Curt's Homecoming

from Shanghai to Boulder

Broke, unemployed, and indebted, Curt returned to the United States in the summer of 2002 after a year in Shanghai—another retrograde success in his sorry life. At least, as judged by the prevailing standards of success for men of his kind and age, “5-ace men,” as his friend Dave called them. In China, Curt had been told a hundred times that a man between the ages of 40 and 49 was in the prime of his life, at the height of his powers. He was doubtful.

What powers, he wanted to know. And as for standards, were there any that held across the board? Where was the board? He had his own standards, he thought, and none too high. A real man never goes out at night wearing shorts, no matter how hot it is. Nobody wants to see your legs at night, and civilization depends on taking other people’s views seriously. But men went out at night wearing shorts, and Curt was powerless to change that.

Dancing, too, no longer made sense. The kids were doing it inside themselves somehow, arms tight against the torso, which was humped up, pointed; they moved staccato at toe and heel, in a brief circumference. The body was pressed, twitching, flexed. An intensity seemed to be on display, but it read as tensity only, and it was deaf to the music. Arhythmic tensity. He had seen Dave Matthews sucked up to the microphone stand, pigeon-toed, howling with strict passion: that was the dance the kids were doing, the Dave Matthews. Eddie Vedder did a version of it, and so did Michael Stipe, and now John Mayer was doing it. Jeff Buckley was the voice of it. The strain of authenticity was too much.

Maybe Boulder was the wrong place to re-enter his country from. And maybe he hadn’t changed in a Chinese year. He still wanted into the pulsing cardboard of a woofer. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what there was to go into.

At Vic’s coffee shop sat the pony-tailed part-time instructor, in his black t-shirt and faded jeans, wearing no socks with his soft black loafers. No wonder professors were held in contempt. And who was this? A younger, less shapely, less silver version of the teacher? A computer salesman. He wrapped his pony-tail in a black leather sheath that snapped. He wore a wide black belt and square-toed black boots. His dark sunglasses sat on top of his head, probably all day long. His coffee cup, or mug, or canister—Curt wondered what he called it—seemed to be his prize possession. It was stainless steel and he wielded it more than carried it. Curt hoped that the top, which the guy took pains to screw down, would come off, and the coffee stain his unpressed white button-down.

Some men strike you as motherless, as this mannerless man struck Curt. Manners, if he had ever had them, had been sheared from him, leaving only the pony-tail of his immodest masculinity. “Let’s workshop that,” Curt could hear another man saying at a business meeting. “Let’s dialogue it.”

Curt couldn’t get over how much a part of the game exposing the game had become. But “the game,” that name for what was at least a third of most people’s daily life, had been an open secret for a few thousand years. People seemed happy to say the most terrible things about the game they could think of, covering its rules, its procedures, its aims and outcomes, and then keep playing. If there were any other game in town, they seemed to think, we wouldn’t keep exposing this one.

But then again, did the Yankees really have any secrets the Indians didn’t know? Were the Redskins in the dark about the Colts? Not with all that film, all those cameras, the scouting reports, the turnover among teams, the friendships between players from the same colleges, the statistics, the percentages. Play the percentages. There could be no enforcing of a non-disclosure agreement. Who would be outside the game enough to see where the game stopped and whatever else there was beside it began?

Everyone even remotely interested was interested for the same reason. Nothing like money, not even the rumor of something free—which amounts to the same thing. If it’s free, everybody knows there must be a lot of money behind it. Anything given out for free exposes the game as a money-making scheme. And those always have to be paid for immediately or eventually or monthly.

In a time when accountants argued that prepays were not a trading liability, lawyers signed off on deal structures, and credit-rating agencies remained sanguine about off-balance-sheet debt, Curt took a drive to get a sash fixed. When he got home, he realized he had seen nothing outbound or inbound. He learned one or two things at the window company’s office, though, while talking to Lars, the proprietor. The color “blue white” didn’t sell in the western United States, so all the stock to make blue white sashes was worthless; it was going to be sent out to be ground up. Cream white was the color people west of the 100th meridian wanted.

“Timing is everything,” Lars said to Curt, as they walked onto the shop floor. “If you’d brought your brother’s sash here next week, we couldn’t help you. I mean, we could do you a cream white sash while you waited, but it would look terrible with the blue white.”

When they got back into the office. Curt asked how business was. He liked to ask that question, and he’d been asking it a lot, if only to get a rise out of the flat economy.

“Well,” Lars said, “it’s picking up.” He got going on a long explanation of how his business had arrived at this point. Lars talked as if Curt knew the window business from California to New Jersey, major and minor players, brands, the trend toward agglomeration, or condensation, or aggregation; Curt had lost Lars’s term. He appreciated Lars’s lack of condescension. But the problem that Lars was trying to solve, Curt was familiar with, and Lars knew he would be: lousy customer service.

“In the case of your brother’s sash,” Lars said, “there was no service. So I take care of it and bill the headquarters. I hope to make a few new customers out of it.”

Curt’s business was the science, or art, of relationships. His question was: why did so many people want them, knowing how practically difficult they were to get, have, grow, and maintain? It was always someone’s pleasure to reduce the richness of any relation to the bottom line or to cut from it to the chase: ‘What it comes down to is, we love each other.”

Some such phrase took care of it. And why not shear off the boring bulk? Daily life is tedious. Who could give an account of his or her daily life? Probably many people could, but there was no demand for it, and where demand is lacking, supply is nil.

Most people carry on a number of relationships all the time—the daily global volume of email would be good evidence for this claim—but the fixation on the one big relationship everyone’s supposed to have (family) guarantees that these brief, evanescent, commercial, superficial, by-the-way, one-off, inconsequential relations (now Curt had it: there are relations, which take up most of our time, and relationships, which we wish we had more time for) don’t count or get accounted for.

When Curt had his book come out, he learned a thing or two. Single people and people in relationships lived on different planes, levels, planets. Paired people had no time for keeping up with or re-connecting with old friends. One of Curt’s colleagues sat him down one day to ask him what it was like to get in touch with a friend he hadn’t seen for eighteen years.

“I’ve wanted to do that with an old friend of mine,” Jim said, “but I never do it.”

Curt sat back in his chair, excited by the topic. He was trying to hold off a philosophical approach. He began his attack instead on a circle closer to the thing itself.

“Can a person you haven’t seen, talked to, or exchanged a letter with in eighteen years be called a friend?”: that seemed almost heartless.

Jim wanted to know what it was like to be face-to-face with the ghost.

Three years later, when Curt himself was feeling that it was too much to keep up with anyone, he began to understand why Jim never called on his old friend. First, you can put eighteen years into one email. Second, the flush of recombining, as it were, lasts for an even shorter span. Am I going to spend another thirty minutes on the phone with this stranger? Why am I writing yet another word? A month later, or a week later, you have to answer the first response to your original phone call or mail, but there’s nothing more to say. The past is the past. But if you get beyond the first, into a second or third, you quickly feel that you have no time for this. What’s to be gained by it? All you have to talk about are two distinct sets of memories, with very few members in each set and almost no intersection. Three months later, you have emails in your inbox you need to get rid of.

An 18-year gap that took a day to close ripped an unseemly hole in the tight fabric of your life. And what did you have to show for it?

Curt was struck again by the littleness that clings to human things, as some nineteenth-century playwright had put it. For the illustration of this, Curt didn’t have to scare himself with his year of recombining, or with the recombinations he’d engineered in hot flashes over the past twenty years. He had only to go running for the thought to occur to him. “I saw Tom Stephenson the other day,” a guy says to a friend who also knew Tom in high school. “Really? Yeah. How is he? I’d like to see him again. It’s been ten years at least.”

Curt’s friend had just seen Tom, thought of him, liked to see him. The only thing he hadn’t done, didn’t need or want to do, and would rather never do, is see Tom again. So powerful is the mind’s eye, Curt reasoned, that it never shuts or even blinks. In that ten-second conversation, Curt’s friend thinks of Tom and sees him again. But that’s rich, that instant; it’s not meaningless, it nothing to shake a stick at. What we do in those seconds must be what gets most of the connecting in the world done: we say someone’s name, we think of someone, we see someone. And then we go on with our lives. Why call or do a search? We’ve just had our relationship with them, had our way with them. And they, now and then, in the same flash, have their way with us. It’s nice to be thought of.

Why trivialize and feel guilty about those ideal relationships, Curt asked himself, out of allegiance to the muddy ones we do have. As he was thinking this through, unsuccessfully, a woman smiled at him in the café. She might as well have been an Olympic gymnast getting the go-ahead to begin her routine, there was such a depth of sincerity in it.

In a sense, we’re all accountants—those of us who are aren’t accountants by profession—and we keep at least two sets of books, informally (and legally, most important of all). Accountants by choice and profession are not allowed, as far as Curt understood, to keep two sets of books. They may keep two, at least two, like the rest of us, but they can only turn in one. And so can we. One set of books. Curt was trying to figure out how many books are in one set. He knew from ninth-grade algebra that a set can have one thing in it or an infinite number of things. A set can even have nothing in it, a null set. But most sets have at least two things; otherwise, why not call it by the name of the thing in it, instead of calling it a set of that thing—as in a hand set, otherwise known as a phone? We never used to say, “answer the hand set,” “I have to use the hand set.”

Curt was an accountant by force of circumstance. He had to make a living, and the living he made didn’t afford him enough to hire an accountant. He learned it by doing it. He kept accounts for his mother’s interior design business (she’d lost her memory). But the first lesson he’d learned was the massage therapy business class: it was is that $50 an hour quickly becomes $17 an hour, if that. The second was that accounting remains fairly simple where the numbers are never large. His sister-in-law was a trained, licensed, certified public accountant for ten years. She got tired of it and wanted out. So she studied feng shui—just as the economy tanked. Only the very rich could afford that luxury, and she didn’t know a lot of rich people. She had to go back into accounting, which she did indirectly, by buying a small business. Small business ownership ran in Curt’s family, in the same stream as alcoholism, skin cancer, and a weak form of autism.

To get the bad taste out of his mouth and stop thinking so much, as he was often told to do, Curt left the cafe at about 9:30 and went to dance at Redfish. A pretty good blues band could be counted on to be playing there on Friday and Saturday nights, and Linda, who liked to turn her ass to him, would be there, and Liz, who sang in one of the bands but wasn’t against listening to the others, and the Texan, Barbara, who was in her mid-sixties, and Janet, from Miami, whose father had once owned the Miami Dolphins. She had nothing good to say about owning a football team, but the money that purchased it and survived her father’s term of ownership had set her up for the rest of her days, and she spent most of her weekend nights dancing at Redfish. The red-headed Ellen was there, too, getting drunk and looking for a man, neither desire in her quite squaring with her need to believe in Jesus Christ.

Curt never asked any of his old friends to go with him. Dave wouldn’t, even if asked, because he liked to be as alone as Curt did. Dave couldn’t sleep, but wouldn’t talk about it. Dave couldn’t sleep, Curt guessed, because he’d stopped drinking and taking pain pills. His body, his system, was undergoing an adjustment. There was nothing to be done. It would pass, and he would be able to sleep again.

Curt had been keeping his chin and his Chinese up since he got home. “I had a great time in China,” he’d say to people who asked how his year was, but “Great” didn’t do it justice; “amazing,” “incredible,” and “awesome” he refused; but nothing more than “great” was wanted. That was the problem. He wanted to give more than he could come up with in time, and people wanted nothing more than a word to go away with. So little is expected. O, to live in a time when avoiding triteness at the risk of becoming paradoxical meant something! Of course, as a practical matter, it has never been good to be paradoxical, not even at a party where everyone is drunk, or in a quiet moment, when everyone is stoned and profound. Better to say nothing than blab.

Curt, when feeling sorry for himself, managed to complain into the ears of an upbeat, optimistic, hopeful friend. “You can sing. It’s never too late,” Christine said. Bullshit. Sing like Michael McDonald sings one syllable for Steely Dan in “Peg”? What did his friends take him for? What did they take themselves for? Was it fine to sing badly in our cars, where no one could hear us but our ideal selves? “If you start learning piano today, just think what you’ll be able to play in twenty years!” Well, she had him there. When he was sixty-four, he could play “Borrowed Tune” in the sound-proofed second bedroom of his condo, but he’d still be teaching “Writing in the West” on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and “Shakespeare for Non-Majors” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Curt had been born and then he studied. From birth to bachelor’s degree in two lines. None of his Chinese students, in asking him a question, had said, “Foreign Expert of English, why do we have to read Shakespeare’s plays? Can’t we just watch the DVD?” There were days when he’d wanted to correct them, when they’d addressed him as “Professor,” but he thought better of it. Most addressed him without name or title. That was fine, too. But for the purposes of his resume or CV, strict dealing was in order, and so: “Visiting Assistant Professor” here, “Adjunct Professor” there, “Lecturer” and “Part-time Lecturer” elsewhere.

“So you’re a teacher, I think you remember you told me,” Janet said. She and Curt were both waiting for a song they wanted to dance to. He paused, as usual, wanting to instruct his interlocutor that “teacher” was good for someone who stood nearest the blackboard in classrooms K through 12. But he taught, and he’d never heard himself or any of his colleagues say they “professed.” He’d rather say he was a massage therapist than a professor. “Yes,” he said. “You have a good memory. But I almost became a massage therapist.”

And he almost had, but he quit after 150 hours, when he realized that his teachers were all part-time instructors, either because they’d injured themselves by doing too many massages or hadn’t gotten enough clients to maintain a practice. Janet listened to him say that and laughed a little. “I never got certified to teach English either. I only had a PhD. But I’d say I’ve taught about 1200 students over the years.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Janet said.

“Now, here in Boulder,” Curt went on, “if I had my certification, I could get a job doing bodywork quicker than I could get a job teaching Shakespeare.”

The next song was too slow for both of them, but so was the conversation. Curt wanted to say he preferred to both occupations the nicer one of being a massage client. Though much more costly, receiving was better than giving, when it came to both massage and teaching, and not only in parlors and classrooms. Most of his students, in any case, had never wanted anything more from him than a massage, in effect. Or a tan, even better. But Curt didn’t want to get started on his Tanning Salon Model of Education.

He said good night to Janet and headed for his car. In that, he could pick the music he he wanted to hear. Guy Clark was singing about Baton Rouge as he drove along the turnpike, thinking of Aurora as the last frontier. Being east of Denver, it gets the dawn before downtown does, and then it’s light all over—dawn goes down to day, as Robert Frost put it. Spring is to dawn as summer is to day, as Eden to the twentieth century—his century. An air-conditioned nightmare? What should one feel in July and August but heat? It isn’t a personal insult.

“Make note of all good wishes,” sang Guy Clark, right before Curt got off the freeway, and don’t get killed, don’t get caught. Then Ronnie Laws came on and put it like this: “When the posse’s riding out, I’ll be riding in. You know what I’m talking about.” Curt did. He was his own posse, very ineffective. Something had to give. He cut his credit card up into seven pieces when he got home.