All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 7

"Don't be a sn.o.b, Sushok."

"Oh, all right. I really like Canadians, actually. They're very polite."

"Polite is good. Polite is a start."

"Mufka, will you visit me?"

"Of course I'll visit you."

"It's not far. And the border's not like the Belarusian border at all, they let you right through."

"I know, Sushok."

"Oh, Mufka," she said, and suddenly burst into tears. "Why did we do this?"

"We had to, Sushok," said Mark. "We were sad."

"We're sad now."

"That's true."

She cried some more. Mark listened. There was a time when her tears received, automatically, his tears in return. Now, standing in their old living room, he respectfully hoped that Celeste didn't call while he was on the line with Sushok. She stopped crying.

"Listen, Mufka." She turned on a dime, his Sasha. "Don't cry, OK? Don't you cry too. It'll be all right. Everything will work out. We're not even that old. I have a friend here, her name is Susan, she's even older than we are. So don't be sad, Mufka. I'll talk to you later."

And that was it. This phone, this aging, cordless Syracuse phone-such amazing things came over the line through it.

Oh, they had split up because they had to, they had to, he knew in his bones that they had to; and now, awkwardly and ridiculously, he was making a new life. Disoriented after her call, as he always was, he was beginning with a kind of resignation to put the phone back into his pants when it rang again. It was Sasha, he thought, forgetting to tell him something.

"Mark?"

But it was Leslie.

"Oh, hey." Mark gathered himself. He heard some noise in the background. "Are you already there?"

"Yeah. I got bored sitting at home. So, listen, I don't know if you're coming, but if you do come, you should bring some beer. There's a beer deficit."

Mark agreed to bring some beer.

It was night now, in dilapidated Syracuse, the cars crawling ominously down Genessee, with occasionally a s.n.a.t.c.h of hip-hop cras.h.i.+ng through Mark's window. He would give Celeste ten more minutes, and then he would go. But he did not return the phone to his underwear this time-what if his father called? P. Grossman was a reasonable man, to be sure, a man who enjoyed the pleasures of life, and although he was chagrined at the loss of Sasha he quietly encouraged Mark's pursuit of further women. He would not think it blasphemous to care for Celeste, or to have chased after girls, even on the Internet. Wasn't it the case that fathers of his generation mostly feared that their sons would turn out a little funny, a little . . . gay? So P. Grossman would have been pleased, in general, with the new Mark. Which is not to say he wanted to hear about the phone receiver down Mark's pants.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed, and then fifteen, and then half an hour pa.s.sed, and finally there was nothing to do. He had pushed Celeste too far; he had tried to mask his desperation, but she had felt it. So it went-he was Liebknecht, after all. He put on a clean pair of jeans and went out, looking both ways before crossing the parking lot. He drove the near-empty streets of Syracuse to Peter's, where Brooklyn beer was sold for $5.99 a six-pack, and bought two packs. Then on to the house on Fellows, where they had these things always, where there was enough room for people to get drunk and fall over and no one to bother them.

Oh, what a sad place was Syracuse, what a sad place was graduate school! And on Friday nights these attempts at human togetherness. And yet, with the collapse of the discipline of history into Antiques Roadshow, Antiques Roadshow, history of social trends, history of the spoon, these department potlucks were pretty much all they had. history of social trends, history of the spoon, these department potlucks were pretty much all they had.

"Hey!" He was greeted in the front room by Troy, short and goateed, student of the cultural history of the coffee mug. "Mark, man, just the man we wanted! Mark, what do you think of B-2-phen?"

"What?"

"B-2-phen.o.betymide."

"Oh. I don't think I've ever-what, injected it?"

"No, it's a pill."

"Sorry. Swallowed it."

"You snort them," Troy said, contemptuously, and turned back to the conversation as Mark headed for the kitchen. The apartment occupied the first floor of an old, handsome Victorian triple-decker, the kind of apartment that didn't exist in New York but would cost $2,500 a month if it did. In Syracuse it cost $600. Mark had noticed that when things cost this little, people tended to get depressed, though as a historian he knew that this might not be a direct causal relation; there might be an intermediate or prior step.

In the kitchen, Mark met Leslie. She looked glum, in the kitchen, all by herself, with too much makeup on. The boys hadn't put a cover over the fluorescent ceiling light.

"Hi," said Mark. "You're in here all by yourself."

"Troy was going on about the pills," she explained, sighing. "I got annoyed."

"Yes, I understand that," said Mark. "All those pills and herbs. What's wrong with beer?"

"Yeah," said Leslie, a little warily.

"Beer and the Russian Revolution!" Mark cheered.

"Uh, right."

Leslie wasn't as nice as she could have been. Mark decided to take the high road. "I'm sorry about today in the gym," he said. "I was rude."

"It's OK," she said. "I was probably weird in there. I get self-conscious. The undergrads walk around practically naked. It's disgusting."

"Well," said Mark. He took umbrage at this insult to the naked undergraduates, but he kept his mouth shut. Instead he said, "Bottoms up," and he chugged one of the beers he'd brought. Then he scanned the counter behind Leslie and located a bottle of rum. He did not love rum, but he didn't mind it, and then, standing in the kitchen, under the bare fluorescent light, after a very bad week, a week during which his hopes of Celeste evaporated, during which his dissertation, while not stalling exactly, certainly did not progress, and in fact began to seem slightly ridiculous-during which the entire project, the sometimes utopian project, of Mark's life began to look like it was going simply to fail-well, Mark made a kind of decision. He said to Leslie: "Shot?"

"OK," she answered, still a little glumly.

But Mark was undeterred. He poured two shots into plastic cups and then, as Leslie put her hand out, quickly drank them both. "Ha-ha!" said Mark. "Psych."

"Hey!" she said.

"Sorry." He poured the shots again and now handed one to Leslie. He chased this third shot with some more beer. They were still alone in that kitchen; you could already tell, if you'd had any doubt about it, that this wasn't going to be much of a party.

In the months to come Mark would have occasion-he would have many occasions-to wonder just how drunk he was, and just how culpable he was, just how conscious he was, when he kissed Leslie briefly in the kitchen and then walked out with her to her car-she insisted they take her car, and Mark agreed to this so long as he was the one who drove. There was only one person Mark trusted to drive a car this drunk, and that person was Mark.

Leslie occupied the top floor of a two-story house just down the street from him on East Genessee. That was another thing about Syracuse, in addition to the fact that everyone was drunk: everyone had a nice apartment in which to sit wretched and alone. Some apartments were nicer than others. Leslie's had a little kitchen table with some plastic flowers on it, and posters from popular films, ironically posted; a little green rug in the center of the main room in front of the television; and on the coffee table a gigantic volume of Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life. The Structures of Everyday Life. One thing you could say about grad students-"Excuse me a moment," said Leslie, and ducked into the bathroom-they might be philistines-in fact Mark now scanned the two bookshelves and they were exclusively populated by books from Leslie's field of study-but you'd never get bored by their libraries, unless you had something against the new trend in microhistories, in which case eventually you would. One thing you could say about grad students-"Excuse me a moment," said Leslie, and ducked into the bathroom-they might be philistines-in fact Mark now scanned the two bookshelves and they were exclusively populated by books from Leslie's field of study-but you'd never get bored by their libraries, unless you had something against the new trend in microhistories, in which case eventually you would.

There was still time to run. He didn't really want to be here; even in his current state he knew this. He could walk down the street and be home. And-but here was Leslie. She'd put on some lipstick, for some reason; she'd done something to her hair. Immediately she was next to him, and they were locked in an embrace. She wore perfume. He was a little dizzy. So this was it, then-this was going to be his new life in Syracuse. There were hands involved now, and some tugging. Mark supposed it could be worse. And soon- they were grown-ups, after all-they were on her full-size bed, big enough it seemed at the time-and tugging off their clothes. Mark didn't know if this is what he wanted to do, but events had a clear and simple logic, at this point, and he followed the logic. Then, suddenly, Leslie pulled up.

"I can't do this," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I can't. I'm not going to do any more one-night stands. I told you that."

"OK," said Mark.

"I've just been taken advantage of, a lot, I think," said Leslie. "And we're in the same department, and that would just be weird."

"I guess so," said Mark.

"I mean, if we just hooked up. I guess it wouldn't be weird if we were like a couple."

"Right," said Mark thoughtfully. Then he tried to kiss her again, and she let him. After a while, once again, she stopped them.

"Do you want to be a couple?" she said.

"OK," said Mark. He sort of mumbled it.

"You're going to love me? And tell me you love me? And go on weekend trips to Skaneateles?"

Mark had often gone to Skaneateles with Sasha. Did Leslie know this? He rolled over and lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. Was he prepared to do this? What if in a couple of weeks he was no longer prepared? It might take more than a couple of weeks to get out of this. It might take a couple of months. But if he knew that now, shouldn't he stop? Shouldn't he let them both off the hook right away? At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark's hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It's pretty clear what Lenin would have done. And so Mark did it, too.

"OK," said Mark. "Let's do it. That's what I want."

Leslie was as surprised as he was to hear him say this.

"Really?" she said, getting used to it.

"Really," said Mark.

Now it was her turn to say "OK," and she did. She slid down next to him and kissed him. He kissed her in return. This was what he wanted, even if it didn't feel like what he wanted. It was, in any case, the best he was going to do in this terrible town. Lenin always made the best of a bad situation, and so would Mark.

Awkwardly, after some false starts, partly attributable to drunkenness, they made love, and then they lay, like strangers, on her full-size bed, now one size too small. Mark felt sick at heart and so, he suspected, did she. Or not. It was hard to tell. He wanted desperately to leave, but he knew he could not leave, not after what he'd said. They lay there and eventually, without saying anything, they fell asleep. In the morning, like zombies, they drove to the Blind Eye Diner just off the highway and ate some eggs. Mark clutched the Syracuse Post-Standard Syracuse Post-Standard to his chest: new revelations were emerging about the man who kept girls in his dungeon; plans for America's largest mall proceeded apace. From the side all this newspaper reading might have looked like intimacy. Mark felt queasy, after all the rum last night. Deliberately, after their breakfast-lunch, she drove him-Mark sat in the pa.s.senger seat now, like a little boy-through a gray drizzle to his car, parked outside the house on Fellows Avenue. So everyone had seen it there when they left; so everyone knew. She leaned over for a kiss and told him to call her soon. to his chest: new revelations were emerging about the man who kept girls in his dungeon; plans for America's largest mall proceeded apace. From the side all this newspaper reading might have looked like intimacy. Mark felt queasy, after all the rum last night. Deliberately, after their breakfast-lunch, she drove him-Mark sat in the pa.s.senger seat now, like a little boy-through a gray drizzle to his car, parked outside the house on Fellows Avenue. So everyone had seen it there when they left; so everyone knew. She leaned over for a kiss and told him to call her soon.

It was past three o'clock, on a Sat.u.r.day, when he finally got home to his apartment. How different it now looked! Cozy, messy, comfortable-if only he'd just stayed here all night.

He wandered over, somewhat idly, to his phone. Perhaps . . . Mark did not have time to finish the thought. There were eight calls on his Caller ID. Eight calls? He flipped through them: Celeste's cell phone from an hour ago; before that, a bunch of calls from the Syracuse Sheraton. Had something happened at the Sheraton? And if something had happened at the Sheraton-an emergency, say-why would they call Mark?

The first message was from nine o'clock the night before-just minutes after he left for the party. "Marky-Mark," said Celeste, Celeste herself. "Where are you? It's the weekend, you know. No time to be at the library." Mark had convinced her that he spent all his time at the library; it was his most romantic image of himself. "Maybe I'll call there and have them page you. You won't believe this-but I'm in Syracuse! Isn't that crazy? I'm supposed to write about that psycho who was keeping girls in his bas.e.m.e.nt. Did you know him, by any chance? I'm at the Sheraton near the university. But it's a one-night-only engagement, Marky-poo, so call me."

That was last night.

Message 2, 9:30: "Marky-poo! I'm sorry I didn't call before, they told me very last-minute and then I wanted to surprise you! Call me!"

Message 3, 11:00: "Mark. You're out at some party with your brilliant grad school friends. I'm sitting here at the Sheraton in a bath towel, all by myself. I have to get up early and talk to a bunch of cops and be on a plane in the afternoon. Call me!"

Message 4 was received just half an hour ago: "Mark, I don't know where you went, but apparently-whatever. I'm on my way to the airport. You don't need to call me when you get this, I am going to be crazy with things the next week. I'll call you when it's over. Bye, Mark."

Oh, G.o.d. The anger in her voice, the frustration, was not feigned. He stood in his apartment, his messy, sweet, his stupid apartment, freighted with all the stupidities he'd committed in it, all the lies he'd told. And until last night they'd all been lies of omission, of not telling the people he loved how much he loved them, with how much agony of love. And now, what a grave miscalculation. He'd thought he was being like Lenin. He'd thought it was October 1917, a time for action, for decisive steps.

Except he was wrong. It was not October 1917 but January 1919, and not in Russia but in Germany, when the Spartacists, led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, called the workers out onto the streets of Berlin-and the government, the social-democratic so-called government, called out its Bavarian peasants, its demobilized soldiers, who beat the workers to death, and then murdered, while the government looked away, both Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Oh.

The phone rang now in Mark's apartment.

"Hey." It was Leslie. "What are you doing?" she said.

Uncle Misha

Before I finally escaped from Baltimore in the spring of 2003 I spent several months driving up I-83 and I-78 to New York. It had been a point of great contention, between my father and my uncle Misha, whether it was faster to take I-95 all the way up, as my uncle and most other people would have it, or whether, as my father fervently believed, I-95 was so heavily trafficked, so miserable, so corrupt, especially in its Delaware portion, that one should take the long way-up to Harrisburg and then across the great state of Pennsylvania at top speed. Keep moving, was the gist of my father's directive. Keep moving. And I followed it.

I did this in a Nissan Maxima-which was after all a graduation gift from my father-a sleek black machine on its last few journeys in this life. It was a car about which my father's Russian mechanics now spoke in the most melancholy reproachful tones, as if to say, If only you hadn't taught Jillian to drive stick on it, oh, it might have lived a hundred years.

I too had my regrets. The car had started eating ca.s.sette tapes sometime in the late nineties, and we never replaced the thing with a CD player. The precariousness of our life together in the run-up to the election had come to infect everything, so that I often felt like, with us possibly breaking up, it probably wasn't worthwhile to replace our deteriorating earthly goods. Of course this made no sense-the goods would remain, even if we didn't-and now, in the case of the CD player, it really was too late-the car was dying, and though I had saved $150, I had paid for it a hundred times. Here I was on the way up to New York and I was forced to place a boom box on the pa.s.senger seat beside me and try to keep things steady, because the boom box had no tolerance at all for b.u.mps and jolts, and the disc, if the car shook, would simply reset, in which case I'd have to fiddle with it, and this is how car accidents happen, at least to me. Luckily the long stretch of 78-22 across the Mennonite state of Pennsylvania, and 81 before it, was a good straight road-for I was speeding down it at ninety miles an hour, because I was free, again, and because I wanted to prove that my father's way was the fastest way, and so if I'd crashed into a tree, in short, because I'd been fiddling with the CD in the boom box, I'd have died in a burst of flames.

I was free. I was free, and having received my freedom I immediately reached for all the things I'd been so put-upon to do without. So I would leave our apartment and go mos.h.i.+ng, sort of, at the Ottobar on North Howard; in our apartment I would leave my clothes on the floor, I'd go jogging at all hours of the day, at all hours of the night. I looked at p.o.r.nography on the Internet, an activity about which I'd heard so much; I even tried, very briefly, to meet girls online, though I soon learned that this was mostly a way of meeting closeted gay men from Chevy Chase. And most important I would sometimes give up a hard-won parking spot to drive to New York to see a girl named Arielle whom I had met during the 2000 campaign. We had e-mailed a bit since then, and I had called her soon after Jillian left for California. "Oh, hi," she said, ambiguously, after I'd explained who I was. We had kissed one time in Los Angeles, after cops on horseback had chased us away from the Democratic convention at the Staples Center, which we were protesting, and it's possible that the kiss had meant more to me than it did to her. And it had been a while. But I persisted, and we'd begun to see each other, if it can be called that.

I was twenty-seven years old. Looking back now I see there were things I did not know about life. For example, that if a woman doesn't sleep with you right away, she might stay inclined not to-the pleasure of resisting has become too keen, or maybe she doesn't like you. At the time it seemed I was just messing up, showing up too late or too early; too aggressively or too demurely. I didn't know what the trouble was, exactly, but I thought it could be figured out.

Arielle was in New York for law school, and part of the trouble was that she lived with two other law students who disapproved of my visits, chaste though they were. "I can't tell tell them that," she protested, when I pointed this out. "I can't tell them anything. They're so weird!" She paused mournfully. "When I was searching for the room they posted it as being in the Gramercy area, but this is Murray Hill. That should have been a clue." them that," she protested, when I pointed this out. "I can't tell them anything. They're so weird!" She paused mournfully. "When I was searching for the room they posted it as being in the Gramercy area, but this is Murray Hill. That should have been a clue."

"You could move?"

"I signed a lease. And it's cheap here. And I can almost walk to school."

"But you have these terrible roommates."

"I have a terribly inconsiderate suitor, that's what I I have." have."

Because the other part of the trouble was that she had a boyfriend. "In Boston I was involved in a situation where the boy had two girlfriends, so I don't see why I shouldn't have two of you," she'd said initially, but sometimes she had second thoughts. As for me, I didn't really mind. I loved my freedom, of course, in those first few months after Jillian left ("Tell me again why?" she had said on the last day. "Because I don't feel what I know I should feel," I said, lamely, and she nodded, generously, studiously, my studious Jillian)-but I also felt as if the thread of my life had snapped, and though my history with Arielle was a brief history, it was history enough. Even inconclusive wrestling on her bed meant something to me, for now. Also, I thought she was funny.

And now-on the night I'd driven up, a Friday, at top speed on 78, through the Holland Tunnel, straight up the gut of Manhatten on Sixth and across at 34th, and finally found a parking spot not far from Arielle's and valid, what is more, until Tuesday-she finally decided that my visits were too much. "We can't do this in my apartment anymore," she announced.

I froze. What did this mean? And my parking spot! Very warily I said, "All right."

"I asked my cousin if we could use hers," she offered.

"You did?" I was surprised. "I didn't even know you had a cousin."

"We're not very close. I see her about once a year, at like Pa.s.sover."

"And you asked to use her apartment for s.e.x."

"Not in so many words. And s.e.x s.e.x is putting it a bit strongly, don't you think? But yes, in effect. They're never even is putting it a bit strongly, don't you think? But yes, in effect. They're never even here here past Friday at six." past Friday at six."

"I'm touched."

"I asked if I could house-sit on weekends. And she said why not come up to Vermont with them. Skiing."

"And?"