Greenwood’s iPhone has been pinging for the latter part of Roebuck’s spiel. He fishes it out. “It’s Artemis,” he says, scanning. “Product manager. She wants to book a lunch.”
Roebuck takes his time. “Who?” He’s reaching for his laptop.
“Lamb.” Greenwood thumbs the text. “Zhanna Lamb.”
Roebuck spreads his arms, exultant. “See!”
4
Nouns have gender. People have sex.
The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck
It’s 4:23 AM, and Roebuck is wide, wide awake.
This happens. More often than before; he has a feeling he should brace himself for more of it to come. Insomnia, for Roebuck, tends to be coordinated chiefly with his wife. Back when they were lovers, he would press against her during nights like this, artfully moulding his shape into hers. The key was to go slowly, to listen, feeling for that catch of breath, that bend of knee, those early, drowsy stirrings of gravitational pull. A gamble, of course, like everything else. If she stayed asleep, it only made the wait for morning that much longer. But often as not the risk paid out: a shift of hip, that flutter of pulse, the soft return of pelvic pressure and finally, irreversibly, those moving, rousing hands. He always thought how wonderful it must have been, to come awake like that into the full flush of arousal, carnality unconstrained by consciousness. In medias res.
A rationalization?
Sure.
But every absolution wears its flip side. Anne, for her part, never seemed to mind. Much the reverse in those days. And she had that awesome knack for falling back to sleep barely minutes after, arms and legs woven like a basket all around him, snoring in his ear. He’d be wanting sleep himself by then, tapped out. But the intertwine was sometimes so complex he couldn’t move without displacing her, and he was loath to wake her twice. So he would close his eyes and wait it out, trussed, wrapped into his sleeping wife until her own dreams took her back to her side of the bed. Roebuck is practised in the art of wakeful reflection.
Love?
A word so freighted with commercial application its value is persuasion only.
Love is sugar. Love is salt. It’s the sum of those trans-fats we’re advised to do without. In his youth he once believed the same applied to writing: that love is a device employed to cheat the reader into reading on. One day he will have the nerve to make that argument with Lily. But not yet.
That always cheers him up.
Oh Lord, not yet.
Roebuck clamps shut his eyes, conscious of his wife asleep in the next room. He is still awake when the alarm goes off.
It’s 9:01 AM, and Roebuck’s turn to burst into his art director’s office, slapping down the morning paper. “There!” he says.
Greenwood is surprised—not by Roebuck’s appearance at this hour, he’s done this before and everyone knows it’s his way of ensuring people make it in to work on time. Roebuck is a morning person; he resents the tendency of his fellow creatives to slouch in after ten. What surprises Greenwood is the broadsheet.
“You still read paper?”
“Print goes better with coffee. Have a look.”
Greenwood scans the headline. “President Bush Eyes Legacy? Interesting. I would not have thought you leaned Republican.”
“Not the front! Back page.” Roebuck snatches the paper and reads aloud.
“ ‘A recent study asked 1,000 women if they could remember the first shoes they bought with their own money. Ninety-two percent reported that they could. The same survey found that only 67 percent of the women questioned remembered the name of the first boy they kissed ...’ Now what does that tell you?”
“That the survey was commissioned by a shoe company?”
“Excellent! Bonus marks. But the sample set was over 1,000 so statically it’s valid.”
“I admit it’s surprising.”
“No! It’s not! You say that because you’re a man and therefore a romantic. You want to believe that you are significant to women in the same way they are significant to you. Serious error. Who was the first girl you kissed?”
“Brenda Levi, Grade Six.”
“Theresa Anderson, Grade Eight. Things took longer in my day. What about the shoes?”
“Greenwood laughs. “Okay. Point taken.” He shoots a leg out from under the chair and studies his foot. “I’d be hard pressed to recall the brand name of the last pair I bought …”
“That’s because it was probably purchased for you by a woman.”
The reaction is almost entertaining. Greenwood actually covers his mouth with his hands, staring wide-eyed at Roebuck across the table. “Holy shit! I think you’re right! I think my mom got me these last Christmas.”
“Think of it like a coin toss,” Roebuck says. “If you know that eight out of ten times it’s going to land on heads, you’re pretty comfortable knowing where to place your bet. The vast majority of consumer purchases are made by women. Imagine zither music when you sing that phrase. Hum it like a mantra …”
As Roebuck rises to leave, he feels his cellphone purr. He removes it from his pocket, checks the number, then slips it back in again where it goes on vibrating privately against his chest.
“Hey!” says Greenwood, stopping him. He has his device out too. “I just got a message from that product manager at Artemis … She says she wants to book a lunch for one o’clock this aft.” He minimizes and consults his calendar. “Yeah, I can make that. You?” Greenwood drums his fingers. “Strange, though, that a product manager is initiating this, not someone higher up. You find that strange?”
“One way to find out.”
“I guess,” says Greenwood. “Coming?”
“Regrettably, I have another appointment. But I know you’ll do us proud.”
When Roebuck is in the office, the policy is open door, a must for a creative shop. But it’s closed today for this call.
“It’s me.”
“Julius! Hi. I’m sorry for calling at work.”
“Don’t worry. It’s fine. You okay? ”
“I just wanted to try to explain. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. But listen, can I call you right back?”
“Um, sure.”
Julius Roebuck is a student of creative irony. He has to be. He accepts the premise that opposing principles can be simultaneously true. He is at peace with his conviction that having Lily in his life has made his marriage sounder. His wife is hard. Roebuck understands the many ways that he deserves this. It is also true that he could not imagine life without her. Is that what love means? Without his kids, life itself would not be worth the effort. So that’s love. That one’s easy. Anne is hard, though. Lily isn’t hard at all.
Lily is a poet; a real one. She is often in the literary magazines and has published two volumes of verse; slim volumes, she calls them. Lily herself is slim and packed with meaning. Roebuck has calculated that the sum total of her earnings from all her published works amounts to less than he makes in any average week; in a good week, like this one is shaping up to be, quite a lot less. She is also a graphic designer of notable worth. Lily does freelance work for Roebuck’s agency. It’s a point of pride for both of them that all her contracts are arranged through his account people, not him.
One of the suits had brought her in to introduce around the office. It was a Friday afternoon in summer; Lily joined them after work at the pub downstairs. Anne had departed already with the kids for the cottage. He and Lily found themselves sitting with their chairs together as his colleagues drifted home, three or four pints down by then, arguing definitions of creative. She called him a purveyor of cliché. As far as Roebuck was concerned, no one could have said a better thing. Roebuck did what he is very good at doing. He told a story.
“When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a novelist. I got myself accepted into the Writers’ Workshop at the Unive
rsity of Iowa”—maybe she had heard of it?—“tracking for an MFA. They kept telling me that fine writing, above all else, must avoid cliché.”
He remembers swallowing his drink to stretch the point, touching his glass deliberately to hers. “I held out for a full semester, mostly because the place was stuffed so full of women. But eventually, I couldn’t stand it any longer. So I quit, came home, and enrolled in Women’s Studies, which, may I tell you, provides an even better ratio.”
“You took Women’s Studies?”
“The only straight guy in my class.”
“What was the problem, at Iowa?”
“It’s the business of writers to create clichés, not to avoid them. Their operating philosophy was completely backward.”
“Mmm, now there’s a perspective.”
“Pick a great writer, start with Shakespeare. Open your search engine and type, ‘Shakespeare, clichés.’ You’ll get a list of hundreds, hundreds of phrases we use every day: a fool’s paradise; a foregone conclusion; a sea change; a rose by any other name; all’s well that ends well; as pure as driven snow; as dead as a doornail. I could go on—those are just a handful of the ones that start with A. It’s the same with every major writer—Dickens, Homer, the funhouse boys who built the Bible. Take your pick.” He set his glass down on the table. Despite his intentions, Roebuck that day was taking himself seriously too. “A cliché is just a phrase so closely associated with a certain thing that it pops into your head whenever you think about that thing.”
“You’ve given this speech before, I take it?”
“What I know is that our job is to create clichés, not combat them. Sometimes, clients don’t understand that.”
“But you persuade them?”
“That is one of my functions, yes.”
Lily took a sip, regarding. “They wouldn’t have admitted you into the program,” she said, touching her tongue to the foam on her lip, “unless you’d shown them some very strong samples. I’m guessing a collection of short stories, maybe the sketch of a novel. Where is it now?”
He unbuttoned her shirt and unzipped her jeans for the first time that night. Roebuck loves sleeping with Lily. Every bit as much as he loves talking with her. Cliché has always been his strong suit.
When the phone rings again he’s there and is waiting.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m here.”
“Can you talk?”
“The door is closed; I’m in conference.
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I know. I know. It’s just that something is eating at me lately. We’ve been through this before; it’s not your fault. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
He doesn’t know what to say to this so he says nothing.
“Please don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m just … apprehensive.”
“Well, that makes two of us.” She laughs. “It’s no excuse, I know, but I got my period this morning. I’m vindictive.”
His relief is so intense he worries for a moment that she will hear it in his voice.
“Julius? Are you there?”
“You know …” he says, “I almost wish I knew what that felt like. So I could know what to say …”
“No, you don’t! But you’re probably the only man I’d believe when you make a claim like that. You are entertaining, I’ll give you that.”
“And that, I keep telling you, is my job.”
“Well, I’m not entertaining for the next few days. Call me next week, and we’ll see if the bloom is back on the rose.”
“O Lily thou art sick. The invisible worm that flies in the night …”
“Enough with the Blake! I hate that one especially. That guy was such a fraud.”
He has steered them both to solider ground. This is an old, familiar theme.
“Anyhow,” she says, “I have work to do even if you don’t. Call next week.”
Roebuck disconnects and sits for a moment, attempting breathing exercises learned and forgotten long ago on an aromatic yoga mat. His door is still closed. He can dispute with himself if he wants to. Roebuck pulls the laptop front and centre, opens up the Google page, draws another breath deep into his diaphragm, clicks to Wikipedia and types the necessary letters.
Vasectomy
* * *
Vasectomy is a minor surgical procedure wherein the vasa deferentia of a man are severed and then tied or sealed in a manner to prevent sperm from entering the seminal stream (ejaculate).
The procedure is usually done in an outpatient setting. A traditional vasectomy involves numbing of the scrotum, using a local anesthetic, after which one (or two) small incisions are made, allowing a surgeon to gain access to the vas deferens. The “tubes” are cut and sealed by tying, stitching, cauterization (burning), or otherwise clamped to prevent sperm from entering the seminal stream. When the vasectomy is complete, sperm cannot exit the body through the penis.
After vasectomy, the testes remain in the scrotum where they continue to produce testosterone and other male hormones that continue to be secreted into the blood stream. Sperm are still produced by the testicles, but they are broken down and absorbed by the body.
It is generally accepted that the failure rate of this procedure is in line with that of other contraceptives.
Worldwide, approximately 6 percent of married women using contraception rely on vasectomy.
He has crossed his legs then consciously uncrossed them. The words scrotum and incision should not be placed together in a single sentence—and cauterizing? Worse than he imagined. Roebuck fights the urge to get up and walk around. He’s fairly certain he’s been squirming. He reminds himself that he survived three years of Women’s Studies; he can manage a minor procedure performed in an outpatient setting.
And he does admire the phrasing of that last bit: that 6 percent of married women rely on vasectomy as their choice of contraceptive. The only point of view that counts is female, even here. He is surprised that this surprises him, and this too is consoling.
Roebuck is further encouraged by the discovery of a product interestingly marketed as “The No-Scalpel Vasectomy.” His professional interest is aroused. Here is the case of a service being advertised not for what it is, but for what it’s not. Experience has taught him the many drawbacks of this approach. On the other hand, no scalpel has an undeniably affirming ring. And there are definite, marketable, claims. “The No-Scalpel method reduces healing time and lowers the chance of infection.” That’s the kind of powerful statement consumers want to hear. Roebuck correctly guesses there has to be a downside buried somewhere. Clearly, the copywriter would not be using this technique if not to minimize some drawback. If not scalpel, then what?
A haemostat, that’s what.
He has done an image search and wishes he had not. A haemostat turns out to be a kind of long, sharp needle with jaws used to puncture the scrotum. Various similes enter his mind involving burst balloons and ruptured dirigibles; the Hindenburg aflame and peeling. Roebuck beats them back. He sifts through the material, but he’s fairly certain by now that he has identified the central claim: “Following the procedure, men with non-physical employment like office jobs can usually return to work the next day.”
So it’s not about the instrument. It’s about recovery time.
That is good. If the day after you’re back in the saddle, then it can’t be all that bad. He wonders if the promoters gave any thought to calling it “The Next Day Vasectomy”? But no, that phrasing might suggest postponement. It’s a unique selling point, regardless—and in Roebuck’s case resoundingly decisive.
He refines his search geographically and almost immediately turns up a website posted by an outfit called “The No Fuss Vasectomy Clinic,” located at an address not twenty
minutes from his office. Roebuck himself is a no fuss kind of guy. The colour scheme’s a little much—he could live without the baby-blue—but otherwise the site is well laid out. Lots of facts, though not enough to overwhelm. He also admires the frequent repetition of the word gentle. Roebuck has not the slightest objection to gentle.
There’s an FAQ that reiterates much of what he’s read already: Q: When can I get back to work? A: Next day, unless your job involves heavy lifting. Q: Will it hurt? A: No, at least not very much. Q: Will it affect my sex life? A: Yes. You will never have to worry about unwanted pregnancy again. Q: How soon will I be able to resume having sex? A: You are advised to avoid intercourse for the week following the procedure. Q: How soon after can I stop worrying about causing a pregnancy? A: Eight weeks and twenty ejaculations …
Eight weeks?
… Patients are also advised to undergo sperm-tests twice following the vasectomy: after twenty ejaculations and then again at the end of eight weeks.
Eight weeks?
Roebuck mulls the implications. With Anne, eight weeks is not significant. Months go by sometimes with Anne. Years. After Zach was born, Anne pretty much lost interest. But Lily? Lily takes that part of their relationship seriously. Putting Lily off for two full months will strain Roebuck’s creativity to the limit. Perhaps a little health issue? A hernia? How exactly do you get a hernia? He’ll need to do better than that.
Fire in the Firefly Page 3