by
Keith Gessen
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Nonetheless, for all the good it did him, he managed to secure some dates. J., one of his three New York dates (the only one that did not end with him sleeping in the 4Runner), lived in a tiny studio on 80th and Amsterdam, the nicest neighborhood in the city, decorated with posters of Al Pacino movies from the early 1980s, so anonymous, so casually everyone’s favorite movies, that a desolation spread over Mark. He was drunk. S., from Ithaca, took him to her capacious sunny first-floor 2-BR, with wood everything and perfect place settings and fifteen books, total, on the shelf. D., who lived in a strange housing complex, with a little fake pond, somewhere between Ithaca and Syracuse, occupied a third-floor apartment with worn brown carpeting and toddler noisemakers for—what? a little girl? She hadn’t mentioned that to Mark at the bar.
As Mark ate Celeste’s much more filling sandwich, he wondered that this attractive young woman could be interested in him. But then Sasha was also attractive. Mark just needed a pep talk. He considered the Mensheviks. They were wonderful people. Deeply schooled, thoughtful, chary, ironic, they told wry jokes and wrote intelligent books. After the Bolsheviks took power, they were scattered to Berlin, Paris, New York—also to the camps.
This was not encouraging. He was going to the gym.
“Do you want to be a couple?” she said.
“OK,” said Mark. He sort of mumbled it.
“You’re going to love me? And tell me you love me? And go on weekend trips to Skaneateles?”
Mark had often gone to Skaneateles with Sasha. Did Leslie know this? He rolled over and lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. Was he prepared to do this? What if in a couple of weeks he was no longer prepared? It might take more than a couple of weeks to get out of this. It might take a couple of months. But if he knew that now, shouldn’t he stop? Shouldn’t he let them both off the hook right away? At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark’s hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It’s pretty clear what Lenin would have done. And so Mark did it, too.
“OK,” said Mark. “Let’s do it. That’s what I want.”
Leslie was as surprised as he was to hear him say this.
oh my god
Then—eighteen months ago—he moved to Brooklyn. Historical periods, according to Marx, produce both recognizable types and anti-types, and late capitalism, at around the time Mark was moving to Brooklyn, was producing its own antibodies, its antitheses, in the form of young women who thought that Mark was just fine, that Mark was just dreamy. They loved that he didn’t have any money; they adored that he didn’t know how to go about getting it. He was so cute! thought the women. Where did you come from? thought Mark. The answer was that the colleges produced them. Then bought them plane tickets, gave them Mark’s address. “The workers have no country,” wrote Karl Marx—but Mark Grossman did have a country, as it turned out, and that country was New York. In his first two weeks there he met more attractive, articulate women, in person, than he had in the previous four years of multimedia dating in Syracuse. He bought a cell phone and the women of Brooklyn called him on it, texted him on it; he set his ring tone to the opening theme of the television show Dynasty, and they caused it to chime from his phone at all hours of the day. What could he do? He canceled his Internet dating profiles, ceased his interminable e-mail negotiations with girls he’d never seen. At the age of thirty, Mark Grossman had finally solved the problem of sex.
Recently, however, there’d been some kind of shift. Celeste, truth be told, wasn’t quite who Mark thought she was, from Syracuse; or rather he wasn’t quite who he thought he was. Too long a sacrifice, Mark sometimes said to himself, when he began to notice their problems, can make a stone of the heart. But that wasn’t really it. Objectively they were in trouble. “We’re not twenty-three anymore,” Celeste said once as they settled down at Frank’s, in Fort Greene, to get drunk. “And I’m tired.” She kept having to fly off to Chicago, to Miami, to cover their so-called news. Mark’s roommate, Toby, would have known that the only news that mattered was the daily increasing hegemony of the global corporations and their destruction of the earth. But still Celeste had to fly. And her sleeping pills and eating habits, and above all her many mood stabilizers, had some troublesome effects, inhibiting important intimate functions in addition to the depression and anxiety ones. “Can you stop taking them?” asked Mark. “I’d be weepy all the time,” said Celeste. Mark said, “That sounds nice.” “What about curled up in the corner with a knife?” “Less nice.” “OK then.” They sat in Frank’s and eyed each other semi-warily. The newspapers, the magazines, the television, and Mark’s in-box were selling youth elixirs and penis extenders. One possible explanation was late-imperial decadence and corruption: life was too easy. Another explanation tended in the opposite direction. The television sold youth because life was not simple and not easy; because you did not emerge from your twenties smiley-faced and full of cheer and love for all existence.
“You know,” Mark began, “the Mensheviks would have said that—”
“Will you stop it with the Mensheviks? I mean, can we have one conversation where we talk about something else?”
That was a month ago, and it had inaugurated a period of Mark’s life that was bound to end badly. If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in Russia in March 1917, hopeful March after the tsar’s abdication, the appointment of the provisional government, the short-lived democratic process, then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July. Was Gwyn his Kerensky? His Kornilov? Ekh. Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life.
Sidorovich was definitely not in Brussels in 1903; he may or may not have been in Petersburg in October; but he was, finally, at the Constituent Assembly in January. He had even produced a witticism on the subject. “The Constituent Assembly was like the opera,” said Sidorovich. “It was very boring but you felt, given how much it had cost, that you had to stay.” It had cost nearly a hundred years of tireless labor; the fight for an all-Russian democratic congress—which is what the Constituent Assembly was—had destroyed the lives of countless men and women. And when it finally came, during the early months of the Bolshevik dictatorship, it lasted exactly one day. When it became clear to the delegates on that day that they would not be allowed to return, they decided not to leave. At 4:00 a.m. they were expelled from the building. And it was over. A Bolshevik, asked by a journalist before the event what would happen if the Mensheviks and others tried to protest against the regime, had made a witticism of his own. “First, we will try to dissuade them,” he said. “Then we will shoot.”
Sidorovich didn’t really have a comeback for that one. Neither did the Mensheviks. Even in Russian, some things aren’t all that funny.
Mark was already at his building, and now he got off the phone. Would he really give her away? Really? The thought of them getting back together was blasphemy, it was socially taboo. You made a certain promise when you gathered all your friends and were married, and accepted their gifts, and congratulations, toasts and well wishes. When, in the course of time, you broke that promise, when you divorced and told your friends and gathered them, together or singly, to announce it, and accepted their condolences, their regrets, their well wishes—well, you soon found you’d made another promise, this time that you were apart. Now you had to stay apart.
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.”