The Futilitarians Read online

  One night at Big Daddy’s I had one of those backstage conversations with Rebecca that left me bewildered and depressed. I remember the dressing room as being narrow, with mottled mirrors and bead-board wainscoting thick and rippling with decades of sloppy paint jobs. I remember Rebecca as a blur: hot off the stage, flushed and transformed, shimmering and distracted. And probably coked up. She didn’t even bother to cover herself, but then again we were sisters, and practically shared bodies. She said she was doing great, dancing was so great, so freeing. She had plenty of money and an apartment uptown.

  When discussing the power of the lies we tell ourselves, Kevin had warned that the more people’s delusions are threatened, the tighter they cling to them. He figured a person would rather remain deluded than admit she’d been lying, to herself, to others. Of course, Rebecca seemed to me anything but great, but the force of her conviction made me doubt myself. What was I even doing there? What did I hope to achieve, or worse, get out of it? What were the proportions of judgment to curiosity to concern that had brought me there? Was I projecting my values onto her? Was I the one being deluded about my motives, about her life?

  Soon I’d learn from my mother that Rebecca had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder a couple of years earlier, a condition so misleadingly named that Mom thought it meant that she didn’t quite have a full-blown condition (this was before widespread Internet access, before we were all experts on everything). BPD actually treads along the dark borders of many other mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, substance abuse, bipolar disorder. It’s marked by delusions, risky behavior, low impulse control, paranoia, and suicidal ideation. Checks in all of those boxes for Rebecca, though surprisingly not for Rachel. BPD can also be notoriously difficult to treat, though my parents tried so many things—individual therapy, group therapy, institutionalization. In her last sketchy years, she seemed more and more detached from her family, but never from Rachel, who was locked into her orbit. In the end, it was the powerful myth of suicide, both as real and unreal as anything, that seduced both sisters.

  Toward the end of the evening and the bottle of gin, when talk generally becomes both looser and more urgent, Sara brought up the letters of Cheever, edited by his son Benjamin—you have to read the letters—and talked about how she found them more affecting than his fiction. Later, when I finally did read them, after getting over my voyeuristic guilt (all those tendernesses and typos not intended for my eyes), it turned out Cheever was a man I recognized, had kind of grown up with. Funny, generous, perpetually and elegantly amused by life’s absurdities, preoccupied with money, insecure and petty, alcoholic, manipulative of the truth for effect, the maintainer of a secretive life parallel to his family and public one, and largely unknowable to many around him. In love with life and with people, Cheever had lots of affairs, with both men and women, both carnally and emotionally. What I found most interesting about the letters was the clear vision of his refracted selves as seen through his correspondences. My favorite example was his two descriptions of a dinner held in his honor by his publisher in 1978. In a letter to a male lover (also apparently bisexual):

  Dear ________,

  … Last night was the gala dinner at Leutece and I sat between Lauren Bacall and Maria Tucci and basked in that fragrance of beaver we both so enjoy, but when I went out to take a piss between the 7th and 8th courses I thought deeply of you and how happy I had been eating French-fried onion rings at Admiral Woolsey’s.

  And to his daughter:

  Dear Susie,

  The most exciting part of the gala dinner came when they brought in the first course. This was a fish quish [sic] shaped like an enormous pastry fish and decorated with a pastry frigate in full sail. I had Lauren Bacall on my right and Maria Tucci on my left and very much enjoyed myself.

  Amazing how we house all of these personas at once, flashing them to different people depending on expectations and desire. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to deceive ourselves like Neddy does up until the end of the story. Just like the swimming pools are containers, people are containers of bits of our fluid selves. Several times throughout “The Swimmer,” Cheever refers to the varying qualities of “voices over water” that Neddy hears as he approaches his next pool. “The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair,” and as he leaves it he hears the “brilliant, watery sound of voices fade.” Later, as he nears the public pool the voices become “the illusion of brilliance and suspense… but the sounds here were louder, harsher and more shrill,” and then, heading back to his milieu, a party at the Biswangers’, “from across the road, the lawns, the gardens, the woods, the fields, he heard again the brilliant noise of voices over water.” His solo quest is dependent upon other people, and we learn about him through them and what they say; Neddy has been created through all these voices, even through the caterer’s bartender. There’s no continuous river of the self, it’s just a construct, the Lucinda River an illusion that Neddy is trying to chart through his force of will. Maybe the water is just bald, indifferent existence that we navigate and shape and dream through and ultimately all drown in. For many of us that June evening, “The Swimmer” was mostly about time and aging—the mind’s and the body’s adjustments to life-fatigue and the general disorientation of the self that can result. How time erodes around you as your body falls apart.

  One afternoon my father, tethered to his oxygen tank in his brown leather, Mission-style recliner, with one of those vitamin drinks I’d buy him by the bag at Walgreens balancing on the armrest, said apropos of nothing, “It all just went too fast.” “What did?” I asked. “My life.” He wasn’t ready for it to be over. I went cold. I was standing in the middle of the room, absently checking out what he was watching on the TV, on my way out the door to pick up my sons from school. Don’t remember what I responded. It’s always disconcerting to see a large man frail and frightened. He’d been a tall, intimidating person my whole life. He seemed slightly incredulous that one could spend so much effort moving things forward and making a big life for a big family and then suddenly it’s done. When he looked at me, what did he see—a healthy woman with her own kids and own life, a by-product of his ascent and decline? For that matter, all of his children, dead and alive, what meanings did we hold for him? Had we just become his voices over water, coming at him from a wavering remove as he struggled toward his end?

  For days that river metaphor and our discussion of it bobbed in my consciousness, as I tried to recall some echo of it from a recent reading. One day, passing the bookshelf en route to bed, I glimpsed Koestler’s Act of Creation, that brick of a book we’d read an excerpt from back in March. I had been really taken with the excerpt from “The Belly of the Whale” and had ordered the book, a vast seven-hundred-page opus on the nature and purpose of creativity in life from scientific, psychological, and philosophical-literary vantage points. But when it arrived, I was so intimidated by its length and density and Koestler’s genius that I skimmed through it and shelved it until retirement. The quote I’d been trying to remember turned out to be by one of Louis Pasteur’s biographers and was on the last page in the section “Multiple Potentials,” which I had flipped to, wondering how Koestler was going to finish this monster. In that section, he discusses the fluidity of genius, specifically regarding scientists and the role that accident and happenstance played in their paths toward major history-diverting discoveries. Apparently Pasteur’s notebooks were full of projects and nascent discoveries that neither time nor circumstance allowed him to pursue. But had events or relationships or whims been differently aligned for Pasteur, suggests his biographer René Dubos, there might’ve been totally different outcomes for humanity.

  It is often by a trivial, even an accidental decision that we direct our activities into a certain channel.… Usually, we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every
decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

  When I first read those lines, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, because they were so brutal and so true. As you get older all the bodies of your stillborn selves may pile up around you but every decision is also its own act of creation. That’s one of the miracles of the self—that we keep creating ourselves amid the personal carnage.

  The day before Dad’s funeral, I sat in the kitchen in a hollow state of suspension, everyday life just bouncing dully off me, as I read the newspaper article about his life, an unreal exercise in language processing. When we were kids, he had warned us against believing everything we read in the paper, that there was no such thing as an objectively true story, that facts and circumstances ranged out far beyond the neat columns and the discreet authority of the byline. But reading his obituary engendered a different kind of disbelief. So did looking at the great picture of him, an unselfconscious side view sneakily snapped at a Christmas party, as he hated having his picture taken, smiling in his outdated glasses, the sweep of brown hair he compulsively combed and his big “lugan” nose whose forensic powers he warned us about every Saturday night before we went out. (“Lugan,” a term he embraced, was a midwestern pejorative for anything Lithuanian, like his Kaunas-born maternal grandparents.) The biographical details, highlights of some of the more prominent cases he tried, even ones he would’ve considered disappointments, padded here and there with a little bullshit from our luncheon. The newspaper listed the children who survived him but not those who didn’t, a sad erasure for the twins, especially since I suspect they were the last ones on his mind as he slipped away from us.

  But it was the story to the left of my dad’s, running exactly parallel on the page a mere centimeter from his, that kept distracting me as I read. INJURIES CITED IN DEATH AT OLD HOTEL. A decomposing body had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned Howard Johnson out in the Katrina-ravaged but recovering New Orleans East. The coroner’s office said that the individual had been dead about four to seven days before someone found him and that he’d died from internal bleeding from pelvic fractures. They had released a description to help ID him. “The man is white, between 20 and 30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches, 148 pounds, and has light brown hair, a full beard and a mustache.… The man also has a twisted right incisor in the right side of his mouth. He had several tattoos on his body, including ‘Sublime’ on his right inner forearm, a Cancer zodiac symbol on his left inner forearm and a cross on his right lower thigh with the letters ‘AT’ on one side and ‘RM’ on the other.… He wore a white shell necklace, a brown shirt and brown pants and brown boots.” The coroner was awaiting toxicology reports.

  Dad would’ve loved that juxtaposition because he thrived on contrast and connection. It doesn’t matter who speaks for you after you’re gone, your tattoos or your tipsy children, nor whether you died alone at the bottom of an elevator shaft, anonymous in darkness, undiscovered for days, or surrounded by your family uptown at the Touro Infirmary under excellent care. You ended up side by side on page B4 of the Metro section of the Times-Picayune on January 19, 2012.

  At that same Rib Room lunch, sometime after hanging up with the reporter, my brother John said that Mom showed us the beauty of the world, took us, all eight, to plays, museums, to work at food banks, out to the country to nourish our city souls. Dad showed us its absurdity. Not a defeatist, nihilistic absurdity, but one you acknowledge and work with. Fun material that’s part of who you are and not anything you ever have to reconcile with anything else.

  But something about the man in the elevator shaft resonated with some deep strain within my dad. He often dressed monochromatically, too—in all black, part of his general rebelliousness, a shadow thrown from a tough youth marked by police trouble and car crashes. The intensity of the “Sublime” tattoo and the quirky ornament of the shell necklace. Dad was a loner with just a few loyal friends, loved cheesy holiday decorations and throwing big parties. He was self-isolating, drawn to the dark margins. Those black eyes and bloody lips and improbable excuses. Dad’s ambitions and weaknesses could’ve led him anywhere. That man in brown at the bottom of the elevator shaft could’ve been one of Dad’s possible selves, murdered and abandoned long ago, finally catching up to him in the stream.

  JULY

  The Least Dead Among All of Us

  It occurred to me that I was the only woman in the room the night Jacques Brel filled the pull-down screen and charged the particles in the air with his existential Gallic virility. We were projecting him from the Internet, from the Olympia Theatre in Paris, 1966, in black-and-white, liberating him from the commercial scaffolding of YouTube via “full screen,” so we could experience him in his unmediated and elemental glory. A dark suit, a spotlight, and a rapt, well-dressed audience. Singing seems an understatement—Brel was conjuring, in French, his ravenous sailors of the port of Amsterdam, ravenous for fish and pommes frites and drink and whores. In the beginning of Brel’s “Amsterdam,” sailors “die full of drama and beer at first light” but are also “born in the thick heat of the languid oceans.” They “sleep like flags draped on the dark banks,” “dance like spat-out suns… to a rancid accordion,” and “blow their noses in the stars.” The beautiful bodies and the vertu of young women are consumed by these men just like the piles of seafood dripping on the too-white tablecloths at the café. The port of Amsterdam is where human desire laps up against that constant in nature, sexual regeneration, exposing man’s complicated, sullying place in it. Through the intensity of his delivery, his brown eyes fixed ardently on some space beyond the balcony, where maybe the firmament has cracked open to welcome these sailors home, the song climbs and climbs and never comes down. As Brel’s performance crescendos toward the end, his face glazed with sweat and passion, he suddenly swirls away from the audience and disappears into the darkness behind the spotlight.

  July is arguably the worst month of the summer in New Orleans and people generally leave town, hibernate in the air-conditioning, try really hard to be productive, or just give up. There’s a sort of siege mentality that confines your plans and moods—we can’t do that, it’s too hot; can’t think about that, it’s too hot. Patience plummets, crime spikes. That night there were just five of us—me, my husband, Kevin, Chris, and Case, who had just returned from Europe and was making a special guest appearance at the ECRG. After their breakup in January, Case and Nina repaired to opposite sides of the planet: Nina to Taiwan to build floats, and Case to Belgium to help artists with marginal construction projects. Case had left the country lost, uncomprehending and bereft. He underwent his own night journey and came back a changed man, surging with ideas for new projects and inspirations. Among these inspirations was the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel, which Case shared with Brad one evening over drinks shortly after he returned stateside. Brad was deeply affected by Brel, by the raw power of his expression, which seemed so rock and roll, more dependent on the physicality of delivery than the words themselves. And when he came home that night, after hanging out with Case, he showed me the videos over and over, with English subtitles and without, both of us experiencing the slight bewilderment of discovering something incredible for the first time, something that millions of people had known about, and been moved by, since before we were born. So in turn, Brad wanted to share it with that month’s ECRG, selecting “Amsterdam” and “Ne me quitte pas,” two of Brel’s most famous songs. Besides, in midsummer, a listening seemed preferable to a reading.

  “Ne me quitte pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”) is in some ways the opposite of “Amsterdam”; instead of the cosmic amplifying of the self, we get the wrenching diminishing of it, as a quietly desperate lover proclaims all of the things he’ll do to keep his amour from leaving him. He begins with grand promises of bringing her pearls of rain from countries where it never rains, creating a new kingdom of love that she’ll rule over, and inventing senseless words t
hat only she can understand. Each sally is punctuated by the repetition of “Ne me quitte pas.” In the film footage from the same performance, the phrase is sung through a forced grin, Brel’s head shaking plaintively. He tries out a few desperate metaphors of hope, long-dead volcanoes unexpectedly erupting, scorched lands bearing wheat as if it were April. “Ne me quitte pas. Ne me quitte pas.” His already shaky confidence breaks apart until he can barely utter the negating word “pas,” as if the syllable itself is too much to bear. Realizing the futility of his plight as he sings, he finally concedes that he’ll weep no more, speak no more, just stand right here and watch her dance and laugh, become the shadow of her shadow, the shadow of her hand, the shadow of her dog. When he disappears into the dark of the stage at the end of that song, it doesn’t feel triumphant as with “Amsterdam,” in which Brel seems to connect with the black fabric of universal destiny. In “Ne me quitte pas” his disappearance is obliterating, the effacement that sometimes accompanies an overwhelming and unreciprocated love, the disappearance of all that you’re willing to strip away from yourself just to be able to stick around. Which in the case of “Ne me quitte pas” is just about everything.

  After we’d watched both videos a couple of times, acclimating to Brel’s expressiveness and style, the natural question that evening was, What made Brel an existential figure? Born in 1929 in Brussels, he reached adulthood in existentially roiling postwar Europe. Raised Catholic and groomed for the family’s corrugated cardboard business, he had the right things to rebel against and basically created his own self, his own “essence,” apart from his upbringing. And though Sartre derided the chanson realiste as bourgeois fatalism, the genre did put expressive individuals, like Brel or Edith Piaf or Charles Aznavour, in opposition to the crowd, though ambivalently dependent upon it. Plus, the chanson’s lyric intensity was grounded in realism, where humor and tragedy are often conjoined, as are death and sex, the elevated and the base, like in “Amsterdam.” All of which made me think of the Simone de Beauvoir quote from A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, “Man is both finite and infinite.” (See also: Crowd; God; Self-Assertion; Women.) Which made Case impatient, for some reason.