I Shudder Page 17

  “Buddy, do you really need this cab?” the police academy reject asked me, raising a fist.

  “I only wish that after this cab takes you and your babies to the shelter,” said the woman who looked like Susan, “that it could run over your filthy ex-husband’s head. I wish it could run over the heads of every filthy ex-husband in this city!”

  By now someone else had helpfully opened the cab’s rear door, and the newsstand operator had folded up the double stroller and was carefully placing it in the cab’s trunk.

  “No, really,” Susan told me, “you take the cab. You were here first.”

  “No,” I said, still suppressing every just and honest impulse. “You take it, by all means.”

  “Well…” said Susan, daring to add a slight, pretubercular cough.

  “You have to,” said Susan’s near-twin, helping Susan into the cab, and shoving the $263 which she’d collected from the crowd into Susan’s fanny pack.

  “Do it for your kids,” said the police academy psycho, passing the first baby, little Eliza, into Susan’s arms.

  “Here you go,” said the newsstand operator, but as he was about to hand Susan her second child, Susan had already slammed the cab’s door and screeched, “Saks Fifth Avenue! The Forty-ninth Street entrance, near the fur department!”

  “But your baby!” the newsstand operator called out.

  “Little Trad!” said the muscle-bound lug.

  “I have a suggestion for little Trad,” I said, as the pilly, powder blue rayon blanket in which Trad was swaddled fell away, revealing a large zucchini, on which Susan had used nail polish to paint a crude pair of wide eyes, one leaking a painted teardrop.

  “Instead of bringing Trad to the homeless shelter,” I advised, as Susan’s raucous cackle could still be heard, even though her cab was already many blocks away, “let’s think about a salad.”

  3.

  That night I sat in my apartment, in my skeleton-shaped chair. I had found this chair lying in bony, cherrywood pieces, in a dusty shop at the end of an alley in Venice, many years ago. Like any piece of important furniture, it frightened me. Purchasing this chair meant living with a constant reminder of the meaninglessness of life, and the inevitability of death. Every morning when I awake, this chair beckons, asking, “Is today the day? How many days do you have left? Let’s think about it. I dare you. Take a seat.”

  When I wish to center my thoughts, and to consider the most profound matters, before I sit in my skeleton chair, I first put on a fresh white cotton undershirt, starched white boxer shorts, and purple cashmere socks. Over this I add a 3,000-year-old kimono from the Han Dynasty, a garment richly embroidered with the massacre of a picnicking peasant family by a flock of rabid herons. This kimono was commissioned by the emperor Kulatsu, who had thirty wives, all of whom complained about money, over a thousand concubines, all of whom felt neglected, and easily 1,200 children, none of whom ever amounted to anything.

  The emperor decreed that every day, while he was out ruling the empire from his royal offices, his bedchamber would be repainted a different color. In this manner, he hoped that each morning would represent a rebirth, and thus he would become immortal. He lived until the age of 103, when he awoke one morning to find that his bedchamber had been painted a vivid hot pink with lime green moldings, which was so Palm-Beach-cabana-kerchief that he died of embarrassment.

  Arranging the emperor’s kimono around myself in graceful yet imposing folds, I contemplated Susan Marie Henkelman, and I tried to define good and evil. Good, I decided, is when another person agrees with me in every respect and gratefully bows to my will. Of course, this gives rise to questions like, “Well, what if Hitler agreed with you in every respect, would that make him good?” I have learned to ignore theoretical, dorm-room debate analogies involving Hitler, because they always leads to propositions like, “What if all of the major critics thought that your first novel was sketchy and derivative, but Hitler thought that it was winningly quirky and a breath of fresh air?” or “What if it was the day before the prom, and because you didn’t have a date you’d told everyone that you despised the whole idea of proms, because they were pure social fascism, but what would you do then if Hitler called and said that Eva Braun had a stomach thing and would you be his date? Would you go with him? Would you go with him but still tell everyone that you were just friends and that you were only going to goof on the whole idea of a prom?”

  Goodness is also the passionate belief in anything pure and worthwhile—like taxis, or nonviolent protest, or a more violent protest when the thing that you’re protesting gets in the revolving door with you, as if that were a cute thing to do. Being good means assessing any given situation and determining how you can offer the most benefit while causing the least harm. For example: if a friend asks your opinion of her new haircut, you could say, “It’s just awful and unflattering, and it exposes your completely deluded vision of yourself as a hot teenaged blonde.” This would be cruel, and would only serve your own probably equally deluded sense of superiority. A good person would say, “I love your new haircut, and I especially love that it makes you so happy, and someday it will grow out, and then you can get another, maybe slightly different haircut, just for fun, and you can feel even happier.”

  Another example: you’re walking down the street and you pass an irate man belittling his long-suffering wife by telling her that she’s slow and stupid. You could punch this lout and tell him he’s small-minded and most likely small-penised, and then you could ask the wife if she’d like you to call someone. If you accomplish all this, the husband will most likely stab you, and as you lie bleeding to death on the pavement, his wife will kick you in the ribs and snort, “Mind your own business, asswipe! I love Dwayne!” The correct response, a product of goodness, would be to watch the couple and then tell the wife, casually, that, “You know, when Dwayne and I were together, he used to treat me exactly the same way. Isn’t that funny?” As you depart, the couple will now be on a far more equal footing, and will most likely begin an entirely new, and more provocative conversation.

  Goodness requires performing acts of both local and global charity. Let’s say that I’m in an elevator, and a couple with their rambunctious, undisciplined children join me, and the children begin screeching and demanding to be taken to certain pricey restaurants and fed certain extravagant pastas. I could tell the parents that, “You should be sterilized, without anesthesia” and I could inform the children that, “Even gourmet pasta will not save you from your parents’ genetic cesspool.” But instead I could behave more charitably, by imagining how difficult and exhausting it must be to raise children; by enjoying the harmless horseplay of toddlers; and by using my mental abilities to teleport the entire ear-splitting clan to an isolated airport during a blizzard, where all of the flights have been canceled and all of the vending machines emptied.

  On a global level, I will contribute whatever I can to organizations that battle international hunger and disease, and I will proudly use the adhesive-backed mailing labels, printed with my name and address and a photo of a puppy wearing a Santa hat, which these organizations will send me in return. When I watch TV news footage of any horror, bloodshed, or starvation, I will weep, I will praise and support those aid workers who travel selflessly to stricken lands, I will curse the negligent or barbaric governments involved, and I will even more fully appreciate my own cozy studio apartment. I will in fact wish that every human being on earth could possess not only decent nutrition and effective sanitation, but a perfectly proportioned studio apartment, although I suspect that somewhere there’s a famished, legless Third World child who would take one look at my place and sneer, “But why doesn’t the bathroom have double sinks?”

  Which brings us to evil. Evil is often far more appealing, and even more delicious, than good. Yet evil is essentially lazy. Evil is amassing mountainous wealth, and then purchasing many homes where the televisions are mounted over the mantels and disguised by priceless oil pain
tings. A Matisse should never mechanically vanish to reveal a sitcom where the characters rely on the rejoinders “Hell-o!” “I don’t think so!” and “Maybe on your planet!”

  Evil is imagining that an apology erases a sin, as in “I’m so sorry that my dog leapt on you with his feces-covered paws—what can I say, he’s a jumper!” or “I know that my country has caused at least two world wars, but we’re terribly sorry and we enjoy American films and miniseries related to the Holocaust” or “I’m sorry that I abandoned you as a child, but I was only a child myself, and if I had it to do all over again, I’d remember that you needed two ice skates.”

  Evil bespeaks a contempt for the highest, greatest good, which is common courtesy. If everyone on earth demonstrated the most basic good manners, evil would cease to exist. Warlords and tyrants and dictators are just people who’ve never learned, or who refuse, to write thank-you notes by hand, and to never take what doesn’t belong to them, such as, for example, Poland. Evil is monopolizing both armrests on an airplane, or at a movie theater; evil is not using a handkerchief when sneezing in a small, enclosed space; and evil is a lack of compassion for other people, with the exception of those other people who stop dead in the middle of a busy sidewalk, blocking traffic in both directions, in order to hug and babble with a friend whom they haven’t seen for almost fifteen minutes.

  Some feel that a sociopath is a person born without a moral compass, or any empathy whatsoever. There is a test that psychiatrists offer to imprisoned serial killers, in which these criminals are asked if they delight in harming small animals, if they have no problem with physical violence, and if they believe that their hapless victims get what they deserve. I feel that, in order to save valuable taxpayer dollars, this test could be condensed into a single question, so that the psychiatrists could ask only: “Are you Susan Marie Henkelman?”

  By defining good and evil, I saw that I had a choice. While I have always been thoughtful and caring, particularly toward those without an ounce of flair, I don’t think I’ve done enough. So that evening, in my kimono, I decided to not merely trot toward goodness at a fine, healthy pace, but to hurtle upwards, onto God’s shoulder. I set my life’s goal: I would become a saint. Was this near-psychotic egomania? Or a divine calling? Is there a difference? Perhaps a saint is just someone who can say, with confidence, I know better and I can help you. So please stop chewing on your hair and then asking your stylist why you have split ends. Please stop asking everyone on line behind you at the supermarket if we’d mind waiting just a sec while you run to fetch those forgotten Portuguese flatbread crisps, because the answer is this: No, of course we don’t mind, if you don’t mind all of us spitting in your sixteen yogurts. Please don’t run for president, just because you can’t hold a real job.

  I stood, sweeping my kimono around me. I raised my eyes, seeking God’s approval, which I have always found in my choice of chandelier. I went to my single window, which looks out onto the corners of several undistinguished buildings, down at a battered and ordinary sidewalk, and, if I crane my neck, at a sliver of Gramercy Park. Gramercy Park resembles, in many ways, the Kingdom of Heaven. It is cramped, tiny, and locked, and a personal key is required for entrance. The park is administered by a ragtag committee, led, I believe, by a psychologically unstable, paranoid, social-climbing woman of uncertain background. And yet on a sunlit day, the park is incomparably lovely, and someday I hope to be admitted, and to sit on a bench in the balmy April air, beside a drooling invalid’s disgruntled Honduran nurse.

  To achieve such entry, to know God, and to embark upon sainthood, I decided to treat Susan Marie Henkelman, and all of the Susan Marie Henkelmans, not as my enemies, but as my targets. Targets for my piercing arrows of kindness, transformation, and love. I would embrace, teach, and bombard these wayward figures with a gale-force benevolence, with a village-flattening typhoon of caring, until they were plastered against the jagged, mighty cliff of my goodness, screaming, “Thank you, Mr. Vionnet! You are so right, about everything!”

  The next day, I was called to substitute-teach at a private preschool in SoHo. I gathered the children around me, seated on their miniature chairs, which, since this was SoHo, were midget replicas of bentwood Austrian classics. I divided the group into the children who were well-behaved because they were on scholarships, and the children who were well-behaved because they were on Ritalin. “All right, children,” I said, “who would like to hear a wonderful story?”

  I was deeply touched as a roomful of hands shot into the air, my own included. Look at all of these shining, untroubled faces, I thought, even six-year-old Easton Schwab, who was allowed to wear her flannel bunny pajamas to school because she was being tested for allergies to all other fibers.

  “Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a little girl named Talisa, who lived with her original parents, her nanny, the housekeeper, and the cook, in a thoughtfully but not reverentially restored townhouse on East Tenth Street, with five working fireplaces and a lap pool.”

  “Oooo,” said all of the children, except for young Gareth, who raised his hand and commented, “My father is an architect, and he says that lap pools always leak and mean nothing in terms of resale.”

  “And that’s why your father only designs warehouses with aluminum siding in Pennsylvania,” I explained sweetly. “But Talisa was so happy, going to school and playing with her friends and taking French and ballet and cello lessons, so that she would become well-rounded and someday get into an Ivy League school, or at least a rich kids’ party school.”

  All the children nodded approvingly.

  “But then one morning, Talisa’s mother was feeling stressed out and refused to give the cook a half-day off so she could go to the dogtrack. And so the cook put an evil spell on Talisa’s entire family, and she said, ‘From this day forward, all of you will lead fabulous, successful lives, but you will always wonder if something is missing. There will always be an asterisk.’ And with that, the cook vanished into thin air!”

  “Our nanny vanished once,” said Gareth’s twin brother, Plein. “But then the police caught her in L.A. with my daddy’s camcorder and all of my mommy’s credit cards. So my mommy had to cancel them.”

  “All of them?” asked Easton, more than a little frightened.

  “All of them,” said Plein, and Easton curled into a ball on the floor.

  “And from that very day,” I continued, “all sorts of nice things happened to Talisa’s family, but there were always nagging questions. Her daddy made partner and handled billion-dollar contracts for a media conglomerate, but he started to wonder, what if he’d followed his boyhood dreams and opened a string of boutique hotels in Central Asia? Talisa’s mommy wrote a screenplay that was optioned by a major studio and then made into a commercial blockbuster, but an insistent voice in Talisa’s mommy’s head kept asking, but what if you’d found the funding and made the movie independently, using more offbeat actors and a soundtrack featuring morose ballads by a dead English folk-rock legend, then wouldn’t you feel less like a whore?”

  Some of the children, despite their many medications, were now starting to feel anxious, and were hugging themselves and rocking back and forth.

  “And then Talisa trained very hard and made the Olympic team in cross-country skiing.”

  “Yay!” said little Copely Westin-Blatt, whose two mommies had each taken her aside and asked to be secretly called Mommy #1.

  “As an alternate,” I said. “So Talisa never got on the Olympic slopes.”

  Copely took a deep breath and began mechanically stroking the two matching stuffed pandas that her mommies had given her, although one of the mommies claimed that her panda was part of a signed and numbered limited edition.

  “And then, Talisa volunteered for a program which cleaned up vacant lots and created more green space for inner-city kids-at-risk, and she also went to theater camp, where she played Juliet and a supporting role in the head counselor’s musical about his father’s drinking pr
oblem, and then Talisa’s parents hired a tutor to prepare Talisa for her SATs, and she did very well and she got into Harvard!”

  The children all looked at me, holding their breath.

  “Waiting list,” I told them, and I watched all of their little faces crumple. “But another girl who’d been accepted got kicked out, because the admissions committee discovered that she’d lied on her transcript about having her pilot’s license, so Talisa got in! But to this day, even after she graduated summa cum laude, and went on to Harvard Law School and became a senator with credible presidential aspirations, Talisa still wonders—why was I waiting-listed? Does any of my life, or do any of my achievements, really count? What if that other girl hadn’t lied, or if my mother hadn’t made that anonymous phone call to the secretary of the Admissions Committee? Is my whole life really just a first-runner-up lie? Have I been permanently waiting-listed for any real happiness?”

  With savage abandon, all of the children began to moan and tear at their flesh, using safety scissors and the most expensive colored pencils, which included such hues as Powdered Olive and Uncertain Ochre. As they all began hurling themselves against the classroom walls, Susan Marie Henkelman walked into the room and clapped her hands briskly. The children froze, and then instantly sat in a circle, with their heads lowered.

  “What is going on in here?” Susan demanded.

  “We were having story time,” I explained.

  “I see,” said Susan, fixing her gaze on me. “I know you. You live in my building. You tried to assault me.”

  “I am Mr. Vionnet. And you have stolen my taxis, and undoubtedly those of many others. But rather than seek an emotionally immature revenge, I have pictured you drowning in a sludge-filled swamp of your own evil. Yet as your head is about to be submerged for a final time in the thick, rotting morass of your venal behavior, I reach out a hand of salvation and forgiveness. You grasp my hand, and while it’s still too late, and you choke to death on the muck of your own bottomless sin, you perish, thanks to me, in a state of grace. Isn’t that good news, children?”