Larry and the Meaning of Life

by Janet Tashjian

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” I asked. You’d think volunteering to donate a major organ would get you off the commuting list.

  “The house is a mess,” Janine said. “Let me get dressed—we can go for a walk.”

  I peeked my head through the small space. “What’s going on? Are you with Gus?”

  “Will you stop? He’s the only reason I’m keeping it together since Brady died.”

  Mike returned and asked me to help him stack wood; I felt as if he was babysitting me while Janine got ready. She emerged in a few minutes, and we hiked down the road to Walden.

  “Can you imagine either of us giving a kidney to betagold?” Janine asked. “The organization double-checked her application—all that charitable work is true. I know it sounds sick, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she planned this whole thing as some new way to mess around with your mind.”

  “Not to sound egotistical, but I was thinking the same thing. Of all the kidneys, in all the towns, in all the world, she signs up for mine.”64

  “Seventeen people die every day waiting for a kidney transplant. If a living donor doesn’t volunteer, they have to wait for someone to die.”

  “Maybe betagold got tired of waiting for me to croak, and this is the closest she could get,” I said.

  When we came to Brady’s favorite cove, Janine choked up.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Maybe we can look on craigslist for a new puppy.”

  “I don’t want a new puppy,” she snapped. “I want Brady.”65 She answered her cell on the first ring. “I was just thinking about you,” she said. “Everywhere I turn, something reminds me of Brady. It’s just so hard.”

  It didn’t take me long to figure out she was talking to Gus. Brady’s death had given him Janine’s full emotional attention on a platter.66 From my hiding place behind the nearest tree, I couldn’t help but hear her make plans to meet Gus later.

  “Didn’t you just see him at the house?” I asked as we set out on our hike.

  “He’s been amazing. He was on the phone with my father last night being so supportive.”

  I felt a pang of envy for Janine, Mike, and Katie all playing utopian Brady Bunch in a giant Victorian with Gus. “Why was he talking to your dad?”67

  “My parents were worried about me and wanted to make sure I was okay. Plus, Gus was talking to my father about some investments.”

  I stopped walking, as much to catch my breath as to find out more.

  “My father’s thinking of investing in some side projects with Gus. I don’t know the details.”

  I told her about the survey plans I’d found hidden on the other side of the pond. “The last people who tried to develop land out here got shut down. I hope he’s not taking your father for a ride.”

  “All I know is, I couldn’t have dealt with losing Brady without him.”

  Janine and I hiked the rest of the way in silence. I appreciated the fact that our relationship was wide enough to embrace such mutual solitude.68 The setting was idyllic and the brisk pace invigorating, but I felt anxious. Was Janine getting in over her head? Was Gus working a scam on her parents? As we reached the crest and gazed down to the water below, betagold seemed the least of my worries.

  When I pulled my bike into the Walden parking lot the next day, the first person I saw was betagold. She was standing next to the bike rack; I had to avoid catching the tubes of her oxygen tank as I ran the cable and lock around the frame of my bike.

  “My body is falling apart,” she said. “But I have money and a specific blood type. Let me buy your kidney.”

  I told her selling an organ was against the law and I wasn’t interested in joining the black market, thank you very much.

  “What’s in the past is done,” she said.

  “Because it’s convenient for you? I don’t think so.” She had probably lost thirty pounds since I first met her; she looked gaunt and pale. I wished her good luck in finding another donor.

  She put her hands on her knees and breathed deeply. Even though she’d ruined my life several times, I couldn’t leave her in such pain. When I asked if she wanted me to call 911, she told me she had these spells several times a day.

  “Look, I admit what I did was wrong,” betagold said. “I apologize. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “No, we can’t. Now if you’re feeling better, I’ll be on my way.”

  When she grabbed me by the arm, her grip was weak. “How about if I offer you something better than money?”

  “I doubt you have anything I need.” I said goodbye and headed toward the pond.

  After a moment, I turned around. She was dragging the oxygen tank behind her, trying to catch up. I waited by the cabin replica until she did.

  “You know that hole in the woods you’re so fond of?” she asked. “How about if I told you I know people on the zoning board who can preserve that land.”

  “Are you trying to bribe me into giving you my kidney?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And how do you know about that hole?”

  She told me she’d read my books.69 “Don’t think of it as a bribe. Think of it as an exchange.” She dragged the oxygen tank up the step and sat on the replica of Thoreau’s cot. When a group of tourists came by, betagold and I leaned back against the inside wall so as not to ruin their shot.70

  “After taking care of my grandchildren, I’ll leave the bulk of my estate to the charitable organization of your choice,” betagold continued. “An anticonsumerism group, a foundation for people working in sweatshops, a nature conservancy.” She took a deep breath from her oxygen mask. “You can come with me to the attorney’s. She can adapt my will according to your requests.” She looked me straight in the eye; as sick as she was, her blue eyes remained clear. “My estate is worth three million dollars now. That kind of money can sow a lot of good in the world.”

  “As much as I’d love to contribute to the betterment of the planet, my internal organs are not for sale.” I watched her fight for each breath. She was just someone’s grandmother, after all. “No offense, but I can’t imagine part of me being part of you, no matter how much you pledge to charity.”

  “How about your criminal record? Or getting you reinstated at Princeton?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “I know lots of things. You should know that my brother-in-law has been on the board there for years. Your academic future can be back on track with a phone call.”

  I lifted up my shirt and rubbed my back. Would I miss a kidney? Would it be worth giving up one of them to keep my favorite woods undeveloped, wipe my record clean, and get back into Princeton? Not to mention a substantial donation to a worthy charity. I leaned back in the tiny cabin and weighed the options. But even after several minutes of listening to betagold gasp for breath, I had to tell her no.

  She took the news surprisingly well. “I know you hate me, but are you sure? Thoreau himself once wrote ‘It is never too late to give up your prejudices.’”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.

  She shook my hand and wished me well. When we got back to the parking lot, she reached into her fanny pack.71 “You might want to see these.” She handed me several photographs. Janine and Gus by the fire. Janine leaning her head on Gus’s shoulder. Janine and Gus kissing.

  I returned them to her. “You could’ve doctored these in Photoshop.”

  She went into her pack again and took out a digital camera. She scrolled through the stored images, identical to the photographs. “He’s toying with her, taking advantage of his position as a teacher. Trying to rip her off.”

  The disturbing images confirmed my worst fear. The only good news was that as much as the thought of Janine and Gus infuriated me, it also meant I wasn’t paranoid.

  She held up the most incriminating picture.72 “I can get him to stop seeing her tomorrow. All you have to do is agree to the operation.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” I said. �
�She can do whatever she wants.”

  “Yes, but she’s your friend. You love her. I guarantee you, he will mop the floor with her emotions. To say nothing of her parents’ bank account. He is one tough Saudi Arabian.”

  I gave up trying to figure out Gus’s ethnicity and instead asked betagold how she planned to get Janine away from him.

  “He has his price, believe me.”

  I thought about everything Janine and I had been through. Was she really in trouble? Did I owe her this after accusing her of spying during the campaign? After killing her dog? Or was beta gold up to something even more sinister this time around? When I looked at her now, though, she only seemed sick and old.

  “Saving the land, wiping my record clean, Princeton, adjusting your will, and getting Gus to stop seeing Janine in exchange for my kidney? Is that it?”

  “And I pick up all medical costs. That’s what I’m offering.”

  I told her first I had to speak to Janine.

  “But you’ll consider it?” betagold asked.

  “I will.”

  She seemed so relieved, I thought she might collapse. As I helped her into her van, I wondered if I’d just made a deal with the devil.

  Cabin site of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond

  I found Janine down by the beach. The hood of her sweatshirt was pulled tight around her face, and she carried a small metal container. When I asked what she was doing, she opened the box. Inside were chunks of ashes.

  “Is that Brady?” I asked.

  “Everything but his head.73 At least he can be here legally now.”

  “He loved the pond. I can’t think of a better resting place.” I watched her sprinkle the ashes onto the cold, green water. The pond would be iced over in another few months. I imagined fishermen walking over Brady’s frozen remains as they cut holes in his final resting place, the cycle of life and death.

  The wind picked up, blowing bits of Brady on our clothes. I hurriedly brushed them off before Janine started crying again.

  “Look what Gus made for me.” She carefully removed a paint-by-numbers canvas of a collie from her pack. The acrylic looked grittier than our other paintings. “Gus mixed some of Brady’s ashes into the paint so I could have a little bit of him with me forever.”

  “How thoughtful,” I lied. The guy was a freak.

  We stood for several minutes watching the gray debris float across the pond. I wondered if the koi would find their way to Brady’s ashes. I waited several minutes before bringing up Gus again.

  “You’re spending a lot of time with him one-on-one,” I said. “I worry about his motives.”

  “You should spend more time on your studies and less time worried about me.”

  I took a deep breath and told her about the photographs. When Janine turned to face me, she was furious. “Where did you see pictures of Gus and me?”

  “Don’t worry about where I saw them. Have you been with him or not?”

  “Was it Katie? She’s been pissed off about us from day one.”

  “Then it’s true? There is a ‘you and Gus’?”

  She accused me of trying to trip her up linguistically, then asked me again where I’d seen the pictures.

  “Betagold,” I answered.

  The veins on the sides of her head looked ready to explode. “How short is your memory? Did you forget she framed me once before? She’s obviously doing it again!”

  “The photographs were on her camera. I saw them.” I reached for her hands, but she pushed me away. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “This is what Gus said you’d do if you found out about us,” Janine said. “Try to make it seem like a bad thing.”

  “It is a bad thing! He’s old, he’s gross, he’s supposed to be your teacher!”

  “I’m eighteen,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Obviously not. The thought of you kissing Mr. Garlic Guru makes me sick.”74

  When I reached for her once more, she pushed me so hard I fell backward with her on top of me.

  “I hate you,” she said. “You believe betagold instead of me—again.”

  I tried to hold her, but she broke free and ran up the trail.

  “I just want to help you get away from him,” I yelled.

  “The only person I want to get away from is you.”

  I could’ve chased her. I didn’t. Maybe we weren’t a couple anymore, but a spare kidney seemed a small price to pay for saving one of the most important people in my life from imminent pain. I took no pleasure in donating my kidney to betagold, but it would certainly make me happy to get Janine away from Gus.

  I rode home and called Mass General Hospital.

  When Peter heard I was bartering my future with my old nemesis, he was apoplectic with anger.75 Katie was pretty much the only one who approved of my decision to help betagold. I wasn’t so sure but needed all the encouragement I could get.

  The private investigator called as soon as I walked in the door from the day’s lesson with Gus. “Boy, you sure know how to pick ’em,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gus Muldarian—eighteen months for fraud, an acquittal for black-market smuggling in Syria, another fifteen months for forging checks.”

  I imagined Peter’s money in neat stacks on a casino table while the ball bounced inside a roulette wheel from one wrong number to the next.

  “There’s an open warrant out on him in Ohio,” the detective said. “He was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct but jumped bail. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of all the aliases.”

  “Anything to do with cults?”

  “No, but he used to work in a halfway house in Columbus for teen runaways,” the woman answered. “Until he started harassing the underage women.”

  The thought made me nauseous until I realized I’d made the right decision about getting Janine away from Gus.

  “Did you find anything good on him? Took care of a sick relative? Volunteered at an AIDS clinic?” I could hear the detective shuffling through stacks of papers. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

  “You know how it is when you get back from vacation. Ah, here we go. He drank himself across the Midwest before passing out somewhere near Cleveland. People actually thought he was dead. He used the opportunity to create a new identity, of course.”76

  “Cleveland? That’s strange. That’s where my father died.”

  “Maybe they were drinking buddies. This guy’s got an alias for every day of the week. Gus Muldarian, John Shalhoub, Thomas Swensen.”

  “Swensen? That’s my name.”

  “Point is, you should be careful with this guy.”

  I could barely hear her with the phone dangling from my hand. What if Gus had used Thomas Swensen, my real father’s name, as an alias the way I’d used Gil Jackson when I chose a new identity? Or was Gus actually my … I couldn’t let the word form inside me. But the coincidences were striking: both from Cleveland, both drinkers, both the same age, both with the name Swensen. When I’d faked my own death, I thought the idea was mine, but maybe I had just unwittingly followed in my father’s footsteps: a pseudocidal biological imperative. Hiding from who we really are—like father, like son. I ran to the bathroom, thinking I might vomit. If Gus was my biological father, was he aware I was his son? Was that why he had my name in his pocket that first day? Was he hitting on my ex-girlfriend while knowing he’s my father? My mother had never given me details of my father’s life; maybe she was trying to protect me from a man with a dangerous past. The whole thing creeped me out on so many levels. I wanted to find another identity and become someone else immediately.

  I pulled down the rickety stairs to the attic and made my way through the boxes of Peter’s records and books until I found my mother’s old brown leather photo albums. Faded color photographs of Mom in college dressed up as the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. A photo of her pulling me in my little wagon to the playground at the top of the street.77 A man with a be
ard and round glasses making a peace sign into the camera. The gesture didn’t belong to either of us, of course, but the fact that my biological father and I shared the same greeting suddenly felt more ancestral than accidental. His other hand held a six-pack of beer. It was impossible to tell if this young man had morphed into Gus through the years.

  From the bottom of the stairs, Peter wondered if I was okay. I asked him what my mom had told him about my biological father.

  He shrugged. “From what she said, he was some big radical who had a few screws loose. Nice guy but always trying to fight the system. Why do you want to know?”

  I ignored the question and asked him what year my father had died.

  Peter climbed the stairs and sat beside me on the wide-planked floor. “Right before you were born. I think he had alcohol poisoning and drowned.”

  I banged my head against the rafter several times. “My mother always spared me the gruesome details, but did they ever find his body?”

  “Your mother never held any false hopes he was alive. You shouldn’t either.”

  I went back and forth but decided not to tell Peter about my conversation with the detective. He lifted one of the photos from the box—my mother standing in the driveway after one of her many chemo appointments. With her black-and-white sweater, pale skin, and thin frame, she looked like an escaped inmate from the local prison. Peter gazed at the photograph and smiled. “I miss her every day.”

  Join the club. I stared at the photo, wishing she could advise me on what to do with my new “teacher.” I rarely thought about my biological father, but for the rest of the night, I could think of nothing else. And if it did turn out to be Gus, what kind of game was he playing?

  I took the bus to Providence to talk to Beth. Her dorm room was filled with stacks of open books, and her bulletin board was so full of notes and photos not a glimpse of cork could be found. She hurried to clear a space for me on her bed. When I told her about my conversation with the detective the day before, she held up her hand to stop me.