by Dan Cluchey
“Is something wrong?” is what I didn’t ever say. We were not used to spending full days apart, and I imagined this was simply what that was like. This had to have been it—growing upward and older, like a tree that had been split by lightning: two towering stalks aspiring towards the sun at independent angles, yoked forever by a common stem and braced far under the earth by roots as sturdy and discreet as pythons. Branching out, to be sure, but always conjoining back home on the ground. That was what this was. It had to be. But: I felt a bug in my blood, a small spot of chill coursing through me in quiet moments, and it wouldn’t go away.
“I’ve been talking to my agent about stage names,” Fiona called out to me one evening from the kitchen that summer, adding, of two sweet onions, “come chop these for me.”
“Why do you need a stage name?” I asked once beside her.
“I don’t need one,” she replied, “but Linda says it could be beneficial. Not sure why, but a lot of actors do it. Probably more than you’d think. And besides, Haeberle is—it’s always been—I don’t really know. It’s a bit cumbersome, I guess. A little bulky.”
“Bulky?”
“Mmm.”
She absently poked at a simmering pan of eggplant with one hand, and pulled assorted detritus off of the back of my sweater with the other.
“Well, if Linda says so…” I started.
“You’re not on board?” she asked, and then, wide-eyed and plaintively, “you’re not on board!”
“It just feels a little, I don’t know, unseemly,” I fretted between chops. “It makes me wonder: what else do they want you to change about yourself? Where does it stop?”
“It stops there,” she declared hotly.
“Okay, well, if it stops there, and if it’s what you want, then you should go for it,” I said, sliding a knifeful of diced onion from block to pan. She froze a moment, then started poking me in the shoulder with one finger.
“So?!” she hollered after a few seconds of this.
“So what?”
“So, are you gonna try to help name me, or what?”
“Of course I am. You think I wouldn’t try to exert influence here? You think I wouldn’t love to name you?”
I flicked the last of the onion residue toward its new home, and rinsed the knife.
“So?” she demanded again, tugging at my clothes.
“Oh, you mean right now?”
“Yes! I mean right now!”
“Phyllis Goldberg.”
“Here we go.”
“Eileen … Nissenbaum.”
“You’re almost too hilarious, Leo. Such a card.”
“Ruth Bader Lopez. Actress Jones. Oprah Winfrey, Jr.”
“This is all just supremely helpful. I’m glad you take my career so seriously,” she said, and pushed me away with two palms.
“No one takes your career more seriously than I do, and you know this,” I countered, suddenly defensive. And this was true.
“So why are you being such a goon about this name change project?”
“Because changing your name is goony, Fiona. Because you’ve railed how many times about how shallow and vapid actors are, and here you are artificially altering yourself to please … I don’t know, the industry, or something.”
She tugged me back in, and lifted her eyes to mine.
“Look, I get your opposition here. I get it, Leo. But now that the doctor show is wrapping up and people are becoming available for other projects, things could happen quickly. My name will be out there—”
“Well, a name will be out there—”
“And I need to be thinking about making sure I’ve got my best foot forward, and all that. At least, that’s what Linda says.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I do. And I recognize that your agent probably knows best in this area.”
“Look at that: contrition. Contrition from Mr. Leo Brice!” she squealed, and kissed me, twice, then spun out of my arms.
“Don’t get used to it, sugar.”
“So you’re going to help out for real now?”
“I will do my best. What are you working with so far?”
“A bunch of stuff. Everybody’s throwing out ideas. Mark thinks it should be alliterative.”
“Does he now?”
“Indeed he does.”
“I highly doubt Mark used ‘alliterative’ in the adjective form like that.”
“That’s true! Nice work, Detective Brice,” she said, returning for one more kiss.
“You really want your new name to be alliterative?”
“It’s just a stage name. And—I don’t know, maybe. Why not?”
“Only lowbrow losers like alliteration. You see what I did there?”
“Pretty deft, man.”
“I do try.”
“Hm … what’s a good name for a star? Fiona Foster? Fee-ohhh-naaa … Fisher? No! Fiona Ford? No … Fiona … Flynn. Fiona Flynn?”
“What about Haeberle?” I said. “I like Fiona Haeberle a lot.”
She stuck her tongue out at me, and began to twirl about the room.
“Finnegan? Fff … reeman? Fisk? Ooh, what about Fox? Honey, what do you think about Fox?”
* * *
James Buchanan could not have been better prepared for glory. History has reduced him to an impotent, milquetoast, sexually confused footnote, too tragically useless to even find work as a punch line. Being reduced by history is itself an accomplishment, though—you must be gifted enough to stand in the batter’s box of greatness, but not so adept as to make any sort of meaningful contact. Historical mediocrity demands both the exceptional rise and the exceptional thud, and James Buchanan was one of the most mediocre public figures ever to have grounded weakly back to the mound.
He was born in an actual log cabin in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and became a state legislator, congressman, senator, U.S. minister to Russia, U.S. minister to the United Kingdom, secretary of state, and president of the United States before dying hated. He was dour, and he looked like an old maestro. He was twice offered a seat on the Supreme Court. He failed so miserably, and the whole thing fell apart around his failure. He must have been so desperate for a second chance.
This wasn’t very long ago at all. Here’s how short American history is: John Tyler, who used to be the president, was born less than a year into George Washington’s first term in office; today, which is to say nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, two of Tyler’s grandchildren are still alive. That’s the whole of the republic—grandfather to father to sons.
You probably remember Buchanan only vaguely from the slowest day in history class. Maybe you know that he was our fifteenth president; certainly you’re aware that he was and is unpopular—no, not even unpopular: just forgettable. But did you know that he also had dreams? That he had pain, rich like yours? Did you know how fully he suffered, right here on the same ground we suffer on, under the same pale stars, not so very long ago?
When Buchanan was twenty-eight, his fiancée took her own life, and it ruined him forever. Tragedy anneals great leaders—the horror tends to forge them into soulful and determined visionaries—but it leaves the rest of us broken: Tyler, to take one example, lost his wife in office and never recovered. Lincoln, on the other hand, outlived three of his four sons, and through grave depression extinguished our national fire. On Valentine’s Day, 1884, Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died in the same house, eleven hours apart, just two days after the birth of his first child. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote in his diary that night, and by 1901 he was president. To overcome the worst loss you are capable of imagining, to fashion it, somehow, from a seemingly barren future into a character-building speck of past—that is the mark of greatness. It is the skill that separates Lincoln and Roosevelt from Buchanan and Tyler, and, when the time comes, it separates us all.
Buchanan was chosen to save the republic in its hour of fracture and despair beca
use he was capable, and careful, and wise: a serious man with a servant’s heart. He couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t resemble the past, and when South Carolina bolted like a frightened colt from the Union, he announced confidently to friends that he was to be the last American president. He couldn’t imagine a future in which he wasn’t the future.
“I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that at least I meant well for my country,” said Buchanan to the Congress less than eight weeks before the end of his term as president.
Three months later came Fort Sumter. He did the best that he could, and still he broke the world.
* * *
I took the bar exam up in Saratoga on the sixteenth and seventeenth of July. Boots and Emily, Sona, Gracie, and I had made a pact: twenty-four hours would elapse between the moment we arrived back in the city and the moment we would allow ourselves to discuss, commiserate over, or, after knocking all of the wood in Brooklyn, celebrate what had just happened. We each took the eighteenth to rest; I slept late and stonily, took a long walk solo into neighborhoods I hadn’t even known were there before—neighborhoods without names—and met Fiona, who was filming that day, for a late lunch. We were all supposed to get drunk together that night, but when the hour came, no one had the resolve. Gracie came over for Thai food, and she and Fiona fell asleep on the couch half an hour into a documentary about big cats. I saw it through to the end, then made myself into a starfish, collapsing alone on our bed.
July 19 was a Friday, and our deferred bash came to be. None of us would have our test results back for several months, but this was secondary to our concerns—the thing was done, the beast bested, and we could all move on with our lives. Sona and Gracie took eager belts from a handle of watery gin. Emily nursed a little jug of hand-crafted cider—something peachy, with a calligraphic name. Boots and I shared a bottle of the darkest liquor the adult versions of ourselves could stomach: a russet rye that sprayed bullets through my throat. Everybody guzzled champagne, and we drained the night away trading stories of heart-stopping computer scares, barbaric multiple choice guesswork, and essay question responses that flew the coop of reason and coherence as our proctors’ clocks ticked themselves down towards the exhausting freedom to come.
Fiona was late; it was her last day of filming for Mercy General, and she had a wrap party of her own that evening. She slunk through the door just before midnight—by that time, we were all in assorted stages of maniacal repose on the furniture—and her lower eyelids were billowy, cerise gobs. This time, I asked: “Is something wrong?”
“What?!” she called out, startled, and I knew I’d spoken indiscreetly—too loud and too intimate for a late night with company.
“Is—” I started, then shut my mouth and watched her, watching me.
“Fiona,” chimed in Emily with sweet concern, “have you been crying? Are you okay?”
She stiffened up, and searched, and I knew that she was searching.
“Oh!” she answered, distantly but with a volume suggestive of nonchalance. “I was just—the show. The show is over, you know?”
“Of course,” said Emily.
“Of course,” I said.
“The show is over,” she continued, “and that’s an emotional thing … that gets pretty emotional, naturally, and—”
“Of course it does,” I said.
“That’s all,” she said.
“That can’t be easy,” offered Gracie.
“It’s—no,” Fiona replied, “it’s, you know … unemployed again. Ha! And all that.”
She smiled her on-camera smile for my inebriated friends, and dabbed at her wet eyes with the hem of her loose T-shirt.
“Well, obviously you’re going to be working again soon,” Emily responded on behalf of the room, a sentiment echoed by the lot of us.
“Thanks—seriously,” Fiona said, adding, “let’s just … this is your big night to celebrate, you know, take a load off and just—can we … let’s just all go back to celebrating.”
We did, and Fiona kept quiet until everyone had slipped away from the apartment—and even after, when the two of us were alone, she kept quiet still. She had not had much to drink by the time she followed me into the silent bedroom; I was still feeling drunk. Something is wrong, is what I knew then as she wriggled vacantly into the covers. And the bug in my blood made a hole in my heart.
“What’s going on?” I whispered right that second. I was staring at where I knew that the ceiling was, but it was much too dark to tell that there was anything up there at all.
“What do you mean?” she answered after fifteen seconds of quiet.
“What do I mean?” I whispered back, incredulous. “I mean, you’re being shifty.”
“I’m not.”
“Awfully shifty, Fiona, and it’s weirding me out.”
“I’m just tired,” she said, sounding every bit like it, and I felt her turn away from me in the darkness, felt the top sheet shift from the berth of my thrumming chest.
“Are you sure?” I asked, still whispering.
“Yes,” she said, and there followed consecutive hours of no speaking. And through that time, which felt like infinitely more time than it had to have been, no one slept. Fiona was all twists and whimpers in Our bed, making a big show of being quietly disturbed, pretending to try to hide it, jerking about like a fallen power line. I didn’t try to talk, and though I must have been after a certain point completely sober—perhaps more so, I thought, than I’d ever been before—there were times when I couldn’t distinguish the pitch black of the room from my eyes being closed. Which was it now: the dark of the bedroom or the dark within my head? I’d catch myself closing them, fling them open wide again, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. The clock was on her side; I couldn’t see it, so I don’t know when it was that she shot straight up, but she did, as abruptly as though she’d heard in the stillness a shotgun blast. She produced her phone from the nightstand and typed out something—some message. It must have been sufficiently late to be wholly tomorrow, comfortably Saturday morning, because there was just enough clarity—just enough of the faintest implication of light—for me to watch her rising away. And then she spoke softly from a standing position, but with her arms folded and head down in a way I’d never seen her before.
“Leo,” she began, and it sounded alien to me, harsh and charged and quavering, knifing through the black, laden with leaden thoughts, not just anchored to the dirty ground but buried many inches under it with the knotted worms and the unseen loam.
“Leo,” she said again, louder, but no more recognizably, “Leo, are you—”
“Yeah, hey,” I whispered, feigning, I guess, to wake. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She exhaled for what seemed like a lifetime; a lifetime slipped out of her lips. I felt jungle-hot and wired, but I lay there like an infant in the sheets. She didn’t say anything after that—she just let that exhalation spread and settle over everything in the room, fossilizing my deadweight body, freezing the furniture in place, preparing us all for a change in tense. After a few minutes, I gathered the churning lumps from inside my organs and secreted them out as words.
“You have to talk to me,” I said, unconvincingly. “You have to talk to me, and tell me what is going on—because I have no idea what is happening here, Fiona. I have no idea what’s going on with you right now.”
She sighed again, exhaling the last of whatever was in there.
“Fiona,” I went on, gaining speed now, and desperation, “talk to me, please. Please tell me what’s wrong, if something is wrong. We talk to each other when something is wrong. You can talk to me, if something is wrong, and we can talk about it, okay? We can make it right, Fiona, but you have to talk to me.”
In the mustering light, I saw her start to cry before I heard the sound. Her tears became a tempest, and she bent at the waist, howling madly. I said nothing at all while she rode this out, but felt tightly-wound tornadoes of my own caucusing inside my st
omach and chest. There was a furor ripping through my brain, sweat gliding out from my fists, the full weight of the night bearing down on my oaken limbs. I couldn’t speed my breath or slow my heart. So I just waited there, prone, and sometime later she lulled at last and spoke.
“I don’t know how to tell you,” she cracked, one palm firm against each of her eyes, “that I have to be gone.”
The dam burst, and all the brine inside of me welled up to my shuddering face, surging for the exits.
“I don’t know how to tell you that I have to go,” she blurted out all at once, with a relative calm, before hiccupping violently and convulsing again.
I pawed roughly at my eyes—a lame attempt to stem the flood—and found myself wanting to speak. But every word seemed to require a drawn-out and toilsome forging in my lungs; the work was slow, and the harvest haphazard.
“I don’t understand,” I sputtered meekly, the very best that I could do.
“Listen,” she said, “listen.”
She stood up straight and breathed: the breath of gathering breath, the one I’d seen a thousand times before. It was the leadoff to her pre-rehearsal vocal warmup routine, making its debut tonight in a new and challenging role.
“Leo,” she lit, “there’s something I need to say. And I know this probably will sound like it’s coming out of nowhere; and I know that it … will probably be very hard—very difficult for you, to understand.”
She seemed too steady, now—too practiced and performative, her arms fired down at her sides, her chin up. It seemed all too much like a recitation. Had she been rehearsing this for—how long had it been—when could it have—what the fuck, Fiona?
“I don’t—” I started, and ebbed back into the quiet of myself.
“There’s no television work left in New York,” she said.
“There’s what?”
“I said there isn’t much television work left in New York,” she tried again, adding, “Leo, I’m—I have to move on, move on if I’m going to…”
