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My first mistake was being in a hurry. I grabbed for what was in front of me: marrying Seth the rock star, having a child—I’d always been special and I thought the specialness would still be there no matter what, but this other stuff might not.
And by the time I saw how really bad things were—Seth fighting with his band, disappearing for days while I scrambled to take care of two kids—by the time I realized what a pit I’d fallen into, it was too late. I had two little girls, a husband who was smoking meth, and one year of community college. I still lived twenty minutes from where I grew up.
I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another.
“Ray,” I whisper.
No sound. The logs shift in the fireplace.
“Ray.”
I go to the door and open it, then the second door. I look down the outdoor stairs and over the trees at the horizon. “Ray,” I call, but the wind has come up and it blows my voice to pieces.
“Ray! Ray! Ray!” Suddenly I’m hollering, because he has to be here. He must be; otherwise I’ve spent all that money and left my girls and come all this way for nothing.
I call his name until my voice gets weak. I go back inside the keep and lie down on the brocade couch. I’m overwhelmed by the purest sadness I can remember in my life—not like Corey, where the sadness was mixed up with guilt, responsibility—this is just loss. Pure loss. I know Ray is gone, and I’ll never see him again.
In the cabana, an older lady gives me a black one-piece swimming suit and a thick terry-cloth robe. There are private changing cubicles with canvas walls and full-length mirrors. I watch myself change into the swimsuit. Thirty-three years of wear and tear, but there I am.
When I come back out, it’s dark except for the big green circle of swimming pool. The cold bites at my fingers and calves and feet. I stand there listening, because a new sound has started up, like thousands of tiny glass pieces breaking above and below and all around me. I turn my face to the sky and then I feel it, bits of cold on my face: snow. In the total quiet of this place, I can hear snow falling through the air and landing on the marble. A trillion invisible clicks.
The steam on the pool is thicker now, like spinning bales of white hay. I can barely see the people underneath it.
And I don’t know if it’s the snow, or the night, or that pale green water, or something else that’s separate from all that, but as I walk to the edge of the pool I’m filled with an old, childish excitement. I wait, letting the snow fall and melt on my hair and face and feet. I let the excitement build until it floods my chest.
I close my eyes and dive in.
aaaahh
“I prefer ‘screaming,’ ” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”
“Do you do it with friends?”
“Most people can’t tolerate it.”
“Family?”
“Zero tolerance. That’s a direct quote.”
“As in, someone used the phrase ‘zero tolerance’ to address the issue of your screaming?”
“As in, they used it all together in an intervention to address the issue of my screaming.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“I see less of them.”
“Because you can’t scream?”
“Because it depresses me to know they’re using phrases like ‘craves negative attention’ to explain my project.”
“Families,” Kristen said with a roll of her beautiful eyes. Then she asked, “Do you? Crave negative attention?”
The café had mostly emptied and the apple tea had gone cold. Alfred sensed that his answer was important. He was vaguely aware of having left out the need he felt to scream at times, like an urge to yawn or sneeze. He hoped this went without saying.
“Actually, it’s the opposite,” he said. “I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more.”
Kristen watched him alertly. “Authenticity,” he said, unfurling the word like an ancient, holy scroll. He almost never uttered it, lest overuse diminish its power. “Genuine human responses rather than the made-up crap we serve each other all day long. I’ve sacrificed everything for that. I think it’s worth it.”
He was encouraged by Kristen’s look of fascination. “Do you do it during sex?” she asked. “Never,” he said, then added, with heady boldness, “That’s a promise.”
cute
“She’s the opposite of incorrigible. She’s making amends.”
“I don’t want her amends. I want her to disappear.”
“What makes you say things like that, Miles?”
I remember exactly where I was standing when we had that conversation: on the deck of the lakeside Winnetka home Trudy and I had overleveraged ourselves to buy (she was pregnant with Polly, our first) and painstakingly decorated together: the site of a planned domestic idyll of children, holidays, and family reunions that we’d rapturously envisioned since meeting in law school at the University of Chicago. Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
Fuck Sasha, I thought.
I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work —so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about. As with Damon (whom I patronized on an accelerating schedule), there was no pretense with Janna, no restraint. The thing itself. Seven kids and two spouses between us were nothing against our mutual longing, and we fucked in bathrooms, on cold sand by the lake after dark, and in Janna’s basement rec room during the small hours when neither of us could sleep. I adored her with a heedlessness poor Trudy had never glimpsed in me; I’d never seen it in myself. I told Janna I would die for her, and I think I assumed I would have to; for all the fervor of our passion, it was death-infused from the start.
At dinner he hangs back, watching the rest of us laugh around the firepit. I’d looked forward to showing off Lincoln —graduated early from Stanford and working nearby in tech —and Alison, who everyone loves, a junior at UCLA. But Miles’s awkward solitude makes me feel petty for having craved these triumphs. He hardly interacts with Beatrice, his half sister, and I wonder if it’s shyness—whether Sasha and I should be asking him more about what he’s doing. But Miles’s history makes those questions feel loaded, or patronizing, and anyway, we’re all in our fifties—do people even ask what we’re “doing” anymore? Hasn’t that already been decided?
By the time the sun nudged at the mountaintop, we were high above the desert. It felt strange to be in the open air at such a height; the intermittent hum from the balloon’s burner wasn’t like an engine noise, and I could hear birdsong from below. As I drank from my water bottle, the sun’s upper edge cleared the mountain and dropped its lighton the world below. In that instant, a skein of brilliant color snapped into view: Sasha’s sculpture. From the ground, it had seemed a hodgepodge, but from my new height, it acquired structure and logic, like random scribbles aligning into prose. Skipping lines of color raced through the desert, skittering and twisting, backtracking, thickening, then scattering almost away: a skylarking utterance of surpassing joy that rushed up from the land and encompassed me. Where the sculpture gave way, the desert looked empty.
Tears broke in my eyes, and I pulled down the bill of my cap. “Look,” I said to Drew. “Look what she did.”
Now, that is funny for sure, at least it was when M told the story at O’Brien’s taco party when each team member shared a childhood anecdote. And yet embedded in the comedy are both sadness and triumph—sadness because M was already isolated, friendless, and at odds with her family, and the ceiling debacle resulted in the dismantling of her plant system, and—when she afterward refused to eat— hospitalization and tube feeding. Triumph because now she is M!, gorgeous and sexy and well paid, and the world has bent her way. Most of the stories we tell—my fellow counters and I—have both these components, sadness and triumph, because the world has come around to us. It’s unbelievable. I still can’t believe it. And while our ranks are fortified by typicals whose adolescence may have included popularity and statistical expertise limited to sanctioned realms like baseball stats, the fact is that we are simply better at counting—we are native speakers, if you will, many of us having understood numbers before we did language.
Avery is using a code that only I and other native counters are likely to comprehend: The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite!
have to think about this more [reminds me of what's his name, the literary critic guy, franco moretti?]