We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  I could see it. O u r industrious couple works their way up from shoddy rentals to a series of nothing-special split-levels, until at last: an inheritance, a market upswing, a promotion. Finally they can afford to construct from the ground up the house of their heart's desire. T h e couple pores over blueprints, weighing where to hide every closet, how to segue gracefully between the living area and the den ("With a D O O R ! " I want to scream, but it is too late for my stodgy advice). All those innovative angles look so dynamic on paper. Even shrubs are rather adorable a quarter of an inch high.

  But I have a theory about Dream Homes. N o t for nothing does "folly" mean both foolhardy mistake and costly ornamental building. Because I've never seen a Dream H o m e that works. Like ours, some of t h e m almost work, though unqualified disasters are equally c o m m o n . Part of the problem is that regardless of h o w m u c h m o n e y you lavish on oak baseboards, an unhistoried house is invariably cheap in another dimension. Otherwise, the trouble seems rooted in the nature of beauty itself, a surprisingly elusive quality and rarely one you can buy outright. It flees in the face of too m u c h effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident. On my travels, I became a devotee of found art: a shaft of light on a dilapidated 1914 gun factory, an abandoned billboard whose layers have w o r n into a beguiling pentimento collage of Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and B u r m a Shave, cut-rate pensions whose faded cushions perfecdy match, in that unplanned way, the fluttering sun-blanched curtains.

  Confoundingly then, this Gladstone Xanadu, beam by beam, would have materialized into a soul-destroying disappointment.

  H a d the builders cut corners, an arrogant architect taken liberties with those painstaking plans? N o , no. D o w n to the torturously blank kitchen cabinets, the visionary designs had been followed to the letter.That mausoleum on Palisades Parade came out precisely as its creators intended, and that's what made it so depressing.

  To be fair, the gap between most people's capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it w h e n they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean. So all evidence to the contrary, the original owners may have had pretty good taste; more's the pity if they did. Certainly the fact that those two built a horror show was no proof against my theory that they k n e w very well that they'd constructed a horror show, too. I was further convinced that neither husband nor wife ever let on to the other what a downer this vapid atrocity turned out to be, that they each braved out the pretense that it was the house of their prayers, while at the same time separately scheming, from the day they moved in, to get out.

  You said yourself the place was only three years old. Three years old? It would have taken that long to build! W h o goes to that m u c h trouble only to leave? Maybe Mr. H o m e o w n e r was transferred to Cincinnati, though in that case he accepted the job.

  W h a t else would drive him out that clunky front door besides revulsion for his o w n creation? W h o could live day after day with the deficiency of his o w n imagination made solid as brick?

  " W h y is it," I asked as you led me around the sculpted backyard, "that the folks w h o built this place sold it so soon? After constructing a house that's clearly so—ambitious?"

  "I got the impression they were sort of, going in different directions."

  "Getting a divorce."

  "Well, it's not as if that makes the property cursed or something."

  I looked at you with curiosity. "I didn't say it did."

  "Ifhouses passed that sort of thing along,"you blustered,"there wouldn't be a shack in the country safe for a happy marriage."

  Cursed? You obviously intuited that, sensible as the suburban recourse seemed on its face—big parks, fresh air, good schools—we had drifted alarmingly astray. Yet w h a t strikes me n o w is not your foreboding, but your capacity to ignore it.

  As for me, I had no premonitions. I was simply bewildered h o w I had landed, after Latvia and Equatorial Guinea, in Gladstone, N e w York. As if standing in the surf at Far Rockaway during a tide of raw sewage, I could barely keep my balance as our n e w acquisition exuded wave after wave of stark physical ugliness.

  Why couldn't you see it?

  Maybe because you've always had a proclivity for rounding up.

  In restaurants, if 15 percent came to $17, you'd tip with a twenty Should we have spent a tiresome evening with n e w acquaintances, I'd write t h e m off; you'd want to give t h e m a second chance.

  W h e n that Italian girl I barely knew, Marina, turned up at the loft for two nights and then your watch disappeared, I was fuming; you grew only the more convinced that you must have left it at the gym. Lunch with Brian and Louise ought to have been fun? It was fun.You seemed to be able to squint and blur off the rough edges.

  As you gave me the grand tour of our n e w property, your camp counselor hard sell contrasted with a soulful look in your eyes, a pleading to play along. You talked nonstop, as if strung out on speed, and a lacing of hysteria fatally betrayed your own suspicion that 12 Palisades Parade was no formidable architectural exploit but an ostentatious flop. Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying, one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born.

  Me, I ' m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as m u c h as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17.

  I hope I persuaded you that I thought the house was lovely. It was the first big decision you'd ever made independently on our behalf, and I wasn't about to pee all over it just because the prospect of living there made me want to slit my wrists. Privately I concluded that the explanation wasn't so m u c h your different aesthetic, or lack of one; it's just that you were very suggestible. I hadn't been there, whispering in your ear about dumbwaiters. In my absence, you reverted to the taste of your parents.

  Or an updated version of same. Palisades Parade was trying lethally to be "with it"; the house your parents budt in Gloucester,

  — 159 —

  Mass., was a traditional N e w England saltbox. But the spare-no-expense workmanship, the innocent faith in Niceness, was unmistakable.

  My enjoyment of your father's motto, "Materials are everything," was not entirely at his expense. Up to a point, I saw the value of people w h o made things, and to the highest standard: Herb and Gladys built their o w n house, smoked their o w n salmon, brewed their o w n beer. B u t I had never m e t two people w h o existed so exclusively in three dimensions. T h e only times I saw your father excited were over a curly maple mantle or a creamy-headed stout, and I think it was over static physical perfection that he exalted; sitting before the fire, drinking the beer, were afterthoughts. Your mother cooked with the precision of a chemist, and we ate well on visits. H e r meringue-topped raspberry pies that might have been clipped out of magazines, though again I would have the strong impression that it was pie-as-object that was the goal, and eating the pie, gouging into her creation, was a kind of vandalism. ( H o w telling that your cadaverously thin m o t h e r is a marvelous cook but has no appetite.) If the assembly-line production of goods sounds mechanical, it felt mechanical. I was always a little reheved to get out of your parents' house, and they were so kind to me, if materially kind, that I felt churlish.

  Still, everything in their house was buffed to a high, flat shine, so m u c h reflection to protect the fact that there was nothing underneath. They didn't read; there were a few books, a set of encyclopedias (the wine-colored spines w a r m e d up the den), but the only well-leafed volumes were instruction manuals, d o -

  it-yourself how-to's, cookbooks, and a haggard set of The Way Things Work, volumes one and two. T h e y had no comprehension why a
nyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty. They owned a top-shelf stereo with speakers worth $1,000 apiece, but only a handful of easy-listening and best-of CDs: Opera Stoppers; Classical Greatest Hits.

  That sounds lazy, but I think it was more helpless: They didn't k n o w what music was for.

  — 160 —

  You could say that about all of life, with your family:They don't k n o w what it's for.They re big on life's mechanics; they know h o w to get its cogs to interlock, but they suspect that they're building a widget for its own sake, like one of those coffee-table knickknacks whose silver metal balls click ffuidessly back and forth until friction tires them. Your father was profoundly dissatisfied w h e n their house was finished, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because there wasn't. Its high-pressure shower head and hermetic glass stall were impeccably installed, and just as he trooped out for a generic who-cares selection of best-of C D s to feed his magisterial stereo, I could easily envision your father r u n -

  ning out to roll in the dirt to provide that shower a daily raison d'etre. For that matter, their house is so neat, glossy, and pristine, so fitted out with gizmos that knead and julienne, that defrost and shoe your bagels, that it doesn't seem to need its occupants. In fact, its puking, shitting, coffee-sloshing tenants are the only blights of untidiness in an otherwise immaculate, self-sustaining biosphere.

  We've talked about all this on visits of course—exhaustively, since, overfed and forty minutes from the nearest cinema, we'd resort to dissecting your parents for entertainment. T h e point is, w h e n Kevin— -Thursday— well, they weren't prepared.They hadn't bought the right machine, like their G e r m a n - m a d e raspberry de-seeder, that would process this turn of events and make sense of it. W h a t Kevin did wasn't rational. It didn't make a m o t o r r u n more quiedy, a pulley more efficient; it didn't brew beer or smoke salmon. It did not compute; it was physically idiotic.

  T h e irony is, though your parents always deplored his absence of Protestant industry, those two have more in c o m m o n with Kevin than anyone I know. If they don't k n o w what life is for, what to do with it, Kevin doesn't, either; interestingly, b o t h your parents and your firstborn abhor leisure time. Your son always attacked this antipathy head-on, which involves a certain bravery if you think about it; he was never one to deceive himself that, by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use.

  O h , n o — you'll remember he would sit by the h o u r stewing and

  — 161 —

  glowering and doing nothing but reviling every second of every minute of his Saturday afternoon.

  For your parents, of course, the prospect of being unoccupied is frightening.They don't have the character, like Kevin, to face the void. Your father was forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life, although the additional convenience, once he was finished, burdened him with only more odious leisure time. What's more, by installing a water softener or a garden irrigation system he had no idea whatsoever what it was he was trying to improve.

  Hard water had offered the happy prospect of regular, industrious de-lime-scaling of the drain board by the kitchen sink, and he rather liked sprinkling the garden by hand. T h e difference is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not. Pointlessness has never bothered your father. Life is a collection of cells and electrical pulses to him, it is material, which is w h y materials are everything. A n d this prosaic vision contents h i m — or it did. So herein lies the contrast: Kevin, too, suspects that materials are everything. He just doesn't happen to care about materials.

  I'll never forget the first time I visited your parents after Thursday. I confess I'd put it off, and that was weak. I ' m sure it would have been colossally difficult even if you'd been able to come with me, but of course irretrievable breakdown prevented that. Alone, without the cartilage of their son, I was presented with the stark fact that we were no longer organically joined, and I think they both felt the same disconnect. W h e n your m o t h e r opened the door, her face turned ashen, but w h e n she asked me to come in she might have been politely ushering in a salesman for Hoover uprights.

  To call your mother stiff would be unjust, but she is a great one for social form. She likes to k n o w what to do n o w and what comes next. That's why she's such a fan of elaborate meals.

  She finds repose in set courses, the soup before the fish, and she doesn't resist, as I would have done, the numbing way in which preparing, serving, and cleaning up after three meals a day can

  — 1 6 2 —

  stitch up a cook's time from morning to night. She does not, as I do, struggle against convention as a constraint; she is a hazily well-meaning but unimaginative person, and she is grateful for rules.

  Alas, there doesn't appear to be recorded—yet—an etiquette for afternoon tea with your former daughter-in-law after your grandson has committed mass murder.

  She seated me in the formal sitting room instead of the den, which was a mistake; the rigidity of the high-backed wing chairs only served to emphasize that by contrast T h e Rules were in free fall. T h e colors of the velveteen, sea green and dusty rose, were at such variance with the glistening, livid subtext of my visit as to seem musty or faintly nauseous; these were the colors of mold.

  Your mother fled to the kitchen. I was about to cry after her not to bother because I really couldn't eat a thing when I realized that to deny her this one busywork delay for which she was so thankful would be cruel. I even forced myself to eat one of her Gruyere twists later, though it made me a little sick.

  Gladys is such a nervous, high-strung woman that her brittleness—and I don't mean she couldn't be warm or kind—her bodily brittleness had kept her looking much the same.

  True, the lines in her forehead had rippled into an expression of permanent perplexity; her eyes darted every which way even more frenetically than usual, and there was, especially w h e n she wasn't aware I was watching, a quality of lostness in her face that reminded me what she must have looked like as a little girl.

  The overall effect was of a woman w h o was stricken, but the contributing elements of this effect were so subde that a camera might not have captured it on fdm.

  W h e n your father came up from the basement (I could hear his tread on the stairs, and fought dread; though seventy-five, he'd always been a vigorous man, and the steps were too slow and heavy), the change wasn't subtle at all. His cotton work clothes sloughed off him in great drooping folds. It had only been six weeks, a period during which I was shocked that it was possible to lose so much weight. All the flesh in his weathered face had

  — 163 —

  dropped: the lower eyelids sagged to expose a red rim; his cheeks slung loose hke a bloodhound's. I felt guilty, infected by Mary Woolford's consuming conviction that someone must be to blame. T h e n , that was your father's conviction as well. He is not a vengeful person, but a retired electronics machine-toolmaker (too perfect, that he'd made machines that made machines) took matters of corporate responsibility and better business practices with the utmost seriousness. Kevin had proven defective, and I was the manufacturer.

  R a t t h n g my fluted teacup in its gilt saucer, I felt clumsy. I asked your father h o w his garden was doing. He looked confused, as if he'd forgotten he had a garden. " T h e blueberry bushes," he remembered mournfully, "are just beginning to bear." T h e word bear h u n g in the air. Bushes maybe, but your father had not begun to bear anything.

  " A n d the peas?You've always grown such lovely sugar snaps."

  He blinked. T h e chimes struck four. He never explained about the peas, and there was a horrible nakedness in our silence.

  We had exposed that all those other times I'd asked I hadn't cared about his peas, and that all those other times he'd answered he hadn't cared about telling me.

  I lowered my eyes. I apologized for not visiting sooner. They didn't make any noises about that's all
right we understand. T h e y didn't make any noises, like say something, so I just kept talking.

  I said that I had wanted to go to all the funerals if I was welcome.Your parents didn't look baffled at the n o n sequitur; we had been effectively talking about Thursday f r o m the m o m e n t your mother opened the door. I said that I hadn't wanted to be insensitive, so I rang the parents beforehand; a couple of t h e m had simply h u n g up. Others implored me to stay away; my presence would be indecent, said Mary Woolford.

  T h e n I told them about Thelma Corbitt—you remember, her son D e n n y was the lanky red-haired boy, the budding thespian—w h o was so gracious that I was abashed. I hazarded to your m o t h e r that tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected

  — 164 —

  qualities in people. I said it was as if some folks (I was thinking of Mary) got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected t h e m from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill w i n d became an agony, an aching slog through this man's fresh divorce and that woman's terminal throat cancer.They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.