Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. Why would I have preferred a fight? Weren’t those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought? Wasn’t I married to a man I loved, so why did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt when I helped him bring in bowls of Häagen-Dazs from the kitchen? In retrospect, I was quite right to kick myself, too. Just a few years later I’d have paid money for an ordinary, good-spirited family gathering during which the worst thing any of the children got up to was sticking gum in their hair.

You, however, announced boisterously in the lobby, “That was great. I think they’re both terrific. We should be sure to have them over soon, if they can get a sitter.”

I held my tongue. You would have no time for my nit-picking about how wasn’t the luncheon a little bland, didn’t you have this feeling like, what’s the point, isn’t there something flat and plain and doughy about this whole Father Knows Best routine when Brian was once (at last I can admit to a guest-room quickie at a party before you and I met) such a hell-raiser. It’s quite possible that you felt exactly as I did, that this to all appearances successful encounter had felt dumpy and insipid to you as well, but in lieu of another obvious model to aspire to—we were not going to go score a gram of cocaine—you took refuge in denial. These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time . To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnamable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turn up their noses at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks—what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

As we spun through the revolving doors onto Riverside Drive, I’m sure my disquiet was unformed and fleeting. Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be —your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.

I proposed that we walk home. On the road for Wing and a Prayer I walked everywhere, and the impulse was second nature.

“It must be six or seven miles to Tribeca!” you objected.

“You’ll take a taxi in order to jump rope 7,500 times in front of the Knicks game, but a vigorous walk that gets you where you’re going is too exhausting.”

“Hell, yes. Everything in its place.” Limited to exercise or the strict way you folded your shirts, your regimens were adorable. But in more serious contexts, Franklin, I was less charmed. Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.

So I threatened to walk home by myself, and that did it; I was leaving for Sweden three days later, and you were greedy for my company. We roistered down the footpath into Riverside Park, where the ginkgoes were in flower, and the sloping lawn was littered with anorexics doing tai chi. Ebullient over getting away from my own friends, I stumbled.

“You’re a drunk,” you said.

“Two glasses!”

You tsked. “Middle of the day.”

“I should have made it three,” I said sharply. Your every pleasure rationed except television , I wished that sometimes you would let go, as you had in our salad days of courtship, arriving at my door with two pinot noirs, a six of St. Pauli Girl, and a lecherous leer that did not promise to hold off until we’d flossed.

“Brian’s kids,” I introduced formally. “They make you want one?”

“M-m-maybe. They’re cute. Then, I’m not the one who has to stuff the beasties in the sack when they want a cracker, Mr. Bunnikins, and 5 million drinks of water.”

I understood. These talks of ours had a gameliness, and your opening play was noncommittal. One of us always got lodged into the role of parental party pooper, and I had rained on the progeny parade in our previous session: A child was loud, messy, constraining, and ungrateful. This time I bid for the more daring role: “At least if I got pregnant, something would happen .”

“Obviously,” you said dryly. “You’d have a baby.”

I dragged you down the walkway to the riverfront. “I like the idea of turning the page is all.”

“That was inscrutable.”

“I mean, we’re happy? Wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure,” you concurred cautiously. “I guess so.” For you, our contentment didn’t bear scrutiny—as if it were a skittish bird, easily startled, and the moment one of us cried out Look at that beautiful swan! it would fly away.

“Well, maybe we’re too happy.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I wish you could make me a little more miserable.”

“Stop it. I’m talking about story. In fairy tales, ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is the last line.”

“Do me a favor: Talk down to me.”

Oh, you knew exactly what I meant. Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

We slowed by the tennis courts in the blaze of April sunlight, pausing to admire a powerful slice backhand through a gap in the green mesh windbreaks. “Everything seems so sorted out,” I lamented. “Wing and a Prayer has taken off so that the only thing that could really happen to me professionally is for the company to go belly-up. I could always make more money—but I’m a thrift-shop junkie, Franklin, and I don’t know what to do with it. Money bores me, and it’s starting to change the way we live in a way I’m not totally comfortable with. Plenty of people don’t have a kid because they can’t afford one. For me it would a relief to find something of consequence to spend it on.”

“I’m not of consequence?”

“You don’t want enough.”

“New jump rope?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Well,” you conceded, “at least a kid would answer the Big Question.”

I could be perverse, too. “What big question?”

“You know,” you said lightly, and drew out with an emcee drawl, “the old e-e-existential dilemma.”

I did not put my finger on why, but your Big Question left me unmoved. I far preferred my turn of the page . “I could always traipse off to a new country—”

“Any left? You go through countries the way most folks go through socks.”