by Dave Eggers
He lit another cigarette. He had told me once that he didn’t expect to have a long life, but in Tokyo he always seemed happy and full of energy. I liked the image from his story: the odd couple at the planetarium, the Japanese gangster’s mistress and the cross-eyed kid from Missouri, both of them staring up at the stars. I thought about that until we reached the airport and he went off to find some shoes.
NICK HORNBY
Everyone’s Reading Bastard
FROM Byliner
1.
ELAINE AND CHARLIE agreed to divorce each other sometime between 9:30 and 10 a.m. on a Monday morning, in a coffee shop near their children’s school.
“Well, what on earth did you say to her? In the coffee shop? To make her want to divorce you?” Charlie’s mother asked him later in the week, when he’d finally mustered the courage to tell her.
“Two points here,” said Charlie. “One, I like how you automatically assume it was something I said. Rather than something she said. And two, divorces don’t just come out of the blue. Like, like a sniper’s bullet. You can’t just be walking along, all happy, la-di-da, and then bang! Ow! Divorce! . . . Things have been bad for a long time.”
A long, long time. Years. When the fatal conversation took place, he was already living out of the family home, in a rented flat that was big enough for the children to stay in at weekends, if it were ever to come to that; at the moment, they were hobbling through Saturday and Sunday together, and Charlie spent the night in the spare bedroom. (When Elaine and Charlie eventually sat the kids down and told them that the marriage was over, Emily, aged nine, said only, “Der.”) Charlie and Elaine had been pretending—to themselves, to the kids—that this might not be a permanent state of affairs, that there was a way back from here if they chose to take it, but of course there wasn’t, not really. Even so, there was an element of shock, despite what he’d said to his mother. The weekend had been like other weekends they’d spent over the past few months—difficult, chilly, separate, sad, but nothing out of the ordinary. Walking from the coffee shop to the tube station, he did feel as though he’d been hit by a sniper’s bullet, if a sniper’s bullet could also make one feel unburdened and a little merry, which, he could see, was debatable. Why that particular Monday? Exactly a week later, when Charlie discovered that he had become known—to hundred of thousands of people who still bought newspapers, and God knows how many more who didn’t but who read them anyway—as somebody called Bastard, it all began to make sense. There are some who would argue that there’s a point where the intolerable can no longer be tolerated, and Elaine had just snapped, fired her rifle after another two whole days of frosty misery. Charlie, however, believed that the intolerable could always be tolerated just a little longer. He was pretty sure that Elaine had seen an opportunity for professional advancement and acclaim, and therefore the time had come: he had to be vaporized.
He didn’t read the Sunday newspaper that Elaine worked for, not any more. He’d had to stop. Elaine wrote profiles, features, and columns, on the face of it about current affairs and the arts, but over the years Charlie had come to feel as though her only real subject was him. No matter what she had been asked for—a love letter to an American TV star, a restaurant review, a comment piece about a suddenly famous royal bottom—she always managed to find a way to squeeze his inadequacies in somewhere. She had once launched into a tirade about his flatulence (illness-related, temporary) during an interview with Daniel Radcliffe, the star of the Harry Potter films, and reported Radcliffe’s suspiciously sympathetic response. Her willingness to reveal all was what her editor loved about her, apparently. Everything was personal: the political, the cultural, the gastronomical. She had told the nation about the loss of her virginity, the current state of her pelvic floor, her sexual fantasies, her marriage, and her marriage, and her marriage. Paradoxically, the very quality that made her job at the paper secure made Elaine seem unhinged.
It was Mary at work who first alerted him to the possibility of new Elaine trouble, although she did so without saying very much. Mary was a petite, depressed single mother, and in the early days of his separation Charlie had slept with her a couple of times. There was an irony in that, if you thought about it in the right way and not in the wrong way—which was the way Elaine tended to think about things. The irony was this: he wasn’t a bastard, but with Mary he had sort of behaved like one. Maybe that was what she thought, too, if she’d made the mistake of extrapolating a whole theory from the way he had brought their underwhelming, time-filling relationship to a halt. (He had never really understood the controversy surrounding text messages as a method for conveying the cessation of a sexual relationship, especially one of this duration and wattage. And he’d be as happy to receive as to give, so it wasn’t that. Texts were clean and unambiguous, and required no eye contact.)
“How was your weekend?” he asked Mary as they were waiting for the lift. Her shrug indicated some bitterness, he thought, as if the disappointing nature of her weekend was his fault. He ignored it.
“Yours?” And then a little “Oh!” as if she’d remembered something, followed by what looked suspiciously like a smirk.
Oh, shit, Charlie thought. Elaine. Smirks, silences, coughs, raised eyebrows, sympathetic looks, half-finished sentences, from friends, colleagues, other parents at the school . . . They all meant the same thing, these days. It was irritating, and it made him unhappy, but he’d learned that he would live, and that in a week it would all be forgotten. But when they got out at the fifteenth floor, Charlie ran into Tim Britton from acquisitions, who was not a man for a cough or a raised eyebrow.
“Here he is,” said Britton cheerfully. “Bastard!”
Tim Britton was an arse, but he’d never just walked up to Charlie and started calling him names. Charlie stared at him. Britton chuckled and shook his head.
“This is going to be great,” he said.
Going to be? Charlie thought. As in, the future? That didn’t sound good.
When he got up to his office, he went straight onto the newspaper’s website and scanned the home page quickly. He couldn’t immediately see anything that was going to cause him any discomfort. A three-page eyewitness report of a revolution in an Arab country, an interview with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an appreciation of a Latin American writer on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Even Elaine’s fond editor wouldn’t let her loose on any of that lot, however eccentric the results. He looked again, and then realized that the disaster was so big that he’d missed it: there was a headline right across the top of the screen, just below the masthead. “DON’T MISS ELAINE HARRIS’S BRILLIANT NEW WEEKLY COLUMN ‘BASTARD!’” the headline said.
For a moment, Charlie tried to hold on to the hope that there was another bastard in Elaine’s life. She didn’t like her father much, for example, and there was an editor in her last job that she loathed to this day. But really, he knew. He gave himself a couple of minutes, took deep breaths to quell the panic, and clicked on the link. Just in case one or two dimwitted people still might not have been able to link him with the eponymous villain, the brilliant new weekly column called Bastard! had a helpful subheading: “LIFE WITH AN EX” it read. “HE’S GONE, BUT HE’S NOT FORGOTTEN.” There was even a logo, as if the column were already a national institution: a cartoon cad, all cravat, mustache, and twinkling, lascivious eyes.
He scanned the column quickly. He recognized nearly all of the crimes she was accusing him of, all of the minor incompetencies connected with child care. The column was clearly going to be thematic. And yes, it was a sorry list, but these were the sourest plums from the last couple of years; there was no way she could keep this level of bile up weekly. There. He had found the only piece of consolation on offer: it wouldn’t always be this bad. He was wrong, of course.
2.
Charlie had met Elaine at university, but they hadn’t started dating then. She was, as she’d reminded him cheerfully on a regular basis throughout their marriage, ou
t of his league then. He wasn’t entirely sure what had changed in the meantime—whether he had somehow managed to elevate himself, or whether her status had become downgraded in some way, maybe by whichever agency handled God’s credit rating—but when they met up again at a party, she seemed inexplica bly interested in him. He was solvent and single, but she was funny, successful, and attractive, so he was still at least a division below her, by his calculations, although he wasn’t going to be the one to point this out. He asked her out to dinner, and they set out on a more or less entirely conventional march toward cohabitation and parenthood.
Every now and again, he would meet someone who had known her back in the day. Sometimes that person was male; and sometimes that male would intimate that he’d had some kind of sexual relationship with Elaine; and sometimes the intimation was followed by something, a face or a gesture or a whistle, intended to indicate that Charlie was brave or foolish or naive. Charlie took no notice. He found it all thrilling. But when Elaine’s career started to take off, it was mostly because of her apparently insatiable appetite for self-exposure and, unavoidably, the exposure of those who happened to be somewhere close to her. And that was what fueled her reputation—and she really was quite well known now—for eccentricity and solipsism. Some of these disclosures began to affect their marriage: they made him tense and ashamed. It is probably not fair to say that they also made him sleep with an ex-girlfriend he’d bumped into on Facebook, but that was what it felt like at the time. (His affair filled up the entire front page of the Lifestyle section.) Bastard! introduced a new and terrible idea, though, one that had never, for obvious reasons, occurred to him: what if Elaine had, despite all appearances to the contrary, actually been reining herself in? What if their marriage had been inhibiting her? Was it possible that Elaine was only just now taking the gloves off? He thought again about the timing of the request for the divorce. He was beginning to feel as though he’d been drawn against Bobby Fischer in a school chess tournament.
He called her on her mobile and got her voice mail. He left a polite message. She didn’t call back. His next message was more urgent, more pained, so when his mobile rang, he thought that maybe she was feeling remorseful. But it was his mother.
“Is it true?”
“Oh, shit.”
“Please don’t use that language with me. It’s bad enough that you use it in front of the children.”
That was a reference to one of Elaine’s stories in the column: the day the car had been broken into and he’d lost his iPad and a pair of stupidly expensive Prada boots, still in their box, that he’d just bought. For a moment he had been lost inside a purple fog of anger. He’d used both the F and the C words and kicked the car, and the children had burst into tears.
“Are you saying that it’s worse to use it in front of you?”
“No, of course not.”
“But that’s how the construction goes. ‘It’s bad enough’ is then followed by something, you know. One step on. ‘It’s bad enough that you forgot my birthday. But to forget Christmas as well . . . ’ Do you see? The second thing’s got to be worse.”
He wanted to punch himself. What was he doing, banging on about grammatical constructions and Christmas? This was his mother he was talking to, a woman who was frequently confused by the rules of television quiz shows.
“I have never forgotten your birthday. And how can anyone forget Christmas? They don’t let you forget Christmas. The advertisements start in October. I don’t understand a single word you’re saying.”
“Nobody’s forgotten Christmas. It doesn’t matter. Who told you about the column?”
“Marjorie from the book group.”
He sighed. He was tired, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.
“Thank her for me, will you?”
“I thanked her at the time. Is it all true?”
Was it all true? Yes. Yes, he had sworn in front of the children. Yes, he had forgotten to pick Em up from her after-school dance class and left her to cry in the rain. Yes, he’d had a public argument with Joe’s football coach and another dad had pulled him away. Yes, he’d come home drunk at five p.m. on Christmas Eve and slept until ten the following morning. Yes to a thousand other idiocies, forgettings, mistakes, and bad decisions. And anyway, he was pretty sure that his mother had heard these stories before. Many of them had been party pieces, jokes told at his expense, sometimes by Elaine, sometimes by Charlie himself. Everybody laughed. That’s what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the charac ters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.
“No,” he said to his mother, because no seemed closer to the spirit of the truth than yes. “Of course not.”
Later, he got a call on the office line from a researcher at a radio phone-in program.
“Charlie!” she said, as if they were old friends who hadn’t spoken for months. “You must be a very angry man. Why don’t you come on our show and tell everyone about it?”
“Is anyone really interested?”
“You were trending on Twitter for a couple of hours this week. Everyone’s reading Bastard!”
Everyone’s reading Bastard! A few days ago, this sentence would have been incomprehensible. Now he not only knew what it meant, but he understood that it had a unique and depressing personal application.
“And do you think that coming on the radio would help my situation?”
“It’s what I’d want to do,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Go on. We’ll send a car for you.” This last offer was made seductively, as if what was stopping him talking publicly about the darkest secrets of his marriage was the expense of a taxi or the discomfort of public transport.
“Oh, well, in that case . . . ”
“Great.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh.”
“Listen, I really want to keep out of trouble.”
“You’re just going to let her beat you up?”
“She’ll win, in the end. I can’t go on the radio every week.”
There was a pause. He was pretty sure he could actually hear the sound of cogitation.
“Do you want me to find out about that? I’m sure we’d love it. So would our listeners.”
Jesus. Was that right? He could go on the radio every single week, talking about the wrongs done to him by his ex-wife? When he was a kid, even when he was a younger man, nobody knew anyone who had been on TV or on the radio or in the national newspapers. There was still the sense then that your life had to take some extraordinary turn, for the better or the worse, to achieve that kind of fame. You had to do something remarkable, or something terrible. Now everyone could get access to something—a cable TV show, a free newspaper, a digital radio phone-in—as long as they were prepared to say something stupid and provocative, with no expectation of money. A warring couple prepared to talk about their marriage publicly: that was a gift, a two-headed goose laying golden eggs. Of course he’d be allowed on the show every week. He could probably get his own program, on radio or TV. If he pushed, they’d probably give him an entire station. Someone had to turn this tap off, before the nation drowned in all the piss and vinegar gushing from it.
“No, thanks.”
He was so frightened of the weekend and the humiliation it might bring (might! As if there were room for doubt, or hope) that he couldn’t enjoy his children as much as he’d wanted to. He left work early on Friday and picked them up from school, as agreed upon with Elaine via terse texts; they still hadn’t had a conversation about the column. None of the other parents even made eye contact with him.
“Why doesn’t anyone speak to you, Daddy?” Emily asked while they watched Joe kick a ball around with his friends in the playground.
“People speak to me.”
“Nobody at school.�
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“They don’t really know me. I don’t pick you up often enough.”
“Did Mum write something about you? Something called a bad word?”
“Oh, you mustn’t worry about that.”
“Why not?”
“You know Mum and her jokes.”
That was one of the most desperate explanations he had ever offered a child. Elaine was known for a lot of things, both privately and publicly, but she was not known for her jokes.
“Jessica in my class says the word means your mum and dad weren’t married when they had you.”
He laughed. He liked the idea of his headmaster father and his church chorister mother giving birth to a child out of wedlock, somewhere on the grounds of the exclusive private school where his father had worked.
“Why are you laughing?” Emily asked.
“Well, my mum and dad, they . . . ”
He was about to paint an amusing portrait of his parents’ painful moral rigor before moving on to a little lecture on the history of the word, how it had become loosed from its moorings, but he stopped himself just in time. The literal meaning, he suddenly saw, was much more useful.
“They weren’t married, no. So . . . so yes. I am one. I’m afraid.”
“Ab-a-s—?”
“Yes. Very much so. Sadly. But don’t ever mention it to Granny or Grandpa. They don’t like to talk about it.”