Those books and stories made me want more, and when I started writing myself, I began to seek new experiences. Writing, if it didn’t make me cooler and better and more interesting, at least made me believe I could be if I stuck with it. Most of all, writing made me believe I could find something more interesting, and for a young kid in high school who can’t quite find a place no matter how hard he looked, in that sort of possibility lies salvation.
I found mine through studying. I found mine in Jack London’s adventure stories, which inspired me to join the Boy Scouts and earn Eagle. I found mine because I realized I would need a car to go anywhere worth visiting, which made me get a part-time job working at a local hardware store, where I learned how to solve the sorts of domestic problems to which one can apply a wrench. By the time graduation came around, my activities around the community earned me several scholarships that allowed me to go to college.
All through those years, I wrote. I graduated from pens and ruled notebooks, first to my family’s computer until my parents surprised me with a desktop for my sixteenth birthday. My parents had never been particularly well off, which made the gift that much more significant, and I made sure, over the next few years, to earn their money’s worth from it. I used it to write the application essay that earned me a full academic scholarship to college, all the English papers that helped boost my GPA, and, of course, the first stories that weren’t just adolescent fantasies of super powers and space aliens.
No, they were bad Dean Koontz rip-offs.
But that was okay. By then I was reading Douglas Adams and Richard Cox and Neil Gaiman, through whom I eventually found Jonathan Carroll and Will Shetterly and then the Nielsen Haydens, Patrick and Teresa, two editors at TOR, a major science fiction publisher. By then, in other words, I had begun to read more books by better writers, and most of all, was seeking them on my own, beyond the confines of the classrooms where my teachers were still trying to convince me Shakespeare was a genius and Pygmalion was how every suitor in the world was supposed to feel—
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.—
And okay, so maybe it really was.
***
By then, I’d long outgrown little league, but Tom and I were in the same patrol in our local Boy Scout troop, and so I saw Veronica often over the years, at courts of honor and various scouting functions. She seemed to get prettier every year, bypassing awkward adolescence to blossom into the beauty of oncoming adulthood. You could tell just by looking at her she was going to break some hearts, while I, on the other hand, remained pretty much a set of thick glasses with a squeaky voice and parted hair. Plus, of course, my pen.
When Tom and I began to hang out more often, playing PlayStation tournaments of martial arts fighting games, I began to see Veronica more often, as well. Some people are lucky when the people they fancy never give them the time of day, or realize they exist, but with Veronica, I had the opposite problem: I became such good friends with Tom that I basically became a second, honorary, older brother, more a best friend than a crush.
Which was why I decided to write her poetry before I left for college upstate.
God, I was such a cliché, wasn’t I? That’s what I’m thinking as I recount those gawky, awkward years—part-time job at a hardware store, Boy Scout, track and swimming, second in my class. Christ, it’s like I was the supporting character actor in my own damned life. Those poems, too, were wholly unremarkable; imagine every cliché every high school senior has ever come up with, every groan-inducing stanza and cringe-worthy metric foot. The details of those poems are hazy, now—
and just before dawn I burn with desire
while I attempt to extinguish this delirious fire
that burns at my core and all the while,
I think of you.
Just before dawn.—
but I know I wrote nine of them, each worse than the one previous. About the only original aspect of the endeavor was its title: “True Images of Beauty,” as I’d read that ‘Veronica’ was Latin for “true image.”
(I discovered later it’s actually derived from the Greek Berenice, meaning “bringer of victory,” which means that even when I was original I was wrong, which may become a running theme here.)
I wanted to let her know how I felt. I had spent so many evenings with her in her family’s kitchen, just chatting, often eschewing another round of UltimaFighter just to talk to her. I got butterflies watching her pour a glass of water. I’d never actually told her that, but my major mistake was believing she hadn’t already known; I’m not sure it could have been more obvious had I skywritten it on her living-room ceiling.
I composed those poems and bound them and then left them, one evening, in her mailbox. Just an hour or so later, Mrs. Sawyer called my house; considering I left my feelings behind on paper so I didn’t have to look Veronica in the eye when I told her I was so in love with her, is it appropriate Veronica confirmed her solely-platonic feelings for me through her mother? That’s exactly what happened.
It’s not like I hadn’t known she loved me like an older brother, no more and no less, but the actual confirmation made the world seem smaller, and darker. I can’t say I had hoped otherwise; one of the reasons I hadn’t said anything before then was that I had convinced myself that, so long as I never said anything, so long as Veronica never had to tell me—either outright or through her mother—that she only loved me as a friend, there might still be hope for more.
Of course, there was not.
Not until I met Angus, anyway. But first, college and some years after.
Chapter Three (College and some years after)
I started college in August 2001, at Montclair State University, barely three weeks before those men flew those two planes into the World Trade Center. College, then, began in an initial, froshy blush of flusterment and excitement that turned too suddenly into something far too somber and solemn. When once we had been undecided, we declared majors in philosophy and theology and biology and physics, as if we believed we might study our stumbling ways to understanding. Montclair was close enough to Manhattan that, during the subsequent autumn, our campus smelled like a construction site when the wind blew just right, and we students made it a point to always be aware of the national threat level before we left for classes. I remember the Anthrax scares and the admonitions to stock up on duct tape and plastic covering.
I pitched myself into my studies like they could be my salvation, burying myself so deeply in extra credits that I had very little energy left over to devote to much else; one of the benefits of doing this was that I stopped pining after Veronica. I put my head down and got the grades and studied literature and science, and by the time I graduated, I was engaged to a girl I thought I loved, which prompted me to find a crummy little apartment in Hoboken. My fiancée was Polish and came from a very strict, very conservative, very traditional family, which strained our relationship until finally it cracked under her pressure. Just a few weeks after I had graduated, and not even a full week after I’d moved into an apartment I’d chosen mainly because it was within walking distance of her house, my fiancée told me our relationship wasn’t fair to me.
It came at first as a shock until, a few dark, empty-feeling days later, I discovered a newfound sense of something I can’t describe as anything besides immense possibility. I suddenly had no ties, no commitments, and I could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone.
I think I reacted like most people in any such situation might: by remaining resolutely me. Waking up in the same bed, studiously checking the same hairline, buttoning the same shirts and shaving the same cheeks, walking the same streets and entering the same building to climb the same stairs to sit in the same desk . . .
There is some degree of comfort in the familiar. It may not be much to subsist on, but for a while it can be enough. Just after I’d graduated, I’d applied at a temp agency that had
placed me at the New Yorker as an assistant to the advertising sales director, and there I stayed, performing menial tasks like updating databases and collating business cards into a rolodex. I’d leave my desk in the afternoon, usually at 5:30 or so, just late enough to be noticed as I squeaked out an hour or so of overtime every week but never so much to actually accomplish anything. PATH train back to Hoboken, take-out, and then writing. I was working on my second novel by then, after having completed my first, the afore-mentioned Dean Koontz rip-off, while an undergrad. My second, back then, wasn’t much better; I’d had the idea while still in high school, and its origins showed through in places.
By then, I’d also begun to split my weekends between home in Hoboken and home in southern New Jersey. Tom had formed a band called Foolish with some other guys from our hometown, and I started blowing off steam by attending their gigs all over South Jersey and Philadelphia. There are few things like a dance floor to get you feeling loose and young and without trouble, especially when the lights are dim and you have a few in you and you truly believe the night could last forever.
I saw Veronica a few times at those gigs. Each time I would buy her a drink, and each time we would talk in precisely the ways you’re just not supposed to in that sort of situation. Those situations are built for drunken debauchery and gratuitous youth, one-night stands with girls whose numbers you don’t try to forget solely because you never made the effort to remember their faces in the first place. Those nights are alcoholically and rhythmically engineered to exist in a nether-place between recklessness and responsibility, and though they might support crooked smiles and tipsy kisses, wondering if there is more to life and the world out there is the sort of tear-soaked question that usually signals the person asking it should be cut off.
But not Veronica and I; when we weren’t dancing, we were talking about what we planned to do in the coming years, and where and how we planned to do it. I’d graduated the year before, but still I was unsure, and still I felt as though I were in some vague, quarter-aged purgatory with fluorescent lights and blink-lighted telephones on fiberboard desks. Still I only wanted to write, and Veronica—a philosophy major who’d taken up acting in school plays and written her thesis on Ionesco—and I most often found ourselves nursing lite beers while talking about drama and words and books and life. I remember those nights as dimly as those bars: blurs of golden and pink neon, Tom’s loud music, the way Veronica moved when she danced.
If there is a better way to spend your mid-twenties, I’m not aware of it.
But like all such times of perfection in one’s life, it could only last so long. No matter how idyllic life might seem at any moment, it’s always in danger of tipping dramatically over; when it’s as good as mine was then, it can only get worse, and when it does, it can only get worse hard:
***
Coming on autumn, 2006: I was still at the New Yorker, still in advertising sales, performing in addition any go-to work anyone needed completed, PowerPoint slides for the CFO, Excel spreadsheets for the VP of Marketing. Part of the reason I remained on was in the hope that it might provide me an in if I decided to write a short story; I’d met some of the people in editorial, and I figured that handing someone a manuscript at least skips over the slushpile.
I can’t pretend that coordinating ads was the most fascinating job in the world, but I enjoyed it. I always was a people person and, as my ex had once told me, I gave good phone. Plus, I was popular in the office, which was gorgeous; the entrance to Condé Nast is just off Times Square and its building looms above it, a great gleaming skyscraper among thousands very much like it. Those walls house multiple magazines—The New Yorker, Wired, Vogue for both men and women, Glamour and GQ, Details and Vanity Fair, a handful of Brides and a couple of Golfs—all with distinct floors and departments and teams of workers, and if you really want to know just how achingly metropolitan it really is, how hip and modern and urban, how it embodies everything about Manhattan without ever really trying, you need look no further than its cafeteria: designed by Frank Gehry and featuring great, waving walls and Spartan fixtures. There, in the cafeteria, no cash is tendered; all transactions use debit cards. There in the cafeteria, the floor seems off-white but is, in fact, ash, and the custom-designed booths sit a handful of people each, all of whom wear designer suits and designer shoes and designer watches, and the blue titanium walls undulate like City waves without ever actually moving at all.
I went on a few dates during that time, or at least I think I did. I might have. I’m pretty sure I did. I “did lunch” with pretty girls in midtown. Heirloom tomatoes as an appetizer at Grand Central Station and clam chowder at some famous soup place near the train platform. Drinks at happy hours after work, where all the gals sipped pink cosmopolitans and probably should have been smoking menthol cigarettes long and slender as their legs but couldn’t because it was recently illegal. I went out with artists who daylit as administrative assistants, directors who spent their afternoons maintaining records for a dental office, and dancers of hip hop and ballet alike, but I still alternated weekends between Hoboken and home, and so very few of those oft-awkward first dates ever made it onto slightly less uncomfortable second dates.
I never minded much, as I’d continued to work on that second novel. After a while, I gave up on short stories, as I discovered that I was more interested in, long fiction, not to mention that I finally realized that the only people who really get published in the New Yorker have names like McEwan, Proulx, and Moody; basically, writers I’d never gotten into because I much preferred the action and fun to fancy writing. I’d begun to expand my reading, picking up Michael Chabon and then the Nicks, Hornby and Earls, trying Dickens—
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
and then Austen—
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.—
which at the time only made me relieved I wasn’t yet in possession of a good fortune.
***
I thought I was doing fine until my dissatisfaction caught up with me. It began gradually; I started to wonder if I really wanted to stay on at the New Yorker, and why. I started to consider that I was nearly 24 and still working temp jobs; I didn’t want to become an aspiring anything daylighting in an office.
Perhaps I put too much into the idea that all I wanted to do was write: I began to devote more time and energy to it, eventually to the point that I basically stopped dating altogether in favor of focusing on words and pages. I even started bringing a flash drive with my novel on it into work, keeping the document open while I laid out ads. If my bosses ever suspected, they never said, but then again I have a feeling they were all doing the same thing; the cliché is that everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay, and I think everyone else, everywhere else in the world, either thinks they can write a book or is already working on one. Most of the people I spoke to were at least somewhat interested in writing, and all universally believed that they could pen either the next bestselling memoir or the Great American Novel.
Me, I wasn’t sure about the Great American Anything, though I’d already begun to realize that working in advertising at the New Yorker wasn’t really going to get me anywhere besides that fiberboard desk.
And that was when I had one of those perfect moments the likes of which remain indelibly with you all your life.
***
Perfect moments—you know the ones I mean, tight little barbs of time that cling hard enough to your heart to draw tears—don’t come often, but if you’re lucky, you recognize them when they occur. Perfect moments: the first time you see a new woman nude; the first time you hold your child. Moments that, should you be so lucky, you recall when you’re old and grey and ready to move on from this world to what happens next.
That night, I was sitting on my big ugly yellow chair I’d picked from a neighbor�
�s curb, in front of the piano bench I used as my desk. I could feel the heat of the processor or harddrive or whatever else spins hot in a laptop even through the gym shorts I was wearing, and I remember the white screen with its blur of black text, though in my memory the words are neither legible nor intelligible. I remember I was on page 68, and I had begun to read what I’d written the day before when suddenly, instead of characters and images and plot, I realized I was just reading words—
words, words, words—
without any meaning. Words without any magic behind them. Words like lightning bugs in the middle of an August thunderstorm, words—
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—
that were no more than the sum of the letters that made them up.
And what difference did they make?
Because isn’t that the question? Hamlet might have mused otherwise—
to be or not to be—that is the question—
but really I think we all seek little more than a way to make a difference, and I realized, then, that I hoped to somehow change the world by writing about it.
But how might I do so if I was just sitting there with a laptop and a blinking cursor? How might I do so by putting one letter after another? Surely better men than I had done so many times upon a time, and where had that gotten the world? Sitting there in my ugly chair, staring at those thin words on that glowing white screen, I realized I didn’t know—
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.—
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 2