We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “This man is here to help us,” she said. “Can I tell you something?” His face was turning purple. “This man is not here for you. Do you understand? He’s here so I don’t have to worry about you when I’m not here. He’s here for me.”

  He began to quiet down, and the violent color drained from his face, and he looked as if he could breathe again.

  • • •

  She woke in the middle of the night to find Ed half on top of her trying to make something happen. She wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing, or if he was even awake at all. She lay him down, calmed his pounding heart, and got on top. It was awkward and a little heartbreaking, but the blood still raced through her veins, and it was more attention than some of her friends had gotten in years.

  • • •

  Sergei stayed until she got home from work on Friday. She might have been able to give him less than nine hundred a week, but she wanted to convey the gravity of the job in the pay, and she was taking this man from his home, his wife, even if Nadya said he was happy to get away.

  Sergei’s main job was to cook Ed’s meals and keep him company. Friday evenings were awkward; the transactional nature of the relationship couldn’t be avoided. She counted out a pile of fifties and handed them over in a folded stack, avoiding Sergei’s eyes. Some Fridays he finished watching a program with Ed before departing. Others, he was waiting by the door when she arrived. Even when he seemed content to chat, he didn’t speak much, owing to his poor command of English. In that respect, he and Ed made a good pair. She imagined them grunting at each other like cavemen when she wasn’t there. It wasn’t the worst thought in the world. She may have had to act disgusted if it happened around her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take private delight in the idea of it.

  76

  His mother wondered what he was still doing there, why he hadn’t gone back to school. The truth was, he was okay thinking of himself as a screwup, but he wasn’t comfortable thinking of himself as a sociopath. To just leave like that, to turn his back utterly—this would be too much for him to take. He wanted to think he was a better person than that, so he stuck around. He told his mother that he would be there to help when he could but that he didn’t want to be primarily responsible for his father, and she told him not to bother. Eventually he just said he was sticking around because he didn’t want to go back to Chicago for the summer.

  • • •

  One morning over breakfast he told his mother that he was going to go in to see his old teacher, Mr. Corso.

  “That’s nice,” she said in the flat tone she’d assumed for talking to him now that he’d made his decision.

  “I thought I could get some direction from him. Maybe he could help me figure a few things out.”

  “That’s not something you go to your teacher for,” she said, abandoning her flat affect. “That’s something you bring to your father. He’s still your father.”

  “I don’t know what I’d say to him. I don’t know how I’d explain any of it.”

  “What are you planning to say to your teacher, then?”

  “Mr. Corso knows how to figure things out fast.”

  “There’s no one who figures things out faster than your father.”

  “Come on, Mom. Dad’s not himself.”

  “Your father is still the person to go to with this. I don’t care how great Mr. Corso is. Is he King Solomon? Is he Marcus Aurelius? If not, then you talk to your father. He’s still here.”

  • • •

  They sat in Mr. Corso’s trophy-stuffed office, surrounded by photos of past teams and Mr. Corso standing with students who’d made good—a prominent attorney, a major Hollywood executive. He wasn’t sure what he was there for—support, direction, or just to be near the man for a while. Connell remembered seeing ex-students in Mr. Corso’s office when he was a student. It wasn’t hard to understand why they returned even decades later. Mr. Corso was the kind of man who knew how to cook a perfect steak at his summer house in Breezy Point and explain why Dostoyevsky beat Tolstoy on points after ten rounds. If all of life was a competition for Mr. Corso, somehow he seemed to draft everyone around him for his team.

  “I still can’t believe you quit playing ball,” Mr. Corso said, leaning back into the red leather of his chair with his hands locked behind his head. “An arm like yours. And to join the army that talks you to death.”

  Mr. Corso hadn’t stopped needling him since his sophomore year, when, just before baseball season started, Connell decided to switch to debate. Mr. Corso liked to argue over ideas almost as much as Mr. Kotowski, Connell’s debate coach, did, but after school he assisted the varsity baseball coach, strategizing on the bench as he crunched sunflower seeds. He had a friendly rivalry with Mr. Kotowski, who had stamped generations of students with his trademark brand of razor-edged hyperarticulateness, and who, Mr. Corso liked to grumble, mined his freshman speech class for prospects. Between them, they seemed to divide the world.

  “I declared an English major,” Connell said. “I wanted to thank you. You had a lot to do with that.”

  Mr. Corso laughed and rocked in his chair, the springs creaking beneath his weight. “Don’t come crying to me in twenty years when you look at your bank statement.”

  He shifted forward, knitting his hands together at the front end of his desk. Connell could see the pink dots of his peeling tan. His eyes were keen and probing, soft brows hovering above them. His craggy, pockmarked face gave him extra gravity and toughness. Connell spent his sophomore year afraid of Mr. Corso, after he quit baseball, but when it was time to pick his senior elective he chose Mr. Corso’s modernist literature class. After a semester of Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, and The Sound and the Fury, what Connell remembered best were those bits of fatherly wisdom Mr. Corso slipped into his lessons. One time he explained the impact supply and demand had on pricing by asking them to imagine approaching a hot dog vendor with a lone dog floating in his cart as rain began to fall. “What do you think he’d take for it?” Connell remembered him asking. “You think the price of things is chiseled into tablets handed down from a cloud?”

  “Where are you working this summer?”

  “I came home to help with my father,” Connell said nervously, “but I don’t think I’m up to playing nursemaid. You know?”

  Mr. Corso looked at him in silence for a few moments. “What makes you think it’s okay to drop the ball like this?”

  “My mother’s bringing someone in,” Connell said nervously. “It’s the best thing for everyone.”

  “Your family is good people,” Mr. Corso said with a slight growl in his voice. “You don’t have a clue yet what that means in life, do you?”

  Connell looked away. Another silence followed.

  “Those guys you debated with. Do they have summer jobs?”

  “More like paid internships,” Connell said. “At blue-chip companies.”

  “Do you want to work?”

  Connell guessed that was why he was sitting across from Mr. Corso, though it wasn’t clear until now that that had been his purpose. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I need a job.”

  “Can you do real work?”

  Mr. Corso drummed his fingers on his desk. The tips were fat, and the nails were neatly trimmed. Another silence followed, in which Connell felt the hair on his arms and bare legs rise in the air-conditioned office.

  “Sure.”

  “The super of a nearby building on Park called to offer summer relief jobs to our graduating seniors. Doorman, porter.”

  He fingered through a pile on his desk and pulled out a piece of paper as if he’d known where it had been all along.

  “Does this guy have a son?” Connell asked.

  Mr. Corso chuckled. “Poor kid’s only ten. They’re starting the application process early these days.”

  Connell tried to hide his embarrassment at being offered this job. “You want me to go break the news to him that you can’t buy your way in here?”


  “Better keep that under wraps,” Mr. Corso said, folding the paper into thirds and handing it to Connell in an official manner. “If you do a good job, we should be able to make this a regular tradition for—what—five more summers at least? Maybe beyond if the kid gets in here. We’ll call it the Connell Leary Memorial Fellowship in honor of your deceased athletic career.”

  77

  Connell was stationed in the basement, beside one of four service elevators, where he waited for the buzzer to ring and the indicator to light up and tell him his fortune. Gate shut, he shot up to the proper floor, to shuttle nannies to the laundry room and shareholders to the little fiefdoms of their storage cages.

  There were some Albanian guys down there with him—college-aged but not in college, or a little older. Connell saw in the snappy way they spoke to Mr. Marku that they had ambitions to make it up to the lobby. Some of them were rough-looking; others, the more recent immigrants, didn’t speak English all that well. He knew he’d have had a better shot at promotion than any of them, if only he trimmed his unruly hair and shaved his scraggly goatee, but he didn’t care. He was just passing through, and he was pretty sure Mr. Marku had taken one look at him and known he’d felt that way.

  He was summoned by a gorgeous au pair. While she moved her employers’ sheets to the dryer, he fantasized about going in and seducing her, then stopping the elevator between floors and having sex in it. After he’d returned her upstairs, he stood on the landing imagining the bedrooms on the other side of the door. He went down to the basement and sat in the chair thinking about her, until he rose and headed to the stall in the locker room. Sadik interrupted him, banging on the door, and he didn’t finish.

  He put the garbage can in the elevator and went to the top floor to do a run, dumping the contents of their cans into his own. Ancient Mrs. Braverman on the twelfth floor opened her door and handed him a Coke from a mini fridge filled with them. She seemed to remain alive for the sole purpose of bestowing little gifts on the porters. The strange tenement squalor of her digs disconcerted him, the old abandoned furniture, the peeling wallpaper. There was none of the splendor he saw in other apartments, the slabs of stone stretched across kitchen islands as big as docks on a lake. She had kids but they never visited. Money was not a guarantor of dignity.

  His presence surprised Mr. Caldecott in 10B when the latter opened his door to toss his garbage bag into the big can. Mr. Caldecott hurried out of there. Connell felt like a Peeping Tom a flashlight had settled on. The feeling wasn’t unfounded: even the proudest of porters from time to time did what Connell had done the previous day, when, once he’d taken it to the basement, he’d gone through the garbage and paper recycling, in search less of salvageable goods than of documentary evidence of the power the shareholders wielded—bank statements, work memos, eye-popping receipts, all the marvelous details of their lives.

  In the afternoon, the building settled into a postlunch siesta and he leaned against the painted brick wall next to the service elevator to read Invisible Man. Instead of a brilliant campaign against Monopolated Light & Power, he was stuck with severe stretches of hallway intermittently punctuated by feeble fluorescence. The elevator car contained the only source of incandescent light, a single exposed bulb. For a few minutes he placed the chair directly in the car, but he lost his nerve the first time he heard footfalls down the hall.

  Officially, he wasn’t supposed to be reading at all. The activity was tolerated as long as it wasn’t comfortable. And so he stood for hours on the threshold of the elevator and stashed the book when he heard someone approach. Whenever Mr. Marku passed—he was in a generous mood that day, announcing his presence with a stagy, whistled tune—Connell trained his gaze on the light-up panel like a laboratory monkey waiting for an experimenter’s stimulus. One time, though, Connell didn’t lose the book quickly enough. Mr. Marku didn’t give orders or ask questions. He just announced what Connell would do, as though he possessed powers of psychic intuition. “You’ll go outside and sweep the perimeter,” he said. “Then you’ll go to the store and get me a Marlboro Lights hard pack and a six pack of Heineken.” (The first time Mr. Marku told him to buy beer, Connell said he wasn’t old enough, and Mr. Marku replied—accurately, it turned out—“When they see you in that outfit, nobody asks questions.”) “When you’re back you’ll start on those fire stairs.” No one ever used the fire stairs, but Connell had mopped them three times already that week. There were four sets to mop, sixteen flights each. They never gathered any dust.

  78

  It was an unusually warm night. The musk of the flowers she’d planted rose up as she walked from the car. Sergei was standing at the back of the house, smoking under a clear, star-filled sky. She greeted him awkwardly, unsure of whether to invite him in, as he could come in on his own when he was finished. It almost seemed he had been waiting for her.

  She went upstairs. A while later, his quick, hacking cough announced his presence inside. It was strange to hear a man in the house when her husband was in the bed next to her. Since Sergei arrived, she’d been able to sleep through the night. She wasn’t even bothered by Ed’s nocturnal ravings anymore; she just stayed in bed with a foothold in sleep and let him walk around the room.

  She heard Sergei climb the stairs. She lay in bed awake listening to the quiet voices and laugh track from his television, and his own occasional muffled laughter.

  It was a mystery what happened in Sergei’s room after he closed the door. She’d gone in when he wasn’t around and found little more than was present when she’d first turned the room over to him. There was the television, the radio, the armchair, and the side table. There was a small stack of Russian volumes in English translation, a Russian-to-English dictionary, a bottle of aftershave, and the suitcase he lived out of. And there was the bed, of course.

  From deep within her, she felt a tremor of unwelcome desire rumble up. She lay there trying to ignore it, but it seized her attention so thoroughly that she felt a buzzing in her fingertips, the room became stiflingly hot, and the sheets lost their softness and scratched at her skin. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, even though it felt like a betrayal, even though Ed was sleeping next to her, she began to touch herself, something she hadn’t done in years, and she didn’t stop until she had brought herself off with a little involuntary cry that sounded vaguely mournful to her ears, after which she lay taking quick, dry breaths and feeling a tingling lack of satisfaction. An attempt at a second round produced no results.

  79

  Connell hadn’t heard Mr. Marku coming, and when he looked up from the book and saw him standing there, he let out a strangled yelp.

  “Come to my office,” Mr. Marku said. Connell rose to follow him. “First, tie up those newspapers.”

  When Connell entered, Mr. Marku was staring at the wall-length aquarium.

  “You read a lot,” he said.

  Connell nodded nervously.

  “You’ve heard of Camus’s The Fall.”

  He suspected a trap. Mr. Marku always dropped his bombs at the end of a shift, when you had little time to react. Connell was in Mr. Marku’s doghouse for coming in late on a seven-to-three shift on a Saturday. He had thought that Mr. Marku never slept, that he had cameras trained on every entrance and exit, until he figured out that Sadik had ratted on him. The guys built up capital however they could.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t read it.”

  Mr. Marku was proud of the year he’d spent at Iona College before family responsibilities forced him to drop out. More than once he’d mentioned that he’d planned to be an English major.

  “It’s a parable of hell,” Mr. Marku said. “The devil is this bartender.” He just waved his hand. “It’s too much to get into.” He knocked a smoke out of his pack and lighted it in the windowless office. “You’ll come in Wednesday at six forty-five in the morning.” He handed him a bundle of folded clothes. “You’ll wear this doorman uniform. You’ll shave.”

  80


  As Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw Connell coming up the hill. Most nights he came home after midnight, and sometimes, when he didn’t have to work the next morning, when the sun was rising. Eileen rolled down her window.

  “There’s chicken in the fridge.” She expected him to wave and keep walking, but he stopped.

  “Where are you going?”

  She turned to Bethany, who took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Out for a while,” she said. “There are potatoes too. Just put one in the microwave.”

  • • •

  When she came home, Sergei was waiting in the kitchen, sipping from a cup of what looked like coffee, but it could have contained vodka for all she knew.

  “Hard work today,” he said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “In Russia, even, I don’t work this hard.”

  “What’s up? What happened?”

  “Is no good to talk about it.”

  “Is Ed okay?”

  “He is asleep.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “I don’t mind to work hard,” he said. “But he is very hard work.”

  He said it with a whistle that indicated a certain professional appreciation. She nodded in solidarity.

  “He wipe shit on walls in bathroom,” he said. “I clean it up. Between tiles. Is all gone.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You mind if I . . . ?” He had taken out his pack and already had a cigarette in his mouth. He was flicking the lighter absently.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  They stood on the patio and he lit the cigarette. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. He pulled on his cigarette and looked at her. Behind it his eyes smoldered. He was stocky and his hair was thick where it wasn’t sparse. He stood in the middle of the patio but seemed to take up much of its space.