Little Failure (49 page)

Partly, this is what being of college age is about, being an expert on everything. But also I am saying exactly what my parents would be saying about Maya. Spoiled American. Didn’t go through what we went through. Wasting her life. In fact, with my thick new stubbly goatee and my joyous sarcasm, I am a direct stand-in for my father. If only I could have one of those UN placards to place in front of me every time I sit behind a desk. Republic of Fatherlandia.

One night during summer break from Oberlin, after getting John to buy me dinner at Le Bernardin or La Côte Basque or some little East Ninth Street joint with perfect butter-and-garlic-soaked snails, the kind of food I could only have imagined while watching
Dallas
and eating my mother’s farmer’s cheese with canned peaches, we find ourselves in the subway. I am so happy to be back in Manhattan, so happy to be with my new best friend, so happy to have been so well fed, each hundred dollars spent on me equal to a new kind of love. Even the number 1 train slowly clanging along from downtown to midtown to uptown, even its crowded melancholy, pleases me to no end. I have to say something to immortalize this moment.

“I don’t understand why people want to root for the underdog,” I say.

And John just looks at me. At my gaping teeth. At my Don Johnson sleeves. He doesn’t want to say what he’s thinking. That to him
I’m an underdog. That he knows who I am. That he’s scared of what I might become. That his own mother had told him growing up, over and over, “I’d divorce your father if it wasn’t for you.” That he was president of his Salem, Oregon, high school class, the boy who crowned the Queen of the Sweetheart Formal but still hid in the library with his sandwich when it came time for lunch. That he failed his parents by never becoming a lawyer, much as I will fail mine in the years to come.

He is a father figure to me. And I, strangely enough, am a father figure to him. Angry, controlling, steeped in the monstrous narcissism of the underappreciated child, unable to part with money: how familiar I must seem to my new friend. When John’s mother was dying, his father, a successful businessman, wouldn’t leave the car in a one-dollar hospital parking lot. “How can he spend the dollar,” John’s psychoanalyst told him, “when he’s losing so much.”

And so John’s unstated mission becomes this: How can he stop me from becoming my father? The first part of his plan, oddly enough, is for me to understand and acknowledge my love for my father, my childhood desire to emulate him.

My first year at Oberlin I wrote a poem called “My Reflection” about a trip Papa and I had taken to visit a distant relative in Florida. At a roadside diner, when my father had gone to the bathroom, the waitress had mistaken him for my brother and told me he looked dashing. When my father came out, I scurried off to the bathroom myself and tried to pose like him in the mirror, pleased that he looked so young, thinking that maybe he would not die during my lifetime. “I counted five gray hairs on top of my head” is the last line of the poem.

As part of his documentary, as part of his effort to show the audience that I am not just a full-time jackass, John has me walking around town reading “My Reflection” in various locations. He takes me to the Meatpacking District, which at the time is as blood soaked
as the name implies, and asks me to read the poem while standing against a wall. “John, this wall is unsanitary,” I say. “John, it smells like lobster.”

“Just read the poem,” he says.

“It’s too much of a high school poem,” I whine. “It’s not inventive. I can’t imagine myself identifying like that with my father. I was trying to write a cute father-and-son relationship poem. This is Hallmark.”

John, always ready for an argument with the son he never had, says, “If you hadn’t felt it, you couldn’t have written it.”

“But I’m good at doing this kind of bullshit.”

“This strikes a nerve. It exposes something about you that you don’t want exposed. Tenderness, empathy, and a bond with your father.”

“It’s manufactured. My father and I haven’t had a real conversation in years.” John and I fight on for about an hour, until I stalk off with the words “I hope someone stuffs that camera up your ass.” But between us, this passes for friendly banter, and John, undeterred, follows me up a rotting pier jutting out into the Hudson with his camera, the signage reading
AREA UNSAFE: KEEP OFF
. In 1994, most of New York is still unsafe, so we ignore it. I sit down on the rotting pier and stare into the sunset over Jersey.

“Read the poem,” John says.

“You’re such an asshole!”

“Read the poem,” he says.

“I’m sick of this shit. This is no way to live.”

“Read the poem, Gary.”

Later that day, I’m having a predinner glass of Beaujolais at John’s apartment. Whenever John is distracted by a phone call I sneak off to the Dell desktop whose gigantic corpus is practically embedded into the herringbone floors of his study, bring a file up on his monitor, and write whatever comes to mind in the middle of one of his Word
documents—e.g., “Another fine night here at Château le Moron,” which is what I call John’s apartment. Any man who fears mortality as much as John does usually keeps an outlandishly exact record of every aspect of his life, and so I find a file that contains the entire song list of a Tony Bennett concert. Sometimes with John, it feels like I’m reliving my childhood, or at least trying to imagine what childhood on these shores might have been like. I find a space between “Tangerine” and “The Best Is Yet to Come” and type in “Duet with Gary.”

I’m too young to even understand the significance of what I’ve typed. The desperate need for adult friendship and guidance, the relief of having found someone who can match my pitch and volume, can understand my song.

Duet with Gary
. Have I ever been so sincere in my life? Will I ever be again?

Returning from Oberlin with my parents after graduation, I am thinking of John and the dinners at La Côte Basque and the easy sophistication and camaraderie that surely await me. Right about now, several hundred miles to the east, he is recording a voice-over to his documentary, introducing me to the viewer.

“I’ve never ceased to be amazed by Gary’s intolerance, mean-spiritedness, and selfishness,” the man who will one day be the witness at my wedding is saying into his microphone. “I don’t know if it was in spite of those traits or because of them that I would come to feel as close to this hostile Russian—too many years younger than me to mention—as I ever have to any friend.”

The hostile Russian is on his way home. He is cocky and still coated with praise from the Oberlin College creative writing department. He has just been treated to a McDonald’s lunch by his parents, the last such treat he will know in years. More tragic still, he cannot even begin to fathom the possibility of failure.

The author at a party on his first date with Pamela Sanders. He is so drunk he can barely stand. Notice the desperate white cravat around his neck. Poor author
.

L
ET’S GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING
. To the Strand Book Annex in Manhattan. To the panic attack. To the book.
I am standing there once again in the Fulton Street Strand, holding
St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars,
the baroque blue hues of the Smolny Convent Cathedral practically jumping off the cover. I am opening the book, for the first time, to page 90. I am turning to that page. I am turning to that page again. The thick page is turning in my hand
. What happened at the Chesme Church more than twenty years ago?

When Jonathan and I used to play our Zork computer game after Hebrew school, there was a simple typed command—
I—
that stood for “inventory.” It would tell you how many swords and flasks and assorted magical loot you, the player, possessed at the moment. Curiously, a “Personality Inventory” or “Self-Report Inventory,” with its Anxiety and Repression and Ego Strength Scales, is also used by psychologists
to evaluate the mental conditions of a test subject. I am just saying.

If I were to type
I
in 1997, at the Strand Book Annex in Lower Manhattan, what inventory would appear?

The problem with Zork’s Inventory function is that it never really tells you what you
don’t
have. What you want. What you need still.

I no longer have J.Z. She is in North Carolina. Her boyfriend is a drummer who lives in a van. After almost three years of having a companion, someone to drive me to the hospital for my last asthma attack, someone to split a soggy tuna sub with at the Student Union’s snack bar, I am alone.

My grandma Polya. Her death is drawn out and cruel. I follow her to different hospitals, Manhattan’s Mount Sinai and a lesser one near her apartment in Queens, but it is hard to sit at her bedside, next to the green-hued monitors that chart her failing grasp on the world. She is dying in parts, as most of us do. Skeins of hard-won adulthood peeling off. The kindness is gone from her face, the kindness she once shared only with me, and what is left is a contorted Soviet grimace. I don’t know what to do. I give her strawberries to eat. I watch my father howl in anger and sadness. I kiss her forehead at the funeral parlor, and it feels cold and hard like a brick, inanimate. So much for George Anderson’s
We Don’t Die
.