Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  He supposed it must have rubbed off from his dad. A vision of his father’s face, livid and distorted with anger, superimposed itself upon Barack Obama’s calm, forceful features in murky red, white and blue as he gazed with visionary intensity into a dawning future of hope. Wes’s father hated Bush with an almost erotic passion, railing savagely against the President’s every utterance and decree. He was completely addicted to this hatred, but Wes had no idea what his father actually believed in. The closest his father ever seemed to come to expressing conviction in anything other than the fact that someone, somewhere, had led his life astray was when he recalled the glorious utopia that was the Lower East Side in the early 1980s. How repulsively he reveled in his memories of a city filled with crime, crackheads, ageing Beatniks, $250-a-month walk-up studio apartments in Alphabet City and freewheeling artists thronging the sidewalks of Avenue A at three in the morning, making the world safe for something. How cruel and untrue it had been to tell someone like his father that when you ain’t got nothing you ain’t got nothing to lose. He had had nothing and had lost everything, and had spent the rest of his life making sure that everyone around him understood that they were accomplices in the theft. Especially his own wife, who’d bankrolled him through two decades of bitter disillusion, which doesn’t come cheap. Wes’s father, for all his so-called liberalism, was the anti-Obama, and Wes could not help wondering, as he gazed at the Senator’s beautiful face, what further price he himself would have to pay for his lifelong exposure to that virulent strain of psychogenesis.

  Lost in thought, he felt a strong hand on his left shoulder, and turned to his right to find James, smelling organically of coffee, smiling maniacally through his blonde bangs and thrusting his Blackberry into Wes’s face.

  “Seen this tweet?”

  “What is it?”

  “Check your phone.”

  Wes had dutifully shucked his backpack, rummaged through the side pockets, removed his phone, turned it on and opened Twitterific. There was a new tweet from PrincessLucy. It said: “When the cats away . . . ! Party @ my place 9 on. C U 2nite mice!”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Lucy, man. You know, hot Lucy in tenth.” James snickered oddly.

  “So why’d it come to me? I don’t subscribe to her tweet.”

  “You do now, my friend. I signed you up. At her request.”

  James seemed to be perfectly serious, yet it made no sense at all to Wes.

  “How, at her request? I hardly know her. It’s gotta be a mistake.”

  “No mistake, Wes. She likes you. You’ve been summoned. You’ve received the call. Resistance is futile, you lucky fuck.”

  And now, lying on the bed with War and Peace resting mutely between his raised knees, Wes felt the full force of shame wash over him. His ears began to ring, his vision blurred and his skin felt hot as coals. The shame was inside him too, snaking through the corridors of his body like that archaic video game with the worm that keeps getting longer, hollowing him out to the core. Love had not won out, of course, and yet he still couldn’t quite see how it had happened. For the better part of a year, ever since the moment he had allowed himself to understand that he was in love with Delia, he had prepared himself for just such a contingency. Over and over again, he had rehearsed scenes in his head in which he found himself compelled to rebuff, gently but firmly, the advances of women who approached him in the street, at the library, at the fish counter in Citarella, on the subway, on a banquette admiring the Fragonards at the Frick, on line for bagels at Russ and Daughters, in a plush Park Avenue parlor, in a darkened screen­ing room watching “Breathless” at the Film Forum, and offered themselves to him unconditionally for an hour, an afternoon, a weekend of unbridled and possibly kinky passion. Because he was attracted to older women, a category to which Delia nominally belonged, and because he felt that his own puppyish enthusiasm and lack of experience would be irresistible to jaded housewife types, the women in these fantasies tended to resemble the young mothers who crowded the sidewalks outside Dalton every afternoon, waiting for their young ones in tight jeans and high ponytails. No celebrities, except perhaps for the actress Blake Lively or the author Marisha Pessl, whose jacket photo he had spent many hours condoling with over her hopeless infatuation for him, Wes. To those women he would say: “I’m sorry. I’m flattered. You’re very attrac­tive, really. Under different circumstances I would be happy to oblige. But you see I’m in love, and mindless, anonymous sex with beautiful strangers holds no allure for me. Haven’t you ever been in love? Then you’d know how I feel. No, not even a blowjob in the back of the taxi. I’m sorry.” It was true that such advances had not come his way, but Wes felt that, lit up from within as he was by the light of pure love, the way pregnant women were said to have a special glow about them, it was only a matter of time. And when it happened, he would be ready, and he would be a rock.

  And then it happened. From the very moment that James had called him a lucky fuck, leaving him stunned and paralyzed in the middle of the school lobby, Wes had spent the rest of the day constructing scenario after scenario of heroic resistance. Lucy was no cougar, but she was said to be aggressive and inventive. He told himself repeatedly throughout the day, as he mentally reviewed every conceivable permutation of the seduction scene, that to be forewarned was to be forearmed. What kind of tactics and techniques could someone like Lucy deploy to weaken the resolve of her unwilling victims? Most boys, of course, would not even entertain the notion of resistance; most boys would in fact, from the very subtlest first encouragement, seek to take charge and ascribe the outcome to their own aggressive charms, so Lucy would need a minute or two simply to grasp the notion that she was being rebuffed—and not in a coy way but with profound moral determination and integrity—by a boy who gave no particular outward sign of being different from all the rest but who had actually turned out to be unlike anyone she had ever met before. On the other hand, once she had this concept firmly fixed in her mind, it would serve only to whet her appetite and hone her hunting instincts, and then Wes would need to be on his guard. How would she go about it? Perhaps they would be talking casually in a quiet corner of her apartment with drinks in their hands—his a club soda, hers a cosmo—when she would suddenly lean in and whisper something in his ear, her breath hot and moist, and run a red fingernail down the side of his neck. Or they might be dancing when she pressed her thigh between his legs as she stared straight up into his eyes. He didn’t think it would be something vulgar or less subtle; that wouldn’t be her way, but he should probably be prepared for anything. And if it had somehow come to her attention that Wes was rumored to be a virgin, he would be wise to expect the challenge to send her into a frenzy of competitive predation.

  In the end, all it had taken was a simple text message—“find me”—to send Wes in search of her without an instant’s hesitation, and today he saw himself for what he really was. Wes did not care to attach the cliché “saving himself” to whatever it was he had been doing with respect to Delia—that would have been too saccharine even to put into words in the privacy of his own thoughts, let alone to suggest to James who, alone among the boys of his acquaintance, might be sympathetic to his motives even if he ragged him mercilessly for it. And in any case it would not have been entirely true, as Wes had pretty much done everything but “it” in the course of casual dating before Delia. Wes was no prude, either; he felt that safe sex between consenting teenagers was probably a very good and healthy thing. Even so, he knew what it meant to have done what he had done last night. He had not been unfaithful to Delia, who suspected nothing and expected nothing from him, but he had betrayed her and himself nonetheless. He couldn’t quite get his mind around what, precisely, the betrayal had consisted of, but he was quite certain that he could not take it back and that it had destroyed something that he’d taken pride in. It was precisely because he had done something that almost anyone in his place would have done that he felt diminished and clownish. Maybe he’d th
ought he really was different from everyone else, but now he felt like a dog in a blue Halloween wig, humiliated and ridiculous. He felt like his father—the ultimate dog in a blue wig.

  And none of this, of course, went any way towards explain­ing why Lucy now seemed so anxious to see him. He was a notch in her belt now; by Monday morning the whole school would know that she’d popped his cherry and moved on, and even those who were most jealous of him—especially those—would make a meal of it. What more did she want from him?

  Wes looked down at the book in his lap, its lines swimming. It was even heavier now than it had been earlier, and Wes felt a thousand miles away from it, could barely even remember what the book was about. The diminutive forest of post-its was daunting, and Wes shook his head in dismay that he had ever imagined this to be an easy A or even a doable assignment. He turned to the back of the book, where he had scratched down some thoughts as he had read, hoping they might jog his memory, but they were less than helpful:

  • “idiotic behavior of Pierre at Borodino.”

  • “812. Shock that André is wounded at Borodino, presumed dead. Had the idea that A’s lesson in life was forgiveness, that he would get back together with Natasha. When later, that is exactly what happens, disgust that Tolstoy is so predictable.”

  • “Death of Petya. Manipulative to what end except pathos? Ultimately, P’s death is necessary to get Natasha to focus on her mother and someone else’s grief, but that is just a plot twist. Is a boy’s life of so little value? Never identified with Petya, boyscout type, but angry on his behalf.”

  • “Everyone learns the lesson they need to learn (list)”

  • “p.1071 ‘And there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.’ Whole book in a nutshell.”

  Wes stared at the last entry, willing it to mean something, anything, as he thought it should, but it was as drained of emotion as a doctor’s illegible scrawl on a prescription pad. Wes sighed and pushed the book to the floor, along with the pens and papers. He sat up; the laptop slid down the blanket tented against his left leg, snapped shut and fell into the crack between bed and wall. Wes balled his fists and pressed them into his cheeks, gritting his teeth, kicking his feet and vibrating his entire skull in a silent scream that caused him to feel light-headed and pathetic, but offered no catharsis. With a grand spontaneous gesture, he swept the covers aside, swiveled his entire body on the pivot of his butt, and planted his feet firmly on the floor. Wes thought that it might be a good idea to take the dog for a walk along the river, throw her some tennis balls, do something normal to clear his mind of all this confusion.

  Leaving his dirty clothes on the floor by the bed, Wes crossed the room and removed a clean pair of underwear, black jeans and a white T-shirt from his dresser. Slipping into the pants, he paused, bare-chested, before the mirror. Until last night, he had been sure that he would look different on this day. In fact, he had envisaged this very moment many times before—the moment when he first catches sight of himself in the mirror after losing his virginity. In the fantasy, the difference between before and after was subtle and hard to describe, but quite irrefutable and as evident to everyone, friends and strangers alike, as it was to himself. Obviously, it was not physical—he was still five foot eleven and one hundred and thirty-five pounds, all protruding ribs and narrow shoulders, but well-formed arms that girls and gay men often commented on and asked to touch. Shaggy brown hair, hippies’ delight, rather attractive large blue eyes and high flat cheekbones that conveyed, in general, the impression of someone two years’ younger than he was, a flaw that he had always played to advantage by adopting a social persona that was both endearingly bashful and aggressively intellectual yet accessible and ecumenically open to less evolved points of view. But he would carry himself differently, he had imagined; no swagger, of course, and only occasionally aware of the change, but with less apology for taking up space, allowing his arms to swing in uninhibited arcs, fingers lightly curled, his stride easier, swaying, not on the balls of his feet but on his heels like a character from R. Crumb. Mostly, though, the change would be visible in his face, in the steadiness of his gaze and the serene settledness of his features. He would smile less often and less broadly, but from a deeper and less perturbable foundation of confidence. He would be like a Tibetan monk, able to slow the beating of his heart and abide fools without getting upset, and without quite understanding why people, women and men, would respond to him with correspondingly greater respect, admiration and desire.

  But Wes could see now from his reflection that none of this had come to pass. His shoulders were not thrown back; his bony chest, hairless but for two ridiculous tufts of hair around his tiny brown nipples, was not swollen with a new inviolable mystery; his lips were deflated and colorless and his cheekbones eroded. His eyes seemed to have taken on the lifeless, green-gray pall of a winter’s day far out to sea in the North Atlantic. What was there here that could possibly have attracted the interest of one of the hottest chicks at school? Wes scowled at himself and pulled the T-shirt over his head. He then applied deodorant to his underarms—it was original-scent Old Spice, the smell of which had given him much secret delight over the years, although it afforded him little pleasure now.

  He looked in on his mother on his way downstairs. She was awake with the light on, looking perkier than he had seen her in some time, sitting almost upright, her eyes shining in a way that, if she had been a healthy person, would have made her look as if she had recently been crying. In her case, it simply meant that she was alert and functioning. Her hair had recently been washed and combed, but as usual this somehow had the effect of making her look worse rather than better. A speck of rice pudding clung to the down above her upper lip. Nora lay curled up at her side, like a toddler, her knees almost to her chin, reading aloud from a book propped against a pillow.

  “I’m walking the dog. Do you need anything before I go?”

  “No thanks, Leslie honey.”

  “Movie!”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Bobby’s reading to momma.” Wes looked at her helplessly. Was she there on a selfless mission to keep their mother company, or was she so bored that she would do absolutely anything for entertainment? She popped her thumb into her mouth, and in the dim light it was impossible to read her impression.

  “Let me walk Crisp, then we’ll go, I promise.”

  Wes turned to leave.

  “Wait, Leslie.”

  “Mom!”

  “Wes. There is something I’d like, Wes, if you don’t mind.”

  “Name it.”

  “Sweetbreads.”

  “What?”

  “Sweetbreads.”

  “You mean, like, pastry?”

  “Look it up. You asked what I want. I want sweetbreads.”

  “Do we have any in the house?”

  “I don’t think so, honey. You may have to go the store.”

  Wes thundered down the stairs, calling for the dog, who appeared from somewhere on the garden level, wagging her tail and laying her ears back submissively. He slipped into a worn gray hoodie that hung from the coat rack by the front door, and scratched the dog above the tail as he pulled the phone from his back pocket, opened the iPedia app and typed in “sweet bread.” He took the leash down from the coat rack and hooked it to Crispy’s collar while he waited for the query to load. He had opened the door, with Crispy straining on the leash, when his query came up, redirected to “Sweetbreads.” Above the text was the photo of something brown, bulbous and glistening on a bed of creamy rice.

  “Sweetbreads are the thymus glands and pancreas glands of lamb, beef, or pork. There are two different connected parts to the thymus gland, both set in the neck. The ‘heart’ sweetbreads are more spherical in shape, and surrounded symmetrically by the ‘throat’ sweetbreads, which are more cylindrical in shape. Although both are edible, the heart thymus gland is generally favored because of its delicate flavor and texture, and is th
us more expensive.