I Will Be Complete Read online

  But I thought she might die, so I got forceful. I said a few sentences from the story I’ve just told: when I was twelve, I lived on my own for a while. I wanted to know why that had happened.

  After I said this, it went dead quiet. She looked at me agape. She shook her head in horror. “No,” she said. “No, that never happened. Never. I didn’t leave you.”

  “But—you did. You got on a plane with Trevor and you called me from New York.”

  “Oh, no, no.” She put her hands to her mouth. She had gone pale. “I would never do that. But I can see why you’d feel so strongly toward me if you think that happened.”

  This is why I can imagine her horror if she heard I thought I should save her. It’s the same face. I was having one of those experiences where I was floating out of my body. For years, when I wrote scenes in which one person confronts another, I made him float, because I didn’t know it was possible not to do that.

  My mother didn’t know what to say, but she felt sorry that my memory was so sour. She wondered why I remembered it that way. Still, the 1970s were strange times, she said, and she would have done some things differently if she knew then what she knew now. But most of all, she said, she did everything for me. She made all the choices about the men and the money to try to find me a good father figure.

  For a week, I cross-examined myself. Had I made it up? Did I need to imagine that set of wild circumstances? Did I have to create a mother like that so that I could—what?—feel abandoned? Maybe I had to make up an origin story for myself.

  Her ear surgery was successful, in that she lived. I’m not sure her hearing was restored. It was sort of hard to tell with her. A few weeks later, she got in touch and said she’d read over her notes, and what I’d said was true. She had left me, something she hadn’t remembered until now.

  I couldn’t bear, again, the understanding that my mother believed deeply and exactly whatever allowed her to survive from one incident to the next. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  She said, “I guess Mommy fucked up.”

  PLEASE FORWARD

  IT’S RARE WE SEE OURSELVES in a life story that makes sense. But there are moments like, for instance, sitting in the back of a cab on Broadway in 1974, when a body falls against the chassis. I look up and am aware for the first time of a gap between when something happens and when I make words to describe it. That might be my birth as a writer. I don’t have emotions so much as I describe them. That is how I was made.

  * * *

  —

  My mother visited me at Thacher in the spring of my freshman year. I took her around the perimeter road. Here was the Outdoor Theater, constructed in the prior century from the white stone, piedra blanca, that was scattered around campus. Here was the horse they’d assigned me, Louis Houdini, who was so clever he could open the gates to the corral with his mouth. Back at the dorm, I told her about buying Ronald’s soul and selling it back to him. Here was a copy of the contract. Funny, right? She agreed—mischief among boarding school students, rather what she’d expected of me.

  It wasn’t much of a tour, nothing to compare with what I’d grown up with, but I’d only been there a brief time and didn’t have much accumulated yet. I had almost nothing—almost—to my name. She had to go soon, so that was okay, but there was one thing she had to take care of first.

  We walked across the Pergola and into a room by the auditorium, where there were overstuffed couches facing a giant fireplace. I asked after Trevor, and I asked after Anton, whom my mother had started mentioning recently. Anton managed musicians. He was tall and handsome, an air force vet who spoke with eloquence about life on the road with talented, famous people.

  Anton was under a lot of stress. A singer had canceled a concert and because of some technicality, Mom said, Anton was financially responsible for it. She said a very partial, almost biased judge had frozen his assets. Mom was hoping to help him get back on his feet.

  It was hard to follow this story, which had more odd details than I remember, but I felt bad for Anton. It wasn’t clear to me what he had become to my mother, but it did seem that life in New York was harsh, especially for people who lived by their dreams. My mother had confidence in him, and she believed that in the near future, maybe only months, he was going to organize a college tour of musicians that would get him out of this fix.

  She had an errand. Concerned and responsible, sitting on a couch, opening her purse, bringing out a manila envelope. I know she made whatever she was wearing look good. She had been a model, remember, and she had a flair that made anything simple look elegant. She used to sing to me when I was a child, “Moon River,” and when I had ear infections she would stay up all night, listening to me howl in a pain she felt miserable about since she could not ease it. When I was four, she led me through the tide pools and she slipped, knocking loose her front teeth, so her very smile was traumatized by being a mother to me. When she asked me for a favor I wanted to do it.

  She had put me into adventure and danger without knowing the difference. She had let me sit with the adults and the freaks. Because of her, I had an education. At fourteen, I was looking at her in a way children might never get to see their parents. I was evaluating her. I was thinking, She looks nervous. She looks awkward. She knows this is wrong to ask.

  She fanned out some documents allowing her to cash in the corporate bonds that had been earmarked for college. My mother told me that the interest rate was paltry. If this money was freed up to invest properly, the return would be phenomenal. I would get every penny back and so much more. She sounded embarrassed. She sounded like she couldn’t believe it had come to this, the world so unfair and chaotic, her being forced to turn to her only child with such a beggar’s dilemma.

  At the same time, she was embarrassed for an entirely different reason. She didn’t believe what she was saying. She was already preparing for the moment where all my money would vanish. She was already feeling shame. When she talked, she sounded upbeat in the manner of a saleswoman who has memorized a brochure offering me great advantages for my future. Both the lie and the truth were true to her. Seeing that then crushed me, a shove in the chest so violent I barely felt it, if that makes sense. I took the pen.

  I hated my signature. My first name came out the same way it had since learning cursive, so it seemed immature. My last name I always signed with a weak collapse of the capital G, exactly as my mom did. I disliked how it looked as if my name were a part of her in a way I wished it no longer was.

  But when I signed I did it boldly. I did it to prove I was my own person, and I knew the real consequences. I told myself and my invisible audience exactly why I was doing it, as I was doing it. I was setting the record straight. My mother’s world was populated by abandoned princes down on their luck and pitiless landlords. But it didn’t have to be that way, not with your shoulder to the wheel and a little luck on your side. So simple, done, signed, here you go.

  Our business was concluded, the ballpoint on the table, the sun not yet set behind Casitas Pass, the afternoon wind picking up and loosely shaking the burgundy-colored flakes around the pepper trees. My mother had not yet gathered up her things. Her flight back to New York was still ahead of her along with all the possibilities in the world.

  Adulthood, I’m convinced, is among all those other measures when you can feel nostalgia and remorse at the same time. That’s what I felt right then. I felt the urge to be where I was and somewhere else, also.

  It would be so beautiful if I weren’t here, I thought.

  My mother gathered her stuff, I walked some part of the way with her, and then I hugged her goodbye.

  Watching myself from a distance of decades, I’m waving to her as she leaves. My awareness, born in the back of a taxi cab, made real now: an event has happened and instead of feeling it, I am telling myself about it. I’m able to tell you about it, and sharing that str
ikes some tiny flint that may be visible from very far away. I have given her all I can and I’m sad it isn’t much, a few thousand dollars, all I have to my name. Here’s just a bit, Mom, a life raft and one burst of wind to make your trip a little easier. There is something terrible out there, I know. You’re not really going to escape.

  2

  * * *

  THE COUNTERFEIT CHILD

  * * *

  for Jason Roberts

  My observation of people leads me to conclude, generally speaking, that even people with some degree of intelligence are likely to go through life supposing they have ample time before them. But would a man fleeing because a fire has broken out in his neighborhood say to the fire, “Wait a moment, please?”

  To save his life, a man will run away, indifferent to shame, abandoning his possessions. Is a man’s life any more likely to wait for him?

  Death attacks faster than fire or water, and is harder to escape. When its hour comes, can you refuse to give up your aged parents, your little children, your duty to your master, your affections for others, because they are hard to abandon?

  —Essays in Idleness, Kenko, 1332

  (translated by Donald Keene)

  REMAINDER TABLE

  IN SUMMER 1983, when I was nineteen, I fell in love with a woman who swore she wouldn’t love me. She let me know I would have to settle for learning from her about books and the classical arts and how to go to bed with someone without fussing about my heart. She would introduce me to the rules of how to live cleanly, perhaps poor as alley cats, but with cats’ autonomy. She emphasized, however, that she would never actually want me.

  I am however unpersuaded by people who say they don’t want me, and this is where the story gets complicated. You could say I run hardest after the people who are running away. That’s something I recognized about myself that summer. Another is that for reasons I didn’t question I had an impulse to rescue women. Alas.

  But before I tell you about who I became, I need to tell you about the person I no longer wanted to be.

  When I graduated from high school in 1981, I was only seventeen. I went to college in the East for some reason. It’s very possible I decided to go to Wesleyan because Mary Goodrich was going there, and she was cute. And then I was in Connecticut, which depressed me every day for not being California.

  I can’t explain why I was a Japanese Studies major. It might be that the classes fit my schedule, and in the classrooms I found cute girls to talk to (Mary Goodrich, it turned out, was uninterested). I wrote out Zen teachings in flabby Kanji. The more I smudged things like “The way of the sage is work without effort” the more angry I got, which I suppose is an illustration of irony.

  I enrolled in a fiction-writing class. I wrote badly. There were only six people in it, and the rest of them quickly had enough of me. We met at the professor’s house, in her living room, and she seemed to eye me in every session like I was about to steal an ashtray. I didn’t know how to convince her otherwise, and the more vulnerable I made my fiction the more hatefully it read. There isn’t much that causes people to recoil more than sensing someone wants to be liked.

  September was humid, and so was October, and in November it kept getting colder in a way I wasn’t familiar with, a brutal muscle-piercing cold, as if the weather actually wanted to kill us all, but people who understood seasons told me that it still wasn’t winter. I was trying to fit in, so I raced some dorm mates down the corridors one evening. I didn’t see a shelf sticking out of a wall, and I hit it nose-first. I’d broken my nose once as a kid, and I thought it was broken again. The next day I went to the campus doctor, who explained to me that it wasn’t broken. If it were, he said, putting his hands on my face, he could break it back into place, like this, and there was an awful snap.

  He was silent for a moment. Now I’d broken my nose three times. I don’t remember that part as vividly as him telling the nurse to bring the pharmaceutical-grade cocaine.

  When I left his office, I was numbed up (he made me sign some release forms after the blow submerged my brain). I had a cast on my face reinforced by surgical tape that went over my forehead and cheekbones. I was confused. I had homework, and I was hungry, and I was supposed to buy some antibiotics at the drugstore, but I wasn’t sure what to do first. I walked through Middletown as the sky darkened and the first snow of the season started to come down and stick. I was surrounded by Connecticut winter, finally—and when people saw me shuffling toward them, they crossed the street.

  The cast stayed on for weeks. The tape dirtied and warped, holding on to every stray piece of lint and fuzz. I slept at odd times. I missed classes. I felt strange, like I was in a space suit that I didn’t know how to take off. Other students learned that when I came into their rooms, I tended to ask unanswerable questions, like if they ever felt alone even when other people were around.

  * * *

  —

  Mom visited me. I’d invited her up from New York to see a concert, the Moody Blues, her favorite. One of my dorm mates had promised to give her a ride back to the city afterward, because there wasn’t train service. But he disappeared, and I was unable to understand where he went. My mother needed to get home, which was a problem so insurmountable I couldn’t function.

  It’s hard to explain what I thought about her then, or what she was going through. It might have been stability. My own semester had been dire enough that seeing anyone else’s situation was almost impossible. I was so lonely that I called my high school friends, hours on the phone, long-distance, to hear voices that were familiar with whom I’d been beforehand. When I talked to my mom, it’s not like my defenses were down—since high school I’d suspected something was wrong with her—but I had this faint idea that a young person who was having a rough time might reach out to his mom.

  So we saw a concert together and the next day I had no way to get her back to Manhattan. I sat down on my bed, then I was lying on it, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. I was familiar with difficult problems. I knew how to think my way through them. But now, my thoughts were going in circles. And then they were frozen in place.

  I could feel how my boots gripped my feet too tightly. They were double-knotted, and thinking about the effort it would take to unlace them started to break me. My mother was sitting in a chair in the corner. I didn’t know how to communicate to her that I was completely lost.

  Mom got up, kissed me on the forehead, above the bandages. She took her things with her and, just like that, she left. Apparently she’d figured out how to get back to New York. She was resourceful. If I were the needy sort, I could have been upset, I suppose, but I didn’t want to be around me, either. I didn’t mind her leaving me. It felt familiar.

  Then I was alone. I didn’t move for a period of time I don’t know how to define. I felt like the fabric onto which the day was sewn had ripped, and I was seeing through it into a void. The sky outside my window caught my eye, and I was unable to tell if it was dawn or dusk.

  It makes no difference, I thought. That’s not a new sun. It’s the same sun. It’s the same, always.

  With this thought, I fell into an awful, hollow place that revealed an essential daily lie, that having a good spirit is enough. But in truth there are no feelings, just chemicals that make us feel things, and when the chemicals recede there is no solace. There is nothing.

  The worst part was this had no air of discovery, but of return, like I’d known all this on an atavistic level. This was confirmation of something I’d glimpsed when I was awake in the middle of the night at six and seven years old. The terrors were real, but they weren’t of an approaching burglar. The terror is that no one is approaching. I had touched nothing, which leaves a permanent mark.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not like anything specific brought me out of this. The awareness was always there as my nose healed up and the cast
came off. Months went by. I was impatient. I didn’t exactly recover socially, but I applied myself, pretending to fit in until my self-consciousness died down a bit. Spring helped a little. Sun on my skin.

  I wasn’t sure what the point of anything was anymore. I was thinking that if I were the protagonist of my own story (and I did think that way), it wasn’t about coming-of-age—I’d done that already. But when I read in my Eastern philosophy classes about how life was mostly suffering I had a faint inkling now what they were talking about.

  * * *

  —

  I joined Alpha Delta Phi, Wesleyan’s literary fraternity, which was coed, and whose brothers and sisters terrified me with their sophistication. They wrote sestinas. They lived in apartments off campus. They took group showers and had mushroom trips and knew how to cook tofu and perform African dances. They spoke about professors by their first names, they hosted readings by Joyce Carol Oates and Trevanian and John Irving and there was supposedly old graffiti by Jack Kerouac in their basement, which they called a grotto. After readings, some of them snapped their fingers in place of applause and the rest gave tired but patient looks to the finger-snappers.

  I wanted so badly for them to like me that I had to calm myself down. The writer Jim Carroll said there are two types of cool: the chimpanzee and the panther. The difference is the chimp has to keep working at it. I wasn’t cool at all, but if I’d managed to get close to one sort, I was the chimp. And the panther—a mystery, and effortlessly so—was the right choice.

  Be here now, I wrote, a lot. It was shorthand, a bastardization of Taoism, the kind of wisdom that would fit on a T-shirt or on the cover of one of my notebooks. It was supposed to keep me from feeling anxious or guilty, because those were emotions from the past and the future, two places not to live.