Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  The credits began to roll and the hokey electronic xylophone theme song to play, but Lucy didn’t move. For a moment Wes thought that she, too, had fallen asleep, but then he felt her fingers tapping the beat against his arm. She smelled of the same soap she had smelled of at the party, and her nails were short, like a boy’s, but shiny with clear polish. Wes turned to her and was about to try to kiss her when he thought better of it.

  “Do you want to stay?” he whispered.

  She hesitated a moment then shook her head. “I’m getting picked up at my place at six in the morning. Anyway.”

  “Yes we can.”

  “No, that’s what I’m saying, we can’t . . . ”

  “No, I mean Obama. Pennsylvania. Yes We Can.”

  She snorted and buried her laughter against his shoulder. “Yes. We. Can. But not tonight.”

  “Help me with this stuff?”

  Together, they gathered up the dirty dishes and piled them on the tray as quietly as possible. His mother had not touched her food, but even Lucy had barely made it through half of hers.

  “Not so crispy, eh?”

  “They do it better in Paris.”

  “Not enough potato flakes.”

  He took the heavy tray from Lucy and handed her the empty one, and they went to the kitchen together. The wine bottle had been emptied. Wes was too tired to clean up, but since he knew that he would be the first awake in the morning, he was confident that the dirty dishes would be waiting for him the next day. Even in his exhaustion, he had enough presence of mind to rinse the dishes and fill the pots with water, in order to make his chore easier tomorrow. Nora appeared in the doorway, rubbing her eyes, and Lucy rubbed her back between the shoulder blades.

  “I’d better be going, Typo.”

  “Don’t go, Lucy. You can sleep in my room.”

  “Sorry Cookie.”

  “Leslie’s usually a better cook than that.”

  “He’d better be if he wants me to eat at this restaurant again. Someone told me he makes a mean risotto.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “He did.”

  “Chump.”

  “I’ll see you when?”

  “Monday morning, natch.”

  He leaned in to kiss her goodbye chastely. She whispered “Well done” in his ear, and was gone.

  “Bobby like Lucy.”

  “Typo too.”

  “Are you going to bed?”

  “Nah. I’d better try to make a little headway with my homework. Wanna come read in my room?”

  “Sure.”

  Together, they plodded up the stairs in silence, Wes stopping off at their mother’s room to tuck her under the covers and turn out the lights. At the top of the stairs, Nora branched off to her room. Even before he opened his bedroom door he felt a current of cold air on his bare toes, and upon opening it was met with a swirl of wind and the sound of rustling leaves. Without turning on the light, he walked to the window and leaned out. The night had turned autumnal, and there were even a few bright stars in the sky. The wind in the trees drowned out all other sounds of the city, and Wes enjoyed the feel of cold air on his face for a few moments before turning back into the room and shutting the window behind him. He grabbed his laptop and the copy of War and Peace from the desk. It had occurred to him that the scene of the dying soldier could well be out of War and Peace, and that if he could find it again it might provide sorely needed inspiration to the task at hand. But even as he leafed through the book he realized that the scene could not possibly be from War and Peace, because the soldier, whoever he is, dies on the battlefield, whereas Prince André is wounded at Borodino but does not die until much later. Even so, Wes continued to flick through the book, barely able to remember what the whole fuss was about. A thousand pages of nothing; even ten thousand would have been insufficient to describe one minute of a real person’s life, he thought. But the paper had to get written, inspired or not. Wes came upon his scrawled notes at the back of the book, and his eyes fell on the paragraph about Petya.

  • “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.”

  Maybe Wes could make something out of that? To show, by parsing the trajectory of a minor character like Petya, how Tolstoy manipulates character to further his programmatic novelistic ends—a kind of deconstructionist analysis that strips away the flesh of so-called “realism” to reveal the bare skeleton of ideology beneath? Wes was willing to bet that no one in Mrs. Fielding’s class had ever written a paper about Petya before, or even given his character more than a passing consideration. It would be a very clever tour de force. But just as he was beginning to warm to the prospect, Wes felt his enthusiasm collapse like a punctured balloon. It wasn’t so much that it was a bad idea, but Wes had had a sudden vision of himself—striving, conniving, intellectually dishonest and arrogant, too interested in making a mark and scoring a point—and it made him dizzy with exhaustion. He was exhausted by War and Peace, by the very idea of War and Peace, but most of all he was exhausted by himself, by the incredible amount of energy it took to keep this carnival on the road. It would be better just to dig in, like a road-weary donkey, than to maintain this charade. It would be more honest to resubmit the paper on the Manual, for all its flaws, and take the F he had coming to him, even if it meant ruining his college prospects, than it would be to try and find something interesting, original and engaging to say about War and Peace. Even as he thought these things Wes knew there was little chance that they would come to pass, that it was only the exhaustion speaking and that by tomorrow he would probably have some rescue plan figured out, but right now he was so heartily sick and tired of himself that the prospect of academic Armageddon filled him with a kind of ecstatic, mystic elation, like a medieval saint. He thought of the dream he’d had that morning, and the imagery of counting light bulbs and plummeting aircraft made a certain sense in light of the day’s experience. He had been right, after all, to assume that the mind knew its own business and understood things that were difficult to communicate to the consciousness. Even when Wes came to despise his own mind and everything it put him through, it was out there working on his behalf. His thoughts were interrupted by a strange noise coming from the kitchen two floors below, and he paused to consider it just as Nora entered the room in pajamas and slippers, book in hand.

  “What’s that sound?”

  “What sound?”

  “Downstairs. Listen.”

  Nora halted in the doorway and cocked her head. She was in her old Paul Frank pjs, riddled with monkey-face logos, that she often wore in moments of stress, although now, of course, they were far too small for her and made her look a little like a circus freak. Wes considered her fondly, and smiled.

  “It must be dad doing the dishes.”

  “Holy shit, I think you’re right.”

  Nora threw herself down on the bed beside Wes and began to leaf through the pages of her book.

  “Whatcha reading?”

  “I Capture the Castle.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a girl who lives in a falling-apart castle with her sister and her dad, who used to be a famous writer but isn’t anymore, and she’s sick of everything but she’s super smart, and then she and her sister fall in love with some rich boys who move in next door, or something like that.”

  “Is it European?”

  “I don’t know? Is England European?”

  “Is it a kid’s book or an adult book? I mean, is it something you might read in a high school English class?”

  “I don’t know. It’s by the same lady who wrote A Hundred and One Dalmatians.”

  Wes sighed and closed his eyes. Whatever the solution was, it would have to wait until the next day, as he was too tired to think. He l
istened to Nora turning the pages of her book and breathing heavily through her nose, and he knew that he could fall asleep right then and there, but felt that there was something still to do that he had left undone. He opened his eyes, and his gaze happened to fall on the bookshelf above his desk. He pushed himself up heavily from the bed, crossed the room and reached out for the thin, ragged hard-cover novel sandwiched between two massive, glossy textbooks. It was The Breadbaking District. He took it back to the bed and examined it. Although he had never read it, this was not the first time he had held it in his hands, but he felt that in some way he was seeing it for the very first time. The cover was a kind of pastiche of a Dickensian novel, with a nineteenth-century lithograph of a baker sliding a paddle of dough into a brick oven, a daintily filigreed border and an ornate Victorian typeface that Wes thought made the book look cheap, as if the publisher could not afford a real designer. The paper stock, too, was clearly not of the best, and Wes wondered whether his father had been aware at the time of publication how little effort his publisher had put into making his book attractive. Wes turned the book over and read the captions on the back. “An impressive debut . . . captures the elation and sweet sorrow of first love.” “The author shows promise beyond his years . . . someone to be watched.” Even the blurbs—written not by real writers but by anonymous reviewers in professional journals—seemed half-hearted, hardly commendations at all, and Wes felt sad for his father. He was sure the book must at least be better than his publisher had made it look. When all this was over, Wes decided, he would finally sit down and read it.

  Wes put his feet against the wall and stretched out his back, nestling his head against Nora’s knees. She stroked his hair and perched her book on his forehead, saying “Good daddy-o” under her breath. Directly overhead was the crack in the ceiling. It really was a very modest crack, and certainly not big enough to stop his mind from wandering. He closed his eyes. Wes could feel himself drifting, but in a last moment of clarity he suddenly realized that he had always misunderstood the lyric. Because of the way Paul McCartney stressed the lines, Wes had always understood him to say: “And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong, I’m right. Where I belong I’m right. Where I belong,” as if he were implying that even when he was mistaken he had grasped something essential and unspoken. But in fact, the lyric made more sense if you parsed it another way. “And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong. I’m right where I belong. I’m right where I belong.” Wes thought it was more obvious and less interesting this second way, but it worked, and it rhymed better. Wes hoped that this insight wouldn’t ruin his future enjoyment of the song, but how could it if the song now had two interpretations instead of one? It would be worth looking into. And then he remembered what it was he still needed to do before putting the day to bed.

  “Want to go for a walk?”

  Nora did not look up from her book. “I’m in my pjs.”

  “So? Throw on a coat. It’s a beautiful night, and Crispy really needs her walk.”

  “Nah, I’m okay.”

  Wes sat up, found his sneakers under the bed, pulled them on and laced them up. He perched on the edge of his bed, gathered his strength, and stood with a muffled grunt, pushing with his palms against his knees like an old man. Then he gathered his hoodie from the floor and crossed the room to the door. On the bed, the iPhone emitted a crystalline chime. Nora lifted her head and looked at the phone, then at Wes, who waited with one hand on the doorknob. The iPhone chimed twice, three times, then with a delicate electronic burp sent the call to voice mail. Wes turned the knob and opened the door.

  “I won’t be long.”

  About the Author

  Jesse Browner is an author, food writer and award-winning translator. He has written four previous books including the novels Conglomeros (Random House 1992), Turnaway (Random House 1996) and The Uncertain Hour (Bloomsbury 2007), and has translated works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard and Rainer Maria Rilke. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, Food & Wine and Gastronomica, among others. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.