Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  As for the jazz club itself, I guess I had been picturing a dark bar with little tables and maybe people smoking and everybody crowded together, quietly watching jazz being played by old guys up front, but that was not what it was at all.

  It was a straight-up club. Or, like, a clubby bar. There were bright white-and-orange hypermodern chandeliers that looked like dangling globules of pure light. The dance floor was packed with people dancing in the most primal manner I have ever seen. Maybe it is just because mostly all the dancing I have been part of has taken place in high-school gymnasiums or people’s darkened living rooms, but these people were sweaty and they had glow sticks and wore body paint and they were gyrating and spasming and it looked less like pretend sex, which is what dancing normally looks like in my experience, and more like people trying to convince God to make it rain. What I am saying is that it was seriously cool dancing.

  My dad totally could not get the bartender’s attention, so I took over and I barked in Russian at the girl and ordered us five mojitos, which, honestly, it was just the most grown-up drink I could think of and I didn’t want to get carded, but she actually listened to me and brought the drinks and I learned a new thing which is that I LOVE mojitos.

  I was worried that I would wind up babysitting Judith, but right after we got our drinks we ran into the teapot tenor and she was miraculously absorbed into their group. They all like totally loved her, which, you know, I love her too, but I wasn’t expecting random Lithuanian strangers to understand her awesomeness right off the bat. I guess since she met them by buying pot maybe they already had a pretty good idea that she was more than a grandma in boss lipstick. But then it was kind of weird because it was my dad and the Susan lady and me and Daniel, awkward foursome! And we all go to the dance floor together with our drinks because honestly, what else is there to do? There is no way to talk to each other over the music.

  And so then, on top of the nerve-racking-ness of trying to seduce Daniel, who is totally older, he’s like twenty-six, hell, he could be thirty, I have no idea, and he has no idea I’m seventeen, and the queasiness of feeling at every single second that what I am doing is wrong and immoral and picturing Fang’s face if he could see me dancing with this guy, and on top of trying to figure out how to dance to this weird music, which is definitely not jazz but like someone took the idea of jazz and then applied it to pop music and threw in some trance and techno, just, like, for flavor, on top of ALL THIS, I have to do it while watching my father dance.

  I mean, on the one hand, it was a spectacular display. I wish I had fucking video. His main move was the handclap, and he would do it big up over his head. But then, at the same time, he was so weirdly confident and so clearly hot for that Susan woman that sometimes his dorkiness would loop back around and become cool again in some kind of ironic, really confusing way. Oh, it was bizarre and impressive and very very funny, and it took me two mojitos to be able to calm down enough to ignore it and just focus on Daniel.

  It turns out that twenty-six-year-old guys are exactly like seventeen-year-old guys. All they want is to press up against you and kiss you. It’s exactly the same. It doesn’t matter how educated they are or whether they would think your thoughts are foolish or if they would judge you for keeping the remains of your Pokemon collection in your room, because in that moment they aren’t having any thoughts: All they are is wanting you. All they are is having a hard time breathing normally. All they are is chemicals.

  It was reassuring, and at the same time crushingly sad. Like the saddest thing I have maybe ever learned in my whole life.

  And thus begins Stage 2. The new part of my life. The part where everyone is just an animal, even me.

  THE NEXT MORNING WE ACCIDENTALLY slept through a lecture about Czesław Miłosz that I had wanted to attend. I didn’t like skipping out on an event we’d already paid for, but it was also about all I could manage just to sit around with Judith and Vera drinking coffee and eating rye toast. We were all mildly hungover. I felt nervous and ultimately uncomfortable with what had happened the night before. I had wound up kissing Susan. I was pretty sure Vera had wound up making out with Daniel. It was not good parenting. I had tried to talk to Vera about it once we got home, and it had become some kind of un-understandable fight.

  “I’m your father,” I had said in the suddenly too-bright light of our kitchen. “There have to be boundaries, there have to be rules.”

  “Do you realize you are yelling at me for being drunk while you are drunk right now?” she said, and pulled out a big block of cheese, cut us both slices.

  “I am not drunk,” I said, although I was.

  “You’re such a fucking hypocrite,” she said.

  “What I’m saying, though, Vera, is that this dynamic of me just trying to be your friend so that you’ll like me—it has to change. It can’t stay this way. I can’t bribe you into liking me.”

  “So what? You’re gonna playact patriarch now? You’re gonna make a bunch of rules for me to follow and then feel proud of yourself because you made me toe the line?” She said all of this with a mouthful of cheese. Really, it was all comical, but in the moment I was blinded with rage, made almost inarticulate by it.

  “I am the patriarch!” I shouted. “I am your actual patriarch!”

  She laughed at me then, hard, the cheese in her open mouth showing. She bent over, hawing like a donkey, slapping her knee. I was shaking, I was so angry with her. A different man would have slapped her. I stood there as she just kept laughing, moaning, trying to breathe. “Sorry,” she said, “sorry, that’s just—oh, it’s too rich. It was too good!”

  I looked at her for another shaky moment, then went into my room, slammed the door, and fumed for a while in bed, sure that I would never be able to fall asleep, before suddenly and completely losing consciousness.

  The next morning I felt angry, ashamed, confused, sheepish, but mostly incredibly anxious. As I had gotten older, the chief physical symptom of drinking too much became a feeling of intense anxiety the next day, and that made my assessment of the night before confused. All of this combined with other feelings of guilt regarding missing the scheduled lecture, my general tendency to drink too much, my lack of exercise, my inability to grow up, yada, yada, yada.

  It was also difficult to tell which of us had even been right. There was no longer any worry about drinking interfering with her medication. She wasn’t on any medication! And it wasn’t like in America, where Vera was still years and years from the legal age to drink. Here she was, if not technically legal, then practically legal. Certainly it did not seem like a big enough deal to have warranted screaming about being a patriarch and slamming a door. In short, there was nothing to do but try to wade through all of it until my mental state returned to normal and I could gain the proper perspective.

  Still, I would have liked to hear what they said about Miłosz. I had read Miłosz before, but somehow he had failed to make enough of an impression. I had vaguely associated him with dreary Eastern Europe, and never really got the memo that he was practically the official poet laureate of my grandmother’s hometown. I had only ever read a poem or two. But then Darius passed out a handout with one of his poems on it and I got curious and started doing some googling.

  What I had always loved most about literature was the way it eased my own loneliness. Even as my mother’s son, at my most awkward and chubby and sunburned, sure I would never have a girlfriend, there was always Shakespeare. There was the possibility of having one’s most opaque yearnings and vague intimations transformed before one’s eyes into the beautiful forms of perfectly expressed thought. It was like visiting a mind reader. It was better than having a lover or even a best friend or a mother. And Miłosz read things in my mind I had given up on ever being able to express.

  I felt like an idiot for not reading his poems every day of my goddamn life.

  I wondered if maybe everything would have turned out differently in my career if I had just chanced upon Miłosz earlie
r. If I had decided to write about him instead of Virginia Woolf.

  I thought often of my failed dissertation. It was like a maze my mind continually tried to run, though by now most of the passageways were so clogged with shame and guilt that I couldn’t make it all the way through to the end of my thought, to that reassuring flush of completion that signaled an idea was functional, that it worked, that it was worth finishing. At times I thought my dissertation was probably the most brilliant thing anyone had ever tried to write about Woolf. Other times, it seemed like everything I was saying was so patently obvious that if I published the thing, everyone would laugh at me. I was not able to hold my perception of it steady, and so my dissertation continually morphed and changed under my scrutiny, like Proteus, only it was just a Word document.

  Part of the problem was that I had edged myself out into the frontier between psychology and literary criticism. This excited my committee, since they had been brainwashed by one million faculty meetings into a slavish lust for all things interdisciplinary, but the truth was, I wasn’t trained in psychology and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I was making connections, but I wasn’t able to tell whether the connections were valid. I was trying to take the idea of theory of mind, a thesis in psychology that was getting a lot of press in regards to autism, and apply it to Woolf. Theory of mind was kind of a misleading term. What these people were talking about was mind reading. Not psychic-in-a-turban mind reading but the ordinary kind we do every day. We see someone make a mad face, and we say, “Ooh, they must be mad!” We see a girl raise her hand in class, and we assume that she is going to ask a question. We infer people’s states of mind from their actions and from the context. The argument was that autistic people had trouble making these same inferences. They weren’t able to accurately infer what someone else might be thinking from the external indicators. Other people were as unfathomable to them as aliens or robots.

  Some literary critics had proposed that reading novels was a way of exercising our theory of mind, practicing our mind-reading abilities, our empathic connection to others. When we were able to read minds correctly, we got a little thrill of success, the same kind of kudos we got from being able to run or achieve feats of strength, an assurance to ourselves that we would survive, that we would be able to navigate the world and its complex social hierarchies. The only problem was, after all the literary critics got on board and started publishing books, and after I had my dissertation idea approved by my committee, there started to be an awful lot of dissent in the field of psychology over what theory of mind was, if it even existed.

  But there I was, about to write a dissertation on it. Literary critics had been making their careers off psychology’s castoffs for ages. Freud’s understanding of the subconscious and symbolism was used constantly in literature classes as a way of teaching students how to interpret the “dream” of the text. He was always presented as a formative thinker of the twentieth century, but when I met a psychology PhD one night in a bar, he laughed in my face. “Why on earth would they teach you Freud?” he asked. “He was just plain wrong about, well, everything.” So in a way, it didn’t matter that theory of mind had lost its scientific validity, and yet it did matter, at least to me.

  Woolf was an obvious candidate for talking about theory of mind because of her use of narrative embedding—her characters were constantly inferring, guessing, even narrating the thoughts of others. Her point of view was notoriously unstable, blurring between consciousnesses even as she technically focalized on just one character. But mind reading wasn’t just a technical aspect of her work, it was one of her most central themes: the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of knowing another person.

  All of it made me think of Vera’s question to me on the plane, about the little men inside her, about the possibility of the self as a swarm or a hive instead of an “I.” In particular, I was thinking of these lines from To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe wonders the exact same thing: “How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.” It was the quote I had used as the epigraph for my dissertation.

  I looked at my daughter that morning, the hive of her, drinking her coffee, tapping away at the keyboard of her laptop. I thought of Woolf and those rocks in her pocket as she waded into the river because she simply couldn’t bear going mad again. The general critical agreement now was that she had suffered from bipolar. Maybe it was only now that I knew Vera wasn’t actually mentally ill that I was able to think this, but I thought that even if Vera had been mentally ill, even if she was still, her experiences were real to her and therefore knowable by me. She could tell me about them, and I could understand, even if her observations were about the blue light coming off of Fang’s skin. She should never, no matter what, be shut away or deemed un-understandable. No one should force her to stay in bed and drink nothing but milk, which was one of the ways they had attempted to treat Woolf’s madness.

  Judith was also quietly writing at the table in a little black leather journal. Her gray hair stood out in a poof around her head. I thought of Judith’s stories about her husband. I had asked her what he was like, and she said, “He was like me. He was a boy version of me,” and then she smiled crookedly. She had followed him all over the world as he pursued his studies. They’d had two children together. She and her husband had understood each other perfectly enough that she thought he was part of her, the male version of her own self. And then he had died and left her alone to wander through the world, through Vilnius, getting lost in the winding streets, unsure how to unlock her own door or locate light switches.

  Woolf was always so anxious about whether or not people could truly know each other, and I couldn’t help but think it was because people had treated her the way we had treated Vera. Judging her thoughts, trying to control her mind, without ever really doing any proper investigation. And ultimately, if Woolf had truly thought people were sealed away, trapped inside themselves, how could she have written at all? Weren’t her books and their characters with their dizzying interior lives proof that mind reading was possible? That as anxious as we were, the feat was right there, on the page, the dangerous crossing already accomplished?

  The phone rang. At first none of us knew what it was; we had not registered that the apartment had a landline. It became apparent after several rings that there was a tan hotel-style phone sitting on one of the shelves in the kitchen. Buttons on it lit up when it rang.

  “Should I answer it?” I asked.

  “It could be the program,” Vera said, which was exactly what I dreaded. I worried it would be Johnny Depp, yelling at us for not attending the lecture. Who else would even know the number of a telephone we had not known we had? I decided to answer it.

  It was a woman’s voice. “Labas,” she said.

  “Labas,” I said, which was Lithuanian for hello.

  “This is Justine,” the voice said, and I had no idea who Justine was.

  “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “The genealogist.”

  “Oh, right, right.”

  Vera got up and was hovering right behind me. “Who is it?” she hissed, but I waved her away.

  “Something very peculiar has happened,” Justine said.

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “I am telling you that something very bizarre has happened.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I see.” I had my back to Judith and Vera and so was facing the shelves, which I had not particularly examined before. There was a small ceramic statue of a toadstool, gleaming red.

  “Your grandmother’s brother, Henryk, survived the war.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes, and he had a family, two g
irls and a boy. Here in Vilnius. They would be your aunts and uncles. And they have had families themselves.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, though I did not think she was joking. Justine was an almost severe and forbidding person to talk to.

  “But getting back to the bizarre thing that has happened,” Justine said, catching me off-guard: I had thought Henryk surviving and remaining in Vilnius was the bizarre thing. “One of your cousins is my fiancé.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said again, feeling instantly like an idiot.

  Vera was up out of her chair and tugging on my sleeve. “What is going on!” she whisper-screamed. I blindly waggled my hand behind me to force her away, never taking my eyes off the bright red toadstool. Obviously I would tell her everything when I got off the phone, but Justine had a very quiet voice and a slight accent and I had to pay a lot of attention to hear what she was saying.

  “His name is Henryk, too, actually, though he goes by Herkus,” Justine said. “Anyway, when I discovered this, I hope you do not mind, but I told Herkus. And he would like very much to meet you.”

  “That’s amazing!” I shouted, and I felt a sudden ripple of joy. But why? I had no specific, conscious desire to have cousins, and yet at the idea of cousins I found I was ecstatic.

  “Great. We will meet you at the reading tonight. We can all have a drink,” she said.

  “The reading?”

  “Nikolai Azarin reads tonight,” Justine said.

  “Right, right, great, we’ll be there,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  Vera exploded, “What IS IT?”

  I told her the news, doing a quick recap for Judith. I was careful not to mention the rape when I told of Grandma Sylvia’s escape, and it occurred to me that I had created a precarious situation by telling Justine about the rape birthday when I had been keeping it a secret from Vera. I doubted it would come up, but it bothered me. A loose end.

  “How wonderful for you,” Judith said. “This certainly will be interesting.”