The Believers Read Online Free PDF Page A

bodega, he twitched and muttered to himself in disgust. Was it unreasonable for a man of his age and station to expect some peace and solitude in the mornings? Was it too much to ask that he be allowed a few hours of quiet reflection at the start of a demanding day in court? He tried to calm himself down by thinking about his opening statement, but it was no good: his composure had been lost.
    Joel was by and large a sanguine man. He regarded his sunny outlook not as an accident of temperament so much as a determined political stance. His favorite quotation--the one that he said he wanted carved on his gravestone--was Antonio Gramsci's line about being "a pessimist because of intelligence and an optimist by will." Lenny, alas, had a rare ability to penetrate the force field of his positive thinking. The very smell of the boy fucked with his internal weather: made him prey to itchy glooms and irritable regrets.
    Twenty-seven years ago, when Lenny first came to live at Perry Street, Joel had been very high on the idea of subverting traditional models of family life. Adopting seven-year-old Lenny was no mere act of bourgeois philanthropy, he had maintained, but a subversive gesture--a vote for an enlightened, "tribal" system of childrearing that would one day supersede the repressive nuclear unit altogether. Lenny, however, had proved to be an uncooperative participant in the tribal program. As a child, he had tyrannized the household with violent tantrums. As an adolescent, he had dealt pot from the Perry Street stoop and repeatedly been caught shoplifting. At last, in adulthood, his petty delinquencies had blossomed into a range of drearily predictable and apparently irremediable dysfunctions. Joel would not have minded--or at least not have minded so much --had Lenny ever put his rebellious impulses to some principled use: run away to join the Sandinistas, say, or vandalized U.S. Army recruiting offices. But the boy's waywardness had never served any cause other than his own fleeting satisfactions. "Lenny's not doing well," was Audrey's preferred euphemism whenever he dropped out of some new, expensive college course, or got fired from the job that she had hustled for him at Habitat for Humanity, or set his hair alight while smoking crack, or was found having sex with one of the other residents at his rehab clinic. She chose to attribute such mishaps to the traumas of Lenny's infancy. But Joel had had it with that psychological crap. The boy was a mendacious, indolent fuckup, that was all--a mortifying reminder of a failed experiment.

    Coming back from the bodega, Joel worked up several elaborately snide remarks with which to taunt Lenny and Tanya, but on reentering the house, he found the kitchen empty. Colin and Julie had gone off on their sightseeing jaunt, and Lenny and Tanya had vanished upstairs, leaving their soggy-rimmed Starbucks cups on the kitchen table. Joel picked up the cups with a murmur of irritation and threw them into the trash. Then he switched on the coffee percolator and ambled into the living room to look at the papers.
    At this hour of the morning, there was almost no natural light at the front of the house, and before sitting down, Joel had to wander about, turning on all the table lamps. Most of the residents on this eighteenth-century street had solved the problem of their low-ceilinged, north-facing parlors by tearing down the first-floor dividing walls and creating kitchen-dining floor-throughs. But Joel and Audrey sneered at the yuppie extravagance of these renovations. Neither of them was of the generation that had been taught to regard sunlit rooms as a birthright, and insofar as they were aware of interior design as an independent category of interest, they thought it a very silly business indeed. Over the years, they had assembled various artifacts and souvenirs pertaining to their travels and political involvements--an ANC flag signed by Oliver Tambo; a framed portrait of Joel, executed in