Plus One

by Christopher Noxon

  “I’m telling you, dude,” he said. “The Plus One thing? It’s the best.”

  “The what?”

  “You know—what you are. And me. And—” Huck arched an eyebrow toward their tablemates, slugging back the last of the house wine. “The hot mommies getting shitfaced while all the power-partner spouses work the room? We’re the Plus Ones.”

  Alex suddenly flashed again on the invite. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything beyond the curlicue lettering. Now he plucked the card out of his coat pocket and inspected the small print at the bottom of the card. There it was, in small Helvetica type the same size as the instructions for parking: Plus One.

  “You gotta claim that shit,” Huck said, leaning back. “I say it loud and proud to anyone and everyone—that way no one can ever use it against me. I don’t ever forget. Look—today at two in the afternoon I was sipping mint-cucumber water at a spa on Robertson getting my whole business…” Huck waved generally at his midsection, “waxed. A brozilla, they call it. I’ve done the trimming and clipping and manscaping—but this is a whole new level. I’m cleaner than I’ve ever been in my whole sorry life.”

  Alex choked on his lollipop. He knew women waxed, but he was opposed to such things on ideological grounds—as a scholarship undergrad at Hampshire, he’d even written a paper that concluded that the bare pubis “is for Barbie dolls and little girls, expressions of a pervy corporate patriarchy.” Discovering that guys, or at least guys like Huck, were now shaving their pubes scrambled his ideological radar. Was it a sign of progress, of gender parity? Was the shorn male groin evidence of post-feminist liberation?

  Alex’s theorizing ended with a horrifying mental picture of his own hairless wang, freed from its fuzzy, protective nest of reddish fur, the fleshy bits dangling alone and fully exposed. A shudder rocked through him as he looked back over at Huck, who was now chomping meaningfully on his lollipop. “I’m telling you,” Huck pronounced, “the second you lose sight of who you are, who you really are, you’re dead. Wreckage on the roadside. Being a Plus One is like riding a motorcycle: crazy fun, but a ton of ways to die.”

  “Dying? Who’s dying?” Alex crossed his arms. “I don’t follow.”

  Huck motioned over Alex’s shoulder. “Over there. Second table on the right? In that pathetic fedora?”

  Alex turned and peered through the crowd. Standing behind a seat and brandishing a deck of playing cards was a guy in his early forties. Gray felt hat, tiny black eyes, micro-sculpted beard that extended across his jaw like a cut-here mark. “The magic guy?”

  “That’s Randall Watkins. He was some kind of radio producer—documentary stuff. Then his wife Sandra gets named VP of production at Fox. You know what they say, right? Behind every successful woman in Hollywood, there’s a guy she’s too resentful to fuck? That’s Randall. Right after the wife hits it, he stops working, gets bored, takes a class in sleight of hand, cute, whatever—but then he starts dumping a ton of money into props and costumes, trying to get a whole stage show going. Just bleeding cash. Wife goes around saying she’s a magic widow, complaining that her husband is turning into Doug fucking Henning.”

  Alex looked closer. Randall plucked a card from the floral centerpiece and handed it to one of the women at the table, who shrugged and handed it back apologetically. Wrong card. Alex winced. “How do you know all this?”

  “Sandra has lunch at the Davies all the time,” he said. “I’m kind of the mayor over there. At least on weekdays from one to four.”

  Alex had only seen pictures of the Davies, a members-only club atop a curvy glass office tower on the western edge of the Sunset Strip. It figured Huck was a regular—Alex had no trouble picturing him sprawled out on the low, modular seating with a mojito and a gang of screenwriters, producers, and other industry-associated loafers.

  Huck motioned for Alex to come in close. “Poor fucker has no idea what’s about to hit him.”

  Alex bent in. “What? What’s hitting him?”

  “Petition for dissolution—all drawn up. Sandra’s got another guy in the wings. Trading up. She’s been lining up the notification requirement for months. No therapy, no arbitration, nothing. And get this: They’re two months shy of the magic ten.”

  Alex leaned back and nodded. He got the general sense of what Huck was saying—the studio lady was leaving the magician—but the stuff about the petition, the notification requirement…. “What,” he finally asked, “is the magic ten?”

  Huck reared back. “How does a fucking concierge from Colorado know about the magic ten and you don’t? California statutory law—split up before your tenth anniversary and you get alimony for half the length of the marriage. Past ten, you get alimony for life. Life, son.”

  Alex took a swig of wine and tried to absorb this information. “So he’s getting dumped because of… California statutory law?”

  “That, and he’s a shitty magician.”

  Alex looked up at the underside of the tent roof, lights dancing across the vinyl in a kaleidoscopic swirl. He wasn’t sure if it was the effects of the lollipop, or Huck’s story, or just the weirdness of the night catching up with him, but he felt an intense sadness spread out inside his chest. He craned his head around the table, looking for Figgy in the crowd. Was she ready to leave?

  “So,” Huck said after a long pause. “How long have you been married?”

  Alex straightened up. “Last year was—eight? Nine? Yeah—ten is next March.”

  Two

  Her foot was in his face again. At seven, Sylvie was far too old to be in their bed. But here she was, tangled up in the duvet between Alex and Figgy, a smug grin between her soft cheeks, one hammerlike heel lodged against Alex’s throat.

  It had been the same with Sam, who’d fall asleep in his own bed (after a long and ritualistic routine, the rigid complexities of which Alex never quite got right), only to appear at their bedside in the wee hours, pawing and pleading. Some nights Alex managed to turn the intruder away, but Figgy was a sucker, especially after production on the show began and she didn’t get home until late. When she hadn’t seen them all day, she was helpless against their dozy warm forms, their yeasty aroma, their sweet silence. It was true, about kids, or theirs anyway: they’re most lovable when semi-conscious.

  Sam mostly left Alex alone, wrapping himself like a kudzu around Figgy, until a moment of reckoning one day when she had been putting him down for a nap and asked him to please remove his hand from her boob. The feel of it made his limbs go slack and his eyelids flutter with narcotic satisfaction. “Okay, deal,” he said drowsily. “Under the shirt, but over the bra.”

  Alex was fuzzy on specifics from the dozen half-read parenting manuals on his bedside, but he felt pretty sure the experts agreed that co-sleeping had officially become inappropriate when a child could negotiate for tit time. Their son’s banishment, however, coincided with the arrival of Sylvie. Normally the nightly brawl with his daughter left Alex feeling cranky come morning, like he’d spent the night being mauled by a koala.

  Today, however, the morning after the big award night, Sylvie’s foot in his face was okay. Reassuring, even. He scooched into it. It meant normalcy had returned. The events of the night before had come and gone. The special was over, and we now rejoin our regularly scheduled program.

  Alex let out a grunt and stumbled to the toilet, where he came face to face with the trophy itself, which Figgy had (ha fucking ha) set on the tank, shoving aside a stack of Sudoku books and Sunset magazines. He gave it a long look. Its golden wings zigzagged in a backward diagonal, sharp as switchblades. Its bust thrust forward in a stance of regal confidence. He picked it up; Jesus, it was the weight of a bowling ball. He looked at it square in the face. The swirling ball of atoms held high above the figure’s head—what was that about? A goddess with a monumental bust and lightning bolts for wings, holding aloft the basic particle of all matter? How was that the symbol for excellence in TV comedy? Alex stared at the blank face, its features flat and r
evealing nothing. You don’t scare me, he thought. Half the d-bags cruising Sunset Boulevard have one of these things—they give ’em out like Chiclets at the Tijuana border. Winning one didn’t change anything.

  Alex was still smarting a little about last night—it was as if the moment Figgy had accepted the award, he’d gone into freefall, as if everyone at the party had been staring out from the sides of a bottomless hole as he tumbled past. Or maybe that was just the lollipop? The business with the shoes—it wasn’t as if Figgy had planned for them to fall apart, and it had worked out fine, but it still left a sting of resentment. Didn’t he deserve better than a dead man’s shoes? And then there’d been all that talk from Huck about the perils of Plus One-ness and the looming threat of the magic ten.

  Stop it, he thought. He and Figgy were good. He shouldn’t start doubting his whole marriage because of a single stoned conversation. Especially now, on the morning after Figgy’s big win. She’d actually won! That was nothing but good. Of course it was.

  “Daaaaad?” It was Sam, calling from down the hall. Alex followed the singsong down to the kids’ room, where Sylvie’s bottom bunk was empty and Sam was splayed on the floor in a pair of faded orange pajamas, shirt hiked up under his armpits, staring at a pile of Legos.

  “Hey buddy.” Alex lowered down, crossed his legs and grabbed a handful. He knew the drill. If Alex wasn’t around, Sam would lie there raking his hand through the pile, scattering the clinking bits across the carpet. But as soon as Alex showed up, Sam would get to work, concentration locked.

  Sam murmured a greeting as Alex handed over a roof shingle. Sam showed no interest in the spaceships and vehicles that seemed to excite other nine-year-olds; he preferred to build houses and shops and stables, all of them vaguely medieval.

  Over the course of an hour, the two kept quiet, the only sounds murmured bits of dialogue from Sam, who kept his head down close to the carpet to get the proper cinematic angle. Cross-legged beside his busy little boy, Alex felt a familiar rush of feeling wash over him, at once tender and panicked. The boy’s slim shoulders, narrow wrists, wispy bangs—he was so delicate, so fragile. Alex flashed to a scene of his son on a basketball court, their first and only attempt to get Sam involved in a team sport, his face tilted wistfully toward the silver glow from the frosted gymnasium windows—and then his head snapping sideways from the impact of a ball whose very existence apparently came as a total shock. They’d moved on to soccer (bad), judo (worse), and finally, fencing (tolerable—Sam liked the outfit).

  So he wasn’t a jock—Alex hadn’t been, either. Alex’s mother, Jane, never missed an opportunity to point out how similar they were. Same straw-colored hair, same pinkish skin tone, same dreamy green-gray eyes. And the similarities went so much deeper, she’d gush—Sam was so obviously an “old soul,” mindful and sensitive and fully conscious, just like his dad.

  She meant it as a compliment, but it never failed to get a rise from Alex. Not only because the observation came dressed in the softheaded hippie prattle he’d grown up with in Ojai. No, what really bothered Alex was his mom pretending to have an actual recollection of who he’d been as a kid—his mom being almost entirely checked out for the first twenty-odd years of his life. She was better now, sober and in a committed relationship, but the fact remained that she’d been barely present in Alex’s life for much of his childhood, her energies consumed by booze, brief, tragic romances, and epic bouts of self-actualization.

  “How’d you turn out so normal?” This was the inevitable question when Alex ran through the high points of his origin story: Midwestern mom moves to California, hooks up with proprietor of highway goat-milk stand. Shortly after Alex is born, marriage implodes—booze a factor, also money, also Jane’s dawning awareness that she’s gay. After dad splits, mom dives headlong into feminist-mystic-folksinger reinvention, dates biker chicks and massage therapists and energy healers. Memories from the period are fuzzy and charged with intense loneliness—he remembers her passed out on a rattan chair on the deck of their small aluminum-sided house, draped in a woolen poncho, her yellowed fingers still clenched around a cup of chablis. He remembers playing parachute games in a scrubby dirt lot, going weeks without bathing, and subsisting mostly on cans of chili and candy bought with coins stolen from his mom’s change bucket. He remembers watching ungodly amounts of TV.

  At fourteen, he discovered punk, decided hippies were the Enemy, and managed to land a scholarship spot at a local boarding school. He packed a bag and never came back.

  Not that Alex was resentful. He’d done his time in therapy, dealt with his abandonment issues, sorted through his mother’s internalized messages about men (who were, she maintained, power-tripping oppressors, with the possible exception of Phil Donahue, Alan Alda, and the turtle-necked guy at the food coop). In some ways, he had come to believe that his upbringing benefitted him as a man and a father. He’d had some rough years after college, drifting from shitty relationship to dead-end job, but as soon as he met Figgy, he’d resolved to get right what his own parents had gotten so wrong. He’d pay attention, stay involved, be the parent he’d never had. He’d even patched things up with his mom, their relations much improved after she went through AA, met Carol, and finally got with the standard lesbian program of shacking up with cats and mystery novels and a matching wardrobe of Polarfleece.

  The only real downside of the way he was raised, Alex thought, was how it affected his relationship with Sam—he couldn’t seem to figure out how to handle him. Things with Sylvie were so much easier. Yes, she was demanding. True, she was persnickety. She was self-possessed in a way many adults found off-putting. Part of it was her voice, a whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp that sounded like it should belong to a bridge-playing retiree in Boca more than a seven-year-old girl from Southern California. She was also, quite plainly, a pain in the ass, defiant and strong-willed and willfully oblivious. But she was his pain in the ass. She clung to Daddy and obeyed his commands to put on her shoes or get in the bath, even as she cheerfully ignored the same requests from Figgy. (“No thank you!” she’d sing-song over her shoulder, as if she’d been asked if she’d like a second piece of pie.)

  Their deepest bond centered on food. Sylvie, Alex was delighted to discover, possessed an unusually sophisticated palate. Sam survived on a diet of quesadillas and applesauce, but Sylvie would eat pretty much anything you put in front of her, and Alex took this as license to expose her to the most exotic edibles he could rustle up, serving rare chunks of blue cheese, dried leaves of salted seaweed, and spicy dishes of kimchi. It was exhilarating, having a little sidekick for his continuing culinary adventures. He’d come to feel about food the same way he once felt about punk. He loved it irrationally, felt sorry for those who didn’t, and instantly bonded with those who did. Was it weird that the only person who seemed to really get his obsessions was his seven-year-old daughter? Probably.

  Then again, weirdness was kind of a fact of life for the Sherman-Zicklins. Sylvie was the only second grader whose lunchbox routinely included separate thermoses for soup and sauces. And he didn’t know any other families who dealt with domestic chores the way they did. Their family rule was All Hands on Deck, which in the chaos of their domestic life was often shortened to “All Hands” or just “Hands” or even a flashed palm. The rule was this: Whoever was closest to something that needed tending, tended it. If you opened the bill, you paid it. If a kid had a meltdown and you were inside the blast zone, it was your job to blot the tears and offer the Popsicle. If you turned on the TV and woke up the baby, you cooed and soothed. Alex loved the raw physicality of the arrangement, the way it flew beneath all the explosive gender expectations that seemed to torment other, less practically minded couples. Let them confront and unpack notions of femininity and masculinity and duke it out with the ghosts of their mothers and fathers; he and Figgy would obey the god of proximity.

  The major flaws in All Hands became apparent pretty quickly. For one thing, Figgy had a way of being either
just out of range or totally absent when jobs needed doing. Alex wasn’t sure whether she was simply better at anticipating problems and removing herself from domestic flashpoints, but it was Alex who, when Sylvie was little, always seemed to be with the baby when she erupted in a level-eleven doodie explosion, Alex who was in the kitchen cooking when the fridge broke and needed a new Dispenser Control Board.

  Then there were all the All Hands exceptions, tasks that without question always fell to him. Like changing light bulbs. Or operating the barbecue. Or handling household finances. Or anything at all related to computers, cameras, or electronics. Figgy never said out loud that these jobs were, you know, man’s work. She simply ignored them.

  Like, for instance, playing Legos with the boy. Assembling tiny villages being one of the tasks exclusively for people with penises, apparently. Not that Alex minded this particular task—he actually felt a tinge of sadness when, after an hour or so of work, the phone rang and the ladies stirred and playtime was over.

  Figgy answered from the bedroom, hollering for Alex to pick up the phone.

  “…it was just marvelous! Empowering!” It was Alex’s mom Jane, mid-gush. He hadn’t known she’d been aware of the previous night—he doubted she’d changed the TV from the local PBS station since the Carter administration—but judging from her frantic, jubilant tone, she’d not only seen the Emmys but viewed it as a historic milestone, a crowning victory for The Movement. “That shout-out to the sisters!” she went on. “Needless to say, tears. The symbolic victories, Figgy—they’re so meaningful. They matter. We marched for this. We did. I can’t tell you how it feels to see all the hard work we’ve done over the years paying off. I could’ve done without the ‘girl power’—really Figgy, you are so not a girl, so very much a woman.”