Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  Anyway, that’s all there is to say about Alexis from Texas, except for her criticism of “Millionaires,” which, offered as she pumped the cue stick back and forth a few times along the saddle of her thumb, was this: “I liked your story. Everybody knows guys like that. Of course”—sinking her ball with an irrefutable smack and a thud of finality—“it’s all about them really being in love with each other.”

  “Yeah,” I said, uncertain. A bit uneasy. “Oh, yeah, you bet.”

  I swear, this interpretation of Harry and Vince’s behavior had never occurred to me. I was just trying, I had thought, to write a story about how a couple of guys—guys like me and my best friend (let’s call him Harry)—could share everything, hold everything in common, but a girlfriend. Like, you know, Jules et Jim. Did any beautiful young woman ever clean François Truffaut’s clock while explaining to him how Jules and Jim were in love only with each other? The problem for Harry and Vince, I thought, was that romantic love was not a thing that could be held at all—collected, curated in a shrine, played with—and thus, it could not be shared. It was unruly, uncontrollable, unreliable, and destructive: a force that in character was opposed to, and in strength, alas (so I probably would have argued at the time), greater than, the force of “simple” friendship.

  But I was willing, then and now, to concede that Alexis from Texas had a point. The love between Harry and Vince was the product of sublimated mutual physical attraction. It was also the expression of a mutual sympathy, an affinity that had nothing, and could have nothing, to do with sex; it was beyond sex and yet no match for it. Maybe love was a kind of force or radiation that, like light, should be understood as both wave and particle.

  Almost twenty years later, having seen a number of friendships come and go, for all kinds of reasons and for no reason at all, I think Alexis from Texas and I missed the real point of the story, or rather, I left out of my story the reason that a friendship between men most often falters, fades, and dies when a woman—the Woman, in Sherlock Holmes’s formulation—intrudes. Yes, sure, sometimes both guys fall in love with her, like Harry and Vince, or Jules and Jim, or Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn in that movie with everybody wearing buffalo-hide coats and smoldering at one another; and a lot of the time, on some level, it’s not really the girl they each want to do, or not only the girl. But most of the time, pace Alexis and the author of “Millionaires,” what happens is that one guy’s girl—the wife, as things with the Woman usually turn out—just really gets on the other guy’s nerves. And strangely, he gets on hers.

  She has no understanding of Pavement; she won’t—won’t—eat even mildly spiced Indian food, let alone the vindaloo at Biki’s that, when you finish it, leaves you bald with a ring of hair lying around the legs of your chair; she hates baseball, believes in astrology (oh, so he’s a triple Gemini, guess that explains the third nipple), got him to go snowboarding (Him. On a snowboard. In one of those little llama hats with the earflaps), to decorate his living room with angels, and to give a shit about women’s issues and the Planet, of all things; and worst of all, most egregious of all, you cannot believe the way she talks to him. No, worst of all: You can’t believe that he puts up with it.

  At first glance this appears to be merely a subspecies of a greater failure, one that ultimately explains almost all the ills and wrongnesses of the world, cataclysmic and trivial. I mean the failure of imagination. And I suspect that when a male friendship dies over a woman, the failure of imagination is to blame. But for once—just this once—I might be tempted to argue that in this case the failure of imagination is not entirely our fault, not entirely the product of our inveterate human tendency toward withholding or bankrupting the faculty of imagination at the very moment when it is most required. When the Woman enters the life of the Holmes to whom you have always served as Watson, and vice versa, it’s not simply that you can’t or won’t imagine what he sees in her. It’s that you aren’t meant to understand; you have not touched to the innermost core of another person and hence the zero limits of imagination.

  That’s what gives the process of losing a friendship over a woman such a lasting sense of distress and confusion: The loss obliges you to confront the fundamental mystery of another man, one whom you believed you knew as well as you knew yourself. But there is something in the guy, something crucial and irreducible, that you do not understand at all, and She is the proof. You have no access to that innermost kernel of him, and you never did. And in turn, this leads you to question everything you ever thought you knew, not only about him but about the man you thought you knew as well as you knew your best friend—yourself.

  Because after all, look who you chose—look at your Irene Adler. You and your best friend fell in together, laid your collections on the table and traded for duplicates, found each other amid the slim pickings in life’s great battalion of idiots, made friends. You chose each other, but the Woman was chosen for you, bonded to you through the actions of some mysterious agency that, however much you and she might have in common, however much you enjoy birding together, or watching The Wire or Peter Greenaway movies, or co-reigning as duke and consort of your local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism, has nothing to do with any of that. This agency operates as forcefully, and binds with as much upheaval, as much power and delight and comfort and destructiveness, when two lovers have nothing in common.

  What became of that friendship is what became of your heart in love: You lost it. And once it’s gone—friendship, heart—you never get it all back. That’s what makes her the Woman; that’s what makes the keeping of an old friend through all the vicissitudes of love and fortune such a rare and wonderful or an empty and terrible thing. Either you and your old friend encountered the black box at each other’s core, with its scatter of mystery particles on which the invisible forces of love and fate operate, and by some miraculous luck, you imagined or muddled your way past, beyond, or around that mystery; or, tragically, you were never obliged to encounter it at all.

  One night when I was nineteen or twenty, I sat drinking Rolling Rock beer and smoking marijuana in an artfully squalid Squirrel Hill apartment with a friend who liked to get drunk and stoned and tell you what was wrong with you and what you ought and ought not to expect from a life such as yours. That probably meets the legal definition of an asshole, but I liked the guy, and his opinion meant a lot to me. “Joe the Lion,” I called him, after the Bowie song (A couple of drinks / on the house / and he was / a fortune teller he said / nail me to my car / and I’ll tell you who you are). “You have no tristeza” was his diagnosis of me on this particular evening. “And you never will.” He was not a Spaniard or a Mexican. He was not a native speaker of Spanish at all. A Pittsburgh kid, Slovak on his mother’s side. But I believed he knew what he was talking about—he spoke with unfeignable authority, and his words haunted me afterward for a very long time.

  Tristeza means sadness, and common sense would suggest that I ought to have been pleased with his analysis of my life and fate. But he seemed to hold my lack of sadness against me or, rather, to pity me for that lack, and it was not long before I began to regret the absence of tristeza in my soul or destiny. I was by nature (whatever that means) a cheerful person, born into comfortable circumstances during a time of unprecedented plenty, free, male, able-bodied, reasonably clever, fortunate, and willing to work. Socially, things for me had been a bit rough there for a while, but over the past few years I had been doing better in that regard. I had fallen in love, gotten laid, made friends with interesting people who understood the world in terms of abstract Spanish concepts. Now it turned out that I was suffering from a grievous lack of tristeza.

  Actually, I was all right with the idea—how could I deny it?—that I was not then in possession of a usable quantity of heroic sadness. It was the part about my never getting hold of any tristeza that rankled me.

  My upbringing and the thing called my nature had accustomed me to thinking that if I applied myself and took advantage of my
opportunities, there was nothing I might want to become or possess that I could not. Without saying anything to my friend—without ever announcing my intentions to anyone, least of all to myself—I set out to remedy this grave deficit of heartbreak or, as I understood it, of the aura, the ineradicable residue, of heartbreak. I implemented a crash program and, like a middle-tier regional power seeking weapons-grade plutonium, went out and got myself a broken heart.

  A study of the available literature—or part of it, since the available literature occupied half the world’s library shelves and three fourths of the attention of its poets—seemed to suggest that one indispensable precursor to the production of tristeza was regret. There were others—grief, exile, loss—and along the way, I might reasonably expect to acquire them or at least get a few leads on their whereabouts. But regret was the one prerequisite for heartbreak that I could hope to ensure a steady supply of. All I needed to do was start making mistakes, but I must do so diligently and clearly, taking full advantage of all my opportunities. I must put my trust in unreliable people, take on responsibilities I could not hope to discharge, count on impossible outcomes, ignore blessings that were right under my nose while expending my youth and energy in the pursuit of dubious pleasure. I must court disappointment, miscalculate, lie when the truth would serve better and tell the truth when the kindest thing would be to tell a lie. Above all, I would have to stick to a course of action long after it was clearly revealed to be wrong.

  A year passed in much the same way as those that had preceded it, and although I had gotten into difficulties and hurt people’s feelings, lost money, and wasted time, I remained more or less the same cheerful and fortunate person I always had been, not unduly prone to regret, with nothing to grieve and everything still to lose. I had cheated on one girlfriend and been cheated on by another. I had done incredibly stupid things, such as buy gum sticks of hashish from unknown Africans on a scary street in Paris called Rue de l’Ouest. Finally, I had removed myself from the company of Joe the Lion and all my other friends and lovers, decamped to California, and holed up in a rented room in Berkeley. I had started work on a novel that would display to the world the depth and understanding of my sorrowing soul, and at night sometimes I would lie in my room feeling alone and friendless and contemplate the ache in me with a distinct sense of anticipatory pleasure, like a child watching his lima bean sprout on a damp paper towel in a dish.

  That fall I began graduate school at UC Irvine, in the MFA writing program. There was a girl I used to see around the English department sometimes, a cute blonde with a gamine face and a Jean Seberg haircut, plump lips, snub nose, big eyes, an air of being fun to be around. One day I saw her, or thought I saw her, in the restaurant of the old student union. She was getting up from the table where she had been chatting with some friends, and as she carried her tray to the trash, I decided to go over and say hi.

  I’m not sure how long it took—not more than a few seconds—for me to realize that this was the other blond gamine of a PhD candidate in the Irvine English Department. I had seen her before and had confused her before with her colleague. She was not as pretty as the other girl, and in place of the other’s slightly hardened pertness, she wore a doubtful, cautious half-smile, as if she knew you intended, like the rest of the world, to try to put one over on her, but she was hip to you, she was on to your methods. People had tricked her and deceived her and let her down in a number of ways, and it had left her embittered and a little punchy. She was older than me by seven years, and probably no wiser, but she knew enough, at least, to be on her guard.

  It turned out she lived on the Balboa Peninsula, where I was living at the time, and she was just about to head home in her worn old Toyota hatchback. Did I maybe want to catch a ride?

  She had a big nose and strong legs and eyes that were an unusual shade of golden green, as pale as champagne—and sad; she was a pretty unhappy girl. I looked at her, this woman who was not the one I wanted to talk to, and I wasn’t even sure if I really liked her much. I remember thinking, as I stood there weighing her offer, This is going to be a mistake.

  “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”

  Eighteen months later, I married her on the back lawn of her parents’ house in Seattle. It was, in a way that I found almost intoxicating—the way slamming a trunk lid on your hand or missing a step as you climb a stairway in the dark can be intoxicating—a great mistake.

  I did like her, as it turned out. She had an eye for furniture and flowers, a rich history of weird sex, weird jobs, and weird scenes, an ear for quirky pop tunes. I found that you could make her intensely happy for a little while with a handful of sweet peas or by putting her in a dinghy and handing her a pair of good binoculars and sending her out very early to row softly among the coots and the buffleheads. Most important for me, she had expectations of how a man ought to act and speak and shoulder his obligations, and in the three years of our marriage, I learned how to be a husband.

  But she was often miserable—sometimes justifiably, usually for no reason at all—and in a short period of time, I found that I was miserable, too. There were operatic arguments, all-night ransackings of the contents of our souls, drunken vituperations, migraines, rages, grim gray bitter mornings. We traveled, and moved, and bought a house and acquired animals, and engaged in all the standard ploys and dodges, short of having children (thank God), employed by couples trying to outrun the shadow of that first enduring mistake. The first wrong kiss, the first broken fuck, the first harsh word, the first false apology, the first slap and fiery imprint of a hand on a cheek.

  Then one spring night I found myself fleeing the house we had bought in all our desperate and mistaken hope for some kind of future together. There had been shouting and tears and a decision to maybe, maybe really, take a little time off. I was steering my car through the rain along a country highway on an island near Seattle, and it was getting dark. It had been raining for days, weeks, months. I had a tape in the player of Te Kanawa singing “Un bel di vedremo,” and there was something about the dreamy stretch of road, the gray light of dusk, the throb of grief in the voice of the singer, the helpless hopelessness of the song, and the long hard stretch behind me of months and years of living with the consequences of my mistake. Something inside me broke, and my face was wet with tears.

  I remembered Joe the Lion then, and his prediction that night years before. If he could see me now, I thought to myself. Then I turned off the music, and opened the window, and let the rain come into the car. I drove to the island’s one town. I stopped at the market and bought myself an ice-cream sandwich and sat in the car with the ball game on the radio. At some point I realized, to my horror, that I was perfectly content. I passed a few minutes working my way around the edges of the ice-cream sandwich with my tongue, listening as a wondrous rookie named Ken Griffey Jr. caught the admiration of the announcer and the crowd; just sitting there, fulfilling my terrible destiny.

  On my twenty-eighth birthday, I got a package from my father, a small padded Jiffy envelope containing two neat little bundles wrapped in white tissue paper, folded and pleated and sealed up in their pouch with the slightly neurotic precision that is characteristic of my father and that he inherited, I believe, from his mother, Irene, who wrapped everything, even the unpeeled oranges on her kitchen counter and the silverware in her drawer. He’d neglected to include a note or a card. I unwrapped the first neat little bundle and found, in their clear plastic sleeves, four baseball cards printed by the Bowman Gum company in 1952, the year my father was fourteen. There was a Bobby Adams, and a Billy Goodman, and two pitchers named Howie, Judson and Pollet. I consider myself a baseball fan and a moderately accomplished student of baseball history, but I confess that I had never heard of any of these players. Thinking that I had inadvertently opened the “auxiliary” portion of my birthday present—perhaps some duplicate cards of my father’s (he’s a collector) that he had thrown in as a kind of bonus—I tore open the other bundle and found th
ree more cards, also Bowmans, also in their archival plastic PVC-free sleeves: a Mickey Harris, and a Vern Bickford, and then a Randy Gumpert.

  Despite the note of faintly derisive disappointment inherent in any sentence that ends in the word Gumpert, I was not at all disappointed in my father’s gift. The 1952 Bowman cards are among the most serenely beautiful exemplars of a popular art form not notable, it must be admitted, for works of great beauty, serene or otherwise. The baseball card has generally and throughout its hundred-odd-year history been an object supremely suited for insertion into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Though to the true fan, any awkward old photograph of some square-jawed, wall-eyed fellow named Carlton Molesworth in a peaked beanie, staring off into the outfield on some long-gone sepia afternoon, may have a kind of poignant charm, and though some of the cards of the thirties and forties, such as National Chicle’s Diamond Star and those issued by the Leaf Gum Company, have a kind of flat, primary-colored crudeness that makes them resemble so many tiny Warhols, most baseball cards are, as specimens of the photographic and design arts, at best uninteresting to look at and, far more frequently, outright ugly.

  The 1952 Bowmans are different: Accidentally, perhaps, they attain a cool and evocative beauty. For one thing, there is no printed text on the obverse of the card, no goofy bird or Injun or sock; there is only a small simulated autograph—say, “Randall P. Gumpert”—modest, dignified, perfectly legible, stitched across the portrait of the Boston right-hander. And the portraits themselves! The ballplayers have been depicted not in the usual glum mug shots, nor in the clumsy hand-drawn caricatures found on cards of earlier years, but in an odd combination of painting and photograph, photographs not merely tinted and retouched but painted over, transformed. Bloodred Boston B’s on caps, radium-white uniforms, dreamy powder-blue textbook skies—all the colors run rich and surreal; the lace cornices of Yankee Stadium over the shoulder of Randall P. Gumpert are a luminous cake-icing green, his resolute mouth a jet-black cartoon line; and one feels that these are unquestionably idealized paintings of ballplayers. But all the men have been caught in mid-windup, or after letting fly, or stooping to short-hop a grounder, as only a photograph can catch a man with his mouth open, or his teeth clenched, or his forehead furrowed in candid anxiety over the location of this next pitch, or with his thoughts patently elsewhere, his eyes looking strangely lost and vacant the way eyes can in photographs.