Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  Because it seemed appropriate to reward his forbearance with another sensual thing, he started running water for a bath. It wasn’t much of a treat; he found baths dull and uncomfortable unless he was sick or chilled, usually stayed in for less time than it had taken to fill the tub. Tonight he got in when the water was just a few inches deep, easing his back against the cold, suctioning fiberglass, and as the water crept up his legs he started thinking again about Karyn. A year ago he would have said that he’d only been in love twice: with his first girlfriend, who was also the first girl he’d kissed (confirmation retreat, fishing dock), and with Gemma. But that reckoning, he now believed, was too conservative. There’d been an unrequited love from high school that was short-lived at full strength but that still lingered, and an only briefly requited love from college, and a love he suspected was requited but unspoken on both sides, and maybe one other that he wouldn’t admit to because it ended so badly. And he knew he loved Karyn. There was something mysterious and pheromonal about her that had hit him from the start and was getting to him more and more, along with things easier to identify: her quarter-smile wit, her variegated hair, her steely intelligence, her easy manner with Maxwell, her ass in those bike shorts. He expanded on that last thought for a few minutes, and before long the bathwater seemed poorly constituted for a lingering soak.

  He dried off in the regular manner, moved to the bed, and picked up the galley of The Second Stranger. He had started the book mostly on Karyn’s account and to confirm his revived suspicion that Archer was a soulless charlatan. So far, unfortunately, he hadn’t found much evidence in that line, save for a few irritating word choices and an interloping passage comparing clitoral with vaginal orgasms. All in all the book was pretty well done. Not to say that he liked it any more than the black-and-white photos that paddingly illustrated it; it was slow, meandering, sometimes primpingly belletristic, the sort of book he used to admire and abandon back when he took on and abandoned admirable books. But it was the work of someone who more or less knew what he was doing. Archer’s competence never failed to infuriate Lucas, no matter how many times he discovered it. He set the book down on the unoccupied side of his enormous bed and tried to fall asleep, but after an alert forty minutes, part of which he spent draping sheets and other ad hoc shrouds over the room’s static light show of digital clocks, TVs, phones, smoke detectors, and DVD players, he returned to the book, mostly with hopes of sleep inducement.

  The next section—there were no proper chapters but many breaths of white space—was a long flashback about an epistolary romance between two kids separated by seventy miles of Idaho interstate and county road. The section confused Lucas, both because it wasn’t clearly germane to, or as good as, the rest of the book, and because it seemed familiar. His first thought, illogical but typical, was that he had dreamed the events depicted in the flashback. Déjà vu for him was always the feeling of experiencing something previously dreamed, which mostly made him regret that he never dreamed anything prophetic or psychologically instructive.

  As he read on, he came to the less paranormal conclusion that he had read the chapter before—under a different author’s name. Not just a run-of-the-mill charlatan, then, a plagiarist! A dumb one at that, since if Archer was stealing from texts familiar to Lucas, he couldn’t be digging into the deepest stratum of esoterica. Lucas tried to step back from these accusations, thinking he’d skimmed the excerpt in that “20 Under 40” circle jerk and had later suffered some sort of literary amnesia, which wouldn’t be unusual, considering that—

  Then he laughed out loud, not sure if he was laughing with or at Sara and her lazy brilliance.

  Part Two

  Postnuptial

  July 2011

  Appazato was said to be the oldest and most luxurious country club in Manitoba, though Sara didn’t imagine that to be the grandest of distinctions, and she had overheard one of Archer’s uncles admit that Niakwa had the better course. It was a hot, humid afternoon, and as she walked uphill from the well-kept but nonluxuriously concrete tennis courts, she felt as if she were walking through a cloud of her own sweat. When she reached the top of the hill, she saw that Gemma was standing on the brick porch of the club’s Georgian command post and inn.

  “Did you drum up a match?” Gemma asked.

  “With a somewhat temperamental ball machine,” Sara said. “I lost.”

  “I used to muck about with that, but now it aggravates my injury.” She touched her shoulder.

  A few windows were open despite the air-conditioning, and Sara could make out a guest playing watercolor piano in what might have been called the club’s drawing room. “Are you waiting for someone?” Sara asked.

  “Not expressly. I stand on porches sometimes in bouts of nostalgie de la fumée.” She took a deep breath as if she were trying to cure hiccups. “Mostly I’m putting off getting ready for dinner. It’s dangerous for me to stand at prolonged length before mirrors, so I pursue these dilatory stratagems.”

  “Oh, but you’re beautiful,” Sara said. “I’m sure you’ll look beautiful.” Maybe that sounded too sadly envious. A long sedan purred by senescently.

  Gemma thanked her, then looked behind her as Archer stepped out of the black double doors. “Oh! Here I said I wasn’t waiting for anyone,” Gemma said, “but I see now that I was waiting for you.”

  Archer smiled. His plaid shirt was 43 percent unbuttoned.

  “But I can’t stay—’Hello, I must be going.’ Will you be wearing the blue?”

  “The blue?” Archer said.

  “It doesn’t matter. We needn’t complement each other in dress. We’re to remain individuals, after all. We won’t begin speaking at all times in the first person plural, will we?”

  They would, he said, “but satirically.”

  “Aren’t you clever,” she said, and left.

  “Thanks for the racket,” Sara said, arriving by chance at a double meaning. She brushed some of its flaking grip off her palm. “Or is now a bad time for you to take it back? I can hang on to it if you want.”

  “Now’s fine,” he said. He waved at another passing motorist. “Is your room okay?”

  “It’s great,” she said quietly. All over again she was nervous around him, obsequious in a way that seemed completely unlike her and completely beyond her control. Over the past few months, as the book’s August pub date approached, Archer had returned as overseer, sending considered replies to her e-mails, texting her half-formed ideas and bits of news, calling or Skyping when he felt the need for a more detailed conference, proceeding as if things should return smoothly, without comment, to normal. It was as if they were staying together for the sake of the children. And things did more or less return to normal, except now it was all friendly formality in place of teasing rapport, and where Sara was previously determined to change or sabotage her employment, now she was comparably eager to preserve it. She was never as tenacious about staying put, however, as she was about breaking free.

  “I need to give a toast tonight,” Archer said. “Maybe you could help.”

  “Sure, of course.” Perhaps this was just the thing to relax their starchy rapprochement toward their old near-intimacy. “D’ya think I need to, though?” Better not to leap in. “It’s a toast, not an address.”

  “But I feel I have a certain reputation for wordsmithery to uphold. I know you’d punch things up, smooth things out, whatever’s needed.”

  “Maybe just deliver it extemporaneously. You’re very eloquent off the cuff.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.” Now she regretted her demurral. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m definitely up for helping. I guess we’d have to do it now.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

  She smiled.

  “You doing good here?” he asked.

  “Doing good deeds? No, I never do those.”

  “Doing well?”

  “Yes. Very well, actually.”
/>   “I thought I’d see you at lunch.”

  “I went to see those Kertészes I love at the WAG,” she said, “and then I was busy writing. I’ve been writing a lot. I meant to tell you this earlier, but last month a novel came to me, came to me practically in full.”

  “Like in a dream?”

  “More like an epiphany. It was just, presto, there—or for the most part there; I’m still contemplating the ending. But I’m working so quickly. I feel like Stendhal or Kerouac or Trollope or someone like that.”

  “Or those novel-in-a-month people.”

  “Well, no, not like that,” she said. “I’ll show it to you soon.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “I’m writing it partly on the clock. So it’s yours, really.”

  “Not so loud!” he whispered. “Jesus.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m—”

  But now he was chuckling, and she berated herself for being too apologetic.

  By the time the groom’s dinner rolled around, she felt ill-equipped for society and was relieved to be placed next to an absentee grand-aunt and an eight-year-old model-airplane enthusiast who didn’t want to talk about it.

  Two short speeches preceded Archer’s. “As many of you probably know,” he was saying now, having tripped through his introductory remarks, “I have a book coming out in just over a week. Thank you, and thank you in advance for your multiple purchases. Feel free to whip out your phones right now and place your preorder.” He looked around the room. “I’m serious. The title is The Second Stranger, and Bondarenko is b-o-n-d . . .” He had one hand on the back of his chair; in the other he was holding a glass of red wine at an angle that couldn’t have been popular with the cleaning staff. “But, uh, writers often say their books are like their children, right? And I think that’s true. You spend all this time with them, try to do right by them, as my parents did right by me.” He nodded to his mother and stepfather, then to his father. “And you love them despite their imperfections—ditto—and then you send them out into the world, where they take on their own unpredictable lives. If you’re lucky, they never call you at two a.m. asking for bail money.” Laughter. “So it’s an apt metaphor—which must make this a shotgun wedding.” He tipped his head. “I hope I’m not showing, eh? But”—he consulted his notes—“without, let’s see, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that I couldn’t . . .” He glanced in Sara’s direction; he seemed unusually nervous. “Sorry, I can’t claim to be the Seneca of modern Manitoban oratory. Who I meant was Cicero.”

  “You got this, bro!”

  “I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that I didn’t make this baby alone.”

  Sara’s heart rate accelerated. She thought, He’s going to reveal me right now to everyone.

  He went on, “This is a book—spoiler alert—about a love that doesn’t work out. And there’s no way I could have written and revised and revised . . . and revised”—this final revised he huffed with little-engine-that-could perseverance—“and gone through the whole obsessive ballet that gets a book from acorn to Amazon, as it were—I couldn’t have done that if I didn’t know about a love that did. And is. And will. Work out, I mean to say. Was that track-able? And this woman”—he stepped to his right, put his hand on Gemma’s shoulder—“is . . . I don’t know how to put it.”

  But he tried, and acquitted himself reasonably well. His fumbling enhanced his sincerity. Sara would have made things too clever.

  Feeling foolish and sick to her stomach, Sara left the dinner at the first opportunity. For an hour or so she sat in bed hunched over her laptop, listening to the din and then hum of the more lingering guests. Her room seemed moneyed precisely in its cramped, outdated modesty. There were dowdy floral drapes, two ornithological prints, a diamond-patterned carpet, and a green club chair with an icicle of stuffing hanging from its black cambric bottom. After the party broke up, she started to hear the younger relatives walking, talking, and laughing in the halls. Sara was one of only three non-relations staying at the club, and though that was a kind of honor, she also felt out of place and conspicuously lonely. She tried composing a handful of tweets to be parsed out on Archer’s account over the next week, including a few demonstrative options to post during the wedding party, but her stomach discomfort forced rest. She lay on the nubby white bedspread, trying to quell her nausea through stillness and denial without letting that denial keep her from making it in time to the toilet.

  She spent much of the night lying on the bathroom floor, partly on a moplike bath mat, partly on cold hexagonal tiles that felt dusty but weren’t. Around two o’clock she had occasion to remember that Archer’s high school rock band had been called the Dry Heaves, and she thought of how thin the walls were, how to a few of the guests she would now be known not as the strange, friendless woman who worked in some enigmatic capacity for Archer, but as the strange, friendless, pukey and diarrheal woman who worked in some enigmatic capacity for him. By three she was taking cold comfort in the idea that her embarrassment was only her vanity; that, after all, no one cared, no one was listening, no one knew who she was or which room she was in. She wished someone would come to take care of her, stroke her hair, ease her back into bed, so that in the morning she would be inexplicably dressed in a fresh, oversized T-shirt, her rinsed pajamas drying on the shower rod, and on the bedside table there would be a tray of fruit and toast and those little sealed bottles of uncommonly flavored jams.

  But of course she woke up to none of that.

  John sat cross-legged on the dewy grass, rotating the sleeve around his coffee cup while uncomprehendingly watching a cricket match. He took a photo of the bowler (was it?), posted it, and lay down with his knees up. Maybe he would stay on for a week or two in Winnipeg. After a half hour or so, he strolled over to the zoo, where blue peafowl roamed free. He was kneeling to inspect a male when he noticed a thinner Lucas Pope walking toward him with an unknown woman, north of forty it looked, and a boy of eleven or twelve. John held out his hand so they wouldn’t disturb the bird. “Amazing creature,” he whispered. It walked away, and John stood up. “Quite a coincidence.”

  “Well, your Instagram inspired our trip,” Lucas said.

  “You should’ve texted. We could have met up.”

  “We did meet up.”

  “Looks like you’ve lost weight.”

  “Yeah, but I found some of it—that’s my joke. So this is my friend Karyn Bondarenko, Archer’s cousin, and her son, Maxwell.”

  John reached out his hand. “Pleased. Archer and I go way back.”

  “You’re already dressed for the wedding,” the woman said.

  “I might go straight there.”

  “But this guy’s known for his gear,” Lucas said. “He’s always, you know, to the nines.”

  John leaned down slightly toward the boy. “What do you know?” It was a question he’d picked up from George. He liked its open-endedness.

  “About what?”

  “These critters, if you like.”

  “Zoos are kind of sad.”

  They parted ways at the musk oxen.

  John drove on to the Exchange District, where the paving stones looked like imbricated dog bones, the buildings looked like Chicago, and the photograms at an Archer-endorsed gallery looked like the grease-stained interiors of oven windows. “It looks,” John started to say to the gallerist, then stopped, fearing he would sound naïve. “Like a.” He had hit on the idea of feigning some sort of speech impairment. “Window.”

  “Yes.” The gallerist’s arms were folded.

  “From,” he said.

  She turned her head toward him.

  “A stove.”

  “I see that,” she said. “I do.”

  And then it was time to drive to the ceremony.

  At the wedding dinner Lucas was seated between Maxwell, now clinking at the smears and crumbs of his cake, and Alan Motrinec, a shinily balding sexagenarian with
rows of dancing elephants on his light-blue tie. Alan and his wife didn’t fit in with the relatively young and artistic table, and Lucas guessed that they’d been set aside like tricky monochrome puzzle pieces during the seating debates, then dumped here as a last resort. During dinner they had mostly murmured to each other, though they did exchange scattered banalities with the photographer Jessica Kim and her new boyfriend, and with Lucas when he wasn’t talking football with Maxwell or listening to Karyn discuss politics with a young authority on Inuit sculpture. “So I didn’t catch your connection to the happy couple,” Lucas said to Alan as the waiter poured decaf. “Happy couple” seemed like an expression Alan would like.

  “We’re old friends of Cole and Pamela.” It took Lucas a moment to remember that Cole and Pamela were Archer’s parents. Alan took his last bite of cake with what seemed to be compromised dexterity. Advanced stage of stroke rehab, Lucas guessed.