Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  Buying time, she did yet another search on Archer. A few new items emerged: a picture of him looking stylishly rumpled at a fundraiser for refugees, a skiing piece for Outside magazine in which he courageously used the word schussboomer in the first sentence, and, on the third page of results, an essay from a journal Karyn knew by reputation to be fashionable. It began:

  In college I took a fiction workshop from a prominent visiting novelist whose marginal notes were sometimes incisive, sometimes obliquely pictographic. He wasn’t like those famously ego-maniacal, belittling writing instructors who rip up manuscripts in front of the class. He was soft-spoken, warm, and encouraging. Much of his encouragement must have been disingenuous, but he provided clues—pauses, equivocal inflections, ambiguous adjectives—by which one could gauge his sincerity. I reasoned at the time that he was sincere when praising my work, insincere when praising almost everyone else’s. For one of the early classes I submitted a story written in the form of a family Christmas letter and heavily indebted to Donald Barthelme, my literary polestar of several weeks. One of my classmates, a hiccupping Arizonan whose story I considered precious and backdated, though I hadn’t said so, accused my story of being “masturbatory.” Later in the semester, another of my stories was summed up in the same way, this time by a student whose work I jealously admired.

  The criticism is scarcely unusual and has been leveled at work of infinitely greater value than my collegiate “fictions,” as I was then calling them. Byron, for instance, used the metaphor to excoriate Keats, as Thomas W. Laqueur reminds us in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. The artist is most readily linked with the onanist when his or her work is fantastic, silly, rebarbative, abstruse, or ostentatiously intellectual (rhymes with “hen-peck’d you all,” as Byron himself reminds us; I note this perhaps to admit that I’m especially stung by and defensive around the criticisms of women). But any imaginative artist is open to the attack, since the campaign against masturbation has been in part a campaign against imagination, or against the wrong breed of imagination, not merely the concupiscent sort but the indulgent, daydreaming sort that is seen to serve no public good. (The self-indulgent writer is the masturbatory writer snubbed by more polite critics.) Often the campaign is fought not in the name of disciplined purity but of disciplined cooperation. If one wants to make love and one’s partner instead chooses what William Gass called “handmade sex,” one is angry. Likewise, the reader undelighted by a story that seems to have been oodles of fun to write (or, short of that, a story rooted in antisocial pleasure) might feel a kinship with the housekeeper—alas, I’m thinking of a specific one—compelled to handle tissues, wadded and dusty, under a forgetful teenager’s bed.

  In my case, though, the criticism was subtextually pointed. I went to an elite university where wealth was relatively common, but just the same many knew me as a student of exceptional means, and further knew that my wealth flowed to some extent from my stepfather having founded a company that was for several decades the world’s leading manufacturer of sex toys. I had courtiers and detractors. In both camps there were people who found my inheritance amusing; in the latter camp, I inferred, there were people who associated my presence at the school, where I was an undistinguished history major and budding alcoholic, with a pulling of strings sufficient for the most Napoleonic of puppet-theater battle scenes (and it’s true that my parents, particularly my stepfather, Cole Neblett ’66, were major donors, though I’ll add that Cole was the first in his family to go to college and that, some three decades after making his fortune, he still delights in playing Trimalchio). I’m close to certain that my second critic, the talented writer and teacher’s favorite, knew something of my family. She was a homely spurter of nonsensical arguments, but I was attracted to the challenge of her unmasked antipathy toward me. For the record, in the early part of my college career I was spending not from an inheritance under my control but from a liberal allowance, and when I did succeed to a full independence, the money came mostly from a trust established by my maternal grandmother. Her father, among other things, developed a kind of borosilicate glass widely used for lab instruments and kitchenware. Nor has Dr. Knox (toys and marital aids) been my stepfather’s most successful enterprise. But there’s rarely any percentage in making these points, explaining, in other words, that my (considerable) sex-toy money is just a drop in the bucket. Besides, the mere phrase borosilicate glass seems to have soporific effects. I’ve accordingly grown accustomed to being thought of as the Dildo Scion and variations thereof.

  All this has made me predisposed to . . .

  Karyn reached the firewall. She would have paid to read on, but her credit cards were several feet away, and she was late in returning Gemma’s call. She accepted Lucas’s friend request without further rumination and reached for the phone.

  “Ms. Bondarenko,” Gemma answered.

  “All right, have him call me.”

  January 2005

  Bad form to alter a colleague’s work, but the more John examined the mannequin, the less he liked the foulard pocket square that Ray or Clee (probably Ray) had puffed out in the mocha herringbone jacket. For starters, the Quadrangle model was cut trim; properly fitted and tailored, it would never accommodate a bulging puff. Sure, you could finesse that on a mannequin, but you were leading the customer astray, just as you were when you sold a 42 Quad to an obvious 40. Basically spits on the whole point of the design! Just sell him a Walbrook in the right size!

  He studied the mannequin some more, reached back to tighten one of the pins. He could fold the square—not so meddlesome—but its relationship to the tie would still be a mite too on the nose. Decent guy, Ray, but kind of Garanimals.

  After picking out a subtly patterned linen handkerchief, he surreptitiously made the swap. Archer’s greeting startled him while he was smoothing out the breast. “Ah hell, sorry,” John said. “I thought you were Ray.”

  “Who’s Ray?”

  “Or Clee. But don’t sweat it.” John motioned Archer to one of the store’s tufted leather club chairs. “New swatches came in last week. I picked out a high-twist blue that’d be great for you.” Archer sat down, started flipping unobservantly through the fabric samples. “The one I have in mind’s right in front,” John said.

  Archer held up the card. “Seems just like my current suit.”

  “Well, but it’s a much lighter shade.” John’s Moleskin contained many comprehensive and maybe only subtly differentiated lists of his dream wardrobe. It killed him that Archer wore the same blue suit year-round to weddings, funerals, and charity functions, the same one he’d worn for graduation.

  “Yeah, I don’t see the difference,” Archer said.

  “In sunlight you would.”

  “I’m not gonna wear it to the beach.”

  “Even in artificial light, though, if we did a side by side.” John had been an authority on style and grooming long before he had the testifying closet, and in college he had sometimes played the valet. Archer arrived in Cambridge just barely able to tie a four-in-hand and with no knowledge of the half Windsor, a more complementary knot for his widish face. Surprising ignorance, it seemed to John, or, as Archer joked, “Engels-level class treachery.” John laughed at that, not quite getting it, then stood behind Archer in front of the cloudy mirror John had hung in their suite’s common room, guiding Archer’s long-fingered hands through the steps of three essential knots. “Lighter weight too,” John said now. “Nine seriously airy ounces. We could have this made just in time for spring.”

  Archer brushed threads off his jeans.

  “I noticed last time that your current suit’s getting awful shiny at the elbows,” John said.

  “Lends character.”

  “That comes from dry-cleaning and pressing it overoften. Really a suit shouldn’t need more than a natural-bristle clothes brush like the one I gave you and occasional sessions in a steamy bathroom. Resort to the cleaners—I still like Jeeves on Madison—only if the suit
’s been dirtied beyond the hopes of at-home spot-cleaning.”

  “Got it.”

  “Which I can help you with, man. Just come over sometime; I’ll run you through it.”

  Archer decided to hold off on the suit, left instead with a cashmere robe for his stepfather. He was a great one for unoccasioned gifts. Over the years he had given John a pair of vintage cuff links, a monogrammed flask, a mandolin (a challenge for John’s fat fingers, but still). On his way out of the store, Archer proposed a jogging date for the unspecified future. It seemed to John—not always, but it sometimes seemed to John that Archer was trying to maintain their friendship in the most efficient way possible, often building plans around mundane things he was going to do anyway. But then, maybe that two-birds-one-stone approach had always held sway; maybe in the past Archer would have gone from restaurant to gallery to bar to party whether John was with him or not. It hadn’t felt that way, though; it had felt as if the barhopping and what all were secondary to their togetherness, even if it was agreed—established, you could say, by Archer—that they would abandon each other on the arrival of what Archer called “sex-type potentialities.”

  Not heaps of those arrived for John, who had little aptitude for bar chat and assumed that all lack-love sex started with dishonesty and led to heartbreak. Mostly he and Archer stuck together, talked about movies and Archer’s travels and their mutual friends; sometimes they touched on spiritual matters in a chill way that made John feel deeply understood. These days, a jog’s spare, panting conversation met their needs, or Archer’s, and even when they had more to say, the extra words only stressed what was missing. Or worse, what had never been there, like with the italicized words in the King James Bible: what often seems like random emphasis is actually the translators’ honesty, their way of pointing out clarifying or grammatically necessary words not found in the Hebrew or Greek.

  On their respective housing applications, John and Archer had reported an interest in music, French, and late but quiet hours, presenting themselves as more placid and artsy than they would prove to be, and in fact John’s interest in music didn’t run much deeper than Archer’s commitment to French. Funny how they’d been matched so impeccably through misrepresentation, though the Freshman Dean’s Office would have had other interests, class mingling maybe chief among them. John, though never a dynamo, grew less retiring than he’d been at home, partly owing to the boost of Archer’s quick acceptance, the unbelievable fact that someone like Archer enjoyed his company. Their suite’s third resident, an intimidatingly focused mathematician, may even have seen Archer and John as out-and-out partiers, though that was wide of the truth.

  Back at his apartment, John took off his tie by undoing the knot rather than brutally pulling and stretching the thing, inserted cedar shoe trees into his bench-made wingtips, and brushed his suit while a kitchen timer rattled for three minutes. Based on past experience, Archer would eventually call to make good on the proposed jog, but it would take a while. Better, sometimes, to remind him. He wrote CALL A on his wall calendar, then inserted an arrow to move the call date ahead a few days, lest an exact two weeks seem too planned.

  May 2011

  “That you, Ania?”

  Sara took the stone path from the driveway to the patio, rounding her shoulders apologetically as she entered George’s field of vision. “No, Grandpa, it’s Sara.”

  “Of course it is,” he said, perhaps guessing her visit was forgotten rather than unexpected.

  “Sorry to just turn up on your doorstep like a foundling,” she said. Her father, Chick, had insisted on the surprise element. “I had some business in Chicago; then my phone died.”

  “These phones!”

  She sat down on the chaise longue. The Japanese garden had fallen into somewhat embarrassed circumstances, but the patio was in good shape, the nearby hedges trimmed, the grass mowed. “Beautiful day,” she said loudly.

  “I can hear you.”

  Only planning to stay for a few days, she needed to gather as much info on George’s lucidity as she could without getting full-on interrogational. “Isn’t Ania dead, Grandpa?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” A brief hush. “I suppose I’ve taken to calling her daughter by that name.”

  “Would it help to write down—”

  “She doesn’t correct me but sometimes flinches.” He took a sip of what looked to be bourbon. He was wearing an open cardigan over a gas-blotted guayabera, formerly his yard-work shirt. “Fix you anything?”

  “No, thank you, I’m fine.”

  “Marion loved Dr. Pepper. She’d add rum and think we didn’t notice.”

  “That sounds like her,” Sara said, not sure if it did. “Feeling all right since your fall?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  Squirrels shook an oak branch.

  “These chairs look good,” she said. She patted the meshed vinyl between her legs.

  “John refurbished them.”

  “Ah.”

  “It took several years.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “At his other job?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you make of—”

  “Well.” George put his hands on his knees and stood up. “Nap time.” Gesturing toward the trees, he added, “Though with these damn birds you can’t get a lick of sleep.” He made his hand into a beak.

  “I might catch a few winks myself. Think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Mi casa . . .”

  This was the second time in five years that Sara had been asked to run reconnaissance on her grandfather, as well as the second time in five years that she had visited him. She had promised to join what remained of the family for Thanksgiving ’09 but had bailed at the last minute, citing a freelance deadline, the imminence of which was significantly exaggerated. She thought the excuse would seem more plausible if she told her dad that she had procrastinated on the assignment, that she had already asked for two extensions, that the editor was on the cusp of dismissing her as a deadbeat. (Why, she later asked herself, were her lies so self-incriminating?) She wasn’t racked with guilt over her grandfilial neglect, but it needled her now as she snooped around George’s abandoned office and sporting den, its walls decorated with dusty-nosed African hunting trophies, its closet equipped with superannuated tennis gear, a teal vaporizer, an armory of redundant windbreakers. She lay down on the daybed and resumed reading an oppressively acclaimed novel in which so far there were two incorrect subjunctives. Despite the ambient chirping, George was snoring in the bedroom across the hall.

  Chick had requested and funded both visits, the funding unnecessary but accepted without protest. The first trip, around Christmas of ’06, sought to determine whether George could go on living independently in the house he and Phyliss had bought sixty years earlier; the second sought to determine whether he could go on living under the suspect care of John Anderson. Chick had recently passed through Lammermuir and had ideas of his own, but he was looking for a second opinion, or he wanted to poke the embers of Sara’s loyalty. “You won’t want to see him next in his coffin,” he had said over the phone, though as a rule the Crennels were cremated.

  Loath as she was to admit it, Sara’s inspection so far told of John’s professionalism. The house was clean and in many spots obsessively ordered; the kitchen was stocked with healthful food; a promising menu was taped to the fridge. George was grouchier than in his younger days and no longer consistently rapier, but for a man born before the establishment of the League of Nations, he was in good health. He didn’t seem hobbled by his recent fall. Still, Sara resented John’s weaselly presence here. He had horned in on the caretaker-factotum search back in ’07; then, like Dick Cheney, he’d nominated himself to Chick (busy and suggestible) as the fittest candidate. He was the main reason she had reneged on that Thanksgiving.

  Chick didn’t think John should still hold an outside job, selling navy blazers and or
ange polo shirts part-time at some mall, but Sara was glad now to have a few quiet hours before she had to face him. She blew her nose, dropped the tissue on the floor. The last time she’d lain on this daybed was the night after her grandmother’s funeral, only a few weeks after Sara’s sixteenth birthday. The dominant notes during dinner had seemed to Sara deficiently reflective, everyone talking and asking about the usual things: hockey and Newt Gingrich and O. J. and what classes one was taking, what plans one had for college. Over dessert, the oldest extant cousin casually applied a slur to Carol Moseley Braun and wasn’t properly rebuked. Sara retreated to George’s den shortly thereafter. Fifteen minutes later, Aunt Marion was leaning against the doorjamb. “Mind if we hide out together?” she asked.

  “Yeah—I mean, no.” She closed her book. She’d brought two on the trip: Foucault for Beginners, one of several illustrated précis from a series she’d been collecting for about a year; and the Mary Gaitskill book she was about to finish.

  “Don’t mind Grace,” Marion said. “She’s a pig, but it’s too late.”

  “She’s nice, usually.” The Crennels weren’t without their divisions, which sometimes led to all-out enmity and estrangement. Sara had noticed her father and Steve, Grace’s son, roll their eyes at each other during Marion’s eulogy. The gesture was true to form but disappointing, even considering the eulogy’s shortcomings, its weird braid of sanctimony, local history, and score settling. Marion, typically a no-show at family events, was often spoken of in joking terms, and Sara could never tell to what degree hostility outbalanced affection in this ridicule, or if the hostility was mostly that of the bully or mostly that of the castoff. Sara had only met Marion four times aside from unremembered baby meetings, but she idolized her as the cool Crennel, the one with ties to avant-garde film and Subaru loads of yellowing radical bona fides. For much of the seventies and eighties Marion had been a social worker in Berkeley. Now she and her partner ran a catering business.