Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  “As long as it doesn’t overwhelm you,” I said. “And being kind of fucked-up and amoral is an interesting possibility, too.” I finished my drink.

  “Brian would say, and maybe me too, that it’s more interesting to resist being amoral and fucked-up. Because for me, at least, it’s very easy to be those things.”

  She said this very solemnly, and my spacious drunken affection for her tightened to a kind of guilt, and sadness. I didn’t even know her yet, really, and I felt like we’d gone through an entire relationship cycle, which meant, probably, that it was mostly in my head.

  “Peter,” she said, still solemn. “I have had slightly too much to drink and should not drive my car. I don’t want to make you drive me the, like, thirty-five minutes both ways. On a scale of one to divorcing your ass, how pissed will Julia be if she comes home to me sleeping on your couch?”

  “We’re not married,” I said, too quickly. “And she’s a doctor. She’ll applaud our prudence.”

  “Why does ‘prudence’ sound so disgusting?” Leslie said. “I guess because it sounds like ‘prurient’? Or because of the creepy Beatles song?”

  “There’s nothing creepy about wanting to hang out with Mia Farrow’s sister,” I said.

  I settled up and sent Julia a quick text: “Our new friend LESLIE needs to stay over tonight if that’s all right. Tooooo much fun. Hope works been OK. Love you.”

  I was feeling a little tipsy myself, so I took a hit of the vaporizer in the stairwell.

  “Wait, I want that!” Leslie said. “You holding out on me, bro?”

  “Just didn’t want to be a pusherman,” I said. I remembered, just barely, not to explain to her how to use it.

  We paused on the landing between flights and she took a couple of big pulls. I took one more, too, and we descended past the band and out into the still-warm air.

  “Does Julia like me?” Leslie said after a couple of minutes.

  “I mean, she only met you the once, right?” I said. “But she definitely thought you were cool.”

  “I got a really good feeling from her,” Leslie said. “She gave the impression of being a really special person.”

  “For sure,” I said.

  We arrived back at the 2:19, where my Outback was parked out front. I hit the unlock button on my key and the car didn’t chirp like it usually did. But the front door opened when I pulled the handle, and I fell into the driver’s seat and buckled my seat belt. Leslie picked up a CD off the passenger’s seat and got in next to me.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Whitney Houston guy,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I put my key in the ignition but it wouldn’t turn.

  “The Bodyguard soundtrack?” she said, holding the CD case toward me.

  “Huh,” I said, examining the dustless dashboard, the cup holder unfilled by sticky change and stray pieces of dog food. “You know, this isn’t my car.”

  “Like you’re borrowing it?”

  “No, no,” I said. “We should get out. It’s somebody else’s car.”

  “Whoa,” she said. “Shit.”

  We just sat there for a minute contemplating this. Then we got out and walked quickly away. No turning back. I remembered that my car was in the parking lot, and sure enough, it beeped obediently when called on. But even in my own car, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dislocation. If you could blithely get in the wrong car, do everything but drive away, what else could you do by mistake? Maybe because I spent so much time failing to write short stories, I thought a lot about the arbitrariness of personality, the shuffled randomness of character. I was a certain way because I’d listened to Sonic Youth when I was fourteen; someone else had heard the siren call of Sublime and taken off in another direction. When you analyze people at either a very wide or a very narrow angle, their actions become predictable, regularized. And maybe beauty’s in specificity, in the particularities of character, but probably we’re just flattering our curiosity, our desire for gossip without social consequences. What’s significant, forget beautiful, about a particular triumph or failure? Or: How could it possibly matter which car you get into?

  When I started the car, the middle of “You Ain’t Gotta Lie” by Kendrick Lamar, which I’d been listening to on repeat all day, blasted out of the speakers. “You ain’t gotta lie to kick it, my nigga, you ain’t gotta try so hard…” over and over again, a not terribly effective mantra.

  “Where are you at with this record?” I said.

  “I know I’m wrong,” Leslie said. “But I really haven’t given it much time.”

  “It’s not going anywhere,” I said.

  It probably wasn’t a great idea for me to be driving, legally speaking, but I felt good, floating but focused, directing the car’s movement rather than steering. And I loved the blunted calm radiating from Leslie, the coiled potential. I was bringing her back with me. It didn’t matter that nothing could happen between us; it was better that way. She would be in our little house, sleeping under the same roof, and she wouldn’t leave until the morning. On the less positive side, she’d see what a shithole our house was. Which, I realized abruptly, was the thing that would upset Julia about Leslie coming over, rather than anything about her in particular. It was 11:30; I could do a quick straightening before she got home. But the fundamental bombed-out quality—the mountains of dog hair, the grime on the windowsills, the creeping mold on the coffee table—was unalterable. I would have been very surprised if Leslie gave a shit about the cleanliness of the house, but Julia would say that wasn’t the point. She cared about how it would look, about what it would say about us, our carelessness as humans. And she was right.

  I crept the car onto our sleeping block. There was Kiki in the window, majestically perched in full extension across the top of the couch, tail rotoring furiously. When Leslie stepped out of the passenger door, Kiki let out a howl of betrayal and warning: Stranger! Imposter! I shushed her as we walked up the steps to the house. Inside, Kiki externalized her painful inner struggle, greeting me enthusiastically, then turning and barking at Leslie, then jumping up on me, then cowering away when Leslie tried to pet her.

  “You’re a little tall for her,” I said.

  “Aw, she’ll get used to it,” Leslie said. “She’ll realize I am a dog.” She crouched down to Kiki’s eye level and said “I am a dog” again in a scary Kanye voice. Kiki barked in her face. I put her in the backyard.

  “Sorry the house is such a mess,” I said. “I’d say it’s not usually like this, but.”

  “Dude, I am a filthy person,” Leslie said. “This actually looks pretty good to me. Well, not that.”

  She pointed out a pile of torn-up paper on the floor, at the center of which was a candy bar, still mostly wrapped. I bent down and picked up the detritus.

  “This dog,” I said. “She’ll destroy a bag but leave behind all the food. Which is good, because she’d probably be dead if she ate all this chocolate.”

  “Okay, but the thing about that,” Leslie said. “Do you actually know of any dog that died from eating chocolate? Everyone’s so paranoid about it, and I guess I believe them, but I’ve literally never heard of it actually happening.”

  “I think people are just really on it with their preventative measures,” I said. “It’s pretty much the only thing I know about dog care. And I’ve had a dog for two years.”

  I threw away the remnants of the bag, and the candy bar, too. I didn’t need to be eating that shit anyway. I still had no reply from Julia—either she was really busy or she was passive-aggressively disapproving of my choices. Probably both.

  “You want a beer?” I called from the kitchen.

  “Yes please!” Leslie called back.

  I grabbed a couple of the metallic-tasting pilsners and sank down onto the big, busted couch cushion next to Leslie, which tipped her toward me, pressing her leg against mine. She unobtrusively shifted back to where she’d been.

  “This is good, man,�
�� Leslie said. “I feel like we’re going to be real friends, you know?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Definitely, definitely.”

  If this had been a regular pickup, if we were an unattached twosome, this, the moment at which we ran out of things to say to each other, would have been the starter pistol for kissing. Instead, we tongued our beers and stared at the wall.

  “So, what are you working on now?” Leslie said.

  I sighed, performing my frustration with myself.

  “Nothing good,” I said. “Killing time that could be better spent helping people, or at least making money.”

  “Man, you can’t worry about that too much. Someone could fucking cure cancer with the time I’ve spent stoned and thinking about, like, the ideal character-defining gesture. I get a little hung up about utility sometimes, but I don’t know. What else should we be doing?”

  I thought about this, took it seriously. I’d been trying to take people at their word lately.

  “Nothing,” I said, ambiguous even to myself.

  I heard Kiki whining frantically from the backyard, and then the crack of her hurling her paws into the screen in the kitchen window. This meant that Julia was home. I let Kiki in the back door so that she wouldn’t injure herself or the window. She bounded in, then startled into a low growl when she saw Leslie was on the couch, then jumped up on it anyway, staying as far away from Leslie as she could while still looking out the window at Julia’s approach.

  “Hello!” Julia called out in her dog voice when she walked in. I stepped over and gave her a peck on the mouth, which she accepted with seeming sanguinity. “And hello, wayward sister!” she said to Leslie, who stood up and gave her a hug. “I’m glad you decided to stay. The cops around here are real dicks.”

  “I’m sorry for imposing,” Leslie said. “I haven’t been socializing much, and all of a sudden I found myself somewhat, um … oversocialized?”

  “I suppose that’ll happen when you’re hanging with my boy,” Julia said. “And you? You were spared this abundance of fun?”

  “I’m bigger,” I said.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Remember what happened to Kenny, drunk boy.”

  Kenny’d gotten a DUI on his way home from a raucous reading at our house, after which he wasn’t allowed to drive for over a year, a punishment that was prolonged when, after having a Breathalyzer installed in his car for a final probationary period, he blew scotch fumes on a hungover morning in my company, which the car’s enhanced intelligence dutifully reported to the law.

  “I was meticulous regarding my intake,” I said. Actually, having this conversation was making me realize how heavy with booze I was. I sank back into the couch. “How was the hospital?”

  “I had to stay a little late because I was sewing up this guy’s hand,” she said. “But, on the plus side, he’s like a concert promoter or something? So he gave me free tickets to a show at the Southern.”

  “You must have done a good job,” Leslie said.

  “Not really,” said Julia. “I think he just liked me. Or was looking for someone to like. Let me change out of my blood-soaked garb.”

  Her scrubs, I should note, looked pretty clean.

  Kiki followed Julia into the bedroom, happy to be freed from the choice between outside and us. This would have really been the most interesting time to kiss Leslie: I could have found out very quickly what she was all about. Instead I leaned a little closer to her so that our legs were touching again. This time she didn’t move away.

  “I can drive you back into town to get your car in the morning,” I said.

  “Oh, I can walk if you have stuff to do,” Leslie said.

  “I can drop you on my way to teach. So like ten?”

  “Whatever works,” she said. “Atcher mercy.”

  Julia reemerged in a T-shirt from a high school production of Guys and Dolls, her contacts replaced by heavy glasses.

  “So, are we going to get to meet this fiancé of yours?” Julia said. “Or is he not invited.”

  I supposed I must have told Julia the story, at least as well as I knew it, and hoped that Leslie didn’t care.

  “He’ll actually be visiting in a few weeks,” Leslie said. This was news to me. “You guys should totally meet him. I think he and Peter would be fast friends.”

  “I don’t care about local food,” I said.

  “Yes you do,” Julia said. “You pick up vegetables from our CSA every week.”

  “It’s not high on my list of priorities,” I said.

  “Well, he likes baseball and arrogant French New Wave movies and, fucking, I don’t know, Otis Redding, too,” Leslie said. “Believe me, you’ll have plenty to talk about.”

  I already wanted to fight him.

  “He sounds good to me,” Julia said. “We’re finally going to go to the art museum in Richmond next weekend if you have any interest.”

  “That’s really sweet of you,” Leslie said. “I need to make sure my aunt doesn’t have anything planned. She likes to show me off to her friends. I know she wants to take me to a freaking polo match one of these weekends.”

  “Oy vey,” I said. “If you like assholes, you’ll love polo!”

  “Some of us do, obviously,” said Julia.

  Leslie leaned back into the sofa, burrowing backward in pleasure.

  “Man, you turn into a real curmudgeon sometimes,” she said. “It’s very funny to watch it happen.”

  “Polo is awful,” I said. “I think that’s a fair and nuanced position.”

  “Just your whole demeanor,” she said.

  “Yeah, he’s a mood balloon,” Julia said. “The booze helps, until it doesn’t.”

  I finished my beer, feeling I didn’t have much of a choice.

  “Do you need a drink, Julia?” I said.

  “I need to go to bed,” she said. “Aren’t you teaching tomorrow?”

  “Misfortunately,” I said.

  “Go get some sheets and a blanket for Leslie so she can sleep,” Julia said. “I think there are some clean ones in the bathroom closet.”

  I got up, my earlier annoyance dissipating in the face of Julia’s domestic bully routine, which was mostly employed as an adjunct to sex. I guess she’d figured out a pretty swell Pavlovian fix to my attitude. We did have some sheets in the closet, though they were the kind of flowery hand-me-downs that signal “dead old lady” a little too strongly for my taste. Still, they were a better choice than our more aesthetically pleasing, but dirty, alternatives. I went into the bedroom to get a pillow and lingered for an extra couple of minutes to give Julia and Leslie a chance to talk, if they wanted to. When I went back into the living room, the women were silent, though I didn’t know whether they had stopped talking when they heard me coming, or what.

  “If you need a toothbrush, we have a bunch of unused ones in the cabinet under the sink,” Julia said. She laid the sheet over the couch and pushed one side down under the filthy cushions. “Some psychotic Costco binge with my mother.”

  “Thanks,” Leslie said. “You guys go to bed. I’ll set up camp here. Y’all are really too kind.”

  “Not too kind,” Julia said. She went to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  “Sleep well,” I said. “I think we did a pretty good job tonight.”

  “Many more to come,” Leslie said. She had her back turned to me, examining the bookcase in the corner.

  “Those ones are mostly Julia’s,” I said. “She’s more committed to the classics.”

  Leslie took down the gigantic second volume of The Man Without Qualities.

  “I’ve always wanted to own this, but I’ve never gotten through the first one,” she said.

  “Maybe if you buy the second one, it’ll inspire you to finish the first.”

  “You’re pretty good at justifications for buying books, huh?” she said.

  “Or you could, you know, borrow it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s in imminent danger of being read.”

  She
put it back on the shelf.

  “I’ll find something amidst your treasure piles,” she said. “Sleep well.”

  I tried to detect a trace of smirk, but, honestly, I didn’t.

  In our room, Julia was in bed under the covers. Kiki sighed melodramatically from her monogrammed dog pillow. I crawled from the foot of the bed up to Julia’s knees.

  “Thank you for being good with all this,” I said.

  “You seem very proud of yourself,” Julia said.

  “Just having fun is all.”

  “I want some, too,” she said.

  “I thought you had to sleep.”

  “Soon. Not yet.”

  In the morning, after Julia got up and went to work, I moved as quietly as I could from the bedroom to the kitchen to make coffee. But when I glanced around the corner, I saw that Leslie was awake, lying across the length of the couch with a book held over her face and a sheet covering her body. I watched her read for a minute, her eyes a model of concentration and tranquility, her mouth twitching downward in a slight frown. I recognized the book, a hardcover anniversary reissue of Blood Meridian that I’d poached from my old job.

  “Have you read that?” I said finally.

  She didn’t startle, simply turned her head slightly to acknowledge me while keeping the book aloft above her head.

  “In college,” she said. “But last night I thought I’d just read the Harold Bloom introduction in this one to put me to sleep, and before I knew it I was terrified, so I just kept reading.”

  “You didn’t stay up all night,” I said.

  “No, no. I fell asleep, and then woke up like an hour ago and kept reading.”

  She went back to her book. Kiki barked ferociously in the backyard at her dog frenemies across the fence. My rule was that if she barked ten or more times in a row I had to tell her to stop. She kept making it to seven or eight, then stopping for a few seconds, then going back to it. I had not asked my neighbors how they felt about this rule.

  I made coffee and tried to gauge how hungover I was. It seemed like maybe not particularly? Leslie also seemed pretty unfazed. Julia’d said I stank of booze, and I’m sure she was right, but nevertheless, we’d been greedy and thorough with each other. Neither of us mentioned Leslie’s presence a short hallway and a couple of thin walls away, but surely it had served some catalytic purpose.