by Dylan Hicks
“Maybe give me the contact info just in case,” John said. “How old’s your grandpa?”
“Ninety? Ninety-one? My dad wants to take his license away.”
“I do think we should be more vigilantly testing the driving competence of our aged,” Gemma said. “Last year I was very painfully doored by a woman of your grandfather’s vintage.”
“What’s ‘doored’ again?” Sara said.
“I was cycling, observantly, when an extremely elderly woman opened the rather ponderous door of her Buick—”
“Mercury.”
“—right in front of me.”
“There was a hole the size of a tennis ball in her shoulder,” Lucas said. He had been talked out of waiting in the lobby during Gemma’s short hospitalization.
“Not a tennis ball, Lucas, a golf ball,” Gemma said, showing the scar on her creamily rounded shoulder.
“Still, it must’ve hurt like hell.”
“It was not quite hell. Perhaps closer to the duty-free shop in the Cancun airport.”
“In my grandfather’s defense,” Sara said, “he hasn’t been in any accidents. He backed into the garage door, but no one was harmed.”
“Hard stuff,” Lucas said, “getting old.” He felt least original when aiming for sympathy.
“At ninety-one I daresay he isn’t getting old,” Gemma said.
“It is what it is,” John said, working in the same mode as Lucas.
“What explains the rise of that expression?” Sara said. “It is what it is.”
“People have always said that,” John said.
“But they’re saying it more,” Sara said.
“I think that’s true,” Archer said.
Sara nodded gratefully at Archer. “There’s the Naipaul book that starts, ‘The world is what it is,’” she said. “And that La Cage aux Folles song, and even Wittgenstein: ‘The world is all that is the case.’”
“I’m sure that accounts for it,” Gemma said. “Lucas, you have what appears to be yogurt on your face.”
“I’m saving it for later.”
“And God in Exodus,” John said with a slight edge, “‘I AM THAT I AM.’”
“I thought that was Popeye,” Lucas said.
“But there must be something else,” Sara said, “like from TV.”
“Popeye’s on TV sometimes,” Lucas said.
“Popeye doesn’t say, ‘It is what it is.’”
“Is that all you have to talk about?” the Defense Department guy barked from the next table.
“What’re you gonna do, waterboard us?” Lucas said.
It was hard to make out his muttered response.
“How long do you ‘spect this hike to take?” John said.
The exchange with the Defense Department guy had flustered Archer. “I need a moment to gather my, uh, thought,” he said.
“Think it’ll take all morning?”
“We’ll be back by two, I guess.”
“I definitely fear it’s too windy for snorkeling,” Gemma said.
“It is what it is,” Lucas said.
Archer had originally led the way along the narrow trail, but he’d been so chary around the spiderwebs, especially those with tropically proportioned spiders in them, that Sara and he had to trade places. She now carried a long stick in front of her, using it to delicately adjust the operational webs, if there was no easy way around them, and to clear away single threads that crossed the path and sometimes glistened through the trees. “You sure you don’t want me to hold the spider stick?” he asked, in the way that Thanksgiving uncles offer to help with the dishes after most have been dried and put away.
She couldn’t identify much of the flora but liked being surrounded by it, liked the whiff of fairy-tale danger. Truthfully there wasn’t much to be afraid of; they had a phone and coverage, the trail was well marked, and the island offered no poisonous insects, no animals fiercer than its small population of feral goats. It was unmistakably a forest, not a jungle, but some of the trees had Tarzan-ready vines, useful for navigating slithery spots along the trail; others, maybe in the plane-tree family, had scaling red-and-white bark like muscle and bone in an anatomical drawing. It was cool in the forest, but Sara was sweating underneath her backpack. Only she and Archer had come on the hike.
“It feels good to be down here knowing the book’s coming out,” he said. “My parents are stoked.”
“You think they’ll start to worry about their wall art?” she said. Eminent Canadians was about a rich young Winnipegger who, for adventure more than profit, hires a Chinese forger to reproduce his parents’ most valuable paintings, then attempts to privately sell the originals. Archer wanted it revealed at the end that the stolen paintings were fakes from the get-go (!), but Sara twice succeeded in leaving that part out. Despite appearances, the book wasn’t substantially autobiographical, though a few passages were substantially, if undetectably, autobiographical for Sara. Archer, however, wanted it to seem lazily drawn from life. “I’d love it if everything was invented,” he had said at the start, “but in such a way that people would insist on reading it as if it were an only nominally fictionalized memoir.” He was unresponsive when she answered that they might insist on reading it like that anyway.
“Ha, it’s possible,” he said now about his parents. “But they’re stoked, really stoked. I hadn’t even told them I was working on a book.”
“You kind of weren’t,” she said, waving her stick from side to side.
“Come on, I did a lot of the work.”
She apologized but stopped short of corroboration.
“To me it’s like I’m the director,” he said, “the director and the author of the source material, and you’re the irreverent screen adapter, the cinematographer, the editor—obviously—maybe the key grip.”
“The key grip, no less,” she said. “I was worried I’d wind up as one of the flunky grips.”
He laughed.
“Well, that’s one way to look at it,” she said. One wrong way. Really he was the star and producer, she the director, screenwriter, and everything else. But he was an essential star, an atypically inspiring producer. Concretely, he had given her a burlap-rough outline that she only partially observed, a few dozen suggestions of wide-ranging quality, and many authenticating details, most of them extracted from interviews she conducted with him over a long weekend in New York. He had put her up again in the tackily stylish hotel, and for three consecutive nights she came over to his apartment around dusk. They would sit on his sofa in the dark, the light of the digital recorder sometimes rouging their hands. He faced her but kept his eyes closed and seemed very relaxed, his normal casual dress having descended into out-and-out dishabille: bathrobes, flip-flops, oxford shirts unbuttoned with gigolo abandon. After a while his answers began to take on a flavor of hypnosis or somniloquism, and she would press him, often leadingly, for detail and precision: How long was the ride to school? What sights did you pass on the way? Was the gear lever unadorned? Well, was it just a stick, or was it surrounded by that baggy, kind of testicular leather? Or did it come out of the steering wheel? Was the back door’s interior nubby and pale or was it blue and felty like a Yahtzee board? Did the door have a little silver coin-purse ashtray? Was there ever anything inside it? Regular or bubble? Pink?
It was a kind of phenomenological therapy with no therapeutic aim. She never asked Archer how he had felt about something, never asked for or advanced an interpretation; she only asked about objects, surfaces, colors, textures, trivia, some of which she could have researched on the internet. It was the resulting mass of mostly useless information, somewhere between dream fragments and the directions on a bottle of shampoo, that gave her the confidence to start writing. She wrote the first, faltering chapters during a September in Winnipeg, briefly accompanied by Archer, who introduced her to his parents and to five-pin bowling (a more enjoyable game than standard tenpins, she thought, the light, holeless ball gentler on her arms). After
three days he flew back to New York, and she carried on alone, working during the day in a sublet apartment in Osborne Village, eating too many midafternoon crepes, sometimes making dubiously research-driven excursions to Aqua Books or Assiniboine Park, where she would write in longhand on a bench not far from the East Indian cricketers. She returned to Buffalo with about 150 pages, pages too scattered and remote, it seemed, to make much of, but within three or four months she started to understand the book—the voice, the characters, the (drapey) form. After that it was mostly play, not easy but devoid of the drudgery, self-doubt, and inertia that had defined most of her writing life up till then. It had taken a while for the situation’s creative benefits to sink in, but when they did, they almost equaled the financial benefits, and not only because it was difficult to take immediate advantage of those financial benefits without raising suspicion. It was freeing to know she wouldn’t be judged directly by the book, except by Archer, and she found herself taking more risks, leaving stuff in that her over-cautious inner critic would have excised from her own work. Energizing, too, to guiltlessly make use of someone’s life, to have carte blanche to steal traits and reform memories. Leading up to when she started working for Archer, especially during the gray months following her sojourn in New York, she had come to think that her tragic limitation as a writer of imaginative prose was her dearth of imagination. Basically, she loved to write sentences, carefully, but she wasn’t brimming with ideas as to what they should conspire to be about. Archer was the corrective. He fed her material and let himself be the material, resulting, pace his analogy, in auspiciously mixed paints more than a piece for adaptation. He pushed her, somehow, to be better. Strangely, a full year went by before she saw that he was her muse.
She stepped over a family of crabs. “I’m wondering about interviews,” she said, knowing she would have to get more specific but not knowing how to proceed. She never wanted him to think she was giving much thought to his career or her place in it, even though that was part of her job. “Obviously you’ll need to do phoners and in-person interviews yourself,” she said, “but d’you think you’ll want me to handle the written ones?”
“I think, hmm, I think I’ll want to do all the interviews,” he said, apparently considering this for the first time. Sara, in contrast, had spent much of her life conducting interviews with herself: in the shower, on walks, as she drifted off to sleep, imagining her dazzling repartee with Michael Silverblatt, her winning humility with Terry Gross, her feet-up elegance with Joshua Kehr. “I’ll want you to tidy up the written ones,” Archer went on. “We should aim for consistency of voice, so maybe you could interpolate some of your pet words into my answers.”
“I don’t have pet words,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Except you do.”
“Like what?”
“Conspicuously is one.”
“Oh. Maybe you’re right. God. I’ll do some finding and replacing.”
“No, no, I like it. It reminds me of Gemma. I like all your pet words.”
“All of them!” She took a moment to calm down. A bird or rodent made a coffee-slurping noise. “As long as we’re offering notes,” Sara said, “I’ll just mention that in interviews you might want to avoid saying things like ‘This book is meticulously plotted.’”
A measure or two of quiet. “Of course that was just a conversation,” he said, “not an interview.”
“But those conversations are preparation.”
“And I didn’t say it was meticulously plotted; I said it was fastidiously plotted. Plus, it’s good, what I said. It makes people want to read the book. No one wants to read a slovenly plotted book.”
“Some of us do, actually. Some of us want precisely that.”
“Most of you are pretending. Besides, fastidious isn’t laudatory. It implies excess.”
“Well, yes, often it does,” she said. She loved this part, really: squaring off with the louche debate captain. “But isn’t that sense reduced if you’re using the word to describe your own work?”
“False modesty is tiresome.”
“The other reason not to say it is that the book isn’t fastidiously plotted.”
“Sure it is.”
“Are you kidding? I don’t know anything about plotting—I mean, I do, I do.” She worried that she’d confessed too much. Archer didn’t have an immense knowledge of narrative theory, nor did he read much fiction; it was possible that he really did think the book was fastidiously plotted. “But this book’s more in the episodic tradition, no? More of a yarn.”
They listened awhile to their steps.
“You think it’ll be a hit?” he asked. Though she had come to see that he wasn’t a terribly glib or ironic man, his earnestness always seemed like an achievement—her achievement, another winning of his confidence. It was attractive because it always seemed rare, whereas John’s earnestness—as this vacation reminded her—was off-putting in its constancy.
“Probably not,” she said. She had written the book to please, but she doubted her genius in that line.
“Wow.” He tripped on a vine but quickly recovered. “Ye of little faith.”
“Don’t get biblical on me again. Most books aren’t hits, is all.”
“But you’ll jinx it.”
“I always strive to blur the edge between realism and defeatism. Anyway, does it matter?”
“Does what matter?”
“The book’s success.” It was as close as she’d come to probing his motivations. She doubted he was spending so much money in hopes of experiencing the occasional air-kisses of public indifference. On the other hand, he had put few commercial pressures on Sara, had taken a smaller advance to work with a more literary editor, and seemed to get most excited when talking about the book as an experiment, a game, rather than the start of a writing career. Also, it wasn’t a lot of money for him. She’d heard two rumors regarding his net worth; the less exclamatory figure was seventy-two million.
“No, it doesn’t really matter,” he said merrily, as if he’d only now grasped how unimportant it was.
They were getting closer to their destination. The first ocean sounds made Sara think of the surf scene in From Here to Eternity. She was about to ask if Archer had seen the movie—she hadn’t, only that clip—but stopped herself. She let out a light laugh at the thought.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
Grumblingly: “I hate that.”
“I know, I know. Isn’t there an old Ukrainian proverb: ‘She who leaves her chuckles unexplained finds her tears unconsoled’?” They walked on in happy silence. Her arrangement with Archer had its drawbacks—the anonymity, the secrecy, the jealousy—but for now it suited her, and in certain frames of mind, such as the one she was in on this walk, the advantages overwhelmed the drawbacks. She was doing the best work of her life. The conservative mutual fund Archer had led her to would be a benison during the water wars of her senior citizenship. Having finally found the right allergy medication, she was putting her mouth-breathing days behind her. (That was only coincidental to her work with Archer, but it felt causal.) She was going out: to readings, restaurants, yoga classes, nightclubs. She was having sex, good sex, mostly with an IT guy whose lazy eye and atavistically leading-edge mustache made him look like a recently punched Orville Wright. He was boyfriend material in few respects, the sort of jagged playboy who couldn’t be trusted to remember a birthday but would inevitably come through with the gift of chlamydia. His strong-and-silent posturings—an encyclopedia of nods and monosyllables—were at once seductive and risible. But mostly seductive; she let her birthday pass unannounced and hoped for the best, enjoying his skinny intensity, his eyebrow scar, his slight scent of having spent many hours untangling cables under dusty cubicles. Though she knew his desire was dispersed across several subsets of womanly Buffalo, she didn’t doubt that it was strong for her, and while she hadn’t in the past been a great fan of bedroom talk, she loved how he got tal
kier during sex, full of blandishments, compliments, and instructions. His name was TJ, which she found funny and unspeakable. She hadn’t mentioned him to Archer. They didn’t talk much about her personal life, but she preferred for Archer to think of her as chastely single, or patiently steadfast. Mentioning TJ to Archer would have felt like confessing to an affair.
They came out of the forest to a more exposed part of the trail not far from the shore. Now the ground was sandy, the plant life desertic. The flat red tops of the Turk’s head cacti indeed looked like fezzes. Some needles from a different species penetrated the sole of Archer’s running shoe, and when he decided he couldn’t wait till they got to the beach to pluck them out, he sat—it was slapstick—on more cactus needles. Sara stood in the sun trying to offer moral support, the small of her back pooling with sweat. “Just leave me here for the goats,” he said, but he recovered. After passing quickly through another more forested area that was in one spot slimy and putrid with pelican guano, they were on the beach.
The sun made TV static on the water. “Swim first, eat first?” she said, pantomiming a fluctuating two-pan balance. He said he was hungry. They leaned on a rock, eating their sandwiches, apples, and witch-finger carrots, sipping water and lemonade from complicatedly sealed bottles.
“Oh, did you catch my line this morning, ‘gather my thought’? Singular. Self-mocking, right? Try and work that into EC during edits. Or you could say ’collect my thought.’”
“Where were you thinking I’d work it in?”
“Not sure.”
“I wonder if it’s funny enough to insert, you know, this late in the game.”
“It’s definitely funny. And it’s the kind of thing—people will say, ‘That’s so Archer.’ Even if they don’t remember me saying it, it’ll trigger something.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and took off his HIGHER IN CANADA T-shirt.
“Might look like a typo,” she said.
“You’ll know how to set it up.”
“Yeah, okay.”
They were both wearing their suits underneath their clothes. His patchwork-patterned trunks were short, loose, and boyish, the boyishness echoed by his inability to thoroughly apply suntan lotion. “You have blotches of lotion on your nose and cheek,” she said.