The unicorn was cool and safe in my hand, but still it felt like it might be wrong. Some wow object like that would take me nine more evening shifts, minimum, the saving up slowed by the gas that the Sovereign commute required of me, and still I’d have to bribe my sister to help me choose and then again to shut up about it. “I can have this, really?” I said. “Are you for real?”
He swung the door open and we blinked like new babies in the lobby light. “It’s yours,” he said, “and she’s yours too, and I gotta run or else mine will kill me.”
He ran and left me with wonder in my pounding heart as he vanished, because how could this have happened? It’s not an obvious thing. Obviously what should happen is the unrequited. Obviously Lila will never notice and our chrome apartment will never appear. You dream forever of the girls who stood next to you and didn’t notice, as far as I can tell so far in this rainy life, or if you’re gay maybe a boy in a locker-room glimpse or a wine-soaked memory of something furtive in a sleeping bag, although nothing like that has ever happened to me and I don’t care what fucking Tomas says. No matter how solid and glittery the unicorn appears, it does not come true. There are no fanciful creatures from the world of epic poems prancing around Mercer Island, no matter how I dream them up. I’m not allowed them. I have a paper due on Monday. Tonight I saw Lila walk through the doors, singing along with the headphones, one of those gloomy tracks she loves with the British singer not making any sense. “You’ve got green eyes, you’ve got blue eyes, you’ve got gray eyes,” he says to her, some guy dreaming with his band, but Lila isn’t going to turn her eyes to me because if you saw it in a movie you would say, “How did Keith bring another girl to the movies without passing either Lila on the right-hand escalator or Joe on the left?”
So I must be dreaming, however sure the necklace feels in my hands. As the story comes to this Sovereign moment I must descend back down to where they tear the tickets. I was all led astray by women I had known, and if that has happened to me perhaps I may be forgiven. Even Gawain didn’t get her all to himself for longer than a second, so let me believe in mine for a second, as I stand in my vest, before I turn the corner and go down down down. Obviously life and its bad times are around that corner, more of the real yearning for Lila and the loud and clear of it not happening and all my chivalry rewarded only by Ms. Wylie in an essay no one else will read. Don’t break my heart just yet, or ask me to lose my reverie on the sticky floor. Grant me one more kickass moment on my island, and hear the boom-boom music muted behind the theater door, and let me believe I’m the guy they all paid to watch all big and mighty, in the dark where I guess I belong.
arguably
Money money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf. When Helena bought the chianti, there was no question which shelf she’d take it from. “We have the cheap stuff on the right, and then it gets more and more expensive as you go along,” said the liquor guy.
“You don’t say,” Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.
“I like to put the expensive stuff here where I can keep an eye on it,” the guy said.
Helena blew a smoke ring, which was illegal in this country. “Well,” she said, “I’ll be over here, as far as possible from you.”
“You have a sexy accent,” the guy said. “Are you from someplace?”
“Yes,” Helena said. “I’m from Britain, originally.”
“I told you,” the guy said. “Because you can’t smoke in a liquor store in San Francisco. In California, and everyone knows it. So I figured you’re new.”
“I guess I am new,” Helena said and walked toward him with a bottle. “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” and this is a good example. Why would she say this? Helena was a young woman, originally from Britain, whatever that means. She was a smoker. She had a sexy accent and a bottle of wine in her hands. The wine was chianti, also from Europe, and very cheap in this case, but that was no excuse for the “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” or that milder, less scrutable joke about being cheap herself. Why behave this way? Helena was beginning to think there was no particular reason. Arguably, of course, there was a particular reason that Helena could not find. Perhaps she had left it in Britain. She paid for her wine, in American currency. Money money money money money.
Helena had moved to New York first. She planned to stay there and work on a new book until her money ran out. Her money ran out in nine days. Prices will have changed as people read this book, so I’ll try to explain it this way: let’s say Helena arrived in New York with money from the American publication of her first novel in the amount of seven hundred billion dollars. She found a hovel of an apartment, crawling with grimy American insects, that cost five hundred billion a month to rent, and half a million usually went to the taxi driver who took her there. Milk—milk!—cost a hundred thousand dollars. A pair of smashing, striking new boots cost over a billion. Nine days was actually something of a miracle, although not the miracle Helena was hoping for. Unfortunately this is also the way she explained it to her husband.
David sighed when he heard it. “You really shouldn’t say smashing or striking,” he said, possibly to change the subject. “Those are terms from Britain, really. In America smashing or striking means something different, sort of violent. You know, I’m smashing and striking you. It’s all the same to me, but if we’re going to live here—”
“We can’t afford to live here,” Helena said in her boots. “To live in New York for nine days costs more than the gross national product of my country of origin.”
“Have you written anything?” David asked.
“Yes, I’ve written something,” Helena said. She had two drafts of the first sentence of a novel, on the index cards taped to the end of the tub, where she could look at them in the bath, if that’s the expression. One was, “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” and the other was, “I imagine you are going to teach me a lot.” She hadn’t decided between the two, but she also had something a little longer written in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar notebook.
“Take it to your editor,” David said. “Show your editor what you have written and he’ll give you some money.”
Helena knew that’s not how it goes but she went to lunch. “Something new?” the editor said with a frown. He was Caucasian, or white, and it was almost Christmas. Helena forged ahead with her plan of reading it out loud.
Dear Mother,
I am about to run out of money. Please send me some money. I need a lot of money. Please send me all, or nearly all, of your money. Money money money money money. Please, Mommy. I love you.
Love,
Helena
“And,” Helena said, “in parentheses, your daughter.”
The editor took a bite of paid-for cheese but he didn’t look content. “That’s from your new novel?”
“No,” Helena said. “That’s a letter to my mother. My new novel is a love story, but the love story, your editorship, requires money.”
“The thing is,” the editor said, and Helena waited for the thing. “We’re still waiting for your first novel to really catch fire.”
Helena liked this guy, and the idea of her novel catching fire, like a virgin thrown into a volcano, if one were available, the heat from the center of the earth catching first the pages and then the cardboard cover and the dust jacket until her entire career was in ashes. It was a lovely idea but it didn’t sound like a money-maker. “What’s the problem?” she said. “Why hasn’t it caught on fire?”
“Just caught fire,” the editor said, “is the American term. The title might be a problem. You called your novel Glee Club.”
“I didn’t just call it Glee Club,” Helena said. Speakers embedded in the ceiling of the restaurant began to announce that they were dreaming of a white Christmas. “It’s called Glee Club. That’s the title.”
“It’s a British term,” the editor said, “and I think Americans might not know what it means.”
“The term glee,” Helena said out loud, “is derived from the Anglo-Saxon gliw or gléo (entertainment, fun) especially as connected with minstrelsy—playing, singing, dancing, and perhaps even acrobatic feats. Until fairly recent times it was in this spirit that American college glee clubs, with rare exceptions, interpreted the term.” This was from the Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition, revised and enlarged, by Willi Apel, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, fourteenth printing, which she threw at David for no particular reason she could think of, even that night in the bath. “See, they know it. They’ve had two hundred years to know it. Britain and America are exactly the same. I’m tired of people saying they don’t understand, and that it’s a British expression. I know what expression it is.”
David had made some phone calls that afternoon, which again was a miracle. It was a miracle that the American government, in its two hundred plus years of ruthless history, did not have the common sense to shut down Helena’s phone line when there was no way in heaven or on earth that she would be able to come up with the millions of American dollars required to pay the bill. “Do you remember my old girlfriend Andrea?” he asked.
“Whom you loved,” Helena said, “and, who you told me once in a fit of pique, gave you the best blowjobs of your life?”
“That’s the one,” David said. “She works for an arts something in San Francisco and thinks she can get you a gig at a school.”
David had this kindness thing he did which occasionally drove Helena up a wall with jealousy, if that’s the term. She loved him, but arguably this wasn’t enough. She had failed him, because her novel, Glee Club, first edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York, New York, first printing, had failed to catch fire, and there were all these inexplicable things that came out of her mouth. Outside the restaurant she said to her editor, “What would happen if I slept with you?” The editor, to her relief, gave the question the same false consideration he had given the two index cards she had slid his way over dessert. “I’d probably ejaculate,” he said, and got into the waiting taxi. “I’ll speak to you soon, Helena.” And look at her now, saying, “What’s the difference between moving to San Francisco and staying here in New York in utter misery without any money money?”
“It’s all the same to me,” David said, “but San Francisco is warmer and apparently the people are more something. A credit card could fly us there. Andrea was telling me about a great bar she went to, and an apartment she used to live in, and there’s a rumor that the entire city is resting on an active volcano they just discovered. Everyone’s skittish so the rent is low, and plus, of course they’re afraid of terrorists.”
“I am,” Helena said, “also afraid of terrorists. And I’m afraid I don’t know what a gig is.”
“It’s a job,” David said. “A teaching job in San Francisco. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
“Dead birds everywhere,” Helena said out loud. “Littering that famous bridge they have over in San Francisco. The Gate Bridge.”
“Golden.” David was picking off the traces of tape Helena had left at the end of the tub, as if they were already hoping for the security deposit back. “I think we might do better there, scrape scrape scrape,” he and his fingernails said, “and your mother scrape scrape thinks the same thing.”
Helena’s mother. Helena’s mother. Mother mother mother. Helena thinks of her mother visiting, and that she could throw her into the active volcano. But what if these arguments were wrong? She leaned toward her husband and gave him a big kiss where the book had hit him. This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says. Arguably there was more to this story, and there is. “But what if there’s no volcano?” Helena said. “What am I going to do then?”
“I imagine,” David said, “you are going to teach.”
particularly
The sign in the teachers’ lounge said YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT WORK HERE, presumably referring to cleanliness. At the word lounge Helena had imagined a dark, lovely place, with elegant cocktails and drapery, perhaps an old black-and-white movie on a screen without sound. Instead this was a room with some chairs in it and things taped on the walls. Love is like this, plenty of places to sit but an overall feeling that the room needs a good uptight scrubbing until everything that mentions your mother has been washed away. “I imagine you don’t have a teachers’ lounge in Britain,” said Andrea, Helena’s supervisor.
“We do not,” Helena said, moving one of the chairs.
Andrea moved it back. “I imagine you’ll enjoy this job,” she said. “I imagine you have a lot to teach them. We’re giving you afternoons and mornings. In between you can be here, or outside if you’re a smoker.”
“I’m a smoker,” Helena said. It was true. She was from Britain originally and had published a novel entitled Glee Club. This had led to a position in a creative expression program in a private school, although led was not the right word for how she ended up here, and gig was sometimes what she called it. The answer was money, which had a particular place in Helena’s love story. She and her husband needed to buy things pretty much on a regular basis. This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position. Helena had been told it would last until the money ran out. From Helena’s experience, she would say that the money was going to run out in about nine days.
“It’s a temporary position, like I told you,” said Andrea, who had said no such thing. “Pretty much what happens is, you facilitate the creative expression part. You’re a creative expression facilitator. Get it?”
Andrea was an ex-girlfriend of Helena’s husband, so she said “Get it?” like one might say, “The same man has seen both of us naked, and prefers you, bitch.”
“Of course I get it,” Helena said, but she sighed. Things like this had not happened to her in England. She could not explain the difference, perhaps because there wasn’t one. Certainly England had castles, but Helena had not lived in them, although memories of her British life had become more and more glamorous the longer she hung out at hideous places like this.
“The first thing is, a field trip where the children will see what’s-its on migration. Magpies. It’s sponsored by the Men’s Organization for Magpie Migration for Youth, who are donating their services for free. That’ll take place tomorrow, unless the volcano erupts.” This was a San Francisco joke due to some rumors of a volcano lurking underneath the city. They had just discovered it, a volcano that had gone unnoticed but was now given official membership in the geological phenomenon known as the Ring of Fire. It was one of those news stories that made everyone giggle but might also be true. It was like love in that way: Look at this! What’s going to happen here? “Unless the volcano erupts” became a joke, like “See you Friday, unless the volcano erupts,” or “I’ll love you forever, unless the volcano erupts.”
“So tomorrow I take them to see birds?” Helena said, thinking of what to wear.
“But today,” Andrea said, “you do a lesson on birds. Magpies in particular. Do you know anything about magpies?”
When my mother was young she went to Thanksgiving at a friend’s house and asked her friend’s mother what she could do to help. “You can make a butter bird,” the mother said to my mother, and handed her two small paddles and a mound of butter. A butter bird is, butter shaped into the shape of a decorative bird, but the point is, why is there cruelty? Why do people ask other people to do impossible things? Why behave this way? Why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly? “Oh, I know everything about all kinds of birds,” Helena said, like it might be true. “At university I studied ornithology before switching to poetry.”
“In America,” s
aid cruel Andrea, “we don’t say at university. We say in college. Do you have information about magpies specifically?”
“I know a thing or two about magpies,” Helena said helplessly. “A thing or two.”
“Then I’ll keep all the brochures the Men’s Organization sent me,” Andrea said, standing up smug and skinny and smug. “We’re combining both grades, so it’ll be fifty kids, in one hour from now. You can’t smoke in here.”
“I just like to keep a cigarette in my hand,” Helena said, putting it back in the pack. “It helps me think. Tell me, what happened to the last woman who had this job?”
“She did a unit on idiomatic expressions that went way over the kids’ heads,” Andrea said, “so I fired her.”
The door shut and Helena was alone in the lounge, wishing it were legal to smoke so she could light a cigarette and put it in her eye. Instead she ran to the school library where there was a miracle: The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies, by Tim Birkhead with illustrations by David Quinn, T & AD Poyser Publishers, London, England, first printing. By the time the hour passed away Helena had a list of interesting facts which she said out loud, and when Andrea came to check on her the fifty children were silent and interested, working hard on a creative expression exercise. “Attractive, artful, and aggressive are all terms which have been used to describe magpies, and they are all accurate,” is the first sentence in The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies, and Helena told them they could write a story which was either attractive, artful, or aggressive, their choice.
“That worked,” Andrea admitted, giving Helena a shiny smile as the students filed out of the room. “Of course, it was probably your accent. The kids love foreign accents like that.”
“That would explain America’s rabid interest in audio recordings of Winston Churchill’s speeches,” Helena said, but Andrea was telling her to watch her purse.
Adverbs Page 3
