All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 6

"Sure you can have a date. Tell your boyfriend you're going to dinner with someone from work. And I'll concoct a similar tale for my my girlfriend. It'll be like eighth grade." girlfriend. It'll be like eighth grade."

"You don't have a girlfriend."

"You're my girlfriend."

"Marky-poo," she said sternly, then sighed. It wasn't at all clear to Mark, not at all, why Celeste even talked to him-he was, to put it most plainly, a divorced fifth-year graduate student who lived in Syracuse and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to simulations of online p.o.r.nography that he refused to pay for a divorced fifth-year graduate student who lived in Syracuse and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to simulations of online p.o.r.nography that he refused to pay for-but who knows the secrets of the human heart? "You shouldn't talk like that, Marky-poo," Celeste had said, on Tuesday. "Though I admit I like it when you do."

Some theses, then, on the philosophy of history: - All women have boyfriends.

- Mark was reasonably certain he could beat this boyfriend up.

It was four-thirty. Somehow the afternoon had slipped, the afternoon had scurried. Darkness began now definitively to fall on lonely Syracuse. Mark found that he was staring, the phone down his pants, at the bare white patches, like water stains, left on the wall by the framed photographs he'd taken down and sent to Sasha. No one called, no one ever seemed to call. The apartment was in decline-Mark cleaned, occasionally, when there was some chance of visitors, but increasingly he made excuses (it would be dark by the time of the visitors). Over the years Sasha had set up a lovely little home for them, and Mark now resembled those peasants who took over the mansions of St. Petersburg after October and began burning the Venetian furniture for heat.

He gathered some books, some notebooks, some scattered pages of his dissertation, and walked out the door. He lived at the Roosevelt, on Genessee, and even in the middle of the day the parking lot behind the building looked desolate and dangerous. It was in fact strange that anyone ever used it, given that there was so much parking on the street. Maybe it was less dangerous than the street. When he and Sasha had lived for a year, that glorious year, in Queens, he'd woken every few days at 8:30 so as to move the 4Runner across the street; in Syracuse he could have parked five school buses in front of his building, and not moved any of them for months. So he didn't want to go back into the parking lot, in short; on the other hand, walking up Genessee, empty, downtrodden Genessee, was too depressing, and cutting through the park could get you killed. Celeste would respect him more, perhaps, if he chose the danger of the park-but then being murdered with a tire iron by a gang of roving teenagers would play straight into her boyfriend's hands. Her boyfriend wrote chatty lifestyle pieces for glossy magazines. He was a jacka.s.s. Mark exploded out the back door of the Roosevelt and jumped three steps later into his car.

And, arriving at the campus, failed to park. A mile south, on the other side of the highway, there was desolation, there was emptiness, there were parking s.p.a.ces; even less than that, even just back at Mark's place, there were s.p.a.ces, there were openings; but here the people ma.s.sed and then, by the time Mark came, drove around and around. And Mark followed them. It was remarkable, the number of people in the world who had cars, specifically Ford Explorers, even in Syracuse, and how many of them sought parking.

He finally found a spot a few hundred feet into the park- barely more than halfway from his house, and it had taken him half an hour to reach it. In the library there would be sanctuary, there would be the acc.u.mulated weight of thousands of years of scholars.h.i.+p, and Mark adding his tiny little contribution, his tiny rock for the gravestone of human knowledge. Perhaps he could forget, momentarily, about Celeste.

Except he had a handful of quarters in his pocket and there were pay phones in the library, even now, even this late in history, and he could get up and check his messages anytime he wished. On the desk in front of him he placed the first volume of the exhaustive account, newly published in Russian, with a bright yellow cover, of the Menshevik Party from 1903 until 1931. He had reached approximately 1904. Those were the days: Switzerland, exile, the battles with Lenin. Had Lenin slept with Inessa Armand? Mark couldn't concentrate.

It was years ago now that Mark first entered this rather grim and unimpressive library. "We have," the great Ulinsky had told Mark when he came up for his interview, "a lot of work to do." The professor handed him a syllabus-Abramovich, Deutscher, Serge, Ulinsky-and Mark went into the library that very day to begin. When he returned to Syracuse in the fall, having read perhaps a fifth of what had been a.s.signed, his head was a-blur with ideas, interpretations, interpolations. Two weeks later Ulinsky was dead of a stroke, and five years on Mark continued to explain that he had come to study with Ulinsky, and stayed for-the quiet.

He saw two of his fellow students on the first floor, checking their e-mail. They made no motions of greeting for Mark. While Sasha was around he'd simply laughed them all off; he'd had no time for them. They hung about in cl.u.s.ters and deliberated on departmental gossip, on the drugs they'd tasted, on the nicknames they considered a.s.signing to one another. Mark avoided them because he was a Menshevik-from mens.h.i.+nstvo, mens.h.i.+nstvo, the minority. A the minority. A mens.h.i.+nstvo mens.h.i.+nstvo of Mark. Perhaps there was an arrogance to this, a sense of his own moral superiority. In any case now he was left to his own devices, in this business of waiting for Celeste to call him back. of Mark. Perhaps there was an arrogance to this, a sense of his own moral superiority. In any case now he was left to his own devices, in this business of waiting for Celeste to call him back.

It was past five already and the undergraduates in the library were on the phone, making their plans. It was always warm in the library and the girls seemed to think this gave them license to take off their clothes. Well, what could Mark do? These were the new conditions, the new late-capitalist conditions, and they were hard on Mark.

He shook his head, as if clearing it of cobwebs. Lenin was always accusing the Mensheviks of being revolutionaries in theory only-"professors of revolution," as someone else had put it- and in much the same way Mark was a scholar in theory only- he loved to talk about studying, but when he was in the actual library, he didn't get a whole lot done. Now he walked over to the pay phone, put in a quarter, and checked his messages. There was nothing; there was nothing at all.

It was not as if he'd never studied. His head was filled with Ulinsky's tales of 1917, and in fact he'd recited one such tale the one time he met with Celeste in the city. He was there for a conference at NYU, and busy Celeste came downtown to have lunch. She wore a smart gray suit and though naturally he had built her up unreasonably in his mind, she was still very impressive: compact, her black slightly curly hair short and expensively cut, her skirt straight but short as well. Upon saying h.e.l.lo, she tilted her head a little and looked at him. He was embarra.s.sed by his jeans and his old dress s.h.i.+rt, but other than that he was OK. "Let's go down to the Vesuvio Bakery and sit outside," said Celeste. "How's that?"

It was fantastic, though the names and descriptions of the sandwiches confused Mark, so that he ended up ordering one with a lot of lettuce and some red peppers. But Celeste laughed at his jokes, and listened to him talk about the conference. As they sat on the benches in the little concrete park at the corner of Sixth and Prince, he told her the story of the unarmed Mensheviks.

It was a few months after the Bolsheviks took power, and the Mensheviks organized a large anti-Bolshevik rally-but asked the soldiers and sailors to come unarmed.

The sailors were incredulous. "Are you making fun of us, comrades? " they said. "And what about the Bolsheviks-are they little children? You think they won't shoot?"

But the Mensheviks insisted that the rally be unarmed. And the next day, the Bolsheviks fired into the crowd, and the rally was dispersed.

"That's hilarious," said Celeste. It was loud in their little park, so they huddled close and ate their sandwiches and talked. Mark was not expecting much, but he was very happy to be here.

"It's our first date," he said.

"Yes," said Celeste, looking at him again with a kind of appraisal in mind. "Thank you for taking me."

Mark had paid sixteen dollars for the sandwiches.

"And now I need to run!" She suddenly jumped up, remembering something. "This was very nice." She put a hand on Mark's cheek and leaned over to kiss him on the other. "You'll finish my sandwich," she said. "I'll talk to you this week."

And she was off.

As Mark ate Celeste's much more filling sandwich, he wondered that this attractive young woman could be interested in him. But then Sasha was also attractive. Mark just needed a pep talk. He considered the Mensheviks. They were wonderful people. Deeply schooled, thoughtful, chary, ironic, they told wry jokes and wrote intelligent books. After the Bolsheviks took power, they were scattered to Berlin, Paris, New York-also to the camps.

This was not encouraging. He was going to the gym.

Mark was a selfish person, perpetually imbibing information, sometimes alcohol, also food, and rarely giving anything back; his sole exports were theories and sweat. On the StairMaster, especially, he produced a prodigious amount of sweat and, looking out over the roiling cauldron of undergraduate flesh, a fair number of theories. He felt bad for the kids. Now Mark, Mark at this point was mostly in compet.i.tion with death-he worked out a little, benched and StairMastered and sat up a little, and then death and decrepitude made him sag a little, and then he StairMastered a little, and so on. It was n.o.ble and dignified, his death and his exercise. Whereas the kids were battling only themselves: they spent an hour on the elliptical machines, another hour with the Nautilus contraptions, and then went out to the bars and drank eight beers. The next day they returned. He recalled his high school football buddy w.i.l.l.y Flint, who'd once declared, while taking a leak and sipping on his beer simultaneously, that he was enacting the "chain of being." Where'd he get that?

Mark pounded the StairMaster. You competed against yourself, in this life, and also against the people you went to college with. Those were the parameters. So was it cool to be stealing Celeste from her boyfriend, whom Mark had actually known, a tiny bit, in college? He considered this. It was cool. No doubt her boyfriend was a nice enough guy, but then why did he write such stupid articles? What's more, Celeste didn't really like him. And if it came to it, Mark could wreck wreck him. You want some more? Mother-f.u.c.ker? You want some more of this? him. You want some more? Mother-f.u.c.ker? You want some more of this?

"Mark!" a woman's voice appeared next to his elbow.

He nearly fell off the StairMaster. Not only was he sweating so much that his T-s.h.i.+rt stuck to his torso and revealed the incredible hairiness of his chest, but in his frenzy over Celeste's gossip-mongering boyfriend he had begun to make inept shadowboxing motions with his arms.

"Leslie," he wheezed.

They hadn't talked since the other night, now a week ago, and Leslie looked at him neutrally, guardedly. It was unclear whether she was angry, but it was definitely clear that she expected some form of approach from him.

Mark couldn't do it. She had joined the program after Ulinsky was dead and two other real historians had defected to Columbia. Her seminar comments were filled with jargon imported from the English department-and not even Marxist jargon, at that! She was part of the new barbarian horde that liked - cultural a.n.a.lyses of tiny objects, - prescription medicines, - elliptical machines.

"Pretty old-school," she said of Mark's StairMaster.

"I don't trust the ellipticals," he managed, even as his interval training took him into the higher exertion brackets. "I haven't seen the studies. It's like the number of peasant deaths during collectivization. " He tried to take a breath. "No reliable statistics."

"And the treadmills?"

"The treadmills are a menace! You're not doing anything, you're just lifting your feet up. It's a big lie."

"I see," she said, not laughing. "How's your work coming?"

"Oh," said Mark. "I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about Lenin. I should be thinking more about my Mensheviks."

Leslie nodded. No one in Mark's department ever knew what he was talking about. "Are you going to the potluck tonight?" she asked. It was all up to Celeste, thought Mark. He told Leslie he was considering it. "I have this thing I have to do," he said, "but I'll try." Leslie gave him a skeptical look-what sort of thing could he possibly have to do, on a Friday night, in Syracuse?-and they spoke for a moment longer before she walked away. Why shouldn't she? Mark had been distant and even a little rude. He felt it. But what else was there to do? He had escaped from peril the other night, truth be told.

By the time he got off the StairMaster, Leslie was gone. Mark toddled on weary legs to the floor mats, placing a towel underneath him, and wiping around himself every time he stopped to rest. No one wanted to see a man this sweaty, and this old, leaving stains all over the equipment.

He thought about Lenin. It was not healthy to think this much about Lenin. But he'd really done it, was the thing. Lenin, not Hitler, was the Napoleon of the twentieth century. He had ideas. He was a scholar, a student. He seized power by willing it, by planning it; the world was a certain way, had been that way for two hundred years, for three hundred years, but Lenin didn't like it. The audacity of such an idea, in the Russian provinces, in the 1890s-remarkable. To be fair, it was also audacious for a twenty-eight-year-old man to sweat so profusely all over the sit-up mats.

Above all, of course, Lenin was an a.n.a.lyst of situations. This is what set him above the others. Right now Mark lived in a time of increasing consolidation of resources that may or may not lead to worldwide perpetual war; a time of truly rapid industrial development that may or may not, but mostly likely would, lead to a global climate catastrophe; and a time of political reaction that was exacerbating both of the above. Or anyway that's what it looked like. But what if in fact this period would be remembered as something else-as a period of progress, when America liberated the Middle East from a generation of tyrants? And a period of exponential scientific innovation that would save, rather than destroy, the earth? Who could tell? Who could say?

Lenin would be able to tell. Lenin would have been able to say. Mark lay on his towel and looked up at the distant, faraway gym ceiling. His brain had wandered back, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, to the decline of him and Sasha. The trouble was-well, it wasn't like Mark was ignorant of the details, the minute details, the procession of events. But the subdetails, the archaeology of what happened-that was more complicated. Mostly it was money that had done them in. Money and Mark's ambitions, Mark's regrets. But mostly money. It wore you down: the worry, and the arguments, and the guilt, no longer a nebulous middle-cla.s.s guilt but a specific guilt before a specific person; the disputes with the sorts of landlords you got when you tried to save on landlords; the nice car, a wedding gift from his father, that they couldn't maintain. They sent money to her family in Russia, a little bit of money, but it affected the way they counted what they had. And they had begun to grow old, was how it felt; whenever Mark met up with friends from college in the city he saw that his life no longer resembled theirs in any meaningful way. They dropped a hundred dollars on drinks; they took calls on their cell phones in the middle of conversations; and as they did so Mark calculated in his head the cost of the drinks on the table, counted the money he'd spent that day, and worried about Sasha's teeth, which they had to fix.

Back in the Syracuse gym Mark had stopped doing sit-ups and was just lying there, motionless, taking up valuable floor-mat s.p.a.ce. After all the trouble with Sasha he had now found Celeste. And it was not as if Celeste was rich or easygoing; in fact she seemed capricious like Sasha and morbidly sensitive like Sasha and often unpredictable, and her family had no money, just like Sasha's. Leslie was more like the anti-Sasha, he supposed, very broadly speaking. And he wasn't interested in Leslie. That was the thing.

Mark felt very comfortable on the floor mat.

"Professor Grossman?" A young man's voice startled him from above. Mark opened his eyes. Two shapes loomed there, blocking out the huge overhead lamps. One of the shapes said, "Are you all right?"

Mark shook his head yes. Had he fallen asleep? He smiled. "I'm good." He decided that the best move now would be to remain p.r.o.ne for the duration of the conversation; looking up again he saw the outlines of two students, a boy and a girl, from his European history section. One of them was named-Brad? The other was Gwyn. What was she doing with Brad? Gwyn was a beautiful girl with a square clefted jaw and thick, sensual lips; she looked like the Mona Lisa. He wondered that the other students could listen to him in section instead of staring at her; maybe they couldn't. As for Mark, the sweat that had poured so prodigiously from him while he flailed on the StairMaster was now caked onto his torso and arms and legs, possibly forever. He smiled up at Brad and Gwyn, whose genial concerned expressions, looming over him, he appreciated. "Good thing you woke me," he said, stretching. "I've got a big night out ahead."

"OK, Professor Grossman," said Gwyn. He thought he detected a slight edge of irony in her voice. "We just-sorry to bother you."

And, very respectfully, kind of nodding and bowing, the students retreated. Mark for his part sat up slowly, and then made his old-man's dignified way to the dressing room.

On Wednesday evening, Celeste had called for the last time. "Hey," she said.

"Hi," said Mark.

"I'm a little drunk," she said. "I shouldn't be calling."

"You should always call when you're drunk."

"I was out with the girls, then I came home."

"Where's your boyfriend?"

"He had some thing. Some event. He didn't invite me. And now it's lonely here."

"Lonely?" he echoed. "Lonely and cold?"

"A little cold."

"You're probably not wearing much."

"Not too much. How did you know?"

"I've been sitting here imagining you."

She laughed her laugh. "Are you trying to talk dirty to me, Mark Grossman?"

"Sort of."

"Don't you have a dissertation to write?"

He smiled. They'd grown more comfortable together on the phone, almost to the point where the s.p.a.ce between them did not always need to be filled with sounds.

"Listen," she said. "What about if we had lunch this weekend? Can you come down for that?"

"Are you making fun of me, Celeste?" They had spoken so much of the logistics of their future s.e.x life that this seemed unfair. "Are we little children?"

"No," she agreed. "We're not. I just don't know how this is going to work. You live so far away."

"Whereas he has an apartment in Chelsea."

"Yes, he does."

It was true. Silence and cunning were grand, but the exile might kill you. Still, he made his case. "Celeste," he began. "Listen to me. I beseech you. I feel like-I feel like we only have one chance at this, you know? And speaking strictly for myself, I've already done so many things that I didn't actually want to do. You know? I've succ.u.mbed to the prejudices of my cla.s.s. I've embodied only the most pathetic cultural contradictions of my time, our time, and none of the really exciting ones. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really like you, Celeste, and this is important."

There was a pause, naturally, and then Celeste said, "I like you too. . . ." With that ellipsis at the end, an extension of the sound, a sort of pleading.

"You're so tragic, tragic," she went on. "I mean, I like that, I do, but I also like to have fun."

"Fun? Are you kidding?" Mark had been indescribably moved, as sometimes happens, by his own soliloquy, and now there were tears in his voice as he said, "I love fun! There's a whole chapter on fun in my dissertation!"

"I can't tell if you're joking."

"I'm joking. Yes. I'm joking."

"I'm drunk."

"Can we go out this weekend? Can we have a date?"

"When?"

"Friday night."

"I don't know. Mark. This is really hard for me. Let me see, OK?"

"OK. But-this is it. I can't really-I need to know, OK? Will you let me know?"

"Yes," she had said, "I think that's fair," and that was the last time they'd spoken.

And now here he was, on Friday night, putting his clothes back on after his shower, as some remaining male undergraduates shouted at each other over his head about their evening's plans.

He left the gym at last, though not before checking his messages from a pay phone in the lobby. There was nothing, but this didn't mean much: Celeste might have called and failed to leave a message. He would have to go home and check his Caller ID. As he listened to his nonmessage, Brad and Gwyn walked by on their way out; he smiled at them and they looked back, a little pityingly. Had he put on his clothes funny? And then he remembered: one had to be a very strange man indeed these days not to have a cell phone. And Mark was already pretty strange.

Walking out, he found the campus already deserted, the girls in their dormitories putting on next to nothing for the bars-Leslie once told him about teaching a section late on a Friday afternoon, so that half the cla.s.s was already dressed for going out, the girls crossing and uncrossing their legs under the little writing tables- and the boys in their frat houses, where they would begin drinking and plotting and playing beer pong, a truly stupid game. His car had a ten-dollar parking ticket on it, which Mark would never pay. "I've never paid a parking ticket," wrote the rapper. "It's twenty dollars now, and three hundred then. / You want your money, then come and get it. / But you better bring two hundred guns and a hundred men. But you better bring two hundred guns and a hundred men." Rap music was the music of the lonely, thought Mark.

It was dark when he got home and learned, from his little Caller ID box, that there had been no calls, not a single one, and while trying to decide about the potluck he once again placed the phone in its waiting position. Ten minutes later-he was developing a lengthy, intricate a.n.a.logy between the potluck and the pathetic first congress of Russian social-democrats in Stockholm in 1898-there was an explosion near his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. He knew it! If you waited and waited-like those revolutionaries had patiently waited-you would be rewarded in this life.

"Mufka?"

It was Sasha. Oh it was. And his heart filled with tears.

She called much less often now. She used to call at night, or whenever anything bad happened. "Mark"-unhappily-"I think there's a spider in my room." "Mufka"-at two in the morning- "I had a dream. It was awful." "Mufka, I hurt my finger." "How?" "I singed it. On the stupid pot without a handle." She'd taken the pot without a handle and refused to buy another.

"Mufka?" she said now. This meant "little fly."

"Sushok," he said. This meant "little bagel."

"What are you doing?" she asked sharply. He'd fumbled the phone in the process of taking it out of his pants, causing some commotion.

"I'm-nothing. Nothing much, Sushok."

She accepted this. "Mufka," she said. "I'm sad."

"I know, Sushok. I'm sad too."

"Mufka, listen." She could always turn, so quickly. "Today I learned that Canadians think John Irving is a great American novelist. Isn't that funny?"