Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  “Monkey … do?” I said.

  “All right, so I guess that story is pretty lame. The main thing about it is that it’s just completely average. Certainly not worth dying for.”

  “I didn’t know the guy,” I said. “Did you hear about the girl who published the same exact story in three different magazines, changing only the proper names and the characters’ taste in music?”

  “I liked all of them,” Leslie said. “Didn’t bother me.”

  “You going to swim?”

  “Maybe when I finish this beer. And yours. It’s getting cooked.”

  “Send it here.”

  Now that was cool—swimming and drinking beer at the same time. Actually I was mostly just holding on to the dock while gulping it, and the beer was disgustingly warm. I finished it and grabbed Leslie’s ankle, tugged on it gently.

  “All’s fair, but I do not want splinters in my ass,” she said.

  I lifted her foot—the one I’d been admiring during the movie, or the other one—and kissed the tops of her toes.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “I see.”

  I lifted her other foot and got to those toes, too.

  “Well, that’s all of them,” she said, smiling down at me.

  I covered my face and went underwater in mostly mock shame, reemerging some twenty feet away from the dock.

  “What happened?” she called. “Come back here.”

  That was what I needed, like a vampire. I swam underwater toward her and popped up near her legs.

  “Do you want me to drown you?” Leslie said.

  “Is that my only option?”

  “Come up here,” she said.

  I hoisted myself up none too gracefully by the elbows and sat next to her, facing the water. I put my hand on her tan, bare thigh and her eyes presented me with a blunt question. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to answer yes with mine, but luckily she just pulled me down on top of her.

  “Sorry I’m so wet,” I mumbled. She bit my bottom lip and felt around inside my bathing suit. I lunged to kiss her and the back of her head thunked lightly against the dock.

  “Is this cool?” she said.

  I ran my hand down her front, which was hot from an hour of afternoon sun.

  “Let’s get this thing off of you,” I said. I pulled down the straps of her suit and wrenched the rest of it crackling down her body and off. I felt momentarily embarrassed by the vulnerability of her undersunned breasts, and shifted my gaze to her dark legs. I kissed her thighs, swallowed sunscreen. She sat up and tugged at the waist of my shorts, so I released the knot of the drawstring and slid them off. I loomed over her on my knees, moved my fingers inside her gently. It was incredibly bright out, so bright that the glare off the water hurt my eyes, and I closed them to her twitching flesh.

  “How prepared are you to fuck me?” Leslie said after a few minutes of this.

  “Oh,” I said. “I mean. I don’t … have anything? But I’m good. I mean, uh, safe? What about you?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Leslie said. She stood up and walked over to the grass, pulled an opened box of condoms out of her bag. She tore one package off from the line of six.

  “You should take this as a real compliment,” she said.

  When I pushed into her she gave a low grunt, so different from Julia’s pitched murmurings that I worried I’d hurt her. But she was with me, with it, driving me deeper into her with throat sounds of affirmation. It’d been a while since I’d worn a condom, and I found myself thinking like a teenager—Was it still on? Had it broken? Leslie didn’t seem worried.

  “I haven’t had a cock in me for a month,” she said. “What the fuck?”

  We rolled over. I was acutely aware of how much bigger she was than Julia, of how the length of her body negotiating mine felt like a wrestling match. With her on top of me, my back and shoulders started aching within seconds—Leslie’d managed a long time against the dock without complaining.

  “Here we are,” she said. “This is how we finish.”

  She touched herself and pressed down hard against me, and it was the sound of her crying out, a sudden, emphatic “Oh shit” coupled with her palm slamming into my chest, that startled me into coming, too. She delicately extricated herself and lay flat against me. We reeked of sunscreen and oniony sweat and rubber. She bumped her forehead against mine so that we were nose to nose and her sweaty hair made a curtain over my face. I couldn’t see her.

  “Boy, this is fun,” she drawled. “And you’re not that bad a lay.”

  Even couched in such a way, I felt, as she’d known I would, inordinately proud of this. It’s hard to know what kind of lay you are when you’ve been with the same person for as long as I had been. I did think of Julia now, though that was about as far as it went: her name fading up into my mind intermittently, then fading back down, without her face or any particular emotion attached. Its very presence implied guilt, but I didn’t really feel it yet.

  We lay next to each other side by side, taking on sun. There was, in me at least, the intuition that when we broke this self-conscious idyll—gathered our clothes and reading material and trash, found the dog, tromped back up the path through the trees to the house—the next, more difficult part of our comradeship would commence, one defined by tension and secrecy and lies. But: it didn’t. We said some funny things to each other as we trundled through our tasks, threw a hopelessly muddy Kiki in the wayback of the car, and rapped along to Drake on the radio as we drove back into town. I dropped her at her aunt’s, kissed her, glowing, on the mouth, and drove home. I drank a beer in the shower humming that John Prine song—“pretty good, not bad, can’t complain.” When Julia got home, I was making dinner—black beans and rice, but still—for once in my goddamn life.

  Part II

  When Leslie was twenty-five, she lived in New York and, for longer than she should have, dated Todd. Todd was a playwright and actor who held down a day job at an investment firm, the one that prided itself on hiring artistic types for their ability to “think outside the box.” Maybe unsurprisingly, given the amount of work he was expected to do, Todd was deeply reliant on Adderall, and, in the quantities he took it, combined with never eating and also drinking a great deal, he became, not infrequently, an insane person. He wasn’t terrifically pleasant to begin with—that wasn’t the attraction, exactly—but by the end of a week in which he’d worked five ten-hour days at the office and then stayed up most of the nights writing and snorting speed, he was demonic, insisting he was imbued with powers greater than those of “lazy, weak-minded hipsters.” Never mind, or perhaps take into account, the fact that he was five foot eight and rail thin, a bald, chain-smoking skeleton.

  His play about “the shadow cabinet” of George W. Bush, in which the torture victims of history (early Christian martyrs, Armenians, Cambodians) assemble in the Situation Room to approve war crimes, was kind of funny, mostly disturbing. Todd himself played the president, though he spoke in his own voice and didn’t wear a suit, instead sporting a white undershirt with “prezident” scrawled across it in Sharpie. Leslie attended a weekend’s worth of performances of this play only a month after meeting him, and even though the show was pretty awful, she saw the potential, or was at least willing to see where things went. It became clear to her that first weekend that he and his female producer Katie were also sleeping together, but it didn’t overly bother her. She knew from a brief college career acting in an anything-goes Shakespeare troupe that theater people were going to do what they wanted, common decency be damned. There was no stopping what happened backstage.

  Sex with Todd was a mess. Between the drugs and his anxiety and his selfishness, there wasn’t a lot to work with. He wanted to be “the dominant one,” a preference with which Leslie was happy to comply, though the fact that she was taller, heavier, and stronger than him created something of a sight gag when she mentally removed herself from the scene, which happened frequently during the periods in which she was nominall
y restrained in some way and he was trying to get an erection by stringing together long sequences of vulgarities and slapping himself in the face. When she was allowed to take control of their sexual activities, ordering him to do this or that, he came almost immediately, which was unfortunately more a source of shame and disappointment to him than pleasure. The only times she got to come were when she “made him” go down on her, which he did reluctantly and badly. And yet, he still turned her on, somehow, at least in principle. When they were apart, she sometimes touched herself thinking about him. The idea of him, not him him.

  Him him told her that a short story she’d written was “a really nice first effort” and that she should come back to it once she’d read some of the books he thought she’d find useful. (She had not, at this point, made it very far in Mason & Dixon.) She got drunk for courage and emailed the story anyway to a friend who worked at an important magazine, asking him only to tell her she wasn’t crazy for thinking it wasn’t bad. In response, she got a note from the fiction editor a week later, saying that the story was “brilliantly conceived, if not entirely emotionally coherent,” and that while they couldn’t take it, they’d be interested to see more work in the future. It shook her so deeply that she didn’t write a word of fiction for over a year. She didn’t tell Todd about any of it.

  One night, she and Todd and his producer Katie were out late at a bar near Katie’s apartment in Park Slope, drinking endless whiskeys and taking turns doing Todd’s cocaine in the bathroom. Katie had the open, helplessly expressive face of a Northern Renaissance Madonna, sad and shining with inner knowledge. While Todd was occupied with his drugs, Katie nuzzled her head against Leslie’s shoulder.

  “You should stay over my place tonight,” she said. “It’s gonna take you forever to get home from here.”

  “Would that be okay?” Leslie said. She hated paying for cars, on principle, and couldn’t really afford them, either. Ride-sharing was still but a glimmer in a young misogynist’s eye.

  Katie lifted her head from Leslie’s shoulder and nodded solemnly.

  “I want your company,” she said. “’Cause I’m a sad and looonely girl.”

  “What happened to what’s-his-name? Charles?”

  “Charles sucked. Bad talker. Better to be alone.”

  “Hey, did you and Todd ever, like, date date?” Leslie said.

  “Nooooo, no no,” Katie said. “I mean, we have history, certainly. And I love him to death. But I couldn’t deal with that, like, consistently. Not that you shouldn’t.”

  They watched him walk across the room, stopping at the bar to order another drink.

  “He is charming sometimes,” Leslie said.

  “I know, believe me,” Katie said. “Too bad—for all of us, really—that he’s so shite in bed. Unlike you, I bet.”

  Leslie, seized by some combination of relief, despair, and desire, leaned over and bit Katie on the neck, twisting her mouth as she disengaged to leave a mark.

  “Oh, I see, you’re an animal,” Katie said.

  Leslie made a low growling sound, like a dog.

  “You be good,” Katie said, petting Leslie’s hair.

  Leslie was panting and holding her wrists limp like paws when Todd returned to the table.

  “One thing you can never have too much of?” Todd said. “Whiskey and cocaine.”

  Leslie leaned over the table and licked his face in a long slurp.

  “Now that’s the kind of affection I’m looking for,” he said. “Just bypassing cerebral consideration and honing right in on the salt of human skin.”

  Leslie gave a demure howl and finished her drink.

  “Sir, you can’t just bring a dog into a bar,” Katie said.

  “Aw, she’s house-trained,” Todd said.

  Leslie thought for a moment about pissing herself in order to enter the realm of legend, but she worried she was too drunk to plausibly claim it had been fully intentional, and not quite drunk enough to make herself that uncomfortable on so many levels.

  “Look what she did,” Katie said, showing Todd her neck.

  “Oh shit,” Todd said. “Okay. Now I’ve got a better picture of this whole situation.”

  “The puppy and I were thinking we should all go back to my place.”

  Leslie lowered her face to Todd’s drink and lapped some whiskey out with her tongue. It was surprisingly difficult to get much down your gullet that way. She hadn’t realized Todd would be invited for whatever this next thing was.

  “I do have a couple more songs coming up on the jukebox…” Todd said. The bar didn’t have a jukebox. He finished his drink in two long gulps and crunched on some ice as he stood up. The two women followed him out the door.

  By the time they’d walked the four blocks to Katie’s, and up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, Leslie had sobered up a little bit, and wondered about what they were thinking here exactly. But then they each had another good-size line to finish off Todd’s cocaine (the stuff simply didn’t keep) and she was reflooded with enthusiasm. She hadn’t realized the degree to which these months of lousy sex had sharpened her desire, and now that the possibility of something different was close, she was nauseous with anticipation, internally begging Todd to be cool, even as she knew that, even on TV, these kinds of things never seemed to actually work out.

  As Katie poured drinks in the kitchen, Leslie decided that the only plausible way for her to deal with her anxiety would be to manifest it, that is, cede control of herself and let the anxiety take her over. In this case: act like an idiot and see if it got her what she wanted.

  “I wanna be in your lap,” she mumbled at Todd. She stretched languidly from her end of the couch onto his, placing her head where his dick might be.

  “Sleepy?” he said.

  She rolled her head back and forth slowly. Not sleepy. Something else. She turned her face upward toward his.

  “I like Katie,” she said in a babyish voice.

  “Yeah, she’s the best,” Todd said. “I’d be lost if not for her. More lost, I mean.”

  “I wanna play with her.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “I mean I wanna…” She switched to a whisper. “I wanna play with her.”

  “I got it, Les,” he said. “We’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?”

  She sighed and sat up as Katie came back into the room with the drinks.

  “These are Negronis, but they’re mostly just Campari,” Katie said. “A little dessert nightcap for us good kids.”

  Leslie took a sip from the one nearest her and shuddered. Campari tasted horrible to her, but she kind of liked it anyway.

  “You okay?” Katie said, perched with her legs draped across the arm of an easy chair.

  “A little. Strung. Out,” Leslie said rhythmically. She hunched over and put her fingers to her temples. “I wish. Someone. Would kiss me!”

  She kept her eyes on the low coffee table, but imagined Katie and Todd exchanging glances, drawing straws. Then there was a hand lifting her chin, and Katie’s blurry face pressing into hers. Leslie pulled her down gracelessly, grappling her vaguely toward Todd, too, so that he’d feel involved. She mauled Katie’s mouth with her own, pulling at her lips with her teeth while trying to hassle her bodily onto the couch.

  “Hey, let me get my boots off,” Katie said.

  Leslie whimpered and leaned over to kiss Todd’s ear. He moved his head just out of her reach, smiling vaguely, his eyes quiet.

  “There we go,” Katie said, climbing onto the couch in her black-socked feet. She kissed Leslie on the mouth gently, thoroughly, then glanced over at Todd.

  “Have at it,” he said.

  “We want you, too,” Leslie said, though she didn’t. She pulled on his collar. She ran her hand over his crotch, but nothing seemed to be going on there.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Katie seemed to not care either way, as she was now putting her hands on any part of Leslie s
he could reach, and Leslie was inclined to stop worrying about Todd’s feelings now, too, what with the sex and substances rolling through her brain. It could all be chalked up to inebriation later, and frankly, at this juncture, it was unclear whether or not she and Todd had much of a future. Leslie let herself be handled, reaching her mouth up for bites and tastes of Katie like a fish coming to the surface of a pond.

  “Should we move this whole project to the bedroom?” Katie said.

  She stood up and pulled Leslie to her feet.

  “Come on, Todd,” Leslie said.

  “I think I’m going to head home,” Todd said. “But you guys should have fun. Seriously.”

  Katie strode over to him, got in his face.

  “You said this is what you wanted,” she said. “You talk to me all day about how you have these debauched visions or whatever, you think you’re fucking Artaud or something, and then you don’t have any interest in actually doing anything. This is just like the night with that Cambridge guy. You get all revved up, you coke yourself into fucking abstraction, and then you bounce.”

  “That guy was literally on heroin,” Todd said. “And I’m sorry that if, on reflection, I’m actually not that excited about hooking up with my girlfriend and my, you know, producer at the same time. Business and pleasure and all that shit that Artaud didn’t have to worry about. I’m aware I’m a fucking downer and a fraud and everything else. I’m not, like, thrilled about it.”

  Leslie remained in the doorway of Katie’s bedroom. She really, really did not want to go home with Todd and spend the rest of the night listening to his self-laceration. She really was too drunk for that—she would not be able to sufficiently pretend to care.

  “It’s s’okay, Todd,” Leslie said, leaning hard into the slur. “You’re just good boy, I know. I’m jus’ gonna sleep here, ’kay?”

  She stumbled over to the couch and crashed down onto it limply. She was surprised by how quickly her legs came out from under her—she had little springs for knees.

  “Don’t pretend to be drunk, Les,” Todd said. “You’re really not good at it.”