Free Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon Page B

fun of getting high. It wasn’t any better when I finally left the house. In a party of any size (one or more), I was always the least successful man in the room, wincing when Lala told a friend I was a writer, changing the subject when anyone asked how it was going (or worse, telling the truth), finally denying it altogether, just saying I was a bookstore clerk or an office worker or even unemployed when someone scorched my soul by politely inquiring, What do you do?
    Even my good points, I realized upon reflection, were nothing more than skills I’d developed to manage my literary disability. Theself-deprecating humor, the easy jokes about what a loser I was, the graceful playing of the jester’s role at table, the mildly eccentric intellectual sidekick, ready to spice the grown-ups’ talk with a silly anecdote about my kooky hobby or accept a small favor from my betters, a part-time job or a pair of pants that the successful had outgrown. The compliant pal (or husband) who knew he had no grounds for complaint. Realizing intuitively that the person I really was deep down was someone no one, including me, could stand, I became, well, nice, as if my life depended on it. Which it did. There was no other reason to feed me. So I quit whining. I quickly learned to have the good taste not to make others uncomfortable about my lowliness, like a disfigurement they were obliged not to notice. Rather, I set people at ease, encouraging them to take my misfortunes lightly, and even enjoy them. It’s fun to have a friend who is a total loser compared to you, as long as he doesn’t make you guilty about it. On the contrary, I was popular. Hanging out with me made all my friends feel better about themselves.
    In other words, my whole personality was nothing more than an elaborate defense against despair. Without my failure I was nothing.

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    BUT THE CRAZY THING, the punch line, the part I had a hard time admitting, even to myself, was that I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing. I don’t know what changed—the focus of my eyes, the span of my attention, the shape of the synapses in my brain—but my Age of Giants was over, and (except for Proust, whom I dithered and dreamed over like a rabbi snoring beard-deep in the Talmud) I now exclusively read crime novels (but never those that “transcended” the genre), newspapers (gossip and horoscope with my wake-up coffee), fashion magazines (which Lala left within reach of the toilet), comics, andporn. Only what was funny, violent, dirty, and fast held my interest and even then not for very long. It seemed I had dedicated my life to a quest whose point even I had forgotten along the way.

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    WE HAD THERAPY the next day. I arrived right on time, but Lala was with our shrink already, in that office that felt like a fairy godmother’s storybook cottage fitted inside the bluntly ugly office building. There seemed to be some bonding going on. Gladys was turning before the mirror, appraising herself, while Lala expertly wound her like a mummy in a long scarf.
    “Come on in!” Lala beamed at me. “I was just showing Gladys a new way to accessorize.” She pecked my cheek.
    “Your wife’s really got the touch,” Gladys said. I realized she was wearing one of the decorative spreads that had been draped on the couch before. Was this allowed, precharming the shrink, like talking to the ref before the match? It wasn’t fair. Although I was the funny one, the comic relief, Lala had always been the star. Her powers of attraction were unstoppable. Her charisma lay in her ability to make her glamour contagious. It rubbed off on you, like stardust, and near her you somehow grew more beautiful and charming as well. That was part of what had made me feel so absurdly lucky to be with her, the specialness of that attention as she glittered at me over a teacup, rapt at my routine anecdotes, or we walked hand in hand through a museum