We Are Not Ourselves(192)
He became a reliable fixture in the lobby. He knew all the shareholders’ names and apartment numbers. He knew the names of their kids who came home from college on the weekends. He knew their nannies’ names, the names of their masseuses who arrived with portable tables, the names of the lovers they never discussed. He kept their secrets and knew the front desk like a mole knows its burrow. As soon as a familiar figure appeared in front of the building, he had his finger on the button to hold open the appropriate elevator door. When someone unfamiliar approached, he had the intercom receiver in his hand, ready to put it to his ear and hit the proper buzzer.
He could tell his presence made a few shareholders uncomfortable. It would have been easier for them if he spoke halting English or hadn’t gone to college or hadn’t gone to a good college or looked a little Balkan or Mexican. To avoid fanning the low flame of their unease, he talked as little as possible about himself. The summer kids were one thing; they caused a temporary ripple in the waters of class identity and were tolerated, even indulged. By collecting a decent check and moving along to good schools, sometimes even schools the shareholders’ children didn’t get into, they confirmed the rightness of the shareholders’ way of life and the durability of their meritocratic ideals.
His mother pressed him about graduate school or another line of work. How could he explain that he’d never finished college, after all the money she’d spent on his education? He heard her talking as though through a body of water, the sounds muffled by some mysterious viscosity in his spirit. He felt his mind working slowly, his imagination straining. He felt himself becoming thicker all over.
The one purely bright spot in his failed last year of college had been the time he’d spent tutoring Delores. He started giving time to Mr. Marku’s kid Peter, who was in eighth grade now and hadn’t gotten anything lower than a ninety since third grade. Connell drilled him on vocabulary words and sat him in the little room off the lobby and made him practice taking standardized tests.
Over Thanksgiving break, the college freshmen dropped in like conquering heroes and asked to see Mr. Marku, who came out and gave them big hugs that made Connell unaccountably jealous. They deferred to Connell like a cool older brother, but he didn’t feel cool, and their condescension stung.
He shared an apartment in Greenpoint with a guy he’d met through Todd Coughlin, his old cross-country teammate, whom he’d run into at a concert at the Bowery Ballroom and who lived across the hall. In the evenings, he went to galleries, parties, shows. He dated a girl named Violet, an actress who worked as a bartender. She never questioned his choice of a job, only assumed it was a temporary solution while he figured out the creative direction of his life.
He wrote a check to his mother to pay down some of the college loan principal. She ripped it up in front of him. “Don’t do this on my account,” she said. “I took this tuition on. Don’t think you can pay your loans back and not have to feel guilty about staying at that job.”
He couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t gone back to school in the fall. Partly it felt as if returning would be a lie; as if it would be making a promise to himself, or to his mother, that he couldn’t keep. Then there was the matter of telling his mother he hadn’t graduated in the first place. It wasn’t that he didn’t care to do anything ambitious with his life; he just wasn’t sure what that ambitious thing was yet.
After a few months had passed, the cup of guilt he’d been carrying around—for having gone away when his father needed him, for letting him go into a home—simply dried up, and he was left holding the empty vessel of his routine. He’d stopped feeling he was living someone else’s life, but he hadn’t started feeling he was living his own.
He never checked his bank balance, just kept depositing the checks. There was always enough to pay the bills. He didn’t want to consider the long-term implications of his financial decisions, because the idea of so many years strung together—twenty years, thirty years, forty years—filled him with terror.
In early January, when Peter Marku was admitted to Regis, Connell felt a surge of joy. He wanted Peter to grab the world by the throat, and he took pride in having helped him.
He was invited to a celebratory dinner at the Markus’ apartment. He found it remarkable how quickly he forgot that it was his boss’s quarters. It could have been any Park Avenue apartment. A couple of times the intercom rang, and Mr. Marku rose to answer it. Tony brought a large envelope to the door. Otherwise, it was as if Connell were a valued tutor who had been invited into their home as a reward for his role in securing their son’s advancement. They ate ravioli, shared a couple of bottles of wine, and polished off a delicious cake that Mrs. Marku said was traditionally Albanian.
As they sipped their coffee, Connell looked at Peter’s proud face. The boy’s gratitude was palpable, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t, because Connell knew the difference he’d made. That was when it struck him, all at once, that he would very much like to be a teacher. The thing to shoot for, of course, was a college professorship. Even if he managed to get into a decent doctoral program, though—he would have to get his BA first—he wasn’t sure he could survive it. He had enjoyed writing papers in college, but he didn’t have the zest for the professional side of academia—the specialization, the obsessive focus on publication. The most he could hope to do would be to teach high school. That wouldn’t do, though: every generation was supposed to do better than the previous one; every man was expected to surpass the achievements of his father. If he were to become a high school teacher, he would have to accept that he’d never be as successful as his father had been. His mother wanted big things from him, and instead he was manning the door at a building. But at least at the moment he inhabited something that must have looked to the outside world like a chrysalis. If he did this thing he was now imagining doing with his life—which he could now see he might enjoy quite a lot, this helping people through the thorny thicket of adolescence—he would not only remain a disappointment, he would be a bigger disappointment than ever.