Indecision: A Novel Page 5

  A sense of largesse is what I always experienced in taking a cab, and cheerfulness from running late, as my whole being sharpened toward the point of arrival. Equipped with these feelings, I swiveled to kiss Vaneetha.

  “You smell of . . . Is it Jiggy Juice? Did you go out drinking with Herr Knittel once I was asleep?”

  Vaneetha was a little sensitive on the subject—the many subjects, really—of The Uses of Freedom, and had even complained not completely in jest that I cared more for Knittel than for her. Admittedly I did feel I had more to learn from him.

  Usually if you ignore one question you will be asked another—and now Vaneetha had switched to her default question of what did I feel like doing on such and such a fast-approaching date. “I’m free on Wednesday,” she was saying. “Or late Thursday might work.”

  “I’m thinking,” I told her.

  It bothered Vaneetha that I couldn’t produce too many clear pictures of our shared pleasant future activity. And when I’d suggested that she was such a special person in my book that I despaired of finding any matchingly special context, such as a really nice restaurant, or one we could afford, she’d accused me of sophistry. I liked it that she knew just the word to wound me.

  “Dwight?” Vaneetha asked.

  “Still thinking,” I said by way of an update.

  The streets were Sunday-empty as we shot up Sixth Ave. like a drug through a vein. Sunlight falling from the east splashed across Vaneetha’s knees snug in black nylon, and I discovered I was glad to be hungover. Sometimes a hangover really helps—otherwise simple mental operations are so easy to carry out that you disdain to perform them. But right now the easy question of Wednesday night seemed ideally suited to my present level of mental competence, and unhesitatingly, with an air of unshakable certainty, I produced two words: “Cambodian Cuisine. Let’s go get Cambodian cuisine in Brooklyn. On Wednesday night or late Thursday. That’s what I want anyway.”

  I’d always been impressed by Vaneetha’s basic clarity of will or lucidity of desire (except regarding our relationship), and had aspired to emulate it. But I could really only sham the thing, and usually it wasn’t until it was too late—and I was eating dim sum while pining for gnocchi, or swallowing some gnocchi while jonesing for dhosai—that I could locate in myself a genuine preference for one restaurant or another, something that was a crucial skill in New York and evidently an important contemporary venue for personality-expression. Yet in order not to behave like one of those wishy-washy males whom I joined everyone else in deploring, I would affect some insistence on—well, in this case, Cambodian food. And this was genius! Because not only was there just the one Cambodian establishment known to me, but it was also fairly cheap and was called, with tremendous forthrightness, Cambodian Cuisine. Pick the food and you’d chosen the place—which more than compensated for my indifference, palate-wise, to fried triangles of tofu.

  “Cambodian cuisine!” I said again, and it did sound good, because at least it was food, and I hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Nevertheless I saw with dismay that you can hardly get more conscious of your arbitrariness than by pretending to be free of it. And as I looked at Vaneetha with a big smile meant to cover up my shameful condition, I was also looking sort of through her—and through the brick buildings knocking past with their zagging fire escapes, rainbow flags, and dazzled streaming windows—to the time when the Abulinix would come and intervene in my brain.

  “I adore your cravings,” Vaneetha said. “It’s as if you’re pregnant.” She put a hand on my thigh.

  I put a hand on her thigh. Soon the two of us would have to decide whether to become, or remain, or cease to be a couple. The anticipation of this event was such a foretaste of shared punishment either way that I wanted us to enjoy things while we could. So I took hold of Vaneetha’s hand in this very romantic heartfelt manner—even if to do so might mean prejudicing our ultimate decision in favor of continued physical contact, a choice that seemed to be, on balance, and all other things being equal, probably the worse or worst of the options. After all she’d gotten to know me as an abuliac, and people who know you have a way of regulating your behavior to make it conform with your incoherent past.

  “So what’s this about Vermont?” Vaneetha asked out of the blue. The question alarmed me—Vermont was not a state we had discussed.

  “Don’t look at me like I’m mad—I saw your great big note to yourself, VANEETHA, VERMONT. It was lying in plain view on the dresser. I’m not sure when you’re thinking of, but you know I have two weeks in August. Hint.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Hint taken,” I said—and immediately postponed thinking about Vermont in August until the Abulinix kicked in.

  “I’m going to kiss you in spite of your breath,” Vaneetha announced.

  “Go crazy,” I tried to say.

  FOUR

  The cab released me at Eleventh. “Call me,” Vaneetha said, and I said, “Defin’ely.” I started running toward mom’s place past the brownstones and the mixed generations of cars, past all the twitching leaf-feathered branches, past a concrete elementary school with aluminum window frames and a primary-colors paint job. Normally I didn’t pay that much attention to New York. It always seemed weirdly pre-perceived, with other people already on the job. But it really was a nice place, if you looked in the right neighborhood, and imagined people more like yourself and your friends living there. Mom had relocated to Eleventh St. just a few months before, when she and Dr. Hajar broke up for the second or third time. It was also around then that she’d gotten way more interested in the Church.

  The new apartment was inside the one brownstone disguised with scaffolding and dark netting. Originally mom had moved to New York to be closer to us kids, and if you did the geography she had been getting closer all the time, living at first with Mrs. Howland up on the Upper East Side, then sliding down for a while into Dr. Hajar’s place in the rich little district it seemed like she was the only one still calling Turtle Bay, and finally renting this apartment on the same block as St. Vincent’s like a month before the walls of the hospital became this horrible mural of 9/11 missing. Then there seemed to have been some terrorism-induced backsliding with Dr. Hajar—a nice guy with a sense of humor, an orthopedic practice, very hairy arms, and sinus troubles—and now she was alone again and spending the days I didn’t know how. I got the impression that the landlord assured her that work on the façade was nearing completion much more often than any worker dudes came along to bear him out. And I resented him and those delinquent guys for prolonging architecturally the whole transitional phase mom was already going through as she tried to set up a life without dad involved, and organized around something else.

  These church excursions with the kids were the latest addition to her single-lady routine. In fact her Episcopalianism had revived to the point where she was threatening to go all the way and get ordained. Mom was full of ideas on how the Church had gone astray. She had even been shopping around this manuscript called The Episcopalian Vegetarian, copyedited by poor Alice. According to mom, new ethical commitments needed to be made by the Church, along with new dietary restrictions imposed, if it was ever going to recover the big-time relevance it arguably never had. This was the notion that led most directly to last Thanksgiving dinner where she served—to me and Alice and Dr. Hajar, plus the visiting ex-archbishop of Cleveland and his wife—an enormous golden-colored tofurkey, or tofu turkey, as what I guess you would call the pièce de résistance.

  “Hmm . . . Mmm . . .” the guy’s wife mused with that special warm falsity of certain rich-ish women. We were sitting in mom’s dark dining room that was paneled in dark wood and made even darker by the workmen’s eternal veiling of the building’s façade. There was no art or other décor in the room except for this white rectangular panel attached perpendicularly to one wall with a Christian cross cut out from it. And in two cages in one corner, standing on their perches, you had Budge and Gordon, mom’s parrots, somehow like souvenirs from a more
tropical period of a person’s life.

  Now I stopped jogging, caught my breath, and realized that Charlotte Bell’s was the buzzer to push, since mom had reclaimed her maiden name. I leaned on her buzzer while fixing my hair, so much like hers, in the reflection in the window in the heavy wooden door.

  “Excellent tofurkey, mom,” I’d said back at Thanksgiving, and really it wasn’t so bad.

  “I hope it was a free-range tofurkey,” the ex-preacher said, and sipped his wine like it savored of his wit.

  “I think humor is good for the Church,” Alice said so dryly that except maybe to me she seemed in earnest.

  Everyone wanted to show Dr. Hajar how we didn’t have anything against Arabs, especially if they were wealthy physicians, and the former preacher asked him delicately how things had been since . . . over the last few . . .

  “Oh not terribly bad. I’m still being allowed to live in a tall building.”

  The Episcopalians looked uncertain over whether it wasn’t too soon for jokes. I tried to help them out and keep things solemn by expressing the hope that Dr. Hajar, who was wearing a bandage over the bridge of his nose, hadn’t been roughed up by some patriotic Turtle Bay thugs.

  “Dwight,” mom said sharply.

  Dr. Hajar chuckled. “No no. It was simply my sinuses that had begun to overwhelm me.”

  “Felix is a very sensitive man,” mom assured everybody. “We cried so much after the— And that can’t have helped.”

  “Crying frees the sinuses in fact,” he said. “If I could have continued crying things would have been fine. That wasn’t the trouble. At any rate my daughter is now accusing me of having gotten a Lebanectomy—as she calls it.”

  Alice smirked. “A Lebanectomy . . . Isn’t that what the Israelis tried to do?”

  “Yes. Well . . . With local assistance.” He swished his wine kind of ruefully.

  “The Middle East seems so troubled . . .” Mrs. Ex-Archbishop said.

  “But we mean to help them,” her husband said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Hajar said. “I feel that in coming years each side will help the other to be more as it wants to be.”

  “Right,” Alice said. “Terrorism as a form of flattery. It’s the sincerest form of flattery. ‘See? that’s how free and good we are.’ ”

  Mom didn’t like this. I was confused. The ex-archbishop and his wife were looking deep into their tofurkey. Mom said, “What I propose is that we go around in a circle and each say what we’re thankful for in America. I know for one thing that we’re all thankful to have people like Alice to keep us honest.”

  Now I heard Alice and mom trotting indistinguishably down the stairs. Formerly Alice hadn’t trotted very much or generally moved around our old Lakeville house in any way implying that she consented to live there, and it had been a regular feature of the old days for mom to scold her for being on the warpath. But these days mom was very gentle with all animals including humans, and didn’t scold much. Now she got along fine with Alice, who lived just a few blocks uptown. Relations were less warm with dad, who mom and Al blamed in the divorce. My own sympathies were more with him, if only because in deserving them less he obviously needed them more.

  It was good mornings and cheek kisses all around and then the three of us went heading off toward the Church of the Ascension. “Dwight’s looking a little green around the gills, don’t you think?”

  “Bristly too.” Alice brushed her hand against my cheek.

  “You wouldn’t want to go to church without sins,” I said.

  “We’re not Catholics, Dwight.”

  Alice took my hand and we began swinging our shared fist in time with our stride. This was something that despite its cutesiness I still liked doing—even if any physical touch from Alice put into my mind the fear that the obscure pact between us would be lifelong, and end up with our comforting each other in some mutually lonely old age of unmarried Wilmerdings.

  Mom, looking very nice in a pale green suit with a light iridescence and some sharp angles to it, greeted people as we walked into the church and started down the nave with the organ going full bore in its somber/joyous registration. Alice was dressed more simply in a light yellow dress, and looked very bridesmaid. Unfortunately the days were gone when she’d worn the awesome costume of a dog collar, black leather pants, and a pink Izod polo shirt with an angry ball of shirtfront stuffed under the fly. “What are you trying to dress like?” mom had asked. “Um . . . a punk WASP bitch?” It was one of their more notorious exchanges. I’d just stood on the sidelines, half in love with crazy Al and actually, physically clapping.

  We settled into our pews. The doors shut and the light withdrew. And now the rector and the other ones, the acolytes and choristers, strode down the aisle in their whispering vestments and carrying those colorful heraldic pennants they all have. I do feel that the Episcopalians put on a good show. And as always I was enjoying the borrowed solemnity of sitting in church. You could feel like the wood itself had grown dark through meditation and that even sunlight became semithoughtful sliding through colored glass into the incense-marbled air.

  The sermon began but I didn’t pay any attention. Although it was not impossible to fool me, I had never believed for a second in God. So I thought not about Him and his Son but about Abulinix. And yet in listening without listening to Reverend Withrow I adopted the look of pious and unhungover contemplation his voice encouraged among more earnest-type congregants, and before long I found myself actually praying. May I discover, so I prayed, or otherwise locate, during this, my limited time only, and even ideally in the next few weeks, before my high school reunion—and with or without the aid of pharmaceuticals—such clarity and justice and stillness of heart as have so far eluded me during my dark but not uncomfortable sojourn here, while I wasn’t looking for them, at least under those exact names, though I mean to embark, very soon, on the pilgrimage of starting to. Then I realized that praying for stillness of heart wasn’t such a good idea. I added, May my gist nevertheless be made plain.

  When the time came mom got up to take communion, and I watched her walk away in her fancy suit, with her neat, bobbed hair. “Mom looks swank,” I said.

  “Dwight do you realize what’s going on?”

  “I’m sure in part I do.”

  “Our mother has become a devout Episcopalian—she’s an Episcopal nun.”

  “But I thought there weren’t any—”

  “Exactly. Charlie”—dad called mom Charlie, and so did Alice—“Charlie’s a sect of one.”

  “That’s not good? It sounds kind of good.”

  “Why do you think she’s so careful to be pretty?”

  Al had been mad at me for a while and I wanted to say whatever she wanted to hear. “Um, because we live in a superficial media-driven culture? All of whose products are converging toward a pornographic norm?”

  “Shut up. She dresses like that in order to assure herself that celibacy is her choice.”

  “I don’t know, Al.”

  “Well if you thought about it you’d know.”

  Whether my own mother ought to be having sex, and how often, and who with, and in what positions, employing what toys or lubricants, really wasn’t something I wanted to think about. But Alice is a brave person unencumbered by politeness or most taboos.

  She said, “We have got to get mom eating meat again.”

  “What are you saying?” Because it was Alice’s sullen anemic picking at even the cruelty-free portions of our family dinners, while the rest of us scarfed up dead flesh, that had probably struck the first blow against the omnivorous patriarchy run by dad. “You always used to complain you could never convince them of anything, and now that mom is veggie . . . You should be happy, Al. You and the animals should be happy.”

  “Mom has become an ascetic. That’s why she’s vegetarian, okay? I have nothing against pleasure.”

  “Like which particular ones don’t you have anything against?”

  But she just gl
ared and shook her head a tiny little bit.

  To wrap things up churchwise a hymn was sung—“Morning Has Broken,” as immortalized by Cat Stevens—and when mom returned to our pew I stood up to add my wobbly tenor to the unmistakably white-person chorus. I couldn’t help wondering whether this song had been a suggestion of mom’s and thus another device to trick kids like Al and me, weaned on classic rock and known to include vegetarians, back into the fold. She’d always tried to keep from losing us by dabbling in our interests. She was all right with books but not so much with the music. A few months after Kurt Cobain had died his epochal death her first comment—or momment, Al would say—was, “I saw a photograph of the poor young man. He seems to have had just terrible posture.”

  At the time Al and I were creeping out of our classic rock ghetto, had semi-grungified ourselves, and therefore wanted to defend the musical genius of our own best substitute for the rock-and-roll casualties of the parental era. Alice in the passenger seat had turned to mom as we drove to the supermarket: “Kurt Cobain was like a Beatle-and-a-half, Charlie. He wrote masterpieces.”

  I remember the foliage had turned, and everything was decked out thrillingly in tragic colors.

  “All right, Alice. What might be a song to start with?”

  “ ‘Rape Me,’ ” Alice said, and indeed it was in my opinion the last album’s most exciting song.

  Mom repeated the title as a scandalized question and said, “I think that’s terrible.”

  “But it’s a protest song.”

  Even from the backseat I could detect mom’s sharp cross-examining smile. “And what is he protesting darling?”

  “The culture,” Alice said.

  Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah,” I said, “the whole culture.”

  “And what don’t you guys like about our . . . culture?”

  “We’re exposed to so much violence,” I speculated.

  Alice said, “We hate the blasé cynicism.”