All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 12

"Sushok," he said, picking up.

"Hi, Mufka," she said. "What are you doing?"

"Walking down the street," he said. "What about you?"

"I had a bad dream about you, Mufka. Are you OK?"

"I'm OK. Yes. I think so. I'm going to defend my dissertation next week."

"Really? Mufka, that's great! In Syracuse? Do you want me to come watch?"

"Oh, no. In Syracuse? No. That would be too sad."

"Yes, that would be sad."

"Sushok?" They hadn't talked in a while, and though there was still no one person as significant in their lives (or Mark's, anyway) , time too had done its work. So had the hurting of others, Mark had found. He was about to hurt Celeste, he feared, and this distanced him from Sasha, whom he'd hurt so long ago. "Sushok, how are things up there?"

"I don't know," she said. "It's pretty here but everyone is stupid. All they talk about is dating. I don't want to do that."

"No. No. Don't date."

"And I don't want to go on the Internet."

"Oh, no. G.o.d, no. No Internet." The thought of his ex-wife on the Internet was truly horrible.

"So, there we are."

Mark took a breath, preparing to say something that might offend his sensitive Sushok. "Sushok," he said. "You need to marry a rich man."

"Find me a rich man," Sasha said very seriously, "and I'll consider it."

"Rich men aren't idiots," Mark told her, half believing it. "They'll find you themselves. You're a beautiful woman still, you know." Which was true.

"Well," said Sasha. "We'll see."

Mark was already at his building, and now he got off the phone. Would he really give her away? Really? The thought of them getting back together was blasphemy, it was socially taboo. You made a certain promise when you gathered all your friends and were married, and accepted their gifts, and congratulations, toasts and well wishes. When, in the course of time, you broke that promise, when you divorced and told your friends and gathered them, together or singly, to announce it, and accepted their condolences, their regrets, their well wishes-well, you soon found you'd made another promise, this time that you were apart. Now you had to stay apart.

His roommate Toby's door was still closed when Mark came in, meaning he had been home all this time, growing angry about global warming. Mark knocked anyway and Toby appeared.

"Jog?" said Mark.

"OK," Toby answered wearily. He hadn't shaved.

"It's a nice day out," said Mark.

"Nice day out for you."

"What's that mean?"

"Nice day here means more drought in the Sahara and hurricanes of unprecedented force off the Gulf Coast."

"Look. I've stopped leaving my reading light on at night."

"I know. Thank you."

Toby was right, of course. They were done for. But still they had to live. Mark said, "I have to break up with Celeste tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Because. I don't know. Because of Gwyn."

"Well," said Toby. "There could be worse reasons."

"Thank you. It would help if we could jog."

"OK, OK," said Toby, and retreated into his room to put on his jogging shorts. Mark did the same. "When are you going up to Syracuse?" Toby called out from his room.

"Monday!" Mark called back. "If I go!"

"Of course you'll go!" Toby appeared now in Mark's doorway. His jogging shorts were too long for him. "You should stay there, too. When the floods come, Syracuse might survive. In fact it might become a coastal city. A Ma.r.s.eilles."

"When are the floods?"

"Can't say. Could be thirty years, could be five. Some of these things, they're not predictable." Mark threw Toby the house keys. Toby had a pocket for them.

"What about Brooklyn?"

"No more Brooklyn."

"Parties?"

"No more parties. No more pretty girls. No Mensheviks, no jogging, no delicious Senegalese restaurant for breaking up with your older but more interesting and intelligent girlfriend."

They walked out onto St. John's, two highly trained, highly educated white men. "Of course, Canada is really your safest bet," Toby went on. He used to be a very quiet guy, but the global climate had changed his personality. "It's the Saudi Arabia of freshwater, plus Canadian citizens.h.i.+p will be very valuable when most of the U.S. is under water."

"Sasha's in Canada," said Mark.

"Sasha's a genius," said Toby.

They used to jog on the concrete road that encircled the park. Now, in deference to their aging knees, they jogged straight through-up and back once, then up and back again on the soft Brooklyn gra.s.s.

He had to break up with Celeste. He said it to himself in the shower; he repeated it to himself as he spread out his notes for the dissertation presentation, and some beers, and turned on the Rangers first-round playoff game. Their best player, Jaromir Jagr, wore a 68 on his jersey in honor of the Czech uprising against the Soviets. Mark had always found this puzzling, like when football players thanked Jesus for touchdowns. He got a little drunk, watching the Rangers lose, and helplessly wrote both Celeste and Gwyn tender text messages before falling asleep on the couch.

But he had to break up with Celeste; he began catechizing himself again the next day as he rode down Cla.s.son on his bike. Break up with Celeste, he said. You are both unhappy. You are not, it turns out, such a great couple. Misanthropes should not marry. At least not each other. And your failure to end it now would be purely the product of fear-and some misguided loyalty to Syracuse Mark, poor lonely stupid Syracuse Mark. In his mind he defended his decision to the dissertation committee: This is a relations.h.i.+p of convenience. We cannot keep it up. We are desperate and we've tugged on this last straw. We don't love each other!

"You loved her before," answered the dissertation committee.

"That was a long time ago. We were both different."

"She's twenty-nine years old."

"I know! That's why we shouldn't drag this out."

"You might not find another girl like her."

"What about Gwyn?"

"She's twenty-two, Mark."

Mark turned the dissertation committee off in his brain. Those people were out to get him. He went into the wine store and bought a bottle of rose for nine dollars, Celeste had declared it the wine of choice for the coming summer. At first he looped the plastic bag over the handlebar but as the road was uneven and his beautiful if very heavy antique Schwinn, once a birthday present for Sasha- "It's definitely a nice bike," Sasha said, trying to lift it, "for an enormous muzhik muzhik"-had deteriorated, quite a bit, in the realm of the wheel bearings, causing the front wheel to oscillate on its axis, the wine bottle kept knocking against the bike, and so eventually he just took it in his hand and held it, keeping the other hand for steering. Up ahead a group of teenagers had come across a ripped trash bag that had been set out for recycling, and were now pelting one another with plastic bottles. When he pa.s.sed they threw one at Mark and he ducked.

Celeste was already at the restaurant, reading the New Yorker New Yorker when he arrived. What a city! She wore a vintage dress, black, with lots of ruffles, or detailing, as they'd say about a car. She smiled when she saw him and got up to kiss him on the cheek. Then she pulled back. "You're so sweaty!" she said. when he arrived. What a city! She wore a vintage dress, black, with lots of ruffles, or detailing, as they'd say about a car. She smiled when she saw him and got up to kiss him on the cheek. Then she pulled back. "You're so sweaty!" she said.

"Oops," said Mark, looking down. He had begun to sweat a ferocious sweat during his afternoon jog with Toby and he'd never really stopped sweating it, though it took entering muggy Bistro Senegale for him to notice just how wet his s.h.i.+rt had become. "Sorry," he said.

"No," said Celeste, "I like it."

They sat down, she had already ordered some plantains. Mark forked one off her plate.

"You're going up to Syracuse Monday?"

"Yup." It was now Sat.u.r.day.

"Do you want me to come?"

"Oh no. I mean, I don't think it's worth it. I'm just going to go up, defend my important ideas, and come right back."

"What are you doing tomorrow night? I can probably get Rangers tickets from someone at the office, if you want."

"Oh no. I need to prepare and they're getting embarra.s.sed anyway. Let's just have a party when I get back."

"I'm flying to Seattle Tuesday," she said.

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Microsoft shareholders' meeting."

"But that's halfway across the continent!"

She laughed. Gwyn, he immediately thought, a little unfairly, would have looked at him strangely and told him that, no, Seattle is all the way across the continent.

"So it goes," said Celeste. "I'm hungry."

They ate chicken with peanut b.u.t.ter sauce. "Tell me, Mark," Celeste said suddenly, "what do you do when I'm gone?"

"What do you mean? I work on my dissertation."

"For a man who every time I've asked him what he's been doing over the past, what is it, three years, has always said, 'Working on my dissertation'"-Celeste put a hunk of chicken into her mouth-"you sure as h.e.l.l haven't produced a very long dissertation."

Mark's dissertation on Sidorovich was, indeed, a slim volume.

"There wasn't a lot of evidence," Mark grumbled.

"I think you're seeing a younger woman," said Celeste, a little experimentally.

"Do you?" said Mark. Celeste didn't really think this, he thought, but she did sense it. It was incredible what women sensed.

"Yup, and I think you're going to give me all sorts of young people diseases."

"Like what?"

"I don't know," said Celeste. "What are the kids into, these days? Syphilis? Chlamydia?"

"Youth, I think, actually," said Mark coolly.

"Maybe you'll give me that, then," said Celeste.

Mark looked up from his plate and smiled as if to say: There is no one but you. Celeste smiled back, as if to say: I will cut off your b.a.l.l.s. They watched each other across the square clumsy table. She wore makeup-a little foundation, a little blush, some eyeliner.

"My ex-boyfriend has been calling me a lot," she said.

"Yeah? What's he want?"

"To get back together."

"That's what they all want."

"What do you think about that?"

"I think he should f.u.c.k off."

"Oh, Marky-poo. You're sweet."

They sat and ate their dinner and drank their rose wine. By expressing anger toward Celeste's ex-boyfriend, Mark had confirmed his affection for her. Peace reigned again at their table. And she-oh, she was formidable. Now she began to relay the tale of the upcoming shareholders' meeting in Seattle, doing the voices of the various financial officers, and he listened raptly. She told him about some journalists' conference she'd been to over the weekend in D.C. The English polemicist Christopher Hitchens had been there, she said, smoking and drinking and with his s.h.i.+rt wide open. "I mean, come on," she said now. "Do you think you're Mick Jagger?"

Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated momentarily on her food as Mark watched her. You could hold out against the calendar of the system for only so long; you could remain steadfast for only so long. This was her last chance at something; Mark of all people was her last chance at something, before she crossed into a different phase of her life.

"Don't look at me like that," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like I'm some lost puppy you've taken in! s.h.i.+thead."

"Sorry."

She reached out her hand to take his, forgiving him. From the restaurant they rode his bike down Fulton to her place, she on the seat holding on to him, laughing. They were tired and sweaty, Mark especially, when they got home, and he took a shower, though Celeste said she couldn't guarantee she'd be awake when he got out. But her shower was so much nicer than his and Toby's, and Mark was a very sweaty man.

Celeste was indeed asleep already when he emerged. He put on a T-s.h.i.+rt and got in bed with her, laying his hand hesitantly on her hip. She woke up momentarily and placed the hand, tenderly, on her stomach. They both fell asleep then, in the Brooklyn night, two people no longer very young, no longer very happy, though still unsettled, still a mess.