Just Friends

by Robyn Sisman

  Or did they? Freya’s attention sharpened as she reached the back pages of the Review and discovered the “Personal” advertisements.

  Yale grad DWF seeks attractive, cultured companion for excursions to theater, exhibitions, country and—who knows?—more private places.

  Well, well.

  Bogart (JNRD) in search of Bergman. Let’s play it again.

  Freya sat up excitedly and looked around for a pen. This could be the answer to her problem. “Lover man, oh where can you be?” wailed Billie. Freya didn’t exactly need a lover man, but she did desperately need a man, and she needed him within the next two weeks. Anyone presentable would do. Readers of the New York Review of Books were bound to be a cut above the usual lonely hearts; these men would be respectable, educated, sophisticated . . .

  Freya found the three most recent issues and started to compile a shortlist. The abbreviations were troubling. Could DWF really mean a dwarf? And what about MWM—marvelous, wonderful me? Murderer with mange? Magnificent white mouse? She tapped her pen thoughtfully against pursed lips.

  First she eliminated those who didn’t give an e-mail address; there wasn’t enough time to contact box numbers, and telephoning seemed dangerously direct. Then she cut out anyone who admitted to being bearded, fit, over forty-five, married, or had used the words intimate, fun, or threesome. She was left with a meager choice, but all she needed was one lucky strike. A faint smile curved her mouth as she began to draft a reply in her head. This was fun, sort of like mail-order shopping.

  Suddenly brisk, Freya gathered together her bundle of magazines, got up from the couch, and walked purposefully across the living room. Jack’s computer was in her room, the room that she rented. If she used it to send out one or two teensy messages, he could hardly object. Could he?

  CHAPTER 10

  The ship came into the harbor.

  Hmm.

  The ship entered the harbor.

  Better, but—

  Entering the harbor, the ship . . .

  Jack drummed nervy fingertips across his computer keyboard and frowned at these clunking efforts.

  The ship chugged?—glided?—sailed?—sped?—cruised?

  No. Think. The ship he had in mind was a big old tub, forcing its way through rough waves. What about this?

  The ship plowed into the harbor.

  Oh yeah, brilliant. He’d made it sound as though the ship were demolishing the harbor. Jack put his finger on the DELETE key and pressed hard.

  Now there was only the white cursor flashing at him, a frenzied lighthouse beam in the flat, empty blue of his screen. He shut his eyes, trying to dream himself into the moment.

  The ship lumbered into harbor on a foggy February night, its rusty metal creaking with cold.

  That was better. He had told the reader that it was a cold night, that the ship was old and big. He liked the alliteration of foggy February and creaking with cold. He read the sentence aloud to himself, to check how its rhythm struck the ear. Not bad. But there was nothing individual about his phrasing, no way of telling whether the writer was Jack Madison or Somerset Maugham or Irving P. Nobody. Would the sentence be more exciting backwards?

  On a foggy February night the ship lumbered into harbor . . .

  Or broken up, like bad poetry?

  Foggy February. Cold creak of rusty metal.

  . . . Rusting? rusted?

  Jack scratched his nose. Did metal creak when it was cold? Was it a ship exactly, or a boat? He decided to look up “Shipping” in his encyclopedia. A description, or a picture, might inspire him. Half an hour later he was a great deal better informed about Saskatchewan (cold), Seventh Day Adventists (weird) and the Seleucid Dynasty (Syria c. 312–64 B.C.). He had also, after extensive nautical research, ascertained that the word ship meant “a vessel with a bowsprit and three, four, or five square rigging masts” or “any large seagoing vessel”; whereas a boat was “a small open oared or sailing vessel, fishing vessel, mail packet, or small steamer.” Ship it was, then. Okay: so the ship was in the harbor. What next? He checked his watch. Hey, time for coffee!

  The kitchen was a mess. So much for having a woman around the place. While the coffee heated, Jack decided it really was time that someone cleaned up around here. He filled the sink with hot soapy water and dabbed one or two plates with a cloth before realizing that the best policy would be to let everything soak itself clean. Instead, he checked through the newspaper to see if there was anything important he’d missed. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit in Riyadh, yet only 35 in Anchorage; New York, at 70 degrees, was exactly in between the two: amazing. He poured out his coffee and was about to carry it back to his desk when he remembered the loose hinge on one of the cabinets that he’d been meaning to fix for weeks. He sighed with exasperation: another delay. Still, no time like the present. Now, where had he put his screwdrivers?

  Twenty minutes later he was back where he started this morning, staring at a blank screen—except he now had a pink bandage around one thumbnail. He picked at it absently, waiting for inspiration to strike. His head felt as if it were clogged with porridge. He lowered it into his hands and groaned. Why couldn’t he write like he used to? What had happened? Words used to gush out of him; once he had written a story in a single day. In his eagerness to get something—anything—published, he hadn’t stopped to agonize over every word, or to fret about his position in the literary pantheon. Yet he had scored a bull’s-eye with his very first shot. At the time he had accepted his success as simple, wonderful luck. Everything was new to him—proofs to correct (his words looked so wonderful in print that he missed all the typos); alternative jacket designs to consider (they were all fabulous); blurbs to write (pompous as hell, he later realized). And then the reviews, falling at his feet thick and beautiful as peach blossoms in springtime.

  Jack opened the deep bottom drawer of his desk. Furtive as someone reaching for his porn stash, he pulled something out from the very back. It was his clippings file. Balancing the fat folder on his knees, he swung his chair away from the screen and began to leaf through the pages. As he read, a self-satisfied smile crept across his mouth. Here was a good one: “Madison springs his narrative traps with the ruthless expertise of a professional, while never losing his compassion for their victims” (New York Times). And another old favorite: “furiously intelligent . . . written with the kind of grace many older writers can only daydream about” (Washington Post). “Brilliant”—what about that? Okay, so it was only the Little Rock Democrat-Gazette, but not everyone from Arkansas was stupid. Apart from a certain H. Hirschberg, who complained that Jack had “not fully embraced postmodernism” (whatever that meant), and whose own first novel Jack prayed might one day fall into his hands for review, every commentator made the same point: He was good.

  Was. Had been. Jack caught sight of the date of one of the reviews and snapped the folder shut. He had long ago passed his publisher’s deadline for delivery of his new novel. He must hurry up! Jack stared at his empty screen, his brain a jumble of fragmented thoughts. All he wanted was to combine the virtues of Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, and The Sound and the Fury. The story was in his head, somewhere, a perfect artifact. But the words wouldn’t come.

  Jack looked at his watch. He’d give anything for the phone to ring and someone to invite him out for a long oblivious lunch. He ground out two more sentences, spell-checked what he had written so far today, printed it out in several different typefaces to see which looked more impressive, and allowed his computer to tell him how many words he had written today (163). Maybe he’d feel more sparkling when he’d had something to eat.

  In the kitchen he began to compile a sandwich—ham, cheese, dill pickle, mustard, a couple of shots of Tabasco—while his mind tussled with a complex calculation. Suppose he wrote two hundred words a day: that was a thousand a week, which meant that, allowing for vacations and other interruptions, it would take him another—Jesus!—two years to finish. He’d be thirty-f
our, halfway through his whole life! And would he do it? If he was honest, his productivity in the last two years had been unimpressive: one story, a flurry of showy but forgettable magazine articles and a couple dozen reviews. (“But who gives a shit about reviews these days?” Leo’s sardonic voice echoed in his ear.)

  Jack carried his sandwich into the living room, popped open a can of lemon soda and turned on the TV. It was important to keep abreast of popular culture. He could hardly work while he was eating, could he? For five fascinated minutes he watched an overweight young woman in cowboy boots confess to sex addiction. A man in a toupee, dressed as if for the golf course, coaxed detail after salacious detail from her until she broke down in sobs, provoking the bovine studio audience into applause. Public executions must have been like this, Jack reflected as he surfed the channels—the same mixture of titillation, boredom, and careless cruelty. He began to formulate a theory about cultural maturity, whereby contemporary America could be said to have roughly the same mental age as medieval Europe, before being distracted by a quiz program in which blindfolded newlyweds were cross-examined about their partners’ domestic and sexual preferences. Jack shook his head sorrowfully and flicked onward. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with literature. If this was what the masses wanted, he’d be better off in Hollywood, prostituting his talent as a sleazy screenwriter. Oh, look!—Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jack slumped back contentedly.

  He was halfway through the show, and had just stuffed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, when the phone rang. With a rhinoceros snort at this interruption, Jack levered himself out of his chair, zapped off the sound, and sidled across the room, keeping his eyes on the screen. He picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah?” Uh-oh. It looked like Buffy was in trouble with some creepy guy with red eyes.

  “Hi! Is Freya there?” It was a man’s voice. He pronounced her name Fryer.

  “No,” mumbled Jack, still chewing.

  “Will she be home tonight?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Okay, I’ll try later. Tell her Max called, willya?” He hung up.

  Five minutes later, exactly the same thing happened, except the man was called Norman. Jack felt a flicker of irritation. He was not Freya’s secretary, after all; he had work to do. As soon as he’d found out what had happened to Buffy he’d—

  Damn it! The phone again. Didn’t these people have the courtesy to wait for the commercial break? A man called Lucas claimed to be calling from his “limo.” Freya certainly had some tacky friends.

  “Who are you, by the way?” asked Lucas. “Not her husband, ha ha?”

  “I’m—I live here.” Jack was indignant.

  “Oh . . .” The voice was full of innuendo. “You the gay one?”

  “No!”

  Jack slammed down the phone. How could a man work with such interruptions? He turned back to the television screen, where the shot of an overjoyed woman in pristine tennis whites was swiftly eclipsed by a close-up of a tampon package. Terrific. On top of everything else, he’d missed the climax of the show.

  He switched off the television and returned to his office in a sour mood. Freya’s things cluttered his space—dresses hanging hither and yon, bottles of face stuff clogging the edge of a bookshelf, her perfume in the air. She’d even put some damned flowers on the windowsill—irises, were they? Gladioli? Tall purply things anyway, the kind you’d see in a wishy-washy watercolor. A man needed order if he was to work efficiently, with everything plain and shipshape; this wasn’t a hair salon. Suddenly Jack caught sight of a sprawl of magazines under the bed and let out a hiss of outrage: she’d stolen his New York Reviews! How did she know he wouldn’t need to refer to one of the articles? He could have wasted hours of valuable time searching for them. She’d even left half of them folded inside-out. Jack snatched them up angrily, noticing that some of the pages had been defaced by scribbles and circles. A loose piece of paper fluttered to the floor, probably one of those tedious promotional inserts. He stooped to pick it up and carried it over to his desk.

  It was the draft of a letter. As he began to read, a smile of glee spread across his face. It seemed that Freya was on the hunt for a new boyfriend to torment.

  To:———-

  From: Freya c/o jackmad@aol.com

  Subject: Dating

  I saw your ad in the New York Review of Books. If you are interested in having dinner this weekend with a tall [attractive crossed out, slim crossed out], blonde, professional woman [35 crossed out, 33 crossed out, 29 crossed out] in her thirties, then contact me and convince me why we should meet. Telephone evenings only, email midnight to 7a.m. only.

  PS. If a man answers the phone, that’s my roommate. [He’s just a friend crossed out.] [He’s my brother crossed out]. He’s gay.

  Jack smashed his fist on the desk. He seized her stupid flowers and wrung their necks like so many chickens, then tossed the corpses into his wastepaper basket. How dared she give out his e-mail address to a bunch of lonely-heart losers? How could she contaminate his computer, sacred repository of his most precious thoughts and ambitions, with her tawdry billets-doux? Who was she calling gay? He paced the small room, kicking shoe boxes out of his way. She’d even given out his telephone number, which was not only insanely dangerous but meant that he’d be the one fielding the crazy calls long after she’d moved out. How selfish could you get?

  When the phone rang again, he let out a roar and charged into the living room like a bull into the ring. He snatched up the receiver and shouted into it. “She’s not here!”

  “. . . Jack? Is that you?” A man’s voice. “It’s Michael Petersen. You feeling okay?”

  “Fine, fine.” Jack forced out a genial chuckle. “In another world, I guess. Writing is so absorbing.”

  “Pardon me for interrupting the great work, but I wanted to get your address. There’s some mail I need to send over to Freya.”

  Jack dictated his address in a labored, grudging tone. Just because you were at home in the daytime, people assumed you weren’t really working and could be interrupted by any manner of trivial queries. Why couldn’t the guy call Freya and interrupt her work? “Freya’s here most evenings,” he said pointedly, “if you require further information.”

  “Thank you.” Michael was equally formal. Then he continued, sounding rather aggrieved, Jack thought, “I guess you two must be enjoying each other’s company.”

  “Enjoying?” Jack practically spat the word. He was about to launch into a savage diatribe about Freya, when he had a brainstorm. The sheer beauty of it made his scalp tingle. He would persuade Michael to take her back! With Freya out of the apartment, he could take showers whenever he wanted, read the sports pages in peace, fill the place with beautiful girls whom he could ravish in rotation. Jack could barely restrain a shout of hysterical joy. With difficulty, he modulated his voice to a persuasive molasses drawl.

  “How could anybody not enjoy being with Freya? She’s such a good companion, so much fun, so . . . helpful. But you know what?” His tone became solemn. “I’m worried about her.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s not herself. She looks sad and lonely. I think she’s missing you.”

  “Really.” Michael’s voice was unaccountably cold.

  “Oh, she pretends. She smiles. But underneath”—Jack paused for pathos—“underneath, her heart is breaking.”

  “Good,” said Michael.

  Good? Whoa, there. Who was writing this script?

  “Allow me to tell you what happened in my apartment on Monday.” Michael clipped his words with vicious precision, a prosecuting attorney in action.

  Jack listened in awed silence. It seemed that Michael’s mother had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown following a bizarre encounter with Freya in Michael’s apartment. Mrs. Petersen had since checked into the Plaza and was consoling herself with shopping and room service, at Michael’s expense. There was worse to come.

  “Six inches?” Jack repeated, wh
en Michael reached the final catastrophe of his story. “That’s—that’s terrible.” Unfortunately, a guffaw escaped him as he pictured a finicky, besuited Michael revealing an expanse of executive hosiery and hairy calf.

  “Obviously you find Freya more amusing than I do,” said Michael. “Some of those suits cost a thousand dollars apiece. I’m thinking of suing her.”

  “Good idea.” Jack’s tone was robust. “Not that I don’t adore Freya, but I admit she can be pretty headstrong. It’s always the same with women: they’re wonderful creatures, until you try to live with them.”