Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  They used the air conditioner sparingly all summer. The mayor and the evening news warned of tri-borough blackouts. “They’ll pull the power whether we use it or not,” Joseph said, fingers threatening to engage the on-switch. “They’re telling us this because Con Edison’s already worked a few well-timed blackouts into their yearly budgets.” “Don’t be stupid,” she replied. “They are afraid of mass revolts in the street. Can you imagine what crimes would go on if this city were left for a night in total darkness? Do you want to be stuck in an elevator for ten hours? It’s serious, Joe.”

  She carried the glass down the hallway and into the living room, where she noticed the stereo’s needle skipping on the last grooves of a record. Her stereo. Now theirs. The stereo had been one of her chief contributions to the mingling of appliances. She wondered how long it would be until those distinctions would dissolve, possessives failing to modify, his and hers being ours without the slightest impulse to claim. They never argued over drawers or closets or cabinet shelves. The fights they had about the heat or his juvenile actor friends could hardly be classified as arguments. Often when her voice hardened into the first signs of irritation, Joseph would draw a slow smile, nod his head in quiet concession, and let her opening assault be the last words on the issue. Madi always said that silence was the male form of hysteria, “All that quiet is just another way of screaming their dicks off.” But Del couldn’t help but be impressed by Joseph’s composure, and usually her highly charged rage would suddenly transform into a hungry adrenaline, her lips guiding toward his mouth and her hands wrapping around his ears, and then she’d go hot for him, because he was so attractive when he didn’t realize he had done anything to stop her dead in her tracks.

  “Del,” he called from the bedroom.

  It amazed her how quickly the evening had returned to normal. The night she asked Joseph to marry her almost a month ago, she walked into the living room ready to supply him with a list of incentives. She had spent her subway ride home from the zoo merging love with legalities—“You see, I don’t have to be tied to a working visa,” she rehearsed, “You see, they can’t kick me out of the country just because I feel like quitting. You see, I’d only be tied to you”—until those words almost reduced her to tears. She imagined him looking at her like an extinguished bulb, two eyes with popped filaments, skin the shade of gray glass, and her teeth chattered and her throat went dry. Why the hell would he agree? Why would anyone get married if they didn’t have to? She asked him while she straddled his lap on the couch, unable to keep a cigarette from her mouth, and for the first time in all of their months as a couple, Joseph answered immediately without a single pause coming between them.

  She entered the bedroom, letting go of that island where Dash still dwelled, climbing on to the warm, open stretch of their mattress. Joseph pulled off her clothes and lifted her pale, skinny body with its moles and snakebite scars on top of him. He put on a condom before he went into her, and she shifted her weight to trigger the little beast that goes loose in her brain. She wondered what made her think of Dash Winslow from eleven years ago, because he hadn’t been the only love of her life. At one point, that had been Madi’s older brother, Raj, who was even more disposed than Joseph to prolonged silences. It didn’t matter who found her first or who claimed her the hardest. What mattered was who stayed on.

  She watched Joseph’s face contort, and she pushed her tongue between his teeth to fill his mouth with thanks. This is home, this is my husband, this has been decided, she thought.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “ RUINED, ” WILLIAM ASTERNATHY said, hand propping the heavy weight of his head on the bar of the Hairy Bishop. He lifted a beer to his lips and took a slow sip, waiting for the impact of the word to register on his friend’s face.

  “Ruined,” William repeated, licking the Heineken from his lips for added emphasis. “By a single decision. You don’t leap over your mistakes and come off clean each time. You’re going to have to pay the price.”

  Admittedly, this reaction to the news of Joseph’s marriage did not go down as a high point of their friendship. But if love had sent Joseph bounding into the bar that afternoon, his grin the only warm pocket in the establishment, the more obdurate propeller of depression had brought William shuffling through midtown traffic to their once-a-week hideout. If he could convert depression into a form of electric energy, William figured he could generate enough power to run Hairy Bishop’s greasy, time-lapsed jukebox clear into another decade. That his good friend, main competitor, and occasional scene partner chose to break the news of his marriage exactly three months to the day of William’s own wife walking out on him did not help matters. Nor did it help that Joseph had stopped attending their Monday night acting class, thinking himself sufficiently schooled in his badly workshopped Brutus across from William’s Cassius. What William had wanted to say when Joseph threw a rock through a perfectly decent afternoon of drinking was, “You think you can succeed where I failed? Good luck.”

  The ruined-life philosophy had come to him that morning by way of a PBS documentary on the dangers of scuba diving. William had woken at eight with the sunlight beating on his eyelids. His bedroom windows faced east, gathering greens and the first rays of dawn—an exotic and expensive luxury for most residents in the gargoyle-tiered building on Central Park West. But most residents weren’t suffering from a tequila-shot hangover, trying to piece together the choppy memories of the night. William had attended a party in Tribeca. The host, Reef Mourasani, the sedentary shipping heir of a family that actually paid him not to embarrass them, had chosen to ring in his thirtieth birthday by inflating a giant neon-orange Moon Bounce castle in the center of his loft. William dutifully unlaced his shoes, climbed into the plastic air chamber, and somewhere between leaps became entangled with a young woman who worked at a Brooklyn recording studio. Fighting gravity and nausea, they jumped in lunar orbit and kissed until the entire structure began to deflate. They tumbled out onto the hardwood floor with keys and pocket change in their hair. William had been drunk enough to ask her back to his place, but by the time he ripped the condom wrapper open with his teeth and felt soft thigh muscles clamp around his waist, he had lost all interest in the intended goal. Which was to prove to himself that he still had this in him—sex or intimacy or at least the ability to be enveloped for extended minutes in another human being. His penis had already curled up for a night of unearned sleep, so he said as politely as he could muster, “Do you need cab fare back to Bushwick?”

  “Use your finger,” she had replied.

  In bed that morning, his head hurt more when he closed his eyes, so he focused them on the blue underwater TV world of crenulated anemones and glistening fish. The controlled movement of the blacksuited divers weighed down with oxygen tanks on the television was utterly quiet and delicately unhurried. They had settled into a slow breathing pattern that William copied, inhaling and exhaling as if preserving air for his own ascent into the day. Then the documentary flashed to the body of a female diver lying on the ocean floor, her wetsuit covered in white sediment like she had sunk decades ago and was being surveyed for whatever treasure remained in her hold. The voiceover explained that most scuba divers met their end from panic over a loose mask or a momentary chink in their breathing apparatus. “One simple mistake one hundred feet below the surface, and an inexperienced diver in a bout of panic, like this Caribbean vacationer, pays the ultimate price.” For a second, the screen glimpsed her face, a skeletal jaw clenched in determination. In his hangover state, William figured the lesson to be learned was not to give in to panic. Brushing his teeth and glancing in the mirror at the broken blood vessels strung like Christmas lights under his eyes, he reassessed the scuba diver story, deciding that it definitely meant to be careful about making stupid mistakes. No mistakes = no panic. Although, fear of mistakes = possibility of panic all along. William rested his forehead against the mirror. For a man whose self-esteem relied so heavily on the power and performan
ce of his body, he felt like time was finally grabbing hold of him and shaking him out for unsettled debts.

  When he returned to the bedroom, divers were collecting the woman from the ocean floor, and he turned to the view of Central Park to prevent having to look at her face again. He smoked a joint while standing naked against the window, letting the ash fall on the hardwood, letting the sun warm muscles that still flexed under his tan, unwashed skin.

  Right now, staring at Joseph on the neighboring barstool, his friend’s clean, shaven skin and bright eyes the color of suburban swimming pools were resurrecting the hangover nausea of the sunlight that morning. Wasn’t the premise of drinking in the daytime a tacit agreement not to feel ashamed for failing in the basics of personal hygiene? William could actually smell the flannel shirt he was wearing, the fetid armpits mixing with the nicotine stink of other people’s cigarettes. No doubt, Joseph’s new wife did his washing for him. She probably stood over him making sure that he brushed and moisturized. Certainly she picked out the cloyingly ironed polo shirt that was tucked into his jeans without the rumple of a gut, because, he could swear, Joseph actually looked like some glossed three-dimensional version of the headshot he carried to commercial auditions. Maybe Joseph had just come from an audition. That thought roused him with added resentment. As fellow actors living off any chance paying role that magically came their way, they could gauge their success off of each other. William mistook the fact that his friend wanted to drink a few beers in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon as a sign they were still on even ground.

  “What part of your life with that woman was so lacking that you needed to fix it with a wedding?”

  Joseph made a show of rolling his eyes. He slapped, not punched, his hand down on the counter. William always found a hint of effeminacy in Joseph’s gestures, a result, he figured, of his friend growing up without a father.

  “Nothing was lacking,” he shot back. “She asked, I replied. As simple as that.”

  “Wait, she asked you? Jesus.” William slammed his glass down in frustration. “I’m telling you this as a friend. The worst mistake I ever made was getting caught up in a few months of decent sex and free dinners. I did the math. I admit it. Jennifer was loaded. I had, what, about two hundred dollars in the bank? Of course I signed a prenup. They don’t tell you in college that you’re going to need to eat one day. There should be an obligatory minor in napkin folding, a seminar in flirting with older women. If those teachers had an ounce of responsibility they’d run into those acting classes warning everyone to quit and save themselves right away.”

  “If that’s your concern, you can stop worrying,” Joseph said, wiping strands of hair from his forehead. “Del’s broke. Or just about. She works for the parks department. She makes me look rich.”

  “Where did you get money?” William asked, suddenly alert to a second indication that Joseph might be landing auditions that he hadn’t even been called in for.

  “Nowhere. What I was saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying.” William tapped his fingers on Joseph’s knee to prove that this sermon wasn’t meant to provoke anger. “Look, I’m not trying to dampen the moment. If you two can make it work, I’d be the happiest. All I’m saying is, I’ve seen the other side. I know you think that this won’t come back to bite you—”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you got over it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your divorce.” Joseph said this so coolly it upset the balance of the room.

  “We’re separated,” William clarified irritably. “Not divorced.”

  “If you don’t like Del, that’s fine. She isn’t that fond of you either. But is it too much to ask for a simple congratulations?”

  William struggled through the insult. He wasn’t used to lectures from Joseph. In all the years of their friendship, William prided himself on being the wiser, street-minded one of the pair, the darker, tougher specialist in weathering setbacks and surviving the leaner years living as an actor in the city. The unchecked confidence in Joseph’s voice suggested a sudden change in that dynamic, and William was not going down without at least dispensing some unwanted, utterly unpleasant advice about relationships. William had learned one essential fact about love: it always goes bad in the end. On this point, he was an expert.

  “Think of your favorite song. What if someone told you that if you played it backward, a bizarre satanic message instructed you to blow up a children’s hospital? Could you ever listen to that song the same way again? That’s what coming through the other side of marriage sounds like—you can’t forget the way it plays backward and the whole horrible message underneath. Love song, mutilated children, love song, children’s body parts exploding through emergency room glass . . . ”

  Joseph grabbed a lime wedge from the garnishes on the bar and flicked it into William’s chest. “You forget, it’s already happened. So please shut up. At least now you know why you weren’t invited.”

  William could remember clearly the moment he first met Joseph and how quickly he had become his confidant and, more importantly, his competition. They had turned the dark, septuagenarian-haunted Hairy Bishop, with its patched plastic stools and permanent smoke halos around the stained-glass hanging lamps, into their hangout. William and Joseph only came to the bar together, and they had done so ever since they were introduced six years ago on the set of a low-budget horror movie. William had played the love interest of a biochemistry grad student who, for reasons not entirely clear in the script, had disturbed the forces of nature so drastically that it wiped out her friends with maniacal ease before spending a second hour having unprecedented difficulty doing away with her. At twenty-five, William’s curly, black hair and brooding, angular face got him cast as the ultimate boyfriend with few speaking lines and gratuitous locker room scenes. Joseph had not been so lucky. Covered in Karo syrup, wearing a bodysuit sewn with stuffed birds, he sat drinking soup through a straw waiting to be pecked to death in front of the camera by a flock of crows springing out of a closet.

  “At least you can see what kills you,” William had said that night so many years ago when they bought each other consolatory rounds on these very same Hairy Bishop barstools. “I get murdered in a football field by a single gust of wind.”

  “There are no small death scenes,” Joseph had offered feebly in reply.

  But there were. Jennifer had left him bleeding from the nose the minute she cut from their relationship. They had spoken by phone twice since the breakup. Jennifer hung up the instant he started crying into the receiver. The second time, she used his name after each sentence. “I’m doing fine, William. I have a new place. Unlisted. Good-bye, William.”

  As long as he had known her, Jennifer had saved everything, packing it away—train tickets, matchbooks, postcards from college friends scattered into the sunsets of Yemen or Alabama to raise children or funds for women’s rights organizations. Not just personal items, either. Her family had made its money in advertising, and she spent her inheritance on high-grade auction antiques. It was also Jennifer Ruben’s money that floated them twelve flights above Central Park in a two bedroom decked out like Ali Baba’s cave with an alarm system that spit out a litany of beeps the minute he opened the door. She always knew when he was coming home late. Jennifer, with eyebrows waxed and redrawn, with the high-school nose job that didn’t hide her Jewish ancestry but revealed her family wealth, with her initials curled on her yellow robe, had saved everything. She kept her grandmother’s pearls, the bridle of the horse she jumped as a child in Connecticut, the first flower that her second boyfriend had pinned to her prom dress right before he pinned her in the back seat of the limousine (that memory too was preserved with the boy’s red cummerbund). But in those final moments, after William had decided to come clean about one sexual episode with an actress in a backstage bathroom, forming sentences carefully and then whining them stupidly and out of order, understanding as her knuckle hit his nose that those seconds
would be the last of their marriage, he realized he had mistaken his wife for what he always thought her to be: someone who could never let go.

  Now he lived alone surrounded by the debris of Jennifer’s twenty-eight years, in an apartment that still technically belonged to her.

  “It’s really Jennifer who ruined my chances for all of the good parts,” William said, waving a finger at the bartender who made no hurry to provide his regulars with refills. “I think that’s what killed the marriage. She wouldn’t give me any room to breathe in her own damned perfect life. She would read every script summary that came over the fax, checking it for sex scenes. Sex scenes! I was responsible for the sexual life of characters I hadn’t yet tried out for.”

  “Of course, cheating on her had nothing to do with the split,” Joseph intoned. He was no longer listening, exhausted by the information he already knew by heart. Sirens called his attention away as they swam across the windows.

  “Men cheat. Women cheat. You’ll cheat one day, or Del will. It’s like death. You can’t prepare yourself for it, you just have to accept that it’s eventually going to happen.”

  Joseph downed the last of his beer. “Come on, aren’t we both tired of feeling sorry for you? If you think your career is such shit, do something about it.”

  “I intend to,” he said. The intoxication of two pints had marshaled some emergency supply of hope: beyond all of the sunlight pouring through the oily windows of the Hairy Bishop, opportunity did exist. His doorman was still accepting script deliveries, wasn’t he? His e-mail account was still collecting messages. He and Joseph had the same agent. She was at her desk right now, wasn’t she, presumably digging into projects invented fresh every hour?