by Dylan Hicks
It was thrilling to look so closely with another person at something she’d written, away from the shibboleths and nitwit observations she’d endured in writing workshops, and as they moved through the pages she got happier and calmer. He knew how to reject an idea, not too bluntly but without lots of time-wasting gingerliness, and he endorsed his favorite revisions with theatrical flair, in one instance shouting his approval and rubbing his hands together like a melodrama’s villainous landlord. She typed up some of the notes on her laptop while he made a competent Thai curry. He asked about her writing while they ate, seemed really to be listening (though he didn’t ask to read any of her stuff). As they were clearing the dishes, he asked if she would “care to take a postprandial constitutional.” She got over her annoyance at the phrasing and enjoyed the shoulder-brushing walk. They worked late into the evening, late enough for her to consider dozing off on his hard sofa, a consideration that included a mayfly thought of him patting her blanketed arm or performing some other tucking-in procedure. In the end she mustered the strength to leave. Feeling flush, she took a taxi.
She bought a drink, a fifteen-dollar drink, at the hotel lounge. She thought about the wardrobe overhaul her windfall would facilitate, but she knew she would spend the money reasonably (damage deposit, bed, credit-card payment, sofa). She rotated on her barstool to face the crowd, made a show of waiting for someone, checking the time on her phone, scanning the room with an impatient brow. A woman near her kept tugging at the back of her miniskirt while her boyfriend talked loudly to someone else. The lounge was burbling with anodyne dance music, peppered with preciously designed chess sets, filled with people Sara probably wouldn’t like, but at least for the moment contempt and superiority had slipped from her thoughts like subscription cards from drugstore Elles. The music continued in the elevator up to her room, and she swayed her shoulders and smiled at herself in the reflective gold doors.
In bed she resumed reading a slim European novel that had been both well- and ill-suited for the plane: impressive looking and easy to slip into her purse, but too slow and challenging for distractive settings. As usual—even in hotel beds—she wrote down unfamiliar words on an index card that doubled as a bookmark. Later she would type the words and their definitions into a document that she called a commonplace book, though it was mainly a word list. She’d been doing this for years and liked seeing the words get more recondite as the document enlarged; many of the recent entries (“siffleur, an animal that makes a whistling noise, or a person who entertains professionally by whistling”) could be used only on rare occasions and at risk to one’s popularity. Writing and typing the words and definitions was supposed to aid retention, but that wasn’t always true; she often encountered a word that was no clearer to her than it had been before she had typed its definition a year earlier, or vocabulary that made repeated trips to her index cards but always seemed too common for her commonplace book. In those latter cases, before scribbling on the card, she would include a qualifier: “again,” “clarify,” “whet understanding of,” “check etymology,” or some other frequently dishonest indication that she possessed at least a weak grip on the entry and was only seeking a refresher or mastery. As if she needed to persuade readers of her private index cards to judge her linguistic gaps more compassionately. This finical self-absorption, this timorous, circular miniaturism, often seemed emblematic of her shortcomings as a writer, even as a person. The consensus in grad school had been that nothing was at stake in her well-written but amorphous stories of longing, bewilderment, and acedia. Of course, she thought everything was at stake in her stories, though she also worried that her everything was nothing, that her passions were misplaced. Given the opportunity, she could talk for hours about when a comma might justifiably be placed between parts of a compound predicate—and when its placement there was purposeless and arrhythmic!—but she was laryngitically silent, because short of deep conviction, about Israeli settlement of the West Bank.
Tonight, though, her index cards didn’t seem pathetic; they revealed one aspect of her character, her pettiness perhaps, but also her devotion, her devotion to something—she couldn’t always say what—maybe to the English language. And it hadn’t been wasted effort! For a long time she had thought that if she could follow her passions, such as they were, do her thing, as Aunt Marion might have put it, someone would take notice, single her out, pluck her from the throng. More recently she had thought that no, she was a fool, it didn’t work that way at all. But it did! It really did!
June 2011
“I thought maybe I could swing by with my suitcase,” Lucas said over the phone, “then just bike over on the morning we leave.”
“I’m not following.”
“My friend has a car,” he said, and explained his plan again, how it would save Karyn from having to pick him up, though it seemed obvious to her that his plan would only make things more cumbersome when they were returning exhaustedly home.
“I don’t mind picking you up,” she said.
“Yeah, but I’m in the opposite direction.”
“The opposite direction from Winnipeg? I thought you said you lived in Stevens Square.”
“Well, yeah. I wasn’t thinking of, like, literal compass points.”
After she got off the phone, she put her dinner plate in the dishwasher, cored an apple, and carried the New York Review of Books into the living room. Lucas must have been calling from the road, because a car door slammed in front of her house fewer than ten minutes later. She turned around and kneeled on the sofa, watched through the window as he unstrapped his bike from the rack. A swatch of wokbelly was exposed when he carried the bike to a boulevard ash recently ringed with terminal green paint. He fetched his suitcase—some would have called it a hockey bag—from the backseat. For a moment he talked to his friend through the passenger-side window, leaning like a streetwalker, the sun shining in retiring amber through the leaves. It was the sort of light by which people stand in long lines at Dairy Queen.
“Snazzy bike seat,” she said a moment later.
“Yeah, classic,” he said, caressing and slapping the leather seat. It was long-nosed and honey brown. He leaned the bike against a recliner she had inherited and ostracized to the porch with other renegade objects: unread community newspapers, a cracked plastic sled, a tote bag filled with tote bags. “You pay a weight price with this model,” Lucas said about the seat, “but there’s a payoff in beauty and comfort.”
“In comfort?” she said, bending down a few inches to touch it. “It seems uncomfortable, seductive and uncomfortable, like five-inch stilettos. Not that I have experience with heels that high.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“Just that they come with . . . podiatric perils.” He seemed pleased with the alliteration.
She returned his smile. “I was at this posh hotel in LA where the women were wearing heels for everything,” she said. “At the pool they were wearing heels.”
“Oh God, I love that.”
“Mm-hm. One night we went out to see this band my ex-husband used to be in, and we were waiting for our rental car at the hotel’s turnaround. Which was cobblestone, so the women could barely walk in their stilettos. They were like sex foals—sex toddlers—boyfriends and bellhops rushing to their sides. Of course that’s part of the appeal, right, that the woman is fettered?”
“Um.”
“But I like wearing heels. Sometimes. It takes me a while to re-acclimate in the spring.”
“These saddles, though, they’re actually pretty comfortable,” he said. “Stiff at first, but eventually they conform to the rider’s sit bones.” He pointed out the saddle’s indentations.
“It’s like an intaglio of your . . . sit bones,” she said.
“I left my bag on the sidewalk.”
After he’d stored his things in the coat closet, he stood expectantly by the front door. There were sumo wrestlers printed on his sweat-spotted shirt.
“You want an iced tea or something?” she said.
“Ice tea, wow.” He seemed unreasonably impressed. “Is it in one of those glass pitchers with lemons on it?”
“Uh, no, it’s in one of those pastel Rubbermaid pitchers with the white top that either strains or pours freely.” They made their way to the kitchen, his bike shoes clicking the Pergo.
“Maybe just water,” he said.
“My pitcher’s not good enough for you?”
“I actually think ice tea’s kind of yucky. Where’s Maxwell?”
“With his dad.”
They sat on stools on the same side of the kitchen island, not quite facing each other. He pushed up his huge black glasses. She could make out a thumbprint on one of the lenses.
“The truth is,” she said, “I’ve had some previous run-ins with those bike seats, or saddles—is that the preferred terminology? I made it seem like it was all new to me, but that’s not quite true.”
He tipped his head rightward. “Weird thing to lie about.”
“I didn’t lie. I’m not sure I’ve ever touched one before. My ex had one, but I get tired of referring to him.”
“Although you just did—the band he used to be in and all.”
“But that seems less about him than the bike seat,” she said. “I never saw him as a legit musician; it never seemed to come out of him, you know, or maybe I just can’t remember when it seemed that way. But he was, I don’t know, into things.”
“A materialist.”
“In limited areas. He was—well, the line between connoisseur-ship and consumerism gets blurry for most of us, right? With him the distinction seemed nonexistent. He was always digging up arcane objects of desire, making them seem hidden and cultish and timeless, and then I’d come to see that he just had a good spot in line for some broadening niche market.” She worried for a moment that, while critiquing Jason, she was unwittingly critiquing Lucas. “Not to knock your bike saddle,” she said. “It really is pretty.”
“A friend of mine has a Tumblr devoted to pictures of them.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not really, no. He’s the guy who built my bike”—he gestured toward the porch—“Archer’s old roommate. He’ll be at the wedding.”
“I’ll get the Tumblr URL straight from the source, then,” she said. “Anyway, I’m trying not to talk about him, my ex, trying not to define myself against what I used to be.” She rubbed her jaw. “For a few years in my twenties I was an actor. Years after I stopped doing it, I’d still find myself at parties saying, ‘I used to act,’ ‘I used to be involved in theater.’ It had only been seven, eight shows.”
Lucas held a blink as he nodded. “You miss it?”
“I don’t, which is funny because for a while it seemed so all-consuming.”
After a short lull, he said, “I’m in sort of a funny mood.” He seemed content, at first, to leave it at that, then confided that his mother was asking him for money.
“She’s having financial problems?”
“In a way, yeah. Although the money she’s asking for is money I borrowed.” He rubbed his right forearm. Karyn wondered if there was a connection between his apparent carpal tunnel and that Jessica Rabbit site. “I had this idea,” he said, “forever I had this dream of making reusable grocery bags.”
“All right.” She hoped she wasn’t registering foreknowledge. Then again, her ignorance might imply apathy. She thought about her life’s ungoogled names; these were people about whom she truly gave not one fuck.
“Yeah, I even tried to get Archer to invest.”
“Really?”
“Not interested. Things kind of languished,” he said, “but when I lost my job, I went for it.” Karyn overrode a smile when Lucas revealed the name, but the venture became less of a joke as she took in his enthusiasm, his pride in the bags’ construction (“incredibly sturdy”) and design (“there’s one with tigers”). There was a shakiness to his voice that seemed to admit failure but not defeat. He had turned his chair to face her, and she noticed again how the corner of his lip sometimes curled upward when he talked, a gentle tic more than an Elvislike sneer, as endearing as a missed belt loop. “So I borrowed ten grand from my mom,” he said, “who doesn’t have much money, almost none. I should never have asked her, but I was so confident I’d make it back.”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, so: had the bags manufactured, hired a friend to build a website, did some SEO. Only, by the time we were ready to roll, reusable grocery bags were the new T-shirt, like people were constantly getting them for free.”
“Right, right.”
He took a deep breath through his nose.
“I’ll buy some of your bags,” she said. “If you still have any.”
“I do. I made five thousand of them, so I should have, let’s see, just under five thousand of ’em in the basement. My mom’s basement.”
“I’d probably want a marginally smaller quantity.”
“Up to you.” He changed the subject: “Have you been gardening a lot?”
“Garnering a lot of what?”
“No, gardening. I like your profile photo, with the gloves and all.”
“Oh, right,” she said. That photo was now sullied by its association with the systems consultant, but she thought that changing one’s profile photo too often looked self-absorbed. “No, not much, not this week.”
“I was thinking that, if you want, I could make some mixes for the trip.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh, different kinds.” She felt like a kid, answering a question like that. “I feel like a kid,” she blurted.
“What?”
“I like a little of everything, or everything from A to, I don’t know, L. Lately I’ve been listening to British folkie stuff: Incredible String Band, Sandy Denny, Pentangle.”
He waved a hand over his head. “I guess I don’t mean ‘over my head,’ just that I haven’t heard of those people.”
“I know them mainly through—” She stopped herself from mentioning her ex yet again. The String Band project grew naturally out of her divorce because it was Jason who had exposed her to the group. It was the sort of music he listened to in college with his set of fellow geology majors, high-testing, tentative neo-pagans or, in campus parlance, “cloak people,” though maybe that designation was for less tentative types. Some of the soundtrack from her marriage was too painful to return to, but Jason’s British hippie folk had taken the opposite course; she embraced it only after he and roughly half of his records were gone. The String Band’s music was full of the dichotomies she loved—earthy/ethereal, local/ecumenical, plus the usual sublime/ridiculous—and their songs affected her more than any had since she was a teenager. They were “songs as empathy evacuation engines,” as Rae Armantrout put it. Karyn looked at Lucas and restarted: “It’s been an obsession because, well”—so far she’d told only Maxwell about her project—“I’ve been writing a play about a woman who’s part of a group a lot like the Incredible String Band.”
“A playwright! Like Yeats.”
“Yes, I recall our common expertise in Yeatsian dramaturgy. I guess it’s a play—it is, but it started with me just acting, escaping into this, I don’t know, this kind of dreamy, forestlike world.”
“Forestlike?”
“Nothing takes place in a forest, but it feels like a forest.”
“Like Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Well, I might prefer to lower the bar of comparison. But I loved it, loved acting the stuff out. When I said I didn’t miss acting, I really meant that I don’t miss it now, ’cause I’ve been doing it, but for myself.”
He was listening with a hard-to-come-by attentiveness.
“And the world of the play had all this mystery and melancholy and romance that I could disappear into; it would sort of overcome me, so that even though I knew I was making everything up—I’m not cr
azy—it felt like there were outside agencies at work.”
“Like in a holodeck?”
She didn’t know what that meant. “Maybe,” she said.
“It sounds great—seriously,” he said. “I’ve been—this isn’t at all the same as what you’re talking about, but I’ve been imagining this—let me backspin: I’ve been having trouble reading lately, okay, like the only thing I can concentrate on are these obsolete travel guides the previous tenant left in my closet.”
“I can see those being addictive, though. A friend of mine has an amazing collection of nineteenth-century Baedekers.” Why had she said that? It wasn’t true, though she’d once read an essay by a man who collected old Baedekers.
“These are from, like, ten, fifteen years ago,” he said. “A whole box of them, which is strange ’cause I don’t see how anyone living in my shitty apartment could have such extensive travel plans. I’ve been picturing this wanderluster—is that a word?”
“I think.”
“Yeah, who’s so ashamed of how badly he wants to travel and how little he can afford to that he hides Exploring Rome ’95 like it’s Barely Legal.”
“What’s Barely Legal?”
“Oh, well, it’s a pornographic magazine with an emphasis on—”
“Little joke; I figured it out.”
“Oh. Yeah, so for me it’s less a box of old travel guides than it is an epic quest novel or something, with this pathetic, thwarted hero.”
“Schmodysseus. Sorry, that was awful.”
“No, I’m laughing on the inside,” he said. “I guess I didn’t tell you, but I was once in an MFA program for fiction.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised.
He named the school; she hadn’t heard of it. “It wasn’t quite the right—I didn’t graduate. Back when I was in Philly I wrote a story, really a pretty good one, about a prison guard. It came in a rush, you know, four days in the ‘zone’ or whatever. So kind of as a lark I sent it off to a couple programs. Well, six. One took me. I wasn’t all that literary, to be straight with you; I mean, I read books.”