We Need to Talk About Kevin

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  industries have closed—these summer folk and, of course, the n e w correctional facility on the outskirts of town.

  I was thinking about you on the drive up, if that doesn't go without saying. By way of counterpoint, I was trying to picture the kind of man I assumed I'd end up with before we met. T h e vision was doubtless a composite of the on-the-road boyfriends you always rode me about. Some of my romantic blow-ins were sweet, though whenever a w o m a n describes a m a n as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

  If that assortment of cameo companions in Aries orTelAviv was anything to go by (sorry—"the losers"), I was destined to settle d o w n with a stringy cerebral type whose skittering metabolism burns chickpea concoctions at a ferocious rate. Sharp elbows, prominent Adam's apple, narrow wrists. A strict vegetarian.

  An anguished sort w h o reads Nietzsche and wears spectacles, alienated from his time and contemptuous of the automobile.

  An avid cyclist and hill walker. Professional marginalia—perhaps a potter, with a love of hardwoods and herb gardens, whose aspirations to an unpretentious life of physical toil and lingering sunsets on a porch are somewhat belied by the steely, repressed rage with which he pitches disappointing vases into an oil drum.

  A weakness for weed; brooding. An understated but ruthless sense of humor; a dry, distant laugh. Back massages. Recycling. Sitar music and a flirtation with Buddhism that is mercifully behind him.Vitamins and cribbage, water filters and French films. A paci-fist with three guitars but no TV, and unpleasant associations with team sports from a picked-on childhood. A hint of vulnerability in the receding hairline at the temples; a soft, dark ponytail whisping d o w n the spine. A sallow, olive complexion, almost sickly. Tender, whispering sex. Curious carved w o o d e n talisman thonged around the neck that he will neither explain nor take off, even in the bath. Diaries that I mustn't read, pasted up with sick squib clippings that illustrate what a terrible world we live in. ("Grisly Find: Police found assorted bits of a man's body, including a pair of hands and two legs, in six luggage lockers in Tokyo's central railway station. After inspecting all 2,500 coin lockers, police found a pair of buttocks in a black plastic garbage bag.") A cynic about mainstream politics with an unabating ironic detachment from popular culture. A n d most of all? W i t h fluent if prettily accented English, a foreigner.

  We would live in the countryside—in Portugal, or a little village in Central America—where a farm up the road sells raw milk, fresh-churned sweet butter, and fat, seedy pumpkins. O u r stone cottage would writhe with creepers, its w i n d o w boxes blushing red geraniums, and we would bake chewy ryes and carrot brownies for our rustic neighbors. An overeducated man, my fantasy partner would still root about the soil of our idyll for the seeds of his .own discontent. A n d surrounded by natural bounty, grow spitefully ascetic.

  Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a m a n w h o tells knock-knock jokes. H o t dogs—not even East 86th Street bratwurst, but mealy, greasy pig guts of that terrifying pink.

  Baseball. G i m m e caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer w h o only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup w h o thinks bicycles are for nerds.

  Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of every description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies.

  Squigglies—you're laughing, but I don't eat them—anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck w i n d o w d o w n and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key—how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear? Beach Boys. Elvis—never lost your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. T h o u g h not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly w h e n Kevin went off t h e m . . .(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland.You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that " Q u i e t City" made you cry. A n d ordinary, obvious pleasures: the Bronx Z o o and the Botanical Gardens, the C o n e y Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building.You were the only N e w Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty Y o u dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat w h o spoke English. Representational art—Edward Hopper. A n d my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise—yourself a strong defense. T h e r e were times you worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so m u c h of your size, though you weighed in at a pretty standard 165,170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. H o w lucky we are, w h e n we're spared what we think we want! H o w weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and h o w I detest the w h i n e of sitar music!

  But the biggest surprise of all was that I married an American.

  N o t just any American either, a man w h o happened to be American. N o , you were American by choice as well as by birth.

  You were, in fact, a patriot. I had never met one before. Rubes, yes. Blind, untraveled, ignorant people w h o thought the United States was the whole world, so to say anything against it was like decrying the universe, or air. Instead, you had been a few places—Mexico, one disastrous trip to Italy with a w o m a n whose cornucopia of allergies included tomatoes—and had decided that you liked your o w n country. N o , that you loved your o w n

  — 4 2 —

  country, its smoothness and efficiency, its practicality, its broad, unpretentious accents and emphasis on honesty. I would say—I did say—that you were enamored of an archaic version of the U.S., either an America that was long past or that never was; that you were enamored of an idea. And you would say—did say—that part of what America was was an idea, and that was more than most countries could claim, which were mosdy scrappy pasts and circumscriptions on a map. It was a fine, it was a beautiful idea, too, you said, and you pointed o u t — I granted you this—that a nation that aimed to preserve above all the ability of its citizens to do pretty m u c h whatever they wanted was exactly the sort of place that should have captivated the likes of me. But it hasn't worked out that way, I'd object, and you'd counter, better than anywhere else, and we would be off.

  It is true that I grew disenchanted. But I would still like to thank you for introducing me to my o w n country. Wasn't that h o w we met? We'd decided at AWAP to r u n those advertisements in Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, and w h e n I was vague about the photos we wanted, Young & R u b i c a m had you stop in.

  You showed up at my office in a flannel shirt and dusty jeans, a beguiling impertinence. I tried so hard to be professional, because your shoulders were distracting. France, I supposed. T h e R h o n e Valley. A n d then I dithered over the expense—sending you over, putting you up. You laughed. Don't be ridiculous, you dismissed.

  I can find you the R h o n e Valley in Pennsylvania. W h i c h indeed you did.

  Hitherto, I had always regarded the United States as a place to leave. After you brazenly asked me o u t — a n executive with w h o m you had a business relationship—you goaded me to admit that had I been b o r n elsewhere, the U.S. of A. was perhaps the f
irst country I would make a beeline to visit: whatever else I might think of it, the place that called the shots and pulled the strings, that made the movies and sold the Coca-Cola and shipped Star Trek all the way to Java; the center of the action, a country that you needed a relationship with even if that relationship was hostile;

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  a country that demanded if not acceptance at least rejection—anything but neglect. T h e country in every other country's face, that would visit you whether you liked it or not almost anywhere on the planet. Okay, okay, I protested. Okay. I would visit.

  So I visited. In those early days, remember your recurrent astonishment? That I had never been to a baseball game. Or to Yellowstone. Or the Grand Canyon. I sneered at them, but I had never eaten a McDonald's hot apple pie. (I confess: I liked it.) Someday, you observed, there would be no McDonald's. Just because there are lots of them doesn't mean that the hot apple pies aren't excellent or that it isn't a privilege to live in a time w h e n you can buy t h e m for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever m e t that its every constituent is fleeting.

  And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever. That of course it was an empire, though that was nothing to be ashamed of. History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said.

  We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted. Sure it was imperfect, you would add, with the same hastiness with which I observed before Kevin was b o r n that of course some children "had problems." But you said that if the U.S. were to fall or founder during your lifetime, collapse economically, be overrun by an aggressor, or corrupt from within into something vicious, you would weep.

  I believe you would. But I sometimes considered during those days you were carting me off to the Smithsonian, needling me to recite the presidents in order, grilling me on the causes of the Haymarket Riots, that I wasn't visiting the country, quite. I was visiting your country. T h e one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks. It was

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  a lovely reproduction, too. Even now, w h e n I glimpse snippets of the Preamble to the Constitution, We, the people..., the hair raises on the back of my neck. Because I hear your voice.The D e -

  claration of Independence, We hold these truths—your voice.

  Irony. I have thought about you and irony. It always got your back up w h e n my friends from Europe would come through and dismiss our countrymen as "having no sense of irony." Yet (ironically) in the latter twentieth century, irony was huge in the U.S., painfully so. In fact, I was sick of it, though I didn't realize that until we met. C o m i n g into the eighties, everything was

  "retro," and there was an undercurrent of snideness, a distancing in all those fifties diners with chrome stools and oversized root-beer floats. Irony means at once having and not having. Irony involves a prissy dabbling, a disavowal. We had friends whose apartments were completely tricked out in sardonic kitsch—pickaninny dolls, framed advertisements for Kellogg's cornflakes from the twenties ("Look at the bowlfuls go!")—who owned nothing that wasn't a joke.

  You wouldn't live that way. O h , to have " n o sense of irony"

  was supposedly to not k n o w what it was—to be a moron—-to have no sense of humor. A n d you k n e w what it was. You laughed, a little, at the lamp-bearing cast-iron black jockey that Belmont picked up for their hearth, to be polite. You got the joke. You just didn't think it was that funny, really, and in your o w n life you wanted objects that were truly beautiful and n o t just a laugh. Such a bright man, you were sincere by design and not merely by nature, American by personal fiat, and you would embrace all that was good in that. Is it called naivete w h e n you're naive on purpose? You would go on picnics. You would take conventional vacations to national monuments. You would sing O'er the la-and of the free! at the top of your tuneless voice at Mets games, and never with a smirk. T h e United States, you claimed, was on the existential cutting edge. It was a country whose prosperity was without precedence, where virtually everyone had enough to eat; a country that strove for justice and offered up

  — 4 5 —

  nearly every entertainment and sport, every religion, ethnicity, occupation, and political affiliation to be had, with a wild wealth of landscapes, of flora and fauna and weather. If it was n o t possible to have a fine, rich, sumptuous life in this country, with a beautiful wife and a healthy, growing boy, then it was n o t possible anywhere. And even now, I believe that you may be right. But that it may not be possible anywhere.

  9 P.M. (back home)

  T h e waitress was tolerant, but the Bagel Cafe was closing.

  And printout may be impersonal, but it's easier on the eye. For that matter, I worry that throughout that handwritten passage you've been skimming, reading ahead. I worry that the instant you spotted " C h a t h a m " up top you could think of nothing else, and that you for once couldn't care less about my feelings for the United States. Chatham. I go to Chatham?

  I do. I go at every opportunity. Fortunately, these journeys every two weeks up to Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility are aimed at such a restrictive w i n d o w of visiting hours that I am not free to consider going an h o u r later or another day. I leave at exactly 11:30 because it is the first Saturday of the m o n t h and I must arrive immediately after the second lunch slot at 2:00.1 do not indulge myself in reflection over h o w m u c h I dread going to see him, or, more improbably, look forward to it. I just go.

  You're astonished. You shouldn't be. He's my son, too, and a mother should visit her child in prison. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules. If anything, following the letter of the unwritten parental law was one of my failings.That came out in the trial— the civil suit. I was appalled by h o w upstanding I looked on paper. Vince Mancini, Mary's lawyer, accused me in court of visiting my son so dutifully in detention during his o w n trial only because I anticipated being sued for parental negligence. I was acting a part, he claimed, going through the motions. Of course, the trouble with jurisprudence is that it cannot accommodate subtleties. Mancini was onto something. There may indeed be an element of theater in these visits. B u t they continue w h e n no o n e is watching, because if I am trying to prove that I am a good mother, I am proving this, dismally, as it happens, to myself.

  Kevin himself has been surprised by my dogged appearances, which is not to say, in the beginning at least, pleased. Back in 1999, at sixteen, he was still at that age w h e n to be seen with your m o t h e r was embarrassing; h o w bittersweetly these truisms about teenagers persist through the most adult of troubles. A n d in those first few visits he seemed to regard my very presence as an accusation, so before I said a single word he'd get angry. It didn't seem sensible that he should be the one mad at me.

  B u t in the same vein, w h e n a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I've noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, w h o m he nearly ran over and w h o had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, w h o seem to grow all the m o r e indignant the more completely they are in the wrong.

  I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I'd had the presence back then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin's instantaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope. But at the time, his fury simply mystified me. It seemed so unfair. W o m e n tend more toward chagrin, and not only in traffic. So I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on.

  Hence, w h e n he was first i
ncarcerated we didn't have conversations as such. Simply being in front of him made me limp. He sapped me even of the energy to cry, which anyway would not have been very productive. After five minutes, I might ask him, my voice hoarse, about the food. He would gawk at me incredulously, as if under the circumstances the inquiry were as inane as it actually was. Or I'd ask, "Are they treating you all right?" although I wasn't sure what that meant or even whether I wanted his minders to treat him "all right." He'd slur that sure

  — 4 7 —

  they kiss me beddy-bye every night. It didn't take long for me to run out of pro forma M o m m y questions, for w h i c h I think we were both relieved.

  If it took little time to get past my posing as the loyal m o t h e r who's only concerned that sonny is eating his vegetables, we are still contending with Kevin's more impenetrable pose as the sociopath w h o is beyond reach. T h e trouble is, while my role as a m o t h e r w h o stands by her son no matter what is ultimately demeaning—it is mindless, irrational, blind, and sappy, hence a part I might gratefully shed—Kevin gets too m u c h sustenance from his o w n cliche to let it go quiedy. He still seems intent on demonstrating to me that he may have been a subjugant in my house w h o had to clean his plate, but n o w he's a celebrity who's been on the cover of Newsweek, whose fricative appellation, Kevin Khatchadourian—or " K K " to the tabloids, like Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia—has tsked chidingly off every major network news anchor's tongue. He's even had a hand in setting the national agenda, sparking n e w calls for corporal punishment, juvenile death sentences, and the V-chip. In lockup, he would have me k n o w that he is no tinhorn delinquent, but a notorious fiend of w h o m his less accomplished fellow juveniles are in awe.