The Easy Chain Read online

  —By the next evening he was on the phone with them, with the office of special admissions. It took a few referrals, and placements on hold, and lines cut off to find the correct desk, but he got there. You bet he did. The follow-ups were by mail. The outcome was in the bag …

  Lincoln got the U to agree to admit him to the Graham School (the division for older students), and then to let him go through the full undergraduate program, core sequence and all. He would graduate with a BA, the first ever given by Graham. Lincoln said he wasn’t altogether sure how they managed this fancy footwork, but he wasn’t about to contest it. Said they just seemed to like him. Later on, when he had a preferred seat in the dining hall (and knew to avoid the Thousand Island dressing), he heard that applications to UC undergrad had been nosediving, specifically because emerging high-school students didn’t want the Core Curriculum any more. Found it a distraction. And this even after the school had reduced the number of required core courses from twenty-one to eighteen, which happened two years ago. Good, Lincoln said he thought: more attention available for him. And the school certainly was supportive. Even offered him a package of financial aid, and helped him get a student visa, keep him legal …

  Certainly he would be several years older than his fellow students, a difference that the U people said would vanish in his classmates’ eyes in about five minutes. Well, Lincoln said, maybe six. Because these first contacts were happening in May, Lincoln had to apply for admission starting the next September – sixteen months later. In his room with a calendar, he had counted that number twice, his finger slowing as he closed in on the month, impossibly distant.

  —You know Lincoln and his optimism/flexibility nexus: he just worked the delay to his advantage. Took the time to get a job, in fact several: he said he usually had two gigs, sometimes three, while he was waiting to board for Chicago. Anything he could snag: in restaurants, in hotels, the usual hustling/handyman circuit. And it paid off: he ended up working for over two years, he said, because he decided to delay coming to Chicago by an additional year so he could do it financially on his own, at least as much as possible. Things were good at home, and by the end of that second year his bankbook was looking pretty good, too: well-fed and healthy – healthy enough that he didn’t have to lean too hard on his parents for money assistance. Hey: the guy’s got a conscience. Lands on his feet.

  —Oh, Lincoln did counterbalance some of the demands of that time with intervals taken for himself. Late at night, or on the occasional Sunday afternoon, he prepared himself for his New World adventure. This wasn’t required by the university, but Lincoln said he saw some virtue in trying to bridge the chasm between himself and his future fellow-students, some of whom, he knew, would be arriving from Andover or Exeter or St. George’s, well-steeped and better-versed. He embarked on some preparatory reading, dipping into overviews and survey literature, including Greer and Russell and even some time with the Durants. A chance association in one of these surveys led him to deeper investigations into Positivism, a philosophy that he found condign to his developing temperament.

  —Also had a few shall-we-say flings during this period, he said. First non-big-deal tumbles. Irrigated a few tulips.

  —And throughout this time, he said, when he was preparing to come to UC and commence his sentimental education, one thought kept thronging into his head: Would he, some day, make member of the Committee?

  —Man, you know – Lincoln. You know? Guy’s the greatest. Guy listens to you. Like one time – this is maybe a month ago – this guy with two earrings in his ear comes over ’n starts gargling that the wife don’t screw him no more. Just like that. Opened right up – just like that! – to Lincoln, who barely knew him. But you know how it goes: girl don’t put out, guy puts out the verbiage plenty. Wife was there, but in the john – this was at a reception – and Lincoln tells him Tell ya what …

  So Lincoln takes the guy over and starts talking with this real looker, six foot if she’s a day, and gorgeous, biggums like this, and like Lincoln’s putting his hand on this guy’s shoulder while they’re talking, just like laughing and gabbling, and the guy eventually joins in and starts talking to the looker too. And the girl, of course, maybe to be nice to Lincoln, she also starts talking to the guy. By then the wife is back in the reception room and sees all this, and she comes over ’n they all jaw for another second. And then, you know, the thing has run its course, and the bodies say goodbye. Lincoln moves on ’n chat time’s through …

  Well, starting that night, and for as far as the eye can see, the wife is dialed in. Screwing like she’s auditioning for the Playboy channel. And the guy tells me all this, and guess what else he tells me: that his wife had her thermonuclear change not because she was jealous, because she saw the looker talking to him, but because she saw him talking to Lincoln. She’s only asking him about him. OK? …

  So I tell all this to Lincoln, and, you know, he just smiles. Fucker knew it all the time! That fucker knew it!

  —How does the boy do it? It isn’t a riddle. Once, over Armagnacs at The Drake, in a back booth at the Coq d’Or, he responded to my perhaps repeated prodding. He had come to his abilities via studying a bit of philosophy, he said, a school of thought called Positivism that he had discovered when in Holland.

  —Yeah, he said this Positivism, it sounded like some American thing, like some kind of American religion, like BrightSideism, or NiceDayism—

  —As if it were Locke’s creed when he ghostwrote the Constitution! What a guy. Good-natured blunder …

  Of course Positivism was just a 19th-Century revival of Enlightenment hopes for determining objective truth, spiked with the scientific predilections – and optimism – of the day. It’s easy to see how this might snag someone who’d imprinted on Allan Bloom …

  Crudely, Positivism was a fetish for measurement. Not so crudely, it was the belief that we can only know what we perceive with our senses, and that this can be measured with sufficient accuracy as to deliver certain knowledge of absolute reality. Ergo, this is the only window we should be looking through. So Poof to speculation, Poof to induction, Poof to metaphysics, triple Poof to theology – that what’s there is that what’s there. The movement was deeply empiricist and deterministic, and led to such losers as the behaviorists, who believed, like “BS” Skinner, that there’s nothing more to mental life than shocks and sweets …

  And of course, with a program like that – which left no room for trivia such as atoms, genes, the circle, measurement fallibility, interpretive bias, quantum indeterminacy, hell all of intangible dynamics, mind, desire, justice, morality, and a couple of others – Positivism had to go. Forefather Comte never realized his perfect, feminized polity. But the movement did kick up a few clouds, and Lincoln continues to say he finds it oddly meaningful.

  —I mean, he said he was stoked just by the word Positivism. He said it was having a real effect on him, and he knew – he said he knew – it would help him.

  —Yeah, though, you know, I once heard that like this Positivism thing, if you kinda – y’know – how like it could make you all like passive, all like accepting of everything. It’s like Lincoln, he said—

  —So be it. That’s what people say when they can’t hope for anything more than what’s in front of their eyes. And Lincoln said—

  —He liked the new feelings of ambition that were stirring inside him. Just the thought, he said, of coming to the States seemed to raise his temperature. Just the thought of leaving Amsterdam contributed a few more degrees of lift. Amsterdam – that small, small city, still undeniably in the grips of Calvino-conformist pressures, would be a load to leave behind.

  —He said those Dutchies took self-effacement to the point of self-obliteration, that their tribal instinct towards non-ostentation became a form of ostentation in its own right.

  —And the fact that they’re so damn judgmental. He was never comfortable with that, he said. Absolutely, the Dutch are tolerant. But that doesn’t mean they don’t j
udge. Which they do, he said. All the time. So Lincoln used local tradition. He judged that intolerable.

  —Hey, Lincoln Selwyn is nothing if not practical, and he came over because he thought his possibilities in the Netherlands were approximately zilcho. Things keep you down in that country, he said. He felt that in Holland there was a Cheese Ceiling over his head. That’s what he called it. And hey, you know, there’s one place on earth that you don’t want to be, and that’s under a ceiling of cheese.

  —So he came over, he landed, top of September Oh Oh. KLM direct, Schiphol to O’Hare, one-way ticket. Blinking dry under the seven hours of jetlag, waiting for his two knapsacks at the spinaround carrousel, he greeted all the skipdoodle of the airport with the grand gesture of a sneezing fit. Plus gurgly coughing. Huge outflushes of gases and sputa, tears leaping from every backwhip. Good four minutes, he said. First time in the US, he’s saluting it with mucus. Laughed about it on the Blue Line in, transfer to the Metra down to 55th Street in Hyde Park …

  U’d set him up with an apartment on Woodlawn. Two rooms. A bed, a desk, a closet, ten thousand traces of poster tape, he was all of five minutes from the Tap – sorry, Jimmy’s – so he had a place to take a sip.

  —Just the sight of the campus, he said, set his system a-tip. He walked through the main quadrangle, by Bartlett Hall and the Reynolds Club; and the great masses of Gothic Revival, the brawny unbroken density of golden Indiana limestone heaped up in towers and crenellations, the stately march of ogival arches, old-looking and unworn, screamed something American to him. All this lifted history, paid for unflinchingly by the oil titan, made him feel something about show and about belief, about quantities hungry to become qualities. He wandered on: the neat green lawns; the ranges of Norway maples, lindens and swamp oaks; the discordant modern buildings thrust in with no need for explanation; the white-paved walkways; the bulky students throwing an American football – that point looked like it could hurt – it all felt like a confirmation. But a confirmation, somehow, of something he had never really seen or considered before …

  And as he walked around, this first time, riddled with jetlag, the thought came chiming up behind his forehead, then gorging in his throat: that someday, and not too far along, he, Lincoln, would, would certainly, be sitting down with the other members of the Committee …

  He spent his first few days sampling Chicago, before all the University orientations and sign-ups and mixers began. He bought a five-day CTA pass – the last one he would ever have – but, an Amsterdammer, wound up at home every evening with sore feet. Navy Pier, The Hancock Observatory, The Mercantile Exchange – he trotted through the main draws noted in bold in the softcover guidebook that the University had left in his apartment. But after a day-and-a-morning of that, he said, he unchained. What he preferred, he quickly discovered, was the neighborhoods, where the walker was endlessly rewarded …

  He toured just those areas for three days: to Ukrainian Village, its flaked-paint storefronts near stocky cream-and-gray Orthodox churches, then past the jumbly Puerto Rican shops, awnings red, black and amber, in Humboldt Park. He scanned the Mexican conquest of Pilsen, searched out Polish vestiges in Near Northwest, fled the Opaa! restaurants in garish Greektown. A wrong turn took him to the syncopated Swedish-Middle Eastern mix along Clark Street, before finding the huge mural of the German fortress, dense walls dark brown and tiny-windowed under lighter brown skies, in Lincoln Square Mall. And at the end of one long day, he traipsed the entire ethnic spectrum slotted down Devon Avenue – Indian spices, saris and videos, newspapers in Cyrillic, restaurants in Cyrillic, Taqueria Chihuahua, the Chicago Hebrew Bookstore, the Croatian Cultural Center, Mischel’s Marshmallows—

  —Guy dug it. All the noise, the cars, the different people – he dug it. It wasn’t just bustle yet, it was hustle. Energy – all new, and all his, he said. Because people, well most people, were speaking English. Even when they weren’t, they were – it was the language they gravitated to, to be understood, to make a point. His language. Amazing for him, he said. He could finally relax.

  —He wasn’t sure when he gave the deep, almost cellular exhalation. But he was sure it had happened. One night in his apartment, he said, unfurled in flannels on his living-room couch, he realized that the water was calm. The water he had been hobbling in – and that he was now floating upon. No longer was it boiling, or even bubbling. Now, perhaps, movement might issue from him, not from the roiling. The water was lofting him, not keeping him twitchy …

  He read the Chicago Tribune, the local newspaper.

  —Freshman Orientation was fun, he said. For three days, he ran around to a bunch of intro talks by faculty members, afterwards to a few sanctioned – i.e., low-beer – parties. There were also concerts and stage performances by UC people, in auditoriums but also in commandeered seminar rooms and science labs through dozens of campus buildings. Dean Konrad gave a talk in Anderson Hall, all enthusiasm and urging. Now that you … and The University is a place for … – that kind of thing, kind of skonky but, you know, not totally terrible …

  Lincoln liked all of it. He made friends at a party with a guy from Georgia – the Southern United States – named Bill, they went around to a bunch of orientation events together. Father was a banker. He was waiting on line at the cafeteria, lunch, and got the telephone number of a student named Vera, grad student in Sociology. Took her to a campus jazz thing, a straight-ahead alto quartet. All good stuff …

  And he loved the prospect of the classes. Just their titles in the catalogue, even their sound – Foundations of the West; Individualism and Humanism; The Hellenic World: Ideals and Idolaters – it all sounded great. Bought the books on the course lists ahead of time, make sure he got them. See them on his desk.

  —Yeah, lotta parties then. But loud, you know, loud. Said he couldn’t hear anything over the stereo going, ’n everyone screaming, ’n the bottles clank-booming into the aluminum trash cans … Said you couldn’t hardly talk, ’n if you did, you just had to lean in ’n yell, you know, right in the ear, just go simple, end up saying stupid things you hadn’t intended on saying. Just get, settle for, you know, the effect.

  —Daytimes started early, evenings ended late. Lincoln said he had his first classes at 8:15 in the unforgiving morning on Mondays and Wednesdays – first-year physics for non-majors, or Let Us Now Praise Overhead Projectors – and held his Hum books open at least til 1, in unforgivable night.

  —Between, he said, he repaid his debt to UC largesse. Three evenings a week, Lincoln put in two-and-a-half hours of unskilled labor as part of his work-study program, also known as the hidden cost of financial aid. But he didn’t mind a minute of it. For two shifts he restacked books at Crerar Library, and on Tuesday evenings he donned an apron and cleaned the offices at Undergraduate Admissions, over on 59th Street. Carrying his swab and broom through the half-lit spaces, he tried to bring order to a waiting room lined with rack-displays of leaflets, then to an inner warren of offices outfitted with heavy, old-style wooden desks and uncountable billions of thickly stuffed folders. On shelves, on floors, on chairs, on every centimeter of desktop not claimed by a phone, folders flopped, stacked, stumbled, gushed—

  —How could he resist. How could anyone? You know, it only took two visits to those admissions offices before Lincoln got curious. At first he kidded himself, actually concluding that it was part of his job to tidy up the leaking folders. So he pushed a few stray papers back into the manila, and who’d be the wiser if he took a bitty peek. So interesting. The background stuff, the grade transcripts, the recommendations, the application forms themselves, handwritten or typed, the supplemental 35-mm slides or glossies or cassettes …

  And then, you know, there were the essays, and it took Lincoln another session to work up the nerve to look at them. But he did, and after he did one he did lots. He said they were fascinating, what people said about themselves, how they said it, all in the hope, you know, of making the play: let me in. Some were double-spaced on th
ree-quarters of a page, some crawled all over good-sized sheaves in close-set lines, a few came on starchy cream-colored paper, one was even monogrammed …

  But here was the thing. He read those entries, and, you know, they seemed to have nothing to do with the people he was crossing paths with in school – nothing. True, he never found any files with names he recognized, but, you know, there was so little accord with even the types of folks he was taking classes with every day, or standing on line with in Pierce dining common, that he began to wonder if the applications were for a first-year undergraduate class on another planet. Like, he read—

  In the overarching superstructure of the future …

  History. It isn’t a subject. It’s a passion …

  Like my father, and his father before him, and his grandfather before him, attending the University of …

  Heidegger, opining, in a clearly pre-autopoietic stance on the interdependence of subjective and objective verifiability …

  There once was a math yutz from Yonkers …

  And when my uncle endowed his alma mater, Dartmouth, with the funds for their new Anthropology Library …

  Chopin, Chopin, Chopin, Chopin …

  —and these, like, pronouncements had like nothing to do with the people he was running into – you know, all the loud, gangle-limbed, sports-sopped, sloppy, driven-but-usually-still-cool-about-it, Ecstasy-sneaking, joking, beer-chasing, sex-immolated, full-time-pop-music-gobbling people that were everywhere on campus. Nothing.

  —The next Monday, classes began. And Lincoln dug in. The Hum and Civ courses were fascinating, moving, got his adrenaline roaring, he said. One teacher, Professor Pellegrino, who asked his students to move their desks into a circle then caromed between them for the where-did-that-go hour – discussing Juvenal, no less – was particularly stirring. Lincoln would raise his hand, then, if that went unrequited, prop his aching arm up by clutching his elbow with his other hand. Then, if nodded recognition had not come and the urge to contribute was really peaking, go to thrusting up his index finger – a technique that proved remarkably performant. And then, at the hour, he would float from the seminar rooms and glide through the campus’s stony caverns, soul-shifting down. He even warmed to the deepening play of correspondences in his hard-science classes, as newly grokked facts solidified into structure, then spawned metaphor. Yes, there was beauty there.