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It was the morning of Thanksgiving. The flurries had stopped and the sun was halfway out. A gull's wings rattled and clacked. The breeze had a ruffly quality, it didn't quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99$ Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.
i do like this
Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing—ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever" s message.
That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone—that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day—cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.
lol
Spread open on Chip's kitchen counter was the section of the Times in which he'd circled all the uppercase Ms. Rediscovering this artifact now, hours later, would have been like remembering a dream except that a remembered dream didn't have the power to pull a waking person back into it, whereas the sight of a heavily marked story about severe new curtailments in Medicare and Medicaid benefits induced in Chip the same feeling of unease and unrealized lust, the same longing for unconsciousness, that had sent him to the chaise to sniff and grope. He had to struggle now to remind himself that he'd already gone to the chaise, he'd already taken that route to comfort and forgetfulness.
lol
"What about Dad, though?" she said. "Did you forget it's his birthday?"
"I lost track of time here."
"I wouldn't push you," Denise said, "except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box."
"Christmas was a bad scene, no question."
"Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork."
lol
Each day that Chip spent grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue was a day in which his rent and food and entertainment expenses were paid for, in large part, with his little sister's money. And yet as long as the money lasted, his pain was not acute. One day led to another. He rarely got out of bed before noon. He enjoyed his food and his wine, he dressed well enough to persuade himself that he was not a quivering gelatinous mess, and he managed, on four out of five evenings, to hide the worst of his anxiety and foreboding and enjoy himself with Julia. Because the sum he owed Denise was large in comparison to his proofreading wage but small by Hollywood standards, he worked less and less at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. His only real complaint was with his health. On a summer day when his work session consisted of rereading Act I, being struck afresh by its irredeemable badness, and hurrying outside to get some air, he might walk down Broadway and sit on a bench at Battery Park City and let the breeze off the Hudson flow under his collar, and listen to the ceaseless fut-fut of copter traffic and the distant shouts of millionaire Tribeca toddlers, and be overcome with guilt. To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing. Of all the things he was wasting—Denise's money, Julia's goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst.
It was pathetically obvious that he'd believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he'd been to take them home. But Jurgen Habermas didn't have Julia's long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn't have Julia's grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn't have Julia's artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he'd sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare—the uniform volumes in their pale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats—he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.
this scene is devastating
"The desserts were a foot tall!" Enid said, her instincts having told her that Denise didn't care about pyramids of shrimp. "It was elegant elegant. Have you ever seen anything like that?"
"I'm sure it was very nice," Denise said.
"The Dribletts really do things super-deluxe. I'd never seen a dessert that tall. Have you?"
The subtle signs that Denise was exercising patience— the slightly deeper breaths she took, the soundless way she set her fork down on her plate and took a sip of wine and set the glass back down—were more hurtful to Enid than a violent explosion.
"I've seen tall desserts," Denise said.
"Are they tremendously difficult to make?"
Denise folded her hands in her lap and exhaled slowly. "It sounds like a great party. I'm glad you had fun."
Enid had, true enough, had fun at Dean and Trish's party, and she'd wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter's taste was a dark spot in Enid's vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate.
:(
[...] Chip had reason to be sensitive. Since D—— College had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U. S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell "The Academy Purple," the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose.
"It's interesting. It is interesting," Gitanas agreed, still hugging himself tensely. "Brodsky said, 'Fresh fish always smells, frozen smells only when it thaws.' So, and after the big thaw, when all the little fish came out of the freezer, we were passionate about this and that. I was part of it. Very much part of it. But the economy was mismanaged. I had my fun in New York, but back home—there was a depression, all right. Then, too late, 1995, we pegged the litas to the dollar and started privatizing, way too fast. It wasn't my decision, but I might have done the same. The World Bank had money that we wanted, and the World Bank said privatize. So OK, we sold the port. We sold the airline, sold the phone system. The highest bidder was usually American, sometimes Western European. This wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. Nobody in Vilnius had cash. And the phone company said, OK, we'll have foreign owners with deep pockets, but the port and the airline will still be a hundred percent Lithuanian. Well, the port and the airline were thinking the same. But still it was OK. Capital was flowing, better cuts of meat at the butcher, fewer brownouts. Even the weather seemed milder. Mostly criminals took the hard currency, but that's post-Soviet reality. After the thaw, you get the rot. Brodsky didn't live to see that. So OK, but then all the world economies started collapsing, Thailand, Brazil, Korea, and this was a problem, because all the capital ran home to the U. S. We found out, for example, that our national airline was sixty-four percent owned by the Quad Cities Fund. Which is? A no-load growth fund managed by a young guy named Dale Meyers. You never heard of Dale Meyers, but every adult citizen of Lithuania knows his name."
"We've petitioned the IMF and World Bank for assistance," Gitanas said. "Since they encouraged us to privatize, maybe they're interested in the fact that our privatized nation-state is now a zone of semi-anarchy, criminal warlords, and subsistence farming? Unfortunately, IMF is handling complaints of bankrupt client states in order of the size of their respective GDPs. Lithuania was twenty-six on the list last Monday. Now we're twenty-eight. Paraguay just beat us. Always Paraguay."