by Rita Ciresi
“I’m saying that in England—”
“My story takes place in the United States.”
“And in Batman comic books—”
“My story isn’t written for the Batman audience,” I said. “It is aimed at literate readers.”
“That’s redundant, Lisar.”
“So what!”
Ebb pushed up his glasses. Then he looked away from me to stare at the mantel—where most people we knew displayed eight-by-ten wedding portraits. We, however, displayed only a pair of candlesticks holding tapers that had melted practically down to the wick.
“Is there a particular reason,” he asked, “why we can’t have a calm conversation about your novel?”
“I can give you two,” I said. “You and me.”
“But I’m interested in your work, Lisar. Just like you’re interested in mine. Every night you ask me what went on at SB—”
“I’m bored out of my skull,” I said, “being home all day. I crave news from the outside world.”
“Which I deliver,” Ebb said. “In great detail. In spite of my sneaking suspicion that you are borrowing my problems for your novel.”
“Why would I want your problems,” I said, “when I’m already schlepping around enough of my own—plus all the burdens of the people I make up?”
“Those are imaginary.”
“They feel real enough to me,” I said. “I mean, bad enough I have to mop my own floor, never mind Simon’s.”
“Who’s Simon?”
I bit my lip. “My main character.”
“He of the penis?”
“That’s correct,” I said.
Ebb pondered this. “Simon as in Simon and Garfunkel?”
“No, as in Alvin and the Chipmunks.”
“I am—justifiably—confused.”
“Simon is my hero’s first name,” I said. “Like that chipmunk in the cartoon who wore those big nerdball glasses.”
“Theodore was the chipmunk who wore glasses, Lisar.”
“I’m positive it was Simon.”
“I’m positive it was Theo—” Ebb pushed up his own glasses. “Exactly what kind of glasses does your Simon wear?”
“Color-enhanced contact lenses,” I said.
“Oh. Is he gay?”
“No, he definitely likes women.”
“But no straight man would—”
“He wears them because he wants to be someone—or something—he isn’t.”
Ebb cleared his throat. “What’s Simon’s last name?”
“Stern.”
“That means star in German.”
“That has already been pointed out to me.”
“By who?”
“My internal editor,” I said.
“Maybe I could point out—”
“Please do not point anything else out.”
“—that the name Robin—”
“What’s your beef with that name?” I asked.
“It rhymes with mine! Robin, Eben. Not to mention Simon.”
I hadn’t even thought of that. But I wasn’t so thoughtless of myself that I would freely admit to being thoughtless of others. So I said, “Nobody but Cynthia ever calls you Eben. I call you Ebb, and Victoria calls you Mister, and everyone else at work calls you Strauss.”
Ebb raised himself up from the couch cushion, reached into his back pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and began cleaning the lenses of his glasses. “How long has this Simon been married to this Robin when she rents this infamous video?”
“Five years.”
Ebb brought his glasses up to his mouth and blew a speck of dust off the right lens. Then he resumed cleaning the lens with his handkerchief. “Care to describe it?”
“Their marriage?”
“The blue movie.”
“The one I put in my novel,” I asked, “or the one I really rented?”
“I suspect the two are pretty similar, am I right?”
Ebb was thoroughly on the money. “In my novel,” I said, “Robin rents a soft-porn flick for the female audience called Tricks for Chicks.”
“And yours was called?”
Oh! I had blushed redder than a Rome apple when the clerk handed the video over the counter and loudly announced, “Wild Women Wanna is due back before noon on Tuesday.”
“The exact title,” I told Ebb, “escapes me.”
“But you remember the plot.”
“Ludicrous as it may have been.”
Ebb put his glasses back on. “Tell it to me.”
Usually I found it hard to boil stories down to their bare bones. But the blue movie had been so spectacularly stupid—one hundred times worse than anything I myself could and did write—that I relished summarizing it for Ebb, as it seemed to prove that I’m Sorry This Is My Life was not pornography but high art.
“In episode one,” I said, “—there were three episodes in the movie altogether—you meet a helpless housewife and her well-meaning but nebbish husband. She pushes a vacuum, he pushes paper. She wears an apron, he wears a tie—that sort of thing. The problem is the wife really wants to be a ballet dancer, so she gets shown pirouetting with her dust cloth and leaping around with her mop. And the husband really wants to do something manly, like work in the great outdoors as a carpenter-slash-handyman, so he gets shown at the office acting like his stapler is a chain saw and his pager is a big wrench.”
Ebb laughed. Albeit uneasily. “What about their sex life?”
“Dullsville,” I said. “So one day the husband and wife decide to do something different. He dresses up as a plumber and goes home—in the middle of the afternoon, before the school bus lets the kids off, of course—and knocks on the door. Wielding the aforementioned wrench. Wifey answers—wearing just a scanty white towel that she clutches at her breast.” I lowered my voice to imitate the male actor in Wild Women Wanna. “ ‘I’m here to fix your drain, lady,’ the husband says. As she lets the towel slip down a bit, the wife says, ‘You must have the wrong house.’ Says he: ‘Nope, your husband called me just this morning. He said you got a clogged drain. Mind if I take a look?’ The wife purses her lips. ‘Well,’ says she, ‘if my husband insists—’ ”
I paused, for dramatic effect. “So the wife leads the husband into the bathroom. She drops the towel. He drops the wrench. Then he puts her up on the counter and fucks her like a stranger.”
Ebb’s toes—propped up on the coffee table—went stiff with disapproval. “I don’t follow,” he finally said. “The logic. Of that last statement.”
I thought for a moment. He fucks her like a stranger. Had I meant: He fucks her as if she were a stranger or He fucks her and she pretends he’s a stranger or In the process of fucking, each pretends he or she is a stranger to the other?
“Why do you have to function as an editor,” I asked Ebb, “every time I open my mouth?”
“I just wanted clarification.” Ebb paused. “So what was in episode two?”
“It involved Jell-O.”
“And episode three?”
“I don’t know,” I said crossly. “I got bored and went to sleep and had a dream that was much more imaginative than anything I saw on the screen.”
“No doubt,” Ebb said with enough bite in his voice to make me fear that he knew—but how could he possibly even guess?—that guerrillas and matadors populated my dreams. “So I guess you—or, rather, this Robin of yours—was turned on by this blue movie?”
I shrugged. “Robin thought the story had its moments.”
The second I stopped talking—and took a breath of fresh air, which carried some oxygen to my brain—my self-esteem took a mighty plunge. Suddenly the plot of I’m Sorry—not my farcical dreams or that asinine blue movie!—seemed limp at best. So once upon a time there were a husband and a wife who weren’t happy with each other—hadn’t that story been told a thousand times already, not only in literature but millions of times in real life? Did the world really need one more version of the unfulfilled housewife an
d the equally unfulfilled company man who woke up one morning and realized that this was not the right way to live their lives?
“Oh,” I blurted out at Ebb. “I don’t know!”
“Know what?”
“Why I’ve spent all these years trying to write a story that was meaningful, when it all just came out as cheap and simplistic as Wild Women Wanna—”
“Lisar! You rented a movie called Wild Women Wanna?”
I nodded.
Ebb waggled his finger at me.
So I said, “Stop waggling your finger at me!”
“Tell me truthfully,” he said. “Right now. What is your novel about?”
“Oh, for the thousandth time, the story’s not—really!—about us. We’re not interesting material. You’re a suit. And I’m a housewife. And our lives are boring.”
The minute my words hit the air—and hovered there, like blinking fireflies—I wanted to reach out and pluck them back. Clearly what I’d said had hurt Ebb’s feelings. He hesitated only a second before he said, “Well. I’m sorry I don’t own a wrench.”
I leaned over, lifted my mug, and looked at Whistler’s Mother—actually envious of this shriveled old woman who sat stone deaf and dumb in her solitary rocking chair, with no worries about how harmful words could be. What was the matter with me, telling Ebb our life together was boring, when it was anything but—fraught as it was with awful moments like this, when we said (or didn’t say) things that later we were bound to regret? I considered going over to Ebb, plopping my butt down next to his on the couch, and throwing my arms around him. Why would I want some dumb hunk with a wrench, I would say, when I have an nice Ebbish hunk like you already by my side?
But Ebb never gave me a chance. He looked really tired—God, when had he gotten all that gray hair near his ears, overnight?—when he asked, “How close are you to finishing your novel?”
“I’m done,” I said. “Or at least I thought I was, until I talked this morning to my agent.”
“You have an agent?”
While Ebb watched me—puzzled—I got up from the chair, put aside my current issue of Publishers Weekly, and disappeared into the half-bathroom, where from the stack of waterlogged magazines on the back of the toilet tank I fetched the year-old issue that featured the article on Aye-Aye. I went back into the living room, stood over Ebb, and opened Publishers Weekly—and to Ebb’s obvious dismay, a handsome color photo with this caption—Twenty-nine-year-old Ifor “I. I.” Iforson—stared him right in the face.
CHAPTER TEN
EBEN
I reached forward and took Publishers Weekly from Lisa’s hands. The photograph showed a handsome young man leaning back in an old-fashioned wooden desk chair, his huge booted feet propped on a paper-strewn table, and his large hands folded on top of his head. His long blond hair, full as a palomino’s mane, grazed the broad shoulders of his button-down shirt, which was tinted a pale, Key-lime-pie green.
“I’m assuming he knows how to spell fjord,” I told Lisa.
Lisa’s face blushed red. “Don’t be so bitchy, Ebb.” She sat back down in her chair. “Ifor is the big time. He handles only a very select group of writers.”
“Why do you want to be handled?”
“Because I want my novel to get group-groped. By the reading public.”
I repositioned my glasses on my nose. “Lisa. Morals. Where are yours?”
Lisa shrugged. “In the toilet bowl. I figure I can fish ’em out after I deposit my very hefty advance in the bank.”
“What makes you so sure this Ifor character is going to get you that kind of money?”
“Because he gets it for everybody.” Lisa leaned back in her chair and ran through Ifor’s client list, which included a writer whose lurid thrillers were hawked at airport newsstands and his female counterpart, a romance novelist always pictured (in posters at those same newsstands) wearing a mink stole and holding a passel of angora cats.
“Can’t you keep better company than that?” I asked.
Lisa sniffed. “Tolstoy is dead.”
I gazed down at Lisa’s handsome Norwegian. No man, I felt, had the right to be twenty-nine. Or have so much hair. Or such large hands. Or be so healthy-looking!
“He’s too young,” I said.
“That’s the way I want him. Young and hungry.”
“His shirt lacks a collar,” I pointed out.
Lisa leaned over and took the magazine from my hands. “That’s called banded.”
“How does he expect to be taken seriously if he’s not wearing a tie?”
“He’s in an artistic profession, Mr. Anti-Dress-Down-Friday.”
I leaned back on the couch and the cushion let off a gassy sigh. “How did you meet him?”
“I haven’t. Yet. We’ve just talked on the phone. But we plan on doing lunch.”
“When?”
“Sometime soon.”
Lisa’s vagueness made my imagination boil—like water in a samovar set over a very high flame. I pictured some scrumptious curry served in a dim Lower East Side basement, where the turbaned waiters didn’t look women in the eye and all the music sounded like Ravi Shankar’s wailing sitar on The Concert for Bangla Desh. Lisa and Ifor greeted each other with an air kiss. No, two air kisses. Ifor helped Lisa off with her coat! And pulled out Lisa’s chair! She sighed with pleasure as she lowered her butt onto the sequined cushion.
Do you mind? Ifor growled, as he pulled some sort of rough Scandinavian cigarette from his Key-lime-pie shirt pocket.
Secondhand smoke? Lisa reassured him. I love it, I love it.
Ifor lit up. So tell me about this novel of yours.
After Lisa waxed on about how her Batman- and Chipmunk-inspired characters fucked each other like strangers, Ifor blew a cloud of smoke in Lisa’s face, flicked his mane, and loudly pronounced for the benefit of the literati and fashionistas sitting six crowded tables away: We’ll see what New York has to say about that! as if Manhattan were one big bruising urban mouth.
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE! were the kindest words those metropolitan lips had uttered to me on my last visit into the city.
“I don’t want you driving into New York,” I told Lisa.
She impatiently wiggled her big toe. “I’ll take the train.”
I counted to nine and a half before I told Lisa, “We haven’t gone into the city together in a long time.”
Silence.
“I could probably rearrange my calendar,” I said. “And come along with you at this lunch. For moral support.”
“A chaperon won’t be necessary.” Lisa leaned forward and retrieved Publishers Weekly from my hands. “You know, Ebb, I don’t even want to go into New York. I don’t want to lunch with Ifor. I swear I just want to make like Thoreau and move into a log cabin.”
“You wouldn’t last two seconds in a log cabin,” I said, “even if it had a flushing toilet.”
“All right, a sweet little cottage in Nantucket—without a phone. And every afternoon I’d take a long walk on the beach after spending the morning writing the kind of novel that . . . that . . . that women refuse to put down when their husbands climb into bed!”
“Noble ambition, Lisa.”
Lisa looked down at the picture of Ifor and her bottom lip quivered. “Ebb: Come kiss me?”
I grunted and picked up a book on retirement planning from the coffee table—which I had been reading, two pages at a time, over the past three weeks. “Wait until I finish this chapter.”
After Lisa and I squabbled about Ifor, I congratulated myself for every five minutes I continued to read my book (thus resisting the urge to peruse my alumni notes). Lisa was not so virtuous. She reopened her current issue of Publishers Weekly, and like a frog I once had seen in the Catskills that had swallowed too many fireflies, she became almost phosphorescent with jealousy before she even passed the table of contents. With each turn of the page, she released a tiny sound—a sigh, a hiss—that voiced her enormous discontent.
/> “If you cluck your tongue one more time,” I finally told her, “I’m going to cancel your subscription.”
“You said that last week. And the week before.”
“Why does that magazine have to come out on a weekly basis?”
“Because publishing is a volatile industry,” Lisa said. “Every week some media giant comes in and eats up this or that small publisher.”
“Sounds like the situation at SB.”
Lisa tossed PW onto the coffee table. “You got your B School Brag Rag today.”
“I saw.”
“I noticed—in the alumni notes—that you didn’t report your promotion.”
“I forgot,” I said.
“But, Ebb—why don’t you brag? You’re the executive VP. Practically the top.”
“If I’m the top,” I told Lisa, “then why did I spend the majority of my day dealing with ladies’ bottoms? And why do I come home every night feeling like nothing more than a highly overpaid human-resources director?”
Lisa looked down at her holey socks with guilt, as if she were the one who had intellectually demoted me. I leaned my head back on the sofa and stared at the dark Rothko-like square in the center of our long-unused fireplace. Why had Lisa looked at my alumni notes? To compare me with other men? Did she think—the way I was starting to think—that even though I had all the outward trappings of success, inside I really was a failure?
“It’s late,” I finally said.
“Yes, and somebody has to clean the kitchen.”
An educated man knew that somebody was singular. But an even wiser guy knew that, from Lisa’s perspective, somebody meant we and not just me.
I sighed and followed Lisa into the kitchen, which bore all the evidence of our messy dinner. Spaghetti strands still clung to the plates. The remains of lettuce and tomatoes and Lisa’s infamous cucumber slices wilted in the salad bowl.
“Glass of wine?” I asked.
“I’m not supposed to be drinking, remember?”
I could have sworn I had tasted wine on Lisa’s tongue when I kissed her earlier. But maybe she’d had just a sip of the jug wine she always added to the tomato sauce.
“I guess half a glass of wine won’t do you any harm,” I said.
