Indecision (6 page)

All the evidence corroborated itself: our communal life was breaking down. For months Ford had been mostly lost to Kat and the higher standard of living coupledom seemed to exact from you, if you were in a couple, or an official one. Meanwhile Dan had become more evasively himself than ever. And as for Sanch, his absenteeism—more of the spirit really than of the pretty considerable flesh—could probably be dated from around when the medical information website he’d gotten in on the ground floor with had finally collapsed, causing him to flip out, smoke weed for a record twenty-six days in a row, at last find a temp job, and then apply to nine different grad schools in four different subjects. He still couldn’t decide between the places he’d gotten into, and so had semi-impoverished himself by paying commitments to all three.

I went and sat down on the saggier, more forgiving couch. Pointlessly I reached into my boxers, weighed my balls, and let them go. I wondered what the Abulinix would assist me in deciding to do once our lease ran out. Vermont? Really? Truly? Or maybe Dan and I would get a place together in the city. In which case we ought to be looking right now. (I got up and went to find my to-do list.) Or else I should probably begin contemplating the harrowing but low-cost possibility of moving in with mom for a while. Even dad . . . However there didn’t seem to be much purpose in thinking along these lines until the drug kicked in, and all I wrote down on my to-do list, standing over it and foully burping, was PATIENCE!

One of Sanch’s potential subjects of knowledge was American Studies, so I went up to him and asked about Quality of Life. “We ever find out if these guys are white or black?”

“Supposedly they’re black guys pretending to be white college students who act like they’re black. They all wear blackface.”

“But they are black?”

Sanch nodded. “Infinite regress has gone mainstream. Supposed to be a think piece about it in the
Times.
”

From the landing I fetched the Sunday
New York Times,
four thick pounds of information. On average I read only maybe two ounces or so. Yet I felt excused in this by our whole collective ownership of the thing, and simply by the nature of Sunday as that recurrent day whose tremendous potential seems much more enjoyable than any actual use of it could be. Usually if the weather was at all iffy I’d just sit inside idling, fueling myself with coffee, and looking out the window at the shoppers and brunchers going by, the terror-tourists headed down the street. I’d sit inside and luxuriate in the impossibility of mailing out overdue bills, or sending anyone my résumé, renter references, or questionable credit report. Alice had warned me that soon the Postal Service would be privatized, and I wanted to savor this sabbathy pleasure while it lasted.

No sooner had I settled with the
Times
into the battered bamboo satellite dish of Ford’s papasan chair than the phone started to ring. It was ringing, terrifyingly, in my hand. Apparently I’d picked it up under the misleading impression that it was the TV remote.

“Chambers St.,” I said in my best fear-dissembling voice.

“So are you on your way, Dwight? Or what are you doing?”

“Al!” My beloved sister Alice! “I’m so glad it’s you.”

“Dwight . . .” From the note of constraint in her voice I could tell that she was with mom. And from a glance at the old homeroom style clock that we’d nailed to one wall it was also possible to know approximately what both Alice and mom would be wearing at this hour. And even to remember that I’d forgotten to reply one way or another to mom’s suggestion that we all three go to church together. “Fuck.” It had been a to-do list item that I’d carried over from day to day like some indivisible remainder. “I’m on my way now.”

Two clean shirts were available, and after closing my eyes in order to pick one, I buttoned up the blue oxford cloth, stuffed it, along with my hairy legs, into some presentable khakis, then threw on my seersucker blazer and ran out the door yelling to Sanch, “No eggs for me, man.”

“Who am I cooking for? I’m already fat, Dwight. You fuck!”

I had just reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped outside to the street when I knotted and centered the floral-print Liberty tie that made me feel, once I did this, on the very same page as the weather. I sighed. The spring consisted on our block of warm blossom-rinsed air and some pear trees in leaf. So that was nice. Nor did I even feel like I would puke as I dashed to the corner to hail a cab.

I found Vaneetha standing off the curb with a brown deli bag in one hand as she waved with the other hand at a slowing yellow taxi. “Hey lady,” I said.

She took a step back. “Remind me not to look at you again in natural light. Are you well?”

“I’m confident that in the end I will be.” I piled into the cab after her.

“But where are you going?”

I knew where
she
was going—to some relative-arranged and parent-appeasing brunch date with some literally Brahmin, like
Indian
-Brahmin young man.

“Church,” I informed her.

“Ah. Mummy’s new initiative.”

Vaneetha wasn’t a huge fan of my mom’s. This may have been because mom pronounced Vaneetha’s name—like she did all girlfriends’ or potential girlfriends’ names—with this delicate indulgent condescension as if it were, à la
Mademoiselle
or whatever, some honorific in a foreign language. “Vaneetha . . .” she would say, like that. “How are you finding New York?”

The second time, Vaneetha was like, “It’s certainly hard to miss.” And what a real little shiver of lust it turned out you got the first time a love object was, behind the joking tone, a little bit bitchy to your mom.

To our cabby’s neck I said, “Um, just to the corner of Eleventh for me.”

A sense of largesse is what I always experienced in taking a cab, and cheerfulness from running late, as my whole being sharpened toward the point of arrival. Equipped with these feelings, I swiveled to kiss Vaneetha.

“You smell of . . . Is it Jiggy Juice? Did you go out drinking with Herr Knittel once I was asleep?”

Vaneetha was a little sensitive on the subject—the many subjects, really—of
The Uses of Freedom,
and had even complained not completely in jest that I cared more for Knittel than for her. Admittedly I did feel I had more to learn from him.

Usually if you ignore one question you will be asked another—and now Vaneetha had switched to her default question of what did I feel like doing on such and such a fast-approaching date. “I’m free on Wednesday,” she was saying. “Or late Thursday might work.”

“I’m thinking,” I told her.

It bothered Vaneetha that I couldn’t produce too many clear pictures of our shared pleasant future activity. And when I’d suggested that she was such a special person in my book that I despaired of finding any matchingly special context, such as a really nice restaurant, or one we could afford, she’d accused me of sophistry. I liked it that she knew just the word to wound me.

“Dwight?” Vaneetha asked.

“Still thinking,” I said by way of an update.

The streets were Sunday-empty as we shot up Sixth Ave. like a drug through a vein. Sunlight falling from the east splashed across Vaneetha’s knees snug in black nylon, and I discovered I was glad to be hungover. Sometimes a hangover really helps—otherwise simple mental operations are so easy to carry out that you disdain to perform them. But right now the easy question of Wednesday night seemed ideally suited to my present level of mental competence, and unhesitatingly, with an air of unshakable certainty, I produced two words: “Cambodian Cuisine. Let’s go get Cambodian cuisine in Brooklyn. On Wednesday night
or
late Thursday. That’s what
I
want anyway.”

I’d always been impressed by Vaneetha’s basic clarity of will or lucidity of desire (except regarding our relationship), and had aspired to emulate it. But I could really only sham the thing, and usually it wasn’t until it was too late—and I was eating dim sum while pining for gnocchi, or swallowing some gnocchi while jonesing for dhosai—that I could locate in myself a genuine preference for one restaurant or another, something that was a crucial skill in New York and evidently an important contemporary venue for personality-expression. Yet in order not to behave like one of those wishy-washy males whom I joined everyone else in deploring, I would affect some insistence on—well, in this case, Cambodian food. And this was genius! Because not only was there just the one Cambodian establishment known to me, but it was also fairly cheap and was called, with tremendous forthrightness, Cambodian Cuisine. Pick the food and you’d chosen the place—which more than compensated for my indifference, palate-wise, to fried triangles of tofu.

“Cambodian cuisine!” I said again, and it did sound good, because at least it was food, and I hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Nevertheless I saw with dismay that you can hardly get more conscious of your arbitrariness than by pretending to be free of it. And as I looked at Vaneetha with a big smile meant to cover up my shameful condition, I was also looking sort of
through
her—and through the brick buildings knocking past with their zagging fire escapes, rainbow flags, and dazzled streaming windows—to the time when the Abulinix would come and intervene in my brain.

“I adore your cravings,” Vaneetha said. “It’s as if you’re pregnant.” She put a hand on my thigh.

I put a hand on
her
thigh. Soon the two of us would have to decide whether to become, or remain, or cease to be a couple. The anticipation of this event was such a foretaste of shared punishment either way that I wanted us to enjoy things while we could. So I took hold of Vaneetha’s hand in this very romantic heartfelt manner—even if to do so might mean prejudicing our ultimate decision in favor of continued physical contact, a choice that seemed to be, on balance, and all other things being equal, probably the worse or worst of the options. After all she’d gotten to know me as an abuliac, and people who know you have a way of regulating your behavior to make it conform with your incoherent past.

“So what’s this about Vermont?” Vaneetha asked out of the blue. The question alarmed me—Vermont was not a state we had discussed.

“Don’t look at me like I’m mad—I saw your great big note to yourself, VANEETHA, VERMONT. It was lying in plain view on the dresser. I’m not sure when you’re thinking of, but you know I have two weeks in August. Hint.”

I squeezed her hand. “Hint taken,” I said—and immediately postponed thinking about Vermont in August until the Abulinix kicked in.

“I’m going to kiss you in spite of your breath,” Vaneetha announced.

“Go crazy,” I tried to say.

FOUR

The cab released me at Eleventh. “Call me,” Vaneetha said, and I said, “Defin’ely.” I started running toward mom’s place past the brownstones and the mixed generations of cars, past all the twitching leaf-feathered branches, past a concrete elementary school with aluminum window frames and a primary-colors paint job. Normally I didn’t pay that much attention to New York. It always seemed weirdly
pre-perceived,
with other people already on the job. But it really was a nice place, if you looked in the right neighborhood, and imagined people more like yourself and your friends living there. Mom had relocated to Eleventh St. just a few months before, when she and Dr. Hajar broke up for the second or third time. It was also around then that she’d gotten way more interested in the Church.

The new apartment was inside the one brownstone disguised with scaffolding and dark netting. Originally mom had moved to New York to be closer to us kids, and if you did the geography she had been getting closer all the time, living at first with Mrs. Howland up on the Upper East Side, then sliding down for a while into Dr. Hajar’s place in the rich little district it seemed like she was the only one still calling Turtle Bay, and finally renting this apartment on the same block as St. Vincent’s like a month before the walls of the hospital became this horrible mural of 9/11 missing. Then there seemed to have been some terrorism-induced backsliding with Dr. Hajar—a nice guy with a sense of humor, an orthopedic practice, very hairy arms, and sinus troubles—and now she was alone again and spending the days I didn’t know how. I got the impression that the landlord assured her that work on the façade was nearing completion much more often than any worker dudes came along to bear him out. And I resented him and those delinquent guys for prolonging architecturally the whole transitional phase mom was already going through as she tried to set up a life without dad involved, and organized around something else.

These church excursions with the kids were the latest addition to her single-lady routine. In fact her Episcopalianism had revived to the point where she was threatening to go all the way and get ordained. Mom was full of ideas on how the Church had gone astray. She had even been shopping around this manuscript called
The Episcopalian Vegetarian,
copyedited by poor Alice. According to mom, new ethical commitments needed to be made by the Church, along with new dietary restrictions imposed, if it was ever going to recover the big-time relevance it arguably never had. This was the notion that led most directly to last Thanksgiving dinner where she served—to me and Alice and Dr. Hajar, plus the visiting ex-archbishop of Cleveland and his wife—an enormous golden-colored tofurkey, or tofu turkey, as what I guess you would call the pièce de résistance.

“Hmm . . . Mmm . . .” the guy’s wife mused with that special warm falsity of certain rich-ish women. We were sitting in mom’s dark dining room that was paneled in dark wood and made even darker by the workmen’s eternal veiling of the building’s façade. There was no art or other décor in the room except for this white rectangular panel attached perpendicularly to one wall with a Christian cross cut out from it. And in two cages in one corner, standing on their perches, you had Budge and Gordon, mom’s parrots, somehow like souvenirs from a more tropical period of a person’s life.