A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “There’s a man watching us,” Lars said loudly.

  The man coughed. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Fine,” said Lars. “But you better not cough again.”

  That first moment has taken on some mythic contours for me now, I suppose. I’m both impious and clinically self-absorbed, so it makes sense that I look hardest for meaning in my own memories. The man kept standing there. At the time, it was probably vaguely uncomfortable—this man watching us, his scarf whipping out behind him in the wind, his eyes growing stung and watery in the cold. He was passably attractive but not arrestingly beautiful. Still, I wonder if I felt a sense of particularity, of unique rightness, in his face even then—in the curl of his hair and the slight crag of his chin and the pencil shavings of stubble across his cheek, in the way his eyes were tired and snappishly intelligent at the same time. It’s possible that his face felt familiar to me, but it’s also possible that this is a quality conferred only in retrospect. I tried not to look at him.

  “Can I play the winner?” he said.

  “One dollar,” said Lars.

  “How much do I pay you?” he said to me.

  “I don’t charge,” I said. I still wasn’t looking at him. “I also don’t win.”

  “She doesn’t.” Lars sniffed. “If you’re playing the winner, you’re playing me.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  He watched us play. People talk about being able to feel a gaze, and I never believed that until I had to squirm through this game. I think even my arms were blushing.

  “Are you letting him win?” said the man.

  Lars harrumphed and looked insulted.

  “No,” I said. “I never let anybody win.”

  “At anything?”

  I was confused as to what we were talking about. “Not if I can help it,” I said. I was aware that this made no sense, since I was losing to Lars—as usual—and it came out as a weird sort of inverted brag.

  “Which she never can,” said Lars. “She never can. She always loses.” He was trying to get this point through the man’s head, though I don’t know why. There was a dollar to be made, after all.

  We played. My fingers felt self-conscious in the way they grabbed my knight, in the way they lingered when they put the knight down. I felt them fluttering in my lap. I felt myself twirling my hair (I am not traditionally a twirler of hair). Good Christ, I thought. What the hell is this?

  I lost, more quickly than usual.

  “He’s all yours,” I said to the man. I stood up too fast. I could feel the air between us, which was suddenly too dense and too thin at the same time. I felt that somehow there would never be a distance between this man and me that would be acceptable, no matter what; that closeness and farness both were going to be forever unendurable. I was standing up then, and he was sitting down. There was a whirring in my ears like an oncoming train.

  “You should stay,” said the man. “To see how it’s really done.”

  They played, and the man was terrible, far worse than I am. He barely knew the rules—he seemed to think it was checkers—and he lost dramatically, with flourish and good humor. Lars seemed increasingly agitated, despite the coming dollar. He seemed to know that this game had stakes that weren’t really about chess, and I could tell that this annoyed him. He respected the game and didn’t like to see it used for sillier ends. He didn’t shake the man’s proffered hand at the conclusion of the game.

  “This isn’t Parcheesi,” said Lars.

  “I realize that,” said the man.

  “Don’t come back until you’ve studied some,” said Lars. “I’m a busy man.”

  “I appreciate your indulgence.”

  “Must have been bad luck this time,” I said as the man stood up.

  “Very bad luck,” he said. “I’m usually a menace on the chessboard.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Maybe sometime I could give you some pointers?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know. He was funny, sure, and smart, but there were plenty of men in Boston who were funny and smart—Boston’s major export is people who are funny and smart, who have advanced degrees, who read on public transportation. And I don’t want to go too much into the gruesome details. Personally, I find other people’s witty banter disgusting. Whenever the kids in the office started in on it, I’d plug my headphones in to an episode of Frontline on the computer.

  But I will say this: it unfolded with the inevitability of a fatally flawed chess game. We met for the first coffee, which led to the art show, which led to the sex—and that was the first time in a long time. He brushed his lips along my neck, and multicolored constellations exploded behind my eyelids, and I was struck by the unfamiliar feeling of not being furious at my body. Afterward, I traced my fingers along his perfect form, the sturdy convexity of his perfect brain—perfect because it wasn’t doomed, or at least not any more doomed than is typical—and I realized that I didn’t resent it, not really, for its normalcy. And that, I’m afraid, was that.

  It was a good spring. Leaving Boston has cast it with a bittersweet sheen, which makes everything seem poignant. But at the time, it wasn’t. Jonathan and I drank coffee and talked and had lulls in our talking. We walked through the red rain-soaked bricks of Cambridge. We watched the Citgo sign reorganize its colors against the night sky. Sooner or later, we started talking in hypothetical about the relatively short-term future. And that was when I realized—or maybe remembered—that I had a problem.

  I stopped calling him. I let his calls go to voice mail, even though I didn’t like the thought of my stupid voice-mail voice—overly solicitous and frightfully high-pitched, like a chipmunk prostitute—talking into his ear over and over and over.

  Before I’d started dating Jonathan by accident, I’d been careful to avoid romantic relationships. This ban of mine was not an affectation, nor was it the outgrowth of a willful and baseless social isolation. It was my attempt to carve out for myself some space to manage without anyone else watching too closely. It was my attempt at sanity. And—let it not be forgotten—it was also my slim, feeble, selfish attempt at selflessness.

  I thought about the day I beat my father at chess. It’s too much to say that this was the day I stopped knowing him, but it was certainly the day I started to stop. I wondered what my equivalent day would be, what my corresponding departing gesture might look like. I wondered if I wanted Jonathan to be the one to see it.

  I started fantasizing about running away. I saw myself walking through cobblestoned streets in generic European capitals; I saw myself riding a camel against a bright blue desert sky. I tried to think of a way out of this—some bargain that would mean I could stay with Jonathan, and call him back, and love him without worrying about the day when the person who loved him would stop being me, because there was no me anymore, in any meaningful sense.

  I still hadn’t told him.

  In the end, I couldn’t tell him, so I had to show him. I took him to meet my father.

  In the car, I explained. I told him that my father’s and my shared fate was in no way unique—in fact, it might be the only thing that’s truly universal. Death, anyway, is universal. And even losing our minds doesn’t really set us apart—we all lose our minds, after all, it’s just that some of us lose them with death, and some of us lose them a bit before. All we miss, really, is thirty to forty years. When you think of the time we spend alive versus the incredible amount of time we spend dead, thirty to forty years doesn’t amount to that much. But when that time is filled with the particular events of your own life, one finds it does take on an inordinate significance.

  I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him th
at there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.

  He listened. He held my hand lightly. I don’t know if I can call that understanding.

  The nursing home smelled, as it always did, of stewed carrots and antimicrobial cleansers and the singed coffee that the first shift had made and not had time to drink. There was a part of me that didn’t like showing my father off like this, as though he were a scientific exhibition and not a former person. At the same time, if there was a way to make Jonathan see what I looked at when I looked in the mirror, then this was it. You could talk about the degradation of cortex tissue forever. But real understanding was in the inverted mouth, the yellow concavity of the face. The dark eyes that shone like those of a prisoner who knew he’d be executed at dawn, though I tried not to sentimentalize. I didn’t think my father really knew his fate anymore. This, for him, was the easy part.

  We went to him. I rubbed my father’s thin shoulders. I gave him a chocolate. He looked somewhere beyond us. He gummed his mouth and made cork-popping sounds. His fingers forked like the shriveled arms of a dinosaur, and he pressed them so fiercely into the table that they turned white.

  “Hello, Mr. Ellison,” said Jonathan. My father, of course, said nothing back.

  “Genetics,” I said.

  “Will that be you?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  In the car on the way back, we were quiet. I let Jonathan drive my car. Route 2 broke into a view of the city, silver buildings catching the receding light, the Prudential Building flashing palely in the murk. I opened the window and thought about my father. Like most people, I was not my best self at twelve. And it bothered me sometimes to think of this version of myself as the last vision my father had of me before his mind went—as if this made any sense. As if he was standing on the opposite end of some magic beam of rainbow light, remembering me in my youth, carrying around a smudged mental snapshot of who I used to be. Really, it was the other way around. But in weak, sentimental moments, I wanted to tell him: look. I grew up with a sense of humor, anyway. You would have liked me if you didn’t already.

  All this by way of saying that it matters to me how I am remembered.

  My father died in April. It was quiet, and strange, and unreal in the way that anything you long for long enough gets to be. It was not horrifying. It was calm, morphined, inevitable. In some ways, it was the only thing that had gone right for my father in the better part of two decades. I kept my hand on his head the whole time, and he turned cold before his pulse stopped. He turned yellow, too—this was from his liver giving out—and it did seem like a process, a natural compulsion, a source of some secular comfort, if only you discounted the eighteen years that had preceded this moment. My mother and I stood there, our tears strangled somewhere back in our throats because we breathed only when he did. And he died sometime after that last breath, sometime after that last pulse, though it would be hard to say precisely when. Dying for two decades takes something away from life, but it takes something away from death, too. Death itself becomes a dim asymptote, ever approaching, ever unreachable. Until, at long last, it is reached.

  I thought of Jonathan—I thought him of pointing to my father, to his skittering hands and carved-out eyes. He asked if that would be me, and I’d said no, not if I could help it. Which reminded me of Lars’s saying, “But she never can, she never can.”

  Jonathan came to the funeral, and he held my hand and bowed his head with the appropriate amount of sober reflection. Still, even then, I was starting to feel a chasm between us, crumbling into enormity. It’s true that we are all mortal, but maybe it’s also true that some of us are more mortal than others. The cemetery was almost lovely—full of the mild green of new buds and grass shyly beginning to assert itself, the cool wind blowing the trees’ shadows across the graves in a way that was a little beautiful and a little unnerving. And Jonathan regarded everything—the coffin, the grave, the green Astroturf laid out to conceal the exposed dirt—with the expression of a spectator.

  I look back now, and I tell myself that in this, as in all things, there are advantages. So we don’t marry, have children, grow old together. This is what we miss. We also don’t stop sleeping together, divorce, come to see each other as strangers, look back in bewildered grief to these early days and try to unravel how it all went so wrong. Those days—that last spring in Boston—were the only days. There is something to be grateful for in this, I think.

  But at the time, I wasn’t grateful yet. I looked at the sky; I looked at the ground. Everything was fragile and raw and acute. I looked at Jonathan. We are not the same, I thought. And you would not wish for us to be.

  A few weeks after my father’s death, I went to clean out the house, and that was when I found the box. My mother had kept the house through my father’s illness—partly because she wanted a place to stay when she returned for semiannual visits, partly because it was the only asset that the state couldn’t claim after we relinquished my father and his savings to a publicly funded facility. After the death, my mother was free to sell the house, and she’d asked me to handle the posthumous categorizing and cataloging and investigating that comes with a completed life. I was given an afternoon to reduce my father to the elements we would most want to remember him by: the wittiest letters, the loveliest souvenirs, the most flattering photographs. Everything else would be thrown out.

  The box was in my father’s study, shoved between a stack of withered postcards and his creaky, outdated globe. When I looked inside, I found a mess of snarled newspaper clippings, curling from age and multiple handlings, and I nearly stepped away, closed the box, and left the mystery alone.

  Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t nearly close the box. I am not the kind of person who would close the box. I kept the box open, and I started to riffle. And inside the box I found pictures and clippings of Aleksandr Bezetov, the chess champion.

  The first clipping was a 1980 article from Literaturnaya Gazeta, detailing an early success of Aleksandr’s at that unpronounceable Leningrad chess academy of his. In the picture, he’s heartrendingly young and nondescript—he never did look like a person who’d amount to much, even when he already had—and he appears slightly chagrined at being photographed. The clippings then follow him to regional and nationwide victories in Russia to international triumph at some tournament in Reykjavík. In the earlier pictures, he is gaunt and grumpy; his gestures are all hard angles; he has an expression of low-grade exasperation. The eighties begin. The reporting about him has a breathless quality; his youth is much remarked upon, as is his brilliance. He has a subversive manner of play, it is said. He has an attitude. There are reports on disputes with the FIDE. He stops meeting the camera’s eye when he’s photographed. He fills out some. He starts to look older. He plays Rusayev interminably. The match is halted. The match is resumed. The last game is played. This was the game I had watched with my father, and the ferocity of Bezetov’s expression put me in mind of that night—the delirious rotating of shadow against wall, the slow-falling snow turning the color of dying fire. Bezetov wins. In the picture with his trophy, he appears clinically depressed. The clippings seem shakily cut now, as we move into the late eighties and the first stirring of my father’s Huntington’s. All documentation stops fairly soon after my father’s symptoms present, though not as soon as I might have imagined. After 1990, there’s nothing—nothing about Bezetov’s book, his much mourned loss to an IBM computer, his entry into post–Cold War politics. My father missed all that. My father missed a lot.

  It was a strange thing, this chronicling of another man’s life. It isn’t what you expect to find in a secret reliquary hidden in your father’s study. In my narcissism, I’d imagined school pictures, honor roll announcements, pinecone Christmas ornaments; in my conspiracy-mindedness, I’d imagin
ed love letters, mysterious sets of keys, government correspondence. Instead, what we had was the grim and thorough documentation of the career of a Soviet chess player—a man my father had never met and whose story he never got to finish. It was unexpected. But I can’t say it was terribly surprising, and not just because of my father’s love of chess and the Soviets, generally, and this Soviet chessman, specifically. I remembered the night of the snowstorm and my father’s glassy-eyed rapture over the unexpected turns in a faraway game. To my father, Aleksandr Bezetov wasn’t just a precocious young sportsman. He was the personification of order over anarchy. He was the embodiment of facing down near-certain doom with a degree of panache. Most important, perhaps, he was the representation of the possibility of unlikely events, which I’m sure my father was already starting to be interested in by the time he sat me on his lap and showed me some of the things one could do in a very short time.

  In the bottom of the box was a letter. I let myself pretend for a self-congratulatory moment that I wouldn’t read it. And then I did.

  The letter was photocopied, undated, and written entirely in Russian. Back then, before I came to St. Petersburg, my Russian was weaker than my father’s had been, even though mine had come from my Ph.D., and his was primarily self-taught. It took me three reads to get the full scope of the letter, and even now that my Russian is fairly good, I wonder if there are elements I miss or misunderstand. Roughly, this is what it said: