take them for granted, and his caution proved well-founded. After an episode in which the bartender proposed to the waitress and was refused, and before an episode in which the waitress spied on the bartender’s date with another woman, his neighbor was found in her kitchen with open veins. The man who discovered her was apparently her boyfriend. She was carted off to rehab and would never return to the building.
For a week or two T. watched the program alone; then he stopped. He thought of the model with remorse and slight wonder: but there was no place for him in any of it.
He called his parents’ house a few days after she left.
His mother could barely muster the energy to speak to him, preferring only to listen. This had become commonplace between them. She claimed that she liked him to call, that she wanted to hear what he was doing: but when he did call the conversation was purely one-sided. He recited a litany of his activities into the receiver, falling into a rhythm defined by her silences; for when he asked what was new in her own life he would invariably hear, “Oh, you know, dear. Nothing much.” This he would counter with a further inquiry—“Well, then, what have you been doing?”—but this would meet with the same answer, until he gave up asking. It was as though nothing much stretched through her days, nothing much united and guided them: in the whole of her experience there was never event.
His father was always busy or sleeping or engrossed in a television show, and did not come to the phone at all.
Soon he decided he needed a change. It would have to be New York or Los Angeles, since these were where both life and business happened; and so he moved to southern California, where he incorporated for the purpose of buying and selling real estate.
He liked the curving drive up the rocky coast from the angels to the Franciscans, sweeping past on his left the wide-open Pacific, on his right the rolling hills of chaparral that cost a thousand dollars per square foot. He liked the fact that speculators tended to ignore the foreshortened future of the hills, their promise of imminent collapse by mudslide, quake or fire.
And when he struck out east across the inland empire to the desert of Palm Springs, the air-conditioning in his S-Class raising goose bumps on his skin, he felt a legion of tycoons riding shotgun. He could almost detect their quaint presence in gas stations along the barest stretches of the freeway. There
behind the counter, where sparkles in the white formica leant an air of yesteryear, sat a disheveled Howard Hughes bent over a bottle of milk; or there beside the newspaper rack stood William Randolph Hearst, paging though a tabloid. He grew to see greatness in open space, which fostered the illusion of a last frontier; for out West, where there were few monuments to the founders of the Republic, there was instead a breathless intuition of novelty.