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Most of the guests were Benny’s dynastically wealthy high-school friends, whose parents cushioned their salaries with passive incomes, affording them the means to fill exciting, sub-living-wage positions at magazines and non-profits; invest in quality homeware from the windows of boutique stores; and, when they eventually met their timely, old-person deaths, to expire in the same private healthcare practices whence they’d long ago been born. I lived on minus money, in an overdraft that was almost overdrawn. On my mother’s deathbed, my main non-existential concern would still be rent.
What are you talkin’ about? Gunner said. What about my foot?
Mom and Daddy are talking adult-talk. Sometimes adults have to talk adult-talk, Sharon said.
Then he began to pressure and pry and make us both deeply uncomfortable but also – it seems to me now, sitting here alone with my drink, watching the water – even more eager to find a language that might, without exposing our plight, also prove magically useful. We had to blur the details and speak in code and we ended up speaking in a kind of neo-biblical lingo.
I’m not sure we can make it up this hill.
The hill is made of your frickin’ ardor.
No, no, the hill is a big-shot banker in Manhattan. We both climbed hills. We’re both equally guilty.
What hill can’t be climbed? I want to climb the hill with you, Gunner said, and in-between our words there would appear a hint of solace, of the reconciliation that would arrive if we simply continued speaking in code for the rest of our lives with our son between us, asking suspicious questions, redirecting our pain into his pale blue eyes, his tiny ears.
hat night, somewhere in the sixties, or perhaps farther south in the fifties, we glanced to the right and saw what remained of the sunset, framed by the length of the street all the way to the Hudson, a slab of pure lavender light, gloriously perfect, combining with the cold, concrete edges.
That’s as beautiful as anything Rothko painted, I said to Sharon.
(Oh dear, wonderful Sharon. Oh Sharon, love of my life. Oh beloved sharer of a million eternal moments. Oh secret lover of secret situations. Oh you who day by day shared a million intricate conversations.)
That vision has stayed with me. It illustrates how the window looks right now as I sit here with my drink, with the hazy deep blue light edged with the serene, pure black of the window frame, as I sit alone in a room, a year after that night in the hospital, thinking about my wife, about our life together while the river out beyond the window quivers and shakes with the last sunlight of the day. I have come to believe, in this time of mourning, that only in such moments, purely quiet, subsumed in the cusp of daily life, can one – in the terrible incivility of our times – begin to locate a semblance of complete, honest, pure grace.
In an average life lived by a relatively average soul, what else remains but singular moments of astonishingly framed light?
I tell the kids that the most important thing in screenwriting is to have a character that wants something. And I tell them this is harder than it sounds. The amateur tendency is to write characters that sit around on couches, talking to other characters on couches. Everyone loves writing dialogue because you can fill up the page so fast, the rising black like smoke signals in the middle of a whiteout blizzard. I love it too, I admit, but at a certain point, you have to get your protag (as I call it, horribly) off the couch and have them do something, something motivated by their desires. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but it’s one of the hardest, like most things that sound like the easiest thing in the world: falling in love, staying in love, not ODing at your husband’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary party.
On the whiteboard, I diagram plot arcs loosely cribbed from Save the Cat and Story. I tell them each scene needs to have a positive and negative charge – that, in other words, something has to change. I tell them that this is true of scenes, and true of sequences as well, a progression of linked scenes. Sequences have to change, and so do acts, which sequences build, and so do screenplays, which are made of three to five acts, depending. I tell them that story is really about change, from the macro to micro level, and that, in this sense, a screenplay is like one of those images made from smaller constituent images of the same thing: a face, for example, but when you get closer you see the features are made of the same face, and closer still, that elements of the features – the shadow of a nostril, for example – is made of very small faces, and when you press your eyeballs up to those faces, you see a pixelated constellation of a thousand more faces. I tell them there’s a word for this that has escaped me and that I’ll give extra credit to anyone who tracks it down, which is ridiculous, as this is a talented and gifted summer camp, and there are no grades.
You asked me once, toward the end, after you’d discovered the withdrawals – the ones from our bank account, and the ones I was going through in that hotel room during one of my ‘business trips’ – why I did drugs. I told you that growing up in a loud and alcoholic household, I liked to enter the storage cubbyhole under our kitchen floor, where it was earthy and cool and dark and still, and pretend that everything outside had vanished, though I could hear the distant yelling, and that as an adult narcotics held a tremendous instinctive appeal, in the way it offered a quiet place to hide, though it was better than that cubby since you could take the still place with you wherever you went. But this was false. Oh, it may have been true years ago, but the need had long since become its own truth, the only truth that mattered.
Because the other truth, I guess, is that I don’t see the point of all this, however you define this. From the outside, the drugs may seem to take away meaning, to confer a dead pointlessness to the proceedings; from the inside, however, it is just the opposite. They provide a titanium-grade purpose to my days, one that is knowable and achievable. Far from meaningless, dope is the greatest possible meaning, an absolutely defined value and good in a world of rumors and wraiths, fleeting desires and disappointments flickering incandescent against the void. It is nothing, but it is something. It is the somethingest nothing there is.
Did I want children, David? I know I always told you I didn’t, but did I, secretly? If not, why did I continue sobbing all the way back to the hotel, all the way through the dose, to the point of addressing the question to you, imaginary you? Are you glad we didn’t? Are you going to do it with . . . Philippa? Can that really be her name? Are you going to have a little Silverlake family? Are you going to wear a Baby Bjorn at the co-op? Are you going to name the girl Hyacinth and the boy Elderflower? Is there any way to reclaim the time we’ve lost? Is there a place where our days aren’t numbered? What is your worst fear? What is mine? And are you even reading this?
Leonard showed me his screenplay-in-progress. It is about an ill man, who keeps getting sicker and the doctors can’t figure out why. He’s at death’s door (the title: At Death’s Door), when they discover a small alien being that has burrowed into his abdomen. That’s all Leonard had so far.
‘What’s next,’ I said.
‘That depends,’ he said.
‘On what,’ I said.
‘On if he decides to have it removed.’
‘Why wouldn’t he have it removed?’
‘I don’t know, maybe he’s gotten used to it. Maybe he likes it,’ he said, and looked at me meaningfully. We were working outside today, or ‘working’, the students spread out here and there with their laptops on the long, sloping lawn. A breeze shivered the grass down the hill, and I thought how strange it is that you can see the movement of this great, invisible thing, although maybe that’s not strange at all, and I just haven’t been paying attention to things like that. I am suddenly, horribly, alive, although that might be not having slept in almost a week. Colors assault me like loud sounds. I feel everything.
liked Samuel best when he was asleep, though even then his drooling and the curl of his little marsupial hands irritated me. No one had told me it was possible to dislike your child. Or at least if you did, it was supposed to happen later, when they were bratty teenagers and then ungrateful, smug adults. I didn’t like Samuel right off the bat. Don’t get me wrong: I loved him – in the sense that I had every intention of discharging my obligations towards him – but, to be frank, he was annoying.
He was fussy, for a start, fussy about temperature and sunlight and noise. He had a series of illogical phobias: he was scared of denim and windshield wipers, and would scream if he could smell bananas. When he danced, he used moves that were weirdly sophisticated, even risqué – rolling his body, thrusting his hips – things he must have dragged up out of the collective unconscious, because he certainly didn’t see me or Connor dance like that, or at all. In some ways I was looking forward to the inevitable bullying he’d receive. I was hoping that the cruelty of other children would effect developmental changes that I couldn’t seem to trigger.
Worsening all of this was the fact that Connor seemed oblivious. He took no responsibility for his part in creating a defective human being.
One night, in bed, I’d tried to talk to him about it.
‘Do you think Samuel’s a little . . .’
I was hoping I wouldn’t have to finish the sentence.
‘A little what?’
I rolled my eyes in the darkness.
‘What?’ Connor hissed. He still had some grit about him then. He wasn’t spending his days on forums, trying to chat up faecal donors.
‘You know. You know what I mean.’
‘You’re talking about our son here.’
‘I know that.’
‘And there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s perfect just as he is.’
‘Okay, geez,’ I said. ‘No need to get defensive.’
Roger had no ethical qualms whatsoever about building weapons that could cause massive, instant carnage. I know this because, unprompted, he told me. It was my first week, and I was in our staff kitchen heating up some noodles in the microwave. He was on his way back from lunch. He stuck his head into the room.
‘I think your ramen days are over, don’t you?’
I looked at the spinning bowl, thought of the invisible waves causing the molecules to go haywire.
‘It’s good to stay humble. Isn’t it?’
He scoffed at this.
‘Don’t ever be ashamed,’ he said. ‘Not of the work, the money – none of it. That’s what the little people want. To shame you. They don’t understand.’
He came close and his voice was low and conspiratorial. Even his halitosis smelled expensive, like beurre blanc and fennel.
‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘it’s like karate. You learn karate so that you never have to use it. And no one looks askance at a man for learning karate, do they?’
I had to agree; they didn’t.
‘That’s the thing you need to remember Fifi,’ Roger said, pleased with his own wisdom. ‘Everyone holds their fire. It might come down to the last minute, the last second even. But no one really wants to press the button.’
I told Connor about this view of my new position, and he was only too happy to agree.
‘I’m going to find him,’ she spat, and she jerked the wooden spoon from the stew and flung it down onto the stove, dotting the countertop and backsplash with beef gravy. The spoon ricocheted off of the toaster and clattered to the floor. My mother turned abruptly, and her hair swung around to cover her face and stayed there as she passed. I could feel the giant particles of air parting to accommodate her as she flung open the laundry-room door and stomped through to the garage. The panic was returning now, beginning at the base of my spine, just outside the body, like an injection or parasite, and plunging in and up through my chest. I felt I might collapse, implode, as though I were tumbling to the bottom of the sea.
I knew what my mother would find. I realized now that I’d known it all along, that I’d seen but elected not to register the shape hanging from the rafters in the gloom of the empty half of the garage, and the faint glint of the kicked-over stepstool. ‘Mom, wait,’ I said, or thought I did; my mouth formed the words, but the breath had left me. Where had it gone? There: she had taken it. She was drawing it in, the way the sea pulls still water back and stands it up, suspends it before the crash. Her scream began as a percussive groan, as though she’d been punched; it stretched into a bass note, then gathered strength, rising in volume and pitch until it filled the house, my head, the world. That should have been me, out there, bearing witness. She didn’t have to see it. And though it was too late, my body moved of its own volition, as though it thought it could turn back time. I stood up too fast, bashed my knee against the table leg, spun around and stumbled against the chair I’d just tipped over. The gray linoleum rose to meet me, and I could make out its many streaks and gouges, the dust and dead insects and bits of fallen food my mother didn’t have time to clean. I closed my eyes, bracing for impact, but instead I passed through the floor and into darkness, as gravity, or something like it, pulled me from every direction.
this was a weird and mostly empty story but this bit really cut through me