Schroder: A Novel (2 page)

Of course, birds aren’t free. Birds do almost nothing freely. Birds are some of nature’s most industrious creatures, spending every available hour searching and hoarding and avoiding competitive disadvantage, busy just having to be birds. Like a bird, I was constantly at work being Eric Kennedy, and like a bird, I did not think of it as work. I thought of it as
being
. The earliest and cruelest deceptions had already happened—meaning, my deceptions of my father. Whenever I was Eric Kennedy, I’d made myself hard for Dad to contact. Even at Ossipee, I had told him there were no telephones in the wilderness of New Hampshire, but that if he wanted me to call him, I would happily set out on foot to the nearest town, and of course he said
Nein, nein, Erik
. Then, in measured English,
I will see you when I see you
.

Right. He would see me when he saw me, which was seldom. During college, I was like any other young man, busy trying to appear more interesting than I was—you know, amassing a music collection, composing mental manifestos, once or twice appearing in a piece of student theater. I drove down to Dorchester only when absolutely necessary. I commenced alone, in my black gown and mortarboard, and then waited until July to bring Dad up for a campus tour, when the place was desolate except for the students at an adult tennis camp. I had befriended a childless professor during my time at Mune, and it was this man, not my father, who cosigned my lease on my first apartment, a sunny one-bedroom kitty-corner from Washington Park.

I was happy in Albany and rarely left it. I liked its protected horizons, its belligerent small-time politicians. And there was always a girl—some girl or another—and laughing, and making fun of tourists in the South Mall. These relationships were easy and promise-free. I had a talent for choosing women who were already temperamentally predisposed toward happiness and therefore wouldn’t use me as a catchall for their disappointments. In my free time, I worked erratically on my research (see
here
) and played soccer with a bunch of foreign transplants on a hill we borrowed from the College of Saint Rose. And the thing after that, I supposed, would be the thing after that.

I did not know the thing after that would be you.

You. The first time I saw you, you were strapping a splint onto a child who had just fallen out of a tree. About a dozen other children were standing in a loose circle watching you. By
then the boy was screaming so loud that no one but you could get near him. It was my lunch hour, and the noise annoyed me, and so I stood to leave. But my gaze caught on you, and I paused.
¹
What caused this snag? What was it about you, or about the moment in which you came to my attention? Was it the way you continued to wrap the boy’s wrist so coolly, despite the fact that he was hysterical, kicking and screaming? It was August. Late, hot, rotten summer. I would later learn that you had been charged with leading twenty of Albany’s neglected children through the poison ivy since July. You looked in need of a shower. But my attention snagged on you. My mind cleaned you off and put you in a sundress and placed a glass of Chardonnay in your hand and turned your face to mine. So I stood up and walked toward you, offering my help, wondering if the feeling would last, wondering if I could string together two or three more moments of this rapturous attention that was commanding me. Who knows why, Laura? Who knows why so-and-so falls in love with you-know-who
instead of what’s-his-name? Reams of poetry have languished in the guessing. I mean, I’m sorry for you, that I chose you. But I guess part of my motivation here, with this document, is to remind you that it wasn’t entirely a waste. Listen:

Were we compatible? I believe yes, we were, very compatible, for a while. Although you made a pretty brittle first impression, you turned into one big marshmallow as soon as you decided I was a decent guy. You couldn’t stop yourself. Soon you were bringing me books, loose tea, candied apricots. Your flirtations were sweet, a little fussy. It was as if you’d been sequestered from men your entire life and therefore could only seduce me as if I myself were a young girl.

Although you were the real American, I was by far more American
ish
. I was more spontaneous. I was more relaxed. I was still, in many ways, Eric Kennedy of Camp Ossipee, a persona for which I’d been richly rewarded at Mune College, but who, as I climbed toward thirty, was in need of an update. With you, Eric Kennedy matured. You were four years his junior, but no one would have guessed. You were prompt. You were responsible. You were deliberate. You were health conscious. You often traveled with your own baggies of gorp. You were easily offended. There was a whole list of social issues over which you took quick offense (e.g., the lack of handicap accessibility in public buildings). The mere mention of such issues made your cheeks red. You were always ready for polite but tense debate. It was as if throughout the course of your life, you had been traumatized by chronic misunderstandings.

How quickly I dropped all other commitments, all other friendships, clubs, and interests. I had a sense of loving you, despite your youth, as if I were your student, and therefore whatever you did—however obscure, however specific—was,
to me, the right thing. You had such a careful way with the truth. You wanted everything you said to be true on several different levels. It took you a long time to fill out simple forms in a doctor’s office, tapping the pen to your lips. Did you exercise daily or weekly? Well, you exercised several days a week but not
daily
. I leaned over your shoulder to help you scrutinize whatever bit of inconsequentia was capturing your attention. I was happy to study bar codes and ingredients and all genres of fine print with you. The grocery store, the DMV. In America, the opportunities to be accurate are endless. And nothing escaped your eye. Nothing, of course, except me.

Marriage. The clashing of expectations produces a new chord. We had a small civil ceremony. A honeymoon in Virginia Beach. And after these rituals, there was the renting of the apartment, and the rearranging of furniture, and then an idleness descended upon us, and we were like any newly married pair, nervously wondering, OK, what next? How should we go forward? For a while, there seemed to be someone missing—someone
else
, like a leader, or a chief. An urgently needed third party whose role it was to direct traffic between us, to negotiate conflicting plans, forge compromises, translate cultural or religious differences. Or were we really supposed to go it alone?
Us?
The bride—you—struggling to outstretch her parochial upbringing, born as she was to slightly ignorant but good-hearted Catholics from Delmar, New York. And the groom—me—raised in a (completely fictional) town on Cape Cod he called Twelve Hills, a “stone’s throw from Hyannis Port,” a treasured only child, endowed with a last name that could only be uttered in rapture.

ERRATUM

For the record: The groom
never
told the bride that he was related to the Kennedys of presidential fame. This has been reported in the papers, and the groom categorically denies it. No, it was simply the word “Kennedy” plus the words “near Hyannis Port,” and everyone started rushing to conclusions. The groom will admit that once or twice late at night with his female peers at Mune College, he
did not sufficiently debunk the rumor of himself as a second cousin twice removed
to the Hyannis Port Kennedys. And he does not deny that the name often greased the gears of bureaucracy, making what would otherwise have been dull encounters with bank loan officers, traffic cops, etc., slightly
charged
, even when he denied any family connection.

The bride, however, never seemed much interested in the groom as a “Kennedy.” If the bride was impressed by the name, that day they met in Washington Park and all the days thereafter, she never talked about it. The bride was a serious and moral woman, not easily wowed. She was also a woman who acquired (by the way), in the period of years in which the groom loved her, an incredible, inflationary beauty, and
the groom just wants to mention that here and to put it here in words in case either of them forgets it. The truth is, she stunned the groom whenever he saw her. I mean
whenever
he saw her. Just the simple fact of her. Whenever she came into one room from another room. For example, stepping out of the kitchenette in Pine Hills with a plate of scrambled eggs. The groom was in love with her. That was no lie. And when he was in love with her, a minute no longer seemed like the means to an hour. Rather, each minute was an end in itself, a stillness with vague circularity, a gently suggested territory in which to be alive. This trick that love did with minutes endowed hours and days with a kind of transcendent wishy-washiness that encouraged an utter lack of ambition in the groom and was the closest thing he had ever felt to true joy, to true relief, and he still wonders what would have happened if they could have kept up with it, if they could have stayed in love like that, if maybe they could have crawled through a wormhole to a place where their love could find permanence. Because in the end, the great warring forces of our existence are not
life
versus
death
(the groom has come to believe), but rather
love
versus
time
. In the majority, love does not survive time’s passage. But sometimes it does. It must, sometimes.

APOLOGIA CONT’D.

Anyway. Soon after his wedding, the groom became a real estate agent, but not by his own choice. It wasn’t a bad choice. It just wasn’t his. The bride’s father had started to bug the couple about the groom’s future plans. He suspected that the groom made little money as a medical translator and even less on his “independent research” (see
here
). The bride resented this intrusion on the part of her father. She did not think the groom needed to
conventionalize
his lifestyle. She liked the idea of him at home, deep in thought, and she liked finding him sitting in the same place she’d left him when she returned from her teacher training. In fact, the bride maintained that if the groom abandoned his research, he would be
selling out
. He would be selling out his dreams, which deserved a chance. In retrospect, it seems that the groom was an exemplar of the kind of suicidal integrity toward which the bride liked to encourage her middle schoolers.

So the bride told her father to
back off
. She told her father that the groom’s independent research would come together. The bride told her father that her groom was working very hard, that he might even be a
visionary
, a term that must
have alarmed her father,
visions
sounding an awful lot like
hallucinations
.

Still, the man was her father. He remained concerned. Soon after the pair returned from their honeymoon, the father-in-law came over for a tête-à-tête. The groom remembers this interview very well. The father-in-law—let’s call him Hank, because that’s his name—sat across from the groom on their used sofa in Pine Hills, knees cracking arthritically, and the two of them spoke at length about the number of automotive accidents occurring on a low salt stretch of Hackett Boulevard, before they fell into an awkward and loaded silence.
²

“Eric,” Hank finally said. “I’m not sure how to say what I want to say, so instead I’m going to tell you a story.”

The story was about Hank as a young man of twenty. The story was about how, back in Troy, New York, when Hank
first married his then-slender wife, he had been lectured by his own father-in-law in an apartment not unlike this one. In the story, Hank had to sit and listen to
his
father-in-law drone on about responsibility and the future and savings and the importance of being heavily insured, adding such stress into the mind of young Hank that he almost wanted to take the whole thing back, the whole marriage. He swore to God that he would
never
be like that. He would never pressure his own future son-in-law. Because a newly married man, Hank said, was like the captain of a rudderless ship. Out there, at sea, with no compass, no stars, no crew, no sight of land. But in the end—and this was the story’s moral—young Hank had followed his father-in-law’s instructions, albeit with a lot of resentment, and only after the old man passed away did Hank understand that he had been right about things, and that maybe he’d even loved Hank. Hank missed him sometimes, this unasked-for father, on certain bracing winter mornings.