by Nino Ricci
It was Sonny, again, who had to take the blame for turning him. Sonny was the one who had instituted video calls during hires, as a way of reducing the number of candidates who had to be flown in for a final vetting. This despite all the research that showed judgment went out the window once physical appearance became a factor. You could confess to war crimes in an interview or recite The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and it wouldn’t matter a lick as long as you dressed well and had good teeth. Case in point: as soon as David set eyes on Jennifer Lowe, she rose straight to the top of his pile. From the surname he had been expecting some thick-legged Highland girl or mousy Wasp, not this tan lotus child. No doubt the name had come down from a Lau or a Liu that had got mangled in the immigration lines; either that or from whatever genetic interloper accounted for her delicious hybrid look. He tried to prise her background out of her at the pre-interview dinner, whose alcohol-fuelled purpose was exactly to ferret out all the compromising personal data that couldn’t be asked about in the actual interviews, but she grew awkward.
“Oh, you know. Small town in the middle of nowhere. Very boring.” And he pictured her serving hamburgers and wonton at the single Asian restaurant in one of those godforsaken prairie towns that were all grain silo and big sky.
David had signed on to the hiring committee only because it had seemed the best way to break Sonny’s balls over the service hours he insisted on bleeding out of him. The last thing Sonny wanted was to lose control of a hire. Now it became a sort of game for David to see if he could push Jennifer Lowe through right under Sonny’s nose. Everyone knew that half the committee was made up of Sonny’s plants, who right from the start had made clear who the Brahmin’s chosen one was. David’s strategy was to foment resentment behind the scenes among the straggling others and so harden them in their own alternative choice. When the inevitable stalemate resulted, it was easy enough to bring Jennifer up the middle as a compromise, even though she had made it through to the short list based on little more than tokenism.
In the kitchen David tops up his meds with ten migs of immediate-release and uncorks a Californian from the emergency cache he still keeps on hand. Jennifer, in her stocking feet, has got up to browse his bookcase. The wine seems to have softened her around the edges like a layer of wash in a watercolour.
He fills her glass where she has left it and drops down onto the couch next to her own emptied spot.
“Any bites yet on the dissertation?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, a little too quickly. “I mean, I’ve had some good readers’ reports. I guess I’m just waiting for the right fit.”
Translation: her first choices have turned it down. It wasn’t that the thing was actually drivel, as he recalls—it was more the earnestness of it, the grating sense of an agenda behind every line.
“Have you tried for funding? It’s hard to get a commitment these days from a publisher without five or ten K on the table.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. Sonny suggested that too. I just sort of feel—”
“What, did he offer you something from the slush fund he keeps to make sure his pets stay in print?”
A tiny pause.
“I didn’t know I was one of his pets.”
“Be careful or you will be. That’s how he gets you, by making you think he’s your best friend. Then before you know it he has so much over you, you can’t even take a shit without asking his permission.”
“What does he have over you?”
“Nothing. That’s why he can’t stand me.”
Some of their earlier lightness is gone. Jennifer, with her back to him, moves on to the glass-doored cabinet that holds his collectibles. Exactly the sort of stuff he used to make fun of, pocket-sized eighteenth-century college editions of Bello Gallico and Bello Civili, thick leather-bound tomes from the library of Esquire This or Egregio That. He feels vaguely exposed, as if she’d stumbled on his porn stash or old disco collection.
She pulls out his 1618 Taubmann edition of Virgil, one of his best pieces.
“I picked that up in a used bookstore in Miami Beach, if you can believe it.”
She runs a hand over the leather binding, which is original, rare for a book this old, elaborately tooled in acanthus leaves and heraldic motifs.
“Just think of who’s held this over the centuries,” she says.
The truth is that David hardly glances at these books after the first thrill of ownership has passed. Then the longer they sit there on his shelves gathering dust the more they feel like an accusation. All he can think of is how bit by bit they disintegrate in the apartment’s shifting air and shifting heat like dead things, things no longer in history.
“Look,” he says. “Don’t let my cynicism corrupt you. Sonny’s fine, really. You’ll work things out with him. If he’s putting money on the table, my advice is to take it and run. That’s what we’d all do. I’d do it myself if he ever actually offered me any.”
“He doesn’t offer you any because you don’t need it to get published.”
“He doesn’t offer me any because he knows I’d eat my own children before I’d go begging to him for it.”
Any minute now, he suspects, she will check her watch, force a smile, make her moue. He wishes he hadn’t let himself want this, hadn’t started thinking of it as a real possibility.
“This one looks like it’s been through the wars.”
She has managed to sniff out the collection’s ur-text, a battered Petronius he picked up for a song back in his student days in Rome, half the spine missing and the marbled front board thickened and warped from ancient water damage. As she opens it a folded sheet falls to the floor.
“Oh! Sorry!”
It takes David a moment to realize what it is.
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Just some notes.”
Before he can get to it she has already bent to collect it.
“Not notes,” he corrects himself. “A translation. Something I did years ago.”
“It’s something dirty, isn’t it? Isn’t that what the Romans are famous for?”
“Not dirty, exactly. Worse than that. I wouldn’t risk reading it if I were you. The last person who did turned to salt.”
But she is already scanning the page, her eyes growing brighter by the instant.
“Wow,” she says. “You translated this?”
“More or less.” In fact he had spent weeks on it when he’d first come across it as an undergrad, scouring every other translation he could get ahold of, rethinking every word again and again. Year after year he had come back to it, trying to get it just right. “You could say there was some sampling involved.”
“I bet you can’t recite it.”
As soon as she says this he feels the poem recede into one of the dark pits that pock his brain now, though he had thought it encoded in his very DNA.
“Tell you what,” he says. “Why don’t you read it to me.”
The flash in her eyes again.
“Seriously?”
“Why not. I’d like that.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You’d have to close your eyes. Otherwise it’d be too weird.”
“Got it. Closing them.”
The second he does so he feels foolish, avuncular, old. But already her voice has started out of the blankness, tentative, like someone crossing a rope bridge over a chasm.
God, what a night
What a soft bed, what hot loving we had,
Our bodies mixing like rivers in our mouths.
I said goodbye then to the merely human.
So began my destruction.
He can still remember the jolt the poem had given him when he’d first read it, the feeling of a sensibility so familiar, so bracing, so new, it was like a message from his own future. In the silence after she finishes it seems she is feeling the same jolt, that sense of someone speaking to them across two thousand years as if from yesterday. Then he opens his eyes to her standing there in front of him like a deer in
headlights.
“I can’t believe I read that to you. I mean, it’s so intimate. It’s so sexy.”
“You read it beautifully,” is all he says, though what sticks in his mind is how she paused the briefest instant before the last line as if already looking back to the wrong turn.
What David wouldn’t give simply for the chance to fuck someone again as if he really meant it. The Prozac messed him up: he has been off it for months already yet still feels some remnant of it coiled up inside him like a dormant strand of viral code, awaiting the trigger that will revive it. It wasn’t just that his sex drive had flatlined but that sex itself had grown suddenly repugnant, as if he’d undergone some nightmarish conversion. All he could see was its grubby absurdity, its pathetic gropings and sick commingling of flesh. The worst was that beneath his horror at his unmanning he sensed a relief, a small unclenching in him at having this thing that had been shackled to him all his grown life, his own animal self, finally cut loose. He started searching his mind then, going back and back, before the Prozac, before the disorder, before the death-in-life of the last years of his marriage, yet could never seem to get back to a time when the sex, for all that it had driven him, wasn’t already compromised somehow, already tainted. Not with Susan Morales or the mindless fucks of his youth; not even in the heady first months of infatuation with Julia, when he’d thought he had finally joined the human race. All he could see was compulsion, a darkness that had run through him like a death wish.
He has begun to match Jennifer glass for glass by now, stupidly, possibly fatally, and they have polished the Californian and moved on to a Barolo he has been keeping since before Marcus was born.
“Marriages end,” he says, rounding out a long, ill-considered ramble on his ex which he can no longer remember the starting point of, “but divorce lasts the rest of your fucking life.”
“But there must have been something good! You must have loved her!”
“Christ, watch your language. You know what love is, don’t you? I mean, medically? It’s a psychosis. It has the same chemical signature as schizophrenia, I shit you not.”
He is running on pure bravado now, without plan, at once desperate to keep her here and wishing she’d go, and so spare them the aftermath of whatever train wreck it is they are headed for. Her puking into his toilet or passing out on his couch; him nodding off in mid-sentence or suddenly spazzing out in one of his fits. Or worse, the two of them falling into bed and fucking in some pale simulacrum of what he has imagined, both of them blunted with wine and him fighting the whole time to stay hard. By now he can no longer ignore the small dark bead of self-destructiveness in her, reassuring, in a way, something that joins them, yet also setting off every alarm, like a siren call to his most depraved under-selves. Like permission.
“You?” he says. “Any marriages yet? Lesbian hook-ups? Psycho-killer ex-lovers?”
Her laugh, a bit too ready now, too compliant.
“Nothing that exciting, sorry to say. Just your typical boring academic.”
Barely a foot and a half of couch separates them at this point, Jennifer still in her lotus squat though growing more and more askew, now her hem riding up, now some kink making her shift a butt cheek or thigh. Meanwhile the wine wears away at his brain, blurring its borders. He sees himself lean in to her to take her wrists, slender as a child’s. Sees her pinned beneath him as he thrusts.
She reaches to the coffee table for another cigarette.
“You must want to quit. I mean, after your father.”
“Quit?” He has no memory of mentioning his father. “But I’m just getting started.”
He gets up to empty the ashtray so he can pop another IR. If he isn’t careful, he will lose it. If he isn’t careful, he’ll slide into some twilight self like a Jekyll and Hyde.
Jennifer is blowing smoking rings, big ones and little ones that ride out on the room’s invisible currents like Morse code.
“I just hope you’re not going to drop dead on me all of a sudden or anything.”
“If I do it won’t be from smoking. Smoking goes in more for long and lingering than sudden death. Lots of time for regret.”
“Not that! I mean those pills you keep taking. If they’re like nitroglycerine or something.”
It seems all evening long, while he has been imagining himself the soul of discretion, she has been seeing right through him.
“Nothing that exciting, sorry to say.” Then instead of putting her off he adds, “More recreational, as a matter of fact. If you’re interested.”
Again, in her eyes, something sparks, and he knows he has taken the right tack.
“I guess it depends what they are.”
Without a word he brings a small mortar and pestle over to the coffee table and starts crushing ten-mig tabs into a powder.
“I don’t believe it! You’re like a pusher! Is it some kind of Oxy or something?”
“Even better. Methylphenidate. Also known as Ritalin.”
She lets out a guffaw.
“Kiddy coke? You can’t be serious! What, did you skank it off your son?”
“How do you know I have a son?”
“There’s a picture of him right there on the bookshelf. He looks just like you.”
David can’t bear to leave Marcus on the hook.
“Unfortunately, the boy is perfectly normal. I have to buy the stuff off the internet like everyone else.”
When he has ground the pills down he spreads the powder into lines on the coffee table with the edge of his cigarette pack. He can feel in her now what he recognizes in himself, the addict’s quickening. He rolls a twenty into a tube and holds it out to her.
“I’m not going to end up naked and comatose in an emergency room, am I?”
“Safe for children,” he says. “But if you do, just remember this phrase: informed consent.”
She hovers over the table an instant as if steeling herself for a dive before finally sucking a line up into one of her nostrils. The briefest pause, then she switches sides and does another.
“This is so wild. Whoever thought I’d be snorting lines one day with the author of Masculine History?”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a Roman history buff.”
“Are you kidding? Not that that even mattered with your stuff. I mean, what you had to say about empire, I tell you I was shitting myself when I found out you were on the hiring committee! I was sure when you read my dissertation you were going to think I was some kind of plagiarist.”
The comment pulls him up short.
“You know what they say.” How far had he got in the thing, really? Forty pages? Thirty? He can’t even call up the title. “Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.”
“But wait, wait! That’s not what I meant!” She is already speeding. “I mean, I meant it, but it’s not what I wanted to say! It was the writing! How you made it feel like you’d actually been there or something! What was that quote you gave? Otto von Richter. Otto von Ranke.”
“Leopold.”
“That’s right! Leopold von Ranke! Only to show how it actually was. Isn’t that it? I mean, it gave me goosebumps! That said it exactly! Never mind all the theoretical bullshit about how you couldn’t say anything for certain. I mean, otherwise, why bother? That’s why I wanted to come to you. Why Sonny suggested it. Because you were such an influence.”
He feels a twitch.
“What does Sonny have to do with it?”
“Oh! Sorry! I mean. I thought he’d mentioned it! Since you brought it up!”
“Brought what up?”
“The dissertation! Sorry! You asked me about it. I just figured that’s what you meant. I mean about you working with me, he thought you could help. I should have said from the start! Shit! I just thought, I don’t know! You’re not angry, are you? He said you gave it such a rave he just thought you’d be willing to help clean it up a bit. Maybe get it to one of the bigger publishers. It sounds so awful now! Like I’ve been
scheming or something! Tell me you aren’t angry!”
He bends to do a line. The twenty is still warm from her touch. He ought to just take her this second, right here on the couch. Surely no one could blame him. Quid pro quo.
No doubt Sonny has engineered this whole scenario, right down to playing on his prurience, to knowing the fantasies that run through his head. Sonny who has stripped him by now of every last vestige of privilege; who has gone out of his way to make him a pariah. Not that David gives a flying fuck what people think of him, and yet it wears at his being, the false smiles, the whispered asides, the going day after day without a single warm look, a single connection with someone he trusts.
He has left Jennifer hanging.
“Don’t be silly. How could I be angry at someone who quotes Ranke back at me?”
Only to show how it actually was. Hard to imagine that he’d actually believed that crap once, that he had been that naive, when even the past afternoon, the past hour, seem already such a chemical and hormonal blot, a hopeless tangle of layered duplicities and veiled intent.
He does another line, then passes the twenty to Jennifer.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m pretty wired already. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
If she had made the least move to leave then, if she had been that obvious, he would have hustled her out the door in a heartbeat, making promises of every sort of the help he would give her that he would then drag out for months or years until they had come to nothing. Instead she gives him a sidelong look that reminds him of Marcus, how he’ll not quite turn to David in a moment of unsureness as if seeking his permission.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. It wears off pretty quickly this way.”
Another look, another pause, then she bends to the table.
The fog of the wine is already lifting. He watches her as she bends, her dress tightening against the small of her back, the round of her haunch, and the images flit through his head of what he has done to her, what he will do.
