Indecision: A Novel Read online

  Poor mom! I always wanted her to have some other, better kid. But I wasn’t willing to become that kid myself or capable of convincing Alice that she should do it. Alice was an excellent student who didn’t, however, get very high marks in the attitude department, whereas my geniality, while genial enough in itself, was also pretty transparently an attempt to ingratiate myself with parents who would otherwise punish me for the underexploitation of my alleged mental resources. Mom was never able to secure a single ally in her bid to reform us. We’d given up sibling rivalry early on, committing ourselves to mutual defense, while dad had contented himself as a parental figure with this separation of powers whereby he took part in legislative decisions regarding Al’s and my conduct but played virtually no executive role in the distribution of demerits or awards. Plus he regarded us as unreformable, same as he did everyone else, including himself.

  Yet mom wasn’t asking that much of us, especially Alice, who she only wanted to be happy and heterosexual, and to dress like a happy heterosexual too. Instead Alice had instituted her punk-preppy style, she’d made remarks such as “So I sleep with girls and boys. So what?” and when the Cold War finally ended, and it stopped seeming like we’d been brought into the world only to be incinerated here, Alice still continued fulminating, becoming a Marxist right around ’91 and reassuring dad that while she felt that socialism should be tried one last time, she had no intention, when the revolution came, of executing him personally or encouraging her New Haven comrades to do so.

  “Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”

  This was one of the rare things that made Alice cry. She’d spared his life, and he mocked her. Then she swore off meat and therefore game hunting with dad. Not that there wasn’t still the horned head of a taxidermied ibex from their last trip to Africa—really, an ibex—mounted above the bed in her apartment. In fact the creature seemed to bear some kind of glass-eyed witness to some aspect of family relations which it might be painful to picture any more clearly.

  We had followed mom through the receiving line and come to Reverend Withrow. The nervous pink-faced glad-hander slapped me on the back with vacant gameshow host affability, and told me how pleased he was that my sister and I were showing a renewed interest in the Church.

  I was barely sustaining myself on stale Jiggy Juice fumes as we escorted mom back to the apartment. She mentioned again how she was seriously thinking of going to div. school and getting ordained. “The last thing I’d like to become is one of those aging Village ladies tottering around with their grocery carts in between going to the latest what-have-you. Creaky bohemia is not my cup of tea. Don’t you think, Dwight”—she turned to me on the street—“that in New York you can become more inert than you notice. You can mistake the city’s commotion for your own.”

  “Yeah,” I said in order to seem like someone who participated in conversations and responded thoughtfully to questions. “I wouldn’t want to become one of those like balding solo guys walking around in tight jeans and a leather jacket with a cute little dog poking out.”

  “It’s like I said mom. Dwight is gay. It explains everything.”

  Mom wouldn’t have it—she has a need for grandkids. “Dwight is very masculine,” she told Alice.

  In accidental confirmation of her thesis I let loose a ripping burp.

  Mom groaned. “The Episcopal disease.”

  I felt bad. The likelihood of my seeing mom and of my being hungover were both markedly higher on Sundays—a meaningless statistical convergence that nonetheless could create a false impression. I said, “If I really drank too much I wouldn’t be hungover now, mom. In fact I’m a lightweight. I should really drink more—or at least more steadily.”

  On the north side of Eleventh Alice and I kissed and hugged mom and said our see you soons. I looked for a moment into mom’s splintered blue eyes and saw there that love was so strong in her that she feared the thing. I think she guessed accurately enough what it was like to be somebody else (such as her husband or one of her kids) that the guess freaked her out and so she kept from making it. In fact I could see how one might do just that, avoiding sympathy out of an excess of it. “Love you,” we said to each other and let go.

  Mom had latched and unlatched the little clinking metal gate and gone beneath the scaffolding when she turned around. “I hope you kids are off to do something fun. Come here Dwight, let me give you some mad money.” I went up to her as she pressed some bills into my hand and folded my fingers back. “Take your sister to the movies. You know she studies all the time.” She drew back. “And buy yourself some breath mints.”

  I returned to Alice and asked if she wanted to see a movie. “Maybe there’s some documentary? About exploitation?”

  “Just take the money.”

  “Come on, Alice. Obviously the last time we hung out was pretty weird. I’m sorry that I acted inappropriately.”

  She didn’t say anything. And indeed we hadn’t really talked that much since the fall.

  Then she said, “So are you seeing anyone yet?”

  “What do you care? You’re a nun like mom.”

  “It’s more likely that I’m single because once upon a time mom wasn’t.”

  “What is that? That’s like nonsense. Was that like translated from French into professor talk? You’re like a Communist nun.”

  “So I’m a nun because—?”

  “I hope you don’t say any hurtful things that I think you’d want to take back right away. It was a trying day for everyone.”

  “Fine. Don’t worry about it. So I asked you a question. Are you seeing anyone?”

  “What do you mean—shrink or a girl?”

  “Girl. Woman.”

  “Kind of. Yeah. Vaneetha. Still.”

  “Kind of,” she repeated. “All you are is kind of.”

  “I’m feeling some real tension between us, Al.”

  “What is this way you talk, Dwight? Everything you say is in quotes.”

  “Everything everybody says.”

  “I’m not going to stand here arguing with you on the street.”

  “You think mom can see out? From behind the, like, shroud? Because I really don’t think so.”

  Alice told me to take the money. I tried forcing it into her hand. Then she pushed the small sheaf at me while I yanked my palm away. The two twenties dropped and fell facedown on the gum-spattered sidewalk.

  “Pick them up,” Al said. “Mom will see.”

  “What kind of Communist are you—”

  “Of course I’m not a Communist—”

  “—if you don’t think somebody’s going to pick some money off the street. Those aren’t like injured people lying there. Without health care. It’ll take like two whole seconds.”

  “Pick up the money, Dwight.”

  “You, Al.”

  “You’re such an idiot.”

  “No, that’s not it.” And with my new knowledge of myself—indecision was my problem—I turned on my heel. Alice did too, on her heel. I’d made it about halfway down the block before I turned around to see if she was following me—she wasn’t—or if the money’d been snatched up. It felt very distressing to leave forty dollars lying on the street and I considered running back for it, and then after Al. I mean the money was basically mine, and I also knew that in some way Alice still really liked me—even to the point of hopeless, because familial, love.

  Someone had come out of the pizza place on the corner and was bending down plucking something up off the sidewalk. Forty dollars! Gone! I turned and went on a few steps, then stopped to lurch and vomit up some acidulated and foodflecked Jiggy Juice. This made me feel temporarily better about everything. Yet in fairness I couldn’t expect a similar attitude from the thin fiftyish bald dude in clamdiggers, leather flip-flops, and one of those guayabera shirts, who had emerged onto what I have to presume was his own stoop while I was
engaged in puking and retching. “What”—he practically shrieked it—“are you doing in my new trash can?”

  I looked up again at the guy. “I’m sorry—I have abulia.” Somehow this made me start laughing my head off. I felt sorry toward the victimized homeowner, but not excessively, and with occasional glances back over my shoulder I went running off in a crapulous zigzag down the sidewalk. I was glad to be on the road to recovery and felt like a convalescent should be granted some leeway.

  But I’d barely reached the next block, and stopped running, panting, before I was completely dismayed again by my somewhat preliminary life that I was constantly starting all over again. I felt very upset to have to wait between five and fourteen days before learning what I would decide about Pfizer, Vaneetha, and my living situation. Plus sad or bad moods employ a deductive method, and always look around for data to confirm them—so I couldn’t help noting, in terms of sad facts, that here today was Sunday, formerly the main family-togetherness day, and all four of us were apart from each other and probably from all other non-Wilmerding humans too. What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be—that must be how many families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous.

  FIVE

  My concern over Dan’s poor diet plus my liking to cook had recently combined into a tradition of shared Sunday dinners, and I’d just finished sautéing some spinach and mushrooms when Dan walked in the door. “You should be a Jewish mother,” he said. For an instant there flashed through my mind the possibility that under the influence of Abulinix I would have a sex change and then a bat mitzvah. Then I realized that despite Dan’s dry tone he was kidding; that I could never bear children; and that possibly I’d just endured a crazy person’s thought. But these were concerns which I folded without comment into the dough I was rolling on its way toward spinach pie.

  Later on we sat in the living room under the three splayed fingers of the ceiling fan and ate our food in the rosy/sooty light of 7 PM. “Nice pie,” Dan said between bites.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Dwight, would you let me know when you start feeling the effect? Because we should really start thinking about our living situation. I see my own options as follows: either we find a place together, or I look for a studio in deepest Brooklyn, or I move into NYU housing with the other geeks.”

  “Do you have a preference?”

  “Eh,” he said. “I live with you, I eat better. I live by myself, I live by myself. Mr. R used to tell me, he used to say, ‘A young man wants three things in this life: he wants one good sports coat, one good pickup line, and a one-bedroom in New York.’ Of course, he meant a one-bedroom in Manhattan.”

  “Cool. Well I’ll just weigh my options until—until the Abulinix puts its finger on the scale in which I’m weighing them. Meanwhile I should do some research. On Vermont.”

  “I believe most researchers have found Vermont to be a state populated by hippies, yuppies and farmers.”

  Once the evening had drained all the way out of the room, Dan got up with our plates and placed them unrinsed in the sink while I went to my cubicle to check my email. Opening my inbox I found that upwards of twenty Formmates were sufficiently unembarrassed about checking their email on Sunday as to have written me regarding the reunion. Of course the correspondent who stood out, as in a certain way she always had, was Natasha, who said she might or might not go. Moreover in a postscript she seemed to be inviting me to visit her in Quito!

  Excitedly I lay down on my bed and then stood up again. What an opportunity of some kind this must be! Certainly there was no law saying I couldn’t go to Quito! (Unless this city or town happened to be in Cuba . . .)

  Suddenly—it was always so sudden—the phone rang. I picked it up and waited to hear who it was before committing myself. “Hello?” Alice was saying, “Hello?” and, once I acknowledged this was Dwight, telling me a) I was paranoid b) I was annoying and c) she was sorry to have talked harshly to me earlier that day.

  “It’s okay,” I said, pleased by this news of her contrition as well as by the exciting development regarding Natasha, which I related right away. “I mean maybe I should go. Nastaha’s such a nice, thoughtful person—”

  “With such a nice, thoughtful body—”

  “So? She also always seemed very wise. Didn’t she?”

  “I haven’t talked to her in ages.”

  “And it might be good to be with a potentially wise person in kind of a nonaligned country—Quito’s not in Cuba is it?—so that I could gain some kind of objectivity when I’m thinking about the decisions I’ll be making once the drug—I should tell you about the drug—once the drug kicks in.” It was then that I told Alice about abulia and the drug designed by careful scientists to treat and cure it.

  “You’re not serious. Can you really think that abulia even exists?”

  “Oh yeah. Whatever else may not be real, abulia definitely is.”

  “Just like social phobia suddenly exists, even though it was created by the pharmaceuticals about four years ago. Like neurasthenia used to exist but now somehow it’s died out.”

  “Maybe the people who had it didn’t reproduce.”

  In Alice’s and my arguments she often played culture while I played nature, and though you would suppose nature to be the stronger force, I usually lost. It was hard not to when Alice was a trained anthropologist—whereas all I had for anthropology was introspection. Yet it was introspection above all that proved the reality of chronic indecision. “For instance I can’t decide whether or not to go.”

  “Then maybe exercise some caution.”

  “Maybe is the key word there.”

  The next few hours I spent alone in my room, paralyzed with the maybes. Then I received Alice’s second call. “You’re right, Dwight.” Apparently she’d been thinking about it. “You should go. It’s just like what you said—you should be in some neutral country when this ridiculous drug takes effect. God knows, if you’re in New York you might ask the first woman you see to marry you. You’ll see a cop on the street and you’ll enroll in the police academy. At least if you’re in Ecuador you can’t do anything rash. Natasha’s not going to marry you, and there are no jobs in a country like that.”

  “We don’t know about Natasha.”

  “So go find out then. Go to Ecuador, Dwight. It’ll do you good. You’re completely provincial anyway.”

  “How can I be provincial? I live in New York City.”

  Aphoristic Alice was like, “A cosmopolitan provincialism is the worst.”

  In the end I referred the question to the reliable and impartial coin-toss method. I have reported the results in the Prologue, and they were still the same as then.

  The next morning I went to work at the Problem Resolution Center, just as on thirty-four of the previous thirty-five Monday mornings. Which meant that I still had one week of vacation time available. Yet it was uncertain to me whether I was really allowed to take time off on such short notice. So I called Alice from my desk to ask for some advice.

  “I didn’t say you should call me every day,” she said.

  “You called me yesterday. Twice.” Then I presented her with my dilemma.

  “Family tragedy. It’s obvious. Say there was a death in the family.”

  “All right.” I turned around to make sure Rick wasn’t eavesdropping. “But also I’m going to need to say something to Vaneetha.”

  “Lie to her. Better to lie to other people than yourself.”

  In some way I had always imagined maybe the opposite was true. “Really?”

  “Listen, lying is incredibly important in developmental psychology. Telling a lie is the child’s way of separating its world from that of the adults. It establishes your independence, it’s how you mark off your own private area of the truth.”

  Alice could be so helpful when she wanted. “I don’t see
why you can’t still be my shrink, Al.”

  “If you had a real shrink they would tell you why.”

  “Not that I haven’t lied. I don’t want you to think I can’t lie.”

  “But not well. Not with that face.” It was like with her tone of voice she was pinching my stubbled cheek. “Now I know how to lie.”

  I emailed Natasha with the fantastic news of my likely visit—an action that made me feel so guilty that immediately after hitting SEND, I called up Vaneetha at work and told how vividly I was looking forward to seeing her on Thursday and eating some Cambodian food.

  “Lovely. You know if you’re so much looking forward, we could do it a bit sooner. I’ve hardly seen you.”

  I said I had plans. And it was true. That evening I visited a travel medicine center where I spent hundreds of dollars on all these shots and prescriptions for pills that I certainly hoped weren’t contraindicated for Abulinix users. But that seemed like the least of my worries. The information the nurse gave me on various Ecuadori dangers made it seem amazing that anyone who went there didn’t pitch off a cliff in a bus while reeling from dengue fever and nibbling at some piece of hepatitis-soaked fruit as a scorpion crawled up his shorts.

  “But what about spiders?” I asked the nurse. “I hate spiders—if something’s going to bite me, I want it to roar at me first.”

  The nurse flipped through some papers. “Nothing here about spiders.”

  Faced with the reality of Ecuador’s many perils, I felt almost frivolously morbid to be devising the death of a fictional relative whose fate of not existing I might soon be forced to share—and then I wouldn’t take it so lightly. Still, the next morning I asked Rick if we could speak in private.

  We went out into the hall by the vending machines.

  “But a whole week?” Rick said. “This is extremely short notice.”

  “He was my favorite uncle.”

  “I’m so sorry. What was his name?”

  “Um . . . Dwight. I’m named after him. His name’s the same as mine. Spooky.”