Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  When I come home after a day of paralegaling to discover the world’s biggest water bug flapping around my studio, I call John and beg him to come over and kill it. He won’t, but it’s a relief to be able to call him and tell him something no one else must know. That I’m scared.

  John is generous enough to go over dozens of drafts of my first novel, for which I reward him with five years of derision. “The Challah character [read: Dominatrix Maya] needs more development,” he tells me.

  “Well, what do you know?” I say, seething like a small samovar on his plush mohair couch. “You’re just a television writer. You’ve never written a novel.” And what I’m really telling him is: Why do I have to work so hard, why do I have to rewrite this fucking novel over and over again just to get a little bit of your praise? Why don’t you just adore me like my grandmother did?

  When I’m with my real parents, I regale them with funny tales of Rich American John—“A woman comes every week to clean his apartment and he pays her handsomely!”—a profligate, silly individual whom we may all safely look down upon. And yet, despite his Americanness, or perhaps because of it, we also respect him. At Thanksgiving family dinners he tries to steer them from their dreams of law or accountancy for me, telling them stories of his own years as a television writer. “And how much money did you make from this writing business?” my father wants to know.

  He tells them. “Ooooooh.” It is a fine figure. “Gary’s very talented,” John says to my parents. “He can make it as a writer.” And I blush and wave it away. But I am thankful. A soft-spoken American whose apartment my parents and I have estimated to be worth close to a million 1998 dollars is my advocate.

  Later, I realize that just as I tried to puff up my family’s barely existing wealth when I was in high school, I am attempting to make John richer and more generous in the eyes of my parents, my friends, myself. I am trying to make John the parent who would take me right out of Solomon Schechter. The parent who would say, “We can do better than this.” The truth is, John’s father did not own half of Salem, Oregon, the glittering state capital from which John hails, as I always claim to others. He owned a hardware store. The Upper West Side apartment, bought in the mid-1990s, cost John two hundred thousand dollars, not one million. The single Armani blazer he owned and bequeathed to me was hardly the Gatsbyesque wardrobe I made it out to be. And even those trips to Le Bernadin or La Côte Basque were rare. More often than not there was sugar-cane shrimp at the Vietnamese joint around the corner from his house. But, honestly, who cares? I was just happy to be with him.

  No, I want the safety of John’s imaginary riches to rescue me from my mother’s $1.40 Kiev-style chicken cutlet. “When you have to pay for everything, you will know that life is hard,” my mother says the night she sells me the stack of butter-stuffed poultry and a roll of Saran Wrap for twenty dollars even.

  And I realize then the dissonance between my parents and John. We’re in America, and, frankly, life is just not that hard. She needs to make it harder. For her. For me. Because we never really left Russia. The orange Romanian furniture, the wood carving of Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress, the explosive Kiev-style cutlets. All of it means one thing: The softness of this country has not softened my parents.

  At the dinner table in Little Neck on the Night of the Cutlets, John and my parents are discussing what to inscribe on my grandmother’s gravestone. A year has passed since she died.

  My father wants to write the English translation of a Russian inscription, which translates roughly as “Always mourning son.”

  “But you won’t always be mourning,” says John. “You’ll always miss her, but you won’t be mourning.”

  My father looks mildly horrified by John’s pronouncement. He’ll always miss her? What kind of American bullshit is this? His mother has died, so he has to literally be the always mourning son.

  My mother has another suggestion for the gravestone. “Always struggling son.” She explains for the benefit of our American guest: “Gary’s father thinks he has to struggle. He has to feel this pain forever. Some people”—meaning our kind—“always want to feel guilty.” She comes up with a few more gravestone inscriptions. “Always painful mourning.” “Constantly painful mourning.”

  My father will take John up to his monkish attic space to show my friend the lay of his land. “And here I have my Sony radio. And here is some Chekhov and Tolstoy. And here are Pushkin’s letters.” How happy I am to see the two most important men in my life talking to each other, being chums across the distance of time and culture. That one term, Sony radio, is enough to make me cry cutlet-dense filial tears. John is doing it again; he’s softening my family for me.

  Finally, outdoors in his overgrown beefsteak tomato and cucumber garden, the sun setting behind him, my father speaks into John’s camera: “When Gary was six years old he was running on the street, kissing me, hugging me. Now he doesn’t want to hug me, he thinks it’s not necessary. But I need this. I feel lost now. Not only because I don’t have my mother anymore, but because nobody needs me so much like she needed me.”

  John and I talk about our parents all the time, me only half listening, or quarter listening, to his stories, him immersed in mine. He points out what I sometimes can’t see through both my rage and my love (at a certain point, the two have become indistinguishable): They paid for my college; they bought me my new teeth so that I could smile. If his father, a successful businessman in Salem, Oregon, could worry about payment at a one-dollar parking lot, what can be said of my mother, a woman born in the year after the Siege of Leningrad was broken?

  Empathy is the first part of this parental program.

  And then, a managed distance.

  The years roll by. 1999. I am dating Pamela Sanders, weeping at the presence of Kevin and his powerful woodworking tools. My novel keeps going through draft after draft. Somebody has to be blamed for all this and since I can’t rise up against either my parents or Pamela, it will have to be John.

  For years I’ve been trying to squeeze him dry. To my friends, who never meet him, he is the Benefactor, aka Benny. The thousands of dollars he’s been lending me have been flowing into my caviar party fund. Several times a year, my two-hundred-foot studio is crammed with about as many celebrants, who gorge on the finest champagne and silver-gray beluga that I’ve sourced from a questionable Brighton Beach store. The reason for these parties is always vague. My hairdresser is moving to Japan. My hairdresser is moving back from Japan. “Caviar courtesy of my benefactor!” I shout over the MC Solaar and the happy giggling of my Osaka hairdresser. “Somebody out there really loves me!”

  And then it ends. And then John has had enough.

  Before the advent of the electronic in-box, I manage to save nearly all the letters and postcards that come my way. A sensible gift of habit, I believe, from my mother, who throws nothing out. Or, perhaps, the inheritance of a totalitarian culture where everything will be used as evidence. In any case, John’s letters to me are at the top of the pile. By the time he’s had enough of me, they are as long as twenty-four pages and they render the truth of my life in those days better than I can.

  You are not a child and I am not your parent.

  There is practically nothing writerly about your process. Your acute and omnipresent anxiety causes you to function much more as an accountant or a producer, with his eyes on the bottom line and no understanding of how artists function, rather than as a young writer, trying to develop a first novel, a new career. In short, you are as mean and ungenerous to yourself as your parents are; they taught you well.

  You are no longer twenty as you were when we met. You are pushing thirty. The wounded child in a defensive rage has become an adult man hurting himself and inflicting pain on others.

  You are still close enough to the beginning of adulthood that you can change.

  Do you want to spend your life as a frightened angry person taking your deepest fears and problems out on innocent bystanders, a
s well as on yourself? In five or ten years, you could be a father bestowing upon his children the same kind of misery that you now enjoy. That’s how it works.

  Your inability to empathize makes it difficult for you to put yourself in the skin of the characters you write.

  You have to decide to take yourself seriously, not in a phony self-pitying way, but in a serious, dignified way.

  It’s impossible to discuss these issues for long without thinking of the role your drinking plays. Last spring’s birthday dinner comes to mind, when you drank a bottle of wine at Danube and a large pitcher of sangria at Rio Mar. About half way through the evening you were incoherent, uncomprehending and slurring your words. A highlight was a disjointed monologue about how you have no drinking problem.

  When do you reach the point that you are no longer so fragile that you can’t see beyond your own pain?

  When do you stop being pitiable Gary hiding in the Stuyvesant bathroom and emerge to become a man who stands up to the inner demons that are driving him?

  When I first read these dispatches, a Pamela Sanders–grade anger boils within me. Fucking John. What does he know about writing? Or hiding out in bathrooms? He’s just a television writer. And, anyway, I’m too old to have a father figure. I’m “pushing thirty,” as he, the man obsessed with his own mortality, has just reminded me. But the thought of going it alone, with nothing but the pricey Kiev-style cutlet awaiting me in Little Neck, turns my anger to despair. I must find a new way to manipulate John, to keep my caviar fund intact, to keep the Duet with Gary humming along. As a gesture of kindness, I take John out to Barney Greengrass for sturgeon and eggs. At first I’m excited by the idea that I’m repaying a vast debt to John by buying him some animal protein on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but perhaps it is the Russian nature of the sturgeon that turns my mood from magnanimous guest of the Upper West Side to pure Leningrad citizen, circa 1979. When the $47.08 check is slapped on the table, the color of my face turns from lox to whitefish, and I have a minor panic attack on the spot. No! No! No! My American papa has to pay for this, not me. If he doesn’t pay, then I have nothing but my real parents! I run out of the restaurant, the edges of my eyes blurring with crazy tears, leaving John to settle the bill once more.

  And then, finally, after all the bilked meals and goods and services and cash, and in response to yet another one of my requests for cash, there is this:

  We the undersigned agree to all the terms specified herein.

  Gary will borrow the sum of $2200 from John.

  The term of the loan is two years.

  On the 27th of each month, Gary will pay to John $50.00 of the principal.

  In addition, on a quarterly basis, i.e. every three months, on the 27th of the month, Gary will pay to John one quarter of the year’s worth of interest on the remaining principal. The rate of interest will equal the interest which is being paid at that time on a two-year United States Treasury Bill.

  Gary further acknowledges that part of his stated purpose in borrowing the money is to embark in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis with a trained certified professional, preferably a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst M.D. He hereby gives his word that this was not merely a ploy to receive the loan but that he does indeed intend to proceed with this plan.

  It gets easier.

  It gets easier fast.

  It is fashionable now to discredit psychoanalysis. The couch. The four or five days a week of narcissistic brooding. The reaching over to pluck Kleenex from the quilted tissue box beneath the African pietà thing. The penis-y Freudianism underlying it all. I have made fun of it myself in a novel called Absurdistan, my hero, the overweight and self-indulgent Misha Vainberg, son of a Russian oligarch, constantly calling his Park Avenue shrink while the real post-Soviet world disintegrates around him and people die.

  The truth of it is that it is not for everyone. It is not for most people. It is difficult, painful, and tedious work. It feels, at first, like a diminution of power rendered upon a person who already feels powerless. It is a drain on the bank account and it takes away at least four hours a week that could be profitably spent looking oneself up on the World Wide Web. And, quite often, there is a seeming pointlessness to individual sessions that makes my days studying Talmud in Hebrew school brim with relative insight. But.

  It saves my life. What more can I add to that?

  I hit the couch four times a week. I mean that literally. I jump on that couch; I hear the thwack of my body against it, as if I’m saying to my analyst, who is partly a stand-in for John: Fuck you. I don’t need this. I’m more real than this talking. I’m more real than your silence. I hate my shrink so much. The smug, silent authority who charges me fifteen dollars a session. The money, the money, the money. I am always the keeper of accounts. And always will be.

  “I think you’re charging me too much,” I say into his silence.

  He’s ripping me off, there’s no doubt about it. The gray-haired, gray-bearded, native-born presence is taking money from me, fifteen dollars at a time. My mother was right about everything. This country was built on the coins of fools like me. “Hide your quarters,” she would warn me before my college friends came over to visit my apartment.

  Thwack, the angry retort of my body against his couch.

  Well, I’m not going to be different. I’m not going to be one of those people. The animal petters. The smilers. The helpers. The Benefactors. The sandwiches-for-the-homeless makers. Stop pushing me. Stop pushing me with your silence.

  “What else comes to mind about that?” my analyst says after I quiet down.

  What else comes to mind about that? I want to get up and beat you like you once beat me. I want to have that power over you. I want to be so big that all you can do is hide your head beneath my assault, offer me up your pretty little ears.

  You with your innocent silence. You think I don’t see your rage? Every man has it. Every man, every boy, has the power to humiliate another with his strength.

  “I think you’re charging me too much,” I say.

  Four times a week, I have a lunch date with reality. I talk, he listens. Later I find out that he is half Anglo and half Armenian, just like J.Z., and I wonder if being in the company of a person who shares in at least some of her nucleic acids soothes me. In the intervening years, she, too, has become a doctor.

  Reality. I’m learning to separate the real from the not. As soon as I say something out loud, as soon as I publicize it into the afghan-carpeted Park Avenue air, I realize it is not true. Or: It doesn’t have to be true.

  I think you’re charging me too much.

  I am a bad writer.

  I should be with a woman like Pamela Sanders.

  I do not have a problem with alcohol or narcotics.

  I am a bad son.

  I am a bad son.

  I am a bad son.

  There is usually a lag between understanding and action. But I move quickly.

  I break up with Pamela Sanders, taking myself out of the path of her wrath and her hammer. At first, I offer her the choice of ending her relationship with Kevin. She tells me that she feels like Kevin and I are both pointing guns at her head.* Yes, I want to tell her, but only my gun is cocked and loaded.

  New Year’s Eve 2000 is coming up and she has not been invited to any parties. “What are you doing around New Year’s? Parties?” she asks me with a new shyness. I email her, telling her I have plans, typing the words reluctantly, because I know what it’s like to be lonely on an important date and because I still love her. She buys me a much belated birthday gift, a book.

  Its title is St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars.

  Several months after I begin analysis, I do something I’ve been scared to do since I canceled my junior year abroad in Moscow. Despite my mother’s insistence that I will be killed and eaten right in front of the Hermitage, I buy a ticket back to St. Petersburg, Russia. And so, beneath my sweaty polyester ski hat, I am standing in front of the Chesme Church, its “suga
rcoated spires and crenellations,” trying not to pass out. I still don’t understand the why of it, but at least I am here. At least I am trying.

  Half a year into analysis, I apply to creative writing programs. Not to Iowa, because the pain of that rejection still blinds me, but to five others. I am accepted by all of them. The most promising one appears to be Cornell, which in addition to covering tuition and fees also gives a healthy stipend of twelve thousand dollars per year.

  I happily call my parents to tell them that I’ve been accepted to an Ivy League school not focused on hotel administration. But, as a lark, I have also applied to Hunter College’s new writing program, directed by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Chang-rae Lee. Reading his novel Native Speaker has severely shaken my perception of what fiction about immigrants can get away with. There are scenes in Native Speaker that are not teased out with bullshit laughter and hairy ethnic weeping but shouted, with anger and resignation, at the sky, scenes that make me question the relative insignificance of what I am trying to do with a “comic” novel still called The Pyramids of Prague.

  I get an acceptance call from Chang-rae, and he invites me over to his office in one of the two skyscrapers that form most of Hunter’s unapologetically urban campus. The elevator smells like the French fries being French-fried in the second-floor cafeteria, and the whole building seems powered by their delicious grease. The fear of meeting one of my favorite writers is only partly offset by the Cornell acceptance letter, which I’ve folded talismanically into my front shirt pocket. In the years before analysis, I would have had a spontaneous eruption of stomach flu or jaundice and found a way to avoid seeing my literary hero. Or, had I made it into the Hunter building, I might have passed out in the fry-smelling elevator.