Before long I was rubbing myself affectionately, stroking with just one hand, caressing, caressing, thinking of Chuck Levy’s muscular arms and tanned belly and sweaty chest.
Curiosity stood up on the end of the bed and looked at me with his head tilted to the side. What? he seemed to be saying. You okay? What?
I’d not had a lot of orgasms before that night—even by myself, I played slightly hard to get—and I had never had one so violent or transporting. I felt like smoking a cigarette.
9
I’ve got channels on my cable TV that show pornographic movies. I’ve watched a couple and both times felt an odd emotional alloy, bemusement plus sadness, a cousin to what I felt when I visited Disneyland with Waverly and attended a Sunday service with my assistant at her megachurch in Garden Grove, a sense that Americans are adorable and ridiculous, both overliteral and desperate to immerse in fantasy.
One of my UCLA colleagues, a woman, has a client in Estonia who wants to distribute child pornography that he’s produced without using any child actors—the videos are entirely computer-generated. Digital animation is apparently moving beyond what they call the “uncanny valley,” where animated human characters look more real than regular cartoons but not quite fully human, either—eerie, unsettling, uncanny.
As junior high schoolers, I’ve come to think, Alex and Chuck and I were living through something like our own uncanny-valley phenomenon. No longer children, not yet young adults but enacting travesties of adulthood—adults who lie and betray and kill and make love lovelessly—I think we became a little eerie and unsettling to ourselves. This is part of what most adolescents feel, I suppose, being neither one thing nor the other, pretending to be a butterfly and feeling like a caterpillar, chrysalids alternating between narcissism and self-loathing, stuck for a few years in a beautiful and monstrous pupal stage.
Yet when children finally become adults, they don’t feel as if they’ve achieved paradise. I think it’s a problem with all utopias. For instance, my online searches and discoveries these days are never as delightful as they were that blissful afternoon ranging through Northwestern’s library. And not just because I’m no longer fourteen years old. Except in fairy tales and religious visions, perfect and permanent bliss never arrives all at once. Plus, awesomeness has a half-life. You grow accustomed to every new marvel and miracle. You forget that a visit to a great library was once precious and astounding. You forget that you didn’t see color TV until you were fifteen or a cellphone until you were forty, that the murder rate in New York City was four times as high when you arrived than when you moved away. And you forget that it was once cool to say “cool” and wear blue jeans, that “under God” wasn’t always part of the Pledge of Allegiance.
We forget.
Could Alex really and truly have forgotten what happened, what we did way back when? It’s possible. Certainly a defense lawyer could claim post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard uncontradicted testimony that the events of 1968 were traumatically stressful for Mr. Macallister.
No objection, Your Honor.
According to the psychiatric profession’s authoritative guide to mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a person suffering from PTSD, quote, “commonly makes deliberate efforts to avoid certain thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the traumatic event and to avoid activities, situations, or people who arouse recollections of it.” And indeed, you have heard testimony from Ms. Hollander that Mr. Macallister has compulsively avoided her, his former best friend, even though they now live nearby one another.
In 1981 he phoned me to discuss a movie he wanted to make about a former Black Panther, and at our college reunion in 1996, we chatted at length about a panel discussion of the mob-bullying that passed for campus protest in the late ‘60s. And collecting celebrated car-bomb cars? That sounds to me like a deliberate effort to arouse and commemorate certain traumatic thoughts and feelings, not avoid them.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I call your attention to Criterion C3 for PTSD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: “This avoidance of reminders may include amnesia for an important aspect of the traumatic event.” And indeed, there has been no testimony and no evidence that at any moment during the last four decades has Mr. Macallister recalled any of the alleged actions or events in question.
Yes, we did weirdly steer clear of the subject for the last three years of college, all of us more or less pretending it hadn’t happened, ignoring the elephant in the room, the monster in the box. But I do remember a conversation about it with Alex, one night just before we graduated, when he started sobbing.
Spontaneous crying: evidence of acute traumatic stress. But that was forty-three long years ago—and since then, nothing, no mention, not even a glancing reference. Once again, members of the jury, I quote from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: “There may be a delay of years, before symptoms appear.” And those symptoms, I remind you, “may include amnesia for an important aspect of the traumatic event.”
Maybe. But I don’t think so. Alex Macallister, I believe, is pulling a Hugo Drax on me—Drax the Moonraker villain who pretends to suffer from amnesia about the political crimes of his youth. I know PTSD is real, and I know amnesia exists outside fiction. However, I also know a bogus psychiatric defense argument when I hear one, because I made them myself a few times in court.
Maybe Alex’s forgetting is more recent. Maybe he has moved beyond NARF (normal age-related forgetfulness) to severe AAMI (age-associated memory impairment) or SDAT (senile dementia of the Alzheimer type). He’s going on sixty-six. But even after my dad had wandered off into the Alzheimer’s wilderness, imagining my mother was his mother and calling the car “the rhino,”, his recollections of the distant past remained crackerjack. I was visiting them in Wilmette in 1994 when a Danish TV crew came to interview him about the Nazi occupation and resistance for a fiftieth-anniversary-of-the-end-of-the-war documentary. The filmmaker told me that my seventy-four-year-old dad’s Danish was impeccable, as was his ability to recall names and dates from the 1940s.
I don’t think dementia has wiped away Alex’s memories of the demented thing we did in 1968.
When I ran into him at a political fund-raiser in Pacific Palisades, right after I’d arrived in L.A., he went on and on about his biotech investments. He talked about “the incredible breakthroughs my boffins are making” in cosmetic neurology, such as a drug called “ZIP,” zeta inhibitory peptides, that Alex said could be used to “edit” and “optimize” memory. “From now on, Hollander,” he said as we stood with our goblets of wine watching the sun dip into the Pacific, “it’s all about SENS.” He waited for me to ask what SENS means, and when I did, he smiled and answered with the combination of excitement and irony that has been his default affect forever: “Strategies for engineered negligible senescence.” A pause. “It’s the end of aging.” I smiled but said nothing. I think he probably knew what I was thinking: Bond villain.
Is it possible that Alex has somehow ZIP’d away his inconvenient memories of the 1960s? Could an insistent billionaire financial backer convince his eager biotechnologists to go for broke and test zeta inhibitory peptides on him, to edit and optimize his memory? At this end of this century, outside of the movies—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Bourne Quantum of Solace?—I’m betting not.
I think Alex isn’t suffering from PTSD or dementia and hasn’t rewired his hippocampus with an experimental miracle drug. I think he’s simply engaging in a regular old-fashioned human habit. I think he’s lying.
Thus my desire for corroborating evidence has intensified. During the last month, since I spoke to Alex, I’ve received form-letter acknowledgments of my Freedom of Information requests from all the relevant federal agencies, but not yet any actual answers. The agencies may eventually tell me they can find no records, and that may be true. Or they could give me what’s called a “Glomar response,” a phrase coined in the 1970
s after the CIA refused to say whether the agency did or didn’t have certain records about a secret ship called the Glomar Explorer. Or they could admit they’ve got files but decline to give me copies. I could appeal such a denial. And then they could leave me in limbo, trying to wait me out. A UCLA colleague who knows all about the Freedom of Information labyrinth tells me there are national security appeals that have been pending for nineteen years.
Yesterday I realized that the problem, if there’s a problem, might just be bureaucratic confusion, stupid but not malign. So this morning I resubmitted all the requests for my files using the original spelling of my last name, the way I spelled it when I was a kid—not Hollander but Hollænder, with the smushed-together a and e, how they did it in Old English and still do it in Scandinavian languages. My father’s one unbudging point of ethnic pride was insisting on the Danish spelling. “Tell them,” he instructed us as kids, “it’s our brand name, as in Encyclopædia, like that sign on Wilmette.” Encyclopædia Britannica Films had its headquarters on Wilmette Avenue. Sophomore year in college, when I started doing my best to seem as standard as possible, I became Hollander, simplified and Americanized and unproblematic.
I’m not sure I’d have gotten to the point of doing what I’m doing now—reassembling the skeleton in my closet, then putting it on display—if I hadn’t been living alone the last seven years. I spent the first fifty-seven years of my life sharing houses and apartments with other people. It turns out that parents and brothers and sisters and roommates and spouses and children in close proximity occupy a giant swath of consciousness. Mine, anyhow. Living with other people, especially people I love or wish I could love, is like having music on in the background, several different songs at once, all the time. It’s not that I entirely blocked out thoughts of my youth. No, I’ve revisited certain unforgettable moments obsessively. But “obsessive” is the key word, the way some people with OCD touch a particular object or spot on their bodies in the same special way, over and over for years, to no constructive end. I’ve spent all these decades touching, touching, touching, touching, touching my memories of a few vivid moments, each time with the same quick ritualized private gesture of regret and (if such a thing is possible) retroactive dread. Until I lived by myself in this very comfortable solitary confinement of Wonderland Park Avenue, I didn’t stop and open those memories and try to think about each of them deeply. They were like computer-screen icons for old files that I repeatedly, ruefully glanced at with a sigh and never dared click open.
Living alone has also made me much, much more conscious of inconsequential things, the sweet banalities of a day in a life. I feel now as if I spent most of my previous time on earth in a state of perpetually frenzied obliviousness, intent on executing all the Important Tasks at Hand. The test to take. The application to finish. The man to marry. The job to get, the brief to write, the motion to file, the verdict to appeal, the meeting to schedule, the PowerPoint to prepare. The apartment to buy, the meals to organize, the two miles to run, the sex to have, the kids to get to school and playdates and doctors and volleyball games and SAT tutors and colleges. The marriage to end. The books to write. I was always good at screening out the noise and focusing exclusively on the signal, which made me successful in school and at work and (more or less) as a parent. Until I lived alone, I was not so good at understanding—really understanding, beyond the obligatory modern lip service to smelling the roses and living in the moment—that the extraneous noise can be lovely. The Buddhists call it mindfulness, a word I sort of hate but an MO I’ve come to believe in.
Such as right now, when I put the half-full quart of grapefruit juice back on the refrigerator shelf hastily, and watch the sloshing make the carton swivel and teeter before it rights itself, like a wobbly drunk almost falling and then too firmly planting his feet to stand perfectly still. We deprive ourselves if we ignore all the tiny, inconsequential bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of life. Quarks and neutrinos and atoms and molecules, the earth, asteroids, stars, the shaft of light angling through the kitchen window right this second, illuminating the slow-motion Dance of Ten Thousand Dust Motes: isn’t it all flotsam and jetsam?
The phone’s ringing.
“Why—why are you there?”
“Greta?” My daughter, Waverly’s mother.
“Why are you still at home?”
“Because it’s seven-twenty A.M. and the drive to campus is only twenty-five minutes even with the construction on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.”
“Right.”
She does this regularly, forgets the three-hour time difference. I think it’s partly because she’s felt abandoned since I moved across the country, and partly because she’s got a lot of things to juggle and lives her New York life in a state of somewhat frenzied obliviousness.
“What’s up?’
“Just calling.”
Ordinarily, she “just calls” at bedtime.
“I saw your ice storm on TV over the weekend,” I say. “I cannot tell you how happy I am to be in my post-blizzard stage of life. And I won’t tell you what the temperature is here.”
“Thanks.”
“Seventy-two. How’s Wavy?”
“Did you tell her that Jungo’s NGO is ‘total crap’? That’s what she told him you said.”
“I didn’t say that.” My son-in-law, Jungo Dixit, an MBA and management consultant who earns his living as a coach for business executives—using what he told me is “a proprietary cross-disciplinary approach to positioning and strategic communications for C-level executives seeking to optimize performance and visibility”—has started an organization called Life Coaches Without Borders. Life Coaches Without Borders sends people like him to places like Haiti and Libya and Myanmar to advise people, pro bono, how to get their lives on track. “I just told her I was surprised Axl Rose was one of his big funders. I may have rolled my eyes.”
“She also says you told her it’s cool to say ‘fuck’ whenever she wants.”
“No, I said she didn’t have to worry about watching her language around me. That’s all.” Jesus fucking Christ. “Is this why you called?”
“No, I called to see how you are. What’s new? How do you feel?”
“I’m fine. I’m great, in fact.”
The pause that follows goes on a beat too long.
“You know,” Greta says, “you’re almost sixty-five, and Morfar wasn’t that much older when he started becoming impaired.” Morfar, Danish for “grandpa,” is what all his grandchildren called my dad. Greta and her brother, Seth, loved it because it made him seem like a character from The Lord of the Rings. “And he didn’t have to remember to test his blood and administer injections.”
“Thanks for the reminder, but don’t worry. My memory is superb—in fact, writing this book, I find I’m remembering more and more stuff all the time. I’m fine. Really.”
There is a long silence, followed by what I take for grudging capitulation: “Okay. I love you.”
When the phone rings again fifteen minutes later, I’m in the garage, plugging in my car, which I seem to have forgotten to do last night.
The caller ID tells me it’s from DIXIT-WU: Greta again. “What?” I answer.
“Are you okay? Why are you out of breath?”
“Because I just ran like hell up here to answer the phone.”
“Do you have a minute?”
I sit down. I’ve got no appointments this morning. “Sure.” I wonder if this is going to be another anxious discussion about Waverly’s interest in a career as an actress and her general bohemianism. Last week she and Hunter were caught Dumpster-diving at a Whole Foods on Houston Street, having filled three shopping bags with overripe tomatillos, two-day-old sushi rolls, stale focaccia, and cacao-dusted chocolate-covered goji berries that had melted together. The cops let them go, and the kids took the food to a homeless shelter.
“I just wanted to make sure you feel okay. Because now that I’m not drinking, I feel so much clearer. Abou
t everything. And so much more willing to look at the truth squarely. Even when it’s painful.”
Greta gave up booze two years ago, right after her father died. I was on her Twelve Step list of people who had been “harmed” by her alcoholism (Step 8). She flew from New York out to Los Angeles to “make amends” to me (Step 9) in person. Until then I had been unaware that she’d considered her nightly cocktail and two glasses of wine problematic. I always figured our telephone bickering and her long silences and occasional dudgeons were just one of those irremediable mother-daughter things.
“Then we’re in complete sync, honey. What I’m writing, the memoir, is exactly that. Lots of painful truth.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t sound convinced. I’m fine, totally fine. Tip-top, handy-dandy. Why did you call back?” Maybe she wants to tell me she’s realized in her crystal-clear sobriety that she finds Jungo insufferable.
“We’ll talk more when you’re here.”
“In March?” I ask. Spring break is a month away.
“I was just wondering if … maybe you’ll let me read some of it. The book.”
Aha, now I get it: this kid is worried that I’m spilling unlovely secrets about my marriage to her father and our family’s private life. “Sure, maybe, some of it, if you’d like. But now I’m late, I haven’t packed, really gotta get going, flying to D.C. this afternoon. Sarah’s big anniversary shindig.”
Among other important engagements in Washington. My friend the senior national security and intelligence-community apparatchik has agreed to meet with me.
10
I recently found the numbered list of Reasons for Loving Summer that I made the summer I turned ten. I can date it precisely because it’s crayoned on a mimeographed church hymn sheet in copper, a color that didn’t exist until Crayola inaugurated the sixty-four-crayon box with the built-in sharpener, which I got for my tenth birthday. That gift is my earliest memory of intense ambivalence, because I was just barely too old for crayons. When I abandoned them at the end of that summer, ceremoniously presenting the box to the little kids as “a permanent lend,” I delivered a speech about how lucky they were, how much more austere my childhood had been than theirs—no TV in the house until I was eight, a bedroom shared with Sabrina until we moved to Schiller Avenue, no record player of my own and no Barbie or Hula-Hoop at all
True Believers Page 10