The Unprofessionals (10 page)

D
URING THE DARK
winter months of not knowing what his life was in California, I assumed that neither the boy nor his parents wished to speak to me because of something bad about myself. The something could be any number of notions they'd gotten me to worry about, from not blow-drying my hair to not knowing which restaurants Robert De Niro owned in New York.

When his mother first asked about one of these restaurants in 1991 and I said, “I don't know anything about it,” his father shouted, “She doesn't know about Robert De Niro's restaurants! She lives as a recluse in the country!”

I had never thought of the word “recluse” this way. I thought I was seeking peace, like Thoreau, or even not like him. I had a lifelong feeling of inferiority to Thoreau, and later on to Christiane Amanpour, Martha Stewart, Emily Dickinson, Elvis Presley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Rachel Carson, Eudora Welty, and Greta Van Susteren before she changed networks.

 

AT FIRST
when he started college, the boy said he loved New York compared with Boston. After a few weeks, he changed his mind and said, “They're all from New Jersey. They come in limos to go to restaurants on Park Avenue South.” He also hated downtown, especially Greenwich Village, where he went to college. “Everyone looks like Salman Rushdie,” he said. He wished he could live on the Upper East Side, on Fifth Avenue.

I told him it was noisy from the roar of the buses, and that the air was dirty from the fumes.

“Then Park Avenue would be okay,” he said.

T
HE CREEPY YEAR
continued on this way. Until one day, in the spring, the boy called. He was all excited, or all up. After the Creative Monsters call he'd never wanted to talk.

I was happy to hear from him. And even worse, I assumed his good mood meant that he was getting better.

“You'll never believe this,” he said. “I'm walking outside, it's actually a beautiful day, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” It was this: a famous professor somewhere on the other coast had been promoted to chairman even though he had a low IQ.

He continued talking in an overexcited voice as he described the political system in academia. I wondered why this subject was of sufficient interest to require a call from his cell phone out in the street in the middle of the day. I didn't even know they had streets in Beverly Hills.

All I knew was what I'd seen on TV news about the trial of an infamous murderer. The killer's house and garden were shown, and outside the front entrance there was a big beautiful lavender flower, an agapanthus. That's how I knew that landscape gardeners could be hired by anyone to design flower gardens, but I never saw a sidewalk.

“By the way, don't you think there's something wrong with my parents, the way they were willing to pack up and move back and forth across the country and do over another house every few years?”

I thought about it for a second. While I was still thinking, he said, “Shouldn't they want to make lasting friends and associates and be connected to a place?”

“They have a lot of friends,” I said. When I thought about them and their friends, it reminded me of high school. Back then, they were trying to do all the things the normal kids did, maybe even appear on
American Bandstand.
They'd talked about this with me.

“They have no real friends,” the boy said.

“I thought they did,” I said.

“Have you noticed that my father doesn't know how to talk to anyone? He can't have a conversation.”

“But he says things that are so funny, everyone wants to be around him.”

“That's not talking,” the boy said. “He doesn't know how to relate to other human beings in real conversation. Haven't you noticed this?”

“I thought that was just with me,” I said.

“No, that's with everyone,” the boy said. “But someday he'll have to face it, and he won't.”

“Maybe he can get away without facing it,” I said. “He's gotten this far and he's been successful.”

“It's an empty success,” the boy said. “And he's trying to deny that. But I'm almost home. I'll call you when I get inside the house, in five minutes.”

“Will you really?” I said. “Because I have to go out to photograph a pond before the light is gone.”

“I will. Five minutes, I swear,” he said.

Half an hour passed as I got ready to go out. I called him on his cell phone and there was no answer. I called on the regular phone and the machine answered. Then I left. I called him that night. Maybe five days passed before he answered. I wondered what he was doing during this time.

“Oh, right. I was supposed to call you,” he said. “But my mother was there and I had to placate her about a number of things.”

I didn't ask about the things. Maybe he'd been out on a dope-buying expedition and she was questioning him about his activities.

He was glad to get right back to talking about everyone's psychological makeup.

“Those who suffer from lack of self-esteem will never recover. Everything in life is a fraud. Most married people should never have gotten married. Most couples' relationships are based on mutual low self-esteem and pity.”

“You mean empathy—not pity,” I said. But first the choice of the word “pity” made me laugh and the laughter spread out and into my chest, right where all the anxiety was stored, and took its place.

“It's the same thing,” he said in his cold way.

“What about love?” I found myself saying, even though it sounded like a bad song title.

“People delude themselves about that. Usually it's just a need for them to think they're better than they know they are.”

“You mean you don't believe in love?” I said. It was the bad song again. Songs with lyrics like these had forced me to leave stores. The one with “the thing called love” had driven me out of many places. I was saving up for the three-hundred-dollar price of the Bose silencing headphones and in the meantime often left the discount drugstore without looking through all the Reach toothbrushes.

“You know about this.
You're
an existentialist,” he said.

“I am?” I said. I was surprised to hear it. For a minute I couldn't even remember what existentialism was—as applied to myself, anyway. I'd been trying to forget about it since I was his age.

The play
No Exit
was performed on television, in my late childhood, while my mother was lying on the couch after a hard day of teaching grammar to juvenile delinquents. She was watching the play on the Motorola wood-cabinet television but told me to leave the room at the part where Colleen Dewhurst was stuffing the towels under the door to keep the gas from escaping and foiling the suicide plans.

“What are they doing with the towels?” I asked.

“Don't watch,” she'd said. “Go do your homework. Practice your piano lessons.”

“Why are you watching?” I asked.

“It's not for children,” she said. “There's rarely any serious drama on television. I want to see it.” She disapproved of my choices,
Ozzie and Harriet
and
I Love Lucy.

That was my first brush with existentialism. “I got over it after college,” I told the boy.

“But you're a Nietzschean,” he said.

For a second I was flattered. It sounded good. I quickly tried to remember the writings of Nietzsche, but could think only of
Nietzsche's Last Days,
a review of a biography—and the part with the mad philosopher talking to a horse at the end of his sad life.

“I decided not to dwell on it,” I said.

“How come? You know he's right,” he said threateningly.

“A boyfriend I had at the time talked me out of it. Then there were the Beatles. My next boyfriend dedicated himself to music and distracted himself with the album
Rubber Soul.
”

“The Beatles?” the boy said. “It makes no sense.”

“This boyfriend said, ‘Which is more fun, Nietzsche or the Beatles?' He was always looking for ways to have fun.”

“Rather simpleminded,” the boy said.

“But he was right. Also involved was the element of romance.” I decided not to say the word “sex” to the boy. He could put two and two together for himself. And also because he'd told me that his parents had confronted him with questions about his relationships with girls.

“Isn't that a personal matter?” I'd said.

“I think my parents are afraid that I turned to drugs to escape the knowledge of being gay. Can you believe that?”

“I can't believe confronting someone with such a question,” I said. “Or that they would even think it. You must have misunderstood.”

“No. And I'm furious that the next psychiatrist had the same idea! The psychiatrist is, like, ‘Can't you see how people might think that you are?'”

“What!” I said. “Why?”

“Because of the way I dress.”

“How? Khaki pants and button-down shirts? Oh, and the sport jackets?”

“Yes! Can you believe that? Because my shirts are neatly pressed, and the way I sit.”

“How? A ballet position?” I said.

The boy laughed. Or more scoffed and laughed at the same time. “You'd think it was, from the way they act. With crossed legs, I said, ‘European men dress and sit this way.'”

“Is this what psychiatrists do now?”

“I'm being hounded on all sides! I have to run away to New York. There's no choice left to me.”

“You could wait it out. Try to find some better doctors,” I'd said.

Suddenly he started quoting Nietzsche at length. Though I was a fan, I couldn't get into it. I couldn't stand it. I thought of adding Schopenhauer, or Spinoza, for a real break—I'd read in the introduction to his work that Spinoza had had a disagreement with his sister about a piece of inherited furniture—but still, adding the two philosophers might make it worse. Now this new twist to the situation. The boy's problems were mounting in an unbearable way.

“Everyone thinks about these things in college,” I said. “But then you figure, you're alive, make the best of it. Or something.”

“Like how? There's no point to anything,” he said.

“Work, love, nature, books, poems, music, traveling, trees, birds, butterflies, flowers.” It sounded like something said by a follower of Norman Vincent Peale. And a Viennese psychoanalyst had told me that Freud hated music.

I wanted to read him a quote from
British Butterflies,
an antique butterfly book: “We live…for moments…minutes—fractions of an hour…for these intervals are timeless. While they last, we have complete understanding, happiness and strength. We live in the true sense and we perceive the meaning of life. This experience is mine while I watch butterflies. I love these mysterious beings and as I dwell in the country…in a place favoured by butterflies, my perfect moments are many….” I wanted to read this to a heroin addict.

“Everyone tells me that,” he said before I tried out the quote. “I don't see the point to anything,” he said.

“Work and love—Freud said that.”

“Freud was an opium addict,” the boy said.

“Only after he was at an advanced age in his life,” I said. “And it was for pain from an illness.”

“True. But all kids my age don't think about this. They're idiots. Some kids I know go right out into the world of jobs and society without thinking about anything.”

I thought that as a joke I might quote the first line of the most famous poem by Joyce Kilmer.

“Don't you have trees in California?” I said.

“Of course! It's Beverly Hills. We have palm trees, too.”

“Maybe you're worn out from the rehab and the withdrawal and the life disruption.”

He skipped right over that and said, “I'd like to travel. I'd like to just travel for my whole life!”

“You could. You could get a job reporting on everything. Remember your trip to Slovenia in high school? You reported to everyone on that.”

He had been dragged on that school trip the way he'd been forced into
Brigadoon.
“Who set the itinerary to Slovenia?” I'd asked when he announced the news in his morose way.

“The teacher,” he said.

“I bet he has Sloveniak relatives he wants to see and the trip is a front for that,” I said.

“It's true, he does have relatives there. We're going to Venice and Greece, too. But you're right, the most time is in Slovenia.”

When he returned, he said, “The whole trip was comprised of sitting on buses, waiting.”

He said he'd been given horrible dumplings and puddings to eat in the homes of the Slovenians.

“They watch you every second, every bite, to make sure you're eating the dumplings and puddings. One day I couldn't stand it anymore and I left. I walked to the nearest hotel.”

“How far away was it?”

“About four hours. I'm on these dusty roads with donkeys and mules, I'm carrying my suitcases and raincoat in the blazing sun. I'm breathing sand and dirt and passing by bandits and beggars the whole way. I have no water. I get to the hotel and they don't think I have money for a room, I'm just a kid. So I give them my American Express card and finally they take me to a room they've hastily cleaned out from the last guest, who departed one second before.

“There's an ashtray with a cigarette butt still going in it and someone's jacket on the chair. Maybe it's the owner's room, who knows. I opened the window and went to sleep for a few hours.”

“You were brave to do all that,” I said. I was impressed. “Did you get a bottle of water?”

“Yes—an inferior brand. I called my parents to inform them, and they're, like, ‘Okay, go meet the tour back at the hotel and fly home with them.'

“The teachers were, like, ‘We'll report you for this behavior,' and I'm, like, ‘Fine. My parents didn't know we'd be in Slovenia for ten days when they sent me on this expensive trip.'”

“Why don't you report them to the principal? Do they still have principals?” I pictured a free-for-all school system and society, the signs of which I saw everywhere.