My American Unhappiness (11 page)

And now, in my office, behind the closed door, I'm alone with this e-mail, from a Valerie, age thirty-four, from the same city where my wife was last seen. I chalk it up to eerie coincidence and file the response on my hard drive.

N
ORMALLY, EACH DAY
at four o'clock, when Lara leaves the office, I retreat to my own office, close the door, make myself a large gin and tonic at the small wet bar I had added some years ago (with some gift funds from H. M. Logan, mind you, not federal money), and call my friend Mack Fences.

Mack, a book salesman who covers the Midwest for a major publishing company, and I have been good friends since my brief stint working in the Madison bookstore, the Pilgrim's Pages, which is owned by his partner, Joseph Simms. Mack, who often worked in the store, too, was impressed one evening by my literary taste and took me out for a martini at Paul's Club, where our bartender, a young man named Jim Meehan, instantly made us feel welcome. He was one of those rare bartenders who seem able to suspend time, so that you do not notice how much of the afternoon you are drinking away. One drink turned into several, and soon we were dining on big medium-rare steaks and mammoth plates of calamari and mushroom caps at one of Madison's better restaurants, Mack's Smith & Gallatin company credit card on the table and a bottle of white wine between us. (Mack always drinks white wine, no matter what the menu recommends. A chilled bottle of white Vendage, to Mack, is the ideal blend of comfort and elegance.)

Although he is more than two decades my senior, Mack is probably the one individual I know whom I could designate as a best friend. In truth, if I am honest about things—and I usually am—I would say he is sort of a father figure to me. He understands my work, for one thing, and he believes in my politics. He is also fond of talking on the phone, and that is why each afternoon at four, while I am sitting at my desk at the GMHI, I close the door to my office, make a gin and tonic, and call Mack. At this exact hour, across town in the leafy Cherrywood neighborhood where he lives, Mack is at his desk, in his home office, fixing himself a gin and tonic. When we talk, we first go over the minor annoyances and triumphs of our day, and then we begin to discuss the political and cultural events of the world's day. At five o'clock Joseph comes home from the bookstore, leaving the evening retail hours to his assistant manager. Joseph is quieter than Mack, a kind and gentle man who is decidedly not fond of talking on the phone and is not exactly tolerant of disruptions in the daily routine. And so, when Joseph presses the Open button on the automatic garage door opener, Mack says goodbye and goes to the kitchen to prepare some cocktails and snacks for his partner of twenty-seven years, and I close up my office for the day. Someday, I would like my domestic life to be that way, as predictable and easy as Mack and Joseph's, but until then, I have a telephone and Mack and I have our conversation and cocktails.

Some may find it a bit surprising that I drink alcohol at the office, but the end-of-day cocktail is a civilized and well-deserved reward. We would do well as a culture to honor that sacred hour. Think of the productivity that we might inspire if the last hour of the workday was for cocktails: what a lovely, dangling carrot! I'm not talking about some forced social interaction in an unsightly break room or a mass retreat to the corner bar. I simply mean that each individual would pour himself or herself a generous drink while seated at his or her desk. How easy it would be to answer that annoying e-mail or return the awkward call if you had the perfect heft of a cocktail tumbler in hand. Think of the happy homes we might encourage if Mommy and Daddy didn't come home from the office washed out and sullen, but rosy-cheeked, with ears abuzz. I often wonder if my own father wouldn't have benefited from something as simple and civilized as cocktail hour. He was a sort of teetotaler, other than the four beers he permitted himself during Green Bay Packers games (one per quarter). Otherwise, he said, alcohol was for the weak. An emotional crutch, he said, and he was firmly against those. I said this to Mack one day, and Mack burst out laughing, almost choking on his cigarette: "Oh, I am all about emotional crutches. I have so many!"

Today, Mack answers the phone on the fourth ring.

"Hello?" he says.

"It's me," I say.

"I didn't think you'd call today, Zeke. It's Friday."

"Friday!" I exclaim. "I forgot."

Every Friday, I join Mack and Joseph for dinner, and so usually I do not make my customary happy-hour call.

"Right!" I say. "I'll see you at six thirty! What can I bring?"

"Just yourself," Mack says, as he always does.

I decide that I will talk to Mack and Joseph this evening about my mother's insistence that I begin thinking seriously about marriage. In fact, it occurs to me that I should set a target date for marriage, as the article in
Simply You
magazine suggests. This odd quest mirrors one of the classic drivers of the literary subgenre known as
chick lit,
in which a youngish (but no so young) woman, in a moderately successful but unfulfilling career (usually of an artistic or cultural bent), decides that she must find a life partner but experiences many travails and obstacles in her quest for said partner—married men, bad dates, the blurting out of unpremeditated declarations, chunky thighs, et cetera. You may find it odd that a man of my age, particularly one with a little bit of money and decent looks, would have that same desire for domestic tranquillity. Ah, but even in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution there is that phrase—
insure domestic Tranquility
—a charge to the newly forming federal government to keep the peace, the bliss, the love. It also had something to do with the suppression of slave uprisings and putting down economic revolt by the exploited working masses, but it is best if one looks at our nation's founding documents through slightly rose-colored glasses, focusing on the spirited high ideals of the language rather than the underlying injustices. Sometimes I wonder if the Founding Fathers, now held in such mythic light in our collective history, were ever plagued by unhappiness. Did Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, understanding the ironies and inconsistencies of their new nation, ever plunge into black depths that threatened to bog down our new and emerging democracy? We now know that Abraham Lincoln was subject to great battles with melancholy; we can guess that Bill Clinton also had his share of the soul's dark nights. What else could project him into such strange, reckless obsessions as a rather unattractive and unstable intern?

Perhaps I've just illuminated why I, and so many millions of other Americans, will be so deliriously happy when this dreadful reign of George W. Bush comes to an end. He seems to be a man who sleeps well, who is unencumbered by something as pervasive as unhappiness—and that tells me he does not have the depth or complexity needed to lead our nation. How can you understand America's peculiar unhappiness if you, yourself, go about your day whistling "Camptown Races," joking with the custodial staff, and calling well-educated, honorable people by cute, offensive nicknames?

We are an unhappy nation and we crave leaders who can share our unhappiness. Our finest leaders are always the haunted ones. When the individual in charge looks untroubled and unaware of the dangers and chaos in the world, the unpredictable nature of the economy and domestic life, well, that is even more troubling than reckless and bad policy. That alone can send us into a collective and far-reaching darkness.

It is nearly four thirty. I drink the last of my cocktail and leave the tumbler of melting ice and twisted lime on the coffee table in the reception area, knowing Lara will wash it eventually. I cherish this small gesture, although I know how dated it is to have one's secretary scrubbing cocktail glasses. It is a small shred of domesticity that I share with Lara. I sort of want to believe she enjoys doing it, too.

Walking to my car, bound for the warm glow of my friends' table, I feel, as I often do after happy hour, light and alive.

A
S I'VE SAID,
I have dinner with Mack and Joseph every Friday. The way this all started is rather embarrassing, I suppose, but I never find honesty embarrassing; lies are embarrassing, the things we tell others to make ourselves appear more stable or happier than we truly are. In fact, I find that one is often relieved when an embarrassing truth manifests its bright and bushy head.

Anyhow, Mack dropped by one night several years ago to drop off some books I ordered, and when I didn't answer the door, he let himself in and found me sitting in the breakfast nook of my small kitchen, iPod ear buds in my ears. I was staring at a fetching, thirty-something woman in a J. Crew catalog, asking, quite seriously, what her name might be, and what brought her to the Cape at such a chilly time of year. I was eating a mess of scrambled eggs, green pepper, and hot dogs, doused in ketchup (cooking seriously for one seems wasteful, to me), and I did not see Mack until he slid into the breakfast nook across from me. I sat up, closed the J. Crew catalog, and removed the ear buds from my ears.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

I stared at him for a moment and then, without looking from his eyes, I said, "I was trying to get a date."

He burst out laughing at first, but then, seeing the seriousness of my statement, he eventually said, "Well, um, then, tomorrow, I want you to come over for dinner. Six o'clock."

With that, he left, the awkwardness of the encounter too much for even close friends to bear. There was nothing else to say. He had seen me at my intimate worst; unbidden, he had seen the skeletons in my closet.

I did, after getting up for a beer, return to my catalog. The model, like so many women from the pages of J. Crew and Eileen Fisher, seemed the sort of come-hither sophisticate who might enjoy a romp with a younger man on a weekend away from the city. Perhaps she was a high-powered editor staying at her grandmother's drafty old farmhouse, rattled by sea winds, where she had retreated to try and get over a failed relationship. But this particular model did not seem out of my reach; she was not glamorous, just well scrubbed and pretty, the sort of model you might find in the ads sent out by a very respectable department store, Macy's or perhaps Barney's. Does Barney's send out catalogs? There are so many things I do not know about New York City. In this way I am a typical Midwesterner. If you are a New Yorker, ask yourself, how often do you think about Duluth? Well, that is exactly as often as Duluth thinks of you!

When I lived all alone, before my mother and the twins moved in, I developed a minor obsession with catalogs, particularly those that featured women's clothing. For instance, I would come home from work in the evening and check my mail. (I did not have a cat or a dog that was eager to welcome me home. In fact, I very purposefully had chosen not to allow a pet into my life. Pets can lull one into a sense of not quite realistic domesticity, but in reality they cannot take the place of human relationships. So, until my life partner came to live with me, I vowed, or I with her, there would be no pets sleeping at the foot of my bed or in a basket on the floor.)

So there it is: I once had nothing waiting for me at the end of each day other than the mail. I immediately shredded all of the junk mail, of which there was a great deal. It still sickens me, the amounts of human energy and resources that go into the production, packaging, and delivery of absolute trash (for more information, see GMHI grant #56-888-2001:
The Coming Death of the Postal Service and the Coinciding Decline of American Imagination
). After I disposed of the junk mail, I looked at all of the legitimate bills—phone, utilities, student loans, insurance premiums, and credit card statements. These I would secure in a large binder clip with a label that said
THESE MUST BE PAID.
This is what Hemingway used to do with his bills when he was poor and lived in Paris. Once, when I was still young and easily impressionable, I read this literary tidbit in the introductory text of a famous
Paris Review
interview and decided that this would be exactly how I would organize my bills.

I then prepared to look over my personal mail. I began by fixing myself my second cocktail of the day. Then I removed my shoes, sat down in an old armchair I purchased at a neighbor's yard sale (and subsequently paid seven hundred dollars to repair and recover), and looked over my correspondence. Less of it than I would like, always, but sometimes there was a letter or a postcard from a friend.

I subscribed to five magazines then (and still do)—the
New Yorker, Harper's,
the
Progressive, Virginia Quarterly Review,
and
Esquire.
If one of those arrived, I often perused that while I enjoyed my drink. But mostly I just got many, many catalogs. These were the things I read while I sipped my pre-meal vodka tonic. For example, I would get the J. Crew catalog and begin to peruse its pages, first deciding on an outfit that I would wear—maybe a pair of weathered boot-cut khakis, brown oxfords, a crisp light blue tee, and a navy cotton blazer. Picturing myself dressed in this outfit, my face perfectly unshaven, my hair mussed just so, as if I'd just awoken from a nap in a hammock, I would imagine, perhaps, that I had just arrived at somebody's weekend home in Maine on a windy and cool Saturday morning. Who was waiting for me? The freckled redhead wearing a bikini on page nineteen? Or maybe the boy-hipped brunette in white capri pants and a green polo (page eleven), or the woman, a sage at fifty, walking barefoot in the sand, her short hair blown across her right cheek? Or did I spend the evening with the willowy blond on page twenty-six, the one in the purple J. Crew bridesmaid dress, the one with high heels in hand as she walks barefoot across the green, for some reason distant from the other wedding guests, alone and separate from the joy the others are so greedily drinking up?

Once I had my date for the evening, I would decide on an opening line, get up from my chair to prepare some supper, usually quite simple and quick; then, as I ate, I spent a long time staring at the woman I'd chosen. I learned her backstory—how old was she, what did she do, where was she from, was she single (not always, the naughty vixen!)?—and I shared something with her: a drink, a coffee, some dinner, a dance. I envisioned our whole evening together. Sometimes I drank too much and fell asleep in my easy chair after supper, still staring at the catalog, and the woman disappeared into a dream; sometimes I'd get discouraged and felt pathetic and offered the woman a kiss on the cheek and then got up from my chair and went to bed, lonely; and sometimes the woman I was imagining took off the outfit she had been modeling, or I would slip a strap from her shoulder, and then we would slip off to the bathroom, catalog and I, where we would consummate the relationship. It sounds a bit like the depressing and secret business of a teenage boy, but I assure you that all men are like this despite their public admissions. Such acts serve a physical purpose, and it is not a wholly unpleasant way to spend the evening. And, I supposed, it did keep me in romantic shape so that I might be prepared to give and receive both physical and emotional pleasure to my life partner someday.