Worthy Of This Great City Read online

  That summer her visible taste was trending towards tackiness, glitz and shine during daytime even at school, reflecting the new exhibitionism, the rejection of all that old weighty shame. On the whole I approve of that liberty despite the problematic lack of moral center. Why not? When you think about it, who’s to say what’s appropriate when?

  I’ve adopted only one specific goal with Sophie: to inoculate her against the myth of the street, the lie of romantic rebellion and the progressive underclass. To force her to think critically about all that trendy shit, about the ludicrous stupidity of suburban coeds in designer prison garb. Teach her to discriminate without, you know, letting her revert into some kind of conventional, stupid robot.

  So anyway I can’t really tell how Sophie’s assessing her new femininity or her encroaching adulthood. Her gaze doesn’t exactly disguise impudence, but it isn’t entirely innocuous, either. And she’s developed a disturbing habit of denigrating everyone else against the impossible standard of her utterly faultless future self.

  One September Monday we headed out early to get her back up to school, the car filled with the happy aromas of coffee and sunscreen. It was the kind of perfect morning people take for granted.

  Ruth’s chirpy pseudo-reasonable radio voice, gamely attempting to clarify another instance of rash illogic, making an additional passenger, her virtual presence mingling into the general confusion of heat and sun and traffic.

  “People used to be able to accept their own cruelty because it was about necessity so it wasn’t even recognized as cruel. You have to be able to afford empathy. I mean, morality is basically about discovering what’s successful for the family or tribe or whatever and that’s what defines virtue.”

  The mechanical whine of a laughing female caller, possibly appreciative or maybe derisive; I never caught the main thread of it. Sophie was studying the view with her arm resting against the window, visibly thinking like crazy.

  “No, well, you have this situation where underdeveloped nations are supposed to play by contemporary moral rules, our rules. Look at environmental policies, for example. Countries that aren’t even industrialized yet. And individual people, too, of course, pushing ahead too fast.”

  This naïve shit had been polluting the airwaves since the Folk Fest: unfiltered statements, nonchalant eruptions of chaos into a previously inoffensive breakfast program. Her frustrated energy responding to the opportunity while it lasted, interspersing banal outbursts of inappropriate passion between soft pop hits and traffic updates, ostensibly in response to listener calls or Internet comments. According to one caller with a gruff male voice, reasonable and amused, Ruth proving herself one of those new Republicans who want their government strong abroad but compassionate at home.

  “I’m everything. Everything so nothing specific.” She made it a joke but blurted it, pushing it away; she was always a blurter and a political coward; I mean, I’d be ashamed too if I had identify with the willfully backward. Plus party affiliations are visceral these days, you have to be careful not to associate yourself with the wrong people.

  “The signs tell me it’s the river.” Sophie said, hopeful but with practiced petulance clearly in reserve.

  There’d been one extremely damning editorial in the local tabloid: they were known for pun headlines so that was a given. Print coverage was otherwise vague and inadequate. Then of course there was an orgasmic eruption of social media vitriol, briefly spent. But everyone was waiting for the rest of it, that other shoe to fall, some proper public or corporate response of deserved consequence, but the respective parties were keeping mum. And probably a decent segment of her public thought her a little deranged but still sympathized. Meanwhile those who imagined her an ally relished having someone voice their own irrational frustrations; she acquired new partisans, covert conservatives hugged themselves in private delight. The problem was, it was all so amorphous.

  Of course the majority of her listeners weren’t all that young or politically active or prone to violence or otherwise likely to command significant influence, so in that sense Ruth was basically screaming into the infinite silence of space. More pertinently, neither the station nor her sponsors objected, but that was temporary; the situation there was complicated and currently in flux, a proper response merely on hold. But we’ll consider that business catastrophe shortly.

  Needless to say, no public uprising of devoted adherents, no intelligent commendation, no thanks for the enlightenment.

  “Now we’re instantaneously seeing the consequences of every action and it’s paralyzing us. You know what I think? I think soon they’ll be proving how plants feel pain and emotion and then what’ll the vegetarians eat?”

  “How do you know what the signs say?”

  Massive sigh. Sophie was dressed for school in a lacy white shirt with a baby blue tank under it, jeans, and ankle boots that brought her up to my height. Like me she’s compact and square, but while I’m dark she’s completely pale, so neutral a beige it seems designed, with bright round eyes under pale lashes, straight dirty-blond hair, and a heavy jaw terminating in a blunt chin. Although she’s stubborn she’s elusive about it, hesitant to articulate her ideas but adept at getting her way, and she’s rarely where you think either physically or emotionally. When she decides to hold her ground she’s unshakable, refusing to concede defeat even in the face of plainly contrary facts. Fully inhabiting her naturally pugnacious features, sticking out that unfortunately prominent chin.

  I was trailing a black SUV, with to my left the twinkling Schuylkill, placid this morning under a few straggling wisps of lambent fog; to my right scrub trees and brush climbing straight up a ridge gouged orange in broad raw swaths, evidence of a recent downpour. Summers those ridges unexpectedly trap the heat over the water, preventing any refreshing river breeze. It was just after seven but it was already sweltering, the fresh sun glaring off cars and guardrails. I spotted a lone kayak out on the water, brilliant blue slicing cleanly through pellucid gray. This river cuts to the west of Center City, providing tap water that leaves a sticky residue in your toothbrush glass, and it can run shallow even around the lower reaches, being more of a recreational type of waterway as opposed to the more impressive and businesslike Delaware drawing our natural border to the east. Although I’ve seen the Schuylkill flood, too, and it’s pretty damn impressive.

  “I tend myself to think in terms of original sin, but I don’t think it’s always necessary to drag in religion.”

  “Did you hear that? Did you hear that incense-marinated rosary-fondling holy-medal-kissing self-elected candidate for sainthood?”

  I used to be your typical ambitious, self-satisfied scholarship undergrad, transient resident in a professionally landscaped, upscale township a few minutes outside Philadelphia. Looking out my dorm window at scenery primped to the epitome of good taste: carefully designed red-gold autumn foliage, springs decked out with pastel shrubbery and blossoming fruit trees, and in December extravagant Christmas decorations gilding the college gothic and precious faux-Colonial shops. It utterly delighted me, essentially penniless urbanite by history and inclination, just because it was so spurious and entitled and successful. Of course I secretly desired that life even while I rightly and loudly disparaged it.

  But I loved the city itself from the first moment I strayed into Philadelphia, and I include the ubiquitous, disregarded natural city: the explosions of feathery pink mimosas, the irrepressible Trees of Heaven, the Queen Anne’s Lace and delicate, tiny fleabane blossoms like miniature daisies, the tall yellow or purple clover. The stray neighborhoods with decrepit back fences cloaked in sweet-smelling honeysuckle and blue chicory pushing through along the sidewalk. No one else seemed to care for these humble urban delights, but I found them enchanting.

  The gardeners for my building were Hispanic, so of course I sporadically exploited them to convince myself I was a member of the proletariat. Their accommodating macho selves intimidated the hell out of me. “That’s an amazing aza
lea.” Inspiring this older guy with a thin, golden face and distant eyes to stand back proudly from what truly was a glorious hedge. “Over half a century old,” he’d say, or something similar about whatever I happened to point to, reluctant to accept personal praise. This was compulsive behavior on my part; I was humiliated for these men.

  The surrounding neighborhood formed a closed circle of disciplined self-approbation, of right prevailing and the teary-eyed faith of the fortunate. I recall the whole complacent town as a special American species of church devoted to an ideology of deserved success, and you know how you instinctively feel reverent when you enter a place of worship even if, like me, you’re not religious.

  Senior year I was living with my second college girlfriend Naomi, an ash blond, small and curvy, best described as essentially average, a woman who pretended to listen. We unwittingly drifted into a relationship of mutual convenience with nothing demanding or ecstatic about it. She was a bland caramel custard, diligent in bed like all girls are who have read up on the subject, but at that time I accepted our coupling as a natural progression.

  I’d just about determined to follow the academic track, of course planning to pass the torch to my own students. In retrospect this decision reflects an astonishing gullibility: critically questing after greater erudition while automatically adopting the given methodology, handing down the same shit. Incredible, when you think about it.

  So far as the God question I think I was pretty average for my generation, a holiday worshipper brought up to consider the whole issue less than imperative, my parents refusing to offer prejudicial guidance or approval, demoting the fate of my eternal soul to something I could decide for myself one day, so enough said. Not that I had any nascent religious inklings, but I had no natural antipathy, either, merely disinterest. I’m not one of those tiresome atheists who use their position like a weapon, like those frightened science devotees who forget it’s just a process that has nothing to do with safe, superior conclusions. My preferred practice is to employ truth in the purest sense, never in service to any underlying philosophy, even my own. Like Socrates I argue in order to expose error.

  There was one ordinary enough early evening right after New Year’s in our efficiency with the particle board furniture and gallery posters, the rumpled day bed and the coffee table piled with textbooks and notebooks with doodles and the local news playing on television. Naomi was sitting with her feet tucked under her in our one armchair, just watching me, and I was curled into the bed, absolutely rigid, sweating out a continuing abdominal pain, waiting and observing as it escalated into the kind of situation you know will radically alter your personal history.

  There followed a lot of efficient movement without much input from me, occupied as I was with resignation and vomiting, and then I was lying on a gurney in pre-op, freezing to death, and hovering above me was an apparent doctor of about my own age, cheerful and chubby-faced and reassuring. I was thinking I’d get to see the inside of the operating theatre because I wasn’t even sleepy when another physician moved into my view, an older man with a triumphant grin and a surgical mask loose around his neck who said everything had gone perfectly.

  Talk about stupefying. It was absolute physical comprehension, the irrefutable flat fact of death with nothing muddled or dream-like or painful about it, no physical or mental presence or sense of continuation because there was no me to experience it, because for a discreet interval I’d been cleanly cut out of time.

  I stared out a window giving onto a series of rooftop terraces with untidy planters and hopping sparrows, conceding what was anyway my fundamental suspicion. What flummoxed me, what I still find bewildering is why everyone who undergoes general anesthesia doesn’t immediately concede this experience, this fact of nonexistence.

  “It’s not like you have anything to offer.” Naomi was sitting across the dinette table from me, a patchwork pillow tight against her stomach. I vividly remember that pillow. This was over a month after my appendicitis surgery, so a couple of weeks into our final semester and February bleak. I remember being mildly surprised by her bluntness but not by her attack or her message. Nuzzling her cushion, that bland hair over the royal purple and deep green material, a curtain for her round little face. And then she reverted to passivity, insisting I understand.

  I was disgusted as much as anything, it was so contemptible and plain unfair, the entire pathetic show of assumed bravery and self-importance. I never even questioned her certainty so on some level I must have anticipated this kind of easy treachery.

  Lifting that stubborn chin - so like Sophie’s - but not to assert any religious or ethical prohibition, merely to reiterate her own decision. I know how this sounds but I was genuinely repelled and insulted. Anyway, I just waited.

  “Well, I’m sorry since I realize you’re not in favor of marriage.”

  I sat back against the bolster and tried to think. I certainly wasn’t about to argue her point; she was familiar with my opinion of monogamy, and in fact we had an explicit agreement in place. But marriage was hardly a necessity, merely responsible paternal behavior. Surely that didn’t require pretending to tolerate this woman now attempting to capture the affection and support of someone she’d just intellectually and emotionally violated.

  I said, “I’m in favor of a short-term marriage.”

  That’s how you can begin and end a marriage in one irreversible instant. Obviously I conceded more than was merited, but I guess I had my reasons: childhood fantasies lingering in my psyche to trip me up. At that moment we became the mortal enemies we are today, although we remain spuriously affectionate for Sophie’s sake and because anything less would be too easy.

  “Language. Symbols signifying river.”

  “How do you know there even are words?”

  “Dad, are you really going to keep this up?”

  One of those callers that make you cringe for all mankind, obviously reading from his list of statistics proving something of unappreciated import, why didn’t everyone just admit it, stumbling a bit but oh so patronizing, sure of his unique insight into everything. The kind of guy who leaves comments to Internet articles.

  Ruth simply ignored his argument. “Facts, you know. A fact by definition is a piece of the past, something that’s considered true because it’s done with. Only scared little people cling to facts.”

  I exist within a contradiction, as all honest, intelligent men must these days, accepting that reality itself and all the appurtenances of truth including science, logic, and language are inextricably involved with the human mind, but at the same time viscerally convinced of an invariant, objective truth, a discoverable external reality indifferent to the human body or will. What’s more refusing to embrace some game-ending, painstakingly clever compromise, some demeaning if reasonable way to worm out. My esteemed namesake, in one of his more famous poems, urges Antony to demonstrate dignity in defeat, to act in a manner worthy of the great city of Alexandria, his own municipal goddess. Philadelphia might not be as mighty a deity but I find it sufficiently demanding, and I can humbly admit my failure to resolve this one essential dilemma without cravenly refuting the possibility.

  “Moral evolution is about realizing that something’s right but not doing it and vice versa. Take abortion: it’s wrong but it’s very often the right wrong.” That’s Ruth’s wishful redeemed Catholicism, flippant over yet another paltry, easily resolved human dilemma. “That’s freedom; that’s the future. Just don’t be cheap, don’t use some slanted, pseudo-scientific lie. Be honest for a change”

  Of course she wasn’t always this irrational or provocative; maybe that finally would have brought the deserved reprisals. She was smart enough to laugh at herself and go harmless for a couple of days between outrageous episodes. This is a compendium. You get the idea.

  Some middle-aged woman’s voice, strident with that South Philly vulgarity that keeps you anxious: “Ruth I love that you stand up for regular people.”

  “It’s
a lot of what I struggle to do. I do try hard, all the time. That’s where all the real courage is and the real virtue, in getting up every single morning and going to the lousy job and feeding the family and being involved in the vital continuance of decent life. Genuinely nice women in their sixties putting on their earrings and eye shadow and getting the train every morning to go do their best. I’m in love with them, absolutely in love with them! I’m just a lucky egotist with these undeserved gifts of time and opportunity. But I try to remember how humility means appreciating the equal greatness of everyone, because everyone is equally great.”

  Humility lessons from Ruth.

  I mean, okay, as I’ve said I too question the instinctive adoration of the revolutionary outsider; identification with the next wave is only prudent because those people truly are coming to annihilate your precious status quo, they’re God if anything is. But nothing justifies going around glorifying the complacent, bigoted masses, lauding mere passive, unquestioning cows and sheep for their sheer animal stamina.

  I studied philosophy in grad school, anxious to place my own inchoate ideas in context. I needed to know more about where the notables stood, and I especially wanted to understand all those romantic and cool but totally confounding isms of the recent continentals. Silly pretensions notwithstanding, my desire was profound, even desperate. I’d never gone further than some introductory undergraduate courses when suddenly I realized I was going to graduate and never acquire any further knowledge forever. I wanted to isolate the unadorned truth and build some kind of ethics based on that still center. And so in a truly egregious error of judgment, encouraged by a greedy academic system and eagerly misidentifying my morbidly self-involved curiosity as an aptitude for scholarship, I determined to turn myself into a professional thinker-teacher-scribe.