Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

Fool, I said to myself. Depressive, raw-eyeballed pansy. Is that all you've got? That's what you had when you still lived on this street, when you were just a budding tristate artist manque. Now what are you? A botch of corpuscles. A waste of quarks. A carbon-based fuckwad. Purdy is better, Maura more right. Someday you will be a fat, grinning embarrassment to Bernie. Will you still pretend to be a painter? Will you still pretend to be a person?

"Milo?"

My mother's voice carried softly from the kitchen.

"Hey."

"Everything okay out there?"

"Sure, why?"

"I just heard this, I don't know, grumbling."

"Oh, sorry. I stubbed my toe."

"Sitting there?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, okay."

The door slid back and I stood.

"Wait!" I wailed.

It's an odd sensation to weep in your mother's lap for the first time in thirty years. It's not the same lap. It's smaller, more fragile. Bonier and tinier. I was afraid my head might hurt her lap. I was afraid her lap wouldn't help my head.

But it did. Claudia cradled me, stroked my hair, cooed: "It's all right, baby. It's all right." It was not all right, not really, but this hardly mattered. My mother was stroking my hair. My mother's lover, at the end of the sofa, kneaded my feet.

"Thanks, Francine."

"My pleasure, Milo."

Soon I was all cried out. I remembered the sensation, felt it frequently as a child, each time I was denied a toy or a chance to play with somebody else's toy or informed that another slice of pineapple pizza was not in the offing. You cried and you cried and then you really couldn't cry anymore. You got wrung, husked. It was that voluptuous emptiness you read about in old books, or old-seeming books that would use the word "voluptuous" that way, a strange, soaring, dead puppet exultation I could never quite explain. I had last felt it a few months after my father died.

Nobody had died just now. The stuff had just welled up in me, up to the eyes, as they used to say, not that I was sure anymore who "they" were.

Who's on first? Self-Pitying Twit. Third base.

More than anything it was just so very good to be stroked and kneaded by my mother and Francine. It was just so very nice to be kneaded in Nearmont. Too bad I couldn't live here with them. But I was not welcome here forever. That's what made me welcome now. I was being readied for release. I would have to drag my botched ass back into the world. Francine was Claudia's family. Bernie, and maybe Maura, was mine.

"I love you," I mumbled into my mother's jeans.

"I know that, honey."

"I'm sorry."

"What are you sorry about?"

"Me. Spidercunt. Everything."

"I forgave you a long time ago."

"And I forgive you, Mom."

"But I don't want your forgiveness, silly boy."

Francine dug lint out from under my pinky toe.

Purdy's chef wore the sideburns of a Vegas legend. They poked down below his purple toque. He lurched around Purdy's enormous Tribeca kitchen with some kind of digital cleaver, shouted into a wire that fell from his ear. He cursed himself, his food, the kitchen, his crew. He castigated various assistants en route with ingredients, though I wondered how much these outbursts counted as theater for the half-dozen party guests gathered near the cutting boards.

"Leave it to a fucking Turk to forget the tarragon!" he said into his wire. "Soon as you get here I'm handing you a ticket back to Istanbul. Freight. You can go back to work in that fusion nightmare I found you in, though perhaps you'd be better off sterno-braising anchovies for the smugglers in stir, you greasy bastard."

"Must be gunning for his own show," said the man beside me, a handsome silver-haired fellow in a pink polo shirt. He had the collar of his polo shirt up. Maybe he liked it that way, or else it was some kind of comment about people who liked it that way. When it came to sartorial irony, the rich had it tough.

"A cooking show?" I said.

"A screaming show," said the man.

"I have an idea for a cooking show," I said.

"Good for you," said the man, and walked away.

A few more moments of baster-based antics and I followed the him into a space the size of a small ballroom. Purdy's parlor was a design-porn paradise. Here twinkled every chrome and leather marvel Maura had ever circled with affecting sanguinity in her catalogs, all the sofas and chaises and cabinets and floor lamps we could never afford. That was half the room. The other brimmed with mahogany bookshelves and gleaming antique credenzas and Persian rugs. One end was for high-tech pleasures, the other for reading Gibbon while getting blown in a wingback chair.

I walked over to the liquor table, to a young barman in a braided jacket.

"Scotch rocks," I said.

It was not my drink, but then again, this was not my world.

"Okay?" said the barman, pointed to a handle of inexpensive blended whisky beside the silver ice bucket.

"No," I said. "It's not okay."

Always it had been okay, but not tonight. Something had changed. I had demands. Certain people might have called it personal growth. These were the scumbags the new me would learn to admire.

The barman shrugged, squatted, came up with a bottle by the same distiller. The label was another color. This was the good stuff. The better stuff. The kid poured me an important man's pour.

"Thanks," I said.

"You're welcome, sir."

"Do you do this full-time?"

"I'm still a student."

"What do you study?"

"Bartending."

"Oh."

"Mr. Stuart always hires student bartenders."

"What a saint."

"I guess it's a lot cheaper, yeah," said the barman. "But it gives us a chance to practice in an LLS."

"A what?"

"A live liquor situation."

"Right."

"Milo!" called a voice. "Over here!"

Here it was, here they were, for to see them stand together, even as they beckoned, made it clear for all time how much I was not of them. There was Purdy, tall, becalmed, nothing like the fiendish candy-store man or the late-night dialer I'd come to know, his taut arm slung over the shoulder of an even taller fellow, bald, with fringes of curly hair: Billy Raskov. Billy looked better bald. Others I did not recognize stood with them, Purdy still the nucleus, the germ seed, the one who could somehow corral us all into a mood of sweet boisterousness, private pangs be damned.

"Milo!"

Another man joined Purdy's group just as I did. We shook hands, but somebody nearby squealed and I caught only the end of Purdy's introduction.

". . farb."

"Farb?" I said.

"Goldfarb."

"Of course," I said.

He'd been a messy gangle back on Staley Street. Now he was lean, handsome, with the mien of a racing animal.

"Goldfarb," said the man.

"I know," I said. "Charles Goldfarb."

"That's right, Milo. I'm surprised. I figured if you ever saw me again you'd want to deck me."

"What are you talking about?"

"You don't know?"

"No," I said.

"Come on, Charlie," said Purdy. "Stop teasing. Charlie, Milo, this is Lisa and Ginny. They're friends from the building."

We did our dips, our pivots, our mock-bashful waves. Purdy raised his glass.

"I'm glad we're all here. Dinner is going to be great."

"It better be," said Lisa. "That man in your kitchen is a dick."

"Nice to see you, Milo," said Billy Raskov. His trademark slur was gone. It made me wonder if it ever existed. Maybe I'd imagined it all these years. Maybe that's why I'd always gotten odd looks whenever I brought up his feigned Parkinson's.

"You too, Billy," I said, glanced back at Goldfarb. "I'm sorry, I guess I'm confused."