by James Gregor
“So what was Antonella talking about?”
“I use the same research twice, sometimes—in different papers. I quote the same scholars. I could have missed something.”
Blake nodded quizzically.
“That doesn’t seem like a big deal. Probably happens a lot.”
“Yeah, just mental fatigue.”
By the time they got off at West Fourth, Richard’s mood was black. They moved down the truculent gauntlet of Sixth Avenue, passing the IFC.
“Look, you like that director, right?” Blake said, pointing toward the roster of films playing that afternoon. It was an Antonioni matinée. “You were just talking about that film.”
A film could be an escape from the weekend revelry of the surrounding streets, and also a reason to cite for not responding to Anne’s texts. But hearing all the buon giornos and ches and fattos and suas would remind him of what he’d done, would peck at his brain, he feared, like a decrypted message reminding him that he’d run away from Anne, left her bewildered and abandoned on campus.
“I don’t really feel like a movie,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Blake responded in an even voice. “There’s that bookstore on Bleecker I like. Want to go there?”
“Sure.”
They were at the bookstore a few minutes later. Blake browsed in the nonfiction section while Richard turned on his phone to numerous messages from Anne. They followed an ascending arc of anxiety and accusation.
He could probably make up some excuse not to stay the night at Blake’s. Since they’d spent the whole day together, it was possible Blake wouldn’t be too upset. But Richard didn’t want to leave Blake. He had such an unsuspecting air as he flipped through a large hardcover book. It all seemed horribly arbitrary. Richard was sure that Blake would find his decision to leave confounding. How would he explain it?
Without waiting for her reply, ignoring the presumptuousness of assuming she would still want to see him after what he’d done, Richard texted Anne: JUST GOT OFF THE TRAIN IN BROOKLYN. SORRY WE MISSED EACH OTHER. CONFUSION. ARE YOU BUSY TONIGHT?
FOURTEEN
Courtney and Leslie’s relationship was entering a new, serious phase, and Richard felt the approach of his inevitable displacement. He had the impression of being nudged, gently pushed to one side. They were always preparing food in the kitchen together now, expertly chopping tofu into cubes while wearing matching gingham aprons with SLOPPY written across the front in blocky blue letters. Richard usually watched from the sofa, a hint of cloistered tension in the air, sensing their irritation at his presence. The conversation between the three of them had taken on a tautness sprinkled with murmured, dainty remarks.
But along with this feeling of displacement, Richard had begun to envy the exclusive, dedicated, tight coupledom that Leslie had suddenly found for himself. Outwardly Richard threw his support behind a bohemian deconstruction of traditional relationship mores, and the necessity for gay people to break them, yet secretly he was old-fashioned and yearned for the stability and endurance of his parents’ marriage and of the marriages he’d observed in the upper-middle-class milieu in which he’d been raised. He hadn’t discussed exclusivity, or the lack thereof, with Blake since they’d started seeing each other. He hoped that conversation would happen soon, though he was scared to start it himself.
One day Courtney asked him if he wanted children, as she doused a bright green salad in homemade poppy-seed dressing.
“I’m not really sure,” he said, which was true, and also he felt that to say no at that moment would have marked him out as a deviant.
“You’ve got to plan,” Leslie said, rubbing Courtney’s back. “You don’t want to be caught unprepared.”
Richard considered pointing out that Courtney was a barista and Leslie a failed doctoral candidate, that the estimated cost of raising a child in New York City would vastly outpace their combined earning power, and anyway wasn’t it immoral to have children under the specter of climate change? But he decided against it. None of that would matter to them anyway. Furthermore, he felt it was unwise to provoke them. Lately, whenever he was in the apartment, he had the troubling sensation of being outnumbered.
* * *
HE PONDERED ALL THIS as he climbed the steps to meet Anne at the library. Inside, she was hunched forward at their usual spot, her glasses perched on her head. She didn’t bother to look up when Richard sat down across the table.
Clearly she was still mad at him for the other day, when he had come to campus with Blake, even though he had found an excuse, a not very convincing one judging from Blake’s expression—a leak from the apartment upstairs—to bolt and head over to Anne’s apartment that same night. Plumbing issues had seemed more convincing than a human illness; perhaps this had been a mistake.
The subway was falling apart. It was increasingly frustrating to get anywhere in the city these days, but especially to get from Crown Heights to Manhattan. Richard had found her on the sofa, barely verbal and watching Netflix, when he arrived. After a few glasses of wine, things had relaxed a little, but in the morning her crabby mood returned and their oily brunch passed in almost complete silence.
Today, they were supposed to work all afternoon, and then go downtown and catch a film at the Angelika. Down the table, a group of physics students filled notebooks with cryptic sequences of numbers and symbols. On his left, two young men whispered about intergenerational poverty. The silence was full of accusation.
If she was mad at him, well, he was mad at her too. She wasn’t innocent in all of this; she had hurt him before, exposing him to insult and teasing in front of Erin and Alicia, dismissing his ideas. She didn’t know how condescending she could be. All this time, she had barely listened when he offered ideas and perspectives, only pretending to pay attention. But even that pretense of respect and consideration had fallen away, so that when he made a suggestion now she hardly even bothered to look up from her work. Before he had considered her to be merely distracted, enthralled by her own originality. Now it was clear to him that she ignored his ideas because she thought him an intellectual inferior, and that she disguised this conviction with insincere praise, though today she was obviously not in any mood to praise him.
He was still smarting about Le Goff. When he’d suggested they might incorporate the work of the medieval historian Jacques Le Goff into their latest paper, she’d just shaken her head. She hadn’t even bothered to say no. He thought of it now as “the Le Goff incident.”
Richard wanted her to believe that he was intelligent and capable. But even if, at that very moment, she were to say something complimentary, he would no longer believe her. She would only heighten his doubt. Instead of finding her praise flattering, he would be patronized; the candy-coated falsity of her words would annoy him.
She had never really bothered to ask him what was wrong, why he couldn’t write, and though he would not exactly have been able to describe the feeling, the whoosh of irrelevance—like gravel sliding from a dump truck into a dead, dry pile—that had replaced an earlier, long-standing feeling of exultance or responsibility when he opened up his computer to write about Torquato Tasso or Guido Guinizelli, nevertheless he would have appreciated the question.
These days, even with her help, he asked himself with alarming frequency: What was the point of it all anyway? Somewhere, Anne must wonder that too. But maybe she was one of those people whose brilliance resides partially in their indifference or unawareness of obstacles that might distract or impede them, an inability to even imagine a credible refutation of their purpose.
That was a kind of ignorance.
Richard had once imagined her carrying the light of scholarship in the loutish darkness of twenty-first-century culture, but now he couldn’t help but see a mere snob, a hoary elitist who belonged in another time. The library was full of young men and women of every race with beautiful soaring graphs on their computer screens, equations that seemed to offer a myste
rious key to things, pointed to the origins and the ends of the universe, to multiple worlds, to problems that had once been intractable but now lay aloof and pliant as a bunch of sleeping house cats. They were building solid bridges and conquering resistant illnesses. What fulfillment, he thought, to know that you will go forth and affect life, instead of wasting your time in a remote corner of some library, choking on dust, escaping only to convene with other dowdy obscurantists for some ill-defined conference about discredited worldviews. He thought back to what Erin had once asked him: Still solving world hunger through Neoplatonism?
As if on cue, Anne bluntly asked him to get her a coffee. He shook his head.
“I’m working on something.”
She raised her eyebrows. “What is it?”
“It’s an article.”
“You are? Since when?”
Richard shrugged. “Since recently.”
If she got up and came around to the other side of the table, she would see that he had written only two lines. As the episode of Pier delle Vigne demonstrates, in Inferno language is intimately linked to pain. Describing the work of the harpies . . . It trailed off after that.
Anne lowered her head, but a moment later raised it again. She dug out something from her bag.
“I brought us a snack,” she said, handing him a large cookie in wax paper.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding as he took it, and immediately lowering his eyes back to the screen.
“You’re not going to eat it?”
“Not right now. I’ll eat it later.”
“I have other food. Let me know if you’re hungry.”
“I will.”
It was awful the way you could dislike, even briefly hate, someone you really cared about. He felt a spreading disgust at his own capriciousness. She was trying.
Several more minutes passed in silence.
“I’m sorry I’m being a bitch,” she said finally.
Richard looked up.
“It’s not you,” he said, exhaling. “I’m sorry I’m being an asshole.”
“Maybe it’s both of us. Do you want to get out of here?”
Her eyes were glassy with suppressed hurt. At the gentle tone of her voice, he swallowed.
“We haven’t been here for very long,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“We deserve a break. Let’s go downtown. I want to go shopping.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
“We just got here.”
“I can’t focus. Let’s come back another day.”
He hesitated. He was about to tell her that he was in the middle of an elegant paragraph. But after all, he wasn’t.
“Don’t we have work to do?”
“I can finish it another time.”
Her eyes had a frenzied glint.
“Okay. Whatever you say.”
They took the train down to SoHo. The car was crowded, and the whole time Anne spoke loudly about what she wanted to buy, asking Richard what he needed in his wardrobe. He felt that the other people in the train, those without earphones to cocoon themselves, must find her irritating. With a low, tactful voice, he tried to answer her questions, hoping she would take the hint. But it was as though she wanted everyone to know what they were about to do: to go and spend money on frivolous things. Didn’t she know this was something you did with discretion, especially in the early twenty-first century, when the American Dream had died?
Anne led the way when they emerged.
They walked several blocks west. Slender Europeans in leather jackets, Japanese and Korean women with furry purses, and chic black couples in bright pants crowded the sidewalks.
They went inside A.P.C.
“Hello,” said an attractive young man, dressed in a creamily monochromatic sweater-and-shirt combo. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” Richard said, vaguely recognizing him from one of the websites. They’d had a few nonstarter conversations.
What’s up lol. My name is Jeremiah Park. I want to enjoy life and I want sex.
Richard walked down a rack, rubbing the arm of a navy-blue suede jacket between thumb and forefinger, glancing behind him. Jeremiah was a handsome, sweet-looking young man, with enviably glossy black hair. He was helping a pair of grim-faced Germans find a pair of shorts.
Judging by what I see here, we all feel the same way. So relieved everyone is so miserable. I’d hate to feel this way alone. LOL.
As Anne perused the women’s racks on the other side of the room, Richard was overcome with a warm sympathy. He imagined that he could summon the lonely dark hours when this boy Jeremiah returned to his apartment alone after a thwarted night out. The innocent search for love, especially as it played out on the Internet, struck Richard in that moment as intolerably sad: clicking through reels of poignant smiles and precarious declarations—I want a man who will rock my world!—pictures of torsos and openmouthed dogs with hanging tongues. He thought of the widely employed defensive maneuver of sending a sassy, one-word question—Hipster?—or taking the defensive posture to its aphoristic limit and writing only Hi. Some risked long-winded confessional paragraphs that included obscure nuggets about their personal lives. These were cheery and inevitably concluded with the self-effacing acknowledgment of the unlikelihood of a reply, or a sense of hopeful resignation, or even a last-ditch compliment as they slipped beneath the surface, to the tune of even if you don’t write back, you’re still one of the most beautiful guys I’ve ever seen.
Richard experienced a wave of relief at having shut down his profile. It was miraculous that he and Blake had found each other on that godforsaken website.
Anne was motioning to him, holding up a pair of pants.
“What do you think?”
“Leather pants?” Richard said. “For me?”
“Why not?”
She was often offering him fashion advice. Did she think he was badly dressed? She herself had a flamboyant style that, though admirably original, made him think of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ”
“I’d prefer jeans.”
“I’m going to hold on to them, just in case.”
Richard went to the other side of the room and looked at a pair of black leather boots. Jeremiah Park covered his mouth as he yawned.
“What about this?” Anne said, loudly again, pointing to a caramel-colored suede bomber jacket.
“That’s nice.”
Richard looked at the price tag.
“It’s twelve hundred dollars.”
“That’s fine.”
“Anne,” he said, but his attempt to dissuade her was halfhearted.
She took the jacket and continued down the rack.
“You would look great in all of this.”
Richard glanced at Jeremiah Park again, now standing in a corner with his hands clasped together. Some lingering resistance began to crumble. He walked down the rack and put his hand on Anne’s shoulder.
“What about for you?” he said. “Let’s find something for you. We can try it all on at the same time.”
She looked up at him and smiled.
“What do you think?”
“What do you need in your wardrobe right now?”
They took the items into adjacent changing rooms and tried them on, side by side. Soon they were spinning out scenarios and characters from the different items they pulled on and off, making each other laugh. They stepped out of the changing rooms and did mock runway walks. He was Fritz, Luther, Miguel, and Chandler; she was Valerie, Sido, Martha, and Paige. Unmoved by the spectacle, Jeremiah Park looked on.
Richard wondered how they had found themselves here, with these clothes, and about the potential of their connection, the future that formed when they were together, disordered but fertile. He could be numbed by her, deadened, but then life would spring out from between them, a refined, affronted color against a gray sky, like a flower growing from a heap of rocks, or a fox running past a cement wall.
FIFTEEN
Richard spent the week in the library with Anne, as she began to prepare her submission for the Clio Prize, and he cast around for his own topic. It was mid-July, the heat familiar and intense. Each day, when they were done at the library, they would go back to her apartment. Anne no longer seemed to care about the power bill or the New York City power grid—she ran the air-conditioning all day, even when they were gone. When they returned, the space was peaceful, humble, and glacial. If they felt particularly oppressed, they swam in the pool in her building or just disrobed and watched Netflix.
“You should move in,” she said one early evening as they watched PBS. “It’s so much better here than in Brooklyn.”
“It is very nice.”
“Yeah, is that really up for debate?”
“It’s already crowded though, with Erin and Alicia.”
He could obviously never live with those two.
“They’re moving out,” Anne said. “They’re in Queens today actually, looking at a place. Besides, even if they don’t, you can live in my room. There’s plenty of space. And I wouldn’t charge you, obviously. You’re never going to rent in a better location.”
“I can’t just leave my place.”
“Why not? It’s a dump.”
Richard frowned.
“I assume it’s a dump,” she said. “You’ve never let me see it after all.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not that bad, but it’s also not worth seeing.”
“You whine about the neighborhood and you hate your roommates. All you do is complain.”
He took another bite of the sandwich they’d picked up at Eataly.
“There’s a lease. I have to think about that.”
“Right,” Anne said, crossing her arms.
He reached over and rubbed her cheek.
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Fine. Erin and Alicia are giving me some kind of vegetable facial treatment later.”
“Well, that sounds nice.”
She was silent.