The Candy House(16)
Alfred went on narrating without inflection until Jack wiped his eyes and begged him to pause. “Gotta take a—you know,” he said, and went inside.
Alfred had been trying, impulsively, to cheer Jack up. But when Jack returned with a whole cooler full of Old Styles and Alfred resumed his parody, it felt different. He proceeded with a sense of perilous intention, as if he were dismantling The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese and setting it afire for Jack to warm himself.
It was then, in the act of parodying his life’s work, Alfred told me later, that he decided to contact me. Maybe he’d known he would; he’d kept my card in his wallet for the year since we’d met. Now that he was junking and repurposing failed endeavors, why not offer up his screaming project for “some phony academic bullshit,” after all? For that, he needed me.
But I needed him, too. Why study authenticity if not to seek it—try to wring some last truth from that word before it’s so leached of meaning that it becomes a word casing: a shell without a bullet; a term that can be used only inside quotation marks? I needed Alfred to help me avoid writing some phony academic bullshit. This collaborative chapter, hybrid and unorthodox as it may seem in an academic context, represents that attempt.
In retrospect, then, there were three of us sitting with Jack Stevens behind his house on that midwestern fall night. Darkness swooped down and the moon rose and hardened and turned white. The hiss of highway sounded like wind, or the sea. Alfred wanted to sit there forever. He drew out the hilarity as long as he could sustain it, staving off the moment when Jack would say he needed to get to bed, and the party would stop.
A Journey A Stranger Comes to Town
MILES
My cousin Sasha had lived in the desert for twenty years before I discovered she had become an artist. I was looking at her kids’ social media stories, as I often did with people I used to know, to see how they’d aged and try to gauge their happiness, when I saw a post from her son: “Proud of my Mom,” with a link to an article about Sasha in ARTnews. The picture showed dozens of hot-air balloons suspended above rambling, colorful sculptures stretched out across the California desert. According to the article, Sasha made these forms out of discarded plastic. Later she melted the sculptures down to create compressed bricks that had been displayed and sold, along with aerial photos of that same plastic in sculptural form, at art galleries.
Sasha! What the hell!
If anyone had required proof that life’s outcomes are impossible to predict, this development would have supplied it. Sasha had been a fuckup all the way into her thirties: a kleptomaniac who’d managed to pilfer countless items from countless people over countless years. How did I know? Because right before she married Drew, in 2008, she started returning things. Everyone in the family received an item or two, sometimes of so little value that it was amazing Sasha remembered what belonged to whom. My dad got a Bic pen, the kind they sold in bags of twenty at Staples. I, too, received a pen, but mine was a Montblanc worth several hundred dollars. I’d nearly had a brain hemorrhage when it vanished after a family dinner at a Korean restaurant while I was visiting New York. I’d phoned the restaurant, the taxi authority, the MTA; I’d retraced my steps through Koreatown, bent at the waist to scrutinize gutters. When that very same pen showed up in my mailbox a couple of years later with a handwritten note that began, “Since my teenage years I have struggled with a compulsion to steal, which has been a source of great anguish to me, and of loss and frustration to many others,” I called my dad.
“I know,” he said. “I got a Bic. I’m not even sure it’s mine, it might have belonged to the restaurant.”
“Can we please be done with her, Dad?” I asked. “Once and for all? She’s incorrigible.”
“She’s the opposite of incorrigible. She’s making amends.”
“I don’t want her amends. I want her to disappear.”
“What makes you say things like that, Miles?”
I remember exactly where I was standing when we had that conversation: on the deck of the lakeside Winnetka home Trudy and I had overleveraged ourselves to buy (she was pregnant with Polly, our first) and painstakingly decorated together: the site of a planned domestic idyll of children, holidays, and family reunions that we’d rapturously envisioned since meeting in law school at the University of Chicago. Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
Fuck Sasha, I thought.
I’m fully aware that Sasha emerges from these descriptions as sympathetic, whereas I come off as a moralizing prig. I was a moralizing prig, and not just toward my cousin. My father, who treated Sasha as a daughter and whom I saw as her enabler; my mother, whose romantic adventures since my parents’ divorce I found sickening; my younger brothers, Ames and Alfred, both of whom I’d deemed “lost” before they turned twenty-five—no one escaped the roving, lacerating beam of my judgment. I can access that beam even now, decades later: a font of outraged impatience with other people’s flaws. How had the human species managed to survive for millennia? How had we built civilizations and invented antibiotics when practically no one, other than Trudy and me, seemed capable of sucking it up and just getting things done?