A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (17 page)

As long as you aren’t too obvious about it, you can deflect almost any inquiry by turning it back on the person who asked you and looking like you genuinely care about the answer. “So, where were you on the night of the crime?” a police officer will ask me someday, and I will smile and say, “Well, you know, here and there, but what were
you
up to, Carl?”

Thus my response to Kidney Lady. “He’s nobody. TELL US ABOUT THE KIDNEY. YOU WERE SAYING SOMETHING REALLY INTERESTING ABOUT THE KIDNEY,” I said.

“Wine is good for the kidney,” she said. “Bud naat too mush wine. That’s the trick: knowing when to stop with the wine.” She swayed a little, gesturing, then lurched into an explanation.

The secret to a good backstory is that nobody actually cares
about your backstory. You can let this depress you (“The universe is vast and indifferent and nobody really listens to what you tell them!”) or you can get really excited by it (“The universe is vast and indifferent and sometimes this means free cheese!”). I know which option I’d pick.

“Seth Aaron” and I managed to make it all the way through dessert and coffee, and at the end we escaped with the business cards of several of our dining companions and a promise to dine with them the next time we visited Korea.

“That was exhilarating,” David said. “I can’t believe we did that.”

You could see the screenplay writing itself.

III.

When David told the class he had been working on a play about exactly where he was in his life right now, he was not kidding. It was
exactly
where he was in his life right now. Any moment of confusion, pent-up insult, or sharp spike of agony worked its way into the draft. Midway through the rehearsal process, sensing that the play was not “edgy” or “theatrical” enough, David decided that all the female characters should be played by men in drag. Then he changed it back.

There was also a Greek chorus that spoke in verse. Did I mention that there was a Greek chorus that spoke in verse?
There was a Greek chorus that spoke in verse.

I giggled. After kindergarten, your feelings can’t really get hurt too badly by anything that rhymes, unless you make a point of seeking out rap battles.

The play ended with David’s character, “Woody,” all alone and being lectured by the Greek chorus on his inability to make decisions.

David claimed that some of the play was from his imagination,
but even in the play, a character picks up the play, glances at the dialogue, and complains that he is being quoted verbatim.

“He’s a composite,” Woody tries to argue.

“Composite?” Dick says. “His name sounds exactly like my name and he says the exact same things that I have said to you. He is your roommate, and I am your roommate.”

That was the play all over.

As the revisions went on, my character cried a lot more than I remembered crying and delivered a long speech about how rueful she was to lose him. “Enter June,” every stage direction would read. “She was hot, but kind of a butterface. She was crying. ‘How can you do this to me?’ June would say. ‘I COULD HAVE HAD YOUR BABIES.’ Exit June, sobbing wordlessly.”

Sitting there with our classmates and his parents while the actors painstakingly dramatized conversations that he had had with his roommates about his love life was the kind of thing that should have been a nightmare—for him.

I sat next to a friend who kept nudging me. “Did that happen?” he kept asking. “Did that happen?”

“No,” I huffed, irritable. “None of it happened. Not like that.”

When he broke up with me, in the play, it was extremely dramatic. June cries. June carries on. June brings up children. June is, in short, a psychopath.

The way I actually remember it, we left Au Bon Pain to sit on a scenic footbridge down by the Charles River, and people kept walking between us, and I kept yelling, “Don’t mind us—we’re just BREAKING UP OVER HERE! YA HEAR ME?”

So maybe it wasn’t
un
dramatic.

You know how they say people resemble their pets? Your dog’s a psychopath, take a good hard look in the mirror? Exes are like that, too. It takes two to make a “crazy ex” story.

Sure, he wrote a play about me. But me?

I paid a man on the Internet to teach me how to get “your man back, or your money back, in ninety days guaranteed.”

Maybe that is how I should have started the story.

IV.

In the play, my character wandered around making jokes constantly and everyone else had to guess her feelings from context clues. One sensed that it was sort of an exhausting process for them.

I did this in real life, too. After a few days of Googling, crying, and Googling while crying, I took prompt, completely logical action: I found T Dub.

I found him the way you find anyone these days: the Google genie. That’s not a cutesy way of addressing Google. I just mean the different Google that exists for the dark watches of the night when you have a wish instead of a question. “How do I get him: back/to marry me/to ask me out/to notice me/to kiss me/to propose/to fall in love with me/to love me again/to want me/to like me again?” Google, how? “How do I stop: snoring/coughing/being lazy/eating/drinking/hating myself?” How? Tell me, whatever it is, and I’ll do it. I’ll do it, Google. Here, have an arm. Have a toe. Have my firstborn.

Usually what happens is you come across a page of Yahoo! Answers people patiently explaining that you can’t make anyone love you, but there’s always a telltale misspelling that gives you hope. The person can’t tell your from you’re. What can he possibly know about love? Besides, you’ve been on there yourself, under an alias, giving people flawed advice about what medicines to give their cats. Maybe you got yourself on the other end by accident. And then there are the people who insist you can do it after all, using
“psychological tricks.” They, too, have misspellings, but what’s a misplaced apostrophe between friends?

And then there’s T Dub.

T Dub is on YouTube. He speaks slowly and soothingly and redundantly.

“I’ve come up with this system,” he says, “where you can speed up time so that you don’t have to spend months or years healing. You can just do this magic, this healing, and get yourself right there in no time.”

Now YouTube’s full of people like him. Maybe it was then, too. At any rate T Dub was the first one I found, and I latched on like a bur with dependency issues. No man making videos in his kitchen where he spoke in such a slow, reassuring drawl about getting your ex back could possibly be mistaken about love or psychology, I thought.

After watching a couple of videos in which T Dub extolled the virtues of the complete “Time-Compression Healing” system, I decided to go for it. It was that or drinking to excess and watching
Sherlock Holmes
over and over again. And the latter was going to lead nowhere good—kidney failure or deciding that a deerstalker hat was a good investment.

I paid T Dub the forty dollars he demanded and clicked
DOWNLOAD
. Soon I was reading through the accompanying e-pamphlet as I listened to T Dub’s words of encouragement. My roommate came home to find me doing sit-ups on the floor as a man’s slow drawl encouraged me to “wait sixty days before you contact him.”

“What in God’s name?” she would have said, once. But this was a full year after the time she’d come home to find a baby pool full of water on the floor and an animatronic Elvis head in the window, so nothing surprised her. “Hi, Petri,” she said.

“I’m going to get my man back or my money back,” I informed her. “Ninety days, guaranteed.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Good night.”

•   •   •

How none of this made it into his play, I will never know. This, to me, is the real meat of the story. I ate better. I did sit-up(s?). And, more important, I spent a few days really intending to wait sixty days before contacting him.

That was impossible. College is basically a big fish tank. You don’t see fish breaking up. Where would they go? How would they avoid each other around the plastic shipwreck? They never break up. They eat each other instead.

•   •   •

At the sixty-day mark, he asked me to come to his house formal with him. I called T Dub to thank him.

“Mailbox full,” T Dub’s voice mail said.

I was too elated to care.

“Why did you decide it was worth giving this another go?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been writing this play. About, you know, my life, this fall.”

“Oh,” I said.

•   •   •

And this time I broke up with him, and all heck broke loose. The revisions began.

The revisions were ugly.

In my defense (this is all in my defense) I didn’t know that it was normal. That the moment you attained something it stopped being unattainable and started to pick at its pimples and ramble on too long about subjects that bored you.

In my defense, I kill plants. The first few weeks I’m excited to have them, and I remember that plants need water. Then afterward they slip my mind and I don’t notice they’ve died until a month later when they’re sprawled helpless on top of my radiator, frozen in their final gesture of making a desperate play for the window latch.

In my defense, I had been reading Proust, and it had gone to my head. This was what he said would happen. He hated Albertine when he had to spend time with her. She bored him stiff. But when he was without her he was miserable. Proust had his share of issues.

In my defense, this was my first time at this, really.

In my defense—I’m sorry.

•   •   •

When we wound up in the same playwriting class the next semester, I discovered that he had not been kidding about the play. There had been no reason to think he was kidding, but—it was, if anything,
more
faithful to life than I had been capable of imagining.

It was strange seeing myself on the page. I was used to narrating.

“Again, it seems unlikely that the character would actually say a thing like this,” I pointed out, flicking my pencil over the portion of the story where June yelled, “HEY, SORRY, FOLKS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE WE’RE JUST HAVING AN ACRIMONIOUS BREAKUP.”

David glared daggers at me. I assume. I was studiously trying to avoid eye contact.

“I mean,” I continued, emboldened, “who would actually say a thing like that? That doesn’t sound like a real person to me.”

At least the actress playing me was hot.

“No,” David told her, not looking at me. “Gawkier.”

“Uh, okay,” she said.

“Could you be more of a self-centered bitch?”

“Excuse me?”

“Not you, the character.”

“Oh.”

•   •   •

Crazy ex stories are hard because they started out as love stories. And the key moment in a love story is the moment when you realize that—of all the improbable things!—there’s a person inside someone else! He or she is not just a character in the plotline of your life. You thought you were the only real one. You thought you were alone in the universe, twisting the dials on a radio in a postapocalyptic hut somewhere. Then one day you get a signal back. That’s a love story for you.

I’m real. You’re real. Now what?

But this isn’t a love story.

This is a story about unreliable narrators, about the stories you tell yourself about the people you can’t have. In stories like that only one person is ever real. So you don’t get to tell this story. I’m the real one; you’re a character in my story. I’m the one who gets to tell this.

Turning people into characters does a kind of violence to them. You lose a dimension or two pinning them down to the page. No, you say. Stop. Don’t move. This won’t work if you move. You are the story I tell about you.

The instant you tell a story it stops being quite true.

“That wasn’t how it happened,” I said, as June sobbed and the Greek chorus launched into another burst of doggerel.

That wasn’t how it happened. Let me tell you how it happened. My crazy ex-boyfriend wrote a play about me. It’s a funny story. Not a love story.

You know the sensation, when you’re talking, and you hear yourself talking, and you suddenly drift up above yourself until you are only dimly aware of this person speaking many fathoms below you? And the only sensation that permeates the cloud on which you are sitting as that poor person beneath you rambles on is, “That really isn’t going well”? And you watch, in a sort of disinterested horror, as this person keeps speaking and speaking, and things get worse and worse, and you think, “I really should stop talking.” And you don’t stop. And what seems like geologic ages pass, and you watch everyone around you evolve into higher forms of life, and develop the use of tools. And you’re still talking. You know that sensation, where you know you shouldn’t be talking but are powerless to stop yourself?

Bertram Wittington has never experienced that sensation.

Bertram Wittington is a friend of my father’s. The best way to describe him is as a mine of impressive, obscure, and totally unverifiable information. He used to spend his days riding the bus up and down Wisconsin Avenue, wearing a tuxedo, a carnation in his buttonhole, a top hat, and carrying a cane. He used to come to my home for Thanksgiving dinner. And I was never sure if he had a house.

My father has always adored Bertram, because he has a British accent and the ability to calculate the day of the week for any date in history. When you complain about your lousy day, he will respond with the story of an eminent Panamanian who committed suicide for similar reasons. Tell him that you just ate a sandwich, and he will tell you how President Garfield really died. “Poor man! It was the doctors killed him. Terrible thing.”

Probably because of the accent and the top hat, my father is convinced that Bertram Wittington is a great social conquest. “This man has forgotten more about the Schleswig-Holstein question than most people ever knew!” he exclaims.

My mother, on the other hand, did not share his rosy view. This probably dates back to the evening that he came to our house and my father greeted him by plucking her prized orchid and placing it in Bertram’s buttonhole. Once, she insists, she saw a centipede crawl out of his collar.

But I’ve always loved him.

•   •   •

Let me explain. When you’re a kid, sometimes you’ll be on your way to someone’s house and your parents will say, in hushed tones, “Now, just so you know, Gerald is a bit of a character.” And you’ll think, “Ooh! A character!” You read plenty of books, so you know what a character is. When the car pulls up to the house you’re expecting a man to come dashing out in full nineteenth-century garb screaming “DO NOT YOU HEAR IT IN THE WALLS? THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HEART!” but then it turns out that what your parents meant by “character” was that Gerald thinks way too highly of his dog and says “mmkay?” a lot.

But Bertram actually WAS a character. He could have slipped right into the cast of anything I was reading, completely undetected. If he’d ever wound up at one of those literary parties with Oscar
Wilde, you had the sense that a vicious knock-down, drag-out fight would have ensued over who got to monopolize the conversation.

He also sometimes drank. As a child, I viewed drunkenness as a kind of superpower. I vividly remember the first time I saw a drunk person. I was standing in a line at a church picnic in Wisconsin waiting for an old lady to give me a piece of chicken, a healthy ladling of mashed potatoes, and some runny gray gravy that looked like snail tears, when I became aware that a man farther down the line was speaking loudly and teetering.

“They’re gonna beat your butts,” he announced, loudly, listing leftward. “TIME will SEE!”

I’d never seen a drunk person before. It was mesmerizing.

This man could say literally ANYTHING! Who knew what would come out of his mouth next?

When I yelled things, my parents said, “Shh!” and “Keep your voice down!” and sometimes they addressed me by my first, middle, and last names, just to show they were serious about it. But this man could just say stuff. Any stuff! As loudly as he wanted! He might as well have flown up into the sky out over the picnic, clad entirely in spandex.

“Come on, Alexandra,” my mom said, yanking me in the opposite direction.

The whole ride back I mouthed, “They’re gonna beat your butts,” to myself, reverently. “Time will SEE!” It didn’t even make sense. It was incredible.

Bertram took full advantage of this power. Some nights, you could get a word in edgewise only if he decided to visit the restroom. I was mesmerized.

He sat there with his carnation in his buttonhole, one hand on his cane, holding his audience spellbound. Admittedly, the audience consisted of maybe five people, two of whom had been trying and
failing to interrupt his flow all evening, and one of whom was my mother, who thought Bertram was full of it, but one of them was me, and I was riveted. I wanted to do that someday.

His specialty was twofold: 1) sweeping and slightly controversial statements about people, supported by one or two vivid but apocryphal anecdotes, and 2) insisting that current or historical events that people had heard of were better explained by other historical events that no one but Bertram had heard of. “The thing about the financial crisis,” he would say, “is that really it resembles
parfaitement
what happened to a man named Herr von Bulow in 1654 in Holland.” (I’m making this up. He generally wasn’t, although we didn’t quite have Google then, so you tended to take his word for it.)

•   •   •

Growing up, every year, I clamored to go to his birthday party. If there was anything stranger than Bertram himself, it was the people who invariably showed up at his birthday parties.

The first year, the hostess was a lady by the name of Elaine who kept going around the party reintroducing herself to everyone under weird aliases. “Hello, I’m Elaine!” she would say. A few minutes would pass, and she would come back around the circle. “Clara!” she’d yell. “It’s a pleasure.”

Her entire home was covered in blown-up pictures of Bertram at various stages of life. Like the pictures, he had gradually increased in size as time went on. He was holding court in the corner of the party talking about eighteenth-century sailing mishaps, paying no attention to Elaine except at one point in the evening when she wandered over to him and introduced herself as Alice.

“Don’t like your hair!” he snapped. “Too yellow!”

She devoted the rest of the night to following us around the house trying to force books on us and then taking them back. My father and I had finally, reluctantly, accepted a book of drawings,
only to find her chasing us down the street screaming, “I CAN’T BEAR TO PART WITH IT!”

Strange as these parties were, they were nothing compared to Thanksgiving, one year.

In attendance were Bertram, my parents, myself, my father’s college roommate, his daughter Katie—who cared a lot about animal rights—and my mother’s friend, who had done some work for the Humane Society.

The evening didn’t start too badly. Bertram was in fine form. “The killer wabbit who pursued Jimmy Carter has indeed been, ah, historically substantiated,” he was saying. “But never mind
All the King’s Men
.
World Enough and Time
is truly the greatest of the books of Robert Penn Warren.”

We were all listening dutifully. Bertram Wittington was a raconteur, and he was going to racont whether you wanted him to or not.

But as we sat down to dinner, the plot thickened.

Bertram had to pause for air from telling us about Bavarian vicomtesses. So the lady who worked at the Humane Society decided to mention her work to Katie.

“Oh,” Katie said, stiffening perceptibly. “The Humane Society. How do you feel about killing millions of innocent puppies and kitties every day?”

This was not quiiiite accurate, and I was going to say so, when Bertram jumped in.

“Well, that’s nothing compared to what the Bavarian gentry used to do!” he responded. “They used to put eight thousand head of cattle in an enclosure and fire on them with a cannon! Five hundred dead was considered a good day’s sport!”

“I don’t think that’s anyone’s idea of sport,” said Katie.

“Well, it certainly wasn’t the Spanish gentry’s!” Bertram said. “They used to hunt gypsy women! With their dogs!”

Bertram paused and became reflective. “But, you know, it wasn’t any fun. The gypsy women didn’t put up much of a fight, just fell over and died. So do you know what they did?”

Silence. Utter, complete, brittle silence. The only one who didn’t notice that everyone was frozen in mortification was Bertram.

I knew that someone had to say something. “What?” I asked.

“They tied their babies to them!”

“I have to leave,” Katie said.

“But that was nothing compared to the Roman emperors,” Bertram confided to me. “They used to feed their eels on used slaves.”

“Ah,” I said.

The following year, Bertram was the only one of those guests to return.

•   •   •

When I was younger, mistaking Bertram for a Figure of Some Literary Eminence, my father told me to give him everything I wrote. When I wrote what I thought was my first novel, I printed it out and placed it reverently in his hands. He returned half of it several months later, covered in soup and unintelligible scribbles.

After graduating from college, I gave him my undergraduate thesis, a verse translation of Aristophanes’
Frogs
. For whatever reason, I could not mail him the copy, nor did he have an e-mail address. Instead, he instructed me to drop it off at a Thai restaurant.

“Bangkok Bistro,” he said. “They know me there.”

I showed up the next morning. “I have a package to leave here,” I began, nervously. The man minding the desk looked at me. “For Mr. Bertram?” I said.

“Oh, Mr. Bertram!” the man said, looking reassured. “Sure, sure.”

For months thereafter he routinely telephoned my office and said cryptic things like “The Serpent Messenger, perhaps?”

As a kid, I thought of Bertram as a figure like Santa Claus, if Santa were real and showed up at the house twice a year to drop off used books. My father had mentioned I was a Civil War buff, so every few months Bertram would heave his enormous bulk up our front steps, looking like Moby-Dick in a dinner jacket, ring the doorbell, and hand over a large brown paper sack filled to the brim with relevant books, some a little damp.

“He reads everything. That’s how he comes to know so much,” my father said.

And maybe he did. Every subject I managed to learn about, it seemed he already knew. Whenever I managed to dominate even a small segment of the conversation at dinner, I felt elated. Bertram’s conversation veered and leaped so wildly that it was hard to stay on the whole time. If you managed to contribute something to the discussion of the Schleswig-Holstein question, you were left empty-handed when Bertram moved on to the enema that had once been administered to Louis XIV (Bertram had it on good authority). And if you were still on the bucking horse of his conversation even after that, well, he had naughty stories about the recordings that had been made of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about Jackie Kennedy’s lips. He generally ladled these opinions out over dessert, as I sat silently, rapt, hoping not to be dismissed from the table to my room upstairs.

“Tell about the killer rabbit,” I insisted. “And Jimmy Carter. Tell about Rasputin. Tell about the eels.”

His decline and the rise of the Internet coincided nicely. There was not room for both of them.

•   •   •

In the past decade or so, Bertram and I haven’t seen each other much. But it’s been enough to know that I was right.

Most people seem like characters only from a distance. You get
to know them and the mist evaporates and you’re left with a person just like all the other people you know. But not Bertram.

He really
was
larger than life.

He even had a show on the History Channel, for a brief time, telling his famous stories from the depths of an enormous chair.

Not that he wasn’t also a person. He was. He had numerous friends. I was proud to be on the roster. I went to another party in his honor—a luncheon, a few years ago—and there was a whole long table full of people who wanted to thank him. He’d edited their books or had rescued them from tight spots with his armada of facts or had gotten them through difficulties of one sort or another. The most improbable people always turned up at these parties. (No sign of Elaine this time, but there was a woman (he’d either flooded or unclogged her sink; I can’t remember which) who insistently pressed a CD of her attempt at traditional Indian drumming into my hands. Her instructor, she told me, believed she was the reincarnation of a famous fifteenth-century drum master. If so, she’d lost a little in translation.)

So many things from childhood seem bigger than they are. There is a kind of magic that clings to things when you don’t know their backstory. That armchair has always been there. That is the Big Serving Spoon. This is What We Do on Sundays. Things take the definite article. This isn’t just a chair. This is the chair. This is the grandmother. This is the house.

Then as you get older you realize that there is no particular magic to any of these items. There was nothing special about this chair. It came from a catalogue. It didn’t matter that you had pot roast on Sunday. Those rituals held no special potency. There are no characters, just more people. You see the strings behind the puppets. The movies that once terrified you leave you bemused, at best.

But Bertram was different. If the lines of people waiting to thank
him and hanging on his words at long tables attested to anything it was that people had noticed he was something out of the ordinary. He didn’t shrink with time, not really.

Yes, he grew older and quieter. He switched to orange juice. He had health problems. Time eats people, always.

But he kept telling stories. Even diminished, he was formidable.

He knew the best way of getting away with being yourself. You could be as odd as you liked, as long as you had something to offer—in his case, a whole arsenal of stories, anecdotes, odds and ends of fact. Once he started to tell a story, nothing could touch him. Not awkwardness, not the silence around the table, not even the thing that might or might not be crawling out of his collar. With him the silence wasn’t awkward, just a vacant space to pour a story in. He was a snake charmer of conversations. It was, I realized, possible to live like this.