Indecision: A Novel Read online

  This was the headquarters of an enormous multinational media empire. Yet it more closely resembled some ideal and futuristic all-girls high-school cafeteria. I was wearing my trademark cords and frayed Brooks Bros. shirt as I sauntered out of the food course with my loaded tray, and already sensing that to dress not so well might seem in these environs like the trait of an authentic-ish heterosexual man. I’d heard this situation—where, as among water buffalo at the pool, the male of the species is seriously outnumbered, and in a pretty good position to choose among mates—was known by animal behaviorists as a lek. Not that I did choose, or mate, or was offered a choice. But I felt pleasantly like the object of some romantico-sexual attention as I sat down and Alex introduced me to someone and somebody, and somebody else, and then Vaneetha.

  (Now in bed on that Saturday night a week before Ecuador, Vaneetha turned to one side, nestling against my thigh, and grunted softly in the inquisitive way of a sleeper.)

  Some fairly technical trendspotting talk appeared to be in progress, over lunch, so mostly I just nodded my head and listened, occasionally weighing in with layman’s observations on matters of style. At one point I caught somebody who wasn’t the one called Vaneetha looking at the one who was, then indicating me with her eyes. As always I pretended not to notice what I’d noticed. Then the non-Vaneetha looked at me. “Nice shirt. The tarnished prepster look? It’s totally coming back.”

  “A stopped clock is right at least twice a day,” I reminded everybody—and wondered if these women, now laughing, would have been so friendly in a situation of more sexual parity. Not so friendly but friendly still, was my tentative conclusion. But to deduct the supplemental friendliness from the rest was not a doable operation, so I became uncertain as to their true feelings for me and was reduced for the rest of the conversation to having made this last remark.

  I’d already set my tray on the conveyor and said goodbye to Alexandra when Vaneetha reappeared. “Good meeting you,” she said.

  “Likewise.” I had already pressed the down button on the elevator. “Completely.” Thankfully I speak slowly, with a marijuana drawl left over from St. Jerome’s—otherwise I might at times sound nervous.

  “Will we be seeing you again?”

  “I really couldn’t judge the likelihood.”

  “Well we could arrange something.”

  I was either titillated or afraid. “All of you?”

  “All of . . . me?”

  “You—I meant plural, all you girls.”

  “It might be easier if it were just you and I.”

  She was right there in front of me; I had no recourse to the coin. Yet her invitation suggested she thought I could say more than one laughable thing—and that the horrible indiscriminateness of my interest in all the women hadn’t been apparent. So that was good. And letting the venerable philosophical category of the Good easily expand to include this tall, dark, and handsome woman, with a narrow nose flaring at its base, a diamond stud in one nostril, and serious-seeming plum-colored lips presently unveiling a smile, I said, “How about Monday? Didn’t one of those girls back there say Monday was the new Thursday anyway?”

  She agreed to Monday night as we stepped into the same down elevator. “You don’t work upstairs?” I asked.

  “Oh no. I’m on 52nd. I’m not one of these . . .”

  “No,” I assured her.

  “I hate people whose inner lives are trends.”

  “I know, don’t you think it would be much nicer to have an inner life where everything was very still?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m quite impulsive”—with a note in her voice like this was a brave and pleasant lie.

  “So what do you do for a job?” I asked her on the street.

  “In fact it’s not entirely unrelated to trends. I’m in FX.”

  “Wow. Very cool. And it’s nice you don’t have to be in LA for that. I can hardly wait for The Matrix sequel—I was really impressed with what they were able to do there digitally.”

  “I don’t do special effects,” she said. “I do foreign exchange.”

  “Oh.”

  “Currency.”

  “I see.” We started walking west along Forty-second, toward the flashing, scrolling, looming trademarks of all the various corporations—not the direction I needed to go in, but I didn’t want to end on a mistake, or begin. It occurred to me that Alice might not like me dating a woman in foreign exchange—I remembered her being upset about what the lack of currency controls had somehow done to either Thailand or Taiwan.

  “I work at Pfizer,” I said. “But I don’t come up with products. I just keep the computers running. I’m pretty neutral.”

  We paused at the mouth of the subway station. “Monday then?” Vaneetha said.

  Suddenly I remembered something. “Oh you know what’s going on on Monday, which I totally forgot? My roommate Ford—it’s his birthday party. But you should come. I was going to suggest some date restaurant, but this will be much better. This way you can see me in context.”

  “Do you promise I wouldn’t be intruding?”

  “No, we’re very accommodating on Chambers St.”

  “This isn’t Tim Ford by chance—Tim Ford who went to Dartmouth?”

  It did seem like a small world, after all, when you belonged to the exact same demographic and all lived in New York City. “No, yeah, that’s him. You went to Dartmouth? Damn, you must be smart too.”

  “Too?” She took out her palm pilot to punch in the address. “Do you mean that in addition to Tim Ford I’m smart, or that intelligence is in addition to some of my other traits?”

  “Let’s just say both for right now.”

  “You’re really too much, you know. I can’t make out your tone—it was like that at lunch as well.”

  “Well you only just met me.”

  “Later on it becomes clear? In context?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Walking back down Forty-second I felt extremely pleased to have invested my life with a certain short-term narrative interest. And in fact one thing led so directly to another that on the night in question, a week before Ecuador, and seven months after meeting Vaneetha at lunch, I’d found myself seated across a tablecloth from her as on certain other Saturday nights. She’d been telling me, just a few hours earlier, that when I started looking for a new job she would conduct mock interviews with me. “I don’t mean to be ambitious on your behalf—but you need to think of what you want from a job.”

  “But largely what I want is just so basic. I want shelter, warm clothing. I want food . . .”

  “But you’ve hardly touched your food. Here—” With her fork she speared a slug of gnocchi and poked it toward my mouth.

  I chewed and swallowed. “But see, my desires are so minimal. It’s good I live in New York, because just food and rent take up all my income. If we lived somewhere else I wonder what I’d spend it on. I mean in New York it costs a lot of money to be satisfied with so little.”

  “But clearly you’re not satisfied. It’s not a fulfilling position you’ve had. Your talents are languishing.”

  “I have a certain talent for modest contentment.”

  She smiled with friendly cruelty. “You know what I think of when I come by Chambers St.? Nineteen ninety-three, the boys during freshman year. The greasy hair, the deliberate aimlessness . . . And Dwight you have been smoking—”

  “Come on,” I said, “Sanch is unemployed—he shouldn’t always be getting high by himself.”

  “But look at you in your flannel shirt. It’s May, dude.”

  “It’s a pretty light flannel. Here, touch.” She demurred.

  “The other day I caught you listening to Nirvana.”

  “Pavement,” I corrected—though I too could remember the days when fellow college students had listened to Nirvana, dabbled in heroin, gone on Prozac, and with a recession on and the job market looking bad, developed the fad of wearing mechanics’ uniforms with blunt proletarian name
s stitched in cursive over the heart. It had been cool and in some circles apparently mandatory to be unkempt and pessimistic. Meanwhile I’d gone around just being as chipper as my nature insisted. Only around now did I seem to have become, way past the point of cultural appropriateness, the unambitious and flannel-wearing holder-down of a totally dead-end job.

  “You’re living a cliché,” Vaneetha had said. “It’s not even a fresh cliché.”

  I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.

  That was my time-honored conclusion, and I’d just come to it again—and shut for the night my edition of Knittel with its piece of handsome shoelace sewn into the binding, and patted Vaneetha’s deluxe head of hair, and made to turn off the bedside light, and wondered again whether I really might move to Vermont, and considered the variety of possible dogs I could get—when out of nowhere the neat isosceles triangle of a paper airplane sailed over the bedroom/cubicle wall, and glided to rest on the floor.

  The sharpness of this event, in the midst of eddying thoughts, astounded me. And getting out of bed I saw that Dan, clearly Dan, had written on the plane in fluorescent highlighter Par Avion and also You up? What a great question! Just to be asked it was to know the answer.

  TWO

  At one point no one knew what Abulinix was and neither did I. Obviously these days you can’t open a magazine of the waiting-room genre without seeing one of those ads with the guy looking into the mirror at his multiheaded self displaying various facial expressions without a smile between them. That’s before. The after, on the opposite page, along with the fine-print warnings, which tell you how safely you can ignore them, has the same guy restored to just the one head and beamingly meeting his simplified gaze. Moreover he has shaved. But back then I had just walked into Dan’s cubicle, an innocent in flip-flops, boxers, and a tee shirt, not even having heard the drug’s name.

  Dan was sitting in his broken and faded La-Z-Boy, a proud trophy from trash day on our street. He had a cigarette going in the ashtray while meditatively, with thoroughness, he was eating some Combos, or miniature hollow cylinders of pretzel injected with orange squirts of cheese product. “Snack?” he asked. Waiving the offer, I pushed some papers off a milk crate and sat down.

  Dan marveled at me in his jadedly-imitating-his-grandmother way. “The boy’s hairiness I can never get over. A prodigy. So healthy.”

  I looked at my legs, blond and hairy as I’d left them. “Why am I here, Dan? And not asleep?”

  “Why are you here? That’s why you’re here.”

  “Please, no fucking with me.” I was wary, due to having been fucked with before. One fucking-with operation had even lasted several years, starting in 1995, night after Yom Kippur, when Dan had expressed some surprise that I hadn’t given him any presents. He’d told me how it was traditional since the middle ages for gentiles to treat Jews to dinner once the atonement-making Jews, or kippurim, had finished their fast. Immediately I was abashed at my thoughtlessness, and offered to take him out for the most lavish available meal in Eureka Valley, an offer I renewed and that was re-accepted every following year as I grew increasingly outraged by the negligence of my fellow gentiles and more and more impressed by the extreme reserve of other Jewish acquaintances and friends, not one of whom had ever sought this special treatment to which they were all entitled. Not until September ’98, when I asked Dan what he typically atoned for, did he tell me that one thing was the deception of a good friend.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said. “Crafty Jew, dumb goy. So unfair to us both. But it proves what I say—they should teach people lies. Except in medicine. But as far as history—fucking lie. If we thought people had acted better in the past we would try and maintain that false standard. With only slight deteriorations. It would all be so much better.”

  I’d asked how we would then explain the reported widespread contemporary prevalence of things sucking so much for so many people through poverty, nihilism, and other ills.

  “Blame everything on the immediately-preceding generation. Cast them as evil usurpers of a long-standing righteous regime. Then we kill them.”

  “But I like my parents.”

  “But you wouldn’t, is the thing.”

  —So I asked Dan again why I was there, in his cubicle. We were whispering in order not to wake anyone up, which kind of conferred a conspiratorial feel.

  “Choice,” he whispered. “You remember our conversation about choice.” He reminded me how I’d told him about what I considered the admirable prominence of the category of choice in Otto Knittel’s thought, and how he’d then noted that when the occasion of an important choice had arisen in Knittel’s own life Knittel had—whoops—moved to Eastern Germany where the government forced him to mate with a beefy Olympic swimmer who, in the opinion of most philosophic observers, he didn’t truly love. Dan reminded me of this as he went rummaging through his desk.

  “Sure,” I said. “Knittel made a big mistake. But like I said last time—just goes to show how important choices are.”

  “Right.” Dan the medical student had found a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen. “So my first question is this—do you feel you have trouble making choices?”

  “If there’s no trouble is there a choice?”

  “Fair enough. But would you say you experience what might be considered uncomfortable hesitation in the face of a decision rarely; occasionally; sometimes; frequently; or often?”

  I tried to think of whether my hesitation was uncomfortable, or if instead, considered from another standpoint, or vantage area . . .

  “I’m going to mark that down from my own observations as a frequently. All right. Number two: do you feel you have a strong predictive sense of where you’ll physically be in nine months’ time?”

  “I don’t know. Americans are such a mobile people. Did you make these up yourself?”

  “Are you hesitating now?”

  “Well I don’t know if it’s frequently that I do.”

  “You don’t know. You can’t decide. And isn’t that the official position on certain other issues? Such as the Vermont-Vaneetha nexus of questions?”

  Reluctantly I nodded.

  “Do you know what abulia is?”

  “Ah-boo-lee-uh.” I tasted the word like a dog testing a vegetable dropped on the floor, to see if he will eat it. “No—no idea.”

  “What it basically is, is the impairment or even”—Dan took a drag on his cigarette and let the suspense hang and dwindle with the blue smoke in the air—“or even finally the loss of your ability to make decisions. But now there’s this new drug in phase-one clinical trials. Meant to treat this very issue. And it’s called . . .”—in a listless voilà tone, as he tapped some ash into the souvenir ashtray from Pompeii—“Abulinix!”

  My mood totally altered. Doesn’t everyone dream of a magic pill? And wasn’t this, come true, but with an ugly name, my own personal dream? Yet in order to seem like an appropriate subject for study I wanted to counterfeit a certain uncertainty. It could be that Dan took a scientific in addition to a friendly interest in my case, and that a trial participant’s decisively expressed desire to be cured of indecision would disqualify him right away. “I’d like to think about it,” I said. “Assuming I can even make up my mind. Can I get back to you?”

  “Sure.” But he’d produced a little orange prescription bottle from his desk and now tossed it my way. “Scored from the lab. And there’s plenty more where that came from. You can start the course now, or you can think about it. Once daily with food is the indication. You know, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t come up with a treatment for chronic indecision every day.”

  I quickly outwitted the childproof top, shook out one of the sleek two-toned blue and white capsules
, and held it like a gem up to the light. The diagnosis and the cure all at once! I understood it didn’t always work that way. Yet only now that I held the panacea in my hand did I recognize abulia as my major basic overriding problem. Previously in my mind I’d been floating candidates more along the lines of

  • ambivalence

  • laziness

  • bad faith

  • good family

  • suggestibleness (regarding ideas)

  • resistance (regarding events)

  • indiscriminate breast fixation

  • together with a weakened libido

  • not having found the right person

  • not having been the right person

  • sociological sense of one’s life (shared with so many others)

  • inconsequence of the self (except to itself)

  • early exposure to drugs

  • early exposure to other persons

  • especially one’s parents

  • divorce of those parents

  • their marriage beforehand

  • the whole Alice issue

  • a little learning

  • not near enough

  • moderation

  • immoderation

  • lack of funds

  and/or

  • lack of Der Unternehmungsgrund der Individuums

  and throughout this whole time I’d been unable to see all of these for the mere epiphenomena they only too obviously were! I felt like inside the pill I could see all these little magic grains of velleity adding up, maybe, to a will. I stood up and shouted. “Gimme a Combo!”

  From his cubicle Sanch whimpered aloud in a sleep-blurred voice. “Dude . . . dude . . . shut fuck up . . .”

  “So,” Dan whispered, “I take it you’re not at all curious how this shit works.”

  “Right.” I sat back down. In my eagerness to make decisions I had forgotten my great love of knowledge.