Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

  Nothing was swell for me. Mealtimes were the worst. Breakfast was fine—a buffet in the hotel’s Excelsior “Ballroom” at which many people chose not to appear, so there were many empty tables, and even if you had to sit at a table with someone, they didn’t expect you to say anything besides good morning, and that I could handle. I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn’t come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine. In what I assumed to be an effort to keep us fatigued and subsequently more manageable, we were not allowed to sleep until late at night and were awakened early in the morning. We didn’t return to the hotel until about 11:00, and then there was an ice-cream social (once again in the “Ballroom”) where people could sing or play their guitars or read their poetry or juggle tennis balls or egotistically display other so-called talents. Then there was a lot of running up and down the hallways and shrieking and boys running into girls’ rooms and vice versa, all of which inevitably resulted in the regurgitation of ice cream. “Lights Out” was at 12:30. Breakfast was from 7:00 to 8:00, and the buses left the parking lot every morning at 8:30 sharp.

  Lunch and dinner were awful. We ate at places like Olive Garden or Red Lobster, usually in our own special rooms with special menus to choose from. I learned very quickly it was much easier for me to be the first to sit at a table and let others join me, because there was something about sitting down at a table that was already populated, especially if it meant sitting down beside someone, that I couldn’t do. I know when you sit beside someone for lunch in a Red Lobster, it’s not like you’re marrying them or imposing yourself on them forever, but if I did sit down beside someone I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me. But there was something about being the one sat next to that diffused some of the tension, for in that case I did not feel I was imposing myself upon someone but rather accommodating someone else’s presence (or imposition). But really it was all generally horrible and got worse every meal, and this was combined with a thousand other moments of feeling fundamentally and entirely alienated, so that by Wednesday night—Entertainment Night!—I had sort of lost my grip on whatever sense of normalcy I had arrived with. I remember at one point (genuinely) wondering if I was, perhaps, genetically altered in some way, some tiny modification of DNA that separated me from the species in some slight but essential way, the way mules can mate with donkeys but not with horses (I think). It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.

  It was a troubling thing to feel, and it made me sad. It made me cry in the men’s room of the Russell Senate Office Building. It made me not want to be alive.

  On Entertainment Night! we had a choice of going to a comedy club or a dinner theater. I decided on the dinner theater because I had never been to one and I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people.

  As we drove back to the hotel late Wednesday afternoon to prepare for our evenings on the town, Sue Kenney said to me, “I’m so excited!”

  I was looking out the window at the garbage that was strewn along the breakdown lane. Most of it made sense—soda cans, the detritus of fast-food meals, newspapers—but every once in a while there’d be something alarming, like a child’s red boot, a birdcage, a suitcase burst open, disgorging its contents. And it bothered me because each of these objects was on the shoulder of the highway for a reason, something or some things had happened to cause someone to toss a child’s boot out the window, and I felt like we were rushing past story after story, and that each story was sad. And I was thinking about this, and trying to think positively, trying to imagine a happy scenario for the odd objects I passed—a little girl had just been bought beautiful new boots, and the old ones were gleefully discarded; someone had packed for a trip to the hospital but on their way had been called by the doctor to say that it was all a mistake, their liver was not riddled with cancer, they should go home, and, undone by joy, had thrown their suitcase out the window. I was trying to put a happy face on the discarded birdcage when Sue Kenney spoke, so for a moment I didn’t answer, and she said, “Don’t you want to know why I’m excited?” She said this very pleasantly, as if it was perfectly normal to prompt someone this way, and I suppose for her it was.

  I said, “Yes—tell me.”

  “I’m wearing my evening pajamas tonight! I’m so excited!”

  “What are evening pajamas?” I asked.

  “Oh, you don’t know? I thought you would, coming from New York City and all. They’re an alternative to formal gowns. A sort of tunic worn over flowing pants. Mine are electric blue with a beaded bodice. I can’t wait to put them on!”

  “So you’re going to the dinner theater?” Evening pajamas sounded a bit posh for the comedy club.

  “Oh no,” Sue Kenney said. “I’m going to the symphony. At the Kennedy Center.”

  “I thought we had to choose between the comedy club and the dinner theater?”

  “Yes, but if those aren’t suitable for you, you can go to the symphony.”

  “What do you mean—not suitable?”

  “Well, they usually make dirty jokes about sex in comedy clubs. And use filthy language. And when my parents found out the play we were going to see promoted deviant lifestyles, they complained to the mucky-mucks and now I get to go to the symphony. Apparently there are eight of us going. I don’t have anything against popular culture and all that dirty stuff, I’d just much rather not drag my mind through the sewer.”

  When we got back to the hotel I asked one of the “mucky-mucks” if I could switch and go to the symphony and she said no, the symphony tickets were only for those people who had moral or religious objections to comedy or theater, and since I had signed up for the theater I obviously was fine with it, and besides, there were no more tickets.

  Both Dakin and Thomas had opted for the comedy club, and I could tell they thought it was faggy to go to the dinner theater. I wished I could figure out a way not to go to either, to just stay alone in my hotel room for the evening reading (Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?), but they were very paranoid about losing someone, and the buses would never leave until it was confirmed that everyone was on board. So I went out and boarded the theater-bound bus. I got on early so I could be sat next to rather than sit next to, but it turned out that more people had opted for the comedy club (surprise) so I had a seat to myself. I saw Sue Kenney huffing past in her evening pajamas, which looked like a cross between pajamas and a warm-up suit. I watched her disappear into a van with the other folk who chose not to drag their minds through the sewers of contemporary comedy and drama.

  There was something undeniably high-spirited about the scene in the parking lot. This was the one night when the American Classroom dress code was not in effect, and you could tell that everyone was feeling liberated. All the girls, like Sue Kenney, were wearing outfits specially bought for the evening, outfits that they thought revealed them in the best possible way, and so they felt perfectly revealed, and this knowledge imbued them with a confidence and gaiety that was almost palpable. And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like—the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.

  I thought dinner theater meant that you paid one price for dinner an
d theater, but I didn’t realize you did them simultaneously. I actually thought we would have dinner in one room and then go into the theater, so I was surprised to see that the tables were in the theater. I thought that only happened in Las Vegas, where I assumed it was okay to eat while watching tigers and showgirls perform, but I couldn’t imagine eating in front of actors. It seemed to me about the rudest thing you could do. Even if they turned the houselights down, there’d be the noise of the entire audience chewing.

  The tables were arranged on terraced platforms and we were instructed to sit at any table on the top two. The platforms below us were filled with mostly middle-aged women who stared unhappily at us as we passed through their midst. Most of the tables were for four or six or eight but there were a few tables on the uppermost platform for two and I knew if I sat at one of them no one would sit with me, and I was right: no one did.

  In lieu of proper menus, small cards at each place setting proclaimed:

  Welcome American Classroom!

  Tonights [sic] Menu

  Overture

  Minestrone Soup or Filed [sic] Green Salads

  Act 1

  Chicken Paprika, Vegetable Compost [sic], Rice Pilaf

  INTERMISSION

  Coffee or Tea

  Act 2

  Chocolate Zum-Zums drizzled with Raspberry Coulis

  Note:

  Vegetarians are welcome to exchange their Chicken for an

  additional serving of rice or vegetables

  Please notify your server

  A frail and elderly waitress approached me with a pitcher of water in one hand and a pitcher of what looked like iced tea in the other. They were apparently heavy, for she strained to keep them both aloft. I had a vision of both her hands snapping off at the wrists.

  “Iced tea or water.” She attempted to raise each pitcher as she named its contents, but the gesture was extremely subtle.

  “Water, please,” I said.

  As she poured the water in my glass she said, “And would you like soup or salad. You can’t have both.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  She put both pitchers down on the table and wrung her hands. “What?” she said, unencouragingly.

  “What are filed greens?”

  “What?”

  “It says here there’s a salad of filed greens. Can you tell me what they are?” I pointed to the word on the card, but she didn’t look at it.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s your basic salad. Lettuce. I’d recommend the soup.”

  “I’ll have the filed greens,” I said. I had wanted to ask her about the vegetable compost and the Zum-Zums, but before I could she said, “Suit yourself,” hoisted her pitchers, and moved to the next table.

  The first course was served quickly and almost immediately cleared, replaced with plates of chicken paprika, vegetable compost, and rice pilaf. The compost was simply that familiar and depressing medley of frozen carrots, corn, and lima beans. What made the rice a pilaf remained a mystery. As soon as everyone was served their entrées, the waitresses scurried away and the lights went down, and it was so dark you couldn’t even see your plate, let alone eat off it. Then a recorded voice welcomed us to the theater and reminded everyone to turn off their cell phones (which I found pretty ironic, given that we would be eating dinner throughout the performance). And then the curtain rose and the houselights were bumped up a bit so you could see to eat, and the play began.

  The deviant play we were seeing was the female version of The Odd Couple, starring two middle-aged actresses who had once had respectable careers in movies, followed by less-respected careers playing moms on sitcoms, and then had disappeared for a while. I wondered if this was just another step on their descent into obscurity or if perhaps they had hit bottom and starring in a dinner theater production of The Odd Couple was the beginning of a comeback. And I wondered if it was their need of money or their desire for fame that prompted them to perform in this production. There was something very dignified and brave and sad about the entire thing—the idea of what people can be reduced to, how variable one’s life is, and the awful things people do to survive—a poignant subtext that was at complete odds with the play itself. This made watching it an upsetting experience.

  And since I was on the top platform, by watching the play I also watched the audience. During the first ten or fifteen minutes everyone maintained an almost devotional raptness, but as the act continued, attention drifted away from the stage. People started eating their food, whispering to their neighbor, or not whispering to the person across the table from them. Every so often someone would hiss a piercing shush and silence would fall, but like a fire that had been insufficiently doused, the sounds of talking and eating would slowly flicker back into being.

  When the act ended, everyone clapped madly to make up for their inattention, and then the ladies all got up and stampeded toward the women’s room. I needed to use the restroom, too, but before I could get up a strange thing happened. This girl named Nareem Jabbar, who was the other delegate from New York State, came up and sat down at my table. I actually sort of liked Nareem. She lived in Schenectady and was very smart and often asked unsettling questions at the conclusion of seminars.

  She sat down in the chair across from me and said, “James, what are you doing?”

  I wasn’t aware she knew my name, and she spoke to me as if we were very old, tight friends. I was disoriented. So I said nothing.

  “James, James,” she said. “Talk to me. What are you doing, sitting here all alone?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. One of the reasons why I hate to talk to people is that when I am forced to talk I inevitably say something stupid.

  “You’re always alone,” she said. “You’re sitting here all by yourself. We can’t have that. Come join us.”

  This is something I really hate. Really, really hate—when people react to your being alone as some kind of problem for them. I knew the only reason she wanted me to come and sit at her table was that she wanted to do someone a favor. My sitting alone bothered her; it’s like how you resent those people standing up on the subway when you’re seated. It’s like they’re standing up just to make you feel bad. Sometimes there are even some seats available—half seats between big men with spread legs—but they won’t sit in them, they just stand in front of you and look exhausted and miserable and make you feel terrible because you’re sitting down. And I knew Nareem just wanted me to sit at her table because I was like some eyesore that prevented her from enjoying the show. I find it disturbing that so much seemingly altruistic behavior is really quite selfish. Even so-called saints like Mother Teresa bother me. In some ways she was just as ambitious as people like my father or anyone who wants to be at the top of their profession. Mother Teresa wanted to be the best saint, the top saint, so she did the most disgusting things she could do, and I know she helped people and relieved suffering and I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying I think she was as selfish and ambitious as everyone else. The problem with thinking this way is that if you want to avoid this kind of ambition and selfishness you should do absolutely nothing—do no harm, but do no good either. Do nothing: don’t presume to interfere with the world. I know this makes practically no sense, but it’s what I was thinking when Nareem sat down at my table.

  She must have sensed in my silence some sort of judgment or wariness (or idiocy), for she looked at me with genuine puzzlement, as if I might be a deaf-mute or something, and said, very slowly and distinctly, “There is room at our table. Would you like to join us?”

  And then I realized she was really being nice. She was sincerely being nice. She was misguided, but she was being nice. But she didn’t know what she was saying, she was saying come sit at our table as if that was something I could do. As if I could get up and sit down at her table and become a person sitting at her table. As if becoming a person sitting at her table only involved getting up and walking down a platform and sitting at her table.


  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine alone.”

  “So you’re a loser?” she said.

  “What?” I couldn’t believe she had called me a loser.

  “You’re a loner,” she said. “You like to be alone.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, that’s cool,” she said. “As long as you’re happy. But please feel free to join us whenever you’d like. Isn’t this play just about the suckiest thing you’ve ever seen?”