Professor X (10 page)

Mrs. LoGerfo's toothy grin, all of a sudden, made sense to me.

I never forgot my lesson about the power conferred by real estate, but as I got older I never particularly burned to be a homeowner. Some people positively ache to do it; for some, piloting a ride-on mower across their holdings is the summit of existence. But I felt I was called to the life of art. I wanted to write, and living in an apartment gave me the time to do that. Except for the ever-looming possibility of cockroach infestation, I enjoyed apartment life. I liked having neighbors. I had been blessed with unobtrusive ones. I have always taken comfort in the faint stirrings of life going on outside my apartment walls. The sound of a stereo a couple of doors down adds a nice rhythm to my movements. I love the sound of a husband and wife arguing across the hall.
Better them than me
, I think, and feel very cozy. I like the vague sociability of a laundry room. I like the smell of food in a hallway, garlic or meatballs or the sharp sweetness of crumbled bay leaves. I like the sound of a dog's toenails click-click-clicking on a hardwood floor.

After marrying in the mid-1980s my wife and I bought a two-bedroom apartment with a river view. The neighborhood was not so hot. There was vague, empty talk of gentrification, some of it quite strident, with some in the neighborhood for it and some against. Nothing came of it while we lived there. The problems of the neighborhood ran both deep and wide, and no one seriously believed it would ever improve. We didn't really care. There was a funky charm to our building, even to the drunken doormen in their threadbare uniforms. We rented out our second bedroom to a friend, and lived more like college students than people nearing thirty. We installed a nice butcher block in the kitchen. We lived there happily for several years. I waited tables in the afternoon and pursued my calling. I wrote essays and a couple of half-novels. Periodically, I would grow discouraged, but then I would sell a short piece or two, just enough to stoke my ambition and make me at once hopeful and miserable.

I continued to wait tables, working lunches at a place favored by local executives. I wheeled around trolleys full of food, transferring meals from sizzling platters to plates of white china: slabs of scrod and T-bone steaks and ladies' portion filet mignons the size of a Rubik's Cube. I struggled with my writing. I had nothing to write about. My life seemed too restrained. I thought that part of the problem was that I was seeing the same meal played out day after day; I couldn't shake the feeling that I was privy to only a fraction of life. I tried working a few dinners, but it didn't help.

On Black Monday in 1987, the stock market crashed. That day, I was serving the tables in the bar. There was a TV on. The stock prices crawled by at the bottom of the screen. My customers weren't eating. They weren't drinking, either. Their faces were ashen. I looked at the TV screen in great puzzlement. I couldn't make head or tail of the numbers and symbols. The silence in the bar was eerie. The only sound was that of my trolley wheels clattering on the tile floor. I brought lots of uneaten food back to the kitchen that day. The owner of the restaurant sat at the bar. He looked up to the TV screen then down to his cup of coffee, up then down, up then down, like a child playing peek-a-boo.

I felt so much on the outside of things. I knew nothing of stocks and finance, the real world. What gall I had trying to set myself up as a novelist. Who was I to think I could illuminate anything for anyone else? There seemed no one quite as ill equipped as I to take on such a task. I felt very stupid. I leaned against the wall in the restaurant's kitchen and thought about my life, and tucked into someone's virtually untouched plate of coho salmon.

 

Rising Action.
Meanwhile, my wife had gotten pregnant. Clearly it was time to grow up. I started to feel that trying to be a novelist had actually stunted my experience. I didn't quite abandon my literary dreams, but I knew I would have to do more living before I had anything to write. We sold the apartment to a dancer who loved the butcher block. Maybe, I decided, I should be a teacher. Maybe that's how people like me wound up. I walked out the front entrance of the apartment building, past the red-eyed doorman, resumé and temporary teaching license in hand, to the nearest school, which happened to be a middle school. You could do that in those days. There was an acute shortage of teachers, and the job didn't pay much at all. Anyone who could spell, and some who couldn't, could be licensed to stand before groups of poor readers. Everyone with half a brain worked in private industry; nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to stand in front of little kids and work on vocabulary lessons. I walked into the school without an appointment, as though I were a deliveryman. The principal hired me on the spot. He couldn't believe his good fortune. He led me over to the secretary so I could fill out my W-4. “He's going to make a fine, fine addition to the faculty,” he said. She seemed unimpressed.

As far as teaching gigs go, middle school is generally considered the bottom of the barrel. I liked it. Seventh graders were the worst, but I never tired of how they tortured you for a year, vanished for the summer, and reappeared in the much more reasonable guise of eighth graders. They would greet me warmly by name, shake my hand and ask about my family, as though we were all corporate executives. I thought I would teach forever, but I left the classroom after a few years to take a job that paid more in a tatty corner of the government. We moved to the rural exurbs, to an affluent little village in a crease between the mountains and farms. The daily commute was a challenge for such an urban creature as myself: I spent my mornings stuck behind school buses and afternoons pinned behind tractors and hay wagons. In this new environment, my wife and I were conscious of our status as greenhorns, but we puzzled it all out: the penny socials and the church suppers, the gun shops, the silos, the gangs of chickens walking on the roadside, signs saying TOPSOIL WANTED and ads for such mysterious processes as rototilling.

We bought a very small home. It was a cheesecake-yellow 1950s dormered Cape Cod of about nine hundred square feet. Tiny. The house always reminded me of a Bavarian cottage. A storybook home. It sat in a little development of several streets among other Cape Cods. On the inside, the place didn't seem quite so small. The rooms were cunningly fitted together like puzzle pieces. No wasted space. There were two largish bedrooms upstairs, one down; living room, bathroom, dining room, and kitchen. The house had lots of wood trim and oak flooring and a back porch. This was what we could afford, and we bought it. So what if the distance from the farthest corner of the living room to the end of the kitchen was about ten steps? This was not just a starter house but a baby house—perfect for people who weren't handy, who really knew nothing about houses. My wife and I mused about the repairs I would have to learn to do. “Really, I don't think you'll even need a ladder,” she said, which was true. Standing on tiptoe, I could practically reach the gutters.

I have fond memories of life in that house. The children were in a golden age. We had lovely neighbors with children of their own, and my kids forged strong friendships. I taught my own little gang to play baseball in the front yard. It looked like the move was a successful one. No more did I think that I hadn't experienced enough to be a writer. Kids will do that to you. I paid my mortgage and raked my leaves and stained my little deck. I rebuilt my front steps. I took a writing class, and the novelist-of-repute who taught it loved the book I had managed to finish. He had a big-time New York agent he would show it to. Off the thing went. I felt the greased gears of a wonderful narrative moving forward rather marvelously. No doubt, it was only a matter of time before a life in literature was mine.

No doubt.
No doubt.
It's a phrase I have come to associate with the 1990s, when the world was on the rise. How fitting that Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, the band, sold 27 million records in that decade. I remember when I signed up for the 401(k) plan at my government job (oh yes, we all knew about stocks and share prices now; how far I had come from my days cracking lobster claws at the restaurant!) and the Human Resource guy advised me to park my money in the riskier stock funds. He said he was averaging a return of about 10 percent a year. What happens, I asked him, when they go down? He looked at me pityingly. Clearly I was going to be a difficult employee. “They don't go down,” he said.

But then my narrative, the one whose contours I could see so closely, derailed. The agent didn't like the book. Rather loathed it, was the feeling I got. What! This, clearly, was not supposed to happen. The great story of my literary discovery had been aborted. The lesson, which I didn't quite grasp, was that stories don't always move forward as we think they will in an orderly and logical fashion. Sometimes the machinery of a tale lurches and shudders and stops altogether. Sometimes the crankshaft starts spinning in the opposite direction.

“Well, that will have to be your
second
book,” said the novelist-of-repute. He said it and I agreed and neither of us believed it. He was sad for me. I vowed hollowly to keep trying. I knew that I wouldn't be able to start another book. I was on the road to forty years old. I read reviews of first-time novelists and felt a growing bitterness. I was sure they were friendly with the people reviewing them.

Periodically, our real estate agent would send us a postcard, reminding us that she was available for all of our needs. Maybe it was time to trade up. Our lack of tax deductions, specifically a larger mortgage deduction, was bothersome to our accountant. He wanted us to spend more. To spend more was to make more to spend more to make more. And the children were getting bigger—older, yes, but physically bigger; the house now seemed unable to contain the lot of us. Daily life took on the flavor of an episode from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
; I started to feel that I might scrape my head on the ceiling if I wasn't careful and that, with any sudden movement, some family member might poke an arm through the sheetrock. There was enormous pressure on our single windowless bathroom. The light and fan and flushing mechanism seemed to run twenty-four hours a day. Why couldn't we have a real house? A house with some scope, some gravitas? I longed for a substantial house, a house with hallways and a foyer and a bit of extra space. My great love affair with literature had come to a shocking end, and I was on the rebound. To have nice floors and large closets and a great big living room seemed to me the pinnacle of existence.

The millennium turned. Everyone we knew was trading up, flipping their houses, moving forward. The nice families with whom we had lived in the little development atop the network of streams had all moved out, which made our decision seem somehow inevitable. This was a madness that fed on itself. There was a computer in a corner of our sons' bedroom; while the boys slept, my wife and I would huddle around the screen, whispering with excitement as we surfed the Web sites of real estate agents and mortgage companies.

 

Climax.
We went for a week at the end of the summer to Miami Beach. We stayed at the Deauville, on Collins Avenue. The place was crawling with European tourists. It was slightly seedy in a good, comfortable, relaxed way. The Beatles had famously stayed here in 1964, and I took a few pensive strolls through the disused ballroom in the basement, where the band played on a live remote hookup for Ed Sullivan. The air was chockablock with ghosts, girls in beehives and bikinis and women in toreador slacks, older leathery women playing canasta at kidney-shaped tables in between inert dips in the kidney-shaped pool. I swore I smelled suntan oil and Brylcreem. I watched a scuba diving class moving as one in one quadrant of the pool. We came into the lobby from the pool and our wet footprints disappeared into the carpet—oh, the glories of 3M and Monsanto! I was happy to be able to afford this look at the lost glory of America in the Sun and Fun Capital of the World. We meandered through the art deco district, stepping gingerly into an additional level of nostalgia; took in a show of local art at the Jackie Gleason Theater; zoomed up and down the causeways in our rental car, rock and roll blasting, Pepsi tickling our throats.

At night in the hotel room, we watched the Little League World Series. The Danny Almonte controversy raged. How old, really, was the pitcher for the Rolando Paulino All-Stars, the pride of the Bronx? Fourteen or twelve? All sides of the controversy launched their own investigations. Little League dads who happened to be lawyers issued sharply worded statements. Gumshoes were hired to track down the birth certificate. We watched Danny strike out 16 batters in his victory over Oceanside, California, who couldn't get anywhere near the ball. We were transfixed. He did look big and overpowering on the mound. It was all so compelling, and so charmingly, dizzyingly, unbelievably irrelevant. Danny Almonte was the last news story that caught my attention before the planes hit the towers. It was on September 1, 2001, that the
New York Times
reported Danny's actual age as fourteen; the country reeled at the news. Expressions “of disappointment, anger and frustration came from President Bush, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Little League officials, and others who spoke of the team's pain and of lessons about honesty in sports,” wrote the paper. An editorial on September 2 reminded us that “the opportunity offered by sports must never be allowed to void all the other opportunities children should be eligible to encounter as they grow up. In a literal sense, Danny Almonte has been defrauded by his father, Felipe de Jesús Almonte. That is the real crime, not the attempt to pass his son off as a 12-year-old.”

What an affluent and carefree country that we could spend time agonizing about such things. No wonder we were the envy of the world. Who wouldn't want to be an American, in our Levis and our Ralph Lauren flannel shirts, the sparkling taste of Pepsi dancing on our tongues?