Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  “Well, not great as in terrific and we’re going to be opening another branch, but not bad.”

  Marcus had finished wiping the plates and rinsing them off. He took a dish towel from a rack above the sink and began drying them. He didn’t notice he was using enough force to wipe off the glaze. “Any chance you’re going to be able to support the family with what you’re making?” It was taking all his effort to make himself not sound as if he was baiting her.

  “That wasn’t the plan,” she said. “We never …” He stiffened at her use of the word we when discussing the store. It was always we and never I. He knew she believed that by using we she could make him feel complicit and so, in her view, less inclined to question how Ripcord was doing. “We never talked about the store supporting the family. The plan was that it would contribute, right?”

  “Yes, right.” Marcus understood that he had not performed due diligence before endorsing Jan’s idea of opening a clothing boutique. Had he encouraged her in a more practical pursuit, they would not be engaged in this exchange. “But there’s a slight …” Having not yet arrived at a plan for imparting this information, he hesitated.

  “A slight what?”

  “How would you feel about moving to China?”

  “Excuse me?”

  From the way she looked at him, Marcus thought he might as well have asked her if she wanted to hold a séance, or go hot-air ballooning. Then he realized, given that the only lead-in he’d managed before posing an unmistakably epic question was a meal of Chinese takeout food, his query did have the quality of a non-sequitur. “Roon is transferring the manufacturing of Wazoo Toys there, and he asked me if I wanted to run the operation.”

  “In China?” The planes of her face coalesced into a portrait of stupefaction.

  “I told him I’d have to discuss it with you.”

  He watched and awaited some kind of response, but she said nothing for several moments. Marcus was pleased that Jan was not the type to get hysterical. He remembered the time Nathan had fallen down the stairs as a two-year-old and his incisor had punctured his cheek. They had rushed him to the hospital, where he was placed in what amounted to a tiny straitjacket, then strapped to a gurney and operated on by a solicitous female ER doctor from Poona, India. Jan was with their son for every moment of this, maintained eye contact with him at all times, and comforted him in his distress, but Marcus nearly fainted and was greatly relieved when one of the nurses gave him a sedative and told him to lie down on a nearby bed.

  Removing a pitcher of iced tea from the aging refrigerator, Jan poured herself a glass, took a sip, and looked at Marcus levelly. “Do you want to move there?”

  He took a deep breath and said “I don’t know.”

  She did not immediately respond. Instead, she nodded her head slowly, appearing to process this information. “You don’t know? Really? So you might want to move to China?”

  “Yes. I might. I’m not saying I do. I’d like to think I’m someone who could, you know, do that. I’m taking the idea out for a test drive.” He planed his hand through the air in front of him, miming the movement of a car.

  She suddenly exploded. “Are you insane, Marcus? China? What am I supposed to do in China? And Nathan? And my mother? And the dog? What is our family going to do in China?”

  “Roon offered to relocate us. There’s an American school, and he said he’d put your mother on my health insurance.” He presented this last bit of information triumphantly, as if to say: See? I’m not a complete fool.

  “What if you refuse to go?”

  “I don’t have a job.”

  “Roon owns lots of companies. He didn’t offer you anything else?”

  “No.”

  “After fifteen years, this is how he treats you? That asshole! How can he do this to us? You’re supposed to be his friend!” Marcus tried to calm her down, but all she could say was “Fuck him.” A minute of complete silence followed, during which Jan drained her entire glass of iced tea in one continuous gulp. “I wish we could go into business together.”

  “You and me?”

  “Wouldn’t it be great? I’m getting kind of tired of being in business with Plum. She’s talking about having a baby.”

  “With who?”

  “A turkey baster. As part of an art project. It’s so insane, I can’t even talk about it.”

  To Marcus, the idea of Plum having a child was nearly as absurd as the prospect of their moving to China. He was glad she was not his problem. A clarinet melody drifted downstairs. Nathan was trying to play a song they had heard on the radio while driving to school that morning. Every third note squeaked and it sounded terrible. Marcus listened for a moment. He knew how much he would eventually miss that sound.

  “This China thing, Marcus … is not going to happen. You can get another job.” Then she kissed his cheek and left him alone in the kitchen.

  Plum and her ex-husband, Atlas Boot, had lived together in the west San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Reseda until the day she read one of his private e-mails and learned that he was screwing a foot model he’d met in an Internet chat room. Now she lived there by herself. Reseda was a quiet place where neat green lawns surrounded modest homes and children rode bicycles down sun-baked streets. Plum hated it. She wanted to live someplace artier, more combustible, but they’d gotten a good deal on the house and it had been awarded to her in the settlement.

  Plum had turned half of the garage into an art studio, and she spent most evenings out there. Just before nine o’clock on Monday night, she ran her hands down her loose black pants and looked around the room. Although Plum had trained as a painter, she now saw that everything vivifying in the art world was taking place off the easel. That this school of thought had had a gray beard fifty years ago did not matter to her. Perception was what mattered, and the art world pooh-bahs who issued these aesthetic fiats (Magritte down! Schwitters up!) had decreed painting over. So Plum set her course: conceptualism or bust. Unfortunately, while Plum was not without talent as a painter, the ability to craft provocative “installations” continued to elude her. It was one thing to create something from a combination of old hubcaps and cell phones; it was another thing entirely for it to have meaning. Now she was surrounded by an accumulation of flotsam gleaned during her travels around town: several broken clock radios and toasters, a freezer door, a bicycle wheel, a large plastic dollhouse, five dolls, three mannequins, a bird-cage, bottles of various sizes and shapes, a couple of old board games, a tattered sports jacket, a moose head with one antler she had purchased at a garage sale, and two bags of cement. Over the past several months she had desultorily tried to conjure something compelling out of the bric-a-brac she’d accumulated, but what to make? She had toyed with the dollhouse metaphor and had spent a few days encrusting the one she’d salvaged with small appliance parts, intending to populate it with old Barbies. But eventually she saw this as hackneyed and the whole Ibsen-by-way-of-Radio-Shack statement struck her as trite. She had considered gluing feathers to male and female mannequins, then placing them on perches in a custom-built birdcage. That piece had progressed as far as the pasting of the feathers, but, try as she might, Plum was not able to get the feathered mannequins to remain on the perches. Before this engineering dilemma was surmounted, she had been undone by the realization that the birdcage was no more original than the dollhouse. A defining metaphor continued to hover just beyond her grasp. Undaunted, Plum would spend her free time puttering in the studio, drinking English breakfast tea and reflecting on her artistic forebears. Edvard Munch had been miserable, yet he’d managed to wring immortal work from the blackest depths of Scandinavian depression. She considered herself to be at least as unhappy as Munch, if slightly less talented, and she wished she could blame this impasse on her physical surroundings. Plum liked to believe that, turned loose in the land of the fjords rather than stuck in Reseda, she too might conjure up something mysterious and heartbreaking. But down deep she knew that that wasn’t it at all.
Plum was terrified that she had run dry. Rather than being the ingredients of a great artistic leap forward, the things she gathered remained junk in a garage in the San Fernando Valley.

  Looking away from this pile of rubbish, so recently imbued with aesthetic promise, but now forlorn and useless-seeming, Plum noticed her dog-eared copy of the poems of Paul Verlaine on a bookshelf, where it was gathering dust among a pile of old art magazines. Picking it up, she opened it and began to read:

  The long sobs

  Of the violins

  Of autumn

  Wound my heart

  With a monotonous

  Languor.

  She immediately closed the book. In her youth, Plum had been drawn to artists who trafficked in emotional pain. Her experience of them as a young person allowed the suffering they elucidated to occur at a romantic distance. When she encountered them a few years later, through a scrim of disappointment and regret, they became too real for her. Sobbing violins of autumn were one thing when you were lying around your college dorm room eating mushrooms and listening to Patti Smith. They were something entirely different when experienced years later in Reseda. Plum thought about whether or not having a baby was really going to make her feel better. She was desperate to try something new. The idea of reinvention held great appeal, and she understood that a baby would shake things up. Right now, though, it was one more idea fighting for space with sundry others, and none of them was adding up to anything. Plum was aware that trying to get any work done in her present state of mind would only make her feel worse, so she went back into the house.

  She leaned against the doorjamb that separated the kitchen from the living room, listened to the hum of the dishwasher, and ran her finger along the soft leather belt she was wearing. When she realized what she was doing, it made her remember Dr. Pradip Singh, D.D.S., since he had begged her to whip him with it. Dr. Singh enjoyed having his bare bottom flagellated, and Plum found the act of administering mild corporal punishment curiously titillating. Once, while striking him a little too forcefully, she had been so transported that a hematoma was raised before she realized he was yelling Costco, their agreed-upon safe word. Other than their taste in sex play, the two of them didn’t share much common ground. She didn’t miss the amorous dentist tonight. Plum just wanted to thrash someone.

  Marcus sat at the desk in his converted garage, enduring the increasingly challenging task of paying the monthly bills. His sixty-thousand-dollar salary was no longer enough to cover expenses. The mortgage was eighteen hundred a month, he had two car payments, and along with all the other bills there was Nathan’s phalanx of tutors, his educational therapist, and his private clarinet teacher (every child in the Winthrop Hall Middle School band was required to take private lessons). They had drawn a fifty-thousand-dollar home-equity loan two years earlier. Servicing that cost five hundred a month, and the principal was nearly gone. Marcus was very conscious of the hole they were in—it was a crater. He looked up from a four-thousand-dollar invoice for the new roof when he heard his wife’s voice asking him if he was coming to bed soon. Jan was standing at the office/garage door, dressed in sweat-pants and a voluminous wool sweater, a sympathetic look in her soft hazel eyes. She walked over to him and began rubbing his shoulders. “You’re carrying a lot of tension up there. You should get a massage.” This was a surprise, coming from Jan. The concept of paying someone to work trained hands over a sore body was out of place in their world. Massages were an indulgence that required disposable income they did not possess.

  Marcus glanced at the pile of bills, which seemed to have magically grown since he’d last looked at it, and realized he’d done nothing for nearly an hour. And his neck was stiff. He would love a massage. He turned and looked up at his wife. “Hey, why don’t you give me a massage?”

  “Tomorrow night, I promise.” He tried to hide his disappointment. He didn’t think she’d actually give him a massage (what had he done to earn one, after all?), but he’d been hoping. “I want to talk to you about something,” she said, looking away for a moment. Marcus wondered how bad this was going be, I want to talk to you rarely portending anything good. “I’m sorry about the store.”

  This was a shock. “What do you mean?”

  “I think maybe it was a bad idea. There’s nothing happening on Van Nuys Boulevard. Right now we’re the gentrification, Plum and I …” She hesitated again. Marcus hoped she wasn’t counting on him to provide a silver bullet. “What do you think? We’ve been doing it two years…”

  “Can you get her to buy you out?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Marcus was surprised by Jan’s revelation. Apparently the China option had spurred her into serious reflection. Although he’d always harbored a sense that she had persuaded herself to embrace retailing, she’d never revealed her doubts about what she’d done until tonight. The family had dropped twenty thousand dollars of the home equity loan into Ripcord, and it was looking like that money had gone the way of the buffalo.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I can’t just quit.”

  “No, you can’t.” He stood up and kissed her on the cheek, pulling her to him. “We don’t have to solve this right now.”

  Marcus did not sleep well that night, turning his impending decision over and over in his mind, holding it up to the light, examining it from every possible angle. If he really wanted to follow his job overseas, he thought he could convince Jan to go. Failing that, he could go alone, like the nineteenth-century New England whalers who left families behind for years at a time, braving typhoons, scurvy, and the blandishments of naked Polynesian women to provide for them. And it would be an adventure. That part of it he liked. How do you say yes in Mandarin?

  Dawn was breaking over the Woodley Lakes Public Golf Course as Marcus placed his ball on the tee at the first hole. It was a Wednesday morning, two days after he’d spoken to Roon, and he was standing with Atlas Boot. The name Atlas had been bestowed on him by his parents, the more prosaically named John and Mary Boot of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They had hoped their only son would be inspired by the mythic appellation, but his shambling, essentially soft physical presence suggested otherwise.

  Marcus had met Atlas while he and Plum were married, and they remained friends after the divorce. The two men had a monthly game, and they always played nine holes in the early morning, giving them each enough time to complain about what was wrong with their lives and still get to work on time. Now Marcus walked six feet behind the ball and squatted, peering down the fairway as he lined up a shot. Although he was not a good golfer, Marcus appreciated that it allowed him to not think about whatever it was he believed he should be thinking about on the days he played. This morning it was Roon, China, and the future of his family. Mercifully, none of these things gained purchase in his head as he tried to envision the ball on a straight 250-yard trajectory. Attempting to achieve a state of complete calm, he rose to a standing position and placed himself to the side of the ball. He stared at it, took a deep breath. There was a water hazard on the left, where a flock of geese was going about its early-morning business, oblivious to the imminent onslaught. Across the course was a glade of trees. Marcus took all this in, then rotated his head toward the ground and looked at the ball again. One more deep breath. He brought the club slowly back, remembering to extend his arms and keep his wrist at the correct angle, then began his downswing. He shifted his hips and swung through the ball, which went skittering to the left, rolling toward the geese, who were not sufficiently intimidated to move, or even to look his way, and then into the pond. Marcus glanced at Atlas, who was standing at a respectful distance watching this debacle.

  “Did you like that?” Marcus said, trying to laugh.

  “Impressive.” Atlas was no better at golf than Marcus, and they had an unspoken pact that whenever one of them misfired, which was often, the offending party should be the first one to make light of it. It kept humiliation at bay. “You sure you don’t want to pla
y for five bucks a hole? I’ll give you ten strokes.”

  “No, thanks.”

  This was a friendly game during which no hard currency changed hands, although Atlas suggested it every time they played. He told Marcus to take a mulligan.

  Marcus’s do-over, while not particularly impressive in its slow fade to the right, was at least playable. Relieved, he walked to the side of the tee box so he could watch Atlas take his first swing of the day. Like many men who were slightly overweight and out of shape, Atlas wore his clothes a little too large. A faded blue cap sat on the back of his head and his green golf shirt was untucked. These elements combined to create a genially relaxed effect.

  Atlas swung and connected squarely with the ball. Rocketing off the tee, it flew up the center of the fairway, bouncing on the short grass then rolling to a stop two hundred and twenty yards from the tee. Marcus complimented him on the shot and then went to fish his first ball out of the shallows of the pond. Atlas politely waited for him, and once Marcus had managed to rescue his errant shot, the two of them marched up the fairway as the sun peeked out from the mountains to the east and the horizon bled pink to blue.

  When they finished the first hole, Marcus told his friend about the China opportunity. Atlas blamed the shock of this news when he missed the putt that would have given him a bogey.

  “As your attorney, I’d advise you to go,” Atlas said, though he was not Marcus’s attorney. He’d heard the phrase as your attorney in a movie. “I’d go to China tomorrow.”

  “You would?”

  Marcus was surprised at how quickly Atlas had formulated an opinion. In the manner of many lawyers, he was circumspect, and Marcus had expected him to take more time examining the subtleties of the situation.

  “I’d be out of here so fast, your head would spin.”

  They were walking up to the tee box of the second hole, a par four. As Atlas scrutinized two golf balls, trying to decide which one to use, Marcus asked him why he would be in such a rush to go to China.