The Failure (8 page)
T
he hills are on fire. Literally ablaze, thought Guy, driving north on Larkin Heights, and it’s not the sunset, it couldn’t be, because the hills are to the north and the sun sets in the west, and in any case it’s only around two in the afternoon.
Wretched Catullus, stop playing the fool and consider lost what is lost. But what does this mean: lost? There is no loss, only an accretion of circumstance, a heap of learning, a frantic scramble to retain focus while the walls of the world crumble. The walls of the world are always crumbling, it’s their natural state. Inviolable entropy demands constant flux. Change is a brick wall that looks exactly like no change, and the headache you get from one is the mirrored throb of the other. I would like to lodge a protest against the notion of progress as reflected in the debased journalism of the marketplace. I would like to stand athwart history and spit. I would like a place I could call my own. I would like to tell better jokes.
In his head, at that moment—which turned out to be among his very last moments—Guy wrote a song, called “The Last Lonely Man.”
The Last Lonely Man
words & music by Guy Forget
Verse (DGC)
Out of the corner of my eye I watch you walk on water
I’m not afraid to say goodbye
This is the room I fit in
I sleep, but
Not always
I’m not afraid to say goodbye
Bridge (AmDm)
And nobody’s ever here
And nobody’s left to hear
Chorus (CGDG)
He stares at the moon and sun
He’s in love with everyone
The last lonely man’s heart breaking
The last lonely man’s heart breaking
Verse (DGC)
Out of the corner of my eye I see the water rising
I’m not afraid to say goodbye
This is the room I fit in
I sleep, but
Not always
I’m not afraid to say goodbye
Bridge (AmDm)
He lives on a riverboat
That will not, cannot float
Chorus (CGDG)
And the tide is always out
And that is all she wrote
The last lonely man’s heart breaking
The last lonely man’s heart breaking
C Section (DBF)
I’m crashing down, I’m crashing down
I’m crashing down, I’m crashing down
Back to the ground where I belong
Chorus (CGDG)
Fade Out (DGC)
(Many years in the making
Now he’s yours for the taking)
V
iolet had been brought up to think that nothing she did could in any way be held against her, because she was entitled to act however she thought fit. Her sense of entitlement derived partly from some innate personality quirk, possibly inbred, but was equally the fault of a world that granted to girls of a certain age and a certain bearing and a certain way of moving through the world—as if they were the still center of that moving orb—an almost limitless degree of slack. If you were young, and attractive, and self-centered, without a thought in your head that did not concern either your immediate physical desires or your immediate-future physical desires, then you were given the real world equivalent of an All Access pass, and treated by most of the world in the way that you saw yourself, which, without putting too fine a point on the matter, is to say you saw only yourself, with the possible exception of those people or things who could supply you with whatever it is you might want, in which cases the near-total eclipse of everyone else’s personality by your own would lift, for a moment, allowing a mild, refracted light to pinhole the gloom of your presence, only to resume when your restless vision set your restless feet in motion.
The good news, for those left behind, wondering
What the hell just happened?
as Violet continued on her way, was that the eclipse would soon lift entirely, and daylight (or nightlight, as the case might be) would resume its natural or artificial course, leaving, as in the Middle Ages before such phenomena had been adequately explained by science, only a sense of unease and mild confusion, which too will pass, class.
You can understand and even—I admit this may be going the extra mile, but why not go the extra mile?—empathize with a girl like Violet, who has never
not
gotten her way in the smallest of life’s transactions, for instance when she didn’t have enough money to pay for a six-pack of beer at the gas station, but smiled sweetly at the attendant, who told her to just go ahead, what’s money anyway but a commodious vicus of recirculation. We are to blame, you understand, in this and all other instances. We are the force that drives a movie star to steal beautiful clothes from an expensive store even though she could easily afford the clothes—because when everything is given to you, there is no pleasure in receiving, only taking. We are to blame when a rich young man drives over the curb at five in the morning on his way home from a nightclub and plows his armor-plated luxury vehicle through the dark windows of a souvenir store, scattering T-shirts and baseball caps and coffee mugs and little plastic replicas of the Statue of Liberty all over the linoleum floor. That’s our fault too, because the rich young man has no one he can really trust, and I will tell you why: because he is rich and young. And society preys on the young and the rich, we turn them into objects of fascination, into playthings, we use them up and spit them out, usually into a plate glass window, leaving them with an inadvisably high blood-alcohol content—also our fault, both for inventing alcohol and effectively marketing its miraculous powers—and a month-long stay in a rehabilitation center, which does not come cheap, because the rehabilitation of rich people is a serious, time-consuming, and expensive procedure, not unlike the artificial insemination of cows (or horses).
The dark victories Violet won, whether effortless or not, were so small in scope, so lacking in imagination and foresight, that the only appropriate reaction, as far as I was concerned, was to shake my head in wonderment. Full disclosure: I never slept with her. Usually when a man tells you he’s slept with a beautiful girl you accuse that man of bragging. There’s really no other reason for telling. You’re making a statement, in the same way that a hunter who brags about bagging a twelve-point buck is making a statement: I’m good, he’s telling you, I’m a good hunter. Stands to reason that I’m saying something the opposite of that: I’m no good, Sven Transvoort is telling you, I’m an ineffective sexual predator.
As such, as an unspurned nonlover, I can claim perfect objectivity with respect to Violet’s peccadilloes. Which I am nevertheless, in the manner of an overindulgent stepuncle, perhaps too easily ready to forgive and forget, or at least forgive.
I have no similar inclination toward Guy Forget. Guy used girls like Violet to get things he could not easily get himself, but held no special affection for them. I’m not sure Guy held special affection for anyone, except maybe Billy, but that’s no excuse. She may have been many things, she may have
fait des bêtises
, but
that is no excuse
.
My point being that had Guy loved Violet more, or had she loved him less, none of this would have happened. In the end, though, you could fairly say that he got
everything that was coming to him
.
Please don’t get me wrong. Violet was no angel, and I am anything but gallant. I don’t rescue fair maidens. I don’t slay dragons. I carry out personal vendettas. That’s my thing. And to answer your unasked question, Mr. Dead Lennon, I sleep just fine at night, thank you very much.
G
uy followed Violet into the murk of her living room. A sputtering fire—charred newspapers and the splintered skeleton of a chair—was being prodded laconically with an iron poker by a gloomy short-haired fellow, to whom she did not bother to introduce Guy.
As his eyes adjusted to the light he made out a rickety table, a mossy, anemic easy chair, and a cushionless couch backed against the farthest, darkest wall. Something that may have been a bookcase, now barren and partly stripped for kindling, was propped unsteadily against the amphibrachic couch. On the table by the easy chair were perched a squat stoneware lamp embossed with a blue dragon breathing green fire, and a telephone painted in several fluorescent colors, obscuring the numbers.
Above the mantel hung a large painting, about the size of a refrigerator door tipped on its side, in color and composition resembling the telephone. On the mantel itself were arranged a foot-high plastic Tyrannosaurus rex, a black lacquer canister of wooden matches, and a pair of scissors.
-You want some tea? said Violet, moving from the living room to her kitchen. She filled a kettle with water from the tap and set it on the stove.
Pushing through a curtain of plastic beads, she headed into her dark bedroom. She bent over a pair of fat candles and lit them with a match. Wispy ropes of smoke trailed helically from the tip of each candle flame toward the ceiling. In the flickering light he could see hardened wax pooled on the bare wood at the base of the candles.
Violet had no bed, but slept on a futon which she pulled now from between the shadows of a wobbly armoire and a bookcase constructed of cinder blocks and planks of scrap wood. Her window was large and uncurtained, and looked out over a short, unkempt hedge along the street below. The window allowed large squares of lemony streetlight into the small room to stretch across the varnished floor. Adorning the pale walls were three large unframed posters, reproductions of famous works of abstract art. Guy arranged himself nervously on the futon while Violet went into to the kitchen, summoned by the crescendoing whistle of the kettle.
Violet returned to the bedroom carrying two large cups.
-Here, she said, offering one of them to Guy. He took it with both hands, and she sat opposite him on the floor with crossed legs. Guy placed his cup down and watched with dizzy interest the steam curl toward the ceiling. He leaned forward and breathed deeply, trying to identify the curious but not unpleasant tea scent.
-It’s not really for drinking, she said, shifting her legs to better distribute her weight. -I like to soak my fingers in it.
-What kind of tea is it?
-Different herbs. I read about it in a book.
He tested the temperature of the tea with the little finger of his right hand. Finding it not uncomfortably hot, he arranged his hands around the rim of the cup so that his fingertips were immersed in the fragrant liquid.
-Very relaxing, he declared.
She smiled her crooked smile.
-Cigarette? She did not wait for his reply but lit for herself a filterless cigarette from a half-crushed pack lying on the floor. In the light from the flaring match Guy could see that her hands shook slightly.
-You shouldn’t smoke, he said equably.
-You think? She exhaled a lungful of blue smoke. The smoke spiraled in a lazy stream upwards, twining with the steam from the tea, and flowered in layers in the still air.
A moment of silence passed between them.
She sat down cross-legged, dipped the fingers of her left hand into the tea, and playfully flicked her hand at Guy. He felt drops of the hot liquid on his face but made no motion to wipe them away. Violet sighed, dropped her cigarette into the cup, and stood up. She fumbled with the zipper of her heavy black pants. She stepped out of the pants and came toward him. Leaning back on his elbows and peering in the candlelight at her face, Guy saw that her eyes were bright, glittering with unshed tears.
She bent forward, and Guy saw on the candlelit wall her shadow lean into his. The two shadows appeared to kiss, and he closed his eyes but did not feel the pressure of her lips. When he opened his eyes again she was staring at him from a distance of six inches. He could feel her breath, quick and warm, and her hair had fallen forward so that lank strands brushed his cheekbones.
-You’ve always been so nice to me, she murmered in his ear.
-I’m a nice person.
-
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
, she said. -
Or bends with the remover to remove.
-You’re left-handed, Guy observed, weakly, irrelevantly.
-I’m left-handed, she agreed, then kissed each of his eyelids. -And you’re probably the first person since my high school art teacher to notice that.
-Okay, he said.