Virtue, page 10
While her future ex-husband sat in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel, Paula stood by the side of the road watching the police car recede until it was toy-size and flickering on the horizon, then squatted in the dust and vomited her continental breakfast between her shoes. She wanted this response to be a physical reaction to racism—I literally vomited, she could hear herself telling a girlfriend. Except it wasn’t that. Once she and Anton were back in Princeton—once she knew (eight weeks) and once she’d done what they agreed was the right thing at this time in their lives (but he agreed more)—she’d been able to explain to herself that she’d been pregnant and now she wasn’t. Her body, however, seemed to reject this explanation and rose up in a revolt; she bled, her breasts swelled with useless milk, and uncontrollable crying jags gripped her for hours. The crying, which Anton received as an indictment, sent him into rages.
On the anniversary of the abortion they had a fight so bad that the only thing to do was to get married. The wedding took place in Princeton, four days after the planes hit the towers. Far too soon for any kind of celebration in America but too late to cancel, and if not now, when? So they’d had a modest ceremony, with a muffled discharge of champagne corks, and a party that died discreetly by ten p.m. with rueful hugs among the congratulations. A week after the wedding, she learned that her old lover, the finance guy, was among the unaccounted for. Paula told me it didn’t seem right to her that such a winking, ridiculous fellow could have attained a tragic end and become part of history, his name eventually etched in the bronze of the memorial waterfall. But fate was weirdly indiscriminate in how it assorted character and event.
Paula ended up spending a bit more than five years as Anton’s blond and vivacious young wife, and, at first, she felt she acquitted herself in the role. It was faculty dinners, not Michelin-starred new restaurants, and the talk was about Habermas, not Page Six and the Financial Times, because now she was the eminent sociologist’s wife, not some finance guy’s little tramp. But then came the kids she’d wanted a lot more than he had, and soon she was excusing herself at dinners to head to the bathroom and let her head slump forward between her knees with maternal exhaustion. And after she and Anton had gone home and she’d paid the grad student babysitter and her husband had cloistered himself in his study, she’d cling to Lannie or Mal, their small, sleeping, grunting bodies in SpongeBob pajamas, and permit herself a brief, silent cry.
Paula was a diligent wife and mother now, not a rich man’s trophy girlfriend, and staring at a small bread roll one night as Anton talked across her to a professor of political science, she realized she much preferred the latter. It had been more fun, she confessed to me, with some chagrin. Her happiness now seemed indefinitely forestalled. During these years with Anton, the memory of painting caused her pain. Having given it up, she felt toward herself, she once said, as if she’d wronged someone a long time ago, and so an ugly thing crouched in a damp cranny of her consciousness, protected by the knowledge that she lacked the courage to address it. That was how it was, she said: motherhood was an exercise in guilt, but so was being an artist. She was guilty of neglecting her maternal duties if she painted; she was guilty of neglecting her artistic duties when she devoted herself to the boys.
At Saint Martins in the late eighties, she’d been a young American who didn’t particularly care that Thatcher was fucking over the miners or that Reagan was disregarding thousands dying from AIDS. She didn’t even care that painting was going out of fashion, because she got to be a pretty foreigner in London dancing to the Pet Shop Boys with sometime Blitz Kids, and she had all the time in the world to become a virtuous person later; the world was for now a red carpet rolled out before her.
That night of the faculty dinner as she stared at the hard bread roll, a flavorless white fist, it was astonishing to her the directions that life could go in. Nothing, it turned out, was guaranteed, not even to the beautiful and beloved and well funded. Not so long ago, she’d been gyrating in a Covent Garden basement with sequined bows in her hair; now she was the exhausted and miserable wife of an emotionally repressed workaholic who was too busy figuring out a new post-Marxist theory of social class for much else.
While Paula was suffocating in Princeton, Jason, she told me, was filling his lungs to make a masterpiece. He’d spent a summer reading Dos Passos, Frantz Fanon, and Burroughs after falling in with a creative commune, a bunch of DIY film people who’d taken over a dilapidated brownstone in Bed-Stuy and made it an experiment in living. There were chickens in the scraggly backyard, kombucha explosions in the kitchen, and his ancient Regal parked out front. He had a tiny room at the top of the house, where he got lost in disciplined mania as he assembled an epic jump-cut poem, his visual goodbye letter to Cincinnati that eventually made his name. Marshaling archival footage, TV clips, ads, endless ads—images upon images, a surfeit—he made some collage of a film that, once you saw it, Paula told me, produced the unmistakable sensation that you’d been going around blind in a fake world, oblivious to the realities of power and control, image drunk and estranged from the truth (“The deep truth is imageless,” went the film’s epigraph from Shelley).
Meanwhile, Paula was changing diapers and mashing carrots and wiping up vomit and pumping from each swollen boob until, in the cold March of 2004, while Anton was away at a conference, she came down with a flu that was sufficiently Old Testament in its severity to warrant the word stricken. Her mother-in-law, a religious woman named Gloria, came and took the twins, and Paula was released to solitude, only her own vomit to deal with. Shivering in clammy sheets with a bucket beside her, she let the TV play as its visions overspilled their boundaries and fed her fever hallucinations that included cartoon toucans firing Froot Loops out of the screen, rings in malicious and ungodly colors like chartreuse and acid fuchsia swelling into the room like spaceships she wished would take her away, until she vomited again and the spaceships and toucans were gone.
She took a swig of Tylenol syrup and when she woke up, it was with the taste of artificial cherry and stale puke in her mouth. It was dark outside, so that the uncurtained windows played the bedroom back to her in the light of the TV: an uncanny reflection of her gaunt face the color of sour milk. A man on TV was talking gently and steadily and his face was lit up and surrounded by blackness; his black turtleneck made him just a neckless face, a big bright face, lucid and alive and intriguingly ugly or possibly just handsome, it was hard to say. And then the camera cut to his interlocutor and here was Charlie Rose leaning forward to ask with a genial frown what on earth he meant by the term cybernetics, could he explain that for the layperson, please, and what exactly did that have to do with Cincinnati?
She hadn’t thought of him in thirteen years. The guy who’d built her shelves was now a feted filmmaker talking on TV.
Of course I’d already known about Jason’s films on that evening when I’d walked through the Village with him after our echt-as-fuck burgers, but I was too shy to ask him more. There were things I could ask Paula that I couldn’t ask him, a man. Instead, I asked him the same question I’d put to Paula in the Viennese café: if they’d be at the magazine’s summer party. I was hoping for a different answer.
He looked at me like I’d asked something in code, a smile beginning on his broad, fleshy lips as his gaze shifted between my two eyes, assessing.
“That,” he said slowly, “is probably up to my social secretary.” It took me a couple of cloddish seconds to realize he meant Paula.
The other day, while Helen was taking the boys for a walk in the park, I thought of the book Paula gave me and wondered where it was. I’ve always thought it was kind of brave of her to give me a coffee-table book of works by the painter who made her feel her own work wasn’t good enough. I would’ve liked to look at one of his white paintings—a living, conversational white, because I was remembering a story that struck me as all the sweeter and more astonishing for my having forgotten it. It’s a true thing but as piquant as fiction: in Avignon in 2007, a Frenchwoman had stood before one of the painter’s white paintings and was so overcome with passion that she kissed the canvas—pressed her lipsticked mouth against the whiteness to leave her mark. She called it an act of love. “I stepped back,” the Frenchwoman told the newspaper reporters. (I’m sure her words were more beautiful in the French, as everything is.) “I found the painting even more beautiful afterward. The artist had left this white for me.” Imagine the hubris! But of course I too would like to feel that sort of ecstasy of consummation. News reports used the word defaced when in fact she was giving the painting a face—or at least a mouth, that stamp of red lips, a mark of desire, ravishment. I still can’t imagine kissing a painting. Is that why I think of this story? Or is it because I feel that with Paula and Jason I did just that?
8
By the day of the party itself, that last Friday in May, I’d pretty much relinquished hope of Jason and Paula being there.
Since college, I’d dealt with my social anxiety by drinking, but here was a new thing: getting everyone else as drunk as possible! Asking someone if they needed a drink, offering to get people drinks—this was something to do, an excellent tactic that allowed me to present as sociable without actually forcing me into conversation. I hurried about playing the young and tractable bon viveur, ferrying generously filled glasses through the crowds, purposeful with my “Coming through!,” giddy with my stolen sips.
“Dude, sit still.” Zara was leaning against the bookshelves with a tumbler of whiskey and ice in hand. “You’re running around like the Mad Hatter.”
I laughed and assented.
When I leaned back against the bookshelves beside her, I felt the paperbacks give and slip and shift behind my shoulders. We stood quietly for a moment, looking out at the crowd. Everyone was sweating. Women with hairs sticking to their temples as if they were feverish, their collarbones slick with sweat. I was in a soaked shirt, sleeves rolled, but there were eminences in blazers they refused to shed out of principle, beetroot faces streaked with fat shining rivulets running down their cheeks as though they were weeping.
It was a pretty white crowd.
“So Julia just asked me how the magazine improves its diversity,” Zara said.
“Oh wow.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not your job,” I said righteously. I adjusted my posture and felt the paperbacks behind me shift again. Everything had gotten very swimmy.
We watched a famous novelist called Jonathan make a sort of genuflection at stooped old Byron, who’d returned from his ambiguous leave with his clothes hanging looser. His mouth was slack, a little agape, and I wanted to point my finger under Byron Tancread’s drooping jaw and tip it shut as smartly as you would a gormless child’s.
I fanned myself, then stopped out of self-consciousness.
“Here.” Zara fished a large ice cube out of her glass and gave it to me. It slid around in my hot palm. With it came a sort of amniotic sac of whiskey, which was all I tasted when I popped it in my mouth and it started melting like a cuboid jawbreaker.
I wanted to bring up that thing she’d mentioned in the bar on Ludlow Street.
“Zara,” I began, my speech made stupid by the unwieldy object in my mouth. “You said your brother . . .” It somehow seemed rude to say the words.
“He’s in jail, yeah.”
“I mean, is he”—I shifted the ice cube into my other cheek—“Sorry . . . that’s so rough. That must be so rough.”
I felt her patience tightening.
“What’s rough?”
“You know. Being in jail.”
She made a scoffing noise out of her nose, somewhere between grunt and laugh.
“What did he—” I stopped myself, because I remembered from movies or TV shows that this was something you weren’t allowed to ask.
“You want to know what he did.”
I accidentally swallowed the shrinking cube, which lodged in my gullet for one horrible panicky moment before it dissolved.
“He did nothing, Luca. I know you know what country we’re living in.”
“America,” I managed. Very drunk. She gave me a pat on the shoulder wearily.
“America, yes, honey. And do you think America is racist?”
I got my mouth around the next word. “Definitely.”
“Which maybe means you’re racist, too, right?”
“Whoa.” She was being kind of mean. I was trying . . . what was I trying to do? She looked at the floor so I looked at the floor too, and considered our four shoes, which swam in and out of being eight shoes, twelve shoes, then back to, wait, four but also sort of eight. She was wearing Nike slides with her strappy party dress and her toenails were silver. I guess she’d exempted them from the hegemonic normativity, or the normative hegemony, or whatever she’d said to Jen.
“You grew up in America,” she was saying. “As a white guy. No one can exempt themselves from racism when they live in a world, like, steeped in it.”
I mumbled messily that I knew they couldn’t. We seemed to be going in circles, or maybe it was just that I was so drunk that everything was going in circles.
“But you want to know what my brother did.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Actually, I want to! You ever smoke a little weed, Luca?”
I made an inscrutable gesture.
“Me, too,” she said. “Leon did sometimes, too. Does. Did.”
She told me he’d been walking home with an eighth of weed in his pocket, a birthday gift from a friend she hated. The friend had flipped off a police car. “So Leon’s walking home to dinner—my mom’s made him pineapple upside-down cake and put eighteen candles in it. And because it’s cold”—her voice glittered—“because it’s January in New York and he’s cold, Leon has his hood up and his hands in his pockets.”
She said their mom would scream at him not to wear a hoodie, and he’d laugh and tell her she was being hysterical. “To be honest, I thought she was, too. I mean, there’s a matcha café on our corner now, you know what I mean? But anyway, his hood’s up and this is still Bed-Stuy, so he’s a thug. A little thug excited to go home and blow the candles out on the cake his mom made him and share a birthday blunt with his dad.”
That’s what they’d do, she told me. Her dad would play him jazz LPs and Leon would play him numbers from a contemporary phenomenon of a musical and they’d get a little high together and Zara and her mom would laugh at them. I felt a familiar throb in the sternum as I pictured this, like some kind of movie montage: Zara’s mother smiling, Zara’s dad twinkling.
“A thug who knows every word to the Hamilton soundtrack,” Zara went on. I’d seen this, actually, on Zara’s Twitter page: she’d linked to a video of a boy with a box fade like peak Fresh Prince, big-eyed, a little lantern-jawed, gangly, singing into his laptop and accompanying himself maladroitly on keyboard. He looked so much younger than he was, a true baby of a brother. “There’s a million things I haven’t done,” he sings, with a mournful sort of sincerity, feeling overtaking technique, “but just you wait, just you wait.”
What they were waiting for now was his case, waiting for it to come to trial, while Zara’s mom’s hair turned steely and Zara’s dad struggled not to yell at the lawyers who were draining Leon’s college fund.
“Julia wants me to write about it for the magazine. A personal essay.”
I was too drunk to appreciate the derision Zara spun into the term. Instead, I’m ashamed to say, I felt a stab of jealousy and awe. The idea of any of us—we interns—being published in the magazine was unfathomable. And she’d said it so casually. No big deal.
“Whoa. That’s amazing. Are you going to?”
She gave me a look of pure distaste.
“I am not,” she said, “selling out my baby brother for a byline.”
Paula and Jason didn’t show.
9
Byron died the following Tuesday. Julia came in to the office Wednesday morning with a strained look on her face, and when she gathered the staff and told us, a soft collective sound went up from the assembly. Jen’s plump hands flew to her mouth like pigeons. Miranda gasped. James uttered the words “My god” like some old ham in a dramatic scene. But I was shocked, too. Here was the most natural and inevitable of things, an old and unwell man dying, but I was unable to get my head around it. Byron had seemed like a permanent feature of the world. I stared at the worn Persian rugs and the polished wooden floor, worried I might break into nervous laughter if I met anyone’s eye.
Julia supplied each of us with a list of people to email to solicit tributes from, and a script: “Dear ______, On behalf of The New Old World, I am writing to ask if you might . . .” An indignity compounded by the email address I’d been given on my first day. Yet, miraculously, people responded to intern4@newoldworld.com. Not just responded but thanked intern4 for asking them, told intern4 they were so grateful we’d thought of them, then proceeded to confess their own emotional state and share reminiscences. When a legendary biographer sent me her tribute in 18-point Comic Sans, I was mirthfully scandalized by the font and wanted to tell Zara but thought better of it. Death had made everything formal. It was exhausting.
