Fear of Success
Easterbrook, Gregg
Fear of Success by Gregg Easterbrook If you want me, she said, I'll be hiding under the bed When Rob Cloherty changed his jogging habits, his lover, Jill Seerbaugh, took it for a bad omen....
...He looked at his desk repeatedly until he figured out that he liked it because there were no more computer print-outs on it...
...As she continued to grow more passionate, physically and romantically, Aaron began to suspect her common sense...
...But I can't think of anything else to do...
...she vanished from the landing for good...
...But its purpose was beginning to encroach on Jill...
...Many would find this line of work draining, but Rob thrived on it...
...You will find claims of passionate romantic conviction to be the only ones more ridiculed than claims of social conscience...
...sometimes to widows...
...This seemed a sensible way to let off steam...
...Up at 7:00...
...The problem wedging into their romance, a problem that would prove to be beyond discussion, a problem that a short time ago would have seemed unimaginable, is squeezing closed the ventricles of romance for so many of us who are young and somewhere near sincerity...
...once, because Aaron left the car in first, despite their agreement to leave it in reverse, and Vicky rammed the front of the garage trying to back out...
...Jill may seem odd for abandoning her lover because he became more interesting, more affectionate...
...not because we are afraid to try for something grand and not reach it— that is fear of failure—but rather because we believe it foolish to gamble for accomplishments when accomplishments will cause more to be expected of us...
...The morning she left, Jill stumbled with a suitcase in the front hall, elbows flailing, and knocked over a flower vase she'd found for Rob in Sausalito...
...he asked one day...
...he answered...
...There was no need for all the driving...
...Therapy 45 minutes twice a week, and no unstructured discussion at unscheduled hours...
...Aaron wasn't sure what to make of the changes in his wife's life...
...We're upgrading our relationship," he explained...
...He had clients who brought him doughnuts, got headaches, and needed shoes...
...Much later, and only by coincidence, did he learn the truth...
...Let's not quibble over taste, and call his verse passable—restrained praise with a little humor...
...Committing words to paper lends them importance, a texture and permanence...
...It could be better...
...Eventually she decided the world of clinical psychology could carry on without her...
...In romance the opportunity exists for an infinite variety of misguided arrangements, for creative expression of all our thin and dilute disabilities...
...He liked to stare indiscreetly at the lovely old houses, with their towering windows and dark trim, shelved together no two the same...
...This insidious conviction makes us want our love lives to mean as little as possible...
...At least I've got to try to do something that counts...
...Vicky found herself home more often and thinking of Aaron more...
...It makes me feel good to do this," he explained...
...Vicky found life as a clarinet teacher delightful...
...Better to pass a life writing carefully hedged denials, in an office muffled with hanging plants...
...drive back to the house for cold cereal...
...Though her playing was time-consuming, it was far less so than school...
...You shouldn't quit," Aaron told her...
...There were other joys for them both...
...Her sudden artistic interest gave him a little trouble, making him wonder if he, too, should be doing something "creative" or "meaningful...
...She had lost her common sense...
...Even when they had been dating several years, sometimes almost nightly, she would say, in passing, "Let's call each other again soon...
...If campus radicals show up on Wall Street and in the Pentagon, collars starched and hair conditioned with animal proteins, it is because the jobs are there and someone will be found to fill them...
...Jill contrived to land a job there with the local bureau of a trade paper...
...Ed Hoover often walked the bumpy Li neighborhood streets in San Francisco...
...Through the years, Aaron found Vicky pleasantly cool to the touch...
...No one's ever made me breakfast before," Jill said...
...She got a nice meal and a nice long kiss, much nicer than she figured she deserved, and watched Rob head out to look for better ways of running things...
...On the surface, the loss of the romance between Rob and Jill would seem to reduce to politics...
...I want to do legal-aid work...
...Maybe in little nudges too slight to feel, but always better...
...even their cynical and dissipated friends were impressed with the arrangement...
...program in clinical psychology, one of those fields where even the most accomplished have a great deal of difficulty explaining just what it is they do...
...What do you do to rid yourself of a passionate lover...
...Aaron found things pretty good...
...But Aaron knew that advertising had to be sold, at least as much as notes had to be blown...
...It's fun...
...It's meaningless," he told Jill...
...Soon she was playing weekends with a first-name jazz ensemble ("That's Ralph on bass over there, and Vicky on clarinet...
...The flush passed, mumbled apologies were exchanged, and the incident was forgotten...
...we want the hammock-strings to snap at the least tension...
...He hit his thumb with the hammer...
...That's the place to look, to understand us...
...Vicky felt more enthusiastic than before...
...Those who would tell you otherwise—the passionate lover who brings affection and adulation—become the most suspicious of all...
...but some were regular letters on her feelings about marriage and the world and general...
...Everything else about the change delighted him...
...Such ceremony is not for our day...
...She found her fear of success fanning out among the romantic lives of her friends and business peers...
...Should I get a cab or something...
...People either clapped or they didn't...
...He was in no hurry to have them, because there was nothing in particular he wanted to show them...
...But the sudden interest in short-order cookery was a sign of what would finish them off as lovers...
...He missed the 1Xmoney...
...More often...
...Until this generation of young adults, mothers and fathers had largely succeeded in convincing their sons and daughters that things were always getting better...
...I want to quit...
...How did my father bring up five children...
...She answered, "You made a commitment to tree stumps...
...Aaron sometimes talked with Vicky about children...
...spread it among fewer children...
...He grew more cheerful, more alert, more aware of his own good fortunes...
...We're not just prepared to be disappointed, cauterized by past wounds and determined not to be struck again...
...Perhaps people like Jill Seerbaugh and Aaron Teller are isolated examples, bound up in love affairs never meant to last, and waiting for the first out...
...Romance is not mandatory and not supervised...
...Now, autistic silence was her only response, and many would say she did the right thing...
...My job is okay...
...Every few weeks he brought her some little present, like a flannel shirt, and she began to dread the next one...
...Rob's new job involved stalling the payment of insurance claims so his clients—underwriting companies—could keep their money as long as possible...
...But the modern romance can tolerate a political or social commitment as long as its undesirable elements—passion, and the danger of elevating success—do not carry over into the love life...
...When Vicky Teller changed her letter writing habits, her husband, Aaron Teller, took it for a bad omen...
...I like you...
...You can't rise to their heights when you want to hide under the bed...
...Well, I don't know...
...Vicky was too far along in life to progress to artistic stature...
...In a day when there is fear of success, passion is the most suspicious of all qualities...
...Although she had no chance for the professional acclaim she might have won in academics, music seemed real and immediate...
...Occasionally he could stall until the widow died too...
...In law, the inability to change things—the blur of stasis—was a positive badge of success...
...Many of us won't vote, not because politics is soiled with scandal but because supporting a politician, any politician, implies he could do something about the world...
...The woman of letters, in other times, might have been giddy with excitement...
...There was an awful lot of defending the usual gang of suspects, people Rob would just as soon not run across while he was out jogging...
...Vicky enrolled in a Ph.D...
...they found a house, divided the closets, and thought they had it made...
...She wasn't expected to change that, or even to pluck truth from the chaos...
...Rob's display of affection was genuine, not a theatrical drop to mask some offstage presence like another woman...
...He was billing every hour, and didn't care how much his clients had to pay, but some of the things he had to say to judges made him blush, particularly the requests for continuances when he didn't plan to spend another minute preparing his case...
...She wasn't playing hard to get...
...ob did switch jobs...
...He still spent almost all his time banging his head against the bench, accomplishing little but procedural details, but sometimes there were tangible results...
...The romance was about to end, although not for the reasons you might guess...
...Nothing is more tedious than a man huffing on and on about saving the world, at some unspecified later date...
...One time he passed close by her...
...we want to be disappointed...
...You're imagining things," she told him...
...Slightly lower and to the left...
...A aron found it acceptable to use a lover, .i.not in a hostile way, but for pleasant and considerate companionship...
...First, try to compliment your friend, in a sincere way...
...This isn't exactly wrong, he thought, but any reasonably bright mouse could be trained to get the cheese at the end of this maze...
...The sidewalks around the house were tree-lined and uncongested, appropriately flat...
...But not so in romance...
...He would ask her to save a table for him at the club, then not show up...
...It is tempting to see willing disappointment in romance as a symptom of selfobsession: since no lover can rival in grandeur the upper-case Self, what is to be gained from giving one's affection...
...They courted slowly and in equal shares, Aaron asking for study dates in the library, Vicky timing her arrivals at the dining hall so they could sit together by methodical coincidence...
...The first night they slept together, Aaron stirred in the bed as they were watching the dawn, and asked, "What should I do now...
...The letters were pleasant and positive, and they made Aaron nervous...
...He did not plan to break new ground, or long to see his children born into a better world...
...As a mainstream lawyer, he had been expected only to play out a series of rote incantations...
...He looked forward to dispossession cases...
...That's different," he said...
...She had to tell him she would rather he stay, but would drive him home if he wanted...
...After a time, Hoover inquired of her neighbors—had they seen her...
...You graduate and retire on the same day," she told Aaron...
...But Vicky's slight frost of romantic indifference had always been, to Aaron, one of her most alluring qualities...
...She got a reasonable offer to teach the instrument...
...Gregg Easterbrook is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Sometimes he stalled payments to other corporations that could live without the money anyway...
...Perhaps...
...That tells all you need to know about us...
...It was not her job change but her growing passion that scared Aaron...
...Jill was right...
...Nearly every morning of their two years in Des Moines—where they'd gone to take better jobs and a house together—Rob had indulged in a rococo ritual...
...He tried to start a business making coffee tables out of tree stumps, but he couldn't find enough tree stumps...
...Vicky chose a poor medium for affection, letters having been diminished to a shunned and almost ridiculed form—but not for the reasons that pop to mind...
...She tried to keep conversation on the subject to a minimum, and often suggested that they go to movies...
...Today we have the dangerous flexibility to express ourselves in whatever romantic adventure we can invent...
...Most were just endearing notes—"Thinking of you, guess who...
...Maybe legal aid work would help usher in the millenium, or maybe it would just burden Rob with giving the obligatory boring speech about public service at the bar association banquet...
...Vicky got good grades, but the plodding pace of the program discouraged her...
...She dared not say, "It'll kill me if he doesn't come back...
...Magnifying the importance of small events—a key test of romance—is in all ways to be avoided...
...He was delighted to discover himself one of those occasional men willing to waste time on an insignificant person rather than take his money...
...The destinies of his corporate clients were beyond his influence...
...Wouldn't people hold out there, against all pressures, with every reserve of dignity...
...You look sexy when you're dirty," Vicky told him once, when he was dusted with sawdust and filmy crud from an attempt at carpentry...
...for a while, their lovemaking became more exciting...
...That implies that we could do something...
...Aaron liked music, and looked forward to the weekend jazz dates so he could sit in the audience and nod knowingly...
...If he won, he could go home feeling satisfied, and his client could go home...
...F ear of success offers no pleasure...
...The fear of success—Jill leaving a lover who becomes more affectionate, fearful she might be expected to do the same—is the exact reverse of self-obsession...
...He began to value his time with Jill more...
...She'd learned as a child and, although she'd long since stopped taking lessons, she had practiced enough to stay in touch...
...When they met in California, he a law clerk, she a business reporter, the question of when their romance would start was a mere formality...
...Vicky began, for instance, to write Aaron letters—even on days when they were together...
...The scene stuck in his mind...
...And he could not imagine what a sensible lover would see in that...
...It was nearly night, but in the spikes of orange light remaining, she sat quietly, writing a letter...
...When she said to him, "Let's go away somewhere together," and he said, "Even Iowa...
...She was as much afraid that Rob would succeed with life, and her, as he would fail...
...As a paladin of the poor, Rob found, there were differences...
...Aaron found her smoky hint of artistic decadence an irresistible attraction...
...Besides, I'm hungry...
...Vicky and Aaron met in college in Ohio...
...Maybe that can be in work and politics, but how can that be in romance...
...No, a romance can be endangered by sheer fear of success alone...
...maybe gone to visit her sister, one said suspiciously...
...Next time you spot one with that jittering corona of ill-at-ease, try these two simple tests...
...not because of the ease of telephones, or because we are too busy employing laborsaving devices to have the time for reading and writing...
...T here's not much you can tell about the 1 current set of young adults by analyzing the schools they pick, the things they buy, the jobs they fill...
...It bothered Aaron that so many thoughts were being set to paper, lying around the house in wait, liable to turn up again...
...or, best, might have been intrigued, and replied in kind...
...Aaron, bored with academics, sifted through some jobs, from city-hall clerk to piano-playing in black-tie night clubs...
...Then let me imagine," he said...
...Not only did the woman fail to reply...
...But Jill alone made enough for them to live on...
...To her surprise, her playing advanced rapidly...
...Jill was skeptical...
...There are only so many schools, and the best will always be busy...
...As Vicky found herself reaching for Aaron more, he began to drift farther away, a floating leaf...
...He ran around the block for 20 minutes, came back and made Jill breakfast...
...and be far more preoccupied with himself along the way...
...It is a consequence of the words we have learned to repeat to ourselves, over and over—"It never really mattered, anyway"— trying to excuse the absence of the great humanistic leaps whose imminence has been proclaimed repeatedly through our lifetimes, but whose effects have yet to be observed...
...If you believe things are beyond control, what could be more discomforting than the company of someone who thinks otherwise—someone who will not accept the majority opinion, determined by show of hands in pockets, that nothing can be done...
...she wanted to deny either possibility...
...As a reporter, her job was to chronicle a society choking itself on confusion...
...Later, he wrote a poem to this woman of letters...
...God," he told the small-claims judge one day, "I live with this beautiful woman and I act as if it's something that they had to give me because I signed up, like a diploma...
...You made a commitment to carry it through...
...It was just her way of being relaxed...
...Her fear suggests an evolving social standard—a standard of willing disappointment...
...Neither was convinced there was any Larger Significance to Rob's new work...
...The names are not...
...Each morning, Jill would watch through half-open and sedimented eyes as Rob stumbled into this routine, she musing that his urge to drive was some defect owing to a boyhood in Los Angeles...
...Not that he was afraid of unleashed emotion: Sometimes they had shouting fits around the house over one thing or the other...
...None had...
...We long for unaccountable tenured jobs...
...And this isn't the movie you've seen, where the wife goes on to surpass her husband, leaving him contemplating a revolver...
...Next, speak to him of your convictions in life and loves...
...Many evenings last summer, he caught sight of an elegant young woman sitting on the landing of a walk-up, regarding the twilight...
...We can relax only in a hammock strung between the notions that no one—self or others—is really deserving...
...It confirmed his suspicions...
...The people in this story are real...
...We all need material things, and all but the ascetic must accept the limitations and obligations that accompany them...
...When the romantic offers his sincere praise, his subject must rise to its level...
...What you do now...
...Embarrassed to hand such a thing to a stranger—after all, what if she had been making out a grocery list?—he left the poem in her mailbox, with a brief note of explanation...
...After commencement and their marriage on a golf course, Vicky continued on to graduate school...
...Hoover worried that he had propelled her into some fantasy of urban paranoia— that she was hiding out, holed up at some isolated hotel, registered under an assumed name and answering only to passwords...
...For diversion, she started playing the clarinet...
...They ended up in Boston, where Aaron found an advertising sales job that pleased him...
...Maybe that's foolish...
...Rob had an offer for a wellpaying job in insurance law in Des Moines...
...In her confusion, Vicky too was reduced to babbling something about their need to "adjust models...
...But lovers have unpredictable habits...
...I'm a square, much straighter than you...
...She said, "No, I mean it...
...Rob's growing admiration of her gave Jill a shudder of tense discomfort...
...Further declarations of passion, she felt, would make her husband all the more likely to reject her...
...But he lacked the conviction they would get better...
...But then the commuting to the park stopped...
...Like most of us, she figured she couldn't if asked...
...But out on the street, she had a lot of company...
...After they were separated, Aaron's last step toward conciliation was technocratic...
...She was too interested in being gotten for that...
...It's 1 just a wrecking ball to knock the upper floors off romance...
...The attention did...
...He liked the shadowy recesses of the little tables in the clubs, where darkness was refreshing, and he could sit and listen, with nothing expected of him...
...But me-mania is a fashion, not a level of the spirit...
...As he acted worse and worse, she became more forgiving of him...
...she would settle into a routine of teaching smart-ass kids to read music...
...Experiment on your friends...
...Thinking too little of yourself is at first a comfort, soon an addiction, then a curse...
...might have been offended by the presumption...
...Aaron made himself testy and gruff, hoping a flash of seedy reality would calm Vicky down...
...she asked...
...Urban nightmares didn't drive her from the twilight...
...They took turns doing each other's laundry in college...
...See if it does not produce graceless confusion, rather than thanks...
...He hoped for a call with thanks...
...And what do you expect me to do...
...Their situation is not unique...
...Now, as Vicky's affection for Aaron grew steadily, it seemed to him that only someone with some kind of character flaw would have passionate desires for a man unworthy of the effort...
...run for 20 minutes...
...drive 20 minutes to Greenwood Park...
...when the using was mutually agreeable, a basis for marriage would be formed...
...she didn't want to search for any truth, all she wanted to do was hide under the bed...
...She lay in bed and heard the breakfast pans clunking every morning, and pulled the comforter a little higher around her shoulders...
...Aaron found it alluring because he thought it showed selective taste, a lack of any foolish notions about him...
...I like to show you I like you...
...It was a bad omen...
...Prudence, of course, was called for...
...Vicky had at her disposal all the wonderful apparatus of romance most college students lacked: an apartment of her own away from the campus, a car, wine glasses of real glass...
...I have trouble getting the shopping done...
...It drove her apart from Rob, this fear of success...
...Hotcakes, mushroom omelettes, crunchy little English muffin sandwiches arranged on a platter...
...After a while, he grew listless at work...
...they took turns being a little romantic...
...It bothered Aaron that so many thoughts were being set to paper, lying around the house in wait, liable to turn up again...
...They fit together fast, and it worked both ways...
...Vicky did not get angry, which made Aaron even more miserable...
...The romantic's praise stirred in this woman the fear of success, for it represented something not false enough to pass for real...
...Like so many others, Aaron steeped himself in the knowledge that he would accomplish, at most, about the same as his parents...
...He cut out wasted motion like the morning drive to Greenwood Park, so he could have the chance for little gestures like making breakfast...
Vol. 11 • February 1980 • No. 12
