Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

“The food’s on the stove if you want it,” he said. “Nothing else needs to happen here.”

  “I’m not trying to be an asshat,” Bob said. “But I’m not like canonized yet, you know? Hey, you know, Molly?”

  “Okay, Robert,” Molly said. “We’re barely even dating. Please don’t become overstimulated at me.”

  “Right,” Bob said. “That’s fine, actually. I am not handling myself well. I will just see y’all around. Somebody’ll take Molly somewhere, right?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” Leslie and I said, just out of sync.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said. “Cool. Um. I’m fine to drive, right? What time is it? Eleven? That should be fine, right?”

  Molly had turned away from him, concentrating on a whirling robin out the window.

  “Well, everybody be well,” Bob said. “Enjoy the rest of your weekend.”

  He kept standing there for a while.

  On Monday, Leslie got a call from the head of the Montana English department. As she soon told me, despite the fact that he’d promised her the job when they spoke two weeks earlier, he was calling to say that they had, in fact, decided to go with another candidate, a guy who already lived in Montana, and had written many books about living in Montana. I was in the study at the end of the hall when she took this call, but I went to our bedroom when I heard the crash that turned out to be her phone knocking over Ken’s broken guitar.

  “Motherfuckers,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s their loss.”

  I felt a gigantic relief. I’d had no idea how badly I had not wanted to go. I didn’t say: this gig essentially fell into your lap in the first place. She stared me down like I’d said it anyway, and I didn’t doubt that she could read my mind.

  “You know I love it there,” she said. “I’m sure I never fucking shut up about it. It’s where I wanted to finish writing this shit. I know it’s stupid. I’m fully aware of being stupid.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, her eyes pointed past me, at the far corner of the room.

  “This just means that we have more choices to make,” she said quietly. “Which is cool. It’s good to choose things, instead of just doing them.”

  “We could pay Kenny some more rent and stay here for a while, probably,” I said.

  “It’s too much,” Leslie said. “I feel like we’re under siege here or something. And, honestly, I don’t think it would be nice to Kenny. I know he wouldn’t admit it, especially not to you, but he’s definitely still a little too into me. Things got, like, pretty close to happening when you were in Maine. He’s a good guy, and I wasn’t doing much to discourage it. But I knew it would be a shit show if you actually broke up with Julia and I was like, uh, by the way, me and Ken … But anyway, I think that’s a big part of the Molly thing, too. Like, showing he doesn’t need me.”

  “I think,” I said carefully, “that he’ll speak up if he’s got some kind of problem.”

  “I’ve got a problem,” she said. “That’s what I’m telling you. Can we get stoned now? Please don’t tell Kenny I told you that.”

  “I don’t think it’ll come up,” I said. “And I don’t have any weed. You want a beer? I could have a beer.”

  “I’m upset.”

  “I’m trying to make you feel better,” I said. “You want me to put on ‘Emotional Rescue’?”

  She grabbed a book off of the floor—one of the Coetzee autobiographies that we were both reading out of sequence, in a different order—and brushed past me out of the room. I heard the front door slam, leaving me alone in the room with the rest of our paltry shit.

  By dinner, we’d both calmed down, or at least mutually committed to pretending to do so. Kenny made catfish and grits, and the meal was taken up with a lighthearted discussion of all the places we could move to (North Carolina, New Mexico, the South of France). Things inevitably seemed more manageable with food and alcohol in us. Notably, Ken did not suggest we stay with him indefinitely.

  “Let’s go somewhere now,” Leslie said. “We’re not just dollhouse people, you know?”

  I was dipping a stale chocolate chip cookie into a mug of reheated coffee. I don’t think I would have minded being a dollhouse person, whatever that was.

  “Where do you want to go?” I said.

  “Let’s go to Richmond. Let’s go dancing.”

  “It is Monday,” Kenny said. “Not that I’d ever tell y’all not to go nuts.”

  It was an hour and change to Richmond, and I didn’t want to have to drive back.

  “It’s a city,” Leslie said. “Worst case, we’ll hang out at a bar for a couple of hours. With, like, other humans. Remember other humans?”

  “Hey, I resemble that implication,” Ken said.

  “Maybe we’ll find, I don’t know, a sex party,” Leslie said. “Eyes wide shut, baby?”

  “I don’t think that’s a Richmond thing,” I said. “Maybe in the Confederate graveyard, I guess.”

  “I’d fuck a ghost soldier right about now,” Leslie said. “Union only, though.”

  The girl wanted to go to Richmond. I drank my coffee down to the gritty bottom of the cup and followed her out to the car.

  When we made the turn onto Cary Street, the one part of the city that I knew at all well, it was quiet, if not quite ghostly, Confederate or otherwise. We parked and walked the sidewalk, past the closed record store and mostly empty restaurants. A bougie-looking bar with a fake rusted steel exterior—Amaretto, or something—promised, on a folding sign out front, a “New Wave Dance Party in Back!!!!!” with a two-dollar cover. The guy at the door was reading a book of poetry by an old college professor of mine, a circumstance about as likely as finding her in the flesh, a mother of three small children and dedicated Brooklynite, dancing in this Virginia bar on a Monday night.

  “How are you liking that?” I said.

  “What?” he said, withdrawing physically like he was afraid I was going to hit him. “Oh, the book. I think it’s very lyrical, actually. Her use of poetic imagery is very impressive. It’s unusual for contemporary poetry, in my opinion.”

  “You prefer the old stuff,” Leslie said.

  “It’s all been downhill since Yeats,” he said.

  It rhymed with “Keats.” I was pretty sure he was fucking with me. He took my two bucks—he let Leslie in for free—and stamped our hands.

  “Wait, is anybody actually back there?” Leslie said.

  He wiggled his fingers and put on a spooky inflection. “You’ll just have to find out!”

  We walked through the empty main bar, where a bartender was watching one of the Alien movies with subtitles on a small, silent TV, and through a red curtain to the back room, where the music was playing at a surprisingly loud volume, given that we couldn’t hear it in the rest of the bar. Two very thin, very young-looking women were twisting desultorily to “Rock Lobster.” A middle-aged Hispanic couple sat in a booth glaring unhappily at them. At the very back of the room, three large white men with elaborate facial hair stood in a semicircle drinking beer.

  “Well, you can’t knock ‘Rock Lobster,’” I said.

  We wandered over to the bar against the wall and I squinted at the scrawled drink lists full of word combinations that I didn’t recognize.

  “Well, I’m going to get whichever cocktail has honey in it,” Leslie said.

  The female bartender had a spiky haircut and intense silver eye makeup in honor of the New Wave dance party that was supposedly taking place.

  “Does it usually get crazier?” Leslie said to her.

  “They haven’t done it for like a year,” the bartender yelled with enthusiasm. “I think next time will be better. But hey, you’re in on the ground floor.”

  “Safest place in a fire,” Leslie said.

  “That’s funny!” the bartender yelled.

  “What’s a Wang Blossom?” I said.

  “It’s so good,” the bartender said. “I’ll make you one. If you don’t love it, it’s free.
”

  “I’ll have a … does that say ‘Burning Fire Truck’?” Leslie said.

  “It’s supposed to be ironic,” the bartender said.

  Leslie ended up with something that tasted like honey and jalapeño. Why these details? The night felt forced, off-kilter. We were trying to have fun, fixating on what was available to us, but it was a stretch. In this desolate space—the song had segued, inevitably, into “Blue Monday”—we were just two more medium-young people paying too much for drinks, wishing, like the seven other people in the room, that there were more people like us present to … what? To prove that we’d made a valid choice in coming out, like moths justifying their attraction to light.

  We shuffled around a little bit to signify dancing, but we couldn’t keep it up, even when “We Got the Beat” came on. It required too much effort. We set our empty glasses on the bar and walked back out through the front, past the door guy, reimmersed in his poetry.

  “Hey, listen to this,” he said. “That loud hub of us, meat stub of us, beating us, senseless. Pretty badass.”

  “What do you think it means?” Leslie said.

  “It’s poetry,” he said, exasperated with her ignorance.

  In the car, we were quiet. I felt ashamed for taking a normal, not-great time as a rebuke to our ability to have a life that made sense.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Maybe we should just go to Montana.”

  Leslie was quiet for a long moment.

  “My sense of everything is so fucking gnarled and provincial,” she said quietly. “I’m never going to see beyond myself.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m all for … enlightened self-interest?”

  “That’s not what that is,” Leslie said. “I’m just selfish.”

  The right way to play this felt out of reach. I didn’t think that she was any more selfish than most of the people I knew. But she was somewhat more successful at achieving results. I stole a glance over at her. She was sitting up very straight, with her hands folded in her lap, staring intently out the windshield. The epitome of formal grace, which was not called for in this situation.

  “Come on,” I said. “Impulsive cross-country killing spree with me? Badlands-style? With slightly less murder? Kenny won’t let us stay much longer unless we start cutting the grass and shit. He told me I wasn’t appreciating his environment.”

  She turned to me, and I could feel her eyes against my skull.

  “I do love you, Pete,” she said. “I wouldn’t be bothering with any of this if I didn’t.”

  She paused, maintained, at a glance, her Egyptian statuary pose.

  “What are you the most worried about?” I said.

  “Well, exactly,” she said. “You don’t know.”

  A couple of nights before Leslie and I were supposed to start driving west, I stayed up late with Kenny. Leslie was in the bedroom writing, emerging only to pad to the kitchen every couple of hours to grab a Corona and bring it back to her lair. (The household had collectively determined that Corona with lime, while not earning any style points, was scientifically proven to increase, and even improve, one’s creative output.) After eleven o’clock, she stopped coming out so I assumed she’d either gotten into a groove or fallen asleep. Most nights like this I tried to keep up with her, or at least keep an eye on her, but since I was now promised a yawning future of some unknown duration in her company, it seemed wise to pace myself.

  Kenny was unhappy that Molly had stopped responding to his text messages.

  “I learned how to text for this girl,” he said. “Now I’m hooked on that shit, and she’s like, nope.”

  “That’ll teach you to dally with twenty-first-century women,” I said.

  “It’s not like I was heavily invested or anything, but it is pretty fuckin’ rude. Least she can do is send over some more pussy pics, leave me with some memories.”

  “I’m sure she’ll come back around,” I said. Molly had told me she’d like to have sex with Kenny again, though she hoped they wouldn’t have to exchange many more words, electronic or otherwise, in the process. They didn’t share a workable frame of reference, Molly said, which was true enough, but what was that compared to wit and beauty? She could show him some Buster Keaton, he’d set her up playing the washboard … Of course, I’d slept with maybe one woman who wasn’t a writer, and even she’d probably tossed off a couple of Briefly Noteds at some point.

  “Have you talked to Julia?” Kenny said.

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  “Well, she must’ve heard you were leaving, ’cause she sent me an email telling me to ask you if you wanted your stuff. Also whether you were going to keep paying your part of the rent. Also whether you’d decapitated yourself with my chain saw yet. Stuff like that.”

  “I guess I should come up with some answers,” I said.

  “I mean, I can hold on to some of your shit. I’ll even move it for you if you toss me some cash. I’m sure you’ll be back around before too long.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “For, like, a visit, man, Jesus. But while we’re on the topic, do you have any, you know, plans?”

  “We’re subletting a place in Missoula from somebody Leslie sort of knows. We’ll get shitty jobs or teach on the Internet or something. Etcetera, etcetera. What do you care?”

  Kenny sucked in his breath.

  “We have a lot of fun around here, kid,” he said. That faux-TV voice was not his usual mode of irony. I sat up a little straighter. “But don’t pull that rich-boy shit. Don’t act like your life doesn’t matter.”

  “Is this about Leslie?” I said.

  “I don’t think you’ve got any idea what you’re dealing with, bud,” he said. “You’re a lot of things, but you’re not some tough guy. Julia, you know, she was good for you. She was tough, but she wasn’t ruthless.”

  “What is this based on?” I said.

  “I know people, man. I’ve lived a minute. What’s the line? She’s the knife. You’re the other thing.”

  “It’s not my problem that you hate women,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said, and smiled like the devil. “Remember Julia? She’s not gone anywhere.”

  I crawled down the hallway with the sun coming up. Leslie was sitting in the center of the bed leaning back against the wall, squinting into her open laptop. A frayed power cord hung in a low tightrope across the middle of the room.

  “Whoa,” she said absently. “Hello.”

  “Are you actually working?” I said.

  “Nah,” she said. Her eyes drifted across the screen like a cat’s following a spot of light. Her fingers pounced on the keyboard.

  “I mean, it’s all work,” she mumbled.

  “What I was doing, too,” I said.

  “Sure, baby,” she said. She typed something, stared at it. “Just make sure you’re writing it down in your brain.”

  “It’s all … somewhere,” I said.

  I looked up at her and she gave me a smile so tired it barely existed, just the slightest softening of her features in pity.

  I woke up on the floor.

  Last Part

  Leslie walked as slowly as possible in the direction of the Rose. She was in it, she would say, more for the journey than the destination. Peter was already holding court, along with what had become, or in her case, been reinstated as, the usual Missoula crew. They were a minutely rotating variation on the people who would be with her until this phase of her life came to an end, forcibly or otherwise: teaching poets, singing bank tellers, drug addicts.

  She crossed the Higgins Bridge, watching a kayaker do battle with a small man-made rapid in the late dusk. She thought he should stop with that before it was fully dark, though she couldn’t quite articulate why. Boating at night, even with the streetlights set to come on at any minute, seemed unnecessarily sinister. There were plenty of daylight hours available for such activities, especially in late summer.

  Now a car sped in her direction, the horn screaming in stacc
ato bursts. She looked down to make sure she was on the sidewalk—where else would she be?—and watched as the car raced toward her. She heard yelling from the windows, male voices, something like “heyyoufuckingslutwe’reinacaaaaarr!” and then something wet hit her face, covering most of the right lens of her glasses. It was on her coat, too, and now her hands, sticky and yellow, and … mustard. Fucking mustard. What, sprayed from a bottle? A packet that had somehow disintegrated completely on impact? It was so outrageous, and so stupid, and there was no possible response to it. They were most likely drunk college students speeding toward a bad time at the police checkpoint down the road. But seriously. She was really quite covered in mustard.

  “Did you see that?” she said to a couple walking toward her, a large bearded man in small shorts and a small woman wearing a cape.

  “Nah,” the guy said, though the panic in his eyes suggested he had, and didn’t want to talk about it.

  “They’ve been doing that,” the woman said resignedly.

  “Doing what?” Leslie said. “Who?”

  The woman swept her arm around slowly. Everyone. Everything.

  It was hard to clean her glasses off—the stuff just smeared. She was wearing the glasses only because she’d run out of contact lenses and the extras she had were still buried in a bag, presumably, or hadn’t made the trip west somehow. The glasses were at least one prescription out-of-date, so everything had a slightly fuzzed-out, not-quite-real quality that she didn’t mind. She felt in disguise with them on, playing at a style that was purely the result of necessity. They did, if she was inclined to make such things manifest, underline her recent bout of seriousness—she was a writer, okay, Mom? Peter said they made her look younger, like a kid dressing up, and at her advanced age, she wasn’t going to argue with that. Maybe, if she never sorted out her contact situation, she’d never have to turn thirty. Maybe if she grew younger, Peter would somehow become an adult.

  He’d left the house that day around noon, half an hour after he’d woken up, with his laptop and a couple of books on his back. He was going to “work,” i.e., wander from coffee shop to bookstore to café until it was time to start drinking, which could be much earlier than five o’clock depending on whom he ran into out there. She didn’t discourage him—let all impulses be allowed, even, nay, the smashing of a nursing baby’s head, like Blake said—but she had her doubts about the efficacy of his methods. She’d been there herself, physically there, in the same damn places. And sure, now she was getting shit done, so maybe you had to kill a certain amount of time before your brain was ready for the real stuff. But it had nearly killed her, getting to this point where she could actually sustain creative thought for hours at a time. She would not object when Peter realized that his true calling was in PR, which he’d started doing part-time for the law school and was apparently, despite his bitching, quite good at.