Lately, Charlie’s done nothing. No auditions, no voice-overs, not even a guest-directing gig with some obscure community theater. Writing this dark and ambitious final task, Fuck Claire, puts something in his heart like lust. He never knew why he wanted what he wanted, not ever.
But he wanted.
He puts the list up on the fridge with one of Don Lowry’s business card magnets.
Out the back window, he looks at the small guesthouse where his work is, in piles and boxes and mazes of clutter, and he looks at the glimmer of the swimming pool between him and all that work.
He gets the coffee, which is terrible, and goes out to the guesthouse/study and begins to look through the stack for something new to read; maybe he’ll go to the coffee shop downtown and have a decent espresso and read. He is in no hurry to do anything—tackle the clutter of the study, see his father, or give his mother a progress report. None of his friends know where he is or why he has left Seattle: they are all actors and writers and artists, their heads stuck so far up their own self-obsessed asses they have not even noticed his dramatic and sudden exit from their world. It would be weeks before they wondered about him. A man exits a pond without a ripple, he thinks.
He writes this on a Post-it note. Maybe he should write a book, but nobody writes a book simply by thinking maybe and should. His father once said that after a long day of working on his own book. He remembers his father coming in one day at cocktail hour, and taking a gin and tonic from his wife’s hand.
They sat in the living room together, Charlie’s parents, and his mother asked, “How is the book coming?” and Charlie’s father said, “You know what gets me? When people say things like maybe I should write a book. Because the truth is, honey, if you’re a real writer, you have to write a book. It’s as if you don’t even want to do it. You have to do it.”
There was a long silence then and as Charlie sat playing with Legos on the rug in front of them, his mother exhaled.
“That’s insane, Gill. That makes no sense.”
Charlie’s father, wounded and indignant, took his drink back out to the study. Charlie still remembers going to the window and watching him walk down the path. Maybe Charlie was seven, maybe eight. He turned to his mother. He said, “Is he mad?”
“In one sense of the word,” his mother had said.
Out in that same study this morning, that place of constant retreat, he does nothing but scan the spines of his father’s bookshelves. There seems to be no order to anything, and he flips through novels he’s heard of but has never read—The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair, Pale Fire. It is next to this last book that he finds Everybody Wants Everything by Claire Lowry. He turns to look at her author photo, over a decade old, and thinks of her ass now, as she shimmied out of his pool, and he thinks, yes, I want to see her again.
3.
In the café downtown that morning, Claire sits in the corner, wolfing down a scone and coffee, suddenly aware of how badly she craves the sugar and caffeine. This is her “nice little Saturday,” a term Don took from a comedy he’d watched a million times, a movie about frat boys or something, with Will Ferrell. Or Seth Rogen. Or a Wilson brother. He liked to make a big deal of how Claire got Saturday mornings to herself, until ten thirty, sometimes eleven, to do whatever she wanted.
Two hours! All her own!
With this endless vast freedom, she would usually go to the only coffee shop in town and waste two hours on her computer while eating scones and drinking coffee, because she had no idea what else to do. Two hours, she’d always thought, was not enough time to do anything when you lived one hour away from even a decent midsize Midwestern city.
Don always said, “You should work on your novel!” which is something he had been saying for ten years, which really meant, of late—you should try to make some money.
She logs on to Gmail. She finds an e-mail from an old college housemate, Lonnie Wilson, announcing that a one-man show about growing up gay in rural Iowa, Queer as Corn, would premier in some hip Chicago venue the next weekend. She clicks on the link.
Claire’s been invited, along with sixteen hundred other friends of Lonnie’s, whose tiny thumbnail heads smile at her under the banner “Who’s Going?”
Back in the inbox, she begins to delete other things: a slew of marketing messages from companies she’d once shopped at online—Lands’ End, Audible, Athleta; a credit card account update (Re: URGENT—your account is now closed!); a note from an old college professor who is now at NYU, Tim Holiday (Re: My new book is now out from Milkweed!); something from a former college friend, Annabelle Sanderson-Maynard (Re: Sorry for the mass e-mail! Here’s my address in Paris!). Also banished from her inbox: a college pot-smoking pal, Will Molsen (Re: New job in DC!); Bank of America (An Important Notice: Action Required); and Hanna Andersson (60 percent off on select winter styles!).
And like that, all of the exclamation points and all caps and embedded imagery and links to dancing goats and ads for sports bras and Frye boots she cannot afford disappear into some other place, far, far from this outpost in the corn-choked, hog-tied center of Iowa.
“Can I suggest something? Just delete everything.”
“Pardon?” Claire says, turning toward the voice to see Charlie Gulliver grinning, wearing fitted khakis and a bright white T-shirt, freshly showered and shiny.
“That is what I did,” he says. “When I left Seattle. I deleted my whole online identity and threw my cell phone in the bay. It was liberating.”
“Why?”
“So,” he says, grabbing a chair and putting it next to her, rather than across from her. “I was playing Hamlet at Seattle Shakespeare last fall, and I was onstage, and I was killing it, we’d sold out every show, the reviews were good, Gwyneth Paltrow came to see me backstage and got tears in her eyes. She touched my elbow while patting her heart with the other hand. And I remember, on closing night, I was getting into the famous speech, I don’t even have to tell you which one, I’m sure.”
“To be . . . ,” Claire says.
“Yep. The role every actor wants to land, wants to nail, and I am onstage, and I am nailing it. I’m doing ‘To be or not to be’ in a way, I think, that’s never been done before. It was my thing, my interpretation, almost jaunty and crazed instead of grave and tortured, you know? And I was fucking IN LOVE with Ophelia too, the woman who played her, I should say, and I was thinking to myself as I was onstage—well, she’s married, I can’t have her, and then I realized so much of my life is wanting things I can’t have, like certain women, or a lake house, or whatever, and my whole career has been auditioning for things I usually can’t have, but then I get one of those things, like the role of Hamlet, and I start to think all my self-worth is tied up in that role, and it becomes me. I fall in love with Ophelia, for fuck’s sake, right? Her husband is the managing director of the theater.”
“Did you have an affair? Is that why you left?”
“Does that matter?”
The barista calls out a name—Stanley!—to suggest a mocha is ready.
Claire clears her throat. “I don’t know. I think it would matter?”
“I had an affair.”
“You thought she’d leave him?”
“No. No, it always starts out that I think I’m going to love somebody. But then I realize what I am really doing is seeing if she loved me.”
“Did she?”
“She did.”
“That’s why you left?”
“No. Not exactly. I’m checking out.”
“Of what?” Claire asks.
“Striving. Trying to get what I want?”
“Love.”
“Laid,” he says.
Claire widens her eyes.
“Kidding,” Charlie says. “I mean, I am checking out of anything that prevents me from enjoying each day. And e-mail and all of that shit actually prevents me from living in the moment. I’m done; no more. Expectation, anticipation, fear of change. Good-bye to all that! To desire things
one can have or can’t have or whatever—all desire leads to the same thing.”
“What if you need to communicate with the outside world? E-mail is practically a necessity,” Claire says.
“This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.”
She looks at him with a smile, a kind of smile she hasn’t smiled in years. It even feels different in her cheeks and lips, a tingling, a buzz.
He seems to notice. “Most of our relationships with people are fleeting. All relationships are, essentially, disposable. When they’re done, they’re done,” he says. “Shit like Facebook keeps everything alive way too long.”
He lowers his voice and points to a tab on her screen. “Click there and you’re free of all of these fuckers.”
“Here?” she says and then she does it.
A warmth begins to flood her body. She’s flushed.
“Yep. And then there,” he points to another button, his hand grazing hers.
“Type your password and then click okay,” he says. His hand touches the small of her back.
The computer asks her if she’s sure.
“You can never be sure,” Charlie says. “That’s why I played Hamlet. But you have to act.”
He is leaning in as if they are studying, together, something on the screen, and she catches his smell, he’s so close, bourbon, chlorine, coffee, and the scent of overpowering soap, like the little harsh bars you get at cheap motels.
“Ha!” she says and then clicks I Am Sure on the screen in front of her. A box of coded letters appears and she has to decipher them and type them into a box. The box disappears, replaced by You have deleted your Gmail account.
“You really did it!” he says. “Good for you.”
She’s all heat now, and a dampness at her center feels like it’s spreading out inside her body.
Her calf touches his. He exudes a kind of tangible aura, a palpable heat, as if the air between them is solidifying. If they were in darkness, she imagines that his skin would glow and the air between them would be phosphorescent with a strange solid light.
“You use Facebook?” he asks. “Log in.”
“Yes, I go on it every morning and keep refreshing it, hoping for justification for logging on in the first place.”
She logs on, then turns and looks at him expectantly. “What do I do with this?”
“Oh boy!” he says, reaching over and commandeering the mouse. “Someone took a picture of the brunch they were enjoying in Boston. A couple in golf shirts with blond hair! And look, Claire, that waifish girl who won’t look at the camera just posted a link to an article about her upcoming art installation in Detroit. She is sooooo way talented. Also you can see right down her shirt. No wonder you can’t sleep. You’ve got all of this useless bullshit ruining your brain synapses.”
“Well, shit,” Claire says.
“Good reaction,” he says. “What do we have here? A notification!”
One “friend” has updated his relationship status and Charlie reads it aloud: “Sam Kukla is in a relationship!” Then he adds, “Yay!”
“You’re really invading my privacy here. You know that?”
“There’s no privacy in Grinnell,” he says. “You don’t need Facebook, Claire! It’s all people bragging about their awesome lives, or pretending they have awesome lives, or cluttering up your intellect with the things that should be steeping in their own intellect, you know, ideas that require some time before they are shared with the world. Or pictures from people who are living a fuller life than you.”
“You’re totally right. I know that.”
“Are you living a full life, Claire?”
He still has the mouse. He moves through the Facebook menu with a series of clicks and says, finally, “May I?”
He hovers over a button that says, Deactivate My Account.
“Sure,” Claire says. “Why the fuck not?”
He does it. Five friends pop up—Sara will miss you! Tyrone will miss you! Marisol will miss you! Simms will miss you! Okkar will miss you!
“God, that is so sad,” Charlie says. “Poor fuckers.”
“They won’t really miss me.”
“What’s your password?” he says.
“Um, Ophelia69.”
“No way!” He types the password.
“I’m kidding. It’s WendyBrybry.” She types it instead.
Facebook asks her to type a random phrase to verify her humanity. She types the words that appear in the box: FAIL HARD.
They bust up laughing over that, she hanging down her head and pressing her forehead into his shoulder. Heat.
“Do you tweet?” he says.
“No,” she says.
“Good for you. My work here is done,” Charlie says.
“Thanks,” Claire says. “I just lost eleven hundred of my closest friends.”
“Your friends who love you!” Charlie says, almost shouting. And then he stands up and gives a kind of awkward wave. Oblivious to the ears of all the other café goers, unconcerned with who might see or hear him, Charlie says, “I’m the only friend you need.”
4.
How do these things happen in a small town? What odd and awkward conversations Claire finds herself in that day. For instance, there she is, under a tree on the lawn at the city pool, next to Ruth Manetti, an old widow whose lawn Don used to cut as a boy. She’d been a faculty wife, Claire knows that much, and must be in her eighties now. She’s sitting in a deck chair, her walker beside her, wearing a pair of yellow capri pants, orthopedic white sneakers, and a thin white hoodie, as well as a large sunhat and giant blue blocker shades. She’s in a small circle of shade near the fence, shade made by a leafing-out redbud tree. The redbuds had bloomed early that spring, bursting forth in the gloom of mid-March.
Claire, undoing her oxford shirt to reveal her new navy-blue-and-white-striped bikini, just arrived from Lands’ End, sets up next to Ruth in one of the only patches of lawn left on that crowded opening weekend.
Claire’s in full sun but skips the sunscreen.
Ruth sips from a large bottle of Gatorade, a dazed kind of smile on her face as she watches everyone frolic about the pool. She turns the dazed smile toward Claire; Claire knows she has to say something. Claire smiles back. The woman looks stoned, Claire thinks, and wonders if she too is suffering from dementia, like Charlie’s father, as if senility is moving through Grinnell like a plague in the warm miasma of late May.
“Hot day,” Claire says.
“It feels excellent!” Ruth says. “I didn’t think I’d survive the winter.”
Ruth giggles, which, Claire thinks, is an odd thing for an elderly woman to do, though it is certainly a giggle. There is no other way to describe her laughter. She is giggling.
Claire scans the pool, mentally checking off each member of her family, something she does every two minutes at the pool, a kind of mothering habit that is likely the impulse sent out by a gene somewhere deep in her female DNA.
Don has gone off into the water with the kids, joining the other farmer-tanned fathers, all of whom seem to be in a competition as to who could be the most fun. In the pool, on the diving boards, on the waterslides, and the kiddie section, fathers, set free from their desks and factory floors for Memorial Day weekend are shouting, splashing, and hurling their children through the water, as the kids scream with delight and beg their normally sullen dads to “do it again” and “higher” and “catch me if you can!” Later, these fathers will grow distant, drinking beer in a deck chair, but for now, they are omnipotent heroes and joyful, smiling gods.
Claire sees a man she knows vaguely, an administrator from the college, look at her for the third time. Tall and bearded and handsome, he waves at her and she pretends not to see him. Everyone is looking at everybody.
At the start of swimsuit season in the Midwest, it is hard not
to inventory your peers and note how they fared over the course of the brutal winter. Claire does her best to ignore the lifeguards in red trunks and sporty bikinis, all impossibly sexy and young, something about their skin suggesting a glow, a pressure, as if they might burst into flame or light at any second. She also does her best not to see the college students, easier in their sexuality than they had been as high-schoolers, flirting with a kind of arrogant abandon. She pretends not to notice a young woman in a gold bikini, full hipped, big breasted, shimmering near the entrance to the pool’s shallow end, luxuriously piling up her brown hair on her head, nor does she acknowledge the fact that Don watches this minute-long process with something like a tortured look on his face before he shakes himself away from the siren and returns to the game of sea monster he has been leading with nineteen or twenty children.
Claire focuses on the many middle-aged women, mostly mothers, around her, also wearing bikinis, but none of them, as beautiful as some of them are, suggested that kind of pending eruption she sees in the half-naked young people around her. No, Claire and her almost-forty contemporaries stand about suggesting the virtues of endurance. They’ve made it to middle age with a remnant of hotness, and despite the attendant sagging and indignities of aging, they’ve managed to transcend the reality that a tattoo above the ass or behind the shoulder had been a bad idea. Yes, many of the women, Claire included, have approached forty with a verve and vigor, had Pilated and power-walked themselves into a level of fitness that they had not seen since sixteen, and when they went to the city pool, the self-loathing they’d been taught to feel as teenagers had been replaced by a sexy confidence. Many of them love fucking in a way they have never loved fucking before, and when Claire thinks this to herself, she cannot help but think of Charlie Gulliver, whom she knows she could have fucked that morning, last week, in the pool.
“You look lovely,” Ruth says suddenly and Claire feels as if she has been caught doing something illicit. “When I grew up in Minnesota, my mother used to swim, every morning, in the frigid waters of Lake Superior, completely naked!”
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