Not knowing what to do, I ignored it. And not long after that, I moved. I broke my lease and moved into a new apartment located just above the Midtown Tunnel. Though I had decided by this time that I wanted to go to graduate school for English Literature, I still needed time to apply, which put me right back where I started: I needed a job. So when I saw an ad in the subway regarding a citywide teacher shortage, I figured since I couldn’t do, perhaps I might teach.
I got a job at a South Bronx public school so troubled that all the Teach for America recruits quit within the first month. Though I lacked the credentials, I was hired on the proviso that I enroll in education courses concurrently. And so I found myself all grown-up and firmly ensconced in a life that had nothing to do with any one of my very intricately designed daydreams.
I was a teacher by day, a student by night, and the serious girlfriend of a soon-to-be lawyer named Martin, whom I’d met one evening at Lex’s ’80s party. On the bright side, my new apartment, the one above the tunnel, had good closets, so I was able to stuff my T-shirts all the way in the back on a shelf behind the linens where, for a while, I never had to see them.
I finished out the year in the Bronx (the school, it was announced in spring, would be taken over by the state and restaffed), exaggerated my way into another job at a private school on the Upper West Side and, loading up on summer courses, earned my teaching certificate after two years. And then, just as things began to settle, just as it seemed the only thing left to do was get married and die, I broke it off with Martin, quit my job at the school, and moved again.
Packing all my things, the T-shirts were the last thing I found. Hundreds of them, stuffed in black garbage bags, evidence of a crime I could not forget. I couldn’t throw them out; I took them with me.
IV
My current apartment on West Tenth Street has a small walk-in closet. For the last year, I’ve been storing the T-shirts on a high shelf in the back. When I run out of clean underwear, I’ll pull out a pair of Bad Ass panties.
After pulling on one of fifty left-over Second Base T-shirts, I gather up my dirty clothes and head to the Laundromat. Around my neck, the cotton hangs heavy. I mean, they’re great shirts, don’t get me wrong, but they’re conversation starters, like the guy at the print shop said, and I don’t want to talk about it. But there lies my punishment.
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.
What is there to say? I shot the albatross and now I must wear it.
On my way out, I pick up a book of Coleridge poems. It’s for a course I’m taking on Romanticism in the graduate Humanities department at NYU, the only program that accepted me. With an undergraduate major in “Individualized Study,” my transcript—Fate and Free Will, Tai Chi, Voyages of Identity, Sense Memory, Poetry Writing, Tap—reads like the afternoon agenda at a posh mental health facility. Lacking the true English credits PhD programs require just to apply, I’ve had to enroll in this Humanities division. If college leaves most graduates unprepared for the real world, my degree, more ambitiously, has left me unprepared for academia to boot.
Anyway, I like being a student again, whiling away the hours in libraries and cafés, reading books I was supposed to have read back in college (Madame Bovary: I confess I only read the CliffsNotes.). “Youth is wasted on the young,” Shaw wrote. This is equally true of college. Certainly it’s the raison d’être of graduate students. But what does it matter what I study finally, when time is really what I’ve bought? Like I told the guy at the job fair, I’m working on a novel, that’s my main thing.
In addition to Romanticism, I’m taking a class called History of the Novel, which, it turns out, has been a controversial art since its inception. We’ve been reading all about Anthony Comstock’s banned books and yesterday had a long discussion about the growing fear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that novels were perverting the minds of the young, particularly the minds of very young girls. The professor distributed this text from an 1815 almanac:
The indiscriminate reading of Novels and Romances is to young females of the most dangerous tendency . . . it agitates their fancy to delirium of pleasure never to be realized . . . and opens to their view the Elysium fields which exist only in the imagination . . . fields which will involve them in wretchedness and inconsolable sorrow. Such reading converts them into a bundle of acutely feeling nerves and makes them “ready to expire of a rose in aromatic pain” . . . The most profligate villain, bent on the infernal purpose of seducing a woman, could not wish a symptom more favorable to his purpose than a strong imagination inflamed with the rhapsodies of artful and corrupting novels.
—T. E. C., JR., MD
After he finished reading it aloud, everyone was excited and a wonderfully interesting conversation ensued. Instead of leaping into the fray as I usually do, however, for a while I just listened. Looking around that safe, warm, wood-lined classroom, out the window of an old brownstone situated comfortably at the edge of Washington Square, and then back across the conference table, at the animated faces of my impassioned peers—eager full-time Humanities students like me, young, unemployed, would-be writers and poets, possessed by literature to the point of total incompetence—it hit me: The real danger of the novel is that it might make you want to write one yourself.
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
THE BASTARD FELIX
That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies.
ELIO VITTORINI, CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY
I
It goes like this: Felix will call from a noisy bar and tell me he’s in town, or from a mutual friend’s apartment telling me to come over, or from his car while en route to a party telling me to be downstairs in five minutes; he’s picking me up. If I decline, he’ll tell me it’s going to be so much fun that I can’t afford to miss it, and if I come and hang out with him and his friends for a few hours, it will be so much fun, I couldn’t have afforded to miss it. And then the night will wind down, and everyone will take off to their respective apartments, and Felix will give me a lift back to mine and end up staying for the next three or four days.
“Wake and bake!” he sings, when I find him in the kitchen watching Soul Train, making breakfast, and smoking what’s left of a joint. “It’ll help with your hangover,” he says, passing it to me. I exhale in a chain of rueful coughs. He pours me a glass of water from the tap. The Bastard Felix—my shame, my solace.
Like a child born out of wedlock, Felix is a roommate born without a lease, a bastard roommate whose origins are illegitimate. Under a mess of broken crackers, he just appeared on my couch one morning. Swaddled in my throw blanket, there was Felix gently snoring, the ignominious offspring of another long night of terrible fun.
I don’t much mind having a bastard, and Felix for his part is quite happy with the