1
WHERE ARE YOU?
I am at Fairview Court.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I'm sitting in a folding chair at the back of the community room—this morning a makeshift auditorium—watching rehearsals for this month’s talent show. I am dressed in my usual sweatshirt and wrinkled khakis. If you were watching, you would have seen me sneak a peak at my watch (a doubloon-sized thing purchased twenty years ago from the Swiss Army) because even though I have tried often to change my ways, I remain one of those loathsome retentive types obsessed with time and I have—in thirty-one minutes—a meeting scheduled with the perpetually gracious Catherine Cain.
WHAT IS FAIRVIEW COURT?
Fairview Court is—or has been for the past four months—my home; what, in today’s euphemizing parlance, would be called a “continued care facility.” It is a crossbred thing (like a jackalope or a tangelo)—half hospital, half hotel.
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
I am here because I am old—or oldish (62)—and have apparently suffered some sort of heart attack. I say “apparently” because the boys in white have not been able to reach consensus on a definitive diagnosis—a thing I try not to let trouble me more than it should. All we know for sure is that I went to bed one night feeling fine, and I woke up the next morning ruined. I collapsed on my way to the bathroom.
IS IT A NICE PLACE, FAIRVIEW?
Let's just say it is not an un-nice place. A little small perhaps and banally decorated in beiges and muted mauves—it offers a full set of amenities. There is a pleasant dining room, a staff of medical professionals, weekly housekeeping and laundry services, art classes, exercise classes, craft classes—etc., etc., etc. It also offers a guarantee: a guarantee that my uniqueness will be honored and that I will be respected for the special individual I am.
AND?
And it comes with a certain saccharine ambience—an institutional commitment to the ceaseless expression of an unwavering conviviality.
WHO IS REHEARSING?
I have been watching Quinton Kohl, our resident hypnotist. His new best friend (and current stage patsy),Theodore, does not seem to be particularly susceptible to Quinton's mesmeristical charms. He will not bark like a dog—not yet anyway. But Quinton is nothing if not hopeful.
Right now on stage though is Edward Manning. Edward is trying to put the finishing touches on a polish-up of his juggling-on-rollerskates routine. He is seventy-one years old and comically vain. He flaunts his sense of balance every chance he gets because he is one of those needling weasels who thrives on the envy of others. It is excruciating to watch my provisional friends over there—Simon, Richard, David—try to turn their feelings of unalloyed hatred into believable facsimiles of sincere admiration, but in craven deference to the guiding feel-good principles of the place, they invariably do. I think Edward gets away with this heartless tease in part because of his jowly face. Everyone thinks he looks sad; they do not want to add to his troubles.
I can see Edward has gotten a little rusty since his last outing. His steadiness is not quite so insultingly certain. I can also see from that look of grim resolve that he is committed to recovering his form. He is determined to show us all that he is incomparable. He is determined to show us all that he is a phenomenon. I tried to talk him into skating a little closer to the edge of the stage. I told him if he truly wanted to impress us, he would introduce an element of danger into the act—but predictably enough he ignored me.
DO YOU ENJOY THE TALENT SHOW?
The honorific is, of course, an aggrandizing misnomer. There is rarely, if ever, any real “talent” on display here. The vestiges of something that was almost a talent are occasionally exhibited—the vocal stylings of the Barbra-Streisand-besotted Joan Nagel, for instance—but this is usually the most that one can hope for. Generally speaking these shows are terrible as entertainment. I know there are people who can make a whole evening of terribleness, but I am not one of them. Terribleness loses its diversional value for me pretty quickly. I become annoyed and cruelly bored.
BUT THE PEOPLE HERE AT FAIRVIEW DON'T ACTUALLY COME FOR THE TERRIBLENESS DO THEY?
No, they don't. They are not the people I am referring to. Those people—the ones who can make a whole evening of terribleness—are another set altogether, a small urban clique who embrace a frivolous, unnatural, esoteric sensibility. Here at Fairview one's attitude toward the talent show is considered a signifier of one's attitude toward a general frame of mind—an endorsing, unconditionally welcoming frame of mind. It has nothing to do with the acts being good or bad, entertaining or not. It’s all about spirit—the spirit with which the performers approach the performance. If they approach it with the right spirit, then everyone (except me, it seems) approves unreservedly.
AND IF THEY DON'T APPROACH IT IN THE RIGHT SPIRIT?
Well, that is one of the things that makes Edward's juggling-on-roller-skates routine so interesting. He pretends to approach his performance as required, but he doesn’t do a very convincing job of it. The delight he so clearly takes in generating feelings of jealously remains too obvious. The audience—which wants nothing more than to be unambiguously supportive—invariably finds itself just the wee-est bit conflicted.
WHO JUST SAT DOWN NEXT TO YOU?
That emaciated specimen is Donald Taylor. Donald is my neighbor. He resides across the hall from me in the ominously denominated (or is that denumerated) Room 666. He wants to argue with me about my demeanor, about my "pandering passivity." Don, you see, is a closet cynic. He is on my side in this. He thinks I am making it too easy on them. It is a remarkable thing about Don—the purity of his hypocrisy. Desperate not to make waves himself, he encourages wave-making by others whenever he can.
WHAT IS THIS MEETING WITH MS. CAIN ABOUT?
Catherine is my counselor. We are all assigned one when we arrive. This meeting is about my being kicked out of Fairview. It is Catherine's job to conduct the “exit interview.” It is supposed to make us both feel better about my eviction.
YOU HAVE BEEN ASKED TO LEAVE?
Yes.
WHY?
Mostly because of my attitude, which the bedizened powers have described as being basically not very good—my attitude and my distinct reluctance to socialize. I am not a team player, and it appears that this has been getting some people down—people who signed on here because they were assured they would be kept up. There have been complaints. I have cast a pall in the dining room with my habitually brutal critiquing of the weekly dinner menu. Here in the community room I am considered standoffish. In the rec room I am viewed as overly aggressive at the ping-pong table.
DO YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT BEING ASKED TO LEAVE?
No, not really. They did a nice job of it—very professional. It was one of those compassionate expulsions. They were sorry, but various evaluations made it clear that we were just not meant for each other. These things happen. Neither of us was at fault. Our differences, though minor, were nonetheless irreconcilable. They didn’t ask me to leave so much as explain to me why it was that I simply couldn’t stay. If I feel bad about anything, it is the inconvenience, the disruption. I just wanted to be left in peace to work on my book.
BOOK?
1
It’s 8:45 a.m. and I have locked myself in the third stall of the sixth-floor men’s room—the one nearest the wall. I am sitting exactly where you would expect me to be sitting, scribbling away in a buff-colored steno pad stolen specifically for the occasion. I’ve been spending more and more time in here lately because I can’t keep spending it out there. Out there it’s telephones and computers and all sorts of people with problems, people who want to interrupt what you are doing (or not doing), people who want to talk to you, people who want to tell you things you’re not interested in hearing. People like Robert Bray, for example, who knows everything there is to know about the downtown condo market, and Lucy McAllister, who seems to think your life would be improved if you knew more guys named Cooter.
*
Had an interesting session with Dr. Costa yesterday. He wanted to focus on the negative feelings I seem to have toward Mrs. Dorton, the evil manageress of my apartment building. I told him my negative feelings for her were mostly in response to her negative feelings toward me, but, as always, he seems reluctant to accept what I am telling him as true.
He has an interesting theory. He thinks I have focused my attention on her as a way of not focusing it on myself, that my unhappiness with my unhappiness is driving me to see her as some sort of persecutor when, in fact, it’s just me trying to avoid admitting things to myself—namely, that I have an inclination to romanticize what (for want of a less loaded word) we have tentatively agreed to call my “depression” and that this inclination is predicated on a quaint eighteenth-century belief in the sanctity of a certain sort of suffering.
A wiry, wedge-headed guy in his middle 40s, Dr. C looks like he could be, is, or has been at one time, a runner. He is the third guy I’ve seen in the last three years. Calm, quiet, quick to write prescriptions—I can’t help feeling he is dangerous.
*
Dean Freeze was just in here working on his teeth. He was flossing, brushing, mouth-washing. There is a scrupulousness about him that is sort of mesmerizing. He never seems to have a hair out of place. It just doesn’t seem possible that a person could be that clean and spotless.
*
There is a rumor floating around that Cathy Manning’s daughter attacked a neighbor kid with a bat.
*
I have a strong feeling that Kate doesn’t really want to meet Peter. She has heard things about him—about the extremity of his personality—and he doesn’t sound to her like someone she would like very much, which worries her. It worries her because she knows how much I like him, and she has no idea what her not liking him might mean for us. We were cubicle mates, Peter and I, for three years—until he inherited some walking-away money from a dying grandmother.
I think Kate is also worried about the way she might not like Peter. She is not the sort of person who would think more of someone because of someone they knew, but she is the sort who might think less. At this point in our relationship she seems to want to think as much of me as she can, and she is afraid Peter might interfere with this. That I’m the sort of person who would know someone like him might end up being a hurdle too high to get over. It would mean something—exactly what, at this moment anyway, is a mystery.
*
I’m not as interested as I should be in wanting to make an impression on Dr. C. So far he doesn’t seem to have noticed this because he’s been busy trying to make an impression on me. He wants me to find him even-tempered and caring. Once I do that, we can begin our work in earnest.
*
Paul Burkholder is just back from his vacation. He spent a month walking across Montana. He’s been regaling us with stories that are basically about what a brave and adventurous guy he is. Everyone he ran into along the way seems to have been amazed that he was doing what he was doing.
*
Excerpt from a conversation between Bruce Howland and Ryan Brown:
“It doesn’t seem like I’m laughing as much as I used to. It’s not like I’m getting serious; I just don’t seem to know what’s funny anymore.”
“You might try looking at your tie.”
*
Had a long lunchtime conversation with Peter about Jennifer Rasmussen, a girl who used to work here. He got an email from her catching him up on things—trips to the beach, barbecues, visits to the butterfly exhibition at the zoo—and he was in a flap trying to decide if he should send her a copy of Cubicle Dreams, a collection of short stories he had just finished publishing. On one hand he wanted to send her a copy because she was in school now and surrounded (presumably) by people who read, and he was hoping she might feel inclined to encourage a few of them to buy it; on the other, he was reluctant because of a passage in one of the stories in which he said something not especially nice about her.
The story in question—a fragmented, not particularly successful look at a week in the life of an office drudge he calls Daniel—is clearly autobiographical. The offending passage involved a description of this Daniel’s reaction to his new officemate, a guy named Gary. He describes Gary as being inherently more entertaining, thoughtful, and interested in things than the officemate just departed—someone who, in spite of having her name and hair color changed and being sent to nursing rather than dental school, was still pretty clearly Jennifer. Peter could imagine her reading the section and feeling betrayed or hurt, and he didn’t want that. He knew the chances of her finding the paragraph were small because even though she read, she did not as a rule read the sort of stuff he wrote, and the passage at issue—the not-as-entertaining, thoughtful, or interested passage—was about a third of the way into the book, behind the infamously alienating story number 5. If she did actually start the book, it wasn’t likely she would get to the scene of the crime. But still .…
*