by Dylan Hicks
“Though they might think I have one of the cooler bank jobs. Security or something.”
She saw him checking out a woman in tacky hip-huggers. In school his stories were provocatively libidinous and syntactically carefree.
“Also I have this venture in the works with reusable bags,” he said. “Brand Nubagian.”
“Brand Nubagian?”
“I don’t have all the cheddar together yet, but I’ve been sensing it forthcoming, feeling things in the works. I know that sounds kind of Joan Quigley, but check it: Two weeks ago I’m flying home for the weekend, right? Settling into my seat, testing the tray-table, adjusting the belt, all that, when this lady asks if I’d switch seats with her. I’m sitting next to her best friend from summer camp or some shit. She’s in first class, so I say sure.”
“You wouldn’t have switched if she’d been in coach?”
“Well, yeah, I would have. So I get promoted to first, and it turns out the guy next to me, 3A, makes bags.”
“He sews them?”
“No, his company”—Lucas pulled out a business card from his Velcro-clasp wallet and handed it to her—“is this huge B2B bag-manufacturing operation.”
“This doesn’t say anything about bags,” Sara said.
“That’s what they do, though. So now I’m all, Carpe diem.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.”
“But isn’t carpe diem, like, Live in the moment, don’t worry ‘bout the future, more than Chase your dreams without delay?”
He seemed to be holding his tongue.
“Not that I’m some shining Latinist,” she said, “but I think the nose-to-the-grindstone version is a sort of business-of-America-is-business corruption.”
“I’d love making these bags,” he said, “so I would be living in the moment.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind looking for a green headband.” They were walking south on Broadway. “I want to take the headband thing to that other level. I had this bananas striped one, but I was getting all these Magnificent Ambersons comparisons, where I’m going for, like, Slick Watts.”
“Magnificent Ambersons?”
“I mean Royal Tenenbaums.”
“You get those mixed up?”
“I confused the names once for real, and now I always pretend to confuse them.”
“You don’t have any Ativan or Paxil or anything, do you?”
“I’ve got some cheeb. Not on me.”
“I should head back to the blog tent,” she said, then didn’t. At the Strand she came close to buying a dozen books, but, overwhelmed and underfinanced, left only with a useless tote bag. They stalled on the corner outside the store. “I should go back,” she said again.
“I’m so hungry I could eat part of an animal,” he said.
On a deli’s stuffy upper story they uncovered a pair of complementary facts: that at twenty-six Sara was ashamed to be living with her difficult mother in West Seneca—she usually neglected to clarify that for now she didn’t even live in Buffalo proper—and that Lucas’s Anglo American girlfriend had recently moved out of his apartment, though this didn’t mean, he insisted, that they’d broken up.
Unable to make it back to the blog tent, Sara was constrained to pay twenty dollars to use the internet in her expensively drab hotel. Her midnight dispatch was better, and worse, than the others. She had entered the assignment with a commitment to journalistic ethics, but she figured it would be harmless just this once to invent a few quotes and coax another from Lucas (“I think in a lot of ways the left benefits from a conservative administration . . .”). All night she was sleepless with dreams of metropolitan transformations, giddy, embarrassing dreams that in some slantwise sense came true.
June 2011
Karyn thought of movie couples uncorking their illicit lust in elevators, against hotel walls the moment after tumbling inside the room. Preferable, she guessed, to this heavy-lidded prelude on her couch with Paul the consultant. Perhaps she hadn’t anticipated anything cinematically frenetic when she was hunching to put in her diaphragm an hour earlier, but she had at least pictured a carnality onrushing enough to frown on contraceptive pauses, and since it was their last time together, she thought it would be nice to forgo the condom. Paul was complaining now about his new multifocal eye-glasses, how much blurring there was around the edges.
“Maybe progressives offend your conservative sensibilities,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say conservative,” he said, as if her joke required amendment. “I’m a classical liberal.”
“Well, they look nice,” she said. The contrast between the dark tortoiseshell and his pallid complexion was too stark. “This thing in Jisr al-Shughour or however you say it—over a hundred dead, I heard.” The Arab Spring, she thought, might bridge their ideological divide.
He murmured cryptically.
“Assad the next to fall?” The next to fall. Please.
“Maybe. Not sure if it’ll do much good so long as—” He broke off when a car alarm began pulsing across the street. When it stopped, he steered talk back to his elusive focal points.
She suggested contact lenses.
“I don’t believe our eyeballs were designed to take in objects.”
She doubted he meant designed in an anti-Darwinian way, but he wasn’t always legible. “It does take a while to get used to them,” she said. “To contacts, I mean. But I was unpopular in high school, so it seemed a worthwhile sacrifice.”
“Unpopular with boys?” he said, constricting her meaning. “That’s hard to imagine.”
“Oh God yes. Awkward. Horrible skin.” Horrible went overboard, but she wanted to fend off his idealizations. Last time he had looked at her too feverishly.
He faced her. “You think the frames are okay, though?” The phone rang. “Jen says they’re too dark.”
Her landline’s holdouts were mostly strangers—political fundraisers, call-center larcenists, the sandpaper-voiced man who rang once a year asking poignantly for Esther—but she welcomed the interruption. “I’ll only get it if it’s my kid.” The caller ID read GEMMA PITCHFORD. Unable to place the name, she let the call go to voice mail.
When she returned to the couch, Paul said, “But the frames are okay?”
“They’re great. Very . . . I was going to say ‘distinguished,’ but—”
“You don’t think they’re distinguished?”
“It’s just, it’s hackneyed to say a middle-aged man looks ‘distinguished’ in glasses.”
“If you say so.”
“Sorry, I always do that. I was in this play—I used to be involved in theater—”
“Ah,” he said, too enlightened. She thought of herself as an un-assuming type who’d been transformed onstage rather than someone drawn to the theater by histrionic disposition.
“Yes,” she said, “and I had a part where one of my lines went, ‘I’ll try to say this so you can understand where . . . my point of view.’ She stops herself from saying ‘where I’m coming from,’ then talks about how she almost said it.”
“I know the type.”
She laughed. “As do I. When I read that line I knew I was—ha, I was going to say ‘born to play the role.’”
It had been her first professional lead, playing Anna in a production of Burn This for a peripatetic but well-regarded midsized company. Anna was a dancer transitioning into choreography, and though Karyn struggled to move with convincingly terpsichorean grace, in all other ways she found herself melding with the character. The guy who played Pale, the ramshackle drunk with whom Anna falls in love, was too young for the part, but it didn’t matter; he and Karyn had what’s called chemistry (the alt-weekly reviewer, pulling a muscle to avoid the cliché, praised “the principals’ analeptic symbiosis”). With each performance they grew more intense without, she was sure, overacting. He was gay and exceptionally attractive, and the closed fantasy of offstage eros, she thought, enabled
her immersion in the show’s sexual energy.
“You gave it up?” Paul said.
“I did. That was pretty much my swan song, actually, spring of ’98.”
He sighed for Monica Lewinsky, the vaulting Nasdaq, Sosa-McGwire.
The production was momentous personally as well as artistically in that it introduced her to Jason. He was already working for the Minnesota Geological Survey but still moonlighting as a musician, and the director put him in charge of guitar noodles and synth mattresses, dignified in the program as sound design. Karyn and Jason didn’t speak to each other during the run, but they exchanged two consequential looks. At the closing party he referenced the where-I’m-coming-from line five minutes before their relationship took a physical turn.
“Speaking of time’s winged chariot,” Karyn said to Paul. She nodded toward the upstairs bedroom.
“Roger that.”
Trying to kindle a more spirited atmosphere, she fell backwards on the bed as if flopping down to make a snow angel.
“I can’t believe you called me middle-aged,” he said, playfully, as if he wanted to wrestle. When she mentioned the diaphragm, they locked eyes with an excitement possibly tinted with STI anxiety. It passed.
December 2004
Sara’s move to New York was hopeful but noncommittal. She had her mother send her a small box of clothes, but she left everything else in West Seneca and told Lucas to think of her as month-to-month. Briefly she worried that he was gunning to make them more than roommates, but soon she saw that he was devoted to the Anglo American, Gemma, whose devotion seemed more controlled. Sara planned to expand her reach as a writer and proofreader, pledged to stay unattached.
It didn’t go like that. Her work flattened out, and she spent most of her not quite four months in New York dating an apprentice bike-frame builder from Idaho Falls. Lucas, who had improvidently expensive taste in bikes, had fixed them up during the second week of Sara’s residence. The frame builder’s name (inauspiciously, she thought) was John Anderson. Lucas advertised him as good-looking, which turned out to be unconventionally true, and a Harvard graduate, which was misleading in that he wasn’t ambitious, moneyed, or conspicuously intelligent. Sara suspected his admission had something to do with geographic balance. Coincidentally, she’d written a story set at random in southeastern Idaho, and John’s recollections helped her add color to one of its unacclaimed revisions. Still, they weren’t a match, John and she. She was about to drop him but instead decided—with six hundred dollars, twice that in credit-card debt, and a trickle of freelance work—to go home for Christmas and sort of not come back. Quickly checkmated but not direly insolvent. Her excitement over learning how not to be the sweating provincial clogging up turnstiles with ineffectual swipes of her MetroCard, over walking to the G past the Polish delis and junky shops of Manhattan Avenue near her Greenpoint walk-up, over knowing there were a dozen interesting things not to do every night—all that excitement had been real but ephemeral. Within a month she felt deracinated and belated, as if she were in that joke about the restaurant no one goes to anymore because it’s too crowded. It was true that by tripping into Greenpoint she’d arrived in a neighborhood still only on the cusp of hipsterization, but watching the extension of her begrudged tribe held little appeal. Her bohemian experience would be a Maynard G. Krebs–like simulacrum at a time when the prospects for moderately talented writers without independent resources were grimmer than they’d been since—she didn’t have dates and numbers, but a long time, surely. Not that she was underprivileged. She had a grandfather with money, some money, though she didn’t feel right asking for any of it, and her dad made a decent salary installing database-management systems for Oracle, though he had three college-bound kids from his second marriage. Her mother had painfully unrealistic dreams of early retirement. So there was safety-net money, not write-your-novel money.
Two nights before her departure, John affably made the haul from Harlem to Lucas and Sara’s apartment, where they were to be joined by John’s college roommate, just back from a long stay in the Lesser Antilles. The apartment’s row of four blippy rooms reminded Sara of a toy caterpillar. It wasn’t an altogether charmless place, but neither was it designed for nonamorous cohabitants or for so many bicycles. She hated walking through Lucas’s bedroom in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, not to mention all bathroom situations in which her noises weren’t entirely private. Lucas was in many ways a good roommate—cleanly despite his hoarding impulses, glad to pay a bigger share of the rent in return for the better room—but he didn’t always respect her work time. He would interrupt her writing and proofing with shouted reports of celebrity arrests, step into her room—granted, she didn’t keep the door closed—to show her some dubious new acquisition: a baseball cap signed by J Dilla, a roll of nonpareil handlebar tape. Sometimes during these visits he would massage her shoulders, making note of her supposedly tangible tension, partly produced by the unsolicited massage itself.
Gemma, at least, rarely stayed overnight or even visited her former apartment, but she was there now with the others in Lucas’s bedroom, its futon couched to reference a living room, two vinyl-and-chrome chairs imported from the kitchen, shoeboxes stacked profusely against the walls. (Lucas was a pioneer of sneaker speculation; he’d recently sold a pair of vintage Adidas for more than four hundred dollars.) The plan was to go to an inauthentic Mexican restaurant—secretly Sara’s favorite kind, though at this restaurant there’d been an unpleasant episode with a slug—then proceed to a Williamsburg gallery where tinily meticulous dioramas were being displayed next to magnifying glasses. “Will we have to wait in line to use the magnifying glasses?” Sara asked.
“I suppose we don’t know what to look forward to in terms of attendance,” Gemma said.
Sara had hoped that she and Gemma would become pals, but despite herself she had stymied more than nurtured the possibility. Really she hadn’t made any female friends since moving to New York, though everywhere she turned there was someone whose friendship she might have sought out in high school or at UB. Maybe it was like the summer she worked at Kone King: after a while the ice cream not only stopped being tempting but grew slightly repellent. She missed Emily, her best friend from Buffalo, though the distance between them had grown more than locational. Emily married shortly after college and had in recent years swerved deeper and deeper into neo-traditionalism. She now attended church services of some kind in a former Office Max, spent many after-work hours on avowedly punk-rock needlepoint.
Mostly to Gemma, Sara said, “Because stuff like that makes me feel bullied. And then when I get my chance to use the magnifying glass, I’ll have to look with philistine brevity or else irritate the people behind me.”
“I doubt they’ll be put out,” John said. His voice was unusually deep, a true bass that would have been frightening had it been more energetic. Hearing him in a group setting could call to mind recordings by the Oak Ridge Boys.
A comfortable silence. There was something sedative about John; he was dull, one could argue, but more than that he was calming. He was one of those impressionist posters sometimes tacked to ceilings above surgical tables. Sara didn’t feel completely calm around him—especially now that she was poised to abandon him—but she felt calmer around him than she did around most people. He was an equanimous, accepting man: accepting of people, accepting of failure. He was twenty-eight but had the drawly air of a graying widower soliloquizing while rearranging the toolshed after church. “I reckon that’ll do for now,” she could imagine him saying as he clapped dust off his hands. His settled tone was deceptive, though, or at least premature. He had once told Sara that in the end he would become a programmer, accountant, or analyst, and she guessed he was capable of all those things, but the prediction reminded her of boys slinking away from playground fistfights (“I’d clobber you if I wanted to!”). In a real fistfight he would probably have an edge; he was a Viking mesomorph who moved with an upright fearlessness
in contrast to his general diffidence. In addition to building bike frames, he worked part-time at a men’s clothing store on the Upper East Side, and as a result he was often flagrantly overdressed, this time in his three-piece suit of brown, chalk-stripe flannel. The suit had recently earned him a full-body shot in Bill Cunningham’s On the Street.
Gemma, refusing to pursue the argument about the magnifying glasses, turned to John. “Is your friend as a rule a punctual man?”
“He can run late,” John said. He had pulled out a mandolin from his weekend bag and was arpeggiating what he believed to be a G-major chord.
“People from hot climates have a reputation for tardiness,” Sara said, “but do people from cold climates have a reputation for punctuality?” John opened his mouth to respond, but she went on: “I suppose that’s obvious. I suppose people from temperate and cold countries that aren’t part of the former Soviet Union set the criteria by which those from hot climates are condemned.”
“Archer’s from Canada,” John explained.
“I believe that’s racist,” Gemma said.
“Being Canadian?” Sara said with what she hoped was a subtly parodic British lilt.
“No, the correlation between southerly climates and laziness.”
“I didn’t say laziness, I said tardiness.”
“It is racist,” Lucas said.
“Or xenophobic,” Gemma said.
“Depends on how you feel about time,” John said. If she stayed with him, empty remarks like that would become a source of wincing regret.
“That’s so,” Gemma said charitably. Her top had an enterprising V-neckline and silver rivets on its sleeves. England was Europe’s most buxom nation, according to a book Sara had skimmed in a London bookshop on her one overseas trip. The book was by an unfunny French humorist who preferred small breasts.
“Germans have a reputation for being on time,” John said, not seeing that the conversation needed to change course. He put down the mandolin and looked at Sara: “Does it get very cold there?” And yet she liked the admiring, unmasculine way he sought and advertised her knowledge, which didn’t significantly extend to German temperatures.
