My American Unhappiness Read online

  I Google Farnsworth's name and discover that he is a former staffer for Congressman Leatherberry. I also discover that he is now a bureaucrat in an obscure domestic wing of the Department of Homeland Security, which I discover because he is pictured, in some newsletter photo, in black tie, shaking the hand of Congressman Tom DeLay. I decide to call him back and start with his cell number.

  "Farnsworth," he says.

  "Hello, Mr. Farnsworth. It's Zeke Pappas from the Great Midwestern—"

  "You finally called me back."

  "Right, well, lots of calls here—some urgent issues relating to the public humanities, in fact. Sorry for the delay. What can I do for you?

  "Federal law requires me to ask you if I may record this call for quality assurance purposes."

  "Aren't you on a cell phone?"

  "Can I tape this phone call?" Farnsworth says, slowly, as if I am a foreigner who doesn't speak English.

  "I understood your words," I say. "I just didn't quite believe them. You want to tape this phone call?"

  "Yes," he says.

  "Most certainly not," I say.

  "Look, it's standard procedure, Mr. Pappas."

  "Well, it shouldn't be!"

  "It's just a precaution in case there's a question. I hate it too. You think I want to tape my methods of interrogation?"

  "Interrogation? Is that what you think this is?"

  "It's a line of questioning."

  "Well, I don't like it."

  "Do you want me to come down there and talk to you in person, Mr. Pappas? Is that what you want?"

  "Are you threatening me? Is that a threat?"

  Farnsworth hangs up.

  And then, this afternoon, at the supposed safety of my desk, my office door shut, my enclave of my books and papers and the towering "to-be-read" desk tray overflowing with clippings and periodicals and pamphlets, I get one new response via our instant web feedback form:

  Valerie, 34, self-employed, Ely, MN:

  Q Why are you so unhappy?

  A: Deception, discontent, the things we've done that we cannot take back, and loneliness. That is what makes me so unhappy.

  And, lo, there I sit, greatly unsettled in front of my screen.

  7. Zeke is floored.

  THE NAME IS a problem. Valerie.

  I am not often unsettled by responses to the American Unhappiness website. In fact, more often than not I see them as pure data—a bit sad-making, yes, occasionally quite witty—but at their core they are raw data, field notes, tales from the front for a project that I hope someday comes to define my working life. To be a great chronicler of the social condition, one must practice a level of detachment from one's subjects. One's observations cannot lead to emotional reactions. For instance, I am a happy man, the best sort of observer of America's overwhelming unhappiness—there is no agenda to make my unhappiness the nation's unhappiness. I am, as Fox News wishes it were, fair and balanced.

  But this message, from Valerie, age thirty-four, of Ely, Minnesota, is stunning in the old sense of the word. Temporarily paralyzed, I find I have to get up from my desk just to be sure I still can. It's not easy.

  Valerie is the name of my late wife. We married young and our marriage was brief. I was twenty; she'd just turned twenty-one. A few months into our union, she disappeared during a canoeing adventure in the Boundary Waters with her friend and former roommate, Jeanette. The last place she was seen, by anyone other than Jeanette, was in Ely, Minnesota, a small town near the wilderness area. Today, Valerie, too, would be thirty-four.

  Certainly, it is entirely within the realm of possibility in a digital age that a random and different woman named Valerie, age thirty-four, would live in Ely, Minnesota, and would wander to my website. But the eeriness of the coincidence, and the cryptic nature of the message, is certainly enough to derail my orderly afternoon.

  I do not speak often about Valerie, not out of any sense of shame, and not because her memory is so grief-laden that it is unspeakable (though it once was, surely), but because I do not like the pity people offer when I tell them I am a young widower. Over a decade ago, I believed that I had met my soul's match, and that she and I would embark on a romantic and domestic life together to rival the world's greatest partnerships; now that she is gone—and time has softened what once felt like a fatal blow—I want to get on with my life, to try another, perhaps less intense, partnership, and resume living. Were I to tell everybody I knew about this brief chapter in my life, set in Michigan, it would inexorably change the way they see me. I do not want to be seen as a sad or damaged person. For one, nobody invites such people to dinner parties—so profound is the weight they carry that people are afraid to express mirth around them.

  Valerie and I met during my junior year at the University of Michigan; she was a senior. We were both taking the impressive Shakespeare course taught by the legendary Ralph Williams, one of the university's most popular professors, who packed hundreds of undergraduates into a sprawling lecture hall. Despite the cavernous vastness of that place, Professor Williams captivated all of us as he bounced about in the front of the hall, waving his enormous hands. There was a palpable energy in the room, an almost sexual energy, and one day in early September, when a lean, fair-skinned woman with green eyes and long, dark red hair sat down next to me in that packed hall, I felt a tingling sensation coming from the skin of her forearm next to mine. I turned and smiled at her. She smiled back.

  Valerie!

  Valerie again sat down next to me during the following lecture, with another big smile, and then, the next week, I sought her out. There was a young woman already sitting next to her on one side and on the other side, a massive frat brother in a white ball cap. I simply went into that aisle, approached Valerie's neighbors, and quietly but confidently said, "I'm sure this sounds ridiculous, but my ability to get through the week depends on my being allowed to sit next to this particularly fetching woman."

  At the front of the stage, Professor Williams entered with a flourish. The pre-lecture talking began to fade, and the frat boy stared at me. The woman on Valerie's right said, "Sorry, I like this seat." I scowled at her rather dull face. That was, as it turned out, Valerie's roommate, Jeanette, and it was prudent of me to refrain from a snide remark. The frat brother in question, however, took pity on me, knew the inexplicable ways that lust could overtake a young man's sanity and sense of decorum on short notice, and he laughed, stood up, and moved to an empty seat in the front row, saying, "Good luck, brother."

  I sat next to Valerie just as Professor Williams was calling out a good morning to all of us. "So good to see you!" he bellowed, as he always did, and I turned to Valerie and smiled and she turned to me and said, "Fetching?" in a way that betrayed how hard she was trying to resist a smile or possibly outright laughter.

  Perhaps that was the fateful blessing I needed, because that night, Valerie and I went out for coffee, and we stayed up all night talking. I finally left at dawn, sun-dazed in Ann Arbor's morning light and with a terrible headache from lack of sleep. At noon we met again, and, after sharing a smoothie at a café on South U., we retreated to her place for a nap, both of us insistently referring to our fatigue. There, in the well-lit back bedroom of her apartment, we began what still ranks as the most intense sexual and emotional afternoon of my life.

  I had never seen hair that particular shade of red before; it was a deep copper color, and in the sunlight, I thought, it looked as if it were about to catch fire.

  Our courtship had the feverish hunger that only college can provide—free of binding schedules, basic housekeeping standards, and the traditional time structures of the working culture, one was free to engage in all sorts of frivolity. Daytime sex, sleepless nights, drinking to excess, intellectual masturbation, creative freedom—all of these blessings heaped on our young, flawless bodies, our shiny teeth, our bright, yearning eyes. Even on Sunday mornings when we lounged about in sweatpants, unwashed and hung-over, we were beautiful.

  Our s
emester went on in this way: we attended our Shakespeare lectures together, we studied together, wrote papers together, drank large amounts of both coffee and beer. We hung out with our good friends, a ragtag group of earnest lefties and aspiring poets and reporters from the Michigan Daily, and I think they were all somewhat jealous of our certainty and lust. I know Jeanette disliked me. She was a political science major, forever reading texts like The Art of War and The Prince, attempting to be, at age twenty, a serious scholar; but it was difficult in that shared apartment. Valerie and I were often behind the thin bedroom door at odd hours, in veritable ecstasy. We coupled at all times of day, showered or unshowered, sleepy or caffeine-buzzed, sober or drunk. We were not quiet. We had the brashness of new and young lovers: just as Americans traveling in Europe flaunt their American-ness, we believed we possessed something so pure and shining that anybody who could experience it even vicariously would be blessed.

  And talk about Europe: Oh, Europe! On our spring break that year, we went to Paris, charging our plane tickets and our hotel on brand-new credit cards we did not have the means to pay back. All of our friends moaned. They hated us for doing something so bold. As they went off to tired beaches in Florida, ripe with STDs, or to something as earnest as a spring break service project rebuilding blighted parts of rural America, Valerie and I were off to Paris. In Paris, our love was respected. These were the Clinton years, and two young, leftist Americans in love, ambling along the Seine, were a sight to behold. We took in the knowing nods and warm smiles of the French, we acknowledged the silent accord we had with them—they would continue to provide us a place of rest and higher culture, and we would continue to come there and spend our money; we would beam all of the American earnestness and heartfelt wonder that we could muster and they could feel superior to our lack of urbanity and sophistication.

  We stayed at a cheap hotel in the heart of Paris; it was near nothing famous but in the center of everything, and while the neighborhood is something I can scarcely remember, the hotel was family-owned. It was called the Hotel Cambrai and it was clean and friendly and a place to ravish each other with the sort of recklessness foreign travel brings into one's sex life. In the morning, there were bread and croissants. I drank the coffee, Valerie the hot chocolate. We returned to our room after breakfast for more love. One morning, we shattered the innocence of a young Albanian cleaning woman, having forgotten to latch our door.

  On our last night, sitting in the courtyard of the closed Louvre, I decided to ask Valerie to marry me. Lacking a ring, or any preconceived ideas of a grand gesture, I led her to the edge of the fountain, and we sat there on the half wall. I said, "Valerie, I am going to ask you something and when you have an answer, please tap me on the shoulder and let me know."

  She leaned in, laughing. "What is it, my sweet?"

  "Will you marry me?" I said, then quickly plunged my head down into the fountain's murky water. It was cold, full of sediment. I heard her screaming and laughing above the water's surface. Then, I felt her frantic slapping of my shoulder.

  I surfaced and gasped and spit.

  "Yes!" she shrieked. "God, yes, you're crazy!"

  For the rest of the spring semester, we jokingly and annoyingly (to our friends) referred to each other as Jean-Claude and Amelie and drank only French wine. We did not have the money for an engagement ring, so we bought the cheapest wedding bands we could find at a Montgomery Ward that was going out of business, and we wore them on our right hands as engagement symbols. Our friends shuddered about this, too. Yuck! Fuck! But despite the strong protests of our peers, we were married at Ann Arbor's city hall during the week of final exams. I still had one year of college left, and so we decided to stay put in Ann Arbor. Our friends thought it odd, crazy, in fact, that we would, in 1995, decide to marry so young. But there was something oddly alternative about it—revolutionary. To be married young was so square and unexpected that it was cool. I felt as if we had warded off the end of the century and its inherent uncertainty. We had been grounded.

  We rented a tiny efficiency apartment, on the third floor of an old Victorian on North Thayer Street, and we slept in a Murphy bed. We bought dishes at Goodwill, had our friends over for dinner parties, opened a joint checking account, and shared a closet. We wrote letters of lofty prose to our families, telling them what we had done. I loved the new intimacies of marriage, the shame-free birth control pills on the nightstand, the merging of morning routines and sets of towels and CDs. We each owned the Bruce Springsteen box set, for instance, so we traded one in at a used record shop and came home with Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf! Aha! With marriage, we were suddenly more interesting!

  Then it was summer and the apartment was sweltering. One night I went to Meijer's at two A.M. and bought us a window air conditioner. I had installed it by three and I felt so heroic as we made love in the factory-chilled air. In July, Valerie was off on her long-planned canoe trip with Jeanette. She had ignored Jeanette, somewhat, after we had married. She'd even left her holding a lease, and Jeanette had ended up with a most unpleasant subletter. I did not want Valerie to leave me for even a couple of weeks. Can you imagine that? I didn't even want the short sort of break that most spouses secretly thirst for on occasion. I'm ashamed to say that I begged her to stay, to blow off the trip and forever sever her friendship with Jeanette. I was a jealous lover. I didn't want an ounce of Valerie's love or energy to go to anybody else. But, in the end, I saw her off with my warm wishes and blessings. It was before dawn when they drove away. I stood in the third-floor window and waved. I looked at my desk. I'd been up all night. I was taking two summer classes and I was going to stay behind and work on my honors thesis. The two weeks, I assured myself, would go by quickly. But what if I had convinced her to stay there with me? My life would be so different now.

  If I think of myself then, I am hard to imagine. Her, I can see her. Me? I am faded. Someone else. How was I different then? I can't say. I just know that I was different.

  Today, my memories of Valerie are contained in a large plastic tote that resides in my attic. Therein lie my photographs, my letters, and a few of her personal articles. I saved a pair of underwear, cotton panties festooned with butterflies, that I had slid from her hips that first afternoon in her apartment. I saved a sketchbook she had kept for an art history class, full of small pencil drawings and cryptic notes taken during visits to the art museums of Toledo and Chicago and Detroit. I saved a stick of lip gloss and her sunglasses and an unused circle of birth control pills, her backups. They are there in my attic, though it has been years since I've allowed myself that self-indulgent gesture of what I call memory sifting. Didn't Jesus say something to the effect of "Let the dead bury the dead?" I don't recall the context in which he says that, but I think of that quote often, when I am tempted to find those sacred underpants, press them to my face, and spend a day weeping.

  And now, in my office, behind the closed door, I'm alone with this e-mail, from a Valerie, age thirty-four, from the same city where my wife was last seen. I chalk it up to eerie coincidence and file the response on my hard drive.

  8. Zeke Pappas considers and weighs, weighs and considers.

  NORMALLY, EACH DAY at four o'clock, when Lara leaves the office, I retreat to my own office, close the door, make myself a large gin and tonic at the small wet bar I had added some years ago (with some gift funds from H. M. Logan, mind you, not federal money), and call my friend Mack Fences.

  Mack, a book salesman who covers the Midwest for a major publishing company, and I have been good friends since my brief stint working in the Madison bookstore, the Pilgrim's Pages, which is owned by his partner, Joseph Simms. Mack, who often worked in the store, too, was impressed one evening by my literary taste and took me out for a martini at Paul's Club, where our bartender, a young man named Jim Meehan, instantly made us feel welcome. He was one of those rare bartenders who seem able to suspend time, so that you do not notice how much of the afternoon you are drinking away. One drink t
urned into several, and soon we were dining on big medium-rare steaks and mammoth plates of calamari and mushroom caps at one of Madison's better restaurants, Mack's Smith & Gallatin company credit card on the table and a bottle of white wine between us. (Mack always drinks white wine, no matter what the menu recommends. A chilled bottle of white Vendage, to Mack, is the ideal blend of comfort and elegance.)

  Although he is more than two decades my senior, Mack is probably the one individual I know whom I could designate as a best friend. In truth, if I am honest about things—and I usually am—I would say he is sort of a father figure to me. He understands my work, for one thing, and he believes in my politics. He is also fond of talking on the phone, and that is why each afternoon at four, while I am sitting at my desk at the GMHI, I close the door to my office, make a gin and tonic, and call Mack. At this exact hour, across town in the leafy Cherrywood neighborhood where he lives, Mack is at his desk, in his home office, fixing himself a gin and tonic. When we talk, we first go over the minor annoyances and triumphs of our day, and then we begin to discuss the political and cultural events of the world's day. At five o'clock Joseph comes home from the bookstore, leaving the evening retail hours to his assistant manager. Joseph is quieter than Mack, a kind and gentle man who is decidedly not fond of talking on the phone and is not exactly tolerant of disruptions in the daily routine. And so, when Joseph presses the Open button on the automatic garage door opener, Mack says goodbye and goes to the kitchen to prepare some cocktails and snacks for his partner of twenty-seven years, and I close up my office for the day. Someday, I would like my domestic life to be that way, as predictable and easy as Mack and Joseph's, but until then, I have a telephone and Mack and I have our conversation and cocktails.