Audio: Greg Jackson reads.
Jonah Valente had been an object of amusement to Jack and his college classmates, and presumably he had gone on being one to other people ever since. An awkward, intense, muscle-bound young man, the sort you could imagine crashing through a wall accidentally, he had had the dim, muddled quality of students recruited to play football at the school, who either didn’t measure up academically or didn’t believe they did. Valente’s claim to fame, what had made him a figure on campus—one of that subset of maybe fifty classmates who, possessing some extravagance of character, defined the larger composite character by which the student body understood itself—came from his having abruptly quit football during sophomore year to take up painting, a passion he had developed apparently out of the blue and with a single-minded earnestness that embarrassed his more sophisticated classmates, who knew to disguise their sincerity. When Valente left the football team, changed his major, and began hanging out with a group of druggy slackers who loitered around the Visual Arts department like sun-drunk flies, the school paper ran a feature on his unusual transformation and he acquired the nickname Beaux Arts. This got shortened to B.A., and then Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, simply the Whale, and, by a different route altogether, Picasso. A year later, after spending the summer in Florence on a painting scholarship, Valente got kicked out of school. According to rumors at the time, his expulsion had to do with drugs, but Valente maintained among his friends that it was the school’s way of punishing him for quitting football. Jack had no basis for judgment. Nor did he really care. You knew very little about your classmates in the end, their real lives and disappointments and hopes, and what you did know was mostly hearsay, and often dubious and even somewhat fantastical.
In the indolent, halcyon days before graduation, Jack had thought about Valente exactly once. He had been lying completely stoned in a friend’s common room, gazing up at the crown moldings, when he realized that people called Valente “the Whale” not simply because of the association pattern in certain words but in reference to the story of Jonah. When this insight lit up within him, it seemed to glow for a minute with a profound and inarticulable meaning. Then he forgot it, and he probably would have forgotten Valente, too, if years later he hadn’t moved to the rural area where, according to their mutual friend Daniel, Valente lived at home with his mother. Jack’s house was in the next county over, half an hour away by car, but he was a newcomer and he didn’t know anyone else yet.
He had moved there with Sophie. “Sophie’s choice,” he jokingly told people. Really, they had both made the choice. But then, shortly after buying the house and leaving the city, he had, in quick succession, lost his new job and lost Sophie. She hadn’t left him because of the job (at a large financial firm), though she didn’t like his new job or believe that he liked it. Apparently, she didn’t like their new life in the country, either. Sometimes she called herself a journalist, but that wasn’t quite right. She wrote—nonfiction, she had a degree in it—but she picked up magazine assignments infrequently and had trouble finishing pieces. Some fire was missing in her, she’d be the first to admit. She bit off more than she could chew, spent months diving deeply into projects, then found herself paralyzed, unable to write a word. Jack had long ago stopped giving her advice. He simply assumed that he would earn the money, and she would (or would not) figure out how she wanted to spend her time, and either way they would have kids and a home, a garden, friends, vacations, and so on. Buying the house had taken the better part of a year. Then in the space of four weeks everything had collapsed.
Sophie said that her feelings for him hadn’t changed, but she now understood—it had surfaced inside her with a force she could scarcely describe—that something was wrong, wrong for her, anyway, with the life they had laid out before them, and if she didn’t get out now she never would. Jack pointed out that their new life had hardly begun. But she was unshakable. “I know myself,” she said. “Once I settle in, once we have a kid and the rest, I’ll never leave.” She looked not exactly desperate but as if she were drowning in a substance his words were forcing her beneath. “Please.” She placed her fingers on his forearm. And he didn’t argue. Better to give people space. Either they came back to you, he reasoned, or they disappeared into their own confusion and misery. With people he didn’t like, he thought of it as giving them enough rope. With Sophie, it was the usual indecision, the usual flightiness. That’s what he believed.
The house was in Trevi, a small hamlet upriver from the city, out past the suburbs, picturesque and quaint (if not quite as grand as its European name), with Bradford pear trees all along the main street, which in spring so filled the roadway and the air with petals that it resembled a snow scene. A water tower bearing the town’s name and stilted up on arachnid legs, with water stains rusting its gray-blue paint, dwarfed the two-story houses and brick storefronts and shops. Years ago, some local wag had christened this Trevi Fountain, and more recently a group of friends from a nearby college had purchased a disused bank building in the heart of town and opened a lunch counter of the same name.
Trevi sat on the train line north of the city and laid claim to the only stop for twenty miles in either direction, and, naturally, this brought a certain wealth and cosmopolitanism you did not find everywhere in the region, and certainly not in Rock Basin, where Jonah Valente lived with his mother. Initially, Jack had planned to take the train to work. He had been at Tabor Investments only a short time when he was fired. Before that, he had spent half a decade in the D.A.’s office and seemed in line for a political career. But he had burned out on that life, or that’s what he said, anyway, and in anticipation of starting a family he had signed on for what he believed would be a cushier position all around. Perhaps his new employer didn’t agree with this interpretation of his job, because, as soon as he gave his bosses a chance by making an impolitic remark on a business-news show, they had wasted little time firing him. No, they had dangled the threat. He could have fought to stay, but, instead, haughty and superior, he had called their bluff and forced them to follow through.
The house was an early-nineteenth-century farmhouse, fixed up and expanded over the years, painted charcoal following the new style, a color like smoke against the pitch-dark sky. It had clapboard siding and a metal roof, a mostly private small field with an old stone wall and a falling-down chicken coop, a tiny creek, and a wild profusion of ivy and flowers. Toward the main road there was an unpainted barn. Jack, who had been so invested in settling in—furnishing, repainting, touching up the trim, replacing cracked windowpanes, talking to contractors, landscapers, and arborists about what to do with the chicken coop, the yard, the silver maples and pin oaks—found himself overcome with apathy. He could hardly bring himself to wash the dishes or take out the trash. The mail piled up unopened on a chair in the entryway. Not long before, he had been a dynamo, on the phone with lawyers and water-treatment specialists, septic contractors, electricians, and insurance agents. He had learned about ground wells and leach fields, UV water-purification systems, sump pumps, pipe fittings, cell-foam insulation, byzantine tax exemptions and property-tax schedules, the life span of roofing shingles, aluminum roof coating, and septic-tank baffles. Baffles. He liked that. That just about said it! Finally, he’d simply stopped.
Daniel, Jack’s friend from school, said that Jack’s state of mind made a lot of fucking sense. “Jesus, considering everything. Get drunk, get laid,” he said. “The French would go out whoring.” Jack supposed that he had been the one to phone Daniel, but it no longer felt that way.
He had called for news of Sophie. Daniel was a successful magazine writer and someone Sophie often turned to for professional advice. It was Daniel, in fact, who had written the article on Valente for the school paper (“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lineman”), and who now told Jack that he should give Valente a ring.
“Any word from Sophie?” Jack asked.
“Soph? She’s all right. She’s staying at her parents’, but I guess you know that.” Daniel laughed suddenly. “The last time I saw her, she was hanging out in bars, writing in a notebook, waiting for guys to text her.”
Jack responded stoically. “What guys?”
“Dates? I don’t know. I think she said she was writing a book. About contemporary dating, or dating apps. Something like that. Maybe she said ‘mating.’ ”
“I see. So she’s the one out whoring,” Jack said.
“Yeah, you’re the only one not having any fun.”
Jack could picture her sitting at the bar, her black hair unfurling about her face as she bent over her journal, pensive and daydreaming. It surprised him to find this thought, the image of her sitting there, poignant, rather than upsetting.
Still, when he reached her on the phone, he said, “So I hear you’ve been out whoring.”
She didn’t laugh at this but made a noise that suggested fatigue or annoyance, or perhaps both. “What did Daniel tell you?”
Jack gave an inaccurate, largely imaginative account of the conversation. He did not want to hurt Sophie, but at times he felt the urge to be crude, and even sometimes mean. It welled up in him like an irresistible pressure, building behind the prim dishonesty that obscured the raw, dark realities of the heart.
When he had finished, Sophie was quiet for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to get in the habit of explaining myself to you. So I guess I’m not going to.”
“If it’s freedom, it has to feel like freedom,” he suggested.
“Something like that.”
Later, with nothing to do, he telephoned Valente. “Holy shit! Jack Francis?” Boy, was it Valente—that same deep, echoic, excitable voice. “Dude, am I glad you called,” Valente said. “My mom is driving me crazy.”
It was Valente who noticed the hollow. This was not during his first visit, which he and Jack spent getting very drunk. Jack told him about Sophie, the D.A.’s office, and his brief foray into the private sector—the general cul-de-sac into which he seemed to have driven his life. Mostly, though, he listened to Valente talk about the years he had spent trying to get his artistic career off the ground, keeping body and soul together on part-time work. Valente had been employed by a house-painting crew, but something had happened and now he coached women’s rugby at a Catholic college across the river. The school was on spring break that week.
They discussed college, of course, and Jack was taken aback to find that their memories of this time did not align. He shouldn’t have been surprised by this—Valente had many strange notions—but it was vaguely unnerving to see that two people could live through the same experience and understand it so differently. Jack said that he had found everyone at college interesting at first—unique and particular and destined, it seemed, for some extraordinary future—but they had all turned out to be dull and conventional, and he increasingly saw himself as dull and conventional, too. Valente disagreed. He thought that their classmates had been deeply weird and had clung to the idea that they were dull and conventional to keep from sliding off the face of the earth.
“Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You tried to be the man in the gray plaid suit, and you got fired for mouthing off on one of those scam shows.”
This was only partly accurate. Jack, on that fateful day, had been listening to an overgrown child in what he believed were nonprescription glasses hyperventilate about the earnings figures for a Chinese company that Tabor did business with. While the man grew practically breathless and goggle-eyed at the company’s undervaluation, a graphic overlay showing a buy-sell meter flashed “Buy! Buy! Buy!”—and Jack, exhausted by this prattle, sick of Tabor and the expectation that he appear on these shows, the little devil in Jack, with an imperceptible smirk, said, “Well, yes, if you believe those figures.”
It would have been a stretch, but he could have told his bosses that he had been confused about which company Tabor was working with. Not particularly plausible, but they would have permitted him the one strike. Instead, he just said, “You really believe those numbers?” At times he felt so clear about his rightness and other people’s dishonesty that he could scarcely breathe.
He and Valente remembered the aftermath of Jonah’s expulsion differently as well. Valente seemed to believe that some sort of popular movement had arisen to reinstate him. Jack recalled nothing of the sort. He remembered jokes about Valente, and the sense, if not the outright suggestion, that it was just as well, what had happened, since there was clearly something off about their former classmate. Mythologies about Valente sprang up in his absence, as predictable as they were unlikely, but mostly he was forgotten.
Jack and Valente were sitting outside under a pergola heavy with potato vine and clematis. Jack had built a fire in the fire pit, and the wood crackled and sparked, dashing the flowers and vines in a shifting light. Valente said that he was rereading his favorite biography of van Gogh, and that the artist, who claimed to find the darkness more colorful and vivid than the day, had painted at night with lighted candles in the brim of his straw hat. “A great fire burns in me, but no one stops to warm himself,” he recited. “They pass by and see only the wisps of smoke.” That was van Gogh. Valente leaned back and tilted his head to the sky. He had lost bulk since college and now was almost thin, carved in intense relief. The light and shadow accentuated the bones and hollows of his face. He told Jack he was saving up for a summer program in France, a painting course. Not the usual bullshit, he said. You studied with some real masters. And they took you to all the famous spots: Auvers, Arles, Saint-Rémy. But it was expensive, and he couldn’t save enough unless he lived with his mom. Was he showing work? Jack wanted to know. There was a café in Rock Basin, Valente said. It wasn’t much, but it had a little gallery and he had some work up there. He told Jack that van Gogh’s first public exhibition had been in the window of an art supplier, a man he owed money to in The Hague. Van Gogh talked the guy into putting up a few of his paintings; if they sold, he said, he would use the money to pay off the debt. Well, they didn’t sell, and the dealers who saw them in the window didn’t like them, either. Valente laughed. “It just shows you,” he said, smiling at nothing but the dark. “Everyone has to start somewhere.”
“Dude, what’s in the middle of your house?”
This was how Valente greeted Jack on his third visit.