The City of Mirrors
Page 70
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“Texas.”
“What’s there?”
“Texans, I guess.” I shrugged. “More school.”
“Do you need any money?”
“They’re giving me a stipend. I should be all right.”
“Well, let me know if you need more. You’re welcome to it.”
We shook hands and then, somewhat awkwardly, embraced. If I’d had to guess, I would have said my father wasn’t going to live much longer. This turned out to be true; we would see each other only four more times before the heart attack that killed him. He was alone in the house when it happened. Because it was a weekend, several days would pass before anybody noticed he was missing and thought to look.
I got into the car. My father was standing above me. He motioned with his hand for me to roll down the window. “Call me when you get there, okay?”
I told him I would, and I did.
—
In Houston, I rented the first apartment I looked at, a garage studio with a view of the back of a Mexican restaurant, and got a job shelving books at the Rice library to tide myself over for the summer. The city was strange-looking and hotter than the mouth of hell, but it suited me. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most of the city was quite ugly—a sea of low-rise retail, shabby apartment complexes, and enormous, overcrowded freeways piloted by maniacs—but the area around the university was rather posh, with large, well-kept houses and wide boulevards flanked by live oaks so perfectly manicured they looked less like trees than sculptures of trees. For six hundred dollars, I bought my first car, a snot-yellow 1983 Chevy Citation with bald tires, 230,000 miles on the odometer, and a sagging vinyl ceiling I used a staple gun to reattach. I’d heard nothing from Liz or Jonas, but of course they had no idea where I was. There was a time in America when it was still possible to disappear by going left when everybody expected you to go right. With a little digging, they probably could have found me—a few well-placed calls to a few department chairs—but this presupposed that they would want to. I had no idea what they would want. I didn’t think I ever had.
Classes began. About my studies, there is not much to say except that they occupied me utterly. I made friends with the department secretary, a black woman in her fifties who basically ran the place; she confided to me that nobody in the department had actually expected me to come. I was, in her words, “a prize thoroughbred they had bought for pennies on the dollar.” To describe my fellow graduate students as antisocial would be the understatement of the century; no lawn parties here. Their minds were utterly unfettered by thoughts of fun. They also despised me for the naked favoritism shown me by my professors. I kept my head down, my nose to the stone. I adopted the practice of taking long drives in the Texas countryside. It was windblown, flat, without meaningful demarcation, every square of dirt the same as every other. I liked to pull the car to the side of the road someplace completely arbitrary and just look at it.
The one eastern habit I retained was reading The New York Times, and in this manner I learned that Liz and Jonas had made it official. This was in the fall of ’93; a year had passed. “Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Macomb, of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Osterville, Massachusetts, are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter, Elizabeth Christina, to Jonas Abbott Lear of Beverly, Massachusetts. The bride, a graduate of Harvard, recently completed a master’s degree in literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a doctoral student in Renaissance studies at the University of Chicago, where the groom, also a Harvard graduate, is pursuing a PhD in microbiology.”
Two days later, I received a large manila envelope from my father. Inside was another envelope, to which he’d affixed a sticky note, apologizing for taking so long to forward it. It was an invitation, of course, postmarked the previous June. I put it aside for a day, then, the next night, in the company of a bottle of bourbon, sat at the kitchen table and peeled back the flap. Ceremony to be held September 4, 1993, St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, Hyannis Port. Reception to follow at the home of Oscar and Patricia Macomb, 41 Sea View Avenue, Osterville, Massachusetts. In the margin was a message:
Please please please come. Jonas says so too. We miss you terribly.
Love, L
I looked at this for some time. I was sitting in the window of my apartment, facing the alley behind the restaurant, with its reeking dumpsters. As I watched, a kitchen worker, a small, round-bellied Hispanic man in a stained apron, came through the door. He was carrying a garbage bag; he opened one of the dumpsters, tossed the bag inside, and closed the lid with a clang. I expected him to go back inside, but instead he lit a cigarette and stood there, inhaling the smoke with long, hungry drags.
I rose from the table. I kept them in my bureau, wrapped in a sock: Liz’s glasses. I had put them in my pocket that night on the beach and forgotten all about them until I was in the cab, by which time it was too late to return them. Now I put them on; they were a little small for my face, the lenses quite strong. I sat back down at the window and watched the man smoke in the alleyway, the image distorted and far away, as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope or sitting at the bottom of the sea, gazing upward through miles of water.
* * *
20
Here I must leap ahead in time, because that is what time did. I finished my degree at a quickstep; this was followed by a postdoc at Stanford, then a faculty appointment at Columbia, where I was tenured in due course. Within professional circles, I became well known. My reputation increased; the world came calling. I traveled widely, speaking for lucrative fees. Grants flowed my way without difficulty; such was my reputation, I barely had to fill out the forms. I became the holder of multiple patents, two purchased by pharmaceutical concerns for outrageous sums that set me up for life. I refereed important journals. I sat on elite boards. I testified before Congress and was, at various times, a member of the Senate Special Commission on Bioethics, the President’s Council on Science and Technology, the NASA advisory board, and the U.N. Task Force on Biological Diversity.
“What’s there?”
“Texans, I guess.” I shrugged. “More school.”
“Do you need any money?”
“They’re giving me a stipend. I should be all right.”
“Well, let me know if you need more. You’re welcome to it.”
We shook hands and then, somewhat awkwardly, embraced. If I’d had to guess, I would have said my father wasn’t going to live much longer. This turned out to be true; we would see each other only four more times before the heart attack that killed him. He was alone in the house when it happened. Because it was a weekend, several days would pass before anybody noticed he was missing and thought to look.
I got into the car. My father was standing above me. He motioned with his hand for me to roll down the window. “Call me when you get there, okay?”
I told him I would, and I did.
—
In Houston, I rented the first apartment I looked at, a garage studio with a view of the back of a Mexican restaurant, and got a job shelving books at the Rice library to tide myself over for the summer. The city was strange-looking and hotter than the mouth of hell, but it suited me. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most of the city was quite ugly—a sea of low-rise retail, shabby apartment complexes, and enormous, overcrowded freeways piloted by maniacs—but the area around the university was rather posh, with large, well-kept houses and wide boulevards flanked by live oaks so perfectly manicured they looked less like trees than sculptures of trees. For six hundred dollars, I bought my first car, a snot-yellow 1983 Chevy Citation with bald tires, 230,000 miles on the odometer, and a sagging vinyl ceiling I used a staple gun to reattach. I’d heard nothing from Liz or Jonas, but of course they had no idea where I was. There was a time in America when it was still possible to disappear by going left when everybody expected you to go right. With a little digging, they probably could have found me—a few well-placed calls to a few department chairs—but this presupposed that they would want to. I had no idea what they would want. I didn’t think I ever had.
Classes began. About my studies, there is not much to say except that they occupied me utterly. I made friends with the department secretary, a black woman in her fifties who basically ran the place; she confided to me that nobody in the department had actually expected me to come. I was, in her words, “a prize thoroughbred they had bought for pennies on the dollar.” To describe my fellow graduate students as antisocial would be the understatement of the century; no lawn parties here. Their minds were utterly unfettered by thoughts of fun. They also despised me for the naked favoritism shown me by my professors. I kept my head down, my nose to the stone. I adopted the practice of taking long drives in the Texas countryside. It was windblown, flat, without meaningful demarcation, every square of dirt the same as every other. I liked to pull the car to the side of the road someplace completely arbitrary and just look at it.
The one eastern habit I retained was reading The New York Times, and in this manner I learned that Liz and Jonas had made it official. This was in the fall of ’93; a year had passed. “Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Macomb, of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Osterville, Massachusetts, are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter, Elizabeth Christina, to Jonas Abbott Lear of Beverly, Massachusetts. The bride, a graduate of Harvard, recently completed a master’s degree in literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a doctoral student in Renaissance studies at the University of Chicago, where the groom, also a Harvard graduate, is pursuing a PhD in microbiology.”
Two days later, I received a large manila envelope from my father. Inside was another envelope, to which he’d affixed a sticky note, apologizing for taking so long to forward it. It was an invitation, of course, postmarked the previous June. I put it aside for a day, then, the next night, in the company of a bottle of bourbon, sat at the kitchen table and peeled back the flap. Ceremony to be held September 4, 1993, St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, Hyannis Port. Reception to follow at the home of Oscar and Patricia Macomb, 41 Sea View Avenue, Osterville, Massachusetts. In the margin was a message:
Please please please come. Jonas says so too. We miss you terribly.
Love, L
I looked at this for some time. I was sitting in the window of my apartment, facing the alley behind the restaurant, with its reeking dumpsters. As I watched, a kitchen worker, a small, round-bellied Hispanic man in a stained apron, came through the door. He was carrying a garbage bag; he opened one of the dumpsters, tossed the bag inside, and closed the lid with a clang. I expected him to go back inside, but instead he lit a cigarette and stood there, inhaling the smoke with long, hungry drags.
I rose from the table. I kept them in my bureau, wrapped in a sock: Liz’s glasses. I had put them in my pocket that night on the beach and forgotten all about them until I was in the cab, by which time it was too late to return them. Now I put them on; they were a little small for my face, the lenses quite strong. I sat back down at the window and watched the man smoke in the alleyway, the image distorted and far away, as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope or sitting at the bottom of the sea, gazing upward through miles of water.
* * *
20
Here I must leap ahead in time, because that is what time did. I finished my degree at a quickstep; this was followed by a postdoc at Stanford, then a faculty appointment at Columbia, where I was tenured in due course. Within professional circles, I became well known. My reputation increased; the world came calling. I traveled widely, speaking for lucrative fees. Grants flowed my way without difficulty; such was my reputation, I barely had to fill out the forms. I became the holder of multiple patents, two purchased by pharmaceutical concerns for outrageous sums that set me up for life. I refereed important journals. I sat on elite boards. I testified before Congress and was, at various times, a member of the Senate Special Commission on Bioethics, the President’s Council on Science and Technology, the NASA advisory board, and the U.N. Task Force on Biological Diversity.
