Benefit, page 8
I abandoned my glass of red wine and paid for two of the old-fashioneds Justin wanted. Justin wore a row of silver rings in one ear and a gray Henley shirt that consisted of some material that looked more fashionable for basically sharing the constitution of pajamas. Justin talked quickly, rushing toward the end of a paragraph and the bottom of his glass, almost surprised at how quickly he got to both, and then on to another round, fast. He was greedy for words and words were always there for him. I think I asked some questions. Somehow I knew he had sold a book for a large advance. A nonfiction book. People, he told me, who work in or with traditions that don’t match their own heritage. He sketched a chapter on the unnoticed Polish man who played bass on a bunch of reggae records and one on the Mexican poet who spent years perfecting prizewinning haiku. He was interested, he said, in the personal impulses behind what could be called “cultural appropriation”; he put air quotes around that. “I mean, when it’s not about power. Not just about power. Is it all power? Okay, yes, it is. That’s basically the book.” I said it sounded interesting. He said, “Come on, interesting is a bullshit word.” I said that didn’t mean I was bullshitting. We mused briefly about what the opposite of bullshit might be. He got up to fetch more drinks.
I like conversations like these, the kind that seduce you into supposing that what sounds like honesty should be taken for approval, as if people like Justin don’t talk this way to everyone. Justin returned with two new glasses. My questions were hardly necessary anymore. He didn’t want the book to be interesting, he said. “I mean, I want to write a bestseller. Don’t get me wrong. Definitely want that. I just don’t want to be one of those assholes who’s writing a bestseller, you know?”
“Okay.”
“Nonfiction is so fucked anyway. I mean the whole category. If I had any integrity, I wouldn’t be writing this. No, I mean it. It’s fine. You’ve got to know what you’re selling. I’ll tell you, though, when to take me out back and shoot me.…” He paused to sip. “When I do one of those books, that’s like a year of doing something. Or not doing something. You’ve read these? You’ve seen them? Like twelve months without electricity and how it changed me. Or whatever it is. Twelve months of reading books about twelve months of doing something. My pitch. My year of years. Jesus. Get a life. Which is the whole point? A life. Of these books? Supposedly?” He drank. He leaned even farther in. Hunched, again, this impossibly graceful, awkward pose. His hair fell forward. “You’re living in Connecticut? You like it? I lived there for two years when I was in middle school. Yeah, it was cool—no, seriously, I hated it. I don’t think I could live anywhere but New York. As an adult. Which is really sad. New Yorkers are such pathetic fuckers about the city. They think the fact they can’t live anywhere but New York is proof they’re super cosmopolitan. Anywhere but certain neighborhoods. I’m like, Ah, no? Not exactly? That is the definition of provincial? Let me ask you something. The Weatherfield people. They hate me, right? They think I’m a fucking deadbeat?”
“The board? I don’t know. Do you care?”
“Good question. Yeah. I don’t. Heather. Heather hates me. You’re friends with Heather?”
“She doesn’t hate you,” I said.
“I never got Heather.”
“What’s to get?”
“Listen to you.”
I blushed. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It’s cool. I’m probably just suspicious of people who are nice. Heather, I mean. What are you hiding? I think the nice people are secretly, like, super misanthropic. Right? Come on. It’s true.”
I said, “I think I should be flattered.”
“Ha. I’ll tell you something about Heather, though. Did you know she was invited to sit for All Souls at Oxford? Seriously. That woman is smart. Yeah. Don’t ask me how I know this shit. People tell me things. I swear. I don’t even try. Anyway. You want another drink? I have to go to this birthday party, birthday drinks. Some guy I used to work with. He wrote that big story about Kanye last year? You read it? No? It was okay. I mean, it was pretty good, I guess. A white guy writing about Kanye. You do you. Right? Who else are you in touch with from our year? Jay? Watch yourself around Jay. He’s like, ‘I’m giving you motherfuckers nothing to dredge up.’ He is squeaky-clean. But maybe it’s just me. Everyone knows to keep their mouths shut around me. I’ll tell you something about Jay, though. He failed the bar the first time. In Massachusetts. Yeah, yeah. I’m serious. Don’t ask me how I know this. But I mean, what are you doing even taking the fucking bar exam?” He scoffed. “Who else? This is fun. Zac out there in Silicon Valley, innovating, disrupting. Play money. Right. You’re a professor? Of course you’re a professor. Big surprise. You like it? Greta is also a professor, but she didn’t really seem the type. No, she’s a doctor. Maybe she’s a doctor professor. Huh. You know what I mean, right? She didn’t seem the type. I thought she’d be, you know, curing cancer. Who else?”
“Caroline.”
“Oh, right, we all want to be Caroline. Caroline really is saving the world.”
“I guess.”
“And Lindsay’s at some think tank. I think I quoted her in a story once.”
At Oxford, Justin hadn’t shown much interest in Lindsay, a thin white girl from Alabama with long brownish gray hair she always wore in a braided bun. She was too openly conservative. Or too southern. The post at a think tank came later. I said, “I’m not in touch with Lindsay. I’m not really in touch with anybody.”
“Me, neither. Another round? You know who was obsessed with Heather.”
“You?”
“Me, no. Mark. He thought she had that small-town goodness. It’s a thing. You’re in touch with Mark?”
“Mark? No. Why would I be?” I took a gulp of my old-fashioned. I could feel for a moment the small, cool breath of the ice.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get all offended.”
“I’m not offended.” The buzz of the room around us had gotten louder. Someone shouted with excitement in the back, near the pool table.
“You look offended. There’s no way I can write the Weatherfield thing. My book deadline is the end of the year.” He held up his glass. “Seriously, one more? The timing—I’ve totally fucked myself even without other assignments.”
“I shouldn’t have any more.”
“All right, I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t do this even if I had the time. It’s a shitty assignment. Weatherfield, I mean. He was rich. He died. End of story. A piece like this, you need some personal interest. Hold the reader’s little hand. Oh, wait. Shit.”
“What?”
He looked at me, past me. “I just realized I should be writing a different book.” He shook off the thought. “I mean, I already knew that. It’s what my agent says. I should write a memoir. You know? Memoirs sell. You remember Tamara, like a year younger than us? She was a fellow.” To my confusion, he added, “I mean, you definitely knew her.” I hadn’t. “Anyway, she’s writing a memoir. I think she got cancer or something. We can’t all be so lucky.”
“No.”
“Anyway, Ennis was a drunk who killed himself in a car accident before he was forty. No one cares. Why should they? You’ve read the stuff.”
“The foundation records.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Actually, it was his wife.”
“His wife?”
“Florence. Florence was the one who gave the money away. After Ennis died.”
“Does that matter? Is she interesting?”
“Probably not.”
“Ennis. What kind of a name is that?”
I said, “Irish.”
“Irish.” He stopped talking momentarily, as if the word proved his point. I didn’t remember his point. I nodded. I had drunk too much. I wanted to ask him something about Mark.
I said the foundation should perhaps include something of the Weatherfield history, even if no one cares.
“Really. Why?”
I think I said, “By way of acknowledgment.”
Justin shook his head no. “I get it, you have a Ph.D. You know what the fuck’s going on. But those people don’t care. The Weatherfield people. I’m serious. They read, like, the fucking New York Times op-ed page and they think it’s intellectual. They just want an excuse to charge five hundred bucks to go to a party.”
“It’s a benefit.”
“To whose benefit? Oxford? Never again. God, it took me like a decade to realize how much I fucking hated that place.”
“You did?”
“I mean, it was like Stockholm syndrome. With a whole fucking culture. Jesus, the English. Get over yourselves. The empire is done. You’re a small island in a bad climate. Learn to install a showerhead, for fuck’s sake. Seriously. You remember those showers? It was like a watering can hooked up to a transistor radio. Like up to here on me. How is this supposed to work? I was like, ‘You’re not all four feet tall.’ Right?”
I said I thought he liked it there. At Oxford, Justin smoked European cigarettes and went to a few events with a woman graduate student who was a minor member of the British aristocracy. He pointed out racism rightly and constantly, but when undergraduates protested a bop with an “Out of Africa” theme he seemed to find their sensitivity amusing. “Yeah, where’s that going to end?” He joined his college’s rowing team and became vice president of the Middle Common Room, then quit the team when he missed too many morning practices and the MCR after the Christmas bash, when officers were allowed to take home the extra wine. Meanwhile, he learned the rules of cricket well enough to talk back to commentary in pubs. He rented little Peugeots on weekends to travel with friends to places like Lyme Regis. He told stories of his mistakes with left-side-of-the-road driving.
I said to him, “I guess Oxford was kind of a waste of your time.”
“Ha.” He looked at me again. “Good way to put it. Waste of time. We’ll go with that.” He shook his head with admiration. “You’re going back tonight? You want to share a car? No, I can’t. I’m late. Okay, text me when you come back to New York. And when I’m in Connecticut … Ha. Not happening. Though I bet it’s peaceful and shit there? Maybe I should live in Connecticut. Maybe I would write a fucking memoir if I lived in Connecticut. Maybe I would blow my brains out. Why are you there anyway? Okay, I get it, long story. Next time. I have to go.”
On the train home, I should have read more about sugar, but instead, on my phone, I found one of Justin’s recent essays in The Mix. I don’t think I’d read anything he had written before then. The story was excellent. It profiled a young black woman from the Bronx with a heart-stopping singing voice who got a scholarship and was planning to attend college but was indicted at nineteen as an accessory to a drug deal while she was trying to help her mother move out of an abusive home. In between paragraphs of her narration, Justin explained how Medicaid works and why housing policy is so rotten and why poor kids can’t go to private colleges even if they get scholarships. The writing was measured and precise. I cried a little at the third and final section. The comments below the story were full of admiration: “This is the most amazing thing I have read in a long time. This is a call to action.”
Justin’s email today, his email of apology: “Sorry I forgot to give you that stuff I found. I’ll put it in the mail by the end of the week, I promise.”
“Sure,” I wrote back. “No problem.”
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2011
Today I read some descriptions of cutting cane. A description from less than a hundred years ago and a description from less than fifty years ago and a description from less than fifteen years ago and much of it seemed to match descriptions from several centuries ago. The work is relentless. Cane fields are sweltering, the soil radiating heat, the plants smothering any breeze. Cutters move through with their sharp, heavy blades. One fist grasps a stalk’s tough base and the other swings the knife; then two more strokes chop off leaves and several more, finally, divide the stalk into portions. Assemble a pile and carry it to the truck or carriage or railcar. Then again. Cutters stoop and rise and stoop. Ripe cane left in the fields too long turns acidic, and cut cane left too long dries out, so the work is intense, quick—but also exacting, and careful, to avoid injury. Injuries are common. The machete slips and slashes a finger, a tendon. And cane can pierce skin, pierce an eye. The green plant, also, ignites a rash on human skin. In Puerto Rico in the fifties, I read, the words for working the cane fields were the words for doing battle and defending oneself. In El Salvador in the nineties, sugar workers started in the cane fields as young as eight.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2011
Today I meditated. I have been reading about meditation, a little, among books about sugar. I should have started with Marcus Aurelius or the Buddha, but instead I started with Meditation in No Time at All. I got this at the library, too. I wonder if Heather has read this or would like it. Probably not earnest enough for Heather. I liked the jaunty double meaning, though; also the typical self-help prose: breezy but taking a while to offer simple instructions. The simple instructions were to sit, breathing, without any thoughts at all, or rather, with plenty of thoughts I note without pleasure or regret and let pass. Clouds in a sky: This is what the book says. One’s mind is the sky; one’s thoughts are the clouds; one’s consciousness is a sun that can observe thoughts come and go without agitation. I’m supposed to do this for ten minutes a day, then work up to fifteen, twenty, forty. Very shortly, I’m supposed to be sitting, blissful, for hours at a time. Today I tried. But it turns out my thoughts are not like clouds in the sky. They do not drift. They gnaw. My thoughts are rats in a field of sugar. Rats, I read, are one of the few animals that not only survive but even prosper when fields are cleared for cane. The crop drives out most wildlife, since it exhausts most land on which it grows. But rats prosper. In some places they are as little native to cane fields as the cane itself; they came with the colonizers and their plants, their plans; they grow fat and vicious on stuff that shouldn’t have been cultivated in the first place.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2011
Today I got an email from Renata. She wants to know what I am working on.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2011
Today I exchanged text messages with Justin.
It took about ten minutes in full. I noted the time because it passed quickly, and usually I am too nervous, when texting, for time to pass quickly. I got a smartphone only last spring, when it seemed like taking a stand not to have one, and mine is the cheap kind sold only in optimistic colors, so I look like a low-income striver rather than someone with principles about thrift or fair labor or technological overreach. I don’t use the phone much, except for maps. Texting makes me nervous because I’m not sure of the proper rhythm for beginning or ending a conversation. I remember one chat with a colleague, back when I was teaching, that started when she needed the time of a meeting, then veered into lunch preferences, and concluded when she at last typed something like “I should probably get back to grading” and I typed “OK.” Later, she commented on how abrupt I was. “No time for pleasantries with Laura!” This she said in front of several others in a crowded hallway. I smiled and apologized. I am in fact good at pleasantries, I thought; just tell me you want pleasantries! Justin did not seem to want pleasantries. A line appeared on my phone screen around 4:00 P.M.: I can’t find that folder, and I wrote back, “Who is this?” and he replied, Justin.
I wrote, “What folder?”
Weatherfield
I wrote, “Oh, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
I’ll find it I just haven’t yet. He texts very quickly. Do you think Royce wants a weird black guy to come speak during Black History Month? And then I’m changing the subject and then My book agent thinks I should get a speaking agent lol and then And do more talks and then Something like TED; get on tv and then Apparently long-form has already jumped the shark; who knew and then Oh wait I guess we all did. The phrases came one after another. Finally, I typed, “You would come here to give a talk?”
That’s the plan
Maybe
I have a couple of pieces that could be talks
But not really
They’re pieces
I hate the word pieces
Do you want to give talks?
I don’t know
Not really the question
Good for the career
I guess it IS really the question
The answer is no
What about your book? Don’t you need to finish your book?
Yeah
It’s almost done
Writing is easy
Oh.
Ha, no
Writing is hard
It sucks
Why do you think I avoid it
I read the article you wrote.
Which one?
About the musician. It was excellent.
It was cheese
Not even
Cheese product
It made me cry.
You see
Do you not like it?
Fine
It’s fine
Bad editing
It’s never about the writing
What is never about the writing?
You know
I mean
Sometimes
The writing is never about what you’re writing about
It’s about, like, this bullshit idea of what writing is
This doesn’t make sense
I think I understand.
Great I don’t
I’m kind of high right now
Okay.
Not really
Just a little
It’s the same in academics.
What is
Getting high
Research is never really about the research.
Okay
The expression is “research is me-search.”
Did you just say that
That’s corny as hell
I’m quoting.
Okay
Better
What is your research thing
I never asked
I wrote a dissertation about Henry James.
