The Futilitarians Read online

  “Do you think Brel got laid a lot?” he asked. “I bet he did!” he answered himself. The other guys seemed curious as well, except for my husband, who’s not supposed to betray an interest in getting laid except as a specific, domestic phenomenon. But wanting some evidence, Case commandeered the laptop, which was connected to the projector, fed some words into the Google search slot, and summoned the Jacques Brel Wikipedia page onto the screen. This abrupt aesthetic shift in the dimly lit room, from evocative twentieth-century chiaroscuro to a bland, sans-serif, crowdsourced information platform was jarring. The five-foot-tall Wikipedia entry in our living room felt like a violation of the evening, an affront to the spread of food I’d laid out, the drinks I’d poured. The oversized puzzle-globe logo looming over us, with its earnest invitation to humanity to contribute to its project, was suddenly depressing. Thus I took my daily dose of ambivalence toward the great gifts of technology. We were given the stunning force of Brel transmitted through time and space, but, before full screening, had to put up with the kite string of comments below the video, the scraps and fragments of expression, barely worth the seconds it took to type them, but markings that people felt compelled to leave behind anyway, whether grubby, disgruntled prints or smudges of grateful enthusiasm. The grainy, black-and-white romanticism of man’s plight in the universe was knifed right there in the living room because the guys had to know how much Jacques Brel got laid.

  Case moved the cursor across blue linked words and citations, scrolled through the paragraphs of biography, each starting repetitively—“In January 1960,” “In January 1961,” “In March 1962”—to the bottom of 1967, the year Brel wound down his live singing career after an international farewell tour. “Look, I found it,” he said. “Here’s all the proof we need.” He read aloud: “‘Toward the end of the year, with vague plans of sailing around the world, Brel purchased a yacht.’”

  A couple of things occurred to me. The first was that the material chosen thus far for the ECRG, though our group was evenly split along gender, represented a male-dominated investigation (except for my reading in May, which, though female-generated was also male-dominated, featuring my father, my brother, and his client), most of the men we’d heard from being alcoholics and/or suicidal and/or misogynists. The second was that the need to investigate whether Brel got laid a lot seemed laughable. One of the most famous French-singing entertainers in the 1960s? I was sure he got chronically, epically, Europeanly laid. You didn’t even need to read his only English-language biography, by Alan Clayson of the English band Clayson and the Argonauts, to figure that out, to be unsurprised that he sent his wife and three daughters back to Belgium after he got a little success, maintained a pied-à-terre in Paris, and had both dalliances and serious side relationships with gorgeous, sophisticated creative types, like Zizou, the temperamental chanteuse, and Sylvie, the green-eyed public-relations manager. Or that when he died of lung cancer, at forty-nine, his funeral was attended by both his wife of twenty-five years and his much younger mistress, with whom he had spent the last few years of his life in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, near where Paul Gaugin had also moved to escape the “artificiality” of European culture.

  I imagine I was experiencing Brel differently than the guys were, with admiration but also with caution. The longing and desire he pulled out of me like knotted scarves, his sharp suit and thin tie, his confidence that could turn to devastating vulnerability under the spotlight. He was the stuff of infatuation. I’d made the mistake of dating guys like him—charismatic performers who never knew when to stop performing—but luckily I didn’t make the mistake of marrying one.

  Another point of interest in the room was Brel’s classy presentation. Wearing a simple dark suit and performing explosive, intimate numbers with just a spotlight concentrated the power into his words, voice, face, and hands, even his legs, with minimal distraction. In those clips, even his band was in darkness behind him, the disembodied accordion seeming both earthier and airier. Case, whose regular uniform was work pants, T-shirt, and tattoos, including one of a hammer drill on his forearm, was saying that he wanted to get himself one of those plain, black tailored suits, that it was time to step up his game. Brad, also an artist, had sometimes said the same thing—that when he was in art school he’d admired those Dadaists and surrealists from a hundred years ago who would create some of the most provocative, culture-shifting art the world had ever seen in their studios in a plain suit and tie. The suit also represented a workmanlike sense of containment, a uniform of duty or class, eschewing claims of sartorial individuality. Suit as cipher.

  So many dads I know these days dress however they want and sport tattoos, their individuality conspicuously inked and illustrated, but I grew up associating dads with suits, the uniform of men with offices, secretaries, and salaries, part of the machinery of the Central Business District, which ground down for long lunches, especially on Fridays, when it nearly sputtered to a halt. Around noon, downtown filled up with simulacra of your dad, on Canal Street or Carondelet; you never knew where he might appear from the crowd of his doubles. Weekend leisure-wear seemed vaguely deceptive and awkward on him, legs too pale and hair too perfect.

  But one day in high school I started associating the suit itself with part of a greater deception. I needed to get the car from him and went to his office to pick up the keys. His office was empty but his suit jacket was hanging on the back of the door, so I checked his pockets but instead of keys found a pack of Marlboros, which was a shock since he’d always been vehemently antismoking and we were forbidden to smoke under the threat of severe punishment. He admonished us that his lugan nose could sniff out the faintest trace on our clothes, so we better not even hang around with people who smoked. Both his parents had died of cancer, and I’d never ever seen him with a cigarette. As I smelled his jacket, it dawned on me—that musky, complicated boardroom/cologne/street exhaust man-smell also had a strain of cigarette smoke. Years later, I would understand how much parenting can sometimes be a performance, the much-discussed “modeling” and the united fronts presented to children at times being choreographed, with much of the negotiations, machinations, and messy behavior going on backstage.

  But Brel didn’t seem to believe much in backstage parenting. Clayson’s account of Brel as father was as predictable as that of his love life. According to Clayson, he would drop into the family home in Brussels, sleep until eleven, hold court, issue judgment, recommend that the children read Camus, and generally dominate the house with his unruly temperament.

  Domestic routine ruins everything. From my point of view, I insist absolutely on seeing my daughters from time to time and taking them with me, say, on tour, so that they can see a man who is fulfilling his proper function as a man because as soon as you take away that function, he’s nothing but a ridiculous sight. Have you ever seen a great surgeon playing billiards? That interests no one—certainly not his children. It is much finer for them to look up to a surgeon at the operating table than a surgeon playing billiards. Children everywhere are being raised by surgeons who play billiards. The mother is above this sort of criticism because she is always playing billiards, metaphorically. The average father is only at home at a time of day when he’s worth nothing and has nothing to give.

  Most dads aren’t surgeons or Belgian pop stars. Most do what they can to feed their families in rather unglamorous ways that don’t lend themselves well to audiences. Brad’s job, for instance, is to make his labors invisible to the audience. As a scenic painter, he’s “below the line,” as the industry calls it, creating the illusion of unity between real and fake. Working the surfaces, a scenic painter can make a naked piece of plywood resemble rusty sheet metal, Carrara marble, or speckled linoleum. To have your work noticed by a viewer is to fail. His job has ruined moviegoing for him, as he frequently gives the industry twelve- or fourteen-hour days and is loath to give it an extra ninety minutes during his off time. And when I do convince him to watch something
, his eye moves to the artifice of the set or the location, his brain to the guts and the systems of movie magic, to the bureaucratic insanity that often drives these productions. Sloppy decision making at the top means the bottom works weekends. Often it’s someone in an office in L.A. deciding whether or not my husband makes it home for dinner. When he does make it home, he’s either enervated or wearied by the absurd nature of his job, the crazy things he spends his days doing. Concocting fake bird shit to dribble on a fake pipe he’s just rusted with fiberglass powder, aniline dyes, and shellac. Spray-painting the romantic lead’s lawn to turn the grass a more desirous green. Soaking and staining piles of play money to look waterlogged, evidence for a post-Katrina cop to discover. Touching up William Burroughs’s prop pot plants for a French production of On the Road. Lots of interrogation rooms and jail cells. The same cinder blocks carved from plaster, the same dado lines dividing the walls. The same requests to “make it dirty.” He actually likes working on horror movies, the dripping walls and corroded torture chambers; you can experiment with materials, push the visual drama to the edge.

  And his job is absurd in the existential sense of futility, too. While the image of what he creates ends up on the screen and in viewers’ brains, the actual physical thing is dismantled, bulldozed, tossed in Dumpsters and landfills. Sometimes what he works on for weeks is annihilated without even ending up on-screen. For a western, he and a crew once spent over a month in a warehouse, sculpting and painting several tons of Styrofoam to make a realistically scaled cavern large enough for dusty outlaws to ride their horses through. The boys and I visited the set throughout its transformation—from a three-story-tall Arctic-white foam cavern to one with striated sandstone walls, conjured with about five hundred gallons of paint, dirt trucked in for the floor, and a stream running through it. The director changed his mind about the horses, and filmed one scene of the lead exploring the cavern with torches, discovering the mysterious cave paintings, the creation of which had been the source of tension among the scenic crew because it was a “hero shot” that the camera would linger on, one of the few times your work is singled out. In the end, they didn’t use any of the footage at all in the movie, and the cavern was trashed.

  When I take the boys to visit the sets or locations where Brad works, he’ll explain whatever he’s having to age or glaze and how he uses the different items from his scenic kit: paintbrushes, rags, shellac, Chapin sprayers called pumpies. The boys are usually quiet, a little disoriented. Already a line of reality has been breached—the line between what Dad does all day and their own days—and from there reality is tampered with even more: miles of cables, impossible lighting rigs, scissor lifts, ear-searing power tools, carpenters blasting classic rock, ad hoc paint shops, temporary structures within structures, and, on the other side of the noise and plywood, the Oval Office or a floating staircase to a witch’s library or a perfectly outfitted morgue. Brad tries to detach himself from the craziness when he gets home, tries to be as fully present and engaged a father as he can—washes dishes, does laundry and bedtimes. Plays billiards, metaphorically.

  Visiting my father at work was like entering the main chamber of his person. Messy piles of documents fringed the floor and covered his desk and shelves, though he insisted they had an organizational principle and that he could locate any piece of paper at any time. Given that his photographic memory was the envy of his children, none of whom had inherited it, I believed him. On the walls were a few family photographs, one in front of the house on State Street that he was so proud of, taken as a birthday surprise for him one Sunday morning when he and my mom were at Mass. The house looks perfect, its Victorian columns and wide gracious porch a reproach to the bleary, puffy-eyed gaggle of teenagers rousted out of bed and into dress clothes for an early photo shoot on the lawn. The walls also held citations from the Department of Justice, recognizing his beloved days as strike-force chief; a framed print of Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the knight a quivering miragelike figure with a spear, so elongated as to be almost skeletal, as if worn down by both the elements and dogged hope; and a panoramic window view of the city he loved and lived in for over forty years but never felt he could call home.

  He resembled the Brel model of a patriarch, defined by his career, often absent. Once, over breakfast, when Mom was speculating about those absences, those long nights unaccounted for, she figured he was carving out some semblance of the freedom that he’d never had as a young man. He was engaged during his senior year of college, had three babies by the time he graduated Georgetown Law, followed by five more in quick succession, after which he had to feed and clothe them all while wary in-laws kept tabs. Mom also thought that Dad, as a child of an alcoholic, had some kind of hole that couldn’t be filled, though she never reckoned with his own drinking. His larger-than-life presence in the house was marked by excesses—spending, anger, mood swings, an insistence on unconditional love, holiday parties, motionless marathons in his recliner. With eight kids, regimentation was sometimes key to domestic sanity, and he would line us all up before leaving the house for Sunday Mass to rake his black plastic man-comb through our hair with something like pride and resentment. When the comb would snag and pull out a knot, your scalp would sting for the whole walk to church.

  Sometime after my father’s death my mother gave each of us a copy of the same black-and-white photograph from the early ’70s, taken at City Park on a slide at the long-gone playground among the oaks and Spanish moss, stocked with wonderful metal play equipment with chipped paint, treacherous bolts, minimal safety features, and thin eerie creaks and screeches that accompanied our play. Winter, we all were dressed in corduroy or plaid, in my case both. The slide’s steps were parallel to its chute and we kids each occupied a step in descending order, oldest to youngest: John, Kristin, me, Susan, Soren. We’re caught between poses, and it’s not a particularly good photo of any one of us, with no one facing the camera. But all of us are looking at Dad and laughing. Six feet three, with muttonchop sideburns and wide-cuffed checkered polyester pants, he has just slid down to the bottom and is laughing and crowding Mom, the only one who’s looking away, smiling down at the youngest in her lap, my sister Amy. Rebecca and Rachel were not yet born so there were just six of us kids on that slide, an uncanny representation of both the past and the future. Soren is grabbing Dad’s knee as he tries to steady himself, grinning so hard you can see the strain in his little jaw. Mom said she chose that picture because she wanted us to remember how much fun he had with us, his outbreaks of goofiness and play. How much fun we all had together.

  It was an interesting gesture of my mother’s, trying to manage our view of him, since he vigorously tried to manage our view of her. Dad would often refer to her as the “moral pillar” of the family, an image that gave her gentle earth-mother persona an architectural strength and rigidity. It also shifted the ethical weight off him somewhat. If she was the moral pillar of the family, he got to be the shadowy eaves, dominating the atmosphere but slightly out of sight.

  Watching Brel, and maybe because we were such a small group that night, made me conscious of everyone’s roles in the room. Case: aggrieved lover, returned from the Continent bearing Brel and fresh ambitions. Kevin: professorial, still-waters type, never making a wasted or unprofound utterance. Chris: restless and brilliant, a true performer who also relished the backstage, constructing sets and wrangling props. Brad: a stable triumvirate of father, husband, artist. Me: facilitator, maternal snacks and drinks arranger, polite agitator. All of us enthralled with this image of Brel, his music and his words, who through his own finite means played his role so well he was able to transcend time and space.

  Though navigating the gaudy funhouse of celebrity identity, in Clayson’s biography Brel also seemed like an ardent searcher for meaning, in life and in himself: “While endeavoring to remain true to his strange star, the swiftest show business lesson that Jacques Brel had learned and would pass on was that ‘it’s easier to be someon
e else than to be yourself.’” Maybe that’s what kept driving him away from the crowds that he courted and cultivated. During his years of relentless touring, he became enamored of flight, bought and learned to fly a wooden-framed biplane, touring the great ruins of Greece, Italy, and the Near East from the air. And, yes, later he bought a yacht, with the intention of circumnavigating the world, but illness cut that plan short. Clayson claims that he took to the air and sea because land “disappointed him.”

  When, at thirty-eight, Brel did finally tire of the intense touring, the scattering of the self, he penned “quotable leaderettes” for the press in advance of the publicity blitz of his farewell tour, like: “The only luxury in life is being able to make mistakes. What irritates me most is being sensible.” And most reassuringly: “People of fifty make love better than people of twenty, but they can’t make love every day.”

  When he retired from his onstage singing career, he kept working—writing, directing, and acting in movies. Eventually, he removed himself from that life, too, and sailed to the Marquesas with his mistress, flying needed supplies and sometimes medical patients around the islands in his plane. Took up gardening. “Responsible for introducing the plum tomato to the island, Jacques was soothed by working with the soil,” wrote Clayson. Maybe finally finding something nourishing in the land that had so disappointed him? Though ill and closer to death than he wanted to admit, he flew back to Europe, recorded one final record, his illness deepening his voice to a bass baritone. A year later, in 1978, he died in Paris, his music replacing regular radio programming throughout the day and France-Soir declaring, “Brel will always live. He is the least dead among all of us.” But his remains were shipped back to the Marquesas and buried in Calvary Cemetery, near Atuona Bay.