Nevertheless, on airplanes it eventually comes to me that I adore Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky
. Then I remember V. S. Naipaul’s
A Bend in the River
, which always reminds me of Paul Theroux’s delightful
Girls at Play
, and I’m away, restored to literacy again.
“It’s ugly,” I submitted.
“What? The amber waves of grain?”
“The fast-food taka-taka. All that plastic. And it’s spread all around the country like potato blight.”
“You said you like the Chrysler Building.”
“It’s old. Most modern American architecture is horrendous.”
“So this country’s a dump. Why’s anywhere else any better.”
“You’ve hardly been anywhere else.”
“Vietnam was a shithole. That lake in Hanoi stank.”
“But didn’t you think the people were gorgeous? Even just physically gorgeous.”
“You took me to Asia for chink pussy? I could of booked one of those package holidays on the Web.”
“Having fun?” I asked dryly.
“I’ve had better.” He shot a ball of bread into the basket. “’Sides. The guys all looked like girls to me.”
“But I thought it was refreshing,” I insisted, “along that lake—even if it does smell—the way the Vietnamese pay entrepreneurs with bathroom scales a few dong to weigh themselves, in the hopes that they’ve
gained
a few pounds. It’s biologically sane.”
“Put those gooks around a bottomless vat of French fries for long enough and they’ll pork out wider than they are tall, just like mall rats in New Jersey. You think only Americans are greedy? I don’t pay attention in European History too good, but I don’t think so.”
Served the salmon for which I now had little appetite, I drummed my fingers. With the backdrop of the wallwide seascape at Hudson House, in that flashy white shirt with its billowing sleeves, raised collar, and a V-neck cut to the sternum, Kevin could have passed for Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood.
“The accent,” I said. “I hate it.”
“It’s your accent, too,” he said. “Even if you do say
tomahto
.”
“You think that’s pretentious.”
“Don’t
you
?”
I laughed, a little. “Okay. It’s pretentious.”
Something was loosening up, and I thought, my, maybe this “outing” wasn’t a bad idea after all. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. I began to throw myself into the conversation in earnest. “Look, one of the things about this country I really can’t stand? It’s the lack of accountability. Everything wrong with an American’s life is somebody else’s fault. All these smokers raking in millions of dollars in damages from tobacco companies, when, what, they’ve known the risks for
forty years
. Can’t quit? Stick it to Philip Morris. Next thing you know, fat people will be suing fast-food companies because they’ve eaten too many Big Macs!” I paused, catching myself. “I realize you’ve heard this before.”
Kevin was winding me up, of course, like a toy. He had the same intent, mischievous expression I’d seen recently on a boy making his model race car hurtle off the rocks in Tallman Park by remote control. “Once or twice,” he allowed, repressing a smile.
“Power walkers,” I said.
“What about them.”
“They drive me insane.” Of course, he’d heard this, too. But he hadn’t heard this, because until then I hadn’t quite put it together: “People around here can’t just
go for a walk
, they have to be getting with some kind of program. And you know, this may be at the heart of it,
what’s my beef
. All those intangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life worth living—Americans seem to believe they can all be obtained by joining a group, or signing up to a subscription, or going on a special diet, or undergoing aroma therapy. It’s not just that Americans think they can buy everything; they think that if you follow the instructions on the label, the product has to work. Then when the product doesn’t work and they’re still unhappy even though the right to happiness is enshrined in the Constitution, they sue the bejesus out of each other.”
“What do you mean,
intangibles
,” said Kevin.
“
Whatever
, as your friends would say. Love—joy—insight.” (To Kevin, I could as well have been talking about little green men on the moon.) “But you can’t order them on the Internet or learn them in a course at the New School or look them up in a How-To. It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy . . . so easy that trying, following the directions, gets in the way . . . I don’t know.”
Kevin was doodling furiously on the tablecloth with his crayon. “Anything else?”
“Of course there’s anything else,” I said, feeling the momentum that gets rolling in those plane chats when I finally get access to the library in my head, remembering
Madame Bovary
, and
Jude the Obscure
, and
A Passage to India.
“Americans are fat, inarticulate, and ignorant. They’re demanding, imperious, and spoiled. They’re self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they’ve got it right—never mind that half the adult population doesn’t vote. And they’re boastful, too. Believe it or not, in Europe it isn’t considered acceptable to foist on new acquaintances right off the bat that you went to Harvard and you own a big house and what it cost and which celebrities come to dinner. And Americans never pick up, either, that in some places it’s considered crass to share your taste for anal sex with someone at a cocktail party you’ve known for five minutes—since the whole concept of privacy here has fallen by the wayside. That’s because Americans are trusting to a fault, innocent in a way that makes you stupid. Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can’t stand them.”
I was talking too loudly for such a small establishment and such abrasive sentiments, but I was strangely exhilarated. This was the first time that I’d been able to really talk to my son, and I hoped that we’d crossed the Rubicon. At last I was able to confide things that I well and truly believed, and not just lecture—please don’t pick the Corleys’ prize-winning roses. Granted, I’d begun in a childishly inept way, asking
how’s school
, while he was the one who’d conducted our talk like a competent adult, drawing out his companion. But as a consequence I was proud of him. I was just fashioning a remark along these lines, when Kevin, who had been scribbling intently on the tablecloth with that crayon, finished whatever he was drawing, looked up, and nodded at the scrawl.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s a whole lot of adjectives.”
Attention deficit disorder
in a pig’s eye. Kevin was an able student when he bothered, and he hadn’t been doodling; he’d been taking notes.
“Let’s see,” he said, and proceeded to check off successive elements of his list with his red crayon. “
Spoiled
. You’re rich. I’m not too sure what you think you’re doing without, but I bet you could afford it.
Imperious
. Pretty good description of that speech just now; if I was you, I wouldn’t order dessert, ’cause you can bet the waiter’s gonna hawk a loogie in your raspberry sauce.
Inarticulate
? Lemme see . . . ” He searched the tablecloth, and read aloud, “
It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy, I don’t know.
I don’t call that Shakespeare myself. Also, seems to me I’m sitting across from the lady who goes on these long rants about ‘reality TV’ when she’s never watched a single show. And that—one of your favorite words, Mumsey—is
ignorant
. Next:
boasting
. What was all that these-dumb-fucks-suck-dead-moose-dickand-I’m-so-much-cooler-than-them if it wasn’t showing off? Like somebody who
thinks she’s got it right
and nobody else does.
Trusting . . . with no idea other people can’t stand them
.” He underscored this one and then looked me in the eye with naked dislike. “Well. Far as I can tell, about the only thing that keeps you and the other dumb-ass
Americans
from being peas in a pod is you’re not
fat
. And just because you’re skinny you act s
elf-righteous—condescending—
and
superior
. Maybe I’d rather have a big cow of a mother who at least didn’t think she was better than everybody else in the fucking country.”
I paid the bill. We wouldn’t conduct another mother-son outing until Claverack.
Discouraged from getting her the scooter, I went to considerable trouble to locate a “small-eared elephant shrew” as a Christmas present for Celia. When we’d visited the Small Mammals exhibit in the Bronx Zoo, she’d been enchanted by this incongruous little fellow, who looked as if an elephant crossed with a kangaroo had interbred with several generations of mice. The importation was probably illegal—if not outright endangered, this tiny creature from southern Africa was identified at the zoo as “threatened, due to habitat loss”—which didn’t help my case when you grew impatient with the time it took to find one. At length we struck a deal. You’d look the other way as I located a pet shop that specialized in “unusual” animals on the Internet, I the other way as you bought Kevin that crossbow.
I never told you what Celia’s present cost, and I don’t think I’ll tell you now, either. Suffice it to say that once in a while it was nice to be wealthy. The short-eared elephant shrew—inaptly named; neither elephant nor shrew, it has flanged, cupped ears that are proportionately enormous—was, bar none, the most successful present I’ve ever given. Celia would have been bowled over by a roll of Lifesavers, but even our agreeable daughter expressed degrees of exhilaration, and when she unwrapped the big glass cage her eyes bulged. Then she flew into my arms with a torrent of thanks. She kept getting up from Christmas dinner to check that the cage was warm enough or to feed him a raw cranberry. I was already worried. Animals don’t always flourish in alien climates, and giving such a perishable present to a sensitive child was probably rash.
Then, I may have purchased “Snuffles,” as Celia christened him, as much for myself as for her, if only because his delicate, wide-eyed vulnerability reminded me so of Celia herself. With long, downy fur reminiscent of our daughter’s fine hair, this five-ounce fluff ball looked as if, with one good puff, he would scatter to the winds like a dandelion. Balanced on haunches that narrowed to slender stilts, Snuffles looked precarious when upright. His signature snout, trumpet-shaped and prehensile, routed about the dirt-lined cage, both touching and comic. The animal didn’t run so much as hop, and his bounding within the confines of his hemmed-in world exuded the cheerful make-the-best-of-it optimism with which Celia would soon face her own limitations. Although elephant shrews are not strictly vegetarian—they eat worms and insects—massive brown eyes gave Snuffles an awed, frightened appearance, anything but predatory. Constitutionally, Snuffles, like Celia, was quarry.
Appreciating that her pet mustn’t be overhandled, she would poke a nervous finger through the cage door to stroke the tips of his tawny fur. When she had friends over to play, she kept her bedroom door shut while she decoyed playmates to more durable toys. Maybe that means she’s learning, I prayed, about other people. (Celia was popular partly for being indiscriminate, since she brought home the playmates that other children despised—like that spoiled, strident creature Tia, whose mother had the gall to advise me quietly that it was “really better if Tia is allowed to win board games.” Celia deduced as much without being told, as she asked me pensively after her bossy companion had left, “Is it okay to cheat to lose?”) Contemplating our daughter as she defended Snuffles, I searched for a firmness, a resolve in her expression that might indicate an incipient capacity to defend herself.
Yet unwillingly, I considered the possibility that, while lovely to my own eye, Celia was fetching in a way that outsiders might be apt to overlook. She was only six, but I already feared that she would never be beautiful—that she was unlikely to carry herself with that much authority. She had your mouth, too wide for her small head; her lips were thin and bloodless. Her tremulous countenance encouraged a carefulness around her that was wearing. That hair, so silken and wispy, was destined to grow lank, its gold to give way to a dingier blond by her teens. Besides, isn’t true beauty a tad enigmatic? And Celia was too artless to imply concealment. She had an available face, and there is something implicitly uninteresting about the look of a person who will tell you whatever you want to know. Why, already I could see it: She would grow into the kind of adolescent who conceives a doomed crush on the president of the student council, who doesn’t know she’s alive. Celia would always give herself away cheaply. Later, she would move in—too young—with an older man who would abuse her generous nature, who would leave her for a more buxom woman who knows how to dress. But at least she would always come home to us for Christmas, and had she opportunity, she would make a far finer mother than I ever was.
Kevin shunned Snuffles, its very name an indignity to a teenage boy. He was more than willing to catch spiders or crickets and dangle the live morsels into the cage—standard boy-stuff and the perfect job for him, since Celia was too squeamish. But the cool, deadpan teasing was merciless. You couldn’t have forgotten the night I served quail, and he convinced her that the scrawny carcass on her plate was you-know-who.