Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  It occurred to him that he should revisit Brave New World as an option for his paper, as it would be so much easier and faster than War and Peace, but he couldn’t bear the idea that someone might consider it an obvious choice, and anyway someone else in the class was bound to choose it. In any case, Helmholtz notwithstanding, Wes had truly disliked Brave New World as a novel; Mrs. Fielding would not appreciate the tone of snotty disdain that was sure to come through if he wrote about it. He turned his head towards the desk as if he might will War and Peace to float across the room to him, but it did not. The mere thought of getting up, retrieving the monstrous book, returning to bed, propping his back with pillows and proceeding to sort through 1,200 pages of highlights was disheartening in the extreme, and reminded him of everything that was wrong with his life, but it was precisely the outrage awakened by the unfairness of it all that gave him the energy to rise and do what had to be done. A few moments later, he was back settled beneath the covers with all the necessary paraphernalia spread in an arc about his lap: book, laptop, headphones, phone, legal pad, yellow highlighter and post-its.

  Wes had already done almost all the preliminary work; dozens of post-its rose like buoy flags from the pages where he had highlighted relevant passages as he had read, and several pages of crabbed notes were handwritten into the flyleaves at the back. All Wes had to do was connect the dots. The problem was, he had had some sort of thesis in mind when he was taking notes, but now he was sincerely incapable of recalling what it was. It didn’t matter much; he would have no trouble coming up with a new one. As a junior, every grade he received this year would be an important part of his college transcripts, and he badly wanted to prolong his unbroken string of A’s in English, but he worried as he flicked through the post-its that he had never felt the least flicker of inspiration or kinship with the characters of War and Peace. In fact, he recalled thinking at the time that it was little more than Gone with the Wind with samovars. He’d read longer books in his time—Lord of the Rings, for one—and books that seemed longer—Atlas Shrugged, for instance—but War and Peace felt denser, somehow, as if the words weighed more on the page, the novel burdened by the gravity of its own importance, as if the years had given it a lustrous patina that made it appear more venerable than it really was. It was easy reading enough, he supposed, and not at all slow going, but irritating and clumsy at the same time, like scaling a rock face with a partner suffering from gout.

  The book fell open at page 467 and Wes began to read. Prince André was listening to Natasha sing and was evidently on the verge of falling in love with her. Typically, André was choking on his own philosophical boner. “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even she, was.” Wes found himself distracted almost immediately. What was that supposed to mean—that our real selves are not our bodies? The tragedy of an expansive soul confined to a fragile, decaying cage of flesh? Not exactly a shattering insight. And yet, as he forced himself to read on, Wes remembered with vivid clarity precisely what had been on his mind when he had flagged this passage. It was an idea that had much preoccupied him at the time, three weeks earlier, when he’d read the book over the course of a single weekend—that life is, or should be, a perpetual interior war between alienated factions of human nature. It was only because Tolstoy was so ham-handed with characterization that Wes had been able to recognize in his writing the cartoonish extremes of a genuinely subtle and complex problem he’d been trying to work out for himself.

  What Wes had finally come to see as he watched Prince André fall in love with Natasha is that Tolstoy had divided his characters between strugglers, like André and Pierre, and accepters, like Boris and Berg, and that Tolstoy was firmly on the side of the strugglers—people who are continuously engaged in an inner battle with their own natures and received ideas of the proper way to live, even if it makes them miserable and turns every little decision into a swamp of confusion and loneliness. It was a problem that Tolstoy had illustrated as a black-and-white thing, and Wes felt that it was much more complicated than that, because he knew from personal experience that no one is purely a struggler or purely an accepter, but it was no less real and perplexing for all that. Wes felt that, like Tolstoy, he admired the strugglers, or tried to admire them, even if he couldn’t always grasp their internal dilemmas. To be a struggler was to be alone, and to be confused and lonely all the time, but just because you fight the good fight, choose the high road, doesn’t mean you admire yourself for it. Usually you irritate yourself to no end, because you can never find a comfortable way to be, and maybe you even end up hating yourself for having become the very person you aspired to be. You start to despise people like André and Pierre for the very things that make them admirable, and admiring dickheads like Boris and Berg for the very things that make them hateful. You ascribe qualities to them they don’t have, such as the thoughtfulness that would justify their arrogance and self-confidence, even though you know in your heart that they’re arrogant and self-confident precisely because they don’t engage in interior struggle, and that if they did they couldn’t be arrogant or self-confident. How did that work? The more you think, the more you feel you should think less, and the more you feel, the more you think you should feel less? And the worse thing about it was that those who actually did think and feel less didn’t seem to suffer from a similar sense of insufficiency—the smart people wish they could be more like the stupid people, but the stupid people never seem to want to be more like the smart people. Which hardly seemed fair.

  Natasha was still singing, and André was still angsting. It was kind of weird, and a little sick, that all these grown men were lusting after a teenage girl, and Tolstoy let them do it without any sense that it was inappropriate. What was André—in his late twenties, maybe? He had a moustache and whiskers, he was a soldier, a hardened veteran, rich and sophisticated. He had probably fucked lots of peasants and whores. And Natasha was only fifteen, younger than Lucy. She had thin arms and a barely-formed bosom, Tolstoy said. Wes knew what that meant—a mature Russian woman, even the most beautiful, would have shoulders and arms rounded out by a little fat, big billowy boobs that had to be strapped down, a slight tub in the gut. But Natasha was probably more like a supermodel, or the star of some teen movie, with pillowy lips, hard, perky little tits, a flat tummy, and sharp hip bones that looked great in low-slung jeans. Nowadays a guy like André would be considered a total perv just for looking at a girl like that. But André wasn’t thinking about her body, probably; he wasn’t there, listening to her sing, trying to make out the outline of her nipples under her dress or imagining what she’d be like in bed. He was thinking of her unwearied soul, shining through her clear eyes and her piping voice, a beacon of purity and optimism and sincerity in a fallen, cynical world. That was all well and good, but a total turn-off as far as Wes was concerned, and she was still a kid no matter what you said. A freshman, for god’s sake.

  Now Hélène, that was a woman in every sense of the word. If Wes were in War and Peace, if he were André with all his money and connections, he’d have made a play for Hélène first thing, before Pierre could get his fat, clumsy hands on her. She was the kind of woman that every man who saw her wanted. Wes had been surprised at how low-cut the aristocratic women wore their dresses in those days, how Hélène was constantly flaunting her “high, beautiful breasts.” Just that word “high” had been enough to send shivers down his spine. They were probably powdered, too. That scene where she leans over Pierre and he can suddenly picture her entire naked body beneath her dress.

  Wes thought of Lucy and Delia and the differences between them. Physically, no doubt about it, Lucy was all Natasha, although probably darker of complexion, but much more like Hélène in temperament—manipulative, insincere, comfortable with her power over men, haughty and dismissive towards those who had nothing to offer her. Wes was certain of one thing—that
he could never fall in love with someone like Lucy. Delia, on the other hand, was a full-blown woman like Hélène; true, with her pale skin and freckles and curly red hair pulled back in a casual ponytail, she didn’t look much like Hélène, but she was dignified and quietly authoritative, self-possessed and powerfully built, not at all a svelte little seduction machine like Lucy or Natasha. Wes had never seen Delia in a low-cut ball gown, but he had seen her in a bathing suit and she definitely had softly rounded shoulders and high, beautiful breasts. Still, neither Lucy nor Delia was a Marya or a Sonya, earnest and devoted, but weak and at the mercy of the whims of fate. He couldn’t stand that, someone clinging to him and helpless without him, someone who would never criticize him no matter how badly he treated her, eager to please but equally ready to fade into the background; taking her own vows solemnly, but content to release the faithless from theirs; feeling that she had a spark of godhead somewhere deep inside, yet not especially surprised that no one else recognized it; yearning for romance and love, yet always half-way towards persuading herself that they did not exist. Wes definitely couldn’t stand someone like that.

  There was a tap at the door, and Wes’s father poked his head in with a sheepish smile.

  “Got five minutes?”

  “I’m doing my homework, dad.”

  His father stepped into the room, clasping an open laptop at his hip. “Just a quick question. I won’t bother you. What’s the homework?”

  Wes held up War and Peace and waved it wearily even as he lowered his eyes to his own computer screen, which had gone dark for lack of activity. Wes punched a button on the keyboard and the screen lit up again. His father strode across the room and took the book from his hand. He was barefoot, in a white T-shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts that may or may not have been underwear. His hair was freshly washed and plastered against his head, and he smelled strongly of Monsieur Balmain.

  “War and Peace? I was just about your age, maybe a year or two younger, when I first read this. Very powerful. A big influence on me in my formative years.” He began to leaf through it, as if to revive fond memories.

  “Wanna do my paper for me?”

  “You have to learn to think for yourself, son.” He dropped the book on the bed and opened his laptop without sitting down. Wes noticed for the first time that his father had hair growing in his ears, squiggly little grey-brown hairs like pubes, and he looked down at his own toes, which had lately begun to sprout little tufts of light brown hair of their own.

  “What do you need, dad? I’m very busy.”

  His father turned the laptop downwards to show Wes the screen, which was opened on a Facebook page.

  “What do you know about Facebook?”

  “I know it’s not for old guys.”

  “Wrong, pal. There’s more of my kind on here than your kind.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “See, I signed on a couple of months ago, kind of by accident. And I never used it, but then people started friending me. It started slowly, but suddenly it’s snowballing, dozens and dozens of people coming out of the woodwork, people I haven’t spoken to in decades.”

  “And?”

  “I guess I want to know what sort of things I can do with it.”

  “How do you sign on ‘by accident?’”

  “I don’t know. Nora wanted me to look at something and her computer was broken or she couldn’t find the charger. I don’t remember. But see, like here, somebody tagged this picture of me from college.”

  The photograph showed Wes’s father, aged maybe nineteen, sitting at the end of a row of students on a low wall at the edge of some sort of quad or terrace, supremely pretentious, in the pre-grunge fashion of the early eighties, in a thrift-store herringbone overcoat several sizes too big, his shoulders hunched Bob Dylan-style against a non-existent chill, as evidenced by the trees in full leaf directly behind him. Apart from the full head of thick brown curls and the blue-tinted granny glasses, he looked much as he did now. The look he had apparently been stretching for was that of a down-at-the-heels artist, a writer or a musician, in the days before he had become a household name, someone indifferent to the hunger and cold that come with the territory of being a young, unsung genius. Like many of the similarly affected students at Dalton, his father might have pulled it off had he not been studying at an elite educational institution that cost more a semester than most people earned in a year. Wes did not recognize any of the other people in the photo, all men or boys, and it was not in fact clear whether his father was part of the group or simply clinging to its periphery. Wes ran the cursor over each one; some had been tagged, some not.

  “They spelled your name wrong. See the question mark? Whoever tagged you didn’t know you very well.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that. Can I change that?”

  “Just go down here to ‘Tag this photo,’ put the cursor on your face and click. You can put in anything you want.”

  “But will people know it was me who made the correction?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so.”

  “Forget it, then. What else can I do?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, post my own pictures, find friends, join groups, that sort of thing.”

  “Dad, I really don’t have time for this. Can’t you figure it out for yourself? Everybody else does.”

  “Sure, I just thought . . . Maybe it was something we could do together.”

  “Nostalgia. Wasted youth. Bitter regret. I’ll pass.”

  “Can I friend you?”

  “Parents and children cannot be friends. That would be a travesty. Now please?” The iPhone rang, and Wes made a big show of pushing his father to the side, picking it up off the floor, and raising it like a talisman between them, as if it were a silver cross and his father a vampire. The call was from Lucy. Wes had no desire to talk to her, but anything was better than helping his father make a total dick of himself on Facebook. He gave his father a dismissive glare, pointed at the door and answered the call. His father shrugged his shoulders and padded from the room.

  “Wes?”

  “Oh Lucy.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home, doing homework.”

  “I was worried about you, when you disappeared like that. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I’ve got this paper due Monday and I haven’t even started it.”

  “Can I see you later?”

  “Like I said, I’ve got to get to work . . . ”

  “I know, but it’ll be, like, just for a few minutes. I really need to see you.”

  “Lucy, any other time.”

  “Please? Five minutes? I’ll come downtown.”

  Wes was not very experienced at casual cruelty, and in fact had impressed himself by holding out as long as he already had. Now he had exhausted his entire repertory.

  “What time?”

  “Whenever’s good for you. Some time this afternoon?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “I don’t know. Hang on. Eleven twenty.”

  “Say around three? You know where I am?”

  “You’re in the school directory. I’ll find it. I had a really fun time last night.”

  “So I’ll see you three-ish.”

  “Bye?”

  “See you later.”

  Wes didn’t get it at all. Why was she calling him? Why did she want to see him? Twenty-four hours earlier she would barely have been able to identify him in a line-up, and now she . . . what? Involuntarily, Wes reviewed a mental slide show of memorable moments from the previous night—memorable for him, certainly, but he could hardly persuade himself that he had so distinguished himself among Lucy’s many lovers that he had ruined her for every other man. Had he somehow, quite unknowingly, touched her in a way she had never been touched before—emotionally? The truth was, he knew her mostly by reputation, had rarely spoken to her until the day before, and was hardly in a position to pr
etend to know or to predict what she might be thinking on any particular subject, much less about him. Wes hoped that he was the kind of person who was able to judge people on their own merits and to rise above idle gossip and speculation, but in fact he had never had any reason to question or doubt the extent to which she had earned her reputation, simply because he had never given it a moment’s consideration. Lucy was the hot sophomore with pouty lips who left herds of middle-school dweebs dry-mouthed and stricken in her wake as she floated down the halls. From everything he knew or thought he knew about the kind of guys she liked—rich, well-groomed, confident, clever but not unduly intelligent—he was well out of the running for what was said to be the best fuck in the upper school, and since his interests and desires had long lain in a very different direction, he had never considered himself to be in the running in the first place. Delia was the girl he wanted, the girl he had always wanted. And he knew in his heart of hearts that when Delia was finally his, the long, humbling wait would prove to have been more than worth it, because it would have demonstrated the primacy of love and faith and patience, and gotten him laid. The Lucies of this world were for guys who set the bar a little lower.

  Wes recalled the fateful moment on Friday morning, just minutes after emerging from his meeting with Mrs. Fielding, that he had received Lucy’s tweet. The school had been still largely deserted, although a few early arrivals like himself were beginning to disturb the serenity of the empty halls. Because his daily commute to school involved a long walk across town and a crowded subway ride on the local line, Wes tended to arrive at the last moment, when the lobby was most frenzied and he himself had no time to loiter. But with fifteen minutes before the bell, on Friday morning he had lingered in the lobby. He had never before noticed all the campaign posters that plastered the lobby walls, and he took a moment to appreciate them. Incongruously, someone, probably in administration, with a view to some misguided concept of political correctness or to forestall controversy, had thought to balance or neutralize them by posting almost as many for McCain as for Obama, although many of the McCain posters were defaced with mustaches and horns or, in the case of Sarah Palin, erect phalluses, usually aimed towards her mouth. Almost everybody Wes knew was for Obama and felt deeply energized by and connected to the electoral process, even though most of them were too young to vote; the few eligible seniors had been strutting around school for months now and making their newly fungible opinions known to anyone who would listen. For almost everyone, Bush had been president as long as they had memories of politics, so the imminent upheaval felt extremely personal in a way that very few issues could to a group of overprivileged teenagers, and even the tweenies in middle school acted as though they were individually responsible for electing the country’s first black president. But Wes’s guilty secret was that he could not play along, at least not in his heart. He despised Bush as much as anyone, he supposed, but he worried that, like the housing market, the hysteria surrounding Obama was a big bubble bound to burst. If you’re in the opposition your whole life, and you’ve come to identify yourself with the frustrated, stifled and outmaneuvered moral minority, how do you take to victory? Republicans knew this; they were masters at playing the victim even when in power, they didn’t own it even when they broke it, but Democrats and these kids didn’t get it and they were going to get their fingers burned. America holding its head high once more among the comity of nations, the dawn of a new day, everything changed and renewed from one day to the next—Wes just couldn’t buy into it, as much as he’d have wanted to. He wished he could just be free to enjoy the moment, but he didn’t seem to have it in him to pop a woody for new beginnings.