by Dylan Hicks
“Or wear them for brunch,” she said.
“They’re unpardonably incorrect brunch attire.” His attempt at an across-the-pond accent foundered somewhere around Bermuda. Karyn hmm’d, amusedly, he hoped. She seemed able to acknowledge that something was sort of funny without laughing, as you might when watching an episode of Mike & Molly on an airplane. Another possibility was that she didn’t find Lucas even sort of funny, and her smile was an attenuated version of sociable laughter. “Gemma says you’re a lawyer?” he said.
“No, that’s the other Karyn-with-a-y Bondarenko, a public defender from Pittsburgh. Weird, I usually show up higher than she does on Google.”
“Search is localized, though. Maybe you’re only winning in the Twin Cities.”
“Damn, I never thought of that.” The Twin Cities Karyn Bondarenko explained that she was an employee-benefits specialist for a large retailer.
“So, talking to insurance people and stuff?” he said.
“I’m on the phone with vendors a fair amount, yeah. It’s a lot of, you know, helping someone go on short-term disability, sorting out compliance issues with the FMLA.”
“That’s the Salvadoran guerilla outfit?”
“Family and Medical Leave Act.”
“I took a Latin American history class in college.”
“Wanna give me a hand with these?” She held out two plates.
It was a small dining room with one turbid window and a built-in cabinet, behind whose glass doors there was little but aging phone books and a monster doll handmade, Lucas learned, by a neighborhood artist with only one name. “I gave it to Maxwell for Christmas,” she said. “It was the year of my divorce, and I hadn’t really figured out presents, even though I’d been given a list and shopping could hardly be more convenient for me.”
“And you must get a discount, right?”
“Yes.” Pause. “I got it for him on Christmas Eve at this ultragroovy gift shop where I kept buying totally wrong things just so I’d have something.” She interrupted herself to call Maxwell downstairs. In a quiet voice and while listening for her son’s footsteps she said, “He was sweet, tried to be grateful. But it was dismal.”
“Fuck.”
“That same year his dad bought him a Wii.”
Shortly after Maxwell came to the table, Lucas asked about the fantasy game responsible for the dissemination of so many cards and dice throughout the first floor. Several minutes later he wished the boy were slightly more afflicted with the mumbling taciturnity that often marked prepubescent responses to strange adults. Alongside the eggs there were fat slices of wheat toast, microwaved vegetarian bacon, hard smiles of cantaloupe, and very good coffee. “Oh, that’s cool,” Lucas said to Maxwell about a particular card’s complicated properties.
“Well, no, that’s bad,” he said, his face showing a mix of frustration and embarrassment.
“No, yes, bad. It’s confusing for me,” Lucas said with a surge of affection for Maxwell, though he didn’t see himself as the type who had to bruise someone’s feelings to fall for them.
“I’m sorry,” Karyn said, “Gemma didn’t tell me what kind of work you’ve done.”
“I’m a public defender from Pittsburgh. No, I—well, I was working in banks. For a while in New York. Implementing marketing collateral, if that sounds like English to you.”
“Sure.”
“Then my dad got sick, so I came back to Mipliss to be closer to my folks, and without really trying to I got another bank job. Then the recession hit and . . . yeah. Now I’m in a What Color Is Your Parachute? phase.”
Maxwell nonverbally asked his mother to elucidate the reference.
“It’s a book for people trying to get jobs as parachutists,” she said. The sound of her voice had lightened now, though there was still something attractively serrated about it.
Lucas: “The metaphor is . . . do you remember?”
“It’s, if you can work out what color your metaphorical parachute is . . . no, I can’t remember.” She turned to Maxwell. “But it’s about matching a career to your talents and interests. Like for you, your ideal career probably isn’t to be a concert violinist, since you don’t seem to be interested in playing the violin.”
“I’m interested.”
“Not in practicing.”
“I would be if I didn’t suck so bad.”
“That’s . . . I don’t even—”
“I feel you, though,” Lucas said, holding a piece of half-eaten bacon like a stumpy pointer. “It’s like, people are always trying to make ice cream or pop or whatever at home, and that shi—that stuff is never as good as store-bought.”
“I’m not sure I see the connection,” Karyn said.
“Just that not every labor is justified.”
She laughed, a slightly mocking laugh, he feared. Already pegged as a bumbler. “You might want to strike school counselor from your list of career prospects,” she said.
“Yeah, no, you should definitely stick with the violin,” he said to Maxwell. “You could be the next, uh, Itzhak Perlman.”
“Or Nero,” she said.
He had so far asked two questions about her job. His goal in situations like this was five; he sometimes pictured hash marks in his head. “So are employees constantly asking you the same things about, like, their 401(k)s?”
“Well, when I was a rep, they were, but now I’m not so much on the frontline.”
“You’re more management now?” he said.
“Not management, just the second line. The reps will come to me if they can’t figure something out, and I deal with employees when something gets escalated.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff no one pays attention to till there’s a problem at the pharmacy. Or someone dies and I have to deal with the family about life insurance.” She forked the last of her eggs on a corner of toast. “It’s nice of you to take an interest,” she said, “but it kind of bores me to talk about work.”
“Oh, sure, it’s—”
“I don’t mean to sound crabby.”
“S’all good.” He adjusted his posture to relieve the pressure from his jeans. For a few weeks he’d been wearing the pair with the thirty-six-inch waist instead of the thirty-sevens in hopes that the discomfort would be motivating. Maxwell began noisily rolling one of his many-faceted dice on the table.
“To tell the truth,” Karyn said, “I sometimes miss talking about work. One of the things about being married is—well, this isn’t always true, is it?—but hopefully you’re with someone who wants to hear the details of your dumb day. Like the exciting thing this month is that there’s a new guy who’s a pig in the kitchen.”
“He makes sexist remarks and stuff?” Lucas said, not really confused.
“He leaves food in the sink, crumbs on the table. I sent out a group e-mail but nothing’s changed.”
“This kid at robotics camp leaves food everywhere,” Maxwell said. “He hides it.”
“Maybe he’s hungry,” Lucas said.
“I seriously don’t think he’s hungry,” Maxwell said.
“Are you saying he’s fat?” Lucas said.
“No.”
“It’s something hungry people do,” Lucas said. “Hide food.”
“He has mental health,” Maxwell said.
Lucas asked for clarification.
“He told me, ‘I have mental health, FYI,’ and then ran away.”
“He means mental-health problems,” Karyn said.
“Yeah, ’cause mental health is a good thing,” Lucas said. “Or neutral.”
“May I be excused?”
After Maxwell finished his clomping ascent of the stairs, Lucas figured it was time to say “great kid” or something to that effect. Instead he said, “I have mental health, FYI.”
“Yeah, me too,” Karyn said.
“Not serious, though. Like I’m off all the meds.”
Without sarcasm: “Good for you. My boss went off her Celexa a few month
s ago, and I really hope she goes back on.”
“She talks to you about that stuff?”
“God no, it’s just information I have access to.”
“Oh, right.”
“Something of a perk,” she said.
“For me—probably for your boss it was the wrong move—but for me, I didn’t like how the pills were flattening and maybe controlling me. Or the thought that I’d let doctors and pharmaceutical marketers convince me that I had a medical condition, as opposed to just being sad sometimes in the regular way.”
“Or sad sometimes because we live in a depressing society.”
“And the pills are just getting us to accept a situation that’s more fucked up than we are sick.” It was a less articulate version of something he’d read.
“Well put,” she said.
“I felt trapped, you know, ’cause when I told my therapist I was feeling good and wanted to go off the meds, she said, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
“Therapists should stick to the clichés of their field,” Karyn said.
“I mean, she didn’t literally say that. Then a few years later when I explained that I was still on the meds but depressed, she advised me to up the dosage or switch to a different drug. I couldn’t stand to be part of that anymore.”
“They seem to help me.”
“Plus I lost my insurance.”
Karyn laughed again, this time a snorty, Bugs Bunny laugh. Lines fanned from her eyes like plumage. Lucas was trying to make out how old she was. A good seven to nine years older than he was, he guessed. But beautiful, beautiful in the way his wife would be beautiful if he were seven to nine years older and long married, married so happily that his wife would be more beautiful to him than ever, and when they went out together he would be proud of her beauty, which would contain and erase all the ways she’d looked before. He pictured holding her hand at a funeral.
She said, “It’s not what I wanted.”
“What isn’t?”
“A lot of things, but you were asking about my job, and I’m sorry I shot you down back there when you were just being nice.”
“No worries.”
“It’s a good job and I’m lucky to have it, but it’s not what I wanted,” she said. “I used to like how concrete it was, how there was an answer for everything, and if the answer was no, then it was no. Outside of work, most of the questions I’m interested in are unanswerable. That makes me sound so metaphysical.” She scraped something off the table with her fingernail. “But maybe I prefer uncertainty and ambiguity to certainty and clarity. Keats’s negative capability, which I’m probably calling on just to dignify my ignorance. Sometimes the whole world’s a mystery to me.”
“Word.”
“Even the simplest mechanical operations.” She picked up her last scrap of toast. “How a toaster works.”
“A toaster?”
“But there are other, more complicated appliances.” She filled her lips with air but didn’t sigh. “Back in the Mesolithic I thought about going to law school.”
“Inevitably,” he said.
“Maybe I should have. Then I could be an unsatisfied lawyer.”
“Hey, there’s still time to pursue all sorts of unsatisfying second careers.”
She pressed her fingers into her cheekbone. Throughout the morning she’d been touching her face, even while preparing the food. “There’s a German word,” she said, “Torschlusspanik, ‘gate-closing panic.’ You see that the unending possibilities you imagined when you were young weren’t in fact unending. You freak out.”
“Midlife crisis, you mean?”
She shrugged. “I suppose that’s all I mean. Trying to skirt cliché through borrowed idioms must be a symptom of midlife crisis.”
“If it ain’t broke . . .”
Through the window a chickadee called in two notes like a rusty swing set.
“Sorry,” she said. “I feel weird.”
“I’m enjoying it—I mean, not enjoying your feeling weird.”
Another nasal laugh. “When I was younger I thought I’d do something more creative and intellectual, or something demonstrably beneficial, something for social justice. So many things have pissed me off in my lifetime—welfare reform, the War on Drugs, the erosion of reproductive rights, the government’s fucking anemic response to climate change—and I’ve done so little in response; I mean, talk about anemia: a few rallies, a few contributions, sporadic volunteerism. In fact I’ve often felt obligated to vote for people who’ve enacted or enforced the very policies I disdain! That’s a real failure on my part, and every time I read something that fires me up to change, to really do something, I put things off a few days till I have more time. Then weeks become months, years.”
“Most of us have failed in that way.”
She dimpled the left corner of her mouth. “Anyway, I saw myself doing something that used more of my skills, not that I’m always sure what those skills are.”
“Yeah, that’s my Achilles—Achilles heel probably isn’t right, but—as a kid I was led to believe I was exceptional. Not like off-the-hook exceptional, but, you know.”
“I think that’s what they say to most kids,” she said.
“Do they, though?”
“No, you’re right. I should say it more. Maxwell, you’re exceptional.” He was out of earshot.
“So I’ve carried that around for the longest, this idea that I’d do something noteworthy.”
“That you would?” she said. “Like it was destiny?”
“Or that I could.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“I’m not. And now I think my desire to be exceptional, like be a famous DJ or a great artist or an entrepreneur, I think it’s the same as my desire to be tall.”
“You’re not short,” she said. “Yeats was around forty when he started writing most of his greatest poems.”
“Was he? That’s good to know.”
“Not that his earlier work is unpopular or without interest.”
“He wrote plays too, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I haven’t read those.”
“I had an idea once for a screenplay,” he said. “More an idea about a screenplay than an idea for one. Three Times Courtney, starring Lauren Ambrose and Mekhi Phifer.”
“You got as far as casting?”
“I had some names in mind. I was thinking: commercial but fairly low budget, and about working-class people. I have this thing about romantic comedies—not a thing, really, I just like them. So I thought I could write one.”
“And did you?”
“Part of one, yeah. I probably spent too much time trying to get the formatting down. I don’t know how much you know about screenwriting, but it’s very precise: the formatting, the structure, everything. Like your climax is s’posed to happen on a specific page.”
“Ugh.”
“Well, it’s just about mastering form.”
“I see these action movies with Maxwell, and my interest always decreases as the action accelerates.”
“But that’s about, you know, combat fatigue, the tedium of CGI heroics and destruction, where everything is possible so nothing matters; it’s not about story templates. Probably the movies you like climax on the prescribed page too.”
“Which page is it?”
“I can’t remember. My script was so boring, I never got to that page. If it was boring me, it was bound to bore everyone else, right?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“Though a minute ago you said you were bored talking about your job, but I wasn’t bored listening to you. My problem, I decided, was that I like romantic comedies, I’ll surrender to them, but part of me still feels superior to even the cleverest, craftiest ones. Like I know I’m incapable of writing something Deep and Significant, but still I think I’m too good to write something frothy and formulaic and bighearted that would make people happy.”
“I bet a lot of froth
y screenplays are written through those same anxieties.”
“But I think for things to really work, you have to be, just, pro-froth,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like Hollywood’s clamoring for proletarian romcoms by unknown midwestern screenwriters.”
She seemed to concur.
“No, you’re supposed to say, ‘You won’t know ’less you try!’”
“No, I think you were right to throw in the towel,” she said. “Not every labor is justified.”
“A great philosopher once said.”
“More coffee?”
“I’m good.” He looked into the living room, wondered if they might sit awhile on the couch.
“So, I haven’t spelled this out,” she said, “but yes, you’re welcome to join us on the road to Winnipeg.”
“Thank you.”
“The Road to Winnipeg, one of the less beloved Hope-Crosby pictures.”
“Criminally underrated.”
“Should be an interesting weekend,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t really know Archer.”
“I’m not sure how knowable he is.”
“Huh. He’s so open in his writing,” she said. She asked if Lucas had read any of his work.
“I’ve gotten a feel for it. I read one of his essays. It was about jerking off.”
“I read that one too, part of it, and the one about Arkansas Bob. And I just finished his first novel.”
“That’s the amateur-Canadian-art-thieves thing?”
“Yeah. It’s good. Light, but charming.”
“A friend of mine was kind of working for him,” he said.
“Yeah? Working for him how?”
“She was his research assistant, I’m pretty sure, and she proofread his manuscripts.” Lucas would struggle mightily to feel sympathy for Archer, but if he were to, it would be over having to suffer Sara’s proofreading. It had taken him several years to forgive her uninsightful and infuriatingly pedantic notes to his MFA stories (“if distilled in the United States, use ‘whiskey’; if in Scotland, ‘whisky’”). To Karyn he said, “Maybe she’s still doing it. We mostly lost touch. But she’s like a walking Chicago Manual of Style, and supposedly he’s a bad grammarian, or dyslexic or something.”
“Really? He seems so elegant.”
