Part 14 (1/2)
My friends during these years were all busy becoming lawyers and getting married, getting married and becoming lawyers. Ferdinand, a lawyer, got married to another lawyer; Josh, a community organizer, got married to a social worker; Ravi Winikoff, now a lawyer, married a banker. It had recently been proposed, at the monthly discussion hosted by the journal Debate Debate about ”what went wrong with the Left” that the Left had failed to replace the deep culture of religion with a culture of its own. ”When I attend the funerals of my social-democratic friends,” the elderly editor of the journal had said, ”no one knows what to about ”what went wrong with the Left” that the Left had failed to replace the deep culture of religion with a culture of its own. ”When I attend the funerals of my social-democratic friends,” the elderly editor of the journal had said, ”no one knows what to do. do. Whereas at the funerals of religious friends, everything is minutely prescribed. It's very comforting.” Well, the weddings I attended were neither social-democratic nor religious-they were rich! Money was the form their oaths had taken-and love, I think. A kind of yearning, and relief. As for myself, while I dutifully attended all these weddings, I had other plans. I spent most of my time alone, walking through my neighborhood, past the famous strip club Scores, around the giant Bloomingdale's flags.h.i.+p store, as big as an aircraft carrier, and writing my long pieces of political a.n.a.lysis. Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPE-TENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the Whereas at the funerals of religious friends, everything is minutely prescribed. It's very comforting.” Well, the weddings I attended were neither social-democratic nor religious-they were rich! Money was the form their oaths had taken-and love, I think. A kind of yearning, and relief. As for myself, while I dutifully attended all these weddings, I had other plans. I spent most of my time alone, walking through my neighborhood, past the famous strip club Scores, around the giant Bloomingdale's flags.h.i.+p store, as big as an aircraft carrier, and writing my long pieces of political a.n.a.lysis. Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPE-TENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the New Yorker New Yorker and opposing-too late- the war in Iraq. and opposing-too late- the war in Iraq.
Toward the end of the time I'm describing I too met a pretty girl, named Gwyn, who worked at a famous book review for which I wrote. She was younger than I was, by a lot, and she still wors.h.i.+pped, or so she told me and I had no cause to disbelieve her, the life of the mind. Gwyn was quiet and studious in person- like Jillian-but wrote sharp, affectionate e-mails from work and sometimes, or at least often enough, laughed at my jokes when we were home alone in bed or walking down the street together holding hands. She was only a year out of college, and the difference in our ages seemed a scandal to me, at first, but I got over it. She often stayed late at the review, messing up our evening's plans, but in return she brought me review copies, hundreds of review copies, an entire underground publis.h.i.+ng economy filtering directly in to me. Gwyn was filled with bright hope for the future and also uncertainty, of course, as to what would become of her and who she really was. (She kept asking me.) And even with her youth, life had not entirely missed her-she'd been involved with an older guy, like me, a graduate student in history, who'd gone off one day to Syracuse and never, apparently, returned.
On Sat.u.r.day afternoons I met up with some friends-the unmarried ones-to play touch football in the park. Touch football is a limited game, frankly, a shadow cast on the wall by the real thing, and I kept losing at it. I played with some writers and magazine editors, we kept our teams the same each week, and my team always lost. Week after week this happened, for reasons that were beyond me, and week after week, after we had a few pitchers of beer at Oscar's, I walked home to my place on First Avenue (where more often than not now Gwyn would be waiting), wondering what had gone wrong.
Everyone was getting married; it was like some kind of cold people were catching. Ferdinand's wedding was lavish and in another country; Ravi's was lavish in New York. Arielle was getting married! After years of picking up men and discarding them, half alive, she picked one up and let him stay.
Then Jillian got engaged. I had seen her a few times, with varying degrees of pain and discomfort, when she'd come down from Boston. She was doing her medical residency there and it occupied all her time. When we'd seen each other there was no more talk, as there had been for a while before I'd left the country, of us getting back together, though we still clung to each other in the vast universe of other people.
Then one day she called, sounding very nervous, as I sat in my Starbucks reading the political pages of the so-called liberal New American. New American. To be connected to the world through a cell phone means getting all sorts of news in very strange places, and it was in the Starbucks on 60th Street that Jillian gave me the news about her engagement. To be connected to the world through a cell phone means getting all sorts of news in very strange places, and it was in the Starbucks on 60th Street that Jillian gave me the news about her engagement.
I said, ”To a doctor?”
”What does that matter?” she said. ”But yes, to a doctor.”
Wow, I thought, almost involuntarily. A doctor.
”Are you OK?” she asked. ”I mean, are you OK with it? You're not mad?”
”No,” I said, then rummaged about in myself for a moment to make sure. I found no anger there. I was relieved, happy, in shock. So that was that. The end of Jillian and me. ”How could I possibly be mad,” I said. And then, knowing I got to ask this only once: ”Is he a nice person?”
”Yes,” she said very seriously. ”He is.”
”OK.” We were silent for a moment. ”I'm proud of you,” I said.
And I was. It was almost like a victory for us together, that she had managed to move on and find someone nice. And for me it was a dispensation, an annulment. It was the end of something, even if of course everything one does reverberates through the universe eternally, so that there is no end to anything, technically speaking. Jillian was getting married. For her, at least, I was glad.
And then, in November 2006, the Democrats won races for the Senate and House in many states and districts. They took back the Congress. The newly const.i.tuted committees began to exercise the privilege-and what a privilege it now seemed!-of congressional oversight. In the spring of 2007, if you'd walked into the Starbucks on First Avenue and 60th Street, you'd have seen a jaded thirty-one-year-old man reading first the New York Times, New York Times, and then, if you'd stuck around and sipped your latte, the and then, if you'd stuck around and sipped your latte, the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, and, in a crooked, lopsided, jaded way, grinning like a little boy. I was reading about the House Committee on Government Reform. I was reading about the Senate Judiciary Committee. Occasionally I logged on to the better political blogs-there were still some left-and grinned along with them. It was not a happy time, exactly, it was not party-time, exactly, and eventually the Democrats would cave on Iraq, but still something was changing. Things were going to change. and, in a crooked, lopsided, jaded way, grinning like a little boy. I was reading about the House Committee on Government Reform. I was reading about the Senate Judiciary Committee. Occasionally I logged on to the better political blogs-there were still some left-and grinned along with them. It was not a happy time, exactly, it was not party-time, exactly, and eventually the Democrats would cave on Iraq, but still something was changing. Things were going to change.
I was sitting in Starbucks one day happily reading my papers when I got a call from Gwyn's book review.
”h.e.l.lo?” I said, because there was a slight chance that it was the editor, not Gwyn.
”Hi, baby,” Gwyn whispered. ”What are you doing?”
”I'm reading the outtakes from the Judiciary Committee,” I whispered back. ”It's awesome.”
”Baby, I'm late.”
I knew right away what she meant. ”How late?”
”More than a week. I had the dates wrong.”
”That time . . .”