Markovits The Rest of Our Lives

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-38856-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Autoren/Hrsg.

Markovits, Benjamin

Leseproben

II

I knew Sam Tierney through Ethan Konchar, Amy’s old boyfriend. Ethan and I met at Pomona but didn’t get to know each other until senior year, when we joined Mufti. I don’t want to talk about Mufti. It’s one of those secret society things people sign up for when they think their bright college days are slipping away. We played witty practical jokes around campus: it wasn’t really my scene. But I liked Ethan. He’s extremely smart but also more generally one of those people you meet at these institutions who is like some NBA-level example of realized human potential. He could cook, even as an undergrad; if you got into a political argument with him, it turned out he had access to reliable inside information that would genuinely change your mind. He also lettered on the Ultimate Frisbee team and ran a steady six-minute mile, so it was a good idea not to go jogging with him.

After Pomona he did a PhD in computer science at Harvard. His real subject was artificial intelligence. I got into BU to study Twentieth-Century American Lit. Since I didn’t know anybody else in town, I looked him up. Ethan lived on the middle floor of one of those ugly Victorian triple-deckers you get in Somerville, where every neighborhood street seems to lead back into itself. Sam Tierney was his roommate. He was at Harvard too, but doing English like me, and sat around the apartment in a Liberty of London bathrobe and leaving half-drunk cups of Ovaltine on every surface.

That’s the thing about Sam—he was always around. If you needed somebody to do something with, like drive out to the new Trader Joe’s, he would do it. At the same time he held in reserve his own vivid and peculiar sense that he was living some wonderful privileged life of the mind and surrounded by a cast of colorful characters, which … I don’t know, maybe he was, maybe we were. Often, when I dragged him out to lunch, I had to wait while he got dressed. But he was always happy to be distracted. Whereas Ethan looked at you with this friendly air of expectation that whatever you were about to say was going to interest and amuse him. I’m not really up for that kind of pressure.

Amy practically lived with both of them before she went out with me. I think Ethan’s attitude to their relationship was, if you’re going to date someone at Harvard, go out with the most beautiful woman of your acquaintance, which he had now done. So when he got the fellowship in Göttingen he figured, okay, let’s see what’s next. I don’t even mean that I disliked him for it. Personally, he was always very charming, which isn’t, whatever people say, a superficial quality; but it also made me feel a little sorry for Amy. She was twenty-three and beginning to find out that certain guys, who weren’t obviously awful or unreliable, would consider her to be part of their experience of the world.

*

Sam lived in Highland Park, where a lot of the professors live. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive from Donner but I had to pull over a few blocks after saying goodbye to put the address in my phone.

I’d been to his house before, about ten years earlier. He bought it when his father died, just to deal with the inheritance, so he didn’t fritter it away. But the house itself was much too big for him. Maybe at the time he thought he might get married, I don’t know. But he still lived there alone, halfway up North Sheridan, near the Park. It looked like his place in Somerville, old and gloomy, with wide steps leading up to the front door under a pillared awning.

When I rang the bell, it took him a minute to answer. Then he stared at me a second before saying, “Hey, Tom.”

He had a soft American voice, a radio voice, which had only gotten sweeter with age.

“You seem a little surprised.”

“Not at all, not at all. But I thought you might be the Amazon guy. Come in.”

There was a rather grand entrance hall, with a chandelier and more wide steps leading up to the second floor. I dumped my backpack next to the umbrella stand and felt like a college kid, coming to mow the lawn.

I asked him if he’d eaten already, and he said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“It doesn’t matter, I’m always happy to eat.”

But it was too late to go out, so we ordered what he called mediocre acceptable Indian, and while we were waiting, opened a bottle of wine. I told him, I’m not really a big drinker right now, for various reasons, but by the end of the evening we’d gotten through two bottles of Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.

Until the food arrived, we sat in the living room, which overlooked the front yard. It had a fireplace with a painted screen and a couple of bentwood armchairs on either side. There’s no point going over the conversation in detail, but I can tell you what we talked about. I mentioned that I’d just dropped Miri off at school. At school, he said, and I had to explain that she was going to Carnegie Mellon. He hadn’t taken in the reason for my staying over, which made me not want to talk about it much. But after a while you get over that kind of thing. He had his own private life, which I was also ignorant of.

When the doorbell rang I thought it was the food. But it was in fact the Amazon guy, who gave him a large soft package, which he left on the stairs. Then the curry came and we moved to the dining room.

At some point he asked me, how’s the teaching, and I told him about my conversation with the dean.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, maybe look for consulting work. Try and make a lot of money.”

“Do you want a lot of money?”

“It’s something to want.”

“Why don’t you write that book?” It was one of Sam’s romantic ideas that I should be a writer.

“What book?”

But he had already moved on. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said. “This is what I tell myself. Before they kick me out, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a middle-aged white man who likes to teach dead white men. Eventually, in the ten or so hours a week I get paid to talk to twenty-year-olds, I’ll say something that one of them takes a righteous objection to. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all, I have many objectionable thoughts. If you stand up in front of kids you end up saying some of them. I don’t have to tell you. And when that happens, do I expect the Chair to have my back? No, I do not.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Enjoy it while it lasts. Look, my situation is different from yours. I don’t have any family left to have to pretend to be ashamed in front of.”

Amy called while we were eating. I thought it might be Miri so checked my phone and didn’t have the heart not to answer it.

“We’re just having dinner,” I said.

“At ten o’clock?”

“It’s been a long day.”

“How’s Miri?”

“Fine, she’s fine. She kicked me out, she’s happy. Can I call you later?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to bed, I don’t know what else to do.”

“That was Amy,” I said, after hanging up. “We’ve been having a fight about Miri.”

We were sitting now at the old mahogany table in the dining room, where he also liked to work. There were papers pushed to one side, and plastic containers of food, gathering oil.

“Is that why she didn’t come?”

“Who knows?”

At a certain age you start making conscious decisions about who you feel close enough to talk to, or maybe it’s just something you learn how to do, it doesn’t matter who with. “Anyway,” I said. “Miri split up with her high-school boyfriend a few weeks ago. I said to Amy, she’s just moving on, but Amy thinks it’s a sign of something else. Like, she’s giving up. There have been other … indicators. So I tried to talk to Miri about it in the car.”

“What did she say?”

“Not much, she’s eighteen years old. But sometimes I worry that it’s filtered down from me.”

“What do you mean, that you’ve given up?”

“That’s what Amy thinks,” I said.

Around eleven the doorbell rang again, and Sam said, “Excuse me a moment,” so I sat in the dining room and picked at the food. It seemed a long time ago that Michael and Amy waved us off in the road. I could hear him speaking to somebody in the hallway, a woman’s voice, and then they both came in.

“I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine,” he said. I thought he was talking to her but he was talking to me. “Deborah Linden, she’s doing her PhD in thing...