Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, smiling shyly as he got up to revisit the bar.

  Sara held up her glass. “Another?”

  Several conversations flitted around her along with a moth the size of a young bat. She watched the moth and listened to Archer run the blender. Soon he returned, deftly carrying three glasses and a can of club soda as if he were an experienced waiter, though in fact he had no traditional work experience of any kind. Most of the guests had dressed up somewhat for dinner, but Archer was still wearing rolled-up Levi’s, his dirty Jack Purcells, and a one-pocket T-shirt with broad horizontal stripes. He looked like he was trying out for Yo La Tengo or delivering the Sacramento Bee in 1966. She noticed now that his tongue was poking out irresistibly from the effort of balancing the glasses, which to Sara made up for his puffed-up replies to the lawyer’s questions.

  He was such an attractive mesh of arrogance and awkwardness. It was hard for her to remember how she’d once found him ugly. As a kid she’d always hated the Buffalo City Court Building, a symphonically dystopic concrete tower, not windowless but with vast window-less expanses and, around its edges, wedge-topped slits that brought guillotines to one’s mind, or to one’s head. Then in college a friend told her the building was a distinguished example of brutalism, and instantly she recognized its overcast beauty, became one of its staunch defenders. Her view of Archer had changed gradually, but the reversal was comparably stark. As far as looks went, Archer and she were suited to each other, she thought, both somewhat off, even homely at times, but with reserves of acquired-taste beauty. (The Stickler had called him “publishing hot,” which Sara guessed was roughly analogous to “hockey smart.”) Money was part of his allure, of course, and she wondered about the purity of Gemma’s motives, and of her own, though she didn’t precisely have motives. If she did, she didn’t pretend they were pure. Besides, one could enter a situation with dicey motives and find purity along the way. She remembered something Mary Anne Disraeli had said: “Dizzy married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love.”

  “The thing is,” Archer’s friend Seth was contending, “the most interesting long-form fiction happening today is happening on television.”

  “I’m just reminding you that Plame’s covert status at the time of the Novak column isn’t indisputable,” someone held in a different conversation.

  “My God, look at that enormous moth!”

  “Well, there will be climate-change winners. Mushy to deny that obvious fact.”

  Sara pivoted to still another group: “They’re definitely related,” Linda said. “Ira is Philip’s nephew or something.”

  “Water rights is one area, sure. Mitigation and adaptation products and services is another.”

  “Is it indeed a moth?”

  “It’s not that close,” Archer said, turning with an apologetically raised finger from his finance-industry friend. “It’s, like, second cousin, or first cousin once removed.”

  “I’ve never bothered to learn the finer points of cousinage,” Gemma said.

  “We don’t need to learn that kind of stuff anymore,” Lucas said. “We can just look it up.”

  “We couldn’t look it up before?” Sara said.

  “At any rate, a talented family,” Gemma said.

  “But didn’t you say you hated Nixon in China?” Archer said, smiling at Gemma.

  Sara didn’t like to think of Archer and Gemma having private conversations about art. She could only tolerate their relationship if she imagined it to be unvaryingly shallow and dull: restaurant deliberations and unfulfilling sex and voiceless games of draughts.

  “I may have done,” Gemma said. “I don’t really care for that lot; I prefer maximalists.”

  “It’s not quite to the point, though,” Sara said, “since Nixon in China is by John Adams.”

  “No, it’s by Philip Glass,” Archer said.

  Sara’s shoulders clenched as she looked at him. He was so sure of himself that for a moment she thought she was wrong.

  “Yes, that’s Glass,” said the painter evenly, permitting Archer to gloat silently in his misattribution. Of course it would seem small of Sara to drag Archer into the internet closet to resolve the dispute. She was still seething when a member of the uniformed kitchen staff entered the lounge, waiting for talk to fizzle so she could announce to the ladies and gentlemen that dinner was served.

  A steep, rain-slick staircase led from John’s cabin to a private deck on which there were two lounge chairs, a straw bench, and a wooden kiosk for shade. John had so far spent much of his vacation on the deck, reclining for hours at night, finding constellations and listening to the rhythmic chirps of tree frogs, reminiscent in a backwards way of industrial sprinklers. This morning he was up in time for sunrise, before most of the workers arrived from the nearby populated island, whose tree-covered northeast coast was visible from John’s deck. Also in view were palm shrubs and organ-pipe cacti, the sickly green salt pond at the bottom of the hill, and the ruins of a Quaker-owned sugar mill once worked by African slaves. When John said yesterday to Sara that it didn’t seem very Quakerish to own slaves, she reminded him that Richard Nixon had been a Quaker. He didn’t think that answered, since Richard Nixon hadn’t, after all, owned slaves. “But he would have,” she had said.

  He swept last night’s rain off one of the lounge chairs, dried his hand on the resort’s terry-cloth bathrobe, and sat down. It was strange to be here. A few years ago he had felt slighted by Archer’s efficient upkeep of their friendship; now he missed that efficiency. They saw each other rarely, and when they did, there was an echoey sadness about their interactions. John understood now that, from the beginning, he had wanted the friendship more than Archer had, though dorm life, demanding little in the way of plans and overtures, covered that up; you sort of fell into talking, drifted toward the same party, tagged along to the boring Fassbinder movie. Still, there was an imbalance of need and affection and, naturally, an attendant imbalance of power. That’s what kept John from doing anything that might jeopardize the friendship. He never argued with Archer, not about anything serious, because he knew Archer would win, would juke him toward some illogical generalization. For some reason John was drawn to people who wanted to make seemingly simple things complicated, when all he wanted to do was make complicated things simple. Complexity could be fascinating, sure, but John more or less believed what he’d been taught in church, not the literal truth of the resurrection or whatever, but in the universals: be honest, be humble, be nice to people, really mean it when you say “peace be with you.” He wasn’t saintly at enacting those beliefs, but he was trying. Hard to know what Archer believed in, except maybe that you should do the wrong thing prudently. Like: every semester back in college, he would hire out most of the work for one of his humanities courses, employing a wheezy comp-lit concentrator to write the papers, which Archer would subject to shrewdly dilapidating revision. He was proud of his small, probably unneeded precautions, how for instance he would misuse a word in class, then insert the same mistake into his next paper. (Maybe he’d meant to mix up Philip Glass and John Adams—John had done some fact-checking last night—but to what end?) John never expressed his disapproval of the inexplicable cheating, inexplicable in that Archer wasn’t pressed for time and was so smart, so quick to absorb the ideas John often couldn’t wrap his head around, even quicker to adopt the jargon John couldn’t tolerate.

  Archer hadn’t abused his power, though, or at least he hadn’t made John feel unappreciated, and it was a touching sign of his loyalty that John had been invited at all to this small but lavish birthday party. He had even been given a favored friend’s cabin, spacious and within spitting distance of the Great House. And maybe Archer was looking out for John when he booked newly single Jessica Kim into the room next door. It was true that when John heard her shower running one morning—it sputtered intermittently like a machine gun—he imagined her lathering herself in a more seductive st
yle than cleanliness and sand removal would require. But he only thought of Jess that way in flashes. Sometimes—it probably wasn’t cool—but sometimes he still thought of Sara in that way. It was awesome to see her. He’d told her so when they hugged on the dock the first night, he having walked down the hill with a borrowed flashlight—or “torch,” as Gemma called it, maybe fittingly—to greet the last incoming boat; only later, when he was trying to read a book about shipbuilding while a bug ricocheted inside his bedside lampshade, did he remember that awesome was one of the words Sara looked down on and tried to discourage. It had just slipped out, and he’d meant it in the old-fashioned, not strictly positive sense, since it was also painful to see her, hard not to stare or seem like he was making a big point of not staring. On this trip he had learned to position himself in spots where he couldn’t get a direct view of her, as if she were the sun, or the fire and brimstone Lot’s wife wasn’t supposed to look back at.

  The first clanks and voices sounded from the kitchen. He sipped his herbal tea and stared at a tiny lizard that had emerged from the deck’s cracked stone parapet. Of course the lizard knew that another creature, a large one, was nearby, but did it sense itself being watched? He started to feel a paternal tenderness toward the lizard, a warmth he suspected would prompt ridicule if articulated. From Sara, probably. Her cynicism was only superficial, but it was a thick surface.

  Birds chirped, tea dribbled down his beard. So peaceful here. He whispered it, “So peaceful,” and his voice sounded strange, like balled-up paper blowing across a concrete floor. He decided to let the tea dry on its own. He thought maybe he could feel it drying. He was all the time talking about leaving New York, but now, as the lizard darted away, he knew he had to make good on those threats, find a quiet place, a place where he could start building bikes again, or start building something else. “So peaceful,” he said again, “so peaceful.”

  Sara woke up early with a hangover and settled in on one of the patios before most of the others. She hoped to check her e-mail over coffee, but Robert, the Defense Department guy, was similarly engaged at the next table, and by now she’d deduced that his laptop was fortified against inclusive use of the resort’s wireless. He didn’t seem to notice her exasperated sighs. She thumbed through the printer-hot TimesDigest and watched an army of creamy yellow butterflies—perhaps the species that gave rise to the name—float around a shrub that one of the gardeners identified as a Jamaica caper tree. After Robert powered down, she took the opportunity to visit an online retailer and arranged for a CD of John Adams’s Nixon in China to be sent to Archer’s condominium. She was still grinning over this when the painter strolled up to her table. “What are you on to now?” he asked, nodding at the paperback to the right of her plate. The cashmere sweater tied loosely around his neck was the color of underripe watermelon.

  “Michel Leiris,” she said, slurring the surname to hide her uncertain pronunciation. She turned the book over to reveal its cover. “A kind of anthropological autobiography. Arrestingly undissembling.” The phrase didn’t excite him. “I loved Persuasion, by the way,” she added, hoping to keep him by her table a little longer. “Overnight it’s my favorite of her novels. I love how Anne is older than the typical Austen heroine and for once not only as clever but as wise as her creator.”

  “God, do you mean, or Jane Austen?”

  She smiled. “Austen.”

  “Good. I don’t rate the wisdom of our creator very highly. But I haven’t read that one, Persuasion,” he said, erasing the endorsement he’d given with apparent emotion on the beach. “I don’t think I’ve read any Jane Austen.”

  “Oh.”

  He excused himself as John and Lucas arrived.

  “Did you guys sleep together?” Sara said.

  “No,” John said.

  “Yes,” Lucas said.

  “We arrived at the same time from opposite directions.” John exhibited no feel for the homoerotic or homophobic joking so common with straight men of his age and type, she thought, forgetting for a moment that she had started it this time.

  “There’s mad caterpillars on that tree over there,” Lucas said, pointing. He strapped his backpack around the chair next to Sara’s.

  “Fat black-and-orange ones,” John said, brushing dandruff off his navy linen jacket.

  “Princeton caterpillars,” Robert broke in. “It’s a good year for them.”

  “Is it?” Lucas said in a tone that didn’t invite embellishment. After returning from the buffet with a quantity of pastries, fruit, and yogurt that might have been called gluttonous in itself, Lucas ordered an omelet and sausage. “I’m trying to cram in my month’s eating down here where the food’s free.”

  “I don’t reckon that’s healthy,” John said, meaning healthful.

  Sara closed her eyes to better concentrate on the just-right temperature: breezy and, she guessed, seventy-eight. John and Lucas were caught up now in a friendly debate about whether bears truly hibernate. Her hangover was gone, and she was feeling the optimum effects of her morning coffee, high but not jittery. She wondered how many more sips she could afford.

  “Oh, did you start without me?” Gemma mock-pouted, sneaking up on them. Today’s romper was marigold orange. Lucas seemed to truffle in vain for an adroit response. Sara watched a hummingbird hover over a dish of mango.

  “What?” Lucas said, looking at Sara.

  She was smiling broadly. “Nothing,” she said as Archer came into view.

  When Gemma showed up for breakfast in another of her amazing baby-style outfits with the high-waisted short shorts, Lucas wanted badly to touch her, not just to touch her sleeve or hug her goodbye three days from now, but to put his hands all over her and guide her into new positions so he could put his hands in different spots. “You didn’t start without me, did you?” she said. “Not in our hearts,” Lucas answered. Archer followed a minute behind her, looking bleary. He greeted Lucas: “Your holiness.”

  “I’m not really into these papal puns, man.” They didn’t bother him out of other mouths, actually, and it was Lucas himself who’d dubbed his first (and last) car the Popemobile.

  “All right, noted.”

  “It’s been a lifetime of ’em, you know.”

  Archer repeated that he understood and was soon recruiting people for a morning hike to Franklin Beach, where there was said to be excellent “schnorkeling” (for some “quirky” reason he pronounced the word in what must have been the German way) and opportunities to “commune with nature.”

  “If we go as a big group, wouldn’t we be more likely to commune with each other?” Lucas said.

  “We could multitask,” Archer said lamely but with a bonhomie that seemed genuinely interested in everyone’s fun. Lucas’s thought experiment for this trip was to imagine that Archer was annoying and full of himself but not a scoundrel. Really there was no reason, other than class resentment and sexual jealousy, for Lucas to be against Archer, and the sexual jealousy wasn’t so gnawing anymore. He admitted that Archer seemed to be good for Gemma, good to her as well, Lucas’s invitation to this island being a sign that he was good to her, willing to make sacrifices. Lucas tried to admire Archer for bestowing such largesse on someone he presumably disliked—and maybe Archer only disliked Lucas because Lucas had disliked him first. Which would make him all the more generous. The resort’s prices were unpublicized on if-you-have-to-ask grounds, but Lucas guessed that, for the cost of a week’s stay, a person could live frugally but not hungrily for the better part of a year. Lucas himself could pull off such austerity if he finally left New York, moved back home to help with his ailing father, returned to DJing in a less competitive market.

  Gemma studied the water. “Too windy today for snorkeling, I fear,” she said. They were on one of the patios overlooking the choppier Atlantic side.

  “For schnorkeling, yes,” Archer said.

  “Archer tells me it was very windy in Cape Town,” Sara said to Gemma.

  “Horrifi
cally,” Gemma said.

  “See any elephants?” John said.

  “I suspect that elephant sightings are unusual in Cape Town,” Sara said.

  “I thought maybe they’d safari too when they were over there,” John said quietly.

  “No, their dry season is better for that,” Archer said, but coughed up a few anecdotes from an earlier safari. He pronounced zebra to rhyme with Debra.

  “You traveled over the holidays as well, didn’t you?” Gemma asked Sara.

  “Not really. I spent a few days with my grandfather in Chicago.”

  “Surely you had to travel to get there.”

  “Well, yes, but it was more of an errand—not that I don’t love my grandfather,” Sara threw in. “He’s ‘slowing down,’ as they say, but resolved not to leave his house, so my dad asked me to check on things. Now we’re trying to find someone to look after him.”

  “A medical professional, you mean?” John said.

  “No, he needs a factotum more than a nurse,” Sara said. “According to my lay evaluation, at least. And my dad doesn’t want to spend much money, or, you know, doesn’t want my grandfather to spend much—no doubt thinking of his inheritance.”

  “Is your father a greedy man?” Gemma asked.

  “No,” Sara said. “I shouldn’t have put it that way. Anyway, best would be someone who’s not a professional in any line.”

  “Like a bum?” Archer said.

  “Just someone whose life decisions have opened the door to flexibility.”

  “Okay,” John said, nodding like a bobblehead doll. “I know a guy in Chicago. He’s in improv comedy, but, as to the professional thing, I guess I’d call him semipro.”

  The sun was shifting. Lucas put on a pair of pink drugstore sunglasses over his regular glasses. He was taking style cues lately from the insane.

  “It’d be a live-in position,” Sara said, “and quite a ways from Chicago itself.”