Adverbs

by Daniel Handler

  “You’re money,” came out of Joe’s mouth in a new strategy.

  “I’m the opposite of money,” Helena said.

  “No, no, it means you’re a good person. I guess it means you’re hot, you’re money. It’s from a movie. Get it?”

  “Well, you’re a vampire,” Helena said. “That’s from a movie, too.”

  “Couldn’t we hang out and see where it goes or something?” Joe squinted and scratched his ear like it had an itch and he was scratching it. “I’m not some gross guy. Maybe I’m the male for you. I’m not going to say ‘I have a ten-inch cock’ or something.”

  Helena stood up. “You just said it. You just said that exact thing.”

  Joe smiled and threw down some money for his half of the bill. “Well, I’ll never say it again,” he said, but Helena never knew if he said it again because the two of them took their searches elsewhere and did not meet for years. Now, though, Helena considered Tony and his story with the wild nights, baby. She has his picture and ten inches is actually a good guess. Her mother would tell her to throw this whole thing away, but Helena decided something herself. This part of the story doesn’t have any mothers. They’re all gone, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of the weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers, and either way things turn out such that nothing you’ve ever heard is any help. Yes it’s love, but how would we love differently, without our mothers? I wrote a book about this and some people thought there was too much sex.

  The Black Elephant Masked Ball turned out to be a Masked Ball held at the Black Elephant, a bar over on Grand. Helena found the listing right away. It cost money to go, but there were quite a few of these events lately. San Francisco had experienced its own catastrophe. It hadn’t killed nearly as many people as you might think, so the citizens were left nervous and giddy and also thirsty, and it might also explain why Helena bought more cigarettes and fought with people and cried, too. The night of the ball was the same as the night David said he would get home. She could spend the last money handful cooking a meal and waiting for the plane to land, or she could go to the Ball and keep an eye on Tony. She decided to go at the last minute, when she was watching TV. “What happens when the hunter,” the narrator asked, but Helena was tired of it becoming the hunted. Why does the hunter have to become the hunted every night? Couldn’t the hunter go to the Black Elephant?

  Helena couldn’t afford a mask but she had a dress as sexy as her accent, and she found a thick black marker and drew a mask over her real face. Is this a good idea, she asked herself, in the mirror, and, also, if you can hear this voice, you’re crazy. She put Tony’s letter and naked picture in her purse, which is where Helena kept all her important mail. It was a badly, badly ripped purse and inside was a sheaf of undelivered letters to—drat, she’s here after all—her mother. “Ever been to the Black Elephant?” asked the cabdriver, who was not Andrea by the way.

  “I’m British,” Helena said. “I’m British and I’ve never been anywhere.”

  “Well, have a good night,” the driver said. Outside, the Black Elephant was a view. The walls were very plain but there was an elegant sign with the name of the place and a terse sketch of an elephant in nice black ink. It was a good sign. Helena paid to get in and Tony Tony Tony was right there.

  Inside the light was like that of a lava lamp although there were no lava lamps around. Instead there was a big tank of women employed as mermaids over the bar, and a large screen shining beautiful old movies. Helena watched for a moment as a woman with ice crystals around her eyes decimated a man in a hat with a spiral of snow pouring out of her cape, and then she sat and looked at the list of drinks she could buy. They had everything, and a few things she hadn’t heard of. She almost ordered a Motherless Child just for the name but it had egg whites in it, which is very wrong, like wearing shorts in the winter or going on a cruise ship or a decorative animal made of butter or the worry and worry of money while we’re trying to be happy and enjoy ourselves. So she ordered a Morning Sickness, which was a mixture of champagne and Italian red wine and this was about as good an idea as drawing a mask on your face.

  “Hey, Tony,” she said, which was another one.

  “Hey,” Tony said, over the music. “Do I know you?”

  “Nah,” Helena said. “I just think you’re money, Tony. I think you’re hot like lava,” and why say these things?

  Tony also had a mask on, but he was still Tony, and grinned at her. “I used to say that all the time,” he said, “but now it’s like you can’t tell the volcano jokes or people think you want to blow up buildings.”

  “I don’t want to blow up buildings,” Helena said. “I think it’s stupid to blow up buildings.”

  Tony slid on down and sat next to her. “Tony,” he said.

  “Money, I mean Helena,” Helena said.

  Tony laughed. “Money,” he said. “You drink too much? I like that in a woman. My last girl was a girl I lived with who drank too much. It was a whole year.”

  “What happened to her?” Helena said.

  Tony answered but over the music Helena could not tell “fire” from “fired.” “But she was for the birds. Tell me your story.”

  “I am also for the birds,” Helena said. “My mother doesn’t exist, and I published a novel last year.”

  “Like a book?” Tony said, catching the bartender’s eye and pointing to himself. “What’d you call it?”

  Helena sighed. Why talk about this, with a love story yet to be written? “Glee Club,” she said.

  “L Club?” Tony said. “Like the band who does yes yes yes, oh baby yes?”

  “Glee Club,” Helena said. “Glee!”

  “Glee?” Tony said. “You’re from England, right? With the accent? ’Cause we don’t have glee here, I don’t think. What else?”

  Helena looked around the Elephant, which was not crowded but certainly not empty. The Masked Ball part wasn’t really happening, just a few masks and feathers, but still it was very lovely, and Helena felt good even with a bad drink. “I’m married,” she said.

  “Married?” Tony said. “So you love a guy already?”

  “Well,” Helena said, and took a breath because it was a long sentence. “He said he went to Canada but I have his passport so I think he’s with his old girlfriend all this time, who I think is the same as your old girlfriend, too.”

  “They’re all the same,” Tony said. “They’re all the same and it’s all the same to me. So you’re looking for a little adventure maybe, married lady. What do you like in a guy? Because I keep fit and I know how to give a total rubdown massage.”

  “Well,” Helena said, and had another taste of Morning Sickness.

  “You ever been with a woman?” Tony said, and suddenly he was wearing cologne made to smell like a man who gave rubdowns. “With your sexy accent I bet you could get women, too.”

  “Actually yes,” Helena said. “I had this crazy flatmate, or a friend, and sometimes we would drink too much and have a lot of orgasms together.”

  “Like the song says,” Tony said. “Wow. What happened?”

  “Well,” Helena said, “we turned out not to be lesbians.”

  “I’d like to watch that,” Tony said.

  Helena thought of what she and Sam—there’s another common name, Sam—usually did, which was sit around and listen to records. “You like to watch two girls, huh?” Helena said. “Maybe you could find another guy who likes that.”

  Tony put his hand on a space between Helena’s neck and her chin, just about where Helena greeted her neighbor’s dog. “And what would we do, if I found another guy?” he said.

  “You could have sex with him,” Helena said, moving her inked-up head.

  “I want to have sex with you,” Tony said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your husband. There must be lots wrong with him if you’re alone at the Masked Ball.”

  “Oh, there is,” Helen
a said, and so she listed them. “He isn’t very tall and he says it’s all the same to him. Things are all the same to him and he hasn’t been fired like me. He likes stupid British horror movies from the 1960s, and Andrea. He is by no stretch of the imagination a good listener, and he flirts with old girlfriends and sometimes he is calm and nice when I wish he’d yell and throw things up into the air and we have no money.” In a list this didn’t seem enough, so she made up something to make it worse. “And he’s a terrorist. He’s a deadly terrorist who hates American freedoms. What are your drawbacks, Tony?”

  “Let’s see,” Tony said. “I’ve been known to make women scream when we’re making love. That’s probably my biggest problem. It’s a ten-inch problem, if you know what I mean.”

  Helena blushed underneath permanent black ink. This was very embarrassing that he was behaving this way. But David embarrassed her too, and who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship where the biggest problem was that he made you scream when you made love? Helena finished her drink. “I really shouldn’t be drinking,” she said, “especially when it tastes so awful.” Most of the chianti was at the bottom, and it made Helena remember this cheap cheap restaurant she and David went to five or six days running in New York. They lived there. “Bring us a bottle of your cheapest chianti!” they would say, which must mean they were not worrying about money. People in love would say such things. Helena would say them if she were in love. She stood up.

  “Have another drink,” Tony said.

  “No,” Helena said.

  A man in a top hat, a man in a suit, appeared in a spotlight. “We’re going to have a dance contest,” the man said, and it was loud. “We’re having a dance contest. We’re going to play a song and the best dancer wins a cash money prize.”

  “Give me your number,” Tony said. “Give me your number you sweet hot as lava baby.”

  “I forgot my number,” Helena said, but she knew where her place was. Tony sent a naked photo in the mail, was certainly another drawback. Yes, Helena had nasty letters too, but she kept them in her purse which slapped against her as she stepped out on the floor. They were playing a song they probably never play in nightclubs. The verses are this:

  It’s not the way you look,

  It’s not the way that you smile.

  Although there’s something to them.

  It’s not the way you have your hair,

  It’s not that certain style.

  and

  It’s not the makeup

  And it’s not the way that you dance,

  It’s not the evening sky.

  It’s more the way your eyes are laughing as they glance

  Across the great divide.

  and Helena began dancing, because it wasn’t any of those things that were leading her home, either. She danced and danced, with the flapping and predetermined motions of a bird flying south. Her purse swung against her because there was no one to hold it, and certain men began dancing in her path, as they will do when a woman is on the floor without a husband for protection. But Helena had no worries about these men or the bag she brought into the club. She knew how to dance even with her baggage. She knew a thing or two about this. She knew who she loved, even if she could not list the particulars of what got her into this kind of love, far from home in another country. But home now was with David and she would fly there soon when the song was over. First let her dance. Let her fly higher than a flying fuck. Let her dance and sing and do all the acrobatic feats required of her sudden glee. She danced like she was going to win the contest, and all the gold medals of figure skating she dreamed of winning when this song was born and that her mother told her would never be hers, would be hers. So she loved him. She just did, immediately and again, often and clearly, naturally and soundly and obviously and many others. She couldn’t stop loving him because it was like pretending your own mother was not in Britain, where the song’s sexy accent was from. Other people around her were dancing with fancier feathers, shaking the sexy plumage in an aggressive and attractive manner, but it’s not the makeup. It’s not the makeup and it’s not the way that you dance, and this is like love too, where there’s only one dancer who will win your contest that night, and they are not particularly the best one. As Helena danced some of the other people at the Masked Ball stopped dancing like they were going to let her win, and why shouldn’t she? Why couldn’t she go out and flirt with a guy at the Black Elephant and then come home with the contest money? She could not remember the last time she felt so not fat, and the song with its humiliating lyrics of

  It’s not the things you say

  It’s not the things you do

  It must be something more

  And if I feel this way for so long

  Tell me is it all for nothing

  Just don’t walk out the door

  kept her in the bright flush of dancing and somebody letting her win. Let her win because she needs the love. Let her dance and win the contest, and let her learn later that you do not need a passport to go from the United States to Canada.

  “You won the contest!” the man in the hat said. “You won the contest and you won the prize! It’s an envelope full of money! What’s your name?”

  “Helena,” she said.

  The man wrote her name on the envelope, H-E-L-E-NN-A-H, and gave her the money and she held it in her hand.

  “There weren’t that many people,” she said modestly, “in the contest.”

  “People are nervous after the catastrophe,” the man admitted. “People think, If a volcano rose up and destroyed us all in a ring of fire, where would I want to be? Dancing with strangers or home with the man I love? So we have masked balls all the time, but more and more people stay home in the nest. Take the money and go home, baby. It’s a hundred gazillion dollars. Go home with the prize money. You won because you are the best dancer at the ball and because you are gorgeous beautiful, and I’m not saying that as a sexy thing baby, because I am totally gay.”

  “You see that guy in the mask?” Helena pointed him to Tony. “He’s gay too and he wants your wild love but doesn’t know it. Go to him. Surprise him.”

  “I’ll do that,” the man said, and Helena stepped out and into the same taxi with the same driver.

  “Nice evening?” the driver said.

  “It sure was,” Helena agreed. “I won a contest.”

  “The contest ripped your purse, looks like,” the driver said.

  Helena looked at her purse and made up something else. “A baby was in it,” she said. “An angry baby who wanted to go dancing so it ripped out of my purse.” The cab got closer to the neighborhood where Helena lived with her husband. “Now it’s in my belly,” she said. “I’m pregnant. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  “Pregnant with a baby, wow,” the driver said. “My lady and I think about having children but I think I have to get over my mother first.”

  Helena rolled down the window of the cab, which is always the thing to do on the way home from dancing. Outside it was right as rain and raining the sort of mist that San Francisco offers, and London. Weather, it’s all over the world like love. It may be that there was a great divide between Helena and her husband, but Brits swim the channel all the time. Helena opened her purse and tossed the letters to her mother into the dark night. “I’m going to have a baby,” she said, but she kept Tony’s picture, because the chorus of the song says that if the guy singing it had a photograph of you, as something to remind him, he wouldn’t spend his life just wishing. It’s a stupid song, but that’s not particularly the point of going out. The point is, somewhere someone wants your picture. Helena could keep Tony’s photograph in the drawer with the passport pictures, as something to remind her, and instead of spending her life just wishing, she could show the photographs to the baby. “This is your father,” she could say, “and this is some bloke I met at the Black Elephant.” The baby would know what bloke meant because the baby would be Helena’s baby, and it would require a pa
ssport photograph to go visit its screechy grandmother who was wrong all the time. We all need passport photographs to go anywhere, even though they tend to show us at our worst. But if you don’t want to see us at our worst, you can shut the drawer where they are kept.

  “Does your husband know?” the driver said, after he had refused her money for good luck. “And does he know your face is covered in ugly ink?”

  “He doesn’t care,” Helena said. “He loves me anyway,” and she went upstairs to see if this was so. David sat up from the bed in the dark.

  “I was worried,” he said. “I got home and you weren’t here and you didn’t even leave a note.”

  “Dear David,” she said, “I went out but I’m home now.” She got herself a glass of water and drank it even though she also had to pee, and this is even another thing like love. We need things and also to get rid of them, and at the same time. We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable. Helena sat in her second-favorite chair and looked. He was wearing pajamas, but the particulars hardly matter. It wasn’t the things he said, and it wasn’t the things he did. All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you’re bisexual and everyone is. And so the happiness is not particular, and so you cannot be particular, or all you will have at the end of the night is a purse full of complaints to your mother. Let yourself win the contest, the music says, or there’s no point in going to the bar except to drink. “Listen,” Helena said. “Listen and look. We’re going to have a baby. I know you weren’t in Canada because your passport is here. I think you were with Andrea and it must stop, because this baby is going to win contests. This will lead to a professional modeling career which will enable the baby to put itself through scientist school and cure all the diseases the world’s throwing at us. Don’t make it sit in its crib instead, writing you letters about lying about Canada.”