Down Time by Andrew Martin

Annotations from "Down Time" by Andrew Martin

She believed with medium confidence that he would earnestly try to reform himself for at least a little while before the first hints of backsliding began. Despite his posturing, he was a sincere person, one who tried to believe the things he was told, to swallow whatever had been suggested might help him improve himself. The problem, he’d told her one night, lying on the floor, drunk, was that he got so bored. Everything was always the same, the same, the same, and he didn’t know how to change things without drinking.

“That would probably help my writing, too. I never know what’s going on.” What was funny was that he did seem to know what was going on in his writing, even if the knowledge didn’t extend to his daily life. His work was unquestionably smarter than he was.

Cassandra had recently read on Thelonious Monk’s Wikipedia page that the Black neighborhood San Juan Hill had been bulldozed to build the Lincoln Center complex. Despite her political commitments, she’d never thought much previously about what had been there before the theaters, most of which were now emblazoned with the names of right-wing oligarchs.

Aaron had not been able to articulate the source of his upset in the hours after they left the opera. His problem was “everything,” but also that he didn’t “have any real problems, and that was probably the problem, at the end of the day.” He hated himself, and he hated how other people made him feel, and he hated that he’d made Cassie’s life so difficult, and he knew that he had to be a completely different person now, but he didn’t know if he could be, and he was afraid of losing an important part of himself, of his being, afraid of destroying his talent. And: he was afraid of losing her. She sympathized with all of this, to some extent, but it all felt oddly abstract, like he was crying over concepts rather than real things. She couldn’t help but continue to suspect that he was pretending, on some level—maybe even to himself—to be overwhelmed in order to avoid something.

Most seemed to be clustered around the large infinity pool of the hotel, baking or texting or, occasionally, reading. She was too far away to see what books they held, but she assumed, ungenerously, that it was the usual garbage, the singing crawfish and little Nazi boys who fixed clocks or whatever. She herself felt the professional need to read almost every novel published about climate or nature or trees, of which there was an increasing, unreadable number. Good for her career, bad for the world, both aesthetically and as a benchmark for how catastrophic the situation was.

He was working on a novel, supposedly, while taking breaks from the academic article he needed to finish. This did not strike her as a good use of time, since most novels, even ones by serious novelists, were quite bad, and those by dabblers like Lev were generally unreadable.

She had taken a writing workshop as an undergraduate and had found the lack of rigor genuinely disturbing. This was an academic discipline? Where, exactly, was the discipline? It seemed odd to her that the study of works that were produced under such unpropitious conditions required so much more thought and organization than the production of the works themselves.

“Sorry. The virus stuff is so weird, and it seems crazy to just be like, sitting here. I’m getting all these texts, like, ‘guess you’re gonna be staying in Mexico awhile!’ And then I’ve been thinking, you know, if Biden gets the nomination, he’s gonna be fucking dead by November. His brain already doesn’t work. Like, what are we doing? All of us, I mean.” “It’s bad,” she said. “Neoliberalism’s a motherfucker. And regular liberalism.” “Not to mention fascism. And the wave of pestilence. Because the metaphorical one was somehow too subtle for contemporary viewers.” “Right, God’s like, wait a minute, I’ve got a couple more options at my disposal here, actually.”

They took the remaining shots in a more combative fashion, as a brave stand against the forces that threatened to destroy them.

They sat down at the table with their breakfasts in front of them. “Listen,” Lev said. “I want to change my flight. I need to go home.” She took a moment to consider this, and then said, “Because of me?” “No, no,” he said. “Are you serious? I think we should both go. What if they close the borders? I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of whatever fucked-up point Trump tries to make about this.”

She was being stubborn, she knew that. What was a hundred bucks, two hundred bucks, for peace of mind, for not being trapped in some global incident? She felt like a cartoon character on a coffee mug: I JUST WANT MY VACATION!!! She was reading a novel by a bilious Salvadoran writer whose ugly, rant-filled writing gave her hope for a not entirely dull literary future. The fucking apocalypse had already happened for so many people, she thought. She said a version of this, without the expletive, to her classes with some frequency.

We could learn how to comport ourselves toward our inevitable demise with some degree of dignity by seeing how others had managed it.

He looked sweet and helpless and physically vulnerable. It was amazing what the two of them did, she thought. They were repositories of knowledge—when they were working, relaxing, talking, sleeping, all they did, all the time, was learn things and tell other people about them.

Xavier was magnetic in the hopeless manner of guys Aaron had met at bars an hour before last call, their intellectual shortcomings compensated for by their admirable distance from conventional thinking and action. He was a different breed from Aaron, dependent on instinct in a way writers, for example, never were, even as his youth and lostness were pleasurably familiar.

He had disliked people in general, and those he interacted with, including his wife, in particular. Antonia had conducted tense negotiations with her brother, Colin, over which of them would speak at his funeral. Antonia lost. As the favored grandchild, mostly because she looked more Armenian than her brother, she’d tried her best to be diplomatic with Levon, and, because she was pretty and deferential, she had rarely received the full brunt of his unpleasantness. Antonia delivered the eulogy as a stand-up routine, shading his volcanic anger down to perpetual grumpiness, his refusal to allow those near him any expressions of joy a sign that he “might have benefited from some therapy” to gratified, knowing laughter. It felt like she was covering up war crimes, but she also couldn’t shake her memories of his last days, when he was in the hospital after surgery and couldn’t speak.

She’d read many novels about the radical daughters of bourgeois parents running off to bomb the draft office under the tutelage of charismatic but sinister leaders before retreating to exhaustively described lives of shattered utopian longing, and she did not think that this would be her fate. Still, she would not condemn those who chose it.

She walked straight to the laundry room, roaring source of the ancient air-conditioning system, and opened the cabinet above the dryer. There was a handle of vodka up there, the same emergency handle she’d kept and replaced regularly since she was sixteen. This was wholly unnecessary—Ben kept beer in the refrigerator and nice whiskey in the cabinet—but it was satisfying as a gesture of debasement. Choosing to drink warm vodka in secret was an acknowledgment of her current fucked-up reality, a rare act of honesty.

The deeper sadness lay in their inability—Aaron’s, yes, but hers, too—to articulate their problems, as though they were a repressed couple in an old melodrama. She’d been reading Savage Love since she was fifteen! She attended monthly DSA meetings! She believed in liberation, goddamnit! Their whole lives they’d been told not to feel shame about their problems, and yet all the training in the world couldn’t force them out of the corrosive grooves carved, she assumed, by their childhoods.

Depression, it was dawning on me, might simply be the absence of champagne, drugs, and friendly acquaintances with whom to share them.

She had a lower threshold for socializing than I did to begin with, especially since all of our friends and acquaintances, in her words, “never stopped complaining about everything, as if we were the only generation that had ever had to deal with difficult shit.” Violet believed in diminishing returns, that once one became bored and restless, there was no point in continuing on—things would only get worse. I knew from hard-won experience that things could always turn around, especially with drugs. But Violet was less inclined than I to make use of such resources.

I was drawn to people with “big personalities,” the talkers, the drinkers, the carriers-on. But the people I loved the most—Thomas, Violet—were made of subtler stuff, their depths slowly revealed over many years, at unexpected moments, rather than declared up front.

I’d be like Raymond Chandler—roping in the mystery people with the subject matter, while signaling to those in the know that the language and atmosphere were the real achievement. Unfortunately, I was not Raymond Chandler.

Maggie spent her time trying to solve problems; she’d be the person trying to untangle the ropes for the lifeboats as the crew sang plaintive death songs up on deck.

Last Antonia had heard, Malcolm had abandoned his contractually obligated thriller and was embarking on a murky project of self-excavation. This, to her, did not seem any more promising, given the material being mined. He’d also told her he was applying for a job at his and Cass’s old prep school, something he’d previously said he would contemplate only if he had a traumatic brain injury. Perhaps that was how he was experiencing fatherhood.