Indecision: A Novel Page 23

  I want at this time to thank you both for your laissez-faire parenting style which hasnt at all times seemed ideal to me, but now I realize that for you (plural) to have criticized me more often would only have made me defensive, and I probably would have been even *slower* in coming around.

  Dad, so you know, I think about you and the dogs very often and—though you are my father and therefore semi-enemy, owing to human nature—I do this with outstanding love. Mom, I bear the same love to you, or more, though it is tempered with respect since you are a person with standards and have disapproved of me up to now, understandably.

  Much love from your own son, cured by Abulinix at 28, and somehow glad of his life in this fairly terrible world,

  Dwight Bell Wilmerding

  PS Sorry that both children are leftists. Medicine is so advanced these days that why not have some more?

  I have already said I was somewhat well-known in my North American life, and won’t list all the emails in my inbox. But for the purposes of this winding-down story it’s obligatory to reproduce one more, the last one I read that day:

  FROM: dan_rorschach@defunct.com

  TO: wilmerdingansich@mail.fignet.com

  SUBJECT: re [none]

  Suicidal ideation? That’s not good, Dwight.

  I hope you’re reading this and not dead. I promise that if you are dead I will throw your memory a big party such as we used to have in the 1997–2001 period.

  MEANWHILE: DO NOT KILL YOURSELF! You’re right about Abulinix. Thoughts of suicide, not to speak of acts, have been found to be fairly frequent in experimental subjects. I guess to be or not to be *is* the question. No one had counted on this. But apparently the decision to end it all is the first important decision some people make. Naturally also the last.

  But the strange thing in light of your suicidal ideation, is that YOU ARE NOT ON ABULINIX! I’m sorry. Really. Really sorry. I just found out the other day.

  The batch I stole your bottle from—all placebos. It didnt say so on the labels for obvious reasons. You could only tell from the Rx #. I wasnt thinking. Didnt check.

  I feel bad about your bad time. I know you arranged this trip in part—in whole?—because for whatever reason you wanted the Big Effect to happen in Ecuador. (You’ll have to tell me how it’s been there, with Natasha. Here it has sucked, btw. I continue to study with fascination the diverse hydraulics of things sucking.)

  Anyway its possible that you’ve been thinking of offing yourself because you expected the Big Effect and obviously it didnt come. Again, sorry. I might be able to get you on a legit trial when you come back. Which is when?

  Mild anxiety over your welfare,

  Dan

  PS I take it the placebo hasn’t caused you to realize you are gay.

  I sent off a note to the effect that I was alive and well and heterosexual, if perhaps a little bi-curious, and swiveled around in the chair. “On y va?” Brigid said. She’d finished emailing and had paid the attendant. I stood up and looked at him, a stoop-shouldered student type, thin in the cheeks and lips, but romantic in the eyes and the swept-back hair. “Cuánto?” I asked, and handed him a small sheaf of filthy cotton-soft singles. Then I went out to the street with my change.

  Across the street was the empty town square with its sad dry fountain. Brigid had grabbed my hand. She was asking me what the matter was. An old man in a straw hat and dirty suit sat on a bench picking his teeth and watching us with as mild a form of interest as is any interest at all.

  I looked at Brigid. “You know what a placebo is?”

  “Yes, for a control of the experiment?”

  I nodded.

  “So? Yes? Dwight, are you all right?”

  “I am, actually.” I could see in her eyes that she could hear that I was. “I’m fine.”

  EPILOGUE

  In the Elizabeth St. boutique we found a nice sundress that would respect Brigid’s semi-hippy-ism at the same time as it stamped her with fashionality. I handed over my VISA to the saleswoman and to Bridge was like, “They don’t make this stuff in sweatshops do they? Seems way too expensive.”

  “Dwight, how do you have this money to spend?” This was Dan, who I’d brought along with us.

  “I don’t know, I figure racking up a lot of credit-card debt will put me in an even better position to understand the terrible indebtedness of the whole global south, not to mention the American consumer. Plus I want the whole reunion fantasy. The well-dressed beautiful fiancée, the fancy new car . . .” Of course we were borrowing the Audi from dad.

  “So in Ecuador you had a midlife crisis,” Dan said. “Dwight, people don’t do this anymore. You don’t fly to Latin America, take psychedelic drugs, and find sexual liberation with some suntanned goddess of international socialism. Excuse me,” he said to Brigid. Then back to me: “Now is not thirty-five years ago.”

  “We’re not gonna quit until they quit, Dan,” I told him.

  “Until who quits?”

  “The bad guys,” I said. “And isn’t it confusing how neoliberals and neoconservatives—they’re often the very same people, did you know this? I feel like there needs to be a new terminology for things.”

  “Like socialism, for instance? There’s a new word.”

  “Dwight,” Brigid said, “has explained his concept to me. He is to dress in old tee shirts and ragged shorts, and this will imply that I only love him the more for his personal magnetism. Since he is a slob and a socialist.”

  “I taught her the word slob,” I boasted.

  In our AM spending spree we had also picked up a bargain bin copy of Air Supply’s Greatest Hits, and it was with special anticipatory glee that I imagined rolling onto the leafy campus of St. Jerome’s and blaring out the windows “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” as Brigid with her nice mezzo voice chimed on in. Meanwhile I taunted the state troopers as we zoomed through Connecticut and Massachusetts, and finally into New Hampshire with its impressive ridges of bared granite rising to either side of the road.

  “I’m probably going to be called on to give a speech,” I told Brigid, shifting down into fourth. “Maybe you could help me think of one.”

  “Be brief,” she suggested.

  I pulled the to-do list notebook out of my pocket, swerved briefly, accidentally, onto the shoulder of the road, and handed it to her.

  “Brevity,” I said. “Write that. Hmn. What else?”

  “What do you think is important to have happened in the last ten years?”

  “I don’t know, the creation, following the fall of the Soviet Union, of an unprecedented opportunity to regulate the world by law and justice? Which was spoiled by the global hegemony and frequent lawlessness of the US? And of course I should mention the badly flawed Washington-led model of global economics and the rise of the internet. How about that? I’m not going to deal with the terrorism issue. I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “I think there is nothing to do but to kill them.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “But what has happened to you in ten years? Besides me?”

  “I feel like you’re enough. But you’re right. Let’s be vague. Write down WORK AND LOVE. I feel it would be nice for an individual to have found one of those, in ten years.”

  With Bridge as navigatrix, I followed green signs to the hopefully named city of Comity, and then came at last onto Duck Pond Road. Ever since I was a kid it had always impressed me how through the narrowing operations of travel, and from out of so many possible destinations, places of such incredible specificity will realize themselves right in front of you, but there it was, the campus of St. Jerome’s, looming up in red brick. Of course all of this happens much faster in a late model Audi.

  “Hit track five,” I yelled as we slowed, and the great melting song of universal cheese poured from the topflight stereo as we nosed through the parking lot looking for a spot. Brigid sang like a dying opera star the backup words out of nothing at all, and we attracted the anxious gaze
s of beardless youth as well as several milling alumni. I got out, shut the solid expensive white door, and saw that approaching me was old Andrew Mulland of Oak Park parentage—these days a sporting-events promoter in San Francisco. “Dude,” he said, “Wilmerding,” as we each laid our arms across the other’s shoulders, “those were some crazy tunes you were blasting. Nice car, man.”

  “Air Supply is underrated. Meet Brigid.”

  “How’s it going, Brigid.”

  “Very well, thank you.” She was looking around at the bright grass, the colonial and neo-Gothic style buildings, the white-painted fences—and it really was pretty absurd to have educated children such as me in an institution such as this. “You went to a remarkable school.”

  Mulland was like, “I guess so if they let Wilmerding in.”

  “They let you in too, man. Don’t forget that.”

  “When they let me in I was fine.”

  Greeting people, shaking hands, introducing Brigid, patting shoulders, smiling all the way, and even kissing several babies, I proceeded like a presidential hopeful down the paths of red brick, across the manicured youth preserve of the grounds, and ultimately conveyed us toward the Upper School. Our reconstituted Form was supposed to meet for supper in the Lower Dining Room, where all our names would have been carved on a wall, and where we would eat terrible cafeteria food in the old style, but chased down now—legally, even—with liquor and beer.

  “You’re a good sport,” I said to Brigid as I caught my breath between greetings.

  “I am good arm candy? For one day.”

  St. Jerome’s looked as miraculously undisturbed as a crime scene. Everything was the same as before: the stern warmth of red brick, and all the old towering pines, the large blue ponds still lit at dusk, and that weird high note of adolescence constantly threaded into the circulating breeze.

  Stark bald Arthur Ribble (currently a head and neck doctor in the Bay Area) stopped me near Connerly House and asked me about Ecuador. I told him that South America’s first popular uprising had occurred in Quito in 1809.

  When asked about my trip by Luisa Calder (now a video artist in New York) I said: “In the jungle the water was green, the moss was green. The orchids were green, the parrots were green. Like, every tree was green. I definitely took away a strong impression of greenness but—”

  “You’re just the same aren’t you?”

  “—but think of all the different shades of the same color. You could definitely make some video art about that.”

  The dim Lower Dining Room was loud with whispered or shouted recognitions. Everyone seemed genuinely glad to see everybody else: if someone looked great that was a pleasure, and if they looked worse than you—so much the better. With one hand I clasped Brigid’s wrist, and with the other shook hands with old Formmates. Then with a serene air of inevitability I noticed someone who stood out a little from all the rest. She was looking at me from one corner of the room with her deep cartoon crescent of a smile brightly on display. Natasha van der Weyden! I rushed over to her and we intensely hugged.

  “I decided,” she said, “to come after all. I want to hear this story! Alice tells me everything happened exactly as she planned. Hello Brigid.”

  The two of them neatly shook hands.

  “Oh come on. Embrace! Hug!”

  They willingly obeyed—although I hadn’t exactly asked for Natasha to peck Brigid on the lips and then whisper things into her ear.

  “Hey Natash,” I said. “Thanks for your role in the conspiracy.”

  She pulled away from Brigid and said, “I always liked Alice.”

  “Me too. Less now. But also more. In a way.”

  “Should I try to understand him?” she asked Brigid.

  “Don’t start to try!” Brigid said. “It takes more than a week.”

  As dinner was served I took my assigned place at the dark round table, staring at Natasha across the room. Recent and ongoing experience had stripped off the old nimbus my fantasies had conferred, and I felt a twinge of wistfulness as she departed from the realm of pure ideas and resumed her rightful place as—even to me—a real person in this only world.

  We’d been served some roast beef sodden with its own stale blood. I sliced the cut into squares without any thought of eating them. Then with one hand I sipped cold milk, and with the other downed some of the Wild Turkey someone had brought.

  Before long a chant had gone up: “Speech! Speech!”

  I joined in. “Speech! Speech!” Then roommate Ford, Formmate Ford, good old Ford—Ford was drilling at my shoulder with his finger, saying, “Dude! Dude!” (“Speech! Speech!” was all I heard.) “Wilmerding! Dude! Dwight!”

  I looked at him.

  “Speech means you. You’re supposed to give the speech. After that we do toasts.”

  So I stood up as if learned in some ancient practice, when in actual fact it was my first time, and knocked the blade of my butter knife three times ringingly against the tall glass that I’d emptied of perhaps overmuch Wild Turkey. Bridge slipped the notebook into my empty hand.

  “A-hem.” I cleared my throat and raised my voice above the din. “A-hem.” I took in the quietened room. The large quantum of consciousness out there, pictured in the watching eyes, was really something to behold; and it alarmed me that as soon as I said a single word it would multiply like crazy and crop up understood in the minds of approximately eighty-five people. There were also fortysome no-shows, and three Formmates whose absences were the result, respectively, of suicide, cancer, and a motorcycle crash on a rain-slick road in eastern Oregon.

  “Brevity,” I said. “That’s what it says in my notes here. After all, brevity is the spice of life. And I guess, when these last ten years have passed in the blink of an eye, it’s only appropriate that I should speak briefly, and not detain you any more than I already will.”

  From behind me I heard a feminine whisper. “Look, he has no hair on his legs. Look at his arms. He used to be the hairiest—”

  “A-hem. When I came to you as Third Former or ‘new boy’ I was, in those days, like every one of you, a relatively hairless individual. Yet increasingly I grew hairier. Right . . . Yes. Okay. And indeed by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union—which don’t get me wrong, that was a good thing—by this I had become the extremely hairy man I was fated for almost ten years to remain.”

  “This is your brain on drugs,” someone grumbled.

  “My point is, Vic”—I looked at Victor Murphy, the grumbler—“we can do with our brains whatever we want. You see, if a person as hairy as me is capable of rubbing himself all over with the sap of the bobohuariza tree, to be found in the jungles of Ecuador, and becoming hairless as a baby; or if, for example, star athletes such as McMeekin who I see is here tonight—”

  “Cheers!” someone yelled.

  “McMeekin!”

  “—if Sean McMeekin, that is, is capable of becoming an Olympic-class rower and therefore making his heart fifty percent larger than normal size; and if, indeed, some of you who were honestly kind of unattractive last time I saw you, have now become really fairly good-looking—”

  There was some laughter at this.

  “—you see, what I mean is that if we can change in all these really drastic physical ways, as clearly we have, then how much easier it must be to change our minds.” It wasn’t quite the applause line I’d expected. “Over many years,” I confessed anyway, “I tried not to change my mind. Yet it was changing all the time. And that, my fellow Formmates, was the way in which it never really changed. My mental promiscuity was finally a form of virginity.”

  Someone snorted. “What?”

  “Wil-mer-ding! Wil-mer-ding!” Ford and someone else had begun beating on their table with forks and knives in their fists.

  “But I mean to be brief. Life is brief. And youth briefer than life. Except for some people. Lots of people actually, especially in the third world, where lots of people die very young. For us, however, youth has been
appallingly expanded, in our remarkable time, when there are more people alive on the planet today than have ever even existed before, and when therefore the things we do have a special new importance, and also, by the same token, each individual possesses a special new irrelevance, because of the same numbers—anyway, for us, during this time, youth has expanded to dimensions apparently without historical precedent. And I would like, in passing, to thank our Formmate Elaine Weddleton, who could not be here today, because she is a labor organizer in D.C. and waging the good fight against people such as ourselves and particularly our unkillable parents.”

  “Power to the people!” someone yelled out.

  Someone else: “What the fuck?”

  Yet another: “Who has a cane?”

  And another: “I have a tomato.”

  Still another: “Wilmerding is a child of God!”

  “Thank you,” I yelled, climbing up onto the table, on which I was now standing. “So all I mean to say is that youth, brief youth, long-lasting youth, is for contemplating choices with your ever-changing mind. And yet the time has surely come for choices to be made. And many of you have made them. I hope you’ve made the right ones. Which kind of I doubt in some cases you have. Some of you are probably demonstrating in your daily lives the dubious fitness to rule of America’s ruling class. To me that sounds like bad work and no love. I see my notes here say WORK AND LOVE. Um, yeah, and I have found both of these in the woman here with me, Brigid Lerman, who is both a Belgian drug-company heiress and my fiancée”—I looked down at this beautiful woman who was laughing and shaking her head—“though she denies being either. Anyway, I have chosen to be her fiancé, and a worker on the garden path of global justice. And this happened more or less at the same time I lost my hair. On my body. Just to come full circle. As you may have noticed that I did. Finally I guess the one single thing I would ask of you, as your Form Agent, in closing—”