by Monica Drake
Sarah shrugged. He lost heart, and said, “I don’t know about this.”
“Think of it as war paint.” She dropped the tube of concealer in his blazer pocket.
Wearing the face Sarah made him, he walked with long strides down the open corridor between cubicles and saw his meeting, already started, through a conference room window at the far end of the offices. People were seated around a rectangular table, trapped in the soundproofed capsule of office space.
Ben nodded through the window at his coworkers and offered what he hoped was an enthusiastic, warm yet professional expression. It was hard to look friendly with a smashed face. He felt the warrior paint of his makeup where it lay heavy on his skin. Would it crease?
His boss, Trisha, swiveled and turned a lever. The white blinds tipped. The room was cut off, his smile wasted on the dusty contours of louvered blinds. Had she done that on purpose?
Her timing was precise.
Not one person in the office had welcomed him back yet after his bloody nose vacation. He’d expected to groan at an office card on his desk, or to crowd in the break room for well-wishes and cheap cake. He didn’t want the card or the cake, but he wanted the connection a card could stand for. They circulated cards with every birthday, new baby, divorce, promotion, and vasectomy.
But apparently not for a crash in the john.
They acted like it didn’t happen.
That’d be fine, except it did happen, and it felt weird to leave so much unsaid. Could he be on the verge of losing his job and everybody knew but him? Or had somebody seen him with his pants down, nose pouring blood, blacked out? He had given them reason to look away, and here they were, still looking away.
What if there were pictures? Oh, God. Totally possible. Everybody had a camera phone. There could even be a camera hidden in the bathroom, some kind of corporate Homeland Security.
He’d Google it. Key words: bathroom, underwriter, nosebleed, cock.
He’d run jacking off through YouTube. How many videos would that call up? His palms started to sweat at the thought. His neck tightened.
He opened the conference room door. His coworkers were deep in discussion, a file on the table. Most people who worked at that level of the bank’s mortgage lending office were women, and the women were all divorced single moms, high school educated, who’d climbed the ladder from claims processor on up. This was their ceiling.
Management was all the same kind of tall, large-knuckled men. There were three managers with corner offices on that floor. Ben was tall, but apparently not tall enough.
He’d drifted into the pink-collar ghetto.
He found a chair, and kept a wary eye to see if anyone noticed his makeover. The underwriters didn’t look up from their pages. The only other man in the meeting pushed a credit report, bank statements, and a home appraisal toward Ben, without looking at him.
Trisha was assessing the file. She said, “So we’ve got low income going on.…”
“But trending upward,” the man said, and he raised a finger toward the ceiling. “And job stability.” That man was very small, with narrow bones and compact ears. He’d never be management.
Ben scanned the credit report. The primary borrower worked in a munitions storage facility in eastern Oregon, not far from where Ben grew up. The borrowers were a couple, a man and a woman. The wife, the secondary signatory on the loan app, was in nuclear waste containment.
He looked closer at the county on the form.
It was the same nuclear waste facility Ben grew up downwind of. There weren’t too many of them. He could picture the low, broken grass that lined the highway, the silhouette of industry against his old running ground. That woman had a long commute on empty roads.
She had great job stability. Nuclear waste would be around longer than the ozone.
He touched the edge of his eyebrow, then drew his hand away. If he didn’t touch it, the makeup would last longer. He tried not to think about his face.
Every file tells a story. It’s an underwriter’s assignment to read the story and decide if the financial narrative arcs toward happy or tragic. Each debt is a choice; character shows in accumulated debt.
In one month, four years back, the husband had racked up a major balance with an appliance store. After four years of minimal payments, it was still a high enough debt load to mean a top-of-the-line refrigerator, or a lower-priced full kitchen set: Either way, Ben would bet that spending spree indicated a first marriage.
The man’s name had been taken off a previous home loan, but the loan still made its way to the man’s credit report. That was a sure sign of divorce.
The two current borrowers shared an auto loan and a maxed-out credit line with Ethan Allen furniture: the sweeping outlay of fresh debt, fast signatures, an exuberant new start.
That’d be a second marriage.
Weddings are only the first step in learning to blow money together in the name of love.
The credit history of each borrower detailed the pursuit of happiness; love and money were mingled. When a dishwasher broke, or a garage door refused to open, when the transmission blew out on what had been a new car, the marriage would feel it.
Divorce was a cumulative response to designed obsolescence, warrantees running out.
He and Sarah lived with a nicked dining room table they found on the side of the road, and when he looked at the dings and scratches of somebody else’s life, he knew they’d done okay: They’d made a home for that table. They’d made a home without the false promise of happiness through overspending.
Credit reports were clean, pared down, beautiful in the details; debt illustrated the skeleton of interactions stripped of both romance and couples counseling, stripped of everything except the money trail.
Ben lost himself in the borrowers’ history and forgot about his own broken face, the makeup mask. He rubbed a hand along his chin.
Trisha said, “Eighty K in savings. Where’d that come from?” Her hair was thick as a wig, a blond helmet. Her face was well fed. She furrowed her eyebrows, then flipped back and forth through bank statements.
The applicants didn’t earn enough to have savings. Not in the past year. Their tax papers didn’t show interest earned, meaning they didn’t have money in savings the year before.
Another underwriter, a woman in her late thirties, with an actual pink collar sticking out from under a home-knit vest, asked, “Should we go there?”
That was underwriter’s shorthand: go there. Were they required by regulations to ask about the source of funds?
An older woman, breathing through her mouth, cut in, “I wouldn’t go there.” With twenty years’ experience, this woman always moved like her back hurt. She had a bag of potato chips open on the table and chewed like she meant business; those chips didn’t have a chance.
The man said, “I’d go there. If we don’t go there and the loan is audited …” He looked to Trisha.
The woman in the pink collar looked up and down the table.
Trisha said, “We’ll go there if those funds are necessary for closing.”
Ben’s head hummed, the bruise over his sinus cavity ripe and singing. He put two fingers to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He used his thumb to move the chip of bone that sat on the side of the bridge of his nose, just under the skin. That chip was his tiny friend, with him but not part of him anymore.
The man on the loan was a veteran. He could qualify for a VA loan, a more complicated form, but they’d chosen the simple route.
Ben cut in. “It’s a conventional loan. If it’s not part of closing, we’re not required to go there.” He heard himself say it: go there. The phrase itself was a hit of poison.
Where was anybody going?
He pressed against his nose, and the pain radiated. It cut against his thoughts, and he liked the way that pain kept him present. The rest agreed, No, we won’t go there. Let’s not go there. We don’t have to.
They called off a major voyage.
The potato chip eater shook her bag upside down in celebration, crumbs tumbling into her thick palm. The way the makeup rested, visible, on the pink-collared woman’s face was what Ben thought of as a suburban mask. It was smooth, perfect, and a shade too dark. He saw now the line along her chin, where foundation came right to the edge of her pale neck. Why did people do that?
It was the lights. Then it dawned on him, and the moment froze—was his own haze of beige cream too dark in the flicker of fluorescents? It made his stomach knot. He tried to see himself in the aluminum bar of the office chair: There his face was warped.
He wanted to leave—put his hands to his face and flee. He was an actor in potentially fucked-up costume. He tried to focus on the job: Get it done and get the hell out of the meeting.
He flipped past the credit report and on into the appraisal. Where a picture of the house in question should’ve been, there was a photo of a squat and gleaming corrugated building cut halfway into the hillside, surrounded by land, on the edge of a river. It was a grain silo. He said, “Is this a farm sale?” He squinted at the numbers: It was a slight quarter acre, with a low estimated land value. He looked at the photo again.
“Now you get the situation,” the man said. “No comps.”
Ben asked, “Of what?” Comps were meant to be comparable home sales to show relative value. There wasn’t even a house here.
The man said, “Our borrowers plan to live in a grain silo.” He reached over and turned Ben’s pages for him until he found one with a few blurry faxes of interior rooms. “That’s our home.” He tapped a finger to the pictures.
The silo’s outer walls were curved. Windows lined the walls, looking out over the hills. The kitchen was modern.
Ben examined what passed for comps: old farmhouses, old kitchens, broken screen doors. He knew those other houses. One was his old best friend’s uncle’s house, or just like it. He knew the layout: two bedrooms, one bath, no dining room at all.
They were the working-class shacks of his hometown.
He flipped back to the subject property. The silo was sleek. It was a castle, a turret. One picture showed a spacious, simple bedroom with a bed in the middle of the room. An individualist’s dream—somebody had personally converted that silo. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.
Trisha looked for the appraiser’s signature. “You can’t just take a house, make a few adjustments, and say it’s equal to a grain silo.”
The veteran and his second wife, with their bad health and their Ethan Allen debt, wanted to move into the silo and make the dream their own.
The small man said, “What about a geodesic dome?”
Trisha said, “A dome’s not a silo. We’ve done domes.”
The pink-collared underwriter in her genuine pink collar tapped the eraser end of her pencil against the table.
Trisha declared, “No precursor.” She pushed the file away.
One glossy photo showed how the sun hit the curve of the silo’s corrugated aluminum and sprang into a gleaming star, shining like a fever dream.
The army vet’s file told a simple story: The man had done everything a man is asked to do. He finished high school, joined the army, got married, bought appliances, had kids, and got divorced. Like a good soldier he got back in the action and married again. He worked forty hours a week at a job nobody wanted. His wife put in forty at her own toxic industry. All they wanted was to buy a grain silo on the edge of nowhere and call it home.
Ben said, “Three bathrooms?” That was a lot, for a one-bedroom. He pulled the blurry photocopies of photos closer to his face.
The pink-collared single mom looked at Ben. She said, “Want to go there?” She smiled, and tapped her eraser against her white teeth.
Somebody laughed, or coughed, or stifled a laugh. Three bathrooms.
Then they all looked away. Was that on purpose? He got it—he was Ben the bathroom guy. He wanted to say the word again, to check. He dared them. He tried it out. He said, “Full bathrooms, each one.”
Nobody looked at him.
He said, “No half baths.”
They kept their eyes on their pages. There was one throat clearing. He’d run that through YouTube: Ben + bathroom.
Trisha said, “No comps, we can’t go there.”
Ben wanted to go there, literally—find his way to a rolling hill with no neighbors—a cheap, gleaming grain silo of a home like a fort. Better yet would be a missile silo, insulated and hermetic. Just Sarah and him. It wouldn’t matter to him if they never got pregnant. He’d be happy with Sarah.
Trisha said, “Not in this lending climate.” She pushed the papers away.
Sorry, borrowers! Sorry to anybody who might want out. No precedent means no money. Banks don’t lend on the rebel dream.
Ben started to fold his pages closed. Then he ran a finger under the single glossy photo of the silo house and pulled it from its glue. He slid it into his blazer pocket. He saw the soft smudge of concealer where his mask had rubbed off on his fingers, onto the empty square left where the picture had been.
Arena couldn’t go back to Maya Angelou High—what the kids called My-High—until her mom talked to the principal. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred. She was expelled, and that was a massive transfer of energy: transferred from school to what?
She wore a T-shirt that said UPTOWN IS NEARTOWN. NEARTOWN IS DOWNTOWN. What the shirt didn’t say was the logical conclusion: Uptown was downtown. It was a syllogism, and syllogisms were beautiful. There was a name, PETE’S DINER, and a street address for uptown or downtown in some other city. Arena loved that shirt.
She flipped through her dad’s vinyl. The records were old and warped, had that great smell of their old paper covers, and they were hers. Her dad had written his name on them: Pete. One name only.
The Wipers. The Jackals. Those records told her that her life would’ve had a different sound track if he’d stuck around. Her mom listened to new age flutes with a trickling waterfall in the background that made Arena have to pee.
How was that remotely relaxing?
She looked at Lou Reed’s picture on the front of Transformer and said, “Hello, Father.”
On the back of that album there was another guy dressed as a hooker on the left-hand side of the cover, and then as a cowboy with a major boner on the right side, hot for himself. She put Lou Reed back in the stacks, because all the albums needed a fair chance to be her father’s voice for the day.
She closed her eyes, walking her fingers along the frayed paper spines. When she felt the right energy—one thin slip of a record casing calling to her—she slid an album from the stack and pulled it to her lap. Only then did she open her eyes.
Television, Marquee Moon.
That was auspicious. Tom Verlaine’s vulnerable, venerable croak would be today’s voice of her father’s wisdom, punked out and bitter.
Okay.
She opened the dusty, smoke-colored cover of an old Sears turntable. She took out the vinyl, held it so gently between four fingers, and blew across it. Someday those black discs would break, and the last bit of her dad would go.
Her room was jammed with clothes in piles, books in stacks, her bed. But the stereo was a temple and lived in a cleared space.
She put the album on the system, dropped the needle, and let Tom Verlaine channel her father.
She sat cross-legged, hugging her knees. Television, the band, was her father’s broken heart. Arena drank it in and waited for the sentences that would speak to her.
It was like reading tarot cards, or throwing the I Ching. It was better than a horoscope.
It didn’t take long before Tom Verlaine sang, “I understand all destructive urges … I see no eviiiiiiil—” The words stood out like a letter written to her. That was her dad!
He understood.
Tom Verlaine wouldn’t fault her for being expelled from school or even worse. Her father understood Tom Verlaine. If uptown was neartown, and nea
rtown was downtown, Tom Verlaine was her papa and he understood everything.
Her dad’s unconditional love went on until the album ground to the end, the needle’s voice turned to a hiss, and the disc kept up a pointless spin. Arena lifted the arm.
To play it again would ruin the magic. Her job was to interpret her father’s wisdom, and what she heard was love.
Downstairs, almost noon, her mom was on the couch and on the phone. She was wearing her “sardine apron,” an apron she’d bought at a garage sale and used mostly to keep sardine oil off her clothes. Nyla ate a steady diet of sardines for her health. The house smelled like fish and olive oil. There was an empty tin with the lid peeled back on the coffee table.
She hung up the phone as Arena came down the stairs. Her hair was still in yesterday’s ponytail. Her mascara had traveled beneath her eyes. Nyla said, “Well, that went exactly nowhere.”
Arena knew without asking: Nyla’d been on the phone with Maya Angelou High. Instead she said, “Don’t you have to open the store?”
Nyla said, “I have to go down to your school.”
There was an awkward silence. Arena didn’t want to think about school.
“Maybe afterward, I could take you out for lunch,” Nyla said.
Her whole life, Arena had never spent so much time alone with her mom as in the months since Celeste moved out. Before, she’d gotten by with listening. How did anyone ever know what to say?
“Mom?” Her voice sounded uncertain. Nyla cocked her head and waited. Arena asked, “Can I show you something? It’s near your store.” Arena heard herself say it: Near. What did that mean? When did something near quit being near and move into far? What was in between?
The words echoed in her head: It’s near the store, we’re near the store. Uptown, downtown, neartown.
Her mom made as much sense as anything: Expelled + lunch date = good again. She could feel her mother’s brain compute the math. But Nyla didn’t understand destructive urges. Her mother was about preserving the planet and every ecosystem on it. Her mother was about trapping energy, preserving her children as babies in photos all over the house. Arena said, “I want to show you the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth.”
