Chapter 15: The Cliffs of Casablanca

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Summer was over, college was starting soon, and my mother’s house was getting sold. It was time to move—into my grandparents’ house in Cliffside Park. The ancestors of my maternal grandparents were from Calabria, though they often say our family came from Naples. They arrived in the late 1800s as did many other Italian American families out of a need to escape economic hardships—but this is merely the “official” version of the story. I have heard such hardships were the aftereffects of a social emergency caused by the liberal unification of Italy. The real story goes, insofar as what I heard was true, that when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or the ancien regime southern Bourbon monarchy was abolished, the north confiscated its wealth and centralized it, first in Turin and then eventually in Rome, the new national capital. This severely impoverished the south and uprooted tens of thousands of its bloodlines that had been there since prehistoric times, filling them with an eternal nostalgia for their homeland, a pugnacious commitment to obtain wealth in the lands they fled to, and a reactionary hatred—by now unconscious but still potent—of what we may call centralizing modern civic enterprises, or “governments.” While they as peasants were steadfastly loyal to the crown, full of pride for Mother Church and veneration for the old feudal order, today one typically finds an anti-state attitude among them, whether it’s the libertarian conservatism in the case of men like my grandfather, the mafioso strain in the case of men like his dead cousin, or even the nostalgia for antebellum America found among current residents of Napoli: I have seen Confederate flags flying out of their apartment windows, brandishing their common allegiance with that other Old South!

Their Cliffside house, a three-story Tudor on the Hudson, was likewise reminiscent of a Faulknerian manor. A Manhattan apartment for me was out of the question; the school dorms were $20,000 a year on interest loans; and I was too lazy to find five roommates for a semi-illegal apartment in Brooklyn. Anyway, it was all fine—I had a romantic vision for my lodgings: they would be in the basement, cold stone floor and back door access, perhaps even in the closet with the pull-string lightbulb and the boiler humming; it would be like Joyce’s stay at Martello Tower, ascetic and writerly, sparse with nothing but a desk and a pen, like I wasn’t even at my grandparents’ but in some forgotten hole just a river away from New York. No no, I insist, I will take the basement!... I don’t want to bother you!... but it turned out that my Uncle Joe, who lived down the shore, would be staying down there for a month (—he’s still living with them to this day). So instead I was directed to take one of the bedrooms upstairs, overlooking not the skyline but the neighbor’s brick wall; I still found cause enough to celebrate, realizing that I could go through the east-facing sitting room to smoke cigarettes on the balcony.

To make up the money spent on the road trip, and to pay my grandfather back for the wire, I offered to pick up a shift at their deli in town—a military-themed sandwich shop called “The Corps” started by my other uncle, Ralph, and his veteran friend. Their first iteration was in Jersey City; it had gone bankrupt, so they moved all the supplies up to Cliffside and got my grandfather, “Pop,” and my Uncle Joe in on the venture. That was why Joe was temporarily moving in, to man the store until it got big, so they could franchise it and revive the same business model that originally made Pop wealthy…

By dressing sandwiches and then delivering them in the Mercedes—which was now stalling regularly in the middle of the road, the transmission just locking up when I’d go from a stop to a slow drive, to the roaring horns of pissed off Spanish people behind me, them speeding around in their leased SUVs they couldn’t afford—I was able to slowly mend my finances through a minimum wage and tips. After the first couple weeks’ worth of work, I was able to take those earnings and combine them with money I made by selling some spare items on eBay and pay Pop back in full, as well as buy a bus pass for $160 a month.

It was while working my first shifts at The Corps that I began to text regularly with Elizabeth. That week, she was vacationing on Nantucket Island, her childhood vacation spot; her middle-class family, when her parents were still together, would rent a small beach house and enjoy the best of the Bush years in one of the prettiest places in America. Like Pop, they had had glory days that were now tumbling into a long-awaited depression. Her father had strategically begun dating a deceased cop’s well-comp’d widow turned amateur slumlord, who was able to pay for the trip, but Elizabeth didn’t get along with her. The girlfriend had changed the locks on her house and told her siblings, still in middle school, that they had to make appointments to be allowed in, along with several other evil stepmotherly crimes. She wanted nothing to do with the island that week because of her, but also because, as she informed me later, she wanted to be in the city to challenge my reticent affection. And so, when she got back, she met me in Manhattan one day in between my orientation sessions.

That morning I had sat through antics from various hicklib alumni and faculty as they attempted comedy mixed with mawkish odes to **Neew Yoork** (the people I grew up around simply called it “The City,” with a streak of contempt fused with familial pride), this wonderful magical fairy land we were to embark on… “when you try to go to a favorite coffee shop or bodega and find that it has been transformed into a laundromat or a bagel place, that’s when you’ve become a true New Yorker” … One recent graduate tried to humble us or something by highlighting the school’s high acceptance rate: “congratulations—just kidding, they let anyone in here.” The matriculating student body was not looking forward to that topic becoming stand-up material: they groaned silently, thinking about the massive private school tuition they just signed up for, now planning exit strategies. My partial scholarship still wasn’t enough to withstand the remark, but I pressed on anyway, hoping the Lena Dunham rip-off was a fluke.

It turned out that she was relatively tame, and that the professors would be far, far worse. But I was ignorant of that, and hopeful, ready to begin studying, remembering the words of the literature department director during my visit to the school: “We read everything from Virgil to Virginia Woolf… the path of a humanities education will not be easy—you will not exchange your degree for a guaranteed salary, like you would with, say, computer science—but it will teach you how to craft a living out of critical thought, by reconfiguring how you see the economy. This has always been the case: you have to figure out how to use the liberal arts to suit the needs of your time; that, in essence, is your contribution to the field.” He was right, in the end—but not, of course, in the way he intended.

After that talent show I left the 12^th street auditorium and headed for 23^rd street. Checked my phone and saw that Elizabeth had texted me she was at a Thai place, finishing up lunch with her cousin. I passed chainsmoking grad students gathered around an old professor; a pandhandler holding out a Big Gulp cup with coins rattling around in it; then, further up, out-of-town mothers and daughters checking their maps to figure out where they were going; more students talking with a resident New School theater director about their upcoming auditions. On and on and on in the city streets, the blur of people, all interchangeable, all …

Then, suddenly, I was there; I froze. Elizabeth of the imperious gaze that adds ten layers of maturity to you, forces you up into a sobering state of realization and honesty. It comes flooding out of her, like a Biblical shower of austere and arresting light. I have seen all its effects: I have seen it act as a magnifying glass on some men, terrifying their cretinous natures; and I have seen it act as a maternal embrace for others, fostering childlike clinging; I have seen it revolt some women as it forcefully confronts them with their laze-born inadequacies; and I have seen it act as a beacon, deemed worthy of imitation by lost girls looking to escape the Limbo that is our era. People think her gaze is a judging one—it is sometimes—but mostly she is just listening with her singularly plying, splaying intensity. Your response to it is on you. A noble face, an edified chin, gentle eyes with a tinge of wilderness, and a body like an actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age. And the best, the worst is Her Laughter. A great teacher of mine, in reference to Abraham’s wife Sarah, said the most powerful weapon a woman can develop, lacking physical might, is their laughter. It was her laughter that I met on the corner of 23^rd , in the noon light; I don’t know what she was laughing at, but I knew somehow it was at me, and I could do nothing but laugh along as I guided her into the subway to take her back to where I had been.

It was out of desire for her that I choked down any display of eagerness. I had seen how little she liked that approach, whether she knew that or not. There might never be a third chance. So without romance or even teasing I asked her about her trip, and she responded in an equally friendly tone, with the faintest forlornness, by asking about college. I slid an arm between the closing doors; she stepped gracefully into the train car.

I brought her to 63 5^th Avenue, the big silver building with the beehive-like hexagonal glass exposing the staircase; we walked up and down, to the art library and to the big auditorium; I tried to be edgy by complaining about liberal Jewish trust fund kids blathering on in my orientation sessions; she eyed around the halls and weakly said she noticed a different demographic. I later learned the abundance of Asian students were paying full price out of pocket since they were foreign citizens. The easy availability of cash injections from fashion aspirants’ parents caused the school to bend over backwards to accommodate them, giving Parsons tons of resources while gutting entire humanities departments like Latin and the critical theorist intellectual tradition the school was known for, all so they could pay off extravagant purchases like the building we were walking through.

At that point Elizabeth was solidly liberal, without even necessarily knowing it. A remark like that wouldn’t have made her mad, but she would scrutinize it in Socratic fashion. She was more of the type that wanted to spend her life serving in the Peace Corps so she could be the next Ghandi on the textbook cover than the type to vocally support Democratic politicians in American elections. In fact, I don’t think I had ever heard her talk favorably about a politician: that sort of politics was to her mind as quaint and ceremonial as the changing of the seasons or the rotation of the stars, because she viewed all that through the eyes of her grandparents, Granny and Poppop, 90-year-old gardeners of Dutch, German, and English descent who read the newspaper every day out of an unwavering fondness for their country and its goings-on; they were Republicans, who disliked Obama and liked Fox News personalities, but they never got worked up. Granny thought people who disagreed with her point of view were “just a bit silly” despite meaning well, whereas Poppop liked to curtly foretell the doom awaiting our nation before breaking into a smile, imagining how fun that would be.

Elizabeth was raised partially in Granny and Poppop’s greenhouses, working with them or with her father in the dirt among the flower patches, and partially by her babysitter who taught her how to sit still and read long books. It was the books I believe that made her a humanitarian: she had exhausted every series of children’s literature by age eight and asked the teacher for something more challenging. She was given a stack of biographies on great Americans written for middle schoolers. It was in those that she learned about the suffragettes and the abolitionists, the unionists and the civil rights activists; she wrote a play at nine about a Jewish immigrant family coming to America in search of freedom, having no experience of anything Jewish but a lot of experience watching Leonard Bernstein musicals.

One must understand that for liberal women at this time, before the Great Awokening, their leftism didn’t come from a pernicious place: it derived from a lukewarm feeling of leftover medieval chivalry. These biographies were read in Nantucket and against the background of the American flag and her fourth-grade teachers, of the northeast, of Protestantism, of old portraits and clear consciences. It flowed forth from a feeling of shining magnanimity that was as beautiful and clean of spirit as the wooden furniture and light sweaters and white painted houses of her social imaginary. She came to feel, in her precocious and rambunctiously declarative tenth year, that the kind of life worth pursuing, the kind of noble work that would get the president to answer her letters—like the one she wrote to Bush about her cat—was the work of an activist, championing whichever struggle that would entail when she was of age. And when in her fifteenth year she began work at Kathleen’s, an Irish pub in town, and learned of the plight of an old Honduran food runner there, a cultured man who would during down time would read classic Spanish novels on his Kindle but was stuck working countless shifts at this bar and grill, just to send all the money to his family back home, she decided the noble work of our time would be helping the people of Latin America in the process of immigrating to the United States.

One night, a few days after our city meet-up, I sat with her on a bench looking out at the big wide pond near her house, pressing her on these beliefs. “But why do you think it’s so important, to help the families of the workers at Kathleen’s come to America? So they can participate in this?” I asked, gesturing to the large suburban houses across the dark water, appealing to our shared counter-cultural dislike for suburbia at the time. “Well, it’s not the life I want, but the one they want because they’ve never had it; they’ve only known poverty. Since I and so many of us here don’t want it, I don’t see what’s so bad in helping them gain it.” I searched for a different approach; I was just as unfamiliar with my new beliefs as she, and I was working them out as I would speak. “I view it like a car—that kind of work, it’s maintaining the car, it’s doing work on it, moving parts around, maybe getting a different kind of oil or gas… but where is the car going? Its purpose is to bring the driver somewhere. What is the destination of civilization? Surely not just to buy and sell suburban houses and shuffle groups of immigrants around?”

She smiled. “I don’t know Finn. These are big questions.” She let her smile die as she saw I wasn’t going to give in. “You remind me of this Billy Joel song, “The Angry Young Man.” He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl, / And he's always at home with his back to the wall!” “I’m not angry,” I laughed. “Anyway, that song’s about a socialist, so if anything you’re the angry young woman,” I laughed again, but Elizabeth only grinned. “I was only joking,” she said. “So was I. Whenever I hear Billy Joel’s name now I think about this meme, where the composer Handel has fallen on hard times and he’s stuck playing at a bar and this drunk boomer is yelling “play some fuckin’ Billy Joel!” at him without knowing who he is.” She laughed and rolled her eyes. “You are crazy… you and your internet jokes.” “Yes, it’s all jokes, it’s all fine. I say these things without rancor, I just wonder how much more interesting human life could become,” I said, standing up and grabbing my bag. “Well, you certainly keep my attention,” she said, “maybe come visit me tomorrow?”

The cat and mouse game proceeded just like that, over the following days and weeks. The clever man knows how to disguise his interest, but the clever woman knows how to draw him into the light of day. I said goodbye to her and didn’t answer her texts until later; I attended more orientation sessions the next day and then walked with a girl named Serena down to Washington Square Park and hung out with her on a picnic blanket. This made Elizabeth stew, so she drew up plans and told me the next day she was hanging out with her guy friends Tom and Jacob from Orville. “Oh that’s cool.” No big deal. “Oh you called me? Missed it,” I say several hours later. I try to call back—and she, also, “misses” it. Everything is coool. Another bus ride, another too-early morning in the city, and I’m wolfing down a breakfast with coffee as we text each other rapidly, giving into ourselves. After the third back-forth-stalemate like this, we finally make a second plan: lunch near Orville, in the larger town of Oakmont, with a lot more restaurants. That goes well. She laughs as a giant piece of fried chicken is served to me, which I had mistakenly ordered thinking it was a sandwich; it said “Cajun” and I missed New Orleans. I laughed at her for still being in high school, feeling all stressed about the summer ending and how she’d have to see everyone again in a few days. “What, like it’s fifth grade? The stakes with these 100 kids I’ll never see again are so high! I’ll see ya, gotta go back to my College in the City.” She shoves me, I pay, we leave, we make out, I drop her off.

And again, more plans, these made a bit faster than those, but still with brake-checked nonchalance. She would come over my old Orville house, watch a movie; its furniture was being torn out and a realtor was managing it but I could still use my room to crash in when I was in town. Bambrick was over; originally a guy’s night, we have Monty Python on and she rolls her eyes; she crawls in bed with me; we lay there; we stir; half-way through the movie Bambrick, getting the picture, leaves. We hear him slam the door downstairs; we turn the TV off; I drop her beneath me; I drop her off a few hours later—more passion this time, but just hugging, kissing.

And another plan. A movie but in Cliffside. They would be at the store. I let her choose. She wants to watch Casablanca. I pull it up on my laptop and sit it there between us. Like an inchworm she leans closer over the course of a half hour. I lean, but not so much. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t. I don’t do it even when it becomes ridiculous not to do it, because I know how much she will enjoy it if I don’t. I was right: she was furious. Finally, she pauses it. I close the screen and look at her.

And then we are walking out. It’s a late August night and the air is full of cooled humidity. We are smoking Camel Crushes—she likes the menthol, I like the Camel—we are heading toward the corrupt mayor’s mansion, because his street has a perfect view of the city. It’s late; a cop always shows up when they see people on the cameras but we climb over a stone wall and head down, out of sight; it’s very dark, on the cliffs now; we lay in the brush; we tumble over, and roll right into it.

***

While her gaze was overwhelming, I couldn’t stand its absence; absence is the highest form of presence, as a lascivious poet once said; I could no longer bear the meager shoulder-shrugging of average worlds, which only now were revealing themselves as such. Less and less could I bear other women, now that I knew how much consciousness could be present even in the slightest look, the lightest talk. She had no need of philosophy—it would hinder the purity of her way; she poured ice over my head through pure speech and facial expressions, the total sheerness of what is without recourse to signs. Out of concerns that I was regressing, settling for what was known, given to me by an unsupportive friend, I tried to make things work with other girls, ones at school, in the big city where I was supposed to meet so many interesting people—Serena here, Holly there. None even approximated what she could do to me. It had nothing to do with us being from the same town, I began to realize as college added a sampling size of four million females. She would text, or call, or we’d meet for a date, and I would lose all attention for anything else, dial completely into her relentless gaze, get fever-broken by the cold spill of her words mixing with the warm arousal of her touch, pulsations like drugs fireworks and batteries hammering at my veins on the way home as I would contemplate what had transpired and what was lurking in her mind. “She is the one; I hear the chime of fate, as true as the quiet certainty of midnight. I love her.”

***

I’m sitting in a classroom that was built in the 40s but had just undergone a new paint job, chrome as a spaceship. The smartboard was new and the projector was new but they were both off; twenty of us freshman were seated around a rectangular table, staring at the professor who was peering back through glue-colored glasses. She had a buzz cut dyed purple and was skinny as a heron; she looked like one too, but was dressed in overalls with splotches, like a little boy who was working as a painter’s apprentice. She was positively vibrating with nervous energy, infuriated to the brim by books—little harmless bricks of paper and glue, written by the defenseless dead.

“Who decides what is canonical? A male upper class? And is it a coincidence the authors paraded around by traditional universities, in traditional literature classes, are all men?! And, is it not apparent that they are Western men? So what we end up with is a canon of western men, chosen by western men, because they reinforce the western, male perspective!” This was day one of college, for people who explicitly signed up to read literature; these were not kids attending community college out of apathy for any subject, looking to clock in hours to get a degree so they could move on with their lives—these were readers, looking to read books and discuss them. “I implore you to name an author, who, objectively speaking, deserves to be “canonized,” who deserves, as this ridiculous practice does, to be cited for all time, read for all time, and esteemed as objectively better than other voices!”

The deafening silence of the room was too much for me, and my Voice was pulled forward. “Homer,” I offered. She stared at me flatly. She looked more confused than anything else. “What?” she asked. “Homer? Like the Odyssey.” Pause again, I don’t flinch and allow the awkwardness to collect in the room. “And why do you think Homer is worthy of this?” “I don’t know, he’s pretty good. Have you read him recently?” When she pressed me on why, I said something about psychology, pacing, and maturity.

She took this, accepted it, but then used it to make some point about how it’s not Homer but what he does that’s good and anyone can do it, blah blah blah. Before letting us go, she added one last complaint about how her first volume of poems performed so badly that she had to pay the publishing house back for printing them, saying the same thing would happen to all of us.

I scribbled in my notebook:

Aestheticism. Those who attack the canon, who desire to see the total destruction of culture, are of the same origin as those who are barbarians to life: lotus eaters, nihilists. To claim that e.g. Shakespeare’s position is unfounded is to wish all poets, all art, were of equal merit—it is a wish to destroy value. They defend themselves by saying they are giving art the absolute freedom it needs. What they are actually doing is smuggling extra-aesthetic ideas into art and canon formation, just as life-deniers bring in meta-narratives (spooks) to devalue life. Canon denial is the slave revolt within aesthetic values. Also fuck the bullshit modernist notion of “manifestos.”

I left the classroom and headed toward SoHo to shop for clothes. It was my dad’s wedding that night and I needed to buy a shirt last minute. Waiting for the streetlights to change color, I started texting Elizabeth my thoughts, saying Shakespeare must be defended. She mocked me, saying, “wow never knew you were such an advocate for reading, you sure you’re against John Green?” The other night I was shitting on Green for his cringe YouTube history lectures, where he says Persia was tolerant while Greece was evil and fascist. She had read John Green’s Looking for Alaska and liked it; I asked her, agitator I was, don’t you see the difference between that and Jane Eyre, which you also love? She defended it for a little and eventually conceded, the corny lines resurfacing in her head. But now she had the chance to stick it to me.

In arguing with her, I came up with new things I hadn’t previously thought. I wrote down several in the Notes app:

-poetry makes life richer and improves its quality

-affirming moods shall be found throughout my writings

-beauty is the point of art

-beauty is found both in praising life and in tragedy

-in both tragedy and comedy I will be affirmative

Near NYU this old man stands up and shouts, “Join the Marxist Student Alliance!” I look over and there's an old crone and an obese kid standing behind a rack holding what looks like 100 to 200 pop-Marxist pamphlets. I wrote down one more thing: Marxism is incompatible with anything beautiful.

I crossed MacDougal where I saw the hookah bar I went to with Jess a few weeks back. She reached out at a certain point to see what I was doing; we took the train from Orville to the city together. I didn’t have much fun. The difference between Jess and Elizabeth, besides Jess’s spirit being an insane gargoyle and Elizabeth’s being a Olympian immortal, was that Jess would never see what was wrong with John Green nor care that I made fun of him, thinking it was just some silly thing I had to say, while Elizabeth, despite reading Green, knew better and would argue with real attention to the points made and the conclusions inferred.

A few blocks later and on a massive billboard is “CALVIN KLEIN – Discover your perfect fit” with Miranda Kerr in black and white posing like a cat. You can almost see her tits, her underwear curving her waistfat ever so slightly making her appear like she has some weight on her but in a womanly way, which makes her skinny stomach and arms stand out even more. But a few months later this would be replaced by an obese black woman and spark the first culture war related to “fat positivity” I can remember. A strange campaign, acting as if we lived during the time of heroin chic. In much smaller billboards, the words barely readable next to CALVIN KLEIN:

IS THIS THE NEW FACE OF CANCER RESEARCH?

With a fucking ferret or some shit covered in water

IS CLIMATE CHANGE IRREVERSIBLE?

glacier crushing some ice and big waves coming from it

WHO WILL HELP SUDAN FIND PEACE?

Hellscape

THAILAND ON THE BRINK - WHO WILL UNITE THE PEOPLE OF THAILAND

I stare blankly at a shot of some Asian people getting rammed by riot shields before looking at my iPhone's map so it can tell me where Zara is. I cross the street while looking at the screen. I walk down Broadway past Forever 21, then past H&M, then past Banana Republic. Finally I find it.

After buying and changing I get on the subway and head up to Riverside Church, an old “interdenominational” in Gothic style across the street from Grant’s Tomb; they had to get married Protestant because the Catholic Church didn’t marry divorcees. I had just finished Glamorama and started A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I got the idea to synthesize the two and started quickly scribbling some of the passages written just above in a notebook. But then text messages from my dad started rolling in about where I had to be, who was taking what where, where I might sleep if I was lucky, and various other logistics. I didn’t want to go, didn’t even support it, but went and kept a smile on out of filial duty.

The reception was in an old chateau in central Jersey. I barely knew anyone there, besides my relatives who as always were weird and were made even weirder out of the awkwardness of my dad getting remarried and them not knowing how to talk to me about it. After several speeches elapsed, it was my uncle’s turn to give a toast, my dad’s older brother who he chose as his best man. I hadn’t been mentioned the entire time—more than half the room had no idea up to this point that my dad even had a child, let alone two. I didn’t care but I did notice it. My uncle cut right to it and made the whole room “give it up” for me. A ballsy move, considering how angry my father got when things didn’t follow his unspoken set of rules and how doubly angry his now-wife got at any mention of his past life.

After all that was over I went outside and found a quiet patio next to a garden shed. I sat on the ground with my back against it, smoking and texting Elizabeth about all my family bullshit. Then she started telling me about how she had always wanted a red ’95 Cherokee, how the exact make and model was in her driveway when she got home from school that day, and how when she went up to her dad with tears in her eyes to thank him he grimaced and told her it was his girlfriend’s—who knew Elizabeth wanted it, and got it to spite her. And just the other night, when Elizabeth came out to Cliffside, her mother called the police on her because of some convoluted tit-for-tat related to their already-established plan that she would borrow the car. These were sick people, the X generation, and we couldn’t wait for it to end, for us to be independent finally and live our own lives. A generation of parents who didn’t want kids, losers who “just wanted to head bang in front of their bedroom posters forever” as Elizabeth put it, and a generation of unwanted children: you felt unwanted at the core of your being. Yet they needed you there, they wanted you to exist on the occasions where you could show face to impress their second or third spouses. Seeking to make our parents happy in their new relationships, they never became happy. “If they’ve never found happiness in all their days, what makes us think we will?” we thought. But they could never find it precisely because the mating ritual was mistaken in their minds to be the end, rather than the means, of life; so they could never fall in love, for falling in love meant missing out on the headbanging. Nihilism as the lack of Love.

***

It was November. I saw somewhere that it was the 75^th anniversary of Gone with the Wind, Elizabeth’s favorite book, and that the movie theater nearby was screening it.

Elizabeth was great at one liners in these days. “You’re wearing a cross…?” I asked her as I leaned over her in bed, expecting some religious admission. “’Cause it’s made of diamonds,” she said and smiled big. At a different point, I mentioned something about the genius of the 17^th century, and she said, “uh, 1600s? Terrible fashion,” writing off the entire thing with hilarious flippancy. She was like Scarlett O’Hara—a coquette, gratefully ignorant about things she didn’t care about, too quick a learner for that to matter, a wit and a bitch, making others “pea green with envy” and enjoying it, stubborn and merciless, but fearsomely hardworking and treu in the Germanic sense of faithful to what matters most—like Scarlett’s “I will never be poor again” line as she pounds at the dirt of her deserted family estate Tara. Ultimately she had a soul of the noblest mold, loyal despite all the Gen X madness, to her Granny and Poppop’s simple way of life, their family religion, which was essentially a form of ancestor worship combined with a deist Protestantism that expressed itself in growing plants, just as Scarlett was loyal to Tara and above all things endeavored to build it back up when the war had brought down the whole of the south.

Elizabeth needed to submit a yearbook quote. I told her to do Rhett’s line, when asked if he supports the Confederate cause: “I believe in Rhett Butler, he’s the only cause I know.” But the cause, the cause! clamored the men in the drawing room of Twelve Oaks, giddy for war, thinking they’d take those wimpy northern yanks down no problem. Rhett pointed out the north had superior matériel and firepower; they lashed out at him like church fathers excoriating a pagan.

The cause for my time had been the suburbs, the west, family, religion, capitalism, anglospheric liberal values, things I didn’t care for when they were bold and loud and dumb with bellicose arrogance in my youth, during Empire, or as I render it under the signifier “Z100.” But now that it was all beginning to fall, now with my reactionary turn to “Culture” through depression and then music and then Nietzsche, and against my potaddled friends who were weakening themselves, and against the tide of leftists turning up at school and on the Facebook feed, and with my newfound and unpredicted commitment to a monogamous lifestyle, I was beginning to turn sympathetic to the “old cause,” just as Rhett did when he, galloping away from safety and toward the burning Atlanta, said to Scarlett: “Maybe it's because I've always had a weakness for lost causes, once they're really lost.”

The reactionary strain was unconscious in the mind of this northern protestant girl whose family had arrived on the Dutch Mayflower, but it was present, and despite her liberal trappings she implicitly felt the wealth of her father going under. Like the peasants who stood by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies even as it was crashing, who never saw common allegiance with the Piedmontese and the Garibaldini despite going along with it, Elizabeth was feeling the pull toward her ancien regime, that of the Nordic north, the protestant work ethic, quiet wealth and Massachusetts Bay aesthetics.

We weren’t cognizant of the pull we were feeling toward the Old Regimes, but we knew at least that we were unhappy with the surface-level manifestations of our class’s decline: incessant annoying texts from our parents. We put our phones on silent and ignored them. I drove around after the movie as she sang songs by the delightful reactionary Lana del Rey to me.

***

It was a cold night in NYC and I was having drinks with Elizabeth, Samantha, and Foz one night at that Thai place in Chelsea. We were still putting on our coats as Foz hailed a cab. We got to his friend David’s apartment: it was expensive but dirty and reeked of weed; he was watching Netflix while ripping a bong in gym shorts. His father made $200 million a year managing strip malls in the tri-state area. He was dumping money on his son to attend The New School for music, paying full tuition out of pocket as well as his $6,000 a month rent. Although Samantha and I were at odds for a while, we had resolved our differences and were having a good night.

Several months later, Samantha, Foz, and David all failed out of school. David didn’t bother to show up, just smoked pot in his apartment every day; his father found out, ended the lease and cut him off. Foz quit music, broke up with Samantha, and became a shut-in. Samantha got a job at a mall and started dating 40-year-old alcoholics. Everything around us that looked stable or promising, wealthy or enduring, was falling; Elizabeth and I just grabbed each other more tightly as we watched the regime slide into the same graveyard as the Old South and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.