Читать книгу Nirvana Is Here - Aaron Hamburger - Страница 24

TWO

A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE THE basketball game, Ari goes for an extra run. He hates running, but he tells himself that if he runs for half an hour four times a week before trooping off to campus to teach Special Topics in Medieval History or Women of the Middle Ages: Feminism’s First Wave?, then he’s allowed the occasional doughnut for breakfast. As a result, he has knee trouble and a small potbelly.

What the hell is he going to do about M? He has to make some kind of decision, the right one, the ethical one. But how can he ruin the man he once believed he’d be spending the rest of his life with? E. M. Forster used to say if forced to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I hope I have the guts to betray my country. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the same kind of situation. So what is he going to do? For the time being, he keeps on running.

Ari’s neighborhood, called “the Park,” is a pleasant enough area northeast of DC that was once working class but is now the kind of place where residents recycle and buy raw water at Whole Foods. The sidewalks are marked with children’s chalk drawings of hearts, moons, and stars that wash out with the rain. Sometimes Ari stops to look at these drawings, scanning them for traces of talent, though he himself hasn’t picked up a paintbrush or drawing instrument in years.

These days, Ari takes pleasure in art by looking rather than producing, a shift of mind dating back to sophomore year of college, and a required survey class, Art of the Western World Part I: The Ancient World to the Late Middle Ages. While cramming for finals, he’d stare at textbook images of stained glass windows and manuscript illuminations, with their broad panes of flat colors. He wanted to know about the people who made these. What were their lives like?

He felt especially drawn to the concept of courtly love. In the early days of Ari’s relationship with M, M would quote bits he’d memorized from love poems by Audre Lorde or Thom Gunn while Ari read from Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century treatise The Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reproving of Dishonourable Love:

He who is not jealous is not in love.

The lover regularly turns pale before his beloved. His heart pulses.

He rarely eats, sleeps little.

A love easily won is of little value; difficulty makes it valuable.

A true lover thinks of nothing but that which will please the beloved.

When attained, love disappears, like a piece of ice in the fist.

When made public, love fails to endure.

He’s taught these verses so often he knows them by heart. Sadly, they seem especially quaint and amusing in the age of social media, in particular the idea that “When made public, love fails to endure.”

Is that why any exchange of genuine emotion seems so rare now, so hard won? Because so much of our lives are lived in public?

Ari’s convinced that Orwell was right about Big Brother, but wrong about how such an arrangement would be achieved. No one forces us to live our lives under constant surveillance; we happily give away our privacy without coercion or reward. He used to warn M about this. “Every time you stream something, you’re giving up your information to Big Data, to be tracked.”

“Oh, Pooh-bear,”—that was one of M’s favorite ironic nicknames for Ari—“you’re as addicted to paranoia as I am to online amateur porn.”

His neighbor, a single mother with two teenage girls, is tying pink balloons to her porch. She’s hosting a Valentine’s Day party. Her windows are decorated with cardboard hearts printed with messages like “Be Mine,” “Real Love,” and the odd “Not Tonite.” She waves to Ari, asks when M is coming home. Ari’s been spreading the story that M has taken an artist’s fellowship at a colony in upstate in New York for the semester.

“Hard to say,” Ari pants, pretending he’s too out of breath from jogging to talk for long. “He’s having a great time up there. Later!”

It’s an especially chilly morning for February in suburban DC, and the weather makes Ari lonely. Had he accepted his parents’ invitation to visit them this weekend in Florida, he could be running in shorts and a T-shirt. Afterward he’d have to fight for bathroom time with his brother and his wife and their gaggle of chatty children. And at meals, he’d be the odd “plus one,” stuck in wherever there was an extra chair. Maybe his parents had only invited him in the faint hope that M might come too.

Also, if he were in Florida, he’d miss the basketball game.

Still puffing his way down the sidewalk, Ari decides to rouse himself from his usual amiably melancholy state of mind. Today isn’t a day for doldrums. Today he’s going to a basketball game, so rahrah. And today, at this basketball game, he’ll see Justin for the first time in twenty years. Rah-rah indeed.

He’d taken up running in college, when he needed to do something for exercise, and the business of trying to find a partner to play tennis was too tedious. He didn’t particularly like running, but it had its advantages. No racquet strings to snap on you without warning, no balls to chase, no club memberships or court time to pay for, no partners to let you down by failing to show up, just you against the pavement, running as fast and as hard as you could, as if your life depended on it.

One time, while in grad school at Columbia, he’d been running in Riverside Park, and it had seemed to him his life really had depended on it. He’d stopped to catch his breath, near Grant’s Tomb, and caught eyes with a man standing in the trees. A white man in a black denim jacket. Not moving, not even seeming to breathe, staring fiercely at Ari as if he wanted something.

Ari began running again and the man followed, staying in the cover of the trees, but following. So Ari ran faster, and the man ran faster too, weaving in and out of the trees, his sneakers crunching leaves.

What do you want? What the hell do you want from me?

His breath short, his throat closing up, his chest tight, his fingers clenched, Ari cut across an open lawn and under a bridge toward the river. The man still followed. All around them were parents pushing strollers, other joggers, bicyclists, but no one could help Ari, none of them could stop this man from taking what he wanted, if he were bold enough to reach out and take it.

Ari continued running, panicking, unsure of where to go, what to do. He turned haphazardly, zigzagging in different directions, tripped up by a divot in his path, his legs scarred by errant thorny branches, his lungs filling up with the humid air that came off the Hudson River, bearing a strangely cool, metallic scent.

And then he turned around and the man was gone.

He told this story to M, who said, “He was probably just cruising you.”

“Or trying to beat me up and grab my wallet,” said Ari.

M sighed. “There are men out there who just want to get laid, not to hurt you. They’re horny, not criminals. Do you get the difference?”

“Of course,” Ari lied. He has never told M about what happened with Mark. So why does M seem to know about it anyway?

ARI TURNS DOWN HIS FAVORITE STREET, a sheltered cul-de-sac of identical homes, all built in the 1920s from a Sears Roebuck kit. There’s been talk of landmarking them, but the owners are against the move, which would make the renovation process a pain in the neck.

Does Justin still play tennis? He used to have such a graceful forehand.

Some people run listening to music or podcasts, but Ari prefers his ears naked as it were, to be alone with his own thoughts. And to be alert, in case someone’s sneaking up on him. Their area is safe, but he’s read reports of crimes on the neighborhood list-serve, and in that free local newspaper that most people throw away but he reads every Thursday, always turning first to the “crime blotter,” to learn of the odd burglary, a good many instances of car theft, and the occasional gun sighting. One young woman living alone had witnessed a young man bang her front door open holding a gun. The man, stunned, asked, “What are you doing here?” Then he smacked her across the face. She fell down, blacked out. He took a laptop and some cheap jewelry.

Now, when Ari leaves his house, he turns on the burglar alarm, a few lights, and the television. He bought several signs and nailed them up on the fence around his backyard: “Beware of Dog” and “Warning: this area under video surveillance.” But he has no dog. He has no cameras.

HE’D LOOKED UP MARK ONLINE. THE trail has mostly gone cold, but Ari has learned that for many years, Mark lived in New York City, though far from where Ari went to school, in an area of Brooklyn where street signs are printed in Yiddish. He’d written advice columns for parents, for a religious newspaper. Once, he’d talked about the struggles of bringing up adolescent boys, “that age when your body is like a ship at sea, tossed around violently by raging hormones and all you want to do is reach out and touch someone . . .”

SO TODAY IS FINALLY THE DAY of the game, the reunion with Justin, his high school first crush—though maybe crush is too faint a word for what Justin was. Is? No, was. Definitely was. Not crush, but love. That he can freely admit. Love.

And then tomorrow there’s another meeting of M’s review committee.

The first meeting had been torture. They’d met in one of the older classrooms on campus, which still had a chalkboard and overlooked a barn where agricultural students were looking after cows, pigs, and chickens. Not a place where you’d want to open the windows in nicer weather.

They were a committee of five, four faculty members, one administrator. There was also a student observer with no voting rights, but she had texted the head of the committee five minutes after the start of the meeting with an excuse for why she couldn’t make it. She had to meet her mother at the airport. “Have fun without me!”

The proceedings were not too dissimilar from Medieval notions of justice, when the accused might have to hold a hot iron bar and walk several paces, or retrieve a stone from a vat of boiling water. They began with a brief review of the sordid details of the story. A party off-campus, in a house rented by four English majors. In addition to underage drinking and a joint passed around, there’d been a hot tub, and students in varying states of undress getting in and out of the tub, until somehow, as in a game of musical chairs, only M and the student were left, dressed only in their underwear.

The words “hot tub” were articulated with disgust, as if they were the smoking gun.

Ari recalled the story all too clearly, beginning with the confusion of the young man, who at first enjoyed the attentions of his charismatic mentor, the mildly flirty compliments, the excitement of being treated as an intellectual equal by a real working poet who wore purple sneakers to class and was equally at ease making jokes about William Wordsworth or Kim Kardashian. And when the other students disappeared, the poet moved closer, his arm resting on the ledge of the tub, not a long distance from the bare shoulders of the young man, now feeling dizzy from the alcohol, the hot bubbling water, the excitement of being away from home and doing adult things. And now the arm was slipping off the ledge, resting on bare skin, with a gentle presence that felt friendly, familiar, so why not go along with it? Where was the poet’s other arm? Under the water, traveling, exploring like Magellan, trying to get to the other side of the world, or at least to crawl up the student’s thigh. “You’re very sweet,” said the poet in a soft voice. “You should have more confidence in yourself. You have so much to offer someone.” It almost might have been alright had it stopped there. It was a nice thing to say, right? But then those fingers kept moving. “You’re very sweet,” the poet said once more. “You said that already,” said the student, wishing not to feel that familiar tingle in the groin, the involuntary stiffening. “I don’t think we should . . .” “No?” said the poet. “No,” said the student. “No?” said the poet again, grabbing hold, now stroking. “Or yes?” “No,” said the student. “Just a little longer,” said the poet. “See how good it feels, how good I can make you feel. You’ll like it.”

Who the hell is this treacherous predator, Ari thought. Is he really my husband? Have I helped him in some way, by listening to his stories?

Because in M’s retellings of the various romantic exploits of his past, all his partners had been willing, complicit, fun-loving worshippers of Priapus. Listening to him, Ari had always felt like a sex-shaming prude for feeling both uncomfortable yet curious, sometimes even experiencing a vicarious thrill or two. He was convinced that he in fact needed to work on himself, perhaps force himself to initiate sex more often to catch up—or at least subscribe to more porn online. Now he wasn’t sure of what he thought. How many of M’s stories were in need of some historical revisionism?

“At first, I wasn’t even sure what was happening,” wrote the complainant. “But later when I got home, it sank in. This was wrong.”

How did you figure it out? Ari thought. Even now, years later, I still have to remind myself that what happened to me, the accident or incident, that it wasn’t my fault.

One of the members of the committee, an art history professor in a baggy neon wool knit sweater that smelled as if it needed washing, raised her hand to say she was already prepared to render judgment. Her first name was Aimee, and Ari resented its unorthodox spelling.

“But we haven’t interviewed the respondent yet,” said Ari.

“I don’t agree with you. As a woman, particularly a woman of color, I don’t believe in being soft on sexual harassment.” Aimee, whose skin was paler than Ari’s, identified as a woman of color because her equally fair-skinned mother had been born in South Africa to white parents. She also made it known that though she was married to a cis man, she identified as bisexual and disabled. In case there was any mistaking the latter, she carried a cane, which she’d covered in shiny silver duct tape, and made a point of loudly dropping on the floor several times during the meeting. Occasionally she used it while walking, or at least, she tapped the ground with it every so often.

“I bought it at Bed, Bath and Beyond,” Aimee told the head of the committee at the beginning of the meeting. “Bed, Bath and Beyond sells the best canes.”

“Excuse me, when did I say I was soft on sexual harassment?” Ari asked.

“Well, I just thought, I mean, when you said . . .” she said. “These are real lives at stake. We have to protect our students.”

“Yes, but when did I say I was soft on sexual harassment?”

“When you disagreed with me, I thought . . .”

“No, you didn’t think,” Ari said. “You assumed.”

Aimee turned to the head of the committee. “I’d like to finish what I was saying without interruption, without being man-splained.”

Ari kept his mouth shut for the rest of the meeting. There had been a time when his queerness had made him an object of fascination, but now queerness was waning out of fashion in academe, having been trumped by disability studies. Anyway, he was glad. He’d never enjoyed being looked at for too long.

In the end, the committee voted three to two to keep the inquiry open until they could hear direct testimony from the claimant and the respondent. The decision surprised Ari since no one said anything openly to indicate that they agreed with him—perhaps they didn’t dare. The art history professor often called people out on Twitter. However, he noticed the two that had voted with Ari gave him sympathetic looks while Aimee was preoccupied with dropping her cane on the floor before getting out of her chair.

The battle-lines were becoming clear: Aimee and another committee member leaning toward lowering the boom, Ari and the other two disposed toward leniency. Though Ari could tip the balance the other way with his vote if he so chose.

A mistake of judgment made on a drunken night. A few fateful minutes. Bad enough to end their marriage. Should it also wreck a man’s life? Ari feared that he already knew the answer, yet could he trust himself to be impartial? Not just because of his relationship with M, but also that other reason, that horrible history Ari carries with him everywhere.

ARI’S ALMOST AT THE END OF his run, and his cheeks are hot pink, burning from the cold air. There’s no one chasing him, though whenever he passes a boy or worse a pack of boys, about the age of fourteen, he feels a deep sense of panic. Sometimes they show up at his front door, carrying boxes of candy to raise money for their high school, or offering to shovel the snow out of his driveway for a few bucks. Every time they ring the bell or pound his door, he freezes, closes his eyes, and waits for them to go away.

And while he’s waiting, he reminds himself that he’s not a teenager anymore. He’s safe.

He recites his mantra over and over, hoping that if he repeats the words enough times, he’ll believe them.