by Dylan Hicks
Sensing that her intoxication would soon give way to exhaustion, she moved closer to Lucas: “We should go.”
During her second dance, Sara held her phone at her hip, thumbed out a quick one:
Archer Bondarenko @archerbondarenko · 13s
Cue “Crazy in Love.” #justmarried
Lucas crouched in front of his room’s minibar. “Is Maxwell asleep?”
“Probably not quite,” Karyn said. “I told him we were having a drink together.” She thought that would sound straightforward enough without getting too explicit.
“Are we having a drink?”
“Nothing for me.”
He broke the seal on a rectangle of almonds, took a beer, and sat down on the room’s desk chair. When he held out the almonds, she stood up partway and cupped her palm for a small handful.
“Archer wants to read my play,” she said.
“Oh? You’re not gonna let him, are you?”
“Turns out he’s an Incredible String Band fanatic.”
“You think it’s hereditary with you people?”
“Ha.” She looked out at the window’s black nothing, wondered if they should close the curtains. “Ever do the thing, ‘If Bush wins’—or whoever—‘I’m moving to Canada’?”
“Nah. I was always prepared to stick around and not really fight. I used to think the left benefited from a conservative administration, and maybe it does, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
“I should have moved when I was young,” she said.
“You still could, right?”
“We’re settled here—or there. It wouldn’t be fair to Maxwell. I’m not moving.”
“No,” he said. “I’m glad.”
“You could not move with me.”
He stood up and held out his hands for her to stand up too. “Okay, I will,” he said. His kiss smelled pleasantly of beer, and she moaned kind of purrily when he massaged her scalp behind her ears. A love kiss—the first in a long time. Five or ten minutes later he was kneeling over her on the bed, his knee pressed between her legs. They were still dressed but becoming undone, and she was lightly scratching his lower back underneath the band of his underwear. “Not that we need it this second,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t have a jimmy hat.”
She started to laugh. “You’re still saying ‘jimmy hat’?”
“I’m reviving it.”
“I thought you were buying condoms at the gas station. I was all excited in the car, thinking about you in there buying them.”
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“I just stopped for a Diet Pepsi like I said. I didn’t want to seem, like, presumptuously or promiscuously prepared.”
She shook her head. “That’s . . .”
He moved off of her, reached for his boatlike dress shoes. “I’ll go back.”
“No, you know, I—to tell you the truth I don’t think we need one. Maybe we do, I don’t know, but not for birth control.”
“You’re on the pill.”
Just say yes, go on it when you’re back home, and avoid sex for a while. “No,” she said.
“Is this a guessing game?”
If she decided to have the baby, could she pass it off as his? He was presumably familiar with the standard human gestation period. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
A period of nonplussation.
“I only took the test last night. I haven’t seen a doctor. But I’m late and it was positive. Faintly positive, but . . .”
“Huh.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend. It was a work thing—that sounds weird, ‘a work thing.’ It was a consultant from Chicago, just in town for a few days. So, um. If both of us are disease free, we could skip the condom. I’ve always hated them.”
“Yeah, sure, I—”
“Sorry,” she said. “I killed the mood.”
But she hadn’t.
Standing in front of a spectral figure in a late-sixties Richter, Archer talked to a circle of Sunday brunchers about his latest project, The Hangman’s Daughter, “a drama à clef,” he said, “about music, love, countercultures”—he pretended to zip his lips—“but I shouldn’t say more.” Archer sometimes sprang ideas on Sara in this way, though the ideas rarely came with names or other claims to specificity. He hadn’t been this animated in years.
“A play?” Sara said. She tried to smile.
“I’ll leave the taxonomy to the critics.”
Sara said, “You’ll have to categorize—”
“Slow down, bro,” Seth interrupted. “Your new novel’s not even out yet, and you’re already plugging the next thing.”
“I know. This crazy restlessness. I start disowning my work before the ink dries.”
“But I think Seth has a point,” Sara said. She knew her face looked anxious.
Archer’s mother turned to Sara. “He was always like this,” she said confidentially. “So hard on himself, never satisfied.”
“Yes,” Sara said. She looked down a wide hallway in which many hockey pucks were encased in glass.
Archer’s mother shook her head proudly. “But that’s the price.”
Parsimoniously, incautiously, they decided not to fill up in Winnipeg and later found themselves coasting a good distance west of the highway to Hamilton, North Dakota (no filling station), then to Cavalier. For twenty miles the fuel gauge warned that they had enough gas left in the tank to travel less than one mile, and Karyn joked that they were living out Zeno’s paradox, which she had never found interesting or intelligible. When they made it to town, they learned that it was the last day of the Pembina County Fair. It seemed wrong not to use their detour as an excuse to attend.
They parked in a patch of dirt not far from the carnie camp and made their way to a white clapboard ticket stand. The outdated rides and games looked photogenic against the azure backcloth, but Karyn thought they would look trite if actually photographed. One of the rides, Hit Parade, featured elongating mirrors and air-brushed portraits of pop stars who were either unrecognizable or dead. She expected the fair’s prices to cater to small-town thrift, but, if anything, her sheet of tickets paid for fewer sick-making rides in Cavalier than it would have in Saint Paul. Most of the carnies sounded Southern, she noticed.
While Maxwell built up speed in one of the Spider cars, Lucas gently pulled Karyn a few more feet away from the small crowd of onlookers. “I liked this ride when I was a kid,” he said.
It didn’t seem like what he had wanted to say.
“I know this is too soon,” he said after a breath, “but I want you to know that I can be there for you, if you want me.”
“I’m not following.”
He turned his gaze back to the ride. “Whatever you decide with the pregnancy. Like, if you need someone to go to the clinic with you. Or.”
It was an odd place to broach the subject, but perhaps as private as anywhere. “I might want to have a medical rather than a surgical abortion,” she said, trying to keep her intentions uncertain.
He inclined his head thoughtfully.
“They have pills now.”
“Oh, right.”
“Though I’d still need to go to a clinic,” she said, “and it would still be hard. Like a miscarriage, at least physically. I don’t know, maybe I’ll have it done surgically. Either way it’d be nice to have support.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. He nodded toward Maxwell. “He doesn’t seem to be having much fun.”
“No, he really doesn’t. I think it’s just disappointment, though, not nausea.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m not always the most perceptive parent. I was never one of those moms who could recognize the cry of her baby coming from an unseen room full of dozens of potentially crying babies.”
“Something you had an opportunity to test?”
“Once in church.”
“I think bat moms can do that kind of thing, in caves with billions of bats.”
She laughed
. “Not billions.”
“But a lot.”
“Last year I was watching Maxwell’s first game of the season. I didn’t know his jersey number yet. So I studied the players, thinking that of course I knew the contours of his body, the quirks of his gait. Plus I was pretty sure what position he’d be playing. I watched the wrong kid till halftime.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “But all that padding.” They followed the ride’s spin. “Or even—again, I know this is weird—but even if you wanted to have the baby,” he said. “I just want you to think of me as someone who could be around.”
“I am thinking of you that way.”
The ride slowed to a stop. Maxwell stumbled out, trotted behind a bush, and threw up.
August 2011
Karyn’s room overlooked the playground in Union Square, where kids were embroiled in a game of king of the hill on what looked like a giant overturned mixing bowl. Archer had paid for her hotel and airfare, and with those expenses covered, she had sprung for Lucas’s ticket. She bit into one of the room’s complimentary Granny Smiths as Lucas emerged from the bathroom, a towel wrapped under his belly. His walk was almost his dance. Before they left for New York, he had received a small order from Alan Motrinec, and he had just now had sex. “When do we need to leave?” he asked.
“Half hour?”
He zipped up his cargo shorts. It was hot outside, but she wished he would wear pants. On the wall was a photograph of a miniskirted woman diving into the sunroof of a vintage European subcompact. “You okay?” Lucas said.
“Yeah.” She sipped her slightly oleaginous bottled water, also complimentary, and let it pool for a few seconds in her lips. “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.”
“About,” he prompted.
She had only told him that Archer might talk to a producer. “The play.”
“Are there decisions to make?”
She paused to consider Lucas’s status in relation to the nondisclosure, whether, contractually or otherwise, he should know everything or just what he already knew. “There’s no harm in hearing me out,” Archer had said less than five minutes after she got to his apartment, “and I can’t say anything until you sign this.” She was confused, she signed. He asked her again if Lucas was the only other person who had read the play. She said yes. He told her he was suffering from writer’s block—“severe,” he said, though Karyn didn’t see how severity could enter the picture on the dawn of his latest novel’s publication. The last book had depleted him, he explained, if not for good at least for a long time to come, and until reading The Hangman’s Daughter—he kept calling her untitled play by this new name—he had thought about quitting. The Hangman’s Daughter, he said, was what he’d always wanted to write; reading it was like coming across something he’d done long ago and put away, where everything and nothing seemed familiar. She was trying to make out the meaning of this preamble when he offered her what sounded like three hundred thousand dollars. He repeated himself: three hundred thousand for the play, plus another three hundred thousand if—and he was optimistic—it were produced at any professional level. “Three hundred thousand dollars for the rights to the play,” she said, not quite as a question. “For the right,” he answered, “to present the play, or the film, or whatever it becomes, as my work.” The money could be wired as soon as tomorrow. Lucas would have to sign a confidentiality agreement too and would be offered a much smaller figure. She promised to get back to Archer soon. Glory, she thought as Archer saw her to the elevator, was an even baser motivation for art than greed; therefore, handsomely compensated anonymity would be a step closer to purity. She pictured writing on weekday mornings, the mortgage paid off, a year in Africa working on clean water or something like that, something that would do some good for the world while boosting Maxwell’s appeal to an upper-tier college, from which he would graduate like a debtless blue blood. Silly to pass that up to avoid a sellout that few people would decry and only three people would know about. Who even used the word sellout anymore?
“I guess not,” she told Lucas while watching a boy raise his arms in triumph atop the mixing bowl. “It’s just, I worry I’ll screw it up. I worry this is my last chance to get it right, that doors are closing.” Not ready to lay out the present dilemma, she settled for this reiteration of how she’d felt on and off for years.
“Torschlusspanik?” Lucas said, or a word recognizably close. He finished buttoning his shirt and stood behind her at the window.
“I don’t want to be this old and still not know what I want to do with my life.”
“Maybe if you knew what you wanted to do with your life,” he said, rubbing the knobbiest vertebra leading up to her neck, “it wouldn’t be your life. You said before how you like uncertainty and all that.” He pushed both palms up the sides of her nape. “Like I’ve been thinking, all my regrets, all the stuff I wish I’d done differently, it’s really just me wishing I’d been someone else.”
“Mmm, a little higher, please.” Massages like this were best because they were always ending; all you could do was concentrate on each last instant of pleasure. During a long, hired massage, she would get caught up in cost-benefit analyses, worrying that she would fall asleep or that too much time would be given over to chakra rituals or the flipping of pan-flute cassettes.
“But I’m not going to do that anymore.”
“That’s smart,” she murmured, not remembering what he was going to stop. Then she thought, Probably Archer would be willing to pay more.
Sara walked down to the bookstore’s basement and found a seat in the fourth row. The reading was scheduled to start three minutes ago, and the crowd still wasn’t one. It was the book’s second and less spectacular New York event; at the first, there were projections of Jessica Kim’s photographs as well as alcohol, a pensive rock band, and more attendees, including an honest-to-God movie star. Here she recognized a few seminotables: Archer’s agent, a midlist novelist, and the lit blogger and podcaster Joshua Kehr. Gemma turned from the front row to see how things were filling in, waved at Sara, then at someone in the back. Sara waited a few seconds to turn her own head. She groaned internally when she spotted John, unexpected and unwelcome, looking like he’d woken up on the wrong side of the park bench. He didn’t seem to take in her fiercest look of admonition. She had told him she was sorry, that their reunion wouldn’t extend beyond the wedding party. This past week had provided a respite from his calls and texts, but maybe he’d only wanted to quiet the stage for his entrance as stalker.
A bookseller tapped the microphone, began announcements.
Karyn had made up her mind by the time she and Lucas got to the bookstore twenty-five minutes before the reading. Perhaps she had made up her mind in Archer’s apartment and had just needed an afternoon to reconcile her decision with her ideals. She wanted to whisper her answer in Archer’s ear, but she couldn’t find him and figured that would be imprudent anyway. She told Lucas she needed to call Maxwell, stepped outside to the narrow sidewalk, and spent a minute or so watching passersby. It was a good spot to feel bad about the decisions you’d made regarding sunglasses. She’d wait till spring to buy a new pair and enjoy for now the fruits of this afternoon’s splurge: the unconscionably expensive Jason Wu purse, the dominatrix-like zippered boots she’d kept on that afternoon in the many-mirrored hotel room. Archer answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he said.
“At the bookstore. Outside it.”
“I’m two blocks away.”
“Have a sec?” she said.
A stretched-out yes.
“I talked to my friend about that painting she wants to sell,” she said. The code had occurred to her only a minute ago; she hadn’t quite worked it out. “She really appreciates your advice, but she says that since the painting has, you know, such sentimental value for her, she’d only want to let it go for five up front and another five in the event of an intermediary sale.”
A few heartbeats of silence.
&nb
sp; “Archer?” She looked at the phone to see if the call had been dropped. “You still there?”
“. . . could work out,” he was saying. “Maybe if you don’t mind carrying on as your friend’s representative, we could meet over breakfast tomorrow, hash out a few last things.”
