Granta 131 Page 6

  His sisters, kind, whitening women, had invited him to spend Christmas with them, their children and their grandchildren. Laura had two children and three grandchildren, one of whom was already ten. The other sister, Ramona, had one child and two grandchildren, and a lesbian partner whom she’d met at church thirteen years ago. Now her ex-husband and her lesbian partner and her child and grandchildren did things like have Ice Cream Sundae Funday Nights and veritable singalongs.

  ‘Billy,’ Ramona pleaded on the phone, ‘you’ll be all alone. Why do this to yourself – on Christmas? Don’t you know you have family? Clarence is walking now. You haven’t even seen his little baby walk.’

  ‘But can he talk the talk?’ Douglas tried to remember which one Clarence was.

  ‘Talk?’ Ramona was bewildered.

  ‘You know, seduce, inveigle, slither into false intimacy?’

  ‘Billy, have you spoken with Miranda recently or something? You sound awful,’ Ramona said, ‘again.’

  Professor William Douglas coughed a little and made an excuse about a lozenge, then walked to the History office to see if anything particular was happening. If he wasn’t by the phone, he wouldn’t be lying when, eventually, he explained to Ramona that he’d missed her call. He might even run into Marlene, the boring little cutie from his night course. Sixty-two, and the thing that kept him functional was the possibility of running into minor crushes. Good God.

  ‘I’m not making you more coffee,’ Clara said.

  Professor Douglas bowed. ‘Happy holidays to you too.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ Clara sniffed.

  ‘No,’ he said, cupping his hand to smell his breath. He must remember to keep mouthwash in his office.

  People in New Jersey talked about going to the city ‘all the time’. ‘If they’re in New York all the time, then how can they be here now?’ Miranda used to ask. ‘I wish they were in New York all the time.’ Douglas and Miranda had met and begun dating in the city. Back then, she was a young woman who enjoyed dressing beautifully for parties. Afterward, they’d return to their little one-bedroom apartment and undress beautifully. She was a legal assistant to an acquaintance of his, Robin Grubler, who had a tremendous unrequited affection for her.

  ‘A tack!’ Grubler would tell Douglas when he was drunk. ‘Miranda is sharp. As. A. Tack.’ It was the highest compliment he ever paid anyone and essentially equivalent to a statement of undying devotion. ‘A tack,’ he said, ‘you dusty bastard.’ Douglas had never understood what dusty was supposed to mean. He wasn’t dusty. Maybe Grubler had said lucky. Maybe he was lucky.

  Then a couple of years into the marriage, Douglas got an offer, and the offer was in New Jersey. Miranda complained about the food and accents, missing her job, loneliness. ‘Oh, we used to live in Manhattan,’ Miranda would explain to neighbors when she met them. ‘We moved to New Jersey to make my husband’s life easier.’

  Sometimes, when she was depressed and unmedicated, he encouraged her to develop an inner life. What he meant was that it would be wonderful for her to have a place to retreat into too when the real world wasn’t to her liking, so that he, her real-world husband, needn’t talk her down into polite despair, which was the best he could do anyway. These talks, brief as they were, took him out of the sixteenth century when he should have been writing something about Luther that would recast the great Protestant himself as a rebel, sexy. Tenure, after all, wasn’t guaranteed. But Miranda always wanted to visit with his sisters in Brooklyn. She became hysterical watching movies about the adventures of sassy secretaries. Sometimes when he was working through a manuscript, she stood by the doorway in her beautiful dinner clothes until he agreed to eat a meal with her. She was nothing like his first wife, a jazz musician, to whom he’d been married quite happily for ten days when he was twenty. Occasionally, he became so irritated that he had to masturbate to the thought of one of his students in his office after class, just to manage Miranda’s antics at home with a smile. Finally, Douglas suggested she take a course in the city once a week, work on her relationship with herself. It sounded like something a sensitive husband would say to a sensitive wife.

  But now, wasn’t he the one working on himself – he, a man without a care in the world? It was just him and the entire run of human history – and his specialization once every four semesters when his elective course was offered. He didn’t need to fix anyone except the only one he could. Which should be easy, but the city was a terrible snooze on Christmas. For a while, he walked through the East Village, and what was more awful than realizing that it was empty of actual counterculturalists was the reality that even the vomiting fraternity glutes were behaving well today, somewhere behind closed doors. He passed by a tattoo parlor, then a nail parlor, then a hair parlor. ‘We’re not hair today,’ the sign said. ‘Come back another dye.’ It wasn’t even witty. If they were going to be unavailable, they could at least be witty, like some of the women he’d pursued. ‘A knock-knock joke is never clever,’ he’d had to tell one girl he dated for a night. Then he’d added an addendum about street-crossing jokes before eventually giving up.

  Beyond Tompkins Square Park and west a little, he was certain the city would indulge his fantasy. He didn’t know what the fantasy was exactly, but he was certain he’d recognize it once it materialized and wasn’t fantastical. He believed it had something to do with commerce or drinking or women, a feeling he thought he might have had thirty years ago. The feeling was that his words would land on someone and that that someone would respond in a way that the words landed back on him. He huddled inside his coat, walking purposefully, running almost, his face chilled pink. It wasn’t so bad. The cold inspired character and briskness. Except in Stalinist Russia, of course.

  A yellow cab slowed suggestively by the curb. Douglas raised his arm and jumped in quickly, then grabbed at his thigh.

  ‘Where to?’ the cabbie said.

  ‘I think I pulled a muscle.’

  ‘Bellevue Hospital? Is that Bellevue Hospital I hear?’ the cabbie asked like an auctioneer.

  ‘No, you’re not listening,’ Douglas said. ‘Listen.’ But he needed a moment to think. It had become increasingly difficult to remember which thoughts were his and which were his mind repeating those of Miranda. For years, ever since she’d enrolled in that ridiculous graduate program, he’d think of things she might say, then shoot them down within the privacy of his own mind. Lately, though, he forgot to shoot down her hypothetical speech. Its regularity matched his own thoughts. Rivalry could do that: confuse winning with a victory. In fact, he wondered whether Miranda hadn’t ruined his previously above-average brain a little just by her presence, reciting her passages, exclaiming her Wittgensteinianness, though, of course, no one was Wittgensteinian except Wittgenstein, and even she had become un-Douglasian post hoc. But the cab driver was waiting for him to say something. They’d go nowhere unless he said something. His leg seized painfully when he rotated it in the hip socket.

  ‘Almost there,’ he said. He was on the brink of remembering someplace wonderful.

  ‘Where?’ the driver pointed a finger left and right expectantly.

  ‘You know, there.’

  A sigh from the front seat. ‘So is that a yes to Bellevue?’

  ‘Washington Square Park, please,’ Douglas said to say something.

  At Washington Square, there was hardly anyone to be seen walking around at all. A teenager ran shrieking down the street. Then he watched a woman with legs like pole-vaulting poles charge through a section of tamped-down snow in nothing but sandals and a cocktail dress. She didn’t seem cold at all. For a moment, he thought he’d ask the girl if it wasn’t painful to walk through snow in open-toed shoes. But what would that mean anyway? Miranda would say that even if he did take off his shoes and try walking sandaled through the snow himself, he wouldn’t know what the girl meant by pain at all. Miranda would say it would be his pain, not hers, he was feeling. Miranda would do very kindly to get out of his head. And y
et, wasn’t she the person he was looking for on every street corner?

  But she wasn’t here wherever he had been that day. He’d walked around in the cold all day, and the only place he’d spent much time was a filthy little deli that smelled like mentholated cigarettes and halal food. The libraries were closed. The museums were closed. The shops were closed, and half the restaurants were too. He looked between the slats of blinds hanging in a twenty-four-hour diner window. Even this place, with its spongy shoestring fries and overpriced tuna salad, was closed for Christmas. Wasn’t anyone Jewish anymore? he wondered.

  ‘Is you racist or something?’ said a man standing on the corner. He took a lollipop out of his fat little face with a loud suction sound just to say it. ‘Ignorance is bliss.’

  ‘I didn’t realize we were having a conversation,’ Douglas said.

  ‘If you don’t want to converse, don’t talk,’ the fat man said. He waved the spitty lollipop wildly, and blue sugar drool trickled from the corners of his mouth.

  Douglas walked toward the train station. There was no reason to be here, and there never had been. He was always misinterpreting his own needs. It was half the reason he was in this mess. He thought of Miranda, how he’d wished she had an inner life when she had one already, a good one that stayed inside except for the occasional blue day. And now that Miranda, that life of hers, and also that life of theirs, was gone, replaced with ideas, and those ideas were not for the outer world. In fact, they were all ideas about the irrationality of interacting with it much at all. ‘We identify a day as a Wednesday,’ she might say. ‘But what makes Wednesday Wednesday, not Tuesday or Thursday? And if I were to ask of a day whether it was a Wednesday, how would I prove it?’

  ‘I’m not racist!’ Douglas called to the candy man. ‘I, for one, know what day it is!’

  ‘Thursday! I do too, bitch!’ the candy man said.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Professor Douglas began to say. But what was the point? How would he prove it was Christmas?

  In retrospect, the trip to the city had been a ridiculous idea. After all, the beginning of the beginning of the end had started on a trip to New York. On the train, he tried to engage Miranda with complaints about the departmental budget cuts, but all she wanted to talk about was this wonderful Wittgenstein she was learning about in her college course. ‘“Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use its breath?”’ she said, an eager sheen in her eye. ‘Well?’

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to respond,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have to do with real life at all.’

  ‘Maybe when you say you didn’t think you needed to respond, you didn’t need to. Maybe I needed you to respond.’

  ‘Is this still philosophy or do you just talk like that now?’

  ‘Jesus, Bill.’

  ‘What?’ He looked at her looking out the window. From the side, her lips were two red jelly beans. He could absolutely bite them. This was real life: lips like jelly beans! Historical facts! He was a man of events, not ideas, a historian, a knower, not a philosopher. ‘We’ll be there soon,’ he said.

  ‘When is soon?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘When you imagine soon, the word soon, what do you see in your mind? When is it?’

  ‘I feel like I can’t say anything without it becoming a fucking discussion anymore,’ he said.

  ‘Lucky we’re going to a play then,’ she said. They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.

  Now, when he groped at his memory, he was certain he could sense something that was almost a clue. But the more he tried to grab at the germ of their alienation, the less he knew what exactly the clue was. It just seemed that after that trip, nothing went right. He remembered one night she said was feeling a little sick on their way to a gallery opening in Chelsea. She told him she would drop him off before she went home, then kept her eyes closed the entire cab ride.

  He’d assumed she really was sick, therefore settling on a dapper exit to cheer her. ‘Promise you’ll make sure my little girl gets home safe,’ he said smarmily to the cab driver. It was a wry little joke that had always gotten a good-natured chuckle from a stranger the first time he was married.

  But this time, the driver looked at him gravely. ‘I promise you, sir: I will take care of your daughter.’ Douglas tried to explain the irony – the husband, overprotective to the point of fatherliness, though of course he wasn’t actually anyone’s father – but the cab driver just kept saying, ‘Your daughter is in safe hands, sir.’ Later, when he came home, she pretended to be asleep, and the next day he couldn’t make her admit her own pretense. Another time, they visited Ramona, and it was all a very nice afternoon until she began crying on the way back. He asked why she was crying. ‘Because you don’t know what I mean even when I mean what I say,’ she said.

  ‘When don’t you mean what you say?’ he asked.

  ‘Sex,’ she said.

  It was January the second, and he’d managed to avoid his sisters and their offspring for the major winter holidays. The trip to New York had been disappointing, but the next semester was coming, and there were things to do, things to photocopy. He’d selected a new reading about the indulgence, redemption as a consumer item, the symbology of the forgiveness of sin. He would argue that the popularity of the indulgence itself revealed postmodern epistemological concerns. Then Ramona called, Ramona who was always self-improving, annoyingly enough, and had recently started trying to improve him too. He tried to bore her from fixing him, spoke about the chic new theories in history, which really weren’t even all that new anymore.

  ‘Happened is over. Happened has happened already,’ he said, his voice cycling through octaves manically. ‘Narrativity. Now there’s something.’ He didn’t believe in these trendy theories, but with any luck Ramona would get tripped up on five-syllable words. His sister’s lesbian partner could be heard humming in the background, as the ex-husband syncopated with a wooden spoon on a pot. Should it bother him that he couldn’t remember the lesbian partner’s name?

  ‘But what the hay does narrativity have to do with you, Billy?’ said Ramona.

  It was a good question, actually. He sometimes did wonder what had happened to the form and thrust of his life. But the larger part of himself, the part that was hypothetically Miranda, was stuck on something he’d just said. ‘Where is there when we say there’s something?’ he asked. ‘For that matter,’ he added, ‘what do we mean by is, anyway?’

  ‘Billy,’ Ramona said. Her voice was rising with fear. ‘Do you know what day it is? Do you know where you are? What’s my name, Billy? Have you hit your head on something?’

  He didn’t know what day it was. ‘I don’t know, Sunday? That’s really not a fair question during the recess, Ramona. R-A-M –’

  Ramona told him he could stop spelling right now. Probably she wanted to go play the recorder. Her partner and ex-husband were still having a jolly time somewhere near the phone, or else very loudly. ‘Anyway, I just thought you’d like to be included. That’s the only reason I called.’

  ‘Included in what?’

  ‘In the new year’s resolution. You stick to it better with a partner.’

  ‘I don’t have a resolution, though. I don’t –’ He paused. ‘I don’t resolve.’

  Ramona cleared her throat. ‘Well, maybe you should. Maybe you should work on your interpersonal skills. Like forgiveness.’

  William Douglas closed his eyes.

  ‘You should resolve things with Miranda, for example. Put yourself in her shoes. Anger is toxic waste to the soul, Billy. Do you want your soul to die, Billy?’

  ‘I don’t know why you think I have a soul, Ramona,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you do.’ It was difficult to know which was more irritating, preaching or pity. He avoided preaching and pitying equally, mostly because he was generally too delirious to do either. So, in fact
, it was not that he avoided either. He was just too busy for them.

  ‘You’re just trying to hurt me now, Billy. That’s not productive. When Andrea and I are angry with each other, we say, “Right now, I feel anger toward you, but I know that this is a temporary feeling.” Then the other says, “I validate your feeling, and I also feel X.”’

  ‘X?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the fill-in-the-blank.’

  ‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I don’t think you can be hurt at all. I’m probably the only real person alive. That’s what Miranda would want me to think, anyway. You see? I’m in her shoes. Her lousy philosopho-figurative shoes.’

  ‘You’re talking like a crazy person.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Douglas. ‘I’m talking like my ex-wife, the crazy person.’

  ‘Billy, I feel anger toward you, but I know this is a temporary feeling.’

  ‘X,’ William Douglas said.

  A man standing outside the strip mall and wearing tight yellow pants thrust a pamphlet at him. On the front, the words TURN YOUR GUT FROM GUTTER TO GLITTER appeared in red letters. Where had this man come from? Professor Douglas looked at the man’s legs. To call them legs was to miss something of their fundamental meatiness, the striations and muscle weave. Why did you have to compare a thing to another to describe it? Nothing meant what it was supposed to anymore.

  ‘By Day Ten the asshole starts blubbering mucus, and that’s when you know your colon is immaculate as our savior Jesus Christ’s conception,’ the man told a woman wearing a bright pink parka. ‘Take any sixty-something-year-old man and stand him naked by my side. Not only will he be more constipated, but ten times out of nine the triceps will hang like wet laundry in the wind.’

  The woman was rapt. She had removed a small notebook from her purse and begun jotting notes.