Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  “Whatever for am I . . . ? Mom, you asked me to make sweetbreads, remember? Paris? Handbag?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Leslie. I hate sweetbreads. I would never have asked you to make sweetbreads.”

  “You’ve never eaten sweetbreads, so how would you know if you like them or not?”

  “I certainly have eaten sweetbreads. I ate sweetbreads on my honeymoon, as it so happens. Do I have to tell you I don’t like them, goddamnit?”

  Defeated, Wes hung his head as he held on to his mother’s hand, cool and pulpy and inert. Outside, he knew, beyond the heavy curtains and sealed windows, the evening, too, was soft and cool, maybe fragrant as the dawn had been with a breeze that had flowed across the autumnal woods of the Catskills, the Berkshires, the Hudson valley, and further north the vast whispering darkness of the Adirondacks, dappled with deep, cold, slumbering lakes and ponds. And above it all a silver moon, waxing gibbous, under which to swim—to swim ever so gently, without a sound, without breaking the surface, to the center of a lake, and there to roll onto his back and float, and there to invite this breeze to wash this taste of clinging decay from the inside of his mouth and lungs. Wes closed his eyes and felt it penetrate, purest water, purest sky, for the briefest moment the impossible, dreamlike state of non-longing that had enveloped him as he draped himself across the calf’s neck. No people, no phones, no books, no disease, no roads, no lyrics, no sex, no sensation but eternal, ineluctable cleanliness. Wes felt himself overcome by an almost messianic sense of kinship and sorrow for the tragic fate of Bob Ross, who had also yearned for impossible purity and had been condemned to spend countless hours and decades under hot studio lights, groping clumsily to communicate his vision to a congregation of the insensible blind. Wes opened his eyes to find that his mother’s attention had wandered back to the television.

  “If you don’t like your dinner, I’ll bring you some pudding. How’s that, mom?”

  “That sounds just fine, Leslie honey.”

  In the kitchen, as he began to assemble the ingredients for the sweetbread dish, Wes realized that for the past few seconds or minutes—he wasn’t sure which—a phrase had been revolving around and around in his head. “What is the meaning of anything?” With the stress on “anything,” it sounded as if it was the answer to a question, as if someone had asked him “What is the meaning of ‘circumnavigate?’” or “What is the meaning of all this?” It kept repeating itself, meaninglessly, with that deeply irritating and equally meaningless emphasis on the last word, without any apparent expectation of being answered. In Wes’s experience, when a phrase got stuck in his head this way, it was because it was the lyric of a song or a snippet of a conversation overheard without necessarily having been noticed, but in this case that was not possible, as no music was playing and there had been no conversation to overhear but his own with his mother, in the course of which nothing even vaguely resembling the phrase “What is the meaning of anything?” had been uttered. Where, then, had it come from, and what was he supposed to make of it? Wes could only suppose it was a message from his own subconscious, sent from some subterranean communications command post to alert his conscious self to a compelling task of analysis, but the phrase was so vague and portentous that one could only laugh at it. Who could ever answer such a question? It’s hard enough identifying the meaning of something.

  With all of the ingredients assembled on the counter before him, Wes found that he’d forgotten to provide for a starch. Noodles or polenta or rice would do just fine, but a cursory exploration of the overhead cupboards revealed none of these. The only plausible option available, short of another trip to the store, was a box of freeze-dried potato flakes and a quarter pound of sweet gorgonzola, which Wes’ father liked to eat for breakfast with a glass of dry vermouth. Wes hoped that the blue cheese crumbled into the instant mash potatoes could, in theory, work as a credible substitute for risotto. He thought of Bobby and his love of all pungent cheeses, and that reminded him that he had promised Nora that she could participate in the preparation of dinner. He found her in the back yard, sitting under the light of a single flood with their father, bent over a Mastermind board perched on an upended cable-drum between them. Crispy sprawled on the cracked bluestone, panting.

  “This dog get walked?”

  “Sit down and shut up, daddy-o.”

  Wes found a chair and sat, facing the back of the yard. The sky was quite dark now, a deep purple, but under the sycamore very little of it was visible. The oriole had fallen silent. Wes felt a kind of serenity descend upon him, not a pleasant serenity like that of his dream but a contingent resignation. He looked at his dad, his face cramped in concentration over the Mastermind board. It occurred to him that his father’s only winning quality was his willingness to continue playing against Nora, who never lost. It does not take many qualities—patience, consistency, fairness, one or two others maybe—to allow a son to worship his father, and the time when Wes had worshipped him seemed both impossibly recent and irretrievably lost. Wes could still remember himself at that age, the issues that had obsessed or preoccupied him, the way he had thought and felt, the hungry boy’s self-serving contortions of logic. The terrible thing about losing faith in one’s father is not watching him change and falter, Wes considered, but watching oneself grow into stronger understanding, an understanding that gradually but inexorably reveals that the father has not changed at all but has always been like this, even in those days when it had seemed that he was perfect in every way. Wes could still recall a moment, back around the time of 9/11, when he had been emotionally overwhelmed in school by the feeling of how beautiful and lucky it was to be born in the United States, the greatest country in the world. The teacher must have said something inspirational, or maybe some class parent had been killed in the attack, because the entire class had erupted in enthusiastic response. Wes had felt that way about his father, too. It had been more than a mere emotion, that certainty that he was the luckiest, happiest boy in the world to have such a dad. His love for his father—his pride in having such a brilliant, handsome, funny, sophisticated, loving and universally beloved father—had been a whole emotional republic in which he had been blessed to be born, live and cavort. And although Nora was too young to remember those happy times, she had felt the same way, Wes knew. Children know where to draw the line, but if Wes and Nora had ever dared to set the choice between mom and dad when they played the game of who would have to be killed by the kidnappers, both of them would certainly have selected their mother. It was odd, looking at his father, to think that he had been the same person then that he was now.

  Wes remembered a guy he had seen in the street on his way home from school a few days earlier. He was an older guy, with thinning, graying hair and a pot belly, in a blue polyester baseball jacket with the Yankee’s logo. There was a pretty-ish secretary-type woman, trim and put together, walking towards him, and when she passed the fat guy had slowed and turned to watch her go. It was only an instant, the kind you see a hundred times a day on the street, but for some reason Wes had had a flash of clear, if not exactly blinding insight. He knew with absolute certainty that, at that moment, the guy had forgotten who he was and imagined himself as he may once have been, young and hopeful with a full head of hair and a future, the kind of person who might have stood a chance with a woman like that. This vision had made Wes feel bad for the guy, at least momentarily until the next distraction came along, and he’d forgotten all about it. But now that he looked at his father it came back to him. Wes had no idea why he should have any particular insight into the souls of middle-aged men, but he did seem to. James was always telling him that he acted too much like an old guy. It was probably because he’d had a lifetime to observe someone who was a master at seeing himself as something he was not. Despite all the evidence, his father still looked in the mirror and saw his younger self, but to do it convincingly he had to lie and lie and lie to himself. And Wes suddenly felt how tired he was of all
the lying; it was an exhausting, all-consuming habit with no upside of any kind. His mother had a solid chance of recovering. His father really would finish that novel one day and return his attention to those who needed him. Nora would survive, beautiful and intact, the years of neglect and self-reliance. Delia loved him, but just didn’t know it yet. Wes himself was strong and dependable, the moral compass and binding agent that would hold it all together for everyone. It would be scary, vertiginous even, to let them go, all these lies, but if he didn’t want to end up the kind of guy who doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror, he would have to find a way to do it.

  His dad looked up and they locked eyes, staring at one another in abstracted curiosity for a few moments. Wes wondered whether his father would try to smile at him. Instead, he spoke as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted only moments earlier.

  “I’ve come to a great breakthrough.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “After nearly 40 years, I’ve decided to forgive Paul McCartney for breaking up the Beatles.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Wes’s father returned his gaze to the board. “It was just a joke.”

  “Jokes are supposed to be funny.”

  His father frowned, apparently in response to the logical challenge of the game, but more obviously to the challenge of responding to Wes’ hostility. Wes was interested in what he would say. The floodlight was not kind to his face—the pouched, rheumy eyes, the smears of gray at his temples, the lower lip that seemed to grow more pendulous and glistening with every passing day, the broken shadow of his nose across melting cheeks, the trembling dewlaps below his chin—and Wes focused on each in turn as if in critical self-examination in a mirror. Although his father was several inches shorter than him, he had resembled Wes to a marked degree when he was young, but Wes knew that he would never look like his father when he was his age because these were the effects not of age but of lack of character. Nothing is thrown away; the mind is vast, and those rooms where the deeds and feelings of the past are stored may be in distant, forgotten wings, but they are never lost or sealed. The miasma that seeps from them will ultimately infect the entire edifice, Wes believed, and in his father’s face he saw it oozing from every enlarged pore and smelled it on his breath with every banal utterance.

  “I’m sorry if I fail to amuse you.”

  “Your failure to amuse me should be the least of your concerns.”

  “Wes, I’m trying to play a game here. If you have something to say to me please just say it.”

  “That’s just it. I have nothing to say to you.”

  His father sighed, and Nora shot Wes an anxious look, but Wes didn’t care.

  “Did anybody walk the dog?”

  “Why don’t you do it, seeing as you’ve got nothing better to do?”

  “What the fuck? I’ve been shopping and cleaning and taking care of mom all day, and now I’ve got to make your dinner.”

  “I won’t be joining you for dinner.”

  “Dad! This is supposed to be a family night. I told you.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but I already had other plans and it’s too late to break them.”

  “Must get lonely down in that basement all by yourself.”

  Nora got up and disappeared into a dark corner of the yard behind the sycamore.

  “Wes, why do you have to come here and ruin a perfectly pleasant evening? Nora and I were just fine here without you.”

  “I’m sorry, am I disturbing your leisure activities?”

  “You are. Please don’t pick a fight for no reason.”

  “I’m not picking a fight, I’m just telling you how I feel.”

  “And how’s that working for you?”

  “I feel great. I got no sleep last night, I’ve had a miserable day, I’m doing all the work around here, and you don’t give a shit.”

  “I do give a shit. Tell me about your day.”

  “I’m not telling you about my day.”

  “Then why are you busting my chops? Did I ask you to come here and spew venom? Why do you have to ruin it for everyone just because you’re in a filthy mood?”

  “I’m not in a filthy mood. I’m just sick of taking it up the ass for the entire world.”

  “Is that how you really feel? That the whole world is out to get you?”

  “It’s not?”

  “No it’s not. You’re smart, you’re handsome, you’re healthy. You live in a beautiful home in a great city, surrounded by people who love you. You’re in no danger of dying of cholera or starvation or diarrhea. You’re getting the best education in the world and you have an incredible future ahead of you. How many people do you think can say that? Are they all out there feeling sorry for themselves and moaning and bitching? So you’ve had a bad day—it won’t be the last. But for christ’s sake get a grip, and stop making life miserable for the very people who only want you to be happy.”

  Wes stood up. “Put it on a post-it, dad. You don’t understand a thing.”

  “You’ve got that right. Wes, I’m really, genuinely sorry you’re having a hard time. I’m right here any time you want to talk about it, but I won’t be your punching bag. And by the way, it’s totally unfair to your sister.”

  “Nora, let’s go. It’s time to make dinner.”

  There was no answer from the bottom of the yard, so Wes turned and left.

  Wes was feeling much, much better by the time he reached the kitchen—better, in fact, than he had felt all day, as if he’d had a long, restorative sleep, a cold shower and a productive writing session in quick sequence. He felt just the way he usually felt right after he’d signed off on an especially incisive homework assignment. He wasn’t quite sure what he had done to make himself feel this way, but it probably had something to do with mouthing off to his father, which he thought he probably ought to try more often. If this was what people called speaking truth to power, he was all in favor of it. If this was what it would be like with Barack Obama in the White House, he was all for it. He reached into his back pocket and retrieved his phone. He texted.

  “Pls. join us for dinner. Extra plate of extra crispy.” He placed the phone on the counter where he would be sure to hear it.

  From the kitchen window he glanced down into the back yard. His father and Nora had resumed their game; even from this height Wes could see that Nora was on the threshold of victory. He turned away. All the ingredients of the most ridiculous meal in the history of the world lay spread out before him on the kitchen counter like the keys of some improbable pipe organ. Wes removed the bricks from the plate covering the sweetbread, then swiped the plate away with a flourish, like a magician pulling a top hat off a rabbit. The sweetbread looked like a car that had been run through a metal compactor, only more brainlike, all its lobes and crevices smoothed into a flat, glistening surface the color of a battleship, laced with bluish filaments. Wes consulted the cookbook, which he had left open to the relevant page on the counter, then went to work.

  He put a small pot of water on to boil, then turned to peeling and mincing the garlic and shallots, which made him think of Delia because of the several times he had caught himself crying that day. He wondered if all the crying indicated that he was emotionally immature or, on the contrary, that he was more emotionally advanced than almost everyone he knew. Certainly, neither James nor any of the seventeen-year-old boys he knew wept with such regularity, if at all, and they probably did not daydream about beatific calves and remote Siberian rivers. He thought that Delia would most likely approve, because crying revealed a kind of openness to and awareness of one’s feelings that were necessary precursors to developing the ability to control them. On the other hand, she would probably find a way to take credit for it, and to make Wes feel small, that he was indebted to her in some way for this superior knowledge. That was how Delia always operated with him, and with her other friends and admirers—moving about in a kind of otherworldly aura that mad
e you want to step inside and share in her transcendence, but when you were in it you found it was more of an electromagnetic pulse that rendered you powerless and without a will of your own. And maybe she had this power over you even if you didn’t like her all that much, as Wes was beginning to suspect had been the case with him. He wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. Because she really was a bit cold, wasn’t she, and did anybody actually enjoy being made to feel that they were being led by the nose in a game of perpetual catch-up? Then again, maybe that was what Wes was looking for without knowing it; maybe he had been drawn to her precisely because the way he behaved in her presence and under her influence seemed to confirm all the bad things he thought about himself in his darkest moments. That he was cruel, narcissistic and ultimately allowed all his weakest impulses to drive him, and that only she could guide him through the minefield of his own soul? Wes had read enough books to know that it was perfectly possible to fall in love with someone who wasn’t good for you, or wasn’t the kind, generous person you would want to fall in love with when you thought about the kind of person you wanted to fall in love with. Even so, Wes was deeply disturbed by the idea that love was just as likely as not to turn out to be a destructive force, when all his life he had been taught and truly believed that it was the one thing that could save them all, that could save Nora and his mother and himself. But look at Nora—wasn’t she the one person in the world that Wes loved with all his heart, and didn’t he treat her like shit over and over again? Did that make Nora to Wes as Wes was to Delia? Did he make Nora feel like Delia made him feel—worthless and puny, yet too weak to break away because there was no one else to turn to? This was all too complicated; it made War and Peace feel like The Runaway Bunny.

  The water on the stovetop was now boiling. Wes took his large tomato, scored it with an “x” at either end with a paring knife, and dropped it in the pot. For the twenty seconds or so that he allowed it to boil, he made a conscious effort to clear his head, not to think, but even as he brought the pot over to the sink and doused it in cold running water, the lingering idea of The Runaway Bunny reminded him of a book his mother had read to him frequently when he was little. In this book, a mother raises her son from a baby to a grown man, each stage represented by a page or two of drawings. At every phase of his life, the son is seen doing something to drive his mother crazy, but at the end of each she is seen tucking him in and singing him a lullaby. “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” She does this to him as an infant, a toddler, a rowdy boy, and even as a grungy, rebellious teenager, and when he grows up and moves out she sneaks across town, climbs in through his bedroom window, crawls across the floor and rocks him in her arms, singing her song. Eventually, the mother grows old and lies dying in her bed, too weak to sing, and the son completes the cycle by cradling her in his arms and singing the song back to her. Even as a very little boy, as he must have been when his own mother had read him the book, Wes had felt that there was something deeply perverse about this story, that it was somehow not meant to be a book for children at all, and the drawing of the graying mother as she crept across the moonlit carpeting of her adult son’s bedroom had unsettled him in nervous premonition of imminent catastrophe. Finally, Wes’s mom had intuited that the book made him uncomfortable and stopped reading it to him. Much later he had learned that the author had written the book in memory of his own two babies who had died at birth, and this new information had recalled the odd, inchoate feelings of dread that the book had evoked in him long before. Although this back story had put the book in a new light—that it had been written to keep the memory of the dead babies alive forever—he had nevertheless been unable to reconcile his sympathy for the author with his sense that there was something very wrong about the book, that it was trying to say something about love and attachment that no child should be asked to understand. And now, as he stood over the chopping block, peeled and quartered the tomato, and reached into its atria to scoop out the seed pulp with his index finger, the book’s he thought that he was no closer to grasping hidden message, or his own instinctive recoiling from it, than he had been as a four-year-old. Is it love and need that drive us to act perversely and against our own interests, or is it our own flaws that lead us to seek out love without understanding anything of its nature, the way a timid mouse is drawn to the smell of ripe cheese, not knowing if it is a rare treasure or a lethal trap? Worse yet, was it possible that there was nothing wrong with the book at all, and that it was Wes himself who had interpreted it in the most sinister possible light? And if that were the case, what did it say about his ability to understand anything that had happened to him today? Why did he always seem to be chasing his own tail? And then a little light seemed to go on in Wes’ mind. What was it Lucy had said? “You’re never talking about what you’re talking about.” What if—just what if—he had never actually been in love with Delia at all? What if it had all been some sick neurotic daydream? Maybe it was Wes who was groveling on the carpet in the moonlight. Maybe it was Wes who was plummeting like a meteor through the window of the Rose Reading Room. The iPhone chimed. It was a text reply from Lucy.