Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel Read online

  “Oh,” she said, “hello.”

  I said hello.

  “Is there a catalog?” she asked.

  I said there was not.

  “There’s no catalog?”

  “Yes,” I said, “there’s no catalog.”

  “Why is there no catalog?”

  “The artist does not believe in catalogs. He believes the work should speak for itself.”

  “Oh,” she said. “How sweet: the garbage cans speak for themselves.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do they speak to you?”

  Of course I had to say yes. This is what happens when you involve yourself in certain professions: you are forced to proclaim that garbage cans speak to you.

  “What do they say?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, stalling for time. “Because they are individual pieces of art, each one says something different.”

  “What does that one say?” She pointed to the nearest garbage can.

  As if it were painfully obvious, I very quickly said, “It says everything is garbage. Art especially. And of course if art is garbage, then so is everything else. Even the things we think of as holy are garbage. Everything is disposable. Nothing concrete is precious. Religion is filthy.”

  She took a step back from the desk, as if I might be as lunatic as I sounded. “That’s a lot for one garbage can to say,” she said.

  “It’s very potent work,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “that gives me a lot to think about. I’m Janice Orlofsky. I write for Artforum.” She held out her hand.

  I shook it and said, “I’m Bryce Canyon.”

  “You’re quite passionate about art, aren’t you, Bryce?”

  “I suppose I am,” I said.

  My mother appeared at that moment in a particularly weird outfit: dark glasses, a jumpsuit with lots and lots of zippers and pockets, and new shoes that were really nothing more than a few strips of leather atop a towering spike heel. She seemed somewhat incapacitated by both the shoes and the shades, and tottered blindly across the gallery, bumping into a few garbage cans on her way. She passed us without acknowledgment and disappeared into her office.

  I tried to think of a joke along the lines of “What do you get when you cross Helen Keller with an anorexic fighter pilot?” but before I could Janice said, “Was that Marjorie Dunfour?”

  My instinct was to say no because I was sure that if my mother was a decent gallery owner she would have recognized Janice Orlofsky from Artforum and stopped and chatted with her, but I was feeling so confused by everything that had happened that morning—or actually everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours (or everything that had happened in my life)—that I decided it just might be easier to tell the truth, so I said yes.

  Janice opened her little notebook and wrote something (probably something cruel and damning about my mother), and then stuck it into her pocketbook, which was a Hogan’s Heroes lunchbox circa 1970. Then she turned around and walked out, tossing something into one of the garbage cans on her way. (A receipt from Duane Reade for a “Sweet ’n Smooth Sugar Wax” kit. And she actually did review the show in Artforum [vol. XLII, no. 2]: “Unnamed Artist, Mixed Media. Dunfour & Associates Gallery, July 16–August 31, 2003. When Is Garbage Just Garbage? When It Stinks.)”

  That afternoon, at Dr. Adler’s, I tried to think of some way to talk about what had happened the night before with John, and as I was trying to collect my thoughts, which apparently were uncollectable, Dr. Adler said, “You know, we’ve never talked about September 11.”

  This was totally odd and unnerving. As I’ve mentioned, Dr. Adler said little during our sessions, and rarely suggested a topic, or instigated an exchange. I looked at her to see if she would acknowledge in some way how uncharacteristically she was behaving, but of course she did not, merely smiled at me with her generic meaningless smile, and moved her head in a little bobbing way that indicated she was waiting for me to speak.

  “There are a lot of days we haven’t talked about.”

  She said nothing, and when it became clear I wasn’t going to say anything else, she said, “Would you rather not talk about September 11?”

  “I assume you mean September 11, 2001,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  I said, “I wonder how long it took for people to begin referring to December 6 as Pearl Harbor Day. Or did they do it immediately? Was it like the next day, or the next week, that people were saying where were you on Pearl Harbor Day rather than where were you on December 6?”

  “I believe Pearl Harbor Day is the seventh of December.” She smiled slyly as she said this, unable to mask her joy in correcting me.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “how would you like to refer to September 11?”

  “I would prefer not to refer to it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It seems unfair that I have to explain why I don’t want to refer to something you brought up that I have just said I don’t want to refer to.”

  She said nothing in her stop-being-silly-I’m-not-going-to-encourage-you way. Just ignore him and he’ll go away, my mother used to say to Gillian when we were young and I bugged her. Just ignore him. All he wants is attention. In retrospect there seems to be something almost cruel about that—to simultaneously acknowledge and refuse someone’s desire for attention—especially a child’s. All he wants is attention, as if it’s bad to want attention, like wanting money or power or fame. Perhaps it’s why I prefer to be ignored now; I’ve been warped in some irreversible way. Of course, I’m sure I’ve been warped in countless irreversible ways. It occurred to me that therapy is an ineffectual attempt to reverse the irreversible ways we have been warped; it’s like futilely trying to untangle a big mess of untanglable knots.

  “I really have nothing to say about September 11,” I said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It really bugs me how people talk about it, everyone saying where they were, what they had seen, who they knew, as if any of that mattered. Or how like people in Ohio were getting grief counseling, as if it had happened to them.”

  “You don’t think people were affected by what happened?”

  “Yes, okay, maybe they were affected, but they weren’t in one of the planes or they didn’t jump out of the buildings, so I think they should just shut up about it.”

  “I don’t really follow you,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said, “don’t follow me.”

  “But I’d like to understand your thought. What you’re thinking. You went to Stuyvesant, didn’t you?”

  “I think you know I went to Stuyvesant.”

  “Yes, but sometimes, James, people can ask questions to which they know the answer. It’s a socially acceptable practice.”

  “I just wish you’d ask me what you want to ask me rather than finagling me.”

  “Finagle—that’s an interesting word.”

  “I don’t really understand how one word can be any more interesting than another.”

  She paused for a moment and then said, “You went to Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant High School is very close to Ground Zero. Therefore, I assume your experience that day was particularly intense.”

  “I know this is going to make you think I’m just being deliberately belligerent, but I really hate that term.”

  “What term?”

  “Ground Zero.”

  “Oh. Why is that?”

  “It seems like a euphemism to me. Like something they’d say in a James Bond movie. And it made it a destination. Like, ‘Let’s go down to Ground Zero. Let’s go to Rockefeller Center. Let’s go to Yankee Stadium.’”

  “How would you like to refer to it?”

  “I don’t know. The World Trade Center site. Where the World Trade Center was. ‘Let’s go down to where the World Trade Center was before terrorists flew a plane into it and caused it to collapse.’”

 
“Okay. Well, given that Stuyvesant was very near to the World Trade Center site, I imagine your experience of that day was intense.”

  “I think everyone’s experience of that day was intense.”

  She shook her head sadly. “I would agree with you,” she said. “But that wasn’t the point I was making. You were across the street from the towers. I assume you saw everything that happened. I don’t think that was everyone’s experience.”

  We did see everything that happened from the windows of our classroom.

  For a while I didn’t say anything.

  I was thinking about something I had read about in the newspaper a month or two after September 11, 2001. It concerned this woman that no one knew was missing. No one missed her. No one reported that she was missing. No family or friends. Her neighbors didn’t notice. She was such a quiet person and lived such a lonely life that her absence affected no one. The only person who noticed was her manicurist. She had a standing appointment every week to have her nails done, and when she failed to show up and couldn’t be reached, the manicurist called the police. They broke into her apartment. They found a bird, a parrot or something, dead in its cage, and of course no sign of her, only the newspaper for September 11 still open on her kitchen table. It took more than a month for anyone to figure out that she was missing, and if it weren’t for the manicurist, no one might ever have known.

  After a moment I said, “I’m thinking about the woman who died on September 11 who no one knew was missing. Did you read about her?”

  “I don’t think I did,” said Dr. Adler.

  I told her the story of the woman and she said she had heard of several people like that—people who had died but had not been missed. At least immediately. She asked me why I thought I was thinking about that woman.

  It made me very sad, that question. Sad and defeated. Because I knew she knew why I was thinking about that woman—I was thinking about my own tendencies toward aloneness and I thought I could end up like that woman, with a bird perhaps, or a dog—probably a dog, I know birds are supposed to make good pets but I think there’s something creepy about them—but alone with a life that didn’t touch or overlap with anyone else’s, a sort of hermetically sealed life. I knew Dr. Adler knew I thought this and just wanted me to say it—to “express” myself, because she thought that by articulating those thoughts I might transcend or purge myself of them—but what she didn’t know was that the story of the woman who disappeared like that didn’t make me sad, I didn’t think it was tragic that she left the world without effect. I thought it was beautiful. To die like that, to disappear without a trace, to sink without disturbing the surface of the water, not even a telltale bubble rising to the surface, like sneaking out of a party so no one notices you’re gone.

  “What made you think of that woman?” Dr. Adler asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She just came to mind.”

  Dr. Adler looked at me like well, yes, but why did she come to mind? And I felt it was okay to think about the lady with the parrot and not think about why I was thinking about her if I knew why I was thinking about her, and I wanted to tell Dr. Adler that by wanting those things to be explained she was missing something else. I thought, It’s enough that I’ve thought that, I don’t need to say it. I don’t need to share it. Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it’s the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say “I love you.” I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they’re released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed. And so instead of answering her question, I said, “I did something very wrong yesterday.”

  She looked a bit startled but managed to cover herself and said, “Oh—what?”

  I told her what I had done with John, and how he had reacted.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. I could tell she was still thinking about the parrot woman and September 11, and trying to figure out what the connection between that and John was, and what to ask me to get me to make some connection. This was the other thing that was beginning to bug me about therapy: how everything was supposed to be connected, and the more connections you could make the better you would be. It reminded me of one of those puzzle things you did in elementary school, where you drew lines between equal things in different columns and eventually you got too many lines and everything was connected to everything in a big tangled mess.

  “Why do you think you did that?” she asked.

  “I think I wanted to prove that I could be this other person. A person who would attract John. And I thought if I could conceive of that person and convince John that person existed, then in some way I would be that person. Or have the potential to be that person. I know it sounds stupid, but it made sense to me. I didn’t realize I was misleading John.”

  “So you’re interested in John?”

  “What do you mean, interested?”

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  I said nothing. I was thinking that I wished I hadn’t brought this up and we were still talking about the lost lady.

  “What did you want to happen last night with John?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really know what happens when two people who are interested in each other—or is it one another? I can never keep that straight.”

  “I don’t think it matters,” she said.

  “Of course it matters,” I said. “One is right and one is wrong and if you don’t care enough to get it right, you’re …”

  “You’re what?”

  “You’re failing the world. That it’s little things like that, like using the language correctly, that keep the world functioning. I mean functioning well. That if we let go of those things, everything will collapse into chaos. Mistakes like that are like little chinks in the dam, and you think they don’t matter, but they accumulate, your mistakes and everyone else’s, and then they do matter.”

  “But sometimes there aren’t rules. As in this case—I believe each other is usually used when referring to two people and one another is used when referring to more than two people, but I believe that is a custom, not a rule, that there is really no correct form.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked. I thought she might be making it up.

  “English is my second language. When you study a new language, you learn things like that.”

  I hadn’t known that English was Dr. Adler’s second language. She must be German, I figured, but she had no accent, at least that I could discern. I always feel humbled by people who speak more than one language. I envy them. It seems with two (or more) vocabularies, you could not only say so much more and speak to so many more people, but also think more. I often feel like I want to think something but I can’t find the language that coincides with the thought, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I’m thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

  “You brought up your experience with John and then you changed the subject. Why do you think you did that?” Dr. Adler asked.

  “I changed the subject?”

  “It appeared to me you did. You started to talk about language. Word usage.”

  “Well, it’s all related,” I said, only because I didn’t like being accused of changing the subject, which I had not done deliberately. Of course that fact holds little weight in a shrink’s office, because they aren’t really interested in the things you do deliberately.

  “How are they related?”

  How is misleading John Webster and causing a scene in the Frick Museum like proper word usage? It seemed like one of those impossible SAT questions where you can’t even figure out what’s being asked, let alone answer it. But then it suddenly made sense to me.
/>   “They’re both about the correct or proper way to do something. There is a correct and proper way to use words and there is a correct and proper way to behave with other people. And I behaved improperly with John and feel bad, so I compensate by obsessing with language, which is easier to control than behavior.”

  I was quite impressed with this answer, but Dr. Adler stared at me as if she were still waiting for me to respond. She looked a bit preoccupied, and I wondered if she had even heard me. I knew from experience this was a tactic she used to get me to continue, but I felt that because I had answered her question I deserved some sort of response. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything, just shrugged her shoulders a little, as if she didn’t think very much of it at all. Then she sat up a bit straighter and said, “I think you’re very clever,” but she said it in a way that made it clear she was really saying that I thought I was very clever. The meanness of this stung me, so I said nothing. I thought of the expression “He’s too clever for his own good.” When I was in second grade my teacher had written that in the comments section of my report card: James sometimes has a tendency to be too clever for his own good. It seemed like some sort of riddle to me, like black and white and red all over, and I asked my mother what it meant. She said it meant I talked too much.

  After a moment of silence Dr. Adler said, “Well, that’s all the time we have today.”

  14

  Tuesday, July 29, 2003

  I STOPPED AT HOME FOR A PEE AND SOMETHING TO DRINK ON the way back to the gallery. Miró was lying in the bathtub. He often lies there in the summer, because it’s cool, I think. He opened his eyes and watched me judgmentally. I wondered for a moment if it was okay to urinate in front of a dog, and then realized how absurd that was, so I gave Miró a kind of fuck-you-you’re-a-dog look. In private I’m often nasty to Miró. I say things to him like “You’re just a dog. You don’t have a passport or a Social Security number. You can’t even open doors. You’re totally at my mercy.” Or “Get a haircut. Put on some shoes.” I know he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but I think he suspects something’s not quite right.