by David Hicks
“There are bills to be paid.” A voice from the back: Troy Dougherty, who had yet to hand in either of the two essays required for the class.
“But what are those bills for?” Flynn said. “I mean, look at you, Troy, you drive a red Miata, so you had to get that job at the department store catching shoplifters so you can pay for your car loan and insurance, so you didn’t read Walden because hey, you don’t have the time, so you don’t ever think about how you’re living your life, right?”
“Right,” Troy said. “I’m doing fine. I like my job; it’s good for my career. I probably make more money than you do.”
“An unexamined life is not worth living,” Flynn said.
“Socrates,” Wanda said.
“Was Socrates an American?” Troy asked.
Wanda rolled her eyes, and Flynn sighed. He despised Troy. Loathed the very sight of him. He wanted to flunk him for the course, but knew he would end up giving him a D, if only so that he would never have to see him on campus again.
“Did Socrates have credit card debt?” Troy asked.
“Listen,” Flynn said, addressing everyone, “don’t you want to just, I don’t know, go to Europe for a year, bum around, have some fun, instead of starting your careers already? I mean, you’re so young!” Flynn thought of the unused Eurail pass he had bought before 9/11, before Rachel had moved in with him. As soon as he got his PhD he had planned to go to Europe for a few months before returning to New York and looking for a teaching job. Even though it was only five years ago, he felt far removed from the person he was in those days—the new millennium launched, his glittering potential as yet unrealized. One night he had gone out with his friend Peter, and they had stumbled home through Washington Square Park at two in the morning, singing loudly. Where was that person now?
“Something I’m not handling well,” Flynn told Rachel that evening. She was in bed with Nathan, watching television, with Mollie the Collie lying at their feet, even though Flynn had repeatedly requested that the dog be prohibited from their bed. “It’s not like when we were in college,” he said. “I mean, I admit, SUNY Binghamton was no hotbed of intellectualism, but I can recall thinking, engaging in spirited conversations, you know, about ideas.”
“Hotbed?” Rachel said. “Use real words, Hawk.”
Rachel delivered statements loudly and with precision, as if perpetually engaged in public discourse or the star of her own reality TV show. When they were first married, she had worn her red hair long and thick, but she had recently cut it short, shorter than his, and added streaks of fuscia. A wisp of it hovered over her left eye. “Anyways you drank a lot in college, as I recall.”
“No, in my classes, I meant.”
A rerun of Seinfeld came on, and she turned up the volume. “Oh my god I love this one!” She grabbed the phone and jabbed a speed-dial button; she and her sister would watch it together.
Flynn stood at the doorway, thinking that the show’s off-color humor might be inappropriate for Nathan. When they had first moved to White Plains, he had steadfastly refused to put a television in the bedroom. It would be like admitting defeat, he said; that’s when you know a couple has stopped having sex. But once he finally relented, he was grateful. It gave him some time to himself. After that, the televisions kept appearing—a total of four now, one in each bedroom, the big one in the family room, and a little one mounted in the kitchen. If he objected to any of her “impulse purchases,” Rachel would laugh at him. “I love you, Hawk,” she’d say, “but you really need to lighten up.”
Flynn went back to the kitchen and saw the stack of bills he had left on the table. He knew, from an article he’d read, that people who shopped a lot were unhappy, trying to fill a void. He wondered if he was the one who had made Rachel unhappy. What sad life had he assigned to her, proposing marriage out of a sense of obligation, telling her he loved her when he didn’t even know what love was?
In therapy, he had retraced his marriage back to the beginning, back to their first meeting, trying to locate a time when he had been madly in love, when his heart had been full with her. If he could remember such a time—if they both could—then, in theory, they could reclaim, and reconstruct, that original love. But he couldn’t. They had met in college, but she was ruddy-cheeked and naïve then, and something about her green eyes—she seemed to make them sparkle at will—had both attracted him and warned him off. Five years after graduating, however, when he had returned for his college reunion, she had shown up at his alumni baseball game thirty pounds slimmer, with a cute haircut and a white top that showed off her freckles. When they had gone to her apartment afterwards she had suddenly run to the bathroom and vomited, then stayed in bed all night while Flynn took care of her. He would later find out she had an eating disorder, and she had starved herself for weeks before the reunion, knowing he’d be there. He talked about all of this to his therapist, and when she asked him to describe some fun moments they’d had together, he told her about the time they drove to Virginia Beach and pulled over to have sex in the car; the time they played golf with her father, sneaking kisses behind her father’s back; the glow on her face as she came down the aisle at their wedding; the time she sang the Barbra Streisand song “My Man” to him, her eyes full of love. But he also remembered his agitation over her aggressive driving on that trip to Virginia; his consternation over her repeated cheating during the golf game; the unease he felt during their wedding, sensing the whole thing was a façade; his discomfort when she sang to him so theatrically.
Rachel laughed at something her sister said on the phone, with Nathan still lounging in the crook of her arm and the dog fast asleep at her feet. She was not the kind of person who needed therapy. She was perfectly happy with the way things were. She knew who she was. And she adored her husband, her son, her house, and her job. He was the one with the problem. He was the one hamstrung by guilt and strife, all stemming from his Catholic discomfort with flamboyance, bombast, or anything that smacked of narcissism. What on earth was wrong with him?
*
A sunny day. Fairfield was green and resplendent. Flynn had taken his students outside, and they were sitting in a semicircle as he read to them, no longer caring what they thought.
“‘No man ever followed his genius until it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. . . . If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, —that is your success.’”
Flynn took off his glasses. Most of the students were looking up at him expectantly; Audrey was watching two shirtless men tossing a baseball.
“That’s from ‘Higher Laws,’” Flynn said. “Page seventy-nine.” He knew he should say something else to spur their participation, but he was afraid they would ruin it for him.
Finally, Mark Pietrovic nodded, looking down at the book in his lap. “Awesome,” he said.
Chuck, who was student teaching that semester, went back on his elbows and blew out a sigh. “I’ve had a bad week,” he said, and Q patted him on the shoulder. “That . . . was medicinal.” He sat up and pointed to the book. “What he’s saying here, Hawk, is we should get our shit together so we don’t go up or down with everyone else, and we’ll just feel this . . . peace. Simple things will make us happy.”
“Yeah, like the other day,” Q said, “I was at a concert and my friends were getting all coked up, but I told them no thanks and they got all up in my face about it. But I felt good about myself, you know? Resolute.”
Cocaine? Flynn thought.
Wanda raised her hand. “This is telling you to be the person you know you really are, to do what you know is right, even if your father and your boyfriend tell you you’re a loser and your whole family thinks you’re wor
thless.” She smiled sadly, her eyes watering.
Then Troy spoke up from his spot under the tree: “This is telling you, Hawk, that you gotta take the bull by the balls!”
After class, Chuck and Wanda followed Flynn to his office, chatting with him about what they were going to do after graduation. Chuck was going to stay on at the school where he was student teaching, and Wanda, who had been admitted to grad school, said she was now thinking of taking a “gap year,” maybe traveling for a while. As Flynn took his place at his desk, they stopped talking, and Chuck closed the door.
Wanda sat down, leaned forward, and clasped her hands in a gesture that smacked of such heartfelt sympathy that Flynn wanted to laugh at her. “So . . . we want to know if you’re all right,” she said.
“Yeah, we heard you had cancer,” Chuck said.
Wanda opened her hands. “If there’s anything we can do . . .”
Flynn tilted back his chair. “Cancer?”
“You don’t look so good, man,” Chuck said.
Flynn shook his head. This had never happened before. Students talked to him about how stressed they were; they told him about their breakups, their homesickness, their relationship problems; but they never asked about him; they never wondered how he was doing.
“I’m not cancer,” he said.
Wanda’s brown eyes were full of concern. “Well then what are you?” she said.
*
When Flynn arrived home, he went straight to the bathroom mirror, peered at the dark semi-circles under his eyes, and weighed himself. The last time he had done so, a year and a half ago, he had weighed 208. Now: 157.
He walked through the kitchen, the dog following him, and fell onto the couch. He wedged a pillow under his neck and closed his eyes, trying to lighten the weight of his head, trying to lessen the effect of his encroaching migraine. During his drive home he had been hit with another dizzy spell, and when he turned onto his street he had rammed into a stone pylon at the entrance to his neighbor’s driveway.
He rubbed his neck and worried about his insurance rates.
For years, he had been living minute by minute, focusing on the next chore, the next thing he had to do. But what had happened? He hadn’t even noticed the deterioration.
He closed his eyes, trying to will away the pain. If he could take just five minutes. If he could completely rest his head for five minutes.
But Rachel and Nathan would be home soon.
He got up and took some hamburger meat out of the refrigerator, along with the half-empty bag of Ore-Ida French fries and a head of iceberg lettuce. As he turned on the oven and made patties, he ticked off the warning signs: the dried blood in his mouth every morning; his erratic driving; six to eight Advils a day. And all the pathetic weeping—in the car to and from work, upstairs late at night, on the floor of the family room after everyone was asleep.
You’re a sad dad, Nathan had said a few days ago, after Flynn had read him a Dr. Seuss book. It’s too bad that Daddy’s so sad.
And now, the frightening loss of weight. He hadn’t realized what a habit it had become, hitching up his pants all the time. After putting the burgers on the frying pan and the French fries in the oven, he went to his bedroom closet, gathered all his belts, and went down to the basement with Mollie the Collie, who was wondering about her own dinner. Flynn put the belts on his workbench and began boring new holes in them. He was working on the last one when he heard the garage door open and close, followed by the kitchen door slamming, Rachel’s footsteps above him, and then her voice screeching his name. He stayed quiet, gripping the augur.
Upstairs, the kitchen was filled with smoke. Rachel was running water onto the burnt burgers and the frying pan, trying to open the window at the same time. Flynn rushed over and shut off the oven—but the fries were burnt as well.
“What the hell, Hawk!”
Nathan plugged his nose and looked wide-eyed at them as they ran around opening windows and doors. “Disaster!” he shouted. “This is a disaster!” Flynn plucked him up, carried him into his room, and opened the window there, too.
Once things calmed down, he got on the phone and ordered a pizza.
Afterwards, with Nathan in his room watching a Thomas the Tank Engine video and Flynn standing on a chair, installing one of the smoke detectors they had bought when they had first moved into the house, Rachel asked where on earth Mollie the Collie was, and when he told her, she went downstairs to get her. When she came back up, she stood below Flynn with her hands on her hips, pooching out her belly. “Hawk, what happened to the car?”
Flynn lowered his screwdriver. “I’m so sorry, Rache. I got dizzy—”
“Do you have any idea how much that’s gonna cost? Did you hit someone? Are we going to be sued?”
Flynn shook his head, came down from the chair, and tugged out the waist of his pants. “Look, Rache, I weigh—”
“Are you having an affair?”
Rachel’s eyes reddened, and Flynn saw, and felt, what it must be like to be married to a man who didn’t love you. Who didn’t even like himself. Who had no idea who he was.
*
That night, Flynn stayed in the attic until well after midnight, revising the draft of his conference paper and preparing for the final week of the semester. He was surprised to feel so lonely, so removed from everyone, in his own home.
Soon he would be renovating this room, to make it Nathan’s, and the baby would take over Nathan’s room downstairs. Flynn would keep the bookcase up here, but take out his books and replace them with Nathan’s. He stared at the spines: Hypocrisy and Ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Work (an outgrowth of his dissertation); Living Through Others (a multicultural composition reader, co-edited with a colleague at Fairfield); and Leading Half-Lives: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (an anthology he had co-edited with Gayle Cullen). They would be enough to ensure him tenure, but not a single one of his books—or articles, for that matter—had been read by anyone he knew.
Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.
Kruger had been talking about ditching it all and going back to his music (he had once been a jazz pianist), even if it meant a much-reduced income. A year ago another of Flynn’s colleagues had quit right after earning tenure, and he now owned his own Harley-Davidson shop in Wyoming.
But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither?
He looked out the attic window, at the starless sky. In his Early American Lit class he would be covering the last chapter of Walden. They would discuss the one-hundred-year-old bug, the one that came out of the larvae inside an old oak table, warmed to its hatching by a lamp. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society . . . may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
He would write on one side of the board, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. He would talk about his father, about the old notebook he had found in the attic filing cabinet, where his father described his dream of quitting his job selling kitchen parts and becoming a baseball coach once Flynn went off to college. It was dated a month before his death.
On the other side of the board, he would write, Awaken.
He would write, Simplify.
He would write, Renew.
He slumped into his desk chair. What would it be like to enjoy his perfect summer at last?
How long had it been?
Since September 10th, 2001.
He reached out for the economy-sized jar of Advil he kept on his desk, and downed four without any water.
*
The first surprise was all the people: fifty or sixty, on an unseasonably warm May afternoon.
The second was how unremarkable the pond looked. How democratic.
The third was the facsimile of the shed. A tiny edifice. More than one guest and you would feel claustrophobic.
And finally, the pile of stones. It was customary for visitors to toss them onto the original site of the cabin, and Flynn had imagined it as the size of a highway department supply. Instead it was a modest mound.