Born Slippy Read online

  Ach, god, I don’t miss this kind of talk, Frank thought, don’t miss it at all. Margie was right, he really is just a pig. Frank caught Dmitry looking at his nauseated face, and he seemed to actually enjoy it.

  “Can I borrow this?” Dmitry said as he grabbed a tape measure from the tool belt hanging on a hook near the kitchen door. “Just like old days! I never could remember where I put mine down, could I! So let’s say she was the same length to the knee as me, about two feet, the same from the belt to the top of the head,” he held the tape measure so that it ran over his nose to his belt, “or about two-eight — if she had a three-foot thigh she would be seven-feet-eight-inches tall, which she was definitely not. The three-foot thigh is an aberration of my memory, what T. S. Eliot called an objective correlative, right?”

  “No, that’s not what it means,” Frank said. But then he thought, well, maybe — he wasn’t sure.

  “We had several days of what was for me an absolute paradise, with everyone pretending nothing was happening, the girls all very lovey-dovey with each other, everything very discreet and me as happy as a man can be, the Neapolitan ice cream of sex every day. Except that, as I found out, not everyone was pretending: Mary didn’t, as it turns out, actually know I was boffing Sally and Matty as well, nor did Sally know, and so when it all was uncovered so to speak there ensued a great wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. A lot of great make-up sex, until Mary and Sally found out I was having make-up sex with both of them. Matty was the imperturbable cucumber she always was, but eventually we had to drop off the other two at a bus station.”

  “And the point of all this is?”

  “I think it should be obvious, Franky! I developed an idea about the kind of women who ride the Green Tortoise, based on a quite delectable sample, and if history repeats itself, which we know it does, the entire trip will be effectively free.”

  “You had to come here for this? There are no women in England?”

  “Well, Franky, I have found that unlike in their home environment, women, when traveling, are much more like men, ready to roll the dice. Women at home have all this pressure from their girlfriends to land the big game, you know, put the head on the wall. Naturally they don’t want to marry every eligible man they meet, but they are determined to make us act like we want to, and parade us around to their family and friends, and make us change our clothing and hairstyle, while all the while, and if they were to be honest, they would have to admit it: not only are they planning to dump us for various infractions as soon as our trophy-tour is over, but they decided what the dumpable infractions were the night they met us. They enter the fray marvelously well-armed. Women who are traveling have no audience for their trophies and so they are, like we are, ready to fuck and suck and make a pleasant night of it.” He took a sip of beer. “Ah, I forgot how easily distressed you are, Franky, by such talk.”

  “Which is what you want to do, distress me, right?” Frank said, which stopped him for a moment. “The thing that distresses me is how much more cynical you’ve become.”

  “Yeah,” Dmitry said. “Right…” He stretched the word so it sounded like a version of riot. “You getting laid at all, Franky? I suspect not. You don’t want to get pulled around by your nose-ring by a flock of vile hens, either, I assume — not to mix my barnyard metaphors. Thus, if we want to get some trim — a laudable American addition to the idioms, becoming more apropos every day as shaving and waxing conquers the last outposts of territory formerly haired — the only way to get it is to buy it, which is where I began: it’s expensive, and you’re even tighter than I am, so I can’t imagine you dropping a couple hundred dollars a bang on a regular basis. Then you dress this frugality up as moral reprehension. You ought to take a little trip on the Tortoise one day. It’d do you good.”

  Frank had busied himself putting together some dinner from the fridge and chose to ignore this, knowing Dmitry would start off on something else right away, which he did. Frank let him monologue his way into the night, and they managed to avoid any tricky subjects, because what would be the point? Dmitry had changed his major from physical therapy — yes, Frank thought, funny — to business, had transferred to another university Frank had never heard of, and reported himself to be quite a success.

  “The thing about university, Franky, is that basically you only have a couple of elementary chores in each of your courses. The first is to make your professors feel fantastically smart, and the second is to make them think you want to be exactly like them. Most students think you parrot back whatever they say, but since professors are flattered like this constantly, they are jaded, and their higher vanity makes them look for proof that they have taught you not just what to think but how to think, a stupendously high standard, really — how can they all do that? Three or four or five of them a term? So you pretend to vigorously disagree with some minor point they have made while ceding all the major ones slavishly — your apparent struggle and error, which you let them correct, convince them they are having an effect.

  “Then you hint you want to do research in field x, because whatever their vanity about teaching, their narcissism about their research is massively stronger. Most of them will explain that you need decades of training before daring to attempt the awesome and intricate feats they manage, which is perfect since your path is greased forever by the offer, and you didn’t want to do the research, now, did you? They tell you to write a term paper that would be nothing more than a summary of their latest white paper, but they never remember what they told you to do three or four months down the road, so you can hand them anything. I’ve given the same research project to every one of my business professors, simply inserting very recent data each time, so they never suspect it’s an updated version of the one from the preceding term.”

  “That’s godawful, Dmitry,” Frank said, having slowly heated. “Imagine what that sounds like to me. I’d love to go to university, I’d love to have that kind of chance, and you’re just fucking off? Cheating your way through? Christ, what a waste! Don’t you care at all, don’t you want to learn anything?”

  “Whoa! Franky, boy! What a torrent from you! If I remember correctly, you, yourself, remember not a single thing from your wantonly brief time at university.” This seemed to Frank a low blow. “That aside, you needn’t worry. I do want to learn, and the research I show them is research I’m actually doing — building data in an always evolving and actually quite useful project, unlike most of theirs. I’m learning the Asian markets. I’ve decided it would be a gigantic error to settle for being a capitalist pig when I can, with not an iota’s more effort, be an imperialist pig.”

  Faulkner said Harvard teaches you how to drown yourself and Sewanee doesn’t even teach you what water is, Frank thought, and so who knows: maybe British universities teach smartass nihilism. They managed not to talk about the motorhome disaster or about the debacle with Margie or his pimping in Connecticut or his other crimes, not that time or the next. Frank knew, after a while, what Dmitry would say if he ever did confront him with them. “Risk,” as he put it much later, apropos of something else, after he had made his first fortune, “risk is the essence of our world, Franky,” and his risking of lives certainly didn’t end that summer. Far from it. “Risk,” he said with that fucking grin. “Makes the world go round.”

  Among the lives he risked, eventually, was Frank’s.

  2004

  Two years later, after he finished his degree, Dmitry came through again. When he called, Frank was still working in the Hartford suburbs, on another custom house, and he was surprised to find himself happy to hear from the kid. He felt an odd pride that Dmitry valued their relationship. Something in him wanted to be upbraided for his lack of morals. Behind all the bluster and bullshit, he wanted to be a better man, to be more like Frank, to be less of a prick. He made fun of Frank’s scolding, but why else would he come back for more?

  That much he found explicable. But why did he want to see this lout? W
hat was in it for him? He knew that, even while being disgusted by stories of Dmitry’s derring-do, he was taken in by them, and he had to admit that he wished, with some small part of himself, that he could march through life without giving a fuck about anyone else, grabbing whatever laurels and pleasures and monies presented themselves, wryly commenting on the foibles of lesser mortals, having sex with multiple women free of the slightest regret. In the novels he read, people like that all came to grief, but Dmitry somehow never did.

  Dmitry usually presented himself in his stories as the bemused mastermind, the self-contained, unflappable marionetteer. Frank wondered if this was why we love stories of dashing bad guys — Butch Cassidy, Jay Gatsby, Tom Ripley, Becky Sharp, Gordon Gekko, Tony Montana — they get away with it all, at least for a while, and do and get whatever they want. Who wouldn’t like that fantasy?

  Dmitry told the story of his career in student government. He ran for president, hiring a bunch of underclassmen to pull down the posters of the other candidates and throw them in the trash. “In politics, Franky,” he said, by way of explanation, “name recognition is very important.” He also managed to have the power shut down at the student radio station when competing candidates were scheduled for interviews.

  “When I became student union president, Franky — and it’s a big deal there, a real job with a real salary and real power of a sort, you have a budget for student affairs, concerts, lectures, that sort of thing — there are so many favors to give out it’s almost Italian — I had but one goal for my presidency, and I’m sure you will think this is somewhat petty, but it was to last out the full term.” No student union president had ever lasted an entire year without being recalled, and he wanted to be the first. He studied the crises that got past presidents in trouble and decided that the only way to stay in office was to manage the risk, to be prepared for the scandals that arose. The only way to accomplish that was to create his own crises, manufacture his own scandals.

  As they were sitting in an upstairs bedroom of an unfinished house he was building, Frank had an unsettling sense of déjà vu, generated perhaps by the smell of fir sawdust and the taste of warming beer.

  “About a month and a half into my reign,” Dmitry said, “a man was coming to campus from Denmark who was a famous champion of pederasty, the head of the Danish Man Boy Love Association, and predictably a group of students was protesting, marching around with banners proclaiming Just Say No to Pedophilia and other such tin-eared sloganeering, writing editorials to the newspaper condemning the visit. Of course, equally predictably, another group nattered on about free speech and unfettered inquiry, yadda yadda, as that great comedienne of yours who punches men in the chest says, and so I wrote an editorial for the student newspaper which, if you read it fast, Franky, sounded like I was not only in favor of letting the man visit, but of men everywhere diddling little boys up the bum. There was immediate uproar and demands for my resignation, the beginnings of a recall campaign, but I had peppered the editorial with sentences expressly designed for rebuttal purposes. I had written if Rosser — this was the Danish pederast — is correct, then man-boy love is not only acceptable, it is necessary for the progress of philosophy and enlightenment, while his opponents can only say that if he is wrong, untold harm will be done. So when the idiots went on and on attacking me for disgracing the office, the university, and human decency, I published my rebuttal, which I had written at the same time as the editorial itself, using this quite impressive list of phrases, like untold harm will be done, quoting myself selectively to prove that my critics were quoting me selectively. Which they were, of course. Selective quotation is the essence of contemporary politics, Franky. And you can quote me on that, just not the rest of this.” Big goofy grin.

  “So the recall failed.” Frank cracked them each another, now tepid, beer.

  “Same with the scandals about military research on campus and the one about animal experiments. All these brouhahas — isn’t that a marvelous word, Franky, brouhaha? From the Hebrew by way of French, meaning the cry of the devil disguised as clergy; isn’t that fantastic? — anyway these squabbles occurred with great regularity. But my real stroke of genius was realizing that the most powerful political forces on campus were the dorm presidents, elected officials on the student government payroll. They controlled money, handing out patronage jobs of various kinds and putting on concerts, parties, that kind of thing — and as everywhere, patronage plus pandering equals popularity. Every deposed student union president had been replaced by one of these dorm presidents, often rallied around by the rest, and as soon as the dorm presidents join any recall effort, the jig is up — the jig is up!” he added in his American gangster accent, finger-guns at the ready.

  It had been a long day, so Frank started to head down the stairs toward his truck, confident Dmitry would follow and keep talking.

  “The dorm presidents have one and only one onerous job — you’ve become much better as a carpenter, haven’t you, Franky? nice balustrade! — and that onerous job is delivering the student newspaper to their respective dorms: getting up early in the morning, schlepping an ancient cart across campus, often in the rain like miserable pack animals, and distributing stacks of newsprint to each floor of their dorm.

  “In my first meeting with all of them I said, Look. You people work extremely hard for your constituents, which wasn’t at all true, except for the newspaper delivery, and so, I told them, I am going to use some of my presidential discretionary funds to have the student paper delivered, freeing you from a burden that, let’s be honest, does not represent the best use of your considerable talents. They all straightaway agreed, giddy with good fortune. No more early mornings, no more tramping in the rain! And I had them by the short hairs” — this again in the gangster accent — “because everyone knew that this was why they got paid, and that to let someone else do it, on other student government funds, amounted to fraud. And, yes, I couldn’t use this information without destroying myself, but neither could they. Mutually Assured Destruction, the doctrine that allowed both capitalism and communism to flourish for half a century.”

  “Hm,” Frank grunted.

  “Yes, I know! And there was a fringe benefit,” he added. “Whenever the newspaper had a piece critical of me or my policies, I had my lackeys take half the circulation to my garden and burn it. By the end of the year I had an enormous pile of ash back there!”

  “Hm.”

  “I know you don’t like me to call them lackeys, Franky, but that’s what they were. I was your lackey when we were building the house for Paul.”

  “You were not a very good lackey.”

  “No, I was never a very good lackey,” he said. “Too slow. I had no ambitions in the building trades, and it showed.”

  No kidding, Frank thought. They got in the truck and headed back to his apartment, accompanied at first by Dmitry lecturing him about how crazy it was to buy a new truck for a business the size of Frank’s, that even the briefest glance at amortization tables would demonstrate this. He then continued with the tale of his history-making presidency.

  The campus feminists, it turned out, were too much for him — delicious irony, Frank thought. With only a month left in the school year, Dmitry had attempted another fake crisis and they saw through it. He was clearly losing the battle in the newspaper, and the recall petition was gaining steam. He went around to the dorms and held town halls claiming that the dorm presidents — who he knew would avoid him like the plague he was and not show up — were on his side.

  “I knew they’d never have the gumption to contradict me after the fact, and as we know, denials never work. In any case, my strategy worked. The recall narrowly failed, and I achieved my goal. I lasted out the term.”

  He told this story brimming with the great glee of victory, replete with pride in his own cunning. This was four years and one college education after he had left both Frank’s personal life and business in shambles. Dmitry’s pieces had now all clicked to
gether, and the future man stood revealed. As they reached Frank’s apartment, a step up from the last one Dmitry had seen, which he noted with a characteristic combination of gee-whiz and mockery, Frank thought about all the talks they had had, back on the building site, about Nietzsche — in those years, he found any opportunity to quote the idea that truth was nothing but the interpretation of whoever happened to be in power, and he remembered Dmitry trying to talk him out of that, arguing for the validity of science, for truth with a capital T. Frank loved Nietzsche’s idea that Christians thought themselves morally superior as compensation for their own lack of power, and that thus, in other words, his father, the Christian guy, who thought he was the last moral, upright man in a world going to pot, wasn’t. And at the same time, he took solace in thinking that even though his father thought he knew everything, knew what was right for everyone, he was wrong about that too: as a powerful person, a white man in America, he thought that whatever he happened to think was true was the truth, but it wasn’t. This whole edifice was not Frank’s grandest logical achievement, he knew, since these two ideas were diametrically opposed — it made his father both powerless and powerful — but at the time he found deep satisfaction in it, as if it were two strikes against the man.

  Dmitry had, instead, taken another lesson from it all. He had freed himself from both absolute truth and from conventional notions of morality. As Frank watched the now-adult Dmitry rumble off to the extra room for the night, he remembered his cavalier unleashing of three tons of metal down Frizzell Hill, heedless of anyone or anything in its path, and realized that he had known even back then, already, that Dmitry was beyond good and evil. He was already a problem.

  2006

  Two years later, like clockwork, Dmitry was back, having been kicked out of the London School of Economics. By that time, Frank’s business was in good shape — booming, in fact. He had put together enough capital that, with a little short-term bank financing, he could build spec houses on his own. He was in the high-end market twenty miles from Margie and Paul, in the next small town being swallowed by Hartford insurance-executive creep. He never lacked for rich customers insulated from any minor ups and downs in the economy, and he was pulling in serious money, charging most of his expenses to his own little company so they were tax-free, paying himself a salary, and getting a huge chunk of change whenever he sold another beauty. No clients in his hair — he sold them all finished, so if they wanted something changed they could do it when they owned it, and he’d recommend someone else do it — which of course got him those men’s gratitude and great prices on subcontracting. He was salting away funds for the kids’ college tuitions, even though they were getting less and less interested in him. Lulu, now twelve, had admitted the last time they talked that she didn’t really remember them living in the same house as a family. She liked him well enough, he could tell, but he didn’t exactly feel like family to her. When she said that, he watched her stirring the slushy he had bought her, on a Saturday in the fall, her brown curls bouncy with youthful energy, piles of crazed maple leaves behind her, like the piles he used to make for her to jump in, and, well, he managed to stop from weeping by squeezing his tear ducts with a thumb and finger. Kennedy was more attached, but at fourteen she considered any deflection of her attention from her friends to be a complete nuisance. He could imagine the day they both would wonder why he kept calling and coming to see them. Anyways, as Dmitry said, he was managing to build a little portfolio, and they wouldn’t have to worry about college, and he no longer feared the end of the month. Not bad for five years.