He stands at the end of the hall before his parents’ door, which is slightly ajar. Here, in a mote-filled stream of sunlight, stands Oscar at the real moment of bravery. He knows that he is not to disturb his mother when she is resting. This is a very important rule. He steels himself. It is worth it. He knocks on the door with his foot. He hears nothing. She is probably sleeping. He pushes through.
The room is small and dark. The shades are drawn. The air conditioner hums. It’s freezing in here. The small TV is on the nightstand facing in toward the queen-size bed, where his mother lies curled up on her side under the covers in the shape of a capital G. Oscar’s will begins to falter. He shouldn’t wake her up. He considers leaving.
But then her eyes open. She seems surprised to see him but not upset. She sits up in bed.
“Oscar...hi, honey,” she says.
“Hi,” Oscar says.
He still holds the bowl out in front of him. She moves over and makes a space for him to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Is this for me?” she says. Her black hair is tied back in a bun. She wears an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with Mickey Mouse. There is a smell in the room, something not unpleasant, something very human.
“I made it for you,” he says. He hands her the bowl.
She lifts the spoon, tilts the surface of the bowl into the light.
“Is this... Did you try to get down the milk?”
Oscar had failed to realize that the lack of milk would raise questions. He panics a little but recovers himself.
“We were out of milk,” he says.
“So you used water?”
“Is that wrong?”
“No, honey. That’s very sweet.”
“It’s not bad?”
“No, it’s fine. Here, look.” She spoons some of the cereal into her mouth. She chews and swallows.
“It’s delicious, bunny. Thank you,” she says.
Oscar swells with pride. In his eyes she is elemental, enormous. As he sits and watches, she eats the entire bowl.
“Mom?” he says.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
Thirty seconds pass.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Oscar?”
“I spilled the milk.”
She laughs. Something has changed in her face.
“What do you say we go clean it up before your father gets home?” she says, and swings her legs out over the floor.
9
The air within the Boatwrights’ house hung leaden with an unsettling finality. The stillness, hovering around the grandfather clock and the empty candy dish and small porcelain ballerina figurines in their glass case, indicated that although something bad had happened, it had now been taken care of, and all that remained to be done was break down the pizza boxes and tidy up the kitchen. There may have been one less of them, but those who remained were now free to go about their business, as all legal, religious, and societal requirements had been fulfilled.
At first the three Boatwrights had sat down in the living room, but Grace sensed almost immediately that she wanted no part of, or wouldn’t be able to bear, the impending conversation, and so she had moved into the kitchen, where she began to very slowly wash the dishes.
“So,” Oscar said to Lee, “it’s time. We need to address the issue that’s simplest to address, which is the financial one.”
“What am I supposed to say?” Lee asked. “That I’m broke? Well, I’m broke.”
“I’m just trying to look at the facts so we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Well, the facts are that I have very little—I can see out to the horizon about three months from now and beyond that I’ve chosen not to look.”
“Dad—this is not like you.”
“Well, it’s like me now.”
“Well, we still need a plan. I mean, come on! You own the house—you could sell it.”
“I’ve lived in this house for forty-one years and here’s where I’ll die. Besides, have you looked at what’s happened to property values?”
“We’re talking about survival here.”
“I know.”
Oscar fought through the wrongness of all of this. His insides wrenched. This man had cared for him, clothed him, disciplined him, and now Oscar was putting him through this? But it had to be done.
“I guess let’s focus on the numbers. I’ll assume that the number in the bank is essentially zero.”
“I have a few thousand or so left. The school gave me a nice check, too, to help with funeral expenses, almost another thousand. Plus there’s your mother’s life insurance, although much of that will go to the funeral home. There are probably a few things around the house that I could sell. I heard that that’s easier these days, with the internet? I can live off my checks from the government, and maybe I can try to go back to work to see if I can pay off a little of the debt.”
“Wait—what debt?”
A look came over Lee’s face—he had let something slip, and he was ashamed about it, ashamed about the thing itself but almost more ashamed that his mind and memory were frayed enough to not do a better job of keeping it in.
“Wha—no. Don’t tell me you owe this fucking St. Germaine guy? You owe him? How much?”
“I wasn’t actually aware of this debt. I was never really involved. Your mother didn’t tell—”
“How much?”
“Twenty-one thousand.”
Oscar stood up suddenly. The hardback chair he was sitting on fell over backward with a bang. He bent to retrieve it while he started raising his voice.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Isn’t this guy supposed to help people? How is it helping them to take all of their money and then invoice them for more? He wants to help people out of depression, or whatever? Well, aren’t they going to be pretty depressed once they’re bankrupt?”
“I don’t know as much about the whole thing as you think I do. I took flights to Hawaii and stayed in the hotel and went to the beach while your mother went to the seminars. When she came back, she wouldn’t talk about what went on, even when I pressed her.”
“And yet you still wrote the checks.”
“I thought you wanted the facts. You’re lecturing me now.”
Oscar exhaled and rubbed his forehead. “You’re right. I’m sorry. So, okay, you owe the great and powerful holy man—”
“Oscar—”
“—twenty-one thousand dollars. And then, if we can get that taken care of, will you be okay?”
“Okay?”
In Lee’s wrinkled face Oscar could see the widening of the man’s perception of the rest of his life. Oscar tried to step in before he reached any sort of conclusion.
“Well, I mean in the sense of you won’t starve or freeze.”
“In that sense, yes, then I suppose I’ll be okay. But Oscar, I’m your father, I’m not asking for any sort of—”
“Dad, we’re past that, please, all right? We’re past that. But I don’t think you have to worry about taking any handouts just yet, because I’ve got nothing to hand out, and I don’t think Gracie does either.”
There was a silence.
“Dad, I’m—I’m sorry I raised my voice there for a second. I just can’t see why you’re not more alarmed.”
“This is difficult to explain but I want to try.” Lee looked exhausted, his eyes unfocused. “Eventually it just becomes hard to care. I’ve become...bored with this all. With being in this body. The thing that kept me going—I buried her today. I’m in a tough spot now, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. But right now, it’s extremely hard to care. About money, especially. All my life I’ve had to worry about this—this filthy shit. I’m ready to be done with it.”
Lee pulled his battered leather wallet out of his pocket and tos
sed it onto the table dismissively.
“First of all, Dad, you’re not that old,” Oscar said.
“Maybe not. But we’re in the fourth quarter.”
“And second of all—” Oscar paused to collect himself. “I didn’t think this was ever going to be something that I would need to ask you, with Mom I thought maybe, but never you, so please don’t be embarrassed, but if you ever think about—if you ever think you might be a danger to yourself, you need to call me immediately.”
Lee made a derisive sound and dismissed the notion with a flap of his hand.
“Dad, I need you to please just promise.”
“I promise.”
Oscar stood up. He left his father and went to the kitchen (his sister was gone) and filled a glass of water from the tap. At the edge of the sink sat a spoon in a teacup on a saucer, and he had a thought about how these things were merely a temporary arrangement of molecules. Tip them over and they would fall apart and shatter.
Behind him, Lee stood up and slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor. His tread on the floor above him was different than Oscar remembered it—his footfalls whispered and dragged.
Oscar went to the broom closet where his father kept the rifles, and there they were, leaning barrels-up against the back corner, behind an ironing board. For a moment, he wondered if he should bury them in the woods behind the house, but then closed the closet door.
Oscar could feel a great force amassing itself outside his city walls, just beyond his perception, and for an instant he was able to appreciate the inevitability of his own destruction, truly understood it with a loving acceptance, but then it was gone.
His flight was scheduled to take off in three hours.
10
Session 3: Expansion.
“Objects exist because they exist. This is good enough for our purposes. Things are the way they are because that’s the way that they are. Events happen because they were always going to happen. You make the only decisions you can make. You are the only person you can be. You are the only person you can be. You are the only person you can be. Repeat that to yourself. Now once more. Again.”
11
After the cheap midnight flight and a long cab ride back from the airport, Oscar got to the university as the sun was rising on Friday morning. He slept for two hours and woke to teach his intro section.
Afterward, he had a three-hour break before the start of his second class, and he planned to spend it in his favorite third-floor alcove in the library, studying the most impenetrable text he could get his hands on.
As he was walking up the library steps, Sundeep came out from inside.
“Hey, man. You’re back already?”
“Long enough,” Oscar said.
“Yeah. Yeah. Listen—how are you?”
Oscar tipped his head sideways back and forth. “Eh.”
“Right. Well, look, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the bulletins but there’s that guest lecturer in from Stanford to speak this evening, a Kantian I think? The paper is pretty good. Anyway I’m supposed to take him out for dinner afterward. Please come?”
Oscar knew that what he really wanted to do that evening, and for every evening following that he could currently foresee, was wallow in darkness. He knew that Sundeep probably knew this, as well.
“I don’t know that I could be very interesting...”
“You don’t have to be interesting, you just have to make me look smart. Come on. Please. See you tonight.”
* * *
The philosopher was tall and stately in his late middle age, with a white beard and a prodigious stomach that strained the buttons of his dark double-breasted suit. He carried a brass-handled cane, which he kept in his hand at the podium while he enthusiastically delivered his talk to a lecture hall that contained nearly as many professors as students.
Sundeep had planned to bring the philosopher, along with Oscar and a few other professors in related areas of inquiry, to a nearby Italian restaurant, but the philosopher insisted on going to a bar instead, “somewhere with food,” so that the half-dozen graduate students whom he had immediately befriended while lingering in the lecture hall could be invited.
The philosopher turned out to be far more game than most of the department’s guest speakers and was soon avuncularly drunk on gin and tonics. He bought several rounds of drinks for everyone in attendance and outright refused to discuss the paper he had presented, which had been quite brilliant. After he handed Oscar his third bourbon on the rocks over Oscar’s initial protestations, he threw his arm around his neck and said, “And what’s your story, fellow? How goes the life of the mind?”
It felt good to be getting drunk, and he wondered why he hadn’t done it sooner. It softened the edges of everything so that he could bump around safely. Feeling truthful, he replied, “I think it’s killing me. And I’m so poor!”
“This is natural, dear boy, perfectly natural.” His breath smelled like a juniper bush. “One must simply push through.”
“For how long?”
“Oh, years and years, of course.”
Sometime later, after another drink or maybe two, Sundeep spoke into Oscar’s ear over the music.
“I think he’ll be all right,” he said, as the philosopher belted out a Rolling Stones song with a pair of townies. “Let’s get out of here. I need to eat something other than fries.”
The sun had not yet fully set. They went to the Italian restaurant, a few blocks away, just the two of them.
“Let me ask you something,” Oscar said as the bottle of wine that Sundeep had ordered was uncorked, “have you ever heard of a guy named Paul St. Germaine?”
“Hmm. No? Who is he?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. Sort of like a motivational speaker. Considers himself something more. But anyway—my parents gave him all of their money.” Oscar was slumped languidly in the booth. He lifted his wine up and toasted to nothing.
“Ah—Christ. All of it? Can anything be done?”
“Nothing has occurred to me. I can barely find any info about him.”
Sundeep shook his head. “Man, you have truly been shat upon.”
“Friend, I’ll tell you,” Oscar said with a laugh, sloshing wine into his mouth, “it’s really something!”
Their food came out. Oscar had forgotten what he had ordered and was happy to see it.
Afterward, out on the sidewalk, Sundeep turned to walk back toward campus, but Oscar insisted that they go out for one more drink. He felt wanton and untethered. Sundeep tried to dissuade him, saw that he wouldn’t be able to, and agreed. They headed back to the main strip, past the four undergrad bars where pitchers of beer cost nine dollars, and entered the grown-up bar where they cost twelve. Inside, Oscar walked directly to the bar, put down his credit card, and ordered two shots and two beers.
Here there was some haziness. The bar filled up and got louder and darker. He was talking with Sundeep one moment, and then in the next he was gone. Or had Oscar walked away from him? Was this a different bar? He discovered a fresh beer in his hands, which was wonderful.
Eventually, a woman emerged from the fog, leaning in over her drink to yell something into Oscar’s ear. The music was loud and unfamiliar to him.
“What?” he yelled back, leaning closer.
“I said, I like your tweed jacket.” They were both now angled in such a way, with his ear to her mouth, that he was looking straight down directly into her cleavage.
“Oh, this? They make us wear these.”
“You teach at the school,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, not sure if it had been a question.
She laughed.
He took another sip of beer, which he found was actually not beer but a glass of bourbon, and immediately lost the ability to track their conversation; he knew that he was talking a
lthough he couldn’t quite make out the words. It felt like he was saying mwah mwah mwah mwah, but it didn’t seem like that could actually be true. She touched his forearm. Whatever he was saying seemed to be agreeable.
His capability for thought was at this point reduced to the most broad and language-free concepts, and one of them was a general negativity or wrongness. There was something bad about this interaction, he knew that much, although he couldn’t perceive it specifically at the moment. However, it did nothing to dull the appeal of sex. If anything, it added a certain desirable edge.
After another slip of time, she was leading him by the hand out the door, and soon they were coupled together in his bed, which rested on the floor without a frame. Of this scene he perceived little. He felt there was no verbal interaction at all, although there must have been. Just bodies, requesting and complying, a flash of pleasure, and the void of sleep.
When he awoke he was alone. His tongue was a pumice stone and he felt as if his brain pressed against his skull in all directions. He was able to fend off full consciousness for over an hour, as he sensed that there was something he would have to reckon with when he fully awoke. But it wasn’t until he sat on the couch curled over a mug of coffee that he remembered that he had come home with anyone at all. He searched his phone but hadn’t added any new numbers (there was however a series of texts from Sundeep trying to find him), and she hadn’t left a note.
The only evidence that proved that she had even existed at all was a hair clip that he found on the floor next to the bed, and a condom wrapper that fluttered down out of the sheets when he tore them up (which relieved him greatly). He couldn’t remember what she looked like or what they had talked about.
“Yikes,” he said out loud to himself, and then he thought that his lack of memory was probably for the best, as he put on his bathrobe and began to settle into a day of headaches and undifferentiated shame. This type of event was rare for Oscar, but not unheard of—depending on your definition, it was either his second or fourth one-night stand. He considered the issue closed.
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 5