We Learn Nothing Read online

  My weird touchiness on this issue—taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work—is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “the Referendum.” The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ different choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s only exacerbated by the far greater range of options available to us now than even a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill: a job or housework, marriage, kids. So we’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated—that we are, in some sense, winning.

  This tension may be less deep than class envy but it’s also more acute, if only because it’s so much more accessible. We’re seldom exposed to the privileges of stupendous wealth except on TV, and mostly don’t know what we’re missing. But we can have lunch with people we grew up or went to school with, who drive the same kind of cars and live in the same neighborhoods we do, whose lives are as alien to ours as Keith Richards’s or Kim Jong-Il’s.

  It’s especially conspicuous among people who’ve been friends from youth, like that editor and me. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before moving back to the suburbs to become their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your twenties make different decisions about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension. You’re like two seeds that looked identical, one of which turned into a kiwi and the other into a banyan.

  I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; in my early forties, I’ve never been married and don’t have kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City—doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, biking across the Brooklyn Bridge—they looked at me if I were describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked. What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to distract yourself from the emptiness at the center of your life. (The constant external demands of frantic busyness provide a kind of existential reassurance.) But I’m sure that to them this problem would seem about as pitiable as morbid obesity to the victims of famine.

  A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life, an interest that’s usually just nosy prurient fun, but sometimes seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.

  I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within twelve hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. (Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.) One of those friends cautioned me against idealizing wedded life, reminding me, “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.” This sounded to me a little like a rich person telling a poor one that money doesn’t buy happiness, but I knew what she meant. I also understand that friends sometimes tell each other lies out of kindness—for example, that marriage isn’t any less lonely, or that being single isn’t more fun.

  Parenthood opens up an even deeper divide. Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. It’s as if these people have joined a cult: they claim to be happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a pampered sociopathic master whose every whim is law. (Note to friends with children: I am referring only to other people’s children, not yours.) They’re frantic and haggard and constantly exhausted, getting through the days on a sleep deficit of three years, complaining about how busy and circumscribed their lives are, as though they hadn’t freely chosen it all.

  Not long ago, when I was staying with some friends who have a young daughter, one of them tiredly reported that there were more “pee clothes” to add to the laundry, and then thought to ask me if I had anything I wanted to throw in the wash. I answered, not to be a smartass but in simple truth: “Not with pee clothes.” She gave me a look best transcribed as: Oooo, lookit Mr. Fancy! Too fastidious to have his precious raiment washed with a little girl’s pee clothes. I suppose “No, thanks” would have been the polite response. I have noticed that parents of young children seem to take some gratuitous enjoyment in discussing what they persist in calling, even in the company of other adults, “pee” and “poop,” like veterans swapping stories of battlefield grue to horrify civilians. But, as another friend who also has young children later explained to me, one side effect of parenthood is the dissolution of all personal boundaries, like squeamishness about our bodily functions. What my friend was really telling me with her laundry offer, which I was too preoccupied with my own Referendum to hear, was that I was family.

  I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. (I already have several large rude incontinent friends, one of whom is bugging me to buy him a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival and another who thinks I owe him a Cadillac.) But one reason my friends with children sometimes envy my life, and I never envy theirs, is that they know what they’re missing, and I don’t. There are moments when some part of me wonders whether I am missing not only the whole biological point—since reproducing is, evolutionarily speaking, the one simple job we’re supposed to accomplish while we’re alive—but something else I cannot begin to imagine, an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like an inhabitant of Flatland scoffing at the theoretical notion of sky.

  And I can only imagine the paralyzing terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for further into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the rote unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely this wish on a daily basis.

  I have no real interest in people’s rationales for getting married or having kids, or for not doing so. I suspect people reproduce for exactly one reason—biology—and decline to for another—pathology—and I’m thankful my own modest pathology exempts
me from having to handle feces or see Disney films or pretend to care about soccer. Nothing anyone says in defense of such major, irrevocable life choices is likely to be their real reason for making them; the number and vociferousness of our rationales is only an indication of how irrational and primal those decisions are. What interests me is the need to offer such justifications, to validate ourselves at the expense of others.

  Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish and wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. Hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a desperate cluelessness, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

  The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”1 A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job and a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful imagining that cartoonist’s tour—sleeping on couches in Brussels, Paris, and New York, meeting fans and colleagues (some of them pretty girls, maybe), being taken out for beers every night. Meanwhile the cartoonist, who looks very much like one of the gangling anthropomorphic birds he draws, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

  One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back—Lot’s wife, Eurydice—are irrevocably lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield. It’s the closest we can get to a glimpse of the parallel universe in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or made that plane at the last minute. So it’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people’s lives, island universes, unknowable.

  Not long ago I received a text message that read: ZELDA’S FEELING BETTER BUT SHE DIDN’T GO TO BALLET, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO PICK HER UP. For an instant it was like one of those nightmares where it’s the final exam for a course you’d forgotten you ever enrolled in. Had I been supposed to pick up Zelda after ballet? My plan had been to spend the afternoon at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar with my friend Rick. Who was Zelda? Then it made sense: Zelda was the daughter of my editor friend—the same one who’d asked me to write the essay on adolescence. His wife had sent me the message by mistake. It was like an accidental glimpse into one of those alternate realities—one in which my schedule was crammed with responsibilities, my life trammeled by love. I wrote her back to let her know she’d misdirected her text, and then forgot about it, the way you wake from a dream or snap out of a moment’s reverie. Rick was sauntering across the floor of the main concourse, late as usual, a hand raised in greeting. One of the benefits of Rick’s company, which lasts exactly as long as you’re in his presence, is the feeling that whatever you are doing is preferable to anything anyone else on earth is doing at that moment. It was time for lunch.

  Bad People

  One Saturday morning when I was in my teens, my father called upstairs for me to get up because we had to get dressed for his younger brother’s wedding. I called Okay then fell back asleep. He called up again, then knocked on my door several times. I said I’m up I’m up I’m up and slept on. Finally, Dad entered my room.

  “Dad,” I told him, “I really don’t want to go to Uncle Lee’s wedding.” He sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “Do you know how many times your Uncle Lee has been married?” he asked me. I hesitated, leery that this question might be a trick one and also, come to think of it, not sure of the correct answer. I knew Uncle Lee had been married once, to my aunt Liz. He was the first person I’d known to get divorced. But hadn’t there been another wife in there somewhere? An overcheerful, deluded-seeming blonde—Aimie? Angie? Or had she just been a girlfriend?

  “No?” I said.

  “Well,” my dad said, “I’m not sure he does, either,” and got up.

  I woke up a couple hours later and was surprised to find myself alone in the house. It took me a few minutes to absorb that my father had, uncharacteristically, let me off the hook. I remember this episode fondly not only because it was one of the few times I was excused from some boring family function but because it was also the first time I could remember my father taking me into his confidence to side, even jokingly, against his brother, or acknowledging that his loyalty to him had its limits.

  My father and my uncle Lee were like two brothers in a fairy tale—much alike, one light, one dark. The overachiever and the fuckup; the favorite and the disgrace. My father, Walter, was what you might call extremely high-functioning, hypercompetent, a man who always seemed to have two or three appointments scheduled at once. If there were such a diagnosis as unipolar mania I’d almost wonder whether he’d had it. “Some who knew him found him slightly unsettling,” a columnist friend of his wrote after he died, “for he was constantly on the go and threw off ideas the way a burning pine log throws sparks.”1 He was chief of staff health at John Hopkins Hospital and later joined the World Health Organization, speculated in real estate and led local efforts in land preservation, served on several church boards and committees, cofounded a religious retreat center, and took us on ambitious family vacations, renting out a Winnebago to drive out west and hiring a boat to cruise the Chesapeake Bay. His brother Lee was bipolar, and died in prison.

  My father was handsome, charismatic, and funny, quick with silly jokes and puns, and a dapper, but not flashy, dresser. My friends called him “dashing.” He was such a large personality that Dad was an adjective in our family: “It was a very Dad way to handle it.” Lee was good-looking in a seedy, Robert Mitchum kind of way, with sideburns, a dimpled chin, and a sly slope to his eyes that suggested he was always scheming something, figuring the angles. (A friend of mine, looking at an old photo of him, said: “He looks like a supporting character in a seventies movie about muscle cars.”) Often one aspect of bipolar disorder is a compelling charm. Lee used his the way anglerfish use their lights. I still don’t know how many times he was married. He never seemed to have girlfriends, only fiancées. He would convince new acquaintances that he was a good guy who’d gotten some bad breaks and been cast out by his family, and they’d give him a place to stay or a temporary job and help him try to set up a life. (One well-intentioned character witness described him as “exceptionally honest and trustworthy.”) Soon they’d be trying to rid themselves of this man as if he were a black curse out of the Brothers Grimm.

  My parents agreed that Lee probably would’ve been a millionaire if he hadn’t been insane. As it was, his life only ever amounted to a pathetic attempt to imitate my father’s success. My father, as I’ve mentioned, was a speculator in real estate—“some of his conservation-minded friends . . . were disturbed by the rate at which he bought and sold attractive properties,” wrote his columnist friend.2 He also liked to go to auctions—I still have an antique post office cabinet and a stuffed sea turtle he brought home. Lee was an impulse buyer, too; a list of his assets includes a mobile home, a truck, an RV, several cars, boats, antiques, and various pieces of property. My father’s investments proved sound: he made a lot of money off the sale of land and left his family a seventy-acre farm and a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay. Lee’s buildings, truck
s, and boats all rotted while he was in prison and ended up being sold off to pay his legal bills. As my mother put it, “Your father had some of that same manic energy Uncle Lee did. They were both full of ideas. The difference was that your father’s ideas generally connected to reality, but Lee’s never did.”

  My sister and I knew that our uncle had been in trouble with the law, in the shadowy, peripheral way that kids are aware of serious goings-on overhead in the grown-up world—the same way adults will vaguely register something in the news about a city-sized asteroid passing within a thousand miles of the earth. “Uncle Lee got mixed up with some bad people” is how it was put to me on the one occasion when I asked directly. I was already familiar enough with my father’s charitable euphemisms (he’d once described a street-corner drunk in Baltimore who’d mistaken him for an admiral as “very confused”) to decode this. Even then I understood that my uncle Lee was the bad person.

  Lee had been a problem since he was a teenager. He’d been sent to a juvenile corrections facility in high school, and his parents had sent him from Illinois to live with my father right after my parents were married, in hopes that his stabler older brother’s influence would keep him out of trouble. It didn’t help. The earliest documents I have pertaining to my uncle record a series of miscellaneous infractions—bad checks passed for an office machine ($833) and a ’69 Camaro ($200), shoplifting (to wit: “did conceal merchandise valued at $7.42 under his shirt”), even a warrant outstanding from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for “failure to obtain [an] oversand vehicle permit,” which would appear to mean he was driving a car on the beach. It’s the record of a man who couldn’t seem to get through twelve hours without committing a misdemeanor.