The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “Let me tell you a story.” Barrington handed his empty glass to a handmaiden for a refill.

  “I had a philosophy professor at LSE whose name was Remington Clewes,” Saddler began expansively, springing his fingers against each other. “He was articulate, stylish, wickedly funny. Students loitered about to press him with contrived questions after class, and hovered in the corners of his local. When possible, they took his courses more than once, though the waiting list for each was the length of a parliamentary white paper. I should know, because I was one of the few who inveigled themselves into a second, even a third of Clewes’s seminars. Have I set the table?”

  “You’ve set the table,” said Edgar.

  “On a swing through London a few years back I resolved to look up the redoubtable Clewes. I harbored the usual sad little vanity that my old professor would be pleased that one of his protégés had done him proud. While bygone nondescripts would have faded, I presumed that Remington Clewes would certainly remember me.

  “But when I ducked into his local to ask after Professor Clewes, the barkeep sniggered. When I called by the philosophy department, the secretary rolled her eyes. Odd. Informed of his schedule, I waited outside his classroom for the seminar to conclude.

  “I noted through the cracked door that the few students in attendance were staring into space. The stylish mannerisms I’d so admired in Clewes as a student had become extravagant. His dress, always natty, was now foppish, and he had taken to wearing—fatally—a bow tie. From what I could hear, his ideas hadn’t changed at all—which may have been what was wrong with them. They were frayed about the edges, like worn tweed.”

  “You’re a kid, you impress easy,” said Edgar. “You grow up, naturally—your idols are no big deal.”

  “My stories are neither so obvious, nor so clichéd,” Barrington abjured. “Unsettled, I didn’t approach Clewes when the class broke up, but fell in with one of his students, who seemed in a haste to be gone. It took little prompting to elicit that Remington Clewes had become the campus fool. Apparently he’d divorced, and the obeisance he had once shrugged off he had come to rely on. Throughout his second bachelorhood Clewes had been inviting students to little soirées at his home. At first a few students made appearances; they were worried about their marks. But in his eagerness to be loved, Clewes never gave anyone poor marks anymore, which soon got about. By the time I called by, he was buying cases of good wine and mountains of melba toasts at the weekend, and no one showed. Possibly the toasts went stale, but the wine didn’t go to waste, since he’d developed a notorious thirst. Meantime, for ten years he’d ostensibly been ‘researching’ a three-volume analysis of the metaphysicists, of which no one had seen a page. Nevertheless, he had announced to each of his classes that this mythical trilogy was destined to win him a Nobel Prize.”

  Edgar waited for the end of the story, but that seemed to be it. “So you don’t think it was you, the way you used to see him,” Edgar prodded. “He’d really changed.”

  “Yes.” Barrington sipped his new drink through a tiny straw.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Perhaps I didn’t tell the story properly. Remington Clewes,” Barrington despaired, “had begun to believe what other people said.”

  “About him,” Edgar inferred.

  “I’ve seen it before, but rarely in such high relief. It’s more than possible to become one of your own fanciers—to trot down the steps of the proscenium and join the squealing crowd. If an orator sits in the audience, no one remains at the lectern.

  “In this instance, you spend most of your time trying feverishly to re-create your own legend. As a consequence, you ape yourself, and badly. You become your own pretender. Ironically, in this process of self-parody you’re bound to lose that mysterious desideratum to which your acolytes were drawn—whatever that was.”

  “You went AWOL,” said Edgar, “to keep from becoming a horse’s ass.”

  Barrington clinked his glass against his guest’s. “Touché.”

  “I think,” Edgar ventured, “you’ve seen yourself as a horse’s ass all along.”

  “Am I,” Saddler returned simply, “a horse’s ass?”—less as if fishing for compliments than as if he truly wanted to know.

  So Edgar took a moment to consider the question in all sincerity. Saddler himself looked to be pretty rigorous in the booze department; odds were these daytime cocktails weren’t a first. He was conceited. He was verbose. He was affected. To Edgar’s untrained Yankee ear, Barrington’s posh accent was unerring, but that didn’t rule out its being, as Nick suspected, self-taught. Though Pretend Barrington may have had a point, that virtue wasn’t very attractive, neither, face-to-face, was vice. Once Edgar awoke in the rubble of the Rat to apprehend a world ineffably desolate forever after, Barrington’s playful amorality had permanently converted to the other morality with a less ambiguous prefix.

  Then there was the physical plant. The cream-colored suit, like most of Saddler’s wardrobe, was a bit much. In this heat the linen had wilted, while wet patches darkened the armpits, lending Saddler the seedy air of Sidney Greenstreet. The yellow ascot and matching citrine cufflinks were self-conscious. While his boosters made much of Barrington’s stature, in an era of good nutrition numerous Western men grew to six-foot-four or -five. As for his measurements on the horizontal axis, there were no two ways about it now: the guy was overweight.

  Lastly, given the build-up, that Edgar would find real-life Barrington a disappointment was a narrative inevitability. Little wonder that Edgar had been agitated before this meeting. No mortal biped could hope to compare with the two-headed, five-legged, one-horned, and winged: the mythical creatures of hearsay.

  Be that as it may . . .

  There was something endearingly undone about Barrington’s person, almost woebegone, with the ice in his drink melted and the translucent pink liquid grown weak, the highball held at a careless angle off the arm of his chair, the meniscus tipped to the rim. Yes, he was pompous, but not nearly so pompous as Edgar had expected. While Saddler’s paramilitary flimflam did have grim results, Edgar was equally at fault, and the man had at least seen fit to rescue Edgar sight-unseen from the lethal stupidities of Bebê Serio halfway around the globe. That—a word that hadn’t cropped up often in the Cinziero gossip mill—was nice.

  Moreover, any master of inversion might have noticed that the pastime of flipping the coinage of character from heads to tails could be played in reverse. In adjudging Saddler, Edgar was therefore free to substitute assured for conceited, elegant for affected, and articulate for verbose. He might even grant that there was an ashen cast to his host, a sag to the man’s bearing in unguarded moments, suggestive that Nicola Tremaine’s death had dejected Saddler more than the man cared to admit. In taking too long to answer Barrington’s simple question, Edgar found himself making what he had never before regarded as a choice. Apparently the very talent that Edgar had exploited to be so hard on people could be deployed to find them marvelous instead.

  Besides, much as he might try to deny it, there was something . . . something about the guy. Edgar had felt it the very instant his hand touched Saddler’s and their eyes locked for the first time: an electricity, a pull, a thrum. Label it as you like, this quality produced in its audience an instantaneous desire to please. Edgar had been fighting the impulse for an hour, if only because an evident desire to please was not itself pleasing and therefore defeated its own purpose. The fact that this magnetism was subject to neither analysis nor description made it no less palpable. Whatever the quantity was called, Edgar himself did not quite have it.

  What drove him to belie the magic, was it plain envy after all? For in a sweep, Edgar recognized his own life as a continual act of reduction. His willful boredom, his hunger for savvy more than wisdom, the alacrity with which he leapt to conclude that he knew all there was to know, and his repeated hoisting of greathearts onto pedestals only to sledgehammer them off again: it wa
s as if he were perpetually trying to make the world smaller, the better to cram it inside himself as he’d once binged on raspberry coffee cake. But none of this diminishment made him happy, and gobbling miniaturized icons like animal crackers had never filled him up. In fact, he could vividly concoct a plausible alternative future whereby Nicola survived at the Rat and agonizingly left her husband for his good self, only for Edgar to shrink her as well—to a spoiled, trivial woman whose politics were obvious and whose decency was drab. Having victoriously demoted Nicola from Isolde to Mary Tyler Moore, he would replace her with another Isolde in ten minutes.

  This project of serial embitterment was a battle against his own nature: Edgar was born a fan. Having never successfully defeated his own gaga disposition, Edgar realized that he’d spent the preponderance of his life being enchanted—utterly, blindly, lavishly enchanted—and that he was good at it.

  “Saddler?” said Edgar. “You’re not a horse’s ass to me.”

  “Well, then,” said Barrington lightly, patting his thighs as he stood, “that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

  “Dinner is at eight,” Saddler instructed as they ambled toward the house. “I’ve had a room prepared for you, but let me know if you prefer another. Do take your pick.”

  “I won’t impose for long, I hope—”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Barrington scolded. “You will stay indefinitely.”

  “What’ll I do with myself?” Edgar stopped on the path. “I don’t see writing much journalism from Bangkok. There’s no war here, and nobody cares about Thai whores.”

  “These young ladies,” said Barrington. “I’ve tried to impress on them that their previous employment did not have the makings of a durable career. In the interests of expanding their options, I wonder if you might improve their English. We should both be better entertained by their company if you did. I don’t know about you, but on balance I should much rather chat all day than shag. It’s far less exhausting. And however fetching, my butterflies are also illiterate. Please teach them to read.”

  “What’s all this enlightened adult education, expiation for the SOB?”

  “If that’s the way you choose to look at it, you may expiate away for the both of us. Might I recommend a catnap before we dine?”

  “I’d rather go for a run, if you don’t mind.”

  “Good heavens, of course I mind,” said Barrington with disgust, heading again for the back door. “How barbaric.”

  Falling into single-file, shaded by the vast man’s shadow, Edgar considered his lifelong position of second-in-command. Sure, constitutionally Edgar was a sidekick. But there was nothing disgraceful about lieutenancy should your captain be splendid. Saddler might be only six-foot-five, but bigness was in the eye of the beholder. For that matter, as Edgar reviewed his shortlist of idols—like his suave, super-jock older brother, the glow-in-the-dark Toby Falconer, the awesomely august Richard Stokes Thole, and now Saddler—he concluded that in every case he himself may have got the better end of the deal. Edgar was bursting with inchoate yearnings, like wishing to be like Barrington. But Barrington had never woken a day in his life wishing to be like Barrington, and how bleak—to have no one else to emulate. It was probably more interesting to adore than be adored, more transporting, more engrossing, and in any event much less creepy. What the hell, given a choice, Edgar might rather revere a hero than be one.

  Heading up to settle into his new room, Edgar tripped nimbly behind his new landlord as Barrington’s towering cream-clad figure foreshortened up the staircase.

  Altavista Epilogue

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