At the bar, she got them another round of Labatt Blue—the odd default cheap beer in this neck of the woods—and was asked to settle a dispute between Waldron and a crew member, Craig, about which of them was taller (Waldron, by a cowlick). When she returned, as if responding to her general train of thought, Seth said, “Charming place.”
“It’s fine.”
“Oh, it’s more than fine, I’d say. It’s delightful.”
“Have you ever considered giving it a rest?”
“No, I never actually have considered that. Intriguing thought.”
She looked around the place—two guys shot pool under a custom Coors Light banner that proudly announced the Liberty Lounge billiards team as regional runners-up. “Just, I don’t know. I’m not sure walking around assuming you’re better than everyone is the best way to go through life.”
“I don’t think I’m better than everyone. Brad Pitt, for example. Mother Teresa.”
“Ha ha.”
“Anyway, you’re as much of a snob as I am; at least I admit it.”
“I’m not as much of a snob as you are.”
“There you are again, not admitting it.” When she didn’t laugh or smile or respond to this, Seth said, “Okay, what’s your problem?”
“Honestly, Seth? I think you look down on everyone. I think everyone’s a joke to you. And I think it’s going to hurt your work.”
“Oh, you’re worried about my work. That’s what this is about? Why don’t you try lightening up for one minute. You’re getting to be a real drag lately.”
“I think you’re going to wind up being a campy hack if you’re not careful. Wait—”
But he was already walking out. She thought about following him, apologizing, but the truth was she just didn’t feel like it. Someone put “Layla” on the jukebox and she finished her beer, swaying as the haunting, inexorable waves of the final piano chords crashed through the room.
Three days before opening night, Seth appeared in the auditorium bearing a Kinko’s box. The group had been lounging on deck chairs in the huge room, with the second circle—the lustful, that is, a group of porn stars from the Valley—practicing the set piece where they blow around the stage in a choreographed dervish. Susannah and Len had been debating a line of Len’s in which he, as Homer, tells Dontay to fuck off. Is that really necessary? said Len. How about screw off? Suse told him screw off sounded fifties and weird. Go screw, she said, in a James Cagney voice. Seth handed her a sheaf of papers and she looked up at him. “What’s this?”
“This,” he said, “is the new script.”
“We already have a script.”
“This one’s better, trust me.” He handed it around to the players. Susannah thumbed through hers, confused. She didn’t see much difference, or any, in the staging, but the dialogue had been changed, laboriously shifted into a sort of faux Old English. She looked up. “I don’t get it.”
“Trust me,” he said again.
The rehearsal was a disaster. Where lines before had been memorized and recited with relative ease, the actors now read frowning, and poorly, from their sheets. Dale held his script about three inches from his sweating face, attempting to work his mouth around sentences like Doth thou makest jest at mine torture, at Lucifer Agonistes, ye goode and noble pilgrimmes? Fools! Verily a pox and vexation upon thou and thine. Even Suse, with her expensive education and experience performing Shakespeare in Brown’s Little Theater group (Gertrude, Titania, Ariel), struggled with the pronunciation and syntax. Around the stage they bumbled a-stuttering, Seth watching from the floor with an appraising eye, not displeased. At the end, he thanked them for their hard work, apologized for springing last-second dialogue changes, asked them to learn the new script, and again implored them to trust him.
When the last of the players had exeunted, Suse held up her pages and said, “Okay, Seth. Really, what the hell is this?”
“It’s just a rewrite,” he said, unable to mask a look of coy mischief on his face—or perhaps he wanted her to see it.
“It isn’t just a rewrite. It’s farce.”
“Well, the play is a farce, so that makes sense.”
“The play was just fine before, and plenty farcical.” She flipped pages. “O what ill humours doth befoule this sepulchral zephyre? Poor Dale is going to swallow his tongue. It’s a cruel joke.”
Seth rose from the deck chair, where he’d been looking up at her with the patient demeanor of a parent enduring a toddler’s tantrum. “Susannah, just remember, this is my play. Okay? You don’t have to like every choice I make.”
“It’s being performed in my family’s hotel, and I say we go back to the script, which was good, by the way.”
“Oh, it was not. It was kitschy garbage.”
“It was fun. This is something else. What is this?”
“Okay, look. When I thought no one would be here, the play was fine. I was just happy to have finished something. But now, there are some real people coming to this, some New York theater people. I heard Lowell Sims might come. And you know, they’ve seen this kind of thing a million times off Broadway. Lowbrow highbrow, right? It’s a formula. Like you said, the last think I want to be is a campy hack.”
“Seth—”
“But I thought, okay, what about doubling down on that, rendering the thing in high language, as spoken by, you know.”
“No.”
“Well, the people in it. Locals.”
“Locals.”
“Right. So it becomes sort of this meta-play about high and low culture.”
Suse looked at Seth for what felt like the first time in years—people you’ve known for a while have a way of adhering to your first impression of them, the early blush of acquaintance and friendship, and you can go years with that afterimage hovering over their actual form. In his later twenties, Seth had gotten slightly fattish—not paunchy, but a kind of white puffiness, like a piece of rice floating in dishwater overnight. At the same time, his features had somehow coarsened, and he looked wolfish to her. Standing in the auditorium, she had a vision of him in twenty years, fat and avid, and in a position of real cultural authority that would lend the weight of actual malice to his habitual archness.
She said, “And in order to create this meta-play, you make the people in it look stupid.”
“That would be the common view, I suppose.”
“Including my father and me.”
“Art is a stern master.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“Oh, yes.”
She shouldered her bag to return to Len’s and said, “I’ve always defended you. People would say what an asshole you are, and I would say you just don’t know him. But people are right. And it isn’t about being an artist, it’s just being a dick. Talk about common.”
She saw that the volley had hit home, and turned to leave before Seth could respond, but he laughed and she waited for it with shoulders tensed. “God, that’s rich,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, you know, playing the ‘everyone says’ card. You want to know what everyone says about you?”
“Not really.”
“Everyone says you’re a hick. Everyone wondered what you were doing in our group when I brought you in. I said, no, she’s funny and nice, and the Catskills thing is a scream. Everyone rolled their eyes, but I defended you. I still do, because everyone still wonders what this—I’m sorry—but this rather dull little person is doing hanging around, being gloomy.”
“Well,” she said, “at least I’m not an alcoholic queen.”
“No, you’re just a grubby provincial kike.”
She walked away and Seth called after her, no wait, he was sorry, he shouldn’t have said that. But she was already trudging down the long hallway by the outside pool, where she used to sit and do homework, past the natatorium and the lobby, to the huge front door. Pushing it open, he called a final time—Suse, come on—but his echoing voice was like something she was
remembering, something already from the past.
She went back to New York the next day, borrowing her father’s old Subaru. Len said what about the play, and she said she had stage fright—that her understudy, Kent, a hair stylist in Tucker’s Cove, would do a fine job. Everyone had to relearn their lines from scratch, anyway. Len protested, but not that much, accustomed to this kind of thing after a lifetime of ill-tempered women deserting him. She didn’t tell him about Seth, because what was the point, really? “Break a leg,” she said.
It took only an hour to clear the apartment of her belongings, which was convenient as she was parked in a delivery-only space. Her other roommates were nowhere to be found, also convenient, both in terms of not having to discuss it with anyone—everyone—and also in terms of being able to filch a framed photo of the group in college, which hung askew in the bathroom. She wasn’t sure whose it was, or if it was anyone’s in particular, but it was hers now.
She stayed with her mother over the weekend, borrowed a little money, and returned to Liberty. Seth, as she’d expected, was gone, had left the day after the show. “How was it?” she asked Len. They were drinking tomato juice in the cottage’s overgrown garden.
Len shook his head. “Oh, you should have been here. I’m telling you, it was magical.”
“How’d the show go?”
“Eh, the show,” he shrugged.
“People learned the new lines?”
“More or less. Dale got some laughs.”
“I bet.”
“It was fine, I never cared about that.”
“Yeah?” The sun glinted off the shiny leaf of some plant. It suddenly felt strange to her not to know more about the flora around here, where she’d grown up. Resolving, from a young age, to escape, she’d apparently refused to take in any information about the landscape or history of the place.
“Yeah. I mean, just looking out at that ballroom, filled with people in formal wear. Filled to the gills.” He held his hands out in front of him as though trying to summon the magnitude of the scene for her, then dropped them on his lap in failure. “Oh, it was magical, Suse. A magical night.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Thank Seth again for me when you go back.”
Somewhere nearby, an insect sawed monotonously. She said, “Actually, I was hoping I might stay here a little while longer, if that’s okay?”
“Really?”
“Maybe just through the rest of summer, while I figure out what’s next. I’m kind of done with New York right now.”
“That would be nice.”
“I’ll keep helping out.”
“You can work at the golf course if you want.”
“Yeah?”
“Real work, I’ll pay you. We need someone to do the books.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay, sounds fine.”
“Hey,” he turned to her. “The play got me reading Dante; I never had. You know who’s in the fifth circle?”
She racked her brain. “The violent?”
“Well, the wrathful. But also the sullen. I thought that was interesting. The sullen stewed below the surface of a muddy swamp. The ancients apparently thought sullenness was anger turned inward.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing,” he said, shielding his eyes and looking up at the sun. “Boy, it’s a nice day, huh?”
So she stayed the rest of that summer, saving money to move back to the city in the fall. But then the towers came down, and by the next spring she was living with a local woodworker named Nick, who sold his intricately filigreed cabinets to boutique stores in Beacon and Brooklyn. She did the books at the golf course, accepted a managerial role and pay raise, hired a design firm to rethink the tired clubhouse and pro shop. And in her spare time, she continued helping her father clean out the Neversink.
One day she oversaw a team of workers taking down the chandelier in the ballroom, Len having sold it to a New York antiques dealer. The thing was enormous, bolted to the ceiling with green screws the size of tent pegs—it took five people and a small lift to detach and lower it to the floor. From her vantage on the second story, she saw them put it on a flat wagon, push it out of the hotel, and load it into the back of a truck. As she watched, the pink sun dipped behind one of the larger trees and cast a long shadow on the floor and wall, and it was as though there were something watching alongside her.
She thought of those ghost stories that she’d heard growing up. She imagined it was the ghost. The thought wasn’t frightening, as it had vaguely been when she’d described the lore to Seth or other friends over the years. To the contrary, it was comforting somehow—a presence that had been there for so many years, a presence that wanted to stay. Together, they watched the truck wind down the access road, carting away another small piece of home. Together, they moved from the bedroom and out onto the main staircase. Together, they surveyed the Great Hall, the dining room, the lounge, the distant lobby, the drained pool—all these rooms she’d roved as a child, all the while so desperately wanting to leave—and in that moment, she knew it wasn’t a ghost she felt beside her, but her tardy love for this great, dead place.
14. Alice
2007
Alice emerged from her psychiatrist’s office into the cold damp of London in October. Though the walk home from Dr. Linväld’s office would take forty minutes, she preferred it to the alternatives. Despite there being a stop literally outside her front door, the Tube was, in local parlance, a nonstarter; she could barely look at the entrance—like the waiting mouth of a blind, starving monster trapped beneath London—let alone walk into it.
She also didn’t drive (owning a car in this city was ridiculous, leaving aside the left-hand-side-of-the-road thing), take the bus (cramped sweatboxes that they were), or cycle (bike helmets looked far too silly). And she hated taking cabs, which entailed talking to the drivers. At minimum, you had to tell them a destination, and sometimes you got a chatty one who wanted to talk about the weather or football or traffic or, God forbid, their family, also a nonstarter. She wanted to talk to people as little as possible lately, including Dr. Linväld, but she’d continued going to see him every week as a nod to the possibility, however slim, that she still might not kill herself.
In this sense, she wasn’t sure if continuing her therapy was an act of bravery or cowardice. Or both. Most likely, it meant nothing, as seemed to be the secret—well-kept or open, depending on how depressed she was—about everything. This had, in fact, been the subject of their earlier session. Dr. Linväld—large and bearded (and, despite his Nordic name, black, a point of confusion when she’d shown up for her first appointment eighteen months earlier)—had leaned forward on his desk, head framed by a square halo of diplomas, accreditations, and memberships, and said, “You keep coming back to this sense that everything’s meaningless.”
“Well, I mean, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks, problem solved.”
“Not to most people. Not to me.”
“Is it possible you’re wrong about that?”
“No. It’s not a thing you can be wrong about. Or objectively right about. I don’t feel like everything’s meaningless, so everything isn’t, to me. You do feel that way, so everything is, to you. It’s how you feel that makes it real.”
“Catchy.” He stared at her. He was a very good starer. “But don’t you think that’s bullshit?”
“No. I wouldn’t have said it if I thought it was bullshit.”
Opening her mouth to respond, she felt the great heaviness of already knowing what she was going to say, of everything being predetermined. This sense of merely going through the motions, immensely fatiguing, was something she’d been experiencing with greater and greater frequency lately. It wasn’t her main problem, but as a symptom it was rapidly achieving comorbid status with the depression that caused it. She forced herself to go on.
“I know you don’t think it’s bullshit, but I do think you can be
objectively right about it. What’s your argument? Okay, some fruity shit about everyone assigning meaning to their lives? But people are right and wrong about things. I mean, some people spend their whole life handling snakes in order to go to heaven, right? Then they get bitten by one and die, and—let’s say I’m correct that there’s nothing—they’ve wasted their life playing with vipers.”
“They haven’t wasted it. They believed in something, even if it was perhaps technically wrong.”
“You don’t think they would have stopped handling snakes if they’d known?”
Dr. Linväld sighed and looked out the window at the impossible bone-whiteness of Belgravia in autumn. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that your best argument for there being a point amounts to just feeling like there’s a point, which is a position that deflates the second you poke it. And my best argument is that there obviously, demonstrably, is no point. That you fucking die and that’s it. That everyone you know will die, and all their children will die, and their children’s children will die, and that’s it. That even if you take the really wide-angle view, humankind will get wiped out at some point, all of its art and science and effort with it. If it isn’t rogue nuclear weapons, it will be global warming, and if it isn’t global warming it will be Ebola, or an asteroid, or the sun dying, or eventually, the heat death of the universe.”
“You’re saying the heat death of the universe precludes life having any meaning?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” She was glad it was Dr. Linväld’s practice to sit in chairs, consultation-style. If she’d been lying down, in the Freudian manner, she would have passed out from the strain of speaking.
“I’m taking you seriously here, Alice. It sounds like you’re saying the only way life would have meaning is if everyone lived forever. But imagine if that were the case. I grant you, Alice Emmenthaler, eternal life!” He opened both hands at her, like a stage magician executing a corny trick. “Tell me what the point is now.”
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