Nothing Is Terrible (8 page)

“You must learn to lie still,” Skip Hartman tried to explain to me, on her bed one morning after the end of my brief period of compliance.

“Why must I?”

“Just as it is important to cultivate useful activity, so it is important to treasure idleness. One might even consider idleness a skill.”

“You’re full of shit.”

Startled yet again. (To startle and be startled: this was another of the ways we loved each other.)

“Why’s everything have to be
useful
and
cultivated
and
treasured
?”

“Because life is short.”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why, because not caring isn’t
useful
?”

“No, because it hurts me.”

Across the hall from the bedroom where we slept on the second floor of the Hartman apartment was another, slightly smaller bedroom. Most of the available wall space in this room had been covered with bookshelves. The books, which nearly filled the shelves, were arranged both alphabetically and by category. I had not seen such a room as this before in a private home. By the window there was a small antique rosewood desk and matching chair. Next to the desk there was a four-story wooden filing cabinet, and on the wall beside the cabinet hung a large glass-framed print depicting a small unhappy child flying a red kite in a scarred purple sky.

Just after the beginning of the unending period of my noncompliance, there followed the period of Skip Hartman’s weeping. She sat at the desk in this room and looked at one particular page of a certain book and wept for most of the day. I didn’t want to go into the room where she was weeping, so I sat on the wooden floor in the hallway just outside the open door. There I tried to re-create my dead brother, Paul, inside myself in the form of a Philosophical Conundrum. The conundrum was not supposed to replicate exactly the situation of the weeping; it was meant as an idealized conundrum
about weeping
. Let us say, the conundrum began—for all conundrums must begin with this supplication—let us say that you
are in a room. And let us say that there is a room adjacent to the room you are in and that someone is weeping in this second room. There is no door to the room in which the person is weeping, and there is no door to the room you are in. Nor are there windows to these rooms. Each of you, then, is sealed in a room with no way in or out. The walls of this conundrum, then, are the walls of the two rooms, which are the walls of the world, for the purposes of the conundrum. It is your task to stop the person in the adjacent room from weeping. Why is it your task? It is your task because it is your task. And it is your task because you cannot sleep with the ceaseless weeping. The weeping distracts you from everything in your life that is not the weeping. You have already tried calling to the person. First you called softly and tenderly. You said, “Oh, my child, I am right here beside you, and though you cannot see me or touch me, I will always be here beside you.” But that only made the weeping more abject, more disconsolate. You have also tried calling loudly and angrily: “Will you shut up already! I am your neighbor, and your sorrow is not my sorrow!” That, too, intensified the weeping. At this point in the conundrum, reader, I noticed a difference between this conundrum and the ones Paul used to instruct me in. In Paul’s, there was generally a choice to be made among two or more distinct courses of action, and it was implied that only one of these courses of action was correct. Whereas the conundrum I had invented to instruct myself presented a situation unresponsive to anything I might do to attempt to change it. Either it was a conundrum without a solution or the solution consisted of a mental adjustment to a situation I was powerless to affect. I believe this was the point in my life at which I abandoned conundrums altogether.

In this way, the memory of Paul’s life loosened its grip on my mind.

For a few days, I sat outside the door to the room of the weeping woman playing the game of jacks that I had brought with me from the suburbs in a red cloth bag.

Then I went into the room.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

Skip Hartman sat in her chair. She was not actively crying now. She was in that red-eyed resting place between crying and more crying. She was looking down at a picture in a book about northern Renaissance painting. I pulled a book down from one of the shelves and opened it and touched the pages and tried without success to figure out what the book was about. I put it back and pulled down another book and touched its insides and put it back. I did this to maybe two thirds of the books in that room. Then I left the room and went out of the house. Skip Hartman did not follow me this time. I imagined she was still in that chair looking down at that page of that book. I went into Central Park and wandered down to Bethesda Fountain and watched two squirrels alternately frolicking and standing still. I came back to the house and made a sandwich and ate it and went to sleep. When I woke up I went to the book room again. She was looking down at the book, crying.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I wanted to do something nice for her but I didn’t know how, so instead I pulled down the books again, all of them, and I did not replace each book before pulling down the next. In the
middle of the floor, I made a huge unruly pile of every single book in that room except the one that Skip was staring down into. Then I put the books back on the shelves in no particular order, as if I had not already left my smudge of randomness on Skip Hartman’s life.

“Ooh, this is fantastic,” Tommy cooed in the entrance foyer. He was looking at a tall, ancient, rectangular mirror with a mahogany frame, to which a pair of coat hooks was attached on either side of the reflecting glass. His pale red silk shirt, his lavender cravat, and his delicate, smoothed-out-baklava skin looked patrician in the tarnished surface of the old mirror. Myra was still wearing the hard rough white-plaster shell that the doctor had put on her forearm the day I felled her on her driveway. She was dressed in a brown cloth in which fragile produce might have been wrapped to be shipped overseas.

Tommy gazed at that mild narcotic, the image of his own face in the mirror. “Oh,” he said. Myra looked at an area of the white wall in the foyer that had no mirror or window or painting.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Skip asked.

It was the end of August and the ostensible purpose of this, the first visit from my aunt and uncle, was to discuss plans for my education, but nobody seemed to want to do that, except possibly Myra, but then one has to invent virtually all intentions and attributes of Myra.

Tommy checked his collar and cuffs in the mirror. He was not quite ready to leave the mirror. He stepped away from the mirror and rushed back to it. “I forgot the cape!”

“As lovely as your cape is, Thomas,” Skip said, “it seems to
me more of a winter cape. Perhaps an autumn cape is in order.”

Now Tommy could safely turn away from the mirror, having found another place that reflected him—Skip Hartman—and the tour of the house could begin.

“I want books,” he said, when we reached the book room. Skip had not returned the books to their previous arrangement but, by using a mnemonic technique she had learned from the Roman orator Cicero, she had asserted the ordering principle of her own mind on the chaos of book placement.

“Perhaps I could lend you some,” she said. “What sort of books would you like to read?”

“I don’t necessarily want to read them, at least not right away. I just want to have them around. I don’t want you to lend them to me. I’ll go out and get some. I’ll build a nice bookshelf in maybe Paul and Mary’s room so it can be the room where the books are, the way you have this room. Do you know where I could get some books like this?”

“In a bookstore, I imagine.”

“I don’t want the kind of books they have in bookstores. I want this kind. Old books that are about things most people don’t know about. I want to read but I’m easily distracted. I want to know things. I think I could work up to reading books by first owning them.”

Skip Hartman stood tall in the center of the book room while the rest of us stood around her. She cocked her head to the side to consider Tommy, which gave me the opportunity to consider her long, curved, graceful neck. “I own many more books,” she said. “Some of them I keep in the basement. Some are quite rare.”

“
Rare
—the word alone gives me a feeling,” he said.

“Rare and juicy,” I said.

“Succulent,” Skip added.

“
Succulent
doesn’t give me the feeling,” Tommy said.

“Why don’t I box up a couple gross of books and have them carted up to you,” Skip said, with the faintest Brooklyn inflection waxing and waning in the course of that sentence.

Tommy was too intoxicated with the aura of the rare books in the room to notice the irreverence. In the chair on which Skip had wept for a month, Myra sat looking at the floor, while the fingertips of her left hand grazed the cast on her right arm.

“Further, let me simply hand over some cash to you,” Skip said. “Here.” She removed several hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them to Tommy.

“Thanks.”

“Look under ‘Books, rare’ in the Yellow Pages and you’ll find many more books that I’m sure you’ll read with relish.”

“And mustard,” I said.

“And not only that,” she said. “We must now hurry you off to my tailor, who will make you an exquisite autumn-weight cape.”

“Maybe after we eat,” Tommy said.

“Oh, no! You must visit the delightful hot-dog cart on the way to my tailor on Fifth Avenue. That is where you will have your lunch. Visiting the island of Manhattan without eating a hot dog from a cart would be the equivalent of visiting Paris without climbing the Eiffel Tower.”

“Or teaching sixth grade without having sex with one of your students,” I said.

“Just so,” Skip said.

“Hey, come on!” Tommy said.

Skip hustled Tommy down the stairs and out the door. She stood in the foyer and said, “How often do you suppose we must have this uncle of yours to the house? I don’t enjoy his company.”

We noticed then that we had not sent Myra out of the house with Tommy. She stood on the stairs above the foyer and had heard what Skip said to me. For an instant, she looked at Skip with what appeared to be hatred, and then the hatred—if that was its name—was swallowed back into the affective abyss of her body.

At noon on Labor Day of that year—the day before what would have been the first day of school in some normative version of my life—I answered the doorbell and saw before me slightly older, wickeder versions of Dierdre and Harry, my elementary school classmates, who had somehow obtained my address. Had my twelve-year-old body not felt so woozy and sated after a morning of love with my thirty-seven-year-old guardian, I would have been shocked to see those two. They were no longer the disgraced elder statesmen of the schoolroom. They did not look wounded and chastened so much as dirty and arrogant and theatrical. Dierdre had dyed her hair black against her pale skin and freckles. She wore black mascara and lip liner. Harry had grown taller than Skip Hartman, and massive. Random light hairs grew from his jaw. He wore a scuffed black leather jacket. He looked down at me with an expression of amusement that suggested he had come as far from wanting to tussle with me as a rhinoceros would be from wanting to tussle with a penguin.

“How’s the sex going?” Dierdre said.

“It’s about the only thing that’s going good,” I said.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

I heard Skip on the stairs behind me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing a white terry bathrobe and her hair was darkened by water and smoothed down on her skull in combed stripes. The skin on her face glowed as if lit from within. This was the classic postcoital Hartman look. Dierdre and Harry stared at her. “Here comes the pervert,” Dierdre said, meaning to be funny, but no one laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Can Mary come to the park with us?”

“Mary may do what she likes. I am not the keeper of Mary.” Skip did not descend the few final steps to greet the two children, one of whom had been her student.

“I thought you were her guardian,” Dierdre said.

“Legally, yes, but it is perhaps best to behave as if we are equals in all things, even while we are not equals in all things: in age or in experience or knowledge, for example.”

“Or money,” I said.

“I thought it was understood that you own everything I own.”

“But you own me.”

“Perhaps,” Skip said, “this particular can contains worms enough for only two people, in which case it would be impolite of us to open it in front of your little friends. Why don’t you all run along to the park, and we’ll discuss this in the evening after they’ve returned to the suburbs.”

“But I want them to stay for dinner. Can they?”

“Here again, a decision is being thrust upon me that is not mine alone to make.”

We entered Central Park at Seventy-second Street and walked over a small grassy hill shaded by large trees and down to a concrete area next to the Sheep Meadow where people
were roller-skating to dance music in a tight ellipse. We stood in a crowd, presumably to watch the skaters. But I was distracted by the pronounced sensation that much of the crowd was watching
me
. I felt the hair sticking to my neck and I felt the crowd looking at my arms and my neck and the black clumps of sweaty hair sticking to my pale, unblemished neck. Have you ever wondered, sexual reader, if people are looking at you funny when you’re out in public just after having had sex?

“Watch what Harry can do,” Dierdre said.

We followed Harry to the low chain-link fence that served as the border of the Sheep Meadow. A skinny black boy of Harry’s height nodded at Harry. Harry approached him and nodded back and the boy shook hands with him and described several arcs in the air with his hands and arms while saying something to Harry. He handed Harry a small green object, which Harry brought to his face and smelled. Harry reached into his pocket and gave some money to the boy, who jerked his head around in all directions and walked away quickly.