Cool for America Read online

  Derek wasn’t delusional enough to think it likely that Violet had any interest in him beyond their already loosely bound friendship, but he was happy to be the recipient of her excess feelings, thoughts, whatever. She was two years older than him and had only predated him at their publication by a matter of months. But somehow this small gulf placed her on a radically distinct plane of experience in his eyes, as alien to his as when he’d been an eighth-grader watching through the chain-link fence bordering the sports fields as the members of the high school soccer team smoked cigarettes and impugned each others’ manhood. He knew that this didn’t have to be the case—he felt on equal footing with, if severely annoyed by the condescension of, most of the members of the reading group—but he still couldn’t help but think of Violet as morally and intellectually superior. And he felt the latter to be true despite what seemed her studied (or unstudied?) indifference to the standard intellectual markers and pretensions of the time. She claimed to be unironically engrossed by the celebrity Internet, and she paid to see romantic comedies and horror sequels that could only be sociologically interesting, if at all. She chewed gum at all hours, sometimes while smoking cigarettes. And yet she was friends with people. The pop music critic for the Times. The Booker-winning young Scottish novelist who taught at NYU. She acted as though she’d gotten her fancy job by accident, as though one could just sort of pick up the phone and find oneself editing … whoever the next day. And maybe, he thought, if one was smart and cool enough (and, all right, went to Yale), one could.

  “Okay, least valuable player,” Violet was saying across the table to the three or four people who were listening.

  “Everyone was so valuable,” Kyla said, to Derek’s left. She was very thin and very drunk and Derek wondered if it was too early to suggest she skip the next round of the already innumerable vodka shots they’d downed from the handles on ice in the center of the table. “You can’t attach value to people,” she continued when no one responded. “Tolstoy? Gandhi? Hello?”

  “I was going to nominate Ben, because he only came once and spilled wine all over his book,” Violet said. “But maybe that’s ‘not nice’ and we should ‘respect all members of the group no matter how tertiary and useless.’”

  “Can I at least be the least valuable regular attendee, then?” Leslie said. “Do I get a prize? I didn’t learn nothing, I swear!”

  “Only a man can be least valuable,” Violet said. “We see right through that mustache, missy. In addition, I hereforth nominate Derek for rookie of the year.”

  “Aren’t we all rookies?” Kyla said. “Isn’t this the first and, God willing, only year of this?”

  “No, and no,” Violet said. “Derek is just a boy and he’s from some terrible state that starts with an I, and yet he is a leading editorial assistant and he attended every meeting.”

  Derek was actually from South Jersey but it was close enough in spirit, and he was ninety percent sure Violet actually knew where he was from. Eighty percent. Also, he was a pretty bad assistant.

  Vivek tousled Derek’s hair, emitting a strangulated howl that one had to assume was intended as celebratory. “As a commander in the Muslim Brotherhood of Hussein Obama, I hereby second this nomination for world’s cutest rookie of the year dot-com,” he said. “Your T-shirt is hereby in the mail.”

  Derek leaned over to see what his sworn rival Jonathan thought of all this silliness, but he was deep in conversation with Thomas at the end of the table. Jonathan was working on a piece, he’d been telling them all relentlessly, about how economics was fake, and Thomas, in his blessed, mildly autistic way, had been contradicting him at every opportunity. Now Thomas appeared to be drawing a chart of some kind on the, well, directly on the tablecloth. The place served vodka like tap water—surely it had seen worse.

  “Fifty K for a verse, no album out,” Derek toasted, raising his half-full glass.

  Those who had been following the conversation took down their shots, or pretended to.

  Prominent in Derek’s mind was the fact that Violet had recently gotten back together with her ex-boyfriend, or was at the very least sleeping with him again. The ex, semi-ex, whatever, was in his mid-thirties, a published novelist and assistant professor at Brooklyn College named Morgan Calder. (The name sounded made up. Did writers still change their names?) Presently Violet was focused on her lap, a half smile fixed on her face. Derek assumed she was texting. The guy sounded, despite the likelihood of arrogance and unkindness suggested by his credentials, normal and decent; if anyone was mistreating anyone it was probably Violet, who seemed to fluctuate weekly between devotion and utter indifference. Not that Derek had an excess of sympathy for the guy.

  He’d been on a few dates lately himself. After spending most of college with Allie (who had gone to Berlin to “check things out” and decided there that Derek, and New York as a whole, no hard feelings, had not been bringing out her best self for quite some time), he’d found himself in a series of months-long relationships, each of which had ended when one or the other party had mercifully taken the karmic blow and acknowledged that, though things between them were rarely less than pleasant, there did not appear to be a pressing need for continued brunches, cocktails, oral sex, etc. Presently he was spending occasional time with Samantha, the current roommate of a college friend. She was calm, zaftig, often dressed like a cowboy. She worked for the Department of Transportation in some capacity, and people thought it was funny to pretend to be mad at her when they arrived late for something because of the subway. She had the decency to pretend she thought this was amusing. The second night he slept over at her place she asked if he wanted to tie her up—and he did!—though he was more enthusiastic than effective. She made fun of him for not knowing about knots and safe words. He agreed that it would be useful to have complicated sex skills, but he got the sense that both of them were thinking these would be used elsewhere.

  It was something of an advantage, he’d realized when he moved to New York, to be thought of as a hick on occasion. It gave him time to figure things out, which he suspected everyone, even those born on the Upper East Side or wherever, would appreciate having if they allowed it to themselves. He was from a township adjacent to Cape May and other self-consciously quaint shore towns, but dull and inland enough to be cheap and ugly. He’d worked beach jobs in the summer, spent weekend nights in Wildwood. His description of the Cowtown Rodeo, which his family had attended every year of his existence, was probably what had stuck the idea of the Midwest, ironic or otherwise, in Violet’s head.

  “What, do they do the rodeo in, like, a parking lot?” she’d said as they made their ritualistic trudge to the Hudson River on one of their work breaks, before she’d gotten too big for book reviews.

  “South Jersey can get pretty country, man,” he said. “These guys were legit cowboys. I never even heard that ridiculous quote Jersey accent until I got to NYU.”

  “Don’t worry, I believe your life was ridiculous,” Violet said.

  She had been born in New York (the Upper West Side), lived in England as a child, returned to the city as a teenager, then off to New Haven. He forgave her for all of this, obviously, because she paid attention to him.

  When he’d gone home to see his family for the Fourth of July weekend, he brought his copy of War and Peace, reading it on the bus between bursts of motion sickness.

  “Is that actually as good as it’s supposed to be?” his mother said when he got to the house. “I always wondered if it was really, you know, the best book.”

  His mother taught middle school English, and when she wasn’t reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the thousandth time she gravitated toward novels with ominous lines from nursery rhymes in their titles. (She appeared to be halfway through And Jill Came Tumbling After.)

  “Believe the hype, Ma,” Derek said.

  “No one invited me to the book club,” she said. “I think you could use a little age diversity in there. Does anybody ever admit it when they don’t understand something? Or is everybody too cool and serious for that?”

  “It’s pretty easy to read on, like, a sentence level,” he said. “There’s a lot of pseudo-philosophy, though, and most people admit that they can’t really follow it. Or, I mean, I think people actually do understand, or would if they tried, but it’s kind of the convention to throw up your hands at the essay parts. I kind of think those are the best parts, honestly.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll get the audiobook for my walks.”

  “That’d be a lot of walks, Ma.”

  The whole family went to Wildwood for the fireworks, his parents and sister and grandmother all piled into the aging SUV, parking a mile from the boardwalk to avoid paying exorbitant lot fees. They walked past the ancient pastel-colored motels, the narrow apartment buildings where old, shirtless men in plastic chairs smoked cigars and eyed the passing humans with naked skepticism. The crowds grew thicker as they approached the boardwalk, and they folded themselves in among the intricately tattooed Hispanic men with little girls on their shoulders, the sobbing white children dragged toward the ocean by sunburned mothers. The sounds of chaos were imminent: electronic clanging from thousands of desperate games, muffled exhortations with Eastern European accents through cheap microphones, the brief crash of the wooden coaster and its seconds of audible screams. It was a nightmare of the past, annually renewed with T-shirts bearing the past year’s catchphrases. He went regardless of whether it was, what, compatible with how he now imagined himself. He wished sometimes that his family were far away or unkind enough that he could justify not returning to this primordial slop, which, no matter how hard he tried for it not to, left him dizzy with despair every time he was re-immersed in it.

  And yet it felt necessary somehow, not because he
believed in the importance of family or tradition or any of that other insidious conservative bullshit, but more in the name of research, maybe, the ongoing investigation into his feelings that he was conducting with what felt like increasing rigor and depth. He didn’t think he was getting smarter, necessarily, despite all the Tolstoy and his recent timid line-editing of elderly Nobel laureates. It felt instead like the more he learned, the less he was able to assimilate into a coherent, what, body of knowledge? He was frustrated by the gap between what he knew he was capable of and what he could actively process. But, he thought, he would get older, and learn more, and assimilate more, and at some point he’d have something resembling wisdom, he hoped. And then he and the surviving members of the War and Peace reading group would sometimes remember over the years how insistently clever and intense they’d all been when they were twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, working for people more important than they were and, some more consciously than others, building these little, yuck, networks for future success by hosting each other in their apartments around the city for the better part of a year under the pretext of discussing Russian literature.

  Derek’s turn to host, in mid-September, had been a source of near-constant anxiety after they’d each signed up for a slot at the first meeting. The overriding concern was, of course, that no one would come, followed very closely by the fear that everyone would come and he wouldn’t have enough chairs, snacks, etc., and that they would all be too warm and crowded in his narrow apartment. His third biggest concern was that an average number of people would come and, having neither the chaos of an overcrowded room nor the immense pity attendant upon a nearly empty one to distract their attention, they would focus on the starkly suboptimal state of his decorating, housekeeping, and general life-maintenance abilities. He lived in a third-floor walkup in Bed-Stuy that he shared with Thomas, who kept his room fastidiously clean but refused “moral responsibility” for the common room due to what he felt was an unfair rent split (even though his room was three times larger than Derek’s), and Arian, a nervous, rarely seen young Persian man who claimed to be a software developer. Two weeks before the meeting, Thomas announced that he was going to be out of town for a conference, which he had surely known about for far longer than he was admitting. Derek had suspected he might pull something like this, and tried to chalk it up to Thomas’s legitimately crippling—if somewhat, it had to be said, conveniently deployed—social anxiety. Derek just had regular anxiety, which in this case happened to be triggered by social expectations.

  So he did his best to clean the house, scrubbing at the filthy baseboards, vacuuming inefficiently with a monstrous Oreck he’d found deep in a closet, gathering up months’ worth of magazines and dumping them in the recycling box (though he would wait until he’d had a chance to go through them again one more time before actually putting them outside for collection). He sent two self-deprecating reminder emails to the group and bought hummus and Brie and baguettes and two cases of decent beer, then sat staring at the pages they were supposed to be discussing while he waited for it to be seven o’clock. Leslie arrived first, at 7:15, looking stoned and bashful, clutching her gigantic paperback to her chest like she was going to use it to try to stop a bullet.

  “Oh no, did I restore your faith in humanity?” she said, peering into the empty apartment. “I swear I just came to be polite, not because I like or respect you.”

  “More beer for us, am I right?” Derek said. He assumed she would understand that his reliance on a tedious cliché was intentional.

  “Oh, I’ll drink your beer,” Leslie said. “Just don’t expect me to know anything about Spy vs. Spy over here. Maybe I need a different translation. One with pictures, and sound. A movie, you might call it.”

  “We could try to find the Audrey Hepburn one online if nobody else shows up,” Derek said.

  “Ooo, I’m gonna tell Violet you suggested we watch a movie together,” Leslie said. “She is gonna freak.”

  “Or we could just skip right to seven minutes in heaven.”

  “More like twenty seconds I bet,” she said, her head deep in the refrigerator. “Is this pizza slice, like, up for grabs?”

  A perfectly unremarkable number of people eventually showed up, Vivek and Kyla and Jonathan and, hallelujah, Violet, who glanced around at the bare walls and deeply gouged wood floors and declared the place “not as bad as I’d assumed it would be.” Jonathan went on and on about Irving Berlin and hedgehogs, while Derek tried to look at Violet without being obvious about it. At one point, while Leslie and Vivek argued about Watch the Throne, he accidentally caught Violet’s eye, and she performed an extremely slow-motion and detailed pantomime of vomiting down the front of her shirt. He wished Leslie would try to incite jealousy in her. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than this semi-public but unacknowledged pining.

  Now, at the long table in the supper club, no one seemed to be eating enough pickled herring or creamed anything to keep up with their vodka intake. (“Where is the horseflesh?” Kyla yelled.) Violet had tripped coming back from the bathroom, and might have sprawled headfirst into the table but for the intervention of the maybe-not-so-sinister-after-all waiter, who caught her delicately by the waist and guided her into her seat without making a show of it. These things happened, after all, when aristocrats gathered. Violet acted as though she’d expected the waiter to be there, flashing him a polite, thank-you-for-your-service smile before resuming her conversation with Pyotr. Derek had too much faith in her to be worried. If she was drunk, she intended to be drunk, and would enjoy herself accordingly. But, also, he’d keep an eye out just in case it seemed like she was about to fall over again.

  He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his whole possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. He realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t exactly derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him that he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beachgoers on the distant shore.

  “Huh,” Derek said.

  “Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.

  “The real question,” Kyla was saying loudly, trying to get the table’s attention, “is what are we going to read next?”

  “Let’s read what’s-his-name’s book!” Leslie said. “Violet’s boyfriend! And then we can have him come and tell him about it to his face!”