Nothing Is Terrible

  Copyright © 2000 by Matthew Sharpe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  VILLARD BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “If I Could Tell You” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson.

  Copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden.

  Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sharpe, Matthew.

  Nothing is terrible: a novel / Matthew Sharpe.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55869-5

  I. Title.

  PS3569.H3444N68 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-39236

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I Die: A Prologue

  1 The Horror of Grade School

  2 I Am Commodified

  3 More Wrong Songs

  4 I Am Stuck

  5 I Am Not Embraced by Everyone

  6 Dirty Little Secret

  7 Soap as an Actual Yardstick of Civilization

  8 I Am Fucked

  9 The Louder a Lady

  10 My Body Writes Checks My Mind Can’t Cash

  11 I Fail

  12 Unrelenting Pleasure

  13 Seven Types of Ambiguity

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books By This Author

  About the Author

  I Die A PROLOGUE

  “That girl is not normal, and neither is the boy,” I overheard my uncle say to my aunt late one summer night a month after my parents had been killed in a car accident on the way home from a wedding. My twin brother Paul and I were ten years old at the time, and we were the children my childless uncle was talking about. “The boy is sickly, that much we know,” he went on. “The girl—hard to say what the trouble is there.”

  This remark of my uncle’s seems like as good a place as any to begin. If you’ll stay with me here for a few moments, I think I can show you that what happened that night gave rise to a series of events that turn out to be the fabulous little story I call, for want of a better expression, my life.

  My uncle was not kidding, by the way. He calls them as he sees them. Who once said it takes a mean man to tell the truth about others and a melancholy man to tell the truth about himself? No, I’m asking because I really can’t remember who said it. There’s so much to forget, my dear reader, and a lot of it will be forgotten here by me, your kind, happy interlocutor, the adult woman whom the little girl of our tale is astonished to find she has become. Ah, but enough about the person who is writing this autobiography. Let’s return to the person who is living it.

  “Paul!” I called out in a whisper to my brother. We were lying in the dark in our new bedroom. The air was hot and thick, and sound traveled well in that little house.

  “Yes, Paul?” Paul replied. The name our parents had given me was Mary, and you may call me that if you wish, but at the time we saw no reason to honor their conventions, now that they had done the most irresponsible thing a pair of parents could do. Besides, we felt “Paul” suited me better, describing the person I was as well as it described my twin brother, just as the word cleave means both to adhere and to split in two.

  “Paul,” I said, “I don’t feel like staying in bed tonight. Can you think of something for us to do?”

  “Let’s go down the street to the golf course,” he said, and explained what he thought we ought to do when we got there. If a boy who had little hope for life and could do nothing well but think can be said to have a beautiful mind, then that was what Paul had, whereas I was a fine physical specimen of a girl, if a little wifty in the thinking department. The two of us had a division of labor whereby he thought up things for us to do and I did them.

  The night we strolled out the front door of the small suburban house of our uncle the unlucky electronics repairman and his almost mute wife was a warm and clear and starry night. Coming from the city, we had not seen stars, and now that we were seeing them we agreed that we didn’t like them. To us they were so many blemishes in an otherwise smooth sky. We knew that everyone was supposed to like stars. We’d heard nothing but good things said about stars, and we didn’t care. Sorrow makes its own principles, which are not necessarily shared by the unsorrowful; I hope you will bear this in mind as you read on.

  We walked on the wet grass of the fairway in short pajamas. I carried the shovel. Thousands of invisible crickets rubbed their legs together. Our naked feet were wet and cool, and cut blades of grass stuck to them in the dark. Far away on the narrow road we came from, a solitary car passed.

  We were two pale, thin children with curly black hair. Paul’s paleness was embellished by a spiderweb of red veins spread out just under his skin. These you could see anywhere you chose to look on the surface of his body. I imagined that the function of the veins was to make his skin that much more sensitive than other people’s skin. I imagined the discomfort of being housed in that body, and when I had a physical sensation that I wished to experience more sharply, I tried to feel how Paul would feel it. The soft breeze on his arms and legs that night, I believed, felt like an ongoing swath of fine sandpaper moving across them. Paul walked ahead, navigating in near darkness with his fine abstract sense of space and time. I walked behind with a flashlight, idly investigating the two narrow strings of muscle that connected his torso to the back of his head.

  We arrived at the first green and he removed the flag from the hole and commanded me to expand the tiny golf-ball hole into a hole that the bodies of two small children could fit into. I bent my back and began to dig while he stood tall above me, head tilted back, nostrils aflare, holding the flag erect at arm’s length like the white explorer claiming some wild land that I the dark native beneath him was busy getting in touch with. I dug and dug and dug and dug, or so it seems from the vantage of memory. And while I dug, my poor little twin brother, who shimmers now on the shared border of consciousness and oblivion, began another round of a game he referred to as the Philosophical Conundrum.

  “All right, Paul,” said Paul, “let’s say your twin-engine Cessna has crashed in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and your millionaire boyfriend lover died in the crash and it’s just you alive in the middle of the desert. And then a guy comes along giving you a choice.”

  “Where’s the guy come from if I’m in the middle of—”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s just a guy, like a guy in a suit. And he comes down out of somewhere to give you a choice. And the choice is you can have a big diamond worth a hundred million dollars or you can have enough glasses of cold milk to last you till you get out of the desert. Which do you choose?”

  “But I already have the rich boyfriend.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “But he leaves me all his money because he loves me so much.”

  “No he doesn’t. He’s just in it for the sex.”

  “No, it’s more than sex. He loves me.”

  “Okay, he loves you, but he just met you like a month ago and he didn’t have time to change his will yet.”

  “Who’d he leave the money to, before me?”

  “His ex-wife, and she’s a bitch and she hates you.”

  “The diamond.”

  “What?”

  “I choose the diamond. From the guy.
”

  “Okay. Fine. The diamond. Now. Poof, the guy’s gone. Now it’s just you and the diamond and a hundred thousand miles to the nearest water.”

  “No. There’s water.”

  “Where?”

  “Right over the hill.”

  “But the hill is a hundred thousand miles long.”

  “How come it has to be?”

  “Because I’m the one making this up.”

  “You can’t make stuff up after I choose.”

  “Your optimism is gonna get you killed one day.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Shut up and dig.”

  I was bent over down inside the hole I had created thus far. Paul put his bare foot on my back, which, given the depth of the hole, was nearly level with the ground. I had taken off my pajama shirt for digging, and some of the blades of grass from his bare foot went onto my back and made infinitesimal bloodless cuts in the skin, and the sweat went into the cuts and my back started to itch and hurt. I laughed. I had to stop digging because Paul was making me laugh so much by having his foot on my back. He was laughing too. I took his foot off my back and stood up and fell sideways onto the crew-cut grass of the green. He fell on top of me and I was feeling passionate so I pulled him close to me and kissed him hard on the cheek. He resisted me, so I stood up and finished digging the hole.

  We jumped into it and lay down because it was midnight and we were tired. I curled up into a tight ball and Paul curled around my back in a loose arc. “I like how the dirt feels, Paul,” he said to me. “Thank you for digging the hole.”

  “Thanks for the wonderful idea, Paul,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do we have to do anything else on your idea?”

  “No. We just fall asleep and wait for some grown-up to come along and get angry at us.”

  I closed my eyes and immediately began the descent. I heard Paul say, “Can I hold your hand?”

  “Sure.” I was lying on my right side, and I reached across my own chest and gave Paul my right hand.

  “I like to hold your hand,” he said. “When I touch you I tingle with how alive you are.” I continued to let myself down into sleep as I felt Paul settling into place behind me. Half asleep, I felt him creeping over the surface of my back, whispery light, a faint tickle on my skin. At this moment, I have a palpable image of him as a long animated skeleton with soft white bones and powers of speech, the shadow of my inner life, clinging to the warmth of my flesh.

  The grown-up whose anger we were waiting for was Tommy, our unlucky uncle. He was a mean, delicate, pretty, fine-featured blond man who repaired televisions and other appliances for a living. He was mean because he was pretty. Prettiness was a terrible burden to him because its mute prophecy—wealth—had gone unfulfilled. Prettiness ruined Tommy for a life of subsistence. It was an outrage to have to live modestly, having been born into the aristocracy of looks. If you have a tendency to be self-regarding, and then you’re also poor and delicate and gorgeous and a man, it’s a hard life. Tommy had little energy for niceness because he had to devote himself to the tragedy of prettiness. The tragedy was that the prettiness kept him enclosed in a stifling little atmosphere of mediocrity not much bigger than his own body that he expected someone taken with his beauty to lift him out of.

  If he could only have convinced someone to let him play golf at the country club, for instance. He practiced his driving and putting at the driving and putting range in the next town, and if he could play just one round of eighteen holes, he’d be in. That Tommy thought he was on his way to insinuating himself into a club membership by signing a service contract with the grounds manager of the club to repair its TVs was proof that he carried around with him this bubble of mediocrity that was impenetrable from both sides. This is only my opinion, of course.

  We were discovered at six A.M. by the aforementioned grounds manager, Hawthorne, the other grown-up whose anger we were looking forward to. He was a big, robust, crimson man in his early sixties who loved his morning constitutional on the golf course in crisp khaki shorts and saddle-style golf spikes. He came upon this huge hole in the first green. He peered down into it and saw the two skinny weirdo new foster children of the TV repairman sleeping. The wrongdoing, I imagine, was so categorically pure that the outrage it inspired in him must have felt something like delight. He had thin white hair, and his whole head turned dark purple with what seemed to be happiness when he woke us up. He grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the hole. As I came up, I put my lips next to his ear and said, “You can’t pull my brother’s arm like that. It’ll come off in your hand.” He thought that was very funny, and Paul came up on his own.

  “I feel like I’m dreaming here,” Hawthorne said. “Tell me this isn’t happening.”

  “This isn’t happening,” Paul said.

  Hawthorne thought that was even funnier. Without taking his eyes off the shovel he said, “Your uncle’s gonna go nuts over this. Your uncle is going to go nuts. I just hope I can get you kids up to the house before he wakes up this morning so I’ll have the pleasure of getting him out of bed for this one. I mean, this is inspirational.”

  Paul said, “I’m sure the golfers will think so.” Hawthorne’s mirth subsided then. As he walked us down to his station wagon in the clubhouse parking lot and drove us up to Tommy’s house he tried to laugh a few more times, but it was a big effort for him. In fact, we were not prepared for just how upset it would make Hawthorne to contemplate the indignation of his bosses, the golfers.

  Hawthorne and Tommy had shared an incident. The very first time a TV set had broken at the country club, Tommy showed up to repair it in a black-and-white houndstooth check blazer and white pinpoint oxford dress shirt and pale blue tie with small bright-yellow polka dots. Hawthorne had a fit. He told Tommy to hurry up and fix the TV and get out of there and next time come dressed for the job he was doing. Tommy was bewildered. Not only did Tommy have better golf skills than Hawthorne without being allowed to play golf where Hawthorne was allowed, but Tommy had a better wardrobe and better taste in clothes than Hawthorne, and Hawthorne could wear his nice clothes in places where Tommy couldn’t wear his even nicer ones.

  We arrived at Tommy’s doorstep with the great discomfort of Hawthorne looming above us.

  Our Aunt Myra answered the door, a non-churchgoer up and dressed on a Sunday morning at 6:45 A.M. Hawthorne stood between and slightly behind Paul and me, one hand on a shoulder of each child. At ten years old I wanted to think of myself as a person who knew who she was, but now, many years later, when I think of the way I focused my attention on the faces of adults, I know that I needed those faces to find myself in. Myra’s was the hardest possible face for this purpose. Before Hawthorne spoke, I saw a look of confusion on her face. Then Hawthorne said, “The children have vandalized the first green.” Then the look on Myra’s face was gone, replaced by a frozen expression that I had been seeing for a month. It was an expression that said here was another of life’s generalized difficulties. To give more of herself to an event like this would have been something too wild for Myra. Where inside a person do all the events go when they go almost unnoticed? To the event graveyard.

  “I’ll get my husband,” she said.

  Hawthorne stood silently with Paul and me on the flagstone stoop, none of us yet invited into the house.

  After ten minutes, Tommy came to the door. He had not been awake. About him was the smell of stick deodorant fermented for hours in dark armpits. He wore a neatly pressed dark blue paisley satin robe that showed some of his narrow, hairless chest. His pale, gently freckled skin looked even softer at this, a wee hour for him. His fingers were long and delicate and tapered, the finest fingers of any TV repairman in town. His blue eyes were shiny and his facial features looked small and fine and hurt. Tommy always looked hurt. If, in the morning, he poured milk into his cereal and the milk splashed on his clothes, that was a small example of injustice. Hawthorne at
his door in the morning with the two brats was a big, vulgar, bodily injustice standing at his door with the two brats. Hawthorne overseeing the TVs down at the club presented a professional and personal challenge for Tommy that was unpleasant but workable. Hawthorne on the border of Tommy’s sleep, however, Hawthorne authoritatively touching the children whom Tommy had brought into his own home for the sake of guilt and duty and love of his dead sister and how it would look to the people who would care how it looked—and even for the sake of the children themselves, whom he worried about perpetually on top of his own worries—Hawthorne, in short, in the tender private places sent Tommy into a quiet tizzy. Did he have to bow to Hawthorne on the threshold of his own house? He needed Hawthorne.

  Partly because of the manly discomfort Tommy’s prettiness caused in him, Hawthorne wanted to get out of there and order someone to fill in that hole, so he gave Tommy the basic information and was ready to leave when Tommy said, “I’ll pay you whatever it costs to repair the hole.”

  “No need.”

  “I want to.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I will.”

  “You will what?”

  “Send you money for the damage.”

  “I’m not gonna tell you how much it is.”

  “I’ll guess.”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “It won’t get you anywhere.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Gotta run.”

  “You’ll be receiving a check.”

  “I’ll send it back.”

  “I’ll send it back at you.”

  “Do whatever you want,” Hawthorne said, and walked away.

  I understood why adults were inclined to hate or at least fear Paul. Paul had an aberrant philosophical cast. He knew things other people didn’t know—secrets from the womb, perhaps—and he had a genius for expressing them in unhappy prophecy. “They’re not ever going to let you into the club no matter what you do,” Paul said to Tommy, and Tommy, who had had no practice at child rearing, grabbed a hunk of Paul’s curly hair close to the scalp and used it as a handle with which to rattle Paul’s head vigorously for fifteen or eighteen seconds.