As the last of the daylight faded, the votive bags shone more brightly. The gathering around the semicircle took on a campfire glow, which is to say it felt intimate — faces flickering in and out of view, everyone drawn into the radius of light — and yet at the same time it felt vast: the dark dancing shadows beyond each light’s small cone a suggestion of the great void above. I found myself standing with Penelope, both of us slurry with beer. Sri Lanka had described her as a MILF, and I guess she was, though she was our own age. She was curvy, and her playful green eyes complimented a high, singsongy voice. The arm-length tattoo was sexy, I had to admit; after she caught me staring, she held it out for inspection. “It’s a snake,” she said. The beast’s mouth was open around her wrist, its scales like chain mail. The illustration was made to look as though her limb was being devoured. “I got it so this would be less noticeable.” She touched three raised patches on the snake’s body each the size of an infant’s palm print and made of what looked like the pebbly skin of a nipple. I hazarded a feel. “The guy who did it is an artist. His ink work costs triple what anyone else on the East Coast charges. The dishwasher where I was working at the time had his back done to look like one of those old anatomy drawings, skin peeled to show the veins and muscle and all that?”
She spoke of Arthur’s mother and father, whom she described as “totally batshit.” She said that Arthur wisely steered clear of them. “They’re Manhattan fixtures. They live downtown in a loft and keep their front door open for anybody to walk in off the street. In fact they encourage it; they welcome everybody in. That place was a madhouse back in the day. Arthur tells me stories. Once, when he was maybe thirteen he was taken by a couple — they came in right off the street and Arthur wandered back to their Lower East Side apartment with them. And here’s the kicker: his parents? Didn’t even realize that he was gone — and he was gone for two days. Two days! Arthur laughs when he tells that particular one, so I don’t think anything too bad happened to him while he was away, but there are other stories he doesn’t laugh about. And a few he refuses to even talk about. I’ve dropped by their loft a few times but didn’t mention who I was. Kind of fun being undercover!”
“They’ve never met you?”
“They’ve never met me, never met Will. They don’t know he’s published a book — even though the bookstore around the corner has it in the window!”
“I’ve been meaning to read it.”
“Oh, you should. He’s brilliant. You read the crap from those people he teaches with, and it’s so clever you want to vomit. Art’s the only serious one of the bunch, definitely the only one those students should be taking advice from.”
“Said the wife about her husband.”
“It’s true, though! Those others?” She cocked a thumb at a clutch murmuring behind us. “They’re just trying to keep up with their careers. They spend as much time sleeping with each other at MacDowell and schmoozing with known members of grant committees as they do thinking about what they write. Art’s different. He could care less about career, about tenure — if he continues to teach, he’ll be an adjunct for the rest of his life, and I say fine. What, you’re surprised hear me say that?”
“You’re living in the city and raising a child. Health insurance and a steady paycheck? That doesn’t interest you?”
“You’re thinking about some other man, some other marriage. I knew what I was getting into when I picked Art. He’s barely employable. He thinks too much, takes too much to heart. But it’s also what I love about him. I figured out long ago that if we were going to be together, I would have to do the breadwinning, so to speak—” She told me earlier that she was the head baker at Balthazar. “It’s okay, though. I’d rather him be brilliant and happy than a miserable so-and-so. Better for me and better for Will.”
I didn’t have a bedside lamp — reading in bed was not a habit — and so I took the gooseneck from its perch on the piano’s music stand and clipped it onto the radiator’s knob by my bed. Pointing it at the wall gave me plenty of light to read by. I slid Arthur’s book from the bookcase and sat back against the pillow.
It had been ages since I last enjoyed a book. As a child I read voraciously, above my grade level, to my mother’s great pride. She was fond of repeating an anecdote my kindergarten teacher once told her, that on my first day when asked to choose a book from the bookcase — arranged in ascending difficulty from lowest shelf on up — I grabbed a chair and nearly split my lip climbing for a selection at the very top. I suppose the bookworm is a common only-child type. But in college I learned the vocabulary of arm’s length. The book was a text. To like or dislike something was to say that it worked or didn’t work, as though we were a classroom of repairmen. The profusion of pages and deadlines made enjoying any of it as likely as savoring a hot dog at a hot-dog-eating contest. And so I lost the habit.
Arthur’s book is about an intense high school guidance counselor, divorced, living alone, who takes an unhealthy interest in a troubled boy he’s convinced is being physically and sexually abused. He calls the boy to his small cubicle daily, trying to get him to talk, but the boy does not want to talk. The counselor tells the boy that abuse has to be dealt with, that unchecked it will eventually eat the boy alive. The boy denies that anything has happened, but only vaguely, in a way that encourages the counselor. His interest in the boy takes on the quality of an obsession. We sense a train wreck on the horizon as the counselor goes through with the purchase of a gun and begins trailing the boy to his home and lurking behind dumpsters. There will be a confrontation between the counselor and the boy’s mean drunk of a father; we see it coming from a mile off and read on to witness the collision. But the head-on never happens. What we don’t see coming is the moment the boy — having been convinced by the counselor over the course of weeks that it was imperative for abuse to be dealt with — arrives at school with his father’s shotgun and blasts a hole in his coach, who, as it turns out, has been the one molesting him, and makes a getaway with the counselor. It ends with the two on a motel room bed, kissing, boy and man, the counselor unbuttoning the boy’s pants and pulling them off.
What’s so shocking about this ending is that although we are unsettled, we find ourselves somehow rooting for it. Arthur has achieved that sleight of hand the best authors make us fall for: we want things to work out for the narrator, whatever kind of person he turns out to be. It’s jujitsu, using the natural momentum of a reader’s desire to see his protagonist’s desires fulfilled to launch us over the line into this transgression, to want this transgression, in a sense. What’s troubling is where it departs from the stories of other reprehensible literary characters. Raskolnikov is crushed by his own guilt in spite of himself; Humbert, though unrepentant, tells his story from a prison cell. But in Arthur’s we have no such assurances of the moral balance of the universe.
I wondered what would have motivated Arthur to invent these characters, to take them — and us — on this journey. That Arthur had written it, not only written it but also essentially performed the role of this character himself — the counselor is the “I” of the book — seemed bold and dangerous. Penelope was right. He was a terrific writer. I disappeared down the hole on page one and emerged 196 pages later, wide awake, disturbed by his vision.