Indecision: A Novel Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  for n+1

  “Willing too is merely an experience,” one would like to say . . . It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about.

  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  PROLOGUE

  Not until my ears popped and the plane was coming down over the winking lights of Bogotá—or really it looked like any other city at night—did I raise my eyes from the page I’d been puzzling at and begin to think of the girl, or woman, the friend or acquaintance, Natasha, whom I was flying so far to visit. That’s how it was with me then: I couldn’t think of the future until I arrived there.

  Yet everybody always remarked on my apparently remarkable, indestructible Dwightness that was immune to time and place. “Dwight, dude, you’re exactly the same, man!” an old friend from school would say. Or “So lovely to have seen you, Dwight, you haven’t changed a bit!” a friend of mom’s would say. Even mom herself would sometimes say this. And I knew these people had to be on to something, since otherwise you would have to imagine either a) a conspiracy or b) a radical collective incompetence in matters of personal identity, both of which possibilities I tended to reject as someone who’d majored in philosophy in college and adopted, as the best of bad options, a pragmatist view whereby what most people said was true probably actually was true, or close enough. I never looked into this or other philosophical problems any deeper than was necessary to rate a B average in an era of runaway grade-inflation, but a pragmatist I was all the same. And not only did my dispassionate investigations reinforce this position, so did my whole agreeable personality that had always made me so popular with others.

  I’m sorry to begin my narrative of important life-changing events so abstractly, especially when the story includes, as well as some sex and many drugs and my final prescription for what the whole world needs, plenty of specific sense data. (There were babies crying in the cabin as the plane sank down, and the guy in the seat beside me annotating in blue ink, with frantic circlings and passionate underlinings—“STRATEGY,” he wrote, and “IMPORTANT!!!”—an article on Colombia in a business magazine.) But abstract is how I felt, up in the air, on the plane, at the time. Other people might feel I stayed the same from place to place; but to myself I always seemed totally steeped in my environment, or dyed in local color, and now because in transit I felt suffused with utter nowhereness, and therefore like I might turn out to be anyone at all.

  Only five hours before I’d still been in New York. I’d lived there for four years plus, mostly downtown on Chambers St., with three other guys and also occasionally another one, who still had a key and sometimes crashed on the less structurally degraded couch. I wasn’t leaving the city for good, of course—just ten days, was all. I think I’d left my bed unmade to increase its air of being there to be returned to. Besides, I had a reunion to go to when I got back, which was how the whole thing with Natasha got started.

  Like Natasha, I was more or less popular at St. Jerome’s, where we went to prep school together, admittedly along with hundreds of others, and when long-awaited senior spring arrived for us in 1992 I was elected Form Agent for the Form of that year. (Rumors circulated that some satirical votes had been cast along with the serious ones, and I can acknowledge that the recount may have taken an afternoon, but in the end the results were certified, and I came out on top.) Being Form Agent meant being in charge for the rest of my life of fund-raising, reunion-organizing and the like, and in this surprisingly burdensome capacity I had recently sent off a mass email reminding everyone to come to our tenth reunion or else be thought a total loser afraid to show his face. Or hers. Some people wrote back with regrets or other news, the one who stood out being Natasha, who said she might or might not go.

  My sister Alice happened to call right after I received this tremendous communication. It was nice that Alice was willing to talk to me again, and as a reciprocal-type gesture of renewed openness between us I read her the message in which Natasha could be construed as genuinely inviting me to go visit her in Quito. “Where is Quito?” I asked. “Because I’m thinking I could go.”

  Quito (pronounced Key Toe, for the uninitiated) is in Ecuador, in South America. Alice told me so and I began telling her—not, she claimed, for the first time—about the fixation I’d harbored on-and-off for this younger acquaintance of hers. Al interrupted me: “What honestly is the deal, Dwight, between you and foreign women?”

  It was true that Natasha was Dutch. And Vaneetha did hail from India. And Vaneetha was someone I’d been sleeping next to for a while, without us, however, all that often sleeping together. Lately other bodies tended to really bring home to me the famous other-minds problem, and I never felt like a woman I knew was more unknown to me than when and if we were kissing, not to speak of outright actual fucking. “Um, when they’re foreign . . .”

  “Yes, Dwight?”

  “. . . then it makes more sense that they’re foreign.”

  Alice, who actually looked a bit like Natasha, if you thought about it, which I refused to, snorted with semi-indulgence. But then she called back an hour later mysteriously saying, “Go. I’m insisting, Dwight. Go!”

  “Are you sure? Wait, let me find the coin,” I said as I went hunting through various pants pockets in search of one of the very special unspendable coins that mom had given me for throwing the I Ching, which I never did, for ancient Chinese guidance. The first toss came up heads. So that plus Alice’s blessing had me feeling I should go. Yet I flipped again, then a third time. I knew a larger sample size would make the stats more accurate. Should I really go? But how do you ever know until you’ve gone? Alice was still on the phone for the fifth flipping. “You are mentally ill,” she said.

  “Not for long,” I assured her, and had my reasons. “Toss number five . . . is heads,” I said, “and so—”

  “You really fucking do this?”

  “So I go.”

  Yet in the five days after I purchased the ticket to Quito through Bogotá, I’d gone from apartment to deli to multiplex to restaurant to park, all the usual places minus one, namely my former place of work, and as I’d made my rounds somehow it hardly occurred to me to think of Natasha at all.

  There had been the email. Then the coin toss. Then I got fired, from Pfizer. The upcoming trip made even more sense to an unemployed person, presently hungover. It was like this little vial of purpose I could unstopper and sniff from in the morning. I really didn’t know what to do with myself next, once my savings ran out, closely followed by my overdraft protection, and possibly the reckless expenditure on last-minute airfare existed in the darkness of my un- or sub-conscious as a way of speeding up the reck
oning. Or else I may have felt like the answer to what to do next hovered beyond me as a kind of Platonic form, and that I might bump into some approximation of it—and maybe Natasha was even it—during my time with her down in Ecuador.

  The landing gear unfolded over Bogotá with hydraulic wheezing and a thud.

  I guess the thing I’d always admired about Natasha from the start was her easy adaptability to anything. That’s what it had seemed to me and the other guys when she’d arrived as an incoming Fifth Former and played the Iroquois/WASP game of lacrosse like it was in actuality a Dutch thing; when she’d shown up at a seated dinner wearing the same sort of little black dress the society chicks from Manhattan wore; when she’d gone out to the Freaky Fields and taken ’shrooms with us, laughing and joking and dipping into drug-profundity like she was some veteran of the Dead show circuit; and above all when she spoke to us in her fluid, fluent English with hardly any accent to it even. Only pretty rarely could you detect a trace of the Netherlands—almost as exciting as if her dress had ridden a couple inches up her thigh.

  But despite this way with fitting-in I never heard anyone accuse Natasha of conforming, which everyone at St. Jerome’s unanimously considered the unpardonable crime. (Myself, I was considered innocent, I was so preppy already: from time immemorial I’ve worn my wavy brown hair in this kind of Bobby Kennedy way, and I showed up at the rectory, first day of school, wearing the same style thin-waled Levi’s cords and Brooks Brothers shirt I still wear now in larger sizes, and even as a new boy I possessed, thanks to Alice, a respectable collection of second-generation Dead tapes.) But about Natasha: in spite of the whole adaptability thing, somehow she remained dignified and aloof. She was popular but belonged to no group, and had very definite and surprising opinions, particularly on euthanasia, legalized prostitution, and methadone. And as far as we knew she’d never more than kissed anyone.

  Senior spring at St. Jerome’s I would conjure up as a time of underage drinking, anticipatory nostalgia, and skinny-dipping in ponds across whose surfaces there floated all these gossamer blobs of milkweed pollen like miniature clouds collapsed and dragged down to earth. One time Natasha and I sat on the dam by Long Pond as water ran between and around our thighs and we passed the prohibited flask back and forth. We agreed how we might like to know each other better. Then we graduated, Natasha going off like Alice had—and like I did not—to elite Yale University. (My diploma, cum nada, from Eureka Valley College in California, doesn’t hang in dad’s office as Alice’s via Yale and then her PhD from Columbia do.) In any case from all I heard from Alice or imagined by myself, Natasha kept up throughout her college years too that whole remarkable combination of participation and aloofness together, and still was not kissing many people.

  Alice said—this was still on the phone—“Obviously the girl’s a lesbian.”

  “Or she could just be shy.”

  “She never seemed shy, Dwight.”

  “Well I don’t seem shy either,” I said by way of refutation.

  Somehow the thought of Natasha always tangled me into self-contemplation.

  Now the tires struck the runway with a little squeal of swallowed hurt. The asphalt was smoking with steam and covered with little dribbles of red and white light. I looked around nodding at everybody in happy acknowledgment that our luck had held.

  “Glad to be back on the ground, huh?” said the besuited dude in the seat beside me.

  We would never meet again so I felt we could talk freely. “Actually I hate indeterminate places.” I’d meant to say intermediate but hadn’t used words all day.

  The guy frowned noddingly. “I guess Colombia is kind of . . . yeah. Good country to invest in, though. People want jobs. No problems with the unions.”

  “That’s nice.” I was so nice then too! “How come?”

  He made a gesture signifying a little of this, a little of that. “Good luck to you,” he said as he got up to retrieve his briefcase from the overhead bin. I noticed how he opened it carefully, prudently. Because it’s true what they say about the contents—they can shift during flight.

  Soon the emptied seats had filled up with passengers going on to Quito, and the flight attendants were reciting their spiel again, first in English, then español. I’d never learned to habla español even a poquito. I guess I’d studied French instead because it seemed like the thing I would do. In about an hour I was going to be completely at the mercy of Spanish-speaking Natasha.

  Or the Joker, as we’d also called her back in the day. She had this incredible smile, a deep cartoon crescent in the parentheses of dimples, and somebody—actually, okay, it was me—once thought to call her the Joker. The name stuck, and we, the guys, would sometimes call her this affectionately and to her face. She accepted the nickname with grinning equanimity, just like she seemed to everything else.

  But now as I buckled the seatbelt low and tight across my waist, and made sure the tray table before me was in a secure and upright position, I felt kind of bad about having coined the Joker. After all it was only me who’d stayed close to Natasha, if close could ever be the word there. And I was sure that when I showed up at our ten-year reunion my recent visit to Natasha van der Weyden would flash from me like some badge of pure prestige. At least I’d have that to show off to fellow Formmates with their professional accomplishments and spousal acquisitions which I knew all about as if they’d been tattooed on my brain in your-name-on-a-grain-of-rice-sized writing because it was my job, as Form Agent, to send in to the alumni magazine quarterly batches of these and similar boastings.

  Whereas I was recently jobless and had not much to be proud of beyond not having gone bald. True, my hairline might have receded some, but at one point looking into the mirror I drew a kind of line in the sand, and past that point it stayed firmly put. Arguably much more of a problem was the insane (if blond) hairiness of my neck, back, chest, legs, buttocks, and arms. Somehow the women who saw and even handled me naked never seemed to mind my being covered all over with a light downy pelt. As the jet lifted off from the Bogotá runway, I wondered again why they didn’t mind. Maybe I seemed to them like a missing link?

  Suddenly, back in the air, it occurred to me what a coup it would be if I were to go to the reunion with Natasha. If I could persuade or even seduce her into doing it, what pride I would feel—as Form Agent and as man. This was great: now it was like I had come to South America for a reason! Also I hoped that after ten days with her I’d have something new to say on the whole Natasha subject. Maybe I could say to Stratton or Bill T., as I nodded toward her in the distance, where she would stand on the lawn in a sundress, “Man we were so clueless calling her the Joker, because actually the thing about Natash, and it’s not elusive at all, is—” And here I’d slip in what I’d learned. Meanwhile everything I’d just thought about Natasha was something I already knew. It was like when I’d taken a trip to some foreign land and everyone asked me about it when I got back: my accounts would grow similar, focusing on this impression, that cool place, a certain funny anecdote, until there was just the one account, which then substituted for my memory. Remembering this tendency, I felt an honest fear. It was the familiar fear, made honest through sudden intensity, that once all the sensation had evaporated from my life the residue would be a cliché. I’d die, St. Peter would be like, “So how was it?” and I’d say, “Great place. I liked the food. I was sick for part of it. But all the people were really nice.” And that would be it.

  I looked out the window to the perfect star-free blackness. And I resolved to say something new about my visit each time anybody asked, not repeating myself once, much less twice or three times. And if there were unpleasant things to say, I would consider saying those too—because the world could be a painful place, the nation of Colombia very much included, as I’d learned since becoming unemployed a few days earlier and having found time to read the paper. Unfortunately my roommates and I had recently abetted Colombia’s long-running civil war by buying and snorting coca
ine. I wasn’t very psyched to tell Natasha this. Yet because I hardly knew her I would need her to tell me everything, and in fairness I’d have to spill my own guts too. I just hoped she wouldn’t ask me who in my opinion ought to win the Colombian civil war. Weren’t there terrorists on both sides? Then again maybe it was getting to be about time to stand up for terrorists of the better sort!

  Soon the plane landed without incident. Two for two. So that felt good. And as we taxied toward our gate all the babies started to stop crying. Have you noticed how they never do this without a few little grunts of totally babyish reluctance, forcing out a few last sobs before they let the new mood in? It’s like they won’t admit that whatever was upsetting them might not be that bad, even in war-torn Colombia.

  But this wasn’t Colombia, I reminded myself as I walked down the aluminum stairs, and stepped out onto the tarmac. This was Ecuador, a terra incognito I knew nothing about. I’d looked at those Let’s Leave! and Tough Planet guides they have, but unable to choose, didn’t buy one. My only real knowledge was that the air here—always amazing to be here, no matter the place—was cool and smelled like wood smoke. Maybe with a faint tang of sewage too? I wondered if I was distinguished in life by a sensitive nose and for my next job should take up wine criticism, drinking for a living and insuring my nose for a fantastic sum. Then maybe I could fake a smell-debilitating brain injury, and become very rich.

  It felt so shameful and exciting, not knowing what to do with myself.

  As I watched the carousel for my bag I noticed I was trembling: the DTs. DT she’d also been called, for Dutch Treat, which meant that anyone at St. Jerome’s who had a crush on Natasha was said to have the DTs.

  So had I maybe been in love with her all these years? Only she had never before shown any return interest? And now that she had gone so far as inviting me to Quito I could finally admit things to myself? Sometimes in spelunking the psyche your little headlamp goes dim. Anyway I was trembling. After all here was a new place, therefore a new life, and hence an occasion for some quaking at the prospect of your freedom to do right away, if you want to, and can make up your mind, a wide variety of things in this world.