Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she’d said, almost in a whisper, and leaned in to kiss Wes on the cheek, but because Delia had very full lips that Wes often imagined kissing it felt different from a peck and sent a little electrical shock through his body.

  “I’m glad I am too. I mean, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “No, you didn’t.” She’d said this with a sly smile that, like her clothes, was so at odds with her usual manner that Wes had found himself confused and a little alarmed. Delia was not the bantering kind and was rarely coy or playful, which contributed to the awe and uninformed esteem in which she was widely held at school, and perhaps also to the failure of gossip and lack of suitors in her orbit. Wes had learned how to be around her—earnest, attentive, morally engaged and one push shy of challenging; there had been a time when he had worried about how such deference would affect their sexual compatibility, if it should ever come to that, but he had long since set such concerns aside. If she was sometimes a little intimidating or intellectually dismissive, that was part of why he loved her. But everything about her tonight—the way she was dressed, the makeup, her relaxed body language, the whispering and the mystery—was new and confounding, and left Wes feeling unprepared and unprotected. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  “What do you mean, ‘no, you didn’t’?”

  “I mean I wanted it to be a surprise. For you.”

  “Well, I am surprised, I guess. I didn’t even think you knew Lucy.”

  “Seniors don’t need invitations.”

  “What made you so sure I’d be here?”

  She gave his wrist a squeeze that, if he hadn’t known better, he would have interpreted as suggestive. Wes wondered if Delia had been drinking. That was not her style at all, but then again, nothing about her was quite right this evening. There was no glass in her hand, and she did not have liquor on her breath, but that didn’t mean anything. Between the smell of her hair, the wrist-holding and the sting of her kiss, Wes was feeling decidedly lightheaded, and he thought that there was probably a simple explanation for her odd behavior, if only he could find a moment to breathe and get his bearings.

  “I think I need a drink.”

  “You already have one, Wes. Come and sit with me on the couch. I don’t know anyone here.”

  Even though it was not on his list, Wes took a package of celery sticks, which came wrapped with its own little container of French onion dip, because they were Nora’s favorite snack, more even than baloney.

  On his way home, Wes stuck his free left hand in the pocket of his hoodie and found an old pair of ear buds that he had thought lost long before. He stopped, placed the shopping bags gently between his feet, retrieved the iPhone from his back pocket, and plugged the ear buds in. Pressing the iPod button, he found the music paused in the middle of “Ballad of a Thin Man” where he had interrupted it while doing the previous day’s crossword puzzle before getting started on the risotto. It had been a difficult puzzle, as Fridays’ always were, and the music, rather than serve as a focusing medium as it usually did, had distracted him. Now, rather than search through his playlist with all these bags encumbering him, Wes merely reset it to start at the beginning of the album, and his heart did a little loving skip on the opening drumbeat of “Like a Rolling Stone.” He listened to the music for a few moments before he started thinking again, and then it was only to find himself rehashing the argument he’d had so many times with his father about whether rock and roll had created a bond between the generations that had not existed prior to the 1950s. His father always pointed to the fact that he and Wes listened to a lot of the same music, mostly from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, whereas he, Wes’s dad, had no feeling whatsoever for the Depression-era musicals or the swing that had been the soundtrack of his own father’s youth. But Wes would argue that this so-called common ground between them was artificial, since he himself was not even born until the ‘90s and in his own childhood his father had listened not to Dylan or Hendrix but to crappy pop bands like the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits. If anything, it served as a barrier to common understanding. His father liked to claim that his very first memory was of sitting on the porch of his family home in Flushing in 1965 and listening to the Beatles perform in Shea Stadium, but Wes had been to that house on Delaware Avenue and strongly doubted that it was close enough to hear anything from Shea. And that was so typical of him—using cultural landmarks to prove that he’d been at the center of every happening scene since the Summer of Love, like a dog pissing on every tree it passes—that Wes tended to question anything his dad might have to say with the authority of age about social, literary, artistic or political issues. Pretty much everything, in fact—it was all lies or distortions at the service of his father’s fragile, loser’s ego. It so happened that Wes even agreed with his father that the heyday of rock lay somewhere in the 1960s, but he couldn’t very well admit it without giving him an opening to drive his poisonous truckload of self-embellishment through. So when his father had come home one day waving a copy of Rolling Stone magazine hysterically over his head to share with Wes the mysteries and joys of its first-ever greatest-songs-of-all-time list, with “Like a Rolling Stone” at the top, Wes had been compelled not only to shut him down (by pointing out that any greatest songs list that omitted “Spiders from Mars” wasn’t worth shit), but also even to re-evaluate his own preferences. When, later that night, he had gone down the list only to find it really top-heavy with stuff from the ‘60s, he’d decided to disown it privately and to stop listening to “High­way 61 Revisited” for a while. It was typical of adults of his father’s generation to think that everything revolved around them and to ruin it for the rest of humanity with their stupid lists.

  But the fact remained that “Like a Rolling Stone” had so faithfully followed Wes his entire life that he couldn’t help feeling that it had a special, secret message for him. When he was eleven, he’d taught himself to pick out the chords on his guitar and learned the words by heart from his father’s original LP, only to have his father point out that the words were not “do the bump and grind” but “threw the bums a dime.” Wes had never picked up his guitar again (almost), and to this very day he believed that one of life’s saddest let-downs is when you finally understand a word or a phrase in a song that you have misunderstood all your life. And then there was the time a few years later, in seventh grade, he had shared with Forrest Schaeffer his idea of writing an abstract poem using only the rhyming words from the song (“Time fine dime grind prime didn’t you/ Call doll fall kidding you/ About out loud proud/ Meal feel own home unknown stone” etc), and Forrest had stolen the idea and submitted the poem for an English assignment, and the teacher had figured out what it meant and given him an extra commendation for creative appropriation. And then when Wes had transferred to Dalton and found himself among all these spoiled super-rich kids, it had been “Like a Rolling Stone” that had put words to all his confused feelings of resentment and humiliation. They went to the finest school all right, but one day they’d all be lonely because they had so few emotional resources of their own. And a lot of them did get juiced in it, but maybe one day they’d have to learn to take care of themselves like Wes had done for most of his childhood, and some of them might end up living on the street with no direction home, but not Wes, because his spiritual compass always pointed due north. And at that moment, Wes arrived at his house, where he found Nora sitting on the stoop engaged in a lively conversation with James, who sheltered two bottles of beer between his feet, very poorly concealed in paper bags. Wes pulled the buds from his ears.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nice way to greet a friend. What’s up with that, Nors?”

  “Bobby says ‘What are you doing here, Leslie?’ You think you own the place or something?”

  “Is that beer for me? Shove over.” Wes climbed the stairs, wrestled the shopping bags into the corner of the door jamb, and took a seat on the top step, to James’s right. James l
ived in an apartment building—in a six-bedroom duplex between Fifth and Mad, to be sure, but an apartment nonetheless—and his favorite thing in life was to sit on Wes’s stoop and drink beer, and he was right. Nothing in the world makes a man more of a king than when he sits high up on a stoop and condescends to the passers-by, most particularly in Greenwich Village. Wes sat there, knee to knee with his best friend, and felt immediately better than he had. James turned to Nora as she breathlessly pursued the story she was telling him, apparently the same story she had told Wes that morning about her friends Claire and Leo and the sexting. James seemed to be enrapt, and Wes thought that might have less to do with his affection for Nora than with a prurient interest in Katrina, whom James had never met but surely knew by reputation and online through Facebook. There was a smell of fried dough and Italian sausage in the air, and Wes supposed there must be a street fair somewhere in the neighborhood, late as it was in the year. Normally the mere thought of a street fair would bring a hot flush of indignation to Wes’s face, but he was feeling too good here on the stoop with his best sister, his best friend, the dappled sunlight playing on the windows of the house across the street, a light breeze cooling his cheeks. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the street. There was nowhere better in the world to be right now than exactly where he was, he thought, and offered himself modest praise for being a good apprentice Buddhist, but in the very act of praising he recalled to himself all the reasons why he might be unhappy—Lucy, Delia, his sick mother, the uncooked sweetbread, the unwritten paper, the unwalked dog, his father, his sad sister—and felt a pang of panic. Was a Buddhist supposed to empty his mind of negative thoughts and emotions or dispassionately examine each one as it emerged? He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do. And the more he tried to recall what he had read and what Delia had taught him, the more crowded and confused his mind became with thoughts that surely weren’t supposed to be there, and each thought split in two and became two, which became four, until suddenly his head was filled with myriad images buzzing around each other like angry insects: Tibetan monks hooked up to fMRI machines, mandalas made of colored sand, sukha and dukkha, the emptiness of inherent existence, sub-atomic particles that cease to exist the instant they are born, “the world, Chico, and everything in it,” Diogenes in a barrel, an African child crouched in the dust, the Dalai Lama’s gallstone operation, Nora sucking her thumb. But then, in the midst of his confusion, Wes remembered one concrete instruction and clung to it. Someone had once explained to him that Buddhist monks memorize complex paintings and then recall them during meditation, focusing for hours on each minute detail. Delia had taught him that, contrary to popular belief, it is not necessary to make your mind go blank when you meditate; it is in fact preferable to have one image in your mind’s eye to focus the thoughts and slow them down. Wes took a deep breath and turned his inner attention on his heartbeat, willing it to slow down, and as he did so he pictured all the extraneous ideas in his head as particles of sand stirred up by rough seas, and now, with the return of calm, sinking slowly back to the bottom. And as the water cleared, there arose through it the image of a calf lying on the grass, its legs tucked beneath it, its head resting on the ground. Wes saw himself approach it. Was it injured or suffering? He could not tell, but in the gaze of its eye shone a light of infinite sorrow and infinite patience. Wes saw himself sit down beside it and rest his head on its neck, feeling the rise and fall of its breath, and then from his back pocket he withdrew a little pouch and unfolded it. It was the kit of cleaning implements for the M-16, normally kept in the storage compartment on the bottom of the buttstock. From among the rods, swabs, bore brushes and pipe cleaners, Wes selected a toothbrush, then carefully refolded the pouch and returned it to his pocket. Then he began methodically brushing the calf’s fur, focusing on a small patch just above its shoulder. Motes of dust rose where he brushed; they glittered in the air as they revolved in the soft sunlight, and were borne away by the breeze. Wes looked up and saw that he and the calf were near the top of a broad meadow that sloped gently downwards to a sparkling, meandering stream, and beyond it the green land rose and fell towards a great forest on the horizon, and he realized that both he and the calf were dead and that they were in heaven, and he understood that they were paired together for eternity, and that he would never have any other task than to keep brushing. He looked at the calf and smiled and said: “Good.” The calf half raised its head and smiled back at him with such radiance and generous love that it was clear that the calf itself was God. The calf lowered its head back to the ground and said: “Yo dude.”

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  “What, no?”

  James had his arm around Wes’s shoulder and he and Nora were shaking with laughter.

  “Oh Leslie, you were so funny with your head on Jamie’s shoulder, girlfriend!”

  “You need to get some sleep, Wesbo. Long night?” Wes stood up, knocking the beer off the stoop. Still wrapped in its paper bag, the bottle fell one step, then a second, and stopped, unbroken and having lost almost none of its contents. Wes went down to fetch it, and looked up at James and Nora.

  “I can’t hang out, friendo. Way too much to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Paper to write, dog to walk, dinner, homework.”

  “Take Nora to the movies.”

  “Take Nora to the movies.”

  “Doesn’t sound like so much to me. I’ll make dinner.”

  “Wait’ll you see what’s for dinner. Help me with this stuff.”

  Together they gathered up the bags and Wes led them into the house and straight back into the kitchen, where his father was standing by the window eating a sandwich made with white bread, which Wes thought he must have his own stash of, since they never kept white bread in the house. He turned as they entered and smiled uncertainly as he chewed.

  “Just dump that stuff on the counter. Dad, you know James?”

  “Don’t think I do.” He leaned forward and shook James by the hand. Wes began to unpack the grocery bags onto the counter. There was no point in putting any of it away, since he planned to use it all. When he got to the celery sticks, he handed them to Nora, who wordlessly went to work pulling back the cellophane wrapper.

  “Wes doesn’t bring too many of his friends down here.”

  “Wes doesn’t have any friends except me.”

  “That would explain it. You at Dalton, James?”