by Tom Perrotta
A kiss landed on her bare shoulder, Martin returning with their drinks. “Bold, I know. I would have tapped your shoulder, but my hands are full.” He handed her a wineglass. “No sign of the great man?”
“Not yet.” Outside, the man and the boy leaned against the brick wall, their faces hidden in shadow. They tossed away their cigarettes and lit two more. This time the boy leaned in close, holding the man’s hand to steady the flame.
Martin waved to someone in the distance. “Everyone bores me,” he said. “Tell me about you and Ivan.”
Christine colored. “I haven’t seen him in fifteen years. I have no idea why I’m here.” Astonishingly, the invitation had arrived in the mail. She’d moved a half-dozen times since college—to France on a Fulbright, to grad school, back to France. She’d touched down briefly in Chicago for a visiting professorship. Now, once again, her possessions were crossing the country in a moving van.
“My own parents can’t keep track of me,” she said. “I can’t imagine where he got my address.”
Martin frowned. “Beth didn’t invite you?”
“I’ve never met her in my life.” Again Christine glanced out the window. The man and the boy had disappeared. She felt a flash of disappointment and then, a sudden jolt. Ivan was crossing the patio—alone, his hands in his pockets, as though she’d conjured him from the air.
The room seemed suddenly quiet.
“Excuse me,” she whispered, and pushed her way through the crowd.
She had never gone to bed with him. In truth, she hadn’t considered it: his wedding ring, the wife and baby waiting for him in New York. What they’d done instead had seemed harmless—less serious, anyway, than adultery. There was still enough parochial school in her to make her blanch at the word.
Later she understood how gravely she’d miscalculated. That with every lover for the rest of her life, Ivan Borysenko would hover in the room.
She’d sat for him as a model sits for an artist. This was how he’d explained it the first time—a weeknight, late, after a long rehearsal. In his apartment, he’d watched intently as she took off her clothes. She hesitated over her bra and panties.
Everything, he said. I need to see it all.
Naked, she awaited further instruction. She lay sometimes on the floor of his apartment, sometimes the bed or the living room couch. His bed was made, always, with crisp white sheets. She lay on her back, gazing up at him. He watched her for a long time, his eyes half closed, his arms crossed. When asked, she turned on her side or belly, raised her arms or opened her legs. He did not touch her, or himself.
“Thank you, my love,” he would say finally, her signal to dress and disappear. To leave him alone with the fresh memory of her.
They sat together on the dark patio. “Tell me everything,” Ivan said, “about your life.”
Quickly she rattled off the details: the Ph.D. in French lit, the Fulbright, her new tenure-track job in California.
He lit a cigarette. “It’s a pity you stopped writing. I was sure you’d continue. You were a great talent.”
Her face went hot with pleasure.
“I tried for a while,” she admitted. “Then I gave up and went to grad school. It’s okay,” she added hastily. And then, not sure if it was true: “I’m happy.”
“I’m not. It shocks me that you have defected from the theater.”
It was a script she remembered from long ago: Ivan playing the wounded prima donna. Her role, now, was to placate him. “I haven’t defected entirely,” she said. “I teach Racine and Corneille.”
He looked incredulous. “Your students are still interested in classicism? Even today?”
“I’m not sure how interested they are in literature, period.”
“Literature is something one reads,” he snapped. “Racine and Corneille never intended their work to be read.”
He stared at her a long moment, the avid dark eyes she remembered. In the shadow of his apartment they’d seemed to be all pupil. “What became of your friend Tommy?” he asked. “He was a great talent.”
Her smile faded. A great talent. The words, she realized, were meaningless, a stock phrase he used to flatter his former students. How many times would he say it this evening? That noisy room was filled, probably, with great talents.
“I don’t know.” She lied. “We lost touch years ago.”
“Daddy!”
Christine turned. Pia was crossing the patio in their direction, a wineglass in her hand.
“Darling.” Ivan rose. “Christine, I’d like you to meet my greatest creation. My daughter, Pia.”
Pia offered her hand, moist from the glass. “Nice to see you.” It was the neat phrase everyone used nowadays, to greet a stranger one perhaps ought to recognize but didn’t quite recall. Christine marveled at her composure. She tried to imagine herself at seventeen, out late on a school night in such a dress, drinking wine in full view of her parents. Teenage Christine celebrated in public, praised and flattered, the shining object of adult attention. The image refused to materialize. Her mind could not conceive of it.
Ivan kissed Pia’s forehead. “It’s eleven o’clock. You’re going to turn into a pumpkin.”
“Another hour,” she said. “I’ll be gone by midnight. Poof!”
“You won’t miss a thing. The party will fizzle without you.” His gaze was tender, his tone nearly flirtatious. Christine’s stomach cramped violently, a wave of sickness. Jealousy was a bodily emotion. It lived in the entrails, a malevolent parasite.
They watched the girl walk away, teetering on high heels.
“She’s taking the SATs in the morning,” Ivan said. “She was supposed to leave at eleven.”
“How will she get home?” It seemed necessary to feign interest, to partake in the general fascination with Pia. Though in fact she’d already heard more about Ivan’s daughter—much, much more—than she wanted to know.
“Beth’s parents bought her a car. Her boyfriend is the designated driver. He doesn’t drink.” Ivan pointed to a corner of the patio, where Pia was sharing a cigarette with the blond boy in the blue paisley shirt.
“Him?” Christine said.
(Possibly her perspective was skewed. Possibly—in New York, the memory of Tommy clutching her like a lonely ghost—she saw hustlers everywhere.)
“Where are you staying?” Ivan asked.
When she named the hotel, he nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll meet you later. We can have a drink.”
His dark eyes cut through her like a laser, as though he could see through her skin. Of course, it was the reason she had come: to be looked at in this way.
Her heart worked loudly inside her. “What about your wife?”
He shrugged elaborately, gracefully, like a dancer stretching.
“It was Beth who made the guest list. She knows I love surprises.” He took her hand in both of his. “It’s my night, after all. You’re a present for me.”
Inside, the air conditioning was going full force. Christine took a seat at the bar, shivering in the cold. She flagged a waiter passing with a tray of appetizers and took one of everything, a tiny quiche, a skewer of grilled chicken, a pile of tomatoes on toast. Eating, she thought back to the shadowy afternoons with Ivan, his bare off-campus apartment, the shades pulled to the sills, his hungry gaze clicking like a camera. After he sent her away, what had he done with the images in his head? She’d believed, always, that the pictures were for him alone. Now she imagined him calling his wife in the city. The girl was here. She sat for me.
Beth had known all along.
Christine, in her innocence, had never imagined such a thing: that her secret afternoons with Ivan were no secret, those burning hours that had marked her like a brand. That in actual fact she’d been part of his marriage, covered under the contract. Ivan loved women. His work took him to Los Angeles and London, to theaters and college campuses. His wife, pragmatic, had granted him certain freedoms. Look, but don’t touch.
“There y
ou are.” Martin laid a hand on her shoulder. She felt herself leaning into it, the living heat of his hand.
“I saw you outside with Ivan. I considered joining you, but he would have torn me apart with his teeth. You’re freezing,” he said, rubbing her arm.
He took an olive from her plate.
“Alex Tinsley is here. His play is getting fabulous reviews. Have you seen it?”
“I haven’t seen anything,” she said.
“How refreshing. I’m sick to death of the theater.” His eyes wandered. “Let me nab Tinsley before he leaves. Don’t move. I don’t want to lose you again.”
She watched him cut through the crowd of great talents: actors performing at each other, directors thinking aloud, playwrights testing out speeches, auditioning their own words. Theater people were born to be looked at, though it occurred to Christine—not for the first time—that they were more impressive from a distance, observed from the mezzanine, the house lights dimmed. Their intricate private lives—Ivan’s and Beth’s, Tommy’s—were best left in shadow. Only Racine and Corneille, dead three centuries, could be safely studied, their strange passions consigned to the past.
“Thank Jesus. A chair.”
Christine turned. Pia sat heavily next to her and removed a shoe. “My feet are killing me. How do you walk in those?” She looked bleary, a little drunk, her makeup smeared.
“Never stand when you don’t have to. Seriously. Try to spend the whole night sitting down.” An errant bra strap slid down the girl’s shoulder. Christine resisted the urge to adjust it, as her mother would have done.
“Have you seen Justin?”
A moment passed before she understood that Justin was the boyfriend. Famous since birth, Pia assumed—usually correctly—that everyone in her orbit knew the details of her life.
“He’s supposed to drive me home? To Montclair? That looks so good. I’m off carbs.” She eyed the toast on Christine’s plate. “For this dress. I haven’t had bread in a week.”
“The night is over,” Christine said, handing her the plate.
Pia took it, smiling gratefully. Her hands were plump as a toddler’s. She ate the toast in two bites. Hungry baby, Christine thought, and wished she had more to feed her, an entire loaf of bread.
She watched Pia lurch away, teetering in her shoes, and thought, Seventeen. That’s what seventeen looks like. She’d been just two years older, a college sophomore, when she sat for Pia’s father.
By one o’clock the crowd had dwindled. Christine watched Ivan from across the room, ambushed again and again by well-wishers.
“I’ve had enough,” she told Martin.
“Likewise,” he said quickly, draining his glass. “Let’s go.”
For years afterward she’d wonder how the night might have unfolded if she’d simply gone back to her hotel to wait for Ivan. Would she have sat for him as she’d done before—still and silent, untouched and unloved? What, exactly, were the terms of Beth’s gift?
Instead, in the taxi, she kissed Martin passionately. Let the ghosts hover: his body was a tangible thing, arms and hands and shoulders. His mouth felt warm and alive. Yes to everything, she thought. Do everything to me.
Later, lying awake in Martin’s bed, she imagined Ivan appearing at her hotel in midtown, waiting as the front desk rang her room. She found out, later, that he’d turned off his cell phone and missed the call when it came. A New Jersey state trooper had found Pia’s car on the Garden State Parkway, nosed into a concrete barrier, Pia unconscious behind the wheel. A generation ago, before airbags, she would have been thrown through the windshield. Instead, the giant cushion rose up to receive her, holding her fast. Her injuries were not serious, but the SATs took place without her. She spent two days in a private hospital room filled with flowers. By day she entertained a constant stream of visitors. At night her father kept vigil beside her bed.
MIKE MEGINNIS
Navigators
From Hobart
AFTER THEY FOUND the metal boots but before the dirt clod, Joshua’s father bought graph paper at Wal-Mart. Unfurled and pinned on the wall where his mother’s family pictures had once hung, it stood six feet high by seven feet wide. The paper was hung in three rows, each printed with thousands of small gray squares. If Joshua crossed his eyes, the squares seemed to rise from the page. He crossed his eyes and then uncrossed them, watching the squares rise and fall. “It’s time we started a map,” his father had said. “Or we’ll never finish this game.”
This was the logical culmination of his father’s theory of The Navigator. In games, where it was so often so easy to lose perspective, but also in life. When Joshua played their game, it was his father’s job to keep watch, to tell him when he was doubling back, to remind him where he meant to go, and how. When Joshua’s father had the controller, these were Joshua’s jobs.
Their game was Legend of Silence, or LoS. LoS was different from their other games; whereas in Metroid or Zelda the player character became more powerful as he explored, the heroine of LoS was diminished by every artifact she found. The manual still called them Power Ups, but this was, father and son agreed, misleading: they should be called Power Downs, or Nerfs, or Torments, because this was what they did. The goal of the game was to lose everything so that one could enter Nirvana, where the final boss lay in wait, enjoying all the ill-gotten fruits of not being and not knowing. It was their favorite game, so much so that they often discussed what they would do when it was over. What they meant was what could they do. It was impossible to imagine After.
Joshua’s father had not played any of their other games since LoS. Not even Contra, which had previously been their favorite, because it had a two-player mode and because they could not beat it: when one died, the other soon followed. He had tried to talk to other fathers about it at Boy Scout barbecues and overnight camps, but they did not listen.
After Joshua’s father smoothed the graph paper to the wall, it exhaled softly and came unstuck, sagging. He took their respective pencil boxes from the top of a pile of R-rated VHS cassettes on the TV stand. Inside were markers, highlighters, and colored pencils, watercolor pencils and pink erasers, and ballpoint pens, and number-two mechanicals.
“We’ll use sixty-four squares for every screen,” said his father. “That’s eight by eight. Starting here, in the middle. Here.” Using a red marker and a number-two mechanical, he sketched the first room of the labyrinth: its gold and velvet throne, its many crystal chandeliers, its candelabras. At the right edge of the chamber he drew a purple pillow on a white pedestal, where the heroine would lay her crown to rest if you pressed the B button. This opened the exit, which led to the next room. Joshua’s father drew this from memory because they could never see it again without restarting their game. Once you left the throne room, the guards wouldn’t let you come back. They did not recognize their queen without her crown.
“If we map the whole world,” said his father, “we can stop getting lost. Then we’ll really get cooking. We’ll be through in a month.” There were, his father had said, maps you could buy. But this would defeat the point, which was the journey.
You always started outside the throne room no matter how much farther you explored. The hall outside was like a decayed palace, hung with rotting standards, walls collapsing, suits of armor disassembled and scattered over the floor, brown with rust. The stern guards at the door to the throne room were responsible for preventing the rot from coming inside, in addition to keeping you out. Of course, much of this was open to interpretation, rendered in simple arrangements of squares. Sometimes Joshua thought this hallway was more like a palace waiting to be born than one dying. It was full of small monsters—green rodents, yellow bats. The first time Joshua walked this hallway, when his heroine was at the height of her powers, these enemies were trivial to kill. A single shot from the blaster, a blow with the sword. Now each journey through the hallway became more difficult as the heroine withered; it served as an index of her progress toward not being, no
t knowing. Sometimes, recently, father and son couldn’t even make it through.
Joshua made the heroine struggle through the hallway. His father stole bites of peanut butter jelly and drank from his Big Gulp with one hand as he drew what they saw with the other. Sixty-four squares for every screen. Joshua struggled not to tell him there was cheese-puff dust in his beard.
Tuesday nights were grilled cheese, but when Joshua came home, the gas was off again. You could make grilled cheese in the microwave, but the bread would come out wrong—first soft and hot, and then too hard. He took the American cheese from the refrigerator and sat down at the television, which still worked. Sometimes he played their game without his father. Today he was upset enough about grilled-cheese night that he didn’t want to play alone. He watched the cartoon channel. The map had grown again. It loomed in his periphery, slowly consuming the wall with its red, purple, forest green tendrils. Doors sprung up all over like a dalmatian’s spots, doorknobs like lidless eyes. His father played without him too. Joshua unwrapped a slice of cheese and ate it in strips. He deleted all their messages, even the new ones, without listening. He unwrapped another slice.
His father came home with an envelope, unopened, in his fist. “They shut off the gas,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Sorry,” said Joshua.
“We can make grilled cheese in the microwave.”
“No,” said Joshua. “That doesn’t work.”
The electric bill was paid through Friday. They could still play their game. Joshua’s father changed into his home pants.
Her name was Alicia. That was, in Joshua’s opinion, the second most beautiful name in the world. The first most beautiful name was Trudy. Then third was his own name. Then his father’s, Dustin. Alicia was not only a queen in the beginning but also a bird girl. She had large brown wings speckled with flecks of silver and white. After her crown and throne room, these were the next things she gave up. She flew to the top of a very tall room (eight squares by fifty-four on the map) and found a door leading to a smaller room, a single screen, housing the metal boots and otherwise empty. These boots sat on a white pedestal like the one they had given their crown. At this point in the game father and son did not properly understand its principles—they thought the throne room was an interesting fluke. Joshua’s father had made Alicia step into the boots. They couldn’t tell what the metal boots were supposed to do. Joshua’s father led Alicia out of the room, and he made her jump out into the emptiness of the very tall room. She fell to the floor, flapping her wings without effect. The weight of her boots was too much. Her wings bent and warped from the effort as she fell through seven screens. Then she crumpled on the floor, half-dead, and enemies nosed her body, gnawed, and further drained her life points. Her wings would slowly atrophy from disuse, shrinking, curling inward, dropping feathers in clots for the rest of the game, until there was nothing left. These feathers being pixels, of course—two each, twisting and angling this way and so on, such that the viewer could see what they were meant to be. Then father and son understood the game. Joshua’s father said, “This is a REAL game.”
