She’d lost two jobs in two weeks. First, a businessman had come into the Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center where she was stacking the shelves and working the registers. As she totaled his pile of CliffsNotes, she’d said gently: “I realize these are convenient—God knows I’ve used them myself plenty of times—but you might go back and read the books sometime. Maybe later, or in addition, or something.”
The slick head thought about this. “Yeah, I could do that,” he said. Then, casually handing her a hundred-dollar bill, he’d added: “But then again, look where that got you.” She didn’t know what he must have said to her manager, but the next day, without warning, she was fired.
The following week she went to work in a midtown office besieged by phone calls. On her first morning, she’d had to say: “Thanks for holding, can I help you?” so many times in a row that she’d once said: “Thanks for helping, can I hold you?” An honest mistake, but apparently one that was not much appreciated by the client. Then, at the end of the day, she and her supervisor had entered the elevator together. As she pushed the button for the lobby, she’d said to him: “I assume we’re both going to L,” which came out sounding like something that was not at all what she meant. She wasn’t exactly surprised when, at the end of the week, she wasn’t asked back.
Now she’d reached the stage where she was having difficulty mustering even enough energy to do laundry or open mail. Her friends weren’t any help. She tried explaining her malaise to her best friend, Emily, but Emily’s boyfriend, Roy, cut in.
“The point of life,” he said, “as I thought I’d taught you by now, is to try to suck as much pleasure out of each passing moment as you possibly can.” But Katie was convinced there had to be more to life than pleasure-sucking. Besides, she wasn’t about to take the advice of Roy, someone whose life ambition was to have a furniture store called The Sofa King, just so he could run ads that said: “Our prices are So-fa-King low.”
Emily was more understanding. “Something good’s going to come your way, I just know it,” she said. “All you need is for one little thing to go right, and everything else could fall into place from there.”
Katie was doubtful. She looked everywhere, even though she didn’t know what she was looking for. She was becoming an insomniac, so she found herself watching a lot of late-night TV. Plenty of people were doling out advice; it’s just that no one ever said anything useful. She clicked through infomercials selling things everybody knew nobody needed, and an old movie whose emotional climax she’d just missed. “What are you running from?” Clark Gable asked as he clutched the trench-coated arm of a perfectly coiffed blonde. “What is it you’re so afraid of?” Most disheartening were the reruns of a daytime talk-show host who seemed to think that tough love was the answer to everything. Diabetes? Tough love! This was what her species had to show for itself?
She went to the Museum of Natural History, figuring if she couldn’t find a sense of connectedness among her own kind, maybe seeing the full wingspan of life would console her somehow. But it was no use. Like everything else, the museum left her with more questions than answers. The mollusks in particular irritated her. What was so great about shellfish that they deserved their own wing?
Even the dodo bird, Raphus cucullatus as he was formally called, was a mystery. It was speculated he had become complacent because of a lack of predators. In the absence of enemies, he grew unwary, got fat, and forgot how to fly. His ancestors must have known how to fly, the little metal plaque said, in order to reach the small island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where Dodo lived. But Dodo himself was just a flightless pigeon. He became extinct around 1700, killed by, among other things, semiwild pigs liberated by the Europeans. His original Latin name, from Linnaeus, was Didus ineptus—an appellation given post-extinction, in what Katie concluded was perhaps the greatest ever example of adding insult to injury.
She looked at Ineptus tenderly, wanting to touch him, but he was in his Plexiglas case. “What is it you’re running from?” she whispered, aware of the competent strangers all around her. “What are you so afraid of?” Lately she would lie awake for hours, wondering whether she should look for a place with cheaper rent? Move to a cheaper city? Apply to graduate school? Learn how to waitress? Maybe she should have studied French wines in college instead of French literature. She shielded her face with the collar of her Windbreaker so the young mothers juggling strollers and BlackBerrys wouldn’t hear her addressing the bird. “Tell me what to do,” she said.
Things continued to deteriorate. The fact that she had recently fallen into the habit of masturbating to thoughts of George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, was not a good sign. Although generally speaking, she was an advocate of masturbation. “Sleep with a person, and you please him for a night. Teach him to masturbate, and you please him for a lifetime,” she would occasionally joke to her closest friends. Katie was not ashamed of Lord Byron. You had to be resourceful in life; she’d learned that early on. Now even her resourcefulness was coming to an end.
One snowy afternoon in early February, she ducked into Fliks Video, hoping for a miracle. Emily had once given her a quote that Katie liked so much, she carried it around on a scrap of paper in her wallet. A miracle is nothing more than justice postponed, arriving to compensate those it had cruelly abandoned.
“I’m looking for a movie where justice is served,” she said to the greasy-haired teenager behind the counter.
He stared at her blankly. “You mean, like, Schwarzenegger?”
“Not exactly,” Katie sighed. “It’s all right. I’ll look for myself.” But as she ambled along, scanning the shelves, nothing promised to be the hope-giving, wisdom-packed wallop she was searching for. Only then, as she stared at the rows of box covers, at the pictures of people laughing or embracing or crying, all caught in the heroic struggles of their lives, did a small thought occur to her with such simplicity she almost said it aloud: I am afraid to try.
Emily and Roy attempted to cheer her up. They cooked her Middle Eastern food, poured her wine. “You’re talented! You’re gorgeous!” they said. “Tell it to my landlord,” said Katie. She stared at her couscous, not eating. Couscous always reminded her of cooked sand—that was probably its proper translation. Where did people muster the energy to harvest the desert and cook it? Where did everyone find the will to do all the work in the world? We’re all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose a life and summon the determination to live it. Her grace period had just run out.
The following Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, her phone was disconnected and her car was towed. Katie tried to remain cheerful in the face of disaster. Well, at least I’m not Ineptus, she thought. Maybe that would be her slogan for the day. She practiced saying: “Look, I am not Ineptus,” and “This is not an Ineptus you’re dealing with here, folks.”
On top of that, it was cold cold cold. It was one of those days she wished her blow-dryer were battery-operated so she could stick it in her pants before she left the apartment.
She went to the municipal building where you pay penalties and back-tickets. It quickly became clear that her strategy of avoidance had not been the best way to deal with parking violations. To get her car back would cost four more dollars than she had in her checking account. She asked the stout, thin-lipped woman behind the counter if she could borrow four dollars.
“No,” the woman said.
Her eyes came to rest on the string of tissue-paper hearts hanging above the woman’s head. “Where’s the love?” said Katie. The woman did not smile. The people in line behind her grumbled. Then she remembered her emergency cash. She opened her wallet and unfolded a weather-beaten five-dollar bill. Emily had always teased her about it anyway. “Yeah, that’ll get you out of any emergency whose solution is a chai latte,” she said. After her account was settled, the woman gave her a slip of paper on which was written the address of the tow lot: 770 Zerega Avenue, the Unlimited Tow
Company, the Bronx.
Next she went to the Verizon payment center at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, just around the corner from her apartment. She waited in a long line; it seemed it was a busy time of year for the phone-disconnecting business. In general, it was not a very happy place. As if it weren’t bad enough that they disconnected your phone, they made you hang around with the kind of people who got their phones disconnected. She imagined a TV camera rolling into the room. People in rollers and sweatpants would still smile ghoulishly and wave. “Hi, Mom!” Hi! I’m here getting my phone reconnected because I’m pretty much a failure, but Hi!
She wrote the phone company a bad check. Just a small fiction that, like most fiction, had a strong foundation in truth. The money had been in her checking account just that morning, before she had to bail her car out of jail. She felt terrible handing it over to the nice man behind the counter, all smiles, but what else was she supposed to do? She’d once had to write a bad check to the post office at Christmastime, when she was mailing her packages home. And they’d been very understanding when she sent them the money a month later, saying they wouldn’t send the federal agents after all. It appeared that in her efforts to get some fuzzy mittens to her sister, Katie had committed a felony.
Walking away from the counter, she remembered that she still had a small amount of money left in her savings account. She’d always liked the idea of savings, even if she wasn’t particularly keen on its practice. She liked calling it saving, too, because it was like that: You think you’re saving something, when actually, it saves you.
But she needed to transfer the money right away, before the phone company discovered her check was bad. It was after five o’clock, but there was still telebanking. Perhaps there was a use, after all, for the rampant inbreeding of technology and information, and all their mutant offspring.
She used the pay phone across the street from her apartment. It must have been the coldest day in the history of winter. Too bad she couldn’t go inside and use her own phone, but she understood that sometimes it’s hard to fix a thing by using the thing that needs fixing.
She put in a quarter and did a little jump-dance to try to get warm. For such-and-such corporate account, press 3; for such-and-such-and-such credit card, press 7. She plumbed the depths of her purse for more change and came up with a few nickels. Several yards away, the homeless man was sitting on a piece of cardboard, feeding pigeons out of a grimy paper bag. How could anyone be whistling on a day like this? One of the birds wandered over to Katie. She ignored it, but it wouldn’t go away.
“I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “I’ve got my own problems here.” The bird cooed softly in the snow at her feet.
She pressed more buttons and waited. Not only were they making her jump through countless audio hoops, but the worst part was, every time she got within sight of her goal she was mysteriously disconnected. It seemed that modern technology was not the perfect überland all the ads claimed it would be.
She was almost out of change when she was disconnected, again. She was incredulous. She was beside herself. But she wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t give up. She had to at least be able to do this one little thing.
She started over. Numbers, shivering, coins.
Click.
She stared at the pigeon, wanted to wring its feathery little purple-gray neck. “I am not a Dodo bird!” she shouted. “Go away!”
The homeless man looked up when she yelled. He gazed at her, and for the first time, she noticed his sign.
YOU’RE JUST ABOUT TO GET TO THE GOOD PART, it read.
Had she begun to hallucinate? Her vision was blurry; she blinked and stared. Then she walked over to him.
“Is that for me?” she said. “Did you write that for me?” The homeless man just smiled, a toothless, beatific smile, and rattled his paper cup. Katie dropped in her last quarter.
She walked all the way to the Bronx. The snow was stiff and crusty, but she was wearing sturdy boots, and was able to make steady progress. The air seemed to have gotten warmer, too. She was not a Dodo bird, complacent unto extinction. She was a mollusk, barnacled and determined. She would survive. She would survive and multiply, until one day entire wings of museums would be filled with her kind. Mollusk makes a comeback, she thought. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, which her mother always said brought out her good looks, and her lips were rosy with her new favorite lipstick. It was officially called “Brick,” but Katie had conceived of a better name: “I’m not really a waitress.”
She marched to the Unlimited Tow Company, and on the way, she made a plan. On the cross streets, she asked her feet questions: “What are you so afraid of? What is it you’re running from?” And on the avenues, she made them reply: “We’re afraid of failure, and afraid of success. We are afraid of being loved, and afraid of being alone. The world is full of pain, and this is scary. And the world is crazy-beautiful, and that’s daunting, too. Worst of all, so little is under our control.” When she heard this last answer, she stopped and struck a deal. “All you have to do is try,” she said. “Okay?” Her feet resumed their motion. That was their way of nodding.
She would eventually get to the tow lot and pass through a chain-link fence into the sea of automobiles. Somewhere there would be a man in a heated trailer who would take her receipt and show her to her car. Somewhere there would be a good part, waiting to begin.
I KNEW YOU’D BE LOVELY
His birthday was only three days away, and Hannah had to find Tom the perfect gift: prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable. All month she’d been looking for clues from the universe. She scoured the Internet, studied mail-order catalogs, stole peeks inside other people’s briefcases. Finally she found herself resorting to desperate measures, and was trying to read the minds of the men seated across from her on the commuter train. She stared at them under the bright lights and asked telepathically: What do you want most in the whole world that costs under two hundred dollars and would fit in a box?
Her psychic acumen, however, was proving to be as dim as her prospects. To make matters worse, she’d been caught squinting purposefully at strangers, a posture she quickly tried to pass off as an attempt to read the contact-lens advertisements. By the time she got to work, she had the kind of headache that made her think she might in fact need contact lenses. She was also on the verge of full-scale panic. Hannah knew that if she didn’t find the gift that demonstrated she, better than anyone, understood the very contours of Tom’s soul, she could lose him.
There was another woman. Tom had done everything he could to assure Hannah the woman was just a pen pal, and described what they had as that clever little word, a correspondence. But it was easy for Hannah to tell that her nemesis was no mere pal of the pen. She was more like a Playboy centerfold with stationery.
Tom met the woman six months ago, at a summer writing seminar in Prague. Hannah’s first warning sign came when she was relating the story to her best friend.
“He met her at some summer camp? What’d they do, sit around, toast marshmallows, and sing by the campfire?”
“It wasn’t a summer camp. It was a writing workshop.”
“Oh,” Nihan said, shaking out her cigarette match. “So they sat around, drank whiskey, and screwed.”
As it happened, when Tom returned to Boston in September, he was somewhat aglow, but Hannah assumed that had something to do with renewed confidence and nutritious Czech food. True, he proceeded to commit to his work with inordinate enthusiasm—retreating from Hannah a bit in the process—but this seemed the natural consequence of a summer of encouragement. In fact, she thought she’d read something about that in the brochure. The brochure that had featured all kinds of attractive young writers, huddled in clusters of smiling excitement.
Back in college, when Tom was first courting her, Hannah used to tease him about his wavy brown locks and gold-rimmed spectacles.
“You’re too good-looking to be a poet.” Five years later she�
��d learned better than to encourage him along those lines. But she did encourage his writing. So although he seemed distant, Hannah stood by her belief in the need for solitude and selfishness—of the good kind—when it came to one’s work. Nihan rolled her eyes.
“True intimacy embraces a certain distance,” Hannah said.
“Sure,” Nihan chuckled. “Whatever.”
But Hannah let Tom have his space and tried not to feel threatened. She reasoned that she would have every advantage over an opponent: She knew Tom, knew his weakness for World War II documentaries, knew his secret dream of becoming a competitive Scrabble champion, knew he often laughed in his sleep. She understood that he considered himself to be “Capricorn, nonpracticing,” and that he’d once set out to read the dictionary but had only gotten as far as D. When he was depressed he liked to go to the movies by himself, and when his back was giving him trouble, it sometimes helped if she walked on it for him. This nefarious newcomer would be no match for her—why, she lived with Tom (had the home-court advantage), and his would-be seductress didn’t even live in the same state.
But as soon as the leaves began to turn, her letters started to arrive. No, they couldn’t use e-mail like the rest of the world. Apparently the girl either had some quaint notion about the benefits of real paper and real penmanship or she was simply too dumb to know how to connect to a server. Before long, Hannah found herself resenting the postman and rethinking his holiday bonus of baked goods. And she would cringe at the heavy, eggshell-colored envelopes addressed with slanted loops of red ink—the felt-tipped marker of Satan’s minion, to be sure.
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