Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an “unhappy husband,” drinking a “cocktail” and “watching the game.” This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke—I have long since quit—and I made the most of it (a man’s den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I’ve ever found.

  My ex-wife and I—I won’t go into the details—had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother’s funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.

  What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped QUEEN CITY RIBBON CO., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.

  I’m reading The Arabian Nights, in Husain Haddawy’s wonderful translation, and I’m struck by the presence in the book’s frame story—surely the single most beautiful story any human being has ever told—of a girl named Dinarzad. Everyone remembers the older sister, Shahrazad, wily and noble, who saves her own life and the life of all the maidens in the kingdom by spinning out a thousand and one nocturnal stories to the wife-murdering king Shahriyar; but no one ever seems to recall the nightly attendance, in that fraught bedroom, of young Dinarzad, even though her presence is crucial to the working out of Shahrazad’s plan. For the job entrusted to Dinarzad is the universal job of younger siblings the world over: not merely to witness history but to demand it. It is Dinarzad night after night—not the king—who speaks up, asking (as Haddawy renders it), “Please, sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad’s sister thrives—survives—on her sister’s stories and recollections of stories, and by gently demanding them, she ensures the salvation of herself and her elder sibling, whom she obliges, in so demanding, to become a hero.

  My younger brother’s wife came home from the hospital yesterday with their second child, another boy, and this new pair of brothers has me thinking about the boys’ father and me. Our mother brought Steve home laid across a hospital blanket, asleep on his belly, red-faced and milky-eyed, no longer than the width of her lap. I’d been waiting for him on the patio of the apartment, and when the family car, a white Dodge Coronet 550, finally pulled into our assigned spot, I shuffled half unwilling down the grassy knoll to the parking lot to get my first long look at him. I had been alive for five years, three months, and fifteen days. In that time I had known love and sorrow. I had lived in Silver Spring, Staten Island, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Flushing, and now we were back in Maryland again. I had learned to work a record player, tell lies, read the funny pages, and feel awkward at parties. But it was not until that morning, in early September 1968, that my story truly began. Until my brother was born, I had no one to tell it to.

  When Steve and his wife were about to have their first child, I said to him, “I remember the day we were having our first, and how you were there.”

  “I was the first one to see her,” he said. “After you guys. Not counting the doctors.”

  “They don’t count,” I told him.

  Then I told him how I remembered his being there, in the LDR at Cedars-Sinai, that day in 1994. My wife was twenty-odd hours into her labor when he showed up, and she had just lost her battle to do the thing without recourse to drugs. My brother showed up around lunchtime, bringing some very good corned beef sandwiches from Jerry’s Deli that my wife was not permitted to eat. She railed with some heat against the injustice of this, but then she appeared to take a certain pleasure in the sight of us enjoying them, two brothers slumped identically in plastic chairs, splitting a corned beef on rye. I felt buoyed by the sight of him, too. She was not progressing well, and though despair had by no means set in yet, by the time my brother appeared, it was long since clear to both me and my wife that the labor was not going to be one of the easy ones that you heard about and hoped for. Doctors and nurses were beginning to mutter and make troubling allusions to Pitocin and decelerations and the strain on the baby of a prolonged labor. I could see the fear and the doubt beginning to work their way into my wife’s calculation of her chances to have the birth go well, and I hated that sight. I would have given a lot to be able to extinguish or even allay those fears and doubts for a moment. I was trying to be strong and hopeful for her; I was trying to be her hero.

  To this end, it was of incalculable value to me to have my brother around. Until the birth of that first child (by cesarian section after thirty-six hours and some scary moments beside the fetal heart monitor), no one but Steve had ever cast my actions in a heroic light, and this was precisely the light that was required. (It also didn’t hurt when Steve did that old M*A*S*H* number of pulling a latex glove halfway down his head and face and puffing it up with exhalations until he looked like some kind of cartoon-balloon rooster.) I made it through the rest of the long afternoon and evening without losing my cool or my faith in my wife to make it through the ordeal to the story at the other side. But when it came time for the baby to be cut from her mother’s belly, Steve and I were obliged to part ways.

  “You can do it,” he said.

  I did it. I held my bloody new daughter and gazed into her wide, staring eyes. I spoke to her while they put her under the french-fry lights and drizzled clean water across her peely belly. I assented to the reckoning of her weight and length and learned how to swaddle her in a blanket just like the one in which my brother had ridden home, on our mother’s lap, in our family Dodge.

  But at some point they had to wheel my wife into the recovery room so she could shake off the nausea
and fog of anesthesia enough to meet our child, and I got separated from the helpful nurses, and from my wife, and from my sense of purpose. I found myself dazed, exhausted, and lost, wandering the corridors of Cedars, aimless, clueless, holding in the crook of my right arm a human I did not really know. I kept turning and turning, trying desperately to look as though I knew where I was going and what I was doing. And then I turned a last corner, and ran, almost literally, into Steve.

  “Oh my God, Mike,” he said, looking into the face of his niece. “I can’t believe.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re a dad.”

  “Pretty strange,” I agreed.

  “What happened?” he said, reading my expression, seeing some lingering hollowness of doubt.

  “I got a little lost,” I said, and I thought of an afternoon with him years before on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

  “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

  “Here we are.”

  “Have a seat.” He found us a pair of chairs in an alcove off the corridor. “Hold your baby. You’re tired.”

  “Remember that time in Kitty Hawk?” I said. “In the dunes?”

  “I remember the dunes,” he said. “We were running.”

  I told him the story of how, when I was sixteen and he was not yet eleven, we had gone down to Nags Head with our mother. The Outer Banks was a place we had visited last when we were small and our parents were still together. On this trip our mother was ensnared deep in the tangles of life as a single woman of the 1970s, and I had just learned how to drive, and in the fall Steve would be leaving to go and live with our father in Pittsburgh, and here, on the sand dunes, we were. In coming to North Carolina, our mother had fled the attentions of a persistent, repeat-calling, fundamentally creepy suitor (today we might call him a stalker) named Francis who, appropriately for a suitor, liked to wear a blue suit, and whom neither of us liked any more than we liked the idea of our mother being troubled by men not our father, or of our soon being separated for a terribly indefinite period by Steve’s departure for Pittsburgh. We ran deeper and farther into the dunes, plunging and scrabbling and ass-sledding down their shifting slopes, frightening and delighting ourselves. After a while we lost track of our mother and, hot, weary, I was called upon to lead the way back to her. I had no idea where I was going, or where she might be found, but I let Steve see none of that doubt. I took readings of the sun, and held a moistened finger to the wind, and looked for tracks in the trackless sand. And then we started walking.

  “It’s like that time,” I told him as we searched for our mother. I wanted to keep ‘himoccupied and’ to conceal the degree of our lostness. “In Pittsburgh.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I told him the story of how we had decided, one summer afternoon when he was eight and I was fourteen, to walk home to Squirrel Hill from our stepmother’s office in the Cathedral of Learning. This was our first joint visit to our father’s new hometown, and so far we had never walked alone farther than the four blocks from his house to the Isaly’s store on the corner of Forbes and Murray avenues. But we had been driven back and forth a few times between Squirrel Hill and Oakland across the Panther Hollow Bridge, and I had some vague notion of the way. Steve had no idea where anything was, and quite blindly and typically, he put all his faith in me to get us home.

  In time I managed to bring us face-to-face with a stretch of asphalt, some patchy-looking trees, and the tall slender stacks of an unmarked, unidentifiable factory of some kind, windowless and fenced. Heat was rising off the asphalt in tall plumes, slicing the mysterious pale factory into long shimmery ribbons. Though I attempted not to show it, I was quite surprised to find us there—wherever there was—in the enigmatic zone behind the Carnegie Institute. Steve looked to me, awaiting my wisdom, my account of the situation. And though I had no idea where we were, I pointed to the patch of trees and scrub and declared those scrubby trees to constitute Schenley Park. We should walk that way, I told him.

  It was a pretty good guess, considering the near-total extent of my ignorance—Schenley Park was actually over there, in that direction, somewhere. We started walking, but somehow or other, I managed to miss the bridge I knew we wanted and brought us instead to a stairway, or rather a concrete landing from which a set of stairs led down into a hollow. There was no obvious way to get up the other side, but it seemed reasonable to me that if stairs went down here, there must be stairs over there that went up. It was a very long stairway down, the steps of concrete, with a railing of painted steel pipe. Indeed, the stairway seemed to lengthen Alice-in-Wonderlandishly as we descended it infinitely; it took us down into a substratum of Pittsburgh that lay even deeper than the dead-bird-filled basement of the Carnegie Museum. We were going down through tangled brambles, climbing vines, and a marvelously thickening growth of blessed shade. That endless stairway got cooler and darker and more silent as the city noises faded away. At the same time, we began to become aware that the strange territory we had discovered was inhabited. There were houses down here, streets, a ball field. From the heights of the stairs it all looked very small and idealized: dollhouses, toy streets, a baseball diamond of green cellophane and modeling clay. We could even see some tiny figures we were eventually able to identify as the native children, children not too different, perhaps, from ourselves, yet adapted to life down here beneath the city. And here we were, Steve and I, exiles from the land of our own childhood, a land of parents who stayed married and families who were not separated by hundreds of miles. We had discovered another lost world, not the irretrievable world of our family but a real one, alive and flourishing and yet somehow mysteriously forgotten.

  It turned out that there were all kinds of flaws in my plan to get us home: train tracks to cross, complete with an actual train; a steep, thorny hill up which we were obliged to bushwhack our way, tearing our skin and clothes in the process. In a short story, the character of the younger brother would have been obliged to experience an epiphany about his brother’s fallibility, would perhaps see him as having passed irrevocably into the flawed world of adulthood, but Steve just went on trusting me, and following me, and doing what I told him we were going to do, the way he followed me years later on our search for our mother across the dunes of Kitty Hawk.

  And then we came upon her along the shore, looking out to sea, her sundress stirring in the breeze, and she turned to us, and for a moment it felt like this was the last summer ever, that life was changing and we were changing, and that everything depended for its preservation on my saying the right thing.

  “Look out, Mom,” I said, pointing to the nearest line of dunes. “Here comes Francis!”

  They both turned, and I laughed, and then we all laughed at the image of big, soft, harmless Francis in his Clark Kent glasses and his blue suit, trudging up the snaking ridge of those random dunes, 350 miles from home.

  “We got lost,” Steve told our mother. “Just like that time in Pittsburgh.”

  “Just like that time in Kitty Hawk,” I said, sitting in the corridor of Cedars-Sinai somewhere in the maternity ward.

  “You found her,” Steve reminded me. “Now what about Ayelet? I bet she wants to hold her daughter.”

  I stood up, having told him the story he wanted to hear, the one about how I knew what must be done—how I was brave and wily and never really lost, no matter how much it might seem that way.

  “Let’s go find her,” I said.

  “But hey, I’m the first one to see you, Sophie,” he leaned in to explain to the baby, “after your mom and dad.”

  I reminded him that I had been the first person to see him after he was born, unless you counted the doctors, and he told me that the doctors don’t count.

  “I remember,” I told him, as the older of my nephews will one day tell his younger brother—his witness, his partner, his inventor, his heart, his courage—the story about the day their story began.

  One summer many years ago, at the Squaw Valley Com
munity of Writers, I gave a reading of a short story of mine called “Millionaires.” It’s basically the story of Harry and Vince, roommates and best friends, whose long friendship is spoiled when they both fall in love with the same young woman. They have always shared everything—not just housing, books, clothes, and record collections but enthusiasms, manias, and passions. The only thing they have never shared successfully is a girl—not sexually, not emotionally, not at all. All of their individual relationships with women have petered out amid uneasiness and hurt feelings. And yet until this woman Kim comes along, they manage to weather every disruption, their friendship surviving each girl’s advent and departure. They have accumulated a small treasury of little mementos and forgotten items, barrettes and bits of jewelry, one for each girlfriend, which they keep on a shelf, almost as a kind of shrine to the durability of their bond with each other, a bond that ultimately, Vince betrays.

  I recently ran into an old good friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in years—in the years after our respective marriages, a certain distance had imposed itself—and since then I’ve found myself thinking about that story, and about the response to my reading it aloud of a young female participant known to history only as Alexis from Texas. Actually, what I might like to talk about is Alexis from Texas, one of those legendary women—the kind Mr. Bernstein recalls in Citizen Kane—whom you never forget even though you have nothing, really, to remember. She wore a short black dress, black cowboy boots, and a pair of clunky black Buddy Holly horn-rims (she was the first beautiful woman I ever saw adopt that strategy of inverse enhancement), and when she shot pool, which she did very well, she would cantilever herself way out over the pool table in the breathtaking way of cantilevers everywhere, and one of her long legs would arise behind her as irrepressibly as an accurate new model of the universe, and the skirt of her dress would hike up a couple of inches, and all the guys standing around the pool table would manifest signs of bodily pain.