The Futilitarians Read online

  I understood that inmate’s desire to attempt to re-create a praline. Just seeing them in the little baskets next to the register at the drugstore or hardware store or traffic court (a side enterprise for the cashier) evokes a convulsion of desire. The simplicity of the ingredients—sugar, butter, and pecans—yielding something almost too good to bear. I used to work across the street from Aunt Sally’s praline factory near the Mississippi, and when their vats were bubbling and the coffee plant a few blocks away was roasting, the neighborhood smelled like the world’s largest continental breakfast and I couldn’t believe I had the good fortune to spend my days in such a place. But such concentrated delight has a particular relationship to heartbreak. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, I befriended a Creole grandfather during drop-off at our kids’ school. Many mornings he would talk to me about his praline business, which was just getting going before the storm, in a repetitive abstracted loop many older folks were stuck in during that time, struggling to move forward, the gears always slipping. He had just made some big deals with a few downtown hotels when his kitchen flooded and everything fell apart. One day he brought me a small, wilted, flattened box cheerily printed with his company’s logo, never to be assembled and never to be filled with what he claimed were once the best pralines in the city. Did he present the box to me as evidence, as emblem? I wasn’t sure. Later, I’d notice a drift of hundreds more empty packages in the back of his car, next to his grandbaby’s car seat.

  But my most cherished praline encounter occurred after Rachel died and I was on the ferry going to visit my sister Kristin in Algiers, in the middle of the Mississippi, in a low, deep funk, gazing into the fierce eddies churning off the stern. An older gentleman in a purple three-piece suit appeared before me bearing a tray full of pralines, actually the lid of a cardboard box, like an ambassador from the land of possibility. I bought two. They were a little crumbly in their plastic sandwich bags but so delicious that I snapped out of myself, surprised and grateful as I watched the man make a few more transactions among my fellow passengers.

  My brother’s client had more questions for me than I had for him. What kind of car I drove (he said what almost every man says when I say “Honda”: Keep oil in the engine and it’ll run forever), what kind of writing I did, if I went to church. He was fascinated by Brad’s job as a scenic painter. They watch a lot of television and movies on Death Row, one TV for every two cells. I imagine this was a fresh way for him to scrutinize the most dynamic view of the outside world he had access to, give it another layer of interest. He asked what movie my husband was working on then and I told him the name of the director. He told me excitedly, “I’ve met him before! When they were filming up here.” He named a few more actors and actresses he’d met while on Death Row.

  “And there was that white dude with black hair, probably about our age but looks older, was in Con Air and a bunch of other stuff. Runaway Jury?”

  I felt something like a warm benediction and relief pass through me and I smiled.

  “John Cusack?” I asked.

  “Yeah, him.” I told him about the piece I’d read the week before, about how much his letter had meant to me. I hoped he was okay with it. He grinned and said he was.

  He explained to me how that one meeting with Dad had transpired. A few years earlier, Soren and Dad had driven up together to visit their respective clients, visits that would often last several hours. At some point toward the end of the afternoon, they decided to switch visitation booths so they could meet each other’s clients. He said Dad made such an immediate and lasting impression on him, so warm and cordial, but also kind of formidable in the way he presented himself. You could feel the force of his professionalism, and how much he cared about what he did. He looked for traces of Soren in him, just like he was looking for traces of Soren in me. And? He said Soren and I made the same gesture of sweeping our hair away from our face as we spoke. Funny to be scrutinized for observable familial bonds behind the Plexiglas in that little booth up in Angola, to be suddenly self-conscious of those tics and traits acquired over the years, often invisible to our own selves, that make us who we are to others.

  He asked me about my summer plans and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I was going to Tokyo in a few weeks, that I’d been invited there to participate in a university symposium about cultural rebuilding in post-disaster communities. I was too embarrassed by my extravagant freedom. While during that week in Tokyo I would truly love the city’s unfurling marvels of ultra-civilization, I also learned Japan has what’s considered one of the more inhumane capital-punishment systems in the world. Its Death Row inmates have to sit more or less immobile, in silence, in solitary confinement. They are not informed as to when they’ll be executed until the day arrives, so years and years can pass, sometimes decades, and suddenly a guard will show up to take them to their hanging. By that time, some executed inmates are elderly and insane. Families are not told about the execution until afterward.

  I had come to Death Row loosely because of Dad, in a way retracing his last true gesture, his final statement to the world. I wanted to visit the place where his professional and moral life had taken on so much purpose. Of course, I’d done it in that oblique way in which large families sometimes operate—not meeting Dad’s client (which I did not have permission to do), but my brother’s. Throughout his life Dad was often driven by injustice within the justice system, and Angola is the physical reality of it, the consequences of it borne out in people’s lives. You enter this bucolic, isolated realm suffused with a long history of brutality, with only your ID and a single key and cash for lunch, shedding the trappings of your life, your vulnerability amplified. In this manner, you confront human fallibility and our imperfect ways of managing it. I think this confrontation was part of the attraction of the place for Dad.

  And Dad was nothing if not confrontational, impulsively so. As a litigator, a father, and a man out in the world. A few times he’d come home with a black eye or scuffed bloody nose, saying he’d been mugged, but nothing was ever taken, and he smelled like booze and smoke. As we got older we figured it was from bar fights. When I lived in the Quarter, in the crumbling Creole manse, the cops once showed up with him at my doorstep, a mess in his three-piece suit. They were deferential, almost gentle with him, as they asked me to take him in and keep him out of trouble. He crashed on the couch and was gone by the time I woke up. We never talked about it again.

  Once he told of an argument with a Frenchman in an airport bar that eventually became amicable; when the man asked who he was, he replied, “Je suis le Grand Asshole,” and they became fast layover drinking buddies. “Asshole” is a word I always associate with my dad. The way he leaned on ass, stretched out the o, and barely acknowledged the l. Both epithet and banner. He loved being an asshole as much as calling them out. When I was in high school and meeting Dad one day at his office downtown before walking to lunch, he was on the phone with an adversary, discussing a lawsuit involving the Superdome. Dad began to relentlessly dig into the guy, cutting him off, raising his voice, having such a good time that he put him on speakerphone for my benefit. The more the guy pushed back, the more Dad enjoyed it. “No need to threaten and cajole, Eric,” the man said plaintively, “no need to threaten and cajole.” Delighted, Dad ended the call, telling the man he had to take his daughter to lunch. I was mortified for all three of us. Afterward, my brothers, sisters, and I, who were used to Dad’s ferocious outbursts—over bills, losses by Notre Dame, frequent dinner-table spills, a vacuum cleaner left in the middle of a room—would sometimes refer to Dad’s misdirected tirades as giving someone “the old T and C.”

  One thing I think I did discover was why my father kept going back to Angola so regularly, why it was so hard to hang up the phone in the visitation booth and rise from the stool—the guilt of privilege and freedom. The obvious tension girding the conversation was that when we said good-bye, my brother’s client was going back to a tiny room where he would spend twenty-thre
e hours a day, a cell block that he could leave only to go outside one hour a week, and I was heading back to the highway with my brother, through lovely and leafy West Feliciana Parish, to a gas station where I’d stock up on gumbo and crab bisque to bring back to my family and buy a huge Heineken for the road to pacify my despair while Soren drove and we later got caught in a traffic jam caused by a seemingly empty school bus hanging off the elevated highway over the swamp. When we arrived back in New Orleans, we hit the diviest dive bar we could find, ordered some bourbon to clear our heads. That bar happened to be next door to the ruins of the St. Claude Furniture Store near Elysian Fields Avenue, my sister’s devil and its man-sized mouth still stretched down to the sidewalk, still boarded up, an empty invitation.

  JUNE

  Voices over Water

  June in Louisiana is a threshold month. Nature’s springtime sexual frenzy is burning itself out—the jasmine, gardenia, wisteria, that make the city’s subtropical spring so glorious, so briefly, are browning and dropping on sidewalks and courtyards. Time to deadhead the flowers and put the garden into protective mode against the coming heat. But the heartier ones, like hibiscus, oleander, and passionflower, will treat us to hot pink and red and orange all summer, surprising us through the chain-link fence of a withering parking lot or brightening the crux of an overburdened power line. June also marks the start of hurricane season: a brief ruffling of the airwaves with stories about storm projections and disaster preparedness. It’s always a relief when November arrives and we’ve dodged the meteorological bullet. For this year.

  There’s something about the New Orleans June heat slamming down that makes you vigilant about issues of will and momentum. It’s crucial to keep the machinery churning so it doesn’t rust in the humidity. So Susan’s choice for this month’s reading, John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer,” felt seasonally appropriate. Even the main character, Neddy Merrill, “might have been compared to a summer day, particularly the last hours of one.” And of course there’s the drinking.

  I bought a bottle of claret, because “The Swimmer” begins:

  It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering a terrible hangover. “I drank too much,” said Donald Westerhazy. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill. “It must have been the wine,” said Helen Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.”

  Susan brought a bottle of gin because Neddy Merrill, husband of Lucinda, is introduced sitting poolside at the Westerhazys’ “by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin.” Neddy, who is feeling one of those moments of intense pleasure in life and circumstance, devises a plan to swim the eight miles from the Westerhazys’ to his home in Bullet Park:

  He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.

  Friends at the first few pools give him drinks and encouragement, and he feels an explorer’s exhilaration of purpose. Soon, though, Neddy’s project meets its realities, both of the topography and of the true condition of his life. A storm comes, water from the sky, water beyond man’s control, and he takes shelter in the Levys’ gazebo. When he recommences his swim, things have shifted somewhat, the weather a little cool, his shoulders a little sore. He encounters the following: a dry pool that “disappointed him absurdly,” the indignity of trying to cross a highway in a bathing suit, the discomforts of a public pool where he is “confronted by regimentation,” some rich nudist-communists who allude to his misfortunes, a former mistress who scorns him, and, at a party where he is not welcome, social snubs by both the hostess and the caterer’s bartender.

  Neddy has been self-deluded, his life is no longer one of privilege, though the details of his fall aren’t entirely clear—money lost overnight, some drunken humiliations. Time seems to speed up as if high summer is turning to late fall during his swim of the Lucinda River and his body starts to feel the fatigue. Neddy is so exposed, nearly naked in his swimming trunks, which become looser and looser on him as the day progresses, and he becomes more and more isolated from the people he encounters along the banks of the Lucinda River, the people who had given him meaning and shaped his identity—family, friends, strangers. In the beginning of his journey, he professes “an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” and he always pulled himself out by the pool’s curb. Now he finds himself achingly using the stairs and ladders. Even though he knows he can cut the whole thing short, exhausted and confused, he keeps going until he arrives at what turns out to be his former home, now for sale, the earlier thunderstorm heightening its state of disrepair. “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.”

  With a narrative like “The Swimmer,” so rich on so many levels, some of the first things people grabbed for were the allusions and literary clues, like all the mythological references. Sara read to us from her iPhone that Lucinda is derived from the Latin word for “light,” lux, and that in Roman mythology Lucina was the goddess of light and of childbirth. (“River of light!” I whispered to Brad as an aside. “The industrial jungle cruise on the Sumida.” We’d just returned from Japan a week or so before, our minds still glazed and awed by the life-shifting trip.) Someone noted that in the beginning of the story Neddy slides down the banister and slaps the statue of Venus on the hall table on the backside.

  Susan mentioned that Neddy wonders why he sees the autumn constellations of Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia, a mythological family connected to vanity and water. Cassiopeia brags that her daughter Andromeda is the most beautiful girl in the universe, angering Poseidon, who has her chained to a rock, to be eaten by a sea monster, until she’s saved by Perseus. One of the original tales of the consequences of hubris. Cheever’s use of myth was so pervasive in his fiction that he was once called the Ovid of Ossining, the New York town where he lived the last couple of decades of his life, similar terrain to the Lucinda River, upscale midcentury suburbia cultivated around security, money, and privilege. But as Neddy swims the Lucinda River and his former world of privilege falls apart around him, his vulnerability overtakes him.

  Kevin, legs crossed, balancing a wineglass on his knee, quietly, flatly, said that for him it was the most affecting of the readings we had done so far. He was going through a difficult time himself—job stress, the recent birth of a second child—and he was moved by Neddy’s worn-down vulnerability, the relentlessness of its nature. Neddy is aging, Kevin said, drowning in his own psychological mythology, the seasons turning symbolically around him. And when he arrives home, locked out, all he can do is peer in at the remnants of his own destruction. For Kevin, the story was a great example of his belief that the less true something is, like Neddy’s own mythology, the more powerful and potentially destructive it is.

  The layers of myth in any family can be difficult to sort out. Living in the South, a few generations in, it’s especially difficult. Our failure of the one test God put before us (as Walker Percy put it), that of not enslaving other humans, was converted to the grand collective lie of charmed southern living we white children of a certain demographic grew up with, one that is impervious to the most liberal of households, obscuring the monstrous reality of how and with whose blood our society was actually built and maintained. As a rangy midwester
ner with heavy-framed Buddy Holly glasses, Dad came down to Louisiana to marry Mom, but had a difficult entry into the wary family, was called a vile epithet by my plantation-raised great-grandmother because of his civil rights work at the Department of Justice. So now, in addition to his own insecurities about his working-poor upbringing, his alcoholic father, and whatever other personal demons he harbored, he had something to prove to these people, though their myths and his overlapped in places, buttressing each other even as they competed. The successively larger houses and parties and extravagances became intertwined with his role as self-made man and patriarch, even as they were also gestures of competitive defiance to his in-laws, who had lost their big houses over the generations. He genuinely loved being a father, but helplessly cultivated a larger-than-life persona that seemed almost theatrical. When he became a grandfather, he chose to be called Big Daddy, a moniker taken from my mother’s beloved grandfather.

  Oddly, one of the first places Rebecca danced, when she was nineteen or so, was called Big Daddy’s, one of the older, seedier joints on Bourbon Street. I could never get over the implied recrimination. Big Daddy’s was famous for a pair of disembodied mannequin legs in fishnets and stilettos on a mechanical swing, a kitschy pendulum forever swaying out above passersby. Even more oddly, around this same time, years before I would ever meet Brad, when he was running with a crowd of musicians, artists, service-industry workers, and strippers, he went to a late-afternoon “band meeting” at Big Daddy’s. When he showed up, a young woman in a black bob wig who was sitting on a friend’s lap was introduced as Rebecca, whose sister worked with the friend’s wife. In those first months of our relationship, during the insatiable biography swapping, we put it all together and discovered that it was indeed my sister, seven years dead by the time we met, and it was like he had encountered a pre-ghost in disguise, in that dank cave of a strip joint.