Bream Gives Me Hiccups (18 page)

A BULLY DOES HIS RESEARCH

Well well well, if it isn't little Tommy. Gimme your lunch money, dweeb! Hand it over! What? Are you scared? Are you worried about your family's financial situation now that your parents are separated? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think it's your fault, don't you? And even though your mommy told you that it had nothing to do with you, that you didn't make Daddy fall in love with his hygienist and run away to that ashram in Oregon, it still feels unsettling. You lie awake telling yourself, “If I had just loved them more, if I had just gotten better grades or was nicer to Grandma when she was in the hospital after her stroke in November, they would still be together.” And now you have to give me the money your mother gives you every morning because she can't pack a
bag lunch since her insomnia and reliance on Ambien makes her too groggy. Well, cry me a river!

Well well well, if it isn't Mr. Sellowitz, the science teacher, catching me in the act of stealing little Tommy's lunch money. Well,
Smell
owitz, smell this: I'm not Claude Monet! Yeah, that's right. I know you're threatened by me, but unconsciously associating me with Monet's not gonna help. Yeah, I know you wanted to go to RISD since you were my age but you couldn't get in and now you're stuck teaching sixth grade science. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably thought you were the future of impressionistic painting, doing your high school art project on a postmodern take on Monet's
Water Lilies
, with real lilies mounted in a 3-D diorama inside a tank of water. Well, guess what? It wasn't good enough for RISD and it's certainly not good enough for your stepfather, Aaron Segura, the beloved art critic who never liked your work to begin with. Sorry, teach!

Well well well, if it isn't Principal O'Malley, here to suspend me for stealing little Tommy's lunch money and talking back to Mr. Sellowitz. I bet it feels good punishing me, right? Lording your limited power over an adolescent bully? Makes you feel big and strong, doesn't it? Especially since I have such a nice head of hair and you started experiencing rapid male pattern baldness when you were only sixteen years old. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You tried everything, didn't you? First the natural remedies because you were too embarrassed to tell your doctor that you were going bald and couldn't afford a prescription for anything that would actually work. So you tried eating sardines every day for a year in the faint hope that it
would help. And then, by the time you could afford Propecia, it was too late because your hairline had already receded and Propecia has little success of actually regrowing hair shafts from dead follicles, especially in the temple lobe region, where you were most explicitly affected. Suck it!

Well well well, if it isn't my father, here to pick me up from school after I was suspended for stealing little Tommy's lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, and showing Principal O'Malley that his need for power is rooted in unresolved trauma relating to his early male pattern baldness. Thanks for the ride home, Pops! Is it weird to pick me up in the middle of the day or does it highlight the fact that Mom's the one with the real job? Does it reconfirm, in some unconscious or even conscious way, that you've lost all sense of pride and masculinity? Did it initially seem interesting to have Mom keep her job at the law firm while you stay home to raise the kids? Did you brag to your friends that you were proud to be eschewing gender norms? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! I bet you feel a burning sense to go out into the world and get even the most menial job just to feel like a person again, once you realized the novel you thought you'd write with your new free time wasn't ever going to materialize and you'd be stuck walking around the house in dirty sweatpants, looking at the clock and waiting for the woman you used to know to come back with the bacon. Psych!

Well well well, if it isn't the town bully, grounded in his bedroom, looking in the mirror and questioning his behavior after stealing little Tommy's lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, revealing Principal O'Malley's inner demons, and
emasculating his father. So, has it really come to this? A clichéd moment of self-reflection from the hardened aggressor? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think that endlessly harassing people with your well-detailed and overly analytical personal criticisms will make you feel better? You probably think you can keep everyone at a safe emotional distance if you put everyone down? You probably think that, if no one can get close to you and you remain hardened against the world, you'll never get hurt? That if no one likes you, you could remain a safe little bubble?! Bite me!

VIII.

LANGUAGE

NICK GARRETT'S REVIEW OF RACHEL LOWENSTEIN'S NEW BOOK,
GETTING AWAY

Cara Dawson, the hapless heroine of the “must-read” novel
Getting Away
, proclaims, “The world and all its people love me!”

One assumes that Rachel Lowenstein, Miss Dawson's creator, must share the feeling. The literary world has been taken by storm with its new darling-of-the-moment, the auspicious twenty-six-year-old Lowenstein, and though the excitement seems only to be building, one gets the wary sense Miss Lowenstein's literary prospects seem gloomy at best.

Lowenstein has been praised for her tragicomic treatise on one woman's journey from hopeless romantic to empowered, staunchly single woman, and book clubs around the country have taken up Lowenstein's “authentic” criticism of the male gaze as their new cause célèbre.

But where does all this vitriol stem from? Lowenstein has stated in interviews that her awful experiences with one particularly “narcissistic” man drove her to write this bestseller, which she says “proves that women don't need love to feel happy.” Although one wonders what Lowenstein did to this “mystery man” to make him so “narcissistic.” After all, it takes two to tango, Miss Lowenstein, two to tango.

Like Ayn Rand before her, Lowenstein uses a “plot” merely as a vehicle to deliver her dogmatism: in this case, an attack on one seemingly harmless man.

Lowenstein's story begins fourteen years ago as readers are introduced to Cara, a scrawny seventh grader in the Philadelphia suburbs. Though a loner, she is starry-eyed, quixotically pursuing unrequited love after unrequited love, in search for what Cara calls her “sole soul mate.”

A late bloomer, Cara goes through high school without ever kissing a boy, something that Miss Lowenstein has joked about in interviews as being “unfortunately based in truth.” At college she meets a young man named Mick Barrett in an elevator and later tells her roommate, “Tonight, I met my sole soul mate.”

Cara's premature declaration of love initially seems sweet, but her expectations for Barrett are clearly too high. Does Cara consider that placing the burden of “sole soul mate” on a nineteen-year-old college sophomore is possibly more than Barrett can handle? And, considering the pressures put on Barrett by his recently divorced parents (a detail Miss Lowenstein predictably glosses over), perhaps Barrett is not in a place to settle down with a wife and kids, something Cara conveniently never seems to consider.

Is it only this humble critic who finds Mick Barrett to be the lone sympathetic figure of
Getting Away
?

Cara and Barrett begin dating and, though their relationship seems stable, a more thorough retrospective reveals cracks in the otherwise polished veneer. For example, the young couple graduates college, Cara with a BFA in Creative Writing and Barrett with the more “sensible” economics degree that Cara encouraged him to pursue despite his inclinations toward painting. “There should only be one artist in the family,” Cara probably said in a scene presumably cut from the book. “I need a man who can support my writing and our children,” Cara most likely continued, bluntly crushing any dreams Barrett might have had for a life in the arts.

The couple moves to Westchester (though insightful readers will get the sense that Barrett would have preferred to spend a few years in the city) in order for Cara to have her precious “quietude” for writing her precious novels, a goal that readers are somehow asked to find noble because it's creatively “pure,” as though creativity is somehow on moral par with curing cancer. And Barrett is forced to work for an Internet advertising agency in Southern Westchester, a neighborhood that Lowenstein mischaracterizes as “diverse” because, were Cara to ever actually visit Barrett at his office, she would have realized that working two blocks from the South Bronx is terrifying and that “diversity” is a euphemism that only a pampered writer like Lowenstein would use to describe the experience of almost getting mauled by myriad cultures from the world's great diasporas on a daily basis.

Lowenstein continues to demonize Barrett, in such an
unbelievably manipulative way that readers who have never met a Machiavellian woman like Lowenstein or Cara would think she was writing the screenplay for the Mussolini biopic.

Consider the section where Cara wants to spend the day toiling away on her Great American Novel and then attend her mother's birthday dinner. In the morning, she asks Barrett if he could stop by the dry cleaners on his way home from work to pick up her red blouse so that she can wear it to the dinner. Barrett agrees because, frankly, what the hell else is he going to do now that his life has become a dreamless landscape of chores?

So Cara gets to work, writing in the study she never allows Barrett access to (
quelle surprise!
), and when Barrett comes home from work, he is empty-handed. Lowenstein has Barrett mutter something about the dry cleaners being “closed,” but clearly readers are supposed to pity the blouse-less Cara in a way usually reserved for the terminally ill.

However, Lowenstein neglects to report that the dry cleaners in question closes promptly at 7:00 and the last express train is at 6:36, so Barrett either has to catch the 5:48, which stops in Larchmont, or catch the 6:36 and literally sprint to the dry cleaners in his suit and after working a full day. Cara is a writer with no set schedule, but Barrett is the one responsible for picking up the clothes? Once again, readers are treated to yet another distorted image of the put-upon Cara and the negligent Barrett.

The next section, which details Barrett and Cara's reconciliation and sexual rejuvenation, is filled with surprisingly beautiful prose, showing Lowenstein's great gift for
description when truly moved by her subject matter. She artfully describes Barrett's face while he sleeps: “The moon shone down on his soft features and Cara had the urge to slow down time so she could stare at him forever.”

And Lowenstein really finds her linguistic footing when writing about the couple's passionate lovemaking: “Barrett's thrusts were explorations, colonizing her undiscovered body, taking her virginal copper and sending shivers down her golden spine.”

It is these hopeful passages that make readers feel like Lowenstein may have a real future—and that she may do the sensible thing and come back to Barrett. Or whomever Barrett is based on.

But just as quickly as Lowenstein introduces us to this lusciousness, she sheathes it as
Getting Away
returns to its customarily vindictive (and hackneyed) prose.

She begins to detail the couple's inevitable demise in a way that feels, in this critic's opinion, deliriously one-sided. Like when Barrett tells Cara that he does not want her mother to stay over at their house for the weekend and she calls Barrett “abusive.” When Barrett asks how that simple request constitutes “abuse,” Cara storms out of the house. What Lowenstein seems to “conveniently” leave out of the narrative is that Cara's mother is the most demanding, infuriating, over-bearing, and manipulative woman on the Eastern Seaboard (although one should not be surprised to discover this after reading two hundred pages of the angry faux-feminist diatribe that is her progeny's
Getting Away
). One time, Barrett drove forty-five miles in a blizzard to pick up Cara's mother,
who refused to take the bus because “it smelled funny.”

And the chapter where Cara finally asks for a divorce, which reads like Lowenstein's pièce de résistance, is a groveling and pathetic cry for sympathy even though she knows that what she did was wrong: not just that she left Barrett, but the
way
she left Barrett. To change the locks while he was at work that day was just so punishing. It just made him feel so small and so stupid. He wasn't even angry. He just felt alone.

And they had good times. They really did. It's probably hard for Cara to remember how much they felt for each other because she's so clouded with inexplicable rage, but they really loved each other. And Barrett would do almost anything to just have one good day back with Cara.

And I guess Barrett hopes that maybe somewhere Cara is reading this. Maybe in that café they used to go to on Peterson with the hookah bar or at that park where they used to make out under the vandalized statue of the horse. And maybe, if Cara wants, they could meet there again sometime. Not to date or anything, but just to talk. Just to clear the air. Just so he can tell her that he's really proud of what she's doing and that she deserves the great success she's having and that he always knew she would do great things.

He just wants to look into her eyes and tell her that he loves her. He just wants to feel her soft palm in his and stroke the inside of her fingers one last time. Despite everything, he still loves her. And he always will.

O
NE AND A HALF STARS.