Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Scott Spencer

  Willing

  to my mother

  What did we care?

  MARK TWAIN, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  SO THERE I WAS, Avery Jankowsky, New York City, early…

  2

  IN THE DAYS following Deirdre’s confession, I had little luck…

  3

  DEIRDRE MOVED OUT, temporarily, saying that in her view the…

  4

  THERE WAS an antiwar demonstration in Central Park, and a…

  5

  I WENT STRAIGHT TO WORK, or what passes for work…

  6

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I was picked up at my apartment…

  7

  A NOISY, none too smooth takeoff, though spirits on board…

  8

  I HAD EXPECTED the North Atlantic to be an icy…

  9

  AN HOUR LATER, I was with Sigrid. You know what…

  10

  I DON’T THINK I had ever even said the word…

  11

  AN HOUR LATER, I was awakened by the sound of…

  12

  YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT getting out of Iceland as soon…

  13

  IT TOOK MORE than riding the minivan to the airport,…

  14

  LATE-NIGHT LANDING at Gardemoen Airport. The moon shone behind the…

  15

  HOW CAN I EXPRESS what happened in those first few…

  16

  WE WALKED BACK to the Christofer around eleven in the…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Scott Spencer

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  SO THERE I WAS, Avery Jankowsky, New York City, early twenty-first century, not terribly well educated in light of all there was to know, but adequately taught in light of what I had to do. I wasn’t someone you could push around, but I was not a leader, not a standout. I was a face in the crowd, a penitent on the edge of a Renaissance painting, a particularly graceful skater in a Breughel, the guy in the stands at the World Series, right behind the crepe bunting, his hand on his heart and his eyes bright with belief during the singing of the national anthem. Why would you even give him a second look? But you do. Physically, I was of the type no longer commonly minted, a large serious face, a little heavier than necessary, broad shoulders, sturdy legs, hair and eyes the color of a lunch bag. I had a kind of 1940s manliness—perhaps the doomed manliness of the father I had never known—and, unfortunately, I had a kind of 1940s income, too. Thirty-seven years old, and I had studied a chart that had run in one of the monthlies I sometimes wrote for, and in terms of income I simply wasn’t where I should be. The thing is, if I’d had more money, it could be that none of this would have happened. Heracleitus taught us that Character is Fate. I don’t want to argue, but money is, too.

  Did I need more than I had? To that, I would have to say Yes. Did I want more than I had? Here, the Yes is unequivocal. Not that I was one of the Gimme Gimme people. I was not hatching schemes to make millions. I was not one to shove my way to the front of the line. I was not plotting the downfall of my competitors. Here’s the way it was with me: I was staring at my half-empty plate with the absurd hope that my sad, hungry eyes might one day inspire someone to heap some of the world’s bounty on me.

  Be careful what you wish for,

  But before that, before I got what I wished for, and more, which is, as most people know, another way of saying Before I got what I wished for, and less, I was, to be perfectly blunt about it, still absorbed with the Sisyphean task of getting over my childhood, which was not at all how I wanted to be spending my brief flicker of existence, but was, to my perpetual chagrin, what I seemed to be stuck with.

  When I asked myself Why am I me? I usually didn’t look much further than the fact that I was a man who had had four fathers.

  Each time my mother remarried she took her new husband’s name, and I did, too. If we were to meet when I was fifteen and I said, as I would have, because I was rather formal as a teenager, How do you do, my name is Avery Jankowsky, I would be giving you relatively new information. Jankowsky was my fourth and final name. First there was Kaplan, after my first father. I don’t like to call him my real father because he was around for such a short time, certainly not long enough to corner the market in realness. I wasn’t yet walking or talking at the time of his death, and I have no independent memories of him; all I have are my mother’s handful of repeated stories about him, memories I have more or less incorporated as my own, something in the way ethnic minorities in the former Yugoslavia have heard the stories of the crimes committed against them by the Moors in the time of Suleyman and somehow take these experiences as their own. I don’t like to call him my birth father, either, since he didn’t give birth to me, and Ejaculation Father is just nutty and rude, so for the most part I have simply called him Ted, though sometimes I have referred to him as Mr. Kaplan.

  After I was Avery Kaplan I became Avery Kearney, out of my second father, Andrew, who was Ted’s partner in a flag and banner business, and who was himself a stern Irish miser, with large ears and icy hands. The marriage lasted eight years, until my mother was caught in an affair with the man who would become the third and by far the worst of her husbands, a sadistic, sarcastic bully named Norman Blake. And so I became Avery Blake, wearing his name like a crown of thorns. In Einsteinian-emotional time, that seemed like the most protracted of her marriages, though, in fact, it lasted three years, which I would say was an embarrassingly short time for a marriage, except my one marriage was even briefer than that. After Blake was swept into the dustbin of conjugal history, I had my mother to myself, relatively speaking, for eighteen months, and then, just when the gears of our shrunken family began to mesh, she met and fell in love with my fourth and final father—Gene Jankowsky. Gene was a painter, a maker of large busy canvases, full of reds and oranges and darting little arrows indicating the flow of energy, that is, God’s presence. He was tall and thick, with a Russian mystic’s beard and hair down to his shoulders. His clothes and hands smelled of turpentine and his breath carried the yeasty tang of B vitamins. He loved van Gogh, St. Francis, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and, to my great relief and surprise, he loved me, too. He saw me as a helpless boy tied to the zigs and zags of a childish woman’s life, like a water-skier hitched to the stern of an out-of-control speedboat.

  My mother was born to Jews, and her first husband, Ted Kaplan, was Jewish, too. Kearney and Blake were both Catholics, though Kearney seemed only to believe in pleasure, his own pleasure, and Blake believed in science, without, quite frankly, having much of a grasp of it. Gene, however, was a devout Christian, though his religion was largely homemade. He was not what is called a cafeteria Christian, someone who helps himself to the easy and attractive parts and ignores those parts that are inconvenient or call for self-sacrifice. But his devotion didn’t fit into any particular dogma; it was a homemade goulash of do-unto-others, prophecy, and joy. Gene’s last work of art was a piece of silversmithery, a crucifix two and a half inches high, an inch and a half wide, the silver stripped and scored to look like petrified wood. He made a few of them to sell at local crafts fairs, and then a Humpty Dumpty of a man in a powder blue suit and aviator glasses came into possession of one of them and bought the rights to the Jankowsky Cross for a small Tennessee company called Calvary Products, and in the last year of his life Gene was making quite a bit of money.

  Dear Gene died of congestive heart failure when I was a freshman in college. He had left his financial affairs in surprisingly good order. Relatives he hadn’t seen in thirty year
s were considerately remembered, soup kitchens, community art programs, a fellow whose animal rescue operation Gene had learned about on the local news, the War Resisters League, all were given small sums of money. More remarkably, he bequeathed a thousand dollars each to fifty-three people who had made generous gestures in Gene’s direction over the course of his lifetime, some of these charitable acts going as far back as Gene’s semester at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had my hands full trying to locate these far-flung earth angels, finding them all was a tedious process, but I owed it to Gene. He had always treated me with such kindness, a kindness that extended itself beyond the grave. I was bequeathed 8 percent of the annual income from the Jankowsky Cross, a sum that was enough to cushion me from the full force of financial disaster, though—and this may have been Gene’s intention—it never gave me enough to live particularly well, not even in the year preceding the millennium, when national jitters ran high. I was a freelance writer, and I was always grateful for the income, though there were times when I was convinced it actually held me back. The trust was like being tied to a balloon that was too small to lift me to great heights but just big enough to create a few inches of space between my feet and the pavement, making it difficult for me to walk like a normal human being.

  I’ve already mentioned my brief early marriage. When it ended I was not even twenty-four years old, and I had to wonder if I was embarking on an emotional journey similar to my mother’s, fated to lunge from one matrimonial catastrophe to the next. I had beginner’s luck in my relationships and already had in my little neural notebook of romantic memories a dozen gorgeous commencements. Now as the only divorced twenty-four-year-old I knew, I was worried if courtship and a ferocious few months were all I was made for. Beginner’s luck is fine if you get the hell out of there before it runs out; if you don’t, it’s worse than having no luck at all. I became careful to keep my entanglements solely with women who were manifestly unsuited to long-term engagements: women who were already married, or who seemed only mildly interested in me, or who lived a time zone or two away, or, as I aged, who were too young for me, which brings me to my relationship with Deirdre Feigenbaum, the end of which began the adventures I am about to impart.

  Deirdre and I never spoke of marriage. I thought there was an unspoken agreement between us that our relationship had an expiration date on it, one that took a bit of squinting and close examination to read, but which was indelibly there nonetheless. I also thought this expiration date was there for Deirdre’s benefit; it was her ticket home when, say, she was nearing thirty and I had rounded the bend at forty and was in full gallop toward fifty. Now she was twenty-seven and I was thirty-seven. Deirdre was gracious about the decade I had on her. Thirty-seven, she told me, is the new thirty-five, so we’re almost exactly the same age. Nevertheless, I dwelled on the age difference, privately and out loud, obscuring the fact that I had fallen in love with Deirdre. I was so convinced that it was temporary that I was in effect fondly remembering her even when we were in medias res. She was a graduate student in Russian history at Columbia, and her spoken intention was to move to Moscow or St. Petersburg once she had her PhD, which wouldn’t take terribly long. Nothing did with Deirdre. She was tall and fleshy, with extravagant waves of red hair, freckles, auburn eyes, a sharp nose that pointed at you like a finger. She was quick and efficient, in her reading, her cooking and eating, her showering and dressing, her walking, her decision making; she was even sexually quick and efficient. Bringing her to climax was like pulling a cork out of a bottle of champagne; if you knew what you were doing, there was nothing to it.

  We had met at a book party, a desultory affair in a bar on University Place—the waiters were eating canapés off each other’s platters; the author was huddled in the back talking furiously into his cell phone. After a decade of relationships that all seemed to last twenty-six weeks, I hadn’t had the company of a woman in months and I felt awkward, constrained. I carried my desire within me like a tray filled with too many little cups of ceremonial wine: one false step and the whole thing comes crashing down. Deirdre started it, and sensing she was somewhat drawn to me was like hearing the little bass and drum riff that begins your favorite song. We left the party, took a long walk that ended up in my small apartment. Afterward, she draped her hefty leg over me, propped herself up on her elbow, and said, “You’re perfect.” I was taking a drink from my water glass at the time, and her praise touched something antic in me. I opened my mouth and let the water drool out, as if I were, as my third father used to say, subnormal. Deirdre’s laugh was loud, masculine, like a locker room punch on the arm. “And you’re funny, too!” she said.

  Two weeks later she moved out of the apartment she was sharing with three other students and moved into my place, and then three weeks after that Deirdre, who could find virtually anything on the Internet, found an apartment we could afford, and I gladly allowed myself to be carried along in the wake of her enthusiasm. We moved to an apartment on Seventh Avenue, near Fifty-fourth Street, a gloomy place, the walls soft from a century’s paint jobs, the sound of traffic like a steel river seven floors below.

  My mother wants me to ask you a question, Deirdre said during a meal somewhere near the end of our first month at the new apartment. This sounds fatal, I said. She took my hands in hers. Our hands were the same size. My mother wants to know why you never married. But I was married. Didn’t you tell her that? Avery, come on, you were married for two months, that’s not really going to settle the issue. Issue? So now there’s an issue? Come on, Avery, don’t play word games with me. There’s no need, you’re perfectly safe here. I stopped myself from saying, Safe? Is my safety an issue? Instead, I asked So what did you tell her? Deirdre smiled and said I told her I would ask you. I disengaged my hand from hers. We were eating a roast chicken Deirdre had prepared according to the instructions of Marcella Hazan—a couple of pierced lemons inside, salt and pepper. No fox or weasel had ever enjoyed a chicken more than I enjoyed those roasters Deirdre now and again brought to our table. I was trying to come up with a smart retort. But as the silence lengthened, and deepened, it took on weight like a punctured hull takes on water, and I found myself sinking into despair. I’m pretty good at the early stages of love affairs, I said. That’s very true, said Deirdre, smiling her encouragement. I’m good in the beginning, it’s true, I said. I’m good at zeroing in on someone and getting her to care about me. I’m good at trying to know everything about her. I like telling the story of my stupid little life, the four fathers and all that. But after that, I said, something goes awry. I don’t see myself as one of those eternal boys in the magazines. I don’t fear commitment. I’m not a commitment-a-phobe, I added, trying to italicize the word, to let Deirdre know I was deliberately saying something tacky and absurd. However, nothing of the irony registered in Deirdre’s face or in the steady, piercing sanity of her gaze. Despite having presented this as a question her mother had posed, Deirdre was surely waiting for an answer, and as I slowly realized this I also realized that what I said next might be something I would have to live with. I don’t get tired of people, and I don’t screw around, I said. She frowned. Do people get tired of you, and then they screw around? Sometimes, I said. But mostly the energy runs out, like an old wooden top that spins slower and slower, until it’s just sort of wobbling and you can see every nick in the paint, and then, boom, it stops, and it’s just this weird little piece of wood with a big belly lying on the table. Okay, then, I’ll tell my mother. I’m sure she’ll be fond of the top analogy. More chicken?

  I may have been older, but I always wondered if I was in Deirdre’s league. She was ambitious, optimistic, full of plans, schedules, energy. She had a pure, open heart. Her innate happiness, her optimistic turn of mind, were as alluring and exciting to me as her soft skin, her warm scalp, the smell of her, like a crushed orange and fresh bread. We never quarreled, though sometimes I was irked by what I imagined she was thinking—like why didn’t I write a best seller or get a j
ob at ABC News, as if these things were available if you wanted them. She seemed to think you could just register for them like putting your name on the sign-up sheet for the Chess Club. I was sure she wondered why I, the oldest man she had ever been with, had the income of a boy. Deirdre’s father, Ronald Feigenbaum, was an intellectual property lawyer who dropped names like Vonnegut, Coppola, Grisham, and Sontag; her mother, Lena Rosen, was a classics professor who dropped names like Ovid and Aristophanes; and her brother, Adam, a pediatrician in Vermont, was also a rising star in the Democratic Party and dropped names like Clinton and Dean. Deirdre herself was surely headed for a life of achievement and material comfort. Without even having begun her dissertation, she had been offered a job in Citicorp’s Moscow office, and four think tanks were in touch with her. I felt a little threadbare compared to Deirdre. Yet her choosing to be with me was a source of encouragement to me. She had so much of what I lacked, which awakened in me not a sense of covetousness but a sense of relief, and validation. I had, against considerable odds, been chosen by a woman whose life was rich and secure—which must mean she saw something at least potentially rich and secure in me. Yet this sense of accomplishment her affection bestowed upon me cast its own shadow, a darkly opposite sense of foreboding that, through the animating magic of neurosis, took on a life of its own.

  Before long, the misgivings and historical pessimism that I had harbored from the beginning of the relationship were all but eclipsed by my growing suspicion that Deirdre was unfaithful. I could not stop thinking about the time she’d asked me if women had ever screwed around on me. I was also struck by the flimsy but pesky fact that since that night she had never cooked lemon chicken again and, in fact, had all but stopped doing her share in the kitchen. As a freelance writer I had plenty of free time in which to perfect my jealousy, spinning out scenarios, sharpening vague suspicions into a fine deadly point, like a prisoner patiently whittling a Popsicle stick into a murder weapon. I sneaked uptown in order to lurk around Columbia, dreading and hoping to catch sight of her kissing some brilliant, irresistible professor, or walking arm in arm with some policy wonk of the future. If she seemed to lack sexual interest in me even for one night, I could not help but believe it was proof that her erotic energies were being spent elsewhere.