Page 15 of A Little Life
[II]
The Postman
1
SATURDAYS WERE FORwork, but Sundays were for walking. The walks had begun out of necessity five years ago, when he had moved to the city and knew little about it: each week, he would choose a different neighborhood and walk from Lispenard Street to it, and then around it, covering its perimeter precisely, and then home again. He never skipped a Sunday, unless the weather made it near impossible, and even now, even though he had walked every neighborhood in Manhattan, and many in Brooklyn and Queens as well, he still left every Sunday morning at ten, and returned only when his route was complete. The walks had long ceased to be something he enjoyed, although he didn’tnotenjoy them, either—it was simply something he did. For a period, he had also hopefully considered them something more than exercise, something perhaps restorative, like an amateur physical therapy session, despite the fact that Andy didn’t agree with him, and indeed disapproved of his walks. “I’m fine with your wanting to exercise your legs,” he’d said. “But in that case, you should really be swimming, not dragging yourself up and down pavement.” He wouldn’t have minded swimming, actually, but there was nowhere private enough for him to swim, and so he didn’t.
Willem had occasionally joined him on these walks, and now, if his route took him past the theater, he would time it so they could meet at the juice stand down the block after the matinee performance. They would have their drinks, and Willem would tell him how the show hadgone and would buy a salad to eat before the evening performance, and he would continue south, toward home.
They still lived at Lispenard Street, although both of them could have moved into their own apartments: he, certainly; Willem, probably. But neither of them had ever mentioned leaving to the other, and so neither of them had. They had, however, annexed the left half of the living room to make a second bedroom, the group of them building a lumpy Sheetrocked wall one weekend, so now when you walked in, there was only the gray light from two windows, not four, to greet you. Willem had taken the new bedroom, and he had stayed in their old one.
Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see Willem’s play—a family drama calledThe Malamud Theorem, about a literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a physicist—five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call, he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage’s very elevation announced Willem’s ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily accessible to him.
His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely resemble what a thirty-year-old’s life ought to be. The same was not true for his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they had and hadn’t done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and promises. Things had changed, then. The secondbedroom, for example, was erected partly out of Willem’s fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety—the fear that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it with their own radical announcements—inspired Malcolm’s hasty coming out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when he started dating a woman.
But despite his friends’ anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable age. He clearly remembered being a very young boy—this was when he lived in the monastery—and asking Brother Michael, who liked to tell him of the travels he had taken in his other life, when he too might be able to travel.
“When you’re older,” Brother Michael had said.
“When?” he’d asked. “Next year?” Then, even a month had seemed as long as forever.
“Many years,” Brother Michael had said. “When you’re older. When you’re thirty.” And now, in just a few weeks, he would be.
On those Sundays, when he was readying to leave for his walk, he would sometimes stand, barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him, and the small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel. Here, time was his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked. He would stand before the tiny hallway closet—an alcove, really, over which they had strung a length of burlap—and admire the stores within it. At Lispenard Street, there were no late-night scrambles to the bodega on West Broadway for a roll of toilet paper, no squinching your nose above a container of long-spoiled milk found in the back corner of the refrigerator: here, there was always extra. Here, everything was replaced when it needed to be. He made sure of it. In their first year at Lispenard Street he had been self-conscious about his habits, which he knew belonged to someone much older and probably female, and had hidden his supplies of paper towels under his bed, had stuffed the fliers for coupons into his briefcase to look through later, when Willem wasn’t home, as if they werea particularly exotic form of pornography. But one day, Willem had discovered his stash while looking for a stray sock he’d kicked under the bed.
He had been embarrassed. “Why?” Willem had asked him. “I think it’s great. Thank god you’re looking out for this kind of stuff.” But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.
And yet—as with so much else—he couldn’t help himself. To whom could he explain that he found as much contentment and safety in unloved Lispenard Street, in his bomb-shelter stockpilings, as he did in the facts of his degrees and his job? Or that those moments alone in the kitchen were something akin to meditative, the only times he found himself truly relaxing, his mind ceasing to scrabble forward, planning in advance the thousands of little deflections and smudgings of truth, of fact, that necessitated his every interaction with the world and its inhabitants? To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he’d had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.
Today he would walk to the Upper East Side: up West Broadway to Washington Square Park, to University and through Union Square, and up Broadway to Fifth, which he’d stay on until Eighty-sixth Street, and then back down Madison to Twenty-fourth Street, where he’d cross east to Lexington before continuing south and east once more to Irving, where he’d meet Willem outside the theater. It had been months, almost a year, since he had done this circuit, both because it was very far and because he already spent every Saturday on the Upper East Side, in a town house not far from Malcolm’s parents’, where he tutored a twelve-year-old boy named Felix. But it was mid-March, spring break, and Felix and his family were on vacation in Utah, which meant he ran no risk of seeing them.
Felix’s father was a friend of friends of Malcolm’s parents, and it had been Malcolm’s father who had gotten him the job. “They’re really not paying you enough at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, are they?” Mr. Irvine had asked him. “I don’t know why you won’t just let me introduce youto Gavin.” Gavin was one of Mr. Irvine’s law school friends, who now presided over one of the city’s more powerful firms.
“Dad, he doesn’twantto work for some corporate firm,” Malcolm had begun, but his father continued talking as if Malcolm hadn’t even spoken, and Malcolm had hunched back into his chair. He had felt bad for Malcolm then, but also annoyed, as he had told Malcolm todiscreetlyinquire whether his parents knew anyone who might have a kid who needed tutoring, not toactuallyask them.
“Really, though,” Malcolm’s father had said to him, “I think it’s terrific that you’re interested in making your way on your own.” (Malcolm slouched even lower in his seat.) “But do you really need the money that badly? I didn’t think the federal government paidthatmiserably, but it’s been a long time since I was in public service.” He grinned.
He smiled back. “No,” he said, “the salary’s fine.” (It was. It wouldn’t have been to Mr. Irvine, of course, nor to Malcolm, but it was more money than he had ever dreamed he would have, and every two weeks it arrived, a relentless accumulation of numbers.) “I’m just saving up for a down payment.” He saw Malcolm’s face swivel toward him, and he reminded himself to tell Willem the particular lie he had told Malcolm’s father before Malcolm told Willem himself.
“Oh, well, good for you,” said Mr. Irvine. This was a goal he could understand. “And as it happens, I know just the person.”
That person was Howard Baker, who had hired him after interviewing him for fifteen distracted minutes to tutor his son in Latin, math, German, and piano. (He wondered why Mr. Baker wasn’t hiring professionals for each subject—he could have afforded it—but didn’t ask.) He felt sorry for Felix, who was small and unappealing, and who had a habit of scratching the inside of one narrow nostril, his index finger tunneling upward until he remembered himself and quickly retracted it, rubbing it on the side of his jeans. Eight months later, it was still unclear to him just how capable Felix was. He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it. He was always waiting, on time and with his assignments completed, every Saturday at one p.m., and he obediently answered every question—his answers always ending in an anxious, querying upper register, as if every one, even the simplest (“Salve, Felix, quid agis?” “Um…bene?”), were a desperate guess—but henever had any questions of his own, and when he asked Felix if there was any subject in particular he might want to try discussing in either language, Felix would shrug and mumble, his finger drifting toward his nose. He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon—Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway—that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.
The previous month, Mr. Baker had asked to speak to him after their lessons were over, and he had said goodbye to Felix and followed the maid into the study. His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling—as he often did—as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.
He had expected impatience from Mr. Baker, perhaps anger, even though Felix was doing quantifiably better in school, and he was ready to defend himself if he needed—Mr. Baker paid far more than he had anticipated, and he had plans for the money he was earning there—but he was instead nodded toward the chair in front of the desk.
“What do you think’s wrong with Felix?” Mr. Baker had demanded.
He hadn’t been expecting the question, so he had to think before he answered. “I don’t think anything’s wrong with him, sir,” he’d said, carefully. “I just think he’s not—”Happy, he nearly said. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. “I think he’s shy,” he finished.
Mr. Baker grunted (this was obviously not the answer he was looking for). “But you like him, right?” he’d asked him, with such an odd, vulnerable desperation that he experienced a sudden deep sadness, both for Felix and for Mr. Baker. Was this what being a parent was like? Was this what being achildwith a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!
“Of course,” he had said, and Mr. Baker had sighed and given him his check, which the maid usually handed to him on his way out.
The next week, Felix hadn’t wanted to play his assignment. He was more listless than usual. “Shall we play something else?” he’d asked.Felix had shrugged. He thought. “Do you want me to play something for you?” Felix had shrugged again. But he did anyway, because it was a beautiful piano and sometimes, as he watched Felix inch his fingers across its lovely smooth keys, he longed to be alone with the instrument and let his hands move over its surface as fast as he could.
He played Haydn, Sonata No. 50 in D Major, one of his favorite pieces and so bright and likable that he thought it might cheer them both up. But when he was finished, and there was only the quiet boy sitting next to him, he was ashamed, both of the braggy, emphatic optimism of the Haydn and of his own burst of self-indulgence.
