His daughter won’t speak and wears a ski hat in the house and writes stories in which family members are eviscerated as the narrator laughs. She’s an isolate, watched but not approached. We don’t want to make the problem into more than it is. His brother’s alone in Florida, an older version of the same pain, just a phone call away. Whenever Conroy makes his hangup indications in their once-in-a-blue-moon conversations, his brother says it was great talking to him. His father’s ignoring the doctor’s advice — most of that advice having to do with meds, his Dilantin, his Prozac, his everything else — and going downhill because of it, and still they rehearse the same conversational rituals, as though time is standing still instead of vortexing down a drain. His career involves assuring people he’s got the answers and he’s got their back when he doesn’t have the answers and he’s all about craven self-interest: he’s part of the team rolling out a major new pharmaceutical, one of the accomplished tyros vouching for one of the eminences who did the science, and in that capacity he didn’t so much invent his data as cherry-pick it. Will it kill anyone? He hopes not. Because he means well.
He always means well. He tells himself this, treading water in bed.
The good news is who’s in this bed with him. His wife, the person he loves most in the world. Here’s the thing about his wife: she travels a lot, in her role as headhunter for the Center for American Progress, and she’s concerned about him, and the conversational form her concern has lately taken has been to suggest, half-jokingly and half-kindly, that he should have a fling. And to him this sounds like “You should get yourself some tenderness somewhere. Because you ain’t getting it here.”
He could ask if that’s what she means. But he’s the kind of guy given to building tall towers of self-pity and then watching them sway. So he speculates instead.
In bed he hints around. His wife is all psychological acuity and knows him like she knows her childhood bedroom, but she’s always been impatient with hinting and her requests for clarification sound like demands. Exasperation makes him close up shop like a night-blooming flower.
Think of the good you’ve done, he counsels. Think of the good you continue to do. A breeze blows over the water’s surface.
But here’s this letter in which a Sri Lankan says he’s all but sure he’s found some major links between the product and miscarriage. The Sri Lankan wants to know if Conroy didn’t review the same data. And here’s this journal entry from his daughter: My Throat = the Shit Pit. And here’s this dream he keeps having of himself as ringmaster with no acts performing, just a guy holding a hoop looking at him and waiting, and with everyone he’s ever let down scattered in the uncomfortable stands, eager to tell him that all of his forays into selflessness have only made clearer what they’re not, like a thimbleful of cola after a trek across the Kalahari.
His mode on such nights is the circuit between bed and bathroom and lamplit magazines. But tonight he’s heard his daughter downstairs ahead of him, and the delicate hiccups of the little breath-intakes that are her version of crying when it’s crucial she not be heard. Her favored position is to wedge herself into the wingbacked chair with her knees by sitting Indian-style. He holds himself still, listening, then throws open the sash on their upper-story bedroom window and climbs out on the roof. And his wife stirs and, sleeping, is sad for his unsettlement. The grit stings his knees. Gravity wants to welcome him forward in a rush. The breeze cools his butt. In the moonlight he’s just a naked guy, most of his weight on his hands, his hands bending the front edge of the aluminum gutter, the grass two stories below a blue meridian, zenith and nadir at once.
How do we help? Throw him a life preserver? How long should anyone survive in that ocean?
He’s Tethys Man, superhero and supervillain all in one. How much does he sweat at night? His sheets smell mildewy in the morning. If you saw him padding to the toilet, stepping naked in place, and waving off the bad images like the world’s least fetching drum majorette, would you imagine that “inauthenticity” was a term that haunted him? If you saw him bare-assed on his roof, gauging the distance from the sloping dormer to the strain insulators and primary cables of the telephone wires, would you imagine that once he jumped he’d ferry himself hand over hand from house to house? Would you imagine that if he did, he would have proved something to himself, in his own inchoate way, about his desire for change? Would you imagine that he then hated himself less?
Would you imagine that when he confronted his loved ones’ sadnesses, his vanity knew no bounds? Would you imagine that he thought his problems would solve themselves? Would you imagine that he fancied himself the prey when he was really the apologetic predator? Would you imagine that he’d last very long, much less get through this alive? Would you imagine that his kind should die out once and for all? Would you imagine that even now he was telling you the truth?
The Netherlands Lives with Water
A long time ago a man had a dog that went down to the shoreline every day and howled. When she returned the man would look at her blankly. Eventually the dog got exasperated. “Hey,” the dog said. “There’s a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way.” “Please. I’m busy,” the man said. “Hey,” the dog said the next day, and told him the same thing. This went on for a week. Finally the man said, “If you say that once more I’m going to take you out to sea and dump you overboard.” The next morning the dog went down to the shoreline again, and the man followed. “Hey,” the dog said, after a minute. “Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.
“Or here’s another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why’d you make Eve so beautiful?’ And God says, ‘So you would love her.’ And Adam says, ‘Well, why’d you make her so stupid?’ And God says, ‘So she would love you.’ ”
Henk laughs.
“Well, he thinks it’s funny,” Cato says.
“He’s eleven years old,” I tell her.
“And very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.
We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn’t passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.
“You failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me. She’d seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that’s what those of us who were older were doing there.
“It’s your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.
“You’re not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I’d produced.
She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she’d been raised by depressives who’d made her one of those girls who’d sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we’d met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.