The Bachelor Read online

  My favorite bachelorette that first episode was an intelligent-eyed high school teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia, but she didn’t get a rose and wept and wiped her tears and said it was the Bachelor’s loss and I switched back to the Bulls game. The fourth quarter had just started, the Bulls were up big, their coach had inserted the second team. “I mean, it was like he shot that blindfolded,” said Neil Funk. “Can I get some butter with that roll!” yelled Stacey King. I found myself, as I often did that winter, focusing my attention away from the ball, toward the players trying to shed their defenders or help their teammates shed theirs. It was strange to watch these glossy men scamper across the glossy floor. They spread their legs wide and covered their crotches with their hands, or pressed their backsides hard into the muscled fronts of their defenders, or took off at full speed in one direction only to suddenly stop after a few strides and sprint back to where they started. There was a constant squeaking of sneakers on hardwood, louder than crowd or commentary. On the bench the Bulls’ starters whispered hilarious things in each other’s ears and cheered their backups in a jokey way that I hoped didn’t hold the hint of condescension it seemed to. Joakim Noah, the Bulls’ manic French-speaking ponytailed center who’d broken his hand a few weeks earlier, sat at the end of the bench in a powder blue suit and purple bow tie. I’d seen him once, on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, walking and laughing with a group of normal-sized men, and now I wondered if he and I might be friends if only we had a chance to get to know each other. The screen switched to a shot of the Raptors’ bench: everyone was solemn, no one spoke. Soon they’d board a charter plane back to Toronto, then drive their Benzes to their mansions in the suburbs. Probably Ashwini, at that moment, was sitting on her love seat in her dark apartment, grading or preparing for a class. Pausing, now, to listen to the rain. In Halifax it was always raining. My first week there I discovered the spot where I would propose to her, a clearing on top of a hill in the wooded park on the city’s peninsular southern tip. In spite of my skepticism of the rituals surrounding marriage, I’d nevertheless kneel, my back to the ocean. She would laugh and wipe tears from her face. “What movie are we in?” she’d say. A month and a half later I lay next to her in the dark of our bedroom and, as she said probably accurate things about me, felt as though I were shrinking to an infinitely small size, then being placed by a disembodied hand into a wooden box, then lying in the box as it was dropped into the ocean and sank. The last time we had sex Ashwini was on top of me when she gradually slowed her movements, then stopped and put her hands on my chest and, faintly smiling, said, “Let’s just look at each other for a while. We never just stop and look at each other,” and she sat upright and arched her back a little and folded her arms beneath her breasts, and we looked at each other and who knows what she saw but she laughed in what I chose to interpret as happiness, and I laughed back. In a week we would fly to London, then Mumbai, then train down the coast to Alappuzha to spend the holidays with her extended family; and at that moment, after several days of dreading the trip, I felt a surge of renewed optimism.

  A week later, as I sat at my gate in the Halifax airport, waiting for the first of the series of flights that would deliver me not to Mumbai but Des Moines, I was alarmed to detect a strong vibration moving up my thighs and into my stomach and chest, where it lingered for a moment before I realized its source was external to me, an airplane landing or taking off. On my flight to Detroit a long-standing feeling, which I’d lacked the space or courage to examine in Halifax, hardened into a resolution: I was done trying to write my novel, done writing novels period. One was enough. One was one too many. Like so many others at around this time—as if we’d all come down with the same sickness—I had begun to doubt the value of making up stories in the service of some hoped-for truth. Now that I’d decided to stop trying, I felt relieved. The work had not been going well.

  My flight from Detroit to Minneapolis was canceled due to snow. I was wheeling my suitcases to an information desk to ask about hotels when I remembered I knew someone in town I could probably stay with, a poet who’d moved to Detroit from New York with a group of other poets and art school grads in order to live for practically nothing in one of the city’s abandoned mansions, where they could practice their respective arts and have sex with one another and urban farm all day. I’d been surprised when I heard Maria was leaving New York; the city seemed to suit her. She’d stood out among the cool kids and strivers as someone who would rise to the top (of what?) without any apparent effort, without pain, by force of remaining quietly herself. Meantime everyone envied her job, personal assistant to a famous mystery writer, since it paid ridiculously well and demanded virtually nothing—the dream. She was, I’d always thought, genuinely cool—one of the coolest people I knew. Her coolness had nothing to do with irony or distance or disaffection. She loved what she loved without embarrassment.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in a few years, and we’d never been especially close, but she seemed excited to hear my voice and was at the airport within an hour. When she saw me she shook her hands next to her face and pretended to scream, then got out of her car and slow-mo sprinted to the curb and hugged me. She looked different than I remembered, less substantial somehow. Maybe it was only the hooded parka she wore against the upper Midwestern December cold. She told me she’d just returned from an extended visit with her father and I was lucky to catch her.

  On the way to her house she asked how things were with Ashwini—they’d fallen out of touch, she said to my relief—and I told her things were wonderful, I was just going to my parents’ for the holidays, but later that evening, at a Japanese restaurant, emboldened by the dim lighting and Maria’s collarbone and the sake, I confessed to her that Ashwini and I had broken off our engagement. This wasn’t true, since we’d never been engaged, plus our official position when I left Halifax had been that we were taking a break, but it wasn’t hard to convince myself as Maria and I shared a rainbow roll that Ashwini and I both understood, deep down, that this would be one of those breaks that lasts forever. “She had the most perfect facial structure,” Maria said, which was accurate but a strange way to commiserate, I thought. She congratulated me on the success of my novel, which I took to mean she either hadn’t read it or hated it. (The New Distance had almost met its modest sales expectations and had gotten a couple of positive-ish reviews.)

  We finished our sake and paid for the meal and, “Wanna get drunk?” Maria suggested, and we walked through the faded city to her crumbling artist house and sat on the thin rug on her bedroom floor, talking and drinking Cabernet Franc from her father’s southern Indiana winery. The room was lined with bottles of wine and stacks of books. The wine was surprisingly delicious, and I said so. Maria told me her mother came from a long line of Argentinian vintners. And her father? She gave the beginning of a shrug; her father was born in Argentina to German parents, both of whom died when he was a boy. But he’d been the one who’d seen the possibilities in making wine in southern Indiana, at a time when virtually no one else was doing that, and when he and her mother divorced he’d taken sole control over the vineyard. Why, I wondered, had her parents moved to Indiana in the first place?

  “Ever heard of the American Dream?”

  “Remind me?”

  The sip of wine Maria took represented the act of thought. She seemed about to say something else before she said, “This is it. I’m living it.”

  “Cheap rent and walking distance to decent sushi?”

  “I mean—the rent is so cheap. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  I laughed. “You hate it here, don’t you?”

  “No!” Her voice sounded almost pleading.

  “You love it here.”

  “I mean…”

  “Tell me again why you moved here?”

  “I mean, why does anyone move anywhere?”

  I thought for a moment. “Religious persecu
tion. Political oppression. Gold rushes. War. Grad school.”

  “All of the above,” Maria said nonsensically, and then she tried to explain at some length her ambivalence toward her current living situation. What was amazing about it, she said with apparent reverence, was that she had all this time, so much time, she’d never been in a place so full of time (hadn’t she had plenty of time in New York?). She was reading more than she’d ever read in her life, and what’s more she was reading better, more deeply, she didn’t know quite how to explain it, she said; in New York reading had always felt like an escape, whereas here it felt like a return, if that made sense. As for the rest, the obligatory twice-weekly dinners and working in the garden and the endless parties and gatherings and meetings and teaching at the experimental preschool—all that was fine, but not essential. For her, Maria said, it all felt like a game, and sometimes it was fun and sometimes it wasn’t and it was always a little ridiculous. Listen. She tilted an ear toward the floor; I did the same. Over a just-perceptible rumble, I made out faint shrieks, irregular stomping, and what sounded like choppy synthesizer music. Her housemates were putting on a show in the basement, Maria explained, a combination of skits and monologues and videos and musical performances whose quality was purposely a little shitty, for all the other twenty-something transplants in town who’d allowed their ambitions to be absorbed into the seductive fuzziness of a sense of community. I asked Maria what her ambitions were, and she laughed and said she’d never had any. I asked if she didn’t value a sense of community, and, in a gesture both awkward and graceful, she waved her arm toward the stacks of books surrounding us, and/or the bottles of wine.

  I don’t have a clear memory of much of what Maria and I talked about the rest of the evening, but I vividly remember the sheen of saliva at the top of her bottom lip, and the occasional appearance there of the tip of her tongue, and I was able to connect this appearance with something I’d never noticed in her before: a slight lisp, which either was becoming more pronounced the more we drank or only seemed so because of my new awareness of its reality. Nothing is sexier than a lisp. Maria burnt popcorn in a frying pan and we ate it. Early New Order emanated from her laptop. We talked about New York, old friends, books. I or she opened another bottle of Indiana wine. I asked how her poetry was going and she laughed and said it had been years since she’d written poetry. To retaliate she asked what I was working on these days, and I said I was almost done with a novel based on the memoirs of my grandfather. Then, to balance my lie with a truth (I’d abandoned the novel less than halfway through a draft), or who knows why, I told her Ashwini had recently sold her debut; it was due out next spring. She’s so talented, Maria said, and I agreed, though I was basing that judgment on a handful of stories: Ashwini had forbidden me to read her book until it was published and everyone could read it. “You know it’ll be about you,” Maria said.

  We woke up fully clothed and holding each other in her bed, and then she was up and had made blueberry-banana smoothies. While she was showering I found a biography of the confessional poet John Berryman in one of her stacks. That is how I thought of him then: “the confessional poet John Berryman.” For several years I’d confused him with Wendell Berry, the righteous Kentucky farmer-poet. Now I knew the difference but couldn’t remember if I’d actually read any of Berryman’s Dream Songs or only read about them. Either way I had the feeling of liking them, their springy intensity, their schizoid exuberance. I examined the biography. Dark-suited, hands in pockets, reclining against a weathered wooden fence, a slender, young-looking, black-and-white Berryman gazed out at me from the cover, his narrow, handsome, half-shadowed face tensed in an expression of defiance or reproach. Beneath a thick mustache his lips parted as if to say something and without thinking I opened the book. “Berryman came over to see Miriam,” I read,

  chatted with her, read her some of his Dream Songs, and was soon boasting of his sexual prowess. In spite of her protests, he began chasing her around the room. When she told him to get out, he suddenly became contrite and downcast and promised to be good if only he could stay. After a short while, however, he started again, until he finally browbeat her into letting him spend “ten or fifteen minutes reverently caressing her feet, while reciting poetry.” Then, realizing that the house had windows and that someone might be watching, Berryman recovered himself, hailed a taxi, and went home.

  The anecdote strained the limits of credibility, and I found myself wondering where it had come from, whether Berryman or Miriam, whoever Miriam was, or else some absent third party. I checked the back of the book for notes: there were none. Realizing that the house had windows. The sound of water against Maria’s body had stopped and I tucked the biography into my carry-on. Confessing my theft could be a good excuse to stay in touch with her, I thought vaguely.

  As Maria drove me back to the airport, she asked what I was working on these days. I paused to see if she’d remember asking me the night before, but when it became clear she didn’t remember, I told her I was finishing another novel. About my grandfather. Like I’d told her the night before. “Oh god, did I ask you that last night?” she asked, in a voice that conveyed both exaggerated fear and sincere anxiety. “You didn’t forget the entire evening,” I said, “did you?” and while I hadn’t meant to imply that we’d had sex, I discovered on my plane to Minneapolis (where forty years earlier, I was soon to read, Berryman had jumped from a bridge to his death) that I wasn’t displeased with the implication. For a moment I hoped she thought we might have. It thrilled me to imagine Maria thinking of me as someone who would sleep with another woman—her!—just days after breaking off an engagement, even if that wouldn’t have accurately characterized me if we actually had slept together. But no, no, it would be awful if she thought that, it was awful for her not to know what happened, what didn’t happen, last night. I composed a clarifying text; I’d send it as soon as the plane touched down. Still, as I gazed through the faintly streaked window, I felt a little mysterious to myself, unmoored, a little dangerous. The places I had left seemed muted and distant. The snow-covered grid of the upper Midwest was blinding in the sun. I lowered the shade, closed my eyes, and thought about how lucky I was to live in an age of human flight. I fell asleep.

  2

  The house overlooks a brush-filled canyon studded with golden and pinkish gray outcrops whose jagged edges soften in the California sun. From above, its cruciform layout is clearly visible, as are the hot tub and pool and lawn and various outbuildings and rows of evenly spaced cypresses. Its roof is low and flat, its lines are clean, its walls are the color of rust or Mars. It’s too big for one person, only it’s not, since just one person will live here. And maybe he’ll need all that space, all those rooms, maybe he’ll fill them with his thoughts. We zoom closer. Concrete, stone, horizontally aligned wood, columns of gray and cream-colored brick. Everything tasteful, modern, clean. The floor-to-ceiling windows that must let in such nice light reflect the close sky’s warming haze.

  The Bachelor emerges barefoot in a black T and charcoal cargo pants. He slips his hands into his pockets, crosses a stream of pebbles, and steps out onto a lovely swath of dense green grass or Astroturf.

  “Waking up in L.A. today, all of this became so real.”

  The voice is the Bachelor’s but his lips don’t move: he is narrating his own experience again. The Bachelor is always narrating his own experience. Shots of him moving through time and space alternate with shots of him speaking to a never-seen interviewer, significant candles flickering in the background. Often this secondary, narrating Bachelor is telling us, in the present tense, what the primary Bachelor thinks and feels. “I’m a little nervous, but I could not be happier.” “I know I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” A psychological dimension is thus introduced; there’s more to the Bachelor than sun-flattened surfaces. Before long, story becomes inextricable from commentary, and the two Bachelors, one acting, one struggling to make sense of
action, merge almost imperceptibly into one.

  He takes a few deliberate steps, then stands and surveys his pristine property—its cypresses, patios, boulders, mulch, its low bushes and tall grasses and cacti like artichokes. The sleeves of his T-shirt hug his biceps at their latitude of greatest circumference. The Bachelor considers his remarkable situation. “Never in a million years,” says his second self, “did I think I was gonna be the Bachelor again.” Somewhere nearby, a house full of women dream of becoming his wife. In spite of this, as he walks to the edge of the lawn toward a football (where did it come from? did he bring it? was it planted?), he permits himself a moment of self-doubt. “I didn’t find love before,” we hear him think. “What if it happens again?” Has he forgotten his sessions with Thomas Parker, PhD, all that deep emotional work? He got so vulnerable with Dr. Parker. He’s not the same closed-off Bachelor he was before.