The following monologue is spoken in the 1992 movie Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman. It involves a bunch of preppies home from college in New York City during debutante season. The speaker is a very well-dressed man in a bar in Manhattan. A couple of young preppies have asked him if their class, the “urban haut bourgeoisie”, as one character terms it, is simply doomed to failure. He starts, if memory serves, by saying, No, that’s too easy. We achieve failure. And he goes on:
“You go to a party, you meet a group of people, you like them and you think ‘These people are going to be my friends for the rest of my life.’ Then you never see them again. I wonder where they go. We simply fail without being doomed. I'm not destitute. I've got a good job that pays decently. It's just that it's all so mediocre, so unimpressive. The acid test is whether you take any pleasure in responding to the question ‘What do you do?’ I can't bear it. You start out expecting something much more, and some of your contemporaries achieve it. You start reading about them in the papers or seeing them on TV. That's the danger of midtown Manhattan—running across far more successful contemporaries. I try to avoid them whenever I can. But when I can't, they're always friendly. But inevitably they ask what am I doing—or think it.”
I wish I could find a link to the scene but no. Ironically, the actor, Roger Kirby, is or was a successful antitrust lawyer in New York, and his luscious apartment served as the scene where the preppy kids had their after-ball parties. He has a very upper-class New York accent; my aunt’s brother had one. He called me “Gawge”.
This scene always rang a bell with me. I went to an experimental high school in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Nova High School, funded by Ford Foundation money in response to the launch of Sputnik and the fear that the Sovs had it over us in STEM studies. The experiment was that the kids were allowed to work on their own time frames, and for the genius science kids it worked out great.
Not so good for me as I had no aptitude beyond the humanities; in accordance with the “work at your own speed” mantra, I was allowed to languish for as long as I wanted in algebra, and all I remember of physics is Kevin Hearne sitting across from me and pronouncing languidly, “Hector vector.”
Many people achieved beyond all hope. James Birch (all names changed here) ended up with a BA from Haverford and an MBA from Harvard and is a big deal in Boston biotech—I think. I can barely understand what I read about his work. Sometime a while back, James sent me a message on Facebook. After I read how he had co-founded his successful biotech company, I thought: I can’t bear it.
Bill Olsen is a doctor, a specialist, in Colorado. First he was appointed to the Air Force Academy, and washed out after a hip injury. No big deal as he then went and got a degree at the highly-selective Webb Institute of Naval Architecture on Long Island. After graduating, though, he lost interest, so, after volunteering at emergency rooms, he got his MD somewhere. Whatever field it was, he could do it.
Aside from these STEM people, Sam Fielder, our valedictorian and one of the nicest people you’d ever meet, was a journalist in Providence, Rhode Island, which he called “a theme park for journalists,” and he won a Pulitzer Prize with some colleagues. He won a second Pulitzer as well and now has a Ph.D. in journalism. When you Google him, the auto function completes his name before you can type it, which I think is a sign of real accomplishment.
He teaches college and his students love him. He was totally unpretentious in high school, and once he wrote me a letter signed, “Dopefully smoked, Sam.” Once we were manning some booth on behalf of Key Club or Honor Society or something at some charitable event, and no one showed up. Early on, Sam proclaimed, “Let’s just cram the whole fucking thing.”
Then I have a neighbor who graduated high school without much idea of what he wanted to do. He worked for his uncle’s private investigation firm for a while, then eventually enlisted in the Navy. By the time I knew him, he was a Lieutenant Junior Grade. He was on shore duty when we met, and then later a supply officer on the Michigan, a nuclear submarine that carried nuclear missiles, which meant that they went out and hid for months at a time, waiting for the signal to launch their missiles.
I learned a lot from him: submarines make their own air, desalinize their water, the laundry runs all day and night, and they won’t go to sea if the ice cream machine is broken, for obvious reasons. He even wrote a novel about it, which was awfully good—he can do pacing and dialog, which can’t be taught, you just need to have a feel and an ear for them.
He has stayed in for 36 years and just retired this week. He’s obtained a B.A. and an M.A., has been to the Navy War College, been posted to Bahrain and Singapore, and then came back to Bremerton, WA, for the last couple of years. He’s retiring as a Commander.
Diligence, endurance (he was 6’3” on a submarine), and a simple sense of getting the job done. Let’s not skate by the fact that he says he was one of the few Democrats in the Navy, and you can only imagine what that was like. His career was an amazing achievement, nothing I’m remotely capable of. I’m in awe.
Finally: back about 20 years ago, I received a postcard in the mail. The front was the cover of a novel; the reverse my name and address, the name of the novel, and a short handwritten note: “G—New one, check it out. J”. The typeface on the mailing label was suspiciously familiar; yes, it was what my MFA program used for mailings. Ah ha.
I did a quick Google search of the author of the book advertised, Sally Hamilton, and yes, she had a website, and she was a novelist who had graduated from UNC-G. She was advertising her third fucking novel. She was a lot younger than me and along with everything else a knockout.
She was one of Fred’s girls—Sally disputes that there is such a thing, and the myth is probably just a matter of the underachieving men from UNC-Greensboro’s MFA program making excuses for not having published much of anything. The novels of Hamilton and Marcy Mellon alone equal six, which are six more than I can identify that any men have published.
The theory is that Fred Chappell, the leading light in the fiction program, was just better with women. The nastiest imputation is that he’s threatened by men, which is laughable, as he’s published so much that he couldn’t ever have been threatened by much of anyone.
Nevertheless, in my psychic pain, I thought, “Oh, one of Fred’s girls! And they let her use the mailing list.”
I launched onto my laptop and let her have it: I don’t know who you are, and it’s highly presumptuous of you to write me at all, much less in such an informal and off-putting way. Take me off of your mailing list, please. Then I hit send, figuring that would be that; probably her publisher or agent managed the website, and she wouldn’t even see my email.
Wrong. Sally wrote back within a half hour, apologizing profusely and promising to delete my name from her mailing list. And then she said that she was just trying to do anything she could to sell this novel and support her family as it wasn’t selling well, and did I have any ideas how to get it in front of people.
Oh, fuck me. I wrote back, apologizing. We became friends, though I haven’t heard from her in a while as she’s been wildly successful, and, I figure, too busy for the likes of me. Though her third novel didn’t sell well—her publisher screwed her over, not marketing the novel like they said they would—she subsequently got tenure at a major southern state university, published a bunch of children’s novels, novels under a pseudonym, you name it. She’s always busy with symposia, readings, and lectures.
And she’s a wonderful person. Her undergraduate writing instructor, Bernie Kaplan, whom I hired to consult on one of my (unpublishable novels) said, “Oh, everyone loves Sally.”
Years later, she coauthored a book with a fellow called Steve Crawford, alternating chapters by a young man and woman who meet at a wedding, nearly have sex in a spare closet, and then eventually find their ways back to each other. I loved it the first time. Then later I tried to read it again. But I just couldn’t because it was too good.
At some point, Mr. Crawford and Sally came out to a Seattle suburb to read from the book, and I told her I’d come, and we could finally meet. Then a day before the event, I thought, “I can’t bear it.” I made an excuse.
Then recently everything suddenly changed: someone from high school contacted me as he was going to be out here in August and suggested getting together. We hadn’t had any contact in about 25 years. I leaped at it, and then we started emailing. It turns out that this guy and I have had somewhat parallel lives: toxic mothers, tough times practicing law.
And then it turned out that we’ve all changed. He’s grown kind and empathetic. He thinks I’m smart. Even if he has had a superior career to mine, he denies it. Emboldened, I contacted another high school friend with the same result. He’s going to try to come up in August to join us in August. In high school, we all had the same useless crushes on the Keyettes.
Suddenly I have two friends who are empathetic, and as self-deprecating, as I am. So even if I’ve been a failure, which my friends say I’m not,maybe when I encounter old friends, I can bear it.
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