The Best of Youth
Page 1
THE BEST OF YOUTH
a novel
MICHAEL DAHLIE
Dedication
for Allison and for Evan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY MICHAEL DAHLIE
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Copyright
ALSO BY MICHAEL DAHLIE
A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living: A Novel
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For help with this novel, the author would like to thank Doug Stewart and Jill Bialosky, Madeleine Clark, Steve Colca, Dave Cole, Seth Fishman, Rebecca Leicht, Alison Liss, George Nicholson, Vivian Reinert, and Rebecca Schultz. Butler University, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, PEN New England, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Universty of Idaho, the Spruce Knot–Upper St. Regis Writing Residency, 5Chapters, and Broad Ripple Tavern. Dan Barden, Hilene Flanzbaum, Andrew Levy, Susan Neville, Brynnar Swenson, and everyone involved in the MFA Program and the English Department at Butler. Chris Bannon, Dave Daley, Kathrin Kollman, Frederick Mendelsohn, Christopher Miller, Gillian Munson, Esther Padilla, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ado Shmnovic, and Alexander Williams. Elizabeth Dahlie, Anne Dahlie, Susan Dahlie, David Wimberly, Trevor McProud, Gary Goldberger, Susan Lynn, Mort Lynn, Heath Albert, Cassie Albert, Gordon Goldberger, and Tatum Goldberger. And, Allison Lynn and Evan Dahlie.
PART
I
1
IT WAS TRUE THAT Henry didn’t entirely understand what, exactly, their magazine was really trying to achieve, although he enjoyed the fervor of his friends and the sort of conviction that everyone else seemed to feel over the importance of the project. And the fact was that he was happy to be included in it all, and the money he contributed was hardly substantial, at least as far as he was concerned. Thirty thousand dollars for what his comrades were billing as a magazine that would finally “challenge all this shit that gets published these days” seemed entirely reasonable, even if he himself did not feel the sort of anger everyone else seemed to feel about what publishers were putting out. Henry had even once had a job of sorts in publishing, although it had ended badly. He wasn’t particularly good at what a human resources person called “interpersonal relations,” on a professional basis at least, and after a two-month internship at a major magazine (“with a literary slant”) he left without so much as the promise of a good recommendation, to say nothing of a full-time job.
But it had been a difficult time. That was true. So maybe he wasn’t to blame for it all. Both his parents had recently died in a boating accident in Katama Bay, off Martha’s Vineyard, leaving him without much stamina for the various demands of a magazine job. The tragedy had also left him with quite a bit of money, which, if he were being completely honest with himself (and, in fact, he often tried to be), probably wasn’t very good for the more competitive aspects of his character, for as much as these dimensions of his character existed in the first place. Fifteen million dollars was hardly the sort of thing that lit a fire under him, as the saying goes. In fact, it was exactly the sort of sum that allowed Henry to imagine that he could take his time to figure out what exactly he wanted to do with his life, although even this seemed not to be such a pressing question. Mostly he wanted to meet a girl he liked and make some friends (real friends) around Brooklyn, and these things, surely, in their truest sense, in the sense that Henry believed in, were not dependent on money.
2
AND THERE WAS, in fact, a girl he was interested in. She happened to be his fourth cousin, which (according to his research) was a relation that was not only legal to date but posed absolutely none of the genetic problems that might be associated with so-called inbreeding. They only shared some kind of colonial ancestor, after all. It did, however, present a sort of psychological barrier, at least as far as this girl (named Abby) was concerned.
“I don’t want to go there, Henry,” she said one evening when, after eating a fairly heavy meal of sausages and noodles at an Austrian restaurant in Williamsburg, he confessed that he was having confusing feelings toward her.
“I mean, of course,” Henry said in response. “Of course, I don’t want to go there either. I suppose that’s why I’m bringing it up. I suppose I wanted to talk about it.”
“Yeah,” Abby replied, “but I don’t even want to talk about it. I mean, when I say I don’t want to go there, I mean I don’t even want to talk about the possibility of going there.”
“Well, that’s what I mean too,” Henry said.
“Yeah, but you brought it up,” Abby said.
“But only so we didn’t have to talk about it.”
Abby stared at Henry for several seconds before saying, “Well, I suppose I should have expected this kind of thing. You’re a strange guy, Henry. Really. But that’s good. I mean it. I really like you. In fact, I think that maybe you’re the nicest, best guy I’ve ever met. But I like you as a friend. As a cousin. Yikes! And I think we need to leave it at that. We really need to leave it at that.”
“Okay. All right. Let’s leave it at that,” Henry replied. “This is exactly why I brought it up.”
Of course, Henry understood that it was probably very unlikely that he would have the ability to “leave it at that.” He even found himself suddenly thinking he ought to try to kiss Abby—perhaps that was the sort of bold act that would really tilt things to his advantage. And perhaps Abby didn’t know about the research he had done into the legal and biological aspects of this sort of thing. That was important, after all. But just as he was having these thoughts, Abby said, “But really, Henry, let’s drop it. Let’s promise to drop it. And it’s not just that we’re cousins. We’re not a good match. So don’t try to talk me into it.”
“Of course not,” Henry said. “Of course not. We’ll leave it alone. I won’t bring it up again.”
And this time, as he said this, he decided that maybe he wouldn’t bring it up again. But the fact was that he really did want to kiss her, and he wondered i
f this particular desire really would ever go away. And he also wondered if maybe he had more of a shot with her than she was letting on. It was always so difficult to know with this sort of thing and perhaps, with time, her feelings would change.
3
IT SHOULD BE pointed out that despite the various failings in Henry’s life (whether he was bumbling as a magazine intern or awkwardly trying to seduce a relative), he was, in fact, quite capable in many other ways. He’d been, for instance, an excellent student, and not just in the colder and less humane disciplines. He’d done very well in his college creative writing classes, for example—both poetry and fiction. And this was at Harvard, of all places, so surely no one could accuse him of not having some kind of subtle and imaginative mind. One of his professors even said he ought to continue to work at his writing because he had “a real talent for this.” What exactly “real talent” meant, Henry didn’t know. But for this particular professor he’d written a lengthy, three-part short story about a ninety-one-year-old man who was caring for his younger sister, who was suffering from kidney cancer.
“It was very moving,” the instructor had said, “and I don’t say that about most of what I get in this class. Generally speaking, Ivy Leaguers don’t always make the best fiction writers.”
Henry was quite happy with this praise—it had come at a good time, since he had, only the night before, been rejected by a young woman (not a relative) who said she adored him as a friend but that the “romantic spark” just wasn’t there. It was very disappointing—and something he seemed to hear at least once a semester—but the next day he really was buoyed up by his professor’s comments.
It was a question, though, why Henry’s story had captivated his teacher, and Henry spent quite a bit of time over the next several days rereading his story and thinking about how to recapture whatever it was that had made this one turn out so well. He did at times suspect that maybe it was a one-off sort of thing, a kind of transitory inspiration, but he also determined that he was, in fact, particularly good at writing about diseases. He had done extensive and creative research concerning nephrology and cancer statistics in the United States, and, as he considered this, he thought that perhaps he might one day become one of the great advocates for people who suffered from cancer of the kidney.
There was also the possibility that he had a certain kind of affinity for old people, although Henry was much less excited about this prospect. That being said, it seemed to him more and more (as he thought about writing other stories and about who, in fact, he got along with in the world) that this might be the most accurate conclusion. He had always gotten on well with old people, and the fact of the matter was that he spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like being old—an old person with a terrible illness, an old person who couldn’t afford to take care of himself, an old person who had never been in love (real love, that is, love that was returned). Maybe that would be his stake in the world of modern literature. Certainly he hadn’t read many novels about people in their nineties. It was an appealing idea, and it stayed with him over the years following his graduation from Harvard and into his postgrad years in Williamsburg, when he eventually put up the $30,000 to launch the magazine.
4
WHY EXACTLY THE magazine was to be called Suckerhead was at first a mystery to Henry, although it was explained to him by the editor-in-chief that “it’s just so fucking funny it’s got to be the name.” It was true that Henry also found the name funny, but the fact that it was a funny name hardly justified it being the title of their literary venture.
All the same, Henry didn’t complain. “Perhaps we could call you sucker-in-chief and I could be sucker-at-large,” Henry said—after making his financial contributions, he had been named an editor-at-large. To Henry’s surprise, though, this suggestion did not go over very well. In fact, the editor-in-chief, a twenty-five-year-old named Tully—a graduate of Wesleyan—seemed quite offended. After a rushed bite of his pumpkin ravioli, Henry quickly added, “I mean, it might be pretty funny to have something like that on the masthead.”
“I want people to take us seriously,” Tully replied quickly. “We’re really trying to do something here. They’re the suckers, not us.”
Henry thought about this for a moment. “I guess that’s right,” he said at last, feeling a bit like he was somehow losing the thread of this particular conversation. “I guess that’s right.”
Losing the thread of a conversation, or the thread of his entire social world, was not uncommon for Henry, especially since he had moved to Brooklyn. But it was also the case that Henry loved Brooklyn, loved Williamsburg especially—the bars, the parties, and the people—and despite his difficulties navigating the intricacies of Brooklyn society, he embraced it all without any sort of resentment or cynicism. True, he did always feel as though things were happening just a bit beyond his reach. He was present for many of the great events—he frequented the popular music venues, ate at the newest restaurants, and was even invited to what he imagined were the most exciting parties. But he never really felt quite like he was at the heart of it all—or like he even particularly belonged to the periphery. He often suspected this was because, while there were lots of people he was friendly with and would hang around with, there was no one in Brooklyn who counted as a close friend, no one who really seemed to like him with any sort of enthusiasm, with the single (and confusing) exception of Abby.
It was not what Henry had hoped life would be like when he moved to Brooklyn (following a strange semester as a graduate student in the English literature department at the University of Michigan). He had moved to Williamsburg because of a woman—one of the few who didn’t reject him outright after he made his customary long confession (again, over starchy Northern European food) about how he was having feelings that were “just a little beyond friendship.”
This woman seemed unfazed by the confession, didn’t say she “really just wanted to be friends,” and even seemed not displeased when, after a month of dating, as she was leaving Ann Arbor for Brooklyn, Henry said that he’d like to move to Brooklyn too.
It was only four weeks after he arrived in Williamsburg (and had even bought a fairly impressive loft in one of the newer buildings on McCarren Park) that this particular woman, named Helena, left him. Or she didn’t really leave him so much as tell Henry that maybe they shouldn’t be romantically involved anymore, especially because she had started dating someone else who had indicated that he’d like to “be exclusive” with her.
It had been devastating to Henry. He was entirely shocked that she was dating someone else, that their own relationship wasn’t, itself, “exclusive,” and that she was throwing him over for this other person. To this woman, their relationship seemed to be nothing more than an odd and minor adventure. She even said as much: “I just can’t believe you’re crying like this. This is nothing. I like you. I do. But we’re only twenty-three. Why are you crying like this?”
Over the next several weeks Henry transformed a short story about an eighty-five-year-old man who had never been in love into a story about an eighty-five-year-old who had never been properly loved by another person, and he found it so moving that he sent it to about a dozen literary magazines with an unusually assertive cover letter. The typed form rejection letters came swiftly, although he did get several small handwritten notes at the bottom of the letters that said things like “Not bad!” and “This was interesting!” It was always good to get a note. Henry knew this. But the fact was that they seemed to make him feel even worse about his romantic and literary failures because somehow his feelings and artistic expression ended up meriting only a kind of booby prize. That is, his pain and his art weren’t laughed at as cliché and ridiculous—his pain and his art were appreciated. But they were appreciated only enough to justify a few mild words of encouragement. And mild words of encouragement are hardly what a man wants to hear when he’s digging deeply into his emotions and his artistic imagination.
; All the same, Henry didn’t give up on the story, and later he even passed it along to the fiction editor at Suckerhead, although with the clear understanding that there was, of course, no obligation to publish it.
“Only if you like it,” Henry said.
“Sure,” the fiction editor replied. “I’ll give it a read and let you know what I think.”
5
DESPITE HENRY’S difficulties in Brooklyn, however, he was sure that he had a friend in Abby. She was a real friend—someone with whom he had meaningful conversations, and who seemed to like him a great deal, and all this continued even after his embarrassing confession. And because Henry needed Abby’s friendship, and because he secretly believed they might, in fact, one day “get together,” as the saying goes, he didn’t flee the friendship after the rejection, as he might have done in the past, but instead put forth a brave face and accepted his lot.
And just a month or so after they’d had the conversation about Henry’s confusing feelings, Abby even invited him away for a weekend to visit a farm in Vermont. The farm was owned by her aunt (an aunt who was no relation to Henry) and the trip away was “just as friends,” as Abby made clear, adding with a bit of a smile, “So don’t try any of that incest shit with me, all right?”