The Altruists Read online

  “I’m not telling you to go anywhere.” He looked at his fillet in the hopes of directing her attention toward the protein-rich sign of his commitment. “I need to get the house ready.”

  Ulrike’s slender brows knit together. Arthur hadn’t asked about her life before St. Louis, but had gathered, from offhand remarks, that her parents were both public servants. Her father was a civil engineer—Arthur decided not to read into that—and her mother, he believed, was a schoolteacher. From this grist he’d concluded that her family, inveterate Frankfurters, were plainspoken realists with no tolerance for bullshit—and that Ulrike had inherited these qualities.

  “The house? Arthur, what will you get it ready for?” Ulrike squared her shoulders as she made—then belabored—her point, asserting that the house was a safety net for him, a means of keeping one foot out the door of their relationship, and that she wasn’t going to turn down a career opportunity in a (let’s face it) more interesting city for a man who paid a crazy mortgage to dodge commitment to a (frankly) beautiful woman in her prime such as herself, espe—

  “For us.”

  Ulrike paused mid-syllable and swallowed it back down. “What?”

  “Give me this time. Let me see my kids. And then, when they’re gone—I want you to move in. To live with me.”

  “For how long?”

  Arthur leaned over the table. “For the foreseeable future.”

  Ulrike set her fork down with a civilized clink.

  “The foreseeable future,” she repeated. “What does this mean?”

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? My kids are coming home. They’ll help me with the house. And then I want you to move in with me.”

  He was not in control of his words. They leapt like lemmings from his mouth. Anything to keep her. Anything to keep from being alone.

  “The job market, Arthur,” she said. “If I stay in St. Louis I am risking opportunities.”

  “I get it. The vagaries of academia. But that’s why I can promise the foreseeable future. The unforeseeable future—well, we can’t see it, can we?”

  “You do not sound like yourself.”

  She was right. The unforeseeable future was nothing to scoff at. The unforeseeable future was Arthur’s greatest source of anxiety, and a major factor in his coupling with Ulrike. Arthur often felt that his entire life was one long postponement of some future reckoning.

  “Give me a chance. Please. It’s much more space. A big improvement for you. Cozy. Great neighborhood.”

  “But my life is elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Berlin. Indiana. I have gone everywhere.”

  “And it’s time to settle somewhere.”

  “Arthur.”

  “Stay. Just awhile. Stay in St. Louis. You wouldn’t have to live in this hovel. No more campus, no more freshmen vomiting in the hallways. You could live in a real house on a real street. Chouteau Place. Have you been? Probably not. Want to know why? It’s private. Our own little neighborhood.”

  “You own this house?”

  “Yes. Kind of. It’ll be all mine in no time.”

  “When?”

  “After my kids leave.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let me handle it. Trust me.”

  “I do not know.”

  “Think of what you’d save, moving in with me. I know how this school treats its faculty. Move in with me and you won’t have to pay a penny in rent.”

  “If I do this, it will not be for the money.”

  “Sure, right.”

  “It will be for us.”

  “I’m saying. As a bonus. The savings are a nice bonus. Think about it.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Now eat your salmon. I made it special.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The following day Arthur returned to his home for the first time in weeks.

  It still surprised him that for seventeen years, from 1996 through Francine’s death in 2013 and in patchwork months after that, Arthur had done most of his living here, here, in this elegant, self-governing enclave of academics, aesthetes, coastal transplants, and other university affiliates. That for seventeen years his steps were softened by Oriental rugs, his belly full with coq au vin and Ore-Ida oven fries, the kind of irresistible, unlikely culinary marriage he’d strong-arm Francine into making. For seventeen years he’d taken long steamy showers and hardly ever reused towels without at least running them through the dryer. O comfort! It was only now, living as frugally as his principles demanded, that he realized her role in making it all possible. He’d had it both ways for nearly two decades, railing against a culture of commodities while partaking in the comforts with which Francine had insulated his family. Without her, he would never have lived this life, occupied this place.

  He put the car in park and stepped onto his property. Birdsong scattered through Chouteau Place. Arthur shut the car door and walked up the driveway, his feet reacclimating to the particulars of its topography, the cracks and ridges and other workmen’s errors. He paused over a bloom of dandelions rooted in a pavement crevice. He kneeled to get a closer look. Serrated leaves cut upward through a growth in the ground. Two yellow flowers wavered with his breath. One would be forgiven, considering the undisturbed calm of the private place, for losing world-historical perspective while within its bounds, for devoting oneself entirely to intimate ruptures, bubbles, and tears in the asphalt.

  Arthur bunched the weed and tore it from the earth.

  He rose, stretched, and then surveyed the small yard. Frowning, he nabbed a trowel from the garage and brought it back out where, along the property line, he scooped and flung the pithy leavings of his neighbor’s poodle mix so that they landed, decisively, in that selfsame neighbor’s garden.

  The kitchen appeared as it had been when he last left: clean, almost sterile. The freezer was still stocked with shiva casserole and shiva kugel, a genre of food that belonged, in Arthur’s opinion, permafrozen. The fridge was still covered in newspaper clippings and one of Ethan’s middle school drawings. The revised USDA Healthy Eating Pyramid. And a flowchart Francine had found and taped up:

  It was only the rotting mangoes and pears in the wire fruit basket, and the tiny flies that swarmed them, that signified a place where no one lived anymore.

  In the living room, he vacuumed. He cleared mousetraps and chucked the corpses out into the bushes that lined the backyard. He spritzed and wiped down glass with citrus-saturated ammonia, beginning with the kitchen windows and then working room to room. The basement carpet had assimilated the smell of smoke from the house fire, but this could be used to his advantage. The olfactory bulb was closely linked with memory and emotion. While restoring Ethan’s and Maggie’s bedrooms, he accidentally touched his face, his fingers fresh with disinfectant wipe, compelling a stream of chemical tears to blur his vision.

  He refocused. As Arthur saw it, the success of his children’s visit depended on the formula

  (P + N)(½A) + G = M

  where P = Pity, N = Nostalgia, A = Apology, G = Guilt, and M was Money, or Mortgage. He tried to keep this in mind.

  He began with N. He hunted for stuffed animals, plus security blankets and beloved picture books and other trigger objects, which he deployed like land mines throughout the house. As a final, pitying touch, Arthur assembled all the letters from his bank and put the first notice on the counter in the kitchen, the second notice on the tiered accent shelf between the dining room and foyer, and the third notice at the foot of the stairs. That way, if his children entered the house through the side door, as the Alters always did, the path to their bedrooms on the second floor would tell a story.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the morning he returned to his work on the house. After breakfast he climb
ed atop Maggie’s bed and pulled on the knot at the end of the string dangling from the center of the ceiling. A rectangular panel teased open. Arthur pulled harder and an angled ladder with red rungs stubbornly descended, touching down with a pfft on his daughter’s white shag rug.

  The Alters’ attic was a black hole for family miscellany. Entering and exiting through that retractable ladder was just difficult enough to ensure no one ever went to retrieve anything, even though Arthur had ingeniously rigged an overhead light bulb to flick on when the ladder stretched to full extension. As his head crowned into the attic, he saw the mess his family had accumulated there: reference books and CD-ROMs, stereo equipment, tennis balls in plastic chutes. Three generations of internet routers. By a small triangular window, a half dozen leather-bound photo albums were splayed seductively open. Beside them, a papier-mâché pharaoh’s mask shared a bin with bundled socks. The interned body of a once-beloved hamster, wrapped in a towel and odor-sealed in Tupperware, sat awaiting burial beside D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. To Arthur’s left, a pile of dinosaur figurines, a disassembled telescope, stacks of Maxwell House Haggadot, finger puppets representing the ten plagues, a Ziploc bag loaded with marbles, and doubles of canonical board games: Monopoly, Risk, the Game of Life. And dust. Dust over everything. Coating it, claiming it.

  In a far corner Arthur found what he was looking for. A cardboard box marked MEMORIES—written with or without irony, he couldn’t remember. He lifted a rotting flap. Inside, as he’d hoped, was a slide projector.

  Arthur parked himself before the box. Methodically he removed each 35 mm slide from its carousel, raising them one by one, squinting to preview the images. The closer he aligned them with the light, the more defined the image; the more color flushed within the borders of the black film, the sharper the lines around the faces and landscapes depicted. Most slides he returned to the carousel, but some, some he dropped into a shoebox. When he’d worked his way around the carousel at last, he descended from the attic, which darkened as the ladder slid upward.

  That afternoon he visited an office supply store in Brentwood with the shoebox under his right arm. With no help from the megaretailer’s stable of incompetent high school employees, he eventually succeeded in converting the little black slides into digital files, which he then printed in color on glossy photo stock. “Is that you?” one of the nametagged burnouts asked, pointing at a print. “Don’t smudge it with your fingers,” Arthur said. He had the best four photographs framed at a nearby shop and hung them in the dining room on fresh nails that he drove into the wall himself.

  He stepped back to behold them. One, two, three, four. All in a row. Standing in their presence, he felt the dining room transformed into a volatile space. Electrified. The photographs made a powerful statement. About what, exactly? Generosity, kindness, the many selves a body could hold. He stood proudly before them until the sun set and the room went dark.

  Arthur’s stomach groaned. He had forgotten to stock the refrigerator. He hopped in the Spero and drove south to the Schnucks in Richmond Heights. He parked in the vast, crowded lot and approached the supermarket, which resembled a giant brick mausoleum. Bags of fertilizer were piled out front and the woody, fecal smell caught Arthur off guard as he passed them. He hurried by stacks of plastic lawn chairs and a rack of flowerbeds.

  Schnucks was mobbed. Students were stocking up for spring break, darting across the checkered floor toward the liquor aisle, descending on corn chips, and tossing packages of grill meats from freezer to cart. Geriatric customers made their slow, intimidated way through the frenzied traffic, pausing to check the price on frozen vegetables in bags or to sniff a block of cheese. Arthur road-raged his way toward the produce and began filling a plastic clamshell with the most exotic and pungent olives he could find.

  A thought occurred to him. I should get some food that they like. Yes! This was good parenting! Arthur smiled, leaning over the olives to bow in deference to himself.

  But what do they like?

  He and Francine had never agreed on anything as much as they agreed on what to feed their children. Francine, who had struggled with her weight from time to time, was the first mother in Chouteau Place to regularly make the drive to the Soulard Farmers Market. She wanted the best for her children, decidedly not the Jell-O molds and marshmallow fluff she’d been raised on, which meant feeding them large quantities of greens and plenty of seafood, which she called “brain food,” as fresh as she could find in a landlocked state. Arthur, who loathed waste, was happy to do his part, diluting his children’s fruit juices to a ratio of 1:1. No one could make sixty-four fluid ounces last like Arthur could. When Ethan had his first cup of uncut apple juice at a friend’s house in fourth grade, his eyes almost fell out of his head.

  Arthur made his way through the mob. He remembered coming here with Maggie, the tantrums she threw over what he bought. She wanted the sweet, radioactive snacks that her friends’ parents bought. Well, she was grown up now, and he would get her what she wanted. But when he steered his cart down the cereal aisle, and was confronted by the endless rows of blindingly bright boxes—the lime greens, the hot pinks, the sun-vivid yellows; the eye-popping text, the cartoon mascots—he had to squint to keep his balance. He couldn’t stomach the sheer variety. The loudness of the boxes. Who needed this many options? The Soviets had been onto something with those bare, gray markets, drab and half-empty. Take your allotted rations and go. No more, no less—no choice. Consumer choice was a ridiculous and overvalued freedom.

  A little girl riding in her mother’s cart knocked a box off the shelf across from Arthur, sending candy-colored balls of puffed grain rolling across the floor, where they gathered at his feet. The girl began to cry, and her mother, those ubiquitous white buds stuck in her ears, kept pushing her cart, leaving Arthur standing over the mess. He shook his head. No. This was all too much. He turned around. The kids would have to go without.

  In the evening, Arthur took a walk. He proceeded east along the length of Trustee Row, the procession of McMansions and stucco palaces and gingerbread castles that lined Forest Park on Lindell. He kept his eyes on the beautiful homes and the lunatic dissonance of their architectures. He thought about the foreseeable future.

  Still, the past provoked him. The Barnes-Jewish Hospital complex loomed beyond the park’s tree line, a towering city of the sick, individual buildings linked by aerial walkways as if trying to draw each other closer.

  The pride he took in his work on the house—and it was a singular pride, truly, the kind borne from hard work with one’s hands, a type of work not typically afforded Arthur, who lived, as his colleagues and neighbors did, in the triple-mint estates of their minds—failed to ward off second thoughts about his plan.

  His plan: What was his plan? When his children touched down in St. Louis—what then?

  He’d have to split them up. Separate them. Get Ethan alone first, try to win him over. Then Maggie. But how? Arthur didn’t know. Who were his children? What were their lives? As far as he could recall, Ethan was living in Brooklyn somewhere, working at some kind of consulting firm. Maggie hadn’t spoken to him since the funeral. Arthur shook his head. He hadn’t been paying close enough attention. He didn’t have access to their hearts.

  But he needed them. He could cover himself for another few years, sure, but with each passing semester he inched closer to a retirement that might never come, and a death that most certainly would. And now that the dean wanted to sit down with him . . . Something would have to be done.

  What was he supposed to do, walk away? A bolder man might have. Men of Arthur’s generation were supposed to rabbit-run away from problems like this. But where would he go? What would become of him?

  He followed the road until he reached the end of the park, puzzling over his situation, when the trees vanished and he was confronted with the Chase Park Plaza hotel. Standing before the tremendous sand-colored pyramid, that mo
numental Jazz Age ziggurat, Arthur realized, suddenly, how exhausted he was—he’d been walking over an hour—and turned back toward University City.

  SEVEN

  Do you like living here?”

  “Here meaning . . .”

  “Meaning here. This house. St. Louis. I don’t know. ‘The Midwest.’”

  Maggie sat on her bed, shoulder to shoulder with Francine, hunched over Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology. She was two finals away from completing her freshman year. One exam was in her mother’s field, and she’d walked home from campus for help.

  “Why do you say it like that?” Francine asked.

  “Like how?”

  “In scare quotes. ‘The Midwest.’”

  “Because I mean it as a, like, construct, an idea, more than I mean the . . . the . . .”

  “Geographic region.”

  “Right.”

  “As in, ‘the heartland.’”

  “Yeah.”

  “‘Real America.’”

  “Right.”

  In this memory of Maggie’s, her mother’s wild curls were pinched back by a silver barrette the same shining color as her favorite watch, which clung to her wrist, ringed by an assortment of loose, jangling bracelets.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Maggie tugged at her ear. “I guess I can’t imagine moving for someone like you did.”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “It’s fine. I mean, my life is here. I don’t know anything else.”

  “But . . .”

  “But we’re not ‘midwesterners,’ are we? We’re like, ‘university people.’ We have this university milieu.”

  “You’re not wrong. Though I am from ‘the heartland’ myself.”

  “That’s true. But no offense, you and Dad only know professors. And they all live in Chouteau Place. And you just said ‘heartland’ in scare quotes.”