What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (3 page)

I ran, leaving my car and equipment. The fireworks were still going; they sounded like gunshots, aimed at me. I was drunk and hadn’t run since I’d quit soccer sophomore year. After a couple minutes I tired out. I stood in the middle of the street with my hands on my knees, head hung between legs, crying, vomiting. I was a few miles from home.

We didn’t see Kendra at all during chemo. She was with Roland now; we got word through him. Roland was a rock, the right man for the job. Everyone agreed. He stayed evenings at the Brigham until visiting was over. After, he’d sometimes stop by Sam’s garage, but he never stuck around more than a few minutes. We’d offer bong hits and beers, but he refused. Said he just wanted to give us the update. Said he was tired.

The rest of us were at it full force. We drank every night, smoked until we couldn’t stand. It wasn’t long until we got onto other stuff—stealing pills from Sam’s mom, buying Oxy and blow from this friend of Roland’s sister. I got fired from Norm’s for showing up high, sold my guitar to stay that way.

The chemo killed more cancer than her doctors had expected. A marrow donor was found. According to Roland, the operation went well. The cancer had been excavated, and I wondered what was left; there had been so little body to begin with.

One two a.m. I heard rocks against my window. I hadn’t been sleeping—not that night or any others. I would stay up online in chat rooms with pseudonymous strangers, saying the most awful things I could imagine—really sick things I wouldn’t wish on anyone. The words flowed from my fingers in manic bursts. I could type like this for hours. I felt possessed, as if there were some other me controlling my emotions, sending all this vitriol into the world.

When I opened the window I was expecting Kendra. I don’t know why—I had a feeling. I thought she would be down there, hair grown back in, looking just like that night when I’d first seen her at the restaurant. We would apologize and she would kiss me and from then on we would never leave each other’s sides.

I came out in pajama pants. Summer had passed and it was getting on fall. The wind hit my face like cold fingers. Roland looked me up and down. I could feel that I was shaking.

“She wants to see you,” he said. It pained him to say it.

“Now?” I said.

“They’re moving. Back to Hungary.”

“Why does she want to see me?”

Roland stared at me for a long minute. “You’re an idiot,” he said. “I always thought you were the smart one, but you’re an idiot.”

“I can’t,” I said, and went back inside.

I work for my uncle Marion now. We’ve built a new town where the woods used to be. We bulldozed all those houses on the lake. Not us personally, but the people who work for us. I sit in an air-conditioned office playing fantasy sports. From my office I can see our new skyline, shimmering silver, blotting out the stars.

Sometimes I eat at Norm’s. Wyatt’s gone—who knows where—but Claire is still around, still the same. The last time I saw the others was at Alex’s memorial. We stood in his parents’ kitchen, making small talk, looking at old photos. There were photos of the four of us—one from that night at Wyatt’s. We have our arms around each other. We look so young. It was only a few years ago.

Alex seized in his sleep, choked on his tongue. Sometimes in bed, I grab hold of my wife and pretend that she’s Alex. I put my hand to her mouth and imagine reaching in, past tonsils and esophagus, elbow-deep, down to his intestines. Alex trembles. I make a fist around his innards. I’m waiting for the moment when it all goes still.

The Long In-Between

I
n August of 2006, during Israel’s relentless bombing of Lebanon, and days after Mel Gibson said his piece about the Jews, I came to New York City to live with a woman who had once been my college professor.

Her name was Elizabeth, and she was staying, for the summer, in a SoHo loft previously occupied by an internationally famous daytime talk-show host. The Host had since moved one flight up to the building’s penthouse, where he threw lavish parties, audible through the floorboards, a weekly reminder of New York’s immutable social infrastructure. No matter how high you climbed, there would always be someone above you.

I knew none of this when I arrived on the Fung Wah bus from Boston. It was a hot day, and humid. The sky was purple-gray, clouds swollen with coming rain. My hair was a mess. My bra clasp dug into my spine.

I dragged my suitcase from the subway, eyeing the women on lunch break whom I’d come here to become: interns in bubble skirts tapping furiously at cell phones, their legs moving in long, deliberate strides. They appeared to be members of a similar but distinctly different species. A taller species.

The elevator opened directly into the apartment. It was an oblong, open space decorated in a series of large abstract paintings accented in gold leaf, and ugly. The furniture looked imported from a Palm Beach condo: white shag area rug with matching throw pillows on white leather love seats and recliners. The walls were cream colored, or crème colored, according to Elizabeth, who occasionally affected a Pan-European patois. The other walls were windows. From certain angles you could see across Greene Street into the Apple Store. A kitchen emerged at the end of the room, complete with two industrial sinks whose gleaming hoses wrapped themselves like long bracelets around the spouts.

I was not particularly impressed. I’d grown up middle class in an upper-class suburb of Boston and had spent countless hours in friends’ McMansions just as tastelessly gaudy as this Prince Street apartment. The décor signified a brand of generic wealth that I had come to find provincial.

Elizabeth appeared from behind the fridge.

“Darling, you’re here,” she said. “Welcome. Isn’t this place hideous?”

Elizabeth walked on tiptoe; she still fancied herself a dancer, though she’d quit ballet in college. She wore a terry-cloth robe that showed off striated thighs and taut, toned calves. She was three inches taller, but otherwise we looked almost the same: flat chests, no hips, prominent cheekbones, “penetrative” brown eyes, Ashkenazi noses, and pale skin caked with foundation. It was a look that had failed me through high school and most of college, but I had high hopes for my new life among the sun-fearing fashionistas. Androgyny was back after an overdue hiatus.

Elizabeth, almost twenty years my senior, was the product of previous boom times for heroin chic. She’d spent the better part of the nineties complementing the look with an actual needle stuck in her arm. After rehab, she’d managed to buckle down and finish her thesis, a sunless tract on AIDS and the American death drive. The published version had earned her a small following in certain academic circles. Now she carried herself with a jaded self-confidence that attracted men and women alike—but mostly men, and mostly gay—and that I did my best to emulate.

During my four years of college I had developed what is sometimes called a girl-crush—though the term sounds too cutesy for what I felt—on Elizabeth. I’d taken her class on late capitalism (the syllabus was divided between Edward Said and Judith Butler) in the second semester of my freshman year. By semester’s end I had already copied her hairstyle (straightened black bangs), clothing style (gothic airline stewardess), and eating style (S.S.S.—soup, salad, sashimi), and was finding excuses to stop by her office on an almost daily basis.

Elizabeth was new to Boston—she’d done her graduate work at Columbia—and seemed appreciative of both the company and worship. I saw her as the epitome of urbanity, and the embodiment of an academic idyll that otherwise existed only in past tense novels by nostalgic baby boomers. Elizabeth and I played out this campus fantasy, smoking imported Gauloises on the library steps and discussing all relevant isms. But mostly we talked about the men in our lives, whom we referred to as our
dudefriends
.

“Dudefriend thinks it’s his life’s work to sperm up my eggs,” said Elizabeth, once. “If only we were lesbians.”

“If only,” I said, unsure what she meant. Was the implication that we would be a lesbian couple, or just a couple of lesbians?

“I mean, I’m not one of those overpopulation people, or worse, the oh-so-magnanimous doomers who don’t want to subject a future generation to blah blah blah. But what happens when my son is molested by his math teacher?”

“Isn’t that a cross-that-bridge-when-you-get-there sort of thing?”

“Oh, he’ll definitely get molested,” said Elizabeth. “The question is whether to uphold the traditions of our rape-shaming society by telling him his body has been traumatized, or refrain from comment and hope he remembers it fondly, some kind of passionate hug session from the man who taught him Boolean algebra.”

“What kind of school are you imagining this is?”

“School of hard knocks,” said Elizabeth.

When she decided to sabbatical in Manhattan, it seemed natural that I tag along. I was, by then, two years out of college, with no life goal except the vague intention to move to New York as soon as I could afford it. Elizabeth was able to secure me an internship at an ad agency run by an old family friend, so long as I promised to maintain ironic distance from the industry’s consumerist credo, in much the same way that Elizabeth “ironically” bought dresses at Barneys.

She led me to a small room behind the kitchen. The floor was stacked with books and printouts. There was no desk, just a coffee table, couch, and mounted plasma television, unplugged. A week-old
Times
was open on the table. The photo showed a bombed-out building in Beirut. A shirtless man lay injured in the rubble, trapped beneath fallen pipes. Another man tried to lift him out by the arm, but the injured man appeared limp and immobile, content where he was.

“My office,” said Elizabeth. She cleared space so we could sit. We lit cigarettes. Elizabeth ashed on the couch.

“My cousin’s,” she declared with a wave. “Or his for now at least. He bought it for eight, wants to sell it for ten. Old story. And I get to squat here until fall when the market’s meant to change. The art and furniture are rented, by the way. I did my best to dissuade him.”

I’d heard of this cousin, an I-banker. Elizabeth liked to brag about the non-penetrative experiments they’d engaged in as adolescents in Pittsburgh. The Cousin was tall and handsome, and still felt guilty about these encounters, which he remembered as being only semi-consensual. Elizabeth remembered things differently—in her version,
she
was the aggressor—but she liked the power position his guilt placed her in. For years he’d been paying off Elizabeth’s Amex.

Elizabeth caught me scanning the
Times
.

“Hideous,” she said. “Just hideous. Women and children they’re killing. Innocents. It makes me sick. And the macho Republican Zionists like my cousin cheering them on.”

The last part irked her most. Two things Elizabeth hated were Zionism and machismo, though she’d flirted with the former on kibbutz after college (“Yitzhak Rabin and pharmaceutical-grade ecstasy, darling—those were different times”) and the latter was a trait she proudly manifested. I do not mean to suggest that Elizabeth’s sympathy for Lebanese civilians was insincere, but something about the word
hideous
—the same adjective she’d used to describe the apartment’s art—made me wonder if it wasn’t all theory for her, some kind of ideological chess match unrelated to actual suffering.

“It’s terrible,” I said, and hesitated, resisting a defense of what I knew was indefensible. Israel was a sore subject between us. I’d been indoctrinated early, and there were feelings from my upbringing I had trouble abandoning. Members of my own family had been exiled from Europe, shipped to Palestine for refuge while their parents were murdered. Besides, the Arab treatment of women and homosexuals didn’t seem to mesh with the radical queer feminism we both espoused.

“You’re right,” I said. “Horrible.” Which it was. Israel was behaving horribly with its showy display of firepower, raining bombs over Beirut as if it were a video game. I’d said so to my father when he’d defended the attacks, ranting at the dinner table about Hezbollah, spearing a chunklet of chicken on his fork and waving it for agonizing minutes while he continued to talk. “They want to destroy us,” he’d said, but it was he, with his hate-filled eyes and four-pronged flesh flag, who appeared bent on destruction. He and the young Israeli soldiers I’d seen photographed shirtless on the Internet, holding Uzis in perfect hip-hop posture.

At home, it was easy to argue with my archaic, conservative parents, but out in the world I fought urges to defend their worldview, to fight my leftist friends who seemed to stick up for every minority group except the Jews. There was general agreement that assimilation had happened and anti-Semitism in America was a thing of the past, but I couldn’t shake the sense that this dismissal was its own anti-Semitism, or an excuse for it. Jews were the new Wasps: privileged, powerful, perfect targets for blame.

I sniffed my armpit.

“Take a shower, darling,” said Elizabeth. “The bathroom’s something to believe.”

The fete was held so I might meet prospective suitors. I’d recently broken ties with my dudefriend, Clarke, who’d taken a prestigious gig gofering for the House’s only out-gay congressman.
Suitors
was the word Elizabeth used.
Fete
was also her word, though it was only a dinner party. The real fete was upstairs, at the Host’s apartment. His bass shook and rattled the glass table, making music with our tumblers.

Elizabeth leaned into Mike, her on-off, surprisingly all-American dudefriend. The others disdained him and baited him, he of the strong jaw and aggressive heterosexuality. According to Elizabeth, Mike had once been a star PhD candidate in sociology at Yale, but a car accident had rendered him partially brain damaged. He occasionally showed flashes of past brilliance, blurting full-formed ideas after hours of silence, but most of the time Mike fumbled his words, failing to articulate what was there on the tip of his tongue, tantalizingly out of reach. He was also always drunk. Mike was a happy drunk and treated me with warmth. Elizabeth’s friends brought out the worst in him.

“Stop, please,” Mike said, but Nikil kept on talking.

“Michael,” said Nikil. “I am not, as it were, defending Melvin Gibson. I am simply pointing out that, if the situation were reversed—if Mr. Gibson had slurred against Arabs or homosexuals—then no one would be quite so up in arms.”

Mike pressed tumbler to forehead and let out a sigh. We’d been on the subject for most of the evening, but Nikil couldn’t let go. Mo leaned into Nikil and squeezed his partner’s elbow.

“It’s no use,” said Mo, shaking his shiny, shaven head. “He’s never going to understand.” They spoke of Mike like he wasn’t there. It occurred to me that Mike, a protestant from Chicago, was the only member of the ethnic majority in our group.

“Well, if you won’t defend him, then I will,” said Elizabeth. I thought she was talking about Mike. Elizabeth rose from her seat, raised her tumbler.

“Mel Gibson had every right to say what he said,” said Elizabeth. “It’s about time someone did.”

“
Salut
,” said Nikil, and they clinked drinks. Elizabeth wiggled her butt a little bit.

“If the situation were reversed, then wouldn’t Mel Gibson
be
the Jewish one?” said Suitor #1, a brunette named Brian Feldstein whom I disliked immensely.

Feldstein was attractive enough, with clean teeth, hazel eyes, and the kind of the cock-clipping skinny jeans that were just coming into style. What annoyed me was his closeness to Elizabeth. He’d graduated a year ahead of me, and was, by all accounts, her first and truest protégé, a whip-smart artist of the sneer and bon mot, in whose shadow I stayed. Besides, I thought he was an asshole. In class he’d always cut down my comments, and at parties he alternated between ignoring me and acting overly familiar, draping an arm over my shoulder and calling me “kid.” I considered Feldstein my nemesis. Not that I’d say so to Elizabeth. There was an erotic element to his idolatry that Elizabeth enjoyed and that I couldn’t quite provide. I sensed he saw me as some kind of consolation prize. I solaced myself by imaging Feldstein masturbating in the dark, cradling his pathetic penis, resigned to the fact that he would never fuck either of us.

“We mustn’t speak in hypotheticals,” said Nikil, who always spoke in hypotheticals. He himself had been a protégé, along with Elizabeth, of the great Said. “We must approach the reality of the situation, which is this: the
Israelites
invaded Palestine, brought about apartheid, and
enjoy
the careless killing of Muslim women and children. To phrase it any other way would be to euphemize, anesthetize, soften the blow. We cannot share sympathy with this murderous regime. We cannot let tribal allegiances get in the way of reason.”

Elizabeth listened intently, still standing, prepped for another
salut
. I wanted to point out that Palestine and Lebanon were two entirely different countries. Mike refilled his scotch and drank it down in a long gulp without grimacing. Tonight was more of the same—the things he put up with for Elizabeth’s love. Or “
love
,” as she often reminded us, fingers raised in fangish air quotes. Feldstein placed a hand on my knee. Mo looked at Nikil and said, “Lighten up,” and Nikil’s face broke into a boyish grin, and soon everyone was laughing.

“Sorry,” said Nikil. “I’m so used to trying to fire up my students that it carries over into dinner party zealotry. Jesus, this is good scotch.”

Suitor #2 lit a joint and passed it to Nikil. When their fingers touched, #2—another old friend of Elizabeth’s from grad school—leaned into Nikil and noogied his head.