My American Unhappiness (21 page)

But I do not see Minn at the Starbucks, so I drink a cup of coffee at a corner table for a while, hoping she'll appear from the back room or the restroom, but she is clearly not working. I decide not to ask at the counter (why rally the suspicions of her coworkers?) and instead head over to her apartment complex. I ring the buzzer several times; I get no answer. I do not have her phone number or her e-mail address, but when I get home, I resort to that last-ditch effort of twenty-first-century communication. I search for her on Facebook, find her quite easily (a picture of her with someone else, a man with dark skin and dark hair, and they are standing in front of a setting sun), and send her a "friend request."

M
Y FAVORITE SORT
of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable. For instance, nobody on earth would know that my status update alludes to me kissing Minn at her request. A good status alludes to some sort of emotion, some sort of yearning, but it doesn't offer any sort of clues. It does not, for instance, report on the mundanity of one's evening meal. It doesn't compliment one's "hubby" or report on an interesting journey or event. It does not make a political statement or wallow in the morbidity of actual tragedy. It does not alert you to a good bargain at Costco. For fuck's sake! Instead, a good Facebook status reminds your network, and yourself, that you are sitting alone somewhere, full of yearning, that you have a desire that needs meeting or a wave of nostalgia that needs revealing or an unspoken sorrow that needs an indirect catharsis. Once, I remember a friend of mine posting only this, the word
Nostalgia!
Another time a friend of mine posted this:
Remember the month when I ate nothing but tangerines?
I do not want to know
exactly
what my Facebook friends are doing; I want to know what they are struggling to express, I want the unsayable said, the unknowable known.

It's late, nearly eleven o'clock at night, and I have yet to hear from Minn. What is the ethical expectation for a one-night stand? Do you have an obligation to "friend" her via social networking sites? Or is that awkward, that ability the one-time lover in question would have to monitor your every public movement for months and years following the tryst?

I feel as if I should go to sleep, as if I should give up on Minn, but all rules feel suspended tonight, the whole world feels as if it is upside down, without logic, unmoored. Before I turn in for the night, or for the morning, as the case seems to be, I look over my prospect list scrawled in those now well-creased pages from
Simply You
magazine and decide to craft my semiregular letter to Sofia Coppola, director, writer, and marriage prospect. I have written to her often over the course of the past three years. But now that I have a goal of finding a suitable and willing marriage partner with some haste, my inquiries to Ms. Coppola must become more direct and urgent.

Dear Ms. Coppola,

My name is Zeke Pappas and I am an oral historian and a nontraditional documentary artist based in Madison, Wisconsin. I am currently at work on a project called
An Inventory of American Unhappiness,
which aims to chronicle the growing and peculiar epidemic of unhappiness that seems to plague so many of our citizens, despite our obvious blessings and the comparative ease of our daily lives to that of the citizens of other nations.

Your film
Lost in Translation
seems to me to encompass the phenomenon of American unhappiness in a way that no other filmmaker of your generation, perhaps any generation, has managed to do. It is for that reason that I am writing to you, in hopes of discussing the visual/film component of
An Inventory of American Unhappiness.
It is my belief that we are intellectual, if not spiritual, kin.

It is my belief that your aesthetic vision and intellectual mission are more in line with the
American Unhappiness
project than those of any contemporary artist at work today. That is why I beseech you to visit our website at
www.americanunhappiness.org
.

I read over what I have written, making no change save replacing the word
beseech
with
implore
and then changing that to
encourage.
Two years ago, I used GMHI funds and hired a private investigator to find me Ms. Coppola's personal e-mail address. Part of our contract includes a stipulation that he must check her e-mail address at the end of each month and make sure that it hasn't changed. I try to limit myself to one message every month. Occasionally, when drunk, I send her additional notes. Sometimes I send her weekly messages and sometimes I just share a link with her:
Sofia, thought you'd love to see this.
Or sometimes I'll just say:
Hey, Sofia, will you be in Chicago anytime soon? Would love to tell you about my new project.
I assume Ms. Coppola has read these and must imagine I am somebody she once met and now can't recall meeting. Who knows what she thinks? I admit, late last spring, after watching the movie
Me and You and Everyone We Know,
I was tempted to remove Ms. Coppola from my prospect list and replace her with filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July, on whom I have an enormous crush. But persistence is one of my best traits, and besides, would Ms. July really be able to sustain a long-term relationship? Might she be too damaged? Simply put, I had too much invested in Sofia Coppola to give up so easily. Spike Jonze has made a grave error in leaving this beauty, this stunning and smart young artist, behind.

Before I hit Send I reread my missive one time for good measure, stop, and visualize Ms. Coppola opening and reading the letter (The Power of Intention!), and then, just as I am moving my mouse toward the appropriate icon, I turn up the sound on my computer to see what Pandora has offered me, and the song "Sweet Thing" begins to play on my Van Morrison station. It is the song that Valerie and I once considered our song, though, in her devilishly humorous way, if you were to ask Valerie if we, as a couple, had a song, she would give the deadpanned answer "Sure, 'Big Balls' by AC/DC."

I set my computer to sleep mode and turn off my desk lamp. I take a minute to stare out at the darkness of Commonwealth Avenue in these last hours of night. There, on the sidewalk, I see a woman dressed in a white hoodie, standing in the light cast by my front porch lights. Elizabeth Vandeweghe is staring at my house. I wave to her.

I go outside. "Hello," I say.

"I wasn't sure if you could see me or not," she says. "I saw that you were awake."

"I didn't see you until I turned off my desk lamp. Were you out there long?"

"Not long."

"What's up, Elizabeth?"

"Do you have a cigarette?" she asks.

"A cigarette. No, I'm sorry."

"That's okay," she says. "I probably shouldn't be smoking anyway."

"No. Probably not. Can I make you a drink?"

"No. I just really wanted to smoke. I felt the urge to do something reckless. I was feeling a little stir-crazy, so then I wasted a few hours on Facebook, which made me feel worse."

"I was on Facebook too," I say.

"How sad," she says. "Seriously? Two loners on Facebook, in the middle of the night, about fifty yards, maybe less, between us. We could have been actually talking."

I shrug.

"Or doing something reckless!" she says.

"Something reckless?" I say. "What do you have in mind?"

"You know, I almost walked up to Laurel Tavern to buy some smokes. I almost left the girls sleeping in their beds and just went for a walk and smoked and smoked. Alone."

"That probably would have been fine," I say. "Mina is ten, right? She can call nine-one-one if the house catches fire, I'm sure."

Elizabeth laughs.

"Pretty sad," she says, "when my idea of rebellion is sneaking out of the house to walk two blocks and buy cigarettes. What am I, fourteen years old?"

I smile. "That's not sad."

"Sadness. Isn't that your thing? Isn't that what you study?"

"Unhappiness," I say. "It's a bit different."

"How so?"

"Well, sadness is caused by something sad—a sorrowful event of sorts. And it's a natural reaction. Unhappiness is simply the absence of happiness. We go about as if happiness should be our default condition, you see. When we find ourselves in some other condition, well, we are unhappy. Does that make sense?"

"Kind of."

"Hey, do you want me to go and buy you some cigarettes? I'd be glad to."

"No. No thanks," she says. "That would be too premeditated. It would dull the edge of the thing."

"Not enough recklessness?" I say.

"Exactly."

Elizabeth and I both look up at the stars, two neighbors, considering the night.

"Hey! I have some marijuana!" I say, remembering an Altoids tin containing two joints that my friend Rory left at my house a few months ago. He was convinced my mother would need and want medical marijuana as the cancer progressed.

Elizabeth smiles. "Yeah?" she says. I run inside.

A little later, I've turned all the lights off in my house and on the outside of the house, and Elizabeth has done the same. Afraid to wake the adults and children who live with us, we walk a half block down to the old cattle crossing that is now a pedestrian tunnel under the new rails-to-trails path. It's a clear night, so we decide to sit right there under the bike path and share the joint. Our houses are quite close together in this neighborhood, so she figures—with a window cracked—she'll hear her daughters if they awake. We are not that far away.

"This is sort of reckless," I offer. "Yes?"

"I know, right?" she says. "It totally is reckless!"

We smoke in silence; the act of passing the herb back and forth seems enough. Also, I cannot think of anything to say and can sense that she is enjoying the fact that I am not saying anything.

At one point, however, good and high, I ask, "Do you really hate your life, Elizabeth?"

And Elizabeth, taking a deep draw on the joint, holding it for a good long time, finally exhales and says, "Naw. Naw. I mean, look at this: my life's pretty surprising."

We laugh about that.

A few minutes later, I walk her to her door. She hugs me.

"Thanks," she says.

"Good night," I say.

Inside, the Van Morrison station on Pandora is now playing the Counting Crows, an odd leap in musical logic, but they are playing a song called "Rain King," which is on an album entitled
August and Everything After.
The music calls to mind my freshman year dorm room at the University of Michigan, where that album was played, along with Pearl Jam's
Vs.,
an extraordinary amount. Listening to the music, I can almost smell the dankness of the rooms in Alice Lloyd Hall, the fried chicken smell rising from the dining hall beneath my room, and I can see my roommates, Brad and Mark, playing Sega video games in the center of that gray and white room. When I think of college, it is hard to remember how sad and depressing it all was until I met Valerie. Whenever I think of Ann Arbor, I am always greeted by a wave of slight nausea and overwhelming longing. And then some days I see Valerie, plain as day, walking across the Diag in the first weeks of May, the ruffled hem of her sundress rustling above her bare knees, the sun new on her bare shoulders, and I think, Look at us, we were just kids, we were so young!

I log in to Facebook for one last peek before bed.

Josh Miller is watching
Casablanca
for the first time.

Wendy Hayes wonders if any parents have heard good things about Water's Edge Preschool.

Morgan Sterbaugh: I can't sleep!!! Too many espressos!!!

Yan Wu believes in miracles.

It occurs to me that Elizabeth may be online at this exact moment too, and, it occurs to me, if she has any chance of marrying me before the grim and unpredictably impending date of my mother's death, I have no choice but to accelerate my slow courtship. The beauty of Facebook is that courtship can be done around the clock, and so, using the iLike function, I send her a YouTube clip of Bob Dylan singing "The Man in Me."

And then I see that, although Minn has yet to accept my friend request, I have myself a new friend request, and when I click on my Friend Requests icon, I can see a small picture of my dead wife, Valerie Somerville—older, lighter, staring off into the distance, a photograph shot in profile.

O
F COURSE, I KNEW
that she wasn't dead. I've always known that! I never even received a death certificate, and I never heard anything from the police or Valerie's family or the Social Security Administration. Any fool would have suspected that he was the subject of some sort of poorly planned though elaborate plot, a cruel plot too, and I suppose I did suspect that, but I could never bring myself to say it. I suppose it was easier to play the young widower than it was to admit that my wife, whom I'd been unabashedly mad for, would play such a cruel trick as a way to escape our marriage.

Valerie's friends in Ann Arbor had a memorial service and they made a big show of it, calling me and asking me if I would read a poem that I had written for her, or asking me what sort of music Valerie might have wanted, but I steadfastly refused to play the game. I blamed the numbing quality of grief: no, I can't even think about it, I said, I am too distraught. I suppose maybe I was expecting Valerie to show up, not exactly laughing at what she had done, nor begging for forgiveness for her unimaginable lie, but simply to return to the life she had in Ann Arbor. I sort of suspected I might see her again, in a coffee shop or on the Diag, and I imagined the weighty awkwardness of that eventual encounter for weeks.

They held her memorial service in a small room in the Law Quad, which was Valerie's favorite place to study. It was the week that classes started. It was my last year in college. Afterward, Jeanette brought the "ashes" back to my apartment, which seemed to be the remnants of somebody's Smokey Joe charcoal grill locked into a cigar box. It was a warm week, and I was sitting in front of a window fan in my boxer shorts, reading Rilke.