But he had to break up with Celeste; he began catechizing himself again the next day as he rode down Classon on his bike. Break up with Celeste, he said. You are both unhappy. You are not, it turns out, such a great couple. Misanthropes should not marry. At least not each other. And your failure to end it now would be purely the product of fear—and some misguided loyalty to Syracuse Mark, poor lonely stupid Syracuse Mark. In his mind he defended his decision to the dissertation committee: This is a relationship of convenience. We cannot keep it up. We are desperate and we’ve tugged on this last straw. We don’t love each other!
“You loved her before,” answered the dissertation committee.
“That was a long time ago. We were both different.”
Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated momentarily on her food as Mark watched her. You could hold out against the calendar of the system for only so long; you could remain steadfast for only so long. This was her last chance at something; Mark of all people was her last chance at something, before she crossed into a different phase of her life.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some lost puppy you’ve taken in! Shithead.”
“Sorry.”
He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn was a little straitlaced, like Sasha, and she was a little awkward, like her, and also like Sasha and very much unlike Celeste she was meant, clearly, for existing with someone in the world—and perhaps all the things he’d done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he’d made, all the money he didn’t spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they’d spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he’d allowed to slip through his lips—not to mention his sexual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now—he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn’s and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn’t do right all that he’d once done wrong.
“Mark!” Arielle called after him. “Choose wisely!”
“Hey.” Toby cut in again.
“No, I need to say this,” Arielle insisted. “I’ve known guys like you, Mark. You think girls need to be saved. But we don’t. We’re OK. Save yourself!”
We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don’t want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one’s hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one’s hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can’t. We can’t. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we’ll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.
He had left Sasha, he had allowed Sasha to leave, because he could no longer abide the person he had become with her. He lied and lied and when the lies had mounted festering in the corner he covered them with further lies. Then he had suffered in Syracuse alone. Or rather the loneliness was the suffering. He had dated. He had Internet dated. And even when he’d solved all these problems of dating he—well, continued to date. As if only the women he dated could tell him who Mark was. As if he would not be a full person, a full Mark, until he’d found the perfect complement. Except every woman he dated took a chunk of Mark with her. And vice versa. So that if you looked, if you walked around New York and looked properly, if you walked around America and looked properly, what you saw was a group of wandering disaggregated people, torn apart and carrying with them, in their hands, like supplicants, the pieces of flesh they’d won from others in their time. And who now would take them in?
[...] Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPETENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the New Yorker and opposing—too late— the war in Iraq.
There were so many things I’d once wanted to do! The trouble is that when you’re young you don’t know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways, so your ideas of what the world is like are jumbled; when you imagine the life you want for yourself, you imagine things that don’t exist. If I could have gone back and explained to my younger self what the real options were, what the real consequences for certain decisions were going to be, my younger self would have known what to choose. But at the time I didn’t know; and now, when I knew, my mind was too filled up with useless auxiliary information, and beholden to special interests, and I was confused.
I walked west for a block, then turned south. On Ninety-Sixth Street I hijacked a cab at the lights – I just yanked open the door and swung my case on to the seat. The cabbie turned: and our eyes met horribly. ‘The Ashbery,’ I told him, for the second time. ‘On Forty-Fifth.’ He took me there. I gave the guy the two bucks I owed him, plus a couple more. The money changed hands very eloquently.
this is amazing. i love the build-up to the reveal
(backstory: he was previously ejected from this very same cab)
[...] Perhaps you fancy your girl’s best friends because your girl and her best friends have a lot in common. They’re very alike, except in one particular. You don’t go to bed with the best friends all the time. In the sack she can give you one thing your girl can’t give you: a change from your girl. Not even Selina can give you that. Is Alec fucking her? Well, what do you think? Is she doing him all those nice favours? Could be, no? Here’s my theory. I don’t think she is. I don’t think Selina Street is fucking Alec Llewellyn. Why? Because he hasn’t got any money. I have. Come on, why do you reckon Selina had soldiered it out with me? For my pot-belly, my bad rug, my personality? She’s not in this for her health, now is she? . . . I tell you, these reflections really cheered me up. You know where you are with economic necessity. When I make all this money I’m going to make, my position will be even stronger. Then I can kick Selina out and get someone even better.