The Altruists Read online

  * * *

  • • •

  Did he miss his children? It was a question too unbearable to ask, like staring wide-eyed at the sun. The physics of it were all wrong. What he missed was his old life, and his children had been part of that. His wife was gone. His house was going to be taken from him. The children were all that was left. The children—and the unexpected money in their name.

  Ulrike choked on a breath and startled awake. Her hands swept the bed. “Mm? Arthur? Come here. Lie down.”

  He dropped his bowl in the sink. “I’m stepping out,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Meeting. Department meeting.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “Yes. Go back to sleep.”

  Ulrike sighed and laid her head back on the pillow.

  Their affair was well into its third year. It no longer seemed right to call it an affair, and it no longer felt like one. Since Francine died, Ulrike had ceased to be “the other woman.” She was something else now. The woman. No “other.” He knew he was in a relationship because he’d begun lying to her about his whereabouts.

  Arthur crept out onto campus. It was a clear, refreshing morning in March, the rarified Danforth air now powdered with perfumes and allergens, no longer winter but the wind still skittish—gathering momentum, agitating trees. Ferrying pollen and rattling windows. Nature thrumming at the molecular level. It was the kind of morning when you didn’t loathe being a professor. When you remembered that the purpose of scholarship was to seek beauty. To seek out beauty and truth and to draw lines around them. To live happily within those walls.

  Arthur beelined past a gang of slackliners toward Main Campus and stately Greenleaf Hall. He ducked inside and up a neglected staircase into the African Studies Library, lurking through the lengths of citrus light cast through the six lancet windowpanes above him.

  The library was in a state of elegant decay. The university, normally fascistic in its regulation of property, had let the African Studies Library fall into disrepair. A spoiled smell haunted the rafters, like something had crawled up into the ceiling beams and died. The library’s odor plus the lagging Wi-Fi and lack of a café conspired to make it an unpopular student workspace, and on a Saturday morning in March, it was practically his private sanctuary. Colleague-free. No students in sight. He inhaled the death smell. God, was it odious. The price for the solitude he sought.

  He sat before a long, sturdy table and he wrote.

  He could hear the wind gathering outside, sweeping through Main Campus, gusting past the offices of deans and vice deans, provosts and professors emeriti. His pen squirmed between his fingers.

  He felt like a pickup artist, a pervert whistling after his life as it passed him on the street in a miniskirt.

  Trembling, he folded the two notes and hid them deep inside his pocket.

  The other upside to the African Studies Library—and this was no small thing—was that it contained his comfort object. (Francine had named it. She was fond of identifying the comfort objects of her patients and relations. Their totems and fetishes. Their repressions realized in plastic. She’d named Arthur’s as a joke, but like all jokes, it was 70 percent true.) Rising from his seat, he made his way toward the back of the room to retrieve it.

  Arthur approached the stacks with predatory alertness, running his fingers along the jutting book spines. Leather, board, paper glossy and rough, text flat and embossed. His one solo publication. When asked why he hadn’t published a manuscript-length study, ever, Arthur was quick to respond: the world doesn’t need more books.

  He pounced as soon as he saw it. A slim, jacketless hardcover, pale red, glue cracking at the binding. TOWARD A NEW SYSTEM OF SANITATION IN THE NEW NATION OF ZIMBABWE: A PROPOSAL, 1981, was stamped across the cover. And below, in smaller (but no less dignified) type: ARTHUR ALTER.

  There existed fewer than fifty copies in the entire world. Most were probably pulped or in prison libraries by now. Arthur’s personal collection had been ruined in a house fire fifteen years earlier. There had been a laundry mishap, a stuffed-up lint screen that had clogged the dryer vent, backing up flammable exhaust gases. The large cardboard box containing Arthur’s copies, which rested by the combination washer-dryer, had perished. Fire and water damage both; the machine had leaked as it burned. But as long as Danforth kept a copy he felt safe. No harm could befall him then.

  His heart rate slowed to a human pace. He took long, sustained breaths. He lingered on the word proposal. Had a word ever held so much hope? He stared at it, the open Os, the Ps like skeleton keys.

  The temperature of his guilt sank. Standing there in the old library, turning the thing over in his hands, Arthur found himself shot through with new confidence. He would have to mail the letters before it ran out.

  FIVE

  It was Arthur who decided that his son would attend Danforth University. Ethan’s grades were good enough to get him out of state, but Danforth waived a generous percentage of tuition for the qualified children of employees who had served the university five years or longer. This was Arthur’s sixth. He learned of the subsidy through the university’s financial aid pamphlet, a glossy document that had the scripture-like effect of converting him as soon as he put it down. He set to calling Danforth “Ethan’s school” long before the applications were due. He said it so often and with such certainty that by the time his son’s acceptance letters puddled on the floor beneath the mail slot, no one bothered rushing to retrieve them.

  Ethan, then a high school junior, wasn’t thrilled with the idea. He had nothing against St. Louis, and was flattered at Arthur’s insistence that he stay close, whatever the reason. But he longed to go elsewhere, to New York City, specifically, where he could be himself, whatever that meant, far from his father’s scrutinizing gaze. Ethan couldn’t risk running into him on campus. Not in college. It would ruin him, he was sure of it. But Arthur explained that unless Ethan wanted to spend the next thirty years of his life smothered by debt, he’d be wise to take advantage of the offer. Plus, this was in the wake of 9/11, there were serious concerns regarding national security, and what could be a less desirable target for international terrorists than a city that couldn’t even draw international tourists?

  “I understand if you want to apply elsewhere,” said Francine, who was spearheading a peer counseling initiative on campus, volunteering her time to run seminars on stress, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other issues commonly observed in undergraduates. “I can see how you wouldn’t want to go to the same school where your parents worked.”

  Ethan looked at his father. Arthur raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Yeah.” He nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe I can make it work.”

  Arthur took his son’s maybe as a yes and began applauding the decision every chance he had. “Ethan’s joining me at Danforth,” he’d tell family and friends, “courtesy of a generous institutional discount.” Sometimes he credited Ethan with the idea. “He was wise to cash in on this discount,” Arthur would say, patting his son on the shoulder approvingly, as though the savings would be passed on to Ethan and not funneled into the mortgage. Still, there was value, real value, in those pats. But the word remained with Ethan—discount—and he forever felt that his education had been plucked from the dollar bin; that the surrounding students in the lecture halls, the ones whose parents paid in full, were somehow learning things he wasn’t, convening after hours and receiving bonus knowledge.

  Though the Alters lived a short walk from the university, Ethan convinced his parents that paying for him to live in the dorms was the least they could do. “I won’t make any friends out here,” he told Francine, gesturing through the dining room window at the sober streets of Chouteau Place. He was not without leverage. There was, after all, the $23,280 per year he was saving them by attending Danforth in the first place.

  His parents agreed. But living in a dorm
meant furnishing it, and subsequently Arthur and Francine made scene upon terrible scene at Tubs & Tupperwares Too in the Promenade at Brentwood. They argued over mattress pads and desk lamps, bulletin boards and book lights, stacking drawers and shoe racks. Whether Ethan needed a shower caddy and a laundry hamper. “I went off to school with a backpack,” Arthur huffed, “and that was it.”

  “I know for a fact that isn’t true,” said Francine.

  “Excuse me. Were you there?”

  Nothing upset Ethan’s father like things. He was a minimalist. He had never learned, nor yearned, to inhabit that enviable space in the “upper-middle class.” The Alters were all too familiar with his position: a refrigerator kept his food cold and a septic system sucked his shit underground. What were all these extra things for? Francine spent, Arthur whined. Yin and insufferable yang. He made an inappropriate amount of fuss the day she brought home a bagel guillotine. He cut his bagels with a knife to spite her.

  “Okay,” he said, looking over the shopping cart. “Tell me why our son needs an electric kettle.”

  “Because it’s nice to have. For tea, when he’s studying. He can make instant coffee and hot chocolate too. It’s not a crime to have one nice thing.”

  Arthur turned to Ethan. “Do you drink tea?”

  “I mean, not really—”

  “See?”

  “And instant coffee and hot chocolate,” Francine said.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve needed an electric kettle in my life? How many times the words ‘electric kettle’ even occurred to me before now? Zero. That’s how many times. Zero times.”

  Francine pressed on with all the cunning of a practicing therapist. “It’s not just an electric kettle. It’s more than that. Think: What if someone walks by Ethan’s room, and he’s in there making tea, or hot chocolate, and that person says, ‘Hey, that looks good, can I have some?’ And then they get to talking. Okay? A new environment is hard enough. You have to give people an opportunity to approach you. This”—she pulled the box out of the cart and shook it—“is an opportunity. And I think that’s worth the cost of an electric kettle. That’s worth twenty-five dollars.”

  Arthur, grumbling, excused himself and went to wait in the car. Francine smiled. “You see,” she told her mortified son, pushing the cart through Kitchenwares, “he’s not so tough when you learn to push back.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Danforth’s century-old Main Campus sat on an acropolistic hill. It had always impressed Ethan as a boy. Now, as a matriculating student, he found the grandeur hollow. Over dinner Arthur lectured on the problem: Main Campus was purportedly constructed in the Oxbridge fashion, replete with arches, spires, and crenellations, when in truth it had clearly been inspired by the Ivies, themselves aping Oxbridge, making Danforth the knockoff of a knockoff. Worse, all the newer buildings spread across Extended Campus were built to look like those on Main, collegiate gothic outfitted with rosy bricks and energy-efficient windows, causing them to appear both contemporary and hundreds of years old, an uncanny homage that argued in favor of the past as being totally inescapable.

  Ethan wasn’t as concerned with the architecture as he was with his father. He feared the still-potent possibility that they might see one another out there, on campus, in public. Arthur, anticipating this—or perhaps similarly determined not to encounter his son in the sandwich line at Olin Lounge—approached him before move-in with a proposal.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. “We’ll divide the campus in two. Main Campus, where my office is, that’ll be off-limits to you between ten a.m. and five p.m. I’ll stay off Extended Campus and the West Forty as best I can. That’s where you’ll live and take most of your classes this year anyway. Okay?”

  Ethan nodded. “Okay.”

  Move-in went smoothly—Arthur stayed home in protest against the school’s coddling, over-the-top student welcoming ceremonies—but socializing was another story. No one at Danforth gave Ethan the opportunity Francine had hoped the kettle would afford him. Impenetrable cliques assembled within days, mostly comprised of East Coast kids who knew one another from high school or theater camp or soccer tournaments. There was an activities fair, predicated on the notion that you already knew what you liked, and that you wanted to do it with people. Athletes roved in packs, and fine arts majors locked themselves in studio all day.

  Ethan wandered, untouched by any social passion. He was a strong student, a one-season high school athlete (baseball, right field), and handsome. But he had never parlayed these gifts into a community. They had only ever worked for him.

  Freshmen were at the mercy of the frats, who held events with themes like “Snowpants or No Pants” and “King Tuts and Egyptian Sluts.” The sororities didn’t have houses to throw parties in because of the state laws defining brothels. Ethan stood in the corner of more dim basements than he cared to think about, watching coeds get sprayed with foam and groped. Parties hosted by the LGBT student groups were no better. They played the same music and also had foam machines. The gropers were gender nonconforming. Twice Ethan went home with boys who were eager to cuddle in the morning. Their desperation was too nauseating, and too familiar, to stomach. One of them dragged him to a meeting of the Danforth Pride Alliance. But Ethan couldn’t understand what the members had in common with one another, and what he had in common with them, beyond the obvious. So they weren’t heterosexual—so what? He thought he might as well start a club for light-haired Jews.

  He took a course in the gender studies department, Intro to Sexuality, which was more therapeutic than academic. His classmates were extremely forthcoming with sensitive information, as though intimacy wasn’t something to be earned, but baby-birded from one mouth to another. The midterm was a survey you had to fill out listing everything you’d ever done, sexually, and at what age. Ethan had no interest in disclosing his intimate history, but it wasn’t a problem for his cohort of Lil’ Kinseys. The surveys were anonymous, but Ethan was the only male student in class. His handwriting gave him away. Halfway through the semester he realized they’d been getting dinner after class without him.

  Months passed and he had not befriended anyone at school, not even his roommate, whose sole interests appeared to be online gambling and his girlfriend back in Nanjing. Tianyi—Eugene, as he insisted Ethan call him—was the shy son of a high-ranking functionary in the Chinese government. (Eugene raised his voice only once all year, interrupting his and Ethan’s global politics professor to denounce, in labored English, the July 1 protests in Hong Kong.) But for all his ideological posturing, Eugene had a weakness for American capitalism. Below his capri-length cargo shorts he sported Nike Dunks. He played 3-D slots long into the night. He owned a Maserati that he kept in the student parking complex.

  His constant presence wore on Ethan. Loneliness, it turned out, was perversely addictive. He found the only thing he wanted after a long day of being alone on campus was to be alone in his room. “At least you won’t be sexiled,” offered Ethan’s acne-scarred residential advisor, explaining that an antisocial, crypto-fascist roommate did not warrant a room transfer.

  Ethan could avoid his father most of the time, but their decided-upon borders were necessarily porous. Now and then he visited instructors during office hours on Main Campus. Once, after consulting with his professor on an essay—the course was Popular Crime and Early American Anxieties, a new offering from the American studies department, which occupied the former sociology wing on Main Campus—Ethan ducked into Greenleaf Hall to use a restroom. He sidled up to one of two free urinals. As he unzipped, his eyes darted to his left, where, under the aqueous green fluorescence of the men’s room, he recognized the man beside him. The man, his father, glanced right and looked back down. He stopped pissing, shook, zipped, and washed his hands. He left without a word.

  Now, Ethan thought, it was entirely possible that his father hadn’t noticed it wa
s him. Or perhaps he simply refused to speak at the urinals. Which was fine. Procedure was procedure. But one more possibility occurred to Ethan, something at once heartbreaking and petty: the possibility that his father had glanced right, registered his son, and, in accordance with their boundaries, pretended that he hadn’t.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the end of his freshman year, Ethan successfully applied for a room to himself in one of the modern sophomore dorms the university had erected on the West Forty. He had given up on finding a new roommate and worried that Eugene, an international student who might not know better, would assume another year of cohabitation. He tried and failed to initiate the conversation until, to his surprise, Eugene brought it up in April. “We must discuss our dorm placement for next year,” he said one afternoon.

  “Yeah,” said Ethan. “About that . . .”

  “I will be in suite with five other Chinese student.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I apologize.” He put a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “I am sure you will find a happy place to live.”

  Ethan wasn’t certain. At parties, he felt like he belonged to another species. He didn’t know how to approach people. Social life was governed by extracurriculars. There was a Korean a capella group, a black a capella group, and an a capella group that changed the words of popular songs so that they were about Hanukkah. He went to an intramural softball tryout but didn’t make it to the diamond. From the parking lot it looked like everyone already knew each other. He realized now that he’d come to count on Eugene as a brother in solitude, a fellow sufferer. It occurred to him that perhaps Eugene had been playing 3-D slots all year with other expat students on campus, forming friendships conjoined by Ethernet cables. He learned then that there are levels of loneliness, as many types as there are people, and that one should never assume that one’s solitary condition has anything to do with someone else’s.