Little Failure (52 page)

My mother has another suggestion for the gravestone. “Always struggling son.” She explains for the benefit of our American guest: “Gary’s father thinks he has to struggle. He has to feel this pain forever. Some people”—meaning our kind—“always want to feel guilty.” She comes up with a few more gravestone inscriptions. “Always painful mourning.” “Constantly painful mourning.”

My father will take John up to his monkish attic space to show my friend the lay of his land. “And here I have my Sony radio. And here is some Chekhov and Tolstoy. And here are Pushkin’s letters.” How happy I am to see the two most important men in my life talking to each other, being chums across the distance of time and culture. That one term,
Sony radio
, is enough to make me cry cutlet-dense filial tears. John is doing it again; he’s softening my family for me.

Finally, outdoors in his overgrown beefsteak tomato and cucumber garden, the sun setting behind him, my father speaks into John’s camera: “When Gary was six years old he was running on the street, kissing me, hugging me. Now he doesn’t want to hug me, he thinks it’s
not necessary. But I need this. I feel lost now. Not only because I don’t have my mother anymore, but because nobody needs me so much like she needed me.”

John and I talk about our parents all the time, me only half listening, or quarter listening, to his stories, him immersed in mine. He points out what I sometimes can’t see through both my rage and my love (at a certain point, the two have become indistinguishable): They paid for my college; they bought me my new teeth so that I could smile. If his father, a successful businessman in Salem, Oregon, could worry about payment at a one-dollar parking lot, what can be said of my mother, a woman born in the year after the Siege of Leningrad was broken?

Empathy is the first part of this parental program.

And then, a managed distance.

The years roll by. 1999. I am dating Pamela Sanders, weeping at the presence of Kevin and his powerful woodworking tools. My novel keeps going through draft after draft. Somebody has to be blamed for all this and since I can’t rise up against either my parents or Pamela, it will have to be John.

For years I’ve been trying to squeeze him dry. To my friends, who never meet him, he is the Benefactor, aka Benny. The thousands of dollars he’s been lending me have been flowing into my caviar party fund. Several times a year, my two-hundred-foot studio is crammed with about as many celebrants, who gorge on the finest champagne and silver-gray beluga that I’ve sourced from a questionable Brighton Beach store. The reason for these parties is always vague. My hairdresser is moving to Japan. My hairdresser is moving
back
from Japan. “Caviar courtesy of my benefactor!” I shout over the MC Solaar and the happy giggling of my Osaka hairdresser. “Somebody out there really loves me!”

And then it ends. And then John has had enough.

Before the advent of the electronic in-box, I manage to save nearly all the letters and postcards that come my way. A sensible gift of habit, I believe, from my mother, who throws nothing out. Or, perhaps, the inheritance of a totalitarian culture where everything will be used as evidence. In any case, John’s letters to me are at the top of the pile. By the time he’s had enough of me, they are as long as twenty-four pages and they render the truth of my life in those days better than I can.

When I first read these dispatches, a Pamela Sanders–grade anger boils within me. Fucking John. What does he know about writing? Or hiding out in bathrooms? He’s just a television writer. And, anyway, I’m too old to have a father figure. I’m “pushing thirty,” as he, the man obsessed with his own mortality, has just reminded me. But the thought of going it alone, with nothing but the pricey Kiev-style cutlet awaiting me in Little Neck, turns my anger to despair. I must find a new way to manipulate John, to keep my caviar fund intact, to keep the Duet with Gary humming along. As a gesture of kindness, I take John out to Barney Greengrass for sturgeon and eggs. At first I’m excited by the idea that I’m repaying a vast debt to John by buying him some animal protein on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but perhaps it is the Russian nature of the sturgeon that turns my mood from magnanimous guest of the Upper West Side to pure Leningrad citizen, circa 1979. When the $47.08 check is slapped on the table, the color of my face turns from lox to whitefish, and I have a minor panic attack on the spot.
No! No! No! My American papa has to pay for this, not me. If he doesn’t pay, then I have nothing but my real parents!
I run out of the restaurant, the edges of my eyes blurring with crazy tears, leaving John to settle the bill once more.

And then, finally, after all the bilked meals and goods and services and cash, and in response to yet another one of my requests for cash, there is this:

It gets easier.

It gets easier fast.

It is fashionable now to discredit psychoanalysis. The couch. The four or five days a week of narcissistic brooding. The reaching over to pluck Kleenex from the quilted tissue box beneath the African pietà thing. The penis-y Freudianism underlying it all. I have made fun of it myself in a novel called
Absurdistan
, my hero, the overweight and self-indulgent Misha Vainberg, son of a Russian oligarch, constantly calling his Park Avenue shrink while the real post-Soviet world disintegrates around him and people die.

The truth of it is that it is not for everyone. It is not for most people. It is difficult, painful, and tedious work. It feels, at first, like a diminution of power rendered upon a person who already feels powerless. It is a drain on the bank account and it takes away at least four hours a week that could be profitably spent looking oneself up on the World Wide Web. And, quite often, there is a seeming pointlessness to individual
sessions that makes my days studying Talmud in Hebrew school brim with relative insight. But.

It saves my life. What more can I add to that?

I hit the couch four times a week. I mean that literally. I jump on that couch; I hear the thwack of my body against it, as if I’m saying to my analyst, who is partly a stand-in for John:
Fuck you. I don’t need this. I’m more
real
than this
talking.
I’m more real than your
silence. I hate my shrink so much. The smug, silent authority who charges me fifteen dollars a session. The money, the money, the money. I am always the keeper of accounts. And always will be.

“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say into his silence.

He’s ripping me off, there’s no doubt about it. The gray-haired, gray-bearded, native-born presence is taking money from me, fifteen dollars at a time. My mother was right about everything. This country was built on the coins of fools like me. “Hide your quarters,” she would warn me before my college friends came over to visit my apartment.

Thwack
, the angry retort of my body against his couch.

Well, I’m not going to be different. I’m not going to be one of those people. The animal petters. The smilers. The helpers. The Benefactors. The sandwiches-for-the-homeless makers. Stop pushing me. Stop pushing me with your silence
.

“What else comes to mind about that?” my analyst says after I quiet down.

What else comes to mind about that? I want to get up and beat you like you once beat me. I want to have that power over you. I want to be so big that all you can do is hide your head beneath my assault, offer me up your pretty little ears
.

You with your innocent silence. You think I don’t see your rage? Every man has it. Every man, every boy, has the power to humiliate another with his strength
.

“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say.