The Other Side of the World Read online

  When I’d say this to him—that I sometimes wished I was more like this person or that person—friends who’d become doctors or lawyers or teachers or businessmen, who owned homes and had kids and the rest—he would seem puzzled. Why did I compare myself to others? Think of yourself as having taken the scenic route, he’d say. Or he’d tell me that in this I was really just a quintessential man of my times—a free agent, much like those professional athletes who moved to different teams and cities every few years. And weren’t we, after all, all free agents these days?

  He was forever alert to the ways others might compare me to him, so that the testimonials to my character I’d get from him through the years, which he must have thought would alleviate my insecurities (they never did) went essentially like this: That I was a fine young man leading a life unlike the lives of most of my contemporaries—that I had not lost my capacity for joy, that my values were sound, and that I remained open to possibility.

  Big deal, I’d think. Or, when I was in a better mood, “Words words words,” I’d say back to him, at which response he’d smile, and say something about the apple not falling far from the pear tree, but it was this kind of perpetual cheerfulness, along with his seeming blindness to the ways in which I was a fuck-up, that often irritated me. By the time I was in my mid to late twenties, his words of praise, along with the repeated injunction to be kind to everybody, especially when it came to the shits of the world, left me pretty cold. Why be kind to people who were mean and fucked over other people? Why forgive people for unforgivable acts? For all his sophistication and shrewdness—his incredible knack, especially when it came to women and books, to discerning crap from quality—he also had a surprising willingness to suffer fools gladly.

  I must have seen myself as one of those fools, since I had a fairly well-developed talent for depriving myself of those things—like sticking with interesting women who actually liked me, or making sure to spend more time with Max—that might have offered more focus and direction—and more comfort and joy. Thus my tendency to change jobs (and girlfriends) regularly, to find jobs as far from home as I could, and to stay away from home for years at a time.

  There was something about the tag sale, though, and, more, about Seana moving in—she wasn’t much older than several women I’d gone with—that pushed me to say things to him I’d never been able to say before: that though I was glad things were going well, and I didn’t want to piss on his new parade, there seemed something unreal about his endless good cheer. Especially, I wrote, given how much loss he’d experienced. For starters, there was the fact that his first wife (my mom) had ditched him (and me), and that two of his other four wives had died on him, so how come, I asked, there was no acknowledgement—not even when he was raising me by himself, and there wasn’t even a housekeeper around to help—of just how lousy and encumbered a lot of his life must have been?

  “Well, Charlie,” he wrote back, “’twas not ever thus, let me assure you…” He understood why I might be puzzled by the ways he showed himself forth in the world, but what he’d come to believe had allowed him to be so cheerful, to use my word (healthy-minded was the term he preferred), as he thought he’d made clear on several occasions—but perhaps I hadn’t been paying attention, he wrote, or had chosen not to pay attention—had to do with a period of considerable darkness in his life, a period that began a few months before my first birthday during which he’d come as close as one could to choosing to leave this world.

  Because I’d been an infant at the time, I would of course possess no conscious memory of this moment—one he’d come to think of as his missing year (an admittedly foolish way of thinking of it, he noted, since it was anything but missing)—yet once he’d survived the year, an enormous clump of feelings and fears—of debilitating vexations—that had previously bothered him were, for the most part, deprived of their power.

  That was the sum of what he wrote, without giving any details (in a postscript he noted that the period he referred to lasted fourteen months and three days, but that there was a certain pleasurable tidiness for him in thinking of it as a single year), and so I found myself wondering if he’d written about this period of his life, and if Seana had found any of it in the stuff she’d taken from him.

  When I woke up on my first day home—the trip took a full twenty-four hours (to avoid Hong Kong, I flew via Tokyo and landed at JFK in New York, then took limo service to Northampton)—Seana was sitting next to me on the side of the bed, looking more beautiful than ever. She had been out of the house when I’d arrived, doing research at the local library, so I had no idea how long she’d been there watching me sleep.

  The last time I’d seen her had been nine or ten years before, in Chicago, where I’d been working for an insurance company as an auto accident appraiser. I’d shown up at a reading she was giving at a downtown bookstore for her second novel, Plain Jane, which was about an American woman in her mid-thirties who, after a divorce and an abortion, takes a job teaching art to teenagers at an international school in southern France, and becomes romantically involved with the headmaster. It was based, in part, on Jane Eyre—the headmaster is married, and his wife, a gifted painter who suffers from bouts of depression and mania, lives in seclusion in a cottage near the school—but, as Seana made clear in the question-and-answer period after the reading, when she reminded the audience that instead of marrying the headmaster, her heroine murders him and gets away with it—‘Reader, I buried him,’ was the book’s opening line—her novel was intended not as homage to Charlotte Brontë, but as Seana’s way of using a situation she found intrinsically intriguing—another one of O’Sullivan’s triangles, she allowed—to get at the dark side of matters that, in her opinion, Brontë had turned into sentimental nonsense. ‘Mawkish’ was the word she used to describe Brontë’s book, and afterwards—we had drinks together in her hotel’s bar—she confided that although what gave her the most pleasure in life was the act of writing itself, she did love getting a rise out of audiences by being mildly outré.

  “Outré?” I asked.

  “Outrageous, eccentric,” she said. She was aware that people thought her books weird, which didn’t hurt sales, and the good sales gave her the freedom to write what she wanted to write, and to live the way she wanted to live. The truth, though, was that she never thought of her books as being weird.

  “I’m essentially a realist,” she said, after which, watching for my response—which was no response at all, since even if I’d been sober at the time, I don’t think I would have understood what she meant about Triangle or Plain Jane being realistic novels—she began giggling. Then she leaned toward me and kissed me on the mouth, very gently, and I was so stunned that all I could do was sit there and grin. “You can kiss me back if you’d like,” she said, and I did, and we kissed for a long time until, a finger to my forehead, she pushed me away from her. “That was very good, Charlie,” she said, and she wished me sweet dreams, and left.

  Now, when I looked up at her from my bed, I saw that her reddish-brown hair was still cut page-boy style, that her eyebrows, which she never plucked or trimmed, were as dark and thick as ever, and that she had not had a chipped front tooth repaired. I’d always admired her for leaving the tooth the way it was because its imperfection had the effect of making me aware of how weirdly beautiful the rest of her was.

  “It’s my apostrophe,” she had explained once when I asked about it. While playing stickball with some guy-friends in Holy Cross schoolyard in Brooklyn, near where she grew up—which wasn’t far from where Max had grown up—she’d broken off a corner of the tooth, and the resulting shape—“Why it’s a giant white apostrophe!” her high school English teacher at the time, a nun named Sister Maureen, had said—seemed a good thing for a writer to hang on to, Seana had theorized, since in addition to representing something that had been omitted—and wasn’t what a writer chose to leave out more important than what he or she chose to leave in?—the word derived from the Greek, and signi
fied a turning away from a large audience in order to direct your words to one person in particular.

  “Hey Charlie,” she said a moment after I opened my eyes.

  “Hey Seana,” I said.

  She caressed my forehead and said she hoped we were still friends.

  “Why wouldn’t we still be friends?” I asked.

  “Well, for starters, I took over your room for a while, though I’ve since relocated to the third floor guest room.”

  “Then you’re not…” I began, and stopped. “I mean, you and my father have separate rooms.”

  “Sure.”

  “I just…”

  “You really are an innocent, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what Max always says.”

  She leaned down, brushing my forehead with a kiss, and said that I’d had a long trip and probably wanted to wash up and get myself settled before dinner. She’d brought my bags up to the room, and there was a glass of ice water and a snack—cheese and crackers and assorted goodies she’d left on my desk—and later, after I got my bearings, she had something she wanted to show me.

  I looked at the clock on my bureau, saw that it was nearly seven, but the shades were drawn, and I wasn’t sure if it was seven in the morning or the evening.

  She saw the puzzled look on my face. “It’s evening,” she said.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Three hours, maybe four. I’m not sure exactly when you arrived, but you were buzzing away—beautiful Z’s—when I returned from the library. You’re good at it.”

  “Good at it?”

  “At sleeping. It’s a talent I wish I had.”

  I sat up. “What’s the surprise?”

  “No surprise. Just something I’d like your opinion on.”

  “That’s all you want?”

  “Don’t get fresh with me, young man,” she said. “But yes, that’s all I want—your opinion on something I’d prefer not to ask your father about, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And there is one other thing.” She opened the door to leave. “Some time—whenever, as they say these days—I want your story. I want you to tell me your story.”

  “Sure,” I said. And then: “Is this the way you usually get material for your books—do you go around collecting stories from everyone you meet?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Why?” She shrugged, and when she spoke again she did so without looking at me. “Why? Because I guess I figure it’s the quickest, best way for you and me to get to know each other now that we’ve both grown up.”

  For dinner, my father made one of our favorites—blanquette de veau, with a spinach and wild mushroom salad on the side—and he served it with a smooth, light-bodied Italian wine. I was still in the grogs from the long flight home, and the wine kept me there, but my father and Seana were in high spirits, especially when they went on riffs where they imagined the way various of his colleagues (some of whom had been Seana’s teachers) might have reacted to the tag sale, and to the deal he and Seana had reached on the morning of the tag sale.

  In general, they agreed, most English department faculty members had little use for living writers, though they didn’t mind the cachet that came their way from knowing a writer who’d become a celebrity like Seana, or—what they got off on even more—being able to tell people they were friends with a colleague whose novel had been turned into a movie. In this, Seana said, they were like most people, thinking the highest compliment they could pay you was to say your book would make a great movie—as if novels were merely movies manqués.

  “Is that why you made sure your first novel would be one that could not be made into a movie?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Seana said. “It certainly could be made into a movie—anything can be made into a movie these days.”

  “A most depressing thought,” my father said.

  “They made Lolita into a movie,” I said.

  “Lolita?” my father said. “Compared to Triangle, Lolita is very pale matter, totally lacking in fire.”

  Seana groaned.

  “And what about Jules and Jim?” I said.

  “Grim and gloomy stuff,” Seana declared, “and with heavy-handed thematic overlays—The Great War and all that—and without anybody ever really enjoying it.”

  “It?” I asked.

  “The sex,” my father said. “What’s so extraordinary about Triangle is the sheer joy the family takes in its sexual escapades, the great and uncomplicated delight in one another, and in who they truly are.”

  “Shhh,” Seana said. “You’re embarrassing the author.”

  By this time, Max had opened a second bottle of wine, and was telling us about how at faculty Christmas parties he’d walk up behind a colleague, tap the man or woman on the shoulder, and before the colleague could turn around, ask—“So tell me—how’s the new novel coming?”—to which the colleague would usually reply, “Almost done,” or “Coming along,” and then there’d be a double-take, and the inevitable question: “But how did you know?”

  Somewhere between salad and dessert—my father’s delicious bread-pudding-with-maple-syrup—I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, Max was pouring more wine—we were on our third bottle—and raising a glass to my health. As to his own health, he said, he was feeling terrific—stronger than ever. He glanced down at his lap, then looked at me.

  “Now I can bend it,” he said.

  Seana rolled her eyes and declared this was the perfect example of the kind of shtik that had charmed his students—had made them use the word ‘puckish’ when they talked about him.

  “A term I deplored,” my father said.

  Seana leaned toward me: “Your father never fooled around with us—with his female students—the way the other profs did.”

  “One should not shit where one eats,” my father said.

  “Still,” Seana said, “there were those among us who thought it a shame.”

  “There can be great pleasures in renunciation,” my father stated, after which he stood, inclined his head slightly toward Seana, and began removing dishes from the table while reminding me that, as he’d mentioned in one of his letters, he was planning a trip to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that he hoped I’d join him. Perhaps Seana would come too.

  Seana shrugged, said she preferred not to go home again if she could help it, thank you very much, and her face took on a look of such sudden sadness—her hazel-green eyes going to dark brown, her smile sucked inward—that I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine, tell her that everything—everything!—was going to be all right. My father continued to clear the table while Seana remained where she was, immobile, so I stood and, on wobbly legs, began gathering plates and silverware.

  “Please sit,” my father said, after which he announced that it was past his bedtime but that he knew we young people had things to talk about—Seana had so informed him earlier in the day—and that we should leave the rest of the dishes, along with the pots and pans, until morning.

  He kissed Seana on the forehead, then came around the table, told me again how good it was to have me home, kissed me on the cheek, and asked me to give serious thought to accompanying him to Brooklyn, perhaps the following week.

  “I need to go to Maine first,” I said. “To visit Nick’s parents.”

  “Of course,” my father said, and reminded Seana that Nick had been a friend of mine from college who had lived in Singapore—who was responsible for my going there to work—and that Nick had died recently.

  “You didn’t like him,” Seana said.

  “Correct,” my father said. “I didn’t like him, although I didn’t wish him dead. I found him a somewhat hollow and manipulative young man.”

  “You never told me that,” I said.

  “He was your friend, not mine, and doubtless possessed qualities that made you favor him with your friendship.”

  “My father�
��s right about that,” I said to Seana.

  “Right that this guy was an ass?” Seana asked.

  “Right that it was because of Nick that I went to Singapore.”

  “So?” she said.

  “So I’m just setting the record straight.”

  “But surely your decision was not based wholly upon your friendship with Nick,” my father said.

  “Not wholly,” I said.

  “Good,” my father said, “because although Nick and your friendship with him were clearly crucial to your choice, what I’ve preferred to believe is that your primary reason for going to the Far East had to do with your thirst for adventure.”

  “That too,” I said.

  My father turned to Seana. “I’ll tell you something about my son that, given his often faux-naïf demeanor when it comes to matters intellectual, you might not suspect,” he said. “Charlie was a voracious reader when he was a boy, and the books he loved most were about faraway places with strange sounding names. When he was seven or eight, I started him off with a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy, and while other boys his age were reading The Hardy Boys or sports novels, Charlie was immersed in tales that took him on exotic journeys to the four corners of the world.”

  “It’s true,” I said and, hoping to pull Seana out of her gloom, I told her about my favorite author in high school, James Ramsey Ullman, and the book reports I did on his novels—about climbing Everest, going across the Karakorum desert in China, and up and down the Amazon—along with books like Kon Tiki and Green Mansions, and before that—at about the time I was reading Bomba the Jungle Boy—the Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle books.