You Were Wrong (6 page)

Jones brought his head in close to the piano and set about extracting its keys with tongs. Valuing speed over precision, he worked fast, broke off half a key, tossed it behind him, moved on. Karl minded this tremendously. What was he doing here? He was investigating the way in which he didn’t mind it all that much, or didn’t mind it enough, or, given the fatalistic passivity with which he greeted the fact of it in his life, minded it an unacceptably large amount and still did nothing.

Jones was on his umpteenth go at the furious middle of the song. Karl understood this song. It described a life, in three parts. Melancholy prevailed in part one, the protagonist limping along in waltz time beneath its onerous weight. In part two, forces of oppression outside him were met by forces of resistance within him, giving rise to a violent battle. Part three, though almost identical to part one, depicted not melancholy but calm acceptance, the satisfaction of having spent one’s soul on a fight and discovering it still in one’s possession, damaged perhaps but amplified as well. Or on the other hand maybe the return to the sad waltz in part three showed how sadness not only always defeats all struggles against it but erases them, carries on as if they hadn’t happened, except in those dreamy moments when one contemplates a new struggle, whereupon the dim memory of the previous struggle and its irredeemable cost extinguishes the spirit of struggle, resigns the protagonist to preserving the very limited energy remaining to him for the purpose of continuing to limp along under the weight of the sadness until on a merciful day it crushes him.

Karl removed himself to the side of the room farthest from the piano, where the entertainment center was located. He ranged around in and among machine-smoothed and varnished black wooden shelves, the flat-screen TV, the receiver, CD player, MP3 dock, turntable, two enormous speakers, each with its woofer and subwoofer; he drifted past a great assortment of CDs, DVDs, and LPs; he wandered near those godless pews, the soft leather couch, love seat, and matching recliners on which were strewn the sacred texts, the TV guides and leisure sections of local and national newspapers.

Jones said, “Two hundred and ninety-eight laps around the couch is a mile, I’ve paced it off. A little exercise at your age wouldn’t hurt, while you still can. I’m having trouble concentrating on the Chopin with you over there restlessly walking around. I thought you maybe were going to help but instead you’re hindering. Shall we play a little bit of pool on a Saturday afternoon? I’m capitulating, in other words, to the desire to play pool. Philistinism wins another victory over art at 218 Dreyfus Road here in West Egg. Not that pool isn’t a beautiful game with a rich history, and I don’t in any way mean to underestimate the value of relaxation, a state which you sometimes simply cannot achieve, let’s be realistic, while playing a Chopin nocturne. Relaxation especially for someone like you you’d think wouldn’t be that hard. What do you have at stake in the world, after all? Whether some kid gets an A on a quiz on polynomial equations, if I’m using the correct term? No employees, no capital at risk, no equipment that amortizes while you sleep—and
amortize
means die, machines die, I’ve seen it happen, it’s very sad, I’ve seen men weep, I’ve wept myself, the death of a machine the size of a blue whale, or, to be more accurate, the size of a series of four dozen giraffes’ necks laid end to end and dropping dead, how many people can say they’ve witnessed that? Well, a lot, actually, but not in the suburbs of New York. The midwestern United States, yes. Detroit, yes, your Malaysian and Chinese manufacturing belts, yes, grown Malaysian men weeping by the side of a dead machine at which they have spent the whole of their lives laboring from age twelve on, the soul of a man in a sense given over to the machine, entrusted to the machine, which your man Karl Marx would call alienation, I have this idea that you are a Marxist based not on any theory of his I’ve ever heard you espouse but on your seeming refusal to make anything resembling money and on your occasional snide remark about the sort of work I do and the people I
exploit
, as you have called it, while with a clean conscience I use the term
employ
. Did you know the average annual wage of a Malaysian adult is the equivalent of fourteen thousand U.S. dollars? That means your typical worker there is earning above the U.S. minimum wage, which, in terms of Malaysian ringgits, is a lot of ringgits, it’s possible to be comfortable in Kuala Lumpur and even more so in your outlying areas on far fewer than the forty-five or so thousand ringgits that fourteen thousand dollars is more or less the equivalent of—Malaysia, the sleeping giant, if you know what I mean, but back to my point, which is that of relaxation. I would kill to have your life. If I had your life I would devote my life to relaxation, I would be so good at pool I would be Jackie Gleason, I would be so good at pool I wouldn’t care that I wasn’t good at piano and was only a math teacher, not that I think some people shouldn’t be math teachers, imagine the world without them, but the point is I can’t have your life, a man of my particular talents and energies, if I had your life I would turn it back into my life in a matter of years, maybe months, some people in this world must make things while others must teach youngsters how to perform abstract operations, this fact was long ago established by minds far more sophisticated than yours, or even mine. But uh, any case, you, who are in biblical terms a lot more likely than I am to get into heaven, would enjoy it a lot more if you could learn to relax, speaking of which, how about a game of pool, aka pocket billiards, which would mean you’d have to get up, I don’t know, maybe you’re relaxed after all?”

Karl, not knowing what to do with the novel, excessive, worrisome amount of energy in his body, had at a certain point in his stepfather’s discourse lain on his back on the pool table, having succeeded in removing all balls but one, which now impinged on a spot between his lower lumbar and sacral vertebrae, reproducing the sort of shooting pain in the left leg he’d have experienced had the disk between these two vertebrae herniated, as the event is called. The latter had happened to Jones, the result of his having sat for many years in a poorly constructed office chair at his job in the manufacturing sector.

“But technically, if you lying there on the pool table like, I don’t know, a jellyfish is a form of rebellion, and I think it is, and I might add that it’s about time, then I would say actually it’s
not
a form of relaxation, and in fact as the orator and activist Martin Luther King Jr. amply demonstrated, nonviolent resistance is one of your least relaxing forms of disobedience. But in the case of Dr. King he had a legitimate gripe against a frighteningly powerful oppressor, whereas although I admit I am something of an asshole, I’m really not the oppressor I gather you think I am, I’m just an irrepressible conversationalist, a man with a clinically diagnosed excess of conviviality, trying to engage you via a couple pieces of interactive furniture here in the house we share. If I thought I’d have more luck with the wood shop I’d suggest we make a bird feeder together on this extremely pleasant spring afternoon, but I remember all too well—remember with a shudder, frankly—our last joint attempt at woodworking, and besides I just don’t like negotiating those basement stairs at this point in my life if I don’t have to. So, in any case, you and I having reached on the Chopin it seems something of an impasse consisting of my bad playing and your high standards, I therefore ask you with all due solicitude if you’d like to join me in a friendly game of pool. All right, no response from you, probably my mistake for not putting my request in the interrogative. Karl, would you like to join me in a friendly game of pool?”

One of the by-products of the previous afternoon’s beating being sore and stiff muscles, Karl had begun a series of modest experiments in neck flexibility on the pool table’s forgiving felt surface. He was in the process of slowly moving the oblong sphere of his noggin from side to side, letting first one bruised cheek and then the other come to rest on the felt. He viewed Larchmont Jones with the more open of his two eyes, the right one, and said, “I don’t like playing pool with you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like doing anything with you.”

“And yet here we are, stuck with each other.”

“Why do you keep saying that? What does it mean?”

“It means I think we should make the best of a difficult situation by playing pool, and then I’ll take a nap if the pains associated with my disease will let me, and you can, I don’t know, go have dinner with your friends, if such people exist.”

“That was gratuitous.”

“I meant only that I’d like to meet your companions because it does a man my age good to be stimulated by the presence of younger people but you don’t ever bring them around, so I was, you know, lamenting that and it came out inappropriately, which I regret.”

Karl slowly stood. He tried to think of what not playing pool with this man would entail. It would entail the quiet insanity of attempting to find something else with which to occupy his time during the remainder of the long afternoon, and time as of recently had become gelatinous, the seconds did not seem to want to flake off and die away one by one as was their custom, they clumped up before him, impeded forward movement, clogged his breathing holes—there were more and more of them, he was drowning in time. Leaving the house crossed his thoughts. The problem of leaving the house, though, now rivaled the problem of staying in the house, which was closely associated with the problem of the man with whom he shared it, which had confronted him most evenings and weekends for as long as he could remember, and which, feelingly, was not so very unlike being trapped in the man’s stale, crumbed, salt-and-pepper beard, or salt-and-brown-shoe-polish, if one were aiming for visual accuracy. The problem of leaving the house, though, was that outside the house had that afternoon become one single enormous location, and he was certain—though he was too frightened to test his certainty empirically—that each part of this location would now resemble that pale face, the loveliest face he knew, made hideous two hours ago by a derision of which he was the object.

Karl stood up and, by not leaving the vicinity of the pool table, signaled his willingness to play. His life was an abomination. He broke and sank nothing, despaired. Billiards is torture. A soul can be dying, another exalting, and to the uninitiated watcher of a game of pool, this might look like a game of pool.

“I just, really, Malaysia, though, so much of me is tied up in it, and as you may well know, or perhaps not, I go there once a year, would love for you to accompany me next time, in the autumn, during your school’s fall break. Fall break, there’s a pair of nouns that once you reach a certain age you live in fear of them becoming verbs. Men break their hips in the shower too, it’s less well documented than the hip breaks of the fairer sex, a virtual commonplace among your geriatric distaff set, all my lady peers either have one themselves or know someone who does.”

“You’re not that old.”

“I can’t believe I missed that shot. Your go. Serious about Malaysia though, what do you say? Anytime you feel like either answering my question or taking your pool shot would be fantastic.”

Karl swayed in place, took his shot, missed.

“You scared to go to Malaysia?”

“No.”

“You’ll go then?”

“No.”

“You’re scared, I think you’re scared. Nothing wrong with that, I’m scared too, that’s why I’m asking you along. You can’t sit next to me on the plane though, because I’m
very
scared of takeoffs and landings and I need to be seated next to a beautiful young woman at these times, the likelihood of which will be halved, or more, if you’re sitting next to me. There’s no guarantee that if you don’t sit next to me I will definitely sit next to a beautiful young woman, but my luck in this area is almost impeccable, as is my luck with these people being excellent listeners, I don’t know what it is, I just have a genius for getting very pretty young women to listen to me, I sort of angle my words right into their open and absorptive—is that a word, absorptive?—pores and they drink me right in. This is not in any way to be disrespectful or adulterous to your mom, I would never, but you’re in the air, you’re so terrified you think you’re going to crap your pants, the beautiful woman is there—she is always somehow there with her striped shirt—and you just cantilever the words into her waiting body and this is intoxicating, this is transcendental meditation on acid as we used to say in the early eighties. My point being you should come with me to Malaysia and face your fear, during fall break, not during fall break, this, the teaching of math, the passing on to the next generation of mathematical skills, it strikes me, should not matter as much as conquering your fears by coming with me to Malaysia matters. And fear by the way is generally caused by ignorance, except when the thing you’re afraid of is legitimately terrifying like a giant metal tub with wings that leaps up off the ground with two hundred people in it. But in your case, you don’t know Malaysia, you’re scared of Malaysia, this is a story as old as the Malay Peninsula itself.”