“Hello, dickhead,” Tim said. “Good to finally hear from you—not.”
“What can I say,” Katz said.
“How about, ‘I’m really sorry for being a total loser and disappearing on you and telling fifty different lies.’ Dickhead.”
“Yeah, well, regrettably, there was some stuff I had to attend to.”
“Right, being a dickhead is really time-consuming. What the fuck are you even calling me for?”
“Wondered how things are going with you.”
“You mean, apart from you being a total loser and fucking us over in fifty different ways and lying to us constantly?”
Katz smiled. “Maybe you can write out your grievances and present them to me in written form, so we can talk about something else now.”
“I already did that, asshole. Have you checked your e-mail in the last year?”
“Well, just give me a call then, if you feel like it, later. My phone’s operative again.”
“Your phone is operative again! That’s a good one, Richard. How’s your computer? Is that operative again, too?”
“Just saying I’m around if you want to call.”
“And just go fuck yourself is all I’m saying.”
Katz set down his phone feeling good about the conversation. He thought it unlikely that Tim would have bothered abusing him if he had something better than Walnut Surprise in the works. He drank one last beer, ate one of the killer mirtazapines that a script-happy doctor in Berlin had given him, and slept for thirteen hours.
He woke to a blazing hot afternoon and took a walk in his neighborhood, checking out females dressed in this year’s style of skimpy clothes, and bought some actual groceries—peanut butter, bananas, bread. Later on, he drove into Hoboken to leave his Strat with his guitar man there and yielded to an impulse to dine at Maxwell’s and catch whatever act was playing. The staff at Maxwell’s treated him like a General MacArthur returning from Korea in defiant disgrace. Chicks kept leaning over him with their tits falling out of their little tops, some guy he didn’t know or had once known but long since forgotten kept him supplied with beer, and the local band that was playing, Tutsi Picnic, did not repel him. On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one. Being free of the Berglunds was proving to be a milder and not at all unpleasant sort of death, a death without sting, a state of merely partial nonexistence in which he was able to go back to the apartment of a fortyish book editor (“huge, huge fan”) who’d cozied up to him while Tutsi Picnic played, wet his dick in her a few times, and then, in the morning, buy himself some crullers on his way back down Washington Street to move his truck before parking-meter hours commenced.
There was a message from Tim on his home phone and none from the Berglunds. He rewarded himself by playing guitar for four hours. The day was gloriously hot and loud with street life awakening from a long winter’s dormancy. His left fingertips, bare of calluses, were near the point of bleeding, but the underlying nerves, killed several decades earlier, were still helpfully dead. He drank a beer and went around the corner to his favorite gyro place, intending to have a snack and play some more. When he returned to his building, carrying meat, he found Patty sitting on the front steps.
She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.
“Well, well, well,” he said.
“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”
His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.
BAD NEWS
Jonathan and Jenna’s mother, Tamara, had hurt herself in Aspen. Trying to avoid collision with a hotdogging teenager, she’d crossed her skis and snapped two bones in her left leg, above the boot, and thereby disqualified herself from joining Jenna on Jenna’s January trip to ride horses in Patagonia. To Jenna, who’d witnessed Tamara’s wipeout and pursued the teenager and reported him while Jonathan attended to their fallen mother, the accident was just the latest entry in a long list of things going wrong in her life since her graduation from Duke the previous spring; but to Joey, who’d been talking to Jenna twice or thrice daily in recent weeks, the accident was a much-needed little gift from the gods—the breakthrough he’d been waiting two-plus years for. Jenna, after graduating, had moved to Manhattan to work for a famous party planner and try living with her almost-fiancé, Nick, but in September she’d rented her own apartment, and in November, yielding to relentless overt pressure from her family and to more subtle underminings from Joey, who’d made himself her Designated Understander, she declared her relationship with Nick null and void and unrevivable. By that point, she was taking a highish dose of Lexapro and had nothing in her life to look forward to except riding horses in Patagonia, which Nick had repeatedly promised to do with her and repeatedly postponed, citing his heavy work load at Goldman Sachs. It happened that Joey had ridden a horse or two, albeit clumsily, during his high-school summer in Montana. From the high volume of Jenna’s calls and texts to his cell phone, he already suspected that he’d been promoted to the status of transitional object, if not to potential full-on boyfriend, and his last doubts were dispelled when she invited him to share the luxurious Argentinean resort room that Tamara had booked before the accident. Since it further happened that Joey had business in nearby Paraguay and knew that he would probably end up having to go there, whether he wanted to or not, he said yes to Jenna without hesitation. The only real argument against traveling with her in Argentina was the fact that, five months earlier, at the age of twenty, in a fit of madness in New York City, he’d gone to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan and married Connie Monaghan. But this was by no means the worst of his worries, and he chose, for the moment, to overlook it.
The night before he flew to Miami, where Jenna was visiting a grandparent and would meet him at the airport, he called Connie in St. Paul with the news of his impending travel. He was sorry to have to obfuscate and dissemble with her, but his South American plans did give him a good excuse to further postpone her coming east and moving into the highway-side apartment that he’d rented in a charmless corner of Alexandria. Until a few weeks ago, his excuse had been college, but he was now taking a semester off to manage his business, and Connie, who was miserable at home with Carol and Blake and her infant twin half sisters, couldn’t understand why she still wasn’t allowed to live with her husband.
“I also don’t see why you’re going to Buenos Aires,” she said, “if your supplier’s in Paraguay.”
“I want to practice my Spanish a little,” Joey said, “before I really have to use it. Everybody’s talking about what a great city Buenos Aires is. I have to fly through there anyway.”
“Well, do you want to take a whole week and have our honeymoon there?”
Their missing honeymoon was one of several sore subjects between them. Joey repeated his official line on it, which was that he was too freaked out about his business to relax on a vacation, and Connie fell into one of the silences that she deployed in lieu of reproach. She still never reproached him directly.
“Literally anywhere in the world,” he said. “Once I’ve been paid, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.”
“I’d settle for just living with you and waking up next to you, actually.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “That would be great. I’m just under such incredible pressure now, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.”
“You don’t have to be fun,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it when I get back, OK? I promise.”
In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent movi
ng from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.
“Are you wearing your wedding ring?” Connie asked him.
“Um—no,” he said before thinking better of it. “It’s in my pocket.”
“Hm.”
“I’m putting it on right now,” he said, moving toward the coin dish on his nightstand where he’d left the ring. His nightstand was a cardboard box. “It slips right on, it’s great.”
“I’ve got mine on,” Connie said. “I love having it on. I try to remember to put it on my right hand when I’m not in my room, but sometimes I forget.”
“Don’t be forgetting. That’s not good.”
“It’s OK, baby. Carol doesn’t notice stuff like that. She doesn’t even like to look at me. We’re unpleasing to each other’s sight.”
“We really need to be careful, though, OK?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just until I tell my parents. Then you can wear it all you want. I mean, we’ll both be wearing them all the time then. That’s what I meant.”
It was hard to compare silences, but the one she deployed now felt especially grievous, especially sad. He knew it was killing her to keep their marriage secret, and he kept hoping that the prospect of telling his parents would become less scary to him, but as the months went by the prospect only got scarier. He tried to put his wedding ring on his finger, but it stuck on the last knuckle. He’d bought it in a hurry, in August, in New York, and it was slightly too small. He put it in his mouth instead, probing its compass with his tongue as if it were an orifice of Connie’s, and this turned him on a little. Connected him with her, took him back to August and the craziness of what they’d done. He slipped the ring, drool-slick, onto his finger.
“Tell me what you’re wearing,” he said.
“Just clothes.”
“Like what, though?”
“Nothing. Clothes.”
“Connie, I swear I’ll tell them as soon as I get paid. I just have to compartmentalize a little now. This fucking contract is freaking me out, and I can’t face anything else at the moment. So just tell me what you’re wearing, OK? I want to picture you.”
“Clothes.”
“Please?”
But she’d begun to cry. He heard the faintest whimper, the microgram of misery she let herself make audible. “Joey,” she whispered. “Baby. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just at least wait till I’m back from my trip.”
“I don’t know if I can. I need some tiny thing right now. Some tiny . . . thing that’s real. Some little thing that isn’t nothing. You know I don’t want to make things hard for you. But maybe I can at least tell Carol? I just want somebody to know. I’ll make her swear not to tell anyone.”
“She’ll tell the neighbors. You know she’s a blabber.”
“No, I’ll make her swear.”
“And then somebody’s going to be late with their Christmas cards,” he said wildly, aggrieved not with Connie but with the way the world conspired against him, “and they’ll mention it to my parents. And then—And then—!”
“So what can I have if I can’t have that? What’s some little thing that I can have?”
Her instincts must have told her there was something fishy about his trip to South America. And he was definitely feeling guilty now, but not exactly about Jenna. According to his moral calculus, his having married Connie entitled him to one last grand use of his sexual license, which she’d granted him long ago and never expressly revoked. If he and Jenna happened to click in a big way, he would deal with that later. What was burdening him now was the contrast between the muchness that he possessed—a signed contract that stood to net him $600,000 if Paraguay came through for him; the prospect of a week abroad with the most beautiful girl he’d ever met—and the nullity of what, at this moment, he could think to offer Connie. Guilt had been one of the ingredients of his impulse to marry her, but he was feeling no less guilty five months later. He pulled the wedding ring off his finger and put it back nervously in his mouth, closed his incisors on it, turned it with his tongue. The hardness of eighteen-carat gold was surprising. He’d thought gold was supposed to be a soft metal.
“Tell me something good that’s going to happen,” Connie said.
“We’re going to make a ton of money,” he said, tonguing the ring back behind his molars. “And then we’ll take an amazing trip somewhere and do a second wedding and have a great time. We’ll finish school and start a business. It’s all going to be good.”
The silence with which she greeted this was disbelief-flavored. He didn’t believe his words himself. If only because he was so morbidly afraid to tell his parents about his marriage—had built up the scene of disclosure to such monstrous imaginative proportions—the document that he and Connie had signed in August was seeming more like a suicide pact than a marriage certificate: it extrapolated into a brick wall. Their relationship only made sense in the present, when they were together in person and could merge identities and create their own world.
“I wish you were here,” he said.
“Me too.”
“You should have come out for Christmas. That was my mistake.”
“I would only have given you the flu.”
“Just give me a few more weeks. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”
“I don’t know if I can do it. But I’ll try.”
“I am so sorry.”
And he was sorry. But also inexpressibly relieved when she let him get off the phone and turn his thoughts to Jenna. He tongued the wedding ring out of his cheek pocket, intending to dry it off and put it away, but somehow, instead, involuntarily, with a kind of double-clutch of the tongue, he swallowed it.
“Fuck!”
He could feel it near the bottom of his esophagus, an angry hardness down there, the protest of soft tissues. He tried to gag it back up but succeeded only in swallowing it farther down, out of range of feeling it, down with the remains of the twelve-inch Subway sandwich that had been his dinner. He ran to the kitchenette sink and stuck a finger down his throat. He hadn’t vomited since he was a little boy, and the gags that were a prelude to it reminded him of how profoundly he’d come to fear throwing up. The violence of it. It was like trying to shoot himself in the head—he couldn’t make himself do it. He bent over the sink with his mouth hanging open, hoping the contents of his stomach might just come flowing out naturally, unviolently; but of course it didn’t happen.
“Fuck! Fucking coward!”
It was twenty minutes to ten. His flight to Miami left Dulles at eleven the next morning, and no way was he getting on a plane with the ring still in his gut. He paced the stained beige carpeting of his living room and decided that he’d better see a doctor. A quick online search turned up the nearest hospital, on Seminary Road.
He threw on a coat and ran down to Van Dorn Street, looking for a cab to flag, but the night was cold and traffic unusua
lly sparse. He had enough funds in his business account to have bought himself a car, even a very nice one, but since some of the money was Connie’s and the rest of it was a bank loan secured on her collateral, he was being very careful with his spending. He wandered out into the street, as if by presenting himself as a target he might attract more traffic and, thus, a cab. But there were no cabs tonight.
On his phone, as he bent his steps toward the hospital, he found a fresh text from Jenna: excited. u? He texted back: totally. Jenna’s communications with him, the mere sight of her name or her e-mail address, had never ceased to have a Pavlovian effect on his gonads. The effect was very different from the one that Connie had on him (Connie of late was hitting him higher and higher up: in his stomach, his breathing muscles, his heart) but no less insistent and intense. Jenna excited him the way large sums of money did, the way the delicious abdication of social responsibility and embrace of excessive resource consumption did. He knew perfectly well that Jenna was bad news. Indeed, what excited him was wondering if he might become bad enough news himself to get her.
The walk to the hospital took him directly past the blue-mirrored façade of the office building in which he’d spent all of his days and many of his evenings the previous summer, working for an outfit called RISEN (Restore Iraqi Secular Enterprise Now), an LBI subsidiary that had won a no-bid contract to privatize the formerly state-controlled bread-baking industry in newly liberated Iraq. His boss at RISEN had been Kenny Bartles, a well-connected Floridian in his early twenties whom Joey had succeeded in impressing a year earlier, when he’d worked at Jonathan and Jenna’s father’s think tank. Joey’s summer position at the think tank had been one of five directly funded by LBI, and his job, though ostensibly advisory to governmental entities, had consisted entirely of researching ways in which LBI might commercially exploit an American invasion and takeover of Iraq, and then writing up these commercial possibilities as arguments for invading. To reward Joey for doing the primary research on Iraqi bread production, Kenny Bartles had offered him a full-time job with RISEN, over in Baghdad, in the Green Zone. For numerous reasons, including resistance from Connie, warnings from Jonathan, a wish to stay near Jenna, the fear of getting killed, the need to maintain Virginia residency, and a nagging sense that Kenny wasn’t trustworthy, Joey had declined the offer and agreed instead to spend the summer setting up RISEN’s Stateside office and interfacing with the government.