Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “It’s perverse I don’t know how to drive through this city,” she apologized. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Wattsbury or Boston, so I’ve never needed to drive.”

  We decided to perform a pageant for the truck’s proprietor that would make our need for directions understandable.

  “My husband and I,” she explained into her cell phone, prim, as if to a maître d’, “are from Des Moines, and we are very excited to eat your Middle Eastern food, and we are crossing some sort of bridge from Cambridge into Boston”—indeed, we were on a thoroughfare that led up to a bridge across the Charles and into a thicket of skyscrapers. “And we’re having a little bit of difficulty finding you, so perhaps you could give us some instructions?” I got the sense, from the helpless sounds coming through her phone, that there were language issues. Brown leaves twisted in the air and flew up throttled roads, down the riverbanks. There was a half of my heart loyal to Julie that saw a black Lethe as I drove over the bridge. Do not think of Julie or you will die, spooled my mantra. Do not think of Julie or you will die.

  Now that we were in Back Bay, Khadijah pointed us in what must have been the correct general direction and named the streets we were on as I drove. I turned over the words Jamaica Plain in my mind, as if to will us there. Absent a map, a higher power than human reason asserted itself. Massachusetts required faith of its returning children. We did reach the legendary truck eventually, but it was battening down the grates over its windows by the time we arrived. We sat in the car, trying to decide what to do. Now that conspicuously informal eating was no longer an option, what would our pact allow?

  I reached into the backseat for the envelope and tossed the photos of my father and Nancy into Khadijah’s lap.

  She shuffled through them, holding them up to the streetlamp light through the window. “They’re kids,” she observed. “I mean compared to how they are now. Look at their faces! They don’t have the faintest clue what they’re getting into.”

  “Look,” I said. “Do you want to just have dinner? There are no public places to go that aren’t restaurants. I know we made a rule, but no one deserves to go hungry.”

  It’s possible that if we had tried harder we could have found a place less violating of our agreement than the tiny Italian restaurant with checkered tablecloths that stood two blocks west of the truck. We might have found the fortitude not to order wine.

  “My dad always used to take me to places like this when my mom was late at the office and she wasn’t around to tell him not to spend money,” she said. She encircled the base of a flaking candlestick with her index fingers.

  “Did it freak you out that he treated you so much more licentiously?” I was hungry for her confessions. I wanted us to be close, and the way I knew to create closeness was to induce her to describe her own suffering.

  She shrugged. “Maybe my dad is gay. Wow, that just occurred to me. Well, no, it’s occurred to me before. But I don’t really think he is. It’s more just I think about the education he gave me, and it’s essentially a fabulousness-based curriculum. After the divorce, he paid my mom to send me to Paris for two summers. The family he embedded me with had these three teenage daughters who were walking ads for France, and I was an American teenager with my backpack and my sneakers. They left me entirely to my own devices. I was incredibly depressed, but I didn’t know this was what depression was, I thought this was just life, that life was this little, wet grove. I didn’t have much concept of how to obtain food; I had this barely adequate allowance, and I didn’t know what to eat except to go get another crêpe. I went to every museum in Paris, but I could have become a prostitute. Whereas my mother, hoo boy. She gave me a Sufi name and then raised me to be the Anti-Sufi. I mean, I was not allowed to go through a fuckup phase, ever. Maybe I’ll go through a fuckup phase now.”

  Envy washed over me. To be overdirected by a parent, made to live according to a parent’s image . . . To have one’s parent expend a disturbing excess of money and attention to make you turn out just so. And envy and love are close cousins; I wanted to hold her. I had that familiar sensation from early childhood of loving a baby chick or a tiny dog so much that I insisted on clutching it to my chest even on the swing set, until it fell from my hands and hit the grass.

  “Do you still feel depressed?” I asked. I was dimly aware of a hazardous dynamic forming, in which I was more a therapist than I usually was and she was in all likelihood more a patient than she usually was. But my appetite for her confessions had been whetted.

  “I am whole,” she said. “I’m just sick of being an intellectual. Is it boring to say that? Is it clichéd?”

  “Not to me. I don’t know any intellectuals.”

  “What are you actually doing? Why did you come here? This anarchy-stone thing . . . You ended things with this person I met, Julie?”

  “We’re done. Parents informed.”

  She took an absentminded gulp of her wine. “Where do you live?”

  “Homeless,” I said proudly. In the universe of musicians, this implied a certain sensuality of lifestyle, a seriousness with regard to one’s career.

  “So, what are you like?”

  “Basically flexible. Shapeshifter ha ha. I was thinking of becoming a recording engineer and building people’s studios. Like in Greater Boston. I’d be good at that. And I’ve been writing songs again. Tell me something.” I, too, did some damage to my first glass. “What’s it like working hard at something and having it work out? Being like, Oh, people are asking me to do this homework, guess I’ll do it, and then becoming a professor? My career has been, you get a bunch of drug addicts together and put instruments in their hands, and you drag them out of bed to practice as their girlfriends throw cat toys at your head, and then you play a show and somebody puts a couple twenties in your hand and says sorry it’s not what we promised, we didn’t get the free case that Heineken promised us for putting the Heineken banner behind you as you played, and then you spend all your money to make a demo in a basement and then a record label is like, Here’s a contract, and you make a record in a deluxe studio, and they don’t do anything they said they’d do to promote it, or pay you the royalties, and then the drug addicts are demoralized and won’t get out of bed anymore, and no longer even have girlfriends to throw cat toys at you, and move back to wherever they’re from, and then Pepsi starts shooting money out of its ass at you. Or it seems like an ass-ton of money because you’ve been living on Pall Malls and Subway. So you spend a lot of it going out to eat. Then you’re twenty-eight, and your hair starts to fall out.” I refreshed her glass.

  “Guys I’ve dated have had the same story without the Pepsi money or the record label. Also, that sounds vastly superior to grad school. That’s all I’ve done. I mean I started right out of college, and now I’m an academic. Before that I was in high school. So I can’t say what it’s like. There’s nothing to compare it to. Where we both failed,” she continued, after taking another sip, “was our careers in anarchist terrorism.”

  We looked at each other seriously. Maybe it should have been Todd and Julie that made us feel like this, feel that we were lovable for our moments of stupidity as well as for our accomplishments. But Khadijah and I had known each other as stupid children. Todd and Julie could never look at us and see the child still in each of us as vividly as Khadijah and I could see it in each other. We didn’t have to imagine those hapless kids to ignite mutual empathy. We remembered them.

  Once we had polished off the wine and a substantial portion of a tilapia and a rabbit, I felt even better suited to intuitive Boston driving. Khadijah, for her part, was not alarmed by the way I guessed my way helter-skelter back to Cambridge. Rubbing the back of her head against the plastic seat, she spoke clearly and calmly.

  “I can’t do my job,” she said. “My mom pushed me into this shit and now I can’t do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Central Square felt inevitable. It drew us in, a vacuum.

  “Whe
n we get back to my apartment,” she said, closing her eyes, “I’ll show you what I mean.”

  When we did finally waver up the stairs of her building and through her door, she ushered me past the entrance to the bedroom and through the tiny kitchen. She sat, almost fell onto the floor of the living room, beside a bookshelf. On the other side of her, cowering in her shadow, was an exquisite little house that would have been a vulgar monstrosity at actual size. A component, no doubt, of the Homelessness Initiative.

  It was a miniature version of the kind of glassy parallelogram I’d seen blocking public access routes to the beach in Malibu, but deprived of mass, waiting, by design, for its own demise. It was precious, asking to be protected. So that was what the performance was for: to show the fragility of things that otherwise appeared obnoxiously stable.

  Khadijah’s purple cardigan still covered her shoulders, but she’d pulled her arms from the sleeves. She took a glossy academic-press paperback from the shelf.

  “Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II: A Thousand Plateaus,” she said. “I’ve read to about page thirty. Not the rest. Cited it any number of times.” The pages made an almost excremental sound when they hit the floor, so zealously did she throw the book. She took another off the shelf. “Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, about page twenty-five.” She threw. “Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, about the first third.” She threw. “Children, this is what happens when you let your mother pick out your career for you. Do you know how insane it is to have my job at twenty-nine? I can’t keep up with some of the brighter undergrads. There’s a reason people don’t have my job at twenty-nine.”

  In music, our age was too old. In academia, apparently, it was too young.

  “It’s just arbitrary,” I said happily. I had her confessing! “If you were a twenty-nine-year-old rock star, you’d be having to fuck up hotel rooms right now to show everybody you were still wild and young and full of cum, you know?”

  “I’d fuck up a hotel room right now, to show them they made a mistake with me.”

  On the wall were three photographs containing bones—the use of bones by three contemporary artists was the subject of Khadijah’s dissertation. One picture was a backlit sculpture of a middle-aged woman in a business suit, holding a shaman’s wand decked with bird skulls. The second was a young, dark-haired woman, presumably the artist, dancing with a robot skeleton. The third was of a mobile, the kind Calder might have made, only using what appeared to be different-size femurs and fingers from various animals. Beneath the pictures there was a tiny wooden desk half-buried by dunes of paper, save for a framed shot of Todd in pajamas, tilted on a stand in one corner.

  “Nobody knows this about me, Josh, just FYI. And now you are the exceptionally privileged person who gets to see someone do this for free.”

  She took a Taschen coffee table book of Chinese propaganda art, about the size of a lobster tank, and held it over the miniature house, so that it cast its shade like a cloud over the little office additions, the pixieish railing around the kidney pool. It was at this point that I began seriously to wonder whether my campaign to make myself Khadijah’s psychoanalyst, to urge her into a state of catharsis, might not have been doing her a true favor.

  “I don’t know if you want to do that,” I said. “You’re smashed.”

  She let it drop. The book stove in the roof of the elaborate little manse, and its walls collapsed over its pool and its porches. A faint smell of dust and glue rose through the air.

  I knelt beside her on the floor. She put her hands on my shoulders. I thought of that moment she’d thrown her arms across the table at Classé Café—do you think I’m overdramatic? I felt tenderness and desire—the hairs on my arms were twisting wicks.

  “The vow,” she said.

  “We already broke it,” I said. “With the stone.” I took her face in my hands and kissed her.

  As we listed downward, I helped ease her to the floor with one hand on her back, and ran the other up her rib cage. A door that had stood locked in the corner of our lives for thirteen years was open. I was holding her breast, her knee, that was all; but I closed my eyes and I was running out of a bright little apartment down a passage with no lights.

  We held each other side by side, until with an effort she straddled me, and lay her head on my chest. A moment later, her eyes closed and her breathing filled with sleep.

  I stroked her hair, the curl like loose tobacco. I wanted to touch the arcs beneath her eyes, these signs of time’s passage. Her face was pressed into my chest, and it was like the teeth of the tiger, unreal.

  While she snored, I composed a plan. I would work as an engineer in a studio in Brooklyn. We would begin a train circuit between Boston and New York in which we spent every weekend together, summers rent a cabin on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Given that kissing Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn was possible, all this was possible too. Life included things I had not known it included. It was the same feeling I’d had when I discovered instruments, at age five, banging on a piano in a dying commune in the woods.

  She woke suddenly, snapped back her head. I took her hand, and she pulled me onto a chair with C-shaped legs. It looked like something Nancy would have owned, sky blue, aerodynamic, modern, a pilot’s seat of command. It probably was something Nancy had owned, back in the Age of the Dads.

  And we kissed, side by side like fetal twins, in that Dadsian chair. I knew some, if not all, of the things this meant: Here we are, full circle; here we are, our parents; here we are, in rebellion against our parents, no longer obedient children; here we are, to usurp their territory. Khadijah took off her shoes and socks, and they were red socks and white sneakers but I could also see the burgundy-trimmed Esprit socks of 1994. She took off her dress and I almost saw the gray Smith College sweatshirt she’d worn when she’d thrown the stone at the window of the bank. I looked at her, both of us naked, and was ringed in old fantasies. It was as if I discovered, still in my mind but heretofore concealed, a younger version of myself. It was an ecstatic state; I was not myself.

  When it was just our bodies on the chair, the two of us kissing noisily, I felt less and less like I was in my body, more and more of a spirit. I pulled her toward me, and she sat on the edge of her chair as I kissed her breasts and eventually spread her legs and tried to eat her out, before her hands cupped my chin and brought my face back up to hers. I was still soft.

  Surely, this was only a temporary setback. I kissed her rib cage, her hair. I memorized the curves of her breasts, I learned the taste of her sweat, I studied the calluses on her bare feet, her interestingly smashed-together toes. My heart was full of gratitude, full of blood.

  But my penis. That most beloved of organs, least obedient, Satan in Paradise Lost. Once frightened into self-consciousness, it would not communicate. I am, I thought, a performer! But I couldn’t make it stand more than halfway.

  On the floor, we still tried to get me inside her for a moment; if we could only get this far, I reasoned, everything would proceed well enough. I thought of Jeremy, my nemesis, battling his own reluctant cock, trying to get it hard enough for the condom, as the tiger looked on. I thought of all the other men before me, who had battled with their members, argued with fate. This was what defeated me for good.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I flopped down on the floor and lay on my back. I expected to have injured Khadijah. I was ready for tears. But she slid beside me on the rug and said nothing. After a while, she spoke, not with resentment but with curiosity, with the voice of an intellectual: “I wasn’t in it either.”

  It was a part of my soul that didn’t touch my body, the part where I kept Khadijah. This cold, pretty truth I had felt floating like snow in the air in the concert hall—it sparkled, but it couldn’t translate into sex. It wasn’t of the flesh, what we had. Not at this point in our reacquaintance, not enough for us to jump in a chair and ravish each other. It was as if Khadijah’s hands and lips and
breasts were waiting for a different person, a fifteen-year-old boy who hadn’t had the life I’d had, the derangement of late adolescence, the construction of a band, the collapse of a band, dawn after dawn with Julie in the egg. That child was unrecoverable, and would have had to be recovered if we were to pick up where we’d left off as children.

  We didn’t touch each other, lying there on the white rug. I was putting on my socks, our clothes arranged around us like sterilized instruments, when she began to speak.

  “I’d like you to leave, please, Josh.” She was moving things in a closet off the kitchen. She extricated a broom and a tin dustpan, with some clanging. Stumbling, slightly, from the wine, she carried them back to the living room. She looked down at the aftermath of her collaboration with Todd, the little mansion shattered by the book.

  “You and my mother are so much the same,” she said. “You like to have a story of how things go. My mom saw her life as featuring a certain kind of kid. You see your life as getting a girl you liked in high school. I’d prefer it if neither of you would see me as who I’d need to be to make a story happen. I wouldn’t mind being that person, but I’m not.”

  “You led me to believe,” I said. Believe what? But I couldn’t say it better than that: You led me to believe. “Did you think I was going to take your little gestures lightly?”

  “I liked the idea that I could just turn out to be on the wrong track for the past thirteen years and then snap back onto the one I was on before. I was into that. Is that so wrong? But I’m not going to switch lives. You’re fifty percent make-believe to me, Josh. I don’t actually know you all that well, can’t you understand? Todd’s a good man. You could be a lot of different things—how am I supposed to know? I can only live according to what’s in front of me.”

  Well—my god.

  She was doing her best to wake herself up, using the broom to try to make order of the shards. She was drunk, but she was fighting it.