Thy Neighbor

Also by Norah Vincent

Voluntary Madness

Self-Made Man

Norah Vincent
| Thy Neighbor

Viking

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Norah Vincent, 2012

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“As I Walked Out One Evening” from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

“The Silken Tent” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1942 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Publisher's Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Vincent, Norah.

Thy neighbor / Norah Vincent.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-58378-4

1. Parents—Death—Fiction. 2. Voyeurism—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

—W. H. Auden

1

I found that little ode to psychopathology this past Monday afternoon crumpled in the wastebasket by my desk. It was strange to have found it there, I grant you, or even to have noticed it at all, since I don't make a habit of pawing through my trash.

But this particular item, on this particular day, couldn't help but catch my eye. It was written on pink paper, for one, which I could see especially well because that wastebasket is made of metal mesh and because, as on this occasion, it is almost always empty. Or empty of paper, anyway.

I never do any work by hand. I write on the computer, and when I do make the minimum payment on my bills, always several months late, I do it paperlessly on the Web.

That basket's a prop more than anything, the kind of design-challenged bachelor's IKEA accessory you're supposed to have in any respectable writer's sanctum, and if you're a real
guy
guy, the place where you repeatedly shoot and miss idle baskets with your college hacky sack while balanced on the hind legs of your desk chair, dredging up your bright ideas.

But I'm not a real
guy
guy, so I wouldn't know. I'm just a hired clown covering for a nerd.

The sad truth about my wastebasket is that I've heaved more vomit into it than toys or paper. The mesh is surprisingly retentive, you'll be relieved to hear, and a snap to clean with a garden hose.

More often than not, that stout receptacle is the first thing I see when I wake, or the first thing I hug and plunge my head into, depending on how hard the clown was covering the night before—specifically, how many times he yelled “Shots!” (or something equally adolescent) down the whole length of the bar before someone in a position of authority forcibly retired him for the night.

I sleep on the couch in my study a lot more often than I sleep in my bed, because I usually can't make it up the stairs.

And so it was on Monday, when I woke to find the strange pink bile-flecked piece of origami perched on a slick of Jameson like some oblivious flamingo sunning itself on an oil spill.

Pink is not a color I confess to—on paper, anyway. That's a really tired cliché of fragile masculinity, I realize, but there it is. Predictable and true. In that, as in so much else, I'm drearily typical. Not that I haven't gone the other way—I've embraced the macho pastel in the past, and that's more embarrassing to admit. I wore the pale pink polo for a semester in college, to show I wasn't afraid, and I swore more colorfully then, too, about all the pinkest parts of the female anatomy, just in case there was any doubt.

But there has always been doubt. How could there not be doubt when this person, this image that is me, is not organic? Not grown out of the common ground and the consensus of culture into solid, conforming meat that is exactly what it looks like: a dude.

I am not that.

I was never that. I was a child built by committee, and then a man by osmosis.

I'm a plastic cast of put-on, pumped-up, artificial dude
ness
at best, that bears absolutely no resemblance to the freak show insect-boy beneath. I look like I stepped out of a catalog, because I did. I memorized myself from movies and men's magazines.

I'm not a person. I'm a facsimile. As far from myself as the antipodes, and—big surprise coming here—I drink to cover the distance.

My teenage years were ones of vengeful transformation.

In the mirror, as I watched myself grow into the sculpture of my parents' good genes, and out in the world, where I saw the pagan beauty of my face begin to wield its power over other people, men and women, I learned that I could use my looks as a glare to hide the drab and charmless grub that lived behind my eyes.

At seventeen I was lean and six foot three, a specimen in the making. I didn't have to try. But by thirty I was tired and showing the drink, a breaking man with too much vanity and time on his hands. And so I did what idle, vain men do. I took supplements. And I joined a gym, flexing and ripping my besotted flesh six times a week until I got the body that only banned substances can build.

And here I stand, at thirty-four, a perfect fake, the botched product of one of those boys' preparatory boarding schools where dishevel-haired, smooth-cheeked yachting models are bred, acquire their torsos on the swim team, and have been wearing designer loafers without socks since they were shitting themselves raw.

I may not be one of the boys at heart, but I do a damned good impression all the same. I've had years of practice, and I dress the part. Business casual, of course. The uniform for every middle-class white American male from six to sixty. Khakis and a button-down. A polo and cargo shorts in summer. Done.

Workers of the world. We might as well be wearing burlap gray pajamas, marching every day to our salt mines of finance and information technology, hurrying home fully cocked (pharmaceutically, if necessary) to pound our Pixy Stick wives into fruition so that when the next replica pops out we'll be waiting at the door of the womb ready with the slip-ons, quipping to our, and only our, infinite delight, “If the shoe fits . . .”

Jesus. Shoot me now.

That's my pedigree, but not, I hope, my fate. So far, I have eluded the wife and family, as well as the white-collar white slavery on the trading floor, or the soul-sucking dronery of the corner office P and L.

I work at home, or pretend to, and on my own creaturely schedule. I sleep late, and I stay up late. In winter I barely see the light of day. When most people are getting up, I'm just going to bed, and when they're picking up their kids for soccer practice or propping their eyes open with triple shots of McSpresso to make it through the four p.m. fit of narcolepsy at Shiteco, I'm just having my blissful waking piss.

I spend the early evening putting myself back together from the night before—DayQuil, Nicorette, Gatorade—so that I can make a college stab at writing whatever book review or snarky think piece I've been assigned that month. I say month, because there really isn't enough work to tally on a weekly basis, and most of it's long-deadline, loose-ended, sidebar pap that a frisky summer intern could bang out stoned.

I give my so-called job my over-the-counter all for as long as I can stand it—usually twenty minutes max—and then I turn to this virtual notebook instead, because it's the only place in the world where I can hide my third-rate mind and my shameless shame and exhibit them at the same time. Yell it all into the void for safekeeping, where it does and does not exist. I do this every day, usually for an hour or two, or for as long as it takes for Dave to interrupt me.

That is Dave's entire function: to interrupt. And subsequently, to distract. He does this very well, and that is the only reason why I allow him over the threshold.

Dave is somewhere around my age, a year or two older. He told me once, but I can't remember and can't be bothered to ask. Our dads played golf together, so I've known him off and on for most of my life. We drink together at least three nights a week and drive each other crawling into the vomitorium at dawn because neither of us can resist the taunt—“pussy”—when the phrase “I think I've had enough” or something similarly bleary and cautionary burbles up from one or the other of us far too late in the evening.

We're both still emasculated enough by our late fathers and our failures to think that liver damage and venereal disease are veritable measures of a man's worth, and we behave accordingly.

We sit. We drink. We rail and rhapsodize about cunt, and we are generally such a shameful waste of plasma that we dishonor even the furniture.

Dave runs his dad's vending machine business the way all reluctant sons pursue the foisted inheritances of untimely death, with resentful passivity and a well-nursed conviction that he was meant for something better.

His dad dropped dead at fifty-two one afternoon on the racquetball court when Dave was just out of college, and Dave was left to salvage the family's misfortune so that his younger sister, Sylvia, then a junior in high school, could go to college herself, and his mother, Kitty, who is everything her name implies, could go on living in the kept, cosmetic style to which she had become accustomed.

So ended Dave's promising career as a fashion photographer and jet-set seducer of women, or whatever the fuck it was he thought he was meant for, and so began his real life as paper trail CEO, bibulous wingman, and sedentary misogynist.

He does nothing of any value or importance with his time, unless you count playing a mongoloid Falstaff to my Hal, but he lives very well nonetheless. For appearances' sake, he signs his name to the company financials every quarter, having satisfied himself that he's bilking the IRS out of a respectable six figures and not in turn being fleeced by his proxy, Alex, the stooge he pays far less to run the company than he pays himself not to.

Dave looks like every January man I see at the gym. You know the breed. The guys my age and up who've been eating too many dollar value meals with their kids and look like gorilla fertility goddesses as a result. They're the New Year's resolutionaries who crowd into health clubs in the first weeks of the year and go through the motions on the ab crunch and the recumbent bike before they come to their senses and realize that it's health care they want, not health.

Thank God they lose heart so quickly, or I would.

Dave is one of their number except that he looks like he's been living in a cave his whole life, which, if you count his home theater, is largely true. His freckled fishbelly flesh is so pale it's blue, and has the consistency of an undercooked donut. His eyes are as flat and black as a shark's, darting blankly back and forth between silver lids. The pupils are always dilated to the point of nearly obscuring the iris, which is some murky, barely discernable shoe-shine shade of brown that makes you think of death by tobacco.

Dave is a loathsome specimen. Existentially disgusting. Repulsive even to the idea of God. A dead soul in a goblin's body.

Even that is too worthy a description, too loaded with conscience and art. Dave is without either, and whatever made him is, too. He's like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch, but less dignified. A stinking example of all I hold profane. So much so, that I consider it the surest proof of my wretchedness that I have stooped to make him, or keep him as, my friend. My best friend, if time wasted together is any indication.

Christ, what a mess.

How did I get here? And why do I need the added humiliation of a witness? Living alone and shoestring employed in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs—the house I grew up in, actually—which is now like a mausoleum to the undead, and a terrarium of aggrieved neglect.

On the face of it, this should have turned out better.

I am the scion of well-planned, well-executed privilege, boundless opportunity, first-grade art class affirmation, tennis lessons, test prep, and day camp. I am the proud cum laude recipient of an obscenely overpriced higher education from one of the best small liberal arts colleges in the nation.

So what could be wrong?

A good question.

A very, very good question.

Well, Doctor (
cough
), here's the thing. I am also, as it happens, the beloved only boy of two handsome, cultured, Catholic professionals (one actual, one manqué) who reached middle age in the wrong spirit (a poor pun intended here, I'm afraid), and,
whoops
, killed each other in a drunken row three weeks after I received my dearly bought diploma.

That's right. Killed each other. Dead.

Actually, my father killed my mother, then himself.

This is the tie that binds Dave and me.

Sort of.

Dead dads (and for me, a dead mom and murder-suicide thrown in). Same age at onset of grief, or shock, or developmental arrest, what have you. Both wrecked, aimless sons, and with foisted inheritances to boot. His a business, mine a house. A house, fully paid off, that I can live in practically for free and that, despite its horrored past, I can't bring myself to sell or leave or incinerate.

I'm sorry? What's that?

Depressed? Destroyed? Crushed beneath the boot heel of fate?

Why, yes. I suppose so.

That's the short of it.

I am, to put it limply, a lost boy playing at lost generation because my father blew my mother into the next life with the family .45 and then tasted the muzzle for himself one summer evening while I was off finding myself in the national parks and legal whorehouses of the American Southwest.

Now give me my pills and walk away.

Actually, I don't see a doc.

I get my pills from Tijuana via a stripper friend, Jaz (short for Jazmin—not her real name, I'm guessing), who deals a sideline in pharmaceuticals. She can get me anything, but most of what I want is benzos. Anxiety balms: Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, whatever's on the menu. When dosed liberally and taken with magnums of alcohol, they knock me on my face for long enough to mimic sleep.

They're doozies, but they can work in the waking hours, too. With just the barest nip or two of sour mash, they level the quake-rubble topography of my mind and let me coast on the barren plain of sweet amnesia like the kid I once was, taking those first euphoric pedal strokes on my brand-new BMX bike.

Thanks, Dad.

For the bike, the memories, the aftermath. For the genes that, in light of past events, you really have to wonder about.

What am I capable of? Can you be programmed for capability? Culpability? Or is that all in the upbringing? The circumstance? The substance abuse?

Hard to say, really.

I'm fine on the first count at least. Free and clear on the early influence, as I believe I've said. Golden normal child—as far as anyone could tell. Well heeled and well liked. Mom and Pop blameless in the offing. Not even an unwarranted spanking I can bring them up on. Just good, solid provider parenting that foretold nothing of what was to come.