Everything Happens Today (7 page)

Wes thought of
Brave New World
, a back-up candidate for his European lit paper, and the deep sense of kinship he'd felt with Helmholtz Watson as he rejoiced at being exiled to the Falklands. Helmholtz had been offered his choice of any island in the world—Hawaii, Tahiti, the Caribbean—but he asked to be sent somewhere with bad weather, somewhere with lots of wind and storms, just as Wes would have. Until that moment,
Brave New World
, even with its abundance of casual sex for people of all ages, had seemed to Wes to be the most idiotic of books. But it had been almost redeemed by Helmholtz's request. A place where you could spend all winter holed up with your books, your notebooks, your thoughts. Wes suspected that this was not a normal desire for a seventeen-year old, but he couldn't help himself. All he wanted was to be boxed in by howling winds and lowering skies in every shade of grey. For the same reason, whenever he played Risk with Nora he always made Kamchatka his home base and defended it to the end. It would help, he supposed, to have somebody, some body, pale-skinned and red-haired like Delia, to have sex with at odd hours, but then again that could just as easily be a liability, in the event that such a body turned out to have needs of its own. If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes reasoned, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence, though he did not suppose that he would suffer from loneliness. All he'd ever wanted, as far back as he could remember, was to be left alone, like Helmholtz, where the mind can expand to fill the vast silence, where a man can find peace from chatter and temptation and opinion—a one-room stone cottage with small leaded windows and a large fireplace, glacial run-off to bathe in, unpolluted, unobstructed views for the eye to linger upon in those blank moments before inspiration strikes. In the morning, black coffee from a moka pot, and a solid wedge of black bread spread thick with creamery butter and lingonberry jam. At night, a roaring fire, a mutton chop charred in the brazier, a peaty single malt, a pipe, maybe an old radio for the dramas and sports scores. Where, Wes wondered, on that rocky volcanic plain would he find a steady supply of firewood? Or coffee, whiskey, tobacco, mutton? Helmholtz, because he was technically a ward of the state, would have all these delivered to him, free of charge, and maybe a girl every so often, because those people were so keen on the pacifying effects of extremely impersonal and uninhibited sexual encounters. But Wes would have to be realistic if he were to survive and work—after all, writers in the real world do not have the luxury of being exiled by benevolent dictatorships, they have to survive by their own wits. Either you find a way to live on the cheap, or you sell yourself into lifelong drudgery and compromise in advertising or academia. Wes planned to pull a Helmholtz, but he thought that it might be better to start off somewhere more temperate to begin with, until he had honed his survival skills. Somewhere like Newfoundland or the highlands of Scotland, maybe, where he could trap grouse and grow winter barley and drive into the village once a week for supplies and a pint of bitter, whatever that was, at the local pub. And where he could roam the scented gorse in rubber boots with a fowling piece on his hip and a brown lab at his heels. But even then, where was he to get the money for rent, the car, the dog, the shotgun, the boots? How long would he have to work in the fallen world so that he could escape it? His father, after all, had pandered his entire life to a similar dream, and just look at where that had gotten him: loveless marriage, indifferent kids, a job he hated, exile to the basement. He couldn't even afford to live in a place of his own, which would have suited everybody. It was no wonder he was such a loser. Wes was absolutely determined to avoid his dad's fate, to foreswear all the entanglements—partly because it wasn't so hard to see himself behaving exactly as his father behaved if he were in the same predicament—but it all seemed so impossibly far away, impossible to imagine maintaining the necessary purity of soul and thought while he waited and plotted his getaway.

It occurred to him that he should revisit
Brave New World
as an option for his paper, as it would be so much easier and faster than
War and Peace
, but he couldn't bear the idea that someone might consider it an obvious choice, and anyway someone else in the class was bound to choose it. In any case, Helmholtz notwithstanding, Wes had truly disliked
Brave New World
as a novel; Mrs. Fielding would not appreciate the tone of snotty disdain that was sure to come through if he wrote about it. He turned his head towards the desk as if he might will
War and Peace
to float across the room to him, but it did not. The mere thought of getting up, retrieving the monstrous book, returning to bed, propping his back with pillows and proceeding to sort through 1,200 pages of highlights was disheartening in the extreme, and reminded him of everything that was wrong with his life, but it was precisely the outrage awakened by the unfairness of it all that gave him the energy to rise and do what had to be done. A few moments later, he was back settled beneath the covers with all the necessary paraphernalia spread in an arc about his lap: book, laptop, headphones, phone, legal pad, yellow highlighter and post-its.

Wes had already done almost all the preliminary work; dozens of post-its rose like buoy flags from the pages where he had highlighted relevant passages as he had read, and several pages of crabbed notes were handwritten into the flyleaves at the back. All Wes had to do was connect the dots. The problem was, he had had some sort of thesis in mind when he was taking notes, but now he was sincerely incapable of recalling what it was. It didn't matter much; he would have no trouble coming up with a new one. As a junior, every grade he received this year would be an important part of his college transcripts, and he badly wanted to prolong his unbroken string of A's in English, but he worried as he flicked through the post-its that he had never felt the least flicker of inspiration or kinship with the characters of
War and Peace
. In fact, he recalled thinking at the time that it was little more than
Gone with the Wind
with samovars. He'd read longer books in his time—
Lord of the Rings
, for one—and books that seemed longer—
Atlas Shrugged
, for instance—but
War and Peace
felt denser, somehow, as if the words weighed more on the page, the novel burdened by the gravity of its own importance, as if the years had given it a lustrous patina that made it appear more venerable than it really was. It was easy reading enough, he supposed, and not at all slow going, but irritating and clumsy at the same time, like scaling a rock face with a partner suffering from gout.

The book fell open at page 467 and Wes began to read. Prince André was listening to Natasha sing and was evidently on the verge of falling in love with her. Typically, André was choking on his own philosophical boner. “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even she, was.” Wes found himself distracted almost immediately. What was that supposed to mean—that our real selves are not our bodies? The tragedy of an expansive soul confined to a fragile, decaying cage of flesh? Not exactly a shattering insight. And yet, as he forced himself to read on, Wes remembered with vivid clarity precisely what had been on his mind when he had flagged this passage. It was an idea that had much preoccupied him at the time, three weeks earlier, when he'd read the book over the course of a single weekend—that life is, or should be, a perpetual interior war between alienated factions of human nature. It was only because Tolstoy was so ham-handed with characterization that Wes had been able to recognize in his writing the cartoonish extremes of a genuinely subtle and complex problem he'd been trying to work out for himself.

What Wes had finally come to see as he watched Prince André fall in love with Natasha is that Tolstoy had divided his characters between strugglers, like André and Pierre, and accepters, like Boris and Berg, and that Tolstoy was firmly on the side of the strugglers—people who are continuously engaged in an inner battle with their own natures and received ideas of the proper way to live, even if it makes them miserable and turns every little decision into a swamp of confusion and loneliness. It was a problem that Tolstoy had illustrated as a black-and-white thing, and Wes felt that it was much more complicated than that, because he knew from personal experience that no one is purely a struggler or purely an accepter, but it was no less real and perplexing for all that. Wes felt that, like Tolstoy, he admired the strugglers, or tried to admire them, even if he couldn't always grasp their internal dilemmas. To be a struggler was to be alone, and to be confused and lonely all the time, but just because you fight the good fight, choose the high road, doesn't mean you admire yourself for it. Usually you irritate yourself to no end, because you can never find a comfortable way to be, and maybe you even end up hating yourself for having become the very person you aspired to be. You start to despise people like André and Pierre for the very things that make them admirable, and admiring dickheads like Boris and Berg for the very things that make them hateful. You ascribe qualities to them they don't have, such as the thoughtfulness that would justify their arrogance and self-confidence, even though you know in your heart that they're arrogant and self-confident precisely because they don't engage in interior struggle, and that if they did they couldn't be arrogant or self-confident. How did that work? The more you think, the more you feel you should think less, and the more you feel, the more you think you should feel less? And the worse thing about it was that those who actually did think and feel less didn't seem to suffer from a similar sense of insufficiency—the smart people wish they could be more like the stupid people, but the stupid people never seem to want to be more like the smart people. Which hardly seemed fair.

Natasha was still singing, and André was still angsting. It was kind of weird, and a little sick, that all these grown men were lusting after a teenage girl, and Tolstoy let them do it without any sense that it was inappropriate. What was André—in his late twenties, maybe? He had a moustache and whiskers, he was a soldier, a hardened veteran, rich and sophisticated. He had probably fucked lots of peasants and whores. And Natasha was only fifteen, younger than Lucy. She had thin arms and a barely-formed bosom, Tolstoy said. Wes knew what that meant—a mature Russian woman, even the most beautiful, would have shoulders and arms rounded out by a little fat, big billowy boobs that had to be strapped down, a slight tub in the gut. But Natasha was probably more like a supermodel, or the star of some teen movie, with pillowy lips, hard, perky little tits, a flat tummy, and sharp hip bones that looked great in low-slung jeans. Nowadays a guy like André would be considered a total perv just for looking at a girl like that. But André wasn't thinking about her body, probably; he wasn't there, listening to her sing, trying to make out the outline of her nipples under her dress or imagining what she'd be like in bed. He was thinking of her unwearied soul, shining through her clear eyes and her piping voice, a beacon of purity and optimism and sincerity in a fallen, cynical world. That was all well and good, but a total turn-off as far as Wes was concerned, and she was still a kid no matter what you said. A freshman, for god's sake.

Now Hélène, that was a woman in every sense of the word. If Wes were in
War and Peace
, if he were André with all his money and connections, he'd have made a play for Hélène first thing, before Pierre could get his fat, clumsy hands on her. She was the kind of woman that every man who saw her wanted. Wes had been surprised at how low-cut the aristocratic women wore their dresses in those days, how Hélène was constantly flaunting her “high, beautiful breasts.” Just that word “high” had been enough to send shivers down his spine. They were probably powdered, too. That scene where she leans over Pierre and he can suddenly picture her entire naked body beneath her dress.

Wes thought of Lucy and Delia and the differences between them. Physically, no doubt about it, Lucy was all Natasha, although probably darker of complexion, but much more like Hélène in temperament—manipulative, insincere, comfortable with her power over men, haughty and dismissive towards those who had nothing to offer her. Wes was certain of one thing—that he could never fall in love with someone like Lucy. Delia, on the other hand, was a full-blown woman like Hélène; true, with her pale skin and freckles and curly red hair pulled back in a casual ponytail, she didn't look much like Hélène, but she was dignified and quietly authoritative, self-possessed and powerfully built, not at all a svelte little seduction machine like Lucy or Natasha. Wes had never seen Delia in a low-cut ball gown, but he had seen her in a bathing suit and she definitely had softly rounded shoulders and high, beautiful breasts. Still, neither Lucy nor Delia was a Marya or a Sonya, earnest and devoted, but weak and at the mercy of the whims of fate. He couldn't stand that, someone clinging to him and helpless without him, someone who would never criticize him no matter how badly he treated her, eager to please but equally ready to fade into the background; taking her own vows solemnly, but content to release the faithless from theirs; feeling that she had a spark of godhead somewhere deep inside, yet not especially surprised that no one else recognized it; yearning for romance and love, yet always half-way towards persuading herself that they did not exist. Wes definitely couldn't stand someone like that.

There was a tap at the door, and Wes's father poked his head in with a sheepish smile.

“Got five minutes?”

“I'm doing my homework, dad.”

His father stepped into the room, clasping an open laptop at his hip. “Just a quick question. I won't bother you. What's the homework?”