We conclude our special Summer Edition of PILCROW with the final chapter of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel, Don’t Disappoint. We’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to serialize it in its entirety, and we suspect this won’t be the last you hear about it. If you’ve enjoyed this summer reading experience, please share widely — our mission remains that our writers reach a broader audience of discriminating readers like you.
Next week we’ll be posting an update submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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Driving north over the hill on the 405 there’s some kind of thunderhead grey and white cloud obscuring the mountains and rising like a volcanic eruption to mask the sun. It doesn’t belong in southern California now on the 3rd week of rain.
Nothing passes. It just becomes normal.
What was this male obsession with fairness and why did all men instinctively get it and why was it so foreign to a woman? He left after just discovering she had terminated a pregnancy—killed their kid—without his knowledge and he was returning after just discovering that she had narrowly escaped being shot by a deranged student. I handle things, she would say to him when he asked for an explanation. Myself. And after another explosion of indignation, maybe after he punched the wall and was sitting with a bleeding hand that she then stanched and walked to the kitchen to look back and appraise him sitting on the arm of the couch. Can you stop for a minute and go through the discussions that would have happened had we talked about this? Can you play them out and see where they are headed? The things this would make us talk about and that we need to talk about now anyway, but now the irrationality can be removed? Has been removed? She would say. It’s unsavory and that’s why I handled it. This was not something we were going to talk about and I know you think this is the kind of thing that adults don’t do, that people with money don’t do, but I don’t have to explain myself to… Maybe you are right, I do have to explain myself to you, but I don’t have to explain myself to the collection of your friends and colleagues in your head asking why this way, why did you handle it this way. And to you yes, I will say, this was the way to make it easier on you. Tell me you wanted to go through with it now. Tell me you know what is going on with us and that you would have chosen that. Tell me you are making conscious decisions about the direction of your life and I will believe you, but I want you to be honest, just let’s not, let’s remove the veneer, let’s just be honest, I want you to be honest and tell me you chose this. That. You thought about it and planned it out and created it. Because I am telling you that’s what I am doing every day and I am not going to apologize for it. I am not going to pretend otherwise and I am most definitely not going to just wing it. This was not part of the plan. I can’t explain to you why I had to do it myself. I can’t explain it if you don’t already know this about me.
The traffic had slowed on the 101 just before Topanga to rubberneck a stop of some kind of a modified F-250 with a bunch of toolboxes and ladders and cords stacked orderly in the bed. There were two cop cars and the two cops had finished whatever business they had with the Mexican driver and the drivers passing by were watching the cops (a black guy and a Chicana) watching a deer that had apparently jumped over the retaining wall on the hill and gotten stuck between that wall and the fence next to the highway and had apparently broken or severely injured a leg in the process.
If we stopped talking about it that’s one thing. But that doesn’t mean I stopped doing it. It doesn’t mean. Just because we are always talking about this vacuous, this domestic…I don’t belong in this neighborhood. I don’t know how I got here. I’m not blaming you. You’re just a better person than I am, you can adapt, you can talk to people. You can listen and change your mind. I cannot change my mind. I’m not saying it was a mistake. The best-case scenario is you grow and no I am not saying I want to be alone. I am not saying I didn’t want it, it flattered me honestly, I never thought someone would ask me to marry them, it seemed so totally otherworldly when it happened, it did make me closer to you, I did want it, I did make it part of my life. It was part of what I was trying to do. What I am trying to do. It’s not that I don’t want to change. This was something, it was something I didn’t know how to do, I didn’t understand how people could do such things in their 20’s. I would still be in a studio apartment over the hill. I’m just saying, I’m trying to get you to see that there was a lot going on there that we understood in different ways. I think you were cutting yourself short. Only I didn’t realize it then. I do now. You want to narrow things, you want things resolved, but you don’t think it through.
I want things resolved? He would blow up then. But then he would calm down again and she would continue where she left off, ignoring his outburst. This Midwestern sentiment, I’m sorry but it’s true, she would say. Find someone and marry them. Don’t take it personal for a second and just please. Have you ever thought through what we were doing?
He had a dream on the plane, he was only asleep for a few seconds, about having sex with her and she has a detached vagina that he held in his hand and positioned below her head and between nonexistent legs for coitus. How it felt to enter this spectral organ he can’t describe. She had a look on her face of perfect placidity and yet somehow the act was helping her traverse something. Overcome something. What it feels like to want something but not to be able to say what it is.
He’s on Ventura when his phone pings. His sister.
<Hows flight?>
<…>
<Sorry about giving you hard time. We will figure this out.>
Before he left, before he got the text from his wife and then the phone call when Jessica says she’s ok from the shooting and says it was yours, I wasn’t sleeping with him (he knew only of the abortion and didn’t suspect an affair), he met with his sister to establish power of attorney for his mother to be transferred to assisted living. You just don’t like making decisions, Alice said, suddenly upset and then crying, silently, for only a few seconds and then level again. You can just fly back to your wife, fly back to California. It’s fine.
You thought being out of control was an aberration, Jessica would be saying to him. It is the normal state of things. What we are trying to do is keep things under control. Get things under control. Why did you just fly home to see your mom and Alice? To get things under control. I don’t understand why you can’t see that’s what I am doing.
There is a concept that you have the responsibility to do the right thing, to protect those close to you and to strive to do something meaningful, to make a positive contribution to mankind. The Lord always led me by the seat of my pants, the priest said to the nun. Better than by your zipper, she replied. And so, when you think about discarding everything and restarting, there has to be a reason. For rejuvenation and rebirth. What is the purpose of rebuilding, of creating, of making something happen if not for your ego or your responsibilities to other people? He’s wondering if there’s anything to work with, he’s wondering whether to start piecing things together and if piecing things together is something he wants or if it’s something that can even be done or whether the destruction has gone down to the molecular level and there’s some freedom in that. Obliteration. It bothers him that she’s not upset, it bothers him that he knows she’s not going to be upset and that he can’t change it, that she will be composed and that she has already decided whether she wants to continue with him and what would that look like, because she knows he won’t make that decision. And it infuriates him to know that despite all of this she’s right, he can’t make that decision and will basically end up going along with whatever she chooses.
Someone’s going to pull it out for you one day, the spreadsheet he’s been keeping of all your affairs, and you have to wonder what the metric is going to be. How you will be scored. He had some innate belief that all activity was fungible, that an exchange rate exists, an inter-convertibility between education and work, between helping someone understand a novel and prescribing a statin, between taking a run at your neighbor’s wife and planting a vegetable garden. Between an embryo and your mother.
He would look down at his shaking hands then, which by that time would have mostly stopped. And she would not say she was sorry, but would tell him she never thought this would happen and that maybe she was wrong, maybe he didn’t foreclose on his future. But he needed to realize that volition was part of the accounting.
