The Lights

by Brian McGreevy

  The clouds descended, consuming the opposing cityscape entirely except for a dim red light from the W Hotel providing a Fitzgerald homage. A woman joined our group, an old undergraduate friend of one of the Bitterati stopping by to stay hello. She was a movie producer visiting from Los Angeles, a pretty blonde woman of the type that I’m normally disposed to hate on sight. I may not have been enamored of my company at the time but I certainly didn’t want my monopoly on their attention disrupted by a blonde, leggy Californian. However, she was one of those unusually socially adept women who knew when she was being perceived as a threat and responded to it by courting the woman who felt that way and putting her at ease. As it happened the conversation between us was effortless, transitioning smoothly between our delight in the latest political sexting scandal and favorite highlights from Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter feed and professing polite jealousy of each other’s accessories and bodies. We began discussing a recent think piece on Slate regarding that keystone of modern feminine anxiety over whether a woman can “play by a man’s rules.” She sighed with exhaustion that this was still subject to debate: the world was filled with countless examples of women who were perfectly fulfilled by their achievements and were having too much fun to notice if their happiness was incomplete by society’s standards. I was happy to pretend to agree with her, as if I personally knew an abundance of such women, as if my thirtieth birthday was not approaching and this question never kept me up at night. She didn’t have long to stay before her next engagement, so we exchanged cards. Her smile flickered when she looked at mine. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been enough to drive me to the edge of persecution fantasies, but she carried herself with such warmth and maturity that I convinced myself I was seeing things.

  After she left, her friend from our group proceeded to explain to us her unfortunate romantic situation. Apparently she had invited a charmless younger man to live with her, everyone but her seeing him as having the social graces of a baboon. This wearied me. She was so pleasant and well put together and her legs were up to my chin—what did it mean if she was as hopeless as the rest of us? More details emerged about the sad cliché she was caught in: the boor in question was a screenwriter (at which there were knowing scoffs, though half present had a partial draft of a screenplay lying around somewhere) who came from Austin (more knowing scoffs) and dressed like he’d walked off a community theater production of Midnight Cowboy.

  I stared for a while into the clouds across the water, then excused myself. I walked to the subway. It was summer and the air was rank and sweet with the garbage bags piled on the sidewalks. Steam drifted up from grates in the sidewalk, and a busboy walked down stairs cut directly into the sidewalk. This image always appealed to me, like the pavement was made of water. Distracted, I bumped into an old homeless man sitting in a wheelchair. His pants were bunched around his knees as though he was sitting on the toilet. The combination of my horror at having collided with a crippled homeless person and the grotesque comedy of his appearance, his pale, shrunken genitals, caused a burst of defenseless laughter to escape my mouth. He howled like a banshee, the way people do when their high is disrupted: Who are you to laugh at ME-E-E-E! Who are you to laugh at MY BO-O-O-O-ODY! I hurried down the sidewalk to the next avenue, telling myself to concentrate more on my feet than my pity. Distracted, I came within inches of stepping into the path of a bus. The wind of it swept my bangs aside. On the subway, my car pulled abreast of another one on a parallel track, you know how it is when for a couple of seconds, you have a perfectly clear view of the train next to yours and there is something inscrutably cosmic about the experience, like some vignette out of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I hoped I would see sex, or a murder. There was an elderly Asian man standing in the other car. He was wearing a dark overcoat though it was summer. He reached into his overcoat and flung several white shapes to the roof of the car. They were white paper butterflies. As they descended he reached into his coat again and produced a fan, which he waved back and forth, causing the wings of the butterflies to flap. They ascended once more, circling each other. Then the other track dipped and that train went down another tunnel and out of view and there was just the reflection of a drunk girl crying. Distracted, I wound up at the door of one of the members of the Bitterati. Lying in bed later that night he asked in earnest what I was doing. He had known me from my old days in the city and saw it, the thing inside myself I was flailing so wildly to prevent anyone from noticing. The next morning, I hid my panties in his bedding without telling him; his girlfriend was an editor of a Brooklyn literary magazine who had acted superior to me at the last Nick Denton party.

  It was around then I started fabricating. The first time was innocent enough: I quoted a source as saying something that when I checked my notes for the exact wording there was no record of. This puzzled me until I realized—it was not something this person had actually said, but something I wished she had. I filed it as it was. Call it the frustrated novelist’s revenge. Call it petulance. In the months before the piece ran I was a wreck with anxiety. Right alongside my stupid pride over this dizzyingly pointless defiance was the child’s dread of getting caught. I never was. My artistic ambition expanded shortly: fabricating whole scenarios and characters. “Fabulist.” It had a certain ring to it. I convinced myself there was a nobility to fabulism the same as there was servitude. Certainly a thrill. As my folio increased, so did my dread. I had vivid fantasies of being escorted from the office through a corridor of whispers; not being able to eat in public without feeling the incriminating stares. My face flushed at the thought. It was the highlight of my day.

  Finally, the woman who originally brought me to the magazine requested to meet me for a drink under clandestine circumstances. The blood drained from my fingers, I sailed to our appointment in a state of grace. Finally! She told me the magazine was folding and requested an up-to-date copy of my CV—she knew of a position opening at The Cut. I gave her the CV and blew off the interview. The magazine went under and I celebrated my unemployment with denial, changing nothing about my lifestyle. But the maze reconfigured around me; I did not come from a family and no longer had the institutional backing of Mr. Nast, and, not so gradually, I could no longer get a table at this restaurant or breeze through the door of this club. Inevitably, that same penthouse bar became my staple; my inner Diane would always have a place there, like Cheers or The Shining, and by the end I was going there almost every night. This wound up being counterproductive: in spite of my declining status there was always some venture capitalist who had briefly been a lit major in undergraduate who would cover the bill and occasionally propose marriage. Women who believe that men prefer dumb and hot to smart and hot are probably neither smart enough or hot enough. Men will always want to possess what they fear they can’t. The changeling would never lack opportunities. But it’s commonplace that you don’t change until it’s time to change; by now I couldn’t tell the difference between a party and a bunch of geese honking at each other, and I had grown bored wrecking myself on shoals of cock. Not to mention what was now a small mountain of credit card debt. A creditor actually beeped in while I was on the phone with my father telling him I needed help.

  And that, Terry, is how you came to have this imaginary conversation with a grown woman living in her father’s basement in Pittsburgh. That is how I came to fuck up my life this much.

  

  All grays pale next to southwestern Pennsylvania in winter; it is the gray caked to the paneling of a dark car that seems unwashable, like an innate feature of the car itself. The men in Carhartt jackets with complexions like the car paneling, ruddy-faced and thick-wristed teenagers going to vocational colleges, girls with nail art and striped hair extensions. I was suffocated with repulsion and heartbreak. I would have offered up every particle of my being to save them and given anything to not be around them. People would ask if I was HERE TO STAY and I would coyly say WE’LL SEE as if I had some trick up m
y sleeve other than deflecting my humiliation. I got dinner with a cousin my age, having to suggest a restaurant that was not TGI Fridays. She lived in a neighboring county with her husband and two young children and worried about the quality of the school district. I asked why they didn’t move closer to the city and she looked at me like a Martian. She had two kids and her husband was laid off. She called me “Moneybags” and looked at me with the suspicion that many local women did, that I considered myself to be an alien visitor, that I wasn’t voicing what a stuck-up bitch I actually was. The suspicion with which my mother would have looked at me if she met me today, the snob she had dreamed into existence. The worst kind of snob: a failed one. I ran into an ex at the 7-Eleven who was opportunistic enough to believe this was an opening; I deflected, suggesting he find me on Facebook, only to be informed he couldn’t currently afford Internet access because of his child support situation. I began running again like I had not since Austin. But Austin summers are hot and wet and louche and Pittsburgh winters call to mind the vision from Norse eschatology of a wolf swallowing the sun, so it felt like I needed it to: grim survival. This feeling appealed to me so much I would wear my running clothes when I went to bed and be up and on the streets while it was still dark, just the sound of my breath and the horn of a coal train. This ensured there would be some motion in my life; otherwise I could spend minutes on end staring at a Diet Coke before sipping it.

  Jack Kelly was equally stymied by the fact of my existence each time he was confronted with it. My long-suffering stepmother had finally left him and he had become so set in his ways he derived more satisfaction from the conviction no woman could understand him than he could from the understanding of a woman. And he’d developed the hoarding instinct common to the obstinately lonely—acquiring whatever junk from thrift stores and yard sales to create a consoling fortress of clutter to best recreate their inner state. In opposition to our respective dynamics with my mother there had always been a cold strain between us, but epic rows erupted over this junk; I challenged him on the utility of a foam cushion with no casing or for that matter a piece of furniture to go with it or an intricate lamp made of popsicle sticks that didn’t actually function as a lamp, his defense was what a bargain they had been—given the current state of my finances perhaps I could take a lesson. But what truly stunned about the relationship was its perfect symbiosis. He treated me like an egg whose safekeeping he had been assigned by some highly ironic cosmic pedagogue and I cleaned his house.

  Soon enough he recruited me for his pub trivia team. Though I had started attending meetings of my benevolent cult, I needed some kind of activity other than running; my father made sure there was always a Diet Coke in front of me, and by the end of the night I would be caffeinated to the point of trembling. I don’t have much to contribute to the literature of sobriety except that you discover the miraculous truth of every platitude you’ve ever heard and that in the cold light of biochemistry it means experiencing every single moment of every single day (excluding, naturally, the number of SSRIs and the antianxiety medication I was taking). He just needed someone who knew popular culture. All my life I’d had a child’s veneration of my father’s intellect. He may have possessed little aptitude for converting it into material gain, but the sheer volume of information as un-triaged as the yard sale items he was acquiring had been a source of pride for me in a my dad can beat up your dad sort of way. It was also his only quality that my mother uniformly spoke highly of. She liked to say I’d inherited his brain and her balls. So it came as no small surprise to discover he cheated at pub trivia; discreetly eavesdropping on other teams when stumped, or filling in answers after pencils were down. His team had long been champions, and this Machiavellian commitment to victory in an environment with this low of stakes made me unexpectedly proud. It was nice to know there was some winner’s edge in my blood.

  

  My first meeting I walked past the door three times. I had to employ the athlete’s trick of visualizing myself walking through the door to finally go through with it. I sat by myself. Young women who avoid processed foods are not in large supply at meetings, and I thought if I looked haughty enough it would mask how afraid I was. It didn’t, and people smiled and said hello without making a federal case of it. The banality of redemption. One woman near me told a story to her friend about how annoyed she was her email had been hacked because of all the typos in the spam attributed to her. Another blue-collar archetype sighed to his friend he wasn’t getting younger, nobody is. I wondered if anyone in the room had partied with my mom. We read a passage from the Big Book, something about how going to prison opened a door. There was no blinding epiphany or anything like that, it’s more like…like candles on a winter night. Just knowing that you are not the only one in the dark is enough, maybe. But that’s between you and the God of your understanding.

  This group met in a black box theater. Diane would have appreciated that.

  

  Of course I thought about her. This was not New York, things did not change here; there were moments when the past bled through the page more strongly than the present. The smell of onions and pierogies on the griddle in a restaurant, the rhythm of bumps crossing over a bridge, the gasp of cold air opening a freezer door in the grocery store—it was hard to predict what would cause the unfurling of some Proustian apparition that would trigger the desire to dive into the nearest bottle. I meditated on the irony that it was Diane who had inspired in me the faith in destiny and that even from beyond the grave was the most likely to derail it. It made me feel closer to her; I was sure she was on a cloud somewhere pleased with the dramatic tension. I prayed for the clarity to distinguish the desire for a drink and the need for one and, for all I know, she helped answer it.

  

  My abstinence included men as well as alcohol. There was no shortage of housecleaning to be done. However, one development around this time was Mark resurfacing. For several years he had been living in New York and working for Tribeca Productions, but he would be leaving before long because he’d finally cobbled together financing for the feature he’d been working on back when we were together. It pleased me that Jason and Harry were wrong: they had perceived Mark as a loser in the same way they perceived all less predatory creatures. As if any man who spent less than every hour of the day obsessing over how powerful he was could hardly be entitled to the same oxygen supply, let alone to come into his own in his own time. Yet it was also bittersweet to feel that I possessed the Midas vagina: destined to lose men before they became something. (My resentments were well fed by the martyr’s conviction that this was a larger cosmic scheme of persecution as opposed to the result of simple decisions made by myself.)

  At any rate, we had remained friends and met for the occasional lunch during my time in the city, but he had been in a relationship with a sweet girl who supported his ambitions without being overly burdened with her own. I was genuinely pleased for him: Mark had found a Mark! But that had recently run its course and we were talking again often, sometimes for hours. The sound of his voice was logical and comforting, and my local sponsor, while as well-intentioned as could be, harbored too much of a girl crush on me to hold me accountable. She was a waitress who had never lived more than a few miles from the home of her birth and had read every issue of the late magazine of my employment and her head swam at the idea that I had lived in a world that she thought was a fantasy invented for grocery checkout counters. Mark saw through my prevarications and, though his nature was no more confrontational than it had been since we were together, now when my actions or my own interpretations of my actions started to spiral he would just chuckle tolerantly and say, “Okay, Lee.” And then I could laugh too, a small vacation from hating myself from the vantage of his tolerant amusement, the creeping sense that I might actually deserve it. Forgiveness. Okay, Lee.

  Then he mentioned he was going to the Sundance Film Festival, they’d be putting him up in a hal
fway decent hotel. As his end was covered, he could float me the airfare, no sweat when I paid him back. I was quiet.

  “I mean this in as casual a way as I can,” he said.

  I said I’d think about it. Head and heart were at yet another impasse. You can’t go back again, that’s not how growth works. Conditions change, and you can’t attempt to recreate a set of preexisting conditions as though the same design flaw isn’t there. But…suppose conditions change to permit the emergence of new conditions. This chiding, knowing Mark, the Mark who FINISHED THINGS, was not the Mark of the past, and for the first time in my life I was sincere about getting well—the creeping sense that I deserved it. Of course this could just as easily have been an argument made from fear and because it was cold. The instant I believed I had reached some kind of clarity, breath fogged the window. I was now thirty years old, and had more than once made the threat in the past that if I reached this age unmarried and unpublished I would throw myself under a train. I knew Mark was a good man, and was sad to imagine the leggy, deserving blonde woman on the other coast with a young, Texan time bomb in her bed, and the good men in her past she hadn’t settled for believing she was happy playing a man’s game.