Venus Drive

by Sam Lipsyte

It hits me in the stairwell, that pin. The Smoker’s Brigade. Comrade. We could start a cell here in the building, rig Martha with dynamite girdles, send Mikhail on recon jobs through ventilation ducts into the Lysol’d HQ’s of pinklungers. Rich and I would vie for the fealty of our troops until one of us, probably me, came up python eyes in his biopsy. Unwilling to wheeze my way to the Great Smoking Section Beyond, I’d pass my Desert Eagle over to Rich and shut my eyes.

  “Savor the fine tobacco flavor for me, Sport,” he’d say, thumb the hammer back.

  “Fuck toil, bro!” Mikhail would shout.

  “Do the prick,” Martha would hiss.

  Downstairs, everyone is weeping and hugging, or readying a lawsuit. There’s a rented cop in my cube.

  “Personal files only,” he says.

  The boss sticks his head in, his face flushed, teary, trauma-elated.

  “You were great,” he says. “You did great work. We all did. They didn’t give me a chance. I could have turned this thing around.”

  “I missed your speech,” I say.

  “Anything I can do for you, let me know,” he says. I almost ask him to hold down the tape at the bottom of the box.

  When my mother was dying I kept going down to the street to smoke. You would think I would be some kind of pariah lighting up outside a cancer ward, but no one paid any mind. Bald men, bald women, bald teens sat out in the summer twilight in their gowns. Cut open, sewn shut, garlanded with IV lines, poisoned with their futile glowing cures, they puffed away like wild heroes.

  I would stand nearby and remember a day when I was not much more than six, seven, see myself sitting on a beach with my mother and father, the two of them slung low in canvas chairs beneath a striped umbrella, smoking, drinking sodas, laughing over secret words, sticking their filter-tips into the sand.

  That day I stood up before them with all the theater of the firstborn child, my feet clamped to the cement lip of the artificial lake our town had built for us, our neighbors, whomever else was good and kind and willing to pay. It was early summer and my birthday was, as my mother had noted, on the horizon. I pictured it a pack mule in the distance, heaped with trinkets, absolution, cheer.

  “What do you want for your big day?” my father asked.

  He wore the sideburns of his time, the kind no retro-styling can ever seem to honor. We are Saigon, those sideburns said, Altamont, Nixon under the rotary gust. We are heart-smashed and uncertain and looking to score. My father, with those whiskers, was one of reason’s priests, on the lam from chaos, cabal, a lit stick of disaffection in his lips.

  My mother, she was spilling out of her swimming suit cups in all her freckled wonder, moving maybe past voluptuous motherhood into some other great, rippling power. The coils of her hair were lit up with warning flares of white. She visored her eyes with her hand, regarded me as she often did, as though secretly awaiting the moment I would cease to astonish her with my devotion.

  “Yes, honey, what do you want? Another Tonka toy?”

  That birthday animal lumbered up, buckled under lashed-down treasures—injection-molded soldiers, many-speeded bikes. Beyond the beast stood me, a vision of me, the most perfect boy the world has ever known.

  “What I want for my birthday,” I said, “all I want, is for both of you to stop smoking.”

  It was my moment of genius, if it is true we are each of us blessed with one. They quit, of course, for a while, at least. Wouldn’t you, if you were as strong and beautiful as my mother and my father were one summer when our town built a beach?

  I stop off at Gupta’s. He’s flipping through a skin mag, all those smears of color, angles of receipt.

  “That’s what my ex-girlfriend looks like,” I say.

  “Is this what you did to her,” says Gupta, “or what you saved her from?”

  “I said looked like her. How’s it going?”

  “Very well,” he says. “I’ve got an assignment. A magazine overseas. Real money.”

  “What about this one here?” I say.

  “I’m not talented enough to write for this one. I don’t know all the ways to describe the big tit.”

  “You can learn that,” I say. “You just have to care.”

  Gupta laughs, reaches back to my carton, the soft-packs.

  “No,” I say.

  “Box?” There’s a shade of panic in his voice, the order of things thrown.

  “No,” I say.

  “What do you want?”

  “I forgot,” I say.

  “No one forgets,” says Gupta. “You didn’t forget. Our brains carry blueprints for a thousand years. There is no such thing as forgetting. You just can’t find it right now.”

  “So, in a thousand years someone will remember what I wanted just now?” I picture a man like me, a man of my build, my coloring, my gait, stitched, gathered, helix’d with my codes. He sits in his commuter pod and whistles through space, maybe en route to Jupiter to sell some ads. A vision of Katrine, stepping out of the bath tub, explodes with the terror of endless sameness in his mind.

  “Exactly,” says Gupta, pounds his fist on a great glossy ass.

  I’m almost out the door when I remember.

  “I know what I want,” I say. “I want something new. Something light. Less tar.”

  Gupta slides the gleaming thing across the counter. There’s a new world there inside the package, new words ringed around the paper, new speckles on the tip. Life, people, happiness, a jaunty, easeful kind of breathing. I’ve seen print ads for this brand, admired them, or more than admired them. I have communed with them. They have spoken to me from billboards, from the backs of scented magazines—no cowboys, no mountaineers, just a handsome couple poised at the end of a plush settee. Maybe they’re Katrine and me, hosting a party, the heave of voices, the crush and chatter, friends in the living room, on the threshold, in the vestibule, the two of us puffing there so elegant, our free hands laced together on the cushions, our free hands squeezing, pulsing words of oath: I Love You, I Love You, Let’s Make it Work, I Love You So Much, Let’s Not Ever Ever Quit.

  Also by Sam Lipsyte

  The Ask

  Home Land

  The Subject Steve

  © Marion Ettlinger

  Sam Lipsyte is the author of the novels The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of The Believer Book Award. Venus Drive was named one of the top twenty-five books of the year by the Voice Literary Supplement. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

  Thanks to everyone for the wise and encouraging words, especially Gordon Lish, Ira Silverberg, Samantha Gillison, J.J. Gifford, Steven Johnson, Stefanie Syman, Amanda Griscom, Alex Abramovich and the good ship Feed, Carol Irving, Ted Grossman, Ceridwen Morris, Farhad Sharmini, Jacqueline Humphries, Cynthia Weiner, Carol Greene, Robert Reynolds, Paul Fleming, Mallory Tarses, Will Eno, Michael Kimball, Robert Lipsyte, Susannah Lipsyte, and Ben Nachumi. Thanks to Joanna Yas, Daniel Pinchbeck, and everyone at Open City Books. Thanks to Deborah Barkow.

  Thanks to Robert Bingham.

  VENUS DRIVE. Copyright © 2000 by Sam Lipsyte. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.

  E-mail: readinggroupguides@picadorusa.com

  These stories have previously appeared in the following publications: “Torquemada” in The Quarterly; “The Morgue Rollers in 5_Trope; “Cremains” and “Old Soul” in Open City.

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-0736-5

  First published in the United States by Open City Books

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Sam Lipsyte’s new novel

  The Ask

  Available now in hardcover from

  Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux

  Copyright © 2010 by Sam Lipsyte

  One

  America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.

  “We’re the bitches of the First World,” said Horace, his own eyes braziers of delight.

  We all loved Horace, his clownish pronouncements. He was a white kid from Armonk who had learned to speak and feel from a half-dozen VHS tapes in his father’s garage. Besides, here at our desks with our turkey wraps, I did not disagree.

  But I let him have it. It was my duty. We were in what they call a university setting. A bastion of, et cetera. Little did I know this was my last normal day at said bastion, that my old friend Purdy was about to butt back into my world, mangle it. I just figured this was what my worst teachers used to call a teachable moment.

  “Horace,” I said. “That’s a pretty sexist way to frame a discussion of America’s decline, don’t you think? Not to mention racist.”

  “I didn’t mention anybody’s race,” said Horace.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “P.C. robot.”

  “Fascist dupe.”

  “Did you get avocado on yours?”

  “Fattening,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” said Horace. “I like big women.”

  “What about hairy ones?” I said, parted my shirt to air my nipple fuzz. Horace let me be a cretin with him. You could call him my infantilism provider, though you’d sound like an idiot. Otherwise, I was ostensibly upstanding, a bald husband, a slabbellied father.

  “Gentlemen,” said our supervisor, Vargina, coming out from her command nook. “Did you send off those e-mails about the Belgian art exchange?”

  Horace swiveled back to his monitor with the mock panic of a sitcom serf. Vargina took scant notice of our talk, tolerated foul banter for purposes of morale. But the fact remained, we had forgotten the afternoon’s assignment. The gods of task flow did not easily forgive.

  Where we worked was in the development office of a mediocre university in New York City. It was an expensive and strangely obscure institution, named for its syphilitic Whig founder, but we often called it, with what we considered a certain panache, the Mediocre University at New York City. By we, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean once.

  Our group raised funds and materials for the university’s arts programs. People paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk. Still, the sums didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the cutthroat world of arts education. Our job was to grovel for more money. We could always use more video cameras, more caulk, or a dance studio, or a gala for more groveling. The asks liked galas, openings, recitals, shows. They liked dinner with a famous filmmaker for them to fawn over or else dismiss as frivolous.

  An ask could be a person, or what we wanted from that person. If they gave it to us, that was a give. The asks knew little about the student work they funded. Who could blame them? Some of the art these brats produced wouldn’t stand up to the dreck my three-year-old demanded we tack to the kitchen wall. But I was biased, and not just because I often loved my son. Thing was, I’d been just like these wretches once. Now they stared through me, as though I were merely some drone in their sight line, a pathetic object momentarily obstructing their fabulous horizon. They were right. That’s exactly what I was.

  A solitudinous roil, my bitterness. Horace, after all, was their age. He had no health insurance, just hope. Our rainmaker, Llewellyn, seemed born to this job, keen for any chance to tickle the rectal bristles of the rich with his Tidewater tongue. He was almost never in the office, instead sealing the deal on a Gulf-stream IV to Bucharest, or lying topside on a Corfu yacht, slathered in bronzer.

  Llewellyn delivered endowed chairs, editing suites, sculpture gardens. My record was not so impressive. My last big ask, for example, had failed to yield a few plasma TVs from the father of a recent film graduate.

  Mr. Ramadathan had mortgaged his electronics store so his son could craft affecting screenplays about an emotionally distant, workaholic immigrant’s quest for the American dream. But the father’s giddiness had begun to wear off. The boy was unemployable. Now Mr. Ramadathan was maybe not so eager to relinquish his showroom models.

  I’d made the hot, khaki-moistening hike past all the car dealerships and muffler shops on Northern Boulevard in Queens, stood in the sleek, dingy cool of the store. Mr. Ramadathan sat near the register in a wicker chair. The plasmas were not on display. Sold or hidden, I had no idea. Mr. Ramadathan stared at me, at the sweat patches on my crotch. He pointed toward some old video game consoles, a used floor fan, dregs of the dream.

  “Please,” he said, “take those. So that others may learn.”

  Unlike the time Llewellyn secured a Foley stage for the film department, there was no celebration on the Mediocre patio. No sour chardonnay got guzzled in my honor, nor did any lithe director of communications flick her tongue in my ear, vow to put me on the splash page of Excellence, the university’s public relations blog.

  If not so ecstatic in her position as Llewellyn, Vargina seemed happy enough, or at least adopted a mode of wise, unruffled decency in the office. She’d been a crack baby, apparently due to her mother being a crackhead, one of the early ones, the baking soda vanguard. Vargina was a miracle, and that’s maybe the only time I have used the word sincerely. Her mother had named her the word her name resembled. A sympathetic nurse added the “r.”

  “Milo,” she said now. “How is the Teitelbaum ask going?”

  Vargina had enormous breasts I liked to picture flopping out of a sheer burgundy bra. Sometimes they just burst out in slow motion. Sometimes she scooped them out with her slender hands, asked me to join her reading group.

  “Making progress,” I said. “Chipping away.”

  “Maybe you need a larger tool,” said Vargina, appeared to shudder slightly, perhaps worried her innocent metaphor would be misconstrued as sexual. Her words, however, were not misconstrued at all. I had already begun to picture my cock in high quiver, sliding up the lubed swell of her chest. We were in a library of lacquered wood. Viola tones rose from a carved alcove. Baby oil beaded on rare folios.

  “Well,” said Vargina, tapped the plastic parapet of my cube wall. “Just stick with it.”

  “Will do.”

  Truth was, the Teitelbaum ask was going nowhere. I was barely hanging on here in development. I wasn’t developing. I’d done some good work at a nonprofit a few years ago, but the South Bronx Restoration Comedy Project never really took off. The university snapped me up at a bargain rate. I’d become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody’s error in judgment.

  But today some karmic adjustment seemed due. Just as Vargina slipped back behind the particleboard walls of her command nook, a painting major we knew a bit too well around here charged up to my desk, planted her bony fist on my Vorticist mouse pad. McKenzie was one of those girls who didn’t eat enough, so that all one really noticed about her were the mole-specked rods of her arms, the lurid jut of her skull. Students had no reason to visit our office, but her father had paid for our crappy observatory upstate. She was in here a lot, to preen, complain. I guess it beat making her putrid art.

  “Hello, McKenzie,” I said.

  “Hi, yeah, sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

  “Milo.”

  “Sure, okay. Milo. Listen, Milo, we talked last week and you promised I’d be able to take the Impressionism to Regressionism seminar even though it was full.”<
br />
  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, you know, you promised you’d talk to the painting department and sort it all out. I mean, if I told my father—”

  “Hold on.”

  “Hold on?”

  “I made no such promise. We have nothing to do with academic decisions, with curriculum or enrollment.”

  “Okay, maybe it was that guy,” said McKenzie, pointed.

  “Horace?” I said.

  “Yeah, Whore-Ass,” said McKenzie.

  Horace wore a pained grin at his terminal.

  “Horace hasn’t been well,” I told McKenzie. “Now, as I mentioned, we have no jurisdiction over any of these issues, but maybe we can all get together with painting and figure this out.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning we can figure this out.”

  McKenzie stared. How could she know I myself had once been a fraud, chockablock with self-regard, at an overpriced institution just like this one, still had the debt to prove it? How could she know she stared down at the wispy pate of a man who once believed he was painting’s savior, back in a decade that truly needed one?

  She spoke quietly now: “Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but you really are here to serve my needs. My father taught me that the consumer is always right. I am the consumer. You are actually the bitch of this particular exchange. But don’t think I don’t respect that you are just a guy, like, doing your shitty job.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But maybe you aren’t cut out to work with artists.”

  I guess what set me off was her effort to be polite. I should have just leaned on the painting department to make room on the roster for her, ruin the semester for some pimple-seared hump who shared his name with no stargazing facility. Nobody cared. I would be doing my shitty job. It was a good shitty job. I’d done it for a few years and it paid pretty well, enough to let Maura go part-time since the baby. There was a quality family plan, plus a quality theft plan, the paints and brushes I smuggled home for those weekends I tried to put something on canvas again, until the old agony would whelm me and I’d stop and briefly weep and then begin to drink and watch Maura cruise up and down the cable dial all night, never alighting on anything for more than a moment, her thumb poised like a hairless and tiny yet impressively predatory animal above the arrow button, Maura herself bent on peeking into every corner of the national hallucination before bedtime.