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Authors: Peter Cameron

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BOOK: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel
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The dog run is this area of the park that is completely fenced, and once you pass through the two gates, which upon penalty of death must never be simultaneously opened, you can let your dog off the leash and let it frolic with its own kind. When I arrived at about four o’clock, it was fairly empty. The people who didn’t have real jobs who frequented the dog run during the day had left, and the people who had real jobs hadn’t yet arrived. This left a few dog walkers with a motley assortment of dogs, all of whom seemed not in the mood to frolic. Miró trotted to our favorite bench, which was, thankfully, by this time of the day in the shade, and jumped up onto it. I sat beside him, but he turned away and ignored me. In the privacy of our home, Miró is a very affectionate creature, but in public he behaves like a teenager who has no interest in a parent’s affection. I assume he thinks that it interferes with his I-am-not-a-dog pose.
There is a sense of camaraderie in the dog run that I hate. This sort of smug friendliness dog owners share that they feel entitles them to interact. If I was sitting on a bench in the park proper, no one would approach me, but in the dog run it’s as if you are on some distant weirdly friendly planet. “Oh, is that a standard poodle?” people will ask, or “Is it a he or a she?” or some other idiotic question. Fortunately the dog walkers, professionals that they are, only talk to one another, in the same way I have noticed that nannies and mothers never interact in the playground: each, like the dog walkers and dog owners, sticks to its kind. And so Miró and I were left alone. Miró watched the other dogs for a moment and then sighed and slowly lowered himself down upon the bench, pushing me a bit with his hind feet so that he would have adequate space to recline. But I refused to shift, so he was forced to hang his head over the end of the bench. He did this in a way that implied it was very difficult being a dog.
I thought about my mother and her unexpected return. I wasn’t surprised that this marriage failed—there had been something weird about Mr. Rogers from the start, which was only eight months ago—but I had thought it would last longer than a few days. My mother was married to my father for fifteen years, and she was married to her second husband for three years, so I suppose this marriage was proportionate. I tried to figure out what percentage of fifteen years three years was so I could figure out what the corresponding percentage of three years would be—might it be four days? Unfortunately I have never been good in math. Numbers simply do not interest me or seem as real to me as words.
But whether it was proportionate or not, four days is still a disappointingly short time for a marriage to endure. And one could argue that the curve should be just the opposite—that people should get better with subsequent marriages, not worse. At this rate, my mother would be abandoned at the altar if she dared wed again.
My father has never remarried—the woman he left my mother for died, suddenly and tragically, of ovarian cancer before they could both divorce and remarry, cancer moving more expeditiously than the court system, and although he is not religious (my parents were married in the Rainbow Room by a judge) I think he felt in some way punished by this death, and since then he has been involved briefly with a long string of much younger women who all seem to have the same artificial-looking blond “highlights” in their perfectly nice brown hair. (I don’t know if this is a generational thing or a fetish of my father’s.)
That evening my mother went to consult with Hilda Temple, her life coach. My mother had been in conventional therapy for many years (in fact she had spent the last couple of years in analysis), but shortly before she met Mr. Rogers, she decided that conventional therapy wasn’t “working for her” and had begun to see a life coach. What you did was tell your life coach what your goals were and your life coach would encourage/ pester you until you achieved said goals or (more likely) moved on to a different form of therapy. Meeting Mr. Rogers had been one of my mother’s goals—well, not meeting Mr. Rogers specifically, and in retrospect certainly not Mr. Rogers; the goal had been to find a partner—and with Hilda’s help (or interference) this had been quickly achieved.
While my mother was out Gillian filled me in on what she had learned. Apparently Mr. Rogers had stolen my mother’s ATM and credit cards, or at least “borrowed” them while she lay dozing in her nuptial bed, and somehow used them to get $3,000, all of which he successfully gambled away in the wee small hours of the morning. (Later, when she got her credit card bill, she learned that he had also bought several lap dances—discreetly billed as a “personal entertainment expense”—a $1,500 portable cigar humidor, $800 worth of cigars, and a dozen pairs of cashmere socks.)
I was in my bedroom when my mother returned from her summit meeting with Hilda Temple. Gillian had gone uptown to see Herr Schultz. For a while I could hear my mother in the living room talking to Miró. I’ve always been a bit jealous of how much my mother talks to the dog. In fact, I think we all talk to Miró more than we talk to one another. Then I heard her walking down the hall. I was sitting at my desk, looking up houses for sale in small midwestern towns on the Internet. It’s amazing what $100,000 can get you in a state like Nebraska. I heard my mother stop in my doorway but I didn’t look up.
“Oh, you’re home,” she said.
Since this was obvious I saw no point in either confirming or denying it.
“I thought you might be out,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be out?”
“Out where?”
“I don’t know: out. At a party or something. Or a movie. You’re eighteen and it’s Friday night.”
“Thursday night.”
“Whatever,” she said. “You should still be out. I worry about you. What are you doing?”
“Looking at houses.”
“Houses? What houses?”
“Houses for sale.”
“Isn’t that an odd thing to be doing? I didn’t know you were in the market for a house.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just looking.”
She stood there for a moment.
I turned around. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just looking at you,” she said. “You’ll be gone before I know it.”
I’m supposed to be going to Brown University in Rhode Island this fall. Well, actually next month: there’s some awful freshman-orientation thing at the end of August. I dread it.
My mother sat down on my bed.
“I’m sorry about Mr. Rogers,” I said. “Gillian told me what happened.”
My mother said nothing.
“What did Hilda have to say?” I asked.
She looked up at me, and rubbed her eyes. She looked tired and old, in a way I have never seen her look tired and old. “I’d rather not talk about Mr. Rogers,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry.”
My mother reached out and gently wiped my cheek as if there was a smudge or something on it, but I knew it was only an excuse to touch me. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve been this tired in all my life.”
“Then you should go to bed.”
In lieu of an answer, my mother lay down on my bed. I turned back to my computer. I was looking at a house in Roseville, Kansas. It was beautiful. It was an old stone house with gables and a dumbwaiter and the original porcelain claw-foot tubs. It had a pantry and a screened sleeping porch. It had a stone basement that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
“Look at this,” I said.
My mother sighed and sat up. “What?” she said.
“This,” I said. “Come over here.”
She got up and leaned over my shoulder. She smelled a little odd. I could smell Prélasser, her favorite perfume, but there was another odor just beneath it, an odd, harsh odor of exhaustion or panic or despair. “What?” my mother said again.
“Look at this house,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Where is it?” my mother asked.
“Kansas,” I said. “Look at these pictures.” I began to click through the photographs that were posted: the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the central hallway and staircase, the bathroom, the bedrooms.
“Isn’t it nice?” I asked.
“I don’t like those old houses,” my mother said.
“I do,” I said. “It has a sleeping porch. And a dumbwaiter. And a Tiffany-glass window.”
“Who’d want to sleep on a porch?” my mother asked.
“I would,” I said.
“You’d get eaten alive by bugs. There are lots of awful bugs out there in the Midwest.”
“It’s screened in,” I said.
“I’d feel like I was in a cage,” said my mother. “And people could see in. Besides, what’s wrong with air-conditioning?” She stood up and sighed and said, “Well. I suppose I’m going to bed.” But she stood there, as if she wanted to be contradicted.
After a moment I said, “Why did you marry him?”
She didn’t answer. She was looking out the window, or perhaps only looking at her reflection in the window—I couldn’t tell. For a moment I thought perhaps I had not actually asked the question, only thought it. But then she shook her head lightly, as if to clear it. She was still facing the dark window. “Because I was lonely,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing.
“It gets lonely,” she continued. She seemed to be in some kind of trance, speaking to her reflection in the window. “Even with you, and Gillian when she deigns to honor us with her presence, and Miró, and my friends, and the gallery, and lunches and dinners and brunches. He was lovely to sleep with, it was lovely to have someone hold me at night.” She paused. “Oh,” she said. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”
“Why not?”
She turned away from the window. “I’ll warp you. I’ll pass all my bitterness and skepticism on to you, and you won’t believe in love.”
“I already don’t believe in love.”
“Of course you don’t. How could you? You’ve never been in love. Or have you? Have I missed something?”
“No,” I said.
“You will,” she said.
“No I won’t,” I said.
She put her two hands on my shoulders and bent down and kissed my cheek. “You’re too sweet not to fall in love. I know how sweet you are. Maybe better than anyone.”
“I’m not sweet,” I said.
“Hush,” my mother said. “Don’t contradict me. I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed. Just say good night.”
She stood in the doorway. I turned around in my chair. “Good night,” I said.
She walked down the hall, and then turned the hall light off. I heard her bedroom door open and then close. I heard a noise behind me, a little ping from the computer. I turned around: because I hadn’t touched a key in five minutes, the monitor had shut itself off. The house in Roseville, Kansas, had disappeared, replaced by the dark reflection of my face.
 
Friday, July 25, 2003
 
ABOUT ONE THING, AT LEAST, MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT: JOHN did not need me at the gallery. In fact he probably could have got more work done without me there, because we liked each other and spent a lot of time talking. I did have a few duties: I was responsible for removing the detritus that collected in the garbage cans at the end of each day. People delighted in treating these $16,000 works of art as ordinary waste receptacles, which is exactly how the artist desired the viewer to “interface” with them. Mostly I would find coins (people have this urge to literally throw their money away; I don’t get it), used Kleenex, candy wrappers, but occasionally people were more creative: I also found a used condom and a soiled diaper. Since I assumed the sexual or excretory acts that produced these items did not occur in the gallery, it meant that people had brought these contributions with them, and I found such attempts at creativity a little disturbing.
The artist who created the garbage cans had no name. He was Japanese, and had interesting theories about identity—for a while, earlier in his career, he had changed his name every month, for he felt identity was fluid and should not be constrained by something as fixed as a name. But apparently after a while of changing his name every month people lost track, and then lost interest in learning, or remembering, his name. So he divested himself of names completely. I think part of my mother’s irritation with Gillian’s reconsideration of her name had to do with her experience with this artist. Originally she had thought that an artist without a name who worked with garbage cans and sacred texts would attract a lot of publicity, but his not having a name made him somewhat difficult to promote, and her excitement had turned to frustration. None of the garbage cans had sold, and my mother attributed this to the lack of media exposure, or “buzz,” as she liked to call it. She pleaded with the artist without a name to be referred to as “The Artist Without a Name,” or “No-Name,” or something buzzy like that, but he refused, reasoning that those were, in and of themselves, names.
I was supposed to keep all the things I collected in a separate garbage can in the storeroom, because he claimed his next project would be to make art of this refuse. (My mother made me throw the used condom and diaper out, for obvious reasons.) My other tasks in the gallery were to keep the mailing list updated, which meant entering the names and addresses people wrote in the guest book on the counter. As few people visited the gallery on those baked summer days, and many who did visit did not sign the book, updating the mailing list was not an onerous task. Every morning I brought John a cappuccino, a double-berry yogurt muffin, two 36-ounce bottles of Evian water,
The New York Times
, the
Post
, and, depending on which day it was, either
The New Yorker
,
New York
,
Time Out
, or
The New York Observer
. (John refused to subscribe to newspapers and magazines because he thought the address labels affixed to them were aesthetically compromising.)
If John wasn’t having lunch with someone, which he tried very hard to do every day, I was sent out to fetch him the salad platter from Fabu, the chic food boutique around the corner on Tenth Avenue. Every day they offered a variety of about a dozen salads, from which you could pick a selection of three for $11.95, which included iced tea or iced coffee and a hunk of artisanal bread. (This bread was not sliced but “hand-torn”; apparently slicing adversely affected its taste and texture.) Fabu released its menu to the world via fax at 11:00 a.m. every day, and deciding which three out of the twelve salads to select occupied the better part of John’s morning. And finally, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I would be sent out to fetch him an iced cappuccino and a dark chocolate Milky Way bar.
If I wasn’t maintaining John’s sugar and caffeine levels, and there was someone in the gallery (which was seldom), I would sit behind the counter and type quickly and efficiently on the computer, thus giving the appearance that business was thriving, or if not thriving, at least occurring. And answer people’s questions or provide information about the art, or the artist, but when people asked questions they usually wanted to know the address of another gallery or if they could use the bathroom.
The rest of the time I sat around and talked with John, who never seemed to do much of anything. I liked John very much. In fact, except for my grandmother, he was really the only person I liked. John had grown up in Georgia and graduated from high school when he was sixteen with perfect SAT scores. He went to Harvard on a full scholarship, which required him to work for the university. His junior year he was given a job as a security guard in the Fogg Museum and was quickly promoted to tour guide when it became evident that he could answer many of the questions that stumped the other guides. John loved art, mostly painting. He said he never saw a real painting, a good painting, until he went to Harvard, but all through his childhood he would look at art book after art book, and he basically taught himself the entire history of art. After Harvard he got a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute in London. He managed the art collection of my father’s law firm before my mother lured him away. (Why law firms have multimillion-dollar art collections is a mystery to me.)
When I arrived the Friday morning after my mother’s unexpected return, John was already at the gallery, which was unusual. He sat at his desk in his private office, and he appeared to be actually working, although what he could be doing, I had no idea. I gave him his cappuccino, his muffin, and one bottle of Evian water (the other went into the refrigerator).
“You’re here early,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I wanted to make sure I was here in case your mother appeared. And being away for a few days creates work. Lots of faxes and e-mails to answer.” He pointed to the mess on his desk.
“Anything I can do?” I asked.
“Is the mailing list up-to-date?”
“Yes,” I said. “Unless people broke in while we were gone and left their names and addresses.”
“We’ll have no snarkiness today, thank you very much,” said John. “So tell me, what happened?”
I sat down on one of the two Le Corbusier chairs that faced his desk. “Apparently Mr. Rogers is a compulsive gambler. He stole my mother’s credit cards and lost about three thousand dollars.”
“Three thousand dollars? That’s all? Some of my dates cost me nearly that much. I don’t think it’s anything to end a marriage over.”
“It’s not really the amount. I think it’s more the issue of trust. He waited till she was sleeping and took her cards and left. On the third night of their honeymoon.”
“Well, I admit it’s bad behavior. And what a shame. Now she’ll want to throw herself back into the gallery. Women who are spurned always turn their attention to work. I was looking forward to a nice long quiet summer. Is she coming in today?”
“I don’t know. She was still in bed when I left.”
“Well, we will just have to wait and see. There is a lot of mail. I left it on the counter. Why don’t you open it and sort it?”
“Okay,” I said.
John pried the sippy lid off his cappuccino. “What’s wrong with this?” he asked.
“What? Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“Are you sure you asked for 2 percent?”
“Yes,” I said.
He sniffed it. “It doesn’t look right. It has that nasty skim look.”
“It’s 2 percent,” I said. “I’m sure.”
“All right,” he said. “Now go do some work. We must look very busy at all times today.”
I left his office and sat behind the front counter. There was a big stack of mail piled there, and I began to sort through it. About eleven o’clock, just as the Fabu menu was being spit out of the fax machine, John emerged from his office. He had an uncanny ability to sense exactly when the Fabu fax would arrive, and was usually standing above the machine as it emerged.
“Damn,” he said. “I was really in the mood for the Thai peanut and mango salad. It’s not here. Don’t they usually have it on Fridays?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I really want it,” said John. “I’ve been craving it all morning. Maybe they just forgot to list it. Why don’t you call and ask if they have it.”
“I’m sure if they had it, it would be on the menu,” I said.
“Well, just call and make sure.” He walked back into his office, still studying the menu.
Since I knew that if Fabu were offering the Thai peanut and mango salad they would list it on their menu, I did not call to confirm the obvious. I waited a moment and went into John’s office and gave him the bad news. “Fuck,” he said. “Why do they put me through this? Why can’t they just serve the same goddamned salads every day? This is insane. What are you getting for lunch?”
“It’s Friday,” I said. “I’m having lunch with my father.” Every Friday I had a standing appointment to have lunch with my father downtown.
“Oh, that’s right,” said John. “So I’m stuck here. Well, I’ll have the baby spinach and pear, the orzo with olives and sun-dried tomatoes, and I guess the tomato, basil, and mozzarella.”
“And what do you want to drink?” I asked.
“Oh,” said John. He sighed, as if I was making things very difficult for him. “Get me the ginger lemonade if they have it. If not, the mint iced tea. And will you go pick it up? When they deliver it takes forever and all the salads get mushed together. I hate it when they get mushed together.”
“I’m going downtown,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “It will only take a minute. Please. And carry it carefully so it doesn’t get mushed.”
“All right,” I said. “But I’ll have to leave early.”
“Go whenever you want,” said John.
It used to be very easy to visit my father at his office: you just walked through the lobby, got on the elevator, and took it up to the forty-ninth floor. But since 9/11 you have to stand on a line in the lobby and then show a guard a picture I.D. If your name is on the list of expected guests, you can then proceed to the elevators. If it isn’t, you have to go to another line and tell that guard who you are visiting and wait while he calls that person and gets permission for you to enter. My father invariably forgets to put me on the list of expected guests (“I’m too busy to remember things like that,” he told me; I asked him if he could instruct his assistant to put me on the list, but his assistant has worked for him so long—about twenty years, I think—that he no longer thinks of himself as an assistant and refuses to do any petty clerical tasks, and since basically his job is composed of only petty clerical tasks, he does very little), so it always takes me about fifteen or twenty minutes to get from the lobby up to his office, and then I have to announce myself to the receptionist and wait until my father appears to collect me, for I am not trusted to walk unescorted down the hallway to his office.
I sat in the reception area, and while I waited for my father a woman appeared from the interior and signed herself out at the reception desk. She looked at me and smiled.
“Are you Jim Bigley’s son?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m Paul Sveck’s son.”
She immediately stopped smiling as if I had said I was the son of Adolf Hitler. I wondered what my father had done to alienate her. While I was pondering this, Myron Axel, my father’s so-called assistant, appeared and beckoned for me to follow him. Myron Axel is a strange man. In the many years he has worked for my father he has never revealed any aspect of his personal life. One might assume this is because he is a private person, but it seems much more likely, upon meeting him, that he has no private life to reveal. Myron Axel walks very strangely, sort of keeping his body stiff and only moving his feet, as if any more movement might have been unseemly. I followed him down the long hallway, past big windowed offices on one side and small windowless offices on the other. I don’t think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can’t bear environments that make this truth so obvious. My father’s sun-filled corner office has an amazing view, a Diebenkorn (thanks to John Webster), a vintage Florence Knoll desk, a leather sofa (Le Corbusier, of course), and a saltwater aquarium, while Myron Axel works in a fluorescently lit closet across the hall.
My father was on the telephone but motioned for me to enter. “Thank you,” I said to Myron, who did not acknowledge this remark. I went into my father’s office and looked out the window at the view, which is always changing with the season, with the light, with the time of day. It is the only time I’m aware of living in a big city, when I visit my father’s office—the rest of the time, being down in it, at ground level, the notion of it somehow disappears.
“I know you’re lying and these are stupid, time-wasting lies,” my father said. “They’re not even interesting. When you’re ready to talk sensibly, call me back.” He hung up the phone.
“Hello, James,” he said. “I’m glad you’re wearing a jacket and tie. Even though it looks as if you slept in them. I thought we might pop up to the partners’ dining room.” My father much prefers to eat in the partners’ dining room because it’s quicker and cheaper than any of the restaurants downtown, but he always pretends he is doing it to please me: as if eating in a room full of suits is a big thrill.
BOOK: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel
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