Commonwealth(54)

“Where were you last night?” Jeanette would ask, and Albie would think, You missed me.

At first Albie went to bars and to movies on his nights out but quickly saw that bars and movies in New York could eat a day’s wages. He stayed at the library until the library closed, and then went to the Christian Science Reading Room until the Christian Science Reading Room closed, and then, depending on the quality of the book he was reading and the amount of speed still hopping him up, he went to the Laundromat that never closed and sat amid the dead moths and thumping dryers and the pervasive smell of dryer sheets. Because he had gotten to know the receptionists at the publishing houses where he delivered envelopes and asked them what they were reading, he always had books. There was no other place Albie delivered to or picked up from that ever gave him gifts, but the receptionists at publishing houses didn’t mind giving a copy of a book to a bicycle messenger, even the bicycle messenger of death.

“Tell me what you think of that,” one would say, and in return he would smile at her. Albie’s smile was a dazzling thing, the wonders of his childhood orthodontia never what one would expect from the rest of the package. With that smile the receptionist felt that she had been given a gift in return.

One night after midnight in the early part of June, Albie was in a Laundromat in Williamsburg. The taxis still rushed by but they were quieter. The people on the street were quieter. Albie was reading the novel he had started the day before, and in reading it he’d lost track of time. It was considerably better than the usual fare of detective stories and thrillers he read, because the receptionist at Viking tended to give him better books. She didn’t just give him what had come out that week either, though sometimes she gave him those too. She’d given him a copy of David Copperfield once and said she thought he’d like it, just like that, like he was the sort of person someone would look at and think of Dickens, and so he read it. It was a book he was supposed to read for school the year he was in Virginia. He had carried it around with him for a month, just like all the other kids in his class carried David Copperfield around, but he’d never cracked it. “If I’d known you when I lived in Virginia,” he told the receptionist after he’d finished it, “I might have passed the class.”

“You’re from Virginia?” she asked. Maybe she was his mother’s age, maybe a little younger, and she was smart, he could tell that. These conversations never lasted more than two or three minutes but he liked her. Albie had places to go and the telephone at her desk never stopped ringing. She picked it up and asked the person if she could put them on hold, which she did without waiting for an answer.

“Not from there,” he said. “I just lived there for a while when I was a kid.”

“Stay right here,” she said. “One second.” When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. “It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?”

Albie shook his head. Last year he was still in San Francisco, the money from messengering then going to heroin. A meteor could have taken out the Eastern Seaboard and he wouldn’t have known about it.

She turned the book over and tapped the tiny photograph of the man on the back. “It was the first book he’d written in fifteen years, maybe more than that. Everybody here had given up on him.” The phone rang. All the hold lights were blinking now. It was time to go back to work. She handed him the book and waved goodbye. He gave his head a small bow, smiling at her before he left.

In retrospect he would say that he knew right from the beginning, maybe the middle of the first chapter, that there was something going on, though everything is clear in retrospect. The nearer truth was that the book had taken hold of him long before he saw himself in it. That was the part that seemed so crazy, how much he had loved the book before he knew what it was about.

It was about two sets of neighbors in Virginia. One couple has been in their house a long time, the other couple has just moved in. They share a driveway. They get along well. They can borrow things from one another, watch each other’s kids. They sit on each other’s decks at night and drink and talk about politics. One of the husbands is a politician. The children—there are six of them altogether—wander in and out of each other’s houses, the girls sleep in one another’s beds. It was easy enough to see where things were going except that it wasn’t so much about the miserable affair. It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The children, who seem only to be atmospheric and charming at first, are more like a ball of snakes. The oldest and the youngest are boys and there are four girls between them. Two girls in the politician’s house, two girls and two boys for the doctor whom the politician is in love with. An extra husband, an extra wife. The youngest child, a son, is unbearable. Maybe that’s the real problem. He is emblematic of what can never be overcome. The lovers, with their marriages and houses and jobs, employ any trick to find a moment away together, but what they’re really trying to get away from is the children, and that youngest son in particular. The children, who are so often stuck with the youngest one, give him Benadryl in order to ditch him. The older son carries it in his pocket because he’s allergic to bee stings. They feed the little boy Benadryl and stuff him in the laundry basket under a pile of sheets so they can ride their bikes to the swimming pool in town unencumbered. Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?