by Dylan Hicks
Marion stepped into the room, sat sideways on an easy chair, and lit a cigarette. “Looks like I’ll have my first and last smoke in the same room,” she said. They were in Marion’s former bedroom, Sara was reminded. Marion described how it had been furnished in the fifties and early sixties: the squat bookshelf, the peach vanity, the Japanese tissue-box cover. Then she asked about the Gaitskill book. Few took an interest in Sara’s reading, except sometimes to argue that she was doing it too much or at unsuitable times. “When I read her,” Sara said, “it makes me want to write, to write for people, I mean, because I want to make someone else feel how I feel when I read her.” Marion smiled—not condescendingly—and said she’d felt the same way when she discovered Doris Lessing. It didn’t seem that Marion was saying she’d felt the same way because youthful feelings pass like batons from one generation to the next, but rather that they, Marion and Sara, were really alike, akin in spirit as much as in blood. Marion had even written a novel, she said, or most of one, but had never shown it to anyone, not even to Corinne. “Wow,” Sara said. “But,” Marion advised, “you shouldn’t be so clandestine.” A few days later, with a receptive, sophisticated reader in mind, Sara started working harder than ever on her writing. For her that meant slowly and sedulously, and by the time she had two presentable pieces, Marion was sick. Sending her the stories no longer seemed appropriate, or rather the stories no longer seemed appropriate, too trivial for a dying woman’s time.
Now she heard John entering through the mudroom. They met in the kitchen. His beard was fuller than before and ended in a curling point.
“Whoa!” he said.
“Sorry to ambush you—I’m not ambushing you. My dad asked me to pop in.”
“He did? He was just here, not two months ago.”
“He worries, is all,” she said.
“This about that fall? Like I said, it wasn’t bad. Missed his hip altogether. I just reckoned you should know—Hey, George.”
Her grandfather was coming down the long hallway in a different cardigan, past Chick’s old bedroom and its blanched baseball pennants, past the so-called front door on the side of the house, past the second bathroom and el cuartito, finally to the kitchen. “Sare Bear take you unawares?” he said.
“The more the merrier,” John said.
George glanced toward the fridge and touched his stomach. “Tengo hambre, Juan.”
For dinner John served rosemary chicken, brown rice, and a quinoa salad brightened by cubed cucumbers and gibbous watermelon.
“No bread?” George said.
“There’s rice, Grandpa.”
“Is rice bread now?”
“And quinoa,” Sara said. “If anything, there’s an excess of grains.”
Unfazed, John got up to close the sliding glass doors that looked out on the patio and garden. On his way back to the table, he touched Sara’s shoulder. “Nice cashmere.”
“It’s a blend.”
He sat down, reached over to feel the sleeve, knitted his brow. “Can’t be a blend.”
“John.”
“I’d trust Beau Brummell on this one,” George said.
“How’s the editing and whatnot going?” John asked.
“I’m still making a living. Lucky in this market.”
“Yeah, Archer says it’s a squeeze.”
“Early in the season for watermelon,” George said.
“I can’t wait for Archer’s new one,” John said. “He posted a rave review from Circus the other day.”
“Kirkus.” A slip—Sara’s: she was trying to grow out of these pointless corrections. Also, it wasn’t a rave.
“That’s the one,” John said.
“Was he ‘humbled’?”
“Don’t recall him saying anything along those lines. You’ll be at the wedding, right?”
She sensed that he already knew for certain she would be there. If only he were less pathetic, she could feel better about finding him insufferable. “Yes,” she said.
“This is the wedding I told you about, George.” John’s tone was artificially upbeat.
“That Greek’s wedding?”
“Greek? No, he’s Ukrainian. Half Ukrainian.”
“Early in the season for watermelon. Not too bad, though.”
“Kristen Hanson will be staying here while I’m away.”
“Fine.”
“After dinner,” John said to Sara, “maybe you’d want to take a peek up in the attic at some of your grandma’s old clothes. Some great pieces up there.”
“She had a wonderful eye,” George said.
“There’s a tweed skirt suit with a Givenchy sort of look.”
“I went through that stuff years ago, John. Most of it doesn’t fit me.”
“If there’s something you like, it’d be no trouble for me to let it out ’fore you leave.”
“No thank you.”
“There’s a mess of cool stuff up there, not just clothes.”
He made two more attempts to lure Sara up to the attic, as if he were desperate to reveal—the thought amused her—his new line of laboriously handcrafted bondage apparatuses, though when they’d been together he had never pushed to transgress beyond reverse cowgirl.
The next morning, he organized a “World Series of Parcheesi,” for which Sara tried, reluctantly, to match some of his enthusiasm. George found none of it contagious and seemed to be making deliberately self-destructive moves. “You sure about that one, George?” John said at one point.
George looked at his Bulova. “Very.”
By midafternoon Sara had switched to an earlier flight home. She didn’t know what to report to her father but was beginning to suspect that George was safer in John’s vicinity than John was in hers.
February 2005
A few weeks after Archer stopped into the store but did not order a made-to-measure suit, John called to pin down those jogging plans and was instead invited to Archer’s SoHo condo for Saturday brunch. When John arrived, Archer was sifting through the filing cabinets in his main room’s office partition, filling plastic tubs with old bills, bank statements, and investment reports that someone else would later shred. Brunch was just a bag of bagels. “There a cutting board?” John asked from the kitchen.
“By the microwave.”
John brought Archer a bagel, carrying a kitchen stool with his other hand. The stool’s seat was made out of an old disco LP. “So how’d that essay turn out?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve done,” Archer answered. “I’m setting it aside so I can see it fresh in a few weeks.”
“Smart.” The seat was about as comfortable as an old disco LP. “Let me know if you want Sara’s contact info. She’s a whiz at editing.”
“Yeah, not really my style, but thanks.”
John couldn’t say what “style” referred to there, but he didn’t think it was a cut on Sara. After that night at the gallery and all, Archer had made a point of saying she was cool.
“She back living with Rodney Road Bike?”
“With Lucas? No.” Lucas’s latest bike, despite some snafus with the seat tube-bottom bracket weld, was John’s best and lightest to date, not much more than nineteen pounds when kitted up with two full water bottles. “He’s actually a decent guy,” John said.
“He’s a putz.”
“But no, Sara—’member I told you how she’s staying home for a spell in Buffalo, mapping out a novel or something?”
“Right.”
“We were trying the long-distance thing, but . . .”
“Tricky,” Archer said. He sounded like he had a pencil in his mouth.
After a few beats, John said, “One of the hardest things these past months has just been—just not seeing her.”
“Well, yeah. To miss, I think, is the standard verb.”
“But I mean looking at her. I just really want to see her. I know she’s not beautiful in the usual way—”
“She’s great looking.”
“You thi
nk so? Yeah, ’cause I see her and it’s like I’m struck or smote or—those Bible words.” In fact, the first time John had seen Sara—she was walking tentatively through Balthazar toward the shepherd’s-check sports coat he’d promised to wear—he had actually gasped as he started to take in her doll-like brown eyes, her slightly open mouth, her porcine nose, how her bangs curved like a cluster of parentheses above her dark eyebrows, only one of which showed over her crooked Velma glasses. Maybe he’d hoped she would hear the gasp, though she couldn’t have (gasp too soft, restaurant too loud), and maybe he was unconsciously mimicking the dumbstruck procedures of ladies’ men in bad reruns—but no, he hated that kind of thinking, that phony tough-mindedness that was really just fear. His reaction had been true, instinctive, and not only about her looks. Later, the memory helped convince him that Sara was the one, and that his love for her could withstand severe droughts of reciprocity. “Tell you the truth, I was thinking of moving there.”
Archer raised his head. “To Buffalo?”
“I’m not going to.”
Archer looked down again at a glossy corporate packet. “Buffalo’s where you move from.”
“Or just someplace different. Sam says Detroit’s cool.”
“But he’s another putz. You need to get better at putz recognition. I’m joking but not. Jesus, why do they send me this crap? Anyway, who’s gonna buy thirteen-hundred-dollar suits and custom bike frames in Detroit?”
“Auto executives.” John would never say this to Archer, but he thought it was sad to be from a country that didn’t manufacture its own cars.
Archer chucked a few more sheets into one of the bins. “Well, you could do anything you set your mind to, right?”
“Doubtful.”
“I don’t really mean anything. I always thought—I know it’s not your scene, but I always thought you’d wind up on Wall Street or at Accenture or something like that.”
John had once thought something like that too. Through junior high he’d been an unexceptional student, strong in math but not the type to rouse lavish praise. Back then he was mainly known, and only to a few, as an uncommonly patient builder, first of Lego and papier-mâché mises en scène for his Star Wars figurines, then of model aircraft, and he devoted many more painstaking, steady-handed hours to those pursuits than he did to his homework. If the model didn’t work out, he would destroy it. Eight years younger than his burnout brother, he absorbed early on the immersive pleasures of solitary play, and from the day he was born to the day he and his parents walked in on Archer slouchily thrumming his Martin D-28 in Lionel Hall, he made only one good friend, a prankish but good-souled Jack Mormon named Frank, who moved away suddenly at the start of high school. Soon after that, John started spending more time on his schoolwork. It wasn’t a resolution; it was something he slipped into for comfort, like how people start doing a lot of cleaning or cooking after a divorce. He had a feel for math—maybe nothing prodigious or, as he eventually confirmed, world class, but a feel, and in the middle of ninth grade he was promoted from Algebra 1 to Geometry. He caught up quickly, started to draw energy from bisection, proofs, and summing angles in polygons; when by trig they moved on to solving differential equations using Taylor series expansion, he experienced a kind of high while working through the problems, became taken with the idea that math existed independent of human thought, that it was discovered rather than invented. Mathematical Platonism, this was called. He liked how important that sounded, liked even more the thought that math existed beyond human thought not just in the way other planets existed before we saw and named them, but because it was divine, that it was created by God, or was God. Even the most repetitive plug-and-chug, then, could be a form of communion, a means of being supremely in the moment while partaking of something beyond the world.
To Archer he said, “But I don’t think it matters so much what you do.” He tried to give this philosophical sally an exploratory air, like when you’re testing out whether it’s safe to say something mean about a shared acquaintance.
Archer reached to put an envelope in his to-read tray.
“Whether it’s math or building bikes or picking a sweet shirt-and-tie combo or studying an outside lineman’s toes: is he poised for the pass or for the run? It’s just about concentration, zeroing in, letting the experience take over. Like in school with Heidegger and that hammer or whatever.”
“I feel that sometimes when I’m writing.”
“Exactly, yeah.” John felt bad that his examples had been so self-centered. “Of course.”
“So if it doesn’t matter what you do,” Archer said, “it doesn’t matter where you do it. No need to skulk off to Detroit. But listen, I should bounce. I’m supposed to visit this guy’s studio in”—he looked at his watch—“shit, three and a half minutes.”
“Oh.”
“You can walk with me if you want.”
June 2011
In the front yard of Karyn Bondarenko’s house a Seussian shrub hung over a Little Free Library stocked with mass-market thrillers, kids’ VHS tapes, and a decades-old investment guide. When Lucas carried his last remaining bike one-handed onto Karyn’s dump-site of a porch, she greeted him cautiously, perhaps with second thoughts. She was wearing a black tech shirt and densely branded bike shorts. In an hour and a half, she said after apologizing for the “ridiculous” shorts, she and her son were cycling over to a friend’s house to return a violin. She seemed eager to stress that this familiarizing brunch wouldn’t seep into the afternoon. Lucas couldn’t be sure, but she seemed to glance admiringly at his bike, a pearl-white racer with JOHN ANDERSON stickered on the down tube. A tyro job, if one knew what to look for, but generally one didn’t. The last Lucas had heard, John was out of that business, working as a houseboy for Sara Crennel’s grandfather in some tassel-loafer suburb.
Might this brunch be called a date? Lucas, wobbly after a bad run on OkCupid, didn’t quite see it that way, but he had put some thought, possibly inapparent, into what he’d wear. Karyn’s apology for the shorts indicated that she’d thought about it too, which, as far as the occasion justified semiotic speculation, seemed like a good sign, even if she’d settled on dressing for the day’s next activity in clothes she disliked. Tight clothes, however. He followed her through a dark hallway to the kitchen, explaining that although he’d long dismissed bike shorts as a yuppie affectation, in recent years he’d conceded that they really were more comfortable for long rides. He was chattering.
Karyn lit a burner under a teakettle. It was a sunny day, and soon the kettle was exhaling steam shadows on the white stove’s back-splash. She poured a bowl of bubbly beaten eggs into a pan and turned around to face Lucas while tapping a splintering wooden spoon on her leg. She had severely bleached blond hair, shortish and pulled away from her high, rounded forehead. There was an undercolor of brown roots and some gray at the temples.
“Mine pill, though,” Lucas said. “They pill at the crotch. Yours don’t seem to be doing that.”
She responded briefly in a brow-furrowing timbre.
“It might be a gendered hazard,” he said.
“I’m seeing some pilling on the thighs,” she said, “if you really want to discuss this.”
“Yeah-no, it’s funny—not funny, really, but . . . I first started wearing spandie—I don’t know if Gemma told you, but I’ve been unemployed for a minute.”
“She mentioned it.”
“Yeah. So after I lost my job I bought a pair of the shorts and was biking like forty miles a day, losing all this weight—I found a lot of it last winter—and I’d look down at myself while riding, and I was so amped about the weight and about generally—I was gonna say generally pulling my shit together, but that’s wrong ’cause in a lot of ways I was falling apart. But, I don’t know”—he stressed and pitched up know—“I’d get kind of turned on looking down at my legs, at what seemed like new muscles, hairs poking through the spandex. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I’m not . . . I don
’t think I have strong narcissistic leanings.”
“Are you sure? You might want to take a good look at yourself before deciding that definitively.” They traded variations on the joke. “But I understand what you’re saying.”
“Yeah?” It wasn’t clear if she planned to elaborate.
“I’ve looked in the mirror and been aroused.” She poured orange juice while she talked and didn’t look at him. “I’ve been disgusted too, but I’ve been aroused, once or twice, when I focused on some part of my body and ignored my face.”
“But you—”
“I’m not trawling for face compliments,” she said. “If I think about it, I suppose I’ve looked at my face and imagined leaning in for a kiss, even as an adult, but that—it wasn’t arousal.” At least tonally there was a bespectacled primness to these intimacies that made them more exciting. (Karyn didn’t wear glasses, but Lucas could imagine chunky, rectangular frames slipping down her nose.) “I was only saying that I’ve had to abstract my body to find it arousing.”
“Right”—he pointed at her in a showbiz gesture of agreement—“on the bike it was like you’re saying, like my legs were abstracted from my body. Though that doesn’t make sense since what was so cool was how, I don’t know, incarnate I felt. Later I got self-conscious again about the shorts. Now I probably wouldn’t stop for coffee in them or anything.”
