Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  Leslie nodded solemnly.

  “I hope, when I’m dead?” Leslie said. “That everybody just cools their shit. I’m not saying that dumb thing where, like, I just want everybody to have a big party and be happy or anything. But just, you know, congregate, reflect, move on. If there’s any money, give it to my brother. Publish anything you can find from my computer if anybody wants it. Go on daytime TV if I died tragic. I don’t care, I’ll be dead. It’s not like it can ruin my reputation any worse than what I’ll have already done to it.”

  “I would like my posthumous legacy to be carefully curated,” Molly said. “The past is remembered through deliberate shaping. We forget this at our peril.”

  She was speaking in a formal monotone that was far removed from her usual revved-up style. In the glow of the projector, it gave her entire person a spooky quality.

  “Neither of you is going to die,” I said. “I’ll make sure.”

  “Do not make promises that you will be unable to keep,” Molly said. Now I was pretty sure that she was purposely talking more and more like a robot, to amuse herself or weird us out, or both.

  “He’s being sweet,” Leslie said. “He wants us to live forever.”

  “That is a really long time,” Molly said.

  “Not for a robot,” I said.

  “Ex-cuse me, are you calling me a robot?” Molly said in the robot voice. “I take offense to be-ing characterized as such when I am a liv-ing and breath-ing hu-man.”

  “Should we turn this off?” I said, tilting my chin toward the screen. Michael was dancing in a teal T-shirt, tight pink pants, and an oversized trench coat; he looked like a shut-in wandering down to the bodega for nonperishables.

  “Fine,” Molly said, reverting to herself. She rapidly hit a series of buttons on the projector and the room faded to pitch dark, though my eyes perceived ghosted light against the wall for a few more seconds.

  “I’m assuming everyone’s really stoned,” Molly said after what felt like five minutes of empty silence. “My basic goal was to, like, incapacitate a roomful of people.”

  We were silent for another long moment, contemplating this in the dark.

  “I think … you succeeded,” I said. “Where’s, ah, Bojo? Think tight? Brain glow?”

  “Oh, Jill,” Molly said. She exhaled heavily. “I dunno, man. I thought it might be kind of transgressive or something to date this super-bourgeois dude, but now I wonder if it might just kind of suck. He’s smart and all, but I think he just thinks I’m, like, this weird chick.”

  “In my experience?” Leslie said. “Those normal-seeming guys can turn out to be super fucked-up. Sometimes in a good way? Like, they’ve repressed all this stuff, and then they meet a groovy lady and suddenly they want to try sucking cock and stuff.”

  “Huh,” Molly said. “I guess that would be interesting. If I had a cock.”

  “I just mean you never know what those normal people are like. They’re mysteries. I was with this one guy for a couple of months in Missoula, and I swear, watching Game of Thrones, like, flipped a switch in him. All types of sex coming out of this dude.”

  “But everybody just watches porn now,” I said. “I mean, so I’ve heard.”

  “I think that’s just mostly reinforcing very specific mainstream desires in most cases,” Leslie said. “Like, ‘You want to get fucked hard, slut?’ That kind of thing.”

  “You might be surprised,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’re into weird-ass shit. But I’m talking about the wider public.”

  “Hey, I’m getting wider every day.”

  “You’re going to make a really great dad,” Molly said in her robot voice.

  “Is the movie over?” Julia said sleepily. She sat up, her hair sticking up like a porcupine.

  “The doctor did it,” Leslie said. “That’s the punch line.”

  I spent the next couple of evenings at home with Julia, making arguments to myself about our relationship. We had better taste than our friends. We were unconventional without being wacky. We had a rigorously exploratory sex life.

  On Wednesday night we made pizza in the UFO-shaped oven Julia’s parents had bought us, the heavy-duty kitchen hardware that reads unmistakably as an enticement to start a wedding registry. That refurbished barn, the pizza oven warned, isn’t going to pay for itself.

  “What do you want on this one?” she said.

  “Is there an option that isn’t vegetables?” I said. I was leaning against the fridge while she bent over the counter rolling out dough. I couldn’t help but remember what had happened the last time I spent extended time in front of the refrigerator.

  “Mushrooms aren’t vegetables, technically,” Julia said. “They’re … bottom-feeders?”

  “Scavengers, I think,” I said.

  I poured a couple of servings of mezcal and orange juice over ice, then stood behind Julia and held a glass out in front of her face. I clinked it gently against her teeth and tipped it back.

  “Mmph,” she said. “Correct.”

  I put the drink on the shaky spice shelf in front of her and went to the front room to put on a record. What said “domestic bliss with a hint of chaos imminent”? Most of our records. I settled on George and Tammy, We’re Gonna Hold On. “By a fountain back in Rome…” came warbling through the static fuzz.

  “Our Bach and Tchaikovsky!” yelled Julia. “Is Haggard and Husky!”

  “I guess we pretty much are the jet set,” I said.

  “The jet set that would rather stay home.”

  Julia and I had been all kinds of places—Thailand, Prague, Cleveland. But it was true that I preferred to do nothing. This was not Julia’s favorite aspect of my character. I opened the pod to check the progress of the first pizza and was greeted by a gust of black smoke.

  “Lost track of that one,” Julia said. She took a sip of her drink, leaving smudgy red fingerprints on it. Luckily we’d taken out the smoke detectors long ago. But the pizza was, unfortunately, on fire.

  Julia stood on her tiptoes and grabbed the bag of flour off the top of the refrigerator. She poured a pile of it onto the charred pizza.

  “One down!” she said. I picked the pizza up by the edges and released it into the trash can. George and Tammy were singing about crawdads with help from some mischievous guitar licks.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re cute.”

  “I’m pretty cute,” she conceded. She was wearing a T-shirt illustrated with heavily bandaged zombie fingers dripping blood. “All right, this time we won’t burn the pizza.”

  By the time we’d cooked all the dough we were fairly drunk. We sat at the dining room table grinning and pulling the pizzas apart with our hands. I thought, blurrily, Well, we’re dumb and we loved each other.

  At the end of the week, I texted Leslie and asked if she wanted to come out to Kenny’s place with me for the afternoon. She was down; she’d been holed up trying to write all week but hadn’t gotten shit done. Maybe what she needed was to jump in a pond and look at some chickens. In any case, I said, it wouldn’t hurt.

  I drove out to her aunt’s house to pick her up, even though it was in the other direction from Kenny’s. It wasn’t like I was busy. Kiki lay across the backseat, staring at a fixed point on the car door, either very content or very carsick. It was too hot out, at least ninety-five degrees, and I was running the air-conditioning with the windows open, because there was no one there to tell me I couldn’t.

  Leslie’s aunt’s place was a low-slung, wood-cabin thing a long driveway down from a surprisingly busy road. Leslie was sitting on the front porch steps when I pulled up, reading a paperback with her knees up around her ears. Kiki sprang into action behind me, her tail waving furiously at the sight of an overgrown border collie bounding toward the car. Leslie glanced up, then went back to reading until I was standing over her. Kiki raced up to the other dog and feinted out of the way at the last second, then came around and clung industriously to its back left ankle with her mouth, cr
eating a swirling miasma of dog.

  “Ready to rock?” I said.

  She looked annoyed to be interrupted.

  “Should I bring sunscreen?” she said.

  “There’s some in the car, if you don’t mind baby flavor,” I said.

  She sneered a little and sprang to her feet.

  “You read this?” she said. She displayed the frayed cover of Soul on Ice.

  “I could never bring myself to do it,” I said. “I love Baldwin too much. It would feel like a betrayal.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure it’s actually that good. It’s definitely cool, though. That counts for something.”

  She got in the car and I called Kiki back—she reluctantly heeded my fourth command. Leslie rummaged through the loose CDs and broken cases wedged into the car’s center console.

  “Oh, listen to this first,” I said. I’d planned it so that the demo version of “$1000 Wedding” would come on a few minutes after she got in the car, after enough time had elapsed that it wouldn’t seem like I’d planned it. “This is the saddest shit ever. Worse than Orbison.”

  We listened to it in silence, me hearing Gram Parsons’s trembling voice go through the whole tragic ordeal for the seven thousandth time, Leslie, I assumed, for the first. I imagined we were sharing a moment of charged, awestruck wonder.

  When it ended she said: “A little overwrought, no?”

  “Did you hear him?” I said. “‘With all the invitations sent, the young bride passed away’! Is the situation not deserving of some emotion?”

  “It’s not like it’s something that happened and he had to report on it. It’s all just Parsons co-opting what he imagines to be the pure yokel cornpone heart. I’m not saying it’s not pretty. He’s a nice singer. I don’t know, for some reason every time I listen to him, I just think Oooh-kay, Gram, thank you, you are a very sad little boy imitating old country music, good job.”

  This was fair enough, as a personal opinion, and a fairly common one, but still wrong.

  “I forgive you,” I said.

  “Here’s some corny shit I do love,” she said. She sang along to the opening lines of the John Prine CD she’d inserted: “When I woke up this morning, things were looking bad…”

  “This definitely isn’t any better,” I said.

  “You have got to be honest, about how you feel,” she said, echoing the melody of “Illegal Smile.” “Otherwise you’ll find yourself, unable to deal. My friends in Missoula had a John Prine cover band. The only song they ever played was that one that goes ‘Pretty good, not bad, can’t complaaain.’ It’s kind of a fucked-up song?”

  “For sure,” I said.

  When we took the fork at the country convenience store near Kenny’s house, Kiki got excited and started pacing in the backseat. I cracked one of the back windows and she stuck her head out, nose twitching like crazy. We pulled into the long, densely forested driveway and Kiki lost it, trying to jam her entire thick body through the tiny window crack. When we’d gotten halfway up the drive, I stopped and let her jump out. She raced up ahead of the car and into the trees, already on the trail of some phantom deer.

  “Is she okay doing that?” Leslie said.

  “Usually,” I said. “I’ve only lost her a couple times out here. She’s always made it back eventually. As you see.”

  We parked in front of the house and Kiki came tearing across the meadow toward us, her sloppy tongue nearly to the ground. She sniffed wildly at the front steps, then did a lap around the house. She marched up to me with an interrogative head tilt.

  “I know, little Scruggs isn’t here, Keek,” I said. “Kenny took him to New Hampshire.”

  She raced around the side of the house to the shady mudhole where the tadpoles lived. Usually I tried to keep her out of there, because it was disgusting, but since she’d be outside all day anyway I let it go. Dog wanted to get covered in slime and eat frog babies? Today was her lucky day.

  “This is a sweet spot,” Leslie said.

  “You’d really like Kenny,” I said. “He’s, like, the opposite of me in a lot of ways. He’s the best.”

  “What does that make you?” Leslie said. “Do you think I’d like him better?”

  “Well, he’s really tall,” I said. “So you’d have that in common.”

  She was wearing a nearly translucent purple Western shirt, unbuttoned over a black one-piece bathing suit and pink cutoff jean shorts. Now that we were out here in the middle of nowhere, alone in goddamn bucolic splendor with a cooler full of beer, I fully admitted to myself that I badly wanted to have sex with Leslie, and started working through whether or not I was going to commit myself to actually trying to do that. My hope, as always, was that someone else would make the decision for me, absolve me of the little responsibility I had. One thing I’ve learned: you can always—always—have less responsibility.

  We walked out to the chicken coop behind the house, past the garden sprawling with basil and mint and deer skulls. I nearly kicked Kiki trying to keep her out of the coop—I didn’t trust her around chickens since an unfortunate Sunday brunch at which she’d been caught at the pond with a drowned orange bantam hen in her mouth. Julia swore she’d been framed, but I saw the murder in her eyes. Kenny’d forgiven me after I presided over a chicken burial, but if she killed another one, I doubted either of us would be as easily absolved.

  “Do you know anything about chickens?” Leslie said. The coop was terribly hot, multiplying the smell of straw and bird shit exponentially. I picked up a chopped milk carton full of grain and opened the wire mesh pen. The little dinosaurs rushed us while Kiki howled in frustration outside.

  “I think it might turn out you don’t have to know anything?” I said. “It seems like you just give them food and water, and they lay eggs, and then they get killed by foxes no matter what you do.”

  “Old MacDonald couldn’t have explained it better,” she said.

  Leslie followed me in and collected the eggs, a couple for each of the three surviving chickens, two of which were regular size, that is, gigantic, and one miniature. The rooster was also tiny, purchased, I believe, to make jokes about having a tiny cock.

  After the oppressive claustrophobia of the chicken shack, even the evil humidity of the air outside felt good. We brought the eggs into the dusty kitchen for safekeeping, and I changed into my bathing suit in one of the unused downstairs bedrooms occupied by a rusty metal bedframe and some broken-looking acoustic guitars. When I emerged into the living room, Leslie was standing in front of the woodstove reading an old New Yorker.

  “This is the one with Henry Lake in it,” she said.

  Lake was a cautionary tale. He’d made his way through the experimental ranks, publishing flashy, glib stuff in small journals. The legend—apocryphal or not—went that when he finally had a story accepted by The New Yorker, he got so distracted reading the email on his phone that he drove his car into a tree. The story itself, published posthumously, was okay, not great. It turned out The New Yorker was just a tool, like a gun.

  “You want to swim?” I said.

  “Hell yeah,” she said. “You know, this story isn’t actually that bad so far.”

  “It gets worse,” I said.

  She rolled up the magazine and carried it down to the pond with her. I’d brought a Renata Adler book about an endless lawsuit—it was like I was trying to never finish another thing. We picked our way down an overgrown path to the little weather-beaten dock, me with the cooler, Leslie with a stack of towels, Kiki with a fetid tennis ball she’d found in the field. I’d spent many afternoons down here with Kenny, drinking beer and paddling lazily across the water’s sun-warmed surface and abrupt cold patches. I admired Leslie’s collarbone bulging under the glossy, taut material of her swimsuit. She went to the edge of the dock and dipped her toe in the water.

  “Not that cold,” she said.

  I stuck my foot in and she lunged like she was going to push me. She must have seen terror on my face because she
grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her.

  “Sorry sorry sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “It would’ve been okay,” I said.

  “Yeah, right, you’d’ve never’ve forgiven me,” Leslie said. “That would’ve been the end of it.”

  “The end of what?”

  “I just know you’re the kind of person who holds a grudge.”

  “No, I forgive. I forget.”

  “I guess the drinking probably helps,” she said.

  I took a beer out of the cooler, opened it, and took a sip. “I forgive you.”

  Leslie took a beer, too, and sat on the edge of the dock with her feet in the water. She leaned back so that I was standing over her and looking straight down at her backward face.

  “I should really be working,” she said with exaggerated languor.

  “I think this counts,” I said. “It’s like walking the dog.”

  “Right, right,” she said, still languid, but distracted. “I mean, where does people’s energy come from?”

  “Rage, I guess? Sexual dysfunction?”

  She put a folded towel under her head and blocked the sun with her magazine. I lay perpendicular to her across the dock, trying, barely, to follow Adler’s ridiculously thorough discussion of libel law, but mostly noticing how hot I was getting and wondering where Kiki had run off to and imagining what part of the Lake story Leslie was reading at any given second. Finally I couldn’t stand my restlessness anymore. I pulled my shirt off—she’d have to see my torso flab at some point—and dived shallowly into the pond. Okay, it was cold. Kiki suddenly appeared on the far bank of the pond, running back and forth in her usual riot of competing emotions—Jump in and save Dad? Bark frantically to alert him of the danger he faces in the uncharted depths? Remind everyone about the tennis ball that is yet unthrown?

  I swam a full loop of the pond, then treaded water by the dock.

  “Oh, hello,” Leslie said. “It’s a wild sea monkey.”