by Joshua Cohen
She’d been complaining about him since the fall. He’d been forced on her by a director, by an agency exec. She’d never been more harried on set, she’d never dealt with talent more demanding. So old, hard of hearing, glaucomic, goutish—just getting his travel arranged was an account in itself, a nightmare.
But the way Rach kept her head in her hands told me the truth: that he’d been her true campaign, or she his, all along, and that all her whining to me had just been a prompt or cue—to be something, to change something, perform my regret, make amends.
What’s my line? Did I have any lines?
Otherwise, his presence would’ve been nothing but scenery to me—he’d existed strictly in bitparts, never as a whole. Until then, I’d thought of him only as a supporter, a walking dead rerun, I’d known him only as a man who—a generation after appearing as the first teacher cannibalized by student zombies in the last installment of a horror franchise, as the smilingly wisenheimer outtaboro accent of an animated knishcart in a popular afterschool cartoon series—didn’t even work with my wife, but worked for her.
A face without a voice, a voice without a face, though even if both were retained, I couldn’t remember his name. I hadn’t expected him to feature in my marriage, and, moreover, even if I had, I could never have suspected that the character most natural for me to portray—Jewish Husband #1—would feel guilty about it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m interrupting.”
Rach raised her head, said, “You’re not,” but too formally, as if our next meeting would be with our lawyers.
“Decided to take the day off?”
“What about you—keeping tabs on me?”
“I had a meeting.”
“We’re having one too,” and she bowed to the actor, who was friendly, or who was trying to be, I’ll give him that—when he held my face with his and said, “You’re the husband.”
Rach, helplessly, laughed, “Take two.”
He repeated, but did so reluctantly, “You’re the husband.”
Rach, out of control, shrieked her teethbleach, “Isn’t that fantastic?”
“Isn’t what fantastic?”
She shrilled, clogstomped, applauded, “You never watched our spot?”
“My apologies,” I said to him, and to her, “I’m sure you never told me to watch it.”
“I did,” she said. “A couple’s like asleep in bed—does that ring a bell?”
My sneaks sunk in the soppy turf, grass engrossing, growing over the heels—“Ringing nothing.”
“Like a couple’s asleep in bed,” she said. “At least they’re presented like a couple in bed, in the suburbs—when suddenly an alarm sounds loud from downstairs, it wakes them up and the woman whispers it must be a burglar, like get up, like go downstairs and be a man—you’re positive I never showed you?”
“About the only thing I’m positive about.”
I was honestly ignorant, yet I loathed her describing ads to me, her scolding me for having to describe them.
“So the guy steps out like with a baseball bat on tiptoe, only to meet like a stranger prowling around the den and shouting who are you and the guy’s screaming who are you and like he’s got the bat cocked and is about to take a swing but like hesitates just perfectly because the stranger, the alleged burglar who’s all balled in the corner, he whimpers?”
“I’m the husband,” the actor gave an imitation whimper.
“That’s who you are?” I said. “You’re the husband?”
“The other guy,” Rach said. “It’s our spot for Skilling Security.”
I’ve since rectified, viewed it online:
After that line the camera pans disinterest across the cozy den, taking in a row of photos of the wife from upstairs alongside the second man, the supposed burglar, plowing the ski slopes, hippie fab at their wedding, babyboomed flabby on an anniversary cruise.
After a cut to the logo of Skilling Security like a coat of arms with a Yield sign, the ad cuts again to EMTs, fire, two burly cops cuffing the adulterer.
A final tense shot of husband and wife, confronted by infidelity, cozened by den and moon.
The commercial’s wife, the actress, appears to be younger than Adam but older than Rach, who cast her, I’m sure, so as not to attract him or be threatened herself. Or just so the relationship would test appropriate agewise. As for the husband, he’s not my type, but not Rach’s either. She had the egalitarian audacity to cast a Vietnamese, who’s ageless.
But it’s Adam who has the last word, in custody overdub, police cruiser voiceover, though now I can’t recall what it was, rather I can’t differentiate it from the last words of his other commercials I clicked on (for razors, deodorants, cholesterol meds), nor can I recall him, for that matter, in any of the made for TV dramedies, or the direct to video aliens vs. robots action thrillers I torrented (always portraying the reliable neighbor in the former, and a rabbi in the latter), as having been wardrobed or madeup at all differently than he was just then, a gentle goof in suede, an endearing streak of sunblock down the nose stump.
“I’m Adam,” he said, finally rolling the credits.
His sitting height was my standing height. His hand was damp, but the body behind it was muscle.
“No doubt,” I said, “Rach’s told me everything about you.”
“You might as well join us.”
“Already?” Rach said.
I said, “Since the weather’s so nice.”
“It is,” Adam patted a slat.
Rach said, “Already?”
Adam said, “A pleasure.”
“I’d love to,” I said, “but I have writing to do.”
Rach said, “No doubt”—like she was flinging a crust, as I hurried off for Ridgewood.
Cut.
One last repeat, one last syndication:
Another man’s career is revived, only because of his relationship with my wife, and I’m supposed to take that as material. A suggestion for Adam’s next vehicle: an adaptation of Rach’s life, in which I play him and he plays me.
How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader? Not even—a memorizer?
What to say, Rach? Will you tell me what to say?
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May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.
Meanwhile, the sweater layers came off and then the women put on shorts and then the men put on shorts and everyone became a child. The applianceries threw up bunting declaring preseason priceslashes on BBQs and ACs, and all the children were out on Atlantic Avenue slurping challenging snowcones in flavors like tripe.
I, no surprise, was camped inside, grilling windowless. Heinekens, pinching the filters out of Camels.
The desk had to be cleared, but then what—go clear out any unmatched gloves I’d left uptown? pack out Ridgewood’s Rach clutter and return it? Spring cleaning—my neighbors, my floor of nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfive units, were into that too.
The unit to one side, the trove of an Albanian who peddled arts recordings mailorder and in person, DVD, VHS, Regions 1 and 2, even rarees on reels, 10mm, 8mm, of concerts and operas, tours of the Hermitage, the Louvre, Gemäldegalerien, both samizdat shaky cameraworks he produced himself from the back rows of Lincoln Center, and classier documentaries duped from public broadcasting, all for homebound infirm or dying oldsters who couldn’t be bothered with or couldn’t afford a system upgrade. The unit to the other side, the vault of a dire Sri Lankan trying to become the exclusive stateside distributor of only the worst products of his island: floppy slabs of irregularly cut rubber reclaimed from sparetires, coir, peat, microwaveable pouches of a prespiced rice—Sprice.
> I wasted a lot of that stretch with them, out in the hall in plastiwicker patio chairs from a patio furnisher, and a homeshopping supplier’s rotating fans.
“You can have shot the actor for $10,000,” according to the Albanian, “or for that you can have also two new womens and not the Tirana bitches but the healthy country girls from Kukës.”
The plaintive Sri Lankan, “You will write for the CNN about my rice?”
I didn’t know what I wanted, Rachwise, and I was as angry at her as I was, I’ll admit, turned on—by the thought of her wanting that actor. After my hallmates left for their own domestic disturbances I got onto wifi and clicked past Adam’s ads, trafficked into his filmography, his televisionography, his large and small screen oeuvre or at least his performances not expressly endorsing rugged yet sensitive colognes, refreshing, switching among the networks—Proven Nexports, WinsumGypsum, AY86MNO22, Readyornotherei1111 (in order of reliability), some from businesses whose proprietors had given me their wpas or wpa2s in order to facilitate my redaction of debt consolidation/collection correspondence, others I’d just guessed (either the names of the networks themselves, or abcdefgh, or that CAPPED, or 12345678, or a combo), but none of his films or shows I found had any sex scenes, rather he, or his characters—because a writer has to be careful about confusing a person with his characters—weren’t involved in any of them: always it was his son fucking someone, or his daughter fucking someone, after which he, Adam, might have a benignly erotic talk with her about it, or a stern but supportive discussion with her partner. Revenge of the Nasteroids I liked. Also the complete Season 2 of Fare Friends, except for the episodes “The Bantling Commission” and “Dolly Dispatch.”
In Daaaabbb! and its sequel Daaaaaaaabbbbbb! he was animated again—busy, active, but also a cartoon—some type of anguimorph in length trailing a long scorpion’s tail without a stinger. He was, I realized, some variety of lizard, and then a franchise fansite’s posting clarified, he was a mastigure, of the genus Uromastyx, and another posting debated which species. The head, because I’m not sure whether lizards have faces, had Adam’s dry/wet features, his slitherine expressions and gestures, and, of course, his voice, conventionally rugged, with fugettaboutit dabs. But that must’ve been relatively easy—for the rest, it was just a matter of having him strip and slapping nodes on his tits, letting a computer model his motions.
I clicked through the clips and, in the midst of loading part 3 of 21, I must’ve fallen asleep and the signal must’ve too, because waking up it was frozen, and I was in a sweat.
The phone. Aar was checking in, “How’s it going already?”
I said, “Nothing going,” and I told him no one had been in touch, and then I told him about Rach.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t contact him, he’ll contact you.”
But I’d meant—about Rach?
Calls also came from Finnity, but I ignored them, and the msgs were: “Is this your phone, Josh? It’s Finn,” “So this is the number Aaron gave me, just wondering if you’ve gotten any sense of the project timeline or maybe you’re already working?” “It’s your daily obscene phonecall from your editor, just wondering what you’re wearing and what the plans are if you’ve made them?” “Regrets OK if I’m wrongnumbering you but that’s the price of an automated greeting, or else OK if you’re there Josh I’m just going to have to conclude that your not picking up or ringing me back is like some fantasy tantrum about something from way in the past that neither of us had control over—it’s Finnity?”
Rach didn’t leave any msgs, just called.
Important that I explain.
Some, not all but some, of my avoidance of their calls was about as basic as psych ever gets: with Finnity, I was delaying a reconciliation with the editor who’d abandoned me and my book in our time of mutual distress and yet whose meddling I’d now have to stet again due to a perversity of Aar’s—a perversity I’d have to appreciate—and then with Rach, I was procrastinating the final total squaring of even more convoluted, more vulnerable, accounts.
But the rest of my evasion was professional in nature.
I had, contrary to the terms of the no conflicts of interest clause in my contract, another client. I had a single active client. My last, and special. Especially demanding.
She was a curator, and a perennially tenuretracked assistant professor at CUNY, and I’d been ““““working”””” with her off and on for a desultory year or year and a half, and also working on a vague ms. vaguely concerned with archaeological controversies that if it doesn’t make her scholarly career will at least make her scholastically notorious as it’s intended for a general audience. In practical terms that meant helping her edit the indefatigable writing she did for various archaeology and Egyptology journals and exhibition monographs—which became, as I got involved, duographs, I guess—recasting the required academese for mass appeal while retaining the authoritative tone. She had a cubicle at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Midtown, but preferred to rendezvous at home, specifically in her bedroom, Tribeca (bought when the market was down, when the towers went down and only the ruthless were buying beyond Canal Street). Her name, not that it’s important—Alana, or Lana, which is “anal” backwards, which is how anal’s done (I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass reflection—her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).
During the second week of May—after having been out of touch, and then away again on perfunctory fieldwork in South America—she called. It’d been a while. It’d been ugly how we parted. Then she called again, and left another msg, but now about having been invited to deliver a lecture at a summer institute—a seminar series held in a pristine mountain state that presented the work of diverse scholars and famous public policy types to the busy and wealthy who required an educational justification for their leisure.
All that was required, she said, was a breezy summary of her blown uncollated messy ms., though she also said she’d decided to focus her presentation on mummies—nothing pleased a crowd of the retired rich like mummies, apparently. So, she wanted to meet. Then, fourth week of May, she needed to meet. Unfortunately, she knew how to find me, and unlike Rach didn’t have an aversion to multistop, multitransfer, masstransit.
We labored (I did) on something that would air aloud, something oral, but had to finish—prematurely—and told her I’d email her the rest.
She never paid me—not cash. It wasn’t that type of relationship.
There was hardly any work left to do on it—but still I let it drag, the lecture (there were other conclusions I’d always put off).
Until after she’d dialed, and redialed, if-I-get-your-voicemail-I’m-going-to-act-like-my-phone’s-in-my-purse dialed, I-just-happen-to-be-driving-a-Prius-on-the-way-to-a-coworker’s-parent’s-shiva-in-Nassau-County dialed, and I had to pick up to avoid another surprise. I was laying on the curses like I was protecting my tomb: I couldn’t meet, not here, neither in her corkwalled cenacle between two cenacles each shared by a dozen prying prudish anthropology and sociology department adjuncts, I wasn’t feeling well, I had other deadlines—I couldn’t stop by her loft to primp her in the mirrored center of the bed amid all that white Egyptian cotton, reaching over only now and then to the bedstands to languidly spin her globes and point—stop.
It would’ve been disastrous—getting into that again.
Instead, gut spilling over my laptop’s lip, I screened more of Adam, but more of his earlier vehicles, from when he was my age, when he was younger, a child, becoming dissatisfied with clips and even sequentials and so going to torrent the entireties, torrenting illegally, getting dropped, returning and resuming, .ph, .id, malware centrals, poisoning my computer, giving it fullblown whatever’s worse than AIDS, now that AIDS is treatable.
Anything to divert me. Anything to distract.
All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. The facts have to be
wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable. Instead of straight explanations, analogies must be pursued—like mummies. Examples, instances—next chapter.
I thought the other JC had forgotten me, or that the job itself had just been a thought—a whim of his, or mine—my “imagination,” which is how a writer phrases a mania or pathology. I’d get to his book in the afterlife, if then.
June. I sat laptopped amid the doldrums, the slowdown, the season when traditional publishing takes fourday weekends at Montauk, when even the sites are updated only sporadically, remotely. I finally returned on Finnity, but in the plasmic midst of night, leaving 2:37, 4:19 msgs on voicemail, and when he’d call back in the morning I wouldn’t pick up. The msgs I left were just, “No news, I’m assuming it’s off,” and he’d voicemail in response, “No news on this end either but still we have to talk,” and my next call would be, “Let’s try to get an extension—also ever catch Daaaabbb!? or Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!? They’re about this lizard and lizards are reptiles, which live on land laying eggs as opposed to amphibians, their ancestors, which are born in the water with gills only to grow up into lungs and die on land, but I’m not sure with them about the egg thing,” and his reply was, “The terms were no contact until contact’s made, but once it is I’ll try for an extension, which means we have to meet—me, you, Aar,” and I’d just capacitate his box, “I can’t, I’m deep into drafting this thing starring this NY Jewish kid who while on a class trip to the White House wanders off by accident and finds in a bathroom a telex using the Soviet GOST block cipher, and he deciphers it, just like that, just like nothing, and tells the president what the telex says, and whatever it says, I haven’t gotten to that yet, it’s enough to convince the president to end Cold War ICBM brinkmanship, and the West is saved and the kid’s father who’s from the USSR and is now in the numbers rackets down on Orchard Street is proud—I’ve been getting into this one specific actor, but also into 1980s and 90s representations of mathematicians and scientists onscreen” (I was cut off, I’m figuring, around the recap of the president).