Etiquette for the End of the World

by Jeanne Martinet

  “I must say I don’t really know. But I’m sure you do—who better than you? After all, it can’t be any harder than going from publishing to financial writing to a newspaper advice column.” He raised a brow. “You see that I have read your résumé. How did those transitions come about?”

  “The truth is—” Tess was about to offer her standard professional line about needing new challenges, but all at once she felt she could tell Peter anything. “The truth is that I wasn’t sure where publishing was headed, and I wasn’t making enough money, so I switched to the financial industry. But even after four years at Samson-Gold I still felt like an alien—not to mention feeling increasingly morally bankrupt. And then I tried to start this funny, informal office-etiquette newsletter at Samson, which got completely squashed by management. Actually it sort of got me in trouble.”

  “I hear you.” Peter said this softly and looked at her so intently, Tess was slightly startled. Had he had something similar happen to him?

  “So then I started a blog,” she said, “which got very popular, much to my delight, and I took a leap and quit Samson-Gold. The blog turned into my newspaper column—‘Tess Knows Best.’”

  “And she did,” said Peter. “Know best.” His dark eyes were dancing. Tess met his gaze and found herself laughing for no real reason. His playful energy was contagious. And what was wrong with a little harmless flirting? She could not believe this man could be available. But maybe in L.A. all the men were this handsome. Maybe straight men grew on trees out there.

  “Well, I certainly thought so, until about a month ago, when they canceled it.”

  “Idiots,” Peter said, raising his glass up. “But, our gain.”

  “Thank you, kind sir,” said Tess, clinking his glass.

  They talked over the schedule for the book. Peter told her that WOOSH needed a signed contract (which meant they needed her fifty pages) by no later than the end of November, and a draft of the whole book by the end of the following summer.

  “Part of the reason for the schedule is that Orbus wants the manuscript to be disseminated among various WOOSH members, vetted, and then edited and proofed,” Peter said. “Then they plan to run off the first copies in November of next year.” He explained that there was a small generator-operated press somewhere in England, from which they were hoping to be able to keep printing copies after the Big Day. “They won’t tell me where it is, but I know that Maryanne and her people have spent a lot of time doing calculations about the latitude and longitude and safety zones,” Peter said, waving Richie over from the bar, “lest their press be turned to dust and rubble … .”

  “What can I get you two?” Richie asked smoothly. Tess looked up at him. It was strange to be pretending not to know Richie well. He had become a friend and she felt, oddly enough, as if she was somehow betraying him, sitting here laughing alone with Peter, instead of at her usual place up at the bar. She realized she did not want Peter to know what a Scrub-a-Dub regular she was. Peter was … well, he was glamorous. And this was not a glamorous place.

  Peter handed Richie his empty glass. “I would love another Static Cling—these are really delicious. Tess, won’t you have one? I guarantee it will send you right into the gentle cycle”—he smiled devilishly—“and besides, it’s on WOOSH.” Richie glanced down at her, his expression unreadable.

  In the end, she had not one but two Static Clings. During the second one, while Peter was regaling her with an incredibly funny story about the time he lived next door to a woman in Beverly Hills who raised rattlesnakes, she spotted Richie, out of the corner of her eye, watching them. When he caught her looking, he waved, then pretended to muss up the back of his hair and raised his arm up behind him, as if he were stretching.

  Tess wondered for a second what on earth Richie was doing, then she remembered her previous instructions to him and shook her head at him. Still, every time she happened to glance over, there was Richie, staring in their direction. Wow, I guess he really is bent on protecting me, Tess thought. It can’t just be Peter’s looks. And, for the thousandth time, she wondered why the really sweet guys were always the ones who were sweet on other guys.

  Chapter Four

  As she knelt in her living room stacking the newspapers and magazines from the entire months of August and September, as well as the first half of October, into the recycling pile, Tess realized how long it had been since she had had anyone over. She usually tried to follow her mother’s rule about inviting someone for coffee or supper at least once a week, to ensure the house got straightened. “House guests, ousts mess!” her mother would always sing, as if it were the last line of a tongue-twisting TV jingle. But during the summer Tess had been too depressed for guests, and for the last month she had been focused on Etiquette for the End of the World. As a result the untidiness in her apartment had grown to epic proportions.

  In fact, if Tess’s monthly women’s poker night, scheduled for tonight, October 13, had not been on the calendar for weeks in advance, Tess might have canceled it. In the end it was her fondness for the game that won out. She loved that delicious moment right before you looked at your cards, that feeling that a miracle could happen—two aces, three kings, wild cards. She loved bluffing in five card stud, and the sensation of raking in the chips with both hands over the green-felt tablecloth, as much as she loved the banter and the camaraderie of the women she’d been playing with for the last ten years. They’d seen one another through boyfriends, husbands, affairs, babies, moves, promotions, deaths—and firings.

  If only it were not her turn to host. She definitely did not feel like cleaning up. It meant vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing the bathroom. It also meant she had to clear off the dining room table.

  The box from her brother was still sitting there, on top of the mound of unread junk mail. It had come three weeks ago and she had not been able to get herself to open it. A big part of her did not want to find out what was inside, and yet she did not seem to possess the fortitude to throw it away or send it back to Stuart. It was like a stink bomb sitting there in the middle of the room, irritating her every time she passed it. Now she decided she may as well see what was in it, if only just to get it off the table.

  She got the packing tape off, and opened the top. Inside was something wrapped in tissue paper. It was something soft. She pulled back the paper.

  It was the rubber chicken.

  She took it out of the box and held the limp, yellowish gray thing up in the air, by its feet.

  Suddenly she was back in the kitchen at her old house in Baltimore, where the rubber chicken had hung from a big nail on one side of the antique kitchen fireplace, next to the ancient copper pots and spoons, for as long as any of them could remember. The fireplace was never used; it was just for show. As kids, neither Tess nor Stuart had given the chicken any real thought until one night when Tess was eleven and Stuart was thirteen, and she looked at this skinny, dull yellow object during dinner (they were having chicken à la king—maybe that was the impetus) and it was as if she was really seeing it for the first time.

  “Mom, what is that chicken doing there, anyway?”

  “Doing there?” her mom said, dishing a pastry shell onto Tess’s plate with a serving spoon. “Honey, it's not doing anything. Why would it be doing anything?”

  “No, really, what is it doing there, I mean, where did it come from?” Tess wanted to know.

  They all stared at it—at its defeated, deflated kind of dangling—and after a little while her father got a faraway look on his face.

  “Must be an old prop from Pagliacci,” he said. “From the scene where the baritone comes into the kitchen and throws the chicken down on the table for the soprano.” His parents had run an opera company in the 1950s, and a lot of the old theater stuff had ended up in the attic. So for a second Tess and Stuart accepted this explanation. Then they caught each other’s eyes and giggled.

  “But what is it doing there? Who put it there? Why?” Tess insisted. It really
did look as though someone had posed it to look like a real chicken hanging up ready to go into the giant Flintstones-y copper pot to get cooked.

  Her father turned his head and peered over at it again, as if he were studying a very complicated set of pre-root-canal X rays. When he finally turned back to them, he looked tired and irritated. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he said. “What difference does it make? For heaven’s sake, Tess, just eat your dinner. Why do you always have to pick everything apart?”

  “What, I’m not allowed to ask about a stupid rubber chicken?” Tess felt her cheeks get hot and the pressure behind her eyes building. It seemed like no matter what she ever did or said, her father would jump all over it. It was so unfair. He was never that way with Stuart.

  “The chicken is there, all right? It’s not hurting you, is it? Just leave it alone!” her father said, in his this-is-final voice.

  “Oh, no,” her mother suddenly exclaimed loudly, looking down at the table with a worried frown.

  “What?” they all asked.

  Brow still furrowed, she picked up a fork and poked it around gingerly in the food on her plate. “I knew I forgot something in this recipe,” she said.

  They stared at her. She looked up at the rubber chicken, her eyes wide with exaggerated alarm, and then back down to her food again. “Oops.”

  This sent Tess and her brother into peels of laughter. After a moment their father got it and was chortling along too.

  “Mo—om,” Tess said, rolling her eyes, pretending to be annoyed, “How could you leave the chicken out of the chicken à la king?!”

  Stuart held his stomach. “I don’t know, mine tastes a little rubbery!” Soon first Tess and Stuart, and then their parents, were laughing so hard they could not speak.

  From then on the chicken had been a running gag between Stuart and Tess. Stuart would wrap it up and give it to Tess for her birthday, and Tess would wrap it up and give it to him on his. When Stuart took up moviemaking with their father’s camera, he made an entire film featuring the chicken. (In this teenage masterpiece, one of Stuart’s friends, posing as a poultry-loving prehistoric man, pretends to catch and devour the chicken, then kidnaps an unwilling female—played by Tess—to drag her off to his lair.) Later, when Stuart and Tess were both home from college, they got stoned together in the old tree house in the backyard and came up with the brilliant idea to hide the chicken in their parents’ bed, under the sheets. Their mother, getting into bed after a long day and feeling it against her leg (thinking it a dead rat, mouse—or even worse, a sleeping bat) screamed bloody murder. Their parents were not amused at the prank. But Tess and Stuart were. They had laughed together for hours afterward, in secret.

  Tess stood in the middle of her living room, staring at the faded, scarred chicken. Her throat was constricted and it was so hard to breathe it felt as though her lungs had collapsed. How could Stuart think this would help? This was a slap in the face, not any kind of a peace offering. All it did was remind her of the brother she had lost, the rift with her father, the family she could never get back.

  Carmichael suddenly jumped up on the table and into the empty box, which tumbled noisily onto the floor with him inside. “Goddamnit!!” Tess yelled. He shot out of the box and slunk away in surprise and hurt. Wonderful, thought Tess, now I’m a bad mother on top of everything else. She followed the cat into the bedroom, scooped him up in her arms, and carried him back to the living room, soothing him by kissing the top of his head.

  Later she went into her kitchen, which—thanks to her years of scouring antique stores—had a distinct 1950s/’60s motif. She took the framed Betty Crocker spice chart down off the wall. Then she put a rubber band around the neck of the chicken and affixed it to the empty nail. It actually did not look half bad, hanging there between the rack of pots and pans and her vintage Humpty Dumpty cookie jar.

  The phone rang. She looked at the caller ID. It was Katie Curlett, one of the players, probably calling to confirm the game start time. Tess sighed as she reached for the receiver. She no longer felt like playing cards. She did not feel like having people over. Why in hell had she promised to host?

  ***

  CHAPTER 2

  You And Them: Interpersonal Relationships in the Post-2012 World

  Boundaries in the bunker:

  Probably things are going pretty badly for you, and you may feel like biting everyone else’s head off. However, this reaction is going to be nonproductive. Also impractical, as you will discover that other people’s head-biting capabilities often greatly surpass yours. Keep to yourself for a while if you must, but try to be patient and kind to others with whom you are sharing your shelter or “personal ground area.”

  Remember you are not the only one who has had a bad day. People are literally eating each other out there. Not only that, but you must be aware that millions of people who, in the past, were medicated for depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders with psychotropic drugs are probably all going cold turkey now. And that kind of cold turkey can really heat things up. For example—

  Tess stopped writing when she heard her email ping. When she opened her in box, she saw that it was from Peter. It was a forwarded invitation, accompanied by a one-sentence message: Care to join me?

  She quickly scanned the invite. It was for the New York premiere of a new Steve Buscemi movie, at Alice Tully Hall, and a dinner after. Black tie. The original sender of the email was a well-known New York PR woman; her parties were famous. Tess looked with mounting excitement at the list of “confirmed” guests: Darren Aronofsky, Emily Blunt, Steve Buscemi, Buck Henry, Candice Bergen, Frances Sternhagen, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins, Harvey Weinstein … ! She had had the feeling after their fun time at the Scrub-a-Dub-Pub that Peter might ask her out. But this?

  This was not just a night out with a handsome man, it was also a golden opportunity. Tess’s head swam with the possibilities, the contacts she might make. Who would have ever thought that the WOOSH job would lead to anything so … well, so very non-nonprofit. Surely people from the media would be there, maybe the Times, or New York magazine. You never know what could happen. She had to make sure she made up new business cards; she only had old ones from “Tess Knows Best.”

  “Hoagy Carmichael, guess who is going to a fancy New York premiere?” said Tess, scrolling through the list. “And guess who is going to get to wear that dress she was saving?” (She often thought the real reason people had pets was so they could talk to themselves.) The “saved” dress was a stunning, off-the-shoulder Alexander McQueen floor-length evening dress she had bought secondhand at the Almost New shop on 72 Street over a year ago on a whim, before her finances had taken a nosedive. It was so formal that afterward she was convinced she would never have any place to wear it.

  Suddenly the cat leapt off the radiator and ran out of the office. That could only mean there was someone at the front door. Tess wasn’t expecting anyone, and she was not dressed for company.

  She followed Carmichael to the door, wondering why the doorman hadn’t buzzed her. “Who is it?” she called out.

  “Tess?” Jesus. It was Matt.

  Tess closed her eyes and took a long breath. “Look, I don’t really want to see you,” she said sharply. “I’m working.”

  “Tess, can you just open the door and let me in so the neighbors don’t have to hear our whole conversation?”

  “The neighbors? The neighbors?!” Tess unlocked the door and ushered him in. She stood in the foyer with her arms crossed. “You don’t want the neighbors to hear? Are you trying to tell me that now you care about what the neighbors think? Why, so you can sleep with more of them?” Tess realized she was probably being unnecessarily mean, but she did not like being ambushed like this.

  Matt put his hands in his pockets and looked nervously at her, then down at the floor, then at her again. He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, which he only did when he felt the situation was out of his control. “I know I de
serve that, Tess. I am sorry about what happened. I don’t even know why it happened.”

  Tess thought about all the biting things she could say to Matt, all the true and horrible ways she could make him feel guilty. And then suddenly she just felt tired.

  “Listen, Matt. I’m sorry I haven’t returned your phone calls. You can have your table and shelves. I’ve just been too distracted since I lost the column.”

  “What? Oh, no! You lost your column?”

  Tess made a small, tired sound in her throat. “That’s right, you never really did follow it, did you? Never were much of a fan.” She rolled her eyes, opened the door, and picked up Carmichael so he would not run out. “Tell you what. I’ll email you and let you know a time you can come and get your stuff when I am not home. The super can let you in.”

  “Can’t we talk? I really do miss you, Tessa. We could … we could go to dinner at that Ethiopian place you like.” So now he wanted to take her to the restaurant in Park Slope—the one she could never, ever get him to go to, because he refused to “pay money to sit on little wicker stools and eat with your hands.”

  “Please just go, Matt. I’ll email you. It’s just not a good time right now.” She gently pushed him through the door and closed it. She felt sad but oddly calm. It was like a big splinter had been pulled out of her heart. It still hurt, but she knew she would heal.

  She returned to her office and sat back down at her laptop:

  For example, people who have lost their family or other loved ones may feel angry. But anger is not a good tool when you are foraging for food, seeking shelter, or hoping to find allies. In the short term, anger can be a good weapon, like having a sharp rock to throw at an enemy, but in the long run, it will only slow you down and cause you pain, like having a sharp rock stuck in your shoe. Of course, you are probably pretty lucky if you even have shoes at this point, but you know what I mean.