My American Unhappiness (7 page)

I suppose the idea for my project came to me shortly after college, when I was rather absent-mindedly thumbing through a copy of
The Portable Chekhov,
during a register shift at the bookshop where I once worked. Rereading the story "Gooseberries," I came across these lines: "There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a little hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."

It was during a time in my life when I wanted to do something revolutionary, or at least vital. I wanted to serve some greater purpose, to create something that changed the way humankind viewed itself. Having also just finished reading a slim volume called
Let Your Life Speak
by Parker Palmer, I was quite open to signs and symbols; I was sort of anticipating an epiphany about what I would do with my life's work. And there, buried in one of Chekhov's masterpieces, was my calling. I would be that little man with a hammer, constantly tapping away on a happy nation's door.

In subsequent years,
An Inventory of American Unhappiness
has led to my interviewing over five hundred Americans about the nature and rubrics of their discontent. I've also collected thousands of e-mail responses to the question
Why are you so unhappy?
In my grandest moments, I imagine it will eventually be a seminal work that helps us understand our culture in a new and promising way, something along the lines of Studs Terkel's
Working
and Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring.

Lara tells me that the project is a brilliant one and she has worked countless hours transcribing my interviews and editing video. Yet, she is an optimistic woman—the sort of person who ends a phone call with the phrase
Make it a great day
—and her one complaint is that my questions often steer the conversations off into depressing places. Well, of course they do! She feels that perhaps it is I, the anonymous interviewer, who might be convincing my subjects of their unhappiness. Of course! I know that happens! But there is no malice at work here. It is more like Michelangelo, I tell her, when he was asked how he managed to carve the beautiful figure of David from a towering piece of marble over eighteen feet high.

It was already there,
he said.
I just chipped away the excess.

Yes! It is already there, so much woe. I want to distill it for the world to see.

Why are you so unhappy?

That is the simple question I ask after a very brief introduction. And certainly some people say, "I'm not." Or "What do you mean?" Or "I gotta get back to work." But so many people, triggered by such a direct and probing question, tell me everything.

Some recent responses:

Abigail H., 41, medical software trainer, Verona, WI:
Unhappy? Well, I suppose I am. I suppose it has something to do with, well, work. Actually, in all seriousness, I've been unhappy since I was about nine. One day, this gray, damp January day, I remember waking up and getting upset because I had to go to fourth grade that day. And then, in one of those
bizarre
flash-forward moments you sometimes get as a kid, I saw the older version of myself, me, now, and I thought, there I am, getting up for work, going somewhere I don't want to go. And at that moment I realized that there was my life, all of it, and almost every day of my life I would have to get up and go somewhere I didn't really want to go. And now, the other morning, I was dropping off my daughter, Zoe, she's four, at preschool, and I was like, oh, look at this, here we go again, her too. God.

Seth S., 30, bike messenger, New York, NY:
Cars, the great American automobile, pal, that's what has me down. Not only do I come close to getting clipped once an hour by some cell-phone-talking prick in a Land Rover, but I have to breathe all that shit we put into the air. When my son Silver inherits this earth, it's gonna be totally fucked. There. Sorry you asked?

[Interviewer: No. No it's okay]
You said this is going to be on NPR?
[
Interviewer: Perhaps. I said perhaps
]
All right. Cool. Check this:
www.cararmageddon.org
!

Simms P., 39, retail clerk, Cleveland, OH:
Well, if you mean, why am I so depressed, look around you. Food courts. Shitty fast-food places posing as Asian-fusion and Latin-fusion bistros. ATM surcharges. That rent-a-cop hitting on that high school girl. The Pretzel Peddler, where I just had lunch. Think of it: I'm almost forty, I'm on my lunch break from a place called Famous Footwear. And where did I eat lunch? The fucking Pretzel Peddler, man? I eat pretzels with fake cheese dip for lunch. And you want to know what makes me unhappy? Me. I make me miserable.

Josh F., 45, government analyst, Washington, DC:
I'm wondering if you have any idea how much federal money goes into this project, which, in my view, is a deliberate attempt to
cynicize
the nation?

And so on.

L
APTOP SLUNG OVER
my shoulder, I slip out to lunch a bit early, around eleven, for an omelet and a Bloody Mary or two at Nick's. George and Gus throw in a third Bloody Mary on the house, as Gus remarks that I look "weary with the weight of the world." How perceptive good bartenders can be! How they know exactly what a regular client needs! I work away on my laptop at the bar, firing off e-mails, then I change my Facebook status, pay the tab, tipping generously, and walk back to the office, abuzz and enlivened.

Having spent much of the morning, and much of my lunch hour, poring over responses to my unhappiness inventory, I come back from lunch in a kind of intellectual fog; I plunk down on the small sofa in our reception area and find myself staring at Lara as she works. This goes on for some time and I find myself still wondering about my mother's inquiry from the night before. Don't I have any prospects? Haven't I even considered the fact that it is time for me to get married, find a wife?

Finally, Lara stops typing for a moment, looks up at me, and slides her delicate reading glasses down her nose, lifting her eyes to meet mine. She points her small chin right at my heart. "Are you okay, Zeke?"

"A bit of reverie," I say. "Lost in a bit of a reverie." She pauses and now removes her reading glasses. "What?"

"I'm afraid I was staring."

"I didn't notice," she says.

"Yes, well," I say, "often one can't help it."

"Who kept calling this morning?" she says.

"Pardon?" I say.

"Your direct line's been ringing all day. It must have rung fifty times!"

"Did it?"

"You didn't hear it?"

"I suppose not. I was working on my project."

"What's wrong with you?"

"You know I have an amazing ability to tune out distractions when I am engaged in my project."

"Have you been drinking?" she asks. "No," I say. "Jesus."

She gazes at me for a minute, but I say nothing else.

"Have you been crying?" she asks.

"That's extremely doubtful," I say.

"Your eyes are all red."

"Are they?"

"Yes."

"Seasonal allergies. Spring! The rise of leaves and vegetation, so ripe with pollen and lust!"

"I thought I heard weeping."

"What?"

"Earlier this morning, when you first came in."

"You did not!"

"It's unsettling to hear your boss weeping in this economy," she says. "Did something happen?"

"Lara! Stop!"

"Are you okay? Did you eat lunch?"

"Yes," I say.

"Did you drink?"

"I had a drink. Just one."

"You said you didn't drink," she says.

"These hardly seem to be the sort of questions an executive director should have to answer after a long lunch. I was meeting with some potential donors, if you must know, and then I was checking my e-mail, and there was a great deal of e-mail that needed my attention."

"How did the lunch go?"

"Fine."

"Are you sure you were not crying?"

"I do not recall, Lara," I say. "I was in my office all morning, engaged in my work, and that is an emotional trance for me. I do not remember what the trance led to, but usually there is some sort of spiritual epiphany or emotional catharsis of some magnitude. While you were away from your desk, in the powder room or whatnot, I went out, laptop in hand, for a bite to eat. A working lunch."

"You should eat something else. You seem unsteady. I've got half a sub from Fraboni's in the mini-fridge."

"That's kind of you, but I am quite satiated at present."

"Okay, Zeke."

I have been trying to speak less formally of late, particularly with Lara. As I navigate the superior-subordinate relationship we share, I have a tendency to speak in long sentences and say things like "quite satiated" and "at present" instead of "full" and "right now." It's as if I haven't quite mastered the easy social interaction that coworkers should have after so many years.

"Did you get that solicitation letter written this morning?" Lara says. "Because if you want to get that mailed out—and we could use some cash infusions right now—I need the text today. Remember, I'm off next week. Your last letter brought in just enough to get through the summer. Maybe you can get us through the fall as well."

"Right," I say. "Sure. I'll get to it this afternoon."

"E-mail it to me when you're done and I'll merge it and print the envelopes."

"I may prefer to dictate it, if you don't mind."

"You're the boss," she says. "Whatever."

"If it's unpleasant for you..." I say.

"It's neither pleasant nor unpleasant," she says, now gone back to the keyboard. "It is simply my job."

"You know I don't care for that attitude," I say. "I want you to like the work. But I prefer to dictate."

"I love it. I love my job. I've been here eight years, haven't I?"

"You sound unconvincing."

"Do I?" she says, and she offers me a smile—a small one.

I retreat to my office and close the door. Although I consider myself a student of human relationships, I admit that Lara is someone I can't figure out: Was what we just had flirtatious and witty banter? Or was it a tense exchange rife with latent aggression? It's not out of the realm of possibility that Lara might be attracted to me. I am a fairly good-looking man and I know it helps me get through life. I am of medium height, broad-shouldered. I have the blue eyes from my mother's Irish side coupled with black hair and skin one would describe as olive-toned, thanks to my father's Greek genes. Three years ago, I even did a brief bit of modeling for a local ad agency—a serendipitous encounter at the natural foods co-op turned into a decent part-time job. For a few months, my face was on a billboard over the Beltline Highway, smiling deliriously over the great service I received at a bank. Outside Milwaukee, above the interstate, I stood with a beautiful family, and my smile assured commuters that All-state was on their side. I drove by that billboard only a handful of times, as it was sixty miles east of Madison, but each time, that picture of me, standing next to that blond, big-eyed wife, those two beaming children, filled me with woe. I still remember how my billboard wife—Ingrid was her real name—smelled, how her hair gave off the vague scent of dandelion stems.

More about Lara: Many days, I confess, I have an urge to kiss her, and once, five years ago, at the National Humanities Conference in Omaha, we almost did kiss in the arcade room of the hotel lobby. We were both fairly intoxicated, having spent most of the evening at the hotel bar with our comrades from the Deep South Humanities Project and the Big Sky Humanities Coalition, and we had retreated to the arcade, alone. We were playing Mortal Kombat II, and she shoved me once, in real life, after my ninja destroyed her buxom, knife-wielding avatar and I shoved her back, playfully, and then she grabbed my hand, and we were there, a few inches from each other, and almost, almost!

This afternoon, weary and restless, bolstered by my three Bloody Marys, I go back out to Lara's desk and I bring up that night in Omaha, and, admittedly, it is the sort of "Do you remember that time?" kind of question you hope rekindles a spark that seems so long gone and dormant.

"I don't remember it," she says. "I don't think that's what happened, Zeke."

"What do you think would have happened," I say, "if we'd kissed?"

"Regret," she says. She is straightening her desk, ending the workday. "Wearying, gut-wrenching regret."

"Really?" I say.

"We were different then," she says. "My husband was cheating on me, my marriage was failing. And you, well, you weren't so weird. You were more vulnerable then, a young widower, not the
bon vivant
you are today!"

It's true, she struck me as enormously sad on that trip, a woman whose life was falling apart, a woman saying farewell to a future she'd imagined, and had good reason to imagine, too. This is when a woman is at her most beautiful, I think, when she is at her saddest. Show me a sad woman, and I will fall in love.

Lara laughs then, turning what could become a poignant moment into a joke. "Anyway, we should never bring that up again. Okay?"

"Weird?" I say, but she is on her way to shut down the copier. "I have not gotten weird."

She turns back toward me and sighs.

"We both have, Zeke. We both have gotten weird and middle-aged."

"We are neither weird nor middle-aged, Lara!"

"Well, maybe you're not. But I am," Lara says. "Anyway, I've got to get home and you've got two girls waiting for you in the conference room."

"Oh, no! I forgot!" I say. "Have they been here long?"

"No. Your mother dropped them off about forty minutes ago. I wasn't sure if you were in any condition to care for them, so I said you were on a conference call."

"Lara!"

"Zeke, you got drunk at lunch!"

"Please, please, Lara," I say. "Why hurl such accusations?"