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A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter One

The Chosen Life

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Chapter One

The tent was the kind that pretended not to be a tent, white and high-shouldered, strung with small lights that had been made to look accidental and had cost, Adrian estimated, about as much to make look accidental as the lights themselves. He had been at the wedding for three hours and had already drafted, in the part of his mind that never stopped drafting, four separate observations about the lights, each more refined and less kind than the last, and he was working on a fifth when Daniel found him at the edge of the dance floor and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You came,” in a voice so plainly glad that Adrian felt the fifth observation die in his throat, unfinished, which was a small mercy he did not thank anyone for.

“Of course I came,” Adrian said. “You only do this once.”

“Twice, statistically,” Daniel said, and laughed, and it was a real laugh, the kind that started somewhere below the sternum, and he squeezed Adrian’s shoulder once more and was gone, pulled back into the gravity of his own celebration, into the orbit of people who wanted to touch him tonight, who had been wanting to touch him all evening, the way you want to put your hand on something warm. Adrian watched him go. He watched the way Daniel moved through the crowd, stopping, bending toward an old woman in a wheelchair, taking both her hands, saying something that made her face open like a window, and Adrian thought, with the precision that was the best and the worst thing about him, that Daniel did not perform any of it, that this was the difference, that Daniel was simply distributing himself among the people he loved without any sense that he was being watched, because the possibility of being watched had never once occurred to him as a thing that might change what a person did.

Adrian had noticed this about Daniel in college and had not had a word for it then either. He had a word now, or several, but the words had never quite closed around the thing, the way a net does not close around water.

He took a glass of champagne from a passing tray, not because he wanted it but because holding a glass gave his hands an argument for existing, and he moved toward the perimeter of the tent where the lights gave out and the real darkness of the field began. There was a seam there, a place where the white wall of the tent met the night, and through a gap in the fabric he could see out across the lawn to the house, and the house had its windows lit, and in one of the downstairs windows a caterer was moving back and forth, doing something with trays, entirely unaware of being seen, and Adrian stood for a while and watched her through the gap because it was easier than watching the dancing. There was a particular ease in watching a person who did not know she was being watched. You could see what a person actually was when the audience was subtracted. The caterer set down a tray and pressed the heel of her hand into the small of her back and arched, briefly, an old animal gesture of a body that had been standing too long, and then she picked the tray back up and went on, and Adrian found the small honesty of it almost unbearable, though he could not have said why, and did not try.

“You’re doing the thing.”

He turned. It was Sarah, Daniel’s sister, whom he had known for years in the loose way you know the siblings of your friends, a knowledge composed entirely of weddings and funerals and the occasional kitchen at the end of a long dinner. She had two glasses of wine and gave him one, taking the untouched champagne out of his hand and setting it on a nearby table with the unceremonious authority of a woman who had decided he needed something stronger.

“What thing,” Adrian said.

“The thing where you stand at the edge and watch everyone like you’re going to be quizzed on us later.” She said it without malice. That was the thing about Sarah, she could say a true thing and let it lie there between you without sharpening it into a weapon. “Danny does it too, you know. Stands back and watches. The difference is he’s checking that everyone’s okay. You’re checking something else.”

“I’m checking that everyone’s okay,” Adrian said.

“No,” Sarah said, pleasantly, “you’re not,” and she touched her glass to his and drank, and he laughed, the real laugh, the one that got surprised out of him, the short bark that he could not control and did not like, because it told the truth about when a thing had actually landed, and Sarah looked pleased with herself, and the moment was nice, was genuinely nice, and Adrian filed away the niceness of it the way he filed everything, as data, as evidence, though evidence for what he could not yet have told you.

The band, which had been playing the sort of music that exists to make weddings feel like weddings, shifted into something slower, and the floor reorganized itself into couples, and Adrian watched Daniel find his wife. Her name was Mira. Adrian had met her three times and had each time conducted the small private appraisal he conducted of everyone, and Mira had survived it, which was rare, because the appraisal was designed to find the place where a person was performing and Mira did not appear to have one. She was a pediatric nurse. She laughed at things that were actually funny and did not laugh at things that were merely positioned to be funny, and Adrian had watched, at dinner, the way she let a silence sit when a silence was the honest response, instead of filling it, and he had thought, that is a person who has been near real things, though he had not extended the thought to ask what real things, or to notice that he was describing, without knowing it, a quality he had spent his whole life unable to produce in himself.

Daniel and Mira danced. They were not good dancers. This was somehow the worst part. They moved with the slight comic earnestness of two people who knew they were not good dancers and had decided years ago that it did not matter, and Daniel said something into Mira’s ear and she laughed and pressed her forehead against his collarbone, and Adrian, watching, felt something move in him that he did not have a clean name for, something that was not quite envy because envy was supposed to want the specific thing the other person had, and Adrian did not want a pediatric nurse named Mira, did not want a wedding tent strung with deliberately careless lights, did not want any of the visible items, and so he concluded, wrongly, that what he was feeling could not be envy, because he had defined envy too narrowly, the way he defined most things too narrowly, building the definition first and then living inside it like a man furnishing a cell and calling it taste.

What he felt, if he had been able to follow it down, was not a wanting of Daniel’s things. It was a wanting of the capacity that produced the things, the capacity to stand in the middle of a tent and not be at the edge of it, to be danced with badly and not narrate the dancing, to receive a Tuesday without auditing it. But he could not follow it down, because following it down would have required passing a door he kept locked, and so the feeling rose in him and found no name and settled, the way water settles, into the lowest available place, which in Adrian was a kind of cool amused distance, and he lifted Sarah’s wine and drank and said, to no one, because Sarah had drifted off to dance with an uncle, “Well.”

He said it out loud. There was no one near enough to hear. He had a habit of this, of small spoken punctuation when he was alone, a well, a there it is, a single quiet word addressed to an audience that was not present, and if you had asked him about it he would have denied it, and if you had played him a recording he would have been genuinely surprised, because the performance ran so deep that it continued even when the theater was empty, even when the house lights were down and the seats were folded and the only person left in the building was the actor, alone on the stage, still hitting his marks for a darkness that watched nothing.

His phone was in his jacket. He could feel it there, the small rectangular weight of it, and he knew that if he took it out there would be nothing on it that he needed, and he took it out anyway, the way you press a bruise, and there was a text from his father, sent two hours ago, that he had not answered. Give Daniel our best. That was all. Our best, the plural of a man who spoke for the family the way a steward speaks for a house, and Adrian looked at the four words for longer than four words deserved and felt the old thing stir, the thing that had no event attached to it, no scene he could point to, just a low pressure behind the breastbone that arrived whenever his father’s particular brevity arrived, the brevity of a man who loved you in a register so quiet you had to strain your whole life to hear it and never could be sure you had. He put the phone back without answering. He would answer tomorrow. He would write something a little too good, a little too composed, the way he always wrote his father, each of them passing the other notes in a language they had agreed, without ever discussing it, to keep formal, because formality was safer than the alternative, because the alternative had never been attempted and at this point the not-attempting had its own thirty-year momentum.

“He talks about you, you know.”

Mira had appeared beside him. He had not seen her come. She had the flushed, slightly undone look of a bride three hours in, the careful architecture of the morning loosening into something better, and she was holding her shoes in one hand, and Adrian thought, there it is, the shoes, the universal tell of the wedding’s second act, and then he stopped thinking it because Mira was looking at him with the directness of a person who was too happy tonight to bother with the usual choreography.

“Daniel,” she said. “He talks about you. The famous friend.”

“I’m not famous,” Adrian said. “I wrote one book that some people who give out prizes liked.”

“He says you’re the smartest person he’s ever met.” She said it simply, the way you report a weather fact, and then she tilted her head and added, with a small smile that had something underneath it, “He says it like it worries him a little. Like he can’t figure out why the smartest person he’s ever met seems so.” She paused. She was kinder than the true word would have been. “Far away.”

Adrian felt the observation land somewhere it was not supposed to be able to reach. He had defenses for cleverness. He had no defenses for this, for a bride in her stocking feet looking at him with no agenda but a vague benevolent puzzlement, reporting that he was talked about with worry. He looked for the joke, found one, and decided, in a small uncharacteristic act, not to use it.

“I’m happy for him,” Adrian said, and the surprising thing, the thing that surprised even him, was that it was true. Under everything, under the diagnosing and the distance and the cool amused water finding its low place, it was true. He was happy for Daniel. He could not be happy with him, could not stand in the warm middle of the thing and be warm, but he could stand at the edge in the cold and be, for Daniel specifically, glad, and the gladness cost him something, the way reaching across a great distance costs the arm, and Mira seemed to see the cost, because her face changed, softened, and she put her free hand briefly on his forearm, just for a second, the way you touch something you have decided not to ask about.

“He’d kill me for saying the worried part,” she said. “Forget I said the worried part.”

“I’ll forget the worried part,” Adrian said. “I’ll remember the smartest part. That part I’m keeping.”

She laughed, the real laugh, and the band started up again, faster now, and someone called her name, and she was gone, swept back into the warm machinery of being the bride, and Adrian stood for a moment with the unfamiliar residue of having said a true thing and not undercut it, and the residue was uncomfortable, the way a muscle is uncomfortable the day after you have used it for the first time in years, and he did the thing he always did with discomfort, which was to convert it into observation, to step back from it and look at it, and he thought: interesting, that I meant it, and the stepping-back was so practiced, so immediate, that he did not notice he had once again declined to simply feel the thing, had once again taken the warm live moment and pinned it to a board to study its wings.

He went out through the gap in the tent. The field at night was cold and the grass was wet and he did not care, the cold was clarifying, and he walked a little way out onto the lawn until the music went muffled behind him and he could see the whole tent from outside, the whole lit white shape of it glowing on the dark field like a lantern, and inside the lantern the small moving shapes of people who loved each other, blurred by the fabric into something almost abstract, a warmth with the particulars sanded off, and Adrian stood in the cold and watched the warmth from outside the way he had watched the caterer through the window, the way he had watched Daniel cross the floor, the way he had, he was beginning to dimly suspect though he would not have put it this way, watched his entire life, from a field, in the cold, looking in.

A figure detached itself from the tent and came toward him across the grass, and for a moment he thought it was Sarah again, or Daniel come to retrieve him, but it was an older man, in a good suit gone slightly rumpled, carrying two cigars, and it took Adrian a moment to place him as Daniel’s father, whom he had met perhaps twice, a retired engineer named Walter who had built bridges, actual bridges, the kind that carried trucks, and who had the unhurried physical confidence of a man who had spent his life making things that either held or did not hold and had made his peace with the binary of it.

“You looked like a man who wanted to be outside,” Walter said, and held out a cigar, and Adrian, who did not smoke, took it, because there are offers you accept for reasons that have nothing to do with the thing offered.

They stood and Walter produced a lighter and there was the small ceremony of the lighting, the cupped hands, the shared brief intimacy of two men leaning toward a single flame, and then they were both looking at the tent, side by side, two figures in a dark field, and Walter said nothing for a long time, which Adrian found he did not mind, and the not-minding was itself unusual, because silence with another person was a thing Adrian normally rushed to fill, treating a silence as an empty chair that demanded a guest.

“He’s a good boy,” Walter said finally, of his son, with the total unembarrassed simplicity of an old man past the age of guarding such things. “Never gave us a day’s worry. People say that like it’s nothing.” He drew on the cigar. “It’s not nothing.”

“No,” Adrian said. “It’s not nothing.”

“You’re the writer.”

“I’m the writer.”

“I tried to read your book,” Walter said, and Adrian braced, because this was a sentence that always ended in a small lie, in I loved it or I didn’t quite get to finish it, in some socially required courtesy, and instead Walter said, “I couldn’t get into it. Too sad for me. All those people in that house, none of them happy, dividing up the furniture.” He said it without apology, the report of a man who had no stake in flattering a stranger in a field. “My wife liked it. She reads sadder things than me.” He turned and looked at Adrian, and his face in the light from the distant tent was kind and unimpressed, which was a combination Adrian almost never encountered, kindness and the refusal to be impressed arriving together, because in Adrian’s world the two were opposites, kindness was a tax the impressed paid and the unimpressed withheld. “Is it true? The book. Are people really like that?”

And Adrian, who had a polished answer to this question, who had given versions of this answer in interviews and on panels, who could speak fluently for ten minutes about fiction and truth and the way the novel tells lies in order to tell the truth, opened his mouth to deliver it and found, standing in the wet field with a cigar he did not want and an old bridge-builder looking at him with kind unimpressed eyes, that the polished answer would not come, that something about the field and the cold and the lantern of warmth glowing behind them had briefly disarmed the machine, and what came out instead, quietly, was, “Some people. The people I know.”

Walter nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he had suspected, not about the book but about the man.

“That’s a shame,” Walter said, not unkindly. “Knowing those people.” And he clapped Adrian once on the back, the way men of his generation did, a single solid blow that was the entire vocabulary of a certain kind of affection, and he turned and walked back toward the tent, toward the warmth and his good son and his wife who read sadder things than he did, leaving Adrian alone in the field with a lit cigar and the slow dawning sense of having been, for once, seen clean through, not by a clever person armed with theories, but by a simple one armed with nothing but a long life of watching things hold or fail to hold.

Adrian stood there for a while longer. The cigar burned down. He did not smoke it, just held it, watching the small ember at its end, and across the field the music played and the lantern glowed and the small blurred shapes of the loved and the loving moved behind the white wall, and Adrian thought, in the part of his mind that never stopped, that he should remember this, the field and the cold and the old man’s clean unimpressed kindness, that there was something here he should hold onto, and even as he thought it he could feel the thing already beginning to convert, already turning from a moment lived into a moment observed, already cooling from experience into material, and he let it, because he did not know how to do otherwise, because the converting was so deep in him now that it ran without his consent, and he stood in the dark field watching the warmth he could not enter and felt, beneath the cool amused water and the diagnosing mind and the polished unspoken answers, a loneliness so old and so total that he had long ago stopped recognizing it as loneliness and had come to experience it simply as the texture of being him, the water he swam in, invisible the way water is invisible to the thing that has never once been out of it.

He dropped the cigar in the wet grass, where it died with a small sound. His hand, going back into his coat pocket for the warmth of it, found the chip. He had forgotten it was there, or had told himself he had forgotten, which was a different operation and one he was practiced at, and his thumb moved over the smooth face of it the way it had learned to without instruction, finding the milled edge, the small worn place where the lacquer had gone soft, and for a moment he stood very still in the dark field with his thumb on the thing and did not let himself think the name of the room it had come from, did not let himself think the word for what the chip was or what it was worth or what he had told himself, the last time, about whether there would be a next time. He let his thumb move over it. He thought about nothing, with great effort.

Then he took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and stood a moment more, and then he said it, quietly, to the empty field, to the dark, to the audience that was not there and had never been there and that he had been performing for his entire life without once being able to find.

“Well,” he said. “There it is.”

And he walked back toward the tent, composing, already, the text he would send his father in the morning.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Two — The Prize

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.