by Dylan Hicks
“Cold but not Canada cold,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking—”
“In the mountains, maybe.”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about lugged frames,” Lucas said to John. “Maybe for my next bike I’d be more interested in that than the, er . . .”
“Fillet brazed? You’d definitely open up some sweet design options, but you’d want . . .”
Sara stopped paying close attention. She courted a look of sororal boredom from Gemma but got nothing. Stylish, milky-skinned, dimpled, Gemma was attractive—probably not in danger of being accosted by reputable modeling scouts, but attractive, notably more so than Lucas. It made Sara wonder if Lucas was more attractive than he looked, like that quip about Wagner’s music (“better than it sounds”). A sexual virtuoso, he could be, if such people existed outside books and songs by men who, as her aunt Marion once put it, thought women were violins. And yet: since there were obvious differences in sexual ability, generosity, invention, and knowledge, it was reasonable to think virtuosi existed and were distributed across the sexes, though not so far among Sara’s seven or eight partners, ten or eleven if one didn’t require penetration, a less heteronormative but perhaps unduly inflationary standard. Maybe there was something about her that failed to recognize or inspire virtuosity. Or failed to desire it; in songs and books, sexual virtuosity usually had to do with superendurance, which sounded painful. John wasn’t the worst, but, in life as in bed (and it was really just a mattress), he was too tentative, too puppyish, too much the follower. She wasn’t into heartbreakers, but she was on the lookout for traits more exciting than loyalty.
“. . . still fairly green when it comes to making custom lugs,” John was saying, “but I’m working on some now—for none other than Archer, matter o’ fact.” This last phrase was delivered with a suspicion of affectionate irony; it seemed that John was trying to assert a native right to elide the f in of, but simultaneously conceding that the right had been surrendered or was controversial to begin with. He was proud o’ his rustic roots, talked more about the relatives he had in and around Zellwood, Florida, than those he had in suburban Denver. His Floridian grandmother, he said, used phrases like “belly girt” and once warned him not to get above his raisin’. “I’ll send you some photos when the bike’s done,” he told Lucas.
“Yeah, I’d love to peep it.”
Gemma sighed in a sort of iamb.
“What’s he do for work, then, your friend?” Lucas asked John.
“Archer?” It was clear that John didn’t care for this line of inquiry. “I don’t think he’s working a steady job at the moment.”
“According to John,” Sara said, “he’s a man of means.”
John gave her a peeved look to suggest she’d disclosed a guarded secret, though one of the first things he’d told her about Archer was that he had a lot of money. The word he used was “shitload.” Once, as part of an ambitious bike trip, John had visited the house where Archer spent most of his childhood. Archer’s parents, he said, owned matching Range Rovers, paintings by Gerhard Richter, a vacation home in Dominica, and a professional hockey team.
“A man of means,” Lucas echoed.
Gemma turned to Lucas. “You should suss out his interest in rare and vintage trainers.”
“So where’s all the cheddar from?”
“Oh, I don’t rightly know,” John said. “His parents are in business.”
“Dr. Knox,” Sara said.
Lucas squinted, looked up: “Dr. Knox . . .”
“Rhymes with cocks,” she said. “They make dildos.” In a comic whisper she added, “Archer’s family makes dildos.”
John said, “Not just dildos,” while Gemma said, “Of course, Dr. Knox! When the doctor knocks, open up.”
“Fuck outta here,” Lucas said. “That can’t be their slogan.”
“I just dreamed it up,” Gemma said. “I told you I should be in advertising.”
“You are in advertising,” Sara said.
“Yes, but I don’t write the adverts.”
“Anyway,” John said. “Archer’s not uptight about it or anything, but don’t bring it up when he’s here.”
“Okay, okay.”
“We’ll just hint at it incessantly,” Gemma said.
“I’m sure he’s heard it all,” John said. “In school they called him—not to his face, but—what’s the word that means, like, heir, but it’s not heir.”
“Heiress,” Lucas said. “It’s like a girl heir.”
“Scion?” Sara said.
“Scion,” John said. “They called him the Dildo Scion.”
The buzzer buzzed.
June 2011
“Hi, Karyn, this is Gemma Pitchford, Archer’s fiancée.”
“Oh, hi, yeah, it’s—I believe you called a few days ago.”
“Yes, and didn’t leave a message. I hope in time you’ll be able to forgive me.”
For a moment Karyn suspected a prank call from a friend, but her friends, Facebook aside, were scarce, no longer given to prankishness, and unfamiliar with Gemma Pitchford. Also the accent seemed genuinely English, not that Karyn had a refined ear for such things. “Well, congratulations on your engagement.”
“Thank you. Rather out of the blue of me to call, I realize, or it would have been had you picked up the first time, but I have an odd little proposal to run by you. You see I’m quite sure you and your son—who sounded charming on the phone, by the way—”
(“Hullo,” he’d said flatly, and “I’ll get her.”)
“—quite sure the pair of you make up two-thirds of the wedding’s Minnesota contingent.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t excel at maths, but these calculations I’m certain are correct.” After a flitting pause, Gemma provided the questionably called-for laugh herself. “I have a friend, you see, Lucas Pope, who also lives in Minneapolis. I mentioned your name to him, but it seems you two are unacquainted.”
“It’s a reasonably good-sized metro area.”
“He’s having nasty car trouble. And ongoing financial trouble. Constant calls from creditors; now even his mother is dunning him. Really he’s quite clever, but he was made redundant some two years ago and has been unable to find suitable employment since. You’re familiar with the discouraged?”
“I don’t keep up on music.”
“No, no, it’s the people excluded from unemployment figures because they’ve stopped looking.”
“Oh, right, yes,” Karyn said.
“Lucas has joined their ranks.” A moment of mute sympathy. “There was an ill-starred entrepreneurial endeavor as well. The greater exigency from my vantage is that he says his car trouble will keep him away from our wedding. He can’t afford to hire a car and obviously can’t afford to fly. So,” she sighed, “I’m wondering if you might consider car sharing with him to Winnipeg.”
“Give him a ride, you mean?”
“He was trying to convince me to bring him in as the DJ, but I fear that’s not quite the fix. It’s how we met, actually: he the wedding DJ, I the too, too intoxicated dancer. Brilliant music, but there was something wrong, a balky needle or something with the calibration of the tonearms—I can’t claim a consummate understanding of the technicalities, but the records kept skipping.” She imitated the sound. “I suppose I could pay his way, but I’ve already established a dangerous precedent of charity.”
“Yeah, I—”
“It’s vital to me that Lucas attend the wedding. Naturally at this stage I’m inclined to believe this will be my only wedding, and just as naturally I want to be amidst the people I care most about—as well as interesting new people such as yourself! I’ll confess to you now that there was a time I fancied Lucas almost intensely”—Karyn weighed how and whether one should modify intensely—“and saw myself walking the aisle towards him, though in the end we couldn’t make a go of it.”
Gemma seemed to expect an answer to a question Karyn had lost
sight of. “I guess I was looking forward to a road trip with just my son,” Karyn said after a moment. “Sometimes it’s hard to get kids to talk, you know, but a lot can come out on a long drive.”
“Vomit, for instance,” Gemma said.
A hesitant laugh from Karyn.
“I only say so because I’m susceptible to carsickness, motion sickness of all stripes, really. I recently became dizzy while riding an extremely aged and sweet-tempered horse.”
“Hmm.”
“On even terrain.”
“That must be frustrating,” Karyn said.
“The horse was called Sleepy.”
“Still, I think it’d be nice for Maxwell and me to be alone.”
“But you practically would be alone.”
“Well, we’d be with your friend.”
“Let me ask you something, Karyn:”—like someone selling a dishwasher, Karyn thought—“When you share a taxi with a friend, do you think, Oh, we had better include the driver in every aspect of our conversation, we certainly wouldn’t want him to feel left out, or do you proceed essentially as if you were alone?”
“If anything I’d be more likely to chat with the cabby if I had a friend to act as a buffer.”
“Lucas would be mortified if he knew I was asking you this favor. Mortified. He’s not a freeloader or an idler at heart.”
“It’s not that I have any objection to him,” Karyn said, “except that he’s a stranger.”
“Yes, well, perhaps it would be better, then, for the two of you to meet in advance.”
“Wait, is this whole thing—”
Gemma interrupted, “Sorry, one moment.” Now to someone else: “Oh, how thrilling!” To Karyn: “Publishers Weekly has given Archer’s new book a starred review. What do you think of the title, Karyn, The Second Stranger? It’s too late for changes, so do say you approve.”
“The Second Stranger,” Karyn said thoughtfully. “What was I supposed to say again?”
“That you like it.”
“I like it.”
“It’s quite an unusual book, much more so than the first. Archer’s been joking that it should be called The Second, Stranger. With a comma, you see.”
“Ah.”
“Oh my, listen to this: ‘Not since Norman Rush’s Mating has a male novelist rendered a female narrator with such authenticity and brio.’ The reviewer is doubtless male,” Gemma put in sotto voce. “But it truly is a striking piece of ventriloquism.”
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Can you not wait? Because people said that to Archer about his first book, that they could not wait to read it; but often they would say so when the book had been out for many, many months and they had already—well, just then!—admitted to knowledge of its existence. In a word, they were waiting, and proving they could do so quite contentedly.”
“I see your point.”
“I suppose those people are better than the ones who play at having read the book when they so obviously haven’t, which is what I tend to do with writers other than Archer—who doesn’t care a whit about any of this, I should say. I’m more sensitive about these things than he.”
“Well, I’m eager to read the book,” Karyn said.
Gemma called out again to Archer: “May we send your delightful cousin an ARC?” It wasn’t clear if she had waited for an answer when she said, “I’m sending you an advance review copy.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“But I’m sorry, I cut you off. You were about to say . . .”
“I’m not sure I remember.”
“In connection with Lucas.”
“Oh, it was—it was just that this call was starting to sound like a matchmaking ploy.”
“Mmm, I can see that, now you mention it,” Gemma said. “But if it were a matchmaking ploy, I suspect I would have downplayed Lucas’s expanding indigence and would not now raise the issue of his appalling clothes.”
“Maybe—”
“Or the fact that he spends much of his time at a computer looking at pictures of women dressed like Jessica Rabbit.”
“Maybe you think I’m into mothering sad cases,” Karyn said.
“I don’t get that sense at all. On the contrary, frankly.”
They listened to the phone static for a few seconds, then Karyn said, “Do you just mean redheads in sexy dresses, or do you mean women deliberately trying to look like Jessica Rabbit?”
“Oh, very deliberately, Karyn. It’s a whole community.”
They laughed.
“Just to be clear,” Karyn said, “I’m kind of seeing someone.” She wasn’t seeing Paul the consultant, of course. He was now plotting a dirty weekend in Wisconsin, but Karyn wasn’t egging him on.
“You misunderstand me,” Gemma said. “I have no ideas in that direction. I only suggested you two meet in advance because I see that you’re right, it would be uncomfortable to make the trip as strangers.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure.”
“But you’ll think about it?”
“I can’t imagine my thoughts will change.”
“I’ll call you back,” Gemma said, and hung up without saying goodbye.
December 2004
“Laqueur’s central point is that what he calls ‘modern masturbation,’ in other words, masturbation as a medical and social crisis, arose synchronously with the Enlightenment—”
Sara missed a few of Archer’s words while sliding a knife under a dab of misplaced guacamole. Lucas, who “hadn’t eaten all day” (she’d seen him eat breakfast), was hogging the thick, limey chips, Archer the conversation. Sara, too, had come to like the sound of her own voice—droll, she hoped, and in a cultured midrange (squeaky at matriculation, she had worked to drop her pitch by a quarter octave over her freshman year), but she didn’t need to hear it all the time. Archer’s was a tall, stocky voice, though he was of average height and slightly built. For the past hour or so Sara had been trying to figure out if he was an asshole. He didn’t seem aloof, exactly, but he could be disdainful, which to her was worse. When she mentioned how much she had enjoyed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he flicked his wrist as if executing a Ping-Pong winner—“overrated”—and added that one of the supporting actors was “an absolute fucking tool,” insinuating that the appraisal was derived from real-world experience. When Sara asked for elaboration, he scrupled as if he’d been transported by palanquin to the high road. It was a new variety of name-dropping for Sara (or a new variety of name-withholding), different from the sort practiced by John, who constantly, artlessly, and with genuine enthusiasm brought up his two semifamous college friends, the minor tech entrepreneur and the one in the floundering sitcom.
“. . . perversion of Enlightenment ideals,” Archer was saying. “Instead of aggregate self-interest serving the greater good, self-pleasure serving only itself; instead of quiet reflection, solipsism; instead of . . .”
A long pause. Sara, Lucas, and Gemma looked at Archer. John picked napkin lint off his suit.
“It was about imagination. Sorry. I was quoting from my essay and drew a blank.” His first show of humility.
“I thought you were quoting this Laqueur,” Sara said.
“Well, yeah, quoting my paraphrase of Laqueur.” He then spoke at half speed, as if the sentence were returning to him word by word on a baggage carousel. “It went like, ‘Not imagination applied to great social and artistic puzzles, but . . .’”
“Fantasy run amok in an intemperance of secret violations,” Sara said, feeling a frisson when Archer responded with a stream of decaying yeahs like the dying of a lawn mower engine.
“I told you she was crazy smart,” John said.
“Really, it’s off,” she said, not wanting John’s embarrassing use of the third person to go unchecked. “Amok is too recent a loan word to apply to a discussion of the Enlightenment.”
“We have to use period language when speaking of the past?” Archer said.
“One woul
d need to be quite polyglot,” Gemma said.
“Yes, all right, point taken,” Sara said. She hadn’t been challenged like this in a while. “But I’d rather summarize an old idea in language neither blithely anachronistic nor strainingly antique.”
Unconvinced silence from Archer and Gemma. “What Laqueur shows,” Archer resumed, “is that the ‘problem’ of masturbation developed with the Enlightenment, as I was saying, because it was a perversion of Enlightenment ideals. Before that it was sometimes ridiculed as the domain of losers and satyrs or whatever, and some Protestants thought of it as a monastic vice, and here and there it was, you know, censored.” Did he mean censured? She might have misheard him. “But generally people didn’t think of it as such a big deal.”
“What about Onan?” Sara said as the food arrived.
“But if you actually read the story, Onan wasn’t even beating off.”
There was no grosser term.
Archer went on, “Onan’s older brother did something to displease the Lord and was killed, right?”
“I don’t really know the Bible,” Sara said. It was one of the few major books she didn’t mind confessing ignorance of.
“Well, that’s what happened. So it was Onan’s duty to marry his brother’s widow, Tam-something—”
“Tammy?” Lucas said. Earlier, while Archer held court on an invasive fish species that was “plundering” the Caribbean, Lucas had indiscreetly rolled his eyes.
“Tamar, maybe,” Archer said. “So whenever Onan fucks Tamar—or whenever, I should say, Onan knows Tamar, his sister-in-law-cum-wife—no pun intended.”
“Nice,” John said. He was ignoring his food, busy again with the napkin lint. Once, when visiting him at work, Sara had been baffled by how long it took him to incorporate a small influx of necktie inventory into a display organized by color and pattern. The ties bordered a round wooden table, and he would hold them up to the light for what seemed like cryogenic minutes, looking for the perfect progression of shade. His deliberation intimated the craftsmanship associated with watchmaking or cabinetwork; but he was just dawdling.
