Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 15

Oh, there were beautiful things, of course-many beautiful and exciting things. Startling landscapes, and the almost physical thrill of encountering unaccustomed languages and unaccustomed people, their music, their clothing, their faces, the food-the sharp, dizzying flash of possibilities revealed-trips into the hectic, noisy, astonis.h.i.+ng towns and cities.

Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, when he wasn't traveling around, John liked to go to a fancy hotel if there was one in our area, and have a comically lavish lunch. Or, if we were someplace where the English had had a significant presence, a tea-which was Oliver's favorite, because of the little cakes and all the different treats and the complicated silver services.

There was the most glamorous hotel, so serene, so grand. The waiters were handsome-truly glorious-all in white linen uniforms that made their skin look like satin, dark satin. And their smiles-well, those smiles made you feel that life was worth living! And of course they were charming to Oliver, they could not have been more charming.

And there were elegant, tall windows overlooking the street, with heavy, s.h.i.+ning gla.s.s that was very effective against the heat and noise, with long, white drapes hanging at their sides. It was really bliss to stop at that hotel, such a feeling of well-being to sip your tea, watching the silent bustle of the street outside the window. And then one afternoon, beyond the heavy gla.s.s-I was just pouring John a second cup, which I remember because I upset it, saucer and all, and could never get the spot out of my lovely yellow dress-there was a sort of explosion, and there was that dull, vast, sound of particles, unified, rising like an ocean wave, and everyone on the street was running.

Well, we were all a bit paralyzed, apparently, transfixed in our velvety little chairs-but immediately there was a whoosh, and the faint high ringing of the drapery hardware as the waiters rushed to draw the long, white drapes closed.

Early on, John would sometimes describe to me his vision of the burgeoning world-lush mineral fields that lie beneath the surface of the earth and the plenitude they could generate, great arteries of oil that could be made to flow to every part of the planet, immense hydroelectric dams producing cascades of energy. A degree of upheaval was inevitable, he said, painful adjustments were inevitable, but one had to keep firmly in mind the long-term benefits-the inevitable increases in employment and industry, the desperately needed revenues.

Well, in practice things are never as clear, I suppose, as they are in the abstract; things that are accomplished have to get accomplished in one way or another. And in fairly fluid situations, certain sorts of people will always find opportunities. And that, of course, is bound to affect everyone involved, to however slight a degree.

In any case, eventually there was a certain atmosphere. And there were insinuations in the press and rumors about the company John was working with, and it just wasn't fun for John anymore.

It was an uncomfortable, silent ride to the airport when we finally did come back for good. I remember Oliver staring out the window at the shanties and the scrub and the barbed wire as John drove. There was a low, black billowing in the sky to one side of us, fire in the distance, whether it was just brush or something more-crops or a village or an oil field, I really don't know. And after we returned, there was a very bad patch for John, for all of us, though John certainly had done well enough financially. Many people had done very well.

"What is it, darling?" I ask Oliver. "Please tell me. Is one of your courses troubling you?"

He turns to gaze at me. "One of my courses?" His face is damp.

"You're not eating at all. I'm so worried about you, sweetheart."

"Ma, can't you see me? I can see you. I can see everything, Ma. Sometimes I feel like I can see through skin, through bone, through the surface of the earth. I can see cells doing their work, Ma-I can see thoughts as they form. I can hear everything, everything that's happening. Don't you hear the giant footfalls, the marauder coming, cracking the earth, shaking the roots of the giant trees? What can we do, Ma? We can't hide."

"Darling, there's nothing to be frightened of. We're not in any danger."

"His brain looks like a refinery at night, Ma. The little bolts of lightning combusting, shooting between the towers, all the lights blinking and moving . . ."

"Darling-" I smile, but my heart is pounding. "Your father loves you dearly."

"Mother!" He sits bolt upright and grabs me by the shoulders. "Mother, I've got one more minute-can't you see me, there, way off in the distance, coming apart, flailing up the hill, all the gears and levers breaking apart, falling off-flailing up the hill at the last moment, while the tight little ball of fire hisses and spits and falls toward the sea? He'll close his fist. Ma, he'll snuff it out. Are you protected by a magic cloak? The cloak of the prettiest girl at school?"

"Please, darling-" I try to disengage myself gently, and he flops back down.

"Oh, G.o.d," he says.

"What, darling? Tell me. Please try to tell me so that I can understand. So that I can understand what is happening. So I can try to help you."

"It's all breaking up, Ma. How long do I have? I'm jumping from floe to floe. Do I have a minute? Do I have another minute after that? Do I have another minute after that?"

I run my hands over his face, to clear the tears and sweat. "This is a feeling, darling," I say. My heart is lodged high up near my throat, pounding, as if it's trying to exit my body. "It's just a feeling of pressure. We've all experienced something like it at one time or another. You have to remember that it's not possible for you to fix every problem in the world. Frankly, darling, no one has appointed you king of the planet." I force myself to smile.

"Every breath I take is a theft," he says.

"Oliver!" I say. "Please! Oh, darling, listen. Do you want to stay home for a while? Do you want to drop one of your courses. Tell me how to help you, sweetheart, and I will."

"It's no use, Ma. There's no way out. It was settled for me so long ago, and now here's your poor boy, his head all in pieces, just howling at the moon."

During that whole, long time, when we were away, I used to dream that I was coming home. Almost every night, for a long time. I dreamed that I was coming home. I still dream that I am coming home.

I stand, for a moment, outside the bedroom door.

"Well, there you are," John says, when I bring myself to open it. "I was calling for you. Didn't you hear me?"

"I was . . . Do we have any aspirin?"

"Come in," he says. "Why don't you come in?"

The blinds are drawn, the house is a thin sh.e.l.l. The acid moonlight pours down, scalding.

"Talking to your son?" he asks.

"John?" I say. "Do you remember if Oliver ever had a nurse-maybe in Africa-who told him stories?"

"A 'nurse'?" John says. "Is he having some sort of nineteenth-century European colonial hallucination?"

I sit down at the dressing table. In the mirror, I watch John pacing slowly back and forth. "He needs rea.s.surance from you, darling," I say. "He needs your approval."

"My approval? Actually, it seems that I need his approval. After all, I'm an arch criminal, he must have mentioned it-he's not one to let the opportunity slip by. I'm responsible for every ill on the planet, didn't he spell it out for you? Poverty? My fault. Injustice? My fault. War somewhere? Secret prisons? Torture? My fault. Falling rate of literacy? Rising rate of infant mortality? Catastrophic climate change? New lethal viruses? My fault, whatever is wrong, whatever might someday go wrong, whatever some nut thinks might someday go wrong, it's all my fault, did he not happen to mention that? The whole world, the future, whose fault can any of it be? Must be dear old Dad's."

I rest my head in my hands and close my eyes. When I open them again, John is looking at me in the mirror.

After a moment, he shakes his head and looks away. "I noticed we're running low on coffee," he says.

I turn around, stricken, to face him. A neat, foil packet, weighing exactly a pound-such a simple thing to have failed at! "I meant to pick some up today-I completely forgot. I'm so sorry, darling. But there's enough for you in the morning."

He looks back at me, sadly, almost pityingly, as if he had just read a dossier describing all my shortcomings. "Enough for me?" he says. "But what about you? What will you do?"

"I don't mind," I say. "It doesn't matter-it's fine. I'll get some later-I have to do a big shop tomorrow, anyhow."

"No," he says. "I'll go out now. Someplace will still be open."

John's car pulls out. The sound shrinks into a tiny dot and I feel it vanish with a little, inaudible pop. I listen, but I can't hear a thing from Oliver's room-no music, or sounds of movement. I'll check on him later, after John has gone to sleep. I begin to brush my hair. It's surprisingly soothing-it always has been; it's like an erasure.

It's extreme to say, "I do my best." That can never quite be true, and in my opinion it's often just a pretext for self-pity, or self-congratulation-an excuse to give yourself leeway. Still, I do try. I try reasonably hard to be sincerely cheerful, and to do what I can. Of course I understand Oliver's feeling-that he's lashed to the controls of some machine that eats up whatever is in its path. But this is something he'll grow out of. As John says, this is some sort of performance Oliver is putting on for himself, some melodrama. And ultimately, people learn to get on with things. At least in your personal life, your life among the people you know and live with, you try to live responsibly. And when you have occasion to observe the difficult lives that others have to bear, you try to feel grat.i.tude for your own good fortune.

I did manage to throw out his card. I couldn't help seeing the name; the address of his office twinkled by. But I made an effort to cleanse them from my mind right away, and I think I'd succeeded by the time the card landed in the trash basket.

There's no chance that he would turn out to be the person who appeared to me this afternoon, really no chance at all. And I doubt I'm the person he was imagining, either-which for all I know, actually, was simply a demented s.l.u.t. And the fact is, that while I might not be doing Oliver or John much good, I'm certainly in a position to do them both a great deal of harm.

I'd intended to stay in today, to run some errands, to get down to some paperwork myself. But there we are. The things that are hidden! I felt such a longing to go into town, to go to the museum. It's not something I often do, but it's been a difficult week, grueling, really, with Oliver here, ranging about as if he were in a cage, talking talking talking about those hearings and heaven only knows what-and I kept picturing the silent, white galleries.

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history-a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope.

It was probably around eleven when I parked the car and went down into the metro. There was that awful, artificial light, like a disinfectant, and the people, silhouettes, standing and walking, the shapeless, senseless sounds. The trains pa.s.s through in gray streaks, and it's as if you've always been there and you always will be. You can sense the cameras, now, too-that's all new, I think, or relatively new-and you can even see some of them, big, empty eyes that miss nothing. You could be anywhere, anywhere at all; you could be an unknowing partic.i.p.ant in a secret experiment. And with all those lives streaking toward you and streaking away, you feel so strongly, don't you, the singularity and the accidentalness of your own life.

We pa.s.sed each other on the platform. I hadn't particularly noticed him until that second, and yet in some way he'd impressed himself so forcibly upon me it was as if I'd known him elsewhere.

I walked on for what seemed to be a long interval before I allowed myself to turn around-and he was turning, too, of course, at just the same instant. We looked at each other, and we smiled, just a little, and then I turned and went on my way again.

When I reached the end of the platform, I turned back, and he was waiting.

He was handsome, yes, and maybe that was all it was about, really. And maybe it was just that beautiful appearance of his that caused his beautiful clothing, too, his beautiful overcoat and scarf and shoes to seem, themselves, like an expression of merit, of integrity, of something attended to properly and tenderly, rather than an expression of mere vanity, for instance, or greed.

Because, there are a lot of attractive men in this world, and if one of them happens to be standing there, well, that's nice, but that's that. This is a different thing. The truth is that people's faces contain specific messages, people's faces are secret messages for certain other people. And when I saw this particular face, I thought, oh, yes-so that's it.

The sky was scudding by out the taxi window, and we hardly spoke-just phrases, streamers caught for an instant as they flashed past in the bright, tumultuous air. And no one at the reception desk looked at us knowingly or scornfully, despite the absence of luggage and the cla.s.sically suspect hour. It was as solemn and grand, in its way, as a wedding.

We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk; we had done it-the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see-elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we'd been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.

Jeffrey Eugenides.

GREAT EXPERIMENT.

If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?"

It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago, refulgent in early-evening, late-capitalist light. Kendall was in a penthouse apartment (not his) of an all-cash building on Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive. The view straight ahead was of water, eighteen floors below. But if you pressed your face to the gla.s.s, as Kendall was doing, you could see the biscuit-colored beach running down to Navy Pier, where they were just now lighting the Ferris wheel.

The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door-these weren't the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were all going organic. They had light-green facades and undulating rooflines, like blades of gra.s.s bending in the wind.

There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.

Kendall was gazing at the luxury buildings and thinking about the people who lived in them (not him) and wondering what they knew that he didn't. He s.h.i.+fted his forehead against the gla.s.s and heard paper crinkling. A yellow Post-it was stuck to his forehead. Piasecki must have come in while Kendall was napping at his desk and left it there.

The Post-it said: "Think about it."

Kendall crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he went back to staring out the window at the glittering Gold Coast.

For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt. It had welcomed him when he arrived with his "song cycle" of poems composed at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It had been impressed with his medley of high-I.Q. jobs the first years out: proofreader for The Baffler; Latin instructor at the Latin School. For someone in his early twenties to have graduated summa c.u.m laude from Amherst, to have been given a Michener grant, and to have published, one year out of Iowa City, an unremittingly bleak villanelle in the T.L.S., all these things were marks of promise, back then. If Chicago had begun to doubt Kendall's intelligence when he turned thirty, he hadn't noticed. He worked as an editor at a small publis.h.i.+ng house, Great Experiment, which published five t.i.tles per year. The house was owned by Jimmy Dimon, now eighty-two. In Chicago, people remembered Jimmy Dimon more from his days as a State Street p.o.r.nographer back in the sixties and seventies and less from his much longer life as a free-speech advocate and publisher of libertarian books. It was Jimmy's penthouse that Kendall worked out of, Jimmy's high-priced view he was taking in. He was still mentally acute, Jimmy was. He was hard of hearing but if you shouted in his ear the old man's blue eyes gleamed with mischief and undying rebellion.

Kendall pulled himself away from the window and walked back to his desk, where he picked up the book that was lying there. The book was Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Tocqueville, from whom Jimmy had got the name for Great Experiment Books, was one of Jimmy's pa.s.sions. One evening six months ago, after his nightly Martini, Jimmy had decided that what the country needed was a super-abridged version of Tocqueville's seminal work, culling all of the predictions the Frenchman had made about America, but especially those that showed the Bush Administration in its worst light. So that was what Kendall had been doing for the past week, reading through "Democracy in America" and picking out particularly tasty selections. Like the opening, for instance: "Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people."

"How d.a.m.ning is that?" Jimmy had shouted, when Kendall read the pa.s.sage to him over the phone. "What could be less in supply, in Bush's America, than equality of condition!"

Jimmy wanted to call the little book "The Pocket Democracy." After his initial inspiration, he'd handed off the project to Kendall. At first, Kendall had tried to read the book straight through, but now he skipped around in Volumes I and II. Lots of parts were unspeakably boring: methodologies of American jurisprudence, examinations of the American system of towns.h.i.+ps. Jimmy was interested only in the prescient bits. "Democracy in America" was like the stories parents told their grown children about their toddler days, recalling early signs of business ac.u.men or religious inclination, describing speech impediments that had long ago disappeared. It was curious to read a Frenchman writing about America when America was small, unthreatening, and admirable, when it was still something underappreciated that the French could claim as their own and champion, like serial music or the novels of John Fante.

In these, as in the forests of the Old World, destruction was perpetually going on. The ruins of vegetation were heaped upon one another; but there was no laboring hand to remove them, and their decay was not rapid enough to make room for the continual work of reproduction. Climbing plants, gra.s.ses, and other herbs forced their way through the ma.s.s of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities and a pa.s.sage beneath the lifeless bark. Thus decay gave its a.s.sistance to life.

How beautiful that was! How wonderful to imagine what America had been like in 1831, before the strip malls and the highways, before the suburbs and the exurbs, back when the lake sh.o.r.es were "embosomed in forests coeval with the world." What had the country been like in its infancy? Most important, where had things gone wrong and how could we find our way back? How did decay give its a.s.sistance to life?

A lot of what Tocqueville described sounded nothing like the America Kendall knew. Other judgments seemed to part a curtain, revealing American qualities too intrinsic for him to have noticed before. The growing unease Kendall felt at being an American, his sense that his formative years, during the Cold War, had led him to unthinkingly accept various national pieties, that he'd been propagandized as efficiently as a kid growing up in Moscow at the time, made him want, now, to get a mental grip on this experiment called America.

Yet the more he read about the America of 1831, the more Kendall became aware of how little he knew about the America of today, 2005, what its citizens believed, and how they operated.

Piasecki was a perfect example. At the Coq d'Or the other night, he had said, "If you and I weren't so honest we could make a lot of money."

"What do you mean?"

Piasecki was Dimon's accountant. He came on Fridays, to pay bills and handle Dimon's books. He was pale, perspirey, with limp blond hair combed straight back from his oblong forehead.

"He doesn't check anything, O.K.?" Piasecki said. "He doesn't even know how much money he has."

"How much does he have?"

"That's confidential information," Piasecki said. "First thing they teach you at accounting school. Zip your lips."

Kendall didn't press. He was leery of getting Piasecki going on the subject of accounting. When Arthur Andersen had imploded, in 2002, Piasecki, along with eighty-five thousand other employees, had lost his job. The blow had left him slightly unhinged. His weight fluctuated, he chewed diet pills and Nicorette. He drank a lot.

Now in the shadowy, red-leather bar, crowded with happy-hour patrons, Piasecki ordered a Scotch. So Kendall did, too.

"Would you like the executive pour?" the waiter asked.

Kendall would never be an executive. But he could have the executive pour. "Yes," he said.

For a moment they were silent, staring at the television screen, tuned to a late-season baseball game. Two newfangled Western Division teams were playing. Kendall didn't recognize the uniforms. Even baseball had been adulterated.

"I don't know," Piasecki said. "It's just that, once you've been screwed like I've been, you start to see things different. I grew up thinking that most people played by the rules. But after everything went down with Andersen the way it did-I mean, to scapegoat an entire company for what a few bad apples did on behalf of Ken Lay and Enron . . ." He didn't finish the thought. His eyes grew bright with fresh anguish.

The tumblers, the mini-barrels of Scotch, arrived at their table. They finished the first round and ordered another. Piasecki helped himself to the complimentary hors d'oeuvres.

"Nine people out of ten, in our position, they'd at least think about it," he said. "I mean, this f.u.c.king guy! How'd he make his money in the first place? On t.w.a.ts. That was his angle. Jimmy pioneered the beaver shot. He knew t.i.ts and a.s.s were over. Didn't even bother with them. And now he's some kind of saint? Some kind of political activist? You don't buy that horses.h.i.+t, do you?"

"Actually," Kendall said, "I do."

"Because of those books you publish? I see the numbers on those, O.K.? You lose money every year. n.o.body reads that stuff."

"We sold five thousand copies of 'The Federalist Papers,'" Kendall said in defense.

"Mostly in Wyoming," Piasecki countered.

"Jimmy puts his money to good use. What about all the contributions he makes to the A.C.L.U.?" Kendall felt inclined to add, "The publis.h.i.+ng house is only one facet of what he does."

"O.K., forget Jimmy for a minute," Piasecki said. "I'm just saying, look at this country. Bush-Clinton-Bush-maybe Clinton. That's not a democracy, O.K.? That's a dynastic monarchy. What are people like us supposed to do? What would be so bad if we just skimmed a little cream off the top? Just a little skimming. I'm telling you I think about it sometimes. I f.u.c.king hate my life. Do I think about it? Yeah. I'm already convicted. They convicted all of us and took away our livelihood, whether we were honest or not. So I'm thinking, if I'm guilty already, then who gives a s.h.i.+t?"

When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d'Or, when someone's misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this, Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down. He took in the bruise-colored bags under Piasecki's eyes, the addict-like clenching of his jaw muscles, his bad suit, his corn-silk hair, and the blue Tour de France sungla.s.ses pushed up on his head.