Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  If I say I didn’t worry about it that much, Julia-wise, it was circumstance rather than carelessness. In that place, in that context, Leslie and I were simply together, a couple of rapacious friends with space to ourselves. Later, of course, that week took on a great deal of significance, proof that it was possible that things could be perfect between us, but the fact is, things could have been perfect between many combinations of reasonable people in that place, in that situation. It was a paradisiacal trap.

  When Kenny finally came home, a week after he said he would, I felt some relief. It felt like leaving the poker table before you’d lost all your money—not a win, necessarily, but it could have been worse.

  Also, Brian, Leslie’s fiancé, was coming. Julia and I had foolishly committed to having dinner with the two of them on his second night in town, at the fancy tapas restaurant. Leslie claimed it was essential that we meet each other—she’d talked about me too much to him, and he needed to see, in person, that I wasn’t a threat. This very nearly made sense.

  Every time Leslie talked about Brian, I felt depression gnaw into me. In the days between Kenny’s return and Brian’s arrival, I spent a lot of time listening to the Sonic Youth albums from their scary period—Sister, EVOL—songs about killing and being very nervous. They sounded like traveling on an interstate bus at night. Julia was used to me falling into periods of shallow darkness. She made sure I wasn’t contemplating imminent self-harm and let me be.

  Leslie remained more vocally ambivalent about Brian during our triumphant days than I would have expected or appreciated. She seemed to see little disjunction in idly wondering about whether or not she was going to marry him while we floated around the pond naked after having sex, though, to be fair, I guess I was unapologetically going home to my girlfriend every evening. I’m not saying my unhappiness was calculated for logical consistency, just that it existed.

  When the day of our big dinner arrived, I’d been fully transformed into a tightened muscle of absolute tension, barely able to communicate even with myself. The day’s class was exhausting. I let the students do group work that devolved quickly into institutional gossip and insults while I met individually with the women about their forthcoming research essays. This mostly consisted of hearing out perfectly legitimate complaints regarding the prison library and its dearth of books about the inequities of the criminal justice system, or anything much else, for that matter. I promised I’d bring some back issues of Dissent and n + 1. The last hour of the class was dedicated to all of us finally turning on the woman who continued to insist she wasn’t a white supremacist, despite the fact that she wanted to write her paper about the threat posed by the worldwide weakening of European bloodlines. As the students filed out, my best student, a butch Dominican woman named Mia, muttered to me, “You’re gonna get someone killed, man. This is prison.” I waved goodbye to a couple of impassive guards on my way out through the yard.

  When I arrived home at three o’clock, I got very stoned and drank whiskey and ice from a jumbo plastic cup. When Julia came home at six, I was a charming blend of catatonia and sentiment. I crooned about how I loved her while she encouraged me to shower. Once I did that, she wouldn’t shut up about me putting on clothes, like there was some big rush. Apparently we were half an hour late for dinner. My carefully selected outfit proved compromised by obvious stains and missing buttons, so I changed and stumbled out the door in whatever, wrinkled jeans and a campfire-reeking lumberjack fleece with nothing under it. Julia drove.

  “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” she said.

  “What oh what will we eat?” I said. “You never know what they’ll have! That’s the thing about this place, you never know.”

  She paused, and made the surprising choice not to scream at me. I would have screamed at me.

  “I got a poem accepted today,” she said. “By a good place.”

  “Holy shit!” I yelled. “That’s amazing! Where?”

  She named the place. I yelled some more.

  “It’s really good for me,” she continued calmly.

  “Damn right!” I said. “Now we’ve got something to celebrate.”

  “Right, you can finally break your abstemious vigil.”

  “Shake ’em bake ’em absteamium sigil!” I said.

  I cranked up the college radio station, which was playing a harpsichord song from the Renaissance or something, and waved my arms around like it was a party jam in a prom limo. Julia switched it to the actual hits station, which was playing Taylor Swift, and we sang along to her song about Starbucks. By the time we parked, I was better spirited and a little closer to sober.

  “Oh, I hope they have that squid thing,” Julia said, finally getting into it. “With the sauce?”

  “They fucking better,” I said.

  This restaurant’s defining design feature was that it had many more seats outside than inside, the tables sprawled across a wide patch of concrete and corralled by a severe metal fence. I spotted Leslie at a table right in the middle of the cluster, sitting next to a benign-looking fellow with a beard. I pointed them out to Julia and we floated over. I felt like I was walking too close to the other diners, like I was practically running my fingers through their food, though they didn’t seem to notice. Leslie and her man stood when we reached them.

  “Guys, this is Brian,” she said. I looked him in the eye and shook his hand.

  “Peter,” I said. “Great to finally encounter you.”

  “Same, man,” he said. He was a little pudgier than I expected him to be—pudgier than me, thank god—but he had the reedy, mellow voice of a smaller guy. “I’ve heard you guys are the picks of the litter.”

  “You shouldn’t pick at litter,” I said. “Gets you sick. She’s a doctor.”

  “I can take care of any medical situations you may experience,” Julia said. “Jockey bump, fox itch. Uh, metaplasmatosis.”

  “Great,” he said uncertainly.

  We sat down, and Julia apologized for our being so late.

  “No worries,” Leslie said. “We’re still trying to catch up anyway.”

  “We were busy celebrating Julia’s big publication news,” I said. “We’re going to need some cocktails very quickly.”

  “I just got a random poem accepted,” Julia said. “It’s not that big a deal.”

  “A doctor and a poet, huh?” Brian said. “That’s awesome. Do you write poems about, like, your experiences as a doctor?”

  “Sure, sometimes!” Julia said brightly. “I hear you write some, too? About food?”

  “When I have time,” Brian said. “Which isn’t that much right now, unfortunately. It sucks when real life gets in the way.”

  “Got to avoid life,” I said.

  “Having money helps, doesn’t it?” Leslie said. She was referring to the fact that I was a spoiled child. She studied my face, sending a message.

  I ordered martinis from Kelly, a waitress three years out of the local MFA program. She wrote short stories about girls turning into butterflies, boyfriends revealed as Draculas, sea otters with charisma.

  “Do you have that squid thing?” I said.

  “Um, there’s an octopus dish on the menu,” she said. “Why don’t you look at the menu while I get your drinks.”

  Her hostility was acceptable because, I remembered in that instant, she’d overheard me talking shit about her at a reading last year.

  “We marked a couple of things on the menu that looked good, but we’re easy,” Brian said. “This place looks really great.”

  The menus were little pieces of paper, checklist-style, designed to get you to order a hundred small plates for fear of missing out. Everything sounded good, but the secret was that a quarter of the things were just steamed vegetables with some salt on them. I tried to look at my scrap of menu but it was dark and my vision is terrible, plus I didn’t have the attention span right then. I pushed mine over to Julia and she neatly placed it under hers in understanding.

&n
bsp; “Does everyone eat everything?” Julia said.

  “I’m not super big on red meat,” Brian said.

  “Well, unless it’s locally sourced, right?” Leslie said.

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” Brian said. “The new people don’t need to know what a weenie I am.”

  “They’re not new to me, darling,” Leslie said.

  She was pointedly not looking in my direction.

  Our drinks arrived, and Kelly gathered up the scribbled-on menus.

  “Wait, did you guys finish figuring out what you wanted?” I said.

  Leslie looked confused, Kelly exasperated.

  “Whatever comes, we’ll eat it,” Julia said.

  “Well, cheers,” I said when the waitress had walked away. “To everybody being in the same place.”

  We all banged glasses, and no one commented on the paltriness of the stated occasion.

  “Well, so how’s your local food hub?” I said. “Isn’t that where you work?”

  “Ah, you know,” Brian said. “You do your best. Nonlocal is always cheaper, and people like it better, because it’s full of delicious chemicals, right? You kind of start to wonder how much it matters when the FDA keeps being like, it’s fine, everyone. Enjoy the chemicals. You’re all going to die from an opioid overdose anyway.”

  “That’s the most pessimistic thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Leslie said.

  He shrugged and took a sip of his beer.

  “Might need to get out of Texas,” he said.

  There was a pause as Julia and I searched for a way to continue that line of thought without stepping in it re: their plans for marriage, and therefore joint resettlement, or possible forfeit thereof by one particular party.

  “Have you been getting stuff done out here?” Julia said to Leslie. “Any interesting adventures since the King of Pop torture party?”

  “Been writing a little bit,” Leslie said, betraying nothing. “Reading a lot, actually. Finished that Cormac McCarthy I stole from you guys—side note, maybe he’s actually terrible?—and now on to James Welch. He’s a big deal in Missoula. I love his first two books, but this one’s harder to get into.”

  “I want to read The Executioner’s Song,” Julia said. “Peter won’t stop talking about it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Leslie said. “I’ve read, um, parts of it. Really need to give it a full chance.”

  “It’s worth it,” I said.

  “Has anyone here read the book about the hawk?” said Brian. “I hear that’s amazing.”

  “T. H. White already did it,” Julia said.

  “I think it’s kind of about T. H. White,” Brian said.

  “So why bother?” Julia said, more pointed now. “It seems like everybody wants to make me read and see shit that’s just a lamer version of something that already exists. Like, why do I need to go see a movie where people pretend to be N.W.A. when I can just watch ‘Fuck tha Police’ on YouTube?”

  “I like to see how things get interpreted,” Brian said, really thinking it through. “You want to know what the contemporary take is, to be part of the conversation.”

  “That’s what Peter says when he wants to watch the Oscars,” Julia said. “But it’s like, if everybody just rejected this shit, there wouldn’t have to be a conversation. The conversation is us, you know?”

  “Well, is it better to be solipsistic?” Leslie said. “Like, my friend Edward refuses to read any newspaper articles about the kids who do mass shootings, because he doesn’t want to give them the attention. And it’s like, dude, they’re not going to stop covering shit people want to read about just because you don’t want to read about it.”

  “But if everybody decided to stop, then it would make a difference,” Julia said. “Like voting.”

  “It’s exactly like voting,” Leslie said. “It’s a completely irrational activity. If you, Julia, decided to not pay any attention to who was running for president, and didn’t vote ever again in your life, it would make not one whit of difference. Period.”

  “If I did that, it would signal some drastic shift in generational priorities, and it would be reflective of a changed culture. Similar to if everyone stopped reading about mass shooters.”

  “Right, but it wouldn’t have effected the change. That’s the difference.”

  Leslie had a pugilistic squint I hadn’t registered before, a desire to curb stomp Julia on intellectual grounds. The debate had ceased to have any basis in concrete reality, but there was a sense of there being something real in the balance, a way of seeing the world vindicated or proven insufficient. (This was, of course, over a year before we found ourselves being teargassed with some regularity on something less than intellectual grounds. It doesn’t get more concrete than pavement.)

  “All I’m saying,” Julia said with finality, “is that I’d rather take an active choice in the way I consume shit. That, for me, is a way of feeling less co-opted, even if it’s basically a delusion. If I can ignore certain things, they can basically cease to exist.”

  “I mean, for sure,” Leslie said.

  Our first batch of food arrived shortly thereafter, three tiny plates of scattered leavings. Luckily we’d ordered a million more things. I got another drink and thought almost exclusively about Brian fucking Leslie, the details of the act itself and also the barbarity of it in principle. The third time Brian complained about Texas, I said, “Why don’t you move here, man, or somewhere.”

  Leslie gave me the ghost of a scowl and I put my attention on Brian, who was staring down at his mushrooms, or whatever he’d scooped lately.

  “We’ll see,” he said deliberately. “Everything’s a little up in the air at the moment, location-wise.”

  “It’s not like I’m planning to stay here, anyway,” Leslie said. “It’s just my little country retreat.”

  “Yeah, moving forward’s the hard part,” Julia muttered.

  “I like the South,” Brian said. “The music, the attitude. There’s some farms. I don’t mind that it’s a little slow.”

  “I’m just not a big-fish-small-pond kind of person,” I said. “I prefer to be ravaged by stimuli.”

  “How much have you had to drink?” Leslie said.

  “As much as necessary,” I said. “To get through this. I mean, to get through this … life. Baby.”

  I felt a charge of recognition from Julia, the way she immediately put some food in her mouth instead of laughing or chiding me.

  The food finally stopped coming and Kelly brought us a check, unbidden.

  “Do you care about basketball?” I said to Brian. There was an important West Coast playoff game that night.

  “Yeah, I’ve been checking my phone to see if the game started,” he said. “Pretty invested in Steph Curry, like everybody.”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “You wanna watch it at a bar or something?”

  He looked at Leslie like a child up past his bedtime, as I’d hoped he would. I actually did want to watch the game, but I also wanted to delay, and possibly prevent, him from having a good night with Leslie. I was willing to put myself in the way of his company in order to take her out of it. Sacrifice: it’s what Americans think love is.

  “Do what you’d like,” Leslie said in a good approximation of neutrality. “I’ll take a bath, get some writing done. Unless you want to do something, Julia? Or do you want to watch the game, too?”

  “I turn into a pumpkin pretty soon,” Julia said. “And I really don’t care about basketball. Even less than I care about the other ones.”

  “Me neither,” Leslie said. “But wait, shit, how are we going to do the cars?”

  I’d thought about this.

  “You could drop Julia off on your way home?” I said. “And I’ll drive Brian back to your aunt’s place when we’re done?”

  “Do you know where it is?” Leslie said. The most explicit lie yet.

  “GPS,” I said.

  “Are you going to be okay to drive?” Brian said.


  “I will taper off,” I said. “In three hours, it will be as though I’d never drank.”

  “He’ll be okay,” Julia said. “I know it’s fucked-up, but he’s a pretty good drunk driver.”

  “She’s a doctor,” I said.

  “Oh-kay,” Leslie said. “I’ll leave you boys to measure Steph Curry’s dick in peace.”

  “Spoiler alert: it’s huge,” I said.

  Julia paid our half of the bill with her credit card, and I handed her a crumpled mess of ones and fives from my pocket. I couldn’t see what she was leaving as a tip, possibly because she was intentionally shielding the receipt from me. I looked up and found Leslie’s eyes fixed on me as Brian did something on his phone. She seemed very sad. It probably wasn’t great that I was essentially forcing her and Julia to share a car. When Leslie sensed Brian’s attention returning, she broke eye contact with me and smiled blandly in his direction. The fact that I felt fully superior to him didn’t do as much as I would have liked to quiet the panic rising continuously in me. My body was sure it was losing her, and it demanded booze in compensation.

  “Please be good,” Julia said when we got up to leave.

  “You too,” I said.

  “I really don’t feel like visiting the jail or the hospital tonight.”

  “Hey, me neither,” I said. “I’ll be foisting myself on you in the dark before you know it.”

  “Foisting yourself on the couch is more like it.”

  “Good nigh-ight,” Leslie said, waving and opening the front door of her car. “Take care of my boy. He’s not built for too much poison.”

  “I do what I want, woman,” Brian said in a terrible imitation of a black speaking voice that had more of an edge to it than I would have expected.

  I have a pretty clear memory of most of that night, but even while it was happening, it was like a dream, where you do things you don’t want to do but can’t control your own actions. Calmly, righteously, I drained double whiskeys on the rocks while lecturing Brian about James Harden and the ugly splendor of the Rockets’ approach to basketball. I explained that by exploiting the foul rules, the Rockets had lifted the rock on the unseemly subjectivity of the contemporary NBA, something I’d read on the Internet recently. Brian didn’t contribute much to the sports chat—it quickly became apparent that he was a recent joiner of the Golden State bandwagon, and also that he was mostly just with me to avoid spending time with Leslie. He also wasn’t drinking much, the miserable fuck. If I had to watch televised sports without booze I’d kill myself out of boredom during the third Bud Light commercial.