The Unprofessionals (6 page)

But maybe a girlfriend had broken up with him and he was practicing up on conversation for the next one. Or he was out of regular friends who were up late. I didn't ask about that. I said, “We should go to sleep.”

I know I said, “It's four o'clock.” Soon I heard birds start chirping and I said, “It's five o'clock.” Once or twice he said, “What? I think I fell asleep for a second.”

“Let's hang up,” I'd said.

“Wait, one more thing. Tom's toothpaste. What do you know about Tom, the person?”

I told all I knew about Tom. I told about the time we passed through Kennebunkport, Maine, in the seventies, and visited the Tom's of Maine factory, or cabin. At the time, we saw the chemist at work producing peppermint toothpaste and honeysuckle shampoo. Outside the factory/cabin, a teenage hippie was sitting with an unkempt baby in an old carriage.

The boy didn't say anything. Maybe he was sleeping through my telling all this as I was realizing how much time had passed since the 1970s.

I saw that this was what it was going to be like to be the middle generation—explaining why people wore bell-bottoms in the seventies, although I couldn't think of the answer to that, and about the origins of Tom's toothpaste. It was going to be hard for the narcissistic personalities to accept passing out of the young important generation.

W
HEN HE WAS
eleven, he would answer the phone and sometimes it was a friend of his parents, a divorced or single guy, he wasn't sure which, a guy who wore dark brown gabardine suits with baggy trousers from the forties, the boy said. He wore wide ties with big prints and he wore saddle shoes.

“Some people think he's gay,” the boy had said. “But he claims to have had girlfriends. He's up all night watching infomercials for Ron Popeil products. He goes, ‘You know that fruit and vegetable dehydrator? I sent that to a girl in Vegas,' or, ‘Did you see that Juicerator? I sent that to a girl in L.A.'

“He comes to visit my parents and he follows them wherever they go, to a million parties.”

“How does that go over, hanging around with them?” I asked.

“He blends in. No one notices.”

The guy in the saddle shoes would call with a medical problem to ask the boy's father. Sometimes it was serious. “Like once he set his chest on fire lighting a candelabra,” the boy said. Other times he alluded to his romantic liaisons and had genetic or reproductive schemes to inquire about. “We figure he's not capable of being married, but he wants to sire an heir,” the boy explained.

He kept the boy on the phone for hours before asking for either parent. “He calls, I get on the phone with him—it's the peak of sunshine—I hang up, everyone's going to bed.”

I imagined the boy's family and household, with his parents and siblings doing different things all day while he stayed on the phone with anyone who called.

But this long yoga-ball call, the summer after college, was different. Because before that summer, the summer of the drug-denial phone call, I hadn't spoken to him for four years. At the time of that conversation, he had moved out of his college dormitory because kids stayed up dyeing their hair purple late at night. He didn't care for the student body, which he described as a motley crew. He didn't like those two new things—multiculturalism and diversity—and had a wish that things were the way they had been in the 1950s. He liked the movie
Rear Window
because of the clothes the actors wore. When he was twelve, he asked me this question: “In the seventies, did people know how they looked, or did they think it was normal?”

His whole life, I realized, was made up of these last two crummy decades. No wonder he was cynical and discouraged by the world and agreed with kids in his generation who were called nihilists and slackers.

As soon as he got to college, he was appreciated by other students and he made friends, but he still wanted his own apartment. He didn't say why. I assumed general misanthropy and a continuing desire to wear neatly pressed khakis and well-ironed shirts. But one of his cousins liked to tell that the boy had insisted on wearing Christian Dior shirts when he was only five. It went back that far.

In high school, in a newly overdeveloped suburb of Boston, he remained the misfit he'd been in childhood. His closest companion was his dog.

“People think I wear the same khakis every day,” he'd said when he was twelve. “In reality I have dozens of pairs, all the same.” In high school he liked to wear a navy blue sports jacket with the khakis and an oxford shirt, because the jacket had lots of pockets to keep things in and putting things into the pants pockets ruined the straight line.

What things? Keys, wallet, change, pens, pencils—this was before he had the drugs to carry and hide.

“Kids in my school don't even know what a sports jacket is,” he'd told me. “One kid asked me, ‘Why do you wear a suit to school?' That's how ignorant they are.”

“Listen to this,” he once said casually during a long phone call during the high-school years. “‘Dear Fellow Student, We regret to inform you that your classmate, __ __, has committed suicide,'” he read.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“Yes. It's a form letter. I get a few every year. It's always the same format.”

In his senior year, as he prepared for college, his biggest worry was where he would have his shirts ironed properly.

“Where do you have them done now?” I asked.

“My mother does them.”

“What!” I said.

“You think that's wrong?”

“Of course.”

“She irons my khakis, too,” he said. “And she can't get the crease right.”

“Why don't you do it yourself?”

“It's too hard. She likes to do it. It's a privilege for her to iron for her family.”

“Where did you pick up this way of thinking?” I asked. “In your Republican conservative clubs?”

“Around. It's everywhere.”

I'd had this shirt discussion with him many times.

“You can say, ‘Press only, no starch,'” I'd told him.

“I've tried that. We don't have it in the suburbs. The Chinese always starch them. They say okay, no starch, and they come back a stiff board, with a thousand wrinkles ironed into them. The regular dry cleaner just refuses.”

The other side of the problem was that sometimes he had to pick up his father's shirts. Wherever they brought them, his father yelled, “Not enough starch!”

“He has us driving all over Massachusetts, and into other states, to get more starch in his shirts. My mother and I both have to do it. We alternate. He opens the box, we're waiting in fear, and he shouts, ‘Look at the collar! It's not stiff enough to stay up!'”

Once when we were on the phone during the high school years, I'd heard him say to his father, “No thanks, I'll do it later.”

“My mother is away and he wants to know if I have any clothes for him to add to the machine while he's doing his,” the boy said. “I'd never let him do my laundry. He's the worst launderer in the world. I'd rather do my things separately than let him mangle and destroy whatever he touches.”

“How does he do laundry that it can be so bad?” I asked.

“He uses a thimbleful of soap powder for ten bath towels and fills the machine with an ounce of water. Then he pours in a gallon of bleach. Or he washes a few socks and pours in a whole box of soap. Then I hear him call me, ‘Quick, come here! Why are all these suds overflowing?' He has no idea! He puts the shirts in with socks, so the sleeves and socks are tied together and wrapped around each other like a tightly wound rope with a thousand knots. I've had to secretly throw out whole loads of wash he's done.

“He's like one of these cleaning people who don't speak English and put sweaters in the dryer for seven hours on hot. My best sweater—he threw in—I take it out, it wouldn't fit a mouse. I didn't recognize it. I thought it was part of the dog's toy animal.”

 

I IMAGINED
the boy in the big house his parents had designed. It was up on a hill and looked like the Guggenheim Museum. But all around it were other houses that didn't look like any museum. The hill was a developer's free-for-all, similar to the one where the electrologist lived, only a more expensive freer-for-all to do anything. The bigness and the mixed bag of architectural details must have contributed to the high prices. People with that money made in the eighties apparently didn't know that the houses weren't built in any known architectural design.

One winter night when I was visiting, the boy took me around the corner to one of these houses. He had a job feeding the fish and the cats when the family was out of town and he had to go over some instructions with them.

“This is the most hideous fish you ever saw,” he told me as we walked up the icy hill in the dark. He'd refused to dress for the cold weather—he hated the idea of warm jackets and was wearing his gray Chesterfield overcoat and loafers. Outdoor-weather gear was something he detested, among many other things. “I detest leeks,” he'd said while telling a story about the day his cousin had taken him to a restaurant in New York, where he'd ordered a vegetable pie. “I thought there would be the usual number of leeks and I could avoid them, but it was all leeks and I detest leeks. It was an entire pieful of leeks!”

As we walked to the house, he said, about the fish, “It's a huge black tubular body that looks like it's made of rubber from a car tire and it has fangs for teeth.”

“Will we see it now?” I asked him.

“Only if the topic comes up in a subtle way,” he said. “Don't mention that I told you about it. Don't say anything about anything.”

Before we'd left for the rubber-fish house, I'd tried to convince the boy to dress for the weather. After a while, he'd become peeved and then lost patience with the whole project. “It's
fine
to
wear this coat
!” he said. “We're just going across the road.” As we crossed, he complained about the cold while his loafers slipped around on the ice. Wearing a scarf or hat would have been demoralizing for him.

“That's what I meant by cold,” I said.

“Usually I avoid inclement weather conditions,” he said. “I don't have these problems.”

We were greeted by a woman wearing a long quilted turquoise-blue-print bathrobe and fluffy royal blue animal-shaped slippers. Which kind of animal, I didn't care to know—I knew I'd seen ears of some kind on the slipper front—rabbit, dog, something for sure. The woman was in her forties, maybe right around my age, I thought, and her hairstyle was this: two red braids down to her waist. Long braids and bangs at this age, to say nothing of the robe and slippers at seven
P.M.
She had slightly buck teeth and a retainer or some other orthodontic device on the upper teeth.

“Hello,” the robed woman said, in that way mothers have of trying to be friendly with odd, silent children and teenagers.

“Hello,” the boy said. He introduced me in his awkward style, as if the words were unbearable to speak. It was having to say my name that seemed to be the worst part for him.

I'd been told that the woman had attended a college that had a prestigious dance department. One reason I hadn't been accepted by the college was that no one advised me to express my interest in ballet. No one told me one thing. In fact, my mother wanted to go to antiques stores in the college towns we visited. Antiques hunting was higher on her priority list than the college interview, and I can't blame her for that. In Bennington, Vermont, she'd bought some English yarn for knitting sweaters.

I walked ahead of her, down the Main Street of the town—it looked like the town in the movie
The Stranger—
while I thought about how badly I'd done at the interview.

Later on, I couldn't remember whether I'd been on the waiting list or just plain rejected by the college.

“Children are overrated,” my mother liked to say.

 

THIS IS
what can happen to a Bennington graduate, I was thinking as I tried not to look too hard at the woman who could have been my classmate had I mentioned an interest in dance during the interview. She'd given up a career as a harp player to marry and have children with a person with a job in some corporate profession.

The house was chock-full of furniture—all brand-new, dark wood—and upholstery and carpeting in more different bright colors than I could take in. I was getting the jittery feeling, leading to the panicky feeling. I knew I fit nowhere into the worlds encountered when visiting the boy and his family and their friends.

As the woman showed the boy where the cat food was stored, I saw her husband sitting at a new kitchen table in a new kitchen. I tried not to look at the room too carefully. The man looked tired and overworked as he sat there with plates of food in front of him. He had the look of having been beaten down by work and the pressures of corporation life about which I knew nothing until I saw network executives portrayed in
The Larry Sanders Show.

After making a hasty retreat from the kitchen, I said to the woman, “I understand you have a big fish tank.”

“Oh yes, would you like to see it?” she said. The boy looked at me with the look described as “daggers.”

We were taken to the fish tank. Around the fish tank were all kinds of other things—expensive art objects, complicated music-listening systems, many-colored glass bowls, glass objects in all shapes, marble things—I couldn't tell what. Marble balls, marble ovals, marble squares, marble, glass, stone, concrete, tile. I began to feel I might faint. Instead, I took some breaths as quietly as possible. I tried to remember the inhale/exhale ratio I'd read about in Dr. Weil's books. Was it four, seven, eight, or seven, eight, four?

“What kind of fish is it?” I asked.

“We have to go,” the boy said. “I have homework.”

The secret was this: He'd told it to me months before, in a long phone description of his activities. Part of his job was to resuscitate the fish if it stopped breathing. The nature of the fish's physiology and anatomy was that it might stop breathing every day.