Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  Given the idiocy with which people choose passwords, plus my access to everything and anything, I can masquerade as almost anyone in the company, dolling out electronic approvals as I choose. Not a good idea when the doppelgänger is liable to notice, but a small invoice from a small office-supply company that I have quietly added to the approved supplier list will not be noticed. Ever.

  I do a test run. Enter a company called “Black and Tan Office Supplies” in the approved supplier database. Then I set up the company of the same name in the Cayman Islands (simple, just Google “setting up a company in the Cayman Islands for nefarious purposes”). I open a Cayman bank account (simple, just Google “setting up a bank account in the Caymans for more nefarious purposes”). I set up a trust to own and operate the nonoperating entity (simple, just …), lowering the chances that anything can be tracked back to me. Then I send an electronic invoice for $32 from Black and Tan to our company for “printer accessory kit.” Then I give it the electronic OK, and mark it “Same-day payment.” Next day I have an additional $32 in my account.

  The question of how to turn $32 into more interesting amounts is next.

  “I stole $32 from the company today.”

  Van is, not surprisingly, unimpressed.

  “You really know how to stick it to the man.”

  “It was a test run. Can multiply at will.”

  “You don’t care that much about money.”

  “You’re right. I intend to give it away.”

  “To who?”

  “I don’t know. Charity?”

  “You don’t care about charity.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Name one.”

  I think for a while. I come up with nothing.

  “I’ll find a cause. There must be a website that lists charitable causes that pull at heartstrings. Maybe I will give it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They seem to do good work.”

  “I’m sure they will be eternally grateful.”

  “OK. I will send anonymous contributions to worthy individuals who are in need.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like the homeless guy on the corner of Los Feliz and Western, who helped me fix a flat tire once.”

  “OK.”

  “So can I ramp up? You’re a man with a keen sense of right and wrong, even though you are a gloomy drunk. Am I crossing any moral boundaries here, Van?”

  “I’d still rather have him killed. After a light bout of torture. But you have a bigger problem.”

  “What?”

  “He will never know.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the principle.”

  “The principle is that it should hurt. This won’t hurt.”

  “Shit. You were the one who told me to steal his money.”

  “Right. Maybe you should steal something else that he loves.”

  “His Maserati?”

  “He’ll buy another.”

  “His girlfriend?”

  “He’ll buy another.”

  “Van, you’re not helping much here.”

  “Contract killing plus torture. That’s the moral high ground.”

  He’s right. This is a waste of time. I will have to come up with something else.

  “Farzad, I want to hurt somebody.”

  “Later. Do you think she will come by today? I want to see her.”

  Farzad and I are in Venice again. We don’t normally meet at the same place, but Farzad wants to see the rollerblader.

  “Why?”

  “Watching her last week was an epiphany, bar mitzvah boy. Even Harvard-trained psychologists need epiphanies.”

  “What was the epiphany?”

  “I cannot tell you that. I can only tell my shrink.”

  “You have a shrink?”

  “Of course. All shrinks have shrinks.”

  “Who’s your shrink’s shrink?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Won’t the shrink community run out of shrinks to shrink them?”

  “Nah, it circles back eventually. It is like a Möbius strip.”

  “Farzad, I want to hurt somebody. How do I do that and still be a good person?”

  “Who said you are a good person?”

  “You never take me seriously.”

  “OK. Who do you want to hurt?”

  “My CEO.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a terrible person.”

  “Why?”

  “He makes waitresses cry.”

  “Have him killed.”

  “That’s what Van said.”

  “Really?”

  “Can’t have him killed anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a vampire.”

  “Wooden stake?”

  “Worldwide shortage.”

  “So you want to hurt him?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Call him fat, to his face.”

  “He’s not fat, and I want to keep my job.”

  “You want to hurt him and keep your job?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Farzad strokes his considerable facial hair. I can tell he is moving into a pedantic attitude, my favorite—at least when I am looking for advice.

  “OK, my beloved wandering Hebe, here are my well-considered thoughts on this matter. What we have here is a revenge-and-punishment scenario, a well-traveled road in the annals of psychology, and indeed, in the history of human endeavor. You throw me an interesting curveball, though. It is not you who wants revenge, but you wish righteous punishment on behalf of others, most specifically waitresses. Therefore, it seems as though you wish to serve common justice, the greater good. Which makes you a self-obsessed, narcissistic, attention-seeking ass, trying to play God.”

  “But I don’t necessarily want anyone to know—”

  “Shut up, I’m not finished. You feel a need to hurt a man who has hurt others. You feel this need as a sort of mythological vengeance, which will make him feel worse, and make you feel better. The problem with all of this is that it will not make the waitress who cried feel better, because she will never know. Therefore, I can only conclude that you are ashamed of your small penis. You have penis envy, my friend, and the coup de psychological grâce is that you envy my large Muslim penis. It has nothing to do with the CEO.”

  “You never take me seriously.”

  “OK, OK. If you want to hurt somebody, steal something that they love.”

  “Hey, that’s also what Van said.”

  “Van is a chronic depressive. Therefore, without serious psychological assistance, nothing he says can be trusted.”

  Farzad stands up and cranes his neck.

  “Where is my rollerblader?”

  We scan the passing parade for a while. There are multiple interfering currents of walkers, rollerbladers, skateboarders, cyclists, and spectators, all trying, and partially failing, to stay on their designated pieces of territory, some being occasionally—and quite literally—routed off to separate single-purpose arteries, the presumed logic of such expense being the avoidance of lawsuits from injured complainants.

  The Venice boardwalk in the height of summer is the stuff of a million dreams. Take a snapshot, from any angle, and it seems like a place of near impossible joy, hope, wonder, happiness. It might strike the disinterested viewer that a perfect society has been built here. There are quaint, trendy, and stolidly honest pedestrian eateries. Shops and stalls catering to every whim, from bangles to bagels to bicycles. Magicians and acrobats and jokers in full throat. By midmorning the babble of the parishioners of this fine church has risen in joyous cacophony, and always, always youth and beauty and sex in immodest display.

  But to me, drenched in dread and complication, it feels like an illusion, a trick, legerdemain, sleight of hand. Nothing this good can last. The good cheer of these people, surely, surely will be crushed and deformed as the sky falls on their heads, as it must, for all of us. Particularly me.

  I drain my beer. Glare at Farzad for a bi
t.

  “Meyer, I apologize for my flippancy, thoughts of my rollerblader’s powerful gluteus maximus has me in a state of mind to consider light matters only. Here is my real answer. You ask me if you can hurt somebody and still be a good person. There are many questions that underlie the main one. The first is whether we even know what a good person is. Do we compare to some objective yardstick? The Ten Commandments, perhaps, revered by your tribe and mine? And that other religion. Clearly not, given that we all covet our neighbors’ wives. What then? If someone transgresses the voluminous legal codes of his country, perhaps? Again, this suggestion fails under the weight of its conceit. If one compared the laws of Christian Uganda and our fair Christian land on the subject of gay people, you would struggle to believe that these laws were based on the same concepts of empathy and goodness. What else? Common sense, perhaps? Perhaps the concept of goodness is simply one of those ‘you-know-it-when-you-see-it’ things. A slippery slope that, my little yarmulke. And I’m sure I don’t have to outline the paucity of that argument. Maybe it is purely a personal judgment call, made at the moment. Inherent in your question is also the fact that you consider yourself to be a better person than the CEO. I would suspect that he would differ, and in fact I would hazard that, with the assistance of smart lawyers of your religious persuasion, he could construct a compelling argument that he employs, and thus supports with his personal largesse, tens of thousands of people. Indeed, for all you know, he might well be donating his entire personal fortune to AIDS research.”

  “Farzad, I assure you—”

  “Shut up, I’m not finished. As a beautiful symmetry to the foregoing argument is how we judge you to be good, and whether in fact you can damage this self-proclaimed goodness by inflicting hurt on another. If he had selfsame Jewish lawyers turn on you, they would, without doubt, dredge up the whole child-growing-up-without-a-father crime. There are at least two of those in your life, yes? A father so solipsistic that he leaves the responsibility of the rearing of his innocent children to bereft and struggling mothers, while he wanders off, oblivious to the damage caused, to play saxophone and do drugs. Your self-appointed goodness can easily be shredded.”

  “That’s not fair, that’s—”

  “Shut up, I’m not finished. We now move on to the definition of ‘hurt.’ Hurting a person is a premeditated vicious act. A consequence of our most base instincts. An anathema to all that we hope … there she is, there she is!”

  He jumps up, runs down onto the boardwalk, stomach and beard jiggling in sync, just in time for his goddess to whoosh past him, a blur of gold.

  Farzad. Fucking pedant. I love him.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, my weekend with Isobel. Krystal and I have been doing well of late. She has laughed at a few of my jokes. We exchanged a few orgasms this week, reversing a worrying throttling of desire and action. Krystal works as a copywriter in a brand-name ad agency, with a bizarrely architectured building near the beach, shaped like a TV set. The building was designed in the ’80s, when TV reigned supreme. When All in the Family signified the great diversification of the body populi, when cables and satellite broadcast were gleaming promises, inchoate experiments foreseeing a brave new world. Then the sparkling explosion of digital, its many shards rendering the stolid cathode-ray TV set a comical ode to clunk. The building, housing one of the most recognizable names in advertising, embarrasses passersby and inmates alike. Krystal used to talk about the building a lot, how it overwhelmed her, how its kitsch excess poisoned her day, how architecture framed its citizens. I used to find that smart. She was full of surprising observations once. Or perhaps one day she simply stopped seeing the need to surprise me.

  We settle down for dinner at a restaurant on Melrose, the avenue stretching out its TV series celebrity well beyond its sell-by date. The place is teeming with people, entertainment-industry workers ranging from the unemployed and hopeful to the employed and cynical. You can feel the new and old hopes and dreams bouncing and colliding arbitrarily off the sharp and asymmetrical architectural fittings of the bar, where we now perch, awaiting our table.

  “So, Isobel, how’s your friend Cheryl?”

  “She’s fine. Got a boyfriend now.”

  She exchanges a glance with Krystal. They keep secrets from me. My good mood finds a small puncture. I can almost hear the hiss.

  “What kind of boyfriend?”

  Isobel rolls her eyes, an eye roll perfectly evolved across millennia of teenagers.

  “How many kinds are there, Dad?”

  “Serious boyfriend. iPhone boyfriend. Steady boyfriend. Aspirant boyfriend. Imaginary boyfriend. Older boyfriend. No boyfriend.”

  She is not as amused as I had hoped.

  “Older boyfriend.”

  Shit. Alarm bells.

  “How much older?”

  “He’s twenty.”

  “Please tell me you are kidding.”

  No twenty-year-old is going out with anyone unless he is getting some. That means she is putting out. I am going to call Cheryl’s parents and ask them to commit her to a convent.

  “Nope, not kidding.”

  “And you, any boys in your life?”

  “Nah. The only boys I know are still teenagers. Not interested in teenagers, anymore, Dad.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Krystal is watching this interaction, clearly amused between sips of wine spritzer. Being a copywriter has armed her with a quick wit, which was what attracted me to her in the first place. When your profession demands that something smart and memorable is said in thirty seconds, you become unable to communicate without resorting to your secret stash of riposte, pun, euphemism, or one-liners. Being in secret estrogen-driven cahoots with your lover’s teenage daughter makes for a lethal combination.

  Krystal is very tall, angular. Sharp bones, long aquiline nose, wide and thin lips, sharply edged jawline, prominent cheekbones, wide eyes. Not classically beautiful, but more striking, perhaps even a little shocking. In addition to a sharp literate tongue, her tallness appealed to me, perhaps as a palliative for my own failings in the vertical department. I considered it a mark of her general excellence and good taste that she would allow herself to be wooed by someone over whom she towered. In the drawn-out fading of our relationship, her height now seems like an optical illusion.

  “Krystal, any thoughts on this matter?”

  “What matter is that, Meyer?”

  “Fourteen-year-olds either dating twenty-year-olds or wanting to?”

  “I dated a thirty-year-old when I was sixteen. He was sweet.”

  “Thanks, Krystal, you’re not helping.”

  Isobel giggles. I decide to back off. These two females will flay the skin off my body. I will have a word with Bunny, appeal to her sense of, I don’t know, gender protection? Daughter protection? I also recommit to not trying to save a dying love affair with a tone-deaf person, particularly if she is not going to support the chastity requirements I require for my daughter.

  There is a small voice in my ear reminding me of the tender age of my own loss of innocence. But it was the ’80s then. The world was in no danger of imminent collapse. Sex was fun. You got a bit drunk, smoked a doobie, groped incompetently in the dark, and then it was over. Nobody got hurt. The girls were as experimentally playful as the boys, or so it seemed. Dread was still an infant. It seems to me that it is now mandatory that kids eschew the temptations of the flesh in favor of saving the planet from the idiocies of their parents. I mean, if they are going to go around fucking each other, who is going to save the whales?

  Fathers and daughters. This incarnation of a family relationship is fraught with bizarre irrationality, particularly on the father’s side. No, actually completely on the father’s side. Doting doesn’t even begin to describe it. Our daughters somehow take the place of our mothers, not in an Oedipal sense, but as the embodiment of hope and kindness and softness and warmth. They make us feel strong, responsible, caring. We guard their w
ell-being jealously, we are proud of them, we will kill anyone who looks at them inappropriately. They make us anxious, they steamroll our other priorities.

  * * *

  “Meyer, you are full of crap, you know that?”

  Bunny also does not seem to share my view. I call her when I get home.

  “The guy is twenty, Bunny. It’s just a matter of time before he asks Cheryl if she hasn’t got a nice friend for his drinking buddy, Biff.”

  “You’re projecting. Not all twenty-year-olds are the same as you were when you were twenty.”

  “How was I?”

  “I wasn’t there, remember? But I assume you were a prick.”

  “All twenty-year-olds are pricks.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “Yes, they are. Have you ever been a twenty-year-old male?”

  “Meyer, you are annoying me. Let this go. Isobel is a responsible young lady, and I trust her to make the right decisions.”

  “Please have a chat with her. I am begging you.”

  “OK. I will tell her that her father thinks she is vulnerable and immature.”

  “She is vulnerable. And immature.”

  “No more than any other fourteen-year-old girl. Leave the mothering to me. Let it go, Meyer.”

  Bunny, unlike Krystal, is not tall. She is short and a bit plump. Zaftig, in the mother tongue of my shtetl ancestors. But she is classically beautiful. Large, dark, impenetrable eyes, blue-black-dyed straight hair, skin one click below albino, and plush, wet, tumescent lips, somewhere between vermillion and ruby. The full thighs and soft belly and generous breasts were endlessly fascinating for me. I wallowed in them. Going against the grain of popular fashion, I must insist that plump makes for better sex.