Home > These Violent Delights(7)

These Violent Delights(7)
Author: Micah Nemerever

In the brief silence that followed, Paul still couldn’t bring himself to meet Julian’s eyes.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean to just . . .”

“It’s a raw nerve,” said Julian evenly. “You’re allowed them. For what it’s worth, there’s a reason I decided to go to college in a town where my parents don’t know anybody.”

Paul noticed distantly that he didn’t much care for the record Julian was playing. It was a girl singing in French, nothing he could object to in substance, but the cadence was poppy and simple in a way that he felt Julian oughtn’t to care for. The dislike elated him—it gave him something, however trivial, that he could politely overlook for Julian’s sake.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“DC.” Julian paused, then corrected himself. “Near DC. My father works at the State Department, but they live in a little village on the bay that ‘keeps the riff-raff out,’ as he says. Of course, according to the town charter, he’s riff-raff, but we’re pretending to be Episcopalian so that we’ll be allowed into the country club.”

Paul tried to conceal his fascination. “That’s,” he said carefully, “I mean, it’s very—”

“Don’t be diplomatic about it, it’s disgusting—I think he only married my mother because he was hoping the kids would turn out blond,” said Julian. “Not that she’s any better than he is, or she’d be chum in the water. She’s from France. Her father owns a bunch of department stores there—money’s so new you can still smell the ink, but they’re swimming in it. She’s on the board at MoMA and owns a gallery in New York, because I guess she needed a hobby.”

A few details in the room that had struck Paul as strange at first sight now began to make sense. The string of maritime signal flags pinned to the wall above the bed, clashing brightly with the room’s general asceticism; the crisp new wool of Julian’s winter coat and the conservative, prep-school shape of his clothes. These details rang false because they had been chosen by someone else, someone who lacked Julian’s wit and energy and his ability to ignore everything beneath his notice.

“It’s not tragic, or anything,” Julian was saying. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just tedious. I hope you won’t hold it against me—being, you know, a half-shiksa trust fund baby who’s never had to work for anything. I usually lie about it.”

Julian’s vulnerability was more calculated than it pretended to be, but Paul decided not to fight it.

“I’d never hold it against you,” Paul said. “I’ve actually been thinking this whole time how I can’t really make sense of you. You’re nothing like anyone else, and now I know it’s not because of where you come from. Nothing made you. You just are.”

He didn’t know before speaking how nakedly earnest the words would sound, but he only regretted it for a moment. One corner of Julian’s mouth went a little higher than the other when he smiled; Paul remembered something he’d read in his art history class last semester, about how the Japanese believed there was something poignant and endearing about asymmetry.

“Damn you, Fleischer,” said Julian. “Now I’m going to have to try and live up to that.”

 

 

3.

 


Paul could only forgive himself for keeping a journal if he told himself he was documenting history. He wrote it for an audience, one who would only read it after the end of a life he’d made significant. He imagined a future biographer poring through his juvenilia for the signs of future greatness, and how that person would perceive the moments of weakness and self-indulgence in between. In hindsight his frustrations and fears would be taken as evidence that he was still human—but in the present, before he’d made anything of himself, they meant he was only human.

A few weeks after his father’s death, Paul had launched and begun to document a variety of self-improvement projects designed to increase his mental and physical vigor—running times when the weather allowed, swimming times when it didn’t, synopses and excerpts from the enriching books and essays he read between the horror and science fiction he secretly preferred. Every few weeks he took himself up the Mount Washington funicular, resuming alone a ritual his father had led when Paul was little in an attempt to cure him of his fear of heights. When he reached the top, Paul had to stand on the observation deck, close enough to the railing to touch it with his elbows, until he was so shaky and light-headed that he had to retreat. His father had always rewarded this so-called bravery with an ice cream or a packet of baseball cards, no matter how much of a fool Paul had made of himself by running away or crying. Nowadays Paul brought his stopwatch with him, and he recorded the minutes and seconds he lasted before his crashing heartbeat pulled him back from the edge.

On bad days, there were no improvements to write down. On worse days he couldn’t even try to make himself better. But he wrote every day, even when all he could do was pick fights with a dead man. He resurrected long-ago arguments about his schoolwork or spats with classmates, things his father would never have remembered. He searched his memory for lies his father had told him, the gentle coddling lies parents always told their children, and none was so small that he couldn’t dissect it down to threads. When the fury burned so bright that he couldn’t bear to look, Paul curled over his desk with his head bowed close to the page, watching the pen move from the corner of his eye. He wrote long, ruthless lists. Reasons to stay alive, however little joy it brought. The same words appeared every time, duty and defiance and refusing to submit to weakness. Paul never let himself consider who he was trying to convince.

He tried to believe there was no shame in what he wrote, those days when he was too lead-limbed and numb to try to make himself stronger. Paul could be forgiven his unhappiness, even his fear, so long as one day he proved strong enough to overcome it. There was no surpassing himself unless he knew which parts of him deserved to be left behind. Paul imagined the summarizing sentences in his biography—how they would mark his sharpest turns of phrase, and marvel, in retrospect, at the resilience he’d showed.

The day after he first spoke to Julian Fromme, he took his journal out of the locked paint box he kept under his bed and opened it to a fresh white page. January 17, 1973, he wrote, more neatly than usual because he pictured the biographer making a note of it. Yesterday I met someone I believe will prove very important.

Paul didn’t know what Julian was destined for, but the promise of greatness marked every part of him. Even Julian didn’t seem to know—throughout the first few weeks Paul watched him breeze between interests and ambitions, and he became an expert on each one so quickly that it was as if he were born knowing everything. But he wasn’t aimless. His curiosity was ravenous, blazing in all directions like the sun. He wanted to write scathing treatises on human nature, empirical data on obedience and self-delusion, nocking neatly into Arendt’s bleak promises. He wanted to hone his Russian to a fine enough point to read Nabokov’s early works in the original, or else to become a spy. He had ideas for satirical novels about what he called the haute-bourgeoisie, because god knew his hometown had given him enough material. When he reviewed movies for the college newspaper, he was razor-precise, calling out long takes he liked and choppy editing that he didn’t—after all, if he ever became a film director, he had to know how to do it right.

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