Fire in the Firefly

by Scott Gardiner

If there has been a guiding principle, getting here, it has been his own internal steadiness, Roebuck’s rock-ribbed fidelity to his own intentions. When Yasmin suggested she come by his office—whatever time he named—his reply was a firm and confident no. “Not the right environment,” he returned by Hushmail. “Difficult, in that setting.”

  “I thought you said you were recovered?”

  “This has nothing to do with that, Yasmin. It’s a matter of …” he chose his wording carefully … “ambience. Privacy.”

  They’d gone at it back and forth like teenagers passing notes.

  “Why can’t you do it at home and bring it with you? I’ll stop by your office …”

  “Even worse. With the kids screaming and Anne yelling at me to get out of the bathroom. Are you kidding? Plus there’s the issue of freshness.”

  “So how do we do this?”

  “Your place.”

  “You’ll bring it to my place? That works for me.”

  “I’ll produce it at your place. Safer.”

  Nearly an hour of silence before Yasmin’s reply. “Julius. I’m not comfortable with that option.”

  “You’re not comfortable?” Roebuck had his script prepared well in advance. “What about me? This is awkward for me wherever it happens. Your place is the least awkward option. Plus it’s the most efficient. Plus it guarantees freshness. If you want to do this, this is how it has to be.”

  Yasmin, he knows, likes her logic laid out like sausages in links. But in the end he’s fairly certain it was the freshness angle that clinched it.

  He sips his Barolo. It’s a heady wine for the circumstances. She has unexpected depths, sometimes. Tannins pluck at the root of his tongue.

  “Well,” he says, standing.

  Yasmin stands also.

  Eyebrows politely raised, Roebuck glances round the room.

  “The bathroom is right this way.”

  He has wondered how she would be dressed for this. Like a real estate agent, as it turns out, for an upscale showing; careful though observably unbuttoned. He notes that she’s in heels as always. Yasmin leads him to the bathroom and halts there by the open door.

  Again he is struck by the image of realty and display. She gestures and steps to one side. The room is massive. It must originally have been a bedroom, converted to its present opulence. He can tell, even through the swirl of all these other currents, that Yasmin is proud of her loo: smoked glass and showerheads like enormous sunflowers; a massive tub more reminiscent of a limestone pool; candles here and there in sconces. He smells incense, but can’t locate the source. It’s the coffee table, though, that draws his eye: elaborate wrought-iron—placed at the foot of a wingback chair. He wonders if this is a permanent feature or arranged just for today.

  And there it is: his orange-lidded sample jar, bathed in candlelight, perched tactfully beside an assortment of erotic magazines, fanned for ease of reference.

  “It’s lovely,” he says. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  She blushes. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  The hostess with the mostess, he wants to add, regressing, but disciplines himself.

  Yasmin shuts the door, and Roebuck is left to his devices.

  He hears her heels receding and settles into the comfortable chair. Roebuck looks over his selection of reading material. He is surprised to see that Hustler is still in print. Didn’t Larry Flint die eons ago? Or maybe he’s thinking of the Penthouse guy? Bowing to nostalgia, Roebuck opts for Playboy.

  He is open-minded on the subject of pornography—as an advertiser, he has to be—but deep down Roebuck has never really understood the appeal. Watching someone else having sex is only a reminder that you yourself are not. Same again with photographs of naked women: they are there; you are somewhere else. Though it’s also true that he remembers, back in adolescence, aching at those pictures slipped out from underneath the mattress—and there it is again: cliché. But the moment he was old enough to access the real thing, facsimiles ceased to be of interest. It’s been decades since Roebuck cracked the cover of a girly magazine.

  The crotch shots are much as he remembers, though come to think of it perhaps more extensively trimmed. And silicone hadn’t yet been standardized, back then, so breasts weren’t replicated in such spherical precision. But the pouts haven’t changed, though the cartoons—which in his memory were daring and often quite witty (is he right in recalling that Heffner himself did the drawings?)—are now depressingly banal.

  It was always said that Playboy published top-notch writing. Roebuck leafs through pages.

  Most of the articles are short and loud. No Norman Mailers, these days; at least not this edition. There’s a profile on one of the more recent boy-band castratos, now launched into a career in motion pictures. Morgan would be interested in it, though grossed out by the photographs before and after. Roebuck lingers for a time at the Advisor page. A reader wants to know if it’s possible to have sex with a ghost. The editor’s reply, in italics, is cautiously affirmative, quoting Chaucer. A gentleman from Raleigh, North Carolina, asks if it’s all right to have sex with his cousin, and a reader from Georgia wonders what percentage of women shave their pubic hair today as compared to ten years ago? The reply cites a survey conducted at Indiana University which found that 21 percent of women age 18 to 24 are typically hair-free, 38 percent go bare sometimes, while 29 percent trim. With each subsequent age group—and this factoid comes as no surprise—less hair is removed less often. Women who go bare are more likely to receive cunnilingus, to be in a long-term relationship, but not married, and to score higher on measures of genital self-image and sexual function … Roebuck slots this information in with other, complementary data. He briefly considers tearing out the page for Lily’s entertainment.

  Drag and clop … drag and clop … drag and clop … Back and forth beyond the door, Yasmin is pacing. Shaved, he decides, dollars to doughnuts. He wishes he had topped up his glass while the bottle was still handy.

  Halfway in, he finds a short story. Has Playboy always published fiction? This too he can’t recall. The lead-in is unpromising. Some kind of sci-fi StarTrek send-up, by the look of it, but Roebuck perseveres. The plot is not what he would call original. The yeoman is expecting to die; he’s the sixth member of a six-man team about to be beamed to the surface of an unexplored planet, and the sixth guy always comes back dead. Wasn’t there was a movie on this theme, a few years back with Sigourney Weaver?

  Roebuck’s glass is now empty.

  He gets up, crosses yards of marble to the sink, and refills it from the tap—more a stone lip, really, than tap: water flowing over the edge for the tranquil-mountain-brook-effect. The crystal makes a tinkling sound against the stone.

  “Everything all right in there?”

  Yasmin is tapping at the door.

  “Um …” he says. And not a word more.

  Roebuck returns to his fiction. The dialogue is not bad, crisp even; though the Captain Kirk figure is parodied so heavily that Roebuck almost gives up on this writer. The yeoman has a wife, though, who’s had enough of her husband’s dead-end jobs and threatens to intercede with the chain of command. A nice touch of irony, but he can see where this one’s going.

  Heels are tracking back and forth again outside.

  The away team has beamed down to the planet. The captain immediately goes looking for aliens to have sex with, while the yeoman is sent to explore a dangerous crevice. Roebuck honestly believes that the monologue at the start of the original Star Trek captures the true human spirit as accurately as anything he’s come across since, though even he would never admit that in public. To boldly go …

  “Julius! What’s going on in there?”

  “Well …” he says. “Um …”

  “I beg your pardon? I can’t hear you.”

  He clears his throat, audibly. “Well, I
mean … it just doesn’t seem to be … working.”

  A pause “Did you find the magazines?”

  “I did. Yes. Thank you.”

  Roebuck gives himself a little breathing room. He coughs a little pointedly. He has decided he wouldn’t mind finishing this story.

  Yasmin flounces off. Footsteps go stalking in the direction of the living area. She’s upending the rest of the bottle, he decides. But in a minute she is back outside the door.

  Silence.

  He remembers that he should uncap the sample jar.

  Roebuck puts his magazine face-down on the armrest so he can free both hands. He untucks his shirt and generally dishevels.

  “Any luck?”

  “Sorry … no.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  Now she’s really pacing. He imagines her consulting the thermometer again … escalating anxiety, her window closing … the clock ticking down …

  Roebuck undoes a little more extensively. He has to look like he’s been giving this his all. He stands, loudly buckling, zipping. Sighing, sighing …

  A brooding silence from beyond the door.

  “I’m sorry, Yasmin. Maybe this was just a bad idea …”

  It swings open. Roebuck has of course undone the lock.

  “What can I do?”

  She has, he sees, kicked off her shoes.

  Part III

  September–November 2008

  However, the possibility also exists that male nuptial gifts alternately or additionally serve to manipulate female reproduction in ways that are costly to females.

  Sara M. Lewis and Christopher K. Crastley,

  “Flash Signal Evolution, Mate Choice, and Predation in Fireflies,”

  The Annual Review of Entomology

  21

  Did you hear the one about the blonde who was so gullible even she could fool herself?

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  “What do women want?” Freud asks. The answer, as every marketer knows, is stuff. We advertisers need to drill a little deeper. Why does a woman want stuff? Because getting stuff affirms the fact that she deserves the stuff she’s getting. Our job therefore is reinforcement:

  Yes you deserve it! And you know what? She does!

  People are constantly looking for ways to validate their sense of self. You—or your product—aim to reward that search. It’s just that simple. That’s branding in a nutshell. If you can link your brand to its target’s sense of self, she will need to have it.

  The important thing is understanding that it is not the stuff that is of value. It’s what the stuff reflects. Here’s a little wisdom, write this down. Your product is a mirror purchased to provide a reflection of its buyer.

  I refer you to Calvin. Sixteenth-century Protestants believed that God identified his Chosen by bestowing them with wealth and status. Accumulating fame and fortune, therefore, was confirmation of God’s grace. Calvin’s Puritan followers brought that belief with them to America. Your present-day consumer has personalized the doctrine. The more she shops, the more she’s confirming that she deserves to go shopping. Into that virtuous cycle, we marketers inject our product.

  No new insight there, you say: David Ogilvy wrote half a century ago that the consumer is not a moron; she’s your wife.

  Granted. But the difference between now and then is that Ogilvy was still pitching his assessments to the man. Today, our understanding is more finessed. Today’s refinement of Ogilvy’s message is more intelligently nuanced: The consumer is not a moron.

  But her husband is.

  Roebuck rubs his jaw. He can feel the heat from the laptop and slips a pillow between himself and it, though he does not allow himself to be distracted by this inward flash of wit. The Calvin reference will have to go. Roebuck highlights the passage. It fits, certainly, but aims a little high. His fingers hover.

  “If I asked you to tell me what you know about Calvin, what would you say?”

  “Calvin Klein? Nothing comes between me and my Calvins. That guy?”

  “Good,” he says thumbing the delete key. “Excellent.”

  “What are you writing about?”

  “You,” he answers then self-corrects. “No, stay.” He has looped one hand around her knee. “That was stupid. I’ve been invited to give a lecture at The Ferrer/Léche School of Business. Something I admit I am looking forward to.”

  “More of your antlers on the elk crap?”

  Roebuck is astonished. “You nailed it.”

  “So obvious …” Her ankle stays where it is in the nook above his shoulder. “You’re just so full of it.”

  Yasmin is lying on her back with her heels against the headboard, working with gravity rather than against. She will hold the pose for thirty minutes, incorporating yogic principle while Roebuck rests against the headboard, standing by. Their appointment is not finalized, not yet, but in the meantime he will get a little work accomplished. He truly is looking forward to delivering this speech. Although the event itself is far into the future, today he feels especially inspired.

  Among the details she’s researched—among the many details Yasmin has confirmed—is the clear desirability of vaginal upsuck induced through the muscular contraction of orgasm which, appropriately timed, positively enhances sperm retention. Beyond this point, insofar as he understands the literature, opinions diverge. One theory holds that female orgasm should occur immediately before male ejaculation. A second and competing hypothesis argues for orgasm at forty-five minutes following insemination. With something so critical, Yasmin is taking no chances. It’s understood that Roebuck will ensure both bets are covered. He has discovered that for someone so wholly physical, Yasmin can be hard work—though the moment when it comes is massive in its scale. It’s what he’s always imagined only more so.

  She prods his shoulder and squeezes the lobe of his ear with her toes. Yasmin’s nails are painted blood-red and decorated with tiny black diamonds applied at regular intervals at a spa somewhere on Yorkville. “Time’s a-wasting.” She has taken his hand, forcefully, and removed it from the keyboard, relocating it to where she believes it can be put to better use. Roebuck types on doggedly, one-handed, but the going is slow. “One sec,” he says, returning his hand to its given profession.

  “Hey! What are you thinking!” Until a few moments ago she has been dozing, possibly meditating, regarding herself in the looking glass attached to the ceiling. Yasmin has just now registered the laptop. “Don’t you know those things cause sterility? That explains it!”

  For once, Roebuck does not appreciate the incidental humour. “There’s a pillow under it, for God’s sake!” He looks at his watch; six minutes to go. “Lie still.”

  Yasmin’s research sternly warns against seminal flowback, a wasteful dissipation strictly to be minimized. She will remain flat on her back for thirty minutes with pelvis positioned at an upward tilt so that Roebuck’s investment travels on the downhill path of least resistance.

  Truth is, he can use the downtime. He’s not eighteen anymore. Bounce back isn’t what it used to be. Yasmin isn’t one for patience in this or any other discipline.

  But Julius Roebuck is a master of timely distraction.

  “So,” he says, “what made you ask about that antlers and the elk stuff? I don’t remember us ever talking about that.” He touches “Save” and moves his work aside. There is very little they have talked about, he and Yasmin, beyond the purely practical. He has been curious to know what age she started shaving there, but decided some time ago to forsake that piece of knowledge, too.

  “Anne’s always on about it.”

  “Anne?”

  He and Anne do discuss things—most things, anyway—though at a largely dialectic level. His wife has come to understand the marriage contract as a solemn vow on her part to disagree with every word
that emerges from her husband’s lips. It is painful, frequently: especially on the day-to-day arcana of whether Katie stopped ballet in the winter of Grade Two or the spring of Grade Three, or whether the Maldives are sinking at 2.3 mm per year or by 2.8 mm, or that a penny costs 1.62 cents to mint rather than 1.79 cents, or that orange cats are always male and it’s white cats that go deaf—but on the other hand it does have real value when it comes to ideas. Roebuck can be confident in knowing that if a thought survives the battering his wife will surely give it, it’s likely to have legs. He trusts Anne absolutely as a peerless perceiver of flaw. But he had no idea that the process transmitted to Yasmin.

  “I’m curious, what does Anne say?”

  “That you’re an idiot and probably impotent.”

  This he should have expected. On this subject—the proper care and maintenance of Roebuck’s ego—Anne and Yasmin speak as one.

  Yasmin twists his wrist to read his watch. “God you two bore me. If I wasn’t there to keep her focused, she’d go on about you all day long. You and her kids.” She drops her hands back, palms up, settled on her upturned thighs. “Though she must be right about the impotence. Three cycles now. Still nothing.”

  Roebuck nearly bites; very nearly articulates the clear distinction between impotence and sterility, ample evidence against the former not a half-hour past; no room for confusion there. But his background saves him.

  “I read the same sites you do. You know perfectly well that it’s not at all uncommon for couples to spend months trying before achieving a conception. Anne and I did with Katie. In fact, now that I’m remembering, we were worried, too, for a while—I think Anne even booked some kind of appointment. But it turned out all we needed was to relax and let nature takes its course. Katie came along and after that, there was never any issue.”

  Yasmin is staring off into space, not answering, which is just as well because Roebuck is paralyzed by the sudden beauty of what he is about to say. He’s been looking for a workable segue and—suddenly, brilliantly—there it is, dropped like a gift into his lap. He spaces out his words as if the thought has just occurred, which is mostly true—as if this is something he has not before considered.