The Road to the Road to Character

(An imaginative work.)

Sometimes, not often, not always, but sometimes when the columnist is on stage being interviewed in front of an audience he wonders if he really knows what he’s talking about, or if he is full of shit.

Because he is viewed as someone worth listening to on matters of the day he gets these opportunities often, sometimes to do it in public in theaters like this one, or on the radio, even television (PBS, but still), and there is of course the newspaper column, twice a week in the Old Grey Lady. Thankfully he is filled with opinions without being overly weighed down by convictions, so having something to say when asked these questions does not seem particularly burdensome.

Also, he reads a lot of books. He is filled with references that sound so convincing, when they hit the page he doesn’t bother to check if they’re accurate or not because the important thing is to appear smart. To sound reasonable. Mostly, no one else bothers to check either, and those that do are unimportant people whom no one listens to. This reasonableness is his gift.

Or his curse. That morning as he was preparing to leave the apartment, gathering his keys and shoulder bag from the credenza by the door he could tell Sally was eyeballing him and when he turned to face her, her body looked hard, arms crossed, one hip thrust forward, but her face struggled for the same composure.

“You better wake up, shithead,” she said. “You’re about to fuck-up your life. Maybe already have.”

She was referring to the night before when he proposed that they do a trial separation. He would go to the house in Saratoga long enough for her to find a place in the city, after which he would return and they could see how that felt. It was all very rational, eminently reasonable. One way or another he would ultimately need the apartment, all his stuff was there, his work and materials, all those books. They’d had shelves built to the ceiling in his office for them, a library ladder on tracks necessary to get to the upper reaches. When he needs to be photographed for this or for that, this is the spot he suggests.

A man at work. A man at hiswork.

To move it all would be inconceivable. It seemed like a sound plan, to separate, to see if their absent hearts would grow fonder, and if not, they could, in the words of a far more prominent pair, consciously uncouple, but Sally didn’t see it that way.

“This is your bullshit again,” she said. “You already haven’t been here for years already. Shit or get off the pot. In or out. Saratoga is not an option. You are either here with me, or wherever she is with her.”

Her,is his Mary. He called her “my Mary” by accident once when he was trying to describe what she was doing for him on the book the publication of which has him on this stage, being asked questions and sharing his opinions which the audience takes as wisdom. The book is about “character” how one achieves it, what one does with it once achieved. He has written a series of profiles of people he believes demonstrated character by overcoming their weaknesses to do amazing things. It is about athletes and actresses, politicians and saints. In it he confesses his own “natural disposition to shallowness” and the difficulty of living a life free of “smug superficiality” which he both wants to believe he has overcome and knows are excellent inoculations against the types of critique he is likely to receive.

Originally, his Mary was just a research assistant, one of three, chasing down materials which could feed his thinking, but she soon became more than that, a sounding board, a collaborator even to the point that he briefly considered giving her co-author credit (in a smaller font) before realizing that doing such a thing would be like detonating a nuclear bomb in the midst of his and Sally’s marriage and he would not do that to her.

To his Mary, he means. Not Sally. He did not think about what such a thing would do to his wife of more years than his Mary is old. He is surprised at his coldness toward Sally. Maybe it’s just a reflection of what Sally feels toward him or he started the chill and Sally is finishing it, individual trips to nudge the relationship thermostat down a few more degrees. He has done the math on the appropriateness of the relationship between him and his Mary, half his age plus seven and it’s okay is what people say. She’s a year short, but thanks to it being algebraic, rather than mere subtraction, in two years’ time, they’ll be on the right side of the equation.

The columnist and his Mary had arrived at the archives in the city library where his Mary had said he simply had to look at the original letters of one of the subjects of the book. The archivist recognized him — as people sometimes do — and asked who was joining him and somehow Freud slipped into the room and changed, This is Mary, my assistant,to This is my Mary, and from that moment he could think of her no other way.

He knows when Mary became more than his research assistant, and it’s when she came into his office with a fresh stack of materials and put her hand lightly on his forearm and asked him, “I’ve been wondering when it was the last time you thought about Jesus.” Later that night as he looked at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, he recalled her touch and the question and burst into tears and he knew he was in trouble, probably had been for a long time and only now was he recognizing it.

He had hired his Mary almost on a whim, sticking out as different from within the stack of usual resumes, a degree from a respectable Baptist college, rather than an Ivy, though like many of the others in the pile, also a Rhodes Scholar. When she interviewed there was something off about her clothes, maybe the fit, or the shine on the fabric, and he realized she was poor, or at least had been poor. She was plain, strawberry blond hair pulled back, a cream complexion without make-up, her face almost featureless. Her plainness was a good thing, as they would sometimes be working at the apartment and he wouldn’t need to deal with Sally’s suspicions as he would if he’d hired someone conventionally attractive, fully put together.

He paid her double the other assistants because he wanted to give her something and at the time, it was the only thing he had to give. As it turns out, she was more than worth it.

He has blanked out during the question from the young woman with whom he is “in conversation,” though of course it is not a conversation at all. She is there to lob softballs at him that he can smack around the theater at his will. Or better yet, in these situations the columnist thinks of himself as one of those people at sporting events wielding a t-shirt cannon, firing merchandise into the crowd. The columnist’s responses to the interviewer’s questions are like those t-shirts, exiting the cannon at high velocity before floating down harmlessly into the arms of the recipient who will be briefly thrilled, afterwards going home and putting the t-shirt in a drawer and forgetting it ever existed.

The interviewer’s responses to the columnist’s answers are confined to statements like “That’s interesting,” or “That brings me to my next question,” whether or not they’ve truly been brought to that question. The truth is, the questions don’t matter for he has come armed with anecdotes, with patter drawn from the book, a copy of which every audience member received complimentarily with their $50 ticket. These sales will be logged through Bookscan and the three events he is doing this week will be enough to make the book a best seller all by themselves. One of the dirty secrets of publishing is that it doesn’t require one to sell all that many books to become a best seller, though of course he still sells a goodly number of books.

His interlocutor finishes whatever she was saying and he launches into one of his pre-canned bits that he can recite with all the proper beats and pauses. Even if it turns out he does not know what he’s talking about he knows he has become extraordinarily good at these events, having perfected the exact amount of wit and self-deprecation that endears himself to the audiences. He heard a famous actor interviewed — perhaps Olivier — saying that once he has the character’s clothes right everything else falls into place, and this is how it has been for the columnist. The sport coat, the checked shirt and khaki pants are important but the lynchpin is the loafers. When he put on the loafers, he became a comfortable man in every sense of the word, and this is how he is on stage. Comfortable, comforting.

Social media has made things a bit harder for the columnist, psyche-wise. When he first started at the legacy conservative publication and then early-on at The Grey Lady, his opinions went into the world on glossy pages or newsprint and occasionally there would be letters of complaint, but no more than a handful, easily dismissed as cranks and malcontents, but Facebook and Twitter have given a platform to every last hater on the planet and some of them seem to hate him deeply.

Or hate what he represents in their minds, at least, the establishment, the center, the reasonable. He now has an assistant who handles his online presence but before that he saw a satirical piece titled the Automatic (Columnist) Column Generator, a kind of MadLibs pegged to his tone and style and when he compared it to the draft he was working on that day damned if it wasn’t spot on.

It hurt. The columnist was pricked and he bled. It was as though he spawned a cottage industry for people who loathed his writing. He was a job creator! Hiring the assistant as a shield helped, but some arrows still slipped through, including once on the subway.

He was strap hanging on the way home from the office when he overheard his name and saw one young person reading something to another from his phone and he realized it was a commentary on the column that he had published just that morning. It was one of his go-to themes, the ruining of America. Many things were ruining America, and in this case, he’d decided it was the upper middle class culture which now looked down on working class people, something he found particularly distasteful and would never do by using working class people as props for his larger point.

He had related the experience of going into a poke bowl place with a friend who had only a high school degree and worked with her hands, and seeing her panic at the bizarre words on the menu — tobiko, tomago, wasabi, siracha, yuzu — he realized that she was over her head, and sensing her discomfort suggested they go to a Pizza Hut instead. It was meant to illustrate the excesses of upper-middle class culture, its desire to set itself apart from the proles with their fancy wares.

Why couldn’t they just call it hot sauce? He asked, rhetorically aligning himself with the working people of America.

Of course there was no friend, and he would never eat at Pizza Hut in a million years, but if there hadbeen a friend he is confident she would havereacted this way. In truth, the poke bowl was delicious, like sushi, but also a salad. Two great worlds, joined.

The young men on the subway each wore earphones, one of the buds lodged in their ears, the other dangling so they could hear each other. The train squealed on the tracks which could’ve drowned out the performance, but the columnist found himself leaning closer so he could hear. As one read from his phone, the Columnist heard his name then words and phrases like, “fucknut,” “waste of space,” “dumbest motherfucker alive” and “must have pictures of the editorial board blowing a herd of goats.” Unclever, but still wounding. Actually, clever, therefore wounding. The rest of the way home he looked at each person he saw and wondered if they’d read him being called a fucknut. There goes that fucknut.He imagined a mob gathering behind him chanting “fucknut” first in low tones, but increasing in volume and intensity with each step.

Fuck-nut! Fuck-nut! Fuck-nut!

He started taking cabs or Ubers to avoid the public, but sometimes sensed he was being silently judged by the eyes in the rearview mirror (Fuck-nut!), so instead he hired a car (Lincoln) and a driver (Arturo) who never read anything other than the racing tip sheets.

The columnist recently pulled some internal strings to secure the hiring of a younger, quite clearly dumber, version of himself at the Old Great Lady to take some of the heat off and it appears to be working. His assistant brings him graphical representations of the online hate and the columnist is at much lower levels than the young buck. When they pass in the office the columnist gives him a thumbs up, “Give ’em hell, Brent!”

After the talk, Arturo will take the columnist to the restaurant to meet Sally who has reiterated her ultimatum by text in emojis, a smiling turd and a toilet, paired. There was a time when Sally would’ve come to the event, would have sat in the front row even, but now when he brings it up she asks if she will hear anything she doesn’t already know and he must be honest, the answer is no.

He thinks that Sally believed him when he denied ever having fucked (Sally’s words) his Mary, which is good because it is the truth. They have never even kissed, their only extended physical contact of any intimacy was when they walked around the lake at Aspen following one of his talks at the leadership institute and as they hiked, they were swallowed by the trees, their footfalls on the fallen needles as quiet as slippered feet, the temperature dropping noticeably thanks to the shelter of the canopy. His Mary said, matter of fact, “I feel God here,” and he was so moved by her faith he reached for her hand and held it as they looped back to the lodge. Her hand was small in his, damp. He could not bear to look at her or to let go of her hand. They did not speak. He practically held his breath, waiting for God.

When they returned to the lodge and risked being seen by others, their hands parted by mutual agreement. That night he dreamed of her and when he woke could feel the impression of her hand in his palm, phantom stigmata.

He doesn’t think he will ever “fuck,” his Mary, but he often thinks about what it would be like to make love to her, to pull the ponytail holder free and see her fine reddish hair fall and he would ask her to unbutton her shirt, which she would do, shyly, turning half away. He never gets much further than this in his fantasies, but they are enough to sustain him. Surely this is love?

His interviewer is once again talking and she is turning toward the audience to ask if they have any questions. Normally, this is one of his favorite parts. He loves how there is a long hesitation before anyone will raise a hand, everyone clearly fearful they will not be up to the task of maintaining the spell he’s woven. The ticket price and the face-to-face nature of communication almost guarantee that anyone inclined to call him a fucknut has stayed away.

When someone is brave enough to finally ask a question he always tells them that they’ve asked an excellent question, a difficult question that he will do his bestto answer, and he sees the questioner glow with pride and the columnist congratulates himself on having done a mitzvah. It is one of the greatest things that will happen to that person, to be acknowledged by the man on the stage, the smart man on the stage who definitely knows what he’s talking about.

He knows it is a mitzvah because it exists and yet he neither needs nor desires any public recognition. He learned this in Hebrew school when he would make sure to hold the door for all the children as they came in from their recess and he would glow in the light of their thank yous. One day when Mark Bernstein breezed past without saying anything, the columnist said You’re welcome!With as much scorn as he could muster. Later, Rabbi Weiss took him aside and said that it did not count if you were only doing it for the glory and anyway, nobody likes a smart aleck. He never held the door open again.

He remembers Rabbi Weiss’ halitosis as he leaned over to point at the page and correct the columnist’s pronunciation of the haftorah. He became a very good Hebrew school student in order to keep distance between himself and Rabbi Weiss’ breath. After his Bar Mitzvah, taking his status as a man seriously he told his father that he didn’t believe in god. His father looked over the top of his newspaper and said that was okay but to remember he was always going to be a Jew.

The people who do not like his writing sometimes send letters reminding him of this, that he is not only a Jew, but a fucking kike Jew bastard who deserves an oven and to have his skin stretched over a lampshade. These messages are frequent enough that they’ve ceased to shock or scare him, but that wasn’t always the case. He came home one day and asked Sally if she thought they should get a gun and she said, “For what, to shoot yourself?”

“Besides,” she said. “We’ve got a doorman.”

The columnist tries to forget that some of these people vote for the political candidates he also prefers.

Ever since his Mary asked him about Jesus he has been thinking about Him all the time. A Jew who founded Christianity, though no, that’s not true. Whoever wrote the gospels founded Christianity. The Jew had inspiredChristianity. One of his favorite things about the Bible is that it took the writers to bring it all to life. He does not compare himself to those earlier men, but it’s not unlike his job, to explain, to shape the fabric of society. It is an awesome responsibility and he does not take it lightly, which is why he wrote a book on character, to better learn for himself what it takes. This is what he’s been saying in interviews, anyway.

The final question asked, the audience applauds and he stands and shakes hands with his questioner, clasps his own hands in front of his chest and bows very slightly. The applause is robust, but does not last long as the people are grabbing their coats, their copies of his book tucked under their arms, phone screens alight as they try to get to the front of the Uber ordering line. He has pre-signed every copy of the book so he will not have to linger or talk with (as opposed to) these people.

They will go home, remark to each other what a pleasant evening that was, place the book on a nightstand where it will sit until it is clear they will never get around to reading it, but if someone asks if they’ve read the new book by the columnist they can pretend they have.

—

In the car, Arturo asks, “How’d it go, boss?” and the columnist has an urge to say, “I’m miserable,” but instead replies, “Fine, good, couldn’t be better.”

He tells Arturo he’s going to be early for the reservation, so Arturo can take a drive around the park to kill some time. In reality, he’s late, but he needs to figure out how to deal with Sally. The Saratoga gambit was an attempt at a punt. He would leave, she would move out, he would return and she would be gone. Their contact would steadily decrease until it ceased entirely. He knows he wants out, but he is too cowardly to say so. He believes she also wants out, but she is going to make him do it because she knows how difficult it is for him to be the bad guy and enjoys making him confront his cowardice.

Arturo has the news on the radio because he thinks that’s what the columnist wants, even though it most definitely isn’t. The Vulgarian has just recently descended his gold escalator and entered the presidential race. The columnist has not written about him yet and hopes The Vulgarian is excised from the race like the tumor he is before he has to, but if he does write about him, this is how he will describe him, “The Vulgarian.” Arturo, on the other hand, is clearly excited, likes the idea of someone who promises to shake up those Washington assholes.

“Whaddya think, professor? Does he have a shot?” Arturo calls him professor because once every other week he drives the columnist to New Jersey where he teaches a single ninety minute class on ethics to the brightest young people in the country.

“We’ll see,” the columnist says. “Stranger things have happened.”

Stranger things have not happened, and the columnist is, deep down, quite fearful of what it might mean if this thing happens. He is an institutionalist, not least because of his perch at one of the most important institutions around and has been doing his thing long enough to be considered something of an institution himself. If The Vulgarian becomes President it means that institutions don’t matter, which means he doesn’t matter.

One fight at a time, though. He asks Arturo to turn on some music so he can rest his brain. Ahh…the first movement of Handel’s Water Musicis an appropriately vigorous soundtrack for the bustling evening activity of the park. Arturo drives slowly, creeping behind one of the carriages and the columnist loses himself looking at different couples, imagining their degrees of happiness, all of them scoring more highly than him and Sally.

At their 25thwedding anniversary party during a toast by his brother-in-law the columnist remembers thinking about how they were still young enough that making it to 50 was entirely possible and got a bit of an extra glow at the thought of hitting such an admirable number and in his head, began drafting the column he would write about it, and then he realized he’d missed the toast’s conclusion and Sally was staring at him, waiting for him to clink his glass to hers.

He wonders if Sally would remember this incident of if it is simply one of those small accruals that have added up to whatever he is about to face in the restaurant.

He needs air so he rolls the window down and the smell of the roasting chestnuts from a nearby cart fills the car. He has Arturo stop and jumps out of the car and buys two bags, handing one through the window to Arturo. The oil thins the waxed bag, and the columnist is careful to keep it from ruining his khakis. He thinks about what a miracle these chestnuts are, wonders who the first hominid was that figured out they were edible, and then the even bigger miracle, fire and roasting to make them so delicious. The ingenuity boggles the mind. The whole city is filled with miracles, its buildings, its symphony, its daily newspaper. The columnist tears up at the sheer volume of wonder even as anger builds at himself for never fully recognizing it previously.

Arturo also appreciates the nuts. “Nothing better,” he says, popping them in his mouth. “Am I right?”

The columnist nods, unable to speak, overwhelmed by it all.

—

No one would ever mistake Sally for plain. The columnist is grateful she’s looking away when he enters the restaurant a full hour past the reservation, giving him her amazing profile, nose and eyes that would be too big in isolation, but together with her cheekbones rendering her striking. A middle-aged Sontagian swoop of grey hair amongst the onyx black of her mane has only added to the effect. In college, she made money as a model for the figure drawing class, and Pilates have kept everything together nicely. The columnist once felt himself enslaved by his sexual desire for her, often hating himself for the frequency and intensity of that desire — it seemed excessive to him — but that desire is barely an echo now. For the columnist, this only proves how important love is to desire, for him anyway.

This both makes his past insatiability more palatable and his current coldness more detestable. What does this say about his character?

Sally waits a beat before turning to face him fully as he slips into the booth. They are in the back, in a private spot to begin with and now that it’s so late, the restaurant is nearly empty, so if there is to be a scene, it can be contained. But of course, there will be no scene. That’s not what people like he and Sally do. They still agree on that. There is one glass of red down to its last swallow and another full in front of her. The columnist wonders how many preceded those. Sally takes the last from the first glass and places it closer to the edge of the table than the columnist feels comfortable with, but he resists the urge to nudge it inward.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about ways to hurt you, and honestly, it’s been fun,” she says.

“Don’t look so scared. I wouldn’t do it. It’d be almost as painful for the kids as for you. No, I’ll go quietly, but you’re going to wait to take your little thing with her public.”

“There is no thing,” he replies. “She left.”

“Please, don’t be insulting. She left because it’s a thing and because you’re married. She’s waiting for when you’re not married because she’s a good person, but she’s not so good that she doesn’t want you to be not married.”

The columnist cannot dispute this. His Mary took a job at a university-based think tank in the South so she could leave the city, reduce their temptation. They barely even have contact with each other, and yet each knows the other is waiting.

“She’s not even pretty. Not very anyway, aside from the youth.”

What is there to say to this? “It doesn’t matter,” he replies.

“Clearly not.” Sally drinks more wine, looks at him, leans forward to look even more closely, a half-drunk sly grin forming on her face. The columnist has an image of her mouth opening and a snake emerging to devour him whole, sucking his whole body back inside her. He thinks Freud has slipped back into the room.

“You realize, right, that you’re ridiculous? It used to be my favorite thing about you, how ridiculous you could be. You were a Marxist for god’s sake!”

This is an important part of his biography. It demonstrates both growth and self-effacement, a recognition that one grows into wisdom through experience and age. First Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

At his Mary’s urging he’d read the Bible not to mine for Proverbs or examples for columns to show his erudition, but for the story, and to understand it through her eyes.

“When did you forget that you’re ridiculous?” Sally asks.

He and Sally were practically children when they met in college when he’d decided that he was not only a Marxist but he should debate a conservative Nobel Prize winning economist on stage about the problems of capitalism. The school paper called it a “disemboweling.” When he slunk off the stage, Sally was waiting for him, wrapping him in a hug saying how well he’d done, how much she loved him, and he knew the first statement was a lie, the second the truth, with the second being even more meaningful because of that first lie.

The thing is, even as the Nobel Prize winning economist was plucking his organs and viscera out of his body and displaying them on the stage for all to see, it’s not that the columnist actually found the man’s arguments convincing. The columnist still believed he’d been correct, that Marx was right about the degradations and moral compromises of Capitalism, but that night he learned that if one wants to win, how important it was to argue from positions people already agreed with.

This was the Nobel Prize winning economist’s advantage, not his (admittedly) superior knowledge, but the fact that he was placing his arguments into a world perfectly primed to accept them.

The columnist looked at the economist — white, flabby, unkempt hair, and a voice that sounded like he was ready to cough up a hairball — and thought he should be more like that guy, better than that guy even because he’d comb his hair and cultivate a soothing speaking delivery. It would be much better to be the disemboweler than the disemboweled.

That public evisceration gave him his whole future in one evening, Sally and his career giving the clear majority of people exactly what they want and need to feel good about being the majority. And what a great ride it’s been. What’s ridiculous about that?

Is this the end, or a new beginning?

It seems understood that they won’t be eating. The kitchen may be closed anyway. The waitstaff does its prep work around them, impatient for them to depart, but not willing to be outright rude and give them the boot. Sally will not be rushed. She ticks each of her fingers one at a time on the table, her parting shots lined up one-by-one.

“You know,” she says. “She may marry a Jew, but she’ll never let you die one. She’s going to want you in the eternal kingdom.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he says.

“Of course not, but you know I’m right.”

She is. A never practicing Presbyterian by stock, Sally converted to marry him and took to the faith in ways he never did having been born into it, shepherding both the kids through their bar/bat mitzvahs. She remains fluent in Hebrew, while he can’t even ask where the bathroom is, something she showed off on their dozen or so trips to Israel back when that was a topic he could write about without antagonizing everybody, but he steers clear of it now.

He’s never known what the right thing to do with that situation is, but he knew what the greatest number of other people believed the right thing was, and also what the second greatest number of other people believed the right thing was so he would figure out how to pay proper tribute to both groups all in a single column with his one hand and other hand, so they could claim him as on their side.

Somewhere along the line he convinced himself that all this straddling was a good thing, particularly if it put him on the right side of the majority. For this he has been feted as a truth-teller, when he’s primarily been a mirror, willing to reflect whatever the most powerful and influential want to see.

When he went to see the big historical Broadway musical, there was a line delivered from the heroic protagonist to the murdering antagonist — If you stand for nothing, what’ll you fall for? — and the columnist recognized himself in that moment, not as the hero, but as the antagonist, a man without convictions until it is too late. Like many others in the audience he wept at the musical’s conclusion, but for different reasons.

Sally has clearly run out of steam, slumping back in her seat. He has never felt more exhausted in his life. This cannot go on, but what is the exit to all of this?

“I’m a good guy,” he says.

Sally sighs. “I know you want to believe that, but it’s probably not true. I mean, look at the evidence.”

He doesn’t want to, so he won’t. He will straddle.

“I’m not a bad guy.”

“Fair enough,” she says. She grabs her purse and stands, placing her hand on his shoulder. “I’m choosing the lawyer and having something drawn up. It’ll be fair. You’ll sign it. And then you’ll be free to do whatever it is your heart desires.” She pats him twice before leaving and he wonders if he will ever see her again. When the children marry, at least.

The columnist sits in the booth, terrified of his heart’s desires. Maybe his heart will burst from his desire and he will be put out of his misery. What a stroke of luck that would be. He asked his Mary how she’s dealing with the situation, her desires. “I pray,” she replied in a way that indicated there should’ve been a duh in front of the sentence and a (hopefully affectionate) you dummy at the end.

Maybe it was worth trying.

The columnist eases from the booth down onto his knees on the floor clasping his hands together and squeezing shut his eyes because he knows this is how it’s done.

The columnist asks for the help of the Lord Jesus Christ as he prays for the wisdom he now knows he never had.