Q: A Novel (24 page)

“Being alone can be more devastating than you realize. Seeing the world is fine and good, but at the end of your life, it will be nice to have made some connections. Perhaps someone will bring you soup, come and visit for a few minutes, watch the baseball game on television.”

I understand, of course, that he has none of these things.

He smiles. “It would be nice, also, to have some people at your funeral.”

I notice then that the bag in my lap has opened. My pants are covered in nuts and salt. This strikes me as profoundly sad. For some reason “MacArthur Park” starts playing in my head, and I begin to cry.

So my visit to Nepal
consists of a five-hour stay at Tribhuvan International. I alight from the plane, purchase a stand-by return ticket at the counter, then wait for them to turn the plane around to Belgium. It doesn’t take long; they don’t even clean it. I kill time by wandering the airport stores, of which there are two. The first is a snacks and notions shop. The snacks are the same sleeves of peanuts they gave out on the flight. The notions are Q-tips, sold individually from a glass jar; orange-flavored Alka-Seltzer tablets, also sold individually from a glass jar; and an ancient copy of
Time
. The cover features its men of the year, Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr, and a teaser for a story about apocalyptic Y2K fears. Seeing Ken Starr is disorienting, and I feel suddenly dislodged in time.

The duty-free shop is more or less the same as any other duty-free shop, with an emphasis on less. Everything in the store could be found at a similar shop in a major airport, there are just fewer items, and instead of, say, stacks of Lindt chocolate, there is a single bar. I feel that I shouldn’t leave Nepal empty-handed, so I buy a bottle of scotch—Johnnie Walker Red Label.

From the look of things, they don’t move much product at the Tribhuvan Duty-Free. A cardboard cutout of Catherine Deneuve adorns the Chanel display, which consists of four bottles of No. 5 and two bottles of Antaeus. I have a hunch the whiskey is twenty years old or more. But time is good for scotch, and one bottle of Johnnie Walker is as good as another. Suddenly, and thankfully, I feel grounded, but only for a moment.

Chapter Twenty-Three

B
ack home in New York, I begin a concerted program of civic and social engagement. I take a job at a bookstore in TriBeCa. The young people who work there go out every night, and I make a point of joining them often. I enlist in the Hash House Harriers and on weekends volunteer at an alpaca farm in Putnam County. It is not the perfect life, and certainly not the one I imagined for myself, but it is a good life all the same.

It is strange not to teach and write, but working in the store keeps me around books, and the weeks have a pleasant rhythm to them. I appreciate this. For writers, there is always work to be done—matters to research, pages to edit, galleys to read. During its creation, a novel inhabits an author’s every waking moment, even infiltrates his sleep. Now, when work is done it is done. I can go out in the evenings with my colleagues and drink beer without worrying about being my sharpest in the morning. Bookstore customers are genial and polite. If I need to turn my brain off because of a hangover, or just to daydream, this presents no problem.

This idea of turning my brain off is foreign. Even as a child, I was goal-oriented. I commissioned an army of officers in the elementary schoolyard and wrote a series of books about a literate dinosaur. And, of course, the dreams of my adulthood heretofore have been grand. But I adapt to a more sedentary intellectual life much more quickly than I ever would have imagined. It is okay, it turns out, to live without the imperative of writing the great American novel or earning tenure or attending and excelling in graduate school. It is fine to go to work in the morning, have a few drinks with friends afterward, then go home and watch
Seinfeld
reruns. In other words, it is palatable to simply exist.

I still have aspirations, but they are more oriented to a lifestyle than to assuring my legacy. I dream of ways to include the people I like in my life. I plan a cooperative bookstore, owned in equal shares by all the workers, not employees but partners who read and confer over what novels to promote and how much to charge for a cup of coffee, if anything at all.

I discuss this idea with a few of my colleagues. They think it is not unrealistic. More importantly, they share the vision. We begin to plot, and discuss places where such an enterprise could take root. Perhaps near one of the colleges, NYU or Hunter, where the academic community might get behind it. I even go so far as to explore a business loan with a bank officer. The details of the plan are key, she says, but thinks it should be possible for my group to secure funding.

I still daydream about success, but this no longer involves bestsellers or a place in the pantheon of writers. Instead it means a cabin in the woods of Maine or perhaps the southern Adirondacks, nothing fancy of course, not on the salary of a bookstore owner, just a place where friends can go for a hike, share a bottle of wine, and watch the sunset—a friendly commune. My dreams, like my life, are serene.

I am therefore surprised and more than a little disappointed when I-68 proposes we go for health shakes and walnuts at the corner juice bar.

“What is it?”
This time,
I
am eager to get to the point.

“It’s you,” he says. “Look at yourself. You’ve gone soft.”

It’s true. I have. Since returning to New York I have put on fifteen, maybe twenty pounds. The cause is no mystery. Since starting at the bookstore, I have gone out to drink beer almost every night. And, to my surprise, I really like the jalapeño poppers at Diablos Cantina, the bar where my friends from the store go after work. I don’t care for jalapeño peppers, so I figured the poppers would not be to my taste, but they’re stuffed with cheese and spices and meat and deep-fried, and after you dip them in ranch dressing you can hardly taste the jalapeño at all. With beer, they taste spectacular.

“How could you have let yourself get this way?” It is ironic that he asks this because, bad as I look, I-68 looks way worse. He has an old-man paunch, a double chin, and skin hanging in other places where it shouldn’t be.

“Buying new pants was the hardest thing,” I explain. “I was quite attached to the idea of wearing thirty-two-inch-waist slacks. As you know, I had worn thirty-two-inch-waist pants since college.” Indeed, I was proud of the fact that my waist hadn’t changed in all those years, and I definitely didn’t want to spend the money on new pants. It just seemed like a complete waste (sorry). The first several times I put on a few pounds, I starved myself or went on a crash diet. Then, one day, I took the plunge and bought myself a pair of thirty-four-inch jeans. Lo and behold, the world did not end. The pants look good, they’re just as comfortable as the old ones, and they didn’t break me. No one tells me that I let myself go. Soon I bought three pairs of khakis and two more pairs of jeans in the same size. You don’t need as many pairs of pants as people think. The trick is not to wash them every time. Pants are not like shirts. There are no apocrine sweat glands in the legs. If you just air pants out, you can wear them again in a day or two. This way, and this is the key, they don’t shrink. So you can get by with fewer than you would have thought possible. It’s empowering, really.

I-68 is uninterested in my disquisition on pants. “You need to exercise.”

“I belong to the Harriers,” I say, but it’s a lame excuse, and I know it, and I know he knows it. The Harriers were founded in 1938 in Kuala Lumpur by a group of expatriate British officers. At a Hash, one or more of the members of the group, the Hares, lays a trail for the remainder of the group to follow, scattering short cuts and dead ends, so that the slower runners can catch up with the faster ones. It’s all good fun. Trouble is—we’re talking about the Brits, after all—the Harriers who reach the end of the trail are rewarded with beer and cigarettes. The organization’s constitution provides, in relevant part, “to acquire a good thirst and to satisfy it in beer.” Obviously, I-68 is aware of this.

“Not the Harriers,” he says. “You need
real
exercise.” Whereupon, he pulls down his collar and unbuttons the top of his shirt so that I can see three four-inch scars running longitudinally down his pectoralis major, unmistakable evidence of a series of open-heart surgeries.

“They didn’t work,” I-68 says ominously, and takes a sip from his banana health shake.

I quit the Harriers
and join the Central Park Running Club, which is heavy-duty. They meet on Tuesdays for interval training, Wednesdays to run hills, and Thursdays for speed workouts. On weekends, the members take long runs, sometimes fifteen or twenty miles, either around the park loop, or up Riverside Drive, or east onto Randall’s Island. In no time, I shed the weight I had added and then a few pounds more. The running is addictive, and I find myself going out to train every morning, even the days when the club meets. I add extra miles onto the long weekend runs. In the fall I run the New York Marathon. In the spring, the Boston. I begin to plot training regimens to get my marathon time down under three hours. I consider the Hawaii ultra-marathon, one hundred miles on the Big Island. During slow moments at the bookstore, and even during some active periods, I find myself daydreaming about these running ventures. I am in the middle of one of these reveries when a gentleman in a wheelchair, carrying a copy of
Our Mutual Friend
for purchase, arrives at my checkout counter, introduces himself as me, and invites me to herbal tea.

I-72 gets right to the point.
He is sipping Earl Grey, black, and not interested in small talk.

“You need to stop running so much. You’ve substituted one obsession for another.”

“So?”

“You’re ruining your knees.”

“You are the one who told me I needed to exercise more.”

“No, not me. You keep making that mistake.”

“Look, I mean no disrespect, but is it so terrible to be obsessive about exercise? So you have bad knees? Do you really need to be in a wheelchair? Couldn’t you just have your knees replaced?”

He smiles, though he is agitated. “You think you know so much, don’t you? The knee surgery causes a blood infection, the blood infection hospitalizes you for three months. It nearly kills you and causes you to lose your right leg. I won’t even mention the unbearable pain associated with the successful knee replacement in the left leg. Do you think I’d come back in time because I had a little trouble walking?” He spits these last words at me.

I feel six inches tall. “What do you want me to do?”

“Swimming,” he says, calmer now. “It is very nice and low-impact.”

Coming out of the locker
room at the Y one evening, I-66 confronts me and asks me to buy him a Gatorade. We sit down at a table in the cafeteria, behind the vending machine which sells premade sandwiches. They have chicken salad, turkey, and peanut butter and jelly. I offer I-66 some change. “The chicken salad and turkey are not good,” I tell him, “but the peanut butter and jelly isn’t half bad.”

He isn’t interested. “You spend all that time swimming and have nothing to show for it,” he says.

It’s true. I am not a particularly good swimmer and show no signs of improvement. I took a couple of lessons, but these consisted mostly of a hairy middle-aged man in a Speedo repetitively yelling “Breathe” at me. As far as I can tell, swimming with humans is pretty much as it is with dogs. You swim the way you swim the first time you’re dropped in the water. Running may have ruined my joints, but at least it kept me thin. I have put five pounds back on since I started swimming, mostly around the middle, where a dense rubbery fat has consolidated. It doesn’t look terrible, but my appearance hardly justifies the effort, which is considerable, and the truth is, I don’t like the water very much. The chlorine is murder on my eyes.

“What do you want me to do?”

“The key to good health is avoiding food allergies. Cut out gluten and cow’s milk and you’ll be a happy man.”

I am walking out
of the health food store in Bay Ridge where I buy my macrobiotic gluten-free whole-grain pasta and soy milk. The soy milk starts to smell like feet after a day, so I make the three-hour round trip from my apartment often. I-84 catches up with me on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn as I am hustling to the subway with ingredients for a vegan arrabiata.

“Please don’t eat the arrabiata,” says I-84. “It is too spicy and will really bother me in the morning.”

“Really. Is that what you came to say?”

“Not exclusively. This is all counterproductive,” he says, over the sound of the rushing traffic. “Soy is carcinogenic, and gluten is good for you.”

“That’s the opposite of what we have been told.”

“Yes.”

“Just like in
Sleeper
?”

“Precisely.”

“What, then, for me?”

“Beavers,” he says. “Study beavers.”

“This seems very random.”

“Our scientists have great hope for its benefits.”

I am donning
my waders on the shore of a stream in the wilderness of Maine when I-74 wanders up beside me.

“Why are you doing this?” It is difficult to hear him over the running water.

“Because I was told to!”

“Does it make any sense?”

“No!” I say. “But I like beavers!”

“Have you learned anything?”

“No.”

“Do you know what six times nine is?”

“Fifty-four,” I say hopefully.

“I mean in base-thirteen.”

“This will take me a moment.”

“Would you like to play a game of pitch and toss?”

Yes, I say, and for several hours we toss coins against the wall.

“These are very obscure references,” I say. “One could read an entire book about my life and not catch this bit. You need to be able to do base conversions to get the numerical thing, and even then I had a difficult time relating it to something relevant.”

“Perhaps you should pay more attention to your own life.”

“Maybe so, but this is becoming boring.”

“Try skydiving. It’s quite exciting.”

I am nine
thousand feet above Earth, halfway down my jump, when I-84 comes swooping in above me in a nosedive. He levels off and matches my descent.

“This is insane!” he cries over the rushing wind.

“I know!”

“Learn to play the guitar instead!” he shouts, as he releases his chute and recedes into the distance.

I take to the guitar well.
I have a knack. After several months, I know more than thirty chords and can perform some basic arpeggios. I have even gotten down a pretty fair rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama.” The hammer-ons and pull-offs in the riff are tough to get down, but otherwise it’s not that hard to play. I like it. It’s my favorite. Ed King of Lynyrd Skynyrd said the chords and two main solos came to him in a dream. Sometimes when I am really cooking, I feel as if I am channeling him.

I adopt the lifestyle of the jerry jazz musician. I eat spaghetti, drink gin fizzes, and wander the streets of Greenwich Village by night. I am at the Vanguard one evening, checking out some hepcats, when I am confronted by I-74. He says he wants a scone.

“It’s one a.m.,” I say. “I don’t think any place sells scones at one in the morning.”

“This is New York. Someone is selling scones.”

“Don’t they have scones in your time?”

“They have scones. You want me to wait forty years to eat?”

We walk around, find a little place on Christopher Street that does breakfast, go in.

He asks the host, “Do you sell scones?”

“No, but we have crullers. Will that do?”

“No, but thank you.”

“They are very much the same thing, a cruller and a scone.”

“I should think not.”

“Nevertheless, I think you will enjoy it.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.” We leave the restaurant and as we resume wandering, I-74 mutters to himself something about lemons and limes.

After half an hour, we find another late-night diner, which, astonishingly, sells scones. We take a seat. He orders a scone and raspberry preserves. The waiter arrives a minute later with the biscuit and the fruit, which I-74 inspects skeptically.