The Made-Up Man

by Joseph Scapellato

  Although we brought up our lives outside of class, and didn’t shy away from follow-up questions, our conversation only skipped across the surface of the personal—all of our anecdotes, however private they appeared, were appropriate for sharing with a stranger. From this shimmered a bright illusion of intimacy. We felt close, but weren’t.

  Dr. Madera and Golnaz wanted to know more about T.

  “She’s an actor,” I said.

  “Does she sing and dance also?” said Golnaz, while Dr. Madera said, “What’s she in right now?”

  I told them about Black and White and Dead All Over, the play that had been accepted to the festival in Prague.

  “That’s got to be noir,” said Dr. Madera.

  79

  —Shadows in the Corridor—

  Shadows split the light.

  Men or women walking.

  Shadows tripped, shadows dragged.

  I put my hands over my face:

  80

  —the Dig—

  We passed a semi loaded up with half a house. I explained the play, which Afiya had written: it followed the actors, writers, and producers of an imaginary old-time radio drama, also called Black and White and Dead All Over, and took place during the show’s last episode. It was about deception, love, and identity, especially racial identity. The actors wore black and white costuming, and the lighting and makeup created a high contrast, making all white whiter and all black blacker. Overall, the play couldn’t be called “realistic,” but its departures from reality were surprising and entertaining, even moving. T played a big role: the lead actor in the radio drama, a “real life” ingénue “playing” a femme fatale.

  Golnaz found it on her phone and bought tickets for her family.

  Despite film noir’s origin in France, said Dr. Madera, the genre had always seemed quintessentially American to her. Its fixation on the conflict between written and unwritten law. The equal-measure adoration of the lawman and the outlaw. Latino noir was terrific too, she added, though different in what it revealed about Latino cultures.

  Golnaz said that we were detectives.

  “Boring ones who follow boring laws,” said Dr. Madera.

  I asked Golnaz if there was any Iranian noir.

  “Most definitely,” she said, and began to explain, but Dr. Madera stomped the brakes—our seat belts lashed—we swerved and hit something, the something ka-thunked and clattered—we slid, we straightened, we slowed. The car wobbled. We crossed the rumble strip and stopped on the shoulder.

  “That was a duffel bag,” said Dr. Madera.

  She got out of the car and I followed. A warm wind rolled, turning over into farmland. The front driver’s-side tire hissed. We walked to the wayback and hauled out the bags, our luggage and groceries and equipment, which we piled on the shoulder. Golnaz offered to help—we waved her off. We opened the well, popped out the jack, and unscrewed the doughnut. Dr. Madera changed the tire and I assisted, handing her tools and holding things, while cars and trucks ripped by, rocking the hatchback, sending sound waves thudding through our bodies. We speculated on the contents of the duffel bag. I guessed bricks, she guessed briefcases full of cash. She wiped her hands on her shorts, smudging her thighs black. She was in her late thirties, a sturdy woman with a knockout smile, the most comfortable-with-every-situation person I knew.

  A state trooper pulled over, lights on.

  Dr. Madera smiled. She tightened the last two lug nuts, jumped to her feet, and went to meet the trooper. I put the jack and the flat in the well. When I turned around, the two of them were walking over.

  “Who’s she?” said the trooper, meaning Golnaz.

  “Also my student,” said Dr. Madera.

  The trooper looked at our pile of bags. Then she looked at Dr. Madera. “License and registration,” she said.

  Dr. Madera went to fetch her documents.

  The trooper asked me where we were coming from and where we were headed. I told her. A second trooper pulled up behind the first. Dr. Madera returned with the information, which the trooper took back to her cruiser. We waited, leaning on the open hatch, saying nothing. A mail truck howled by, two trailers long. The trooper came back and asked if we wouldn’t mind opening a few bags. “Porque no?” said Dr. Madera. She unzipped them one by one. While the trooper used a metal wand to poke through our belongings, Dr. Madera caught her up on the Cahokians—how they were this continent’s great forgotten ancient indigenous civilization, how they’d created a city more advanced, populous, and culturally rich than London was at the time.

  “Their society collapsed,” said Dr. Madera. “They couldn’t get along with their neighbors.”

  “Lot of drug runners coming through here,” said the trooper. “You have a nice day.”

  We returned to the road.

  “Wow, I am very glad that she did not find my secret marijuana drugs,” said Golnaz.

  I told a high school story about getting pulled over after picking up Torrentelli and Barton from a St. Patrick’s Day party. I’d borrowed my dad’s car without asking, driven the forty minutes from Joliet to LaGrange, and collected the two of them from Barton’s shithead cousin’s house—I was sober, they were sloppy—and as soon as we turned the corner at the end of the block, a cruiser zoomed up behind us. The cop shouted us out of the car. He searched the front and the back and the trunk, throwing things around, flinging open all four doors, swearing that he’d find our alcohol, until his radio firecrackered with code speech—he stopped—he bolted back to his cruiser—he sped away, lights on, sirens off, leaving us standing there, staring at the ransacked car, Barton with a pint of whiskey in his jacket and Torrentelli with a half-smoked joint behind his ear.

  Dr. Madera said that that was a white person’s story, all right. She told one about her first dig as an undergrad at the University of New Mexico, a trip to Puzzle House in Colorado. At the border between the states a Colorado trooper pulled her over, for speeding, and made her and her four classmates vacate the car while he searched it. One of Dr. Madera’s best friends had stuffed a handle of tequila into his backpack, which he’d left on the seat. The neck-and-cap poked out between the zippers. It hadn’t been opened, but the officer took everyone’s licenses anyway. “New Mexico IDs are easy to fake,” he said. He ran them in his car. When he gave them back, he pronounced everyone’s names perfectly—they were all Mexican American—the officer didn’t seem to be—and right before he left, he said, “Don’t forget: you’re in America, now.”

  “Which, for the region, I wouldn’t call ‘racist,’” said Dr. Madera.

  We exited for Collinsville and found an auto parts store. Pickups lined the parking lot, tricked out or rust-pocked. We put on a new tire.

  At the hotel, we agreed to meet in a few hours to figure out dinner.

  For the first three nights we’d stay at the hotel. Then we’d settle in at the house on the outskirts of St. Louis that Dr. Madera had rented every summer since she’d joined the dig, the place she called Green Door. As a second-year MA graduate student, I’d heard nothing but sacred fondness for Green Door, even from the most ground-down dead-in-the-eyes fifth-year PhDs. Green Door was where they’d found deep refreshment after burning all day at the site. It was where they’d showered and changed and had the drink they felt they’d earned. It was where they’d cooked up big dinners, lazed on the porch to watch whole-sky sunsets, and stayed up later than they should have to argue about how the lives of ancient men and women had been lived, what those lives might have meant, back then, and what those lives could mean now, today. More than one person in the program had said, “Bury me at Green Door.”

  The only reason that we weren’t already at Green Door, Dr. Madera had reported, was because Miss Vera, the owner, was using it to put up relatives from out of state. They’d come to town for a birdwatching conference.

  “Don’t those people have birds where they’re from?” said Dr. Madera.

  I key-carded into my room, hopped into the mid
dle of the bed, and turned the TV on right to a Sox game. Our bullpen was blowing a lead. It didn’t matter. I rolled cigarette after cigarette, stocking my old-fashioned “smoking case,” a gift from Ro that I’d rediscovered while packing for the trip. I didn’t like to think about Ro. We’d both wanted it to work. But thinking about her there, in a hotel in Collinsville on the day before my first dig, I felt hopeful, hopeful that she was one day away from doing a thing she’d always wanted to do, a thing she might’ve never done if we’d stayed together. I rolled the twentieth cigarette, placed it in the case, and shut the lid. Then I rolled a twenty-first and strolled outside to smoke it. Maybe she was boarding that plane to Bangalore. Work vans and six-wheeled pickups chugged down the strip, rumbling. I walked to a gas station across the way to buy pop and snacks. The grandma behind the counter greeted me with a manly head-nod. Next to the register, where my neighborhood gas station showcased bowls of bananas, sat a grease-smudged jar of “GENUINE ‘HOME MADE’ DOUGH-NUTS.” I asked for three. Behind the counter was a shelf of booze. At its far end stood a dusty fifth of off-brand tequila.

  “That’s racist,” said Dr. Madera, when I gave it to her in the lobby.

  Golnaz, smiling, set off for cups and ice.

  Dr. Madera examined the bottle in a loving way. “I don’t really like tequila,” she said.

  We sat with our drinks in big generic chairs by the entrance. Dr. Madera ordered pizza from a local joint, enough to offer leftovers to the other half of the field team, who’d be stopping by, she said. They’d been on the dig for a week already—they’d rented a house outside St. Louis, too. “But their house is definitely a shithole,” said Dr. Madera. The lobby doors opened: a dozen elderly white couples walked and walkered and wheelchaired over to check-in, fresh off a tour bus. They brought a slow chatter and a clean smell. One joyous old woman shouted, “Exotic St. Louis!” A sweaty man arrived with our pizzas. They gleamed with pooled grease, the crust thin and crisp. We dug in. I passed out doughnuts for dessert. Golnaz refilled our cups. Dr. Madera gave us each the same gift—Sacred Centers. She reminisced about being a grad student. “All those hours with the data, compiling, charting, graphing!” she said, as we flipped through the pages. “But I loved it. I still do. I didn’t know there’d be such poetry in it.”

  Golnaz wondered out loud about the use of the word poetry to describe things that weren’t poetry, how the comparison elevated or satirized. She shifted in her chair, folding her legs up under her. She had five years on me, at least, but looked five years younger, a petite but solid person. Her precise way of speaking brought to mind an expert witness at the stand—calm and careful.

  “The poetry in work,” she said. “The poetry in choosing one’s profession.”

  “The poetry in hand-rolled cigarettes,” said Dr. Madera, miming one at me.

  Outside I lit her up.

  She pronounced me a bad influence.

  I told her that T and I had made a pact to quit by June 1. “We want a smoke-free summer. We want to feel good.”

  Saying this out loud embarrassed me.

  Dr. Madera kept her cigarette an arm’s length away, so that the cherry’s running smoke didn’t trail onto her. She exhaled hard from the side of her mouth.

  “Nowadays I only smoke OPs,” she said.

  I hadn’t heard of those.

  “Other people’s.”

  I was supposed to laugh, and did.

  “What the poets do,” she said, “makes what we do valuable.” Her favorites were Neruda and Paz and Sexton, and more recently, Natalie Diaz and Karla Kelsey. She talked about poetry as the mother discipline of every social science, as the original experiment-based investigation into every observable realm of human experience, just as subject to logically progressive principles of truth. We smoked another cigarette. I was relieved that she had so much to say, that she didn’t require anything of me except to listen. I didn’t want to talk about how happy I was feeling. Anything I could say, if said the way I’d want to say it, wouldn’t sound true.

  Golnaz had fallen asleep in her chair. Somehow she looked tense—she glowered in a dream, her body bunched up. When we sat down, she stirred. She brightened. “Bedtime,” she said, sounding all the way awake.

  Dr. Madera wondered where the other half of the field team was.

  I suggested that we do another drink.

  “No thanks,” said Dr. Madera, checking her phone. “Maybe they got a flat.”

  We took the elevator to our floor together and said good night. Our rooms were close, but didn’t share walls.

  In bed I called T. She’d gone to Milwaukee for the weekend to hang out with Afiya. If she stayed alone in an apartment for too long, she said, she succumbed to feelings of cinematic desperation.

  Her voice bobbed up from a noisy bar.

  “Wait,” she sang.

  She hustled outside, the crowd sucking away.

  I waited with a grin. Her voice was big without being showy, sure without being smug. It had body, texture, movement, range. If I missed what she said, it was because I leaned too close to how she said it.

  “We’re at Wolski’s,” she said.

  “It’s Polish—like you!” she said.

  She described Wolski’s real metal darts and real cork dartboards and how you could play for free and eat free popcorn, and if you stayed until they closed at 2 a.m., they gave you a bumper sticker that read I CLOSED WOLSKI’S.

  A dude on the street asked her for a cigarette.

  “Are you old enough to vote?” she said to him.

  “But did you vote?” she said to him.

  “Milwaukee is druuuuuunk tonight,” she said to me.

  “Milwaukee better call a cab,” she said.

  “Milwaukee better get some food in its belly,” she said.

  “I can’t believe I just worried about Milwaukee getting some food in its belly,” she said.

  “Oh!” she said, and she cupped her mouth, making her voice less distinct, and louder: she whispered that Afiya’s boyfriend, an outdoorsy Wisconsin-proud man’s man named Dunn, was finally going to propose to her.

  “He asked for my help with the ring!” she said. “Just now! When Afiya went to get more popcorn!”

  I rose from the hotel bed, alarmed.

  One month ago I’d asked Afiya for her help in picking out a ring for T. I’d called her and she’d answered in what sounded like a crowded coffee shop.

  “I’m supposed to be excited that you’re doing this, Stan,” Afiya had said. “And I am. But I want you to think about it. I want you to be sure.”

  “I’m sure and I’ve thought about it,” I said.

  Afiya told me about her kid brother and the woman he’d married, a story I’d heard from T: an angry ultimatum, an angry wedding, three angry infidelities, and a slow, sad, life-devouring divorce.

  “They weren’t sure,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “They didn’t think about it.”

  “Yes.”

  Someone asked a question that made Afiya chuckle. She called the question-asker one impatient motherfucker. An espresso machine clanked and rattled: she was behind the counter, making a drink.

  To me she said, “T is my best friend. T is my girl.”

  “T is my best friend also, that’s why I want to marry her.”

  “How do you know she’ll say yes?”

  I said that if she wasn’t going to help, that was fine, just say so. I hung up.

  She called me back.

  “I shouldn’t respect you for being so crazy-sensitive,” she said. “But I do. I’m a romantic.”

  With suggestions from Afiya I settled on a style, something classic and simple. I ordered, I paid with my card, I waited. I took the L downtown to the jeweler, a bored and distant man who wore no jewelry himself, not even a ring, and I took the L back to our apartment, where I sat at the table and opened the box and put the ring in my palm. T had just left for rehearsal—the apartment smelled like her body
wash. I searched myself for feelings of commitment, and then for feelings of relief.

  I decided not to think about what I hadn’t found until after the dig.

  Outside Wolski’s, T said, “It’s what Afiya wants! But she has trouble saying yes to what she wants.”

  I paced the hotel room. Afiya had promised to keep our conversation a secret, but she might have made a different promise to T, and told her, in which case T telling me about Dunn might have been her way of letting me know that she knew I’d bought a ring. The idea of T knowing knocked cracks through me. I wanted to confess: I wanted to tell T that I’d be proposing to her despite the fact that I wasn’t sure, that what I was sure about was that being in a relationship with her was better than being in a relationship with anyone I’d ever known because of how she enabled me to forget myself, which was maybe just a way of saying that when I was with her, I was happy with who I wasn’t.