“Unfortunately!”
“Enough,” Alfred said to Denise. “You’ll never win.”
“You sound like a snob,” Enid said.
“Mother, you’re always telling me how much you like a good home-cooked meal. Well, that’s what I like, too. I think there’s a kind of Disney vulgarity in a foot-tall dessert. You are a better cook than—”
“Oh, no. No.” Enid shook her head. “I’m a nothing cook.”
“That’s not true at all! Where do you think I—”
“Not from me,” Enid interrupted. “I don’t know where my children got their talents. But not from me. I’m a nothing as a cook. A big nothing.” (How strangely good it felt to say this! It was like putting scalding water on a poison-ivy rash.)
Denise straightened her back and raised her glass. Enid, who all her life had been helpless not to observe the goings-on on other people’s plates, had watched Denise take a three-bite portion of salmon, a small helping of salad, and a crust of bread. The size of each was a reproach to the size of each of Enid’s. Now Denise’s plate was empty and she hadn’t taken seconds of anything.
“Is that all you’re going to eat?” Enid said.
“Yes. That was my lunch.”
“You’ve lost weight.”
“In fact not.”
“Well, don’t lose any more,” Enid said with the skimpy laugh with which she tried to hide large feelings.
Alfred was guiding a forkful of salmon and sorrel sauce to his mouth. The food dropped off his fork and broke into violently shaped pieces.
“I think Chip did a good job with this,” Enid said. “Don’t you think? The salmon is very tender and good.”
“Chip has always been a good cook,” Denise said.
“Al, are you enjoying this? Al?”
Alfred’s grip on his fork had slackened. There was a sag in his lower lip, a sullen suspicion in his eyes.
“Are you enjoying the lunch?” Enid said.
He took his left hand in his right and squeezed it. The mated hands continued their oscillation together while he stared at the sunflowers in the middle of the table. He seemed to swallow the sour set of his mouth, to choke back the paranoia.
“Chip made all this?” he said.
“Yes.”
He shook his head as though Chip’s having cooked, Chip’s absence now, overwhelmed him. “I am increasingly bothered by my affliction,” he said.
“What you have is very mild,” Enid said. “We just need to get the medication adjusted.”
He shook his head. “Hedgpeth said it’s unpredictable.”
“The important thing is to keep doing things,” Enid said, “to keep active, to always just go.”
“No. You were not listening. Hedgpeth was very careful not to promise anything.”
“According to what I read—”
“I don’t give a damn what your magazine article said. I am not well, and Hedgpeth admitted as much.”
Denise set her wine down with a stiff, fully extended arm.
“So what do you think about Chip’s new job?” Enid asked her brightly.
“His—?”
“Well, at the Wall Street Journal.”
Denise studied the tabletop. “I have no opinion about it.”
“It’s exciting, don’t you think?”
“I have no opinion about it.”
“Do you think he works there full-time?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand what kind of job it is.”
“Mother, I know nothing about it.”
“Is he still doing law?”
“You mean proofreading? Yes.”
“So he’s still at the firm.”
“He’s not a lawyer, Mother.”
“I know he’s not a lawyer.”
“Well, when you say, ‘doing law,’ or ‘at the firm’—is that what you tell your friends?”
“I say he works at a law firm. That’s all I say. A New York City law firm. And it’s the truth. He does work there.”
“It’s misleading and you know it,” Alfred said.
“I guess I should just never say anything.”
“Just say things that are true,” Denise said.
“Well, I think he should be in law,” Enid said. “I think the law would be perfect for Chip. He needs the stability of a profession. He needs structure in his life. Dad always thought he’d make an excellent lawyer. I used to think doctor, because he was interested in science, but Dad always saw him as a lawyer. Didn’t you, Al? Didn’t you think Chip could be an excellent lawyer? He’s so quick with words.”
“Enid, it’s too late.”
“I thought maybe working for the firm he’d get interested and go back to school.”
“Far too late.”
“The thing is, Denise, there are so many things you can do with law. You can be a company president. You can be a judge! You can teach. You can be a journalist. There are so many directions Chip could go in.”
“Chip will do what he wants to do,” Alfred said. “I’ve never understood it, but he is not going to change now.”
He marched two blocks in the rain before he found a dial tone. At the first twin phone bank he came to, one instrument was castrated, with colored tassels at the end of its cord, and all that remained of the other was four bolt holes. The phone at the next intersection had chewing gum in its coin slot, and the line of its companion was completely dead. The standard way for a man in Chip’s position to vent his rage was to smash the handset on the box and leave the plastic shards in the gutter, but Chip was in too much of a hurry for this. At the corner of Fifth Avenue, he tried a phone that had a dial tone but did not respond when he touched the keypad and did not return his quarter when he hung up nicely or when he picked the handset up and slammed it down. The other phone had a dial tone and took his money, but a Baby Bell voice claimed not to understand what he’d dialed and did not return the money. He tried a second time and lost his last quarter.
He smiled at the SUVs crawling by in ready-to-brake bad-weather automotive postures. The doormen in this neighborhood hosed the sidewalks twice a day, and sanitation trucks with brushes like the mustaches of city cops scoured the streets three times a week, but in New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage. A nearby street sign seemed to read Filth Avenue. Things cellular were killing public phones. But unlike Denise, who considered cell phones the vulgar accessories of vulgar people, and unlike Gary, who not only didn’t hate them but had bought one for each of his three boys, Chip hated cell phones mainly because he didn’t have one.
Under the scant protection of Denise’s umbrella, he crossed back to a deli on University Place. Brown cardboard had been laid over the scuff rug at the door for traction, but the cardboard was soaked and trampled, its shreds resembling washed-up kelp. Headlines in wire baskets by the door reported yesterday’s tanking of two more economies in South America and fresh plunges in key Far Eastern markets. Behind the cash register was a lottery poster: It’s not about winning. It’s about fun.™
With two of the four dollars in his wallet Chip bought some of the all-natural licorice that he liked. For his third dollar the deli clerk gave him four quarters in change. “I’ll take a Lucky Leprechaun, too,” Chip said.
The three-leaf clover, wooden harp, and pot of gold that he uncovered weren’t a winning, or fun, combination.
“Is there a pay phone around here that works?”
“No pay phone,” the clerk said.
“I’m saying, is there one close to here that works?”
“No pay phone!” The clerk reached under the counter and held up a cell phone. “This phone!”
“Can I make one quick call with that?”
“Too late for broker now. Should have call yesterday. Should have buy
American.”
The clerk laughed in a way that was the more insulting for being good-humored. But then, Chip had reason to be sensitive. Since D——College had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U.S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell “The Academy Purple,” the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose.
Judging from Julia’s negative response to his script, the American economy was safe for a while yet.
Up the street, at the Cedar Tavern, he found a working pay phone. Years seemed to have passed since he’d had two drinks here the night before. He dialed Eden Procuro’s office and hung up when her voice mail kicked in, but the quarter had already dropped. Directory assistance had a residential listing for Doug O’Brien, and Doug actually answered, but he was changing a diaper. Several minutes passed before Chip was able to ask him if Eden had read the script yet.
“Phenomenal. Phenomenal-sounding project,” Doug said. “I think she had it with her when she went out.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“Chip, you know I can’t tell people where she is. You know that.”
“I think the situation qualifies as urgent.”
Please deposit—eighty cents—for the next—two minutes—
“My God, a pay phone,” Doug said. “Is that a pay phone?”
Chip fed the phone his last two quarters. “I need to get the script back before she reads it. There’s a correction I—”
“This isn’t about tits, is it? Eden said Julia had a problem with too many tits. I wouldn’t worry about that. Generally there’s no such thing as too many. Julia’s having a really intense week.”
Please deposit—an additional—thirty cents—now—
“you what,” Doug said.
for the next—two minutes—now—
“most obvious place you—”
or your call will be terminated—now—
“Doug?” Chip said. “Doug? I missed that.”
We’re sorry—
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m saying, why don’t you—”
Goodbye, the company voice said, and the phone went dead, the wasted quarters clanking in its gut. The text on its faceplate had Baby Bell coloration, but it read: ORFIC TELECOM, 3 MINUTES 25¢, EACH ADD’L MIN. 40¢.
The most obvious place to look for Eden was at her office in Tribeca. Chip stepped up to the bar wondering if the new bartender, a streaky blonde who looked like she might front the kind of band that played at proms, remembered him well enough from the night before to take his driver’s license as surety on a twenty-buck loan. She and two unrelated drinkers were watching murky football somewhere, Nittany Lion action, brown squiggling figures in a chalky pond. And near Chip’s arm, oh, not six inches away, was a nest of singles. Just lying there. He considered how a tacit transaction (pocketing the cash, never showing his face in here again, anonymously mailing reimbursement to the woman later) might be safer than asking for a loan: might be, indeed, the transgression that saved his sanity. He crumpled the cash into a ball and moved closer to the really rather pretty bartender, but the struggling brown round-headed men continued to hold her gaze, and so he turned and left the tavern.
In the back of a cab, watching the wet businesses drift by, he stuffed licorice into his mouth. If he couldn’t get Julia back, he wanted in the worst way to have sex with the bartender. Who looked about thirty-nine herself. He wanted to fill his hands with her smoky hair. He imagined that she lived in a rehabbed tenement on East Fifth, he imagined that she drank a beer at bedtime and slept in faded sleeveless tops and gym shorts, that her posture was weary, her navel unassumingly pierced, her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove, her toenails painted the plainest basic red. He wanted to feel her legs across his back, he wanted to hear the story of her forty-odd years. He wondered if she really might sing rock and roll at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Through the window of the cab he read GAP ATHLETIC as GAL PATHETIC. He read Empire Realty as Vampire Reality.
He was half in love with a person he could never see again. He’d stolen nine dollars from a hardworking woman who enjoyed college football. Even if he went back later and reimbursed her and apologized, he would always be the man who ripped her off when her back was turned. She was gone from his life forever, he could never run his fingers through her hair, and it was not a good sign that this latest loss was making him hyperventilate. That he was too wrecked by pain to swallow more licorice.
He read Cross Pens as Cross Penises, he read ALTERATIONS as ALTERCATIONS.
An optometrist’s window offered: HEADS EXAMINED.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
How he’d changed since D——College fired him! He no longer wanted to live in a different world; he just wanted to be a man with dignity in this world. And maybe Doug was right, maybe the breasts in his script didn’t matter. But he finally understood—he finally got it—that he could simply cut the opening theoretical monologue in its entirety. He could do this correction in ten minutes at Eden’s office.
In front of her building he gave the cabby all nine stolen dollars. Around the corner, a six-trailer crew was filming on a cobbled street, kliegs ablaze, generators stinking in the rain. Chip knew the security codes to Eden’s building, and the elevator was unlocked. He prayed that Eden hadn’t read the script yet. The newly corrected version in his head was the one true script; but the old opening monologue still unhappily existed on the ivory bond paper of the copy Eden had.
Through the glass outer door on the fifth floor he saw lights in Eden’s office. That his socks were soaked and his jacket smelled like a wet cow at the seashore and he had no way to dry his hands or hair was certainly unpleasant, but he was still enjoying not having two pounds of Norwegian salmon in his pants. By comparison, he felt fairly well put together.
He knocked on the glass until Eden emerged from her office and peered out at him. Eden had high cheekbones and big watery blue eyes and thin translucent skin. Any extra calories she ate at lunch in L.A. or drank as martinis in Manhattan got burned on her home treadmill or at her private swim club or in the general madness of being Eden Procuro. She was ordinarily electric and flaming, a bundle of hot copper wire; but her expression now, as she approached the door, was tentative or flustered. She kept looking back at her office.
Chip gestured that he wanted in.
“She’s not here,” Eden said through the glass.
Chip gestured again. Eden opened the door and put her hand on her heart. “Chip, I’m so sorry about you and Julia—”
“I’m looking for my script. Have you read it?”
“I—? Very hastily. I need to read it again. Need to take some notes!” Eden made a scribbling motion near her temple and laughed.
“That opening monologue,” Chip said. “I’ve cut it.”
“Oh, good, I love a willingness to cut. Love it.” She looked back at her office.
“Do you think, though, that without the monologue—”
“Chip, do you need money?”
Eden smiled up at him with such odd merry frankness that he felt as if he’d caught her drunk or with her pants down.
“Well, I’m not flat broke,” he said.
“No, no, of course. But still.”
“Why?”
“And how are you with the Web?” she said. “Do you know any Java? HTML?”
“God, no.”
“Well, just come back to my office for a second. Do you mind? Come on back.”
Chip followed Eden past Julia’s desk, where the only visible Julian artifact was a stuffed toy frog on the computer monitor.
“Now that you two have broken up,” Eden said, “there’s really no reason you can’t—”
“Eden, it’s not a breakup.”
“No, no, trust me, it’s over,” Eden said. “It is absolutely over. And I’m thinking you might enjoy a little change of scenery, so you can start getting over it—”
“Eden, listen, Julia and I are having a momentary—”
“No, Chip, sorry, not momentary: permanent.” Eden laughed again. “Julia may not be blunt, but I am. And so, when I think about it, there’s really no reason for you not to meet …” She led Chip into her office. “Gitanas? Incredible stroke of luck here. I have, here, the perfect man for the job.”
Reclining in a chair by Eden’s desk was a man about Chip’s age in a red ribbed leather jacket and tight white jeans. His face was broad and baby-cheeked, his hair a sculpted blond shell.
Eden was practically climaxing with enthusiasm. “Here I’ve been racking my brain, Gitanas, I can’t think of anyone to help you, and probably the best-qualified man in New York City is knocking at the door! Chip Lambert, you know my assistant Julia?” She winked at Chip. “Well, this is Julia’s husband, Gitanas Misevičius.”
In almost every respect—coloration, shape of head, height and build, and especially the wary, shame-faced smile that he was wearing—Gitanas looked more like Chip than anybody Chip could remember meeting. He was like Chip with bad posture and crooked teeth. He nodded nervously without standing up or extending a hand. “How’s it going,” he said.
It was safe to say, Chip thought, that Julia had a type.
Eden patted the seat of an unoccupied chair. “Sit sit sit,” she told him.
Her daughter, April, was on the leather sofa by the windows with a mess of crayons and a sheaf of paper.
“April, hey,” Chip said. “How were those desserts?”