Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “Oh. Is that bad?”

  “It’s a year or two early. But they gave me a decent severance.”

  “So are you staying awhile?” John said.

  Chick laughed. “I still have a place to live, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “No, I just—I didn’t know you were coming.”

  Sara looked up. “You didn’t?” She had been reading again, or pretending to, which either way seemed teenage.

  More loudly than necessary, Chick said, “Dad, you didn’t tell John we were coming?”

  George shifted in his seat and looked out at the patio. “Yes, I told him.”

  “He didn’t,” John said. There was a brief nonverbal exchange between Sara and Chick.

  “Maybe he should get started on din-dins,” George said.

  “I only have two chicken breasts,” John said, “but they’re good-sized.”

  “No need for loaves-and-fishes theatrics,” Chick said. “We’ll just order a pie. Does Al’s still deliver?”

  “Al’s does not still deliver,” George said, “and I can’t for the life of me fathom why.”

  “They went out of business,” John said.

  “Christ,” Chick said, as if Al’s shuttering symbolized everything wrong with the world.

  “There’s another place,” John said. “I’ll call.”

  While John used the kitchen phone to order the pizzas, he heard George say, “I told him!” He returned to the family room with a bowl of almonds and George’s celery juice. “It’s supposed to help with his arthritis,” he told Chick.

  Chick was pouring himself a bourbon at the bar. “Have a seat, John.”

  George, ignoring the celery juice, shook the ice cubes in his original drink.

  Chick sat down and folded his hands between his legs. “So I’m sensing my old man’s left you in the dark here.”

  “How so?” John said.

  “Maybe I should leave,” Sara said.

  “You can stay,” Chick said.

  The seating in the family room was spread out. John and Chick sat about five feet from each other, both facing the garden but angled slightly toward one another like stereo speakers.

  “Well, John, I found George an assisted-living facility,” Chick said.

  “Oh.”

  “A nice place over in Barrington.”

  “That is news to me,” John said.

  “On the phone he told me you had a new pad lined up and everything,” Chick said.

  “He does,” George said. “Fully furnished, he says. Nattered on and on about it over dinner. His memory’s worse than mine.”

  “See, this is why he needs trained caretakers now,” Chick said.

  “The doctor says he’s doing very well for his age,” John said. “As for now, with all due respect, I think he’s just, you know, lying. It’s not a memory thing.”

  “John,” Sara said, “you really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I understand he fell not long ago when you were at work,” Chick said.

  “Yes,” John said.

  “Why you didn’t call me that night, I’ll never understand.”

  “I called Sara.”

  “Sara’s not your contact.”

  “He wasn’t badly hurt,” John said.

  “Thank God!” Chick said. “Look, it’s been great, what you’ve done, it’s been great. You reached out to us at just the right time. I know Dad’s liked having you around. But it’s not safe for him to live here anymore.” Chick turned to George, notched up the volume: “It’s not safe here, Dad.”

  “There’s no crime,” George said.

  “There’s crime,” Chick said. “Remember when you and Mom were robbed?”

  “Burgled,” Sara said.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t talking about crime,” Chick said.

  George waved dismissively.

  “So what’s the time frame?” John said. He watched his own feet tap the edge of a black-and-white rug whose strands reminded him of sea anemone tentacles.

  “I’ve got a Dumpster coming tomorrow,” Chick said, “movers on Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “For the movers. I’d like you out by Sunday. Sara’s here to help organize the small stuff. It’d be great if you were free to help too. By now you probably know better than anyone where stuff is. I thought we could start tonight, put in a long day tomorrow.”

  “You might’ve spoken directly to me ’stead of trying to send a message through Mr. Crennel.”

  Chick held out his hands like a bank teller in crisis. “I realize that now. But he told me you two had discussed everything. He seemed very lucid that night on the phone.”

  “I’m sure he was,” John said.

  “Okay,” Chick said. “Let’s not . . .”

  “It’s just, it’s abrupt.” It was all the more humiliating to be expelled like this in front of Sara.

  “You know what you should do?” Chick said.

  The question dangled like legs on a ski lift.

  “Take a vacation,” Chick resumed. “Take one on me. I’ve got miles coming out my rear end. Go to Jamaica, wherever—maybe not the Far East.”

  “No, that’s not needed.”

  “I told you I got a nice severance from those assholes. Here’s yours.”

  “If it’s a severance package, I’d rather get money.”

  “I can’t do cash.”

  John adjusted his neck. “Could you book me a hotel room in Winnipeg?”

  “Winnipeg? Why not Montreal or Toronto. Whistler’s gorgeous this time of year.”

  “I’m going to my best friend’s wedding in Winnipeg. As of now I’m booked into a rattrap.”

  “Well, why the rattrap, John? We pay you.”

  “For now,” George put in.

  John shrugged. He had figured that cheap lodging would leave him with more to spend on the chocolate package.

  “It’s Archer’s wedding,” Sara said.

  “Oh, of course,” Chick said. “Well, I can check for participating hotels in Winnipeg.”

  John’s thank-you barely sounded.

  “But if I put you up at a Sheraton in Winnipeg, that’s it. You can’t come back to me a month later saying you want to go to Venice after all.”

  John stared at Chick.

  “Let’s assemble some boxes before the food comes,” Sara said.

  The next afternoon, John followed Sara up the dog-legged staircase that led from his room to the attic. Through some maneuvering on John’s part, he and Sara had been assigned to work together on emptying the attic’s contents. Chick’s view was that everything still up there should be transferred directly to the trash—“It’s a shame we can’t fashion some kind of chute”—but Sara, who only a month earlier had been so uninterested in her grandmother’s clothes, was now inclined to be more preservationist.

  That meshed with John’s aims. He pulled on the light. In some spots the dust was as thick as mouse fur. He pointed: “Maybe you could take the west side there, and I’ll take the east.”

  “I just don’t want to throw things away indiscriminately,” she said.

  He watched her clear cobwebs from the pie-chart top of a golf bag. He said, “So here we have a box of Christmas cards and an old kite.”

  “An interesting old kite?” She went on inspecting boxes, didn’t turn around to look.

  He held the kite. “Bent. Not sure how flyable.”

  “Interesting?”

  “It’s hard for me to judge; I’m not really interested in kites period, so I can’t say. Maybe if it was—”

  “All right.”

  “—one of those Asian kites where—”

  “Toss it.”

  He walked downstairs and out to the trash. When he returned to the attic after two more hauls, Sara was sitting on her haunches with her back to John, reading one of the old typewritten pages of Marion’s novel. Except for the long delay, it had worked out exactly as he’d planned, a sil
ent game of hot or cold.

  “Something cool?” he said.

  Her shoulders jumped slightly. “What?” she said.

  “What’d you find?”

  In a clearer voice: “Nothing. Just some old school assignments.”

  Strange that she was lying. The bell-bottom corduroys that had shared box space with the pages were now resting on the attic floor next to Sara. “Your dad’s?” he said.

  “Here’s a box of cookie tins you could take down,” she said. She turned over the manuscript and pushed the box toward him as if she didn’t want him to come too close. He picked up the box, lifting with his knees though it weighed hardly anything, and returned to the rented Dumpster.

  He could hear kids playing at the country club’s pool, the diving board’s springs. He walked over to the patch of shade by the garage and leaned against the wall between the two doors, remembering how one of his Burger King duties had been to stand in the overflowing Dumpster on busy Saturdays, compacting the saucy garbage with his black, bag-covered Reeboks. It had been nice on those afternoons to be outside, away from the customers, but the task was degrading. Once, when he stepped out of the Dumpster with daubs of milkshake on his blue, elastic-backed uniform pants, he felt his chest swell up with rage and wanted to quit on the spot. Now the memory helped him see that he wasn’t obligated to stay in Lammermuir, that he was only making Sara uncomfortable and irritable, that she didn’t want to share important discoveries with him, didn’t want anything from him. He went back to his room, quietly packed a suitcase, draped his favorite suits, coats, and odd trousers over an arm, and threw everything in the trunk of the Oldsmobile. He wasn’t as tender with the clothes as he normally was, and that felt good. After releasing its front wheel, he put his bike behind the front bench. He packed a few more things, including a tennis racket that didn’t officially belong to him, and called up the stairs, “Sara, I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving where?” she yelled.

  “Just leaving.”

  The floor creaked. She stood now at the top of the stairs, he at the foot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I’m not like this, not impulsive.”

  “I think you kind of are, actually.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t mean to be creepy, but I still love you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe I’ll try to teach high school math,” he said.

  “You’d be good at that.”

  “I’ll see you at the wedding.”

  He managed to evade Chick and George on the way to his car, then started driving west, figuring he could plot a slow course to Winnipeg.

  December 2010

  In the unexpected letter containing Lucas’s plane ticket, Gemma billed the party, to be held at Archer’s condominium, as a casual and mixed celebration of their engagement and of the December holidays, “doubtless with a decorative tilt towards Christmas.” The ticket seemed like the kind of gift that would end up costing Lucas a lot of cheddar, but two mornings after the invitation arrived, Gemma called to say that, for a few more months, she still had her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; Lucas could stay there with John Anderson. By this period Lucas and Gemma were still in regular but often omissive communication. “You have an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen?” he said.

  “For a few more months.”

  He had no experience with engagement parties. They seemed to be uncommon in the Midwest among his class, and he hadn’t been part of a marrying crowd in New York. Not sure what he was in for, he had pictured a grander affair than the invitation spelled out, had seen himself making his way crabwise to the bar through clots of sycophants, microcelebrities, and travel-weary Canadian plutocrats. But as he stood with his back to the condo’s plate-glass windows, counting heads, he wondered if he’d been wrong to think of Gemma and Archer’s life together as a bustle of social amusements and obligations. He hardly credited Archer with outsize magnetism, after all, and in the past Gemma’s friends made up not so much a network as a tic-tac-toe board (or noughts and crosses). Thirty-one, maybe thirty-two heads. He was surprised to have made the cut.

  Despite Gemma’s promised decorative tilt, the only clear signs of the season were a snow globe in which Santa and three elves were playing pond hockey, two prompt-to-arrive cards placed in a ceramic bowl by the door, and the tartan skirt worn by Gemma’s approaching mother. Lucas tried to remember her first name. “Mrs. Pitchford!”

  “Good to see you again, Lucas. You’re looking well.”

  “Well fed, at least,” he said stupidly, noting an instant later that he and Mrs. Pitchford were now comparably overweight. He asked about the Pitchfords’ flight (from Seattle), how they were enjoying their weekend so far.

  “We’ve had some excitement.”

  “Losing a daughter but gaining a son,” Lucas said.

  “That too, I’m sure. What I had in mind was that, on our morning excursion, we happened, gruesomely, upon the aftermath of Mark Madoff’s suicide. Bernie’s son, this is. Hanged himself. Perhaps you’ve heard.”

  Lucas hadn’t. Over Susan’s shoulder (the name had come to him; he hoped he could sneak it in without revealing the cover-up behind his earlier formality) he saw that Archer was passing around an exotic and, it appeared, autographed stringed instrument.

  “On the second anniversary of his father’s arrest,” Susan said. As she fleshed out the story, Lucas started to suspect that she and Mr. Pitchford had happened upon the scene in a manner that included some rerouting. “A rueful affair all around,” she finished.

  “Yes.”

  “And did Gemma tell me you’ve returned to your homeland?”

  “Well, to Minneapolis.”

  “And what keeps you busy there?”

  Nothing. “I’m a shoe salesman.” Of a sort. He propped up this misrepresentation with an outright lie: “And still working as a disc jockey.”

  “Wonderful that radio has survived all these technological shifts.”

  “I work more at private events and discotheques.”

  “Do they still call them that?”

  “No. And what about you, Susan? Are you still in aviation?”

  “I was never in aviation.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “No need for apology—the field never interested me.” She was a senior scientist, she reminded him, for a company that developed protein-based therapeutics.

  He struggled with his fifth question—“Do you wear a lab coat?”—and she excused herself shortly after Gemma and John joined them.

  “So we’re roomies for the weekend?” John said.

  “I already claimed the bottom bunk.”

  “Don’t let me forget to give you boys the key,” Gemma said. “John, I’ll drop it in your large and responsible hands in deference to your experience in property management.”

  “That’s not actually what I do.”

  “I trust you all the same.” Her black ankle boots had gold floral heels and a medieval air.

  John craned to check out a late arrival. “Is Sara coming?”

  “She sent her regrets,” Gemma said. Then to Lucas: “It was kind of you to catch up with Mum.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I’m sure she likes you more now that your threat has long passed.” Gemma’s bluntness, comic but never ironic, was partly responsible for attracting Lucas in the first place, and perhaps for limiting her social sphere as well. But the charm of her whole shtick—her free-speaking, distantly monocled elegance—diminished as her circumstances enlarged. Grimier settings brought out the humor in her persona; without an incongruous backdrop, Lucas worried, she would just seem rich and affected, until she simply was rich and affected. “Oh, I’m glad to have you two together,” she said. “Archer, taking what I trust will be a happy liberty, has reserved two seats for tonight’s second set at the Village Vanguard. The Glass-Steagall Trio, I believe it is, or—it’s on
my phone—Robert—”

  “Robert Glasper?” Lucas said.

  “You have it.”

  “That jazz?” John asked.

  “Yes, it’s jazz,” Lucas snapped. Brilliant pianist; what bothered Lucas most was that Archer’s liberty was so well intuited. “Is he trying to get rid of us?” he said.

  “Of course not,” Gemma said. “You needn’t search for dark designs behind every kindness.”

  “We came all the way out here for the party,” Lucas said.

  “Which will be guttering out by the time you’ll need to leave.” Gemma’s sharpness sounded stylized but genuine. “Archer only had in mind your love of music and your straitened finances.”

  “I’ll stand you drinks,” John said to Lucas, and left for “more grub.”

  After a pause, Lucas touched Gemma’s arm. “Sorry I was ungracious.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  “Sorry,” he said again. After Gemma and Archer went public with their relationship, Lucas had worked in two, maybe three, insinuatingly critical remarks about the new boyfriend before Gemma issued a boundary-drawing rebuke. His attempts to view Archer more charitably faced a perpetual headwind, so he learned instead to avoid him as subject and person. Even before Lucas moved back to Minneapolis, he and Gemma stayed in touch mostly through the phone and occasional one-on-one drinks after work. Following Lucas’s lead, Gemma talked about Archer only in passing, and as the years sped or dragged on, she talked less about her widening travels and shrinking work (she was now self-employed and highly selective), or anything else that might call attention to their diverging fortunes. Topics of conversation, accordingly, grew narrower, centering most often on Lucas and his problems. He often hung up the phone feeling like an analysand.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll make sure to thank Archer too.”

  “He’ll want to hear all about it tomorrow at brunch.”

  He suspected that he wasn’t, in fact, forgiven, and he found himself trying to change the mood through a show of forlornness. “I wish we still lived in the same city,” he said.

  “Do you have to stay there now that your father’s passed?”

  He chafed at mortal euphemisms. “It’s a better place to be broke.”

  “Perhaps a change of locale would reignite the job search.”