Virtue, page 11
A year earlier Byron had written a long essay reflecting on his decades of being the magazine’s editor. “Shouldn’t there be term limits?” Zara had muttered. It was true that the piece had a fireside, cigar-smoking sort of quality—self-regard, we thought, dressed in the language of cultural stewardship. Alive, the man had been miraged with absurdity, the tweedy old patrician spinning his boozy and name-dropping yarns, oozing the kind of courtly sexism that made Julia roll her eyes like a kid sister. And now, overnight, death had conferred some kind of valor on his superseded life, ennobling it. In the inboxes of us interns, friends of the magazine summoned their wisest and most generous selves to do him justice, man and life molded smoothly into misty remembrance. The website published tributes for the next five days, until a famous old stage actress died and Byron’s death was kicked out of the metropolitan news. This was the second death, that of the published remembrances; death was strangely plural, it turned out, because the third and final installment was Byron’s memorial service.
It was held at a grand old cathedral on the Upper East Side, a stony space where the air hung dense and dolorous with incense and lilies. (Byron, it turned out, had been a devout Catholic, not a WASP. He’d just never talked about it.) The hoary scrum of organ music drenched us in sounds somehow brown and maroon and purple as we the interns in a self-conscious line took our seats in a pew in the back. The only other mourner approaching our age was the bedheaded consort of the famous Jonathan, a bee-stung-lipped strawberry blonde, conspicuously sexy in dirty sneakers and a mauve slip dress—almost as if her boyfriend had roused her from a postcoital nap and dragged her here in a nightdress.
As the rest of the crowd filed in I stared up at Jesus above the altar, Jesus naked but for a pubis-skimming bit of tautly wound cloth, a guy so lean and buff that his iliac crest cut arrows to his groin, his hands limp and spilling riches of blood, his head cast back with orgasmic surrender. I’d fuck Jesus, I thought, just to shock myself. And then I looked to the doors and my heart rushed up and burst, because here they were, my small gods. Paula in a little black turban, shift dress, and ballet flats, looking like an Alex Katz painting. Jason reverential, apologetic almost, in his own handsomeness, with his hand on the small of her back.
I didn’t want Zara to catch me staring at them. None of my fellow interns knew about my Sunday-night suppers or summer-Friday sojourns; I’d managed to keep my obsession private.
Jason and Paula took seats several rows in front of me, right where my gaze naturally fell. When halfway through a hymn, Jason inclined his mouth to her ear and whispered something, she didn’t break her stride, just gave a quick, coy smile as she continued singing, “Abide with me.” I would have run over pews and heads and shoulders, trampled them, to have heard what he said to her. “Abide with me,” I sang faintly, “fast falls the eventide,” a tiny song into my own body rather than out into the world. I sang while sexy Jesus watched. Send my heathen soul to hell, I thought, melodramatically.
The wake was a short walk away at the large and fusty house of an older couple, benefactors of the magazine. We the interns formed a little group in a corner, kids at the grown-ups’ party, and our spot adjoined the kitchen so we were the first to catch the stream of hors d’oeuvres, wrapping our student-debt-suffering fingers around the tiny greasy triangles carried on silver trays. I was hungry, but as I swallowed one miniature beef Wellington and palmed a second, I knew we should probably try to talk to people who weren’t us.
Near me, two women were talking. One whose features were drawn taut and dolorous with surgery was holding up her hand and delivering the air one precise notch as she said, “Stunning . . . I mean stunning,” while the other, eyes dulled with hostility, nodded.
I averted my gaze from the pair and looked around. It was a beautiful moment when I caught Jason’s eye. Standing by Paula’s side, he lifted his glass of red wine, gave me a dapper incline of the head, and closed both eyes at me in a sort of grave and loving double-barreled wink, like he was acknowledging some secret understanding we shared.
I lifted my glass and could not help the goofy grin that broke out over my face.
“You know him?” said Zara.
Sensing Jason still smiling at me, surely lip-reading or intuiting this question of Zara’s, I nodded, bashful and pleased. Jason seeing me in my little group of little friends.
He and Paula were being talked to by some short guy straining for their attention, gesticulating too much, as if he were desperate to convince them of something. I hoped that wasn’t how I looked when I talked to them. Paula was nodding gently; Jason was leaning toward the man, his face arranged into an expression of solicitousness as tasteful as the narrow gold pin in his black silk tie.
“How d’you know him?” asked Zara. “He’s that filmmaker guy, right?”
“Yeah. This Is Cincinnati.” It seemed prudent to answer only the second question.
“Good film.”
At this I felt a roar of pride, as if I were the one she’d just commended. People still talked about that film. Zara was still looking at me like I was an idea she might have to revise when we were interrupted by Jen huddling toward us penguinishly while fanning her face in a frantic way.
“Oh my god oh my god oh my god.”
“What?” some of us said.
“Linda J is here!”
“Who?” someone said.
“Jackson.” Zara supplied the information. “Linda Jackson. She wrote those pop feminist essays in the nineties. ‘Like a Fish,’ you know?”
Zara’s tone left no need to ask what she thought of Linda Jackson’s pop feminist essays of the nineties. I tried to supply the terms of her critique. White feminism. Zero concept of intersectionality. Hints of transphobia. And most damningly, lightweight.
“She’s like . . . my literal shero,” said Jen.
“Your what?” said James, bemused, professorial.
“And she’s here! I’m literally dead.”
“And yet here you are,” said James just as Amit said, “Double funeral,” and Zara doubled over in a silent cackle. James’s shoulders shook as he indulged a chuckle, even Amit let a smirk crack through.
“Oh my god,” I laughed softly. We were bad.
“Guys!” protested Jen, with a quaver in her voice. “I’m serious!”
“Just go talk to her,” Amit said.
“I can’t talk to her; I will seriously die!”
“I thought you were already dead.”
I thought maybe we should stop joking about dying. I imagined one of the grand dames in va-va-voom headgear cornering Julia with a strong word or two about the behavior of the interns. Should they really be allowed at an occasion like this? She stooped to conquer.
Funerals are supposed to make people horny. This one seemed to have made us hysterical, we the last Tancread interns. The internship was coming to a close; this was one of the last times we’d see one another and maybe that knowledge had sent some current through us. James was off to grad school, which surprised no one. Amit was moving to San Francisco to be a junior copywriter for a tech startup. The pictures of the office he’d showed us on his phone made it look like adult daycare. Beanbags in bright preschool colors, Ping-Pong tables, and a snack room full of self-serve pretzels, popchips, and M&M’s. I wondered whether I was meant to be jealous of this destiny, and once he found the opportunity to admit his starting salary and the fact of unlimited paid leave, I surely had to be. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to worry about money anymore. Jen had found an editorial assistant position with a literary nonprofit where employees brought dogs to the office; I’d seen the organization’s Instagram account where canine subjects “wrote” the captions. A snoozing Labrador asked “#Mondays amirite? Tell my humans to wake me up only if they have treats.” A pug suffering a fuchsia tutu pronounced: “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” A three-second loop of a scruffy terrier running toward the camera, skidding across the office floor in a manic rush: “Me going into the weekend like . . .”—a flurry of loopy-faced emojis and paw prints. One of Jen’s responsibilities, if it could be called that, was to run this account.
Zara and I were the only ones the future hadn’t yet accounted for.
Some kind of glumness had succeeded our hilarity when Linda Jackson walked by us. Jen bit her lips, the gummed inverse of a pout, and stared at the floor.
“Ms. Jackson!” called Amit.
“Yes?” She spun around, hands in the pockets of her loose black pants. She seemed indifferent and a bit mean, with her thick-rimmed glasses and rick of russet-dyed hair.
“Hi.” Amit held his nerve. “This is my friend Jen and she really wants to meet you.”
Linda Jackson put out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Jen.”
“Oh my god hi.” Jen was verklempt as she shook her hand. It was actually pretty moving. “Sorry, I’m, like, a huge fan so I’m kind of dying right now.”
“Ack, Christ.” Linda shifted her weight from one foot to the other like a stand-up at the mic. “You guys can’t die on us, we’re counting on you young ones to call 911 when the pacemakers fail.”
Jen laughed very hard, an odd display in her abashed and starstruck state—two clashing conditions, like eating while crying.
“We’ve been making a lot of dying jokes,” James explained.
Jen was now actually crying with pleasure and terror at meeting her idol, we saw, and that was one strange thing about this memorial: no crying anywhere I looked. Plenty of old ladies meekly popping vol-au-vents in their mouths, not one dabbing her eyes. The awful thought occurred to me that after a certain age—seventy-five?—public tears for the departed weren’t shed.
Seized with a sudden need to be with Jason and Paula, I slipped away from embarrassed, tearful Jen and the rest of the embarrassed (but not tearful) interns and went in search of my grown-up friends.
On my way I pretty much collided with Julia in the corridor. “Hi, Luca,” she said, recovering her composure before I did. There was a power in using someone’s name, knowing they wouldn’t use yours back at you. She leaned against the faded old wallpaper—tiny pink roses, like a doll’s house, quaint and droll. “Jason Frank just asked after you.” She’d folded her arms and was giving me the same look my high school teachers did when I couldn’t tell if they were annoyed or charmed.
“Huh,” I said. “Well, I better go find him then.” The audacity! I slipped off, leaving The New Old World’s senior editor to her unspoken questions.
From the verandah out back I could see Jason and Paula below in a garden that had no idea there was a wake going on. Here were all these somber people in their careful, well-pressed black while the wisteria tumbled about, heedless, and birds trilled and fluttered and the trees were pink and plumate, boughs laden with great cotton candy whorls. And there, neat and right and side by side as if patiently waiting for me, with petals falling on their polished shoes, this colloquy of two. Paula inclined her head as I approached, pulled a face of sympathy, and opened her arms to me as if I were the bereaved, a Gertrude to my Hamlet.
“Hiiiii, Luca.” She honeyed the words, taking my head in her hands, kissing my cheek.
“Hey, man.” Jason raised his almost-empty glass in solidarity with my presumed grief.
“It’s good to see you guys.” Which was true. They both smiled.
“Yes,” said Paula. Her yes was always very soulful and I was sure I wasn’t the only one who thought this.
“End of an era,” she added, with a sort of hopelessness. Death, like love, made people talk in platitudes. My era was ending, too: I hadn’t really thought ahead and didn’t particularly want to. I had some savings, I told myself vaguely, clutching the thought like a throw pillow.
Paula asked me what my summer was going to be. Her tone implied that the season called for an inspirational mood board rather than the mere banality of plans.
I mumbled that I didn’t really know yet to be honest and hoped my laugh veiled any note of rising panic.
“But, hey, so you’re coming to join us tomorrow night, right?” Paula was as eager as a kid.
Tomorrow was Sunday. I was.
* * *
—
Sunday brought another warm night and, with our funeral observances concluded, we were all back to wearing colors and talking with our mouths full. Along with seared scallops and asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, Paula had cooked something viridescent, a spring risotto teeming with wild, weird, coiled green things I’d never seen before—fiddlehead ferns, she said.
Lannie and Mal were staying with their father in Princeton, Noah and Eli with their mother, Pina was asleep in bed, and there were no other guests. Just the three of us then, and this felt special, seeming to signal some new stage of a triangular relationship I couldn’t and probably didn’t want to define.
Outside on the streets, stray cats were in heat. It was a desperate, embarrassing sound they made: “Aaooo, Aooo!” they keened, shameless in their pleading, so horny their vulvas hurt.
“God, they sound human, don’t they?” said Jason, rubbing his hands dry on a dishcloth and sitting down opposite me.
“You know you can relieve them with a Q-tip,” said Paula, pouring my Chablis so casually it sloshed up around the rim of my glass. I stared at her for a moment, processing this. “I read it on the internet,” she added unnecessarily.
“Jesus Christ, P,” said Jason, appalled and amused.
I thought and did not say, So that’s the size of a cat’s vagina. Huh.
“I’ve never done it!” she protested in a large way.
I could not shake the image of Paula’s long-fingered hand pinching a Q-tip into some grateful and violated cat.
“Even if we had cats, I could never bring myself to do it. But isn’t it the humane thing to do? Put them out of their suffering? If you were a cat, wouldn’t you want it, faute de mieux?”
“If I were a cat . . . ,” Jason considered. “Well, that’s some Thomas Nagel philosophy-of-mind shit, isn’t it? Being a bat. Unimaginable.”
“Jason wants you to know that even though he didn’t go to college, he’s still read all the books,” Paula told me unmaliciously.
I felt she loved her husband.
“And my wife wants you to know she speaks French,” he said.
“Anyway, whatever. Bat, cat”—she went on, biting into a fiddlehead—“I’d want someone to fuck me.”
“Someone?” said Jason. “Anyone? A bat boyfriend?”
“Not boyfriend. Man. Batman.”
“Michael Keaton or Christian Bale?” he said. A tease of a tease—ironic but erotic.
“Oh, Bale. Big-time. You?”
“You want me to watch?” Jason said.
They were showing off for me, I think. They did this. Ostensibly talking over me when really they were talking at me.
“Your cat girl?” said Paula. “Your Catwoman?”
“Halle.” He closed his eyes with reverence. “Halle, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
“Seriously? You want to throw Michelle Pfeiffer under the bus like that? Damn.”
There was a needle of the truly pissed in her question, the pique of Why not the blonde, the blonde like your wife.
“Halle,” he repeated firmly.
“Anne Hathaway?” I offered. No, of course not. Idiot. But Paula looked my way and shrugged generously, with feminist good faith.
“Whole buncha sexy cats,” she conceded.
“But can a cat consent?” I offered facetiously, because this was one of my generation’s sincere preoccupations, consent, and they knew this, and even though I worried about consent all the time, I was always willing to play the self-ironizing millennial with them.
“A new frontier for the vegans to worry about!” Jason said. Like his wife, he disapproved of not eating animals. It was a mutual contrarianism. They considered veganism puritanical. Organic, grass-fed, local—sure, be ethical about it, but why deny themselves the pleasures of expensive roast chicken or Wagyu steak.
Does that make them sound contemptible? Happy people are too easy to despise. They never seemed contemptible to me. If anyone had ever asked me about them in the years that followed our summer, I would have said this: I never heard either of them ever say a bad word about anyone. Not once. Yes, they were rich people—Wagyu and fiddleheads up the wazoo—so it was easy to hate them for that. But never to direct their energy into unkindness—that seemed more meaningful to me than their diet or whatever else they consumed. Did it matter that their car was a Tesla, that their candles were from Diptyque, that all their brands were rich-people brands?
As Jason got up to get another bottle of wine he dipped fleetingly toward Paula’s ear. “Catfucker,” he whispered, and she meowed quietly.
They’ll fuck tonight, I thought, thrilling myself with the simple insight. They were married people who still fucked each other.
Paula looked at me suddenly, green-gold eyes sharp and wild, as if she’d heard my thought or sensed what lowness I contained. I smiled a mild question mark at her as a wash of yellowish guilt went through me.
“What?” I said. There was a pause before she said: “Have some more risotto,” and she rouletted the spoon’s handle around the rim of the pot to me. I knew it was just a gesture, something to hide the real thing beneath, but I took the spoon and served myself another mouthful anyway. There was a strange silence for a moment.
“Hey, Luca,” she said suddenly. “Why don’t you come to Maine with us this summer?”
Jason turned abruptly. Looked first at Paula, then at me.
“Yes,” he said oddly. “You must.”
