By Victor Greto
He was happy, there, at the point of concentration, the place where he lost himself in a well-ordered spray of ancient or Renaissance context that filled his head with a logical chain of ideas and narrative certainty.
The smell of the book, the look of the text, ink-fresh ideas impressed on a white slate; the clean charge of a new book, the mildewed thoughtfulness of an old one. The touch was smooth. He hated wrinkled pages, or marginalia written by anyone but himself. Each turn of the page, of the sound of flesh on paper, smoothed the surface, prepared the table for fresh ideas, logical but not inevitable, surprising enough to make him stop and look up, wrinkle his forehead, smile, and breathe, Hmmm.
The book’s intoxication was damning. He wanted to do nothing else, and did nothing else, as much as possible, for as long as he could. He imagined it as a dialog with the author, but, like all his reading, it was a dialog with his self, a beast that saw everything self-consciously through a noirish prism.
Summers were the best times, of course, because he could go outside on the porch and read as much as he’d like and the sun would drink up everything in him and he would pour the contents of the book in himself as replacement. With each book, he felt as though he had become a better, more knowledgeable person. Even before he went to college he felt the same way about books and the solace they offered him. He wanted to be able to write them, but not as much as he liked reading them and the way they made him feel when he understood them.
Take the subject he would learn to master in the next few years: the history of early Christianity. It became a puzzle for him to solve – via other scholars. He could not help but become absorbed in the arguments, biases, hidden agendas, circular reasoning; but also in the willingness of a few to venture to the edge of the historical abyss. He wasn’t just reading history, of course; he was excavating his own spiritual past layer by layer. His obsessive absorption told him so, and it told him so in his fixation on the historical method, his intellectual insistence that it be followed consistently. After a time, he began throwing books down in frustration, as one scholar after another left the method for a self-satisfied, even sentimental, spirituality.
Yes, of course, his fixation on history and the historical method was the result of his temperament, his own disappointment in mystifying nonsense that often stood for scholarly discourse. Still, the method lay outside himself, he was sure, testable depending on the premises, and always human.
It all went back to that. He had learned from his old man and science that madness and genius and religious assumptions were nothing but conjecture and chemicals and the brain trying to understand itself via the right anterior insula, sprinkled and nudged by winking spindle cells at the frontoinsular cortex. There were a million self-conscious dead ends when he approached ultimate puzzles, but they were only dead ends because he was asking questions locked and loaded for metaphysical answers. It was not just because it was easier that way: It was a habit of mind that had infiltrated every part of his being, as it did to everyone he knew.
But to become self-conscious about his assumptions: this was the power of reading, of his dialog with himself. Because these other men and women with whom he was speaking, politely arguing, or shutting up with a quiet close of the book, were just aspects of himself, his weaknesses or strengths – depending on when and where he was, even what mood he was in. It also was that way later, after weeks and months of immersion, when there grew a scholarly impatience with amateurish or false reasoning.
Reality, including the excavation of his own hollowed core, paled.
Already withdrawn, it was another fine excuse to stay away from the everyday around him. His impending divorce became just another thing to avoid, joining work, people, television, nature. Divorce became another swooning affirmation.
He had convinced himself long ago that the only things that ever really mattered were his thoughts. He was not naïve. He knew how important his body and feelings were, but he was determined, as he had been since a teenager, that the body and the emotions that serviced it were a nuisance, a detraction from his rarefied goal of happiness with books and writing. He had taken the spirit of Origen’s deed to heart, even while knowing he would never do it. Masturbation was fine, enough, what the hell. He had been a fool to marry, to think he could deal with a child. The disaster that was his twenties was proof. In everything else lay betrayal.
But there were others in his life that made him feel brave. Not because his thoughts centered on them but because his emotions wrapped tightly around them. They were his life preservers in a deepening and lengthening ocean. Whenever he felt too cold, seasick, tired of bobbing around on his own thoughts, they were there.
Most of them will be saved for later, but the one I’ll mention here is Thomas because Nick had known him the longest, since they had begun the Master’s Degree program at the local university three years earlier. Thomas was a cipher because he was the physical opposite of Nick: light skin, blond, thinning hair, mustache, lean, gimpy body; his pale features seemed to mesh into a bland image, a figure that, if you saw it only once, you could not think of what it looked like afterward. The quiet voice that came out of his pale, thin lips was like the tiny bubbling of a spring just started, a makeshift well dug by desperate hands; the words hiccupped slowly, and even as they quickly gained cadence and volume, remained low, unsure, unconfident. He came from Indiana, a veteran and now a reservist, whose duty consisted of making dental partials for all those soldiers who wanted to get new teeth before they left the service. He was an American history guy, a buff on the Vietnam War, whose fixation on the stupidity of the American leadership of the 1960s stayed mysteriously fresh. Lost innocence, he repeatedly told Nick: American history is all about innocence lost, every four to eight years. It infuriated him that nothing seemed to be learned from the past. Nor his past, of which Nick was never told, and about which he never asked, because, well, he never thought to ask.
Thomas liked to drink, as much as Nick began to drink, and so they drank together as much as possible toward the end of Nick’s marriage. They both had Fridays off, so they spent several of those days together, sitting outside Nick’s house near downtown, drinking the sunny days away.
It felt so good for Nick to drink and talk to Thomas about history and why America never learned from its past. Nick liked it so much because he had zero interest in American history: it was boring, about presidents and businesses and corruption, and then it was about women and minorities and working people, as groups, which was no better because, to him, it was all done in the same oblique, pathetic way: each history infused with some sort of manifest destiny about it, a Whiggish obsession on progressive ends justifying (or, more likely, smoothing over) means, sprinkled with self-righteous anger and pride.
Yes, okay, there was some good stuff there, and he read it when it interested him: Lincoln and the Constitution and literary history and figuring out how the strands of high and popular culture wove together; that is, the intellectual history, of ideas and strains of thought. But even that seemed too constricting because, just like much of the scholarship on early Christianity, it was full of agendas and biases that grew as corrosive and oxymoronic as theology.
For Nick, religion or philosophy or the history of ideas, especially as these disciplines were born and germinated either from world or European history, were about the origins and evolution of primal, fundamental ideas that continually riddled his mind. The American stuff was like a sad, disappointing echo of the great and not-so-great ideas. Romantic notions, say, of a slave-holding elite that either had great generals, or more likely, mediocre generals fighting really bad ones, held no interest for him. The Civil War – again, except for Lincoln and his writing – was another example of the invidious idiocy of American history; romantic, racist tales disguised as history. There were exceptions, sure; but as rare as his own happiness.
Perhaps it was all about disappointment and unhappiness. But when he drank with Thomas, the disappointment washed away and he became lighter than air, especially on those Colorado afternoons where the sky seemed bluer than his jeans, there was no humidity, and a cool breeze dried the sweat on the foreheads of Nick or Thomas as one or the other made yet another point.
Thomas was so bland that the fact that he pissed off Dorothy made Nick like him even more. During Annie’s last birthday party, he had invited Thomas, and after he left, Dorothy berated Nick. Why the hell was that guy even here, she had yelled at him. Thomas had actually given Annie a cute cat-crossing road sign for her white cat. He was there because he’s my friend, Nick had replied. The rest of the house had been crowded with Dorothy’s relatives: her stepfather, mother, sister and her sister’s daughter, all of whom smoked and littered the house with smoke, butts and conversation about other family members or reminiscences about when they had lived in Denver and the colorful neighbors they repeatedly critiqued.
But I have to admit it was even more than that: Nick liked Thomas because Thomas liked Nick, a lot, ever since they first met during a Historiography course at the college. Nick and another student had been separately tasked to find out whether a document was authentic or not. It purportedly was a letter Nazi Hermann Goering wrote explicitly ordering the killing of Jews. The one guy had found nothing about it, crying that he had combed World War II records for an entire week. Nick had found the document tucked inside the Nuremberg Trials transcripts at the Colorado College library, where he once worked. Except that the document had been altered by the teacher; the original did not order the killing of the Jews. So, after the other guy tap-danced his way around the question, Nick produced the document and explained how the doctored paper was an example of wishful thinking on the part of some scholars to find documentary proof that the Nazis left a paper-trailed order the Holocaust. Although Hitler probably ordered it, Nick had said, screwing with evidence to further an agenda – no matter for what allegedly noble a purpose – was not the way to do it. Afterward, Thomas came up to Nick and slapped him on the back. You son of a bitch, he had said. Great! Absolutely, fucking great!
It was in the literal backslap, the way Thomas had looked into Nick’s eyes with admiration that caught Nick’s own eye. They soon made a habit of going out to a nearby bar after each class to discuss the night’s work and classmates. It was during those nights, before they began meeting regularly at the house to drink, when Nick quickly realized that Thomas’ mumbling frustration and resentment at the people around him pointed to Thomas’ own disappointment about his own life, his own mediocrity. Nick seemed bemused by his friend’s resentment because it helped him to feel that much better about himself.
Which is really funny, now, thinking about it, because Nick’s mumbling frustration and resentment at everything and everyone around him made Thomas an emotional amateur. Still, they were brothers this way, happy to share misery, boosted by commiseration and love for the effects of alcohol.
But Nick loved the effects of sex as much as he did alcohol. How he thought, fantasized and dreamed about it, and how he made bits and pieces of those thoughts, fantasies and dreams become reality.
This, of course, had been one of the reasons he had buried himself in books. In fact, if you wanted to be reductive about it, you could say that his quest for scholarship, his longing to be a writer and his love of losing himself in a nirvana of imaginative literature were only limp-wristed attempts to close up the gash of sexual fantasy. He learned to live by balancing them all, like most people balance their passions. He obsessed over them more than some or many or most; or maybe he was just like everyone else. I do know that his obsession for knowledge and sex became partners early in his life, and stayed with him.
Like his sinewy love of literature and writing, so his love of sex. He did it obsessively, compulsively, and briefly. He loved the beginning stuff, the longing, the sex, oral or otherwise, just as he loved the beginning of a book, nonfiction or otherwise, and more often than not, skimmed to the conclusion. He got a lot of reading and studying done that way. It did the books no harm, and did him a world of good. People, though, that was a different story; but it was still a story.
He learned how to love the way an actor learns the method: using his own artless emotion and immersing himself in the histrionics of feeling, eyes welling, enamored, profoundly believing himself as he spoke the honeyed words that never failed to hit their mark; while, at the same time, watching and becoming impressed with his own nerve. It was as gross a manipulation as you could imagine, but as sincere as St. Francis doubling over and receiving the stigmata.
He never believed himself, until he had worked up an expression. He lived with himself by diverting his attention elsewhere. He could recall emotional sincerity almost at will. Later, guilt became only a memory stifled by an emotionally satisfying present.
It may be too obvious to say this was something he learned early in life, longing for attention in a house filled with dramatic, apathetic parents and petulant brothers. His skill just happened to be dramatic subtlety, if only because he could never hope to attain his father’s maniacally extroverted drama. He learned more from his mother’s subtle variety, of the martyred, die-hard female Catholic, fatally resigned to serve in a man’s world, muttering with her sisters how men deserved nothing, while dutifully serving them breakfast, lunch and dinner, and ignoring them emotionally.
Nick’s brother Marco had become the adventurer, driving out west without a plan, sending back photos of himself on mountains, in near-empty apartments, with friends; Vincent became the family man, sincere, politely draining the energy of his life into a brood of children as sweet and plain.
Nick learned early he could turn on emotion if he concentrated long and hard enough. He self-consciously saw as soon as the third grade that he could draw eyes to him by imagining a situation that might provoke anger, loss, sadness, pain, and following through by concentrating on the particular emotion, screwing tight his body and face. The thing was, as soon as the emotions physically surfaced in an ache of sensation, Nick felt them as anyone might, and his mind slipped into the moment of anger, loss, sadness or pain and he became overwhelmed.
Love, he learned, was the same, but after the first fuck, the camera stopped recording. Maybe that was why Dorothy faded so soon. And maybe that was why he seemed so fucking mean to her, or why, perhaps, he actually was so fucking mean. After a while, his falling in love – easily, quickly, desperately – became a habit, like eating tacos or a pizza when he watched an old movie. The attitude became so ingrained that he told himself he couldn’t help it. It was the way he was. Afterward, after the first fucks and flushes of excitement, he just didn’t give a damn.
There was a short line of women, but what made him feel relatively innocent was that he rarely did the chasing. They asked him out, or said something to him first. Even his first love, Angie, addressed him initially. Somehow, this made him feel better about not giving a shit later. But he wouldn’t admit he just didn’t give a shit about, say, Dorothy or Glenda or Sheila or Rachel or Nadine. He wished them well, he hoped they ended up happy, but he knew that he could not love them like he had, or thought he had. He no longer felt an encompassing desire to swallow them whole. He grew impatient, or bored, or both.
But the impatient boredom would never come until Nick had gotten some unqualified assertion of love or desire that echoed for days or weeks; perhaps months. Once a woman he loved began to look at him in a certain way, he looked back with increasing indifference, as though a light had been switched. His bookishness mimicked this: his interests were perennial studies in limited obsession. He read everything in a particular field. The reading might last for months or even years; then, he would look at rows of shelved books anally lined in descending size and wonder why the subject had fascinated him.
A dilettante in love and books, he detested his own impatience. Even so, he lived it every day, and during those obsessive, brief times, he was happy. All other times he was angry and corrosively self-conscious.
Hence his writing, holed up in a basement down the stairs during the final years of his marriage. Hence his reading, anywhere and everywhere, in the cold, in the heat. Hence the dissolution of his marriage, which had been dissolving from the day he married, or, really, from the day he met Dorothy. It was not that it wasn’t meant to be; it never could be.
© 2023 Victor Greto