He bends from the waist to pick up the football, balancing for a moment on his bare right foot, his left leg extending with balletic grace behind him. He gives the ol’ pigskin a familiar slap and tosses it once, twice, a foot or so in the air, flicking his wrist to generate a slight spiral. Not a trace of gawkiness now: just expertly casual American masculinity. Of course he will meet his wife this time. Of course she will bear his children and prepare his meals and run her hands up and down his chest and eight-pack in wonder and affection and loving submission. He is the Bachelor. He was silly to doubt himself. “I want to find somebody,” he reminds himself and us, his voice insistent, certain. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” To find somebody: every love story is a quest—a knight on horseback roaming the countryside, searching for maidens in distress. Only in this story the knight stays put, bides his time, and waits for the maidens to come to him.
The Bachelor turns around, strolls back to the lawn, tosses the football one more time, then cradles it in the hollow between his neck and shoulder, a perfect fit. His gaze is downcast, contemplative. It’s serious business, being the Bachelor. What task more serious than finding somebody? He lifts his head to look out over the canyon that falls away from his big backyard. Beyond the canyon’s distant opposite rim, barren land stretches to a ridge on the hazy horizon; beyond the horizon lies the conjugal happiness that awaits the Bachelor and his wife-to-be.
* * *
—
Des Moines in winter: grimy, faded. Dead leaves scratching across sidewalks and driveways. Crows keeping watch from telephone poles. Dirty snow piled high against curbs. Fresh snow falling on dirty snow. Iowa Hawkeye and Iowa State Cyclone flags fluttering wanly on front-porch poles. Thin sunlight turning, as if before your eyes, the primary colors of plastic backyard jungle gyms (glimpsed, inevitably, through chain-link fences) to pinks and grays and mottled off-whites.
My mother’s friend’s house was at the opposite end of the block from my childhood home. As a kid I rarely ventured in its direction, a little afraid of the woods the street gives onto, so while it was maybe two hundred yards from the setting of many of my most persistent memories and dreams, I sometimes had the feeling the winter of my return that it wasn’t in Des Moines at all but rather in some notionally similar city, Indianapolis or Omaha or Peoria. It was a tan two-story brick-and-aluminum bungalow. My mother’s friend had emptied it of all furniture and appliances save the bed and dresser in the master bedroom and the TV and couch in what I thought of as the family room, plus a small wooden table and two chairs and a clock and printer and toaster in the kitchen. In effect it was a multi-room one-bedroom apartment, and my rent was around what I’d considered paying for a standard Des Moines one-bedroom (or approximately a third of the rent for the room Ashwini and I had shared for two years on the extreme periphery of the then most recently gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn). I had enough money from my novel to live in Des Moines for a year and a half, maybe two, not that I planned to stay that long, not that I planned to do anything else. In any case I didn’t know how long I’d be allowed to hang on in my mother’s friend’s house: she’d moved with her family to lower Manhattan a few months earlier but was keeping a home in Des Moines for a while so she’d have a place to sleep and toast bread and print documents and watch satellite TV when she returned to attend her central Iowa art-world events; there was one the last week in January.
I hadn’t been to Des Moines for six years. My parents had retired north, to Duluth. My childhood friends, like me, had fled the city, or weren’t my friends anymore. My first few days there, I moved through the house’s rooms as if afraid of disturbing some sleeping person or animal or spirit. The clock’s ticking seemed to issue from inside my skull, so I removed it from the wall and put it in the garage. Sometimes I felt as if I were in a church, other times the set of a sitcom. The emptiness made the house seem huge, and as I crept over its carpets I felt what I remember as a sort of weightlessness or substancelessness, as if my body had sublimed so that it could fill and partake of this hugeness. It was a feeling I knew only from reading and dreams. At first I attributed it to the sudden change of setting and the quiet of the neighborhood and my newfound solitude, but after some time I discovered what I suspected was a deeper source: the house had the same floor plan as my childhood house, and differed only in its location on the block, the things it held, the lives it had witnessed, the paint and wallpaper and carpets that covered its surfaces, and the views from its many windows. It had the same open ground-floor layout, the same two rows of upstairs bedrooms, the same closets and staircases and ceilings and walls, the same insubstantial wooden doors. As in a dream, it was and wasn’t a place I knew.
It was hard to say why Ashwini and I broke up, I told another ex when she called, though Ashwini and I had technically not broken up and I’d long thought of Laura as a friend.
Laura accused me of being evasive. I knew, she said, I just didn’t want to say. I said I didn’t want to blame Ashwini for what happened, and yet, if I was being honest, I felt it was mostly her doing.
“Are you being honest?”
“I know, it’s a dumb phrase.”
“How was it mostly her doing?”
Ashwini had started to behave strangely, I said. She seemed…angry. At everything and everyone but, most concerningly, from my perspective, at me. I told Laura about the time the Wi-Fi stopped working and Ashwini threw a chair across the living room, shattering a lamp. I’d never seen such violence in her, outside of her writing, and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to calm her down but she started yelling at me, vicious attacks whose content I immediately forgot, until I left the apartment.
“You’ve never liked conflict,” Laura said.
“Who does?”
“Sometimes it’s necessary.”
Maybe, I said, but this particular conflict felt especially disturbing. Anyway, I’d already sensed Ashwini turning away, but after the chair-throwing incident it was almost like I didn’t exist to her. She’d go to campus early in the morning and stay there till late at night. She must have been napping in her office sometimes, because when she got home we’d stay up even later fighting about who knows what. She started talking about the possibility of visiting India without me. She said it would be best if I left Canada for a while; I never should have come in the first place, she said, even though she’d encouraged me to come when she found out she got her job, an assistant professorship at one of eastern Canada’s premier universities.
“It sounds like you both needed some space,” Laura said.
“I didn’t. I had plenty of space.”
“Mmm. You’re good at that. Making space for yourself.”
“Thanks. Anyway, it’s over. I mean, not officially, but it feels final.”
“I’m really sorry,” Laura said. “It’s the worst. You loved each other.”
“Mm-hmm.” I wondered if she could hear the catch in my throat. “We did. We still do.”
After a brief silence Laura said, “Everything happens for a reason.”
“Everything that happens will have happened,” I said.
“Everything that happened did.”
The resurrected routine gave me more solace than anything since I’d arrived in Des Moines. Laura and I had broken up just out of college and since then had remained closer than I could have imagined. She was second-chair cello in arguably America’s best chamber orchestra and, in spite of having grown up in one of the most dysfunctional families I’d ever seen, was among the happiest people I knew. Devoted to playing other people’s music, she was free, it seemed to me, from the tyranny of big decisions. The past barely existed to her; the future was simply what would come.
Now she was distracting me with stories about former mutual friends—Mindy had been dating a man with an infant son for over a year and he hadn’t allowed her to see the baby yet; Paul’s wife
was pregnant and Paul was depressed; Jane’s mother was encouraging Jane to freeze her eggs—and her yoga-class boyfriend, whatever that meant (I felt a muted, absurd pang), and her delinquent new co-cellist, and, at some length, her latest fight with her mother, with whom I’d always had a nice rapport in spite of her imperiousness and alcoholism. What happened was that Laura had been in Chicago the previous month to help her sister with wedding preparations, and one afternoon they were trying on dresses and Laura took a photo of her sister wearing their favorite and sent it via text to their mother, who didn’t respond. A couple of weeks later Laura was back in the Twin Cities, having dinner with her parents at their house, everyone throwing back as usual glass after glass of Pinot Grigio, when the subject of her sister’s wedding dress came up: Laura told her mother she was pretty sure her sister had decided on the one she’d sent a photo of. “You tell your sister if she wears that dress,” said her mother, who Laura suspected had been waiting for an excuse to express her disapproval of her daughter marrying a woman, “her mother will not be attending her wedding. Makes her look like a slut.”
“So we haven’t really spoken for a couple months,” Laura said.
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m so sorry. How do you feel?”
“Totally fine. I mean—honestly, I’m used to it. But seriously, tell me seriously this time: how do you feel?”
“I don’t know. Hollow. Like a nonentity.”
“What are you doing? What’s your project? Aren’t you working on another book?”
For a moment I considered repeating the line I’d delivered to Maria, but instead I said, edging closer to the truth, that I was taking a break from the second book and wasn’t sure I wanted a project.
“I think you might feel better if you had one.”
I suggested that my project could be to resist well-intentioned suggestions to have a project. This was a joke, but the more I reflected on it the more it seemed like a good idea. All my adult life, such as it was, I’d had projects; I was lost without them. I’d never considered myself an ambitious person but looking back I was forced to conclude I had been. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I was blindly devoted to a certain story about myself, a story I didn’t realize, because I couldn’t bear to, didn’t belong to me. Now, I decided on the phone with Laura, or maybe that evening, or the next day, or the next, I would empty myself of stories. I would wait. Instead of fighting my newfound anonymity, I would embrace it, work with it, see what it could bring me. “Cultivate a radical ambivalence,” I wrote in my notebook. “Stop clinging to outworn preferences. Renounce the fantasy of self-determination. Lose control a little.” Through my project that consisted of not having a project I would open my story to other stories, open my self to other selves, open those selves to the circumambient world, its gentleness, its indifference. For a moment, at least, I felt fantastic, not fantastic but fantastically unlonely. A little nervous. It was a new beginning.
* * *
—
How did I spend those first few days back in Des Moines? To an observer it might have appeared that nothing was happening. And yet so much is always happening! I ate a lot of packaged pastries, which I bought from the Kum & Go at the end of the street. I ate a lot of Hot Pockets. Presumably I spent a lot of time on the Internet, though I have no specific memory of this. I walked around with Ashwini’s absence, spoke to it, tried to ignore it. Mostly I did a lot of sitting and staring. It wasn’t long before I discovered a favorite spot: on the thin, pearlescent living-room carpet, my back supported against the bare white wall opposite the grid of south-facing windows that looked out on the quiet dead-end street. From there I liked to watch parallelograms of sunlight make their slow progress from right to left across the floor. Sometimes I’d scoot into the center of the room and stretch out like the drowsy animal I was, and, as I lay there, sleeping and not quite sleeping, the shape the sunlight carved out of the carpet took flight and carried me somewhere else, a shopping mall, a childhood classroom, a lakeside beach in the height of summer, warm and alive with human activity, the sounds of insects and birds, soft breezes—only to drop me off right where I started, in the middle of my mother’s friend’s living room, alone.
Then I’d get up and wander from room to room, feeling both larger and smaller than myself. The house wasn’t as empty as it had first appeared. I discovered drawers still full of stuff—pens and pencils, batteries, power cords, old cameras, business cards, playing cards, keys, flash drives, folders packed with contact lists and instruction booklets and warranties and receipts, a toy car I was sure had once belonged to me, a few wooden blocks, a yellow-and-red-and-orange stained-glass cat. The bathrooms were full of fancy “natural” creams and lotions and soaps and shampoos and body washes and bubble baths. “Free and clear,” they said on their labels. A few small dresses and sweaters (lots of cashmere) and blouses hung in the master bedroom’s closet. A framed reproduction of a Modigliani—the usual elongated empty-eyed nude gazing out emptily at the viewer—loomed above the dresser on the wall opposite the bed, which I assumed was the bed my mother’s friend and her husband slept in, the conjugal bed, to use the phrase I involuntarily repeated to myself as I lay in it waiting for sleep to come or go.
I spent a morning mindlessly rummaging through boxes that sat open on and under a Ping-Pong table in the basement. One held nothing but sculpted hands. Another was full of photographs of birds. Another held folders thick with clippings from a wide array of newspapers and magazines, organized by category: Natural Catastrophes, Climate Change, War, Restaurants, Education, Gardening. Another box held a dozen or so small waxy abstract paintings in which the night sky seemed to pulse behind a gauze of oranges and pinks and purples and salmons that suggested drugs or memory. From these and other ephemera in the house, I formed a picture of my mother’s friend as a Des Moines type familiar to me from my childhood: an effervescent, vaguely tragic woman of advanced middle age who’d grown up in a small Midwestern town and sublimated her creative impulses in a variety of innocuous and doggedly pursued hobbies, and also in a constant, effortful display of superior taste in clothes, food, and interior decoration. As a kid I had always been drawn to this type—Mrs. Bond, my sixth-grade English teacher; Mary Perkins, the wife of my high school tennis coach; the mother of my friend turned enemy Evan Heinrich, who baked cupcakes for us every time I visited her house to play the barbaric video games my parents wisely denied me.
She called—my mother’s friend—to check in on me a few days after I arrived. How was everything going? Had I found the key? Of course I’d found the key. Had I figured out the trick to the washing machine? Did I have everything I needed? She must have picked up on an unintended tone, because the next thing she said was “Did I interrupt you?”
The question struck me as almost funny. “From what?” I said.
“I don’t know!” she said.
I apologized, sensing I’d said something offensive. “No—no, you didn’t, sorry. Not at all.”
“Oh good. I know you’re a very busy person.” Where had she gotten that idea? “A very competent person. I can’t imagine there’s anything about the house you won’t be able to figure out.”
I told her I’d be sure to tell her if there was.
“Do! Meantime I’ll try to keep myself from asking if you’ve gotten the remotes to work.”
“Is there a secret?”
“Oh yes, mm-hmm. There is a secret. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is.”
I told her of course I understood, and she told me I should feel free to use the—well, there was no food in the house, per se, but I should feel free to use the spices.
We ended the call and I stayed where I was, stretched out on the living-room carpet. The day was fading, I felt more than saw. My body was the fading day; the steam rising from it was made of moments. I stared at the white plaster ceiling, pocked with shadows, until it became a
floor. I walked through the upside-down house in my imagination, hopping over lintels and ducking under chairs, eventually pausing in some other room to lie down on the ceiling and look up at the floor.
The still-young man, newly a bachelor, stands up and goes to the south-facing windows. He presses his nose against the glass. In the windows of the houses across the street he sees a reflection of himself at ten. It’s the winter of the Bulls’ second championship season, and he’s alone in the house—really alone—for the first time. His family is cross-country skiing in Minnesota, the latest in an endless series of family outings. They’ll be gone the whole day; he can hardly believe it. To choose not to participate in a family outing has never seemed possible until this morning. What changed? I think I’m going to stay home, he’d said, and his mother said, You sure? and he was sure. Almost disappointing how easy it was. And a few minutes later his family was gone—not on a family outing now at all, but something else, something without a name—and at first he felt an urge to run after the green minivan, tell his parents he was only joking, of course he was coming, it was a family outing, it wasn’t a family outing without him, a member of the family; or they would come back and tell him they were only joking, it wasn’t that easy to get out of a family outing, family outings weren’t things that could be gotten out of: and so he’s come here to the windows to watch for the minivan pulling down the street and turning into the driveway. No one stirs in the houses across the street. A few cars pass, a girl with a dog. He is measuring the movement of clouds against treetops when he sees with startling clarity the minivan on the interstate, its inexplicable slow drift toward the shoulder, the green mass hurtling toward the ditch, the flames, the smoke, the mangled bodies, the ambulance—too late: his family is dead and he killed them, he killed his family, murdered them by making a family outing something else, he’ll have to live with Brian Leslie’s family, and every day he’ll shoot baskets with Brian, who will be his brother, on their backyard half-court basketball court, and play video games with him in his big blue basement, and his new parents will let him stay up late on weekends to watch Saturday Night Live and Letterman and SportsCenter, and he’ll be able to act however he wants because everyone will know his family’s dead and who will blame him.
The Bachelor Page 3