To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (21 page)

“They made you a website without your permission?”

I nodded.

“And you’re not writing those tweets?”

Had he been so friendly, bought me that sandwich, laughed at my jokes, had he wanted to meet me solely for my tweets?

“I’m afraid not.”

“So you might not belong. They might simply be using you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

He turned and looked off. When he turned back, it was to slap his thighs in preparation of standing. “Well,” he said, rising.

“Are you leaving?”

“I don’t want to take up any more of your time.” He extended his hand. “You’ve been an immense help.”

I stood at last and accepted his handshake. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how have I been of help?”

“Serious people don’t go around impersonating others online. They don’t steal a man’s identity and proselytize in his name. If I were you,” he said, “I’d hire a good lawyer. I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a hoax, as have I. It was compelling,” he added, before walking off. “Too bad it’s over.”

He was probably right, I thought. It was a hoax. His swift departure from the park reminded me that it was possible to see that clearly again, and to leave the whole ridiculous fantasy behind without another thought.

I went to the mall that weekend to work through some things. Was I relieved it was a hoax? Disappointed? Returned to outrage?

When I decided to stop buying things, years ago, I started saving my money with the intention of doing some good for the world. Rather than buy whatever I had my eye on, I tallied up its suggested retail price, and at the end of the year added everything together and made a big donation to a cause I believed in. Haiti. Hunger. Starting families off with some farm animals. As far as I could tell, it never got us anywhere. Haiti was still a mess, malnutrition was on the rise. I didn’t expect to cure every ill, but the only real difference I saw was an uptick in my junk mail. Better living through economy was one thing, but trying to improve the world through a few donations just highlighted the futility and put me in a funk.

Now buying was back on. It made me feel better to buy, it reassured and comforted me. In light of my recent gullibility, I needed
to be reassured. But walking the mall corridors, I had a hard time finding something I needed, wanted, and/or didn’t already own. I stepped into the Hallmark store, to set the bar low, subjecting myself to an onslaught of sentimental cards, heart-shaped vases, and inspirational plaques
(HERE’S THAT SIGN YOU WERE LOOKING FOR: LOVE, GOD)
. Next I went into Brookstone, the high-end novelty store, and sat in the massage chair. I also test-drove the latest in pillow technology. But I already had the massage chair, or had had it at one time, before getting rid of it, and with respect to the pillow, I preferred the old technology to the new.

I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn.

Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the
B
s when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy.
It was the Beatles’
Rubber Soul
, which had been released in 1965. I already owned
Rubber Soul.
I had owned
Rubber Soul
on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played
Rubber Soul
from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy
Rubber Soul
for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to
Rubber Soul
for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving
Rubber Soul
on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair.

I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy? To scatter the clouds of your cynicism with its innocent delights in the simplest pleasures? That’s what I’d come to the mall to buy, I realized at once: a dog. I’ll liberate one of these cute bastards from cellblock 9 here and never be lonesome again.

But then I remembered a time, preparatory to having children, when Connie and I decided to buy a dog, and after we took it home, I couldn’t stop thinking of how short a dog’s life expectancy is. It wasn’t right to talk about one day having to watch our new puppy die with Connie down on the floor playing with him and laughing, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to revel in the new puppy while it was still a puppy, because puppies become dogs all too quickly. And that was exactly my point: he’d be a dog in no time, and while he would appear to the human eye to remain unchanged for years, every day he’d be getting older, slowly but inexorably approaching death. When he died Connie and I would be bereft, which was, aside from being dead ourselves, the worst of all human things to be. Why ask for it? What had we done, impulsively purchasing this puppy without giving due consideration to its demise? I told Connie I thought we should return it. I couldn’t even get down on my hands and knees. I was up on the sofa crying, imploring her to take the puppy back. I could no longer so much as call it a puppy, and certainly not Beanie—no way could I call it Beanie. I just called it “the dog.” Connie got up on the sofa with me. She tried her best to understand. Inevitably she thought it had to do with my dad. But Beanie Plotz–O’Rourke and Conrad O’Rourke were apples and oranges. It wasn’t very likely that Beanie was going to put a bullet in his head because another round of electroconvulsive therapy had failed to take. Beanie just wanted to delight in the simple things. Do you know how embittering it is to watch something delight in the simple things while you’re consumed by the subject of death? Connie ended up keeping Beanie at her place. I’d stroke its fur occasionally when I was over, but that was about it. I left the Best Friends Pet Store empty-handed.

By then, the other people at the mall had started to wear me down. Not just the handicapped but the sickly, the stunted, and
the debt-soaked diabetics. At first, I tried to convince myself that they weren’t representative. I was at the ass-end of a cross-section, and soon sprites of health and beauty would come floating by, bare breasted, their outspread arms wrapped in banners of silk. But those who kept passing me were identical in every way: terribly misshapen people, whale fat or rat thin, trailed by homely broods while screaming at deaf elders in open psychological warfare. My countrymen. I took refuge in a single, healthy-looking woman on her way to pick out a high-end handbag or maybe a pair of shoes. She moved with purpose, free of the discord of the poor and the lost, and was gone in the blink of an eye. I gave up and went to dinner at a T.G.I. Friday’s.

The waiter who came over to take my order was decked out from top to bottom in branded swag. Heavily mocked across America, swag was a comfort to me, because I had never forgotten how special it was to eat at a T.G.I. Friday’s when I was a kid. The swag brought back the memory of my mom and dad and the rigor with which we stuck to the least expensive items on the menu. Now that I had money, I always ordered more than one appetizer, the most expensive steak, something for dessert, and a Day-Glo cocktail or two. I wasn’t hungry. I was never hungry anymore. But it never got old. The Pottery Barn and
Rubber Soul
had gotten old, but my ability to order more than the chicken fingers with honey mustard from T.G.I. Friday’s would always provide me with a sense of accomplishment.

As I ate, I wondered if what applied to the Pottery Barn and to
Rubber Soul
might also apply to people. It applied, I had to admit, to Sam and the Santacroces, who had been everything to me at one time and now were nothing. Would it also apply to Connie and the Plotzes? I didn’t like to think of Connie as pure utility now all used up, and most days I was able to frame our split as so
much more than that. But that day at the mall, surrounded by the melancholy redundancy of everything on offer, I wondered if it was really Connie I longed for when I longed for Connie or only the novelty of being in love again, of being estranged from my self and enchanted by her family, by the Plotzes and by Judaism—which was lost to me now, if it was ever mine.

On my way home, I stopped for beer at a package store. Whenever I stopped at a package store, I always looked for Narragansett, the beer my father drank while watching the Red Sox. It was during my cursory search for Narragansett, along a dusty aisle of niche beers, that I came across a warm six-pack of Ulm’s, a lager brewed in Ulm, Germany, and distributed out of Hoboken. It’s no hoax, I thought.

“Hey, it happens. You don’t need to apologize,” he wrote.

As Mrs. Convoy stood in the open doorway calling “McKinsey?” Connie turned to me and said, “I have a confession to make.”

I drew closer. In the small confines of the front desk, crowded
by the swivel chairs and shoulder to shoulder with blockades of files, drawing closer really only meant turning around. She sat on the chair, dressed entirely in shades of gray—a gray skirt over darker gray tights starting to fade at the knees, a gray T-shirt with darker gray bird—except for a diaphanous blue scarf twisted wildly around her neck. She wore a pair of flat blue tennis shoes that lacked all pretense to athletic utility. Her hair was set in bobby pins imprecisely arrayed, like a train yard seen from the sky.

How inimitable the bobby pin is! The coppery crimp on the one prong and the other prong straight, the two dollops of hard amber at the endpoints. The bobby pin has not changed since it was worn by good-hearted nurses in virtuous wars. Though they held her hair down with old-fashioned severity, on Connie bobby pins were the very edge of fashion. I recalled the pleasure I took whenever I had the opportunity to remove them from her hair, one pin after the other, and to place them on the nightstand in a neat little pile, taking out one as carefully as the next so as not to pull the hair with it, until down came a storm of curls gently scented and still a little damp.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to say it. Remember how I told you that I was a nonpracticing atheist? Well, I’m not, really. I mean, I sort of was for a while, but now I think I’m not. An atheist, I mean. What I mean is, I’m not a hundred percent certain that God doesn’t exist, and sometimes, I’m almost certain that He does.”

“As in, you believe?” I said. “You’re a believer?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

I was shocked.

“Sometimes?”

“Most of the time.”

I was beside myself. On how many occasions had she expressed
her skepticism about God? On how many occasions had she rolled her eyes along with me when some idiot on TV was telling women what was best for their bodies in the name of God? Or condemning gay marriage in the name of God? Or denying evolution and restricting scientific research in the name of God? Or defending assault weapons with hundred-round clips because God wanted us all to have guns? On how many occasions had she nodded along in implicit agreement while I went off on some Hitchensian rant?

“Have you always been a believer?”

“Not always.”

“When weren’t you one?”

“Around the time we got together.”

“You were a believer when we first met?”

“You made some very convincing arguments,” she said. “You can be very convincing.”

“You mean…
I
convinced you to be an atheist?”

“I was swept up!” she cried. “I was in love! I was willing to change!”

“You lied to me?”

That first year with Connie, year and a half even, I can hardly remember for how in love we were. We were just all love, morning and night, and all day, and love, and love. The only thing that gave me pause was her poetry. From what I could tell, she was a decent poet. Her poems never made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but neither did any of the published ones that she read aloud to me in bed, and in the park, and in bookstores, and in empty bars on winter afternoons. Not making sense seemed to be what it meant to be a good poet. Which was fine. But in that first year, year and a half, she stopped writing altogether. I thought it was important, if you called yourself a poet, to write poetry. I didn’t totally mind
that she stopped, because I wanted her to be with me more than I wanted her to be actually writing poetry. But as time went by, and she still wasn’t writing, I asked her why. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m just happy.” “You have to be sad to write?” “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Maybe. I guess maybe I do. Because when I’m happy, I don’t feel compelled to write. I’m just happy being happy.” “So when you start writing again, I’ll know you’re unhappy?” “You’ll know that I’m stable. That I can write because I can think about something other than you, us. I can think about poetry again.” That made sense, I supposed. But I still had to wonder, what was she if she wasn’t writing poetry? She wasn’t a poet. Poets write poetry. She was really just a receptionist at a dental office. A receptionist and the girlfriend of a dentist, her employer.