Today Will Be Different

by Maria Semple

  Spencer held his tongue and we headed out to face the second half of the day.

  “Okay, let’s get this over with,” I did or didn’t say out loud as we walked down the steep incline, the autumn wind whipping through the corridor of apartment buildings. The Olympic Sculpture Park, once a contaminated industrial site and now an impeccably designed waterfront public space, hummed with activity.

  A busload of children played hide-and-seek in a valley of rusty Richard Serras. Lovers lolled on quilts in the shadow of an enormous Calder, a pop of red amidst the cool blues and greens. A bicycle club rested at the Claes Oldenburg typewriter eraser, and squirted water into their mouths. Teens with Down syndrome, gripping handles on a rope line, hooted as they weaved through Louise Bourgeois’s black marble eyes. Tourists snapped gag pictures of themselves holding the Space Needle in their palms. Sculptures everywhere, whimsical or baffling, challenging or just plain lovely.

  Placed near all, discreet plaques etched with names of donors well known in Seattle and beyond: Gates, Allen, Wright, Shirley, Benaroya.

  Taking in the joyful mix drawn together by a common enjoyment of art, I couldn’t help but think: rich people, you gotta love ’em!

  “I’ll catch up with you,” Spencer said and ran in the direction of the glass pavilion marking the park’s entrance. If he didn’t stop until he crossed into Canada, I wouldn’t have blamed him.

  Timby and I headed along the wide path that gently zigzagged down to the water.

  “I was sorry to hear about Piper,” I said. “You need to tell me these things. Not if you don’t want to. But come on, we’re buds.”

  Timby jammed his head into my side and I put my arm around his shoulder.

  “Mom?” he said. “What’s your favorite season?”

  “I’ll have to go with the obvious. Spring.”

  “Mine is winter,” he stated proudly.

  “Winter?” I said.

  “Because of snow.”

  “When have you ever seen snow?”

  “Remember that time we went to the Salish Lodge and Dad’s patient who owns it got us that really big room and then we woke up and it was super-quiet and then you said, ‘Open the curtain,’ and it was snowing and then I ran outside and rolled around in my pajamas and then I caught snowflakes on my tongue and then Dad and I made a snowman that was full of leaves and then I thought a bee stung me but it was just ice inside my slipper?”

  “Why don’t we do that more often?” I said.

  “Because you don’t like being cold.”

  Oof. Instead of my accustomed rat-a-tat-tat, I paused to let myself feel the ache of the myriad ways I’ve disappointed Timby.

  We walked quietly for a while.

  “Mama?” Timby said. “Piper Veal called me a bad word.”

  “What did she call you?”

  “Then I’m saying a bad word.”

  “Tell me the first letter.”

  “C,” Timby’s voice cracked.

  “C!” I said. “A third-grader called you the C-word?”

  “Yeah. Cow.”

  “Cow?”

  “Why are you laughing?” he said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. It’s shocking and rude.”

  “It means I’m fat,” Timby said.

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t say that. I wouldn’t have you any other way. Besides, soon you’ll shoot up like a bean stalk.”

  “I hope it’s really soon,” he said.

  “When I was your age, my father took me shopping and I had to buy my clothes in the Chunky section.”

  “Who called it that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some awful store in Glenwood Springs. There was a section with a sign. ‘Chunky.’”

  “Poor Mama!”

  Eight. Eight was the best age.

  “That’s the thing about hard times,” I said. “Generally speaking, one survives.”

  Yo-Yo stuck his head into a boxwood and emerged with half a burrito. If there’s one thing that dog has a talent for, it’s sticking his head into a bush and coming out with 7-Eleven. He gobbled the burrito, foil and all.

  “Mom!” Timby cried.

  I reached into Yo-Yo’s mouth, hooked out the drooly stub, and tossed it in the trash. Yo-Yo, on the verge of panic, fixed his attention on me.

  “It’s gone!” I presented my empty hands with a Vegas dealer clap, but it meant nothing. “Let’s go, you stupid dog.”

  I yanked the leash. He yanked back. I nudged him with my foot.

  “Don’t kick him!” Timby cried.

  “That’s not kicking.”

  People hadn’t stopped to watch, but they were certainly slowing down to judge.

  We arrived at the bottom of the hill, looked both ways for cyclists, and crossed the bike path onto a lawn that rolled down to the water.

  A square of grass had been staked off in CAUTION tape. Within, two framed panes of glass were mounted on poles at eye-level.

  “Is something going in those?” Timby asked.

  Like I had any idea.

  A guy in painter’s pants and T-shirt was crouched over something, his back to us. At his side was a black plastic cart piled with tools.

  Suddenly, a spray of water arched over our heads and squirted the glass. The worker jumped out of the way.

  It was Spencer, behind us, pointing a hose.

  “You found me!” he said.

  The glass on the left glistened with water pebbles. But the one on the right…

  “It’s coated in high-tech liquid repellent,” Spencer explained. “Water bounces right off.”

  I ducked under the yellow tape and touched the glass. It was magically dry.

  “When the Seattle Art Museum commissioned an outdoor piece,” Spencer said, “I thought, Yay, I get to play with rain. I remembered you’d moved here, et voilà.”

  “Me?”

  Spencer led me by the hand. The workman held a level between his teeth as he affixed a plaque to a concrete stump.

  “CAREERIST / ARTIST”

  SPENCER MARTELL

  American, b. 1977

  If it was shock and delight Spencer was after, I certainly delivered. In one frame, the cedars beyond wobbled through water drops. In the other, the same view, bold and crisp.

  “Careerist is the canvas covered with tears,” I said, figuring it out. “It’s distorted by emotion. Artist is the identical image freed from self-pity.”

  Spencer’s hands flew up to his face in mock horror. “Could you make me sound any more maudlin and faggy?”

  Timby gasped at the bad word.

  “This is what an artist does!” Who was I even talking to? “Look around. There’s everything to choose from. The vastness of the sky, the blues of the water. Ferries, sailboats, mountains, and everywhere you look, people. Timby, come here.” I was apparently talking to him.

  He instinctively took a step back.

  “Have you ever seen such abundance?” I picked up my son so he was eye level with the frames. “But this is art, daring to put a frame around something, signing your name, and letting it speak for itself.”

  “Listen to your mother,” Spencer said.

  “At Cooper Union, I had to take History of Photography. Who’s the guy who took the pictures of those sisters? In the seventies? Lined up like a Christmas card, year after year?”

  “Nicholas Nixon,” Spencer said. “The Brown sisters.”

  “Thank you! I was having a serious problem with photography in general. When we got to Nicholas Nixon, I said to my professor, ‘That’s so random. I could have taken those.’ And he said, ‘But you didn’t. Nicholas Nixon did. And he put his name on it. That’s what makes it art.’”

  “And he did it over and over,” Spencer said.

  “He persisted!” I said. “And it became a body of work.” I turned to Timby. “I don’t mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The w
orld will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My God, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.”

  “Say amen to that,” Spencer said.

  “But you have a vision. You put a frame around it. You sign your name anyway. That’s the risk. That’s the leap. That’s the madness: thinking anyone’s going to care.”

  “Mom, you’re saying the same thing over and over.”

  “I’m embarrassing you, am I?”

  “Stop.”

  To throw gas on the fire, I stuck my butt out, assumed my shake-your-booty crouch, and—

  My eyes locked on something through the tearstained glass.

  Perfectly framed: the yacht.

  The dock was a ten-minute walk up the bike path.

  “Spencer?” I said. “Can you watch Timby?”

  “Shoot,” he said. “I’m meeting my curator in the pavilion.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Timby knows my number.”

  “Mom!”

  I handed Timby my purse. “Gum, makeup. It’s all yours.”

  “Ooh.” He hooked the purse smartly around his shoulder. “Go.”

  The yacht, the third largest in the world, belonged to the Russian oligarch Viktor Pasternak, who’d gotten stinking rich on natural gas. Last month, he’d gone snorkeling in Hawaii, where one hooker got jealous of a different hooker and threw a black sea urchin at Viktor’s head. He’d covered his face in time but the poisonous spikes got stuck in his hand. When it began to swell, he took off for Seattle because he’d heard about The Guy.

  “A sea urchin defense wound!” Joe remarked gleefully when he received the call.

  Viktor lived by a credo he’d dubbed the “eight-minute rule.” He’d calculated he was rich enough that he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want for more than eight minutes. That included being in hospitals, which he mortally feared due to an overreaction to a recent Anderson Cooper piece on antibiotic-resistant staph infections. (Viktor kept saying Cooper Anderson, but Joe didn’t correct him.) So Viktor converted the disco on his yacht into an operating room. He’d invited Joe to the yacht, presented him with the state-of-the-art setup, and announced it was where Joe would be removing the hooker-delivered sea urchin spikes. Joe, not being insane, balked.

  Viktor persisted. His equipment had been installed under the supervision of Spain’s Dr. Luis Rogoway, famous for operating on the knees of European soccer stars. Rogoway, a great friend, would fly in his nursing staff, gorgeous Spanish women, none shorter than six feet, to assist Joe.

  Joe thought about it. Audacious, yes, but unethical? No law said you had to operate in a hospital. Joe had done a hundred procedures on dirt-floored dwellings in Haiti, India, Ethiopia. Insurance companies wanted you to do everything in a hospital; this guy was obscenely overpaying in cash. It was an out-of-body moment, one Joe still didn’t quite understand, when he heard himself saying yes.

  Viktor had another stipulation: Joe had to clear his schedule for the week-long recovery. That’s why Joe had told his staff he was out of town.

  As for why Joe didn’t tell me? He knew I’d be a gusher of opinions, all negative, and who needs that the night before you’re performing surgery in an unfamiliar disco? Joe made the decision to operate, donate the money to charity, and laugh with me later.

  On the appointed day, Joe opened Viktor’s hand, removed the sea urchin spikes, and repaired the tendon damage without incident. Before closing the hand, Joe wanted to zap any lingering bacteria. He instructed the Spanish nurse to turn on the UV light. Her English being less than bueno, she hit the wrong switch. A pound of glitter dumped onto the operating table and into Viktor’s open hand. After fifteen minutes of recriminations, panicked discussion about the relative filth factor of Chinese glitter, and a torrent of cursing straight from the Tower of Babel (much of it from the patient himself), Joe was frog-marched off the yacht by Uzi-packing security.

  For days he’d been trying to get in touch with Viktor but he’d been cut dead. Joe whiled away the week at Mariners games. (It was heading into October so they were in the playoffs.) He’d bought a high-powered telescope to monitor the comings and goings around the yacht, still ominously in port. A black sedan from the state’s medical board had arrived at the pier this morning. The thought of it was so revolting it had rendered Joe face down at the breakfast table.

  Was I insane?

  Joe hadn’t operated on a Russian oligarch in the disco of his yacht!

  He wasn’t assisted by a staff of perfect-ten Spanish nurses (where did I come up with that, a Robert Palmer video?), one of whom had accidentally glitter-bombed the surgery!

  The medical board doesn’t have a black sedan!

  The Mariners have no chance of making the playoffs!

  This witch was on tilt.

  The yacht, I realized when I arrived at the dock, was no yacht at all but a banged-up squid boat. How did I know? A van from Renee Erickson’s restaurant empire was parked at the pier. A tattooed chef (is there any other kind?) haggled with a fisherman over a sea creature the size of a toilet.

  A fluorescent cloud of cyclists whizzed past and practically knocked me off my feet. I was standing in the middle of the bike path, clueless and let down, unmoored from space and time. Yo-Yo sighed.

  “You and me both,” I said to him.

  Could Joe have been looking at something behind the boat? No, across a small channel there was only a row of corrugated metal buildings: a nautical-supply house, a marine-fuel station, and, beyond them, a Costco.

  I sat on a guardrail. Yo-Yo placed his front legs on my lap and waited for a head scratch.

  What I knew: Joe had told the girls in the office he was out of town for a week. Spencer’s call today had placed Joe at the end of that stretch.

  But as of this morning he was facedown on the breakfast table. He must be going somewhere each day without telling anyone. And at some point, he’d aimed a telescope at this exact spot…

  This was ridiculous. I called Joe’s cell.

  He picked up after one ring. “Hey, babe.”

  “Joe.” My calm voice belied my heart, which had broken loose in my chest. “Where are you?”

  “At the office. Why?”

  Yow. I realized I wasn’t dreading a scene, I was itching for one. I was ready to jack this party up to eleven and start breaking some plates. The last thing I could have fathomed was that I’d be lied to with such calm, clarity, and conviction. (C-words! They’re everywhere today!) I’d like to say such a thing had never happened to me, but I knew sickeningly well it had, eight years before, at the hands of my sister, Ivy. It’s the last impression I have of her, the cool betrayal. But now Joe? If there was one thing in this world I thought I could count on, it was that Joe was no liar. But here he was, lying.

  Yo-Yo pawed at my lap. I’d stopped scratching his head.

  “Just thought I’d check in.” I matched Joe’s nonchalance and raised him a bored sigh.

  “All’s well?” he asked.

  “‘I myself am hell, nobody’s here, only skunks,’” I said. “You know how it is.”

  “Do I ever,” he said.

  “I had to pick up Timby at school. It’s a long story involving cheaply made clothing, Bangladeshi slaves, and an antagonist with the last name Veal.”

  This was better than a scene! It was so exotic, so uncharted; it was forging a new pathway, the two of us, liars. I actually felt closer to Joe in a kinky, thrilling way. Lying! The middle-aged sex?

  “I’ll fill you in tonight,” I said.

  “I’m stuck at a thing,” he said. “I might be late.”

  For years I’d been cataloging traits of Joe’s that annoyed me, things I’d be relieved to have out of my life should he ever decide to leave me. The Gratitude List, I called it.

  1. When I get out of the shower and ask Joe to hand me a towel,
he invariably hands me a damp one.

  2. He has never once offered to walk Yo-Yo. He’ll walk Yo-Yo, but only after making me play the harridan.

  3. When we go out to restaurants, he puts leftover dinner rolls in his socks and brings them home so they won’t go to waste.

  4. Said dinner rolls get placed on his bedside table until he notices them a week later, at which point he hands me the wheat stones and asks me to “use them in something.” (Thus the frequency of bread pudding. No wonder poor Timby is a chunkster.)

  5. Every time we go to a movie and it starts twenty minutes late because of the previews, Joe goes nuts, showing me his watch and informing me and everyone else in the theater what time the movie was scheduled to begin.

  6. When we run a fan to cool down a room, he insists it point into the room, not out, which just seems wrong.

  7. He puts sriracha on everything I make. Even waffles.

  My Gratitude List was self-protection. I started composing it the morning after Joe and I first said “I love you,” at Dojo on St. Mark’s Place. Bob Marley’s Legend was playing in the background. (This was New York in the ’90s; when wasn’t Legend playing in the background?)

  Joe was due at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. He’d showered and dressed quietly enough. But then he sat at the end of my bed, on my feet (!), and put on his shoes. Just so you don’t take me for a complete scorekeeping bitch (which I am, but there’s better evidence), Joe freely admits he’s “essentially selfish.” It’s the single piece of insight he received the one time he went to a shrink. (Me, on the other hand, I’ve been to nine shrinks in twenty years and I’m still like, “Wait… what?”) This selfishness, according to Joe’s miracle shrink, was a response to being one of seven children. Every time a box of Quisp or Quake was unpacked from the grocery bag, kids descended on it in a feeding frenzy. Joe shared a room with three brothers. Control of the remote, a private place to read Playboy, everything a cage match to the death. The fault, of course, lay with the Catholic Church, which encourages lower-class families to reproduce like rodents and build up the Church’s ranks, blah-blah.

  Another item for the Gratitude List: no more Joe railing against religion.