The Mere Future (13 page)
Immediately, I saw by her expression that I had made a gross error. I seemed trite and unimportant, with no clue as to what really counts. Whoooooopsie, wrong strategy. People dump you for less. Oh my God, is there nothing worse than saying the wrong thing? My level of insecurity informed me of how much danger I was in.
I mean, it’s not like we had just started dating. I should have shouldered her disapproval as a temporary bump.
“I mean, I mean … I mean ... I was thinking about getting some more stability. I mean, some stability.”
“Well,” she scorned, black hair glowing thick and juicy as an oil spill. “You know that my cat is named Cotton Mather, and that I both love my certainty and am used to it. But now I want even
MORE
. I want to pull myself up by my bootstraps and at the same time be a trapeze artist, happily flung to my net.”
“But there is no net,” I cried.
Oy vey. To err is human, so what’s my excuse? I built my own scaffold and tried on the noose.
“Listen,” I said in my girlfriendly way. “You’re right, Nadine, and I am wrong. Protection only comes from within, I guess. And yet, I also feel that the attentive mob might actually be illusory. They can turn as quickly as the night. All we have is each other, I guess.” These were my facts and fears laid out like a cadaver. Or a gift.
“I’ll think about it,” she lied. For the rest of the night she read a book, as I silently watched commercials and worried.
U
NBEKNOWNST TO ME
, the book Nadine was reading that night,
The Age Of Innocence
, was set in Manhattan in the 1870s. Central Park was a wilderness then, surrounded by one-story saloons and hills topped with goats. Rich people whispered through the opera, which they had to go to Fourteenth Street to see. They noticed no one but each other.
It was a delicious book. Edith Wharton pulled through all her tropes.
Newland Archer, her hero, loved the main female character, May, principally because she was acceptable. However, she turned out to be a fairly deep person, despite her obedience. They announced their engagement at the ball. Later, Newland fell in love with the wrong woman, someone who would ruin his life because the exterior punishment of being with her would, mathematically, outweigh all personal satisfactions. But because choosing her would mean that he was a man who preferred satisfaction, he would have to leave her when the punishments overtook them. It was a Catch-22.
If he stayed with the acceptable and really kind of cool lady, he could anticipate a different type of satisfaction in the long run. He would enjoy some version of it, no matter how temperate.
At this point, Newland pushed the acceptable one to marry him faster because he wanted to make the possibility of being with the wrong woman something from the past. He wanted to eliminate the option.
His fiancée guessed this. He was afraid to admit her suspicions because he was afraid that she would punish and humiliate him, deprive him, and send him off on the wrong path. But she did not.
She asked him honestly what he felt, and she let him speak the truth.
This strategy was disarming and dangerous. It made him feel accepted and understood despite his inappropriate but true emotions.
It made him pass up profound satisfaction followed by long-term despair for a mild acceptance on an even keel. His fiancée did him a favor.
But then she blew it with her stupid, petty jealousy, and he was alone again with his desire.
I, N
ADINE, HAVE
no sympathy for Newland Archer, or any other creep who wants it both ways. You can only have it one way on this earth. Only the perfect can ask for forgiveness and get it, the rest had better shut up. I’m too busy.
My girlfriend, the “author” of this despicable, unforgiving book you are currently reading instead of Edith Wharton (don’t you feel foolish?) is a real jerk.
Look at the way she knows what every character is doing and feeling, even when she is not in the room. That’s just wrong. Any teacher of fiction knows that much.
I have figured out how to make
THE BIG CHANGE
work for me. By example. The society changed, so I can too. That’s how it works. The society doesn’t change
FOR
me. I have to watch and then do it for myself.
If you examine it with any pith, this New Society is really still for the same people who ran the Old Society. Why can’t my girlie figure that out? It is what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance.” They make you feel freer so that they can get more control. Why doesn’t she understand?
Actually, I can see some startup glimmers in her otherwise dusty eyes, some beginning realizations that things are not going to work out her way. But she only realizes this subconsciously.
I know, before we go to bed, that we are out of milk.
But she only finds out once the hot coffee is in the cup.
Then she stands, stupidly, before the opened refrigerator door, in her dragonfly pajamas, cup in hand and finally,
AND ONLY THEN
, is she disappointed. I was disappointed all night.
GET WITH IT!
Knowledge is available a lot sooner than you think.
Lately, the first thing she says after any long period of silence is: “Why is this happening to me?”
And
EACH TIME I
answer: “You cannot ask me this every single day.”
I mean, life is tough, but so what?
What right did she have to expect justice anyway?
What’s the point of suffering for having been stupid?
Just be smart, and you’ll feel better.
Believe me, more than once I have just blurted out:
SHUT UP AND GET A BETTER JOB OR ELSE STOP COMPLAINING
.
My idea is that she try to climb at THE MEDIA HUB. She’s been writing ad copy since first grade. It’s time for her to conceptualize ad copy, not just write it out. She needs goals.
On the other hand, I am not a monster. I understand how all this unfolded. When things were officially terrible, she knew the score. But when things improved, she never adjusted.
It stinks, but it’s a fact. There comes a time when you have to choose between surgery and suicide.
As they say at work,
You can’t play a laser disc if there is no electrochip
. Know what I mean?
Let me simplify this into more nostalgic terms so that you can get it. You can’t play a record if there is no electricity. You can’t play a record if there are no record players. You can’t play a record if they don’t make records any more. It may not be right, but it is happening.
So, MOURN, MOURN, MOURN
your old expired self. Then be done with it.
You lost, you silly butch. Everything’s better, so it’s a different game now.
GET A BETTER JOB.
I
N THE UNIVERSE
of this novel,
The Mere Future,
here is a recap of where we all stand.
NADINE AND I
We are equally in love and equally not. There is no accurate measure. A hand on a wrist. That beautiful face. Its limits become one of those ultimate mysteries.
HARRISON AND CLAIRE
The room was so crowded with their sadness. A simple sigh would have collapsed it. They glance, a narrow road. Hearts pounded or stopped. No difference between grief and collapse. Impossible demands. Another signifying the existence of truth.
HARRISON AND GINETTE
They shared details of the day at work. Each one knowing all the other’s characters. The other’s details. The other’s predictable reactions, a second skin. Each other’s taste in wire baskets, sauce, streams, shows. All known. Remember the blue hills? Remember the stapler? Remember the vault?
CLAIRE AND JEFF
If life was based on feelings, it would all be clear. But propriety brilliantly obstructs. And so they behave and revert to private torments whose existence the other tearfully doubts. Scenarios replayed privately by the memoirist alone in a chair. The room is lack, the radio strums. Pleasure, interior and recalled.
JEFF AND HIS SON FRED
Exhausted limitations, division exhausted. Refusals both low-grade and the highest tar. No effort. No satisfaction.
JEFF AND HIS SON DOMINICK
A heavy satchel dragged from place to place. Subtracting chunks on a daily basis.
FREDDY AND DOMINICK: THE BROTHERS
A bowl of soup, some rain. A shaking—but not of the fist. Gazing irrationally, serene as a drill press that signs the presence of somebody else’s progress. Forgotten inventory. Paging through a blank book, a boring book, an old book with no relevance. Rocking as they pursue an understanding of the mountain. Two skies in one day.
J
EFF WAS FOLLOWED
everywhere by everything he’d ever done wrong. He was paranoid, but that did not energize him. Even with psychotic fear, he felt lifeless. That dichotomy was his clearest evidence that something was profoundly wrong with his life. After all, if he was Death Incarnate, then why was he being chased?
Jeff was frantic with entropy.
He decided to try to relax. But how? TV was no fun these days. It just made him want to buy stuff.
He paced back and forth. Then he realized that holding up the fourth leg of the table that supported the TV was a book. The only book in the house. It was a gift from Claire, but he had never opened its covers. Carefully, Jeff lifted the TV set and placed it on the floor. It was a Fold Screen, so he rolled it under the bed. Then he moved the table and picked up the thick volume with the deep imprint of a table leg in its center. It was by a man named Ralph Ellison.
Jeff started the first page but didn’t get it. So he skipped to Chapter Two. It had been so long since he had read an actual book that Jeff had forgotten that you can’t just pick up at the second episode and figure out who’s who. If it’s a GOOD book, you won’t ever have met characters like that before. He was pretty frustrated by his inability to figure out what kind of book it was: Domestic Sit-com or Police Drama.
Then, suddenly, like a triple shot of tequila, it overtook his mind.
INVISIBLE MAN
hit! Reading Chapter Two was like staring into the sun.
Here’s why:
In Chapter Two, a rich white man hears that a poor black man has impregnated his own daughter. This fascinated Jeff. Why would someone want to do something like that? It escaped him.
Whitey goes to the sharecropper’s house to tell him off, to lecture him on why impregnating his daughter was wrong. But instead of actually explaining it, he starts off the confrontation by asking the black guy why he fucked her.
The black man in question, named Trueblood, then begins a monologue that lasts about twelve pages. He never stops talking. He explains, in his gorgeous, seductive, entertaining, intriguing, juicy way, the slyest feelings and most vulnerable sensual gestures that lead to that crucial morning when he penetrated the girl. His justification is so sexy that the white man forgets entirely about standard protocol. It is intoxicating, the desire these two bandy about. It is completely familiar, casual, and entirely understandable. It is something that men share. In fact, the white man is now so enchanted that he hands Trueblood a one-hundred dollar bill. That’s how persuasive Trueblood’s story is.
Jeff also was a horrible father. He didn’t fuck his children, but he did other things to destroy them. Like Trueblood, he knew that he had done something wrong. But still, he wanted to get away with it. And he enjoyed the escape. He was good at avoiding responsibility, and a person needs to be good at something. Even if it is only denial. It suddenly gave Jeff a sense of self he had never known—to imagine pulling something off, no matter what it was.
It is in this way that readers derive messages from books that have nothing to do with the author’s intentions.
Because, actually, Trueblood was ironically and complexly standing up for himself as a black man. The white guy had no right to ask him anything, no matter how gross his misdeed. It was none of the white man’s affair. He had no right to walk into this black man’s house and quiz his morality. And yet Trueblood could not tell the white guy to fuck off, because he could get lynched. If the reader just focused on this aspect—Trueblood’s courageous resistance to white supremacy—then one could forget that he was a child fucker. That was the brilliant trick of the book. And that was exactly how Jeff felt about the Richies, the kind of folks that Claire seemed to rub shoulders with. It made him hate her proximity to them. That was the only thing about her that he hated. But that was a lot.
Further interpreting the book through his own lens, Jeff realized that even though he sucked as a parent, he was still a working-class man, doing a boring hard job. And that gave him some kind of decency. In fact, being exploited was the definition of decency. He did his horrible job instead of pawning it off on others as the Richies did.
Trueblood showed Jeff that he could be a monster and still be okay. Nothing else in his life ever had. Jeff reconsidered books and started to love them. He could pretend they said anything he wanted them to say, and as long as he stayed out of classrooms and book groups, no one would claim otherwise. The only thing that kept him from reading nonstop from then on was the fact that books had come back into style. He didn’t want to be like every other fucker. Books were coming back as part of the Low-tech Revolution. Jeff had always known better than to do/believe what everyone did and believed. Trends were all constructed, any idiot knew that. He’d been a computer mechanic for twenty years and he knew how the plastic hearts who ran the world functioned. Those plasties. They’d come up with some slogan like:
“Better Potty Than Snotty”
to sell an antihistamine that caused mood swings. After all, everyone was used to psychotic behavior, but no one liked sniffling. The slogan would go out on the psycho-serve for a while, then the magazines would pick it up as a headline to an unrelated article. For example: