Good Kids: A Novel (26 page)

“Guys I’ve dated have had the same story without the Pepsi money or the record label. Also, that sounds vastly superior to grad school. That’s all I’ve done. I mean I started right out of college, and now I’m an academic. Before that I was in high school. So I can’t say what it’s like. There’s nothing to compare it to. Where we both failed,” she continued, after taking another sip, “was our careers in anarchist terrorism.”

We looked at each other seriously. Maybe it should have been Todd and Julie that made us feel like this, feel that we were lovable for our moments of stupidity as well as for our accomplishments. But Khadijah and I had known each other as stupid children. Todd and Julie could never look at us and see the child still in each of us as vividly as Khadijah and I could see it in each other. We didn’t have to imagine those hapless kids to ignite mutual empathy. We remembered them.

Once we had polished off the wine and a substantial portion of a tilapia and a rabbit, I felt even better suited to intuitive Boston driving. Khadijah, for her part, was not alarmed by the way I guessed my way helter-skelter back to Cambridge. Rubbing the back of her head against the plastic seat, she spoke clearly and calmly.

“I can’t do my job,” she said. “My mom pushed me into this shit and now I can’t do it.”

“What do you mean?”

Central Square felt inevitable. It drew us in, a vacuum.

“When we get back to my apartment,” she said, closing her eyes, “I’ll show you what I mean.”

When we did finally waver up the stairs of her building and through her door, she ushered me past the entrance to the bedroom and through the tiny kitchen. She sat, almost fell onto the floor of the living room, beside a bookshelf. On the other side of her, cowering in her shadow, was an exquisite little house that
would have been a vulgar monstrosity at actual size. A component, no doubt, of the Homelessness Initiative.

It was a miniature version of the kind of glassy parallelogram I’d seen blocking public access routes to the beach in Malibu, but deprived of mass, waiting, by design, for its own demise. It was precious, asking to be protected. So that was what the performance was for: to show the fragility of things that otherwise appeared obnoxiously stable.

Khadijah’s purple cardigan still covered her shoulders, but she’d pulled her arms from the sleeves. She took a glossy academic-press paperback from the shelf.

“Deleuze and Guattari,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II: A Thousand Plateaus,
” she said. “I’ve read to about page thirty. Not the rest. Cited it any number of times.” The pages made an almost excremental sound when they hit the floor, so zealously did she throw the book. She took another off the shelf. “Giorgio Agamben,
The Coming Community,
about page twenty-five.” She threw. “Latour and Woolgar,
Laboratory Life,
about the first third.” She threw. “Children, this is what happens when you let your mother pick out your career for you. Do you know how insane it is to have my job at twenty-nine? I can’t keep up with some of the brighter undergrads. There’s a
reason
people don’t have my job at twenty-nine.”

In music, our age was too old. In academia, apparently, it was too young.

“It’s just arbitrary,” I said happily. I had her confessing! “If you were a twenty-nine-year-old rock star, you’d be having to fuck up hotel rooms right now to show everybody you were still wild and young and full of cum, you know?”

“I’d fuck up a hotel room right now, to show them they made a mistake with me.”

On the wall were three photographs containing bones—the use of bones by three contemporary artists was the subject of Khadijah’s dissertation. One picture was a backlit sculpture of a middle-aged woman in a business suit, holding a shaman’s wand decked with bird skulls. The second was a young, dark-haired
woman, presumably the artist, dancing with a robot skeleton. The third was of a mobile, the kind Calder might have made, only using what appeared to be different-size femurs and fingers from various animals. Beneath the pictures there was a tiny wooden desk half-buried by dunes of paper, save for a framed shot of Todd in pajamas, tilted on a stand in one corner.

“Nobody knows this about me, Josh, just FYI. And now you are the exceptionally privileged person who gets to see someone do this for free.”

She took a Taschen coffee table book of Chinese propaganda art, about the size of a lobster tank, and held it over the miniature house, so that it cast its shade like a cloud over the little office additions, the pixieish railing around the kidney pool. It was at this point that I began seriously to wonder whether my campaign to make myself Khadijah’s psychoanalyst, to urge her into a state of catharsis, might not have been doing her a true favor.

“I don’t know if you want to do that,” I said. “You’re smashed.”

She let it drop. The book stove in the roof of the elaborate little manse, and its walls collapsed over its pool and its porches. A faint smell of dust and glue rose through the air.

I knelt beside her on the floor. She put her hands on my shoulders. I thought of that moment she’d thrown her arms across the table at Classé Café—
do you think I’m overdramatic?
I felt tenderness and desire—the hairs on my arms were twisting wicks.

“The vow,” she said.

“We already broke it,” I said. “With the stone.” I took her face in my hands and kissed her.

As we listed downward, I helped ease her to the floor with one hand on her back, and ran the other up her rib cage. A door that had stood locked in the corner of our lives for thirteen years was open. I was holding her breast, her knee, that was all; but I closed my eyes and I was running out of a bright little apartment down a passage with no lights.

We held each other side by side, until with an effort she straddled me, and lay her head on my chest. A moment later, her eyes closed and her breathing filled with sleep.

I stroked her hair, the curl like loose tobacco. I wanted to touch the arcs beneath her eyes, these signs of time’s passage. Her face was pressed into my chest, and it was like the teeth of the tiger, unreal.

While she snored, I composed a plan. I would work as an engineer in a studio in Brooklyn. We would begin a train circuit between Boston and New York in which we spent every weekend together, summers rent a cabin on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Given that kissing Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn was possible, all this was possible too. Life included things I had not known it included. It was the same feeling I’d had when I discovered instruments, at age five, banging on a piano in a dying commune in the woods.

She woke suddenly, snapped back her head. I took her hand, and she pulled me onto a chair with C-shaped legs. It looked like something Nancy would have owned, sky blue, aerodynamic, modern, a pilot’s seat of command. It probably
was
something Nancy had owned, back in the Age of the Dads.

And we kissed, side by side like fetal twins, in that Dadsian chair. I knew some, if not all, of the things this meant: Here we are, full circle; here we are, our parents; here we are, in rebellion against our parents, no longer obedient children; here we are, to usurp their territory. Khadijah took off her shoes and socks, and they were red socks and white sneakers but I could also see the burgundy-trimmed Esprit socks of 1994. She took off her dress and I almost saw the gray Smith College sweatshirt she’d worn when she’d thrown the stone at the window of the bank. I looked at her, both of us naked, and was ringed in old fantasies. It was as if I discovered, still in my mind but heretofore concealed, a younger version of myself. It was an ecstatic state; I was not myself.

When it was just our bodies on the chair, the two of us kissing noisily, I felt less and less like I was in my body, more and more of a spirit. I pulled her toward me, and she sat on the edge of her chair as I kissed her breasts and eventually spread her legs and tried to eat her out, before her hands cupped my chin and brought my face back up to hers. I was still soft.

Surely, this was only a temporary setback. I kissed her rib cage, her hair. I memorized the curves of her breasts, I learned the taste of her sweat, I studied the calluses on her bare feet, her interestingly smashed-together toes. My heart was full of gratitude, full of blood.

But my penis. That most beloved of organs, least obedient, Satan in
Paradise Lost
. Once frightened into self-consciousness, it would not communicate. I am, I thought, a performer! But I couldn’t make it stand more than halfway.

On the floor, we still tried to get me inside her for a moment; if we could only get this far, I reasoned, everything would proceed well enough. I thought of Jeremy, my nemesis, battling his own reluctant cock, trying to get it hard enough for the condom, as the tiger looked on. I thought of all the other men before me, who had battled with their members, argued with fate. This was what defeated me for good.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I flopped down on the floor and lay on my back. I expected to have injured Khadijah. I was ready for tears. But she slid beside me on the rug and said nothing. After a while, she spoke, not with resentment but with curiosity, with the voice of an intellectual: “I wasn’t in it either.”

It was a part of my soul that didn’t touch my body, the part where I kept Khadijah. This cold, pretty truth I had felt floating like snow in the air in the concert hall—it sparkled, but it couldn’t translate into sex. It wasn’t of the flesh, what we had. Not at this point in our reacquaintance, not enough for us to jump in a chair and ravish each other. It was as if Khadijah’s hands and lips and breasts were waiting for a different person, a fifteen-year-old boy who hadn’t had the life I’d had, the derangement of late adolescence, the construction of a band, the collapse of a band, dawn after dawn with Julie in the egg. That child was unrecoverable, and would have had to be recovered if we were to pick up where we’d left off as children.

We didn’t touch each other, lying there on the white rug. I was putting on my socks, our clothes arranged around us like sterilized instruments, when she began to speak.

“I’d like you to leave, please, Josh.” She was moving things in a closet off the kitchen. She extricated a broom and a tin dustpan, with some clanging. Stumbling, slightly, from the wine, she carried them back to the living room. She looked down at the aftermath of her collaboration with Todd, the little mansion shattered by the book.

“You and my mother are so much the same,” she said. “You like to have a story of how things go. My mom saw her life as featuring a certain kind of kid. You see your life as getting a girl you liked in high school. I’d prefer it if neither of you would see me as who I’d need to be to make a story happen. I wouldn’t mind being that person, but I’m not.”

“You led me to believe,” I said. Believe what? But I couldn’t say it better than that: You led me to believe. “Did you think I was going to take your little gestures lightly?”

“I liked the idea that I could just turn out to be on the wrong track for the past thirteen years and then snap back onto the one I was on before. I was into that. Is that so wrong? But I’m not going to switch lives. You’re fifty percent make-believe to me, Josh. I don’t actually know you all that well, can’t you understand? Todd’s a good man. You could be a lot of different things—how am I supposed to know? I can only live according to what’s in front of me.”

Well—my god.

She was doing her best to wake herself up, using the broom to try to make order of the shards. She was drunk, but she was fighting it.

Khadijah cast aside the broom. She didn’t throw it; she only gave up on it, letting it fall to the ground. She went back to the closet, hauled out a black, new-looking, Earth Vac vacuum cleaner, and plugged it into a socket in the kitchen wall.

“Please go,” she said. She switched on the vacuum cleaner, giving herself a force field of noise.

It was when I was back in my rental car, driving into the first blue suggestions of daylight, south of New Haven, that I was able to formulate what I had done. It had felt to me as if the person who
was at the core of my life—Julie—was dispensable. And the person who had felt like the real core—Khadijah—had turned out to be someone who could only walk around the margins.

For a long time I pounded on the steering wheel and cursed. But this could last only so long; after forty-five minutes, there was an oasis. A brief moment when reflection overcame confusion and self-flagellation.

When a band is good, I thought, it doesn’t sound like music somebody composed. You don’t get a good band by hearing music in your head and making that music real. Maybe a good painting or a good poem can be the realized vision of an individual; Joanna Newsom’s a vision made real, and she’s good, but she’s not a band. A good band happens because two or more people play music together and, either immediately or over time, surprise each other with a sound conceived jointly. The music is sovereign over its players. Nobody’s in control, and you can hear it.

The same is true of true love.
True love
being understood here to mean sustained love. It’s better if you don’t place your faith in a vision of how things are going to be. The shock of what happens can be superior to any concept you had in your head at the start. But you have to listen carefully to the other person; you can’t imitate the other person; you can’t drown out the other person; you can’t be drowned. If you forget these precautions, you will think your concept was flawed; you’ll forget that not having a concept, being surprised, was the point. You’ll start acting like dicks to each other. There will be fights, and boredom. The music will go flaccid. Like a band in decline, you will become a joke or break up.

At the tollbooth guarding Queens and Brooklyn, the boroughs where I had places to crash, I reached into my wallet for $6.50 and found only napkins: Tom, Myra, Julie 2. The ink had begun to bleed. Tom’s nose had melted, and merged with his mouth. Myra’s flower now sprouted from her head. Julie 2’s hand was reduced to a blot, but her cello, creased in two places, was still a workable instrument. There was a mile-long line of cars behind me. I folded the napkins, put them back inside, and turned to face the brooding man in uniform.