Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “You don’t seem too upset,” Lyndon had told her.

  “These things happen,” she said. “This isn’t my first store.”

  Having weathered his share of mercurial clients, Lyndon appreciated her composure and levelheadedness. With the many tradespeople and vendors and inspectors she had to deal with throughout the day, she never yelled, never got flustered, was decisive and polite and resolute. This was a woman who knew what she was doing. She knew how to listen, negotiate, compromise. She wasn’t affected by internal quirks or idiosyncrasies. She didn’t let anything perturb her personally. It was all just business. All the more which made her behavior with Lyndon perplexing.

  She initially told him she didn’t care what the spiral staircase would look like. She didn’t want any decorative or ornamental touches, interested solely in its functionality and completion. That was what she told him. So he got some twelve-gauge steel plates with a nonskid diamond pattern, cut them into treads, and started tacking them to a center pole. He added mild-steel rods for balusters and a stainless-steel handrail, welded out all the joints, and ground out the points.

  Yet, when he had completed the staircase’s raw construction, she balked. She walked around it, studying it. “It looks so…industrial,” she said.

  “You told me you didn’t care how it looks.”

  “I know, but I didn’t realize it’d be…I don’t know,” she said, faltering unexpectedly. The stitch weld marks underneath the treads, where they met the support brackets at a right angle, especially bothered her. “They’re unseemly. Isn’t there a way you could make them…seamless? Cover them up and make them smooth?”

  At that point, it would have been cheaper and less time-consuming to tear apart the whole thing and build a new one. What they eventually agreed upon was to have Lyndon apply Bondo—auto body filler—on the underside of each tread. He’d put down a thick caulk-like bead to cover up the weld marks, mold a concave curve on each side of each T-joint, and sand it down so everything would be flush and seamless. However, there was no way to do any of this except by hand.

  It was tedious, backbreaking work, sitting on the steps and contorting his body to reach up to the next tread. Lemke Books had its grand opening before he was able to finish, and he had to come in during off-hours, mornings or nights, when it’d be just him and Sheila inside the store.

  Then, after he finished smoothing down the Bondo, there was the issue of painting the stairs. He had to hang a well of plastic sheeting around the staircase, attach a portable ventilation system, and spray on two coats of primer, three coats of oil-based enamel, and a final coat of polyurethane sealant, all of which he thought was overkill for an interior staircase that would get little traffic. And since it was “unsightly” to have the plastic sheeting hanging there during business hours, Sheila asked him to take it down and put it back up each night. Then she changed her mind—twice—about the color of the paint, deciding she wanted a slightly different shade of blue-black after he’d applied the final sealant on the previous one, which meant he had to sand it all down again to the primer, requiring a week’s more work.

  “Am I being difficult?” she asked. “Do you mind?”

  Normally he would have minded; he would have minded a great deal. But he was almost sanguine, because she was now paying him by the hour, and because she was always apologetic and a little shy with Lyndon, and because each amendment, each additional task, gave him the opportunity to spend more time with Sheila, this pretty, competent redhead, with her clear blue eyes and sharply carved face. There was something irrefutable between them, a flirtation, an attraction. He’d sensed it early on, and he knew she did, too, from their second day in the store together, when she got off the phone after arguing with her daughter about homework, the parent promoting the virtues of ambition and discipline to the child. Offhandedly, Sheila had said to Lyndon, “You agree with me, don’t you?” and he’d said, “If you must know, I’ve always taken a principled stand against ambition and discipline.”

  She’d stepped back then, regarding him, her curiosity piqued. What have we here? he could read in her eyes. “That’s not very reassuring to hear,” she said, “considering I’ve just hired you.”

  “You’re going to have to keep a close eye on me, then.”

  They chatted over the many weeks he worked on the staircase. About their present lives, their childhoods, how and why they had arrived in Rosarita Bay. She had grown up in Chicago, gone to Northwestern, and then Stanford Law. She’d met her first husband, Chris Frost, in Palo Alto while he was getting a combined JD/MBA degree, and they had lived almost exclusively in San Francisco, most recently in Noe Valley, before moving to the coast. She had wanted to get out of the city, out of the congestion and traffic and stress of urban life.

  “The world seemed so much coarser to me all of a sudden,” she told Lyndon, and talked about an amorphous yet acute feeling of malaise that had weighed down on her. “I was looking for quiet. I was looking for escape.”

  Lyndon was customarily evasive with her about his former career as a sculptor. As far as anyone in town knew, he’d only had middling success as an artist in New York, and this was the assumption Sheila herself drew, based on his reticence.

  “It didn’t work out very well for you, did it?” she said one night, arranging books in the travel section while he stirred paint.

  “No,” he told her, which wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lie, although he’d had solo exhibitions all over the world, his work appearing in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate Collection, and he’d been featured in Vogue and Life and People and had regularly been fodder for the gossip tabloids.

  “I’m surrounded by failed artists,” Sheila said.

  “Oh?”

  “My daughter, she sings and plays guitar. She’s pretty bad right now—no big surprise, she’s thirteen—but there’s something there. Even I can tell she has some natural talent. But know what? I’m never going to tell her that. I’m never going to encourage her one iota in that direction.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve seen what hope can do to people, to dreamers.”

  “You wanted to be an artist?” Lyndon asked.

  “No. Not me. My husband. My second husband, Steven Lemke. He’s a sergeant with the sheriff’s office. Do you know him?”

  Lyndon had an image of a tall man with remarkably lustrous dark brown hair. He nodded. “I think he’s given me a parking ticket or two.”

  She stared at the rack of travel guides. “Does it make more sense to order this by country or region?”

  “Region,” he told her.

  “I keep signing up for language classes,” she said, “but keep dropping out of them. I’ve always wanted to travel.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “Difficult with a child.”

  “And a new business,” he said.

  She shuffled a row of books—Japan next to China. “Sometimes,” she said, “it doesn’t feel like it was a matter of making a good choice or a bad choice, of missing an opportunity or not. I just wasn’t paying attention. I looked up one day and found myself where I am, and now I have fewer and fewer chances to do anything about it.”

  He didn’t exactly understand the antecedents of this statement, but she was suddenly naked to him—lonely.

  “Do you read much?” she asked.

  “I like a good mystery now and then,” he said. “No, not much, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” she said. “I don’t think this bookstore has a chance of surviving.”

  “No?”

  “No. I can say that almost definitively.”

  “You haven’t been open a month yet.”

  “I’d give it a year at most,” she said. “Independent bookstores are relics, dinosaurs. There’s no market for books anymore.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “I had a misguided notion it’d cheer up Steven,”
she told him. “I thought—and this is how desperate I’ve become—it might help save our marriage.”

  “Are you succeeding?”

  “No.”

  Steven was an aspiring fiction writer—or, before summarily quitting earlier that spring, he had been for twenty years. In that time, he had produced three novels and reams of short stories. He had attended dozens of workshops, panels, and conferences, pored over a multitude of how-to-get-published books and magazines, entered contest after contest, applied for every conceivable fellowship, submitted his manuscripts to hundreds of literary magazines, editors, and agents, all to no avail, unable to publish anything, save for a handful of vignettes in a few inconsequential, obscure journals. All the while, he had been convinced he was a genius, that his experimental narratives were not being appreciated because they were too advanced, too sophisticated, for mainstream publishers. He had been absolutely secure about his gifts as a writer.

  “That’s an admirable quality to have as an artist, and maybe a necessary one,” Lyndon said. “The only problem with it is, one can be wrong. What did you think? Was his stuff any good?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t really say,” Sheila told him. “I don’t have a lot of expertise in the matter. I can’t really judge.”

  “What did you major in in college?”

  “Literature.”

  “What?”

  “His prose style was always a little idiosyncratic, his characters generally unsympathetic, unlikable, and his vision was, well, let’s say it was sort of harsh, apocalyptic.”

  “I’m beginning to understand.”

  Sheila had offered to pay to have Steven’s stories and novels self-published, but he’d said no, insisting that the traditional arbiters of the literary world should recognize his work.

  “It was so sad to see all these self-addressed, stamped envelopes coming back from magazines,” she said, “after Steven had waited months, sometimes over a year, for an answer. He’d just want a little encouragement, a note, a handwritten ‘Thanks’ or ‘Sorry’ or just someone’s initials scribbled on it, some acknowledgment that his stories merited the briefest human response, but they always just contained blank form rejection slips. They were like little deaths, one after another, those slips, for him and for me. It’s terrible to see someone’s dreams die before you.”

  Steven started sending vituperative letters to the magazine editors, sometimes phoning them, demanding to know if his stories had even been read, or merely funneled into the slush pile for an intern to process. Sheila told him this strategy would not help his cause, since he often ended up soliciting the identical editors with more of his stories, but Steven would not listen.

  The final indignity came during the latest round of trying to get his novel into print—the same one he’d written in his early thirties, which he annually revised and retitled and resubmitted. (He had not, in truth, written anything new in years, devoting himself instead to learning the ins and outs—the trick, there had to be a trick—of the business.) He sent the novel to every major and then every minor publisher, and then every first-book competition, each one for which he duly mailed in his twenty-five- dollar entry fee with a photocopy of his 744-page manuscript, double-spaced, paginated, no contact or identifying information anywhere except on a cover page to ensure anonymity and avoid conflicts of interest. He received form rejection letters from every contest apart from one, which had a handwritten note on it. The note—unsigned—read: “The world might be a better place if Steven Lemke would just get a clue.” Soon afterward, the results of the contest were announced, and Steven learned that the winner had been the judge’s former student—perhaps, it was rumored, even the judge’s former lover.

  Ever since, Steven had been on a campaign, dedicating every waking spare hour to exposing the corruption inherent in the publishing industry. It was all a sham, a charade, completely unethical and elitist. The entire enterprise was rigged. All the awards, grants, fellowships, and contracts went to favorites and sycophants and the select few who managed to inveigle themselves—with youth and good looks and connections—into the inner circle. The literary establishment was a cowardly, complacent old New Yorkers’ club that excluded outsiders and shut its eyes to anything that was different, innovative, anything with real guts, anything that dared to challenge the status quo. Steven now was a leading contributor to muckraking writers’ forums and blogs. He badgered the IRS, trying to get them to revoke the tax exemptions of certain nonprofit small presses. He pestered attorney generals, asking them to charge contest organizers with fraud. He bombarded editors with chastising e-mails, deriding their highfalutin magazines and publishing houses as torpid and moribund. He posted nasty online reviews of books by new writers, particularly contest winners, assailing their careerism and mediocrity. It didn’t trouble him that he never read the books. He never read anything anymore. He hated everything he cracked open.

  “It’s making him go gray,” Sheila said. “Literally. His latest pet peeve is with minority writers. He claims most of their books would never have seen the light of day if they’d been white, that they’re getting the benefit of literary affirmative action. He’s coming off as vaguely racist.”

  “I don’t know if there’s much that’s vague about that.”

  “Steven is not a racist,” she said. “Really, he’s not. I would never tolerate that. Underneath, he’s a good, honorable man. That’s why it’s so tragic, what all of this has done to him.”

  “Did it ever occur to him that if he’d spent as much energy writing as he did trying to get published, he might have gotten further?” Lyndon asked.

  “Owing to residual loyalty, I cannot comment,” she said.

  The irony was, it had been a love of books that had brought Sheila and Steven together. They had met in a book club, sharing a passion for reading, a fervent conviction that fiction mattered, that novels and stories could change and shape lives, even whole societies.

  She reached behind her and pulled out a volume of Chekhov. “There’s nothing with more elegance and power in such a simple package,” she said. “When you read a good book, it stays with you forever. It teaches you about family, about love, about the dialectic of being an individual and finding community. It teaches you about the search for connection. What could be more meaningful than that?”

  He guessed she had used this argument many times before. To bank managers and investors, to the zoning board and the planning commission. Nonetheless, as she spoke, she was ardent, earnest, and he saw a light in her, an incandescence—perhaps she was a dreamer after all, a romantic.

  “That’s what we used to believe, Steven and me,” she said. “Enough to have always fantasized about owning a bookstore together. But he’s no longer a believer, and I don’t know if I am, either.”

  “Because of what happened to him?” Lyndon said.

  “Partly,” Sheila said, tucking the Chekhov back into its slot. “But it’s more…I just don’t know if novels are relevant anymore. I don’t know if they can tell us anything about the world today.”

  “Do they really need to?” Lyndon asked. “Is that the role of art?”

  “You think it should just be entertainment?”

  “Hardly. But that’s not why people make art.”

  “Why do they?”

  He shrugged.

  “If you had to say.”

  “If I had to say,” Lyndon told her, “I’d say that it’s enough to provoke the imagination, which in its own way instills compassion. But from the point of view of an artist, I’d say that art, at its core, is a quest for transcendence, for purity.” This was from an old speech of his own, a sound bite he’d manufactured long ago for interviews.

  “You know,” Sheila said after a pause, “there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

  “That’s called a backhanded compliment, I think.”

  “The weld marks never really bothered me,” she said to him. “The paint was fine the first time. You must’
ve thought I was a complete bitch.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I put you through hell for nothing.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “It was just an excuse.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me I’m not as dumb as I look? It’s all right,” he said. “I know. I know.”

  WHEN LYNDON GOT HOME, he found Yi Ling Ling standing at his kitchen sink, barefoot in her blue tracksuit, dumping out the contents of his entire liquor cabinet. Presently she was holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s upside down over the drain.

  “This is so liberating,” she said, eyes agleam. “I’ve had my last drink, you see. You’re witnessing a new YLL. I’m going to cleanse myself of all impurities. This air, this wonderful air here, I just breathe it in and feel this clarity. There’s something about this place, this farm—it’s transformative. I hear the ocean, the wind, all these birds. It moves me. I feel all this energy. Did I do that to your eye?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I only have the vaguest recollection of it, to tell you the truth. I think I was having an adverse reaction to some medication I was taking for jet lag.” She had finished with the Jack Daniel’s and was now pouring out a bottle of Tanqueray. “Things are so alive here. I feel everything growing. I never imagined the countryside could be so invigorating.”

  “You know, other people might want a drink now and then,” Lyndon told her.

  She looked at the gin splashing out, then flipped the bottle upright. “Oh, of course, I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, giggling.

  She returned the remaining bottles to the cupboard, and he put the empty ones into the trash. “Where’s Woody?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, really. He sort of abandoned me. He said he’d be right back, but that was hours ago.”