The Bend of the World: A Novel Read online

  12

  Toward the evening’s end, I found my grandmother sipping wine at a low table. She was in a wheelchair. Nana! I said. Why are you in a wheelchair?

  Junior, she said, which was what she’d often call me, since my father was also Peter. I detected a subtle reproach in the nickname; our family had never had a tradition of naming sons after their fathers, and I think she disapproved of my parents for what she perceived as their egotism. Give me a kiss. I bent to kiss her cheek and sat down across from her. It’s my toe, she told me, gesturing at her one elevated foot.

  What’s wrong with your toe?

  They say it’s broken, she answered in a tone of patrician skepticism that implied that they, the doctors, presumably, were putting one over on her. She was both addicted to and disbelieving of modern medicine; she availed herself of an immense network of doctors and had specialists for every part of her body; she couldn’t sneeze without a consultation; but her principal joy was in doubting their diagnoses and complaining about their bills.

  Well, is it broken? I asked.

  I haven’t the slightest idea. The X-ray was inconclusive. I’ve asked for an MRI. Of course they agreed. Do you know doctors are paid by the procedure? Ask your mother about it. It’s the reason health care is so expensive.

  I laughed and said, But would you have preferred that they refused the MRI?

  They might have tried to dissuade me. I think it’s a conspiracy. Do you know my ophthalmologist told me I shouldn’t drive? I told him in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t be a prisoner in my own home. Now this toe business. Of course, I went to the orthopod for it. I may go to Dr. Patel, who’s the podiatrist. I’ve always found her to be very accommodating.

  Maybe you shouldn’t drive if your ophthalmologist thinks your eyesight is going.

  He’s overly cautious. I have no trouble seeing large moving objects.

  Right, but I think maybe he’s more concerned about, you know, small moving objects.

  She waved her ring-encumbered hand. Like what, squirrels? Kitty cats? Pigeons?

  Well, children, I said.

  Children, she repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time. No, I doubt it. It’s not like when your father was a little boy. I don’t think they’re allowed out anymore, due to the pedophiles. Nana was particularly concerned with pedophiles; for a woman of her age, she was remarkably adept with the computer, and hardly a day went by without her forwarding some link or article to me about the latest depredations of some priest or schoolteacher or coach.

  Why don’t you just hire a car service? I said. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about it.

  I could never afford it. This horrible museum has taken all of my money. I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t spend it on all this contemporary trash. And you know I’m not some awful old matron, either. Your grandfather and I once had lunch with Warhol. After he was famous, no less. He was trying to sell us something. Your grandfather asked why on earth we’d want a picture of a car crash, which is what it was, I think. Warhol said, Because it’s going to be worth a lot of money. The two of them got on famously, but then Jack found out that he was a homosexual and backed out. I tried to tell him that all artists are homosexual, but as you know, your grandfather was very traditionally Catholic. There haven’t been any good Catholic artists since the Renaissance, which is why we never accumulated a decent art collection.

  Nana, you’re hysterical. Wasn’t Warhol Catholic? And you should meet this guy I just met. He doesn’t like art, either. Anyway, I’m sure Mom and Dad would pay for the car service if you needed it.

  Well, where would I go?

  This was the sort of thing that infuriated my mother. Dad was either so accustomed to it or so oblivious to the behavior of others in general that he didn’t notice. Nana had been a formidably intelligent woman, much smarter than any of the men in the family, either her Ivy League husband or his brothers or any of their sons, but after she turned eighty, all of her intellect seemed to turn toward an endless game of always finding a reason to disagree with something that she herself had just said. She may just have been bored, all the original thoughts that she’d ever think already thought; all the conversations exhausted; her friends either dead or preserved under the Florida or Phoenix sun. She may not have known she was doing it, although I detected an element of glee in her voice and bearing when she pulled the trick on Mom, with whom she’d always had an odd relationship, more like the rivalry between sisters that between a mother and her daughter-in-law. Not to suggest any kind of crackpot Freudianism. It was hard to imagine that Nana worried about Mom taking Dad away from her. Dad was so blissfully abstracted that he’d never belonged to anyone anyway. He enjoyed wine, opera, baseball, Yale, and the stock market in roughly descending order. He loved us—I was sure of that—but his love was so matter-of-fact and inevitable that it felt mostly like a product of nature and instinct, an adaptive evolution of human sentiment that our biology was as yet simply too primitive to explain.

  Alone among my family, I thought Nana’s circumlocutory games were fun, and I usually egged her on, but Lauren Sara, who’d drifted off for a while with Tom and a gaggle of upscale fags, had found me, and I had to introduce her.

  I’d hoped to escape the party without their meeting but now saw how absurd that hope had been. To be fair, I’d always tried, unsuccessfully, to keep Lauren Sara apart from my friends and family, had always failed, and felt that they all viewed her with something like embarrassment on my behalf. That my own ridiculous, furtive behavior might have been the largest part of this reception did not, at the time, occur to me. The conclusions you’ll naturally draw about my character aren’t very flattering. And actually, I’ve exaggerated slightly. She and my father got along just fine; the few times they’d met, they’d found common topics of interest in metallurgy and materials science and welding and suchlike—Dad had trained as an engineer before becoming, ahem, a management consultant, and Lauren Sara knew her way around a shop. Johnny, of course, told me that I wasn’t afraid of my family’s disapproval at all, but of their approval. They loved Katherine, he told me, and you fucked that up. So obviously the whole thing is a subconscious act of superstitious, self-imposed distancing. I thought this was all rather pat. The truth was that she was just so not a Morrison. I’d taken her to one doomed dinner with my family where she’d tried to explain her current veganism to my mother, telling her she didn’t eat anything with a face. Mom gave me a significant look, then offered to order her a plain cheese pizza.

  Nana, I said, this is my girlfriend, Lauren Sara. Lauren Sara, this is my grandmother, Nanette.

  My grandmother offered her hand and said, Lauren Sara. Isn’t that two names?

  My best friend when I was a kid was named Lauren, too. So she was always Lauren Nicole and I was always Lauren Sara.

  Well, Nana said, that seems fully rational. Peter is named after his father. His parents toyed with the idea of calling him PJ, but I convinced them otherwise. I said that he’d end up an unsuccessful radio sports announcer if he were to reach adulthood known only by his initials. How long have you two been seeing each other?

  About six months, I said.

  Seven, said Lauren Sara.

  Well, be prepared, Nana said. The true tests of relationships occur at eight months, three years, and seven years. The last one is famous but less consequential, because by then you’re too exhausted to care. How long did you date Katherine, Junior?

  Three years, I said.

  Well, there, you see. Empirical confirmation. Oh dear, here comes Mildred. I abhor her. You’d both better run off before she gets here. Don’t worry, you have plenty of time. She drags herself around like a walrus with that walker. Have you seen Arlene? Good Lord, this show. You know, there was a time, before the war of course, when you could meet real, live fascists. Half your grandfather’s graduating class at Yale, for God’s sake. I have to suspect they’d be embarrassed by this whole charade. The Nazis deserve something more substa
ntial than a game of dress-up, if you’d like my opinion. In any case, if you run into Arlene again, tell her that I think her show is a triumph . . . of the will.

  13

  Your grandmother’s a trip, Lauren Sara said.

  We were smoking in the courtyard. The party was winding down. Arlene and a gaggle of curators and museum administrators and other people in important geometric glasses had bundled Steinman off to a private dinner party. Tom and Julian and the art fags had gone off to the same bar where Lauren Sara and I had first met, which was a popular post-dinner stop-off for the curators and their visiting artists owing to its collection of works by local artists and carefully designed tumbledown chic, and this was, not coincidentally, why Tom and his gang had gone there; not having been invited to the dinner, they hoped to head Steinman et al. off at the pass, so to speak, hoping to offer up the few moments of public sycophancy that they believed to be their natural and inalienable right as minor vassals in the little feudal country of Art. Julian, whose preferred topics of conversation ranged from an expensive new squash racket to the weight savings of the expensive new components on his expensive road bike, would not enjoy himself, and Tom, seeing that Julian wasn’t enjoying himself, would get angry and sulk, because as he saw it, before he’d met Julian, or Julian him, his boyfriend’s life had been a dull and effectively meaningless existence, days at the office followed by hard workouts, tasteless expensive dinners at pricey but inferior restaurants, and the heroic intake of beer and scotch, to be compensated for by more and harder workouts, all of it surrounded by and fueled by and bathed in money—Julian was no Internet millionaire or New York finance wunderkind, but he made the sort of money that I associated with my parents and their friends; Tom, of course, was poor; I doubted the museum paid him more than thirty thousand a year, if that, but he considered himself glamorous; before him, Julian had gone to steakhouses and trashy gay house parties where everyone took off their shirts or swam naked in the pool; now he went to openings and galas and met artists and similar subspecies. These things were so self-evidently superior to Tom that he couldn’t see how wasted they were on Julian, and he attributed Julian’s sour moods to ungratefulness. In his version of things, his inversion of things, Tom incredibly played the role of the older, wealthier man, and Julian was the kept woman chafing against the very comforts she’d originally sought. It might have occurred to me that this said something about the way we all misapprehend our relationships, but it did not.

  14

  My grandmother is nuts, I said.

  She seems super-rich.

  Not really, I said. I guess maybe she used to be. Nobody talks about it, and I used to think there was, like, a dark secret or something. But then I figured out that after my grandfather died she gave a bunch away. Ill-advisedly, as my dad says. And then she lost a bunch in the stock market. No one ever talked about it because there wasn’t anything to talk about. It’s actually a very boring story.

  What’s a boring story?

  Jesus! I yelped. Mark and Helen had appeared behind us again.

  Sorry, said Helen. Mark is always sneaking up on people. It’s how we met. I was so startled that I accidentally agreed to go out with him.

  Cool, said Lauren Sara.

  Smokers, said Mark. I like you guys even more. Can we steal cigarettes from you? Neither of us smokes unless someone else gives us cigarettes.

  We all stood for a while watching the end of the party queuing up at valet.

  So what’s this boring story? Mark asked.

  Oh, nothing. We were talking about my grandmother.

  And who’s your grandmother?

  It was an odd question, so I laughed, but he seemed to want an answer, so I said, No one. An old lady who may or may not have squandered her fortune.

  That doesn’t sound boring, said Helen.

  Trust me.

  I don’t, said Mark. It sounds like an English novel. The Life and Times of . . .

  He trailed off. I didn’t say anything. Lauren Sara said, Nanette Morrison.

  Nanette? said Helen.

  That’s her name, said Lauren Sara.

  No shit, said Mark. We know your grandma. How about that?

  How do you know my grandmother?

  She bought a piece from Helen.

  Oh, cool! said Lauren Sara.

  A piece? I said.

  Of art, Helen answered. I was an artist.

  15

  I have to warn you, Mark said.

  Warn me?

  Helen is going to stuff your girlfriend’s nose full of coke.

  She’s not really into coke.

  No offense, Mark said, but she looks a little get-along, go-along.

  You might be right.

  They’d gone off to the bathroom together, and I’d made some lame comment about women going to the bathroom together. Mark had asked for another cigarette. So, I said, you don’t really think all artists should be shot.

  He shrugged and grinned and inhaled and exhaled.

  Seeing, I said, as your girlfriend is an artist.

  Mark said, She’s the exception that proves the rule.

  It’s funny that you know my grandmother.

  All coincidences converge on the inevitable, he said.

  I’m sorry? I said.

  So what do you do, Pete? he asked as if he hadn’t heard me.

  Corporate shill, I said. Fake money and contracts and stuff. I work for a big company downtown, although no one’s ever heard of it. What about you?

  Sort of a lawyer.

  What’s a sort-of lawyer?

  I don’t practice. I’m a bit of a corporate shill myself. I used to work at a company called Dynamix.

  Sounds like a breakfast cereal.

  That’s funny, he said. That was actually a joke around the office. It was a consulting firm, whatever that means. Anyway, then I did some private consulting and equity stuff for a while, and now I’m working for a big Dutch NV that’s gobbling up some shitty American companies for reasons that only the Übermenschen in Rotterdam comprehend.

  Oh shit, I said.

  He smiled—not a grin, not a smirk, not a guarded display of approval or pleasure, but an actual unmediated expression of joy. Really? He said, and then he laughed, and his laughter, too, was disturbingly genuine. Global Solutions Solutions for a Global World?

  16

  This, more or less, was how we ended up crushed in the back seat of Mark’s little fast car on our way to what Mark called Our Club. New friendships require less bargaining than old ones, less planning, fewer points to settle and details to iron out; for instance, I’d left my car on a side street in Oakland; if it had been Tom or Derek or even Johnny (not that the issue would have come up with Johnny, who didn’t have a car and did not, to the best of my knowledge, know how to drive), I’d have worried about that part—for no good reason, but nevertheless. But that evening it had seemed immaterial. The valets had brought Mark’s silver teardrop around, and we were off.

  We whistled down Fifth Avenue, past the university and the hospitals, a pile of immense, mismatched buildings that climbed the hillside to our right like a stepped bastard ziggurat and from whose satanic bowels there emitted a constant Luciferian thrum. Packs of students crowded across the intersections. A helicopter passed overhead. We ran a red light. Honey, Helen said, red means stop.

  It was yellow.

  It may have been yellow at one time.

  Don’t worry. If I kill someone, we’re by the hospital.

  Again, Helen said, a timing issue.

  Beyond the hospital the road dropped in a steep S-curve toward the cantilevered highways that clung to the cliffs between the high bluff of the Hill District and the Monongahela. Across the river, lights stepped across the Flats and up the Slopes, and it struck me, not for the first, more like for the thousandth time, just what a preposterous place it was for a city, what a precarious topography. We crossed the Birmingham Bridge in a tight single lane between traffic cones. Whole lane
s and great portions of the high arch and suspension cables were blocked and swathed in sheets of translucent plastic, which were illuminated from within by powerful work floodlights, revealing the silhouetted work of the tiny men within—tent caterpillars, ten million years hence, our successors.

  We were on Carson Street briefly. A girl in tight pants vomited. Young men stood in gaggles outside of bars, simultaneously sinister and preposterous in their puffy jackets. I hate the South Side, I said.

  Doesn’t Johnny live above Margaritaville? Lauren Sara had seemed to be sleeping before she spoke, her head canted back against the seat.

  Yeah, I said. I keep telling him to get out of that shithole. We should stop and say hello.

  Who’s Johnny? Mark asked.

  My best friend.

  Your only friend, said Lauren Sara, not cruelly, and anyway, I reflected, it was awfully close to being true.