We Learn Nothing

by Tim Kreider

  Like a lot of siblings, my own sister and I—by which I mean Laurie, the sister I grew up with, who’s also adopted, to whom I’m not related—don’t seem to have much in common. She’s a doctor, married to another doctor, with two kids, living in a big suburban house outside of Boston. I’m an artist and bachelor who lives in a studio in New York City. When they visit New York they see Broadway musicals and eat at chain restaurants in Times Square; when I visit them I skulk around their house unsure what to do with myself and stay up late channel-surfing. These days we mostly see each other for holidays and emergencies. When our mother was in the hospital for a month Laurie and I had to spend several days in the town where we grew up, driving back and forth between the hospital and our childhood home, both of us yanked out of our own lives, sleep-deprived and scared. In the car, passing a supermarket, I’d ask her, “Did I ever tell you about the time Dad left me at that Safeway?” or she’d point at a tree and say, “That’s where I had my first car accident.” (I gave her an older-brother look of bemusement and contempt: “Your first accident was in the driveway?”) She remembers the same grade school teachers I do, the old house on Green Spring Avenue, the imaginary country under the stairs. She remembers Dad. We may not have much to talk about anymore, but our voices still sound the same.

  At family get-togethers Laurie still likes to retell the stories of how I dotted red food coloring onto her Raggedy Ann doll’s throat to simulate a vampire bite and would read her passages from Stephen King aloud, which allegedly traumatized her. When she starts in with this routine I always make a pained, weary face as if to say, Please, why must you do this, I beg of you. I worry that these stories do not reflect particularly well on me and can only imagine she tells them to publicly mortify me. I’m too obtuse to understand that—in addition to, yes, maybe taking a little vindictive pleasure in making me squirm—she’s trying to talk about our shared past, and her love for me. I don’t have to worry that I’m somehow going to blow it with Laurie—I’ve already blown it. She knows all about me. We’ve shared a bedroom. I walked her down the aisle. I’m her brother. I have granted this woman the legal power to remove me from a ventilator, even though there is still a small gray mark in the ball of her thumb where I once stabbed her with a pencil.

  Like indifferent parents who become extravagant, doting grandparents, I felt as if meeting my half sisters was a chance to atone for my derelictions and finally get being an older brother right. I was forgetting that it’s the scars that mark us as siblings. Amy apparently had a history of borrowing her older sister’s clothes without always explicitly asking first. Once she borrowed one of Sophie’s dresses—a coveted dress that she had not only not been granted permission but specifically forbidden to borrow—and wore it to a party where, in a moment of forgetful exuberance, she leapt into a swimming pool without first removing it. This incident came to light when an incriminating photograph was posted on a popular social networking site showing Amy at said party in the now sopping and translucent dress. Inevitably, this damning evidence was brought to Sophie’s attention. “I knew there was something different about that dress,” she seethed. This grievance festered for most of a summer. A punitive policy of Not Speaking was instituted for an indeterminate period, and a moratorium placed on all sororal loans or sharing of any kind. It was a tense several weeks around the Dillon household. The night that Sophie had left home to move to New York, Amy and I came back from having a beer and found that she had left the dress on Amy’s bed, with a piece of notebook paper placed atop it on which was drawn a magic-markered heart. Seeing that note, I felt a pang of fondness, but also, faintly, of envy. It was a gesture that spoke of the kind of affection that’s annealed out of a thousand little hurts and reconciliations. I would never be family to Sophie and Amy in the way they were to each other; we had never hit each other or told on each other or made each other cry. And I would remain an outsider to that intimacy until I did the thing I was most afraid of—doing or saying the Wrong Thing, blowing it somehow, making them go away.

  Which had to happen sooner or later. The biggest events in life often take longest to affect us, and it was several months after we’d met when Amy wrote me to confess that she was feeling uncomfortable about how much more often I spoke or wrote to her and Sophie than to their mother. The day I got this email I spilled hot coffee on my leg and almost broke my nose walking facefirst into a metal pole on some piece of playground equipment. I tried to reassure her, without sounding too defensive, that my relationship with their mother was not less important to me than ours; it was, on the contrary, far more complicated, fraught with old issues and history. Amy didn’t respond. That’s just how she was, Sophie assured me—she needed time to work things through for herself. The next time I saw her it would be as if nothing had happened. I ought to have understood this well, since withdrawal has long been my own preferred method of conflict management, but it didn’t make it any easier to wait out the silence, which is, as I may have mentioned, my least favorite thing.

  Months later (after Amy had, per Sophie’s prediction, come back as nonchalantly as a cat does after it’s freaked out and fled) Sophie and I had a half-sibling summit talk of our own. She told me that, although she genuinely liked me, some of the issues my appearance had raised were catching up to her, and seeing me was, frankly, sometimes hard for her. She’d had to accept that what she’d thought of as the most basic facts about her family were untrue, or at least incomplete—that there weren’t only four of them, that she wasn’t the oldest child anymore—and some part of her was recoiling, having none of it, shaking her head saying No! She also asked me the question I’d dreaded: “Why do you like us so much?” She wasn’t exactly creeped out or bothered so much as she just didn’t get it. “Not that we’re not likeable and all,” she said, “but you really seem to like us.” I made the mouth-tugged-to-the-side-with-chagrin face. Apparently I am not a CIA-level dissembler. I’d also forgotten that Sophie can read my mind. All I could tell her was that I was as helpless over my affection for her as she was over her own conflicted feelings about me. I genuinely like her and her sister, too—they’re extraordinary people I’m glad I have an excuse to know—but I also love them, for reasons that have less to do with who they are as individuals than with what they are to me—a love that’s as overwhelming and mysterious to me as it must seem weird and unprovoked to them. I can’t expect them to understand this, any more than I’ll ever be able to appreciate how Rachel must have felt not knowing for forty years what had happened to her son—what kind of people had raised him, if he ever thought of her on Mother’s Day, whether he’d been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan—or how it must have felt to find him again.

  I deliberately plunged into this undertaking without too much reflection, the way I’d volunteer to go into space if the opportunity presented itself, reasoning that if I thought through all the ways in which it could go wrong I might never do it at all. I’m still only beginning to understand how naïve and oblivious I’ve been to the tangled realities of the situation, and how disruptive my presence in these people’s lives has been. We are enmeshed now, and because we’re all so touchy and high-strung, our relationships seem likely to involve dramatic emotional ins and outs for some time. Rachel and I are proceeding more steadily but also more slowly, as if in gradually closing spirals. We’ve made strawberry-rhubarb pie together, and she taught me to use the leftover dough to make a treat her daughters call “roly-polys.” She’s also introduced me to some of my extended relations—cousins, second cousins, cousins in-law. This, finally, is beginning to feel like what I think of as family: being introduced and explained to people you don’t know, having to remember names and genealogical connections, being instantly dismissed by ten-year-olds as another boring grown-up. It’s a little like having in-laws—another family full of birthdays not to forget, idiosyncratic customs and etiquette not to breach, and hidden dynamics to try not to run afoul of. The honeymoon phase is over; we’re beginning the long p
rocess of disenchantment. But disenchantment also means being freed, unblinded. We have the rest of our lives to get to know each other as people—ordinary, disappointing, surprising, and impossible.

  But I hope we won’t forget how we looked to one another in those first days of discovery, when we first learned we weren’t alone. The summer we met, Amy and I took a half-sibling field trip together to see a show of astronomical photographs at the National Air and Space Museum. We saw Mercury silhouetted against the inferno of the sun, a pebble cast into a lake of fire, the deranged landscape of Miranda, a little world shattered and imperfectly rejoined, and Saturn’s rings arcing across its limb, like fine hairs against the curve of a cheek. It emerged that Amy had never touched the moon rock before, so we stood in line with all the other earthlings and waited our turn to run our fingers over its glassy surface, smoothed to a warm polish by millions of fingers before ours. Later, over oysters and beer at Old Ebbitt Grill, we were considering a stuffed walrus head on the wall above us when a man at the bar next to Amy said, “I see you’re admiring my ex-wife,” and as Amy threw back her head in delight I caught a startling glimpse of my own laughter in hers. Seeing my own goofy expressions transposed into beauty in her face was like seeing those filigreed blue shadows fall over Saturn’s lambent clouds. Yes: the sky is cool. Touching that piece of lunar basalt brought from a quarter-million miles away was not stranger or more marvelous to me than the touch of my sister’s finger. We’ve all touched the moon rock. What gives us that faint interplanetary chill of awe is not the commonplace matter but the knowledge that it’s come back to us from such an abyssal distance, from someplace that was torn from us long ago, a place we’ve always looked to with wonder and yearning, but never dreamt we would ever really go.

  Averted Vision

  In 1996 I rode the Ringling Brothers circus train to Mexico City, where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone’s husband. I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels—vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Annie and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to chill our Coronas every afternoon, the black velvet painting of the devil on the toilet she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is funny, since, if I think back on it honestly, I did not actually enjoy my stay there; in fact, as mi esposa did not hesitate to point out at the time, I griped incessantly about the noise and stink of the city—the car horns playing shrill uptempo versions of “La Cucaracha” or the theme from The Godfather, the noxious mix of diesel fumes and piss. The air was so filthy we’d been there a week before I learned we had a view of the mountains.

  I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City. I was recovering from an affair that had ended with what are called hard feelings, and during my convalescence I was subletting a cool, airy apartment a block from Tompkins Square Park, with a kitchen window that looked out on a community garden. A theater troupe was rehearsing a production of The Tempest out there, and I got used to the warped rattling crash of sheet-metal thunder in the evenings. I happened to catch The Passion of St. Joan of Arc on cable for the first time late one night, a film I’d known nothing about—it was grotesque and beautiful, unlike anything else in cinema. (I’d had no idea there were transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc.) One of the happiest memories of my life is of sitting on top of the little knoll in Tompkins Square Park with a friend, eating a sweet Hawaiian pizza and waiting to see what movie would play on the outdoor screen that was being inflated in front of us. It turned out to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even though throughout this time I was preoccupied with thoughts of the woman I’d lost and torturing myself with insane fantasies of jealousy and revenge, in retrospect it’s obvious that the main thing I was doing that summer was falling in love.

  I’m not sure whether it is a perversity peculiar to my own mind or just the common lot of humanity to experience happiness mostly in retrospect. I have of course considered the theory that I am an idiot who fails to appreciate anything when he actually has it and only loves what he’s lost. But I think I recall that summer with such clarity and affection for much the same reason that I so pleasantly remember my month in Mexico City or even my time in Greece, where I got stabbed. Heartbreak was, in a way, like a foreign country; everything seemed fresh, brilliant, and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt. When you’re that unhappy, any glimmer of beauty or comfort feels like running into an old friend abroad, or seeing mountaintops through smog. We mistakenly imagine we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harderedged quality of intensity. We’ve all known (or been) people who returned again and again to relationships that seemed to make them miserable. Quite a few soldiers can’t get used to the lowered stakes of civilian life, and reenlist. We want to be hurt, astonished, reminded we’re alive. In San Francisco’s Pioneer Square, Annie and I saw honeysuckle blossoms the size of lilies, their creamy fragrance filling the night air. “Are these real?” she asked.

  We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But that kind of intense and present happiness is famously ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, the way you block yourself from remembering a word by trying to retrieve it. And any attempt to contrive this feeling through some replicable method—with drinking or drugs, sexual seduction, or buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers—never quite recaptures the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words, be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a surefire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars.

  About the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort is the less celebrated condition of absorption. I didn’t always enjoy being a cartoonist; during the twelve years of my career, if I can call it that, I bored friends and colleagues by complaining about the insulting pay, the lack of recognition, the short half-life of political cartoons as art. And yet, if I’m allowed any final accounting of my days, I may find, to my surprise, that I reckon those Fridays when I woke up without an idea in my head and only started drawing around noon, calling friends at work for emergency humor consultations, doing frantic Google image searches for Scott McClellan or chacmool, eating whatever crud was in the fridge, laughing out loud at my own inspirations, and somehow ended up getting a finished cartoon in by deadline, feeling like an evil genius and well deserving of a cold beer, to have been among my best.

  If I consciously felt anything when I looked up from my work, it was mostly anxiety and guilt about having been so derelict and left everything until deadline yet again. But during the time I was actually focused on drawing—whipping out a perfect line, fluid but precise, gauging the exact cant of an eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the infinitesimal universe of cross-hatching—I wasn’t conscious of feeling anything at all. My senses were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to redraw something, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of music or line of dialogue I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time; the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that rock climbers, pinball players, and libertines are all seeking: an absorption in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.

  Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself bu
t only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.

  Notes

  How They Tried to Fuck Me Over (But I Showed Them)

  1. Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Norton, 2000).

  When They’re Not Assholes

  1. New York Times/CBS News Poll: “National Survey of Tea Party Supporters,” April 5–12, 2010.

  2. Charlie Daniels Band, “In America,” Full Moon, 1980, Epic FE 36571.

  3. John T. Jost et al., “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition: Political conservatism; psychological variables; prediction; motivated social cognition; personality; epistemic & existential needs; ideological rationalization,” Psychological Bulletin 129:3 (2003). One of the studies cited in this survey reported that conservative women dream more frequently than liberal women about falling, being chased, and being famous, and dream less frequently about sex, a finding I’m just placing before the reader without editorial comment.