by Julie Hecht
The thought of the boy, forced into Brigadoon, walking alone in the hot New Haven summer to the old bookstore, was too sad. The walk, the weather, the desire to look at old books in summer rather than play a sport outside or even go kayaking alone, the suspicions of the ponytailed old hippie owner—it added up to a picture of unbearable sadness.
“I told him I was looking for Alan Sherman’s biography. He had no respect for the book and said it would be hard to find, and expensive.”
“I think I can find it for you,” I said.
“I’ll pay any price,” he said. “Up to a hundred dollars.”
The book was located immediately at Powell’s in Oregon. The price was five dollars. When I mailed it to him and his mother got him to call to say thank you, he started guessing the price, and as I had to say lower with each guess, he became more interested. He liked a bargain as well as the idea of having big bucks. When he was sixteen he’d spent the day in Venice on a school trip to Slovenia and bought a counterfeit Rolex watch for five dollars by walking away from the vendor’s best offer. He’d always taken pride in the transaction.
I FELL into an anxious acceptance of not knowing about the boy’s life.
The summer of the yoga ball, one of the last normal summers for the world, he told me that he was going to a woman psychiatrist. He said he called her by her first name. “She’s Persian,” he said, telling me her name as a punch line. He loved to say foreign names, and had kept his childhood amusement at hearing anything that wasn’t American. He said he believed the psychiatrist had started to dress better because of his influence. First she wore plain suits; after a few visits, she began to wear silk shirts and slacks, or dresses.
“I think she’s changed her style for me,” he said seriously. I knew that with psychotherapists anything was possible, but it sounded ridiculous. I myself had gotten a psychiatrist to switch from black oxfords to sneakers. “Only nuns and priests wear black shoes in summer,” I had told him. Fear of association with that group must have propelled him into action.
The night of the all-night call was the time we discussed his psychiatrist’s wardrobe—one of our many topics. Later, when I looked back I tried to figure out which drug he had been using. When he described his doctor, he sounded as if the whole thing was another adventure in which he was the audience for the antics of the human race.
He said he had decided to stop seeing friends who used him as their entertainment. He’d realized that most people said their dull ordinary sentences and waited for him to speak so they could laugh.
I told the boy that I knew what he meant and I had given up socializing with the dull, and then had to give up socializing altogether. I gave a few examples of the things people spoke about, how they all said the same thing. “Usually a thing they’ve read in a magazine or heard someone else say on television,” he said before I could say it.
“The majority of people have no original thoughts,” the boy said.
WHERE WE lived in the winter, some alumnae of various junior colleges had formed a “book club.” The two ringleaders of the club had even graduated from real colleges, so the job fell to them to lead the club. From what they said when I met any of them on the street, the book was always the one that everyone in America had heard of that day. One word the junior-college graduates had learned in the book club was “accessible.” I always changed the subject.
The boy understood when I described the women in the book club. He knew their type, he said, and their nail polish, from his parents’ circle of the bourgeoisie, as he liked to call them.
When he was eleven or twelve, he used to describe their situations in the suburbs of Boston. He told the story of one woman: “Her marriage is unraveling.” Her husband had an apartment in London and a mistress. He’d given up his science professorship at the university to pursue a career in art. His art was making mandolins out of tinfoil. Their cat had drunk some antifreeze and almost died, or did die. The boy couldn’t be sure.
“How do you know that?” I’d asked him.
“Well, she comes over to have coffee with my mother and they’re in the kitchen talking and I go in on the pretext of boiling water for tea.”
I asked what the woman would do if they split up. “She has her cat—I think she has the cat, it might be dead—and her garden…and her job as a part-time cake baker,” he said.
THAT NIGHT of the yoga-ball call he’d mentioned that he had started to go to psychotherapy in high school and he said that he liked the doctor because he wore Turnbull & Asser shirts. I saw that he was on the path of liking psychotherapists for the wrong reasons, but I didn’t get into the subject. He was a novice. He’d learn.
“Oh, the shirts,” I said. I told him that I had seen a psychiatrist for a year because of his shirts.
“What kind were they?” the boy asked.
“Tattered old Brooks Brothers. And he had corduroy slacks that had no corduroy lines left. The legs looked like cardboard.”
“That can be an affectation, too,” the boy said.
“Yes, but I figured it out too late,” I said. “I’d seen ones wearing so many worse shirts—big stripes with starched white collars and cuffs, for example—I was desperate.”
“I can understand that,” he said.
THE BOURGEOIS BLUES
DURING THE DARK winter months of not knowing what his life was in California, I assumed that neither the boy nor his parents wished to speak to me because of something bad about myself. The something could be any number of notions they’d gotten me to worry about, from not blow-drying my hair to not knowing which restaurants Robert De Niro owned in New York.
When his mother first asked about one of these restaurants in 1991 and I said, “I don’t know anything about it,” his father shouted, “She doesn’t know about Robert De Niro’s restaurants! She lives as a recluse in the country!”
I had never thought of the word “recluse” this way. I thought I was seeking peace, like Thoreau, or even not like him. I had a lifelong feeling of inferiority to Thoreau, and later on to Christiane Amanpour, Martha Stewart, Emily Dickinson, Elvis Presley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rachel Carson, Eudora Welty, and Greta Van Susteren before she changed networks.
AT FIRST when he started college, the boy said he loved New York compared with Boston. After a few weeks, he changed his mind and said, “They’re all from New Jersey. They come in limos to go to restaurants on Park Avenue South.” He also hated downtown, especially Greenwich Village, where he went to college. “Everyone looks like Salman Rushdie,” he said. He wished he could live on the Upper East Side, on Fifth Avenue.
I told him it was noisy from the roar of the buses, and that the air was dirty from the fumes.
“Then Park Avenue would be okay,” he said.
DAYS OF LATE SPRING
THE CREEPY YEAR continued on this way. Until one day, in the spring, the boy called. He was all excited, or all up. After the Creative Monsters call he’d never wanted to talk.
I was happy to hear from him. And even worse, I assumed his good mood meant that he was getting better.
“You’ll never believe this,” he said. “I’m walking outside, it’s actually a beautiful day, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” It was this: a famous professor somewhere on the other coast had been promoted to chairman even though he had a low IQ.
He continued talking in an overexcited voice as he described the political system in academia. I wondered why this subject was of sufficient interest to require a call from his cell phone out in the street in the middle of the day. I didn’t even know they had streets in Beverly Hills.
All I knew was what I’d seen on TV news about the trial of an infamous murderer. The killer’s house and garden were shown, and outside the front entrance there was a big beautiful lavender flower, an agapanthus. That’s how I knew that landscape gardeners could be hired by anyone to design flower gardens, but I never saw a sidewalk.
“By the way, don’t you think there’s s
omething wrong with my parents, the way they were willing to pack up and move back and forth across the country and do over another house every few years?”
I thought about it for a second. While I was still thinking, he said, “Shouldn’t they want to make lasting friends and associates and be connected to a place?”
“They have a lot of friends,” I said. When I thought about them and their friends, it reminded me of high school. Back then, they were trying to do all the things the normal kids did, maybe even appear on American Bandstand. They’d talked about this with me.
“They have no real friends,” the boy said.
“I thought they did,” I said.
“Have you noticed that my father doesn’t know how to talk to anyone? He can’t have a conversation.”
“But he says things that are so funny, everyone wants to be around him.”
“That’s not talking,” the boy said. “He doesn’t know how to relate to other human beings in real conversation. Haven’t you noticed this?”
“I thought that was just with me,” I said.
“No, that’s with everyone,” the boy said. “But someday he’ll have to face it, and he won’t.”
“Maybe he can get away without facing it,” I said. “He’s gotten this far and he’s been successful.”
“It’s an empty success,” the boy said. “And he’s trying to deny that. But I’m almost home. I’ll call you when I get inside the house, in five minutes.”
“Will you really?” I said. “Because I have to go out to photograph a pond before the light is gone.”
“I will. Five minutes, I swear,” he said.
Half an hour passed as I got ready to go out. I called him on his cell phone and there was no answer. I called on the regular phone and the machine answered. Then I left. I called him that night. Maybe five days passed before he answered. I wondered what he was doing during this time.
“Oh, right. I was supposed to call you,” he said. “But my mother was there and I had to placate her about a number of things.”
I didn’t ask about the things. Maybe he’d been out on a dope-buying expedition and she was questioning him about his activities.
He was glad to get right back to talking about everyone’s psychological makeup.
“Those who suffer from lack of self-esteem will never recover. Everything in life is a fraud. Most married people should never have gotten married. Most couples’ relationships are based on mutual low self-esteem and pity.”
“You mean empathy—not pity,” I said. But first the choice of the word “pity” made me laugh and the laughter spread out and into my chest, right where all the anxiety was stored, and took its place.
“It’s the same thing,” he said in his cold way.
“What about love?” I found myself saying, even though it sounded like a bad song title.
“People delude themselves about that. Usually it’s just a need for them to think they’re better than they know they are.”
“You mean you don’t believe in love?” I said. It was the bad song again. Songs with lyrics like these had forced me to leave stores. The one with “the thing called love” had driven me out of many places. I was saving up for the three-hundred-dollar price of the Bose silencing headphones and in the meantime often left the discount drugstore without looking through all the Reach toothbrushes.
“You know about this. You’re an existentialist,” he said.
“I am?” I said. I was surprised to hear it. For a minute I couldn’t even remember what existentialism was—as applied to myself, anyway. I’d been trying to forget about it since I was his age.
The play No Exit was performed on television, in my late childhood, while my mother was lying on the couch after a hard day of teaching grammar to juvenile delinquents. She was watching the play on the Motorola wood-cabinet television but told me to leave the room at the part where Colleen Dewhurst was stuffing the towels under the door to keep the gas from escaping and foiling the suicide plans.
“What are they doing with the towels?” I asked.
“Don’t watch,” she’d said. “Go do your homework. Practice your piano lessons.”
“Why are you watching?” I asked.
“It’s not for children,” she said. “There’s rarely any serious drama on television. I want to see it.” She disapproved of my choices, Ozzie and Harriet and I Love Lucy.
That was my first brush with existentialism. “I got over it after college,” I told the boy.
“But you’re a Nietzschean,” he said.
For a second I was flattered. It sounded good. I quickly tried to remember the writings of Nietzsche, but could think only of Nietzsche’s Last Days, a review of a biography—and the part with the mad philosopher talking to a horse at the end of his sad life.
“I decided not to dwell on it,” I said.
“How come? You know he’s right,” he said threateningly.
“A boyfriend I had at the time talked me out of it. Then there were the Beatles. My next boyfriend dedicated himself to music and distracted himself with the album Rubber Soul.”
“The Beatles?” the boy said. “It makes no sense.”
“This boyfriend said, ‘Which is more fun, Nietzsche or the Beatles?’ He was always looking for ways to have fun.”
“Rather simpleminded,” the boy said.
“But he was right. Also involved was the element of romance.” I decided not to say the word “sex” to the boy. He could put two and two together for himself. And also because he’d told me that his parents had confronted him with questions about his relationships with girls.
“Isn’t that a personal matter?” I’d said.
“I think my parents are afraid that I turned to drugs to escape the knowledge of being gay. Can you believe that?”
“I can’t believe confronting someone with such a question,” I said. “Or that they would even think it. You must have misunderstood.”
“No. And I’m furious that the next psychiatrist had the same idea! The psychiatrist is, like, ‘Can’t you see how people might think that you are?’”
“What!” I said. “Why?”
“Because of the way I dress.”
“How? Khaki pants and button-down shirts? Oh, and the sport jackets?”
“Yes! Can you believe that? Because my shirts are neatly pressed, and the way I sit.”
“How? A ballet position?” I said.
The boy laughed. Or more scoffed and laughed at the same time. “You’d think it was, from the way they act. With crossed legs, I said, ‘European men dress and sit this way.’”
“Is this what psychiatrists do now?”
“I’m being hounded on all sides! I have to run away to New York. There’s no choice left to me.”
“You could wait it out. Try to find some better doctors,” I’d said.
Suddenly he started quoting Nietzsche at length. Though I was a fan, I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t stand it. I thought of adding Schopenhauer, or Spinoza, for a real break—I’d read in the introduction to his work that Spinoza had had a disagreement with his sister about a piece of inherited furniture—but still, adding the two philosophers might make it worse. Now this new twist to the situation. The boy’s problems were mounting in an unbearable way.
“Everyone thinks about these things in college,” I said. “But then you figure, you’re alive, make the best of it. Or something.”
“Like how? There’s no point to anything,” he said.
“Work, love, nature, books, poems, music, traveling, trees, birds, butterflies, flowers.” It sounded like something said by a follower of Norman Vincent Peale. And a Viennese psychoanalyst had told me that Freud hated music.
I wanted to read him a quote from British Butterflies, an antique butterfly book: “We live…for moments…minutes—fractions of an hour…for these intervals are timeless. While they last, we have complete understanding, happiness and strength. We live in the true sense and we perceive
the meaning of life. This experience is mine while I watch butterflies. I love these mysterious beings and as I dwell in the country…in a place favoured by butterflies, my perfect moments are many….” I wanted to read this to a heroin addict.
“Everyone tells me that,” he said before I tried out the quote. “I don’t see the point to anything,” he said.
“Work and love—Freud said that.”
“Freud was an opium addict,” the boy said.
“Only after he was at an advanced age in his life,” I said. “And it was for pain from an illness.”
“True. But all kids my age don’t think about this. They’re idiots. Some kids I know go right out into the world of jobs and society without thinking about anything.”
I thought that as a joke I might quote the first line of the most famous poem by Joyce Kilmer.
“Don’t you have trees in California?” I said.
“Of course! It’s Beverly Hills. We have palm trees, too.”
“Maybe you’re worn out from the rehab and the withdrawal and the life disruption.”
He skipped right over that and said, “I’d like to travel. I’d like to just travel for my whole life!”
“You could. You could get a job reporting on everything. Remember your trip to Slovenia in high school? You reported to everyone on that.”
He had been dragged on that school trip the way he’d been forced into Brigadoon. “Who set the itinerary to Slovenia?” I’d asked when he announced the news in his morose way.
“The teacher,” he said.
“I bet he has Sloveniak relatives he wants to see and the trip is a front for that,” I said.
“It’s true, he does have relatives there. We’re going to Venice and Greece, too. But you’re right, the most time is in Slovenia.”
When he returned, he said, “The whole trip was comprised of sitting on buses, waiting.”