The Bed Moved

by Rebecca Schiff

  “I could go back to the law office.”

  “The real estate guy? He evicts people for money. Marx says landlords are the scum of the earth.”

  “Get the Manifesto. I want to see where he says that.”

  “It’s in Das Kapital,” she said. “Rent is bullshit.”

  Owning a van was not bullshit. Nobody could evict you from a van, though they could snatch it if you went bankrupt. A van could break down. There was more to understand about vans than I was prepared to learn. I could type quickly and edit Arlocumsalot’s About Me (“I am a 19-year-old male who luvs loves slacklining and pleasuring himself”). I could proofread the van repair manual, but I could not repair. Sex work required a willingness I thought I might have if I didn’t have parents. My mother watched one hour of television a week. She gave hugs freely and wasn’t addicted to anything except Midol.

  “This is a class issue,” I said.

  “Just because his parents were coke dealers doesn’t make him a different class. Coke is expensive.”

  “His father went to jail. Your father is a podiatrist.”

  “It’s a fine line. Don’t you want to get out of society? We hate society. We’ve always hated it, ever since that idiot homeroom teacher made us turn our Pro-Choice T-shirts inside out.”

  “We shouldn’t have listened. We had the First Amendment on our side.”

  “That’s one of the only decent laws,” she admitted. She buried the roach in a mint tin. “But it doesn’t matter. The law is worthless. We have to leave society.”

  “We’re still in society.” I looked across the street. The hotel pool shimmered. Maybe we could sleep in the hotel. My mother would pay. I’d tell her it was an emergency, that we had almost been sex trafficked. In the morning, Mindal could drive me back to the city, where I would resume typing 3-Day Notices to irresponsible tenants. The lawyer didn’t require loyalty, only a willingness to never stop typing. He and I had the same birthday. It created a bond that allowed me to quit for weeks at a time as long I continued to forward him our shared horoscope.

  “The risks you take today will reap great rewards.”

  For him that probably meant trying a new Turkish restaurant. For me it meant showing my nipples to agoraphobes who preferred watching tit in real time. I put on my camouflage bikini top. We had found the bikinis in a thrift store on our drive north from the Bay. Mindal wore hers with a matching camo bandanna when we went grocery shopping, endured catcalls telling her it wasn’t hunting season yet.

  She took off her shirt and opened the car door.

  “Where’s your bikini?” I said. I had counted on her being scared of the cam so I could be the one to say it was okay to be scared.

  “I’m going topless tonight,” she said. “We need to make some money.”

  We’d make porn, not war. There were new wars, a lot like the old wars. Arlo was the right age to enlist. If Mindal fucked him, did I get to keep any of the money? What could I do on camera, stand there explaining local rent regulations, how to outsmart your landlord? Braid Mindal’s hair?

  Arlo told Mindal to put her shirt back on.

  “It has to be a show. We show a little, the tips give. We show a little more, they give more. Have you ever been to a strip club?”

  “Once,” she said.

  “But it was really a pizza place,” I said. “We just had to walk through the stripping part to use the bathroom.”

  She made a face she had refined over years of friendship, the “Stop talking you’re ruining it for me” face. It always meant I would keep talking for at least ten more minutes. I needed to be interrupted to stop, maybe even asked to leave.

  “Can you go back to the car to get the blueberries?” she said. “We’re out in here.”

  Now they were a we. She was going to sleep with him, and a shared hatred of cock blocking that rivaled our hatred of U.S. foreign policy dictated that I should let her. We had once been virgins for too long. That was why we lined, so she could sleep with good-looking morons. Mindal insisted on the ways they were smart. They could fix their vans when the vans broke down. They could place gear. But they didn’t understand her. Or maybe I didn’t understand her. Nobody had infused me with natural antidepressants as a child. Back at the car, I looked for the berries, looked at the pool. I already had on a bikini. We could sneak in later to swim, maybe after we’d filmed ourselves singing folk songs. I suspected I could talk her down to folk songs.

  “We’re going to make a movie,” I said, returning myself to the we fold. “This van is our trailer.”

  “Yeah!” said Arlo. “I like to think of myself as a director.”

  “We’ll make it like a seventies porno!” said Mindal.

  “That was a good decade,” I told Arlo. “We were born.”

  Mindal made her “Stop talking about how old we are” face. I made my “Too late you shouldn’t have brought up the seventies” face.

  “Mature women are hot,” he said.

  “We know more about how to please men and ourselves,” I said.

  “Young girls, they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “That’s why I don’t sleep with too many of them.”

  “Do you like girls or boys better?”

  I had a new hunch about Arlocumsalot. It was actually an old hunch, a new idea to say something about it.

  “Some of the tips get this notion about me that I must be gay because I don’t sleep with too many girls.”

  “And you show them your cock every night,” said Mindal. “That might be swaying their opinion.”

  “Yeah, but the audience is diverse,” he said. “I’m sure some of them want to see me with a woman. And an older woman would be great.”

  “But do you like women?” I said. “Or would it just be to get more tips?”

  “I like you two,” he said. Arlo sat back on a couch that had seen a lot of cum. He patted either side of himself. Neither of us moved. We made the same face.

  —

  AT THE LAWYER’S a week later, I got an email.

  “Arl took mescaline, freaked out. Very bad. Call when L is at lunch.”

  L was our code for lawyer.

  “I thought Arlo was sober,” I typed back. “L doesn’t take a lunch.”

  L was the last of the Dictaphone generation, or was at least trying to prolong the idea of that generation. He was young enough that he could have learned how to use a computer, and other lawyers found it confusing that he signed every email “Very Truly Yours.” The signoff had become a joke between me and L’s evening typist, Gray, whose suicide note I’d found open on the screen the day I started the job. Gray stuck around, though, long enough to make edits to his suicide note (it was a living document), and to begin flirting with me using the Very Truly Yours signoff for our intraoffice memos. He had a second job shouting landmarks at tourists from the top of a bus, and a third job tending to a girlfriend who seemed to dress exclusively in period costume. He had typed for L the entire time I was road tripping with Mindal and he was ready to kill me.

  “You and Neal Cassady made it back in one piece,” he said.

  “She’s sleeping by the marina,” I said. “I’m back in Oakland. I had to kick out my subletter.”

  “You can’t keep doing that. Shit or get off the pot.”

  “That’s what Alexis says about you proposing.”

  It was nice to see that I still had the office zing in me, the gallows humor of the coffee-brewing class. Gray and I talked about library school the way draft dodgers talked about Canada. L liked to hire well-read people to fetch his coffee. I wrote my name in the books I lent him, in the books I left in Mindal’s car, books she could finish in half the time it would take me or L, but which she wouldn’t touch if they had my name in them.

  Mindal was clear about what belonged to her, what belonged to me. Now she had a high Arlo. He was hers. I thought about helping, but what would I do? Hold him till he came down? Hold her while she held him? We could turn on the cam, m
ake an experimental film called “Cumming Down.” Humor didn’t play well with tips. Nobody wanted a laugh when they were seeking what Arlo was stroking. I checked Arlo’s cam page, his various wish lists. Gifts were a kind of tip. The pictures of what he wanted scared me more than the money. It was hard not to look. L wasn’t savvy enough to install one of those net nannies, so I had to nanny myself.

  “Please pick up a wisteria salad with extra wisteria,” L dictated onto his most recent cassette.

  L’s wife had him on a diet that involved salads made of edible flowers. She had bulk shipments of vitamins sent to the office, some of which I pilfered for Mindal. I tried to reach my friend while I stood in line for salad.

  “Hey comrade, how’s tricks?”

  “Not good. He’s split.”

  “He drove away in his motor home?”

  “No, he took BART. I told him to stay here till the peyote wore off, but he said he needed to see San Francisco. You know he’s never been outside of Oregon?”

  “I bet he’s meeting one of his web johns.”

  “Oh God. Do you think he uses condoms?”

  “No.”

  “On his cam page, it just says he’s bi-curious.”

  “Mindal.”

  “Can you get AIDS from pre-cum?”

  “We’ve been over this before. The research is inconclusive.”

  “Why don’t they fund more studies? This is an important issue for idiots who use the withdrawal method.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

  I stopped at a drugstore on my way back to work to buy a box of condoms. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for them. I could give her a few as a token goodbye gift, then use the rest to resume sleeping with the reluctantly urban, sous chefs and wine dealers, cognitive behavioral therapists, divorced programmers with one son. They all had erectile dysfunction.

  “Thank you for taking me with you into the world,” I would write on L’s letterhead. “Please be safe. I’m staying here.”

  Or I could get back in the car with her, convince her to ditch Arlo. There would be other Arlos, though, Arlos after Arlos, miles of Arlos, whole stretches of highway sponsored by Arlo.

  I left the salad in front of my boss, trying not to interrupt what looked like a stream-of-consciousness Motion to Dismiss. Inspiration struck him legally. I liked having no idea what was going on. Somewhere in my gourmet suburb, they had been preparing us for L’s career, for file folders and logic you could monetize. I had done all the work as a means to no end. L looked up, waved me away. “You’ll hear this all later,” was the message. “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

  I sat down to a pile of folders and a tape, a time capsule from the last half hour. L got a lot done by not taking a lunch. The work ethic was alive and well in America. Some people spent their lunch hour whoring. Others fetched lunches for people not taking lunches. Lunch kept the city employed, an entire industry of boxed salads and rubber-banded soups. Mindal would say we had been separated from the land, from growing our own soup. I agreed, but I didn’t want to plow. Farmers from our socioeconomic bracket usually lasted a season before returning to the city with phone memories full of radish pics. I was hungry. Men like L could subsist on flowers. He would live forever in the absence of a moral compass. I was going to die young, not from falling off a rope, not from melanoma, but from something grayer that I couldn’t yet name.

  Write What You Know

  I ONLY KNOW about parent death and sluttiness. What else do I know? I know about the psychology of Jewish people who have assimilated, who dye their hair, who worry about bizarrely specific allergies: Does the Mee Grob have soy sauce? The Mee Grob is fine. Melissa had it last time and she was fine.

  I know about liberal guilt and sexual guilt and taking liberties sexually, even though I haven’t actually done any of the liberties I know about, except once something with a very small dildo, it hardly counts. I know about unrequited love, and once love that was requited, but not for very long. I know about baseball—it didn’t take that long to learn it. I know about relief pitchers, and which guy switch hits. When guys know other guys, they know something I’m left out of. Guys know about towels—towels are a big part of how they know each other, in the locker rooms where they only use each other’s last names. The first name is what the girlfriend calls them, when she calls them. She’s got a ponytail, she’s got boots, she’s got chlamydia. No, she doesn’t got chlamydia. She’s got a mom and a dad and a bathroom at home with a rug on the toilet seat. She’s got a ponytail.

  I don’t know about the rug on the toilet seat. Jewish people who have assimilated rarely keep rugs there. They won’t hang a flag. They will get a tiny Christmas tree with irony, or a bigger Christmas tree if they are more serious about assimilating and less serious about irony. I know a girl whose parents ruined her. They had a tree. They even had a wreath. My friend knew how to play the piano, and how not to eat any meal except breakfast, and eventually she knew how to trade stocks, and then how to give up trading to start a food blog for former anorexics, with recipes, and then I didn’t know her anymore.

  I know how to lose a friend for not caring enough about Unitarian Universalism, and how to lose a friend for not attending her adult bat mitzvah, and how to lose a friend for telling her to dump her Catholic boyfriend, not because I abhor Catholicism or think it is the worst religion, but because he is dumb. I know how to get that friend back by telling her it’s none of my business if she wants to marry a dumb man—leaving out the word “dumb”—to get her back by apologizing for pretending to know things I can’t know, saying that only the two people inside a thing can know how dumb each other are, to get her back by waiting until she knows what I know, and I can stop pretending I don’t.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to acknowledge the editors who first published these stories: Carla Blumenkrantz, Keith Gessen, Ben Kunkel, Ben Marcus, Halimah Marcus, Lynne Tillman, and Rebecca Wolff. Thanks to my book’s editor, Diana Miller, for her patience and insight, to Sonny Mehta, and to everyone at Knopf. Thanks to my agent, Peter Straus. Thanks to Jackie Delamatre, Andrea Donnelly, Nora Friedman, Patrick Gallagher, Tom Grosheider, George Loh, Kara Levy, Sam Lipsyte, José Miguel Palacios, Lilah Ringler, Rachel Schiff, Freida Schiff, Erika Scott, Rachel Sherman, Tom Drury and Alex Waxman. I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to the MacDowell Colony. Thanks finally to my dad, who loved books and taught me to love them.

  A Note About the Author

  Rebecca Schiff graduated from Columbia University’s MFA program, where she received a Berg Fellowship and a Henfield Prize. She lives in Brooklyn. Her stories have appeared in The American Reader, Electric Literature, Fence, Guernica, and n+1.

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