Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  The women were the antithesis of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman; they were grim and unsmiling and somewhat dissociated. They were in the grip of dark forces from which they could not be rescued; if anything, men would destroy them—desire itself would destroy them. This idea seemed very highbrow to her. The highbrow visions of female abjection in those books gave her grief something to fasten itself to. The grief was literary now, it was part of a tradition. The women in the nouveaux romans elevated her despair into something mythic. They were not just characters in books, they were her avatars. Through them, she fused with some archetypal feminine misery that filtered itself through the atmosphere, that was part of everything, part of history and life. The abjection in the stories correlated with her own abjection, and with horrible traumatic memories, like when she walked in on her mother holding a prosthetic breast and saw the scar from her mother’s mastectomy and thought her mother’s body (and all bodies) came in detachable parts—a horrible buried thought that had been disinterred in the archeological dig that was her English major. The past was a big black smudge on her life, and at the center of the smudge was the death of her mother. She never spoke about her mother’s death with her siblings or her father. They tried to ignore it and move on, but Cathy could not. Now the kernel was erupting under the heat of her liberal arts education, the horror of childhood suffering pigmenting everything in the present moment.

  She made regular, audible refrains about her wish to be mothered. She had become infatuated with Mary Gordon—the professor of the class about the depressed women—whom she wanted as a mother, and her obsession started to drive me insane. “I wish she could be my mother,” she’d say again and again, “I wish I had a mother.” I cringed at how openly she would admit such shameful wants and needs—why couldn’t she want and need nothing, the way I’d taught myself! Her desiderata were open wounds, it was so ugly. Why did she need her mother so much? Why was she so stuck in the past?

  We were at an Indian restaurant on Amsterdam when I confronted her about her unhealthy fixation. “You need to get into therapy,” I said. Cathy stared down at her plate of uneaten chana saag. She was on some crazy diet that prohibited her from eating oil, and worried the waiter ignored her food restriction. “It’s glistening on top,” she said. “That’s oil.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little extreme?”

  Cathy laughed. “Oh, I’m extreme?” Her thick brown hair fell to one side and she pushed it back.

  “What’s that supposed to mean,” I said.

  “Maybe you should be the one in therapy.”

  “I was in therapy for years. I’ve been in therapy since I was fourteen.”

  “Okay, good for you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with therapy.”

  “Did I say there was?”

  She was staring at the table. She dug her fork through her food, making a little furrow through the plate’s diameter.

  “I’m not the one who keeps bringing up my mother constantly,” I said.

  “Don’t be so reductive. God.”

  “It’s not reductive to say someone needs therapy when they do actually need it.”

  Cathy was glaring at me now.

  “You know what, Dread? You don’t know what it’s like to deal with losing your mother, and you’re being a complete asshole to me right now!”

  Was I being an asshole or was she being defensive and unreasonable? It was hard to know. We were fighting more and more around this time; small peccadilloes quickly blew up into huge arguments, and we were getting stingier and nastier with each other. I hated seeing the ungainly machinery of her thoughts, her failed attempts at sophistication. I’d erupt into huge peacocking tantrums, and Cathy would respond in the vein of whatever Marguerite Duras novel she happened to be reading. We parried endlessly in this specular revulsion of each other. Even though our fights were utterly stupid, we staked everything on them. We were so eager to fight every fight, as if each idea was a limb or an organ, and if we lost the argument we’d have to surrender a part of ourselves we’d never get back.

  Cathy’s morbid incursions into the past made me more determined to propel myself into the future. I was up every night in the library with my trusty highlighter reading Balzac and Ralph Ellison and Hélène Cixous, transcribing polysyllabic words onto index cards, unknotting Proust’s winding clauses and the strange marginalia in Derrida’s Glas. I worked until my body shook with fatigue; it was like I was training for an Olympic event. But I was getting smarter. I felt the ideas from different books and writers connecting and interleaving, building into a reticulate order inside me like arteries or veins. I was no longer frightened of Nietzsche; now I drenched myself in his ideas. I read The Birth of Tragedy and The Will to Power. I read Heidegger’s multivolume biography and Stefan Zweig’s. I read about Nietzsche’s hideous sister, Elisabeth, who co-opted his work and tried to refashion it for Nazi propaganda. I read his “Madness Letters” from 1889, how he signed them Dionysus, Jesus, Napoleon—fusing his own life with myth and history, the way Cathy did with the depressed women in Mary Gordon’s class, the way I soldered my own self to Nietzsche.

  For Nietzsche there was no self. The “self” was, in his words, “an audacious forgery.”* There were no facts except the facts you invented. Reality wasn’t objective or solid, it was a perspective—and the perspective could shift. Reality was just another kind of artifice. If that was right—if artifice was simply another kind of truth—what did it matter if you were truthful or not? If there was no truth, there was no self. I didn’t need a new past. I didn’t need a past, period! I could create myself from sheer will, moment to moment.

  It’s impossible to overestimate how seriously I took these ideas. There was nothing speculative about my reading of Nietzsche: as far as I was concerned, he was offering me a practical guide for how to live. I was drawn to him the way I was later drawn to bad romantic relationships. In some sense, my infatuation with him was romantic infatuation—it was Freudian. Nietzsche was the family I was running from, the insanity I wanted to escape to become sane and cured. But if my father suffocated me with his narratives, Nietzsche offered me a narrative of limitless freedom. God was dead, and it was up to the Übermensch—the Superman—to imbue the world with meaning. The Superman establishes his own values in the vacuum of a godless world. He embraces all of life. He does not turn away from pain or suffering, for he is the embodiment of human greatness. To be great meant you had to overcome your own self—and I took this as a personal mandate. Maybe greatness would compensate me for all the indignities I’d been forced to suffer in life. “Man,” wrote Nietzsche, “is a rope tied between beast and Superman. A rope over an abyss.” The task was to cross the parapet, to walk the tightrope from slouching beast to Übermensch.

  Kaspar oversaw my progress as though he were monitoring a child’s science project. He’d look over at whatever I was doing and make a patronizing little fist and salute: “Keep going!” He tendered flinty little compliments that had the result of making me feel small and useless—but at the same time I felt flattered, seen. I gave him short stories I’d written and he’d make purplish, equivocal comments: “You’re not untalented. You have a certain felicity of phrasing . . . a word sense . . .” The swollen narrowness of his face exaggerated his every movement and gesture; he was odd and possibly malign but it didn’t matter—I wrapped myself around his approbations like ribbons around a maypole.

  I began to write down and memorize clever things I read or thought—then I would regurgitate them for an audience and make the thoughts appear spontaneous, as though they emanated naturally from me as a kind of glittering residue. I collated new traits and mannerisms: an empty series of gestures I could unpack at will, the way a child unpacks toys from a chest. Smugness seemed like a virtue so I faked it. I swaggered around campus in self-mythologizing postures. I wore my arrogance like an insignia. In the back of my mind I could hear Nietzsche barking at me: “Clench your teeth! Keep your eye
s open! Keep a firm hand on the helm!” I began to walk upright and puff up my chest. I shot words from the Barron’s Vocabulary Builder like lead balls from a cannon. If there was ever an opportunity for me to say “prestidigitation” I seized it! Nietzsche cautioned against sympathy and the warm heart so I made my heart freezing cold. I had to be as vicious and sophistic as I could. I began to develop a reputation among teachers and students of being formidable and brilliant. I battered other students with counterintuitive ideas that were hard to argue. I tormented my classmates with crazy, baroque attacks in class—but I had to be cruel. Charity was a malady, cruelty was my portal to higher culture, and I had to be cultured. I had to become the Superman. I had to be severe and unforgiving of people’s failings, the way Harper Goldfarb had been with me when I couldn’t round my Rs, the way Nietzsche had hurt me with his name-calling and sickening images of hair-pulling and swamps. Pain was astringent and clarifying. Pain would burn away the mediocrity until all that was left in the world was a bright shining nucleus, a single electrified atom of human greatness. I wouldn’t be like my brothers, or my sister, or anyone in my family. I wasn’t part of a family—I wasn’t part of anything. I was living on the flickering border of life and death, real and imaginary. I was like Atlas, supporting an entire universe with the strength of my own mind, my will.

  One crisp afternoon, as I basked in the lambent glow of my academic success, and waited on line for a grilled cheese at The Pub, a girl from my nineteenth-century literature class accosted me. Sarah Lawrence wasn’t a haven for preppies but this girl was a rare exception. She was intelligent, but had an unsavory primness. She wore Izod sweaters and had a shoulder-length haircut with short, precise bangs. As she approached me, I saw right away she looked dazed, and a little worried. “I was upset by your comments in class,” she said, referring to a cynical defense I’d made of one of the utilitarian characters in a Balzac novel. The Izod Girl was a humanist. She wanted to scold me for my corrupt and jaded morals. On the surface it was not a scolding, just a friendly colloquy, but there was a touch of crusty lecturing in her tone. That made me angry. And so, marshaling the unseen forces of flash cards and painstakingly memorized quotes, I began to dismantle her flimsy premises. Piece by piece, I broke her down. She argued back but I argued harder. My arguments were like shards of glass cutting and slashing at her. “But that’s moral relativism,” she cried, when she could take it no longer. “Because I am a moral relativist,” I replied, brushing off her silly philistinism like a cobweb. The girl looked me right in the eye, and I looked right back. I stared with such chilly defiance it made her face redden in splotches. I enjoyed the spectacle of her defeat. I enjoyed watching her slump away with her soggy sandwich of sprouts and cucumbers. At the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something depressing about this person I’d become. I was like a house made of all bricks with no rooms, fortified and empty. I had no friends, not really, and I was still in the closet. I’d started having semiregular sex—a bunch of one-night stands with boys I met at school or on chatlines—but was still deeply in denial, and couldn’t begin to envision being in a relationship or falling in love.

  And yet, I felt, for the first time in my life, powerful.

  I didn’t want to relinquish that power.

  Cathy began emulating my snide aristocratic airs—maybe they were part of some readerly effluvia from her Marguerite Duras books, I wasn’t sure, but our friendship, which I’d begun to rely on as a salve and reassurance, had suddenly become very punishing. Her disgust toward me had become intense, and would break out every so often like a blistering rash in the form of nonstop insults: How could I fail to see what was so gobsmackingly apparent? How could I be so stupid and retrograde and useless? We’d eat dinners together in drawn-out, aggrieved silence. We’d suffer long, quiet drives in my Honda as we stewed in our private frustrations and animus. When she wasn’t shouting at me, she’d be hunched in a sweatshirt, a dark silhouette in my passenger seat, hair in her eyes and clutching a copy of The Bell Jar.

  Over time, Cathy became increasingly tiny and locked; she had to completely cut herself off from me or risk being infected by my cretinous thoughts and utterances. The more disconnected she got, the more I’d fight to make her see my position, which would only make her more disgusted, more locked. She’d make little quiet ripostes only half meant for me, so quiet I could barely hear her. Her voice was soft and gravelly, like she’d had a long screaming tantrum and was now hoarse and tired. Her psychic shutdowns put me in a momentary state of terrified distress. I couldn’t bear to be ejected from the bubble, the privileged communion we shared. And then, just as I’d think the friendship was done forever, her outlines would suddenly sharpen, her eyes would beam with adrenaline and intense need, and she’d make a new bid for my affection.

  Back in those days, I was predisposed to magical thinking. I had the naive idea that I’d crossed over to some idyll of intellectual perfection, and that once you became an intellectual nothing bad happened to you. So when things took the turn they did in the spring, I was shocked. It was barely light outside when the phone rang. I fumbled for the receiver—wedged, I remembered in my half-asleep state, between the mattress and the wall, where I dropped it after some three-in-the-morning conversation I had the night before.

  “Dread?” said the tiny, frail voice I recognized as Cathy’s.

  “I asked you to please stop calling me that.” I felt a terrible pain behind my eyes, like I hadn’t slept in weeks. “Can I call you later? I’m still asleep.”

  “I uh . . . I’m in the hospital.”

  I sat up in bed.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m in the psych ward,” she said. “I had myself committed last week.”

  After a stunned silence I asked if she was okay.

  “Not really,” she said.

  Her tone was affectless, and there were odd silences after all my questions. She sounded so tiny and far off, like she was calling from overseas.

  “Did they give you drugs or something?” I said. “You sound a little weird.”

  “Yeah, I’m taking something.”

  “How long are you staying there?”

  “I’m not sure. I talked to my dad, he’s coming with my stepmother.”

  “Did you sign something? Are they allowed to keep you there?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  I’d never known someone to go insane before. Other than what I’d seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I knew nothing about mental institutions, but the idea of Cathy pumped with Thorazine and abused by nurses made me sick with worry.

  Then I wondered if this wasn’t some calculated move. Even if she hadn’t consciously planned for it, Cathy was clearly determined to be put in a mental ward. Now she could follow in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath and Camille Claudel and all the other women who were destroyed by sex and grief and life. Now she could be destroyed too! She could talk about her mother endlessly to doctors who subjected her to their nonstop clinical dissection—it was what she’d always wanted!

  I told myself that if Cathy had herself committed it was her choice—that she was part of what Nietzsche called an inferior herd, and this was what happened to people like her. I rationalized my worry away by telling myself worry was a useless emotion. And if I ever doubted the “reductive” (to use her favorite word) things I told myself, or related too deeply to Cathy and feared that maybe I too would end up in an institution, I could bury those feelings. I was able to bury feelings now. I was like Eunice at the end of Streetcar shouting “Don’t look!” to Stella when the doctors come for Blanche. I was able to block things out. I sensed this new ability signaled a tragedy, the tragedy of my fading into adulthood. I hadn’t been taught coping mechanisms but somehow they mysteriously erected themselves inside of me. Only now I couldn’t see through or past them: it was like I was staring through a thick pane of fog-condensed glass.

  A week or so after Cath
y had herself committed, the phone rang and it was, of all people, Gladys Abadi. “David?” she said—and right away I could tell she was sobbing. She was making a high-pitched noise, a sort of yelping sound. She kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God” and her voice was cracking and abrading over the phone receiver. I hadn’t spoken to Gladys since the day we drove up to Bronxville, but it was like no time had passed—like she was living out one long, extended nervous breakdown over three years—and I felt a sadistic wish to punish her. I wanted to impress upon her in the most unambiguous fashion that her phone calls were unwelcome, that despite our stupid common heritage she was a stranger to me. “How did you get my number?” I asked in a deliberately arch inflection, but she just kept sobbing. I took this as her indulgence. “Gladys,” I said in my most condescending voice, as though she were a puling infant, “why are you calling me?”

  “Vivian died,” said Gladys. “She’s dead. She’s dead, David!”

  Gladys was crying so intensely I couldn’t make out much of what she said after that: something about Vivian’s parents, how they were all liars, how there was a funeral but it was done in secret, and none of Vivian’s friends were told about it and nobody even knew where she was buried.

  I hung up the phone in a daze and called Vivian’s house. Her mother, Faye, answered the phone. I asked if it was true: if Vivian was really dead, if there really had been a secret funeral. Faye had taut answers that had nothing to do with my questions—they were almost non sequiturs. She kept saying Vivian was a good person, she was a nice girl. She spoke about her like Vivian was some remote acquaintance, not her daughter who’d just died.

  I kept pressing for answers: How did she die? Why wasn’t there a funeral?

  “She was a good girl,” replied Faye. “She was pretty.”