Soren Kierkegaard

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story. The stories in this collection are (lightly) based on different philosophers. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

John Halbrooks

writes on negative capability.

Best,

Sam

SOREN KIERKEGAARD

She was a talent, that was clear, the incontrovertible fact. He’d seen a show she was in, at the time she was in an indie film that was doing well, in awards talk, so her doing theater at all, being lent to theater, was an act of munificence and artistic integrity. He was part of a group that was having a drinks thing in an apartment nearby, it was exciting to be part of that, there were caterers discreetly mixing drinks, there was money floating around as a background hum in a way that he had always heard so much about, always imagined, but hadn’t actually experienced, to the point where he was starting to wonder if it wasn’t a collective fiction. And they were annoyed, unhappy, in the way that rich people are all somehow expected to be. He met each of them, professionally, inconspicuously circulating, and they gave him their presentation of self like they were in a low-budget computer game. “I run a hedge fund that invests in other hedge funds,” said a hedge fund manager who was starting to disintegrate into a really melancholic-inducing combination of uppers and downers, “it’s done well — serves no purpose whatsoever.” “I work in oil-and-gas,” said the party’s host, surprisingly forlornly, “everybody hates me.” “I don’t like oil-and-gas,” said his companion, who seemed never to have thought before about what he did for a living. He wandered off, irritated, and she gave her monologue, her eyes dancing around a bit, exactly as if the graphics weren’t high-quality. “I guess I’m a professional girlfriend,” she said, “my friends are kind of like what are you doing, why is that what you’re doing, but I like it, I think I just really like sex, to be honest I can’t think of something that’s better suited to me.”

He had the impression that he was being given a sales pitch — sales pitch disguised as a confession. He knew much better than to transact with her, even to stand and talk to her for too long — she was off-limits, she belonged to the host. In any case, he didn’t have anywhere close to the cash to even think about it. He had an erection just from standing close to her. The party was dull, flavorless, really it was for Muriel and the cast. They weren’t showing up — probably they had other parties, other rooftops. There was a difficult cycle of nursing his drinks, managing his anxiety, being careful not to overstay his welcome, always sort of preparing to leave without leaving — he had nowhere else to go, dull or not dull, this was the kind of room where he wanted to be forever.

She showed up around midnight, he congratulated himself for the mental tricks he had deployed to keep himself there. Suddenly, the apartment seemed to be full of people — the smokers, the cell phone users wandering back, huddling around the drinks table, leaning in towards other people’s conversation to hear a stray tip about what working with Liam Neeson had been like, listening for just the right aperçu, the kind of thing that they could repeat endlessly. Like a versatile cast, everybody had shifted roles, they were all Dorothy Parker all of a sudden, all mavens, all surprisingly attentive to theater and art.

And Muriel herself seemed very tired. She had had a show that evening and would have another the next day, her cat-eyed makeup was wrapped tightly around her features, she was grateful for clear, iced drink to be handed to her, she seemed completely oblivious to the mavens, how they were waiting for her to say something pithy and brilliant.

And they lost interest, unbegrudgingly. That was how they clocked evenings, as a succession of high hopes and disappointments, the play, which they had confessed sotto voce to each other in corners of the apartment they didn’t actually like, and the apartment itself with its soon-exhausted view of the skyline and then face time with these semi-famous actors and then back to the same familiar faces, seen around drinks tables in yachts, the Hamptons, other penthouses, sometimes even in offices, one of the younger women doing recon work on her cell phone spotted some late-breaking party, a different penthouse a cab ride away and a bunch of them went trooping off there.

He found himself by a plate-glass window with Muriel. He felt like he should be offering something, a cigarette, a bit of cocaine. She seemed to be taking the skyline very seriously. “I don’t know if it’s in good taste or not to tell you how terrific you were,” he said.

She looked perplexed, disappointed, he had the feeling she might be mulling over bad news she had gotten earlier that night.

“Because you don’t know if it’s bad taste or you don’t know if I was good?”

“Because you might be sick of hearing how terrific you were — maybe it gets tiring.”

She looked out at the view. She had a man’s sport jacket over her shoulders, he didn’t know which man. She was so brittle, bird-like, anybody there would have had the impulse to protect her the instant she looked like she might be getting cold. “I don’t think I’d get sick of it,” she said.

“Well,” he told her, “I don’t see a lot of theater, to be honest. I’d kind of forgotten there was such a thing as theater, and in my world if anybody talks about theater it’s always this like status symbol, they bought subscriber tickets or they’re hoping to produce a show, and it’s supposed to be so high-brow and remote, and then I go see it — and it’s just so intimate and simple, you and your husband and your difficult relationship and every pause is so powerful and it’s all just very true, relatable, real life just distilled.”

“That’s true,” she said very flatly, which, he’d noticed, was also part of her character’s personality, “it really isn’t a big deal — it’s a very simple thing.” And he couldn’t tell at all if she was insulted or agreed with him.

A pair was hovering over them, the owner of the jacket and his girlfriend. This was Jonathan, Brandon’s invite to the whole evening, his sometime business partner, he was congratulating Muriel, he was apologizing profusely but he had to reclaim the jacket from her, she grinned like she might box him for it, wrapped the jacket tightly around herself, the sleeves hanging far over her wrists. He would share a cab with Brandon if Brandon wanted and that seemed like his cue — he didn’t know anyone else here, it was bad form to linger.

She and Jonathan embraced, they were very warm with each other, she and the girlfriend thanked each other voluminously, she and Jonathan had been impresarioing the evening, subscription tickets were in play, charity donations, she was so thrilled in turn with Muriel’s performance. They exchanged contacts. Brandon was in the semi-circle and exchanged contacts as well. They didn’t hug — they had really had a very short talk. “Be in touch,” she said.

***

Brandon managed to wait two full days before he called her, hoping to be assertive and ambush her.

“I really enjoyed our conversation,” he told her.

There was a real stillness in the air around her, he was trying hard to pinpoint it, the way white noise from a phone call gives you a whole other world, a whole other consciousness. He just didn’t know enough about her to work it out. A dressing room, some kind of elaborate candles-and-scents meditation, a bed like in the apartment he’d been in, maybe the apartment he’d been in, a face — a face he recognized — turning inquisitively from the other pillow.

“I would like that,” she told him when he’d given her his proposal. “I’m really crazed right now, but, yes, I would like that.”

He’d prepared something complicated, a late lunch at Momofuku, a visit to a gallery if she had time. She told him she’d have to be at the theater early — just a walk was best.

And there was something very beautiful about it, fall in Central Park, the kind of New York event that never actually happened to him. His New York was all indoors, offices, restaurants, he felt that he was always pacing around somewhere, behind a desk, on the phone. And Muriel, to be honest, didn’t actually seem any more authentically to inhabit this role, the manic pixie loose on the North Meadow. She kept complaining about the cold, she kept pinching herself tighter, he draped his enormous greatcoat over her, with its sagging pockets, this seemed to be a thing of hers, always in men’s coats. They made loops around the North Meadow, they made it all the way to the Reservoir. The conversation was mostly about things they passed – about ice skating and tennis and the skyline and where they had been on 9/11. He had the feeling that he was managing the conversation very well, nothing about theater or film or the perils of celebrity, nothing too close to home where he would be sure to err, definitely nothing about venture capital. The feeling was that they had known each other for a very long time, had been together even for a very long time, it was stray thoughts, glancing thoughts, he might say something like, “I always find this very depressing for some reason, the skyline to the south and then the way it just empties, everybody loves the skyline but to me it feels like hoarding, it just feels like traffic or something the way it’s not spread around,” and she’d lean forward very thoughtfully, wrapping his coat tighter around herself, his keys and blackberry jangling unfortunately in his pockets, said, “I see what you mean, I wouldn’t call it depressing, I’d just call it a fact — that’s a fact and it’s up to you whether you find the fact thrilling or not.”

The feeling was that neither of them had had a normal adolescence or college — he’d read an interview about the grueling conservatory she’d been in all the way through, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that acting could be such boot camp. They just had never really had this kind of experience, inane thoughts, a wandering afternoon. It was like trying on a different way of being, different tempo, different taste.

When they reached the park exit and she was waiting for her Uber, he made sure to stand squarely towards her. “This was wonderful,” he said. “I really feel — I hope that this isn’t the last of it.”

“Of course not,” she told him.

He had timed it well. The cab was pulling up to the curb, they wouldn’t have to stand around for a long time and figure it out. He leaned in, kissed her on the lips and she accepted it. She turned her head demurely to the side, that was her signature, it was in the movie, it was in the play, to be honest she was pushing a little with it. A smile like she had some secret, like she was overwhelmed with things she couldn’t manage to say. When she looked back at him her eyes seemed to be brimming with tears – and he couldn’t figure out what that connected to in their walk; figured it might be some actress’ trick.

He waited till the next morning to text, ask her how her show went, if she might be willing to meet him on another free afternoon. She wrote back, “I had a great time and you’re a lovely person but I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew — it’s just crazy intense right now, and I need to work without distractions.”

It felt like a computer game or something, pretty women were armed with so many excuses, they could just grab whichever one was nearest at hand, toss it at you.

***

He dedicated himself to work. He had always been a hard worker, in school, in business school, as an associate, as a dedicated entrepreneur with his own firm, playing the role of CEO as well as accountant, tax lawyer, programmer, secretary, janitor. But now everything that wasn’t work seemed to clear itself out — what he had been kicked into overdrive. It was a strange discovery, it wasn’t something he had expected even from his expensive school or elite business school — that was pretty much seen as a place to drink. The sense was that everybody was just checking a few boxes, making the right connections. It was common for people to say things like, “You just have to put in five years of really hard work and then — ” There was usually a hand gesture to accompany this, a plane taking off, their arms spreading wide, Brandon wasn’t sure what it meant and he suspected his interlocutor didn’t either, if it meant mai tais, if it meant golf, lots and lots of anonymous pussy, just something off on the other side of the dream. Brandon, for all sort of reasons of upbringing, of personality, didn’t have it in him to relax like that, he seemed to just hook himself in a little deeper, make sure that that five year thing actually had some basis to it. And — surprise, surprise — it turned out to be another gimmick from people who had gone on to sell all kinds of other very dubious products. He sometimes left his office, or his home office, took a lap around the full city block — always a much longer event than he would have expected, a desultory turn around a prison courtyard — just sort of couldn’t believe all the people who somehow or another got by. All the coffee-drinkers, all the young people on cell phones, the deliverymen with their lousy wages. Maybe welfare was more robust than he realized, maybe people in the distant boroughs had figured out ways to economize that he couldn’t dream of. In any case, from his mid-afternoon funk, over-caffeinated, buzzing with different spreadsheets and meetings, he tried to remind himself that it was all a bloody miracle, the trust funds, the EBT programs, the food stands with their secret rates for cab drivers and deliverymen, all of it a beautiful bloody miracle, and what he was working on, at the end of the day a very straightforward database for allowing professionals to communicate with each other, was meant to be part of the puzzle, a modest contribution, and enough for him, in return, to sit down on Sunday afternoon, put on some music and actually take pleasure in paying his bills.

And that was a long way off. There were plenty of good reasons why everybody he knew was a prick, why everybody had voted Trump, for instance, why everybody was so adamantly insistent that the homeless get a job and the schools be stripped of funding. They were drained, they were hit in taxes from about six different directions, everybody he hired ended up being an albatross around his neck — the way he’d get fined, essentially, for hiring people. And he tried to be a voice of reason for it when somebody had a really liquored-up weekend and started in, made a little mental note to himself to remember his grandparents’ dry goods store, his parents standing wide-stanced, arms crossed before the front door making the explanations to the debt collector. He was like a politician who’d budgeted time on the schedule for a ‘listening tour.’ “Crazy, crazy,” he would say head-shakingly, agreeing with the outrage about regulations, the hike in customs. “And we’re the lucky ones, we’re the ones who are doing well. That tells you what a fucking basket case it all is.”

When he was 40, one of the companies he was involved with sold to a major buyer out of France. It was one of these astonishing things where everything had been difficult and then it had been easy. The company posted for auction, to be honest against his cautious advice, and then a dribbling of offers, just as he’d predicted, and then their direct rival, the French, swooping in out of nowhere with an offer five times what everybody else put up. They had spent so long loathing the French company, loathing the ludicrous manners of their executives, loathing their hold on the European market, and now they were doing exactly what Brandon had always despised them for doing, snapping up and burying a competitor on the off-chance that they started to cut in to the profit margin — and that made Brandon a rich man.

“We should make a night of it,” said the cowboyish CEO when it was time for the closing dinner. Brandon knew what he had in mind — Meatpacking, bottle service, the CEO’s proceeds from the sale would last about six months.

“You kidding me? I’m drained,” Brandon told him. “I’m going to sleep for the next week.”

“Well, at least bring somebody,” said the CEO. “Somebody who would appreciate it.”

And that was a vanishingly small list for Brandon. He did have a kind of girlfriend, she was divorced, two kids, older than he was. He liked how she talked to him about sex, at which he felt like a patzer. Their sex life was intricately tied up with her custody schedule. Usually, she was ready for him the same night she’d finally packed her kids off to their dad’s in New Jersey and she said that she was ‘crazed’ with her sex drive. She’d text him something like “Bed’s made up, wine’s chilled, leave your cell phone — just come over.” She had a long neck, sharp features like in a Modigliani, a way of twisting her wrist when she talked that was queenlike, always held the stem of a wine glass so that it felt constantly as if the wine would slosh out.

He still had Muriel’s number and gave her a call. “You probably don’t remember me,” he said when, out of some cosmic glitch, she picked up. There was the same quiet on the other end of the call, the same detective work with the white noise around her, he just couldn’t even begin to imagine the surroundings she would be in, her mother’s attic, the green room for Kimmel, a lunatic asylum, anything seemed just as plausible as anything else. He had of course followed her on IMDB and tried to decipher her fortunes from that, had seen her role on Netflix, in a show that everybody knew, although unfortunately as the pretty, alluring new girlfriend of the main character, somebody who dramatically changed his status within his friend group, made everybody jealous, but then, gut-wrenchingly, he went back to his ex-wife and Brandon kept watching the show, waiting for the character to reappear. And, for a non-professional, IMDB wasn’t easy to decipher — lots of titles, lots of parts, always her cute headshot, looking pensively down and to the side — but when he cross-referenced them against Wikipedia or Google they seemed to be, who knows what, limited-release, just something swallowed up in the caverns of irrelevance that always seemed to beset creative people.

He told her his proposition, told her it should be interesting to see business from the inside out, and this was the heart of it, in a way, the closing dinner, people he’s shouted at for months, literally ripped out clumps of hair exactly at the intractability of these very people, and they would have dinner at a terrific restaurant and since some of them were French, and snooty French, it was reasonable to expect wine that would be the best wine anybody had ever had.

“We don’t have Oscars,” he said, “or Tonys, this is like our Oscars. No awards, no presentation, just everybody very drunk, and very exhaustedly happy with each other. Good material for an acting exercise, if nothing else.”

There was a stillness in the green room or the loony bin. “I’d love to come,” she told him.

***

She didn’t seem particularly like she was harvesting material for a character. She sat next to him. She was in a gray dress, kind of stooped to one side — that was part of her style. Not everybody recognized her right away, but when they asked if she’d been in anything they would know and she told them it clicked right in. “Man man man of mystery,” said the CEO with his hand on Brandon’s shoulder as if they were brothers in arms together.

The restaurant was really extraordinary, the Frenchmen were very well-dressed, everybody else there was a long-suffering wife, Muriel really added a lot. It was a real effort to not talk about the mechanics of the deal, at bottom nobody at the table had anything else in common.

“How will you spend all of your new-found wealth and fortune?” one of the Frenchmen asked shrewdly.

The CEO looked around wildly, like what wouldn’t he spend it on. He was hamming it. He looked like a contestant on a game show floor asked to choose a prize. “Her,” he said, pointing stubbily at Muriel. “I would spend all my wealth and fortune stealing her from Brandon.”

The Frenchmen liked this, it had to been annoying for them to shell out money on a property they considered beneath them. They had compensated by running down the company every chance they got. Now they got to talk about sex, which they enjoyed.

“Well,” their leader said, “We knew them both inside-and-out. We can tell you everything you want to know.”

“And?” Muriel said, very curious.

“He is a complete jerk-off,” the Frenchman said, pointing to the CEO. “Impossible, irrational, full of just absolutely stupid ideas. And just a disaster of a person, an incomprehensible person.” He had long, stringy hair, the CEO, he looked like some kind of cyborg surfer. He was staring absently around the restaurant; even now, he couldn’t stand to be insulted by the French. “Without this one — ” meaning Brandon — “he would have taken everybody off a cliff. Absolutely. No question about it. But business, basically, is about driving other people crazy, making other people unhappy, making yourself indispensable when everybody else would like to get rid of you. And, in this, in being disagreeable, this one is an absolute genius.”

They all raised glasses and clinked except the CEO, who was annoyed for some reason, just pushed his glass forward so as to touch with someone.

It was very different kind of people from who she had been with at the party where he met her, there the businesspeople were effortlessly wealthy, a lot of them had inherited it, but no matter, there was a flow from them to the creatives, a sense that they had to do something or other with their money, and at some point they’d hit on art. The CEO was aggrieved, he’d spent most of his adult life building up his company from scratch, a part of him didn’t want to sell, for no matter how much money, if selling meant making the French happy. There were real emotions here, real contempt, real frustration and rage. He could see Muriel starting to study the CEO intently.

“So choose your poison,” the Frenchman said. “The most impossible businessman in New York City. Or the person who is sane and pleasant and rational — but gets into business precisely with that one.”

Muriel was smiling her famous ambiguous smile. She was acting a bit. She was looking between them, like a kid with two presents on Christmas, like which one should I choose.

***

She came home with him that night and she stayed, pretty much without interruption, the next three weeks. It was a terrible place, bed, home office, a handful of frying pans in the kitchen — his divorcée had added a few spices on her weekends away from her kids. In the long hours when he was working — he seemed, incredibly enough, to be close to a deal on another of his companies — she straightened the place. She went on Amazon, he slid her a credit card, bought curtains and rods, bought a bed skirt, bought a cast-iron pan. At night they collaborated on the curtain installation, they made and erased their mark, squinted at it from different angles. Finally, with her shouting encouragement from the ground, he drilled in his holes. When he went to get a celebratory beer, he found that she’d cleaned out the fridge for him.

Asking her questions about herself had the odd wrinkle in it that he didn’t want to pierce her celebratory halo; didn’t want to make the mistake of asking, in the usual allotted time for discussing sex preferences and histories, about what it had been like to work with Liam Neason, whether there had ever been on-set flirtation with Noah Baumbach or Sam Worthington. She was tight-lipped and he decided not to ask. The only real clue was when he asked her, over coffee, how she was going to spend her day, if she had auditions or anything.

“No auditions,” she said in the sing-song that all actors seemed to have picked up somewhere in conservatory. “Agent handles auditions. All auditions — agent.” She sipped coffee and time seemed to stop — it was the same expression that had been so arresting when he’d seen it onstage at the Broadway play, the thousand-year-stare of her adorable, charismatic character trapped in a hopeless marriage. She came out of it with her cute smile, one shoulder tipped forward. “Have you ever had that happen,” she said, “where you’ve dedicated yourself completely to one thing — I mean completely, wholeheartedly, with everything you have in you — and then at some point it occurs to you that maybe that whole thing was just a mistake?”

He sipped his coffee and tried to consider it. He didn’t actually quite know what she was talking about, couldn’t really relate — the beauty of what he did was that there were always options, everything was always diversified, failure built into the system. It felt like the moment when you were supposed to say something well-crafted and profound, and it was as if he were adlibbing it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’s my creed or something – I don’t think there’s such a thing as a mistake. There are dead ends, moments of being lost, maybe years of being lost. But mistakes — I don’t see how a mistake can exist. It’s possible that I’m just a bit limited, or I’m closing myself off to possibility or something, but I do feel like you choose the things you want, and you apply yourself to them, and sooner or later, you know, if your heart’s in the right place and everything like that, they come through to you.”

She was spinning her fingertip around the top of the coffee mug as if it were singing glass. He shrugged. “Maybe that makes me the one actual optimist alive.”

***

He saw her two or three more nights after that. She went back to her place — to get a few things, to just keep tabs on her life. And then she texted that there were more loose ends than she’d expected. And then she came over once more and he had the sense, which he tried to tamp down, of being put to the test, bought a bottle of Pauillac for $1000, rented something he thought she would like — Last Summer at Marienbad — to watch through his Apple TV. When they’d finished, and duly argued about what the film was about, and the TV went on a screensaver and then faded to black, he put his hand out to her and led her to bed. Her lips were stained with resin from the wine. Her lipstick was very pink. Her hair was cut short and kind of spiky, maybe she was supposed to audition for somebody punk. Her body was so small and thin, ridiculously insubstantial. She flung her arms around his neck at the moment he entered her, scratching up to the crown of his head. She made noises that seemed to have nothing to do with him, yelping noises, animal-in-pain noises, like she was calling out to something he didn’t recognize, had never encountered.

In the morning they had coffee at their favorite place. They chatted about his business, his hot streak. She went home, she wanted to freshen up her outfits and from there, she texted him:

“You’re a wonderful man, truly wonderful, one of the best — and you deserve all the happiness that there is. I’ve talked to my whatever he is, my producer, the man who shares my apartment, we are going to try one more time. Stupid. But we are going to try. Enough water under the bridge that there’s no option really except to drown in it — if that’s what it takes. Thank you for calling me after all that time! I’m honored that you would even think of me.”

Well, if he was being honest with himself he wouldn’t have expected anything else. She was totally out of his league and always would be, no matter how many roles dried up on her, no matter how well he was doing. And there wasn’t much to be upset about it — he was killing it now, he’d worked hard and he was killing it, and there would be plenty more opportunities. The thing to do — he’d learned this — was never to get attached to anything, the start-ups he worked with failed nine times out of ten, nineteen times out of twenty, you just learn to keep your eyes on the prize, never be too hurt by anything, it was a good discipline for business as it was for love and he would practice it. But sooner or later — this was important too, not to rush it, not to put on some kind of false shell, to give himself the chance to air it out, to mourn, no question about it, this was a rough one, this one hurt.