by Robert Cohen
It was the sort of bad luck Don was famous for. People said you made your own luck and Teddy supposed that was true up to a point—it was why he ran on the treadmill like this every morning—but the point was not as flexible as it used to be. Nothing was, it seemed, when you were fifty-two. Fifty-three.
His heart thudded against his ribs. His right knee was showing signs of meniscus fatigue. He felt a surge in the current, a kind of electrical empathy, as if he and the treadmill were old running partners huffing their way home, and not a man alone in an insulated basement with $700 worth of sporting equipment. He gripped the handles hard, holding on. Goddamnit, here was a position he could hold: not stillness, but motion; not tranquillity, but noisy, pounding labor. Blind persistence. Putting one foot in front of the other, again and again, while the rubberized mat unfurled beneath him like the flattest, most unvarying of rivers. This he could do. Never mind his recent trials, both medical and legal. Never mind the school board. Never mind that Gail had failed to present him with a birthday present at dinner, and that there was no present from his daughters either, or for that matter no card. So what? He was a grown man, not a greedy and dependent child, mooning after the attention of his loved ones, but a vigorous, determined adult of fifty-two. Fifty-three…
Finally he’d had enough and flicked off the machine. His towel smelled salty and rank; his shirt clung to his ribs like a second skin. He left it there, rolled up on his chest, like an animal skin half-molted. Water rushed through the pipes overhead. Mimi taking her shower. By the time she was finished the hot water would be depleted, the mirror lost in steam, the bar of Lifebuoy slim as a wafer. What an uphill battle it was, getting yourself clean.
Now he heard Gail’s footsteps in the kitchen. The dull whine of the coffee grinder, the ticking of Bruno’s paws across the floor. Mimi would be down in a few minutes, wet-haired and irritable, unhappy with her clothes. Gail, looking up from one or another domestic task she seemed increasingly ambivalent about performing, would make a motherly, affectionate joke—or a not-so-motherly, not-so-affectionate joke—after which with astonishing but not unprecedented suddenness Mimi would wind up in tears. There would be slammed drawers, and operatic threats and complaints, and inevitably a portion of breakfast would succumb to gravity and find its way to the floor, where bony old Bruno would trot over to lick it up. That was how it would go. The dog’s presence at their feet, his goofy and enduring goodness, would allow for a truce. Then the room would grow still. Then after a while the stillness itself would become a problem, as stillness does. Dad’s absence would be remarked upon by both parties, if not resented, if not singled out for blame for pretty much everything that was wrong. Such were the statistical probabilities of the morning. The coffee, the newspaper, the fruit shakes, the fights, the dog, the blame, the toast. The rituals of a household patiently assembling itself. Making its own luck.
Ten more sit-ups, Teddy thought. Because of the lamb.
2
The Very Exquisite Melancholy of Acting Vice Principal Pierce
The very exquisite melancholy of Acting Vice Principal Pierce was a sight to behold. He was tall and skinny, fair-haired, with a loose, bent-shouldered gait. His smile for all its brightness was easily erased; it slipped off his mouth like a glove. He had no wife. No wife and no children. If you ran into him at the supermarket after school, you’d catch him floating thoughtfully down the immaculate aisles, pushing a cart with almost nothing inside it. Chicken breasts, lettuce, yogurt, and wine. He drove an old, long-finned Dodge with New York plates and a snaking crack in the side window—the scar, it was rumored, of some errant gunshot back in the city. A jealous husband? A drug deal gone bad? Nobody knew. The car’s shocks, as if bending to the weight of the driver’s secrets, sagged and sighed.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. P.”
“Hey.”
Still, Oren Pierce was that rare thing: a vice principal who wasn’t an asshole. He was boyish, congenial, good-looking, and all in all, rather easy to avoid. He was rarely to be found in his office. He rarely yelled. He rarely indulged in pointless power plays or random disciplinary actions. When he encountered students in the hallways he rarely asked to see their bathroom passes, and when he did and found them wanting he rarely gave out detentions. He had only been promoted, if a promotion it was, a few months before; he was still finding his way. Every afternoon he stalked the labyrinthine corridors with his clip-on walkie-talkie, a minotaur in black denim, lingering attentively at the doorways of the classrooms, the teachers’ lounge, the computer lab, the gleaming gym with its dangling, clustered ropes. His face loomed against the windows, as if looking for something—a way out, a way in, it wasn’t clear. Meanwhile he circled the peripheries.
“Hey, Mr. P, I think they’re looking for you down at the office.”
Oren nodded. The school, or half the school anyway, had been left in his care, a challenge to which he had no choice but rise. Apparently Teddy Hastings had tapped him for the vice principal job last summer, and then gone off on his abrupt sabbatical—gone off, it was said, like a wayward rocket, in a wobbly, flaming spiral—leaving no instructions or navigational instruments behind. Even now, the fallout of Hastings’s departure had not yet settled into clarity. The budget, half a dozen curricular issues, and at least one knotty tenure case were still unresolved, and now of course there was the Blackburn fiasco, all of which required some rigorous vetting from Oren and his fellow vice principal, Zoe Bender, with whom he shared power.
It was hardly a fair arrangement. Zoe, with her eighteen years of distinguished service, her hard-won doctorate in moral development, her handsome Eileen Fisher ensembles and officious pageboy haircut, had both the will and the tools to be acting principal; moreover, she had the experience, having stepped into Teddy Hastings’s shoes many times in the past, even on some occasions when his feet were still in them. Zoe was a skilled administrator, it must be said. On In Service days she brought in big, flaky homemade pies and left them on the table in the teachers’ lounge with a note (“ENJOY!”) she never signed, though no one failed to recognize the handwriting. The secretaries adored her. Parents sought her out at concerts. Her office was full of tributes, framed photos, memory books. Why hadn’t she been named acting principal? Only a flagrant act of perversity, of reckless, heedless passive-aggression—all qualities for which Teddy Hastings was famous—would seek to deprive her of the title and salary that were rightfully hers. But then Zoe Bender was something of an expert in the field of deprivation. She had made her mark in that area, it was said, a long time before.
As for Oren, he’d made a mark, or a smudge anyway, in a number of areas. That was the problem. His childhood had been a shower of gold. Doting parents, Quaker day schools, piano, chess, a tasteful but lucrative bar mitzvah, summer camps of every kind…no comforts were denied him, no deep wounds were lodged. In high school he’d been popular and canny, high-achieving; the girls had favored him with their blessings, his garage band was the best in town. Flying off to college, shooting down the runway in that big, gleaming jet, sunlight sparking giddily off the wings, his eyes had grown moist from the sheer dazzle of his future. But somehow when he got to Stanford, he never quite managed to land. For years he’d skidded from department to department, adding and dropping courses, trying on majors in the same inquisitive and fastidious manner he tried on clothes. Nothing fit. For years he’d been told he was a cool, gifted, creative person. But gifted how? Creative in what way? In his poetry workshop, he specialized in white space. In the painting studio, the old masters he sought to emulate turned their backs on him. He could stretch out a canvas perfectly well; what he could not do was fill one. All through his youth he’d understood, with precocious solemnity, that somewhere just out of view, in the banquet room of his future, an extraordinary meal was being prepared for him alone. Now came the hard part: narrowing his appetites to a single dish. After so much promise, no one actuality proved enough; too much
of the world’s plenitude was missing. And so he wound up like a lot of his classmates, loitering in cafés, reading poetry and art criticism of a theoretical nature and writing notes in his journal even he couldn’t bring himself to reread.
He was good at smoking hash, actually. He was pretty goddamn masterful at that.
The drugs he’d done along the way, that was small, ephemeral stuff mostly, gone up in smoke. His dreams by now had calcified; the fine point of his will had frayed. The hash, looking back, had been a holding action, a way of stopping time while the equity of his potential gathered interest. But there was no stopping time. It went ahead and did its thing, whether you were with it or not.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Pierce.”
For years now he’d been wandering through the desert of his unformed intentions—though he preferred to see it as a quest—following lines in the sand from one hopeful and shimmering vision to the next. Always beginning, then ending, then beginning again, a motion in search of a motive, a train in search of a track. Even after his father had died, and his mother began to fail; even after his first love had broken his heart, and he’d retributed for it with his second; even after his various graduate studies in law and film and rabbinical school and social work had come to nought; even after his friends, one by one, had jumped ship, swum to the comforts of shore, and begun to take root in the quotidian terra firma—which always looked like quicksand to him—he’d drifted on, until finally, after a decade of disappointment, of keeping all options open not closed (“You like to look over people’s shoulders,” Sabine told him once, “especially your own”), he’d arrived here, at river’s end, where there were practically no options whatsoever.
Well, he supposed it was progress of a sort. The end of his beginnings, his false starts and hopeful embarkations. He had been a luftmensch, an aspirant, too long. Time to burrow in and build himself a life from the ground up.
“Wassup, Mr. Pierce.”
These days he defined himself more by what he wasn’t than by what he was. He was not a lawyer. Neither was he an artist, a rabbi, an independent filmmaker, a psychiatric social worker. These were his lost boys, the shadow selves he’d failed to become along the way. But perhaps that was being too harsh on himself, Oren thought. Perhaps he’d actually succeeded—succeeded in avoiding these false selves, thereby maintaining his freedom to become the formidable and significant person he was even now in the process of becoming.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce, can I get a late pass?”
“I think Ms. Bender’s looking for you, Mr. Pierce.”
Whom did they see when they saw him? Someone too different to learn from, or too similar? The mirror still offered, floating in the amber of his irises, the fossilized particles of his youth. Traces of it too were in his excitable cheeks, his high, avid brow, his golden dome of corkscrewed curls. But there were hints of maturity—or was it dissipation?—as well. His face had grown longer. The first white hairs, unnaturally elongated and smooth, had begun to insinuate themselves at his temples. He was no longer the youngest person in the room. He’d turned the corner somehow since his arrival in Carthage. Or perhaps the arrival itself had changed him. He remembered winding around the traffic rotary that cold October evening—broke, gaunt, pleasantly strung out on speed, peering through a windshield fogged with his own breath, looking for the unmarked road that might lead him to Sabine’s house, to which of course he had no directions. People in shapeless sweaters stared at him blankly from the crosswalks. What, were you supposed to stop for pedestrians up here, when there were so few of them, and they were dressed so badly? Huddled over the dashboard in his black leather coat, wild-haired and bug-eyed, Oren must have looked like some anarchist or refugee, an outlaw in midflight. And in a sense he was. In flight from a life far too flight-heavy already, and hence in flight on some level from flight itself.
Ah, the frequent flier, his father used to greet him, half admiringly, half not, on the occasional stopover in South Jersey. How’s the air up there anyway?
Well, now he knew. They both did. The air was thin; it would not sustain weight. Which was why no sooner did he alight in a new city—Seattle, Paris, Prague, Ann Arbor—than he began plotting his departure for the next. And now he’d left New York, which he’d supposed the final stop, in flight from all the venues in which he’d whittled away the last golden shavings of his youth: Columbia Law School (two years), NYU film school (eight months), Hebrew Union College (three months), and the CUNY program in social welfare studies (six months); from all of which he had, depending on whom you asked, either not chosen to graduate (his view) or chosen not to graduate (his therapist’s) or made no choice regarding graduation whatsoever (everyone else’s). In flight as well from Sabine, and his mother, and from a dozen other once amiable relationships that had ossified or attenuated or somehow gone wrong. In flight from his many haunts and habits, the bars and coffee shops, the movie houses, the hotdog-and-papaya joints, the washed-out light at Julian’s, the narrow underground aisles of the Strand, the spindly, yellow-skinned rotisserie chickens he’d buy at the Korean grocers and pick the wings off with his fingers. Yes, he’d given them all up. To succeed in life, his therapist liked to say, one had to make choices, to say yes to some things and say no to others. That was how the maturity business operated. And everyone agreed Oren needed maturing. Even the people he did not write checks to for $105 an hour agreed on this point.
“Dude, I fell asleep. I forgot it was even on.”
The first no was to his therapist. This to show them both he was serious. The second no was to the city itself. The third, renouncing all options to his rent-controlled studio in Alphabet City, was the most fateful no of all. He’d hesitated, down at the Carthage post office, before dropping his notarized letter through the OUT OF TOWN slot. It seemed an irretrievable message. And so it was. Even now he still dreamed of that apartment in all its shitty, claustrophobic glory, the blue-veined bathtub in the kitchen, the galaxy of cracks on the ceiling, the parched aspiring tendrils of the coleus plants, all those webby, intricate designs that had held him in place for five years. Who was living there now? It didn’t matter: Oren Pierce was not. That bridge was a cinder. He had a new place now. A new life. New goals.
He’d learned a few things about goal-making since moving to Carthage, had found a strategy of sorts laid out in the administrator’s handbook in his office. First you identified your particular need areas, then you reconfigured your systems and procedures to achieve them. The goals had to adhere to certain requirements. They had to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bound. SMART goals.
“Hey, Mr. P.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Wassup, Mr. Pierce.”
If on close analysis the choice of Carthage was not strictly, or even loosely, his own—he’d chosen it because Sabine had scored a job there, and he was in reckless, abject pursuit of her at the time—then he would refrain from close analysis, from any analysis at all. The facts on the ground were simple. He was here. And here he would stay. Because you had to be some where, apparently. And if you were going to be somewhere, you couldn’t ask for a more congenial, low-impact environment than Carthage, with its cornfields and dairy farms and craft collectives, its postcardlike downtown in which one could buy, if one chose, something like eight different varieties of maple syrup. True, Oren didn’t care for maple syrup, or any of the breakfast foods that went with it, pancakes and waffles and so on. But he liked the idea of maple syrup, of having a cabinet at home—of having a home at home—with maple syrup and all that other heavy, bland American stuff on the shelves, a place where you could either make pancakes and waffles or not, according to your personal preference, as the light streamed through the windows and the birds twittered musically in the trees. And that was what Carthage offered. A healthy grounding in the essentials. Weather, shelter, good light, local foods. A town free of urban pressures and noise, urban intrusio
ns.
So free in fact was his new home of urban pressures and noise and intrusions that it struck Oren on first glance as incredibly boring and unreal, an impression his second and third glances did little to change. The trouble with Carthage, he thought, was that it resembled not so much an actual town as a movie location, a movie about a small, boring, unreal town like Carthage. Oren had worked on such a movie, as it happened, two years back, a dismal independent called The Unknowables, directed by his friend Roger Barstow from NYU. Roger was one of those fiery, long-maned, take-no-prisoners young-Turk types, as Roger himself would cheerfully tell you. What he wasn’t was a director. Among the crew the film was dubbed The Unwatchables. It had some minor success on the film festival circuit, played the Thirteenth Street Quad for a week, then went straight to the back of the video stores. Oren logged no little time in the back of video stores these days himself. Such was the social life of a single man stranded in the provinces.
True, looking back, the decision to follow Sabine up here to Carthage—moody, unreliable Sabine—was itself rather dismal and independent, given Oren’s antipathy for small, boring, unreal towns, and also his academic status at the time, a mere three credits short of taking his master’s from CUNY, and also of course his romantic status: that Sabine had, to be ruthlessly linear about the chronology, already broken up with him two months before.
“There’s this dependency issue,” she’d announced the day the job came through, toweling dry her hair after a shower. “Like part of me wants to stay with you and part of me doesn’t, and I can’t figure out which part is the good, admirable part and which part is the bad, cowardly part.”