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Authors: Peter Cameron

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BOOK: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

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“But sometimes there aren’t rules. As in this case—I believe
each other
is usually used when referring to two people and
one another
is used when referring to more than two people, but I believe that is a custom, not a rule, that there is really no correct form.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. I thought she might be making it up.

“English is my second language. When you study a new language, you learn things like that.”

I hadn’t known that English was Dr. Adler’s second language. She must be German, I figured, but she had no accent, at least that I could discern. I always feel humbled by people who speak more than one language. I envy them. It seems with two (or more) vocabularies, you could not only say so much more and speak to so many more people, but also think more. I often feel like I want to think something but I can’t find the language that coincides with the thought, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I’m thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

“You brought up your experience with John and then you changed the subject. Why do you think you did that?” Dr. Adler asked.

“I changed the subject?”

“It appeared to me you did. You started to talk about language. Word usage.”

“Well, it’s all related,” I said, only because I didn’t like being accused of changing the subject, which I had not done deliberately. Of course that fact holds little weight in a shrink’s office, because they aren’t really interested in the things you do deliberately.

“How are they related?”

How is misleading John Webster and causing a scene in the Frick Museum like proper word usage?
It seemed like one of those impossible SAT questions where you can’t even figure out what’s being asked, let alone answer it. But then it suddenly made sense to me.

“They’re both about the correct or proper way to do something. There is a correct and proper way to use words and there is a correct and proper way to behave with other people. And I behaved improperly with John and feel bad, so I compensate by obsessing with language, which is easier to control than behavior.”

I was quite impressed with this answer, but Dr. Adler stared at me as if she were still waiting for me to respond. She looked a bit preoccupied, and I wondered if she had even heard me. I knew from experience this was a tactic she used to get me to continue, but I felt that because I had answered her question I deserved some sort of response. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything, just shrugged her shoulders a little, as if she didn’t think very much of it at all. Then she sat up a bit straighter and said, “I think you’re very clever,” but she said it in a way that made it clear she was really saying that I thought I was very clever. The meanness of this stung me, so I said nothing. I thought of the expression “He’s too clever for his own good.” When I was in second grade my teacher had written that in the comments section of my report card:
James sometimes has a tendency to be too clever for his own good.
It seemed like some sort of riddle to me, like black and white and red all over, and I asked my mother what it meant. She said it meant I talked too much.

After a moment of silence Dr. Adler said, “Well, that’s all the time we have today.”

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

I STOPPED AT HOME FOR A PEE AND SOMETHING TO DRINK ON the way back to the gallery. Miró was lying in the bathtub. He often lies there in the summer, because it’s cool, I think. He opened his eyes and watched me judgmentally. I wondered for a moment if it was okay to urinate in front of a dog, and then realized how absurd that was, so I gave Miró a kind of fuck-you-you’re-a-dog look. In private I’m often nasty to Miró. I say things to him like “You’re just a dog. You don’t have a passport or a Social Security number. You can’t even open doors. You’re totally at my mercy.” Or “Get a haircut. Put on some shoes.” I know he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but I think he suspects something’s not quite right.

I looked in the refrigerator for something to drink, which you’d think would be a relatively easy thing to find, but since no one in my family ever really shops, it can be difficult. At that moment there was a carton of Tropicana orange juice with only a few drops left in it (since it was the rule that if you finished something, you were responsible for replacing it, the competition not to finish something was keen), a quart of 2 percent milk that was three days past its expiration date, three bottles of Peroni beer, a liter of caffeine-free diet Coke that I knew belonged to Rainer Maria, and some of that disgusting soy milk stuff that Gillian had bought months ago when she was going through a supposed lactose-intolerant phase.

And so I was running the faucet, waiting for the cold water to get from wherever distant place it was to our kitchen sink, when Gillian came in through the front door. She entered the kitchen and said, “What are you doing here?” as if I didn’t live there and have just as much right to be there as she.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “but I’m on my way from therapy to the gallery.”

“That all sounds very pleasant,” said Gillian. “Meanwhile, I’ve had the worst fucking morning of my life.” She opened the refrigerator and stared into it.

“What happened?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Please be sure, because there’s lots of it and it sucks.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Okay. Well, first I had this date to meet Amanda Goshen at the Barneys Warehouse Sale at noon.”

“Who’s Amanda Goshen?”

“She’s this sort-of friend from Barnard. She was in my memoir-writing class last semester.”

“You were in a memoir-writing class? Barnard offers classes in memoir-writing?”

“Yes,” said Gillian, “and stop interrupting. If you’re going to question everything I say, forget it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just think it’s a bit odd to be writing your memoirs before you’ve even graduated from college.”

“These days you’re never too young to write your memoirs,” said Gillian. “So shut up. Okay, first I’m walking along Bank Street past the brownstone that has that ridiculous miniature privet hedge growing in front of it and I’m just running my hand along the top of it, sort of patting it on its head as I walk past, and this lady appears from behind me and says, Don’t touch the privet. And I can’t believe this lady is telling me not to touch the privet. I mean, how sick is that? So I look at her and I say, What do you mean? and she says, I mean this is my privet, it’s private property, and I wish you wouldn’t manhandle it. She actually used that word,
manhandle
. And I swear I was barely touching it, you know, just running my hand along the top, tickling my palm, and I can’t believe this woman is yelling at me for manhandling her privet, so I grab a handful of it and yank and throw it at her and say, Fuck you and your privet, and keep walking. And she’s screaming after me that she’s going to call the cops. And meanwhile there must have been thorns or something in the fucking privet because my palm is cut and bleeding. Just a little, but still. See …” She closed the refrigerator and displayed her palm, which had indeed been injured. “Okay, so you can imagine what kind of mood that puts me in, and I get to Barneys, and I’m waiting outside for Amanda and it’s sunny and hot, so I’m leaning against the building and I’m wearing this tank top and I pull the straps down so I won’t get lines, and an old man comes up to me and says hello in this very friendly way, as if he knew me. And I thought he was Mr. Berkowitz, so I say hello, very friendly, and then I realize it isn’t Mr. Berkowitz but just some dirty old man that looks like Mr. Berkowitz. And I realize he thinks I’m a hooker or something because he asks me if I’d like to go on a date with him. A date, okay. He wants to take me somewhere and manhandle me and give me money and he calls it a date. So I say, No, I don’t want a date, and he says, Why not, it looks like you’re looking for a date, and I say, I’m not looking for a date, I’m just waiting for my friend, and he says, I’d love to watch you and your friend be friendly together—this is an old man who’s a dead ringer for Mr. Berkowitz, remember—and I tell him to fuck off and he calls me a bitch and starts to walk away and then he turns around and spits at me, but he’s not a very good spitter and it just sort of dribbles down his shirtfront, so he calls me bitch again and walks away. Okay, so by now it’s like quarter past twelve and I’m still waiting for Amanda and I wait for another five minutes and my cell rings and of course it’s Amanda and she says she can’t meet me because guess what, she’s sold her memoir to HarperCollins for $600,000 and she’s having lunch with her editor in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons and if I see a pair of jade green Giuseppe Zanotti sandals would I buy them for her and she’ll reimburse me? Okay, so at this point I decide I can’t deal with the Barneys Warehouse Sale and I walk the ten blocks home and I think about buying an iced coffee and I think no, there’s a bottle of Smartwater in the fridge and that’s much healthier especially since you’ve already had three coffees, and I get home and of course the Smartwater has disappeared. Did you drink it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then it must have been Mom.”

“Do you think she was lying?”

“Who? Mom?”

“No. Amanda Goshen.”

“About lunch at The Four Seasons?”

“No,” I said. “About selling her memoir for $600,000. About selling her memoir, period.”

“No, I’m sure it’s true. She had the greatest memoir; she had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.”

“What’s alopecia?”

“Hair loss. She was bald, all over.” She opened the refrigerator and gazed inside again, as if the bottle of Smartwater might have magically appeared. It had not. She closed it. “Oh,” she said, “by the way, before I forget—Jordan Powell called you this morning.”

“Who’s Jordan Powell?”

“Your roommate.”

At first I had no idea what she was talking about and then I remembered getting a big envelope from Brown a few days ago that I threw away without opening, since I thought opening and reading mail from Brown would only deepen my connection to it, the way if you open a box of cookies in a grocery store you are obligated to buy them.

“What’s his name?”

“Jordan Powell. Or Howell. No, it’s Powell, I think. I wrote it down somewhere. He’s ‘passing through New York on his way to the Vineyard,’ and was hoping to get together with you. I told him you’d call him back tonight.”

“Well, I won’t,” I said. “There’s no reason to call him, since he won’t be my roommate, since I’m not going to Brown. What did he sound like?”

“Like someone who would say ‘I’m passing through New York on my way to the Vineyard.’ But besides that he sounded okay.”

I filled a glass with not even remotely cold water and drank it.

“Are you going out?” Gillian asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going back to work.”

“Would you stop at Starbucks and get me an iced coffee? Please?”

“What, and bring it home to you in four hours?”

“No. Go to Starbucks, get the iced coffee, bring it back here, and then go to work.”

“Maybe I could pick up your dry cleaning while I’m out there,” I said.

“It wouldn’t kill you to get me an iced coffee.”

“No, but not getting killed doing something is not a very compelling reason to do it.”

The gallery was empty (surprise!) when I returned and the door to my mother’s office was closed. I sat down at the desk. It was two-thirty, which meant I had to sit there for another two and a half hours. My mother’s gallery was in a building of galleries surrounded by other buildings of galleries, and I thought of how in most of those galleries there was someone like me, sitting alone in the air-conditioned chill with nothing to do except try to look as if there was something to do, and then I realized it probably wasn’t just at galleries, that throughout the entire city thousands of offices must be sunk into this midsummer, midafternoon stupor. New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.

I got up and looked out the window and there was no one on the street, and there was something spooky about it. There are these strange moments in New York City when it seems as if everyone has disappeared. Sometimes I go out early on Sunday morning, and there’s no one around, just stillness and quiet, or I’ll wake late at night and look out the window and there will be no lights on anywhere, in all the apartment buildings surrounding us, and I’ll think, Can it be possible that everyone is asleep? Is the city that never sleeps sleeping? Then someone appeared below me on the street: an old man walking a basset hound. The man walked very slowly, but the dog walked even slower. It was almost difficult to tell if they were moving. They reminded me of those sprinklers that follow a hose laid across the ground, rolling it up as they go. When I was young they really bothered me because they seemed to move without moving. I would spend hours watching, trying to see them move. I realize a child who spent hours watching a sprinkler not seem to move across a lawn was destined to grow up to be a disturbed person like me.

“James.”

I turned around and saw my mother standing beside the reception desk. She was looking at me strangely, as if she hadn’t seen me in a very long time. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking out the window,” I said.

“Oh.” She seemed to consider this for a moment, as if it was a suspicious activity she had never heard of. She tapped her fingernails on the top of the marble counter and then said, “I’d like to talk to you. Why don’t we go into my office?”

This seemed odd to me, since there was no one else in the gallery, so we hardly needed to go to her office for privacy. “Okay,” I said, and followed her down the hall into her office. She sat down at her desk and I sat in one of the two Le Corbusier club chairs that faced it. It was a little weird that she was sitting behind her desk. It made it seem very businesslike and official, and that’s not how I think of my mother.

She moved some things around on her desk and then she abruptly stopped and folded her hands together in front of her, like a news anchor after a commercial break. And she looked at me as if she were looking into a camera. Her face was composed and cheerful, but you could tell she was neither of those things. “I just spoke with John,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“He told me what happened last night. He’s very upset, and I don’t blame him.”

“What did he tell you?” I asked.

“He told me what you did. That you concocted a profile on some Web site and contacted him.”

“Actually, he contacted me,” I said.

“He didn’t contact you, James, because it wasn’t your profile. And I want you to be quiet and listen to me.” Her happy/composed look vanished and she looked at me in a scary/fierce way.

I said okay.

“John is very disconcerted by what you did. He doesn’t want to come back to the gallery while you’re here. He seriously threatened to quit. Fortunately, I talked him out of that.”

“Good,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is good. I’m sure you know how difficult things would be for me here if John left. It would be the end of the gallery. I can’t replace him and I can’t manage the gallery myself. And you may think this is all a game, James—the gallery and my life and John’s life and your life—but they aren’t. None of these things are a game. Well, maybe your life is, but that’s for you to decide. Do you think your life is a game?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you seem to. Do you know what sexual harassment is?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course I do.”

“Then why did you do what you did? Didn’t it occur to you that it was wrong? Illegal, in fact? That you’re not supposed to put your co-workers in embarrassing sexual situations?”

“That’s not what I thought I was doing,” I said.

“Oh. What did you think you were doing?”

BOOK: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

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