Lord Tusky nodded.
“This pig doesn’t speak very much,” said Helen.
“That’s the best costume I’ve seen all night,” said Adam. “Kind of steampunk but still cool.”
“Adam isn’t wearing a costume,” said Helen, “even though it looks like he is.”
“We all wear costumes every day.” Adam tweaked his oversize yellow bow tie, which matched his pleated, peg-legged pants. The boy reminded Lord Tusky of someone, but he couldn’t quite figure out who.
“Adam is crashing with his Uncle Boykin for a while,” teased Helen. “Starving artist.”
“Only until I figure out where I want to go to film school.” The boy pouted.
“He’s got his eye on NYU,” said Helen.
“Tisch is pretty rad, but New York winters are a bitch. So I’m thinking CalArts.”
“We’re lucky to display his photographs before he becomes rich and famous.” Helen winked coquettishly. “Tell Mr. Pig how you got the idea for this series.”
“It’s kind of stream of consciousness.” Adam fingered his phone. “Postmodern Dada minimalism, you know. I like to push boundaries. Each image captures a spontaneous moment of self-expression, my subjects in states of, like, vulnerability, their deepest desires on display like raw wounds. I’m really into the French new wave.”
Lord Tusky snorted. Adam looked up from his gadget and stared into the pig’s eyeholes.
“Are you an artist?” he asked.
“Taxidermist,” Helen said tightly, her voice lilting into a strange hiccup. “If Mr. Pig is who I think he is, I mean.”
And then it came to me: Boykin’s pip-squeak nephew reminded me of Adrian, the art student Helen had dated at USC. During our first year of college I’d kept chaste, waiting for her summer return. When April exploded with its riot of azaleas and bees, she called me one warm ruttish night, broke down and confessed that she was “seeing someone.” The way she put it sounded self-consciously adult.
“Who?”
“Just this guy. An art student.”
I was a wannabe artist studying graphic design at Trident Tech, and her words stung me to the quick. Idiot that I was, I nursed the hope that when Helen came home for summer, she’d look into my eyes with repentant sorrow and forget all about this art student. But she moved into a duplex in Columbia, a ramshackle millhouse in the Olympia neighborhood, with two other girls. Adrian occupied the other half all by his lonesome, courtesy of his banker dad. In their backyard, spray-painted mannequins relaxed in retro wheelchairs and milled about among pokeweeds. When I visited, unannounced, one June Saturday, Helen and I had sat awkwardly in wheelchairs, emotionally crippled, out in the jungle of pokeweeds, while Adrian glared at us from an upstairs window.
“He’s really intense,” Helen said.
She explained that Adrian spatter-painted found objects and placed them in random public settings. Adrian was into guerrilla art. Adrian had a spiky Duran Duran hairdo. Adrian wore pointy Beatle boots. Perpetually sported the same model of black jeans and always, rain or shine, hot or cold, a vintage leather jacket that smelled like the corpse of Joey Ramone. I finally met the brilliant asshole one July night when I ran into Helen and her paramour at the Hampton Waffle House. Sweating in his skunky leather jacket, he smirked with superiority at my King Crimson T-shirt. I walked off into the shrieking summer night. Called Crystal Flemming. Got drunk beside the railroad tracks and wept into her lush bosom.
Even after Helen’s dad died and Adrian “was not there for her,” even after we got back together, she continued to think of him as a moody, adorable genius.
Now she was making goo-goo eyes at her boyfriend’s fey nephew, gushing over a privileged brat’s crappy “art.” Why was she so susceptible to the pretentious conceptual drivel of talentless hacks? Why did she have such a weak spot for skinny pretty boys in tight pants? I was almost relieved when I saw old possum-faced Boykin navigating his way through the sea of people, struggling with his spinner rod and two plastic cups of red wine, his paunch thrust forth like the prow of a ship.
“Thanks, hon.” Taking her drink, Helen kissed Boykin on his sagging cheek, probably to reassure him.
And it did look like he needed reassuring. He’d gained weight. His eye bags looked more voluptuous than usual. His hairline had crept back.
“Boykin,” said Helen, “you remember Romie, don’t you?”
“He didn’t look so hairy last time.” Boykin smiled. “But I do remember him.”
Gamely, Boykin set down his rod and offered me his hand. I felt a little foolish maintaining my air of lofty silence, but a plan is a plan. I shook his hand, nodded, cocked my head in what I hoped was an open, friendly manner.
“Apparently, silence is part of his costume,” said Helen.
“I like it,” said Adam. “Very John Cage.”
“Adam,” said Boykin, “did you get a chance to talk to Annabelle, the owner?”
“She scares me.” The boy shrugged.
“But she was kind enough to give you this show.”
“So sue me,” quipped Adam. “Mr. Lawyerman.”
Helen giggled. As she and Adam exchanged conspiratorial smiles, Boykin took a tense sip of wine.
“If you sell any of your work,” said Boykin. “You’ll have her to thank.”
“Money, money, money,” said Adam. “That’s all you and my parents ever talk about. The revolution will not be commodified.”
I wondered who’d financed Adam’s dope outfit, his Oracle6 phone, his expensive-looking clown shoes. I wondered if he dyed his own hair or hired a coiffeur. I knew instinctively that Adam expected to be paid lavishly for a flexible “creative” job in some awesome city, to live in a chicly shabby apartment with outlandish rent, and to purchase whatever tech gadgets, cool duds, and artisanal brunches tickled his fancy—all while identifying with antiestablishment ideologies. I actually felt a little sorry for Boykin (even as I relished his discomfort) and longed to break Adam’s delicate jaw.
I wondered, now that the cougar meme had reached its full flower in our culture, if it was possible that Helen could be fucking this little prick. I thought of Colette, who’d begun an affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson at age forty-six. I imagined that Adam, whose feeble, digitized sexuality had sprouted during the golden era of Internet porn, would have plenty of aging-woman presets available in his sorry skull—WILFs, MILFs, GILFs, and cougars—cartoonish vixens preening and duck-facing, catering to his solipsistic pleasures.
“There’s Annabelle.” Helen pointed at the socialite, who was dressed as the Goddess of Love, complete with a Styrofoam Cupid nestled in her elaborate hairdo. In the throes of some anecdote, she contorted her Frankensteinian face and waved her skinny arms.
“I don’t think she’s human,” said Adam.
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” Helen looped an arm through Adam’s and tugged the boy toward Venus. Adam pretended to struggle. Helen scolded him with mock maternal sternness.
I could tell she knew that the boy thought her attractive. Knew that the weasel wanted to get his paws into her pants. And this knowledge made her glow.
“So,” said Boykin. His smile was shy, his ears tipped with crimson. “Did you make that mask?”
I nodded.
“Very creative. I’m a big admirer of creativity.” Boykin sighed as he watched Helen introduce Adam to Annabelle Tewksbury DeBris. And then, in a very small voice, my ex-wife’s lover unburdened himself of a secret dream: “I always wanted to write a novel.”
It was a good thing I was wearing a mask. It was a good thing my outraged sneer was concealed within the humid darkness of my fake head. Why wasn’t Boykin content to devote himself to tedium for status and a fat paycheck? Why did he have to dabble in the arts?
“Kafka was a lawyer,” Boykin said wistfully.
“He worked in an insurance office,” I burbled, breaking my vow of silence. “And he loathed it. Though his career proved to be good fodder for his
absurdist novel The Trial, which is the best companion piece to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish I’ve ever read.”
“I haven’t read much Kafka,” said Boykin. “Just that one story about the cockroach.”
“It was a beetle,” I snapped. “As Nabokov, who was an entomologist, argued in his lecture on The Metamorphosis, the convexity of the insect’s back, in combo with its mandibles and antennae, suggest that Kafka’s fabled vermin belongs to the order Coleoptera.”
As my ex-wife’s lover peered into my eyeholes and smiled like a sheep, I felt ashamed of my pedantic outburst.
“You’re the taxidermist, right?” Boykin looked confused, exhausted. He looked older than I’d thought him to be, at least fifty-eight. And then I realized that he was extremely drunk. His eyes were vein webbed. His mouth slack, his lower lip glazed with spittle. I realized that the poor man was not worth hating. I lay down my imaginary sword. Feeling the fight draining from my body, I sighed.
We were two aging men standing on the sidelines together, wallflowers with depleted testosterone levels. Shadows of men, we watched a beautiful woman flirt with a downy ephebe.
We looked at each other and shrugged when we saw Annabelle Tewksbury DeBris reach into her gold lamé handbag, snatch a fistful of glitter, and sprinkle it upon the heads of Helen and Adam, anointing their dalliance with magical dust. Helen giggled. As Adam took a sneak peek of her still-marvelous boobs, his young face lit up with a smile of infinite entitlement. The world belonged to him.
I could picture the little turd lolling in the guest room of Boykin’s McMansion, looking down his nose at the provincial décor while enjoying bagels in bed. I could see him soaking in Boykin’s Jacuzzi, whacking off to a mumblecore montage of erotica, incorporating sly references to The Graduate as a parade of mature hotties held their own amid his Solomonic harem of sexbots. I could see him mounting the diving board of Boykin’s pool, smooth and pale as a marble statue of Adonis, looking much better with his stupid glasses off.
And I could see Helen inside the house, drawn to the window, feasting her tired eyes on the carefree youth. I could see her world-weary smile, taste the bitterness in the back of her throat, the residue of a thousand disappointments—her derailed career as a marine biologist, her dismal sex life with a rich dullard, her host of lost children, a series of golden eggs dropping into a black void one by one and lapsing into slime.
Why the fuck not? she’d think. Men have been doing this shit for centuries.
As Helen and Adam strode back toward us, enveloped in cozy banter, I imagined myself charging Adam, goring him in his lily-white flank with my right tusk. I imagined purple tears of blood weeping from his wound.
“Did you try the food?” Helen asked me. “The duck empanadas are amazing.”
“Not much for vegans on that buffet,” said Adam, shaking glitter from his hair.
“Like you need to get any skinnier.” Helen poked him in the ribs as though he were a toddler whose smile she wanted to spark. And behold: a grin and a blush broke like dawn upon the boy’s wan face. Boykin mumbled something and glanced at me with harrowed eyes.
“Aw shit.” Adam fingered his phone. “I’ve got to take this.”
Gadget pressed to ear, Adam pushed through the dowdy crowd.
“Time for me to tank up,” said Boykin. “Can I get you something, Romie?”
I waved my half-empty Sierra Nevada. Sometimes it was easier not to speak. Sometimes it was easier to lapse into moody silence, to peer at your ex-wife through the eye slits of an animalistic mask.
“So, Romie,” said Helen, her voice suddenly grave. “How are you?”
I shrugged.
“Well,” she said. “I still worry about you. But I saw Lee last week and he said you’re doing great.”
I nodded, gave her two thumbs-up, frowning behind my pig mask.
“Did Lee tell you I was going back to school?” she asked. “Just two online courses at USC, but it’s a start.”
I put down my drink and clapped my hands to show my support.
“Now that I can afford to work part-time, I can manage it.”
She didn’t say how she could afford to work part-time, but I knew. For years she’d fantasized about going back to school, but her forty-hour-a-week serfdom at Technomatic Quick Lab had kept her from her dreams. We used to fight about the relative flexibility of my job, especially during the bad years when, low on customers, I’d crack a beer at work, forget to eat lunch, piddle with the corpses of animals as my buzz came on. Then I’d wash my hands for an Internet fix, skip though YouPorn, Fleshbot, and VenusVille. I’d spend entire afternoons clicking through catalogs of sportive minxes and homemade fuckfests, zipping hither and thither like a frenzied bee until I found just the right flower to plunge into.
Afterward, I’d nurse my fourth beer while fussing with inventory, rearranging boxes of eyes and tongues, but never having the wherewithal to overhaul my supply room. I’d somehow make it to five thirty, when I’d trudge home and find Helen on the sofa, too tired to change out of her medical costume, which smelled of strawberry disinfectant spray.
“What do you want for dinner?” I’d ask, opening the fridge, casually plucking a beer as though it were my first.
“I don’t care.”
“Monkey jerky?” Perhaps my voice sounded menacing, something vile beneath the false brightness.
“Whatever.”
She’d watch me move around the kitchen, opening random drawers, another dusk closing in, one of thousands we’d experienced together. Sometimes the windows were open. Sometimes the windows were closed. Sometimes you could hear a bird going at it, twitting with all its soul.
“Drunk already?” she’d ask. “It’s not even six o’clock.”
I’d choke out a laugh. “What makes you think I’m drunk?”
“I know you, Romie Futch. I’ve known you for over twenty years.”
She’d look at me with pity and disgust. She could see through my skin. Could see my heart, a shriveled thing with a husk of discolored leather, sagging like a half-deflated football.
And then we’d claw idly at each other, waiting for something to catch. We’d bicker until a jazz of insults blared in the night air and we felt alive again, our dead blood oxygenated, pulsing brightly in our veins.
But now Helen seemed calm yet energized, self-possessed with yogic poise.
I could see her out on a patio with her micropad, brain cells revitalized. I could see her glancing up from her homework to feast her eyes upon optimally fertilized flowers maintained by a landscaping crew, not one weed visible in the perfectly spread cypress mulch. I could see Adam in the background, just out of focus, his platinum hair catching the sun. Boykin was at the office, of course, making three hundred dollars an hour.
“But seriously.” Helen put her hand on my arm. “I hope you’re doing well, Romie.”
“I’m fine,” I finally said. “I’m making art again.”
“Now we’re talking.” Helen smiled. “What? Sculptures?”
“Postnatural taxidermic dioramas,” I said. “Mounted mutant scenarios; working with my own kill. It’s taken me forever to deconstruct the taxidermy-art binary that’s always hindered me, but now that I have, I feel a small sense of deceptive liberation.”
Helen blinked, peered at me. “I’m not sure what that means exactly—maybe Adam would know—but it sounds really creative.” There was that word again. (Was it my imagination, or did she seem less clever than she used to be?) “You are so creative. That’s one thing I love about you. And your pig costume. I really like the way you—”
“I doubt Adam would get it,” I interrupted, “though he’d no doubt declare it epic before clicking on the latest viral YouTube video.”
Helen bit her lip, removed her hand from my arm.
“You ought to talk to Annabelle about a show here,” she said. “She’s into things that are different.”
“Like anal bleaching?” I sniggered. “Annabelle Tewk
sbury DeBris might be too avant-garde for my stuff.”
“Oh no. I think she’d like it.”
“I am Ironic Man,” I said. “Do you really take that synthetic creature seriously?”
“Believe me, I know,” said Helen. “But I’m trying to stay positive, you know?”
In my ex-wife’s forced smile, I saw some of the old sadness welling up, which made me feel connected to her again.
“Helen,” I whispered.
The word sounded ancient, archetypal, like some tender appellation emerging from a caveman’s lips—the name of a newly discovered flower.
“Helen, I . . .”
She waved me off.
Now Boykin was at her elbow with drinks. Adam was moving sulkily through the throng of dowdy revelers, many of whom had reached the staggering, bellowing stages of drunkenness, costumes askew. But I was painfully sober. Painfully alone. Painfully alert to some not-quite-rightness, a general drooping of the spirit.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Boykin when he offered me a beer.
“It’s early,” Helen said.
“I’m going hunting tomorrow morning,” I said.
“For real?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Totally,” I said, imitating Adam.
As I walked away, I saw her turning toward the boy to peer at some trifle he’d pulled up on his little screen.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s amazing.”
And I wondered what magical image he’d bewitched her with—a short art film, an E-Live photo stream, some oft-tweeted meme that offered just the right political commentary in six words or less.
As I strolled toward my truck, I thought of the Calydonian Boar, that beast from antiquity who tore ass through the Greek countryside, snorting Stygian smoke. I thought of old Beowulf, the first dragon slayer in literature, gray haired with shrunken sinews, slumping into the wilderness in heavy mail. I imagined Hogzilla, asleep in his musky swamp nest, dreaming mysterious hoggish dreams.
I’d rise with the sun. I’d smear my body with sacred mud to deface my decadent human stink. I’d become an animal, fleet-footed, keen-snouted, my mind in tune with the intricately shifting wind.
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 17
