The Extra Man Read online

  Acclaim for Jonathan Ames and The Extra Man

  “THE EXTRA MAN wins us over with its sheer energy and good will, its confidence in the ability of its own humor and intelligence to widen our ideas about the possibilities of love, and about the permissible range of inner and outer lives to which today’s young gentleman may properly aspire.”

  —Francine Prose, New York Observer

  “By updating the moral education of a young gentleman, Ames has written a Bildungsroman for the end of our century.”

  —Washington Post

  “Not since Harold and Maude has there been such a lovable odd couple as Louis Ives and Henry Harrison. Told in a lucid, diverting prose style, THE EXTRA MAN is a picaresque tale of a young man’s sentimental education (in subjects ranging from tuxedo studs to transsexuals). In Henry Harrison, Jonathan Ames has created a truly memorable character.”

  —Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides

  “The Louis and Henry show is honest, funny, and original, making the meaning of ‘human’ deep and strange in the best way.”

  —Village Voice

  “Wonderfully odd and charming, at times riotously funny, Jonathan Ames’s THE EXTRA MAN strikes a perfect balance between sympathy and comedy, drawing upon deep reserves of compassion for the strange and unnamable urges that infiltrate the lives of his two remarkable characters.”

  —Martha McPhee, author of Bright Angel Time

  “A miracle … This novel is not to be missed.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Ames makes it clear that his protagonist’s sexual tentativeness and anxiety are really just flimsy covers for his passion and warmth. That’s what makes THE EXTRA MAN work so well. Louis may feel as awkward as Milton Berle in drag, but inside he’s really Fred Astaire—he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  —New York Times

  “If you thought the mix of Jewish and sexual comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint was unpredictable and wild, Ames’s second novel almost has it beat.”

  —Jerusalem Report

  “An endearing, entertaining story.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[A] blissfully funny, brilliantly written novel.”

  —Paper magazine

  “Funny, delightfully odd and surprisingly sweet … With Ames, the sensational is oddly charming. So is the mundane.”

  —Long Island Newsday

  “A gentle account of a burgeoning friendship between two likable oddballs … It’s just plain fun to watch these quasimisfits fall for each other.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Written with almost embarrassing candor, THE EXTRA MAN is a novel of exceptional control about the uncontrollable passions that shape our lives … bittersweet … boldly vulnerable and touching.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “An Odd Couple for the sweetly naive and the cautiously dissolute … Here is a confection to be devoured on the loneliest of nights.”

  —J. D. Landis, author of Lying in Bed

  “Makes verbal high jinks look almost as easy as pie in the face … An urban confection.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Effervescently funny and stealthily heartbreaking … An extraordinarily humane book that only Jonathan Ames could have written.”

  —Peter Cameron, author of Andorra

  “The most hilarious book we’ve read all summer.”

  —Bay Area Reporter

  “Brilliant … a coming-of-age tale that explores the labyrinth of our sexual selves.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “An utterly charming—and never saccharine—tale of friendship between two peculiar people. Henry and Louis are so beautifully drawn that it’s easy to get caught up in their drama.”

  —New York Post

  “Ames’s second novel is outrageous, yet his characters evoke sympathy and interest.”

  —Library Journal

  “In Henry and Louis, Ames has created … two of the most startlingly human characters in recent fiction…. Beguiling, quietly disturbing.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Jonathan Ames has always been one of my favorite contemporary writers, both for his limpid and elegant Lost Generation prose style and for his utterly fearless commitment to the most demanding psychosexual comedies. THE EXTRA MAN extends his accomplishments considerably. This is one of the most charming and alarming books of recent years.”

  —Rick Moody, author of Right Livelihoods

  THE EXTRA MAN

  JONATHAN AMES

  For my parents

  My story is much too sad to be told,

  But practically everything leaves me totally cold.

  The only exception I know is the case

  When I’m out on a quiet spree,

  Fighting vainly the old ennui,

  And I suddenly turn and see your fabulous face.

  —COLE PORTER, “I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU”

  Who will teach me what I must shun?

  Or must I go where the impulse drives?

  —GOETHE

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank and acknowledge the following individuals and institutions: Rosalie Siegel, Peter Cameron, Blair Clark, Joanna Clark, Leigh Haber, Greer Kessel, Doris Klein, Elizabeth Thayer, Larry Wolhandler, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Runt Farm, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  Also available from Pushkin Press

  Copyright

  CHAPTER I

  The Brassiere

  I came to New York to find myself and get a fresh start. I was also, to be honest, running away from some messy business that occurred at the Pretty Brook Country Day School in Princeton, New Jersey. I had been a respected English teacher there for four years, ever since graduating from college. My downfall was a brassiere.

  I came upon it in the deserted teacher’s lounge after school one day late in the spring of 1992. Its white strap was hanging out of the large gym bag of one of my colleagues, a Ms. Jefferies, whom I found attractive, though that’s more or less incidental to the case. She was the assistant tennis coach, and I imagined that she must have changed into a sports bra of some type and that she was out practicing with the girls.

  So I saw that strap dangling out of the bag like a snake and I was alarmed. I decided to be virtuous and ignore the strap. To show my strength, I sat at my little desk to grade some essays, which had been my original intention. We all had our own little desks in the lounge for doing work and after laboring over three or four poor samples of seventh-grade grammar, I forgot entirely about the brassiere. I did become thirsty though, and I walked over to the watercooler to get a drink. Without realizing it, my path took me right alongside Ms. Jefferies’ gym bag and there, miraculously, the strap of that bra hooked itself into the cuff of my khaki pants and the bra was yanked out like a magician’s handkerchief.

  I felt only a slight tug, like a bite, saw a flash of white out of the corner of my eye, realized it was the bra, and my first impulse was to look to the door. No one was coming! Then I stared down at the bra. I saw the barely visible etchings of flowers in the white material. I saw the sturdily lined, ample cups, whose very shape implied so much. I saw the white loops for lovely shoulders. “Oh, God, it’s beautiful,” I thought. I wanted t
o steal it and take it home. Again, like a sinner, I looked to the door. I became rational. I was in Pretty Brook! I kicked my leg out and the bra dislodged. I then kicked at the bra like a soccer player, aiming to get it back in the bag, but it only skidded a few inches and stopped. It just lay there, still, on the low-cut brown carpeting.

  My weakness prevailed. I bent down quickly and scooped the bra up. The touch of it aroused me immediately. I felt the stitched-in wire supports of the cups. The weight they held! Why couldn’t I have such weight? Then I pressed a cup to my nose and I smelled perfume. It was intoxicating. Then I did something mad. I put the bra on over my spring-weight tweed coat and gazed at myself in the mirror above the watercooler. I looked absurd, I was wearing a tie, but I had a wonderful, fleeting sensation of femininity, and then at that very moment the head of the Lower School, kindergarten through fifth grade, came in. A Mrs. Marsh, who was married to Mr. Marsh, the principal of Pretty Brook. I faced my executioner with her brown skirt, yellow blouse, and bullet-gray hair, and she said, baffled, yet accusingly, “Mr. Ives?”

  “It was in Ms. Jefferies’ bag!” I blurted out, which was of course an incriminating and ridiculous thing to say. I could have escaped by passing it off as a joke, a silly gag. I could have kicked out my leg this time like a Rockette, but she had heard my guilty exclamation, she saw my guilty eyes, and then she looked down—how could she fail to notice—and saw my protuberance pressing up and to the left (pointing north to New York? to my heart?) which proclaimed the guilt of my action even more profoundly than the wild look of sex that must have been in my eyes.

  To Mrs. Marsh’s credit she discreetly left the room without saying another word. I took the bra off and I wondered if it was sturdy enough to act as a noose. I could take it to the men’s room and hang myself. I knew my career at Pretty Brook was over. The publicity of my erection had sealed my fate.

  I bravely stayed on for the remainder of the spring term, but I wasn’t asked back for the fall. I was let go supposedly because of budget cuts and declining enrollment, but I knew the real reason why the budget could no longer sustain me.

  I spent most of the summer depressed and ashamed. I had liked teaching. I had enjoyed pretending that I was a professor and dressing like one, even though I only taught the seventh grade. But I was afraid to apply for other teaching jobs. I feared that Pretty Brook would give me a terrible reference: “He’s very good with the children, but we suspect that he’s a transvestite.”

  I had a little money saved up, but it wasn’t going to last me long as I had my college loans to pay. I was eligible for unemployment, but that wasn’t going to start until the fall, nor was it a solution. In my nervousness about my future, I took to walking the beautiful and elegant tree-lined streets of Princeton. I often marched up and down Nassau Street, the main drag, though I made sure to avoid the window of Edith’s Lingerie Shop.

  I frequently saw former students during my walks and their happy greetings would initially cheer me up and then further depress me. But overall, walking in Princeton was a very good thing—it’s quite a civilized and genteel community. There’s nothing else like it in New Jersey, or even perhaps the rest of the United States. It has both an English feeling to it and a Southern feeling. There are grand colonial mansions; middle-class houses with wraparound porches; a poor black neighborhood with clotheslines waving like international flags; and then, of course, Princeton University, peering down upon everything from its eerie Gothic towers, and resting regally behind its gates like Buckingham Palace.

  In the center of town, off Nassau Street, there’s a charming grassy lawn with old trees and flowers and many benches. It’s called Palmer Square and it rests between the attractive art deco post office and the century-old hotel, the Nassau Inn. The benches of Palmer Square were often my destination when I would exhaust myself from my daily marches.

  Because of my act of spontaneous, self-destructive bra-wearing, which had cost me a beloved position, I thought of myself as unwell and imbalanced. Also I had started reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and I overidentified with the main character, a profoundly confused young man, Hans Castorp, who takes a seven-year tubercular cure in the Swiss Alps even though he’s perfectly healthy. So I began to think of my walks as a form of cure and I took to wearing a light coat because Hans always wore a coat. And I started to view all of Princeton as a gigantic sanitarium and considered the other Palmer Square bench-sitters to be fellow patients, which in fact was true. For some reason, Princeton has attracted a number of halfway houses that cater to various mental disorders, and many of the residents gravitate towards Palmer Square.

  So we all sat on the benches, holding on, in differing states of desperation. Two of the regulars on the benches were old professors who had lost their minds, but I admired how elegantly they still managed to dress. And along with those of us who were having mental problems there were quite a few pensioners, men and women, and they weren’t crazy, but they were mad with loneliness. A few of them were dangerous to speak with: the only way to disengage was to suddenly stand up, say good-bye politely, and then walk away while they were in mid-sentence.

  As a result, I only had passing acquaintances with these bench colleagues—I had no close friends. The only person who could have fallen into that category was a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Paul, who had left town a few months before to take up a Presbyterian ministry in Adelaide, Australia. So my only solace, besides walking, was drinking iced coffee and reading as much as possible.

  Then one day in late August I was sitting on my favorite bench in front of the post office and I was stupefied by the central Jersey heat and atmosphere, whose degree of moisture in summertime can be Amazonian in content. I had made matters worse by parading around like a vain fool in my gray-striped seersucker jacket, which you can wear in summer in most climates, like in the Swiss Alps or even the South of France, but not in Mercer County. I had sadly finished The Magic Mountain and I was now carrying around Henry James’s Washington Square, but I was too devastated to do any reading. My copy was an old paperback and on the cover was a watercolor painting of the Washington Arch viewed from Fifth Avenue. And I was simply staring at the cover in a state of depression and dehydration, when I suddenly had an inspiration as to what I should do: Move to New York City and live!

  A simple plan unfolded: Find a cheap room and gain employment. Since I had been an English major at Rutgers, in the honors program, I thought I’d look into the magazine and publishing worlds for a job. But the first step was to find a room, a base of operations.

  I thought that the romantic thing to do was to live in a hotel. I liked to imagine that I was a young gentleman, and so the idea of having a friendly hotel clerk who took messages for me, and said good-bye to me every morning as I headed out in my jacket and tie, appealed to me.

  The next day I took the train into New York. I used The Village Voice classified section as my guide and I sought out the hotels that advertised under the heading “Furnished Rooms for Rent.” It was easy for me to find the hotels, as I was quite capable of making my way around Manhattan. I grew up in northern New Jersey, just fifty miles from the George Washington Bridge, and I had been coming to the city for museums and plays and odd quests my whole life. But until that moment when I looked at the Henry James cover, I had never really thought of living in New York.

  My earliest memories of the city are of how it appeared from the top of the Ramapo Mountains, at whose base my hometown, Ramapo, is located. The Ramapos aren’t a very impressive mountain range—in other states they would be considered large hills—but as a child I thought they were beautiful, and from them you could see New York. During the day, only the tops of the buildings were visible: they rose out of gray mist and pollution. And at night, my father sometimes took my mother and me to a peak of one of the Ramapos, on a road called Skyline Drive, and he exclaimed every time, “Look! There’s the city!”

  He was proud that he had moved from Brook
lyn to a place with such a view, almost as if he himself had discovered it. And it was spectacular. You could see the buildings as they were defined by the light around them. They looked like rocket ships to me, and the whole city shone like a crown, like a faraway Oz.

  So in some ways I had never let go of my initial awe and fear of New York, this feeling that it wasn’t a real place where a person, where I, could live. But having lost my job at Pretty Brook, and armed with a pleasant fantasy about being a young-gentleman-about-town, I put my old fear away and I went to hotels all over Manhattan.

  I unfortunately discovered that a young-gentleman-of-limited-means no longer stays in hotels. Even the least expensive places cost five hundred dollars a month and the rooms they offered were squalid and depressing. The beds were collapsing and stained, all the windows looked on to air shafts, and you had to share a bathroom with everyone else on your hall. And the other residents, whom I caught glimpses of, looked like crack or heroin addicts.

  I spoke to only one person, a young woman. She was leaving the Riverview Hotel on Jane Street in the Village just as I was climbing the stairs. She was carrying a guitar case, and I thought to myself, “Maybe this is where artists live. This could be good.” I decided to be gregarious and I said to her, with a smile, “Excuse me, I’m from out of town, and I was wondering, is this an all right place?” She gave me the most frightened look and upon closer inspection I saw that her hair was filthy and clotted and that there were violet pools beneath her eyes. She fled past me down the stairs and I imagined, in that brief moment, that she was a folksinger who had fallen upon hard times. I watched her walk quickly up the sidewalk and I realized that her guitar case was burst open on its side and that it carried no instrument.

  I hadn’t expected beautiful accommodations, but the environments in these hotels were much worse than what I had imagined, and the clerks were not at all what I had hoped for. There was no chance that they would take an interest in my life and wish me well in the mornings when I left for work. They all dealt with me from behind bullet-proof sheets of glass, and even with the speaking holes I found it difficult to understand what they were saying.