The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  “Damn, Tweety,” was all he said.

  He took the pipe from her, into which Tweety had sprinkled a little ketamine she’d managed to save after the raid, and then kept on watching TV.

  “So, you don’t talk that much about Maria Timpano except to say you love her,” Tweety said.

  Lee nodded. “Yep.”

  “Well, maybe you can tell me a little about this seductress.”

  Lee sighed and rolled onto his side, his hand cupping his ear. “She happened to be the first person I fell in love with in high school. That’s just how it worked out. And now I just want to—I don’t know. I want her to tell me her dad was the one making her say all that shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “About how she didn’t love me anymore.”

  This made Tweety unspeakably sad and she feared she knew why.

  “I do love her, I just feel weird about it,” Lee said. “You know what I mean?”

  Tweety shook her head, though she knew exactly what he meant.

  “I don’t know, dude.” Lee turned onto his back and made binoculars of his hands, stared at the ceiling. “I’m not doing any of this right.”

  It would be the boldest move of Tweety’s short life, what she did next. She kissed Lee quick on the mouth. She pulled away and looked at him, breathing hard, while he looked at her. Then he smiled and pulled her to him and kissed her back. Tweety had imagined before how this would happen, when and where and who would start it, but she’d never imagined it would be in a Comfort Inn somewhere in Ohio while she wore a crushed velvet dress she’d bought at Annie’s Closet. She’d imagined fumblings in a dorm room, both of them so drunk and high that they would ignore what had happened the next day. She’d imagined Lee lying about it to his other friends if they ever found out. She’d imagined being bad at sex, it being something she’d never had with anyone besides herself, so bad that they’d stop halfway and Lee would say what a mistake they were both making. But she wasn’t bad at sex, at least not with Lee. They did it twice in one night.

  After Lee kissed her on the cheek and fell asleep, Tweety started to come off. She was naked under the sheets, neither the boy who’d made a bong of his old N64 controller nor the girl who’d worn the crushed velvet dress—just a someone lying very still, breathing, wiggling their toes, flexing their feet, realizing for the first time how their body responded to being loved. This person, this once-Tarzan, once-Tweety person, wanted to spend their life hanging suspended between two poles. It could’ve been the horse tranquilizer, but some part of their brain that stayed sober always, even in the most extreme of circumstances, knew it wasn’t the horse tranquilizer. There was no telling how the brain hitched its reins up to the body, especially not after sex like that. They wanted the hotel to last forever, the night under the clean sheets with Lee sleeping naked by their side to last forever, but then Lee’s phone started buzzing. Lee didn’t stir.

  The New Person reached over to pick up the phone and answered, “Hello?”

  “Lee?” a woman’s voice said, sounding thick and desperate. The New Person felt bad for this woman. They wanted this woman to know that someone cared about her in her state of crisis.

  “Yes, speaking,” they said.

  “Lee, I’m—I don’t know where to begin. This is Melinda, your half brother’s mother.”

  The New Person’s eyes widened. “Okay.”

  “I’m, um, calling because the Marshall family came forward, Reggie Marshall, actually, I’m not sure if you’ll even know who he is. But he’s reached out to let us know that your father had some money that belonged to him, and he’d be willing to um, divide up the inheritance at this point, if we can locate it.”

  The New Person nodded. This all made perfect sense. “Sounds good.”

  The desperate woman sputtered with joy. “Lee, thank you, I’m so sorry, I could’ve been so much better to you. I wish I’d reached out to you, but I was fearful. He wouldn’t grant me that divorce. He was a bigamist, your father, but his sons were never all bad. Lee, anyway, we couldn’t find the money anywhere so I had the idea to check that temple in South Florida, he wrote to me about it so much in his letters. The one where you used to go as a child. He never mentioned the name. Can you remember the name?”

  “Not off the top of my head,” the New Person said.

  “That’s fine, that’s fine. I’m just so thrilled you answered the phone! I’m trying to do right by everyone, and your brother—well, I know you’re not on the best terms—but your brother had a briefcase in his basement and we took a look in it and there were just bricks and packing peanuts.”

  “That’s very like Dad.”

  “Right, yes, he was very paranoid about his possessions. He left decoys everywhere. Especially toothbrushes—he used one he kept hidden under his pillow and kept a perfectly clean one in the bathroom, you know, just in case I used it on accident? That sort of thing. He was a sick man, I’m sorry to be saying this. I bet you don’t want to hear it, and I know perfectly well how you feel.”

  The New Person couldn’t help wanting to hug this woman. The world hadn’t done right by her. “I don’t mind you saying any of that, Melinda. I appreciate you calling me.”

  “Bless you, Lee.”

  Lee stirred in his sleep, flipped onto his stomach.

  “Will you call me when you remember the name of the temple? You have my number.”

  The New Person smiled. “Of course I will.”

  MARIA TIMPANO

  (1992–)

  May 2009

  Princeton

  No matter how broad the taxonomy of definition-bound “humanness” grew, Maria knew there would always be some human whose existence served as a counterexample, whose life would be constantly questioned by authorities and defended by advocates. There is no system big enough, loving enough, to catch us all; and aside from that there’s just individualism, loneliness, tribalism. Certainly now—trying and failing as they were to make their lives in the landscape scorched and cratered by their parents’ culture wars and economic crises—she and every other irregular member of her generation deserved the utmost compassion and patience. But she was only one woman, and she didn’t know whether she had the resolve to be compassionate or patient.

  She and her ex-boyfriend were obvious counterexamples to respectable “humanness”: he had a mood disorder and she had a brain disease. He had called her for the first time in what felt like years and was speaking with the drugged-up certainty she was so used to hearing from him, the gibberish-in-a-baritone she’d come to associate with white maleness. He was saying he missed her and he was on his way to her, and when she told him that wasn’t such a good idea he agreed that it wasn’t because he might be in love with his best friend, too. She asked him if he meant Max and he said no, it was Tarzan, well—it was Tweety, she didn’t know him, but he was beautiful and they’d fucked twice in a row a few nights ago and had been fucking pretty steadily ever since. He was sorry to be saying all this so quickly, he just missed her so much and also could she remember the name of the temple he told her about visiting when he lived in Florida? He didn’t want to call Diedre and ask because maybe she’d be mad, but he really had to know the name of it ASAP.

  Why had she picked up the phone when he called? Why did she still have his number, even? She had, contrary to what she’d told him when he was in the hospital, never fallen out of love with him.

  She had, on the other hand, fallen out of love with Princeton. Two or three years ago, tiny teenaged Maria would’ve gotten—as her mother, Amanda, liked to say—“dinner-plate eyes” at the idea of coming to a real Ivy League university, the wood-paneled halls bustling with the world’s future public intellectuals, cancer-curing research scientists, Nobel laureates. She would’ve imagined a place richer and greener than gray-brown Cleveland, where all the parched grass in her front lawn could be folded into a tumbleweed and bowled down the street. The Ivy Leagues made you a person of consequence. She loved the idea of tha
t, and of the purported daily rigor of such an environment. But now she felt differently. And that wasn’t because the appearance of the place failed to match the campus of her dreams: the lawns were cut daily and freshly irrigated by sprinklers that sensed changes in the barometric pressure, the dining halls were Waldorf Astoria–beautiful, the thick-trunked trees had been growing for centuries, and a wall of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room bore framed images of Princeton grads who’d grown up to become people of consequence.

  But the campus population had come up short. Well, that was unfair—it was the spirit in which the campus population was being molded. The celebrated alumni on display in the Yankee Doodle Tap Room included Donald Rumsfeld, and with the exception of Michelle Obama, they were overwhelmingly white. Though Maria was white herself, whiteness wasn’t something she’d ever bothered to notice. Nonwhite people were all around her at home, and she’d known since she was a child that their lives were historically regarded as things of lesser consequence than her own. But she’d never sat down and really considered the syrup-thick, ectoplasmic dominance of whiteness everywhere, the country’s best-kept secret. Not until she’d arrived at a place like Princeton did she realize that whiteness was a cudgel being used to keep everyone in their proper place. Whiteness was being thrust in her face every day, rich whiteness, the kind that people of all races on Princeton’s campus aspired to, where Aryan investment bankers walked around in boating shoes and pink Lacoste T-shirts and made a big deal about Manhattan real estate and drunk brunch. Regardless of who you were, you kept your hair straight, sipped champagne out of cut crystal glasses, and loved Kanye West’s music while thinking him “insane.” You pledged the right eating club and stuck with them, your kind. Even the kids who pledged the “creative” club knew and respected the right collection of white male writers and filmmakers: Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky.

  Among these people, Maria was a fixer-upper, a cultural infant whose whiteness had gone to waste on a Cleveland childhood and clothes from Target. Even her friend Gourav, who spoke bitterly about being one of only two brown kids in his Montessori school in West Texas, was shocked that Maria had never traveled to Berlin or Paris, had never at the very least kept up with the lives of the Olsen twins. “It was like yesterday they were on Full House, and now they’re modeling and one of them dated Heath Ledger,” he said, shaking his head. “I would basically kill to be their childhood best friend, like their guy friend who they grow up with and realize is actually really likable and virile. Is that a bullshit fantasy?”

  It was a bullshit fantasy.

  Most of her students in the freshman seminar she taught hadn’t noticed she was a year or two their junior, so eager were they to prove themselves to one another. The class was meant to weed out candidates too weak for the philosophy major, a swift and brutal tour of Descartes, Kant, Hume, and Berkeley with a special focus on the transcendental arguments. It was nearly nine-tenths male, shoulders hunched, looking over their tortoiseshell glasses and talking over the two women, who sat next to each other in the back row and were forced to ask the clarifying questions none of the men would. Maria was grateful for the two women, and answered their questions about Cartesian space and the foundations of idealism as patiently and thoroughly as she could. Most of the actual teaching she’d accomplished that morning came in the form of responses to the women’s questions, corrections of the men’s statements about “its intangibility” and “its ubiquity” (“it” was sometimes “space” and sometimes “the study of metaphysics” and sometimes nothing), and the dousing-out of one brushfire between two guys in the front row about whether or not Nietzsche was influenced by Kant (which—what the hell?—everyone was influenced by Kant). The ninety minutes had worn on tediously. At the end of class, no one said good-bye to her, and she forgot to remind them that all the readings were posted on the class module online.

  This was the first time she’d been around college students since Case Western, but she hadn’t forgotten about collegiate sangfroid, the way everyone treated the formulation of successful hypotheses as validations of themselves instead of ways to strengthen others’ understanding of—and comfort in—the world around them. Why else would people debate the existence of an external reality with so much passion? You had to love yourself more than anything to be happy about proving skepticism true. The kids at Princeton were exactly the same, debating big ideas in order to fill small careers, scuttling across campus with their messy hair and briefcases, minds full of proofs and pure math that they planned to someday share with students who looked and acted just like them.

  She had never thought of this before. Here was a set of Western rules and conventions and ways of being and seeing and so on and that was designated “philosophy,” and then here were all these non-Western ways of being and seeing and they were called “religion.” She spent an afternoon Googling the parts of the world she knew nothing about. She read about obeahs in the West Indies, the mixture of Yoruba and Roman Catholicism that resulted in Caribbean Santería. She looked at pictures of Jagannath, Hindu Lord of the Universe, his wide eyes carved into the surface of a temple in Uttar Pradesh. She scrolled through reams of images, imagining them flattened and compacted and printed on the pajama pants of white girls in Ivy League dorms. Atheism and empiricism were de rigueur for a very small, very isolated set, and she was an element in that set. For years now she’d been debating nothing among a substanceless group of people who’d deluded themselves into thinking they had a better relationship with capital-T Truth than anyone else. As a consequence, she hadn’t attended the first meeting of her graduate seminar, preferring instead to spend the day in her room eating Cheerios, watching YouTube videos, and thinking about how she’d broken things off with Lee.

  The exemplar of this winner-take-all-and-I’m-the-winner attitude was G. E. Moore’s tongue-in-cheek proof for the existence of an external world:

  1.  Here is one hand.

  2.  And here is another.

  3.  There are at least two external objects in the world.

  4.  Therefore an external world exists.

  What jackassery. That was the kind of proof by fiat that made everyone feel embarrassed about arguing in the first place. Like everyone has to stop hair-splitting because this dude just showed up and proved them all irrational with his immensely clearheaded thinking. How many times had she been at a party or sitting in the cafeteria and heard something like: “The Arctic Monkeys are easily the best band producing music today, and that’s in large part because most other bands are channeling their influence.” What the hell was that supposed to mean? “The Arctic Monkeys are the best band because other bands know they are the best band.” The external world exists because G. E. Moore sticks out his hands. As if his existence were enough to make anything real. The kind of proof Maria would’ve submitted, if she had even wanted to participate in a skirmish as trivial and exhausting as the logicians’ debate over whether everything is real, would likely have been participatory: Stick out your one hand, and stick out your other. See? You’ve borne witness to two external objects in the world. You have authority to claim the existence of an external world. But of course that proof wouldn’t hold water with Moore. Of course it wouldn’t, because each subject’s individual confirmation of an external reality could amount to nothing more than a series of imagined realities, independently “confirmed.” All rational subjects needed was some agreed-upon epistemic landmark to demonstrate the existence of some reality independent of them. And that landmark was G. E. Moore’s hand—he’d even offered a second landmark, his other hand! There can be no “private Moore’s hands,” everyone knew that. His hands are the Hands; they are the primitive by which the rest of the world is defined. Gloves would be “the things that fit on G. E. Moore’s hands,” food “the stuff that is eaten using G. E. Moore’s hands,” Africa would be “the continent that is hundreds of thousands of miles from G. E. Moore’s hands.” Maria’s hands would be
“the hands that are not G. E. Moore’s hands.” He’d colonized everything. And, as far as Maria was concerned, colonization could go fuck itself.

  So that’s how she found herself sitting outside the Firestone Library one night with Lee on the other end of the phone. She conjured from her mind’s recesses all the Lee memories she dared to: his galumphing shaggy-haired around his mother’s tiny apartment, his bringing his face between her thighs (this one made her wince with its intimacy, made her tingle just thinking about it), his listening patiently as she explained about being-in-the-world. They were still friends on Facebook, and he hadn’t taken down any of their photos together. In her favorite, she is smiling directly into the camera (the photographer must have been Max), her mouth parted midjoke and her eyes red-ringed. Lee is at her side, eyes closed, head resting on her shoulder. Another guy might have found the photo embarrassing—her assertiveness, his submissiveness—but Lee had made it his profile picture for a while. His current profile picture was of a red dwarf exploding.

  She wondered if she’d grown weak, desirous of the heteronormative predictability afforded her by an admittedly powerful high school romance? Was she using Lee’s un-Princeton person as the vehicle for her rebellion, attaching herself to him under the false assumption that low-income, drug-addicted white people weren’t the white people she hated—the white people like herself? Was she in love with Lee in an undeniable and sometimes panic-inducing way? All are true, she thought as his phone-babble continued, and she wondered how much of what he said was true and whether he was on cocaine. Her own experiences living in her own mind had disturbed and disquieted her so much that nothing he was saying sounded remotely out of the ordinary. He was just being alive, the way he’d been alive since the night he stumbled out of the ravine shout-whistling her name through the bloody gap in his teeth.