American Innovations: Stories Read Free Page B

don’t even help me? It’s just fucking weird, he is saying. Also something about the rent, and about health insurance. “And I don’t even really care that much about any of those things,” he says. “I just care that even when you’re in this room with me, you’re not here. Even when you’re here, you’re gone. You’re just in some la-la. Go back out the door and it’ll be just the same: you’re somewhere else and I’m here alone—”
    I think this goes on for quite a while. Accusations. Analyses. I feel something like a kind of happiness, shy but arrived. A faint fleeting smile, in front of the firing squad. All my vague and shifting self-loathings are streamlining into brightly delineated wrongs. This particular trial—it feels so angular and specific. So lovable. At least lovable by me. Maybe I’m the dreamer in the relationship after all. Maybe I’m the man.

 
    THE REGION OF UNLIKENESS

     
     
    Some people would consider Jacob a physicist, others might say he’s a philosopher, or simply a “time expert,” but I tend to think of him in less reverent terms. Though not terms of hatred. Ilan used to call Jacob “my cousin from Outer Swabia.” That obscure little joke, which I heard Ilan make a number of times, probably without realizing how many times he’d made it before, always seemed to me to imply a distant blood relation between the two of them. I guess I had the sense (back then) that Jacob and Ilan were shirttail cousins of a kind. But later I came to believe, at least intermittently, that actually Ilan’s little phrase was both a misdirection and a sort of clue, one that hinted at an enormous secret, one that they’d never let me in on. Not a dully personal secret, like an affair or a small crime or, say, a missing testicle—but a scientific secret, that rare kind of secret that, in our current age, still manages to bend our knee.
    I met Ilan and Jacob by chance. Sitting at the table next to mine in a small Moroccan coffee shop on the Upper West Side, they were discussing Wuthering Heights too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me. Jacob looked about forty-five; he was overweight, he was munching obsessively on these unappetizing green leaf-shaped cookies, and he kept saying “obviously.” Ilan was good-looking, and he said that the tragedy of Heathcliff was that he was essentially, on account of his lack of property rights, a woman. Jacob then extolled Catherine’s proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff.” Something about passion was said. And about digging up graves. And a bearded young man next to them moved to a more distant table. Jacob and Ilan talked on, unoffended, praising Brontë, and at some point Ilan added, “But since Jane Austen’s usually the token woman on university syllabi, it’s understandable if your average undergraduate has a hard time shaking the idea that women are half-wits, moved only by the terror that a man might not be as rich as he seems.”
    Not necessarily warmly, I chimed in with something. Ilan laughed. Jacob refined Ilan’s statement to “straight women.” Then to straight women “in the Western tradition.” Then the three of us spoke for a long time. That hadn’t been my intention. But there was something about Ilan—manic, fragile, fidgety, womanizing (I imagined) Ilan—that was all at once like fancy coffee and bright-colored smutty flyers. He had a great deal to say, with a steady gaze into my eyes, about my reading the New York Post , which he interpreted as a sign of a highly satiric yet demotically moral intelligence. Jacob nodded. I let the flattery go straight to my heart, despite the fact that I didn’t read the Post ; it had simply been left on my table by a previous customer. Ilan called Post writers naive Nabokovs. Yes, I said. The headline, I remember, read “Axis of Weasel.” Somehow this led to Jacob’s saying something vague about Proust, and violence, and