Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “But it’s complicated, as they say these days,” Alan’s wife, Francine, added.

  “I’m not judgmental,” Lucas said.

  “Complicated, not sordid,” Alan said with a chesty laugh. “Well, maybe a mite sordid. Let’s see, Cole is Pamela’s third husband, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “My older brother, Charles”—he pronounced it in the French way—“was her first.”

  Of course, Motrinec’s!

  “Their separation was less than amicable,” Alan continued, “but we managed to stay on good terms with Pam.”

  “Well, I did,” Francine said. “At first it was me who kept the friendship alive.”

  “That’s true,” Alan granted. His wedding band chimed his wineglass when he took a clumsy sip.

  “You’ll need a baby bib, Alan.”

  “I’ve been eating with my left hand,” Alan explained. “Neuroplasticity.”

  “I think I read about that.”

  Alan tapped his head. “Start eating with your nondominant hand and you’ll know whether you read something or not. So are you part of the literati with Archer and his gang?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Not my bag either. I like to read history when I have time, though I did read—what was the name of that novel I stayed up to finish the other day?”

  “Loaded for Bear,” Francine said.

  “Loaded for Bear. Outdoorsman from Little Rock. I couldn’t turn the damn pages fast enough.”

  “I’ll look for it.”

  “Don’t try to finish it on a school night. But yes, Frannie kept things alive with Pam, and Cole and I have done some business together over the years.”

  The table broke to watch Gemma and her father inaugurate the dance floor.

  “What kind of business?” Lucas said after a dutifully sentimental minute.

  “Just a few stray dogs with Cole,” Alan said. “Mostly I’m in the grocery biz. My family ran a small chain of supermarkets for many years, eventually sold to a competitor. But after the noncompete expired, I got sucked back in.”

  “On an even smaller scale,” Francine said.

  “Right, sucked into a Dustbuster more than an upright Dyson.”

  “Isn’t he impossible?” Francine said.

  “We just have the one store, Select Table,” Alan said, “but we do all right.”

  “So I have to ask, are a lot of your customers bringing in their own bags?” Lucas said.

  “Oh sure, we’re seeing more of that.”

  “We were selling some for a while at the registers,” Francine said, “branded and the whole shebang, but we found—maybe this was just me, but I didn’t think they washed well: got peely, took an eternity to dry.”

  Lucas sat up straighter. “Exactly,” he said. “I bring this up, see, ’cause I have a line of reusable grocery bags, kind of a back-burner operation for me, but they’re great bags, sturdy vinyl ones available in all sorts of—an array, really, of collectible colors and designs.” He pointed to Alan’s tie. “We don’t have elephants yet, but we have one with tigers, another with llamas. Eminently washable, in cold.”

  “We have our girl do most of the laundry in cold now,” Francine said, “not just the darks. Although some detergents, I understand, aren’t activated in cold water.”

  “And these bags dry—what is it, in a twice?” Lucas said.

  “Trice, I think.”

  “Wham: dry,” Lucas said.

  “Wham, I like that,” Alan said. He nodded a few times, sucking in his lips. “Wham. What’s the name of your outfit?”

  Lucas swallowed. He had learned to downplay the name. “Brand Nubagian.”

  “Come again?”

  “Brand Nubagian.”

  “Brand Nubagian!”

  “Yes.”

  “Now that’s . . .” He trailed off contemplatively. “You say this bag outfit isn’t your principal employment?”

  “A sideline. I’ve been in banking and footwear, but I’m getting into air dryers.”

  “Hair dryers?”

  “Hot-air electric hand dryers.”

  “Ah.”

  “Like you see in restrooms.”

  “No need for further explanations,” Alan said. “The technology has reached us.” He pulled his card from his breast pocket, laid it on the heavy white tablecloth, stood up, and took Francine’s hand. “Send me a few samples, the llamas for sure.” Lucas wondered if Alan was pursuing counterinstinctual business opportunities in support of neuroplasticity. “Now if you’ll excuse us,” Alan said, “I think we’ll get in a dance or two while they’re still playing the geriatric music.”

  “You do that,” Lucas said. He tucked the card into his wallet and looked over at Karyn. She raised her eyebrows. He looked from side to side at the two-hundred-odd guests, the chocolate fountain, the buttery wallpaper, the swelling dance floor. He hoped to dance with Karyn when the music got less geriatric, though maybe for Maxwell’s sake they would have to leave early. He stood up. “Need anything?” he said to Karyn, tipping his hand to his mouth. “I’d better not,” she said, moving her hands in a steering motion.

  As he made his way to the bar, he felt a druggy combination of secret relaxation and heightened awareness, saw the room with mellow clarity, as if he’d just put on new sunglasses in a strengthened prescription. John Anderson’s hand startled his shoulder.

  “Oh! Sorry ‘bout that,” John said.

  “No, my fault,” Lucas said.

  “Y’all stay much longer at the zoo?”

  “Another half hour maybe.”

  They talked briefly about bikes, but John didn’t seem excited by the topic, and a silence fell between them too soon and too sadly for Lucas to use it to excuse himself. Some raspberry sauce had found its way to John’s lapel. “So—I didn’t ask you earlier—are you still in Chicago?”

  John took a sip of his drink. “Outside Chicago? No. To be straight up with you, I’m living in my car just now.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a full-size car so it’s not so bad.” If he wasn’t drunk, he was at least tipsy. “And I’m at the Sheraton for a few nights.”

  Lucas nodded.

  “Hey, I got a mint Wilson T2000 for sale if you’re interested. With the case.”

  “I’m not really in the market for that stuff these days.”

  Hilarity broke out by the photo booth.

  “Archer seems happy, huh?” John said.

  “Well, you’d hope.”

  “Just finished the new book,” John said. When he gestured with his drink hand, an ice cube dropped to the floor. “He let me borrow an advance so long as I promised to buy the real thing. ‘Course I would’ve anyway.”

  “And?”

  “Amazing.” He let the adjective stand on its own awhile, then said, “It’s not the kind of book I read, but he sucks you in, you know?”

  “I do.”

  “It makes me wish Sara had stuck with it more,” John said. He seemed to be looking around the banquet hall for her. Leaning into Lucas: “I think sometimes smart people just can’t stop questioning themselves, you know, all the time analyzing and second-guessing, and then in the end they don’t finish anything.” He leaned away. “Archer, he just does it. In school he had no confidence in his writing. None. Goes to show.”

  “Goes to show what?”

  “That sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of is the thing you most need to do.”

  “The thing I’m most afraid of is burning to death.”

  “Sara would never show me her stuff. Which, to level with you, kind of hurt. I always knew she must be great, though—well, you went school with her and all, so you know.”

  Lucas wasn’t sure if he ought to let this pass, or if Sara had planted the truth for him to find and disclose. “I should”—he hesitated—“I should send you one of her old stories.”

  John seemed to snap into focus. “You kept that stuff?”

  “You don
’t know the half; I keep everything. It’s on my laptop, PDF.”

  “You think she’d mind?” John said.

  “Well . . .”

  “You know, I’d love to see something. I don’t have a computer at the moment, but my phone might work, or I could stop at a library. You reckon that would work in a Canadian library?”

  “Not sure, man,” Lucas said. He reached up to put his hand on John’s shoulder. “But I’ll send it tonight.”

  John liked some of these old Motown or whatever songs, but so far only people near the poles of the age continuum were dancing, and he was starting to feel kind of Weeble-like on his feet. He put down his whiskey sour on a highboy table and walked over to the coffee station. At this juncture in his life it didn’t matter when he slept, and he would want to be alert if Lucas remembered to send Sara’s story tonight. Most of the people back at John’s table were still finishing dessert, so he returned to the same highboy, took a last swig of the whiskey, then a tongue-burning sip of coffee.

  Archer and Gemma were independently visiting each table, Archer struggling to be at his most hail-fellow-well-met. His tuxedo fit nicely but was incorrect in three or four respects. A tux, for one, should never have a notch collar, only a peak or, if you must, a shawl. A redheaded boy was circling around the back of the ballroom, leaning to his left and holding up a model airplane, making engine sounds with his lips puffed out. When the boy got closer, John called out, “Northrop P-61 Black Widow.” The boy ignored him.

  John’s most accomplished model had made the trip with him to college. His parents had driven him from Idaho Falls to Cambridge. A tarp secured over the truck bed covered three or four boxes, one of which included a basically flawless Stearman PT-17 biplane. About a month later, Archer and John were awaiting guests, women, at their suite, when Archer picked up the plane from John’s shelf. “But when I became a man,” Archer said, “I put away childish things.” Handing the model to John, he added, “You have nothing to lose but your planes.” John put the model in a bag and stashed it under his bed, but by the next morning that seemed like a half measure, and he found himself dropping the bag in a trash bin outside Santander just after sunrise. It felt like a step toward manhood at the time, but he remembered it differently now. He walked over to the boy.

  “That’s a really nice Black Widow.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hang on to it.”

  “’Kay”

  “Don’t let anyone convince you that it doesn’t have value.”

  The boy moved away, sputtering at a higher volume.

  By the time Archer made it to Karyn’s remotely situated table, she and Maxwell were the only ones sitting at it. He took the chair to the right of hers. “I’m so glad you could come,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it. This is Maxwell.”

  “Hey, Maxwell.”

  “Hi.”

  “You can keep playing,” Archer said, and Maxwell returned to his tablet.

  “I loved your book,” Karyn said. “Both books, I mean, but Gemma sent me a galley of the new one. Transporting, really. It reminded me of Jean Rhys—not that it seemed at all derivative.”

  “Wow, thank you. I did feel that something, I don’t know, clicked with that one.” He paused as if waiting for an elaboration of her compliments, then said, “Any shows coming up? My dad said he got to see you in The Cherry Orchard.”

  “Three Sisters, yeah. He and I were just reminiscing about that. But no, I haven’t acted in years.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “So what are you up to?”

  “I’m in HR,” she said.

  “The House of Representatives?”

  “That’s right. I legislate during the day and hit the stage at night, pining for Moscow.”

  “My dad said you were the best part of the show.”

  “It was an uneven production.”

  “Well, you might come back to it. I’ve been working with this guy who studied painting in his twenties, then gave it up to work in infrastructural consulting. Now he’s having his first solo show at age sixty-five.”

  “I like stories like that.” Feeling expansive, she said, “I have been fooling around with something. You know, acting is funny because”—she nodded at him—“unlike writing or music or painting, you don’t as a rule do it alone for your own amusement. But I found that you can.”

  “Like you’re talking to yourself?”

  “Putting together a play, I guess, something I’ve been performing at home. Improv-based but, you know, composed.”

  “That’s cool.”

  She hoped she didn’t sound like some crazy aspirant. “You think it’s all about crowd energy, but working without an audience can be invigorating.”

  “What kind of thing is it?”

  “You should get to that last table.”

  “They can wait. I’m curious.”

  “In a way it’s nothing; that’s what I like about it. But it’s a period piece, I guess you’d say, set in the late sixties, early seventies. A sort of hippie bildungsroman about a woman who’s dating the coleader of a psychedelic folk group.”

  “Really?”

  “And then she starts playing in the group, and—how do the summaries go?—trouble ensues.”

  “Funny, I love psych-folk from that era.”

  “You do? I wouldn’t think someone your—I was about to say ‘someone your age,’ but it’s not my era either. My play’s based on this group hardly anyone knows, the Incredible String Band, though my protagonist is an American.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, I knew it’d be hard enough making the guys sound Scottish, and I figured—”

  “No, I mean, they’re my favorite band!”

  “Seriously?”

  “So your heroine’s like a Rose- or Licorice-type figure?”

  “Yes! I was thinking of Licorice in particular.”

  “Christina McKechnie.”

  “My God, you know her real name.”

  “I told you, they’re my favorite band. I followed them around the UK on one of their reunion tours a few years back—Licorice wasn’t with them, of course—then did the same thing last year when Mike Heron was out doing some shows with his daughter. His voice is a bit worse for wear but still great.”

  “But his voice has always been rough, right?” she said. “That’s what’s so affecting about it; he’s always stretching to make the best of things.”

  “Oh my God, Smiling Men with Bad Reputations?”

  “So fucking good.”

  “A lost classic.”

  “I can’t listen to ‘Flowers of the Forest’ without crying,” she said.

  “Me, I know you like I know the song in my soul,” he sang off-key, closing his eyes.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” she sang.

  They sat for a moment without talking, as if they were hearing the song over the noise of the crowd and the Adele song that was actually playing. He pulled out his phone, scrolled for a half minute, and held up a photo to her face.

  “What’s that, a gimbri?” she said.

  “Ding ding ding! You’re hardcore, eh?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sharpied by Robin himself.” He waved at Gemma. “Well, I have to get to that table you mentioned.” He touched the veiny back of her hand. “I need to read your play.”

  “Oh, like I said, it’s hobby work.”

  “Dude, I need to read your play.”

  Dude?

  “You can’t be at brunch?” he confirmed.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Remember that joke? I’m a frayed knot.”

  “No.”

  “It’s about a rope in a bar.” He stood up. “I’ll call.”

  “Are you feeling quite all right?” Gemma asked. She was the third person to express concern over Sara’s intestinal health.

  “Yes, fine,” Sara said, watching the swing of Gemma’s gold drop e
arrings.

  “I understand you had a rather trying night.”

  “But I’m fine now.”

  “I suffer horridly from motion sickness so I can empathize—oh!”—Gemma’s unmistakably American-accented sister was pulling her by the arm to dance. “Feel better!” Gemma called out.

  “I do!”

  John replaced Gemma from his nearby lurking station. His linen suit was the color of milky coffee and wrinkled in a way suggestive of a transoceanic flight spent restlessly in coach; his knit tie was partly undone, and his normally shaven upper cheeks were stubbled. She couldn’t tell if he seemed refreshingly loosened up or scarily unhinged. He hadn’t been given a role in the wedding, and though he was normally forgiving to a fault, during the service—she had sat one pew behind him—she detected a bitter profile when Seth, the best man, pulled out the ring. “I’m sorry you were so sick last night,” he said.

  “Could we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.” They stood for a moment. Sara watched two little girls spin each other on the hem of the dance floor. “You look great,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She was wearing a floral-print dress of, for her, unusual bravado. John didn’t seem as laid-back as usual, but still Sara felt the calming, room-changing effect he could have, like when you turn on the vacuum and all the lights dim.

  “Since we’re here, should we dance?” he said.

  “Ahm.”

  “One song.”

  There are times when the mere knowledge of being loved and desired is pleasure and comfort enough, and times when you’re more susceptible than that.

  He held up his index finger. “Just one.”

  Maxwell stepped shyly onto the floor when the DJ honored his request for Jay-Z, and Karyn wondered if this was the last time until his own wedding that he’d be willing to dance in such proximity to his mother. Lucas had taken off his oversized suit jacket and was sometimes mouthing the words with Maxwell, sometimes looking at Karyn, sometimes bobbing slowly and sexily toward her, then backing off at the same rate. He danced almost imperceptibly, like a buoy on a calm lake.

  Karyn had allowed herself one more drink after all, and she wondered with a blink of paranoia if she ought to be observing a just-in-case teetotalism. Over the past twenty-four hours, the idea of a second kid had drifted sporadically into her realm of consideration, which was also the realm of miscarriages and complications and four a.m. feedings redolent of supposedly pain-relieving menthol gel. How could she lift a child anymore; how could she rest a crying three-year-old on her hip while opening the door to an overpriced day care with one hand? The kid would be touch deprived, would grow up to slaughter a farm family for thirty-seven dollars and a bag of Doritos. It was good, at least, to be alone with the decision. Were Jason and she still together, he would want the baby (he never bought her argument that having more than one child was environmentally immoral, and in fact he took the opposite line, that population decline would eventually become macro-economically disastrous, that people should stop being so selfish and churn out more kids). He would defer to her in theory, but with a sulkiness pointing to enduring resentment from one party or another. The DJ millimetered up the volume. Archer’s thickset friend from the zoo, moving in small but zealous circles with Archer’s unfriendly yeoman or proofreader, bumped into Karyn and apologized in a deep, blunted twang. “No worries,” she said, and smiled at Lucas. Still, if she wasn’t ready to say that no aspect of her life had been as fulfilling as motherhood—too soppy to say that, too self-denying—she was willing to say that no aspect had been more fulfilling, and as she looked at Maxwell, growing up to be so kind and funny and smart and handsome, and at Lucas, whom, she admitted it now, she was falling for, she wondered if a baby, an expanded family, was the unknown she needed, one that had announced itself in this strangely fortunate city, in the winter of her fertility, one that would enrich rather than negate her plans for middle age.