You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

  Karl removed himself to the side of the room farthest from the piano, where the entertainment center was located. He ranged around in and among machine-smoothed and varnished black wooden shelves, the flat-screen TV, the receiver, CD player, MP3 dock, turntable, two enormous speakers, each with its woofer and subwoofer; he drifted past a great assortment of CDs, DVDs, and LPs; he wandered near those godless pews, the soft leather couch, love seat, and matching recliners on which were strewn the sacred texts, the TV guides and leisure sections of local and national newspapers.

  Jones said, “Two hundred and ninety-eight laps around the couch is a mile, I’ve paced it off. A little exercise at your age wouldn’t hurt, while you still can. I’m having trouble concentrating on the Chopin with you over there restlessly walking around. I thought you maybe were going to help but instead you’re hindering. Shall we play a little bit of pool on a Saturday afternoon? I’m capitulating, in other words, to the desire to play pool. Philistinism wins another victory over art at 218 Dreyfus Road here in West Egg. Not that pool isn’t a beautiful game with a rich history, and I don’t in any way mean to underestimate the value of relaxation, a state which you sometimes simply cannot achieve, let’s be realistic, while playing a Chopin nocturne. Relaxation especially for someone like you you’d think wouldn’t be that hard. What do you have at stake in the world, after all? Whether some kid gets an A on a quiz on polynomial equations, if I’m using the correct term? No employees, no capital at risk, no equipment that amortizes while you sleep—and amortize means die, machines die, I’ve seen it happen, it’s very sad, I’ve seen men weep, I’ve wept myself, the death of a machine the size of a blue whale, or, to be more accurate, the size of a series of four dozen giraffes’ necks laid end to end and dropping dead, how many people can say they’ve witnessed that? Well, a lot, actually, but not in the suburbs of New York. The midwestern United States, yes. Detroit, yes, your Malaysian and Chinese manufacturing belts, yes, grown Malaysian men weeping by the side of a dead machine at which they have spent the whole of their lives laboring from age twelve on, the soul of a man in a sense given over to the machine, entrusted to the machine, which your man Karl Marx would call alienation, I have this idea that you are a Marxist based not on any theory of his I’ve ever heard you espouse but on your seeming refusal to make anything resembling money and on your occasional snide remark about the sort of work I do and the people I exploit, as you have called it, while with a clean conscience I use the term employ. Did you know the average annual wage of a Malaysian adult is the equivalent of fourteen thousand U.S. dollars? That means your typical worker there is earning above the U.S. minimum wage, which, in terms of Malaysian ringgits, is a lot of ringgits, it’s possible to be comfortable in Kuala Lumpur and even more so in your outlying areas on far fewer than the forty-five or so thousand ringgits that fourteen thousand dollars is more or less the equivalent of—Malaysia, the sleeping giant, if you know what I mean, but back to my point, which is that of relaxation. I would kill to have your life. If I had your life I would devote my life to relaxation, I would be so good at pool I would be Jackie Gleason, I would be so good at pool I wouldn’t care that I wasn’t good at piano and was only a math teacher, not that I think some people shouldn’t be math teachers, imagine the world without them, but the point is I can’t have your life, a man of my particular talents and energies, if I had your life I would turn it back into my life in a matter of years, maybe months, some people in this world must make things while others must teach youngsters how to perform abstract operations, this fact was long ago established by minds far more sophisticated than yours, or even mine. But uh, any case, you, who are in biblical terms a lot more likely than I am to get into heaven, would enjoy it a lot more if you could learn to relax, speaking of which, how about a game of pool, aka pocket billiards, which would mean you’d have to get up, I don’t know, maybe you’re relaxed after all?”

  Karl, not knowing what to do with the novel, excessive, worrisome amount of energy in his body, had at a certain point in his stepfather’s discourse lain on his back on the pool table, having succeeded in removing all balls but one, which now impinged on a spot between his lower lumbar and sacral vertebrae, reproducing the sort of shooting pain in the left leg he’d have experienced had the disk between these two vertebrae herniated, as the event is called. The latter had happened to Jones, the result of his having sat for many years in a poorly constructed office chair at his job in the manufacturing sector.

  “But technically, if you lying there on the pool table like, I don’t know, a jellyfish is a form of rebellion, and I think it is, and I might add that it’s about time, then I would say actually it’s not a form of relaxation, and in fact as the orator and activist Martin Luther King Jr. amply demonstrated, nonviolent resistance is one of your least relaxing forms of disobedience. But in the case of Dr. King he had a legitimate gripe against a frighteningly powerful oppressor, whereas although I admit I am something of an asshole, I’m really not the oppressor I gather you think I am, I’m just an irrepressible conversationalist, a man with a clinically diagnosed excess of conviviality, trying to engage you via a couple pieces of interactive furniture here in the house we share. If I thought I’d have more luck with the wood shop I’d suggest we make a bird feeder together on this extremely pleasant spring afternoon, but I remember all too well—remember with a shudder, frankly—our last joint attempt at woodworking, and besides I just don’t like negotiating those basement stairs at this point in my life if I don’t have to. So, in any case, you and I having reached on the Chopin it seems something of an impasse consisting of my bad playing and your high standards, I therefore ask you with all due solicitude if you’d like to join me in a friendly game of pool. All right, no response from you, probably my mistake for not putting my request in the interrogative. Karl, would you like to join me in a friendly game of pool?”

  One of the by-products of the previous afternoon’s beating being sore and stiff muscles, Karl had begun a series of modest experiments in neck flexibility on the pool table’s forgiving felt surface. He was in the process of slowly moving the oblong sphere of his noggin from side to side, letting first one bruised cheek and then the other come to rest on the felt. He viewed Larchmont Jones with the more open of his two eyes, the right one, and said, “I don’t like playing pool with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like doing anything with you.”

  “And yet here we are, stuck with each other.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? What does it mean?”

  “It means I think we should make the best of a difficult situation by playing pool, and then I’ll take a nap if the pains associated with my disease will let me, and you can, I don’t know, go have dinner with your friends, if such people exist.”

  “That was gratuitous.”

  “I meant only that I’d like to meet your companions because it does a man my age good to be stimulated by the presence of younger people but you don’t ever bring them around, so I was, you know, lamenting that and it came out inappropriately, which I regret.”

  Karl slowly stood. He tried to think of what not playing pool with this man would entail. It would entail the quiet insanity of attempting to find something else with which to occupy his time during the remainder of the long afternoon, and time as of recently had become gelatinous, the seconds did not seem to want to flake off and die away one by one as was their custom, they clumped up before him, impeded forward movement, clogged his breathing holes—there were more and more of them, he was drowning in time. Leaving the house crossed his thoughts. The problem of leaving the house, though, now rivaled the problem of staying in the house, which was closely associated with the problem of the man with whom he shared it, which had confronted him most evenings and weekends for as long as he could remember, and which, feelingly, was not so very unlike being trapped in the man’s stale, crumbed, salt-and-pepper beard, or salt-and-brown-shoe-polish, if one were aiming for visual accurac
y. The problem of leaving the house, though, was that outside the house had that afternoon become one single enormous location, and he was certain—though he was too frightened to test his certainty empirically—that each part of this location would now resemble that pale face, the loveliest face he knew, made hideous two hours ago by a derision of which he was the object.

  Karl stood up and, by not leaving the vicinity of the pool table, signaled his willingness to play. His life was an abomination. He broke and sank nothing, despaired. Billiards is torture. A soul can be dying, another exalting, and to the uninitiated watcher of a game of pool, this might look like a game of pool.

  “I just, really, Malaysia, though, so much of me is tied up in it, and as you may well know, or perhaps not, I go there once a year, would love for you to accompany me next time, in the autumn, during your school’s fall break. Fall break, there’s a pair of nouns that once you reach a certain age you live in fear of them becoming verbs. Men break their hips in the shower too, it’s less well documented than the hip breaks of the fairer sex, a virtual commonplace among your geriatric distaff set, all my lady peers either have one themselves or know someone who does.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “I can’t believe I missed that shot. Your go. Serious about Malaysia though, what do you say? Anytime you feel like either answering my question or taking your pool shot would be fantastic.”

  Karl swayed in place, took his shot, missed.

  “You scared to go to Malaysia?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll go then?”

  “No.”

  “You’re scared, I think you’re scared. Nothing wrong with that, I’m scared too, that’s why I’m asking you along. You can’t sit next to me on the plane though, because I’m very scared of takeoffs and landings and I need to be seated next to a beautiful young woman at these times, the likelihood of which will be halved, or more, if you’re sitting next to me. There’s no guarantee that if you don’t sit next to me I will definitely sit next to a beautiful young woman, but my luck in this area is almost impeccable, as is my luck with these people being excellent listeners, I don’t know what it is, I just have a genius for getting very pretty young women to listen to me, I sort of angle my words right into their open and absorptive—is that a word, absorptive?—pores and they drink me right in. This is not in any way to be disrespectful or adulterous to your mom, I would never, but you’re in the air, you’re so terrified you think you’re going to crap your pants, the beautiful woman is there—she is always somehow there with her striped shirt—and you just cantilever the words into her waiting body and this is intoxicating, this is transcendental meditation on acid as we used to say in the early eighties. My point being you should come with me to Malaysia and face your fear, during fall break, not during fall break, this, the teaching of math, the passing on to the next generation of mathematical skills, it strikes me, should not matter as much as conquering your fears by coming with me to Malaysia matters. And fear by the way is generally caused by ignorance, except when the thing you’re afraid of is legitimately terrifying like a giant metal tub with wings that leaps up off the ground with two hundred people in it. But in your case, you don’t know Malaysia, you’re scared of Malaysia, this is a story as old as the Malay Peninsula itself.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t like you!”

  “My response: you’re scared. Let us begin—what’s the word I’m looking for?—desensitization by looking at a map of Malaysia, oh! And there’s the eight ball in the side pocket, we are done with that game, my friend, you rack them up, I’ll roll down the map.”

  Karl did not rack them up. The face of his stepfather, Larchmont Jones, was ruddy and flushed. Karl was no physician and did not know if this was a sign of good or ill health. Jones did seem to have benefited from an influx of energy sometime in the twenty minutes since they’d met in the front hallway of the house. Was he young and energetic for his age or old and infirm for his age? What was his age? Karl wished, begged God for peace from thoughts. As Jones entered the brief passage of blank floor between the pool table and the entertainment center, Karl took the rat’s-eye view of the room. By a black piano leg, from the bottom of the beige wainscoting, tiny mental Karl looked out at all he could see. He saw the distressed body of Karl, limned in angry electricity, that bruised, puffed, agonized face so astonishingly unsympathetic. He saw Jones in pressed leisurewear, stooped and ruddy, the fragile body incommensurate with the prodigious energy that ran through it whose provenance was a mystery to rat’s-eye Karl and to the one of full stature.

  The map was furled on the wall above Jones. He reached up the way old people reach up, their skeletons remade by time to reach only straight out or down without strain. From the top of the Tower of Pisa four hundred years before, Galileo Galilei had proved the earth’s gravitational field acted equally on objects of unequal size. It had perhaps not occurred to the great astronomer to investigate how gravity acted on the young animal versus the old: this was where gravity revealed its inherent bias. Rat’s-eye Karl, who was curious about the human species but did not participate in its cumbersome allegiances, detected on the face of real Karl a kind of impractical sympathy for the old man, a sadness on his behalf, a mourning for all those for whom reaching things a foot above their heads was onerous, which nonetheless did not neutralize his dislike of the man, ratcheted up now to hostility by events some of which were non-Jones-related. The map Jones pulled down with a groan startled Karl.

  “Have you read the Koran?”

  “Is this a quiz?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. Have you read the Bible? Cover to cover, I mean?”

  “God.”

  “That’s a fairly accurate one-word summary, yes, that’s a succinctly delivered book report. How about the Bhagavad Gita? I’m just saying I find these to be important and interesting texts, I like to have them around for easy reference. The indigenous Malaysians are largely Muslim, and if you know anything about migration patterns throughout history it’s not hard to imagine how that happened. I like in any case on my annual pilgrimage to Malaysia to stroll the factory floor and engage my subcontractors in a discussion of the finer points of Islamic law, known in Arabic as sharia, if I’m pronouncing that right, which means ‘path to the well,’ and is relevant for anyone doing business in that part of the world, since it presumably regulates aspects of life as diverse as banking and sex. There’s an old joke about banking and sex that I won’t tell right now since you’d have to know a fair amount about both to appreciate it. Now you look perturbed, that was not my intention. Here’s this map, in any case. Now, where’s Malaysia?”

  This was a different map than the one that had hung from the wall of this room in his youth. This was a cruel kind of map with no names or national borders inscribed on it, just a six-foot-wide picture of the world flattened out and seen from above, with the top of one’s head oriented northward, of course, and one’s genitals, knees, and feet off to the south.

  “The God’s-eye view of the world,” Jones went on—and rat’s-eye Karl would have contested this, had he a voice—“but not if you don’t know geography. Come on, you’re an educator, you’ve got to know this. You don’t know this? Do you really not know this?”

  Karl wished Jones ill.

  “Let’s narrow it down, let’s eliminate as many landmasses as we can that are not Malaysia. America you can presumably pick out. You know where Europe and Africa are. Can you point out all the places where Europe ends and Asia starts? China? Japan? Australia? India? Indonesia, for that matter? If you get Indonesia it’s a hop, skip, and jump to getting Malaysia. I’m just, look, this is fun, isn’t it? Geography is fun. Knowledge is fun and greater command of the facts might improve your self-esteem, you seem a little depressed lately, and by lately I mean since I met your mother a dozen years ago. This is humor, I say it deadpan but I mean it funny. Karl, buddy, hey.”

&n
bsp; The doorbell rang. The rec room’s occupants looked at each other. Jones’s eyebrows went up, quoting eyebrow raises in cinematic history. Jones often seemed to be quoting someone else’s manner and phrases, Karl never knew whose.

  Jones went for the door and Karl made use of the respite to lie down again on the pool table, all obstacles to comfort having been removed. There was a sweetness to Karl’s experience of this piece of furniture used in this way that was almost a corrective to the repeated mild suffering he’d endured via it across the vast desert of his short life. Indeed, most of Karl’s suffering was mild, but there was so much of it that his two hundred mild sufferings a day were the equivalent of another man’s one horrifying suffering a day.

  Again he explored the table’s gentle felt surface with parts of his head and face. And now in his relaxed state the brave thought found its way to him through the thickets and brambles of his melancholy: Sylvia Vetch had come back to beg his forgiveness and renounce her friend Stony, and so the world beyond his house would welcome him again.

  An accidental convergence of architecture and décor in the house Karl shared with his geographically knowledgeable stepfather let it be possible that a man lying on the pool table and rolling his head around its surface could at a certain stage in this free and easeful movement have an unimpeded view of the house’s front door and entrance hall, as Karl now did on that Saturday afternoon, and so he saw the older man place a small cluster of ten-dollar bills in the hand of each of the blond boys who’d punched Karl in the face the day before, grab their shoulders, pivot them toward the door, and send them on their way. Rat’s-eye Karl, on the floorboards by the black piano leg, saw this too, and took it far more philosophically than real Karl did. Rat’s-eye Karl liked it. Rat’s-eye Karl, because of his intimate connection with the sad man in whose stead he looked, sensed in the breast of that man a new feeling developing. This was not the new feeling the latter had been hoping for, the one born of his bond of love and trust with the woman he’d wanted to believe had come to rescue him from his life; that new good feeling was a stillbirth, which he now cremated in the smithy of his soul. This bad new feeling was much worse than the one it came in place of, but it would have to do.