Love May Fail

  Portia seems tired from driving. She’s not saying much, pushing the food around with her fork but not really eating either.

  “I’m really starting to worry about you,” I say, “which is strange, because it’s you who’s supposed to be saving me.”

  She looks up. “Why are you worried about me?”

  “Because this trip is not going to end the way you hope it will. It’s a really nice idea. Romantic, even, in a wonderfully platonic way. The former student returning after all these years to save the grizzled teacher who has suffered calamity and given up hope—it’s poetic, but it’s simply not real life.”

  “And yet here we are,” she says, far too confidently.

  “Look, I’m not going to pretend for you, so you can take all of my remaining strength and go on living your life believing in fairy tales. I won’t lie. I don’t wear a mask for people anymore—not even kids. I just can’t.”

  “I don’t want you to lie. I don’t want to see a mask. I just want to awaken that part of you deep down that wants to be a good man again.”

  “What if the part of me that wants to be ‘a good man,’ as you say, truly is already dead? Hacked out of me like an appendix just before it erupted? What if it’s simply gone?”

  “It cannot die. It cannot be removed—because it’s who you are—your fate,” she says, as only a fool or a child could, and I start to worry even more, because she’s talking nonsense now. Utter rot.

  “My fate? You’re starting to sound a lot like my delusional mother. Please don’t start spouting her religious nonsense—”

  “It’s whatever I saw in you when I was in your class—the real true you,” she says. “I don’t know what to call it now. Maybe a spark.”

  “A spark? Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Just a beautiful spark.”

  “But a spark flickers for only a moment, and then it goes dark forevermore,” I say. “By definition it cannot endure.”

  “Not the kind of spark we’re talking about, and you know it. Those kinds of sparks set blazes that can be seen for miles and miles and provide warmth and beckon strangers to gather round and sing songs even and feel alive and dream under stars and become sparks for other people who will use the light to do great—”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Kane. I cannot follow this line of logic. I just can’t—”

  “The spark was there plainly manifested through the smile on your face when I pinned the Mark Twain button to your jacket, the little twinkle in your eye when—”

  “Don’t do this to yourself, Ms. Kane. Please.”

  She frowns, shakes her head, and then says, “Why did you agree to come with me?”

  “So you would finally leave me alone. So I could get on with my suicide. No other reason,” I say, and then add a quote for emphasis. “‘And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.’ Albert Camus, from A Happy Death.”

  She squints at me for a few moments, looking like she just bit into a ripe lemon. “Oh, bullshit! Stop hiding behind the words of other men. And you can fuck Albert Camus in the ass with a crusty old baguette for all I care about him!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Be a man! Stop hiding! I’m so tired of your constant Albert Camus quotes and references. Fuck him.”

  “But he’s a Nobel Laureate!”

  “Who cares?” She refills her glass and takes her wine into the sitting room.

  Who cares about Albert Camus? Everyone with a working mind!

  And yet I’m compelled to join her for some reason, to comfort her.

  Damn you, teacher instincts, for you are a sickness never cured!

  A few minutes later I find her slouched on the couch facing the grand windows, lined with heavy golden curtains.

  Wineglass in hand, I sit at the other end of the Victorian-looking ornately carved twelve-foot cherry wood couch adorned with red silk cushions, which is not as comfortable as it is beautiful, and stare at the lit park through the window.

  “You used to quote literature for good,” she all but whispers, in this tiny voice.

  “Albert Camus put good into the world. Like Thoreau, he inspires us to live an examined life and—”

  “You twist his words in a cowardly way now, and it scares me.”

  “It ends in death for me. It ends in death for all of us—so why be afraid? And why put off the inevitable when the spark is gone?”

  “Because if the world crushes my hero and reduces him to a weak man, then maybe there’s no hope for me.”

  “I don’t want to be your hero, Ms. Kane.”

  “You could have fooled the eighteen-year-old me,” she says, and when I look over, I’m worried that she’s going to start crying again.

  “I was young and foolish back then,” I say. “Maybe even younger than you are now. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I’m now very sorry I used to teach that way.”

  “You are not forgiven.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “It’s not okay,” she says, and glares at the window with a look of determination that I used to see in the mirror a long time ago.

  When the silence becomes unbearable, I say, “Where are we going tomorrow?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She’s staring even more fiercely at herself in the glass, or maybe only I can see her reflection from this angle. I feel myself wanting to comfort her—almost against my will—and so I say, “The Mark Twain button was the best present I have ever received from a student.” When she doesn’t answer, the wine and I stand and retire to my bedroom.

  After I get ready for bed, I decide to crack my windows so I can hear the city.

  The noise—traffic, wind, the bustling of a few million strangers—seems endless, and yet also ephemeral as my own heartbeat.

  When I was a teenager, I dreamed of living in New York City. I fancied myself banging out a novel in some tiny one-room apartment in whichever of the five boroughs was the hip place for fiction writers to live at the time. Finding my own modern-day version of Max Perkins to edit my work, with whom I’d have three-martini lunches, talking endlessly about literature in general and the upward trajectory of my career with great specificity.

  That dream was once so real I could touch it, if I only stretched out my arms far enough.

  But I never reached with any effort, never even got a single short story into some semblance of a final draft form that I could submit with confidence, I think, as I lie in a king-size bed surrounded by furniture that I could never afford.

  “I’ve been kidnapped by a former student,” I say. Then, in spite of myself, I smile.

  I drift off into a deeper sleep than I have known for months.

  “Mr. Vernon, wake up. You have visitors,” I hear. When I open my eyes, Portia is pulling back the curtains, letting in the early-morning sunlight with all its blinding intensity. She’s barefoot, in a white and extremely fluffy bathrobe that reveals a small V of her chest.

  I jump when I see three men in red monkey suits staring at me from the end of the bed, each with a portable table in front of him.

  “What’s going on?” I say, pulling the covers up to my chin.

  “I didn’t know what type of breakfast you took when you were visiting New York City, so I ordered you three kinds,” Portia says, a look of utter delight on her face, gesturing with her hand like Vanna White. “Would you like the healthy breakfast?”

  The first monkey suit lifts a silver half globe. “Steel-cut oatmeal, assorted berries, brown sugar, pineapple juice infused with wheat grass, a bran muffin, and green tea.”

  “A moderately unhealthy breakfast . . . ,” Portia says.

  The middle monkey suit lifts his silver lid. ??
?Egg-white omelet with asparagus, turkey sausage, rye toast, grapefruit juice, and decaf coffee.”

  “Or death by breakfast,” Portia says.

  The third monkey suit lifts his silver half globe. “Eggs sunny side up, Angus steak cooked medium rare, fried potatoes, freshly squeezed orange juice, coffee, cream, sugar.”

  “Death by breakfast,” I say. “Definitely death by breakfast.”

  “Very predictable, Mr. Vernon,” Portia says, and then nods at the men. The first and second wheel their tables out of the bedroom as the third monkey suit places a fancy silver tray across my lap. It has legs, so it doesn’t touch my thighs, but it’s heavy enough that I feel the mattress sink where the four feet have been placed.

  Without making eye contact, the monkey suit sets my personal table with silverware, a china plate full of wonderful-smelling food, a first-rate steak knife I think about stealing, and even a crystal vase with freshly cut roses. He pours my cup of coffee and then says, “Is everything to your satisfaction?”

  “This is a dream, right?”

  “Sir, we are very much conscious and here,” he says. “May I do anything else for you, or shall I take my leave?”

  “Is he real?” I ask Portia.

  “Thank you very much,” Portia says to the man. “That’s all for now.”

  “Very well, Ms. Kane.” He bows and takes his exit.

  I cut into my steak, watch the juices pool across the plate, and say, “I have to admit, I like this part, Ms. Kane,” before I fork a cube of meat into my mouth.

  I close my eyes and savor it. This is the best steak I have ever eaten in my entire life—it explodes with bold, juicy flavor.

  Portia sits down next to me on the bed as if we were a married couple. “Including the breakfast I already ate without you, Mr. Sleepyhead, and adding in the generous tip for all three men, we just spent seven hundred dollars of Ken’s money.”

  I slice into my steak again. “This steak alone is worth seven hundred dollars.”

  “I hope you enjoy it,” she says. “You need to fuel up, because we’ll be doing a lot of walking today.”

  I focus on my food. It feels like I haven’t eaten in days. I’ve missed food.

  The roses in the vase smell wonderful too, and the satisfied look on Portia Kane’s face is also a thing of beauty, I must confess. I begin to worry about disappointing her again when she fails to do what she’s set out to do.

  These temporary satisfactions—travel, gourmet food, even the praise of a former student—are novelties, no match for the eternal tides of my mind, which can wear down rock given enough time. Portia’s tricks are like the sand castles of children whose parents are smart enough to leave the beach before their efforts are inevitably destroyed and erased.

  “You look happy,” Portia says.

  “Just chemical reactions—my tongue and stomach sending thank-you messages to my mind. Just the hardwiring of any man who ever lived.”

  “Breakfast in bed is nice.”

  “It’s something.”

  “I’m glad to be here with you, Mr. Vernon.”

  “Don’t get too attached,” I say, and then attack my potatoes.

  We gaze out the window at a beautiful winter’s day in Central Park as I finish eating and drink my coffee.

  “I wish Albert Camus were here,” I say.

  “Oh, fuck Albert Camus,” Portia answers.

  “Not the writer you wish to sodomize with a stale baguette,” I say. “My dog, Albert Camus.”

  “Why did you name your dog Albert Camus?” she says, rolling her eyes.

  “Maybe because I am a former teacher of literature—a man who forever monitored the great conversation and yet never added a line himself.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say, thinking I really do miss Albert Camus, wondering about what my mother’s letters might say if I ever bother to retrieve them from my PO box, and sipping the best coffee ever to pass through my lips.

  “Goddamn it, money is a wonderful thing,” I say.

  “I thought so too, for a while,” she answers. “But the sad part is that you adjust quickly to it. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but like what happens to the protagonist in A Happy Death.”

  “So you’ve read it? Ms. Sodomize Camus with a Baguette has actually read his books?”

  “I read everything by Camus in my early twenties—not just his novels, but his essays and plays too.”

  “You were assigned Camus in college?”

  “I actually dropped out of college before I read much of anything. The pressure of maintaining the grade-point average my academic scholarship required led to a breakdown. There it is. The truth. No higher-education diploma for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because she’s obviously embarrassed and I don’t know what else I can offer here.

  “Anyway, I read Camus while I was waitressing. Mostly because the French Nobel laureate was greatly revered by my high school English teacher, who I admired even more. He gave us these cards on the last day of school that—”

  “Okay, okay, enough with the sycophantic banter. I’m not even dressed yet, for Christ’s sake. Can I not digest my breakfast first?”

  “I will make you whole again, Mr. Vernon,” she says, staring into my eyes with a dangerous intensity. “I swear to you. I will not fail.”

  I blow a lungful of air up toward my forehead, turn my eyes toward the barren trees in the park, and resume sipping my coffee.

  This is not going to end well for either of us.

  CHAPTER 15

  Allowing her smart phone to lead us around, Portia walks the soles off my shoes—although there are a few cab rides thrown in here and there—to several buildings, telling me to take a good look up each time we stop.

  “Why?” I keep asking.

  “I’ll tell you once we’ve seen all six!” she keeps replying.

  I don’t know the layout of New York City, having only visited once or twice, and many years ago, and so I have no idea what connects the various buildings at which we gaze.

  The city buzz induces a high level of anxiety—everyone is marching quickly with blank faces, cars and yellow cabs slice through streets like so many angry sharks eating up free inches of asphalt—and while Portia seems to benefit from the New York state of mind, being here makes me feel like one of many insignificant ants that will crawl through the city for a time before being replaced by other ants that will also be forgotten, on and on ad nauseam.

  As we gaze up at the sixth building, Ms. Kane says, “So, did you figure it out yet?”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Why I showed you six buildings in New York City.”

  “Does this have something to do with architecture?”

  “No.”

  “Some form of birds that are flourishing in nests built high above?” I guess, shading my eyes with my hand as I look up, trying to see the tops, and whether there are any nests. “I read something about falcons thriving in cities.”

  “Not even close. Do you give up?”

  “Does it mean we can stop running all over the city if I do?”

  “The six buildings we saw house the six major publishing houses in New York—Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, FSG, Penguin, and Random House.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Which one do you think it will be?”

  “Which one will what be?”

  Portia smiles mischievously. “Which one do you think will publish my novel?”

  “You’ve written a novel?” I say.

  “Well, not yet, but I’m going to.”

  “Perhaps you better concentrate on writing the actual words before you start predicting who will publish,” I say. “Selling a novel to a major house is extremel
y difficult.”

  “Have you tried?” she asks.

  “Well, no—but—”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I guess I don’t.” I can tell this is important to her, and even though I am beginning to sense a pattern of delusional hope, I really don’t want to be the one who urinates on Portia’s parade. I’m beginning to feel sorry for her in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I admire her moxie and determination, even as I watch her jump off an emotional cliff without a parachute.

  “Then guess again, just for fun. Which one will it be?” she says.

  “Which house will publish the book that you haven’t yet written?” I ask, feeling once again as though Mr. Kafka is writing my life as I live it. “I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t it give you a rush to think that one of your former students might be published by a real New York City house someday? That your teaching might have a great ripple effect? That you may have encouraged a future New York Times best seller just when she needed it most? Haven’t you ever dreamed of that?” she says, looking up at me from under this very cute pink hat, and I suddenly realize that she is wearing matching lipstick, eyeliner, and some sort of blush. She’s done herself up to walk around NYC with me. Me. To Portia Kane, this day is worth makeup.

  “So that’s your dream now—to be a fiction writer?”

  “It’s always been, since I was in your class. We used to talk about it, remember?”

  “No,” I say, even though I have a vague recollection.

  “Haven’t you ever dreamed of becoming a published novelist? I mean you practically worshipped—”

  “Never wanted to be a writer,” I say, too quickly, I admit.

  “Well, I’m going to be published someday, and I’m going to dedicate the book to you. That’s a promise. You’ll want to stick around to see your name in print, right? Right at the beginning. ‘To Mr. Vernon, the good man who first helped me believe.’”

  I stare at her and try to decide if she can possibly believe what she’s saying—promising to dedicate a book to me, a book she hasn’t even written, and guaranteeing that it will be published by one of the major houses in New York City. Aside from the dedication she has presumptuously penned before her dreamed-up novel, she probably hasn’t even written a paragraph since her brief college stint, almost twenty years ago. It’s a delusional promise at best, and probably psychotic otherwise. And yet she’s looking up at me with these wonderful, childlike believing eyes, bathing me in that rare gaze I used to receive from my most promising students, who were not necessarily the most intelligent or the best read or the ones who had previously studied under the cleverest teachers, but the ones whom Kerouac called the mad ones, the people who were crazy enough to do something outside of the norm, just because it was in them to do.