Enjoyably Pretentious
Not to Be Confused with Capable and Knowing It
"No More Buttered Scones for Me, Mater, I'm Off to Play the Grand Piano!"
While scanning a shelf that appeared to be Mrs. Balbach's, Daniel heard Rudy's mother slowly making her way down the stairs. She crossed the kitchen to the stove, then picked up the teakettle and shook it. Grabbing a teabag, she poured the last of the hot water into a teacup.
Daniel had just pulled out a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses—a hefty tome he had long been tempted to buy on his visits to Wonderbook but which he still found too intimidating—and he had opened it to a random page. Mrs. Balbach appeared in the doorway, rubbing her back.
"Mom," Rudy moaned. "Why do you insist on coming down? Just send Rachel down or call me if you need something!"
Mrs. Balbach ignored him and lifted the book Daniel was holding to read the cover. "Oh, don't even bother reading that." she said. "He's so pretentious."
"So is Oscar Wilde," Rudy snapped from the stereo cabinet in the living room, "but you like him…"
"Oh, but he's funny." After a pause: "Wilde's enjoyably pretentious, you know? He isn't so goddamned serious about it the way that Joyce and Beckett and all those other guys are."
Hearing Rudy's mother curse always gave Daniel a mild jolt. Not because she was the only parent who swore in front of her children (Cecilia's mom had cussed them out more than once while drunk, and David's gave as good as she got from her son) but because she always did it with a certain finesse, a patrician charm. There were times, in fact, when Mrs. Balbach sounded inexplicably like a Salinger character, saying goddamned instead of goddamn, or calling something crummy or phony. And the rest of Balbach family replaced the typical American profanity with bugger, shite, or sodding among other anglicisms.
"Mater," Rudy replied tartly, "it sounds to me like you're confusing pretentious with capable and knowing it. Besides, a genius doesn't need to be modest."
"But wouldn't it be nicer if he were?" she said. She folded a towel and slipped it over the oven handle. "It still just seems arrogant and overbearing to me to—"
"Good for you!" Rudy interrupted. He was leaning in the doorway now. "And doesn't it just make you feel so much smarter than the rest of us to say as much? Unlike everyone else on the planet, you've figured out that James Joyce is just a big, dumb showoff... All those critics and all those professors and—"
"Oh, Rudy,"—Mrs. Balbach sighed—"now you're showing off, I think. Enough." She shuffled back to the stairs and started climbing back to her room, mumbling to herself: "Sometimes I can't believe they're my own flesh and blood..."
Rudy snorted and marched back to the record collection in high dudgeon.
In their high school, there were some who didn't appreciate Rudy's haughtiness, and his lack of recognition that his abilities were unusual was often mistaken for snobbishness. Rudy's friends, however, liked him all the more for his attitude and envied him his brilliance. Boyishly, he sometimes allowed his aloofness freer rein than it deserved, but it was clear his faculties were superior to those of others. For the time being, he was still uncomfortable with his superior talents—he abused them at times and at times he ignored their full potential. But it was obvious to those around him, those who took the time to delve deeper and get to know him, that once he had overcome his awkwardness, he would prove himself great in some capacity.
At his house, Daniel never had arguments so intense or so cutting. The poses and pretensions Daniel had learned from watching Rudy were all but lost on his family. In fact, if it hadn't been for his aunt Roseanne, who was herself quite conversant in pretensions, Daniel's Christmas list might have remained a mystery to his mother.
"Daniel, what the heck is this?" his mom had asked just that morning, before she and her sister had left to go antiquing. "A Mont Blanc… A leather valise…" She waved the piece of paper in the air: "Spectacles?"
"Glasses," Daniel had replied.
"I know what spectacles are. What do you need glasses for? You see just fine. And what's a Mont Blanc?"
"A fountain pen," Daniel had explained.
"We got you a pack of pens at the beginning of the school year. What did you do with all them?"
"Oh, Marion," his aunt Roseanne had interrupted. She'd been visiting since the week before Thanksgiving. It had become a tradition for her to stay with them throughout the holidays. "A young man wants a nice pen. The kind he can take to college with him. I think it's a good idea for Daniel to have a special one."
"Well, then," Daniel's mother had said, "you can get it for him."
And in a cloying tone (she routinely forgot that he was no longer five years old), Roseanne had warned, "But you have to take care of it, Daniel."
Being at the Balbachs' made Daniel wish there were at his house, if only once in a while, an opportunity to observe that something was enjoyably pretentious, to quip that he had nothing to declare but his own genius, or to say goddamned or bugger with aplomb. But his family never had such conversations.