Impulse

Laurie
Impulse
March 9, 2009, Pain Quotidien

I am standing on the curb outside the Atlanta airport when a black car pulls up and a bald man with a paunch gets out and pops his trunk. I look for the curly-haired, 16-year-old Danny Schwartzberg in his face, the boy I sat with on the lawn at Woodmere Academy. He’s a senior, and I’m a junior, and he makes me laugh. He’s sarcastic or cynical. Smart, not flirty. I don’t try to attract him. Maybe we're not attractive. I’m fat. He’s kind. I feel a little separate from the others, a little bored, but the boredom is with myself. I’ve moved from the suburbs back to the city and I’m wandering the Village, pretending to be a flanneur—a fancy word for a lonely, awkward girl.

Danny lifts my suitcase into his trunk and as he sets my computer next to it shoots me a sideways grin. “You’re brave, aren’t you?” On the phone he has said he drives a Mercedes, but I don’t know one car from the next. I think: “You really come from Woodmere. You really are a doctor.” I slip into the passenger seat and ask why he thinks I’m brave. Bach is playing. “Well,” he says, “you call a stranger and get into his car.” It’s 46 years since we sat on the grass. It’s 1963 and Kennedy has been shot and Marilyn has died the summer before. I don’t know anyone in the Village as I nose around the cafes and sit in the park, studying beatniks with limbs entwined and folkies strumming guitars. I want to wear black tights and eyeliner and swing along with twig arms. I think these black-garbed girls know a way for me to slip out of my family.

On the van to Atlanta I meet an Indian man who does brain research. He loves his lab, his zebra fish, his kids, his wife. He wears a jaunty wool cap, and his front tooth is chipped, making his goofy smile winning. He is doing what he has chosen to do, and he thinks I have done the same, and we talk for two hours about how brains are emergent systems, how they create themselves, and he describes the protein he is studying that is either turned on or turned off, allowing the brain to differentiate its functions. I like him so much that I’m a little worn out by the time I meet Danny, who sits across from me in the retro restaurant we go to, and for another two hours we discuss mirror neurons, consciousness, and tumors, for Danny is a neuroradiologist who has earned enough money to retire and teach. We order eggs and sausage, but Danny is still hungry after the meal and eats a second breakfast. He doesn’t ask about writing, says he’s never married, explains he went to medical school after discovering he didn’t have the chops for math.

On the phone before we meet, establishing how to recognize each other, he says, “I’m gigantically obese and have no hair and a fat neck, and there are tufts growing out of my nose and ears.” He’s being funny, but I think he believes this. We drive past his house in a little wooded ravine, and I don’t know what to make of his life. Maybe it’s foolish to phone someone out of the blue and imagine they will be what you remember or want—someone as easy as the scientist on the van who pleasingly reflects me back to myself. Maybe I’ve made up the memory of Danny and me on the grass. He has a different recollection I’ve forgotten. After college, we cross paths in New York, and I say I was a “schmuck” at Woodmere Academy. Would I ever use such a word? I’m rubbed that he’s preserved a sour-sounding person, while I’ve retained a laughing, generous boy. But the real Danny is spending two and half hours entertaining a stranger, and I appreciate the meal, the conversation, the drive. What does he make of choices that have cast me far from the rewards of professional success? I’m glad I didn’t worry about the meeting, just let it play through, and as he stands beside his car, the lanky kid with a mop of dark curls emerges behind the scrim.