Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

Before the rest of life there were hijinks, the joys of brash ignorance and selfishness. But he did not begrudge them their entertainment. It was increasingly clear to him that the company of straight men was seldom a pleasure for other straight men. What the fraternities offered was a last gasp of boyhood before the assumption of a purely adult identity, one that for most would bring loneliness. To each other, men were useful mostly for business: and it was through their ranks that he must move on his forward trajectory, for they held the reins. But most of them lacked important social skills beyond the manipulation of power; most were unable to muster even the pretense of intimacy with others of their gender. This was particularly true among the wealthier classes, where, absent a clear oppressor, there was little need for solidarity.

Moreover most men, he suspected, agreed with him, though they seldom admitted it. Their peers were largely competitors; their wives became all they knew, socially. This was why after they married they rarely looked beyond their houses again, unless it was for the purpose of changing wives. Meanwhile, at their sides but otherwise occupied, the wives maintained a wide array of friends.

And it became clear to him that his early mentors-the founders, the dead sages of the judiciary-did not have modern counterparts in government. The great roofs that had sheltered them were raised now not over heads of state but over the motile geniuses of corporate novelty; these men now wore the mantles formerly worn by the fathers of the nation-state. They held up economies and reshaped them at will. After the robber barons had come the technophile visionaries, the practical philosophers of earning, and they, not the government men, were the new kingmakers.

He read their bestsellers.

Meanwhile the discipline of watching stocks, keeping up with his classes and managing the welfare of his peers kept him busy, and he was seldom melancholy. And if, when he was roasted along with his fellow fraternity officers shortly before graduation, he felt slightly needled by the remarks about his stodginess, the allusions to Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons, the denigration of his manhood implied by such terms as monk and eunuch in reference to his lack of prurient interest in the fairer sex, he gave no evidence of such. He laughed at every boyish jab and raised his tumbler of Glemorangie from his seat at the head table, and when the fraternity president dealt him a manly clap on the shoulder during the applause he only smiled and shook his head with good humor, to say: How cleanly have the arrows met their mark.

Five months after he left the fraternity and the small green town he made his first six-figure profit, not in fact by tradingwhich he would subsequently give up as a job, though not as an avocation-but by brokering the sale of a derelict apartment building.

It was a building on a beach in south Florida, owned by an aging heiress whose long-dead father had made his fortune growing sugarcane in the Everglades; T. had met the heiress at school through his father, who had pledged with her son Brad. He visited her after graduation, out of politeness, and she offered him the commission. In this way all the hours of his indentured servitude, his careful stewardship of the brothers and many small defenses of their honor were repaid instantly.

Shortly before the sale Brad took him on a tour of the old sugarcane plantation, where they stepped over piles of crumbling yellow brick that had once been the walls of a manor house and looked out over a soggy field of cattails. By way of explaining the recent repossession of his BMW-it had left him driving a cheap rental car for which he felt the need to apologize-Brad gestured to the canefields and said, smirking, "Big Sugar belong to Big Mama."

On behalf of the mother, and for a modest percentage, T. sold the building to a hotel chain at a price far beyond her original asking.

Several weeks later the gentle old lady sank into a coma, leaving Brad crowing with glee at his suddenly liquid assets and believing firmly that T.-whom he called "this serious, intense guy," because T. did not laugh at his jokes-had been his salvation. His patronage, and the praise he repeated in various old-boy circles, would prove vital to T.'s fledgling enterprise.

Around the same time the nightly news was prone to show millions succumbing to famine, far away in a sandy country. More popular than the news was a sit-com about an arrogant bartender and a frigid waitress, which T. watched every week with a female neighbor. He was living near Wall Street in a bare suite of rooms in a high rise; the neighbor was an emaciated model who got into the habit of dropping by with a bottle of bad wine and a packet of good cocaine exactly five minutes before the program began. The cocaine was for her; he partook of the wine; and there was a tacit agreement for sex when the program ended. The model, doe-eyed, quiet, and with low self-esteem, made no demands on him beyond their weekly appointment. When they passed in the hallway in the days between, she slouched past him with her head down and her doe eyes averted.

"Hey," he said once, for an experiment. She nodded almost imperceptibly and shrank back against the wall.

He regarded the arrangement cautiously, grateful for her favors but reluctant to take them for granted, and his caution proved well-founded. After an episode in which the bartender proposed to the waitress and was refused, and before an episode in which the waitress spied on the bartender's date with another woman, his neighbor was found in her kitchen with open veins. The man who discovered her was apparently her boyfriend. She was carted off to rehab and would never return to the building.

For a week or two T. watched the program alone; then he stopped. He thought of the model with remorse and slight wonder: but there was no place for him in any of it.

He called his parents' house a few days after she left. His mother could barely muster the energy to speak to him, preferring only to listen. This had become commonplace between them. She claimed that she liked him to call, that she wanted to hear what he was doing: but when he did call the conversation was purely one-sided. He recited a litany of his activities into the receiver, falling into a rhythm defined by her silences; for when he asked what was new in her own life he would invariably hear, "Oh, you know, dear. Nothing much." This he would counter with a further inquiry-"Well, then, what have you been doing?" — but this would meet with the same answer, until he gave up asking. It was as though nothing much stretched through her days, nothing much united and guided them: in the whole of her experience there was never event.

His father was always busy or sleeping or engrossed in a television show, and did not come to the phone at all.

Soon he decided he needed a change. It would have to be New York or Los Angeles, since these were where both life and business happened; and so he moved to southern California, where he incorporated for the purpose of buying and selling real estate.

He liked the curving drive up the rocky coast from the angels to the Franciscans, sweeping past on his left the wide-open Pacific, on his right the rolling hills of chaparral that cost a thousand dollars per square foot. He liked the fact that speculators tended to ignore the foreshortened future of the hills, their promise of imminent collapse by mudslide, quake or fire.

And when he struck out east across the inland empire to the desert of Palm Springs, the air-conditioning in his S-Class raising goose bumps on his skin, he felt a legion of tycoons riding shotgun. He could almost detect their quaint presence in gas stations along the barest stretches of the freeway. There behind the counter, where sparkles in the white formica leant an air of yesteryear, sat a disheveled Howard Hughes bent over a bottle of milk; or there beside the newspaper rack stood William Randolph Hearst, paging though a tabloid. He grew to see greatness in open space, which fostered the illusion of a last frontier; for out West, where there were few monuments to the founders of the Republic, there was instead a breathless intuition of novelty.