The Altruists Read online

  “Gaylord,” Bruno said. At MathBlast or tinker, Maggie wasn’t sure.

  Alex rolled his eyes. “Get a girlfriend.”

  “Bruno, language,” Maggie said. “Alex, kindness. That’s a dollar in the jar. For each of you.”

  The jar had been Maggie’s idea. More than a swear jar, Maggie’s was a goodness jar, broad enough to include most forms of misbehavior. She didn’t mind how the boys treated her—the more they misbehaved, the more she felt justified in setting them straight on what was pretty much a pro bono basis—but she would not stand for cruelty between them.

  “I have two girlfriends, and you don’t see me acting out,” Alex muttered. The boys surrendered their money to the jar on the kitchen counter, where it sat between a corner and a knife block.

  Bruno returned to his math homework, using his pencil to turn pie charts to penises. Alex went to tinker. Maggie slumped down in Flower’s corner to nuzzle him for a minute before rising and meandering over to the kitchen. Her eyes found their way to the jar. It was three-quarters full, moss green and tickseed yellow, a thicket of bills above a bed of copper and zinc. Her little fiscal terrarium. She coughed and under cover of the sound removed a flutter of singles and stuffed them in her pocket.

  Like all economies, Maggie’s was rife with paradoxes. Necessary evils. This was one of them: in order to charge the Nakahara family so little for her services, she was forced to occasionally take from them.

  The real question was whether the boys were also plundering it. They almost certainly were—the jar sat unattended all week—but what could Maggie say, without being a hypocrite? She would steal, but she refused to be a hypocrite.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours later she bid the boys goodbye and headed home. Maggie lived a few blocks over on the Bushwick-Ridgewood fault line where the elevated M train thundered overhead, metal wheels gnashing the tracks as it passed. The border between Brooklyn and Queens was bustling and tectonic, as though the two boroughs understood their identities to be both distinct and in conflict.

  Her apartment building, in which entire floors were boarded up, stood opposite a Food Bazaar and beside a pit. The pit was massive, and comprised the view from her sixth-floor window. She often found herself staring at it. Into it. It was better than TV, she thought—though she didn’t own one—better even than the Wi-Fi paid for by her roommate’s parents. The pit! Sometimes she saw little men in helmets walking its perimeter, pointing at each other, shouting instructions. The pit might become a parking lot, more apartments, a commercial strip, anything. But things were moving slowly. For now it was a pit, Maggie’s pit, a cavity of tremendous potential to be developed in the future.

  In the entryway to her apartment, she found her mailbox stuck shut with a grimy compound. Maggie forced the lid and it popped open, revealing a rubber-banded bundle of bills and catalogs. She sorted through them as she climbed the tall staircase. The electric company wanted money, her alma mater wanted money. Maggie wondered why she bothered checking mail in the first place.

  She wedged the bundle in her armpit, damp from hiking six flights, and let herself into the apartment.

  Her roommate, who was inconveniently named Maggie, too, sat slumped in the blue canvas camping chair that our Maggie had brought in from the street a few months prior.

  “Long day?”

  “Insane. Three student birthdays. The sugar intake alone. My kids were wired. Totally off-the-wall.”

  Other Maggie was a teacher with AmeriCorps. She hated it. Her third graders were constantly scuffing one another’s sneakers and resorting to violence. It was weird to see her sitting out like this, sunk into the canvas seat’s deep pocket. Most of the time she holed up in her room, her existence little more than a series of clicks and latches, light at the bottom of the door.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that. You should’ve seen my boys today. Bruno tackled me again.”

  “Maggie,” intoned Maggie. “You tutor two boys. I teach three classes of twenty students each. It’s exhausting work. You have no idea.”

  “Relax. I’m not being competitive.”

  Maggie resented her roommate’s superior tone. Other Maggie didn’t have a teaching degree and was almost certainly making things worse for her students. The last thing they needed was a bumbling white savior at the head of the classroom.

  She scoffed as she made for her bedroom. She was already dreading Emma’s party. Now she was in an awful mood. She tossed the mail onto her bed, where it landed in the shape of an outstretched hand.

  Something bright drew her attention. Beneath a misaddressed Working Mother magazine she found a crisp white envelope, her father’s name in the upper-left corner above the name of the street where Maggie grew up.

  As she lifted it to her face, Maggie had two thoughts almost simultaneously. One was: What? And the stranger thought—which beat the other by a fraction of a second—was that physical mail was such a formal thing, and so last century, the envelope like a little white tuxedo.

  TWO

  Ethan leaned on the lap of a bay window, the afternoon sun warm at his back. A tome was parted open in his hands. Learning philosophy had lately seemed like a noble means of self-improvement, an antidote to all the screens, a diversion from the Crate and Barrel spirits cabinet with its lacquer exterior and liquor interior. But he quickly found that you couldn’t understand Foucault without Marx, and you couldn’t understand Marx without Hegel, and so on, all the way back to the Greeks. When he realized that he couldn’t understand the Greeks, he bought a Cambridge Companion, which he was currently mired in, wondering if there existed a companion to the Companion.

  He returned to the introduction. Compare the following two questions, he read, for the fifth time, both of which greatly exercised ancient Greek and Roman thinkers:

  What is a good human life?

  Why isn’t the earth falling?

  Ethan was puzzling over the former when he heard the mail come through his slot.

  He could not imagine why his father would write. Why he’d go to pains of actually writing, with a pen on paper, to his son. It had been five months since Ethan’s last fleeting contact with Arthur on the phone. After Francine’s funeral, Ethan had returned to New York for good, his sister—who’d graduated from college that same week—close behind. Neither had seen their father since. It had been almost two years.

  He turned the envelope in his hands and worked the lip open. The note itself was characteristically withholding:

  E.—

  Would be good to have you home. You (&Maggie) can visit midapril. (spring break.) Important to see family, remember roots, &C.

  —A.

  Two years.

  A lot could happen in two years.

  Little had.

  The letter scrambled his head. For Ethan, home and humiliation were inseparable. Reading his father’s note glitched his system, caused shame memories to unspool like loose tape from a VHS cassette. Here was one: Ethan, fifteen years old, sitting nervously across from Arthur and Francine at the dining room table like it was a Senate judiciary hearing. Like he was defending a thesis. Silk flowers flanked his parents, stemming from fishbowls with glass marbles lining the base. He cleared his throat and told them he was bisexual—not gay; it seemed a safer bet, like dipping one foot into a freezing lake—and his father snorted.

  “Arthur!” Francine yelped, but it was too late.

  That had been a sweltering, murky August, a St. Louis August, the stink of brow sweat and the sour smell of deet so entwined that it only took the presence of one scent to invoke the other. Ethan’s third summer in St. Louis and he still wasn’t used to it. The move was his father’s doing. In Boston, Arthur had published the odd paper and lectured at MassBay Community College. When he let it be known that he was tired of life in the private sector, an old mentor wh
o’d had the same thought a decade earlier put in a good word for Arthur at Danforth. Then he drowned himself in the Mississippi River, and Arthur was called on to replace him.

  Though the offer was rife with words like visiting and in-residence, Arthur believed he could parlay the appointment into something permanent. He’d spent the last few years working for one of the civil engineering firms managing the Big Dig, a plum contract spoiled by inefficiencies, corruption, and design flaws. He complained to his family endlessly. Corrosive salt water leaked through fissures in the I-93 tunnel. The metal barriers intended to protect construction workers from cars had sharp, squared-off edges, earning them the designation “ginsu guardrails.” It was only a matter of time before someone was beheaded in a traffic accident. What should have been a dream job quickly turned into a game of pass the buck, Arthur scrambling to dodge responsibility for mistakes that weren’t his, to keep his name away from the mounting toxicity associated with his office, until Francine caught him murmuring the Nuremberg defense—I was just following orders!—in his sleep. He wanted out. When the invitation came, to teach engineering rather than practice it, a flattering proposition that reinforced Arthur’s belief that he was smarter than his colleagues, he decided to move the entire family west, like the pioneers did, in search of opportunity. He frequently played up this angle. They were like real and true Americans, fortune seekers blazing a trail to a distant, less competitive environment. Francine, a couples and family therapist, could start a small home practice and even volunteer at the university where he’d work. “When you get tired of listening to those upper-crust couples drone on about their lives,” he’d laughed, “you can take a break and listen to their kids.”

  Though anyone familiar with Arthur knew his snorts were stifled snickers, Ethan’s adolescence was rocked by a problem of interpretation. Where Francine correctly assumed that the snort suggested Arthur knew his son not to be straight, Ethan thought it was a wholesale denial of his confession.

  Arthur elaborated: “No, you’re not.” It didn’t clear anything up.

  Ethan jumped to his feet, toppling his chair. He fled up the stairs and into his bedroom. He fell down to his mattress and threw the duvet over his head.

  The overhead light was dull through the duvet. Ethan’s breath gathered in the dark, warm and dense. He wondered how long he could stay under there before he would be forced to come up for air.

  There was a knock at the door a few hours later; Ethan had fallen asleep. He tentatively crossed his bedroom. Arthur stood in the doorway. Between his right thumb and forefinger was a little wire key. “We have to do it,” Arthur said, “every night, no matter what.”

  Ethan’s eyes welled with tears of anticipation. He swallowed hard, making an audible gulp that caused him to blush. He made his way back toward the bed and sat on it, staring at the wall opposite.

  Arthur sat beside him. “Open,” he said.

  Ethan opened his mouth and tipped his head back. He tried to envision what his father was seeing: the rapid palatal expander. It was a metal bar jammed up in the roof of Ethan’s mouth, held in place by branches that extended from it like spider legs, anchored to his back teeth. Arthur inserted two furry fingers into Ethan’s mouth, fit the key into the screw hole at the center of the expander, and twisted. Ethan winced. A needle of pain pierced his skull. He dug his fingernails into his thighs. Bitter, metallic saliva pooled at the corners of his mouth as Arthur slowly turned the key, Ethan’s jaw stretching wider with every crank. Knuckle hairs tickled his gum line and he coughed, spraying the surface of his father’s reading glasses with a fine mist of saliva. Arthur wiped them dry with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “I don’t like it either,” Arthur muttered when he finished, removing the key. Ethan tried to close his mouth but his jaw felt locked in place. A high-pitched sound whistled through his brain. His teeth were ringing. He tried to speak but Arthur was already at the door, closing it behind him.

  Later that evening, Ethan slunk downstairs. His parents were in the living room, reading on the couch.

  “I’m gay,” he said. “Not bi.”

  Arthur looked over his glasses at his wife. He raised his eyebrows before lowering his gaze back to his book. Francine nodded at Ethan sympathetically. Standing there in tremendous pain, the nerve endings in his gums crying out for relief, it was hard not to feel as though the information had been tortured out of him.

  Despite it all, he had to admit there was a small thrill in receiving a letter from his father. An invitation. You waited ages for your father to invite you anywhere. But when it happened, you had to wonder: Is it too late?

  Ethan tossed his Companion onto a chair and tucked the envelope in his back pocket. He scanned his apartment, decorated in exactly the spare style he’d wanted. Right angles and clean surfaces. Naked brick. No photographs. Against sentimentality. He wondered what to do—with the letter, with the rest of the day. His eyes fell on the floating shelves of reclaimed pine. They stood there dumbly, parallel and bare like an equal sign on his wall.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ethan’s retreat inward had accelerated in the twenty-two months since his mother died—since he quit his job and bought the place on Carroll Street. He had ceased to be a public person, in any meaningful sense. He disliked how he was in public. His creaking voice, the timid gestures he caught sight of in reflective storefront glass. He was not at ease around people and regarded those who were with envy and suspicion. Whenever Ethan caught someone looking at him on the subway, his first thought was that he was doing something wrong. Standing wrong. Breathing wrong. Then his cheeks would flush with anger. Why should he doubt himself? Why should he make himself small, when lesser souls sat on life with their legs spread open?

  Stepping out into the world had begun to feel like a shameful concession. An open admission of dependence. Whether it was food or sex or toothpaste, coming face-to-face with that refrain—I need, I need, I need!—made him physically ill. His fantasy of self-reliance was a bunker full of endless shelves, a lifetime supply of everything. His mother, his money—he had coped as best he could, shielding himself from need, girding himself in comfort.

  It didn’t help that so many public places were objectively unpleasant. Laundromats he hated in particular. The penetrating fluorescence, the pools of rusty water. When his machine went bust and he learned that the blue-awninged Suds & Duds on Union was offering a not unreasonable delivery service—the prospect of a mechanic in his home was unthinkable, to say nothing of fixing it himself—Ethan caved. He hadn’t washed his own clothes since.

  The grocery store, the deli—all delivered for a fee. In making these arrangements he found fewer and fewer reasons to go out. He streamed movies and TV. His phone brimmed with podcasts and music on demand. He ordered books online that arrived in half a day. The apartment, spacious by Brooklyn standards, multiplied in size when you considered all the media available within it.

  His lifestyle had come at a cost. Strictly speaking, Ethan was in debt. He’d dropped $150,000 on the down payment for the apartment, a one-bed Neo-Grec that shared a wall with an Episcopal church, gutted the bathroom and kitchen, and redecorated with unusual pleasure, which left him with enough money for a year of voluntary unemployment and compulsive online shopping. He spent enthusiastically on housewares and other nonnecessities: Bernardaud china, a Le Creuset he never used, Waterford Lismore candlesticks, a white marble bread box, an electric corkscrew. A Williams Sonoma subscription to Six Months of American Cheese. Ethan had read somewhere that holding on to money was like clutching an ice cube, which inspired him to buy an aluminum mold from Hammacher Schlemmer that yielded perfectly proportioned balls of ice. Like a comatose patient with no DNR, his sedate lifestyle required a steady drip of funds.

  He was an attentive debtor. He tracked his losses and kept meticulous files of receipts and credit card statements, his wallet growing fat with
plastic. He knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the stone-top coffee table with the hand-forged iron base. He knew what it cost to run errands in the back of cars captained by Somalis without papers, and the price tag on the Tom Ford suit he’d ordered, though he had no occasion to wear it.

  And yet for all his attentiveness, for all his foresight, the debt felt completely unreal. Numbers in columns. Debt was immaterial, a figurative abyss—and did the depth of an abyss matter when the abyss was only figurative? Metaphors were flimsier than the actual pleasure he derived from the purchases he made: Egyptian cotton bedsheets, a La Pavoni espresso machine. Financial institutions spoke in the language of community—membership, relationship, belonging—and to Ethan these words were significant. It was good to be wanted, to feel as though he belonged.

  If the debt seemed illusory when Ethan was sober, it was all the more so when he was drunk. He enjoyed cocktails, but the upside of beer, thanks to the nationwide surge in microbrewing, was that it could be passed off as a hobby. He drank the spectrum, from the palest yellow wits on through to night-black stouts, pilsners and pale ales and lagers, brown ales and dunkels and porters. He was democratic in his drinking, more consumer than connoisseur, unconcerned with specifics. He’d experimented with other vices: cigarettes in high school, cocaine twice in college. But St. Louis was a beer town. Drinking reminded him of home.

  It wasn’t serious. Not really. Because of his cloistered lifestyle, he was never drunk in public, rendering him incapable of harming anyone but himself. He could stop when he wanted to. But he didn’t want to. He lived according to the wisdom of those novelty T-shirts: he didn’t have a drinking problem—he drank, he passed out, no problem.

  At thirty-one years old, his twenties officially in rearview, he found himself alone. It was an awful realization and he seemed to make it fresh each morning. Whatever friends he’d had at the consulting firm where he used to work had fled the city for suburbs with better public school districts, or else were only interested in talking shop, the petty squabbles and betrayals in which Ethan was no longer invested. He recalled a time when he’d been invested—in bonuses, colleagues’ weddings, the way his supervisor pissed with his hands on his hips like he was trying to intimidate the urinal. But that era was done, finished. A few months out of the loop and you realized how insubstantial all that was. It was only the buoyant shouts of the hedge funders balling in Carroll Park on Saturday mornings that made him wonder whether he was wasting his life.