The Bachelor Read online

  The Bachelor is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Palmer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for permission to reprint excerpts from “Message” and “Tea” from Collected Poems: 1937–1971 by John Berryman, copyright © 1989 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Palmer, Andrew, 1981 August 4– author.

  Title: The bachelor : a novel / Andrew Palmer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Hogarth, 2021

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020056621 (print) | LCCN 2020056622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593230893 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593230909 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3616.A338824 B33 2021 (print) | LCC PS3616.A338824 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020056621

  Ebook ISBN 9780593230909

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Na Kim

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  After the Final Rose

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality!

  —George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways

  1

  Not long after I moved into the mostly empty house of a friend of my mother’s in northwest Des Moines, near the dead end of the street I grew up on, in order to reset my life or retire quietly from it, I discovered on the satellite television service channel 665, “home of your Chicago Bulls.” I started tuning in to every game. I didn’t ask myself why I watched. I watched because for the two and a half hours it took for the forty-eight minutes of each game to elapse, I knew exactly how to feel: removed from myself into hope and joy when the Bulls were winning, full of almost comforting anxiety when they weren’t. These automatic responses took root further back than I can remember; they’re as much who I am as anything. My family never had cable when I was a kid—my parents once told me they would have gotten it but they knew if they did I’d lose my childhood to ESPN (they were right, as usual)—so the occasional Sunday afternoon NBC telecast was all I could watch of the Jordan-Pippen-era Bulls, from whom I learned everything I know about heroism. When I started watching Bulls games again at my mother’s friend’s house, after living without a TV for more than a decade, those distant, wide-open afternoons returned to me, and, though I would soon be a thirty-year-old man, I felt something of the annihilating sweetness of childhood. This sensation was no doubt heightened by my familiarity with the telecasters, Stacey King and Neil Funk. King had been a mediocre but enthusiastic reserve on the Bulls’ first three championship teams, whose radio broadcasts, called by Funk, I used to love to listen to, lying on the bristly orange living-room carpet in front of my parents’ enormous speakers, or probably enormous only in memory, whenever an especially meaningful game failed to reach our little TV screen.

  And so it was strange to reencounter Funk and King allied in this new way, but before long their partnership grew to seem natural, and I came to look forward not only to watching the usual miracles of semi-choreographed human movement, but to listening to Funk, in his grating Chicago accent, ooze derision toward the Bulls’ opponents (“Is it me or does something stink in this gym?”), and to King shout his silly catchphrases (“Pressure bursts pipes!”). They were terrible telecasters. Several times each game their narration of a play would be contradicted by the footage itself: “That right there is a clean block,” for example, as I witnessed what was plainly a heinous mauling; or “Inbound on the baseline,” as a player inbounded from the sideline; or—more than once—“Short,” as a shot flew long. It was as if they and I were watching different games.

  In any case, by January 2011 the Bulls were among the best teams in the NBA for the first time since Jordan left them for good in ’98, and I could root for them again with the assurance that more games than not I’d be rewarded with a brief respite from my malaise. From time to time it unnerved me, though, to see these unfamiliar men in the red and white jerseys that had loomed so large in my childhood dreamscape, and I couldn’t shake the sense that these new Bulls were impostors.

  Sometimes as I sat there in front of the vast flat-screen, I felt as though I’d fallen out of myself, free to watch this solitary man reclining on an overstuffed couch in a stranger’s house, sinking so deep into its forest green cushions he seems on the verge of disappearing into its softness, never to be seen or heard from again. Watching myself watch my Chicago Bulls, a great sense of release coursed through me, as though my body were ridding itself of some previously undetected foreign object, something hard, jagged, and compact that had been lodged deep within me for many years. I felt wonderfully susceptible, calm, almost content. That I felt almost miserable doesn’t mean that I couldn’t also feel almost content. I waited for the almosts to drop away. The smallest action, the slightest change of mind or mood, just might be the door through which would enter some big definitive feeling or idea. In this way my life was full of suspense.

  At first I didn’t change the channel during commercials, whose strategy of tricking me into buying things via immaculately crafted thirty-second comedy skits struck me as terrifying and hilarious, a lot funnier than the skits themselves, but they soon lost their novelty and I started switching over to PBS, bow-tied antiques dealers or Peruvian birds of paradise or actors reading Andrew Jackson letters with echo effects. One early January evening I was watching the Bulls play the Toronto Raptors at the United Center in Chicago, where my father and I used to drive once a year to see a game when I was a teenager. Chris Bosh had left the Raptors the previous summer to join Wade and LeBron in Miami. Everyone hated him for this but he seemed thoughtful and kind and everyone should get to decide where they live, and so I felt defensive on his behalf, vaguely. Without him the Raptors were very bad. Their players hailed from seven different countries. Toronto is a city that takes pride in its multiculturalism. Ashwini, my ex-fiancée, though we were never actually engaged, whose parents grew up on premodern farms in unimaginably lush southern India, grew up in a northern suburb of Toronto, and I was trying not to think about the three months I’d just spent with her on the outer reaches of Nova Scotia. The Bulls were up big, Stacey King was trying out new catchphrases, Neil Funk was yelling at the Raptors for being awful. The game went to commercial and I changed the channel to PBS, Custer’s Last Stand, the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was a hero, Custer was a monster who was made into a hero, he and his band of palefaces desecrated Lakota burial grounds, they
deserved their fate. About three minutes seemed to have passed and I pressed the pre ch button on the remote, except I must have pressed a different button because instead of the Bulls game I was watching a man who looked a little like Brad Pitt talking to the camera in a slight southern accent about the ways in which he’d grown emotionally in the past three years. He’d spent a lot of time thinking, self-analyzing, changing. He had struggled, he wasn’t ashamed to admit, with trust and commitment issues. Thanks to Thomas Parker, PhD, he’d traced these back to his father’s absence from his childhood. “I don’t know if I’ve ever let someone know the real me,” drawled the beautiful man. “When I give my all to somebody and I’m let down, I revert back to that feeling of when my dad told me he was comin’ to pick me and my brother up for ice cream and…yeah, he never came. And after that”—he lowered his eyes and pursed his lips—“after that I didn’t hear from the guy for five, six years.”

  He had forced himself to face up to his past. He had done a lot of soul-searching. Finally, after all these years, he was ready to fall in love.

  * * *

  —

  The Bachelor is a heartbreaking reality TV show on which twenty-five single women in their twenties or early thirties compete for a lifetime of sex and companionship with a conventionally handsome and successful man. Each episode, the Bachelor takes some of the women on “dates,” many of which involve helicopters and/or rooftops and/or leaping from high places, so that he might gauge their suitability as wives. The bachelorettes are made to live together in a gaudy mansion outside L.A. in order to exacerbate the tensions between them inherent in the show’s competitive premise. Each episode ends with a Rose Ceremony, where the Bachelor dramatically hands out roses to the women he wishes to remain in the competition, tacitly eliminating the ones who aren’t on the show for the right reasons, or have failed to open up. When the rejected women are interviewed immediately after the Rose Ceremony they cry, smudging their dark eye makeup. “I should’ve put myself out there,” they say, or, “I can’t believe I put myself out there like that.” They say, “I’m tired of being alone.” They wipe their tears. “I would’ve been a good wife, a good mother.” Then they say, “It’s his loss.”

  Who are these women? Where did they come from? How did they get here? They are executive assistants and apparel merchants and operations managers and food writers and nannies and dancers and dentists and dental hygienists and insurance agents and sales directors and sales consultants and publicists and models and aestheticians, although many of them, as they stress to the Bachelor to convey that they’re on the show for the right reasons, have quit their jobs so they can be here. They are Madison and Raichel and Lacey and Britt and Britnee and Keltie and Marissa and Shawntel. They’re Ashley H. and Ashley S. They’re from America’s biggest coastal metropolises and the beautiful beige suburbs of its most authentic heartland, but mostly they’re from California and Florida. They’re the type of people like, “This is me. This is who I am.” Their faces glow. They’re all about family. They love a good love story. They’re totally huggers. Most of them harbor some deep, secret hurt, the revelation of which constitutes their opening up. Many, like the Bachelor, have father issues. All are losers in love. All, too—how could they not be?—are aware of the show’s ridiculousness, and all who make it deep into the competition express surprise at how quickly that ridiculousness has become just another condition of their existence, to be transcended or at least ignored, so that they can allow their relationship with the Bachelor to seem to mean something. “I didn’t expect to feel this way,” they say. They always say, “I didn’t expect to feel this way.” And their self-awareness, imperfect as it is, makes them almost complicit with you.

  Still, I struggle to understand, these many years later, what made my first encounter with The Bachelor seem so enriching and deep. I’ve watched every subsequent season of the show—and also its fascinating mirror version, The Bachelorette (not to mention the irredeemable spin-offs, Bachelor Pad and Bachelor in Paradise)—and while usually I find something to be interested in, I’ve never been gripped like I was that first season. Along with untold millions of co-viewers, I had chosen to invest some twenty-five hours, rationed almost cruelly across twelve weeks, in the romantic fate of a man I would never meet and likely would have little to say to if I did. Was it just that I loved a good love story? Maybe. Everyone loves a good love story. And maybe since I’d all but renounced romantic love, my interest in the Bachelor’s quest, I mean journey, took on a heightened vicarious quality. Maybe a part of me wanted to be the Bachelor. Of course a part of me wanted to be the Bachelor. I’m not sure that’s the right way to put it. In this case, as in so many others, my desire felt somehow separate from me, as if it belonged to someone else and had strayed by accident or sinister design into my defenseless body.

  Probably what pulled me in that first episode had something to do with my ignorance of the show, which seemed to strategically take for granted a certain amount of familiarity in its viewers. It was its own world, with its own laws and logic, fraught with history, self-reference, and myth. I sensed I was missing some essential information; actions and speech seemed full of obscure significance. The narrative that constituted the Bachelor’s identity was rounded into fullness by way of suggestion and omission. The Bachelor had a whole world inside him; he had, if people have these, a soul. I quickly came to understand that this wasn’t the Bachelor’s first time on The Bachelor: he’d been the Bachelor a few seasons ago, but instead of proposing to one of the two finalists, per the rules of the competition, he confessed to both that he wasn’t in love, then sent them to their limos to weep in their finery, leaving himself once again all alone. “For this Bachelor,” narrated the show’s kindly host, “nothing would ever be the same.” Now, a changed man, he was back for the most controversial Bachelor ever. It was a new beginning. He had the sincerest intentions. Near the start of the first episode he sits in his Austin apartment—where he has spent, presumably, thousands of unfilmed hours, dusting and doing push-ups and microwaving Hot Pockets and masturbating—and watches a slightly younger version of himself tell two women he’d after all only recently met that he’s sorry, he wishes he felt differently, but he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with either. “I can’t look you in your eye and tell you that I love you,” I watched him watch himself say. Those words struck me as brave and honorable, and I sat up a little straighter on the couch.

  After his initial season aired, though, the Bachelor sank into a deep depression. He tells us this over footage of himself reenacting his depression: the Bachelor sitting at his kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal; the Bachelor sitting on a concrete floor watching rain fall over his city; the Bachelor sitting at his computer reading Bachelor forums, on which fans of the show release their venom toward him, the Bachelor. But the fans were right, he can now admit. He was closed off for so long. He put up walls. He made a habit of hurting women before they had a chance to hurt him. This time, he promises, things will be different. “I truly believe my wife is sitting in that room,” he says before entering the bachelorette living room to meet his second batch of pursuers. “I really do.”

  The Bachelor often punctuates his statements in this way: “I think you’re one in a million. I really do.” “I’m so sorry I kept you waiting. I really am.” It adds to his air of impossible earnestness, which he has the ability to convey even without words. His shoulders are broad, his jaw square, his eyebrows thick, his eyes an intriguing silver blue. He has a five o’clock shadow and high cheekbones. He takes long shirtless runs on beaches at dusk. His chest is smooth and shapely. On his back: a tattooed cross. He is solid. He has presence. He is a Real American Man. When he speaks he furrows his brow and gives intermittent little nods. He’s convinced himself he’s the role he is playing, or else—which may amount to the same thing—doesn’t believe he’s playing a role at all. This, it struck me with the force of an epiphany
, must be how what is called character is formed.

  At first, and this may have been another part of the show’s appeal, the Bachelor seemed so remote from me that I could hardly believe we shared a language and country. Sometimes I could hardly believe we belonged to the same species. It wasn’t just that the Bachelor was on TV and I wasn’t. It went beyond his superhero physique. There was his accent—no state comes closer to a foreign country than Texas—but it went beyond that as well. It even went beyond the depressing sterility of the Bachelor’s meticulously staged environment, all those thornless blood-red roses, all that bluish light. The Bachelor’s foreignness, I’ve come to think, was rooted in the certainty he exuded: certainty about how beautiful he was, certainty that marriage was the endpoint of love, certainty that America was the greatest nation in the world, certainty that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and that one day He’d return to Earth and whisk the Bachelor up to Heaven, trailing clouds of rose petals. The bachelorettes, while presumably as devout as the Bachelor—the show generally avoided religion—for the most part seemed to lack this certainty. Who wouldn’t be consumed by self-doubt in their positions? They made up for it, though, until the moment they were rejected, with an impressively relentless cheeriness—a cheeriness that seemed to serve basically the same function as the Bachelor’s certainty: to camouflage a deeper, maybe more existential, uncertainty (so I hoped, so I consoled myself). The Bachelor and his cheery band of bachelorettes, in any case, came to occupy for me a sort of shadow world, a world whose weekly dispatches I watched with a blend of bafflement, boredom, sympathy, delight, sadness, horror, and longing.

  I was pleased to note, as I watched the first episode, a small puncture in the Bachelor’s Bachelorness: he runs funny. I noticed it as he was taking one of his shirtless sunset beach runs: there’s a slight but undeniable awkwardness to his stride. His knees bend too deeply, his feet are splayed—he’s gawky. The Bachelor is gawky. And this physical imperfection brought the Bachelor a little closer to my world. It called to mind a younger version of him, pre–protein drinks and personal trainer, an awkward, acned, resentful adolescent. And after adolescence? A year in college, a year out, two years of pulling himself together, finding God, then back to college, business school, gyms, hair products, drinking buddies, the downtown condo? Or was it L.A., commercials, an aborted modeling career, semi-famous friends, piles of coke, something gone wrong at a hotel in Malibu, the shameful return to Texas? The show had a way of planting these seeds in your brain, which grew into stories that should have competed with one another but instead bled together, forming an underlayer of hypothetical realities. Even as you sense the gulf between yourself and the Bachelor, you start to feel you know him as you know people in real life, or at least as you know characters in books and movies.