A Replacement Life

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A Replacement Life Page 6

by Boris Fishman


  –4–

  MONDAY, JULY 17, 2006

  Everybody’s on shpilkes,” said Arianna Bock, Slava’s cubicle neighbor, the dimes of her eyes appearing above the fiberglass divider between them.

  “Big day,” Slava said, trying to sound casual.

  “Big day for Slava Gelman?” she said, flitting the tips of her fingers over an imaginary keyboard.

  “Did you see what I wrote?” he said. “It’s in the database.”

  She nodded, a flicker of disagreement passing over her face. He noticed her: pale skin, a slash of red lips, a frizz of charcoal hair. A large birthmark spanned both halves of her right eyelid. It reunited and broke again when she blinked.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Nothing, it’s great,” she said.

  The deception cut into him, but he didn’t pursue it. “It’s time for your walk,” he said drily. Every morning at eleven, Arianna vanished for a constitutional, as she called it. Cannons could be firing on the palace, but everything would wait until her return. He admired and resented her skillful oblivion.

  She smiled, forgiving the sharpness in his voice.

  “And where today?” he said.

  “You don’t know until you get outside,” she said. “That’s the point. You should come.”

  The thought of wandering without editorial purpose filled Slava with anxiety. Unlike Arianna, he had things to do. Slava owed laughs to “The Hoot.” Upon ascending to the editorship two years before, Beau Reasons had decided the magazine needed humor, and so Slava was assigned to scour regional newspapers for slipups, flubs, and double entendres, to which Century appended a wry commentary (the rejoinder, in Century talk). Slava would find in the Provincetown Banner:

  The dog Claude Monet, who was lost last week and whose disappearance has been extensively covered by this newspaper, was found yesterday by the banks of the Pamet River.

  Century would add:

  He must have thought the light superior there.

  If Slava managed to clear through the pile of Union-Tribunes and Plain Dealers on his desk before quitting time, he launched into the stories he himself was trying to write. There was no time for walks to . . . where? They were in Midtown, a cold needle-forest of skyscrapers, striped shirts, pencil skirts, flats, barrettes, crinkling brown sandwich bags of the sort Slava had used to cover his first American schoolbooks, bodies in perpetual sidestep, instructions barked into a cell phone . . . No, Slava didn’t want to go outside. His life had a shape, hermetically sealed: on one end the office where he spent the daylight hours, on the other the apartment where he slept, between them the long underground rod of the 6 train. No walks.

  He studied the treacherous slingshot of Arianna’s clavicle. She knew all about it—in the summer, you could count on one hand the number of times she wore sleeves. Not that Slava counted. Unlike Slava, who remained in the office to work on his writing, Arianna went home at six sharp—“I need to veg” was her announcement, as if she had depleted herself mowing a field. Arianna, a fact-checker, had the eagerness of the red checking pencil anchoring the bun of her hair. He had no time for her, if that’s how it was. Besides, Slava stayed clear of anything that could turn into something. He had precious little free time as it was.

  However, sometimes curiosity bested even Slava’s leonine will, and he listened to the noise she made on the other side of the divider. White, blocky teeth eviscerating the leisure end of an old-fashioned pencil. The hollow thump of a bracelet against the Lucite of which their desktops were made. A back cracking in both directions, then the knuckles. The rabbity progress of teeth down the rims of a sunflower seed. Boots jangly with some kind of spur. Hooting laughter, as if there were no one else in the room.

  Sometimes, when she wasn’t at her desk, Slava would peek over. Arianna ate almost nothing but salads, occasionally a pair of hard-boiled eggs without mayonnaise. The plastic containers remained on her desk, unfinished and open, until the end of the day, when he heard the day’s purchases hitting the walls of the garbage can: coffee cup, salad container, eggshells. Occasionally, these items missed and landed on the floor, or she left them on her desk altogether. Arianna maintained the American attitude toward help: It was their job. Souvenirs from the day’s salad decorated her tabletop: a triangle of lettuce, a streaky olive, a full anchovy. After she walked out, Slava tidied up on her side.

  It was thanks to Arianna that Slava had found himself assigned to observe a new feat by an urban explorer. Beau had appeared before the Junior Staff pen—it really was a pen; the sixteen Juniors sat behind a railing like zoo rhinos—and thrown out an invitation to contribute to Century—an invitation to contribute to Century—as if he was merely adjusting ad count for the upcoming issue.

  While everyone was busy being stunned—except for Peter Devicki, naturally; Peter, the only Junior to have published anything in the magazine, had his hand up before he knew what Beau was asking for—Arianna stared incandescently at Slava’s temple. He looked over. Her eyes were fixed on him like headlights. She would have raised his arm for him if she could.

  “Listen,” she said now, draping her forearms on the divider. Five copper bracelets rattled against the fiberglass. Her nails were boyishly short and girlishly red. “This is tacky, but sometimes tacky’s just the thing. Imagine yourself winning this afternoon. Do something as if you got it.”

  “Like what?” he said. “Champagne bath in Bean’s office?”

  “Don’t make fun,” she said. “I said it was corny. What are you going to do? Get on the phone, call your parents, and tell them to buy next week’s issue. Because it’s going to have a story by you in it.”

  “It’s bad luck to celebrate beforehand,” he said.

  “The point is to do it when it’s impractical.”

  “They think I’ve been writing for this magazine for three years,” he said. “That’s what I told them when I got hired, so they wouldn’t feel bad.”

  “What would they have you do?”

  Slava threw up his hands.

  “All right,” she said. “I have to go.”

  He was chagrined to have her give up so quickly. “How did you know I wanted to do it?” he said in a rush. “The way you looked at me when Beau came around.”

  “You’d have to be deaf and mute not to know,” she said.

  He watched her walk away. Despite his spying on her, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might spy in return. Arianna Bock wasn’t really a noticer. This Slava knew with a husband’s knowledge—in the last year and a half, he had spent more time within a foot of this hieroglyphic presence than within any other, a melancholy statistic. She marched around the Junior Staff pen heedless of its funereal quiet, forgot what she was told, and cast out of mind things that refused to clarify themselves with efficiency. At the Friday-afternoon Junior Staff assignment meetings, she responded to Mr. Grayson, their voluminous chief, as if they were both senior editors rather than she someone dependent on his goodwill and desire to employ her. Once he had asked her if she was interested in fact-checking a story, and she’d said: Are you really asking? Everyone laughed. Even Mr. Grayson.

  He looked down at his desk phone. They were all still there, at Grandfather’s. Only Slava had left. The events of the previous day, momentarily sidelined by Arianna, refilled his mind. You had to give her that: She filled the frame of your thinking.

  The idea had been Beau’s. He had replaced Martin Graves, the Patriarch, deceased after forty-six years at the helm. (Mugging for history, Mr. Graves went not at the breast of some wet nurse but in his office chair, making his faint disapprobations on a sheaf of magazine copy.) Mr. Graves’s late phase had some peculiar concerns. There had been a strange piece by a Papuan cannibal (in Dani, the cannibal language), as transcribed by a Canadian linguist, and an even stranger one by Frank Moy, the war reporter, about soap operas. But no one was going to touch Martin Graves until he was retired by the angels.

  In any case: An assignment had fallen through
; the money had already been spent; what if, in lieu, Beau sent a Junior? These, deranged with dispossession and dreams, thought they could write articles a thousand times better than what those overpaid marquee writers turned in. They’d do it for free, too. Century paid writers three dollars a word: You do the math. Beau would send two just in case—two times zero in fees was still zero, and competition bred innovation. He did that sometimes even for the senior writers, which caused no small amount of consternation because book contracts were not given out to someone bylined “Staff.” The senior editors would make a clinic of the whole thing: The Monday-afternoon Senior Staff meeting would be open to the full masthead, the choice between Peter and Slava put to a vote.

  Berta picked up. In his frailty, Grandfather could not be bothered to answer the telephone. “I’ll get him for you,” she said.

  “Yes,” Grandfather said a minute later, as if answering an already posed question. His voice sounded like raked gravel.

  “Buy a copy of the magazine next week,” Slava said, feeling stupid.

  “What?” Grandfather said. “When?”

  “Sorry—how are you feeling?”

  “What?” he said again.

  “Come on. You know what I’m saying.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Just buy the magazine,” Slava said.

  “Why?”

  “It’ll have a story I wrote.”

  “Where am I supposed to find it? What is it called?”

  “It’s called Century. You know this.”

  “Sancher,” he said. “Hold on, let me write it down.”

  “No—Century. You’re not trying.”

  “I am eighty years old, and my wife died yesterday. Do you understand that, or you’re already on with your life? S like a Russian S?”

  “No. Yes. C. Like a Russian S.”

  “Then?”

  “E. Same in both. Then a backward Ee—N. Then a T—same in both. Then that horseshoe.”

  “What horseshoe?”

  “Just draw a horseshoe.”

  “Open side down?”

  “No, up.”

  “I had horses. One was called Beetle, and one was called Boy.”

  “Next is an R. An English R. Like our ya but backward.”

  “Ya backward . . .” Grandfather repeated dejectedly. “I need Berta.”

  “She speaks even less English than you,” Slava said. “Come on, you can do it. Ya backward. And then—this is the last one—a Y. Same in both.”

  On the other end of the line, Grandfather studied the paper. “Sancher,” he read.

  In the preceding years, Slava had tried to propose to his superiors at Century stories of the kind he saw in the magazine every week. He prayed and broke bread with five young evangelical men from Ohio who had come to New York to test their faith in the most depraved place they could think of. He jumped on a trampoline with a runaway to the Big Apple Circus who was a Ph.D. in semiotics and was writing a semiotics of the tightrope. One Saturday, Slava clawed ninety-one dollars from the cold, dead fingers of his bank account and took a Peter Pan bus to the Massachusetts town where the fourth synagogue built in America was going to become the first Staples in town. A town baker who had stayed kosher even though too few Jews remained to notice—he was wise to persist; soon non-Jews would be buying more kosher products than Jews, another story Slava would try to give Century—had appeared at the grand opening to protest. (“Destroying a heritage?” his placard said in wandering Sharpie. “Come to Staples! That Was Easy.™”) The baker gave Slava another lead: an underground international bidding war for Hitler’s personal map of Europe by a Belgian industrialist with neo-Nazi proclivities and the British Orthodox Jew (a third cousin of the baker) who wished to procure it first so he could destroy it.

  None of it had worked, Slava did not understand why. Had his submissions been received? Slava inquired with the IT department, but his e-mail appeared to be working; Mr. Grayson was managing to get through with brainless new assignments with no difficulty. Archibald Dyson (the senior editor) probably never opened Slava’s e-mails in the first place. Slava could write Arch that he had humped his wife outside a liquor mart on Tuesday afternoon and Arch would never know. Arch thought he was spam.

  An image of Slava’s grandfather spun out of the screen of Slava’s desktop one hopeless afternoon: I have beaten a man eyeless for saying “kike” out loud. I put enough goys in my pocket to get your mother into Belarus State. We left only with what we could carry and now your parents have a Nissan Altima and a Ford Taurus. So, lift your ass from your ergonomic work chair and put this Dyson’s nose directly into whatever it is that you do, with a little two-finger pinch at the base of the neck if that helps. We have seen your kind, Mr. Archibald, and we have seen worse, so why don’t you give this a read.

  Slava did it, minus the pinch of the neck and plus a bout of diarrhea nervosa, but this did not have the result intended by Grandfather-genie.

  Slava pressed forward. On a weekend, feeling war-roomish, he bought a wipe board and wrote out on its left side the previous issue’s table of contents. To the right of each entry, he assigned the story a category:

  Profile of eccentric personage

  Interview with famous person

  Story of a stunt action

  International report

  Highlight of social issue

  Memoir of picayune childhood experience

  Famous people and international reports he could do nothing about—he didn’t know any famous people, and he didn’t have the money to go to the nearest war. But the rest: They had an eccentric personage, he had an eccentric personage (the baker). They had a stunt action, he had a stunt action (the evangelicals). And while the Jewish evacuation of Rhode Island was perhaps not as pressing an issue as the epidemic of underage mothers, it was along the same spectrum, that could not be denied. Was Slava required to produce a memoir of Little League times or learning to bake with his mother? Slava cursed his mother for never teaching him how to bake, and the full Gelman clan for keeping him busy translating credit-card offers until it was too late to join Little League.

  No, it couldn’t be the subjects. It had to be the style. Slava returned to the issue and reread every article. Then he went to a bin where he kept old issues and reread the last six issues, this time latitudinally: the opening story across all six; the next story across all six; the closing story. He experienced the Egyptologist’s tremor upon stumbling on Nefertiti’s lunch bowl: He had decoded the pattern. The wipe board full, Slava started taping note cards on the refrigerator, the fridge burping in acknowledgment of this first garlanding since its purchase.

  Article A. Opening part: The Scene. Sentence One: Specific Date. “On January 27, 2005, Avery Coulter went outside to clear his driveway of the heavy snowfall that had blanketed Rochester, New York, the previous night.”

  The prose made the obvious elegant—you could not very well shovel snow anywhere but outside, could you, but one didn’t mind with such a sinuous sentence—and though it stayed well shy of the fences, the tempered, diffident tone was like a mother’s hand on the cheek. Absent a mother, a Beau Reasons.

  Onward. We watch Avery start to shovel the driveway; his neighbor owns a Range Rover; the township recently cleared a nearby creek’s overflow tubes of debris (the randomness of the details only adds to their aristocratic, mysterious elegance); booltykh—Avery feels a strain in his lower back. He knows something’s wrong. Section break.

  Section Two: The Issue. “Tens of thousands of Americans strain their backs shoveling snow every year, leading to millions of lost workdays and tens of millions of dollars in hospital bills. Many Americans have snowblowers, but quality machines are pricey indulgences, at five hundred dollars and more. It was while Coulter, an entrepreneur, was laid up after his unsuccessful driveway clearing—according to Forbes, Coulter has enough money for a million snowblowers, but that morning he wanted some exercise—that he thought: There has got to be a better way.�


  Section 2A: The Quote. “‘I hadn’t shoveled a driveway since I was seventeen,’ Coulter said on a recent afternoon. ‘So I guess it served me right. But it wiped me out for a week. I thought about people who don’t have the luxury of that. And that’s when I thought: SnowGlow.’

  “Coulter, who specializes in domestic use of nuclear energy, imagined a negligibly radioactive field that could melt the snow in your yard [note the smooth intimacy! not a yard but your yard] at the rate of a square foot a second. Don a protective suit, warn the neighbors, flip a switch, and voilà: snow into snowmelt.”

  And we’re off. A biographical section on Coulter, quotes from a current (ingratiating) and a former (passive-aggressive) associate, a skeptical comment about runoff from someone in Energy, a zoom-out about the state of nuclear, and then the semi-autistic peter-out of the end: “The winter has been especially persistent in Rochester this year. On a recent afternoon, Coulter was in his driveway, pulverizing a snowfall with SnowGlow. By his count, it was number sixteen of the season. He had been spending more time at home than ever. In his hazmat suit, he looked a little like an extra from Red Dawn. It was nearly dark when his wife called him to dinner. ‘In a minute!’ he yelled. He sounded like a kid reluctant to let go of a toy.”

  It was too easy. Why had Slava waited to do this till now? He poured himself a celebratory glass of brandy from a bottle that Grandfather, who reacted with dismay to homes without high-quality alcohol, had pressed on him. Slava clinked the bottle with his glass. The peal rang through the room and loosed the Grandfather-genie once more. Again, the genie growled at Slava. How does the clever aspirant seal the certainty of impending success? it asked him. Slava slapped his forehead.

 

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