E. Doctorow: Andrew's Brain

Well, I was only asking.

You lack empathy, you don’t know when to stop asking me these things. You can’t imagine what it was like having her but never forgetting for a moment my killing ineptitude. That I would be at my most dangerous when blissfully happy. How I had to concentrate moment by moment, examine my actions, everything I did, living attentively with the minutiae, watching myself every waking minute, attending carefully, ritualistically, to everything I did so as not to become Andrew the Pretender. I can’t talk to you anymore, it is too painful. You don’t get it. Just speaking her name destroys me. I can no longer hear her voice.

You, with the ear for voices?

I can still summon the voices of my long-dead mother and father. I can hear their voices quite well if only for a fading moment. What I hear is their moral nature. My mother’s practicality. My father’s sad evasiveness. Their moral nature is in the remembered voices of the dead. It is what is left of the dead that is still them, that fragment of the voice that renders a moral nature though the rest of the person is gone.

But her voice, Briony’s voice, is gone, you say? You don’t hear it? Maybe that’s why for my part I can’t seem to get a fix on her. I get your voice, your feeling what you think and feel about her. It’s as if it’s in the way, your voice. What was she like, except for her athleticism? And she was a math major? They go together, perhaps, the math, the gymnastics. Doing geometry on the parallel bars.

Who said she was a math major? How did you know that?

Didn’t you say—?

Are you CIA?

Really, Andrew.

I don’t know why I talk to you.

Martha I feel as if I know from your description of the way she acted. But Briony doesn’t come through to me.

She was a younger person, Briony, still becoming herself. Innocently smart. Unaffected. She didn’t act as if she felt especially pretty. She was intensely physical, as grown children are. When she liked something it was passionately. She had favorite books, favorite bands. She worked at her studies. She could write a grammatical sentence — you know how rare that is in an undergraduate? She believed in her life, her future.

I see.

Martha was being, Briony was becoming. What kind of a shrink are you who has to be told this? You have the heartlessness of someone living vicariously. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it, living vicariously through me. I am grist for your mill. Jesus! Don’t you have a life of your own?

Not really.

I’m not clear on the time here. When did you and Briony marry?

We never married.

She was your wife.

Of course she was my wife, but we never married. We never got around to it. We never got past the intense feeling for each other that you have to get past in order to legally marry. In our minds we were married. We didn’t need anyone else to tell us we were. We were Andy and Bri. One day I went to the Saturday football game, and there she was, of course, atop the cheerleader pyramid, and doing a swan dive into all their arms at the end of the cheer.

I should have known …

Meanwhile there he was, the lout, padded and helmeted, leading his team out of the huddle, glancing disdainfully at the defenders, running off his plays with calm authority and moving his team efficiently down the field. I watched as he threw the football forty yards in the air, a perfect spiral right into the arms of his receiver. Touchdown. Twenty thousand people leapt to their feet, and roared, the college band struck up a victory march, some idiot in an ape costume danced a jig in front of the stands, and I realized I had stepped into a powerful tribal culture here, and if I was going to extract her from it I had some thinking to do.

I seem to recall your saying the lout didn’t have a chance once you entered the picture.

Well, after all, I was Andrew, he of the dark mournful eyes. Even as I lectured provocatively, they shone with a glistening cry for help. To Briony this was personhood on display. The vulnerability of the teacher at the lectern was a new classroom experience for her. She stared at me, she was attentive. [ thinking ] I’d known since high school that women were attracted to me. My first girlfriend was a zoology nerd at the Bronx High School of Science. She said I had the eyes of a langur. After school we went to her apartment, where her parents weren’t home, and we made out.

Because of your languorous eyes.

Well, that and the mop of curly hair, though by now it has lost its color. I have always been good-looking in a kind of weak-jawed way. And I had attitude. I was one of those wise-ass high school kids, loose-limbed and scornful of everything. The fact is, Doc, that I’ve had a lot of success with women. But this with Briony was different. Overwhelming. An abrupt neural resetting wherein I found myself with an immense capacity for love. Much later, when we were living together — actually, we had gone out for a celebratory dinner — we had just learned that she was pregnant — Briony admitted to a revolutionary experience of her own: Andy, she said, I realized one day in class that I’d been waiting for you. And there you were. There was such recognition. It was as if this was only the latest of our lives, she said.

But at this point, here at the peak of the Wasatches, I only knew how I felt. It wouldn’t do to be careless. I needed to know more before making my move. More of what, I didn’t know. [ thinking ]

What?

Emil Jannings.

What?

I didn’t want to be Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel . You remember that movie? The professor who falls in love with this cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich and ends up as a clown in her sleazy act, crowing “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” He gives up everything to marry her and of course she screws around. His life is ruined, job, dignity, it’s all gone. He staggers back to his empty classroom one night and dies at his desk. You mean you never saw that?

No.

At least he had his desk.

Of course Briony could not be compared to a decadent Weimar cabaret singer. On the other hand I knew I could accomplish whatever it took to destroy myself. I could imagine her staring at me in a kind of end-of-it-all sorrow as I did the Far West equivalent of a cock-a-doodle-doo dive off the mountaintop. As we sat to catch our, or rather my, breath, and drank our bottled water, I said to her, Briony, not many people could have persuaded me to climb up here.

But, Professor, it’s good and aren’t you glad you did? Don’t you feel happy? Because a climb like this gets the good brain hormones going.

I said: Please don’t call me Professor, call me Andrew. That’s what the other students call me, after all.

She smiled. OK, I will, then. Andrew. I don’t know what to make of you, Pro— I mean Andrew. I’ve never met anyone like you before.

Howso, I said.

I don’t know. I’m not bored with you. No, that isn’t the word, I’m not bored in my life, I’ve got too much to do to be bored—

That was true, she had her classes, her gymnastics, her cheerleading, she waited table in the faculty dining room and on weekends she put in hours at a local old people’s home.

— but your moodiness, she said, I don’t know, that’s so unusual, a powerful thing, almost like your way of life. And it’s such a personal way to be up in front of a class. It almost seems like a strength, like someone who has an affliction and is brave about it. When it’s just, I don’t know, a worldview that’s very solemn.

And I said: Briony, I think if we carry this as far as I’d like to, I will end up depressing you into marrying me.

Oh, how she laughed! And I with her. At that moment we were no longer teacher and student. She must have realized this because she grew quiet, not looking at me. She made a ceremonious thing of unscrewing her water bottle and holding it to her lips. I detected the faintest flush on her throat. [ thinking ]