Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

And really, that should have been the end of my story with Victor. Over the months his problems began to seem less exciting, less mysterious, less vivid , than they had at first. For one, there were new children, who would prove challenging in different, more understandable ways. A year after I adopted Victor, I added to my family another child, a boy, whom I named Whitney. He, like Victor, was underfed and undersocialized, but unlike Victor, he was wild — a screecher and a tantrumer. In other words, he was easy to discipline and swift to improve. Still, after Whitney, I decided to take a break from adopting children. (It is curious to me now that I thought of my decision in exactly those terms: I would, I resolved, take a break from children, but I was somehow unable or unwilling to admit the truth: that I had long ceased to derive that joy I so desired from a new child’s arrival, that I should simply stop adding them to my life.)

Consequently, those years, between, say, 1982 and 1985, were very pleasant ones for me. A batch of the children went away to college, and suddenly the house was empty (or at least emptier than it had been in a long time), and I was able to travel, often and for extended periods, both to places I’d long wanted to go and to places I hadn’t visited in years. One weekend I left the children at home under Mrs. Lansing (after more than fifteen years of tending to my children, Mrs. Tomlinson decided to retire, giving me the telephone number of her sister-in-law, a similarly capable woman named JoAnne Lansing, before she did) and went to see Owen at Bard, where he had just begun teaching. We spent a very nice few days together, Owen and I, as well as a boy 77—one of his students, I believe — whom he was dating at the time.

But in 1986 I was seized by — what? A sort of boredom, I suppose, or else a madness (or was it simply my old yearning?), and traveled once more to U’ivu, where I spent a few listless days trekking over the island and charting its ongoing decline. And when I returned to Maryland, I found myself doing so with a set of twins, Jared and Drew, as well as a girl, Kerry. Suddenly my life once again seemed to elude my grasp, and three years later I was almost horrified to find myself with an entire new generation of children; it was almost as if they had multiplied one night when I was asleep. Indeed, it seemed a far more plausible explanation than the truth: that I had, for some inexplicable set of reasons I could not quite articulate to myself, repopulated my life with a dozen new existences, all of whom I would have to witness trundling through the multitudinous steps of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I began to wonder seriously whether I had something of a tic. How was it, I thought, that I found myself now with more children, when only a few years before I had been anxiously waiting for the house to empty of them so that my life, alone, unburdened, might finally begin anew? Why was I incapable of stopping? What was I hoping each new one might provide me that the previous thirty-odd had not? What was it that I wanted?

II.

In retrospect — when it is so easy to blame oneself for everything that has gone wrong — I realize that I should not have been so complacent about, so accepting of, Victor’s apparent maturation without first finding a way to properly control him, a way of exerting my authority that he would understand and respect. But something had changed. Once I would have wanted to discover why Victor behaved the way he did, but that was no longer true; by the time he had begun to behave appropriately, I was merely relieved that he had learned to be manageable and that he had left certain behavior behind. I began to realize that I was bored, or rather, that I had lost my taste for the whole occupation of child-raising. I was no longer interested in solving the formerly intriguing puzzles of my children’s psyches. I no longer cared why one shrieked hysterically when confronted with coffeepots or why another cowered at the sight of the orange juice in its sweating, frosted bottle. Before, I would have spent many contented days mulling over the (usually unhappy) possible events and narratives that had resulted in such reactions; I often thought of them as bright, snappy little mindbenders, rubber bands to mentally stretch and tease when I was taking a break from the real work that filled my day. And such petty quandaries were in their own way immensely fulfilling, for they satisfied much of what I considered the romance of child-rearing: that it should at times be puzzling and elusive and problematic, that each child was a being who could be understood and, if need be, led in one direction or another. Indeed, when I had adopted Muiva, in 1968, the prospect of raising a child had seemed both tantalizing and rich with wonder: to have as one’s charge something both knowable and not, at once predictable and full of startling surprises, seemed to promise unimaginable adventure, dozens of daily revelations wrought in miniature.

And for many years, for decades even, it had. But then (again, in creeping stages I would not recognize until they were long past) things began, inevitably, to change. For one thing, I found myself growing old. In 1984 I turned sixty, and the lab threw me a small birthday party, something that, given my frequent and sustained absences, I had been able to avoid every year previously. Still, it was not so awful. Two of the institute’s emeritus professors came, both offering me ironic congratulations (they were both past eighty, after all), and there was a Lady Baltimore cake with buttercream frosting and some not terrible brandylike liquor that one of the more refined fellows had been developing in his idle time. 78One of the techs wove around the desks with a camera, taking pictures of the festivities, and I found myself, unexpectedly, having an enjoyable time.

The next week, a plain brown envelope was left on my desk, and inside it was a picture of a man whom I at first could not identify. He looked familiar, and for an instant I wondered if he was someone I had encountered not long before and liked despite myself: he had a slant of marrow-colored hair, a simpering smile, and huge, bready hands, each finger as yeasty as a rolled pastry. But of course the picture was of me, and I stared at it, teetering between dismay and a sort of clinical curiosity, for some minutes. I had never had the inclination or the freedom to spend a great deal of time considering my appearance, but there was, I realized, something obscene and horrific about my girth, the rind of fat that had grown around my midsection, about the way my lips appeared thickened and oddly mauve, the way the folds of fat at my neck lay in heavy pleats as if I were some clumsy, flightless bird. What was most striking to me was the apparent absence of any bone structure at all; indeed, it looked as if I had been fashioned from a soft block of sweating lard. Age — and the thought of aging — had never particularly upset me, but I was depressed upon seeing that picture and contemplating the decay of my body and my knowledge of its apparently disgusting appearance. Of course I had noticed that I was growing old, that memories were no longer as crisp as they had been, that I found myself breathing through my mouth after mounting the stairs to my room, that my sleeping patterns had grown erratic. But it was not until I saw that picture that I was able to understand how stealthy and cruel age’s progress was, how noticeable and irreversible the decay. Oh god , I thought, there will be another fifteen or twenty years of this, and every year will grow worse . Suddenly the thought of my life, its relentless march forward, seemed almost unbearably oppressive. And I could not forget that were I somewhere else, I would have been feted not with cake but with an opa’ivu’eke of my own, and I imagined myself at the fire’s edge, Tallent beside me, the turtle’s mounded back being slowly dragged into view, moving ever closer to me.