The index of self destru.., p.10
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 10
It sounded so banal, but she couldn’t help that. When you lived with such privilege, even your crises were bound to seem self-indulgent. She had all the neuroses that came from growing up rich, plus the added neurosis that only some had: the feeling that you weren’t quite entitled to your unhappiness. The Anxiety of Affluence, Richard had jokingly called it.
She closed her contacts and looked at her notes, where she came upon one that read, simply, Turner. She remembered now that she’d been planning to visit the Met’s J. M. W. Turner exhibition, which might have some relevance to her work, such as that still was. If nothing else, it would get her outside.
She was halfway out the door when Frank called after her. She hadn’t thought to worry about running into him, since he spent most of his time tucked away in his office, where he was supposedly finishing the big book he’d been working on since Margo was fourteen. She considered pretending she’d hadn’t heard him. If she stopped, he might ask where she was going and decide to come along. It was the kind of thing they’d always done together, and he either hadn’t noticed or had chosen to ignore the fact that she wasn’t interested in doing the things they’d always done together. She turned only when she realized that he wasn’t alone.
“Sam, this is my daughter, Margo,” he said to the boy beside him. “Margo, this is Sam Waxworth.”
The boy seemed to expect some hint of recognition at the name. When she provided none he said, “I’m here for an interview.”
He was certainly dressed for an interview, Margo thought, in his khakis and white oxford button-down. Was her father hiring a research assistant?
“It’s for a magazine,” he added.
Then it came to her.
“You’re the young man from the provinces.” He looked back blankly until she laughed. “Bad joke,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Sam.” She took her hand from the door to shake his politely. “I’ll leave you to your subject.”
“We’ve actually just finished,” Frank told her. “Maybe you can show Sam out.”
When they got to the bottom of the stoop, Margo looked the boy over more carefully, considering what to make of him now that she knew who he was. He was an inch or so taller than she was, medium build, around her age. His light brown hair was cut close and carefully combed. His narrow face had something faintly canine about it, though he wasn’t unattractive. He was almost handsome in an awkward way. She noticed his wedding ring and wondered idly what kind of woman he would marry. He looked a bit lost; it was probably his first time in the neighborhood.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Nowhere in particular,” he said. “What about you?”
How easy it would have been to tell him she was meeting friends, direct him politely to the subway, never see him again. In a few weeks she’d read an article in which she wouldn’t merit a passing mention. But at the moment she was happy for company.
“To the Met.”
“I haven’t been yet,” he said.
“It’s worth seeing,” she told him. “You’re welcome to come.”
He hesitated before answering. He seemed likewise to be wondering exactly what to make of her.
“I should probably get to work on this profile, but I’ll walk you there.”
Margo was still embarrassed about her initial greeting, and to show that she did after all know who he was, she said as they walked, “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to an oracle before.”
Sam shook his head.
“All that stuff’s a little overdone,” he said, though obviously pleased by the acknowledgment. “I just like to crunch numbers.”
“You went fifty for fifty.”
“I got lucky.”
“Don’t be modest.”
“Modesty’s not a trait I really possess,” he said with a laugh. “My model was probabilistic, which means it’s not supposed to be right every time. Or rather, being right doesn’t mean what people think it means. If the most likely outcome always happens, then there’s a problem with the model, unless I’ve pegged the probability at one hundred percent. The system has to be ‘wrong’ occasionally, if it’s doing its job. I was predicting more than a hundred outcomes, most with likelihoods in the ninety-to-ninety-five-percent range. If there’d been a few cases where the second most likely thing happened instead of the first, that actually would have made my predictions more accurate, though it wouldn’t have gotten the same attention. That’s the trouble with elections—there aren’t really enough outcomes for the law of large numbers to kick in.”
He seemed to come into sharper focus as he spoke. His enthusiasm was so guileless that it could only be laughed at or urged along, and she decided on the latter.
“The law of large numbers?”
“It’s a principle of probability that says that the more times you conduct an experiment, the closer the average outcome will get to the expected outcome. In other words, chance cancels out over time. If you flip five coins, they might easily all come up heads. But if you flip five million coins, you’re going to get a fifty-fifty split. Predicting election outcomes every four years is more like five coin flips. You’d have to do it for a very long time before it would produce a sample large enough to assure that the better system wins out.”
“On the other hand, it’s not really a coin flip at all,” she said. “Because the outcome actually matters.”
“Do you think so? To tell the truth, I’m suspicious of how much difference elected officials make in the world. Particularly in a system where the range of choices is so narrow.”
“Why do you study it, if it doesn’t make a difference?”
“Well, I started with baseball, but this company that bought my model made me sign a noncompete, so I couldn’t write about sports.”
“Okay, but why politics?”
“I tried a few other things first. I just asked myself what else was out there to predict. Then it was the spring of 2007, the most wide-open presidential campaign of the modern era. No incumbents on either side, not even a sitting vice president, lots of candidates for both nominations, everything up for grabs. And I could see how politics was like baseball: full of mythology, bad conventional wisdom. People talk about a candidate ‘looking presidential,’ which is no different from an old scout who ‘throws out the numbers’ because a prospect passes the ‘eyeball test.’ Pundits make a living getting things wrong over and over again with no consequence.”
“People like my father?”
She’d meant this teasingly, but he hardly seemed to notice.
“I just mean that there was lots of data floating around that no one seemed to know what to do with. National election results, exit polls for every two years, plus extensive polling leading up to every election. I decided to see what I could make of it.”
“And you accidentally got everything right.”
“I got lucky,” he said again.
“You’ll start getting some things wrong once the law of large numbers kicks in?”
They both laughed. Margo sometimes found that long stints of reading without human interaction rendered her socially inept, but she found talking with him easy. He wasn’t awkward in the way she’d expected. He was probably a little arrogant, but she was used to that, even preferred it to the alternative. It felt like a long time since she’d had a real conversation, the kind that forced you to think a little bit, the kind she’d always had with her father.
The sidewalks near the museum were filled with hot dog carts, street vendors selling prints and African masks, caricaturists entreating tourists to sit for portraits. Amid the crowd, Margo spotted a few of the gray uniform skirts she had herself worn as a Melwood girl not so many years before, when she and her friends had sat on the museum steps during lunch breaks, smoking cigarettes.
“We’ve got a family membership,” she said. “Free tickets.”
They walked inside, to the front counter, where Margo handed over her card and asked for two buttons. Beyond the entrance gate sat the grand marble stairway, lined with the carved names of old donors, Margo’s grandfather and great-grandfather among them. At the top of the stairs they turned left, into the Turner exhibition, where they walked in silence to a landscape that showed a medieval ruin bathed in sun.
“This is why I came,” Margo said.
Sam leaned over to read the title.
“Tintern Abbey,” he read. “Should that mean something to me?”
“It was a Cistercian monastery in England. Shut down during the Reformation. The ruins became a kind of tourist site. Wordsworth wrote a famous poem about it around the same time Turner did this painting. That’s why I wanted to see it, for my dissertation.”
“Does it match Wordsworth’s description?”
“Actually, he never describes the place. I said the poem is about the abbey, but that’s not exactly right. It was just written near there.”
“What’s it about, then?”
Margo considered this.
“It’s about coming to a place at one point in your life and coming back years later. I guess it doesn’t sound like much when I put it that way. It’s about memory. It’s about that blessed mood, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lighten’d.”
He looked more carefully at the painting, as though searching for some reflection there of what Margo had just said. She’d had plentiful experience in graduate school of boys who stopped listening the moment conversation entered territory they couldn’t easily dominate, and she imagined him thinking of ways to work the subject back to baseball or her father. Instead he asked, “Do you think the world is unintelligible?”
The question was so unexpected that Margo laughed a bit, and she noticed Sam reddening slightly in response.
“Much of the time I do. I suppose you disagree.”
“I think it’s a lot more intelligible than people let on. Occasionally we don’t like what it’s saying to us, so we pretend that the messages are indecipherable.”
“Seems like someone in your line of work would have to think that.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I suppose someone in your line of work would have to insist on the mystery at the heart of everything, or the endless room for interpretation.”
“I’m not sure I’ve got a line of work.”
“Aren’t you writing a dissertation on Wordsworth? I assumed you were an academic.”
“I say that mostly out of habit. I’ve sort of left school for a while.”
“What happened?”
He didn’t seem to have any sense that this was a tactless question. Not even her mother had asked her so directly.
“Leigh Hunt—he was a minor Romantic poet—once wrote to Coleridge to say he’d gotten a job as the secretary to a prominent politician, a common form of patronage in those days. He was encouraging Coleridge to do the same. ‘Either I will be something far greater than that,’ Coleridge told him, ‘or I will be nothing.’ That’s how I feel about graduate school right now.”
She’d read the Hunt quote a few days earlier in Holmes’s Coleridge biography, but she hadn’t thought to apply it to herself until that very moment. It sounded silly and pretentious as it left her mouth, and she waited for him to say something slightly deflating in response. Perhaps she even wanted to be deflated. But his face showed a kind of recognition instead.
“What’s your far greater thing?”
Having made the initial remark, she thought she might as well go all out.
“The same thing it was for Coleridge. Not a student of poets, but the thing itself.”
It had been years since she’d attempted to write a poem, let alone voiced the aspiration to be a poet. Saying it had always felt childish, like telling someone you meant to run off with the circus. This was especially true when she’d said it to people who knew her family had money. She’d always imagined that they took her to mean she was going to live off her trust fund while she thought beautiful thoughts. Graduate school had appealed to her partly because it seemed more respectable.
“To tell you the truth,” Sam said, “I’ve never really understood poetry. When we read it in school, I always thought I was missing something. Then the teacher would explain it, and I always wondered, If that’s what it means, why don’t they just say it that way?”
“Maybe you just had bad teachers.”
She meant this to sound encouraging, but he responded defensively.
“Probably,” he said. “We moved around a lot, and I went to some pretty shitty schools.”
“I just meant, part of the problem is the idea that you’re supposed to understand a poem, rather than enjoy it. That it’s a container for some message that can be extracted, that you’ve failed the poem somehow if you don’t get that message out of it.”
“If there’s really nothing to get, what’s the point? I prefer the idea that I’m missing something.”
“Of course poems are trying to say something. But they’re not riddles. They say what they say. I went to fancy private school, but I still had some bad teachers, too.” Margo wasn’t sure that she wanted to tell this story to a reporter who was writing about her father, but Sam wasn’t acting much like a reporter. “In third grade, I had to memorize ‘The Road Not Taken’ for homework. I recited the poem to my father, who asked me what it meant. We’d talked in class about the importance of taking the road less traveled, not always following the crowd, but when I told him this, he asked me to recite the poem again. This time he stopped me as I went along. ‘If Frost had been writing about nonconformism’—this wasn’t the word my teacher used, but my father doesn’t really know how to talk to children—‘why would he say that as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same?’ I didn’t have an answer to that. When I got to the part that went, I shall be telling this with a sigh, he asked, ‘Do we sigh when we think about choices we’re glad we’ve made?’ We went through the whole thing like that. ‘So what do you think the poem is really about?’ he asked me when we were done. I told him it was about how we can’t really know where our choices are going to lead us. ‘Not only that,’ he said, ‘but we’re probably going to regret those choices either way. Frost had a fundamentally tragic view of life. There is always going to be a road not taken. We only get to live once. Nothing we do is ever going to wholly satisfy us in the end.’ In retrospect, I can see why this was not a lesson my teacher was especially keen to impart to a bunch of third graders.”
She remembered it still so vividly. After Frank had finished talking about the poem, he’d gone to his shelf for his volume of Frost, and together they had read “After Apple-Picking.” They went through it slowly, two or three times. Again he asked her what it was about.
“He’s been picking apples all day,” she’d said. “He’s tired, and now he’s falling asleep. He’s starting to dream, and he’s dreaming about apples, because he’s been picking them so long.”
“It is about that,” her father had agreed. “But it’s also about more than that.”
One more time they’d read the poem, and he stopped to talk about the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He showed how something like a poem could be about the thing it was about but also about something else, something more. He made her reread the lines about how all the apples That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth, and he started telling his eight-year-old daughter about the modernists and the desire to make poetry that concerned only the things that hung from the branches above us and never touched the ground. He talked about how Frost opposed that idea by writing about things like apple picking while writing at the same time about all the tough philosophical subjects that someone like Wallace Stevens wrote about. And so it wasn’t really right to say that the poem was about something other than what it pretended to be about, only that it was about many things at the same time.
“He always spoke to me like an adult,” she said. “It’s the only way he knows how to talk.”
She and her father had stayed up late into the night—or what seemed late to her, certainly well past her childhood bedtime—reading poems and talking about them. By morning all these lines and ideas were jumbled in her head, and she was so tired that when her turn came to recite “The Road Not Taken,” she’d needed prompting and wound up getting a B. Her father had found this wonderful. Another lesson! It didn’t matter what grade you got. It mattered that you understood the thing. That wasn’t exactly true, her mother had interjected. It was easy for a man to claim that grades didn’t matter, but a woman who wanted to be successful didn’t have that freedom. She wasn’t given the same margin for error, and she needed to prove that she could perform. This led to a long conversation between her parents, which Margo was urged to join, though it didn’t interest her.
That night she’d decided to surprise her father by memorizing “After Apple-Picking.” It was longer than “The Road Not Taken” and irregular in its rhythm and rhyme scheme, so she needed most of a month to get it right, where the other poem had taken only a few days. Reciting it to him was one of the proudest moments of her life to that point.
“I memorized a poem a month after that,” she told Sam. She usually picked them with her father, though sometimes she surprised him. They were often poems that he’d memorized years before, and he would listen without the words in front of him, remembering well enough to correct her or help her along. When he didn’t already know the poem, he would learn it with her. His memory for quotes and lines of verse was legendary. His columns were sprinkled with them. “I did it for more than a decade. I’ve still got most of them banging around my head. I want my own words banging around in someone’s head like that.”
“Committing stuff to memory seems sort of outdated,” Sam said. “Now you can just call it up on your phone any time you want.”
