Today Will Be Different

by Maria Semple

  “Do you mind if we do this in the shade?” asked Jimmy. He put his chair in reverse and zzzt’d backward.

  “Do what in the shade?” I watched him recede farther away from where I needed to be, and yesterday: the sculpture park.

  “Our talk!” Jimmy shouted from under the eave of Costco.

  “We’re not having a talk!” I said.

  Alonzo lowered himself onto the curb, a three-step process accompanied by a fair amount of grunting.

  “No, don’t sit down!” I said. “Ugh! I’m telling you, I don’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  “Shit,” Alonzo said. “It’s hardly Sophie’s choice.”

  He was now cradling his head in his hands. “Costco’s the only insurance that pays for in vitro. My wife’s going to kill me. But nothing is worth another hour of that place.”

  “Come on, Alonzo.” I patted his back. “All work has dignity.”

  “She’s right!” called Jimmy from the shade.

  “Not that work!” Alonzo shouted back. He turned to me. A puzzled look befell his face. “Wait. What happened to your steak fish?”

  “Right. Uh. It was delicious, but my son is with a stranger who expected me back an hour ago and the line was really long and—”

  Jimmy motored over. “Where did you leave it? I’m not going to turn you in. It’s just, it could thaw.”

  “In a basket of T-shirts.”

  “Oooh,” Jimmy said. “You better show me.”

  “Yeah,” Alonzo said. “Show him.”

  “No.” I reached through my legs, pulled up the back hem of my dress, and tied it in a three-way knot. Looking like Gandhi from the waist down, I climbed the rungs of the dumpster.

  “My life,” I said, “is with my son, who I need to get back to before someone calls Child Services.”

  I snatched the apron and tossed it at Alonzo’s chest. He let it bounce off.

  “Your life,” I said to Alonzo, hopping down, “is in that Costco.” I tied the apron around his neck.

  “Jimmy?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Your life is escorting Alonzo back to his steak fish station.”

  “Can do.”

  “I’m a poet,” Alonzo said. “I’m writing a novel. It’s called Marigold, My Marigold. When I came to work, I passed a rack of marigolds. As I did, one broke off. This one. It was a sign. Today is the day my novel comes first.”

  “Alonzo,” I said. “Quit tomorrow. I don’t care. Just talk it over with your wife.”

  I aimed him in the direction of Costco.

  “Go back to your darkling plain,” I said, giving him a helpful shove. “Everything will be fine.”

  “My what?” Alonzo asked, turning back.

  “Your little standing mat. Your darkling plain… pretend I never said it.”

  I’d love to tell you I jogged the half mile back to the museum at a measured and steady pace. Really, I sprinted with boobs flapping, R. Crumb calves wobbling, throat burning, blister on the inside of my right heel forming. And stopped after a hundred feet.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. Spencer must have waterboarded my number out of the recesses of Timby’s mind.

  “Yes, hello?”

  “Am I speaking with Eleanor Flood?”

  I took my phone away from my ear.

  JOYCE PRIMM.

  “Joyce, hi! I’ve been meaning to call!”

  “This is Camryn Karis-Sconyers,” the voice said. “I’m an editor at Burton Hill.”

  Whatever was about to happen, I had the strongest premonition I shouldn’t hear it standing up.

  I’d arrived at a small fishing pier. A Native American in a jean jacket sat on a bench with a portable radio. At his feet was a bucket filled with bloody gunk. BAIT 4 SALE. He nodded at the empty spot beside him. I sat down.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said to Ms. Karis-Sconyers.

  “I’m calling because we’re moving our offices downtown. I’ve been going through our files and found one for The Flood Girls. I’m wondering what you’d like us to do with it.”

  “Oh. Joyce will know.”

  “Joyce?”

  “Joyce Primm,” I said. “My editor. Let me speak with her.”

  “Um, Joyce Primm isn’t with Burton Hill anymore.”

  So that’s why Joyce had been calling, to tell me she was going to another publisher.

  “Where did she land?” I asked.

  “At a cheese shop in Nyack.”

  “Oh.”

  “I heard it’s a really good cheese shop,” Camryn offered.

  So it hadn’t been Joyce Primm calling. My phone just thought so because I’d entered Burton Hill’s main number in my address book.

  What a singular sensation, to have the facts of my career unraveling and raveling back up all at the same time.

  “And, so, my book?” I asked.

  “The Flood Girls?” she said. “It was kind of due eight years ago?”*

  “Are you my new editor?”

  “I edit YA.”

  “YA graphic novels? I’m sorry. I’m confused.”

  “We’re not doing a lot of graphic novels anymore,” Camryn said. “They were big ten years ago but we got burned by a few. You know, Joyce and her cheese shop.”

  “So you’re saying my book is canceled?” I said. “You’re just going to eat my advance?”

  “I suppose we could sue you?” she said helpfully.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I feel bad,” Camryn said. “Maybe this is a conversation you should be having with your agent. Who’s your agent?”

  “Sheridan Smith,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “What?”

  “Someone said she’s a homeopath in Colorado.”

  “She is?”

  “Publishing,” Camryn said. “You might have heard. We’ve been going through a rough patch.”

  “Gee.”

  “You can still write your book,” she said sweetly. “It probably just won’t be for us. Oh!” She’d almost forgotten. “This file. I’m not sure if you want us to send it to you. Looks like contracts, correspondence, a Christmas card you drew for Joyce where instead of reindeer it’s the Looper Wash ponies and instead of Santa it’s that guy with the thing whose name I can’t remember—”

  I hung up and dropped my phone into the bait bucket.

  I sensed a strong gaze. The Native American.

  “Bad call?” he said.

  “Bad call,” I said, and walked away.

  My oxfords crunched up the sculpture garden path toward the glass pavilion. My body was numb and made of feathers. People and sculptures grew denser until I was in thick with picnickers packing up, mothers chasing toddlers, tourists posing, the spindly legs of the red Calder spaceship teetering.

  Oof. I was on the grass. I’d tripped on an outdoor light.

  “I need help.”

  It was a story Joe once told. He was in Indianapolis for the NFL Combine and he’d gotten food poisoning. He’d spent all night on the tile floor of his hotel bathroom burning with fever. Vomit, sweat, diarrhea: name an orifice, there was something coming out of it. He found himself moaning, “I need help. Someone help me.” As a doctor, Joe knew he didn’t need help. His body simply had a bug and the quicker he expelled it, the better. But he found himself “made better in another way” by the act of repeating those words. “I need help. Somebody help me.” He said them over and over until he started laughing. The next morning at breakfast he overheard people at the buffet. “Did you hear that poor fucker last night? I hope somebody helped him.”

  I hated that story. Joe was my Competent Traveler. He wasn’t the one who laughed naked on the shower floor of a Holiday Inn Express. He didn’t cry out helplessly to no one.

  I’d forced myself to forget the whole episode. Until now.

  I picked myself up off the grass. I sprinted the rest of the way, a bead of red running down my shin.

  The glass of the pav
ilion was pure reflection. Orange the color of the birch leaves. Flat-bottomed clouds skipped across the sky. In a patch of inky ocean, I could make out Spencer standing with his back to me.

  A sign: CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION. The door was propped open.

  Spencer conferred with a gaggle of art types, at their feet a patchwork of furniture pads. Men in blue rubber gloves. The guy from before, still with the level in his teeth. An older woman with wild gray hair and harlequin-patterned tights spoke with her hands. Spencer noticed me over his shoulder. He shot me a very annoyed look.

  Annoyance! How quaint!

  I spotted Timby in the corner, legs folded impossibly underneath him, examining with quiet concentration the contents of my purse.

  Timby with his pinch pots and darling belly and paper airplanes and backward Ys and his love of winter and carbs and walking sticks and his scavenging for clues to help him better understand the screwy adult world. Timby, it’s not your fault my mother died when I was your age. You don’t know that all the time you have with me from now on is a gift. It’s not your fault I can’t absorb that lesson myself. That I’m cobbled together from broken promises of jigsaw puzzles never started and pot-holder kits unopened. That’s why Timby reads Archie! It’s a steady group of characters behaving predictably. It’s a world with the guarantee of small-scale problems. How do I break it to you that people aren’t predictable? That life is confounding and sadistic in its cruelty? That when things go your way, it never makes you as happy as you’d expected, but when things go against you, it’s a cold-water jolt, an unshakable outrage that dogs you forever. But I can be steady. I will show you kindness and bring you snow—

  “Mom?” In Timby’s hand was the ring of keys with the lanyard of baby blocks.

  D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E.

  From school! The ones I’d stolen. And completely forgotten about.

  I darted toward him.

  In my side vision, horror on the faces of Spencer, the installers, and the hip older woman, their mouths trying to warn me off something.

  But I needed to get that awful name out of Timby’s hand.

  I raised my chin just in time to see a flat piece of metal with layers of green enamel, mottled like mold, across my field of vision.

  Clunk.

  The last thing I heard before I sank to the floor was Timby’s voice.

  “What are you doing with Delphine’s mom’s keys?”

  Troubled Troubadour

  Long before Eleanor met Bucky, she’d heard the stories.

  Barnaby Fanning was the lone offspring of a marriage between two of New Orleans’ finest families. Growing up in a Garden District mansion so iconic it was a stop on all the tours, the future heir to sugar and cotton fortunes both, his adolescence spent at debutante balls during the season and trips abroad during the summer: it was the stuff of true Southern gentlemen.

  But Bucky always refused the first table at a restaurant. He carried a pocket calculator so he could tip a strict twelve percent. When his father nudged him out of the nest after graduating Vanderbilt (straight Cs), Bucky fluttered only as far as the carriage house because no other address would suit. He sported head-to-toe Prada bought on quarterly pilgrimages to Neiman Marcus in Dallas, paid for by Granny Charbonneau. At the slightest perceived insult, Bucky would fly into rages, becoming so red-faced and spitty in the process that even those on the receiving end of his invective grew concerned for his health. During the holidays, Bucky would stand over the trash and drop in Christmas cards unopened while keeping mental score of who’d sent them. He never accepted a dinner invitation without first asking who else would be there. Bucky Fanning had never been known to write a thank-you note.

  There was a girl once, from an equally prominent family. A joining of the two would be the social equivalent of unifying the heavyweight title. Bucky would fritter away hours on the veranda dreaming of their wedding and life together. The girl was five years his junior; Bucky was at Tulane Law when she went away to Bard. The girl’s first Thanksgiving back, Bucky arranged a party at Granny Charbonneau’s, a proposal party. A hundred local eminences were in attendance, a videographer on hand to capture the moment. But the girl, a bit fuzzy on her status with Bucky, entered on the arm of her boyfriend, a film major, last name Geisler. Not German Catholic. It was widely appreciated that Bucky would never recover from the public humiliation. Indeed, he dropped out of Tulane.

  Bucky now spent his days at the Williams Research Center in the French Quarter toiling away on a sprawling history of the Charbonneau family. He worked in the light-filled second-floor library in the mornings and walked to lunch at Arnaud’s or Galatoire’s, the only places that would allow him to dine with his beloved Pomeranian, Mary Marge, perched on his lap.

  In addition to his writing and seats on local charity boards, Bucky attended to the Court of Khaos. Khaos was arguably New Orleans’ most elite social club, or “krewe.” Bucky’s father had been king of Khaos, his mother queen. Bucky had been a page in every court. When he aged out, he was elected captain. King might appear to outrank captain, but Bucky was quick to point out that king was ceremonial whereas captain wielded the real power: over membership, court assignments, invitations, float design, charitable disbursements, etc. During the season, August through February, the court-related parties averaged five per week, climaxing in Mardi Gras, when the various krewes rolled through the French Quarter on floats, tossing beads and doubloons to the public before disappearing behind closed doors where that year’s debutantes officially “came out” at lavish balls. Hierarchy, secrecy, exclusivity; pageantry, privilege, tradition: the Court of Khaos was Bucky’s unified field theory.

  At times, Bucky’s fervor for the debutante balls resembled that of a wedding-planner character from an ’80s romantic comedy, a fey id gone wild. But New Orleans cossetted their eccentrics. The Skoogs had a grandfather who believed the Civil War was still being fought and indulged him with daily dispatches of Confederate successes. One of the Nissley girls spent second grade dressed as the Little Tramp. That the Fannings’ eminently eligible son haunted the debutante scene but never seemed to risk romance, preferring instead to hover on the sidelines sneering at certain maladroit dancers and settling scores through seating charts, that was no different.

  “I love this guy!” Eleanor said to Lester, looking up from her light box at the Looper Wash offices.

  “He’s really quite wonderful,” Lester said.

  The stories came courtesy of Lester Lewis, who had roomed with Bucky at Vanderbilt. Eleanor had hired Lester as her number two. He was a meticulous draftsman who’d grown up on a thoroughbred farm in Kentucky but was afraid of ponies. It was his idea to give the ponies of Looper Wash their ornery personalities.

  “Grr,” Eleanor said, erasing the eyes on a laughing Millicent. “I’m terrible at eyes.”

  It was 2003. Looper Wash was still a month from airing but the animators had been working for two years in a loft on the dodgy end of Broome Street. Eleanor had her own office, but she preferred the bullpen, working side by side with her New York team. Scores more artists hand-painted in Hungary.

  “Is there anything likeable about your friend Bucky?” Eleanor asked.

  Lester had to think about it. “He’s loyal.”

  “But you can’t genuinely like him,” Eleanor said, raising Millicent’s lower lids in an attempt to give her that smiling-eye look.

  “We’re devoted friends,” Lester cried. “We speak every day.”

  “Does he know you mock him behind his back?”

  “I mock him to his face!” Lester said gleefully.

  Eleanor’s team was color-correcting, making last-minute changes and throwing in topical jokes to season one, getting animatic notes on season two, and storyboarding season three. It was high-stress and sedentary work; fourteen-hour days hunched over drawing boards, vacations canceled, out-of-town parents stood up at fancy restaurants, weddings postponed, births of babies just missed.

  In the strangleho
ld of deadlines, a bunker mentality set in. The animators versus the idiot network executives; versus the capricious and overpaid writers; versus the incompetent and venal Hungarians.

  The one bright spot in the animators’ day occurred after lunch when Lester would return from his daily phone call with Bucky and recount the highlights in delicious detail. For the next hour, a calm settled over the bullpen as the animators dissected Bucky across their light boards.

  Did they love him? Hate him? They took extravagant pleasure in the debate.

  If only there were some way to hear his voice!

  Eleanor suggested they get the phone guy to add Lester’s line to the speakerphone in her office so the animators could pile in and listen in on him and Bucky.

  “Please?” Eleanor asked Lester. “He’s all we have.”

  A rush order was submitted.

  Bucky didn’t disappoint.

  “I’m every shade of aggravated.” Bucky at home, settling onto his daybed after an especially rich lunch. His voice was confident and strangely accent-free.

  Eleanor passed a note to Lester. Why doesn’t he have a Southern accent?

  Lester nodded and gave Eleanor a wink.

  “Bucky,” Lester said. “The other night I started to explain to someone your philosophy on Southern accents, but all I could remember was that it defied logic.”

  “Southern accents are hillbilly,” Bucky said with petulance. “Anyone with a proper education, I don’t care if he’s never stepped foot out of the South, doesn’t go around sounding like Jubilation T. Cornpone. If he does, it’s a put-on. And please, I’m in no mood to rehash the obvious. I’ve just had a knock-down, drag-out with the mail lady.”

  “No kidding,” Lester said.

  “As you know, I had a mailbox made for the carriage house. Last week I left a note stating that from now on, all mail addressed to Barnaby Fanning was to be delivered there. Every day it’s been empty. Today I confronted her, and she said that by law anything addressed to 2658 Coliseum had to be put in Mummy and Daddy’s box. If I wanted mail in a different box, I’d need a different address. She kindly suggested I traipse down to city hall and have the carriage house designated 2658 A. Can you imagine? Barnaby Fortune Charbonneau Fanning, 2658 A! She obviously doesn’t know.”