Standing in the freshman quadrangle, reading the name tags of her fellow scavengers, Miranda felt her resolve to be less judgmental weaken. What could she ever have in common with three Asian engineering students from Queens, New York; a goth lesbian from Manhattan Beach, California; a blond cheerleader from Dallas who drew a smiley face next to her name; and a lumberjack named Jason from a town called Prince Rupert, B.C.?
Miranda arched an eyebrow at Jason’s name tag. “B.C.? Before Christ?”
“British Columbia.” He looked at her chest. “Los Angeles? The acorn did not fall far from the tree.”
“You have no idea,” she answered.
An androgynous young man wearing a turquoise polo shirt (collar up) and khaki pants handed Jason their first clue. “Good luck,” he said. Something about his walk made Miranda think of a gymnast approaching the uneven bars.
“Notice how the white man instinctively gives the clue to the only white man in the group,” the goth lesbian observed.
“Wow.” The Dallas blonde gazed at the lesbian, without elaborating.
“I think he handed it to me because I was closest to him,” Jason said.
“The ruling class has always found justifications for its oppression of minorities.”
“Right.” Jason nodded amiably and read the clue aloud. “‘But at my back, I always Hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’” He looked up from the paper. “Hear and Time are capitalized.”
One of the engineering students shook his head. “What’s a winged chariot? A plane? A bird?”
“No,” his friend answered. “Superman!” The engineers laughed.
Miranda said nothing. She thought the game moronic but was curious to see how the hayseed from Canada would solve the puzzle.
“Why are Hear and Time capitalized? That’s the question,” he mused.
The blonde moved closer to Jason. “Mmmm,” she said, as if smelling something good.
The blonde’s attention to Jason made Miranda look more closely at the broad outline of his shoulders, the set of his chin, and the short, military thatch of his haircut. If you ignored the plaid shirt and stiff new jeans, she could see his appeal. Something about him seemed more solid than the other students, like a person who had shouldered responsibility—a soldier, perhaps, on the eve of World War I. Her thoughts were interrupted by the campus bells chiming three o’clock. With each bong, Miranda stared more intently at her teammates, hoping they would intuit her intent, but nobody paid any attention to her. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Hello?!” Miranda blurted out, pointing to the bell tower. “Does anybody else ‘hear time’?” It took every one a second to process her strangely strident presence, but it was Jason’s face that first lit up.
“Brilliant!” He grabbed Miranda, kissed her on the lips, and took off running for the bell tower. As understanding dawned on their faces, the others followed, including the goth who seemed suddenly girlish under her white foundation and burgundy lipstick. Only Miranda remained rooted to the spot, jolted by that sexless press of lip to lip and the sight of her teammates happily galloping away. How could virtual strangers bond so quickly? Like iron shavings to a goddamned magnet.
Jason was halfway to the bell tower, enjoying the spontaneous kiss with the girl from California, when he turned around to look at her again. More than a hundred yards away, Miranda stood in the exact spot where he had left her, a look of such sorrow on her face, he almost didn’t recognize her. As the engineers and the goth ran past him, Jason walked back to Miranda.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Miranda looked into his face. She saw bright blue eyes spaced a tad too wide, making him look vaguely lizardlike, a tiny constellation of zits at the right of his mouth, a high forehead creased with concern for a girl (woman, she corrected herself ) he hardly knew, and thought to herself, Well, why not?
“It’s from a poem,” she said.
“I know,” he answered, “Andrew Marvell.”
Miranda blushed. She had underestimated him. How embarrassing.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. She let herself be pulled, limply, reluctantly at first, until his will seemed to flow like transferred heat through the skin of his palm into hers. Suddenly, she too was running toward the bell tower. Laughing, skipping, like a kid trying to catch up. It wasn’t that hard to get along. If someone was pulling you. If that someone had nice blue eyes and a perfect V-shaped torso. If that someone knew who Andrew Marvell was. If that someone did not resent you thinking he did not know who Andrew Marvell was. If that someone seemed like a grown-up. A man. A person who understood the laws of actions and reactions. Consequences.
After the hunt, Jason asked her if she wanted to see his dorm room. A few feet away, the Dallas blonde was pretending to make a call on her cell phone.
“Is that, like, some kind of code?” Miranda asked.
“A code for what?”
“You tell me.”
“Are you always so suspicious?”
“Yes,” she answered.
His room was a twelve-by-six rectangle of cinder-block walls painted peppermint green. The floors were linoleum, the lighting fluorescent. He had put nothing on the walls or over the windows. His bed, a single mattress without box springs, was neatly made with flannel sheets and a wool blanket.
“Have a seat,” he said.
She looked around the room. The only place to sit was on the bed or a wooden desk chair on wheels. She sat on the bed, her hands folded primly in her lap.
“I think this may be the ugliest room I have ever been in,” she said, unclasping her hands.
He sat next to her. “Are you always so honest?”
She tried to give the question real consideration, but her attention kept wandering to his hand on the bed. Did he mean for it to be so close to her thigh? Why did she suddenly feel so nervous and breathless? She stood and picked up the closest thing she could find, a bleached white skull of an animal she did not recognize.
“Dog?” she asked, holding it up to the light.
“Bear. Old Cyrus.” He leaned back casually, like a sunbather. “He foraged in our backyard for years.”
She placed it back on top of the bookcase and sat on the hard chair. “Old Cyrus. Osiris.”
“The Egyptian god of the dead.”
She blushed. Once again, she had underestimated him.
“You think I’m stupid because I’m from Canada.”
“No.” She shook her head, and sat back down on the bed, deliberately putting a few inches between their thighs. Why was he looking at her mouth like that? Did she have something on her teeth? Was her breath bad? How could you want somebody to do something and not want him to do it so intensely, and all in the same moment? “I don’t think you’re stupid because you’re from Canada. I think you’re stupid because you’re eighteen, and most eighteen-year-old guys care about one thing.”
“Baseball?” He moved closer so his thighs were touching hers.
“Football.”
He pressed his lips against hers, the heat and smell of him covered her like a thick blanket. His saliva tasted like caramel.
“Ah,” she said, mostly out of surprise.
He went still. “You want me to stop?”
“Uh,” she exhaled. “Yes. No. Yes some more.”
He laughed and maneuvered her back onto the bed, his hand poised thrillingly above her breast.
Miranda succumbed. Mostly. But not entirely. She loved lying next to him, intertwining legs, hands, lips, feet, and fingers. He smelled of soap and deodorant and something uniquely Jason, a kind of woodsy, feral smell, which she privately labeled the smell of Canada. This, she could see, would also be something easy to do, if somebody was pulling her along. But when he tried to unzip her pants, she tensed and moved his hand away.
“Not yet.”
“When?” he asked.
“Don’t you think you should at least ask me out on a date?”
&n
bsp; “You want to go out on a date?”
“When?”
“Tonight?”
“Too soon.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Too far away.”
Jason smiled. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
4
to the public, Harry Harlow was Would You Rather? They assumed he picked the guests, wrote the questions, and devised the traumas for the daily half-hour show, which, at the end of the day, was nothing more than a child’s game with better technology. Harry had initially hoped to have more input in shaping the show. Had even looked forward to the idea of regular work, a daily commute, lunch at the company cafeteria. He’d never gotten over the feeling that acting for a living was too easy. When he passed men doing real work, road crews tearing up the tarmac, repairmen untangling the mystery of water or electricity, things people needed to survive, he always felt a stirring of shame for the physical ease of his life. Even the sweat in acting—water spritzed from a plastic bottle between takes—was ersatz. It was one of the reasons he never shirked his daily exercise regime. At least there, in the middle of the eighth mile or the eightieth sit-up, he felt pushed.
The first few weeks of production, he’d gotten up at six a.m. and joined the morning traffic jam. At work, every one began the day complaining about the commute. Not him. Traveling in the same direction as every one else made him feel solid, like a citizen of the world. And he loved his office—the faux walnut expanse of his desk, the red light on the phone that blinked when he had a message, the bleakness of a brick wall through the window. As a child, he had imagined working in just such an office, conducting important business over the phone with a secretary waiting on his needs, though what business he was doing in the fantasy, he could not have said.
It didn’t take him long to realize there was nothing for him to do. A young woman with a bullhorn and a smoker’s hack was responsible for culling the audience, some snarky Ivy League types fact-checked the questions, an ex-agent worked the phones, bartering prizes in exchange for plugs on the show, and the executive producer oversaw every thing else. The first time Harry walked by the glass-walled conference room where the staff was meeting, he had assumed they’d simply forgotten to invite him.
“Hey,” he said pulling up a chair, “I didn’t know we were meeting.” A look he chose to ignore passed around the room like a secret code.
When the meetings continued and Harry still was not invited, he stayed in his office, a queasy rivulet of shame dripping through him. He had, he realized, become the “talent,” the word on the set that inevitably came with quotation marks around it. He remembered it from jobs where he was the nobody, the extra getting $100 a day, meals included. In those days, it was easy to hang with all the other nobodies—the assistant grips or gaffers; wannabe union guys with their talk of pussy, beer, and blow. Harry remembered how they all felt about the star in the trailer—if he was friendly, he was a suck-up; if he was unfriendly, he was an asshole. There was no winning. Harry had seen it happen a hundred times. He just never imagined it would happen to him. He began staying home in the morning.
“It’s better this way,” Gus Morbane, executive producer of Would You Rather? and one of the truly conscience-free men Harry had ever met, assured him. “This way, we get you fresh.”
Nevertheless, there were moments when Harry alone saw things that needed doing. The double chin was one of them. It might not seem important to Aaron, but Aaron was indifferent to matters of the flesh—how else to explain the extra thirty pounds of it he carried around? Unlike the smirky young people who worked on the show, Harry understood how people in middle America watched TV, because he was one them. He might not know where the Pyrenees were compared to the Azores or how many electrons orbited the outer ring of a hydrogen atom, but he knew who played Elizabeth Montgomery’s mother in Bewitched (Agnes Moorehead) or the bumpkin oil heir on The Beverly Hillbillies (Max Baer Jr.). He understood the man on the couch who turned on the television as soon as he got home, a beer in one hand, the remote control in the other. He knew he would turn to his wife at the sight of that scallop of flesh under Harry’s chin and snort like a pig. He knew she’d laugh guiltily, momentarily feeling a little better about her own fat stippled thighs and Buddha belly. But soon they’d turn on him. They didn’t watch television to see their weaknesses made heroic. If Harry Harlow, who had nothing to do with his life but make himself look as good as he could, had a double chin, how was he better than all the fatties out there watching him? Harry went upstairs to his bedroom, showered and pulled on a pair of jeans, loafers, and a loose-weave Armani shirt the color of oatmeal. Outside his bedroom window, he could see his wife speaking to José, the gardener. Catherine was very proud of her Spanish, a rickety blend of tourist jargon and café patois she’d picked up studying art and getting banged by a guitar player in Cuernavaca during her junior year of college, but Harry saw the panic of incomprehension in José’s eyes whenever she spoke to him.
When Harry got to the studio, the guard at the entrance booth, a genial middle-aged black man with a shiny bald head, waved Harry in, a big smile on his face.
“Afternoon, Mr. Harlow.”
Harry smiled and pressed his fingers together in a beauty-queen wave.
“You know, Harry”—the guard leaned down so Harry could see the brachiochephalic red veins in his eyes—“I’d rather be golfing.”
Inwardly, Harry rolled his eyes. Twice in one day? But he just smiled and said what he always said. “Me, too!” The guy laughed and waved him in.
Harry opened the door to the studio and literally bumped into Marian Blaumgrund, aka “the rat lady.” It was not an uncommon experience to bump into her. Most days she seemed to be studying the floor for an answer to a deep and troubling question. But Harry thought she seemed even more preoccupied than usual.
“Are you okay, Marian?” he asked.
“Oh, Harry, no. I’m not. Thank you for asking. It’s this new shipment of rats—”
Harry began to back away from her. He had a soft spot for Marian, if only because she was as marginalized as he was, but the woman had a tin ear for the ebb and flow of social conversation. Long past the moment things ought to start wrapping up, Marian would keep talking and talking. Harry often had the feeling she had recently been in solitary confinement and was relearning the art of conversation. “If there’s a problem, Marian, I am sure you will work it out. There’s nobody in the business better than you.”
“Thank you, Harry. Lord knows I have put in my time.” Twenty years to be exact, but Harry was already gone. Marian sighed. A few weeks earlier, Gus Morbane had told her to make the rats “nicer” after one of the contestants had complained to the National Enquirer about a bite on his left thigh. Marian wasn’t worried about infection, she herself had inoculated every single rat in her care for rabies, TB, hepatitis, hantavirus, and a handful of other diseases. But rat bites didn’t make for good public relations. She had tried every trick she could think of to calm the rats—she gave them lots of room and toys during the day, she fed them high-quality dog food with gravy. But rats were rats. They did not like stress. Dump them into a glass cage the size of a bathtub and turn hot, bright lights on them, coupled with loud music, and they were going to be stressed. And stressed rats are violent rats. In the twenty years she spent running the rat and mice lab at UCLA, she had seen stressed rats do astonishing things, including chewing off their own tails.
“I could drug them,” she had said to Gus.
“Rats on valium?” He frowned.
“I could try a calmer breed…” she mused aloud to herself.
“Good idea.” Gus seized on the suggestion.
“It could be expensive,” she warned.
“Spend what you need.”
The Chestnut rats had arrived special delivery on a British Airways flight a few days earlier. Even Marian, who had seen plenty of rats in her time, was impressed. Their haunches were sleek and muscular. Their coats were shin
y without being oily. Their teeth were pearly, pointed, and even. Actors’ teeth. They had almond-shaped brown eyes, pink tongues, and long whiskers that seemed to twitch with joy when Marian leaned down to look at them. Most adorably, they loved to do tricks. Marian could watch for hours as they did somersaults, walked on their back legs, rolled over and played dead. One could even do a back flip by scurrying up the cage, dropping his front paws so that his body dangled from the ceiling, then releasing his back claws so that the bottom part of his body jackknifed forward. Marian was enchanted. In the 1970s, Morrissy Chestnut had achieved worldwide fame for his skill in training English sheepdogs; in the early 1990s, when his arthritis got so bad he couldn’t spend time in the field anymore, he had turned to rats. Clearly, the man had not lost his touch.
But there was one problem. The Chestnut rats didn’t like American rats. Hated them, in fact. The minute Marian put one in the rat cage with ordinary American brown rats, the English rats turned mongoose. Their backs arched, their hair stood straight up, they bared their teeth and emitted a low, hissing sound. When another rat approached, they would fly into a rage, scratching and biting like a rabid animal until Marian put on her thickest work gloves and scooped the rat out of the cage. It would take a few minutes of petting and cooing before the rat’s breathing returned to normal.
And Sometimes Why Page 3
