by Dylan Hicks
“It’s not what cum means, though,” Sara said. Archer had pronounced the word not to rhyme with womb or loom, but like the vulgar variant of come. She was happy to let that part slide; a word’s more defensible pronunciation isn’t always the right one.
Gemma said, “Isn’t it just ‘wi—’”
“It’s about duality or simultaneity,” Sara rushed in. “Like if you lived in your car, it’d be your Honda-cum-home. Or if you were a flea living on the skin of a collie, it’d be your Lassie-cum-home.”
Lucas was the joke’s lone supporter, laughing dorkily between bites. He was eating as if his burrito had said something unkind about his mother.
“So it’s like slash,” Archer said.
Sara wasn’t proud of her know-all streak, particularly when one of her elucidations or corrections contained its own mistake. (A week after this dinner, for instance, she consulted five dictionaries and found disparities about when amok was introduced from Malay into English, apparently by way of Portuguese, while she herself concluded that her argument about anachronism was pretty much groundless.) In the teeth of arrogance, however, pedantry seemed a lesser crime than meekness. “Slash usually connotes either-or,” she said.
“You should send Sara your essay,” John said. “She’s a professional editor.”
“Proofreader.”
“The piece isn’t that far along yet,” Archer said, which may have been true, though he said it as if the weight of his borrowed ideas would overwhelm all errors and infelicities.
“Do you write, then, for a living?” Lucas said.
“No, for now it’s more of an avocation than a vocation,” Archer said.
“So what’s your vocation?”
Lucas could be such a jerk, but Sara admired him for it. It had so far been an odd, tense meal, and she kept switching sides, just as she had as a kid during sports broadcasts in which neither the Bills nor the Sabres were playing. “You have to pick a team,” her dad would say, and she would answer, “I just want it to be close.”
“I do some consulting,” Archer said vaguely, “some work in the art market. It’s a patchwork of self-employment.”
“Hey, I wonder if you know anyone who’d want to invest in this company I’m starting,” Lucas said. “Sturdy vinyl grocery bags.”
“That’s the name?” Archer said wearily.
“No, the name’s Brand Nubagian.”
“The first name was better,” Archer said.
“They’re to come in all sorts of bright colors and designs,” Gemma pitched.
“It’s an opportunity,” Lucas said. “The reusable bag thing is moving way beyond self-righteous hippies in bad shoes.”
“Soon even the smartly shod will be self-righteous about their tiny sacrifices and adjustments,” Sara said.
“Eminently machine washable,” Lucas said. “In cold.”
“I doubt investors will care what temperature you wash the bags in,” Archer said. He looked back at Sara, changing his expression from bemusement to something hard to interpret. “So Onan always pulls out,” he said, “spills his seed, because he doesn’t like the idea of giving it in some magical way to his dead brother.” Sara didn’t understand why Archer felt the skeevy need to look at her during this part of his lecture, or why he wouldn’t let the subject be changed. People were always misreading the clearly marked maps of conversation. In fairness, she had drawn him out on his essay (of course he would never send it to her). Once prompted, though, he had proceeded as if he were sitting down for a half-hour interview with Leonard Lopate. “God kills him for failing to honor the rules of levigate marriage,” he said. She silently reiterated the new-to-her word; later that night, she saw that he’d meant levirate, with an r. “Only way later was Onan’s coitus interruptus conflated with masturbation.”
“But don’t you think,” John started to say, then faltered. “Don’t you think that when he pulls out he jerks it a little to come?”
“Charming,” Gemma said.
“I actually think it’s a good point,” Lucas said.
Archer: “Genesis is, um . . .”
“Silent on that particular question?” Sara filled in. John could say the dumbest things, but now she was contemplating the matter, picturing Onan by some dusty pillared house, bearded, she guessed, like John, whose beard bothered her face but felt good on her thighs. It was unusual but possible, she could testify, for a grown man to come without much direct genital stimulation, for instance—
“Yes, completely silent,” Archer said, interrupting Sara’s thought and finally moving the discussion in another direction, away from himself but not explicitly toward anyone else. He wasn’t a great asker of questions. Sara—big on civility, insecure about her current status—disapproved of this but liked not having to answer the customary questions. As a confident man with a putatively Croesan net worth, he was probably used to being the center of attention, even if he wasn’t someone you’d necessarily notice on the subway, or for that matter on an airport shuttle bus with many available seats. His strongest feature, if something below the chin can be called a feature, was his very pronounced Adam’s apple, almost ugly, though again, not to such a Tom Pettyish extreme that you’d necessarily notice it. He was jowly and his hairline was receding, but unlike most of his young-and-balding peers, Lucas for one, he wasn’t keeping his hair cropped, was in fact showing what she hoped was an inadvertent comb-over. His face, in contrast, was wide and innocent, a Boy Scout’s face; looking at him could yield the sort of chronometric confusion one might get before a neo-Gothic building. Maybe a tendency to arouse such confusion united Archer and John? Archer could have found more interesting companions than John, Sara thought, though maybe Archer didn’t want interesting companions; maybe John put him at ease like he nearly did with Sara, or maybe Archer saw John—legitimately working class: his father a pipefitter, his mother a part-time church secretary, his brother reportedly the kind of guy who blows marijuana smoke into the mouths of dogs—as a sartorially assimilationist exotic. The check arrived.
Gemma and Lucas had been getting more tactile over the past hour and decided to return early to the apartment, while Sara, John, and Archer shared a cab to the art gallery. John paid the fare and tipped with what Archer implied was a yokel’s munificence. Archer laughed about the tip as they slalomed through the millers and smokers outside the gallery, John accepting the teasing as if it held only affection. Archer’s full smile was strange and gummy, like an angry horse, and that ugliness probably made his teasing seem crueler than he meant it to be. “It’s no crime to send a taxi driver back to Queens with a few extra dollars,” she said, but by that time the men were filing into the gallery, and either they didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her.
Inside, everything was crowded and cute, like the squeezed rightward letters on a grade-schooler’s title page. She watched Archer and the others drift away from her, or maybe she drifted away from them. She had expected Archer to be handsomer, having envisioned the playboy aristocrat of half-remembered movies. She gave some credence to the terrible idea that the rich are better looking than the middle and lower classes. The exceptions were countless, of course; most members of the lower- and underclasses wouldn’t get the chance to rise no matter how spectacular their beauty, and plastic surgery’s frequent deformation of elderly elites was a great leveler, though obviously not an inheritable one. Maybe Archer wasn’t as rich as John said. There was nothing immoderately swanky about his appearance. He wore jeans that had blued the tops of his canvas sneakers, a button-down shirt the color of avocado flesh, and a parka that he stashed in a corner of the gallery, unconcerned about theft. She watched his loose-limbed movements through the crowd, watched him greet someone with a shoulder-level handshake, low-key but affected, like they were fellow messy-haired indie rappers, their music as white and uneven as salt stains. Archer’s shirt, she noticed again as she pressed into his widening circle (in which John looked ludicrous in his Ronald Reagan getup), was mu
ch too big, definitely not tailored, unless, paying a premium to ward off foppish perfection, he had asked his tailor to duplicate a shirt bought hastily off the rack from a store catering to gutty businessmen. The jeans were Levi’s, though they did seem to be one of the upmarket selvedge reissues. On the right leg there were two bleach drips that might have pushed someone altogether money-blithe toward a new pair. The stains also advertised that from time to time Archer handled bottles of bleach, that he took pride and pleasure in doing things for himself. Near the end of their stay at the gallery (Archer bought two of the dioramas, the same two Sara found most bewitching), she examined the back of his head, staring at it from a distance, the crowd now thinning in sympathy with Archer’s hair, and she wondered if, like a thrifty and suicidal boyfriend she’d had briefly in college, he even served as his own barber.
She didn’t really like him but was thirsty for his approval, the approval he wouldn’t give that “fucking tool” of an actor. She wanted to finish the evening with Archer and John in some quiet bar where she could show that, in addition to being sharp and glib, she could be soft and contemplative. After social outings she often had fantasies of laconism, wishing she had maintained a mysterious but not detached silence interrupted infrequently by blinks of gnomic wit and koanlike wisdom. And often she was quiet and shy, especially at parties, but rarely in small groups or around people who interested her. She wanted to interest them too, after all, and she didn’t have the reputation, beauty, wealth, or power to do so without talking. Maybe once in a while she could arouse curiosity with the sphinxian wonder of her interiority, but more often she would just be thought boring, burdensome, and pudgy, if she was thought of at all. People are sympathetic to the shy, sometimes, but they resent them for making others do all the work. Then again, someone like Archer might welcome any boon to his conversational hegemony.
Saying goodbye, Archer touched John’s back with a force harder than a pat, softer than a slap. Then he hugged Sara gingerly, caressing her back for a few seconds. “It was great to meet you,” he said, wrinkling his forehead, making eye contact, putting the words in a consequential minor key, like he was telling a child not to forget her mittens. In theory she didn’t like that either, but something about it felt good, to be looked at with such passionate intensity, the right phrase, she thought, though one yoked to Yeats’s famous line about what the worst are full of. His eyes were brown and prettier than the rest of his face, and it surprised her to realize that one of the things she was feeling was lust.
That feeling haunted her on her last night in New York, lying guiltily in her little bedroom, listening to John’s de trop words of love and dedication. She didn’t think of Archer while she and John made love, not much, but he returned in force to her thoughts immediately afterwards. She waited five minutes to ask, “So how much money specifically do you think Archer has?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” John said into the semidarkness. “A shitload.” (Again with that.) “In college he got a major allowance. Like, major. I don’t know how much, but it seemed . . .”
“Inexhaustible?”
“Near about. It was tricky at first, ’cause he always wanted to go out to restaurants and concerts and that, or like go to New York for the weekend. And I didn’t have too awful much money. Then midway through freshman year he called his parents. It was cool because he was talking to his mom on the phone, but he was also talking to me—I mean, I was in the room and he was looking at me, and he told her how he’d lucked out with his suitemate, the Idaho one, not the other guy, but that I was broke, and could she maybe send something extra for me.”
“All so the two of you could pursue recreational opportunities on a more equal footing?”
“Yeah, I guess. Just to narrow the gap. I don’t like to feel beholden and all, but, you know, it was really nice of him.”
“Sure, very,” Sara said. From Lucas’s room someone sang in a melancholy falsetto over squelchy dance beats. “Though I suppose you could argue that it was a somewhat wanting act of noblesse oblige, in that if his allowance was really so inexhaustible, he could have given up some of his own money without noticeable deprivation.”
“Well, maybe, but—”
“Petitioning his parents for an extra allotment was just a way to seem thoughtful and openhanded without making any sacrifice whatsoever.”
“That’s pretty harsh. His own money was his parents’ money too, so I don’t really see the difference. Someday his parents will die—I don’t like to say that, ’cause they’re really nice—but someday they will, and he’ll inherit a bit less money because he gave some to me. Or they did.”
She drowsily pretended agreement, though she wasn’t tired, and they both lay together for another quietly wakeful two hours. Then, as if a day passed outside of memory, she was back in her single bed in West Seneca.
June 2011
Standing in the gym’s jump-ball circle, the camp director reached what Karyn hoped was the peroration of his speech about adversity, team-work, and much of his own childhood. Too grudgingly respectful to take out her phone, Karyn instead inspected the remains of Maxwell’s lunch: the sandwich bitten daintily into the shape of Arkansas, the browning apple slices, the wrapper for one of the invariably stale youth-market energy bars she often bought for the last time. She shifted her weight, tried to obscure the pain in her back by focusing on the pain in her knee. Some days she wished she could just be a consciousness floating on cotton balls; other days she wished she could be on codeine. In the car she said, “So how was that?”
“Good,” Maxwell said, meaning the opposite. Questioned further, he explained that he didn’t like his group; the better players were imperious ball hogs, the lesser ones distractible doormats. “This one kid yells ‘Brick!’ every time I get the ball, even though I hardly ever shoot and only one of my misses was a brick miss.”
“He says it just to you?”
“I don’t know.”
She never knew how to advise his responses to minor bullying. A certain cheek-turning sangfroid seemed wise, but she didn’t want him to grow into a knot of stanched resentment. At a different day camp, she had complained when a sexist little homophobe said Maxwell’s shoes were in a “sissy color,” but her intervention, she feared, had succeeded only in making the taunting subtler. “I’ll mention it to the coach,” she said now as they drove into the garage, the side mirror bumping against an unfinished credenza from Jason’s bout with woodworking. “Maybe robotics camp will be better.”
“Maybe.”
The landline was ringing when she turned the back door’s deadbolt. In her work voice: “This is Karyn.”
“Gemma Pitchford, but you know that.”
“I just got in. Can I call you back in an hour?”
“Bated breath.”
While the meat grayed for hamburger mac ‘n’ peas, she ran up to change (drawstring shorts, Miranda Lambert baseball shirt, toe socks), poured a glass of wine from the seventeen- rather than the twelve-dollar bottle, and set up her laptop on the kitchen island, resolved to an efficiency she rarely applied to her nonprofessional life. First she would cut it off categorically with Paul the consultant, who at this moment, conceivably, was reserving a B and B on Lake Winnebago and wondering if he had after all married too young. She tried to formulate a discreet cipher: I think we should keep the system offline, something like that, though of course discussing the HRIS on Facebook would in itself be—
It seemed, however, that he had already unfriended and—she ran a few more tests—blocked her. Beeswax versus an unsinging siren.
She took a moment.
She dumped the peas and pasta into a strainer, mixed them in a plastic bowl with the meat and the packet of powdered cheese, called Maxwell away from the collaborative computer game he was playing over Skype, and closed her laptop screen. She called him again.
“Two minutes.”
Seven minutes later, he took the stool next to hers and raced through his first half-doz
en bites. Karyn was almost finished. “How’d your game go?” she said.
“We could’ve won but Galen rage-quit.”
“Oh.”
Some silence.
“If a genie gave you a million dollars,” he said, “would you wear the same Hammer pants every day for a year?”
“How do you know about Hammer pants?”
“Everyone does.”
That point didn’t seem worth arguing. “I’ve paid to wear dumber things than Hammer pants,” she said.
“So you would? It’s every day,” he stressed. “To work, to church.”
“We don’t go to church.”
“But if we did. Or like to that wedding.”
“How would you feel about a guy driving with us to that wedding?”
“What guy?”
“I’m not exactly sure—I mean, not a hitchhiker or anything; I know his name.”
He shrugged. “And you can’t wash ’em.”
“The Hammer pants?”
“Yeah, ’cause then what are you wearing?”
She sipped her wine. “I’d do it for fifty thou. Less if I knew I wouldn’t lose my job.”
“What if they had swastikas on them?”
“Do I get the money ahead of time?”
“No, after.”
“So I couldn’t just stay inside like a Nazi invalid.” She thought for a moment. “No, not worth it.”
“A billion?”
“Then it would be wrong not to take the money,” she said. “I could help a lot of people.”
“Yeah, like me. You could help me buy stuff.”
“Better to disgrace myself for the greater good. Utilitarianism. Not that disgrace has to enter the—”
His chair honked when he stood up. “Did you know there were swastikas before Hitler?”
“Yes.”
“You could say they were those kind of swastikas.”
“Put your bowl directly in the dishwasher, please.”
She pushed her own bowl aside and opened her screen. Googling Lucas Pope led her to a website, its design clearly guided by thrift, for a badly named line of reusable vinyl bags. The last of the site’s three blog posts was two years old and underpainted with frustration. She didn’t find much else: he, or another Lucas Pope, was quoted in a competently written, poorly reported piece from 2004’s Republican National Convention, and his name turned up on a few old alt-weekly calendar items for DJ gigs in and around Philadelphia. She clicked back to Facebook and paused over his five-day-old friend request. To her mind, accepting his request was the same as agreeing to drive him to Winnipeg, the same as demoting Maxwell to third wheel. Having a child ride shotgun when there was an adult in back would be an affront even to her progressive ideas about natural power.
