Thy Neighbor (34 page)

See what happens.

I had a short-term girlfriend at boarding school senior year who said that to me all the time. It was her answer to everything. It was the way she lived her life. Just wait. Just hang around and see what happens. That's all you have to do.

It was the main reason I broke up with her. That, and the fact that her name was Sunny. No joke. Sunny. I told her right out: Look, I can't be with someone named Sunny. I just can't do it. It makes me want to punch you in the face, and I don't think that's very fair to you.

She agreed, and we went our separate ways. She wasn't in the business of changing anyone. She didn't think she had that much agency. Hence the mantra. She was a happy person. It was as simple as that. And after we broke up I'd see her around campus occasionally just being happy. Being happy with her friends, being happy in the library, in the cafeteria, in geology class, in the infirmary for a week with the flu—wherever. Just hanging around and breathing, taking what came and not getting angry or upset or even that excited about anything.

I envied her, of course. I still do. And now, of all times, after everything that's happened, I'm thinking mainly of her and the mind-blowing simplicity of those three words.

See what happens.

When I say that to myself now, I feel my bowels unclench and my shoulders drop and I am almost able to laugh aloud at how easy it could all be if I just stopped trying so hard.

I am at the far end of something that has gone on for all of my thirty-four years, the last thirteen of which have been excruciating. And for what? I have gained nothing. I have lost time.

I have thought, like a spoiled child, of wanting to die, because I was uncomfortable. I have put my toe in the riptide. I have put myself in danger and asked fate to intervene. I have tempted the violence and vengeance of others. Yet all of this has been a flying at life, not a relinquishment of it. You do not shake your fist at the world when you want to leave it. You cannot shake your fist at the world and be taken seriously as an adult.

I will never get this part right. How to be serious. How to say what's on my mind without reaching. I do not have the right circuitry for serious, or for musing or joking in earnest, either. I can hear it even now as I am saying this. The tone is wrong. The adolescent is still there protesting, making a show of his conscience and the big ideas that he has just discovered. Life, death, I don't have to take this anymore, and so on.

It's funny to look at myself this way. Genuinely funny, because I am laughing with kindness for the first time as I am looking in the mirror. This is friendly ridicule.

I accept that I have made a poor showing. I accept that this acceptance is still itself a poor showing, still self-conscious and posed and overly didactic. That's me. Here I am. The germ behind the clown in the polo shirt revealed as he has been throughout. I have been a baby
and
I have been through something unimaginable—as Mrs. Bloom would say, both are true.

Dr. Cunningham was wrong. Knowing has released me. I know what has been done, the awful things that were done by whom to whom and why. I have even heard some of my parents' last words, and contrary to everything I expected, they were banal. As banal as my father's poems and promises and threats on paper. As unimaginative as any fight between two married people dragging out the same old six or seven grievances, slurring the same dull insults back and forth.

I have seen Dorris and Jonathan do the same with a different ending. I have seen Ellie and Gruber not do it, because Ellie figured this out a long time ago and simply turned off the receiver. To think that all this time she has been the happiest, knowing the secret that fullness lies in silence. She must have practiced it. Or did she just know? Every time you feel the rope go taut, walk away. Every time you feel your feet slipping, let go.

Mrs. B., you have a way of doing this. But you learned it. You had to practice it, which meant that at the key moments you would always fail to embody it. You would put your hands to your mouth and scream when the news came. You would sit up in bed in the middle of the night, not able to help it. You would feel the hoofbeats on the ground from miles away, and cold worry would have its way with you.

We are alike in this. I will practice, and I will get pretty good at hanging around. At the easiest times, I will seem like a master, as you seemed to me that day I first rang your bell. I will even make wispier jokes and learn to speak in lassos that never cinch. Some days, you will be amazed by my equanimity. Others you will see me fighting myself and losing and breathing deeply to regain control, and you will rightly laugh at how neurotic I still am. I will have forgotten that control is not the point, and I will have to settle for gaining control of my need to control.

I will find a way to paste a laugh over all this, because I will concede that I can do only so much with who I am. I will change, but you will always know that I am there under the garment. There is a singular person in there after all, a man with qualities, though I cannot say what those qualities are, and neither really can you. But you will know them and smile to yourself and say, yes, there is the Nick Walsh I know, and I will smile, too, affectionately, having found that much forgiveness for myself.

But the verdict now is for life. Striding life. And I will do my sentence with joy and constant invention, because Denmark is not a prison after all.

As mad as I sometimes am, it really isn't.

But Hamlet is.

I know that now.

He
is
a prison.

And at the end of the tragedy—guess what?—Hamlet dies.

He dies along with everybody else.

Thump
.

Everyone except Horatio, whose name itself sounds like a cheer and whose temperament is cool and light as a cloud and shaped like a scoop of ice cream.

Horatio, who passes up suicide.

Horatio, who is there at the beginning—did you notice?—
and
at the end, too, surrounded by soldiers and ghosts.

Horatio, who completes the circle, who persists and tells the story again.

See what happens.

He is the hidden hero, the narrator, and the floating moral of the sleight of hand.

Hamlet is just the decoy.

So, in momentary contradiction of everything I have just said, and one last maudlin time, I say this.

Mom? Dad? Here's the thing, if you're listening. Take this as a conclusion. The baby's valediction that is not one, because the baby can never stop saying what the baby always says as long as he is speaking.

This is the best I can do for closure.

This testimony has been for you. My life up to this point has been for you. And every part of me that I have put down here in these pages has been a form of pleasing you, still, and a form of explaining and excusing myself for what I have become and what I have failed to become.

That is over now.

I exist, and in violation of all instruction on this matter, I do not have to justify myself to anyone. I am not your continuation. I am not your mistake, or the bright spot in it. I am just another person, and nothing that I have read or not read or achieved or failed to achieve has any bearing on that fact. Your conflicts have not made me, and your crimes, your deaths have not condemned me. Not anymore.

I have heard your voices and your judgments and your petty conceits, and how anticlimactically they ended your life together. I am not impressed by your complexity.

Now I am for living below the frequency of obsession. I am for the great defiant act of taking up space, of continuing simply.

I am not for death anymore, or half in love with it, even in quotation marks. I am not enamored of my pain. I am not sophisticated. There are no answers. There are not even any questions.

It is the noise that kills us.

So I am for bland as bread, Mommy. I am for the inadequacy of language, and I am against its very real power to do harm. I am against the cruelty of a little learning and the bludgeon of memory.

And, Daddy?

Finally.

Yes, finally. You.

I am for the limits of genes and influence, father to son. I am for reinvention. I am for burning paper and what is written on it: poor imitation to a despicable end.

And

lightly now,

shallow,

go,

I am

for

no

more

words.

I would like to thank my editor, Paul Slovak, for his belief, kindness, and support, as well as my agent, Eric Simonoff, for the same.

Also by Norah Vincent

Voluntary Madness

Self-Made Man