Adverbs

by Daniel Handler

  “Watch my purse,” Andrea said, “while I get your paperwork. I’m afraid you won’t get your money for twelve weeks.”

  “Okay,” Helena said, but when Andrea left the room she opened the purse and found the wallet. There was a ridiculous amount of cash money and she took all of it. It was gone and in Helena’s pocket long before Andrea returned with a plastic cup.

  “We have to test you for drugs, is how we do it in America,” Andrea said. “You have to pee in this.”

  On the way home Helena bought a magnum of very expensive champagne from a liquor-store guy who flirted outrageously with her. She flirted back and drank most of it on the way, the bottle as heavy as a pair of twins. “How did you drink all that without peeing?” her husband said, when she walked in the door.

  “Oh, I peed,” Helena said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Everyone I’ve ever gone out with,” David said, “has drunk too much. Your mother told me you’d probably be tipsy when you got home from your first day of new work. You’re British but even all the Americans I dated, they all drank too much.”

  “What are you saying?” Helena said. “That there’s no difference? With magpies even, there’s different what’s-it, between the British and here in California. Plumage.”

  “What I’m saying,” David said kindly, “is that first thing tomorrow morning you have to take fifty children out to the hinterlands to look at black birds. Andrea says to meet at the place at eight sharp.”

  “They have yellow breasts,” Helena said sourly, “and don’t tell me you don’t notice, David. Andrea’s got enormous ones.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” David said, and then sighed very kindly, too. “I don’t think this conversation is going well,” he said. “You’re being a little aggressive.”

  “You’re being a little artful,” Helena said, “and Andrea’s being a little attractive. I can’t believe you talked to my mother and your ex-girlfriend while all the while I was buying you a bottle of expensive champagne.”

  “Which you’ve drunk most of,” David said, “and I don’t like.”

  “Look,” Helena said. “Look, I love you and I don’t know what to do. I’m worrying about money. That can’t be love.” She slunk down on a chair she had bought on a whim. It cost let’s say three million dollars. Her mother told her that you can’t live on love, but Helena could not find anything else to live on. This is love and its trouble. You can earn it but it may not come for twelve more weeks, so you take it from other people and buy gifts for your lover he does not like and you drink most of. You take it to live on and you worry there’s never enough. Helena could not stand this line of reasoning, but the trouble was, not standing this line of reasoning didn’t pay anything either.

  “I love you, too,” David said, and took the bottle.

  “I want you to love me in particular,” Helena said. “I’m not the same as an American. I’m my own species and I want you to be picky about it, if that’s the expression. How can it be all the same to you? What is it, did we move here so you could be with Andrea again?”

  “I’m not with her,” David said. “She gave you a job.”

  “Her and her jobs,” Helena said. “Just tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” David said, “but I’m not sure that’s enough for the likes of you.”

  “Then tell me you love me and give me a hundred billion dollars,” she said, and David shook his head. In the morning there was no field trip, but not because the volcano erupted. There was no field trip due to weather, if that’s the expression. Rain fell all over the windows and Helena had the class write letters to her mother and read them out loud for creative expression. Helena wrote a list of things that had to be in the letter, but they could be creative.

  Dear Helena’s Mother,

  It is expensive to call from San Francisco to London so you should call. After all you’re the mom. Is my husband David sleeping with Helena’s boss?

  Sincerely yours,

  Laurie

  Dear Helena’s Mother,

  You sound mean. Helena is doing the best she can. Maybe you should yell at David for once.

  Love,

  Mike

  Dear Mommy,

  Stop making Helena call the other way. You can’t live on love. You are a mean mommy and David and Andrea might be kissing. Oh, what shall I do?

  Your Friend,

  Todd

  Dear Mommy,

  I want a horse for Christmas.

  It was possible Margaret didn’t understand the assignment, but it didn’t matter because Andrea came in halfway and put an end to the entire program. “The money is gone,” she said, with a significant look in Helena’s dismayed direction. “You can throw those letters away, kids.”

  Helena would never have called them kids, but maybe this was an American thing. “Don’t throw them away!” she cried. “I’m going to send those letters to my mother!”

  The kids for some reason were cruel, and Helena was bombarded with balled-up letters and paper airplanes, like a terrorist action from a country not known for terror. “Look,” Andrea said, when they all had left. Helena looked where Andrea was looking, at some rubbage of letters on the floor. “I just mean, look,” Andrea said, picking up after her. “The expression look. The gig’s over. The money is gone. Get it?”

  “My mother doesn’t work here,” Helena said, “and neither do I.”

  Andrea sighed. “You’re fired,” she said, “I’m fired, we’re all fired without the money.”

  “We’re part of the ring of fired,” Helena tried, and put an airplane in her purse. “Like the song. I fell into a something ring of fire. Johnny Money.”

  “Burning,” Andrea said. “Cash.”

  “Aggressive,” Helena said. “Artful.” This was the creative expression part, the part they were going to pay her for. What was the third word? She felt fat. “Money,” she said, and looked out the window. The rain was spread hard all over like an ocean of cheap wine, wet and seasonal, and this was like love too. We love someone in particular, but without money it’s all the same to us; we’re in despair. Without money we can stand next to someone else’s girlfriend instead, for all the love it brings. This wasn’t enough for the likes of Helena, and every word of the love she was losing was sadder as she said it. Every word got sadder, every letter nothing in her purse. “Money,” she said again. “Money money money money money money money money.”

  briefly

  Golfing today I beheaded a magpie. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Some kind of bird, anyway—grant me this—midair in the curve of the ball I hit. It fell. I walked across the lawn wondering what it was I had seen, some small glop of something fallen. It was a good swing and my eyesight is strong, but there are moments it doesn’t matter if you look or not. The magpie’s mouth was open like it couldn’t believe it either. I picked up the ball and looked at the stain of blood in a perfect square. I sort of nudged the body with my foot, rolled it over into a thicker part of the grass. It was all alone, the bird. And here I bury you, O thing who winged your way into my path. Only I know of your poor little murdered head.

  I grew up in the sort of house with a pool out back, and a small shack to shower and change into clothes to swim in the pool, and my older sister. She had boyfriends. Usually I went someplace else when they came splashing in, because my older sister grabbed boyfriends in ways that meant no girls came around the house. I was fourteen. The girls were at the pool at the club, so I went to the pool at the club, and there they sat, the girls older than me, rows of legs, rows of sunglasses, rows of laughing together. They let me sit knowing I was staring at them: a meager insult to my older sister, the only boy they could keep. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. I handed them the lotions. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. This was my summer, my two summers, my long weekends, all the sudden sunshine veering into town without reason, and all of it has abandoned me. I have loved none of those girls. I could not picture for you what any bathing suit revea
led, although that’s where I must have been looking, fourteen years old, all that skin that crossed my path. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes.

  What I remember is named Keith. By all means he was not the favorite because my older sister had no favorites. Anybody could hand her snitched rum in the good glasses while she lay out and waited. By agreement, on these rare afternoons without the club I was changing in the shack and then would swim alone at the deeper end, while the boyfriend would stray at the shallow where my older sister dangled herself, and cup handfuls of the pool and let them run down her legs until dusk, while I treaded the surface of nine feet of water and pulled myself out on the shaky ladder when my skin couldn’t wrinkle any longer. Four steps on the ladder, three steps on the ladder, five steps, I could not tell you now. That ladder has abandoned me, some maybe moment when I could have pulled myself out. That was the last time, when I emerged myself out of the pool and went to the shack to change forever, the moment before I fell, if fallen is what I am feeling, if fallen is what I am.

  Show me the man who would not love the man who stepped out of the shower and put on his briefs, because I would love that man too. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Soaking wet the shoulders, the hair spiked with water, pushed back with his hand which had a hippie ring on it of thick pewter, silver, some girlfriend gift, some souvenir of a place he went before he walked into my path forever once. Hair the color of the hills surrounding the club when the droughts hit, but nothing would get me to the club again. His breathing chest rising carelessly from the rest of him, but the desire here like nothing I can type: grant me this. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Five years older, arms from the shoulders with the careless towel hiding nothing, the chest swelled and flat with impressing my sister, hair I had yet to grow trailing toward me like warm smoke from someone’s mouth. Down to the legs, down to the penis, thick with sitting all day near something he wanted but showered calm, never something I had seen before. Oh, certainly: in locker rooms, textbook something, but to no avail. Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. There was no one I loved before Keith and his arms, his face scarcely glancing at me, the thin line of not smiling as he shook off water without fear. Where do they come from who can do that, step out wet and share a small nude space with someone’s brother, cup his own penis for nothing, sit on the redwood bench and dry his feet where I would never walk, wreck my life like a pop song can wreck your brain? At fourteen I couldn’t tell you “swoon” and now I cannot remember any love but the swoon of him until he picked through the scrabble of his clothes and stepped into his underwear, and there was that little stumble into my path. He nudged me on the spot on the side of myself below my armpit oh my God. He nudged me and I occurred to him, and Keith, Keith, Keith looked up and said it, said the thing I heard myself say right now as the bird did its last thing and got slain.

  “Hey.”

  The rum on his breath and then the blue shirt ate his chest and he zipped up and he walked out carrying his shoes away from me like I was fired. Briefly that door swung open and briefly that door closed. There was a song playing from a portable thing my sister must have owned, or maybe blaring through the open windows into the air. The song is “Come and Get My Heart” by The L Club, from their first album Introducing The L Club on L Club Records, and Keith put his briefs on during the part of the second verse that goes “Yes yes yes, oh baby yes,” while the bass line gurgles a thing I could recite note for note. It got louder as the shack door opened and then quieter as he went home, but I never got his tune out of my little head. Never never saw him again. If I called my older sister she would say, “Keith who, and why are you calling?” My wife would say the same thing, like the chorus of a stupid song. It is only on mornings like this, the birds just out living life, that out of view, privately, briefly, you can lose your head. All alone, unwitnessed, there is no one else to believe it, the way paths cross in the sun. Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green. I killed the bird and I never saw Keith again and so I am alone this morning with blood on my shoe.

  You won’t believe how I love this guy. I can’t believe it either. Is it possible to love someone forever but not think of him for years? Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Is it possible to lose someone who only stepped in front of you once in a towel? Yes yes yes, oh baby yes. Grant me this, this brief murdered moment, and then I will bury it sadly and go on with my game.

  soundly

  Let me explain what is happening to the Jewish people,” the guy said. He had just come out of the lounge, and had spilled maybe coffee all over his vest, so recently that it still glittered and beaded on the ugly puffy fabric of it. He was speaking very loudly over music coming from his headphones, and this did not make him the best spokesperson as to what was happening to the Jewish people. We listened anyway. Lila and I had been Jewish all our lives and we were curious about what would happen to us.

  “They want the money, right?” the guy said. “Let me explain it. They want all the world’s money, right?”

  “Right,” we said. I was almost out of money myself and soon would be chained to a student loan. All the world’s money was something I wanted, come to think of it.

  “And the world’s money is down in San Francisco,” the guy said, “or San Fran, as everybody says. I’m going down there myself as sort of a freelance guard. Something terrible is going to happen down there that the Jews will use as an excuse. Maybe a building, like with terrorists, will…” The guy plucked his earphones from his ears and dropped them around his neck like one of those stupid pillows people wear on airplanes, and then spread his arms out like he was tossing handfuls of flour. He made a noise like a ten-year-old boy pretending to blow things up which is always the trouble. It was very pretty to look at, but then again I was drunk. I don’t know why Lila was listening but she has always been kind.

  “It’ll either be guys with bombs or a volcano is my theory,” the guy said. From his earphones we could hear an old song sung enthusiastically by the original artist. “You know how I know it?”

  “I’m guessing a pamphlet you read,” I said.

  “I’m going to go with the Internet,” Lila said. We turned to see if there’d be a guess from the only other person in the lounge, but the bartender was still cranky at the both of us and he stacked napkins to show us it was so.

  “Both of you big-breasted girls are wrong,” the guy said. “I did it by reading birds. They behave badly when disaster is going to strike. You know, like with earthquakes.”

  “Wouldn’t an earthquake be more likely,” Lila said, “in San Francisco?”

  “Not in my theory,” the guy said proudly.

  “Well, that’s a great theory,” Lila said. She made a gesture like she might put her hand on the guy’s stainy vest, if she weren’t all the way across the lounge.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Go tell someone that theory and they’ll interrupt the Super Bowl.”

  “You think I’m hilarious and crazy,” the guy said, in that sudden spooky clarity only exhibited by crazy people. He walked backward toward a pair of swinging doors. “I’m just wrecked up. I’ve been beaten down by the knowledge of all the terrible things happening, and my theory is to tell my fellow man. In San Francisco my fellow man will see how wrecked I am and he’ll treasure all the time he has before the Jews take over. So you’re welcome, even if you don’t love me and never will.”

  He put his tunes back on his head and left us there. We shifted in the booth of the lounge and I raised my finger to the bartender, who brought me another bourbon. “San Francisco,” he said, shaking his head. “And I was just going down there to work in my brother’s bar with better tips.”

  “We’re going to tip you,” I said, “at the end of our day.”

  The bartender snorted and caressed a blank TV which hung silent near the ceiling. He touched it like he could bring it back to life. “Not like you said,” he murmured sadly, and Lila changed the subject.

  “Everybody has a
theory today,” she said. “That woman leaving as we came in? She had a blackjack theory, how to win. It also had to do with birds, come to think of it, but they were her own birds, in cages.”

  I took a delicious sip. The bourbon was perfect but then it almost always is. “My theory is,” I said, “pay no attention to theories in bars.”

  Lila patted my hand and took a fake sip of water. “You should get a guy like that.”

  “You just like him because he said you have tits,” I said.

  “No no no.” Lila shook her head very carefully. “Clean him up and turn off his music and he’s the guy for you. I always thought you’d do well with a guy who was apocalyptic. It would remind you nothing is the end of the world.”

  “Except when it is,” I said, too quietly with my mouth full of drink. I ordered another. She was comforting me, which made me sick. Lila was the sick one, the one who ought to be comforted. This was an old song, too: she was sick and dying, for sure, in a lot of pain. We couldn’t drive north enough to escape this: young people in a deserted bar, drinking as death approaches, and still the men come at us and still we notice them. The only thing you haven’t heard about it is how rare she was, such a rare gastrointestinal thing that the doctors could never hide their excitement when they were called into the room. There had only been eight previous cases, one of them Lila’s mother, who had died helpless, aching and coughing all over and finally screaming, Lila told me, when Lila was the only visitor left to her.

  It had been Lila and her mother; today it was Lila and me. Lila had undergone one operation that had been invented since, when they rerouted a part of her intestines or some such shit, and for a while there’d been a capful of hope, sort of. They thought in a couple of years she might be able to eat, and when she farted the doctors opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. They poured it into urine sample cups in the hospital room, except she couldn’t have any and the doctors were on duty, so I finished the bottle myself and watched her doze in the upright bed. But it’s always dawnest before dark. Now she had a beeper clipped to her waist, for when some poor soul with the same blood type stepped in front of a bus and offered up a digestive system, but even this was not the sort of hope one hopes for. This was hope that the operation would work for a few weeks, so that the doctors could learn something and maybe fix the next person. Lila herself would be granted more pain and a few months unless she died first. Hope was now hitched to the doctors, who were handsome to a fault and wore leather jackets when I saw them walking in the parking lot. Hope was hitched to them, and not to Lila, who rarely got to leave the room.