Audio: Adam Levin reads.
PLUNGER
As Sara bunched up her nightshirt, she clocked a disturbance. Some movement or sound. Scraping? Paddling? Exhalations? It happened so fast, she said, she couldn’t be sure, but a rat in the toilet, submerged to the neck, was definitely trying to scale the bowl, and the next thing she knew she was standing in the bathtub, hollering for Darren.
Next thing Darren knew, he was brandishing a plunger and yelling at the rat, hoping to scare it back down the toilet.
Then nudging it toward the outlet with the plunger.
Then driving it below the surface with the plunger.
But soon he was afraid he was making a mistake. Were the rat to escape the toilet through the outlet, it could drown along the path to freedom. Clog the line expensively.
And so he changed course.
He angled the plunger to block the outlet while pinning the rat till the haunch that protruded from under the plunger cup no longer thrashed.
By then he was traumatized, he said, don’t laugh. Or, well, go ahead and laugh, he said, but he was beside himself. Or wasn’t himself. Could hardly, in any case, recognize himself. He was angry at the rat for having made him a killer, and he did something senseless. He did something ugly. He pushed on the plunger and the cup went flat and the rat’s back snapped, and then he did the same again a couple more times.
“Couple dozen more times, more like,” Sara said. “You were at it forever, Don Corleone.”
“I was at it awhile,” Darren admitted. “I was sweating a little. I was somewhere else.”
“That rat was a mess. That rat was a Frisbee. Tell our newlyweds here what you said once you stopped.”
“I really don’t remember saying anything, Sara.”
“Claims he doesn’t remember because he’s ashamed. I try and tell him—”
Darren stood up. “You want another beer?” he said to Josette. “You want another whiskey?” he said to me. “You get nothing,” he said to Sara.
He gathered empties and left for the kitchen, shutting the sliding glass door behind him. The thermos-shaped speaker on the table, stammering, severed its Bluetooth connection with his phone. A few minutes later, he’d return with the drinks: a beer, two bourbons, a Negroni for his wife.
“So, a Frisbee,” I said, once he’d gone inside.
“A Frisbee,” Sara said. She grabbed us each by a wrist. “I can see it from the tub. Completely disgusting. That’s the least of my worries, though, O.K.? Darren—his face. Oh God. Contorted. Frozen on the bottom, frowning like a fish. Jumping all over the place on top. Scariest part is his shoulders keep moving. Up and down, up and down. He isn’t holding on to the plunger anymore—his hands are at his sides—but these shoulder movements, they’re close enough to when he was using the thing that maybe he thinks he’s still using it? Like, maybe he’s having a seizure? A stroke? Something medical. That’s what I’m thinking. Something major. Something’s really wrong. The good times are over. Everything’s gonna be hard from now on. I go, ‘Darren? Baby? Darren? You there?’
“He nods at the toilet. . . . ‘Look how they massacred my boy,’ he says.”
CHAIR
The first conversation I had with Hattie Grant was near the end of September, 2001, a month or so into my first year of grad school. I asked her how her teaching assignment was going, and she said that a freshman had turned in an essay about self-esteem in which “self-esteem” was spelled “self of steam,” but that wasn’t the punch line. This was the punch line: the essay was plagiarized.
My sisters would like this woman, I thought.
I’d had that thought only three times before, and each instance had predicted a relatively long-term monogamous relationship. The M.F.A. program we attended was small, though, and the friends we had in common were the only friends we had in the entire Northeast, so our flirting was timid. Much of the time, I thought I might be imagining its being reciprocal. I wasn’t sure I could distinguish signal from noise, call from response, abiding politeness from receptivity. There’d be a lingering smile or a hug good night—maybe. Or at the dive we’d all meet at a few times a week, I’d buy a round for the group, and Hattie would help me bring it back to the table. Or we’d both “need” the single-user unisex bathroom—or actually need it—when the line got long.
A season of that. A touch more than a season. A whole semester and a winter break.
•
One January night, first week back in classes, we snorted some crushed Dilaudid and fucked.
In the morning, while I was cooking breakfast, a mouse blurred out from under the broiler and squeezed itself between the wall and the fridge. Next thing I knew, I was standing on a chair across the table from Hattie, hugging myself and breathing loudly, watching liquid omelette crawl the crooked floor.
I pushed out some laugh sounds, dismounted the chair. Hattie helped me clean up and walked home.
•
That evening, I arrived late to the bar, Hattie wasn’t there, and I started to worry that she wouldn’t show up: that I’d disappointed her, become a regret. A wilting indoorsman who lived amid filth.
I got wasted fast, inadvertently. In fact I had, to prevent my getting wasted, substituted, at Darren’s suggestion, lower-A.B.V. Amaretto sours for my usual bonded Old Grand-Dad-and-waters, but it was difficult to drink those sours slowly, and my liver, I guess, was still cleaning out Dilaudid.
When Hattie appeared—at last, at last—I was stupid with joy and I kissed her on the mouth, right in front of all our friends.
She pushed me, hard, and made a terrible gagging sound. Rushed out the back.
•
Our friends were livid. Scorning me all the way through the door. “Hell’s wrong with you, Levin?” “The fuck are you thinking?” “You can’t just do that.”
Outside, Hattie was catching her breath, bent over a snowbank onto which she kept spitting. The five of us encircled her. I said her name. She waved me off, said, “Back. Get back.”
“Hit the bricks, man.” “You heard her.” “Take. A hike.”
I turned to go. She grabbed my sleeve.
“No,” she said. “Just . . . don’t watch me do this.”
We back-stepped, waited. Hattie spit some more, straightened, and asked for gum. Darren gave her a stick. “Him, too,” she said. Darren gave me a stick. Then everyone else.
We stood on the salted parking lot, chewing.
“Did one of you tell Adam, ‘Take a hike’?” Hattie said.
“That was me,” Darren said. “Except only after Peter told him, ‘Hit the bricks,’ though.”
“I thought he was cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” Peter said.
“Oh yeah. Me, too. I was ready to feed him a sandwich,” Darren said. “A real knuckle sandwich.”
Peter shoved me at Tim. Tim shoved me at Darren. “Get bent,” I said, and everything was fine. I walked Hattie home.
•
This is what I learned while I walked Hattie home:
Palmetto bugs are colossal roaches that thrive in hot climates and smell like Amaretto. They prefer the outdoors, but sometimes get lost and turn up in your house. If, as a five-year-old girl in Gainesville, Florida, you step into a steaming, oddly redolent shower, feel a light tap way up on your thigh, reflexively grab whatever just tapped you, find in your fist a roach with the heft of an operable pencil stub, fling it away, find a sharply bent leg affixed by its barbs to your middle finger’s meaty bottom phalange, repeatedly try to shake the leg off, repeatedly fail to shake the leg off, then sit in the tub and cry and cry, you’ll become a lyric poet, and your stomach will, from that day forward, repeatedly try to empty itself whenever you catch the scent of Amaretto.
So, gum or no gum, no kiss good night.
We dated nine months.
•
I never encountered the mouse again. Before the end of the week, I’d forfeited my whole security deposit—two months’ rent; an eighth of what my fellowship paid me that year—and moved into a smaller, more expensive apartment.
PHONE
Josette and I were married by a judge in Chicago on Wednesday, August 15, 2012, and then we got lunch. Our witness snapped a photo, which I posted on Facebook.
Hattie called some hours later. We were on good terms—“Happy Birthday”-text terms—but we hadn’t spoken in long enough that we’d have had to catch up, and I wasn’t in the mood. I’d been taking calls from closer friends and family all day.
In her voice mail, she said that she and her husband had just bought a house, that if Josette and I ever came through Vancouver we could stay in their guest room as long as we wanted, and I wasn’t surprised not to doubt her sincerity.
•
The following summer, we visited Darren and Sara in Brooklyn and they told us about the rat and the plunger, which caused me to recall the mouse and the chair, and it wasn’t till then that I remembered Hattie’s voice mail.
•
I thought I’d call her in a couple of days, when we returned to Chicago. The next afternoon, though, alone in the kitchen—Darren was grading papers upstairs, our wives were swimming at the Red Hook pool—I looked at her Facebook, which was filled with condolences. Her sister had died. It wasn’t clear how.
I’d never met the sister, didn’t think I knew her name, but I seemed to remember that she’d had a hard time. Mental illness or credit cards, perhaps violent boyfriends.
Hattie’s most recent post, from six months earlier, was a childhood photo of the two of them hugging. Above it were the words “I can’t believe that she’s gone.”
The post preceding that one was a link to a video that compiled every instance in which the word “pishadoo” was used on “The Sopranos.”
•
Darren came down to refill his coffee, and I paused the “pishadoo” video and up-scrolled. Showed him my screen. Asked if he’d known.
He said that he hadn’t and wished I hadn’t shown him. This was the No. 1 reason that he’d closed all his social-media accounts. He didn’t want to have to think about whether or how he should respond to news of illness and loss that the bearer of the news hadn’t borne to him directly. Do people, he wondered, post such news to save themselves the inconvenience of calling those from whom they seek comfort? Or is it more like they do it to save themselves the strain of having to perform being comforted by those who’d offer comfort by phone? If he knew it was the former, he’d know to call. If he knew it was the latter, he’d know not to call and would post a condolence.
“So what’ll you do?”
“Well, since I’m not on Facebook,” he said, “it’s either call or don’t call. . . . Six months after the loss? Hattie? We’re not that close. Haven’t spoken in at least five years. I’m going with don’t call.”
“You’ll pretend you don’t know.”
“I won’t pretend shit. I’m just not gonna call.”
“O.K.”
“Faux pas?” he said.
“No idea. No one close to me’s ever died.”
“Me, neither. But, I mean . . . I don’t think that I’d want Hattie calling me six months after someone I loved died just to offer condolences,” Darren said. “What if I’m in the middle of a happy day? Or a real depressing one, for that matter? I’m gonna want to think about my dead loved one being dead? Go through that whole script for the zillionth time? Odds are not high. I think next time I talk to her, if that even ever happens, I’ll say something in passing if it feels appropriate. Something like ‘By the way, I heard about your sister. I’m sorry for your loss.’ Yeah. That’s the move.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Thanks.”
“I’m not talking about you, man. You dated her a year. And you’re on social media.”
“Nine months,” I said. “More than ten years ago. Plus I barely check Facebook. Obviously. I just found out right now about her sister.”
“Still.”
“So I should call, then.”
“I’m not saying that, either,” Darren said. “I have no idea what you should do. But you can’t go by what I do. Even if we stood in identical relation to Hattie, I’ve got a more relaxed, friendlier demeanor than you. People have a far easier time believing that my interpersonal blunders owe to innocent mistakes or absent-mindedness. Everything you do is presumed deliberate. Probably that owes to your mean fuckin’ face.”
“Well, that’s unfair.”
“Meow meow, meow meow. At thirty everyone has the face he deserves.”
“That’s not . . . It’s ‘at fifty.’ I’m barely thirty-six.”
“Yeah, still. The look you’re giving me right now—”
“I’m not giving you a look.”
“It’s like you want to stamp on my face—forever.”
Five years later, it was 2018, and Josette got hired to teach in Florida. We bought a house here in Gainesville, our first.
The day after the movers delivered our things, I encountered, while I was unpacking art books, a cockroach the length of my thumb, in the living room.
I dropped the lid of a banker’s box over it.
Josette came running in, panicked, from the kitchen. I told her what I’d seen, what was under the lid. She got a little angry: I’d shouted “Oh!” multiple times, she said, and she’d thought I’d been injured or was having a stroke.
I hadn’t been aware that I’d shouted anything. I said I was sorry and offered her my cigarette.
She hadn’t smoked in a week, she said. She was trying to quit. Had I failed to notice?
I might have failed to notice. If I hadn’t failed to notice, I’d forgotten that I’d noticed.
Both accounts were bad, we agreed, but we argued a bit about which one was worse. I don’t remember who argued which side, just that mine was the loser, and before I got to say as much Josette’s back stiffened and some “Oh!” s ripped through me.
The roach had escaped.
It must have climbed through one of the punch-out handles. Now it was atop the lid, approaching us.
The approach was slow enough to seem considered: like, maybe the roach, though curious about us, wasn’t convinced the feeling was mutual and knew that it needed to exercise caution. But probably the roach was perplexed and fatigued, caught between competing neurochemical directives: Flee from danger! vs. Suspend animation when overly cold!
Our A.C. was cranked.
•
“It’s too big,” Josette whispered, exhaling smoke.
“Too big,” I whispered back.
What we meant by “too big” was “too big to kill,” by which we meant the roach was big enough to (1) suffer pain visibly, perhaps even audibly, and (2) survive being stamped on once.
“But it’s not like a spider. We can’t just ignore it.”
“It’s nothing like a spider. Something has to be done.”
Our parrot, atop his cage in the corner (when we’re home and awake, we leave the cage open), emitted a series of sibilant fricatives, mimicking our whispering. These were some of our favorite sounds that he made, sounds that we wanted him to make more frequently, so we looked his way and whispered, “Good bird! ”
Our plan developed rapidly.
•
The previous evening, hoping to still a twitch of buyer’s remorse, we’d tested the reputedly unmatched power of our brand-new bagless hand vac’s suck on the contents remaining at the bottom of a box marked “drawer junk, office.”
The suck had proved impressive, the twitch had been stilled, and we’d mounted the charger on the wall by the birdcage.
Our plan was this: Josette would watch the roach while I tiptoed over to the corner for the vacuum, then I’d zap the roach up and free it out in the yard.
I still believe the plan would have been a success had I thought to first empty the junk from the cannister. The roach, however, died in the cyclone, battered and punctured by drachmas and pushpins.
We threw it away.
•
I hadn’t smelled Amaretto, and neither had Josette, so that night I didn’t sleep a lot. I kept waking up to search the Internet, more and more afraid that the roach we’d killed hadn’t been a palmetto bug; that it had been the kind of roach that prefers the indoors; that it was one of hundreds or maybe even thousands breeding in the hollows of our unfamiliar house.
My fear was unreasonable. Unscientific. Other than a palmetto bug, no roach endemic to North America could grow to the size of the one we’d killed. But between my insomnia, the conflicting information Wikipedia offered, the scores of (mis?)labelled photos I reluctantly maximized, and the pseudo-calming copy on pest-control sites, I got pretty worked up and started doubting my experience. Perhaps the same mechanism that had pushed the involuntary “Oh!”s from my mouth had doused my optic nerves with something potent that had caused them to exaggerate.
•
In the morning, I e-mailed Hattie. I’d been planning to anyway, had thought it would be almost inconsiderate not to. After all, we’d just moved to the not so big city where she had grown up.
The letter was long. I covered tons of ground: the spookiness of falling asleep in a house after decades in apartments; musings on where she might have gone, as a kid, to see gators, play soccer, eat ice cream; the lucky feeling of living blocks from a bar where smoking was allowed and popcorn was free; the pleasure of learning that this bar used to be the favorite haunt of Harry Crews, whose early novels we both held in high regard; the ready availability of high-end bourbon that would, in Chicago, if and when you were able to find it, cost five times as much; the mysterious power, especially at dusk, of the cloud-plumped sky, which, although it looked little like the sky of my childhood, triggered memories of that childhood so rich and high-def that I was able to observe them from multiple angles—all the rooms and landscapes and faces they contained—just by shifting my gaze.
Nearly six hundred words of that kind of thing.
Then three hundred more on the roach in our living room. I tried really hard to be funny in that part, was self-effacing about my state of alarm, recalled for her the time with the mouse in my kitchen, admitted that I’d lost a night of sleep and was seeking reassurance.
The letter closed as follows:
At 11:37 p.m. E.S.T., Hattie sent her response:
•
I was surprised to learn she’d been holding that against me. I hadn’t imagined my failure to condole could have hurt her so much. I hadn’t imagined it would hurt her at all. Nor can I say that I understood—or, for that matter, that I understand today—why it should have hurt her.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t deserve an apology, or that I wasn’t apologetic. She did. I was.
Whether what I’d done, or hadn’t, should have caused Hattie pain didn’t matter. I knew that.
Know that.
But here was a problem: she didn’t mention pain, so for me to bring her pain up in the course of an apology could be presumptuous. For me to talk about having hurt her could be self-aggrandizing and presumptuous. Yet if I talked about the pain that I felt upon learning that I’d hurt her—or even about simply fearing that I’d hurt her—I’d be guilty of making the apology about me, and I was supposed to be humbling myself before her. Wasn’t that what people wanted from apologies? For the apologizer to humble himself?
Or maybe it wasn’t?
I tried to think of apologies I’d gotten from others that had satisfied me. I had little to draw on. I don’t demand, let alone receive, many.
There was only one I was able to think of.
•
I had a true-blue dickhead in a workshop I taught once; a terrible piece of shit of a person.
Another student in the workshop had turned in a story in which the protagonist struggled with bulimia. A very badly written story, to be sure. Confessional melodrama with oblivious mother, saintly doctor, selfish father, and child abuse. A story that had clearly been written for the deadliest pair of sub-literary reasons (to process a trauma and to educate readers), and this annoyed everyone, of course it did.
But it was also an autobiographical story. The protagonist’s name and the author’s rhymed, both enjoyed knitting, had the same tattoo (though on opposite limbs), the same “ironic” crush on Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, and came from the same small town in Wisconsin.
I run a fairly conventional workshop. The authors stay quiet while the rest of the class discusses their work, and then, at the end of the discussion, the authors are free to ask questions or make clarifications.
Most of them decline to say anything but “Thank you.”
This one spoke.
“So I guess . . .” she said. “Well. It sounds like none of you thought that my protagonist was likable or empathetic?”
And the dickhead student, who before then hadn’t said a word about the story—had only sneered and shaken his head—said, “Put it like this. The only real thought I had about her at all was Kill yourself, fat girl.”
So I kicked him out.
•
But you can’t really do that. Kick them out. Not where I was teaching. You’re just not allowed. They pay too much tuition. The dickhead knew that, but also he didn’t. When he e-mailed to say that I couldn’t kick him out for “simply stating [his] opinion,” I told him he was incorrect, that I could kick him out, and that I could, furthermore, fail him for missing the classes that he’d miss now that I had kicked him out. I said that, if he wanted to get back in to class, he had to write three heartfelt, deeply reflective letters of apology: one to the author of the story, one to the class, and one to me.
So he did. And it was great. For me, at least.
It was great not because I got to help some twenty-two-year-old dickhead grow into a kinder, better young man—that is not what happened; he remained a dickhead, albeit a somewhat quieter one while in my workshop—but because I knew that he, like all of us (and maybe even more so than some of us), couldn’t help judging his own value by his relative power, and it gave me great pleasure to witness him witness himself overpowered, forced to lie about himself: to attest to beliefs he didn’t hold, to profess possessing feelings he didn’t have.
It was a pleasure to humiliate him, I’m saying. To watch him act humble. And I believe I enjoyed it far more than I would have if he had actually been humble.
•
Hopefully, I’m not the kindest guy you’ll ever meet.
Probably I’m even worse than my face.
•
But I do love my friends, and I did feel miserable for having hurt Hattie, and perhaps especially because I’d done so unintentionally. And so I spent some hours writing an apology that—despite how sincerely humbled I was by the realization that my negligence had caused a friend of mine pain—must have been insufficient because she, for all my efforts, humiliated me by way of never responding, which I guess I deserved, and even, it would seem, continue to deserve.
MASK
A day or two after the shootings in Kenosha, we discovered that our Publix sold prosciutto di Parma in vacuum-sealed packages. The price was an insult: near double what we used to pay in Chicago to have the same amount sliced off the leg. To buy it would have made us feel defeated by Florida.
Then a couple-three Sundays prior to the election, a colleague of Josette’s was coming over with his wife to drink on our porch. We’d forgotten they were coming till they texted at noon to confirm for six o’clock. Six meant apéro—all parties involved were French except me—and we wanted to serve them some good, small food that they could rest assured we hadn’t handled.
Here we saw our opportunity to buy the prosciutto without losing face. Along with their very own unopened package, each couple would, at their end of the table, have an uncut cantaloupe, a plastic box of shaved Grana Padano, and a brand-new bag of these crispy imported saltines we like.
We had to go to Publix anyway. We hadn’t been shopping since the previous weekend.
•
When the list is long, I’m in charge of the produce, not because I have a special talent for choosing it but because I take twice as much time as Josette to find things on shelves. If I finish before her, I go to the dairy case. The eggs, at least, are always where you think they’ll be. Ditto the butters.
So I went to the produce, where a sweaty, luminescently heat-rashed family in tank tops and Crocs were crowding the melons. By the time they dispersed, I’d found everything else: onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and apples.
There were dozens of cantaloupes from which to select. I knew that, unimpeded, ripe melon smells rotten, and overripe melon more rotten than that, so it stood to reason that overripe melon, through the barrier of a mask, should smell like ripe melon, whereas ripe melon shouldn’t smell at all.
Except unripe melon wouldn’t smell at all, either.
I slouched before the cantaloupes, perplexed and fatigued, stubbornly and incorrectly convinced that a sane, alternative way to choose was only one simple insight away.
Between the operability of my intellect and the amount of time that I’ve been wearing a mask, the correlation is negative.
Having worn the mask for about nine minutes, I was in a kind of sweet spot: punchy enough to consider lowering the mask to engage in naked sniffing, yet astute enough to see that (1) to do so would be reckless, and (2) I wouldn’t remain that astute for much longer.
I walked away without any cantaloupes.
•
Josette found me trying to locate mozzarella. She said, “You’re gonna start eating yogurt again?”
“They hide the mozzarella.”
She pointed it out. I put a couple in my cart. She frowned at the cart.
“Yeah, no cantaloupe for us,” I said. “It’s impossible.”
“I thought I saw a stack of them.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Then a man at the nearest snack-cake endcap sang, full throated, the chorus to Otis Redding’s worst song, but with different lyrics: “He’s sorry for the cantaloupe, bae!”
I’d normally have appreciated that kind of thing, and Josette would have, too, but this genius was wearing his mask on his wrist.
“This fucking guy,” Josette said. “I hate this fucking guy.”
“Fuck you, guy,” I said.
“He’d like to do me in the dock of my bay!” the guy sang, even louder, right as one of the pimpled, inbred simps who’d crowded the melons was passing between us, her cart full of Slim Jims and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the top of her mask folded under her nose. She paused beside the singer and told him she thought he had a beautiful voice.
“We lose,” Josette said.
“Not if they die soon, we don’t,” someone else said—an elderly woman standing behind me, reaching out over her basket for cream.
I cheered up a lot.
•
The prosciutto was a hit. No one seemed to miss the melons. We decided to drink more and order a pizza.
While I placed the order, Manon used our bathroom. When she came back outside, she told me our parrot was screaming my name.
“Levin?” Josette asked.
“No,” Manon said, laughing, “Adam.”
“He was doing this while I was in there, too!” Luc said.
Under the table, Josette kicked my ankle. She thought I should go in and tend to our parrot. I was comfortable, though, and we were entertaining guests, so I pretended I hadn’t noticed the kick. When she kicked me a second time, I crossed my legs.
•
I don’t teach our parrot words. He just picks them up, and only very occasionally. Mostly he whistles and beeps and shrieks.
“Levin,” like “Hello,” as well as most of the other words that he knows, means something like “I’m here with you,” or “Tell me you’re here with me,” or “Here we both are.” He’d been saying and screaming it for fifteen years.
“Adam,” however, he’d learned only after Josette moved in with us. It means he wants to be scratched at the base of his skull where neither his beak nor his claws can reach.
Rather, it means he wants me to scratch him there; anyone else who tries, he’ll bite.
•
In the delivery app, I’d added instructions for the driver to bring the pizzas round back, but fifty minutes later I received a text:
So I raced through the house to collect the pizza before an anole or a roach breached the box.
•
Our parrot was perching on the rope-covered branch attached to his cage top, and not saying anything, let alone my name. In fact, he ignored me in favor of his wing, the left, which his head was tucked under, and which he seemed to be preening with above-average vigor but was actually harming, though I couldn’t have imagined that was what he was doing, because I’m too stupid or coldly optimistic or willfully blind.
Passing by him again, now bearing the pizza, I said, “Hey there, man,” and he gave no response. An all-time first. That made me nervous.
“Hey!” I said.
Again: no response.
Then a number of times—maybe fewer than you’d think; surely more, however, than I’d like to admit—I shouted his name, until at last he stopped doing the thing that he’d been doing, which was plucking at the root of his left wing’s longest, bluest feather.
That is: I shouted his name until he’d plucked out his left wing’s longest, bluest feather.
At which point he faced me, stood on one foot, then removed with the raised foot the feather from his beak, leaned forward a little, inclining his head, and, while he scratched at his skull with the quill’s bloody end, said, “Adam Levin.” ♦
