My American Unhappiness Read online

  "Well, then there's dinner to cook, and dishes to wash, and baths to give, and bedtime stories to read."

  "Well, you don't need to do that. You don't have to be home every night. And we could get a sitter on the weekend, if you wanted one. Sharon Loy's daughter, Maya, she is a great babysitter."

  "She's fourteen!" I say. "I wouldn't trust her. I see her trolling the neighborhood a lot. She runs with hoods."

  My mother smiles. "Well, how about Cathy Pettijohn? She could always baby-sit."

  "Mrs. Pettijohn was crazy when I was a kid and she seems crazier now. I ran into her at Whole Foods last week. She's on a raw food diet."

  "So?"

  "So, that sort of betrays a kind of inner instability, don't you think?"

  "I'm not even sure what a raw food diet is, Zeke," my mother says. "The truth is, I think you're afraid to leave the girls with a babysitter."

  "If I had need for one, I would find one."

  "Aw, come on, Zeke. You must know of at least one woman you'd like to date. The article calls them prospects. Do you have any prospects? Let's make a list. Just for fun!"

  "Are you worried that I'm gay?" I ask. "Is that what this is about?"

  "No!" she says. "I worry that you're lonely. That you'll be lonely."

  "I see."

  "You're not gay, are you?"

  It occurs to me that the only way to end this thread of conversation is to give my mother some nugget of information that proves to her I am neither an asexual nor a homosexual human being.

  "There is a woman, at the coffee shop," I say, "but I think she has a boyfriend. She must. She wears an engagement ring of sorts."

  "Does she know you're interested?"

  "I suppose. I go there every day. That might be a clue."

  "What's her name?"

  "Mother, the fact is, there are probably dozens and dozens of sad sacks like me whom she smiles for every day. She has to be pleasant. It's a corporate ethic. A mandate."

  "What about the girl at your office? Lara?" my mother says. "I know she's divorced and has those two children, but, well, you're at the age when..."

  "Mom! She is my employee. That would be very unprofessional. And she's not 'the girl at the office.' We don't call them girls anymore. She is an administrative specialist."

  "Always so sensitive, Zeke."

  "Jesus, Mother."

  "Well, why don't you ask the coffee shop girl to go to the movies?" my mother says. "I know. I can call Hadley French. The girls can go over to play with Lily and Winnie next Saturday and maybe spend the night..."

  "Hadley French is a strumpet," I say. "That's no place for April and May to spend the night."

  My mother groans. "You're hopeless."

  "Besides, you don't just ask a barista for a date. It's creepy."

  "What's a barista?" my mother asks.

  "Look, I'm taking my hopeless self for a walk," I say. "Don't lock the side door. I may be gone for a while."

  We live, the four of us, on the near west side of Madison, in a neighborhood of professors, nonprofit workers, artists, and graduate students. Our house is a Sears bungalow with an added rear dormer, all assembled right here on Commonwealth Avenue in 1925. It is a neat and tidy house (despite an unruly garden of prairie flowers—and, shamefully, invasive species—that flanks the front porch) and is complete with hardwood floors, original woodwork, four bedrooms, and two full baths. My mother and the twins have the upstairs rooms and bath, and I have the two bedrooms and the bath on the first floor. The back bedroom on the first floor is large enough to contain my king-size bed and a dresser and nightstand, no more. You cut through my small bathroom to get to the front bedroom, which has three large windows that overlook the garden. This is my office, and the books and piles of manuscripts and news clippings and magazines make the room a musty maze of intellectual distractions. It is my favorite place on earth, quite frankly.

  As I walk through the neighborhood this evening, I can't help but consider my mother's question: Don't you have any prospects, Zeke? The truth of the matter, I want to tell my mother, is that I do not. Now that I'm in my thirties, I have found it difficult to find romantic partners in Madison. In Madison, everybody seems to be already partnered up. Domestic bliss is a sort of matter of civic pride; unhappy families and single people do not play much of a role in Madison's social fabric.

  Yet, although one doesn't get the sense that there is a great deal of unhappiness behind the closed doors of Madison, especially in the Dudgeon-Monroe neighborhood, I know the truth. Some of my neighbors have sat for interviews for my current professional project: An Inventory of American Unhappiness. I have heard, in stark and trenchant detail, the long woes and worries of their lives.

  On Fox Avenue, for instance, there is a man who wants to be a woman. On Keyes, there is a young computer programmer whose equally young wife is sleeping with a sixty-eight-year-old butcher. On West Lawn, a thirty-seven-year-old piano teacher, addicted to online poker, has lost everything and faces foreclosure. His garden rots in a state of moldy neglect, high with thistles and pigweed.

  On Gregory Street, a financial analyst for the Credit Unions of North America, a man who urinates off his back deck each and every night as an assertion of some buried wildness and freedom, contemplates suicide every Sunday evening as he prepares his clothes for the workweek. This man said to me, "The logistics of living wear me out—paying bills, dropping off the dry cleaning, making sure there is butter in the house. I can't seem to ever have butter or eggs in the house when I need them. I can't take it. It's too much."

  As I wander past these houses, my own loneliness seems a small problem, and, as is the case most of the time, I return from a walk in the neighborhood restored and settled.

  When I get to our driveway, I see my neighbor Elizabeth Vandeweghe sitting at her patio table by candlelight, her feet propped on a chair across from hers. I go over to say hello, and she doesn't move. Elizabeth Vandeweghe has a long, lean runner's body, and her legs, wrapped in Lycra running tights, shine up at me. It appears as if she is dozing. She wears a black hooded sweatshirt, unzipped to show the top of a white men's sleeveless undershirt, and a pair of brown Ugg boots. A paperback novel has fallen onto the flagstone below her chair, and her head is slumped forward, so that I can see the back of her long, exquisite neck. Quickly, I go inside my house, pour two tumblers of Irish whiskey, and meet my sleeping neighbor in her backyard. We have, on occasion lately, shared some Jameson's on the porch, and it is always a highly pleasurable exchange for me.

  I sit down across from her.

  "Elizabeth," I say.

  She wakes, looks around, dazed. "Zeke," she says. "Sorry. My God."

  "Don't be sorry," I say. "I brought out some whiskey."

  "I guess I fell asleep," she says.

  "It's lovely," I say. I hand her a glass of whiskey and she smiles.

  "Thanks," she says.

  "You're very welcome," I say.

  Elizabeth has three children, three blond girls, very spirited and amusing. They often play in my yard with the twins, and so we have developed the easy silence that sometimes exists between neighbors as they sit and watch children play, or cars pass, or snow fall.

  "Can't refuse one of these," she says. "It's been a long day."

  "Wednesdays are tough," I say. "Cheers."

  We drink.

  "Anyway," she says, "Rod is here and so I just wanted to hide out somewhere and read."

  "What are you reading?"

  "Blood Meridian."

  "Cormac McCarthy?"

  "I'm feeling sort of dark, lately. It's rather cathartic. All of that blood, all of that grimness."

  "Rod?" I ask, and she nods.

  Rod is Elizabeth's estranged husband and the father of her three kids. He lives in a rented room near campus; they are not, yet, technically divorced. Rod's rented room is so small that he visits his children in their own home, every Wednesday, and he cooks them dinner.

  "I hoped nobody
would bother me back here," she says.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I say.

  "No. Not you!" she says. "The kids! Rod!"

  "Right," I say.

  We drink for a while in silence.

  "Shall I let you go back to your book?" I say.

  "What?" she says. "Oh, no, it's okay."

  "How've you been?" I say.

  "We're good," she says, and then she seems to retract that statement. "We're okay," she says.

  There's a scream from the inside of the house, one of the Vandeweghe girls. Another of the girls is now crying. Then we hear the sound of Rod yelling and then Rod Vandeweghe comes out the back door of what used to be his own home, holding a spatula. "Can you come in here, please?" he says, exasperated.

  "Rod," I say, nodding.

  "Hi, Zeke," Rod says, but fails to make eye contact with me.

  Rod stands there staring at Elizabeth, who has not moved. She kicks off her Uggs and puts her feet back into the chair next to me, as if to tell Rod, Not now, pal, I'm quite comfortable. Her bare feet are lovely and clean, in the seat next to mine. I am not a foot fetish sort of guy, but her feet strike me as immensely sexy. I would not be beyond defiling them.

  "I'll be right there," Elizabeth finally says. "Let me finish my drink," she says, shooing Rod back into the house.

  We finish our cocktails in silence. Without thinking, I sort of touch her foot, and then squeeze it. She looks at me, awkwardly, but she does not shriek.

  "I'm sorry," I say. "I don't know why I did that."

  "I don't either," she says.

  "It was just, they were there and you sounded so sad, and I, well, it was like squeezing a child's shoulder when they are scared or something."

  "Okay," she says. "It was sort of weird. But not all that terrible. My feet were in your face, after all."

  "Nonsense," I say. "I get dreamy in the evenings. I do things, without thinking. The loss of light or something."

  When she stands, I resist the urge to help her into her Uggs.

  And then the beautiful and lithe Elizabeth Vandeweghe mutters, looking at the ground, "I hate my life."

  Before I can say anything, she is gone.

  Elizabeth is someone I always thought quite lovely, but I certainly never had any serious designs on her previously. She seemed happily married, firmly entrenched in a middle-class domesticity that so mirrored the one I myself longed for, and the idea of even attempting to pull her from that fertile ground seemed insane. Thus, she was lovely, but not someone I lusted after with any real intentions.

  But last spring, on one of the first warm nights of the season, I was sitting outside, in my boxer shorts, in complete darkness, my chair up against the back of the house. I was drinking a small bottle of chilled white wine, sans glass, and I was admiring the moon, when I heard a door slam. I heard the jingle of keys. And then I heard Elizabeth Vandeweghe, trying not to yell, saying, through what sounded like gritted teeth, "Where the fuck are you going?"

  And Rod Vandeweghe hissed, "I'm leaving until you calm down."

  At this moment I slipped inside my house, quiet as a mouse, and, in the darkness, found my way to the twins' bedroom upstairs, where there is a window that looks out at Rod and Elizabeth's driveway. The window, because of the warmth, was already open, and I sat in the shadows beyond it, watching and listening.

  Elizabeth looked gorgeous in the evening, wearing a white slip, one spaghetti strap falling off of her shoulder. Her voice sounded hoarse, and from the window I could see, when she turned to the porch light near the garage, that her nipples were hard. Men notice such things, no matter what trauma is going on around us.

  I could hear parts of their conversation and surmised that they had had a huge fight, and that Rod had been caught having an affair with a young graduate student who interned at the Department of Natural Resources where Rod worked as a wildlife biologist.

  "This isn't fatal," Rod had said. "We can work through this."

  "You fucked her outside, didn't you?" Elizabeth had said.

  "Elizabeth," Rod had said. "Jesus."

  "You did. You fucked her on that prairie, under the stars."

  "Elizabeth, don't do this to yourself."

  "Tell me if you fucked her there, Rod."

  "Why?"

  "Don't be a coward."

  "Fine. We fucked outside, Elizabeth."

  "We've never fucked outside, Rod. Not once!"

  Rod was trying to whisper something to her, he came close, and she smacked his face. Three times.

  Then Rod drove off, and I watched from my window as Elizabeth went back into the house. I could hear her sobbing. It was eerily beautiful.

  A few weeks later, Rod Vandeweghe moved out of the house.

  And now, with my mother pressing me about my prospects for marriage, and with Elizabeth suddenly so, well, available, it is hard not to think lustily of Elizabeth as I enter the side door of my own house.

  My intent is to retire with another small cocktail to my home office and work, but my mother is still up, wrapped in an afghan in the living room. The television is off, there is no book beside her, and she stares at the wall as if somebody's image is displayed there, as if somebody that I can't see is talking to her. I think I know this look. It is the look of grief. She is thinking about Cougar. Or my father. Or Melody.

  "Ma?" I say. "Are you okay?"

  "Well, Zeke," she says, "I'm going to die someday."

  I look at her and see from the sunken state of her eyes that she is terrified.

  "What?" I say. "What are you talking about?"

  She stares at the wall a moment longer, then stands up, quickly, and begins folding the afghan.

  "Someday," she adds. "I'm going to die someday."

  "Well, of course you are," I say. "I mean, you are a superb grandmother. That's for sure. But I've always assumed you were a mortal being."

  She smiles. And then moves to the kitchen. I follow.

  "Ma," I ask. "Why now? What made you say that?"

  "Have you ever even thought of getting married?" she says, rummaging in the fridge.

  "Not this again," I say.

  "I just don't know," she says, "if it's in your plans. You never tell me anything. You never did. A mother just wants her children to be settled, you know. And it would be good for the girls, too. An aunt. Somebody young and energetic, not old like me."

  "They have Aunt Harmony," I say.

  "She lives so far away," my mother says. She closes the fridge empty-handed.

  "It's hard to plan for marriage," I say, "without having any idea of whom you might marry. It's doubly hard to plan for marriage with seven-year-old twin orphans factoring into the equation."

  "Zeke," she says. "Please."

  "Zeke what?" I say. "Please what?"

  "I'm just curious."

  "You're being judgmental of my bachelorhood."

  "Now you're just being silly," she says.

  "Silly?"

  "You know what I mean," she says. She goes to the sink, takes the skillet I've already washed, and begins rewashing it vigorously.

  "I'm afraid I don't," I say.

  The skillet drops into the sink with a clang. She stalks off, leaving the water running. I shut off the faucet, and I do not follow my mother, not even later, when I hear her in her room, maybe, perhaps, crying.

  4. Zeke Pappas is weary.

  THE NEXT MORNING Wisconsin dips into that beautiful period of transition from spring to summer, and in the newly warmed air, one senses that, up and down the block, good-looking couples are shedding their lightweight, moisture-resistant pullovers and Smart-Wool socks after a brisk and vigorous run, and making happy love while their children doze soundly upstairs. I imagine them then sitting around, still naked, drinking fair-trade coffee and eating tamari almonds and figs from the Willy Street Co-op. They'd shower, the children would wake, and the father would read a story aloud—something like an African folk tale in a bright, colorful picture book recently featured on
NPR—as the mother prepared breakfast. This is precisely the carefree, sweaty, and familiar intimacy I long for in my own life, and there it is, all around me, plain as day.

  As I think I've said, Madison is not an easy town for those of us who are single. It is not conducive to, or particularly tolerant of, the sort of melancholy that accompanies solitude. Like most college towns, Madison has all of the same brightness that comes with young bodies and rich minds. And I don't just mean the bared limbs and midriffs, the display of flesh and hipbone, but also the bubbling optimism of life at a Big Ten school: the expectation that your team will win, that life will offer you much, that you will have choices upon choices set out before you like a feast, and all you have to do is choose the kind of happiness you would like to pursue. It makes a man want his own fight song!

  This morning, however, still shaken a bit by my mother's inquiries from the night before, those probing questions into my potential loneliness, I am faced with the realization that I, for the most part, am a solitary creature. And under the burden of this realization, I find that the friendliness of everybody in Madison suddenly strikes me as a problem. And when I hear my friend Mack Fences, the book salesman, calling my name from half a block away (he must be en route to his partner's bookshop), I pretend not to hear him and walk briskly in the opposite direction. Around the corner, I break into a brief sprint to increase the distance between us, even though now I hear him yelling my name.

  Some mornings you simply have no desire to make conversation. You long for a reflective stroll, in which you amble along the sidewalk, gazing here and there at one of the city's lakes. Still, you see people you know everywhere—neighbors, baristas, colleagues from the university, past grant recipients, and potential grant applicants. It is difficult to see so many people you know, so many busy and active people, if, frankly, you don't care how somebody's novel, thesis, art, job, marriage, life is going, not because you are heartless or cruel, but because you simply don't have the energy to hear about other people's struggles and triumphs. Your own joys and woes are exhausting enough, aren't they? And in Madison, where everybody is supercharged by yoga, organic food, locally roasted coffee, microbrewed beer, biking to work, and classes at the Monkey Bar Gym, the energy and optimism in the air can make one weary. What is it that the Old Testament prophets say? Do not grow faint? Well, I realize that I have done just that on this fine morning: I have grown faint.