Authors: Matthew Quick
As Portia loads my duffel bag into the back of her rented car, I get an up-close look at her suitcases for the first time and see that they’re designer, just like the clothes that she wears—except the retro jean jacket—and I begin to understand that this woman has the funds and the means to take me anywhere, which is not exactly a pleasant feeling. I get into the passenger side and rest my cane between my legs.
She starts the car. “Put on your seat belt.”
“You’re joking, right, Mom?” I say, staring at my ruined truck, which is still embedded in the tree.
She sighs. “The car will make an annoying beeping noise, and I could get pulled over by a cop if you don’t buckle up.”
When the car starts to beep, she points to a little flashing yellow light on the dash that depicts a man properly strapped into a car seat, which is indeed annoying, so I return her sigh and buckle up. “I’m old enough to remember when no one wore seat belts.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” she says, and then smiles.
“Getting cocky, are you?” I say as we navigate the dirt roads through the long piles of snow pushed to the sides by plows. “Where are we headed?”
“You’ll see,” she says, smiling again.
And then she drives in silence for a long time on the highway, headed south, following the dashes, becoming part of the blur of
vehicles doing sixty to eighty miles an hour, like so many drops of blood flowing through a countrywide system of arteries.
Are we any different than the molecules that make up our bodies, I think, or are we just the molecules that make up something larger that we can’t even fathom?
“What are you thinking about, Mr. Vernon?” she asks.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“No.”
“You’re a prison warden!”
And then we drive on for hours.
At one point she asks if I want to listen to music and what kind. I tell her, “Classical, please,” and she searches until she finds a station that’s playing Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor, op. 23.
“Is this good?” she says.
“It’s divine.” I remember listening to this very composition many times with Albert Camus curled up on my lap. He’d beat out the dramatic and wonderful piano notes with his little tail.
I lose myself in the music, and as the road dashes dance with the notes, I wonder if I could be dead. Could I have already killed myself, and might this be some sort of existential purgatory?
Massachusetts zooms by uneventfully, and then we are in Hartford, Connecticut, turning off the highway and entering what appears to be a financially challenged neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Portia smiles coyly.
But I see a sign for the Mark Twain house, and suddenly I know exactly where we are headed.
From taking my class, she must remember that I am a huge fan of Mr. Clemens’s work. While I’ve never visited his home in Hartford, it’s going to take a lot more than this to help me answer the
first question, and so I’m afraid Ms. Kane has underestimated her sizable task.
“You do know that Mark Twain was an extremely ornery man,” I say, “especially at the end of his life. If you read
No. 44,
the Mysterious Stranger
, you’ll see that ultimately Twain was not very optimistic. Vonnegut loved Twain, and he tried to kill himself. Are you sure this is a good idea?”
Portia ignores my comments as she pulls into the parking lot and shifts into park. “In your classroom you used to have a poster of Mark Twain and his quote: ‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.’ Do you remember?”
I do remember, but instead of acknowledging that, I say, “Well, then, maybe you should keep away from me.”
“Come on,” she says and gets out of the car.
I follow and cane my way to the Twain house, which is brick, quite large, beautiful, and mysterious-looking.
Inside, Ms. Kane buys us tour tickets and we join a small group led by an almost oppressively eager young man who—to be fair—really does know a lot about Mark Twain, although he has an unfortunate love for posing unanswerable questions like, “If you were Mark Twain, living here back in 1885, what would you hope to have seen when you looked out this window?”
Our peppy guide leads us through various rooms as he discusses the “happiest time” in Mark Twain’s life, showing us his telephone even, one of the first in the world, the angels carved into his headboard, and his attic billiards room, where he shot pool and smoked cigars (always in moderation, Twain said, “one at a time”) and looked out from his lofty perch.
It’s a little hard for me to do the steep stairs with my cane, but
the tour is nice enough, and I think about how I haven’t done anything like this in years—how once upon a time I would have been thrilled to be in Mark Twain’s home.
Mark Twain!
The father of American literature!
And I would have schemed ways to get my students here too.
In the gift shop, Portia buys us matching little white pins with cartoons of Mark Twain’s face in profile. She pins hers on her white jean jacket, adding to her collection of rock groups, Sylvia Plath, and my favorite, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I allow her to pin Mark Twain to my own jacket, right over my heart. “You know, Hemingway said that ‘All American literature comes from—’”
“‘—one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’”
“You know that quote?”
“Learned it in your class,” she says. “And it’s on the T-shirt behind you.”
I turn around and see that she’s quite correct.
She says, “Your pin looks cool.”
I look down at Mark Twain displayed on my chest like a military medal, and I have to admit the former English teacher hiding deep within does think it’s “cool,” but I don’t tell Portia that because I don’t want to let on that it was a pleasurable experience—and I sure as hell don’t want to get her hopes up.
“I still have no desire to teach, let alone live,” I say. “Nothing’s changed.”
“This is just day one,” she says, far too cockily. “You ready to go?”
“Well, while we’re here, we might as well see Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house too, don’t you think? It’s right next door, after all.”
“Isn’t
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
considered racist now?” she asks. “It’s super uncool to call a black person an Uncle Tom. That’s worse than the N-word, right?”
“I have no idea,” I say as I cane my way toward the museum. But for some reason it’s closed today, which disappoints me greatly, and so we get back in the car and continue driving south.
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t kill yourself yesterday?” she says to me.
“Because I got to see Mark Twain’s home?” I say, thinking how silly that seems. How can seeing the home of one of your favorite authors help you answer the first question?
“No,” she says, and then laughs mischievously. “Because now we’re wearing matching Mark Twain buttons. That’s pretty killer, right?”
It takes me a second to realize that she is serious—that she thinks wearing the same button is actually a significant gesture that implies or maybe even proves in her mind that we have made some sort of meaningful connection. This is the logic of an eleven-year-old girl—the equivalent of buying one of those cheap heart necklaces that breaks in two so that each friend can wear a jagged-edged half and yet the pieces can be put back together to form this phrase:
Best Friends Forever!
“I’m afraid it’s going to take more than a button—albeit a ‘cool’ and ‘killer’ one—to save me, Ms. Kane. I wish it were that easy, but it’s not.”
“Okay,” she says, but when I look over, she’s smiling from ear to ear.
“You like that we are wearing matching pins—why does this mean something to you?”
“I don’t know—you’ll probably be mad at me if I tell you, anyway.”
“Now you have to tell me!”
She pulls back onto I-84 South, speeds up, and says, “When I was in your class, I used to pretend you were my father, because I never had one—and if I got to pick, I would have wanted a father exactly like you. I used to fantasize about you taking me places like the Mark Twain House and teaching me about great writers, the way other fathers might teach their sons about baseball players at the ballpark. And now we’ve been to the home of a famous writer together. It’s kind of like a childhood dream come true for me.”
“So that little pit stop was for you and not me, Ms. Kane?”
“It was for
us
. Both of us.”
“Why aren’t you married?” I ask—out of the blue, I admit. “You are a smart, attractive woman. So why are you driving around with your fat old crippled former English teacher instead of doing something productive with an age-appropriate life partner? Why aren’t you with a family of your own?”
“I
am
married—legally, anyway. To an asshole named Ken Humes. He cheated on me with a teenager. I caught him just a month ago. And this was after he treated me like shit for years, cheating on me many times, belittling my ambitions too. But catching him in the act, actually seeing him fuck a teenager, led to my getting on a plane home, which is where I met your mother, remember? Ken’s moral low point started this whole chain of events.”
I can hear the pain in her voice.
“Well, he’s a fool to let you go,” I say, almost reflexively, knowing that it’s a mistake to offer her kindness. She will amplify it to mythical proportions until I can no longer possibly live up to her expectations, even if I try, which I am not about to.
“Was that a positive remark from Mr. Suicide? Mr. Gloom-and-Doom?” she says, beginning already with the amplification.
I do my best to redirect her emotions back to a safe place by saying, “Your husband let you down.”
“He did.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kane, but I will let you down too. It’s inevitable. Fair warning.”
“You may surprise yourself,” she says in a way that depresses me. She’s like a poor kid the night before her birthday who believes she will wake up to a surprise party and endless presents and a pony just because she’s tried to wish these things into existence, and I’m the father who owes money to every bill collector in town and has no way of providing what his daughter needs, let alone what she wants—except that I am not even Portia’s father but a man who was once paid to teach her how to write a five-paragraph essay and make sure she didn’t graduate without knowing the difference between
then
and
than
—and let me tell you that an alarming amount of twelfth-grade students didn’t know that difference when they first entered my room.
“Technically, you kidnapped me,” I say after almost an hour of silent driving and thinking. “I’m not even here of my free will.”
“What?” she says, snapping out of a daydream, oblivious. It would be disconcerting—she is behind the wheel of a car, after all—if I didn’t wish to end my life.
“Nothing,” I say, and we drive on south.
“We’re not going to the Empire State Building to throw airplanes off the top, are we?” I say, when it becomes apparent that we are heading into New York City. “Because I think that’s illegal and dangerous.”
“Now there’s an idea!” she says.
“Why New York City?”
“We’re going to have a Holden Caulfield day. Look for the ducks in Central Park, drink scotch and sodas in jazz bars, watch kids ride merry-go-rounds and reach for the gold ring—maybe even visit the museum and erase all of the Fuck You graffiti we can find.”
“Are you serious?” I say, wondering how that would be beneficial for either of us.
“I’m joking, of course,” she says. “Just a little American literature humor to get you back into the right head space.”
“J. D. Salinger is always good for a laugh, right? What a role model for hope and living with open arms. I envy his solitude at this moment. You would have never even made it onto my property if I had a wall and maybe a moat. Did Salinger have a moat?” I sigh. “I wonder—in all that time alone—if he ever found an answer to the first question. Publishing became his boulder—like in Camus’s
Myth of Sisyphus
.”
“You have to stop obsessing about Camus. Jesus Christ.”
It takes her a long time to navigate the traffic into Manhattan,
but somehow she gets us to a hotel, and then she’s handing the keys to a valet in a red monkey suit and men in green monkey suits are retrieving our luggage from the trunk.
Standing on a red carpet under heat lamps, leaning on my cane, I say, “I’m not sure I’m dressed appropriately for this sort of thing.” I’m wearing jeans, a sweater with snowflakes stitched into it, a puffy ski jacket from the 1980s, a five- or six-day beard, and a black knit hat that makes me look like a cat burglar from the neck up.
Portia ignores me, and I follow her like a child to the front desk, where she refers to me as her father and checks us into a room.
In the elevator with us now there’s a man in a blue monkey suit, whose job it is to push the proper button and carry our bags. I don’t say anything. I’ve never before stayed in a fancy hotel like this, so I don’t know the etiquette.
When we enter our “room,” I see it’s more like an apartment—two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a TV room, and even a formal dining room with a crystal chandelier, all of it overlooking Central Park.
The man in the monkey suit shows us how to turn on the lights and work the TV and close the curtains and offers suggestions for restaurants until Portia hands him some money and he leaves.
“You’ve done this before, I see,” I say.
She smiles. “Surprised?”
“Who the hell is your husband, and what does he do?”
“What, you don’t think a woman metalhead from the good ol’ HTHS can earn her way up to this sort of lifestyle?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“My soon-to-be-ex-husband made his millions in the pornography business, if you really must know. His is the misogynistic kind of porn, too. Made for misogynistic men. There’s nothing even remotely artistic or empowering about his movies, at least from the
feminist point of view. He’s a producer-slash-owner. And he’s subhuman, capable of turning ‘the endless well of human lust into mountains of capital’—his words, not mine. Likes to use first-time college girls on spring break because they don’t know how much they should get paid. Many of them will sign a legal document and appear on film for free drinks and a T-shirt. He also has a sex addiction problem. Ken’ll stick his dick into anything blond with an IQ under seventy.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“Anyway, he’s a complete asshole, but he knows how to travel. I charged the room to his account here, the prick. So drink and eat as much as you want from the mini bar. Take a bathrobe, if you like. Trash the place. Smash the jumbo TV set with that expensive-looking floor vase over there, if you feel so inclined. Live it up like a rock star.”
I raise my eyebrows ever so slightly in disapproval, or maybe pity.
She smiles at me, but it’s a sad smile. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Um,” I say, and suddenly I feel sorry for this woman who can stay in posh hotels because she married a pornographer. While I have nothing against what consenting adults do with each other behind closed doors, Portia’s face tells me that her Ken is not a very nice pornographer. Maybe I should have taught more female authors when I was a teacher? Maybe I should have emphasized the importance of having one’s own room, like Virginia Woolf suggested?
“Well, do you like the place?” she says, letting me off the hook.
“It’s lovely.”
“Hungry?”
I nod, and shortly after that we are eating room service—ginormous lobster salads, chilled sweet Riesling wine, and carrot
cake for dessert—in our private dining room overlooking Central Park.
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.”