(What I Did Wrong: A Novel)
by John Weir
Viking. 243 pages, $23.95
JOHN WEIR’S The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, both published in 1989, were among the first novels to register the emotional cataclysm that was AIDS. Feinberg did so through outrageous black humor. His hero, B. J. Rosenthal, a wise-cracking, self-aware, sexually hungry young gay male, arrives in New York City in 1980, the year before a New York Times headline reported on a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” which was for many the beginning of a nightmare from which there seemed no awakening.
In Part One, B. J. struggles to fashion himself as a gym-honed, denim-clad, moustache-sporting, emotionally detached and eminently desirable “clone,” visiting bars at night while struggling during the day with a computer programming job at International Conglomerate. In Part Two, B. J. is forced to drop the defensive sarcasm that allows him to hold everyone emotionally at a distance and “learn how to cry.” In a final movement that echoes Gabriel Conroy’s epiphany at the close of James Joyce’s The Dead, B. J. gives himself over to tears that begin “as a gentle rain. Just a drop, for each illness, each death. And with each passing day it gets worse. Now a downpour. Now a torrent. And there is no likelihood of its ever ending.”
Weir’s Eddie Socket, conversely, is the awkward face of unrealized promise. Eddie lives his life, as he puts it, “in parentheses.” Unable to access his own emotions except through allusions to films—“Who am I quoting?” is his constant refrain—he impulsively fixes his hope for the future on the emotionally constipated Merrit Mather. Eddie is a late 20th-century John Marcher, the Henry James protagonist who spends his life waiting for something extraordinary to happen to him, for some beast to leap at him suddenly from the jungle, the encounter with which will mark him forever. Unfortunately for Eddie, that beast is AIDS.
Whereas Feinberg was able to complete a second novel, Spontaneous Combustion, and a collection of essays, Queer and Loathing, before his death from AIDS-related causes in 1994, Weir has taken seventeen years to complete his second novel, (What I Did Wrong). (On the dust jacket, the title appears, much like Eddie’s life, in parentheses.) The novel records one weekend’s events in the life of Tom, a 42-year-old novelist and professor of creative writing who: a) is vaguely attracted to a 25-year-old straight poetry student named Justin; b) reconnects with a pot-smoking straight friend from high school named Richie; and c) is haunted by the memory of Zack, the aggressively verbal and demanding novelist-friend who died of AIDS-related causes six years before (a sharply but affectionately drawn portrait of Feinberg). Tom is a middle-aged version of Eddie Socket, an intelligent, sweet-natured, but vaguely ineffectual gay man who rarely initiates an action but, like a pinball, is sent careening first in one direction, then another, by his contacts with other forces. As the novel’s title insinuates, Tom broods continuously over his perceived failures.
(What I Did Wrong) is a road novel that never leaves New York. Richie, a Neal Cassady manqué who cannot work the stick shift of his new car, co-opts Tom into chauffeuring him on a Kerouac-esque crisscrossing of the five boroughs—from Manhattan out to Kew Gardens to change clothes, back into lower Manhattan for a blind date he made in a computer chat room, out to a beach in Brooklyn for a late night frolic with the posse they’ve collected at a makeshift concert, over to Staten Island to drop off their acquaintances, and back across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, from where Richie will make his solo way home. Tom and Richie’s automobile odyssey parallels the bike ride that Tom made the day before with Justin from Tom’s apartment in lower Manhattan to a cemetery in the Bronx to visit the grave of Herman Melville. For Tom, the outings trigger three memories: a trip to Amsterdam with Zack and their friend Ava, in which Tom narrowly escaped being bashed by homophobic street punks, and which proved to be the last time that Zack was able to travel; an expedition with Zack to Macy’s shortly before the latter died in which Zack terrorized the store clerks by demanding the courtesies due the soon-dead; and the cab ride from Zack’s hospital during which an inept Tom managed to lose the laundry that he’d reluctantly agreed to do for his friend.
Curiously, for all the time that Tom spends in motion, he never seems to move forward, remaining in his own way as suspended “in parentheses” as Eddie Socket. Although occasions present themselves during the weekend for him to have sex with both Justin and Richie, Tom’s adolescent feelings of worthlessness in the presence of straight boys reassert themselves and he allows both moments to pass. Six years after his friend’s death, Tom is still brooding over his failure to be with Zack when the latter died. Indeed, Tom’s life seems much like that of New York itself, whose surface energy masks a sad entropy, and the beauties of whose industrial decay are presciently witnessed and movingly celebrated by Weir.
Yet, for all of Tom’s seeming passivity in a sea of action, a glorious joyousness sounds at the novel’s close. In the opening scene, when Richie comes upon Tom in his neighborhood coffee shop, the latter is reading Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s ode to his intellectually stimulating yet difficult friend Allan Bloom, the closeted gay social theorist. And, like a Bellow protagonist, Tom is a weak-willed nebbish unable to resist the force of someone else’s actions. But, as also occurs in Bellow, the consciousness of the schlemiel makes up the center of Weir’s novel. How does one survive in a world of bigger and more powerful forces? (What I Did Wrong) is the drama of how not to be swamped in the wake of passing liners.
More importantly, (What I Did Wrong) is an exquisite meditation on how one rectifies the mistakes that death will not let us undo. “I sing what’s left,” Captain Ahab proclaims in a poem titled “Ahab’s Other Leg” that Justin writes following their outing to Melville’s grave. Ahab had three legs, not two, Justin reminds Tom: the leg he lost to the whale, the prosthetic leg that replaced it, and the “good sturdy leg overlooked because it worked,/ didn’t ache, and wanted nothing.” In our pained consciousness of loss, Weir suggests, we risk losing sight of those parts of ourselves and our world that remain whole and that continue to support us. Tom’s joy at novel’s end upon returning to his island home, Manhattan, with its ferries, bridges and tunnels—its “many entrances and exits”—bespeaks a new-found willingness to live actively with “the missing and the dead,” rather than spend his life mourning their loss. A life lived “in parentheses” need not signify the suspension of meaningful activity, but an acceptance that the people whom we love prove a haunting “mix of density and vanishing.”
Jean-Raymond Frontain is the author of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (second ed., 2003).
