We Need to Talk About Kevin Read online

  It might seem, in the circumstances, a little embarrassing for me to continue to need a sweater or a muff, or to object to being cheated of a dollar and fifty cents. But since that Thursday my whole life has been smothered in such a blanket of embarrassment that I have chosen to find these passing pinpricks solace instead, emblems of a surviving propriety. Being inadequately dressed for the season, or chafing that in a Wal-Mart the size of a catde market I cannot locate a single box of kitchen matches, I glory in the emotionally commonplace.

  Picking my way to the side door again, I puzzled over h o w a band of marauders could have assaulted this structure so thoroughly while I slept unawares inside. I blamed the heavy dose of tranquilizers I was taking every night (please don't say anything, Franklin, I k n o w you don't approve), until I realized that I was picturing the scene all wrong. It was a m o n t h later, not a day.There were no jeers and howls, no ski masks and sawn-ofF

  shotguns. T h e y came in stealth. T h e only sounds were broken twigs, a muffled t h u m p as the first full can slapped our lustrous mahogany door, the lulling oceanic lap of paint against glass, a tiny rat-a-tat-tat as spatters splattered, no louder than fat rain.

  O u r house had not been spurted with the Day-Glo spray of spontaneous outrage but slathered with a hatred that had reduced until it was thick and savorous, like a fine French sauce.

  You'd have insisted we hire someone else to clean it off.

  You were always keen on this splendid American penchant for specialization, whereby there was an expert for every want, and you sometimes thumbed the Yellow Pages just for fun. "Paint Removers: Crimson enamel." But so m u c h was made in the papers about h o w rich we were, h o w Kevin had been spoiled. I

  — 10 —

  didn't want to give Gladstone the satisfaction of sneering, look, she can just hire one more minion to clean up the mess, like that expensive lawyer. No, I made t h e m watch me day after day, scraping by hand, renting a sandblaster for the bricks. O n e evening I glimpsed my reflection after a day's toil—clothing smeared, fingernails creased, hair flecked—and shrieked. I'd looked like this once before.

  A few crevices around the door may still gleam with a ruby tint; deep in the crags of those faux-antique bricks may yet glisten a few drops of spite that I was unable to reach with the ladder. I wouldn't know. I sold that house. After the civil trial, I had to.

  I had expected to have trouble unloading the property. Surely superstitious buyers would shy away w h e n they found out w h o owned the place. But that just goes to show once again h o w poorly I understood my own country. You once accused me of lavishing all my curiosity on "Third World shitholes," while what was arguably the most extraordinary empire in the history of mankind was staring me in the face. You were right, Franklin.

  There's no place like home.

  As soon as the property was listed, the bids tumbled in. N o t because the bidders didn't know; because they did. O u r house sold for well more than it was worth—over $3 million. In my naivete, I hadn't grasped that the property's very notoriety was its selling point. W h i l e poking about our pantry, apparently couples on the climb were picturing gleefully in their minds' eyes the crowning m o m e n t of their housewarming dinner party.

  [Ting-ting!] Listen up, folks. I'm gonna propose a toast, but first, you're not gonna believe who we bought this spread from. Ready?

  Eva Khatchadourian.. .Familiar? You bet. Where'd we move to, anyway? Gladstone!... Yeah, that Khatchadourian, Pete, among all the Khatchadourians you know? Christ, guy, little slow.

  ... That's right, "Kevin. "Wild, huh? My kid Lawrence has his room.

  Tried one on the other night, too. Said he had to stay up with me to watch H e n r y : Portrait of a Serial Killer because his room was "haunted"

  _ 1 1 _

  by "Kevin Ketchup." Had to disappoint the kid. Sorry, I said, Kevin Ketchup can't no way be haunting your bedroom when the worthless little bastard's all too alive and well in some kiddie prison upstate. Up to me, man, that scumbag would'vegot the chair. ..No, it wasn't quite as bad as Columbine. What was it, ten, honey? Nine, right, seven kids, two adults.

  The teacher he whacked was like, this brat's big champion or something, too. And I don't know about blaming videos, rock music. We grew up with rock music, didn't we? None of us went on some killing frenzy at our high school. Or take Lawrence. That little guy loves blood-and-guts TV, and no matter how graphic he doesn't flinch. But his rabbit got run over?

  He cried for a week. They know the difference.

  We're raising him to know what's right. Maybe it seems unfair, but you really gotta wonder about the parents.

  N O V E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 0 0

  Dear Franklin,

  You know, I try to be polite. So w h e n my coworkers—that's right, I work, at a Nyack travel agency, believe it or not, and gratefully, t o o — w h e n they start foaming at the m o u t h about the disproportionate n u m b e r of votes for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach, I wait so patiently for t h e m to finish that in a way I have b e c o m e a treasured commodity: I am the only one in the office w h o will allow t h e m to finish a sentence. If the atmosphere of this country has suddenly b e c o m e carnival-like, festive with fierce opinion, I do not feel invited to the party. I don't care who's president.

  Yet too vividly I can see this last w e e k through the lens of my private if-only. I would have voted for Gore, you for Bush.

  We'd have had heated enough exchanges before the election, but this—this—oh, it would have been marvelous. Loud, strident fist pounding and door slamming, me reciting choice snippets f r o m the New York Times, you furiously underscoring op-eds in the Wall Street Journal—suppressing smiles the whole time. H o w I miss getting exercised over bagatelle.

  It may have been disingenuous of me to imply at the start of my last letter that w h e n we conferred at the end of a day, I told all.To the contrary, one of the things that impels me to write is that my m i n d is huge with all the little stories I never told you.

  — 1 3 —

  D o n ' t imagine that I've enjoyed my secrets. They've trapped me, crowded me in, and long ago I'd have liked nothing more than to pour out my heart. But Franklin, you didn't want to hear.

  I ' m sure you still don't. A n d maybe I should have tried harder at the time to force you to listen, but early on we got on opposite sides of something. For many couples w h o quarrel, just what they are on opposite sides of may be unformed, a line of some sort, an abstraction that divides them—a history or floating grudge, an insensible power struggle with a life of its own: gossamer. Perhaps in times of reconciliation for such couples the unreality of that line assists its dissolve. Look, I can jealously see t h e m noting, there is nothing in the room; we can reach across the sheer air between us. But in our case, w h a t separated us was all too tangible, and if it wasn't in the r o o m it could walk in of its o w n accord.

  O u r son. W h o is not a smattering of small tales but one long one. A n d though the natural impulse of yarn spinners is to begin at the beginning, I will resist it. I have to go further back. So many stories are determined before they start.

  What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. I k n e w this about myself in advance, too: that I was just the sort of w o m a n w h o had the capacity, however ghastly, to rue even so unretractable a matter as another person. But then, Kevin didn't regard other people's existence as unretractable—did he?

  I ' m sorry, but you can't expect me to avoid it. I may not k n o w what to call it, that Thursday. The atrocity sounds t o r n from a newspaper, the incident is minim
izing to the point of obscenity, and the day our own son committed mass murder is too long, isn't it?

  For every mention? But I am going to mention it. I wake up with

  — 1 4 —

  what he did every m o r n i n g and I go to bed with it every night.

  It is my shabby substitute for a husband.

  So I have racked my brain, trying to reconstruct those few months in 1982 w h e n we were officially "deciding."We were still living in my cavernous loft inTribeca, where we were surrounded by arch homosexuals, unattached artists you deplored as "self-indulgent," and unencumbered professional couples w h o dined out a t T e x - M e x nightly and flopped about at the Limelight until 3 A.M. Children in that neighborhood were pretty m u c h on a par with the spotted owl and other endangered species, so it's little w o n d e r that our deliberations were stilted and abstract. We even set ourselves a deadline, for pity's sake—my thirty-seventh birthday that August—since we didn't want a child w h o could still be living at h o m e in our sixties.

  O u r sixties! In those days, an age as bafflingly theoretical as a baby. Yet I expect to embark to that foreign land five years from n o w with no m o r e ceremony than boarding a city bus. It was in 1999 that I made a temporal leap, although I didn't notice the aging so m u c h in the mirror as through the aegis of other people.

  W h e n I renewed my driver's license this last January, for example, the functionary at the desk didn't act surprised I was all of fifty-four, and you remember I was once rather spoiled on this front, accustomed to regular coos over h o w I looked at least ten years younger. T h e coos came to a complete halt overnight. Indeed, I had one embarrassing encounter, soon after Thursday, in which a Manhattan subway attendant called my attention to the fact that over-sixty-fives qualified for a senior discount.

  We'd agreed that whether we became parents would be "the single most important decision we would ever make together."

  Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbellina that wets itself for Christmas.

  I do recall a sequence of conversations during that period that lurched with a seemingly arbitrary rhythm between tending toward and tending against. T h e most upbeat of these has surely to be after a Sunday lunch with Brian and Louise on Riverside Drive. T h e y no longer did dinner, w h i c h always resulted in parental apartheid: one spouse playing grown-up with calamatas and cabernet, the other corralling, bathing, and bedding those two rambunctious little girls. Me, I always prefer socializing at night—it is implicidy more wanton—although wantonness was no longer a quality I would have associated with that warm, settled H o m e Box Office scriptwriter w h o made his o w n pasta and watered spindly parsley plants on his w i n d o w ledge.

  I marveled in the elevator down, " A n d he used to be such a cokehead."

  "You sound wistful," you noted.

  " O h , I ' m sure he's happier now."

  I wasn't sure. In those days I still held wholesomeness to be suspect. In fact, we had had a very "nice" time, which left me bafflingly bereft. I had admired the solid oak dining set seized for a song from an upstate tag sale, while you submitted to a complete inventory of the younger girl's Cabbage Patch Kids with a patience that left me agog. We c o m m e n d e d the inventive salad with ingenuous fervor, for in the early 1980s goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes were not yet passe.

  Years before we'd agreed that you and Brian wouldn't get into it over R o n a l d R e a g a n — t o you, a g o o d - h u m o r e d icon with easy flash and fiscal ingenuity w h o had restored pride to the nation; to Brian, a figure of menacing idiocy w h o would bankrupt the country with tax cuts for rich people. So we stayed on safe topics, as "Ebony and Ivory" crooned in the background at a grown-up volume and I suppressed my annoyance that the little girls kept singing tunelessly along and replaying the same track. You bewailed the fact that the Knicks hadn't made the playoffs, and Brian did an impressive imitation of a m a n w h o was interested in sports. We were all disappointed that All in the Family would soon wrap up its last season, but agreed that the show was about played

  — 16 —

  out. About the only conflict that arose all afternoon was over the equally terminal fate of M * A * S * H . Well aware that Brian worshiped him, you savaged Alan Alda as a "sanctimonious pill."

  Yet the difference was dismayingly good-natured. Brian had a blind spot about Israel, and I was tempted to plant one quiet reference to "Judeo-Nazis" and detonate this affable occasion.

  Instead I asked him about the subject of his n e w script, but never got a proper answer because the older girl got chewing g u m in her Barbie-blond hair. There was a long maunder about solvents, which Brian put an end to by lopping off the lock with a carving knife, and Louise got a litde upset. But that was the single set-piece commotion, and otherwise no one drank too m u c h or took offense; their h o m e was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice— nice, nice, nice.

  I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfecdy pleasant people inadequate. W h y would I have preferred a fight? Weren't those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought?

  Wasn't I married to a m a n I loved, so w h y did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt w h e n I helped h i m bring in bowls of Haagen-Dazs from the kitchen? In retrospect, I was quite right to kick myself, too. Just a few years later I'd have paid m o n e y for an ordinary, good-spirited family gathering during w h i c h the worst thing any of the children got up to was sticking g u m in their hair.

  You, however, announced boisterously in the lobby, "That was great. I think they're both terrific. We should be sure to have t h e m over soon, if they can get a sitter."

  I held my tongue. You w o u l d have no time for my nit-picking about h o w wasn't the l u n c h e o n a little bland, didn't you have this feeling like, what's the point, isn't there something flat and plain and doughy about this w h o l e Father Knows Best routine w h e n Brian was once (at last I can admit to a guest-r o o m quickie at a party before you and I met) such a hellraiser.

  — 17 —

  It's quite possible that you felt exactly as I did, that this to all appearances successful encounter had felt d u m p y and insipid to you as well, b u t in lieu of another obvious m o d e l to aspire t o —we were n o t going to go score a gram of cocaine—you t o o k refuge in denial. These were g o o d people and they had b e e n g o o d to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some u n -

  namable quantity w i t h o u t w h i c h we could n o t abide, but w h i c h we could n o t s u m m o n on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

  You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs w h o turn up their noses at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks—what more could I possibly want?

  Besides, the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. T h e only hint that in truth you'd found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

  As we spun through the revolving doors onto Riverside Drive, I'm sure my disquiet was u n f o r m e d and fleeting. Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Sam-sonite sui
tcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be—your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately w a n t e d — w o u l d produce such devastating consequences.

  I proposed that we walk home. On the road for A W i n g and a Prayer I walked everywhere, and the impulse was second nature.

  "It must be six or seven miles t o T r i b e c a P ' y o u objected.

  — 18 —

  "You'll take a taxi in order to j u m p rope 7,500 times in front of the Knicks game, but a vigorous walk that gets you where you're going is too exhausting."

  "Hell, yes. Everything in its place." Limited to exercise or the strict way you folded your shirts, your regimens were adorable.

  But in more serious contexts, Franklin, I was less charmed.

  Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.

  So I threatened to walk h o m e by myself, and that did it; I was leaving for Sweden three days later, and you were greedy for my company. We roistered d o w n the footpath into Riverside Park, where the ginkgoes were in flower, and the sloping lawn was littered with anorexics doing tai chi. Ebullient over getting away from my own friends, I stumbled.

  "You're a drunk," you said.

  "Two glasses!"

  You tsked. "Middle of the day."

  "I should have made it three," I said sharply. Your every pleasure rationed except television, I wished that sometimes you would let go, as you had in our salad days of courtship, arriving at my door with two pinot noirs, a six of St. Pauli Girl, and a lecherous leer that did not promise to hold off until we'd flossed.

  "Brian's kids," I introduced formally. " T h e y make you want one?"

  " M - m - m a y b e . They're cute. Then, I ' m not the one w h o has to stuff the beasties in the sack w h e n they want a cracker, Mr.