They tossed the balls with sticks, curved ones like worms at attention, going long and cutting short, creating the impression, with lines, that the dogs ran circles around them. There was a rugged one, big enough for the shih tzus to ride it, and brown, and a white, firehouse type with black spots and fine muscles. The owners were beardos or mustachioed, shorts taut with brolic thighs, and they went for each other’s dogs, not bending over—that’s what the stick was for.
She made a note; she was supposed to be reading. It was a difficult novel, stolid like a good distraction and concerned, like her, with morals. The thing was a time sink and, now she had it, her mind could go elsewhere: the cigs she’d never smoke, how sunlight felt on cashmere. She wondered if she could take the big feelings, the ones to do with death. Could she feel what the scriptors left her? Maybe, taking the good parts themselves, they left shapes in jagged poses. Whatever; an old man was crossing the green, to her bench.
“Do you like him,” (she did a who-me), “Myshkin. What do you think?”
She said: He’s sweet.
Sweet, he said, face red in a pale hand; six-foot collapsed to five ten with a necktie; loafers, touch of ankle; smile. “Many-faced, our Russian Christ.” What, she said. Two of the dogs were fighting. He asked if she thought the prince knew love and, laughing, she said probably.
“We turn from ourselves,” froggy—foot on knee, “And think it’s enough.” She smiled, a little sarcastic, questioning: Who’s ‘we?’ Him being funny now, claiming the Russians, the French: We who write ourselves, as Christ. “Haha,” her now, “Right.”
He used to know them all, he said. Scholars, talkers, the pros on Beacon Hill. There were books she’d know with his name in the acknowledgements. (Were you a scholar? He never was.) His secret: no chance of marriage. At seventeen, he jogged, shorts soiled, to the infirmary and asked what was wrong with him. Well: he’d sprung a leak, one he could manage, but nothing that would go away. That was it; he wouldn’t know love. Consolation being longevity—his peers caught up, found their own incontinence aids. But that, of course, took time.
He was born into Boston’s salutary machinery; he was a preemie, it kept him alive. Not one for figures, though, he grew up to work, humbled, for the engineers, lining their works with copy—willful clauses with Latinate vocab, needles through a bloated corpus. Or they were a shroud, cast to trace a profile. He hoped to write their logic meant he’d get it, but he only got the words. People as functions, things with electrons, to him it meant nothing. The young woman closed her book and asked, earnestly, if he felt like The Idiot. Smiling, he popped a nut and caught it. He said Hhhhh.
He liked books, though, so he thought he liked people. Friendless, undatable, (he won’t say it but) diapered, he trolled Harvard Square, shooting whiskey with down-and-outs and waiting, eager, for literate conversation. That’s how he met Al, unbothered in a corner, scanning Karamazov with annotations. “Would that Alyosha had the strength,” smiling, sitting unbidden in his new friend’s way. Albert laughed: You’d make him a Napoleon? No. He’d make him Ivan, but strong—strong like only he knew, or Dmitri. They discoursed like this, impressing no one and enjoying the hell out of each other, until it was far too late—then they did it again. And again, crawling pubs with their bad looks and library bindings, accosting anyone with patches on their elbows and speaking contentiously.
“Al got this one fellow, an oaky type, with this one: That Whitman used ‘and,’ not to posit conjunction but separateness, that things were different from themselves. The man, it turns out an Americanist, said yes, yes—but why must that be? This was the eighties, remember, de Man not cold in the ground, his life brought stark to the light. It was beginning to be you couldn’t deconstruct a thing unless you had good reason. Al drunk by now, grinning, he was handsome. He says, ‘Why not,’ and the guy comes swinging. I’m laughing, and he’s laughing, and the professor—think three-letter schools—starts laughing, and before you know it, we knew his friends.”
“What did you know about them?”
He smiles, familiar with irony: Good reason, remember.
Friends, though, fall in love. Albert, binge drinker and literary militant, found a wife playing tennis and became one of two. The old man—still just young—had his professors, but they had their wives—he needed buy-in. And so he got it: what about a book club? He had no problem with plus-ones, and they all could use the outing. He found a night that worked, drank through the most promising locations (as it turns out, his regular haunt was perfect), and the club was born. The first time was slow, contentious after that, and then a long-haul of accomplished and spirited meetings. People even talked: Have you heard of The Lay Club?
Really, they were the American readership: Late-blooming New Critics fought closet Structuralists, the early dissemblers were rebuffed, in earnest, by time-fearing historians, and if it threatened to become the academy in micro, they were always checked by engineers, insurance salesmen, a handful of brilliant wives.
“Brilliant wives,” she said.
Embarrassed: That’s what they were.
Solipsists and lovers passed through The Club, sometimes starting as one and leaving as the other. The years, though, favored dissolution: pairs became ones and the custodian withdrew, except one year, when a chemist and his wife, a teacher, kept on for months after they split, erupting eventually in a dispute over Death in Venice. The club kept their Aschenbach, the other too good for any crowd that would have her husband, and they all hoped quietly that the disagreement was more literary than not.
Still, the man kept busy. Dinner one night on Beacon Hill, then at Brigham Women’s, towing provisions (more readers among the female doctors), then readings, schedules, solemn cocktails with (male) divorcees. And solo nights, once so lonely, now at his bar, where they held meetings—where he met Al. He and the barman were friends: no book-talk, just people, keenly observed from behind the counter, did you see the rug on Martha, laughter.
“And he liked the chat?”
“Do you?”
“Well,” a dismissive gesture, “Clearly you’re busy.”
“As it turns out:”
Things live, spread their legs and die. People have kids, leave the city; find a post at Yale; kill themselves; become passionate and devoted appointment viewers; sell their homes; become television bloggers, but cynically; decide they want nothing to do with anyone in Cambridge; decide they want nothing to do with Harvard; decide, in the Hari Krishna sense, they want Nothing. The man found, maybe ten years after starting the club, he knew fewer people on the faculty at anywhere worth checking. He knew almost no one at Brigham Women’s. He hadn’t heard from Al for a while, and when he did some digging, it turned out he wasn’t just talk: he’d fled the city with an Au Pair. People paired off and left or turned to ones and dissolved.
The man kept going, though, at least for a while: no more a symbol to the Ivies, he was captain of the dispossessed. There was a year where it was himself, some loveless young professionals, and a delightful old Emeritus who, and he’d say it himself, had literally no penis. When the kids wrapped up and it was just them two, they’d sit there, silently diapered and understanding each other, or feeling like they did. One day, though, the old-timer finished his drink and said: I’m going West. The man could have pushed harder—certainly, he wasn’t just “going West,” but he didn’t. Trust an Americanist to leave such a thing as-is.
“Then?”
“Then nothing.”
She sighed, wasn’t being glib: We all lose people.
“Yeah,” he said, “Yeah.”
The park, suddenly cool, was getting gnatty. There was only one guy on the green and his dog was licking his face. The woman looked straight at the old man, now an object of consideration, and mulled her words over. He said don’t. He said he got one friend out of this, that the bartender worked over here now, near the common. The woman smoothed her pants. Somewhere, a Chinese guy played an erhu while the old man, an unexperienced and chronic misreader, touched her elbow: How’s about a drink?